Glenn Greenwald's incendiary analysis reveals that ABC News knew at the time who was spreading the word that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks, one of the threads in the case for war. They still know and they're not telling. Compare and contrast to Matthew Ingram's reflections earlier this year about the internet blurring the lines between fact and rumor.
Traditional media can be influenced. PR and propaganda go back far into the history of mass media because they work. This is why companies have pr departments and famous people have media agents. Representatives of traditional media who believe they report fact without rumor or influence are Snow White's haughty and deluded Evil Queen.
In his BlogHer writeup, Robert Scoble dings Vox for being targeted at novices.
"As to Vox, the idea is great (expand blogging to more "regular people") but I've gotta wonder how successful it'll be. Microsoft's Bob taught the world that no one wants to be a beginner, or seen as one. I think it's condescending, don't you? If you're going to get dragged to learn to ski, don't you want to get off the beginning slopes and hang out with your friends on the intermediate and advanced slopes?"Vox strikes me less as blogging for novices and more like LiveJournal or MySpace for grownups. Vox takes the build-in social networking and privacy design patterns and applies them in an application that's more tastefully designed and easy to customize. The Vox target audience is grownups wanting to communicate privately to friends and family. The challenge for SixApart is the need for viral spread of a more introverted application.
The younger culture is more extroverted, not to say exhibitionist. The tools spread across social networks defined by groups of friends and subcultures that want to reach out and leave their mark. These networks can spread like wildfire. The growth of grownup networks of public blogging, using tools like Wordpress and MovableType, connected by implicit links and overlay tools like Technorati rather than explicit networking features, are driven by a different exhibitionistic impulse. For reasons personal and professional, many bloggers strive for recognition and fame. This can be microfame (say, bay area food bloggers) or macrofame (DailyKos), but there's a built-in drive for attention.
The grownup friends and family networks that Vox seems to want to support are more stable and more private. People might want to share pictures of kids in the pool that they wouldn't share on a public blog. The question is whether this quieter desire to share and connect will cross the threshold needed for viral growth and baseline success.
I went to Blogher on Friday and Saturday, and had a blast. The Hyatt San Jose on First Street has a weird blowzy appearance, but the snacks'n'drinks area sorrounding the large pool, with shady side gazebos, was just perfect for extended hanging out. I saw friends from out of town and across town, met some new folk, got a good lead on a contractor for a work project, went to a good panel billed on political blogging, where the best discussion was about hyperlocal blogging.
Blogher has clearly grown up, gone mainstream, and reaped the benefits of good old-fashioned commercialism. I heard there were over 750 people. Last year, I was somewhat surprised by the outpouring of interest in making money from one's blog. The blogging I've done has been affiliated and complementary with various professional and avocational activities. I've thought about blogging as a way of connecting with people and getting the word out, but never about making money directly. The Blogher crew have tapped a vein of demand to make blogging an economically sustaining activity for bloggers by creating an ad network. And they've clearly tapped an interest among mainstream marketers for the niche that used to be filled by women's magazines. This resulted in jarring yet archetypal combinations of conference schwag -- the weight watchers propaganda next to the mineral water next to the condoms . Meanwhile, one of the keynote speakers talked about her daughter's struggle with an eating disorder.
I'm glad to see that people who were seeking economic support for blogging are getting it. The reinvention of the magazine industry around ad networks for independent writers with two-way comments and linking is not a bad thing and a step forward. The commercializing and mainstreaming of Blogher was disapointing to some of my friends who looked back nostalgically to the previous year when Blogher felt less like a commercial venture and more like a movement. There were definitely some real deficits - the crowd looked more prosperous and paler than average, and didn't have lots of younger folk -- there are probably pricing, scholarship, and outreach choices that would make the event accessible to a greater diversity of people. I'm not going to go down the liberal guilt path and say that an event with middle class people is not worth doing, just that more accessibility is better.
There were birds of a feather sessions and networking opportunities, so folk who want to gather around minority interests could. I didn't find the commercialism to be censoring of things that I might say, including criticism of the product pitches at the closing session (I counted four) and the Cadilac Escalade promotion in the age of global warming and peak oil.
So, Blogher this year was an expression of our culture, with connection, culture and consumerism intertwingled. The universe of peer media is combining with commerce; the various permutations will have differing combinations of integrity. Overall, I came to Blogher expecting to have fun and connect, and did. Overall, I felt that the conference had some of the ambiguities of our culture, but the sum was a good thing and a good time.
I went to a strange community meeting a few weeks ago BackFence is a site that publishes citizen-generated community news. This is the company that acquired Dan Gillmor's Bayophere venture. They are new in Palo Alto and want to get the word out. The CEO, community manager, and development manager stood up at the front of the room wearing jackets. They gave a polished series of frontal presentations about the value and importance of bottom-up, community-generated news.
As it turns out, the folks included leaders from Palo Alto's active community groups and moms' groups. Interestingly, their main problem wasn't that they didn't get enough news -- there are apparently very active listservs for the various neighborhood associations. THeir needs were getting word out to a wider audience. Also, getting locally powerful groups, like city council and real estate developers to pay attention to citizen concerns.
The questions for the audience tended toward condescention, "do any of you have any hobbies"? (I was waiting for someone to say, "I'm on a nobel slection committee", or I'm on the boards of two schools and a church," "I'm precinct captain of a political party", that sort of thing. At times, speech used the language of advertising demographics, "a lot of our users in Virginia are "soccer moms." Right, and the soccer moms also run the pta and the local fundraising, or take their kids to soccer in a break from software coding.
The audience sat silently. Slowly, people in the audience started to speak up. Many of the comments were feature requests -- one person wanted different sorts of ratings, another person wanted to be able to control how the boxes on the portal appeared, another person wanted to tone down the blinking advertisements.
The feature requests struck me as thoroughly beside the point. The value of Backfence, if it takes off, is the telling of stories that are undercovered in existing media. The role of the instigators, then, would logically be to kick off a conversation about what people wanted to write and read about. By putting a screenshot up and describing features, the Backfence team positioned themselves as software providers rather than community enablers.
Attendees also commented that the focus on Palo Alto created an unnatural separation of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. At least three of the people in the room lived in Menlo; one of the mom's groups was Palo Alto/Menlo Park, the sports leagues cross the town boundaries, social groups and cultural activities flow smoothly across the towns. The areas are politically separate but culturally linked. The CEO asked us to post that to Backfence, so they could consider making the change. It wouldn't be hard to have a system that used tagging or geocoding to allow users to define the boundaries of their own community; it was irksome that the vendor was trying to define the boundaries of our community for us.
The Backfence presentation was totally different from my previous experience with a community portal. Austinbloggers.org grew out of get-togethers of local bloggers. We wanted to have a shared space to post about austin. So we gathered around tables at Mozarts, Brick Oven pizza, Spider House and chatted about the functionality and the rules. With Chip Rosenthal as tech lead and site host, and others including Adam Rice, David Nunez and me, we got started simply. We added features when it seemed like they were needed.
Austinbloggers is noncommercial, community governed, and the tools are released open source. Having a commercial community portal doesn't bother me that much. It takes some money to keep a server running and keep spammers away. As long as I own my copyright and am free from spam -- and those are their non-evil policies -- I'm ok with a money-making site. There's more of a problem making money off of someone else's words. The BlogHer ad network, by contrast, shares the wealth, giving a majority share to the bloggers.
The governance issues are more troubling. To play a role in Austinbloggers, I showed up and tried to be useful. Probably the best way to a role in Backfence governance is to apply for a job -- there was no obvious way to have a say other than market research. Backfence (and BlogHer) would benefit from going more of the DailyKos route, with additional front page editors chosen from among the community, with the power to make or promote posts to the front age.
In general, peer content is getting mixed with commerce in a variety of ways. In order to be accepted, the vendor needs to have the right level of respect for the community and contribution to the community. The niche that Backfence is attempting to occupy is an important and powerful one. If they don't succeed at it, someone will. I'll check in at Backfence to see if something interesting is going on, but will be seeking models of community media that provide more room for the community.
Jay Rosen ponders the right format to integrate blogs into newspapers. What's the right combination of "top-down" and "bottom-up" content?
Daily Kos and the scoop sites have a good model. Anyone can post a piece. The front page consists of a combination of stories written by core writers, and stories promoted from the ranks of highly-recommended reader contributions. Recommended stories are given a prominent sidebar position.
I would add aggregation to that model. Like the Austin Bloggers model, individual bloggers would be able to submit posts to the aggregator. There could be relevancy moderation, as there is with Austin Bloggers. Then, add on top of that the recommendation and promotion features from the DailyKos model. So independent community bloggers could have their content featured also.
So, in a model with money flowing through it, who would get paid? Maybe anyone who gets a front page story, whether they're on the staff, or whether the story was promoted by editors or by reader recommendation.
There was an unconference yesterday in Philadelphia where the traditional journalists and bloggers were on the same side, trying to figure out how to get journalism paid for. The journalists in the room were staring up at an elephant -- the papers in Philly are up for sale, and they don't know if they'll be "allowed" to innovate. Liveblogged by Jeff Jarvis.
That smells like a business opportunity. Mike Phillips of Scripps describes it on commenting on Jay Rosen's site
There are days when I’m tempted to gather a few friends, move into a nice town with a newspaper run by one of the slower-moving publishers, start up something that’s digital and citizen-driven and make a nice living picking the big guy’s pocket.
What about the idea of buying out a paper? Buying out the San Jose Mercury News or the Inquirer? That sounds tough because you start with a high cost base, mostly going for trucks and printing presses.
I'd start cheap, like H20town. When there was a large enough ad base, then I'd start printing a subselection of the online stories and buy some used equipment really cheaply. Which is sad for the old printing press culture, but removes a lot of pressure to start.
One of the cool Amazon feature is the list -- users post their 10 favorite Taiwanese films, 17 favorite waffle-making gadgets, and so on.
It's handy and fun. It draws on primal foraging instincts. And it's closely tied to Amazon, and only losely tied to the listmaker. Amazon has user profiles, but they are tightly constrained.
Squidoo enables users to make lists, and offers to help its members increase their fame and fortune by linking their personal site to the Google-friendly link haven. It's an odd combination of fun amateur topics such as the coolest laptop bags and sandwich recipes, and moderately creepy get-rich-quick ads for foreign exchange trading and mystery shopping.
The lists are much prettier than a bare delicious link collection, but they take a little more effort to create. Time will tell if it has the magical combination of benefit to the individual and increasing benefit to the group.
The most interesting question on last week's panel at the Berkeley Hillside club on old and new media was raised by John Markoff of the New York Times. Why, he asked, at a time of great democratization of media, are we seeing increasing concentrations of wealth and power? Why isn't media democratization translating into political and economic democratization?
A few thoughts toward answers:
* Knowledge doesn't become power directly. People who are getting information from Glenn Greenwald's blog about the slow parliamentary strangling of the NSA warrantless wiretapping investigation still needs coordinated action in order to persuade legislators.
* Blogs are widespread and cheap. But tools for more direct organizing -- email tools, databases, volunteer management tools -- are harder for volunteers to come by and harder to use.
* Online organizing needs to be coordinated with in-person organizing and persuasion in order to have enough effect.
Aside from that interesting question, I agree with Scott Rosenberg that the panel would have benefited from breaking out of the tired old "old media vs. new media" frame.
the old version of mt-blacklist.cgi has run out of room, and the only choice is an upagrade or migration. I'm going to SXSW, so the migration's not happening til at least next weekend. It will fit with the unpacking theme. Sorry about all the spam.
Excio is doing a geoblogging service. You can look up a zip code, see who's blogging in the same place, and contribute posts.
The catch is that it's a standalone blogging tool. "Excio offers all great features of other blogging tools, plus the ability to Geo-Code individual posts."
Maybe this is a demo to show makers of other blogging tools how it works? But if they wanted to get integrated into TypePad and Blogger and WordPress -- and logal blog portals like Austin Bloggers they ought to have a public api. As it is, they're starting from zero users instead of millions.
I was on a panel last week for the Association for Women in Communications, a group of PR professionals. The topic was blogging in business, and it drew a lively crowd.
Teresa Estrada told the story of IBM's blogging policy -- they're for it. As IBM becomes more of a services, company, they see blogging as a way of changing the impression of IBM as a faceless behemoth (not her words). She had sensible answers to people's anxieties about unprofessional behavior.
Sean-Paul Kelly, aka the Agonist gave a fiery talk about how blogs compensate for the failings of mainstream media, and have a symbiotic relationship with mainstream media.
The hot button conversation topics are the ethics of blogging; blogging "vs." the mainstream media; "getting fired for blogging".
These topics distract from what seem to me to be the major theme for communications professionals. Blogging turns PR from mostly pitching to mostly listening. You can find out what people are saying about you, and be part of the conversation.
Traditional media (think mediation) is a workaround for the inability to talk to people directly, and to hear what people are saying.
On the other hand, I recoil from the implication by Dina Mehta that we should turn blog rank into an explicit, Orkut-like friend rating system.
I like this measure - "i enjoy their company" - maybe someone should use that as some form of index? There are some bloggers who come up with really 'popular' posts which get linked to heavily - they may be 'popular' in a mechanized sense, but it isn't always the case that they make for relevant reads most of the time. There's value in what Alok says as it may lend itself to a more holistic approach - if someone loves hanging out at your blog, enjoys your company through conversations there, that's the best measure for me. It is what builds my network and community in ways that are far more compelling than from just links I may generate.
Hmmm.... rereading Dina's post, it is not clear whether she is talking about implicit metrics and visualizations, or explicit rankings. I like the first idea and hate the second. This goes back to the critique of "friending" during the social network service fad. Explicitly declaring the emotional valence of a link or comment -- fondness, congeniality, prickliness, etc. is not socially a good thing.
Although, going back to the discussion that sparked this conversation about the differences between men's and women's patterns of relationship, this brings to mind a social pattern from girl society in grade school. Little girls have explicit friend ranking. A girl will say that Heather and Myra are my Best Friends. I used to be friends with Sarah but I don't like her any more. Girls compete explicitly to be friends with popular girls. Rank is bolstered by deranking girls who are less popular with mean gossip.
I suppose we could revolt against the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism by implementing an explicit, short-list, constantly changing, competitive "best friends" feature. Let's not.
On the other hand, it would be interesting for discovery services to reveal the strength of ties, through the pattern of interlinking and commenting among subcommunities. For example, at Socialtext, we did an analysis that showed the strong ties between the cross-disciplinary design team at Ziff Davis, and weak ties between the designers and the sales and marketing staff.
I would much rather reveal that I enjoy and respectMary Hodder's facilitation of the conversation about alternative blog metrics through the visualization of links to Mary's posts and cross-links to others in the conversation, than to rate Mary.
Ross is scathing about MSN's new "Filters" project, a commercial group blog in the business niche that Weblogs Inc occupies.
Ross argues that by creating a blog zine with paid writers, MSN Filter is competing with its customers. That implies that blogging is a mass-medium with limited channels. During the height of the portal frenzy, there were stats suggesting that the Web was consolidating to three home pages. The "Long Tail" discussion and Google Adsense have put that to bed.
To the extent that part of blogging joins the mass media, more power to them. MSN and AOL already have portal home pages with pictures of celebrities and celebrity gossip. I don't care, and I don't have to care. Radio is a top-40 wasteland, but satellite and internet offer diversity. As long as I can find and read the blogs I care about, they are welcome to compete with Gossipster.
I suppose it's competing with those customers who are doing blogging for money. If MSN had social smarts, they'd be looking for the popular bloggers on their service, and promoting them onto the portal for extra traffic, and compensating them. Given their terms of service, they could just take the content and not compensate the customers, which would be legal but reprehensible.
Jay Rosen writes that one of the themes he recognized at the BlogHer conference was fear. Women bloggers were more likely to admit that they felt afraid, about job risk, stalking, and other risks of blogging. When I read through the Blogroll in prep for the show, I noticed people talking about pre-conference jitters. I suspect there are fewer posts admitting to butterflies about, say Always On.
My pre-Blogher jitters were about the potential level of identity politics. I blog about women in technology and business occasionally, but most often about other things -- social software, tech policy, books. If there was a conversation about what it's like to be a woman blogger, I don't think that I'd get that far.
When you assemble a group focused on "identity x", there's the risk of rathole discussions about whether people and things are "x enough".
Overall, Blogher avoided the perils of identity focus, and got good things done because of the focus:
* Mary Hodder started a speaker list to identify female conference speakers. There is no good excuse for conference program organizers who just can't think of women panelists.
* Blogs and the mainstream media have even fewer excuses for stupid stories about the scarcity of women bloggers.
* Ideas about alternative blog metrics beyond the mass-market A-list were catalyzed, as a result of conversations among people who care more about their "long tail" subcommunities than overall fame.
* In the panel on investment, audience members asked basic questions ("what is the difference between angel and venture investors"), and got answers that were friendly and informative. The questioners might not have spoken up at the investment panel at a general (mostly male) event.
* Reports say the Mommy blogger panel rocked.
* Interesting insights from the globalization session about the challenges of blogging in multiple languages -- what to say to whom, in what tone.
At Blogher, I was at a birds-of-a feather session on citizen journalism. It was moderated by Amy Gahran. Jay Rosen was there, along with several others who are doing citizen journalism of various flavors.
The discussion focused on the tired old wordgames -- what is a journalist, what is a citizen journalist. Are bloggers journalists or not? How can citizen journalists be ethical? Is citizen journalism a good term, or is it intimidating for citizens, and exclusive of people who are non-citizens.
The discussion implies a zero-sum game of prestige and reputation between "old" and "new" journalism. I say it's boring, and I say the heck with it.
Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to discuss. In the battle to save municipal wireless projects in Texas, Chip Rosenthal and I set up a weblog and a mailing list. And we covered the ins and outs of the issue through the legislative process. Someone attended the hearing, or watched it on video. We tracked the latest version of the bills.
We were doing "advocacy journalism" -- we have an opinion -- we're not neutral on the question about whether cities and towns should be able to support broadband access. But we were covering the story. We often "broke" the story, simply because we following an issue closely, and the mainstream media has a broad beat and can't cover everything. When we had news, we sent email to the reporters who were covering the issue for the mainstream media. And we became a source for the reporters.
We assembled a community. We found the people who were doing community broadband projects, and we wrote about them. We used the mailing list as a primary means of staying in touch with the community. And the blog did a great job of helping us link with others who were participating and covering the story, through comments and Technorati-discovered cross-links.
We didn't complain that we were a few citizens fighting the phone company. We didn't complain that the issue was undercovered by the mainstream media. We took the resources we had, and we used them. We didn't spend time trying to define what we were doing. We just did it.
By committing acts of citizen journalism, whatever you call it, the new definitions will emerge.
Off to breakfast at the BlogHer conference. I love the blogroll where you can catch up on who's there. Gizmo wanted -- something that lets you pick a number of the people on the conference blogroll and create a FeedShake.
Brilliant piece by Scott Henson comparing the the prose form of campaign blogging to the musical forms of jazz and blues.
Mass media campaigns are fixed compositions, where the same notes are played over and over again. (Scott uses the analogy of classical music, but I'd say Top 40, Clearchannel, focus-group-tested, endlessly-repeated pop.)
Campaigns using bottom-up media are more like blues, where the theme is repeated with enough variation to keep things interesting, enough repetition to be satisfying, and a folk culture transmission in the music community.
Thinking out loud, the cultural parallels may extend to social organization. Group blogs like Daily Kos and RedState are like bands with leading soloists, and background players who occasionally take front stage. The group structure is in flux, with soloists heading off to start their own band, like Billmon from Kos, and the creation of supergroups like Tagsonomy, which can be more or less than the sum of the parts. There are informal but distinct "schools" connected by interlinks -- Texas bloggers, liberal bloggers, conservative bloggers, environmental bloggers.
Like musical traditions, blog communities are about affiliation. Blogs are language, not music, and one of the primary roles of language is persuasion.
Scott's argument is targeted at traditional campaign managers who are antsy at giving up control to the free-wheeling blogosophere. Just as ClearChannel is losing market share to services with greater diversity, like iTunes and satellite radio, Scott argues that campaigns based on fixed repetition will lose out:
Message-makers who resist the change, especially those who stick to the repeat-it-ad-nauseum approach, will increasingly cause their campaigns to lose the message wars. Those who've learned to vary their message and rhythms to accomodate the changing environment along the line of the 12-bar blues model possess greater flexibility to operate in the new era..
Coming from the opposite "emergent democracy" side of the conversation, which celebrates the "bottom-up", improvisatory spirit and scorns the rigorous practices of organization, Scott's focus on campaigns is rather refreshing. Campaigns are unabashedly, er, purposive. Evangelism and persuasion are part of the blogging genre, whether the domain is politics, technology, or something else. Ants get other ants to swarm with pheremones; humans get other humans to swarm with ideas.
One of the hallmarks of traditional journalistic culture is the race for the "scoop" -- beating competitors in a race to cover a "big" story.
This meta-story makes several assumptions. Fellow journalists are competitors. One's job is to win against them. Sharing information is against the rules of the game.
When blogs cover news, the assumptions are different. Early reporting on the big Texas House telecom bill involves bloggers sharing information, puzzling out the intricacies of a debate with nearly 40 amendments, and the meaning of the bill that came out of the sausage machine.
The enemy isn't other bloggers -- it's the indifference of the mainstream media to stories that are less dramatic than an oil refinery explosion. The Statesman covered the telecom story. The Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle apparently didn't [correction: the Houston Chronicle picked up the AP story, and the Dallas News had a story on the bill's passage by Vikas Bajaj].
In a world of online peer production, facts aren't the scarce resource. Attention is the scarce resource. We're not limited by the front page, news-hour spatial constraint where an oil refinery explosion crowds out other news. We're limited by social dynamics that focus attention on the day's cause celebre.
The scarce resource is attention. Collaboration multiplies links and attracts attention. Thus bloggers swarm to assemble the facts.
When blogs do real investigative journalism, there's a distinct benefit to the form.
Newspaper and magazine investigative pieces tend to be really long. Journalists are assigned to cover an issue in-depth for months, and then fill pages with detailed name, date, and fact-filled paragraphs At the risk of seeming shallow, I have a hard time getting throught them.
Ordinary stories tend to be short, written by journalists who have cursory familarity with the issue and tight deadlines, drawing on press releases, standard stories, and conventional wisdom. There are a some strong "beat" reporters who are an exception to this rule. Unless you're strongly interested in the topic to begin with, they are harder to find, since their stories "look" like every other story.
The blog form is different. When blogs are doing real investigative reporting and analysis, they'll cover a topic in small bites, day after day. A reader can learn the players and the vocabulary, gradually, and gain an understanding of the topic over time.
Contra the "A-list" stereotype, it's easy to find these people. A quick Google or Technorati search will find bloggers who write about a topic. It's easy to zoom in on people who sound cogent. Then follow their blogroll and the people they link to. Put a couple in an RSS reader. And soak up domain knowledge.
Catching up on the RSS reader and the furor over MSN Spaces, the new Microsoft blogging service. Most of the noise was about the nifty censorship features, but to my mind, the most offensive bit of the terms of service is the sharecropper's intellectual property clause.
For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.".
Microsoft infers that, because most bloggers don't make money from their blog content, they therefore don't mind if you sign your rights over to Microsoft. This is tyrannical record-company contract terms transferred to the long tail.
You start as a blogger, and become a successful novelist, inventor, consultant? Sorry darling. Your ideas already belong to Microsoft. Free is pretty darn expensive.
The censorship features wouldn't be so bad, if only they could be turned off. I gave a talk a while ago at a conference on community uses of technology. The main audience questions about the use of blogs in schools and community centers were about obscenity, and trying to keep a kid-friendly environment without overwhelmingly time-intensive moderation.
The problem with general-purpose censorship and IP sharecropping is that it keeps out grownups. Who is MSN Spaces trying to appeal to?
The helpful folks at the local computer shop were unable to find the part for my Fujitsu laptop anywhere on the planet. So back it goes to Fujitsu, for an expected $500 repair.
I've figured out how to recover Thunderbird mail after a crash. The next step today is to figure out how to recover the mail folders, so I can have a working foldering system.
It's an interesting experiment in discovering the level of dependence on a working, email-based folder system; and on a portable computer for productivity and mental clarity.
Living without a living, foldering system feels like having short-term memory loss. Work-related stuff lives in Socialtext. Customer correspondence from our sales and service systems is fine. So my long term memory is ok.
Immediate correspondence is by phone and instant message/IRC, and that's fine.
But correspondence that's not tied to a repository, and doesn't get immediate responce, goes into a deep black hole. I usually have an excellent assisted memory of what happened 3 days ago, or last week. For the last month or so, that part of memory has been crippled.
My volunteer projects have suffered most, since they depend more on email, and less on database-backed systems.
The other piece that's missing is computer-aided reflection. The core, daily/weekly/monthly priority setting and planning uses paper. But there's a more meditative process of reading and thinking and writing that requires a laptop, coffee, background noise.
I haven't used a desktop computer since... 1991 maybe, when I bought a beloved Powerbook. The desktop works for "leaning forward tasks". But not so well for reflection.
Blogging will be lighter til I have a laptop back in hand.
Live reports of voter stories and voting problems.
I love the visibility into turnout and problems as they happen.
Just read a lovely review of October Sky by Victor Ruiz, in Spanish, with the help of a bookmarklet phrase translator.
The brouhaha about Ublog's acqusition by 6Apart and some conversations with Spanish bloggers on Joiito was inducement to read blogs in Spanish and French. But I don't have enough vocabulary to read fluently. Picking up a dictionary -- or even opening another browser window to google-translate -- is sufficiently slow enough that I just won't incorporate non-english blogs into daily browsing.
I really wanted a one-click method of translating an unfamiliar word. So I modified a couple of these translation bookmarklets to accept phrases instead of whole pages.
Words that give meaning and context to the story -- cohete = rocket, huelgas = strikes -- are suddenly a click away.
Technorati's pairing with CNN to cover the Democratic convention is a sign of the times. Tools for “mass listening” like Technorati are key to a new era of politics.
Technorati enables the discovery of blog conversations in close to real time -- so convention watchers will be able to tune in to public conversation, around the US and around the world.
Mass listening tools can provide a richer perspective than polling, which captures answers to loaded, pre-defined questions.
One of the challenges faced by the Dean campaign was listening to the voices of the thousands of citizens active in the blogs and forums. When Joe Trippi was asked at the 2004 O’Reilly Etech conference about using the input from the online Deaniacs, Trippi talked about the big red bat that was used to measure campaign contributions. He didn’t mention ideas or policy proposals.
This wasn't just cynicism on Trippi's part. There weren't good ways to hear what thousands of people were talking about. With so many more citizens using blogs in public conversation, citizens and politicians need new ways to tune into the distributed conversation.
The second half of the 20th century was the era of "mass broadcasting" -- a few anchors spoke, and the rest of us listing. The first half of the 21st century is about "mass listening" -- more of us participating in public conversation, using new tools to discover those conversations, catalyze opinion-forming and political action.
Here's a brief outline of some of the more popular "tools for mass listening"
• Technorati is a weblog search engine that reveals which weblogs link to a given blog or write about a topic
• Feedster searches RSS feeds to discover and aggregate conversations.
• Daypop and Blogdex show the top news articles mentioned in weblogs. These tools give a quick check of the “zeitgeist”, showing what masses of bloggers think about the news of the day.
Note: I discovered the phrase in a paper by Elisabeth Richard of Canadian Policy Research Networks.
Ross Mayfield says that paid PR is less important when the CEO blogs, responding to a PR and blogging event.
Ross is overstating a bit -- he has PR background, and is really good at it.
On the other hand, the PR responses to this post overvalue outsourcing. Traditional PR and marketing agencies developed as intermediaries to bridge the vast gulf that opened between producers and consumers in a world of mass production, mass distribution and mass advertising.
Real people can now talk to each other across the gulf. Intermediaries are less important when the parties can talk to each other.
A PR and blogging discussion is full of PR pros eager for a new world where they ghostwrite corporate blogs. The idea makes me vaguely nauseous.
Blogging becomes a sub-discipline of speechwriting -- execs and politicians hire wordsmiths, and celebrities hacks to answer fanmail and ghostwrite bios.
I've always been skeptical of the Romantic pose of the Cluetrain guys -- blogging is the true, authentic voice, cutting through the phony, saccharine hype of marketingspeak.
But an outsourced PR blog is a corporate newsletter -- it's the pep-talk tone of the American Airlines letter from the CEO, multiplied by a million.
Then again, if it's really boring, we don't have to read it. In the world of blogging, the limit is the number of blogs a reader can scan in a day. If a CEO blog is interesting, it will get linked and found. And if the propaganda is BS, easier to link and puncture the bubble -- viz the response to Movable Type's new pricing.
With comments and trackback and Technorati and Feedster, there are more ways to find the real conversation.
It's been here forever -- tucked behind warehouses on E 5th street across from railroad tracks. Only a few minutes from my house, but it's one exit on 35 and an unmarked street. I found it for an AustinBloggers meetup that I came late for. Patio and uncombed garden, decor is austin boho pseudo-ruin. Outdoors which looks comfy but I'm shunning the mosquitoes.
Free wifi, good coffee, and excellent vegetables with breakfast. The (only) problem with Green Muse is the extremely limited menu -- their coffee cake is great but not so healthy as regular breakfast food, and the panini sandwich is... edible. Nice to have coffee, wireless, lectric, and nutrients in the same place.
I think this comes back to my understanding of a weblog as a representation of a person online - an avatar with a voice. A self-representation is about being both true to yourself and knowing how to self-edit in different circumstances. That's what a weblog is to me. -- Tom Coates
Bruce Eckel is trying to cultivate bloggingas a genre for expressing ideas that aren't yet complete thoughts. "I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. "
Eckel draws an interesting connection between initial simplicity -- getting something out quickly -- and elegant simplicity, which takes a lot of work to prune a complex expression to a simple form. They aren't the same thing at all, but getting material out into the world helps give you the feedback that lets you refine and polish.
What is the balance between simplicity and expedience? "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" is certainly not saying "do the most elegant thing" because the goal is to get something working, without too much effort, so that you can try it out and see if it solves any portion of the problem. "Trying it out" is what will produce the valuable information that can be fed back into the next iteration, and will also begin to tell you what's most important about the problem.
In the link blog, Anil writes "i fear it may take us another few years to live down the impression generated by this story." Anil, who is "us"? When you use the phone, you don't have to "live down" the impression created by teenagers chatting about crushes and parties. People who blog about social software and politics don't have to "live down" teenagers blogging about life -- just like the teens don't need to "live down" the grownups talking about car repair and jobs and insurance.
It's just communication. People say what they want to say. The medium and the tools let us say it. All good.
Joi Ito and Marko Ahtisaari in a conversation about whether blogs are just, given the inequality in traffic and link stats that Clay Shirky pointed out. The premise is wrong. The charge of injustice only applies if blog traffic is like money or power; more is better; the greater can oppress the lesser.
Adam Rice has it right here: "Power laws? I don't have a problem with them. I write my blog for my own satisfaction and to let my friends know what I'm doing and what I'm thinking about. And to remind me in the future of what I was doing/thinking. While it's nice knowing that other people are reading it (which, I think, a few other people do), that's not why I do it."
Zephoria grouches about a-list bloggers being catty and self-serving and mean.
To which I respond in comments:
It's just gossip, world-readable.Social networks that sustain conversation also harbor gossip, for good and for bad. For good-- models of behavior and thought to learn from the different lives of others (I hate to link, for fear of embarrassing people). And for bad -- cattiness, schadenfreude, one-upsmanship, and posing.
Seems to me that the ethics of blogging overlap mostly with the ethics of gossip.
Bloglines, a web-based RSS reader, recommended by Chip.
What I like about it most is the way that it helps you manage and avoid weblog subscription cruft, with:
* an easy "unsubscribe" link that you can use to sign off from blogs you really don't want to be reading.
* ability to synch the list of blogs you read, as maintained in bloglines, with your blogroll.
One of my hesitancies about using RSS instead of web browsing to read blogs is that RSS subscriptions gather, unread, in your reader, like magazines in the corner. If you browse, and return to a favorite blog that you haven't read in a while, it's a delicious treat. If you subscribe, and see 52 unread posts, it's a guilty burden.
The Bloglines pruning functions seem like they'll help manage the joy/guilt ratio.
Last weekend, I reassured my mom that I'm ok and not really working too hard. Then Ross publishes this.
Dan Gillmor writes about the rise of RSS web syndication. What's happening is related to the boom vision of "internet push" technology, yet very different.
Microsoft, Netscape, and the late unlamented PointCast envisioned a world where Net feeds from corporate content providers would be streamed to the desktops of users, surrounded by ads. Media companies would pay huge premiums to snag plum real estate on the "webtop." The cable television business model would take over.
RSS newsreaders put the choice of content in the hands of the end-user. RSS feeds come from big companies and local friends. Search engines find related content, aggregating the bottom-up choices of readers and writers.
Gillmor writes about current and emerging uses for RSS, beyond subscribing to weblogs and newspapers. Chris Pirillo sees RSS evolving as a replacement for e-mail publishing and marketing. Dave Sifry envisions RSS applications that "aggregate information from traffic cameras, published to the Web, to be able to more effectively calculate and predict traffic flow during rush hour? How about entirely new industrial applications made possible because the sensors are all describing information in the same format?" Dan Gillmor anticipates more control over the selection and display of content "more nuance, such as the ability to highlight by topic, by writer, by popularity and other measures.
It will be interesting to see where RSS goes from here, but on thing's for sure. It doesn't look much like cable television.
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) covers contact mining tools, from companies including Visible Path, Spoke Software, and Zero Degrees.
The goal is to identify people within the company who have potentially useful contacts elsewhere and could make a personal introduction, say, linking a salesperson with a potential customer, an attorney with a prospective client or a fund-raiser with likely donors.
Success depends on effective use of permission and integration into the existing social network. For example, when a salesperson using Visible Path asks the system for an introduction to a person at Microsoft, she doesn't find the name of the contact inside the company, or the contact at Microsoft, until after the person who has the contact has given consent.
These tools complement explicit networking tools, like Linked In, Friendster and Ryze, where participants explicitly declare their business and personal relationships.
These approaches represent two ends of a continuum
* contact mining tools infer relationships from email and address book contacts
* social network tools explicitly represent relationships
A third complementary approach is emerging, based on hyperlinked public and semipublic media such as wikis and weblogs. Tools like Technorati and Feedster implicitly identify relationships by following the trail of hyperlinks.
On the one hand, a link relationship is weaker -- hyperlinks are one-way, and may indicate a tangential association rather than a direct relationship. On the other hand, the content is public. So you can read the discussion over time, and decide for yourself whether Sam Ruby knows Mark Pilgrim.
Here's what's really true and important about RSS: It increases the rate at which information flows by and it decreases the number of times you read a web page twice.RSS makes the web more addictive; it helps make sure we only get new-to-us information, and that we get that information when it's fresh....
I'm just not sure that the side effect, of accelerating the rate at which we turn into into information junkies, is necessarily a good thing.
I'm trying to get the network-surfing thing, I really am. I still think weblogs are a much richer way to get to know people than profile forms.
Instead of shoehorning people's taste into a few favorites, a blog lets you check out what people are reading and watching and listening to.
Blog posts are conversational. They invite response, and it's easy enough to join the conversation in comments.
Writing a blog post is easy. You have something to say; and people in mind to say it to, and write.
Writing a profile entry is really, really hard. Abstracting the essence of one's identity into a paragraph or two is a miserable, impossible task.
And it feels barely relevant; one's identity is made up of a series of interactions, moments, perceptions, actions. A blog captures the flow of identity. A profile forces you to pin it like a butterfly to a page.
The New York Times covers the trend toward using instant messaging and chat in lecture halls and conferences. Greg Elin doesn't think we should consider this "virtual participation."
My own contribution to this supposed conundrum of "real" v. "virtual" is that it is very hard that it may not really matter, at least not along the lines of "off line" v. "online."Let me explain. As we grow more accustomed to technologies, as they become more translucent and a part of everyday experience or a part of society's infrastructure, we as humans simply integrate them into our overall social interactions. For example, I don't think we consider something as familiar as a telephone conversation as "virtual." It is just a telephone conversation.
Dave Pollard has nice, clear, useful, but non-definitive guide for when to use different communication media.
| Tool or Medium | Some Unique Advantages |
| Face-to-face | Conveys body language, allows sidebar conversations, builds trust, coordinates multiple communication media best |
| Telephone | Fast iteration of a few people's ideas and knowledge , conveys tone |
| E-mail, Letter, Memo (anyone remember memos?)
| Makes the organization of complex ideas visible and easy to grasp, leaves a trail, can be saved |
| V-mail | Conveys tone, can be saved
|
| IM, Chat | Immediate access, fast iteration of a few people's ideas and knowledge |
| Weblog | Provides context of communicator's other work, categorizable, allows comments back, can be saved |
| Newsletter, Newspaper
| Brief, immediate, categorizable |
| Radio, TV, multimedia | Compelling, reach
|
| Videoconference (room) | Visual, inexpensive |
| Videoconference (P-to-P) | Next best thing to being there |
| Forum, Collaboration Tool (project, team)
| Egalitarian, leaves a trail |
| Wiki | Openness, multiple voices
|
| Format | Unique Advantage |
| Conversation | Iterative, flexible |
| Interview
| Structured |
| Presentation | Can use multiple media |
Some of these items are subject to debate:
Despite these quibbles, the article makes the right underlying assumption. There isn't one best communications medium; each mode has its strenghts and weaknesses; different modes should be used in different situations.
The Seattle blog portal sparked some reflections about what makes a metablog successful.
Seattle's blog portal, and the Austin metablog, come out of existing communities. People want to read other people's posts.
The TopicExchange for the Clickz Jupitermedia Weblog in Business Conference was successful at gathering posts from the conference. I remember the aggregator for Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference last year was excellent, too.
They were successful because there was a community of people, in the room and outside of the room, who wanted to follow people's takes on the conference.
Thought that the Sam Ruby wiki should have a trackback aggregator; looks like TimA may have got to it already.
Communication patterns:
* A real-time event with people following in-person and remotely, or
* An active project, where people are working individually and together, or
* An ongoing community, where people are blogging individually and want to stay in touch
Beautiful design, blue-green, very Seattle feel, lovely map, and seems like a nice community.
via Anita Rowland on #joiito.
At the JavaOne conference, Sun launched Java.net, the first commercial developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs (disclosure: Socialtext consulted on its design). Ross Mayfield covers the announcement, here.
The Java developer community has pre-existing blog and wiki communities, including JavaBlogs.com, Freeroller.net, and JSPWiki.
The communities take different approaches.
JavaBlogs.com is a classic metablog -- a portal which aggregates Java-related blogs using RSS feeds. The organizing unit is an individual java developer with a weblog.
The organizing unit in Java.net is the development project. Sun wants existing development projects to affiliate with Java.net, and gives them a set of tools including mailing list, weblog, wiki, and cvs.
So far, content is produced using an editorial model: articles from O'Reilly, plus bloggers who are invited in. Any Java developer can sign up to join a mailing list. But you need to join a particular project, or be invited to blog. Java.net also plans to use RSS to aggregate content from other communities.
The discussion on the Java.net and JavaBlogs shows some classic tensions between a commercial software vendor, which wants to support a community of developers, and developer community, who self-organize, and want support from the commercial vendors.
It will be interesting to see how the communities evolve. Will there be syndication and federation techniques that bridge communities in different locations, or will developers choose affiliations?
Meanwhile, this is a strong sign of commercial interest in the value of weblog and wiki tools in supporting developer communities.
As with the hybrids between independent blogging and traditional journalism, the interesting question isn't the "purity" of any model. It's the process of evolution at work creating new variants. The most compelling new variants will survive.
Gratitude and admiration to Sam Ruby for catalyzing productive discussion about weblog standards.
Blogger
Part of Boucher's message was disappointing.
Boucher advises the recording industry to invest “real money” in a marketing campaign for the concept of copyright law. “$100 million is peanuts to them, and they’ve got the best communicators in the world. They need to be on TV and radio, with performers selling the value of copyright – it’s not a complicated message, but word is not getting through. People think it’s an antiquated notion, but the industry can explain why people should get paid for their work.”
We don't just need advertising about copyright law.
We need public interest education about fair use. Customers have fair use rights to back-up, timeshift, space shift, copy snippets, and more.
As one of the proponents of the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act, which asserts these fair use rights in federal law, Boucher should be advocating public education about fair use as well.
Orrin Hatch has been catching hell around the blogosphere for advocating that the RIAA should be able to destroy the computers of customers it thinks are stealing.
If we're legalizing vigilante justice, why stop there? Lessig suggests that along those lines, we should be able to "bomb the offices of stock brokers thought to be violating SEC regulations. Or bulldoze houses of citizens with unregistered guns."
Tim Appnel clarifies what he meant yesterday:
What I meant to say (and did rather poorly I suppose) is that a wiki does not sufficiently facilitate discussion over time or communicate reason for the change nor does it alert me to the change which may change the context of the collaboration elsewhere. I have to really dig for it. (Perhaps this is just my experience with MoinMoin the wiki Sam Ruby is using.)
Part of this social process, not technology.
Several classic wiki pages on techniques for effective wiki-based conversation:
* How to Converse Deeply on a Wiki
* How to use Thread Mode in a Wiki
* Soft Security
It seems to me that some of the small confusions can be cleared up (and are being cleared up) with these types of techniques. For example, a person who disagrees with a sentence shouldn't change the meaning of that sentence, but should add a signed comment. When discussion converges, create a new document in Document Mode, not Thread Mode.
I agree with you that it's good to use wiki with other communications tools. In a membership group, it works nicely to have the back-and-forth conversation in email. In this case, the community is open and ad hoc, so the public modes (wiki and weblog) are a good fit.
Completely agreed that email notification would be useful. I don't know if MoinMoin has that feature or not.
Sam Ruby wrote a blog post about the components of a well-formed weblog entry, and started a wiki to flesh out the picture.
It looks like the discussion on the wiki is percolating nicely.
Tim Appnel is somewhat concerned about the use of the wiki; because people can edit the pages, he's worried that people will go into loops, changing the meaning of content.
But a well-formed social process can assuage that concern.
It looks like they're doing a good job abstracting the discusion, and using the data model diagrams to express emerging concensus.
This is a good example of using the different modes in a decision cycle.
* Start with people bouncing ideas back and forth using a mailing list or weblogs
* Use the wiki to converge the discussion. Generate a prototype document and build shared definitions of concepts and terms
* Use individual weblog posts to explore particular ideas in depth, and link back into the discussion
* Once the wiki conversation has reached agreement, use the document as the starting point for the next phase of action.
SimpleTracks is a hosted application that lets people without trackback send entries to a metablog.
Perry de Havilland makes the not-very-interesting point that an individual weblog is not democratic. Of course, a single weblog represents the view of its writer or writers. Within the framework of democracy, a weblog is a vehicle for free speech, which helps citizens articulate ideas and make up their minds.
Following up to the de Havilland article, Jon Lebkowsky talks about the role blogging can play in a deliberative process among citizens.
Blogs help generate broader discussion of ideas. But discussion doesn't inherently lead to convergence and decision-making. Therefore, we need to have explicit processes for leading discussions to...
* reach conclusions that bloggers can use to advocate within the political process.
* form constituent groups, who can actually aggregate influence, advocacy, votes, and (in our corrupt system), campaign contributions.
Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe caught two themes of the Jupiter conference: blogs as marketing, and blogs as self-expression, and is convinced that they will cancel each other out.
"It's a clever way to give Internet companies a human face. But is it really blogging? Sure, the corporate weblogs use the same technologies, but their hearts are not really in it. The best blogs don't just deliver authoritative information; they resonate with the personalities of their creators.""Just as e-mail, born as an academic convenience, is now a marketing
tool for human growth hormone, the blogs are bound to go commercial. Who
knows? Maybe a few will even get it right. There are good TV
commercials, after all."
These stereotypes aren't much like the top work-related public blogs
(Mark Pilgrim, Jon Palfrey), where articulate professionals converse
with peers and build reputation with articulate essays on technical
subjects. Nor are they like the real-life intranet blogs in the IT
departments of Verizon and the State of Connecticut, in which employees
manage projects, talk with internal customers, and brainstorm about
managing through a reorganization.
Bray caught the hype and missed the reality.
Heath Row transcribes a great session at the JupiterMedia conference, in which people talk about how they're actually using weblogs in business, and the affect of weblogs on organizational culture.
Choice quotes:
Paul Perry, IT Director at Verizon Communications:
I knew that a lot of emails were going around about what was going on in the industry. Sometimes I was in those threads. Sometimes I was not. The problem with cc lists is that you have to decide if the email is spam or if you've hit the right audience. I needed to find a way in which I would be fully informed but I didn't have to decide who to inform. Another problem with email is that it's gone. I didn't want to have to go into everyone's email to see what had been read or not. I also needed the right technical people to highlight what I thought was important and what they thought I needed to see....
Even very technical people who were aware of blogs didn't want to post at all until they saw other people post. I created a private space for them to post in their own private journal. As soon as they were ready to open it up to the project, they could. It was important to post and make mistakes. You need to offer a ramp that is shielded and private. I don't see any additional candor. The organization size is very large. Verizon IT is 10,000 people. It's not like we can all share and have enough interaction person to person. With an organization that large, you are open to some misunderstandings if you don't offer more context first.
Rock Regan, CIO, State of Connecticut
We've got probably 90 people using a blog to discuss the architecture of our organization. I have a liaison who deals with the 65 agencies, not just technical agencies but the business folks. It really started in my office. I'm not going to claim that I'm good yet, but I'm certainly open to ideas. How can we use this? How can this make your job better? For me, it's a critical function that's going to be instrumental in our survival. A 22% staff reduction in the last two months. We've got to do things differently....
We're beginning to see some great discussion among people who don't communicate well together. We've had some discussions recently to make some differences in core technologies that will allow groups that don't communicate well know what the other groups are doing. You've got to open up the opportunity for people to know what's going on in those different functional areas.
Social software works bottom-up. People sign up in the system (for example, by downloading an IM client and registering an ID there) and then they affiliate through personal choice and actions (I add you to my buddy list, and you decide to remove me from yours).Traditional software approaches the relationship of people to groups from a top-down fashion. In the corporate setting, its hard to imagine a person existing without being specifically assigned membership to top-down groups: your team, your division, the budget committee and so on.
Over time, more sophisticated social software will exploit second and third order information from such affiliations — friends of friends; digital reputation based on level of interaction, rating schemes and the like. And this new software will support David Weinberger's notion of enabling groups to form and self-organize rather than have structure or organization imposed.
Jason at Blogger -- we're playing catchup. The customer base isn't web designers any longer, it's the Geocities audience. New community features, stat-tracking. Scale a community directory. "Can it GoogleScale?" "my IP lawyer and PR person wouldn't like that."
Frankston. Uses blogger, and a homegrown tool.
Bricklin. Spreadsheet automated tedious housekeeping of writing a custom programming. We're at the stage in blogging tools where Lotus 123 started to displace Visicalc. And we don't know what Excel will look like. Pictures -- that will be as important as the gridlines and formatting we got in excel.
Anil Dash. TypePad. Designed for basic users to create and host weblogs. We think the anatomy has been decided. Comments, trackback, permalinks, blogroll, images. None of our tools have kept up with managing those components. Working backward from the way people work with the format.
Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter. There are a variety of devices and platforms. Has anyone blogged on something other than PCs?
Next-generation Manila. Mail to weblog, server-level aggregation, built-in publishing. Make the interface easier to use. Radio. 2way synchronization, with multiple desktops, backups. Doing things you can only do on the client side adding a very slick mac and windows interface, instead of being inside a browser. P2P system, augment ability to publish large files form the desktop. First 10 people become resources for the next 100.
Anil. Choosing who can read what you publish? If you do that, is it a blog? Anil thinks so. Anil thinks you have a contract with your readers to update.
Doc. Blogger permalinks don't work.Jason. It was a feature -- most first blogs don't work. Actually, permalinks will work on the new platform.
Question: How open is the code? Robb -- everything but the core. Anil -- any user can modify. MT Pro on schedule for this year, same license, with code exchange. Enterprise customers can share customizations. Evan -- developers will become more important. Anil -- javascript blogrolling will happen at API level instead of javascript.
Doc: wants to save pictures from home machine and serve from home machine. The cable guys have the vision of an asymmetrical web. Does blogging have the leverage to make the dream happen.
Rick Bruner: Wants Macromedia Lite for blogger. The answer is using those as front end tools, with an API. Can do this already in Radio. The HTML control is already in Trellix, there's a gecko version. Works fine. Also pastes from HTML, and Word, and Excel.
Search and replace for regular expressions, feature to flag dead links.
Michael O'Connor Clarke: What about the reading tools?
Blogging as content management. "Blogging is about voice, content management suppresses voice."
(this relates to the earlier discussion about editorial control -- traditional content management is based on editorial approval workflow -- weblogs assume no or minimal editorial review)
John Robb -- users are in charge of content -- aggregation will make content management obsolete.
Moderator -- have we had an 8-year digression into front-end markup?
John Robb -- future of blog platforms -- add features: integrate with portals, LDAP for single sign-on, administration to handle communities of weblogs, limit MP3s, virtual domains; extensibility; verticals: customer services, web application functionality
Adam Weinroth sees small businesses and nonprofits filling a gap as low-end CMS
Bill French -- Blogging is just an use case of content management -- there are others -- brochure sites; group blogs; integrate OfficeXP and post-it notes. A federation of services built on xml standards; something so agile that it looks like a chameleon in a bowl of skittles.
Summary -- The difference between this panel and the others -- this panel is about content -- the other panels were about people. The people are more interesting.
The Army created a war game, to make army service more attractive to kids. The speaker went to cover Afghanistan for this game. They created the weblog to "build relationships with their customers." The coverage was self-sensored, because of military security concerns.
At the beginning of this session, Halley told the story of how she started blogging, writing about her father's death.
Dave Winer started the the day's program, talking about weblogging and honesty.
An honest weblog from a battlefield will talk about people killing, and people dying.
I'm not a pacifist, but I am very troubled by the idea of war reporting where nobody kills and nobody dies.
To be honest, I haven't read the Afghanistan blog -- need to.
Dave Weinberger weblogs are about writing badly, and readers forgiving spelling errors and broken links.
If you're blogging the conference, ping http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_business_strategies_conference/
Courtesy of Martin Roell.
Blogging in the marketing mix
Beth Goza, Microsoft "the only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy" I started my blog as a person, because I love technology. Blogs personalize giant corporations. It's about people being passionate -- you can't force people to do it. They should be allowed to be controversial.
Blogs are anti-pop-ups -- anti-invasive
How do you overcome the fear of your PR and legal team?
"Does a blog need personality?"
Michael O'Conner Clarke -- the act of linking is an act of personality. Blogs don't need to be dramatic. If you're a CEO and think what you're doing is good and right, then let your employees go and get out of the way.
"Offer top 3 customers the ability to have a blog".
"Marketing departments have shied away from having conversations with customers for many years."
"When is it time to retire a blog?" "When no-one is reading it"
How to measure success? "Technorati is the best thing that's happened to blogs".
Is blogging the death of the pitch?
Beth Goza is the person who flew the bloggers out to Microsoft. "They're influential, and we want them to know about what we're doing." "You need to treat bloggers with the same level of respect as other sources."
A pitch is education.
"I don't want someone to educate me, I want to learn."
Rick Bruner reads blog for content and personality, not ranting.
the genre difference between personal and business blogging.
Gartenberg says that business weblogs are different from personal weblogs -- "you shouldn't put the cheesecake recipe online"
Dave Winer thinks people should put cheesecake recipes online.
Does blogging subvert the corporate hierarchy?
Dave Winer tells the story of someone at Harvard who criticizes the administration's perspective on the DMCA.
Is blogging journalism?
"Blogging is the same as journalism." People question this -- are reader comments a different sort of editorial feedback.
Is blogging commentary, not reporting?
"Disclose your interest, never say something untrue."
The dangers of employees blogging
"You have to trust people."
Halley -- "how much truth do businesses want to have?"
Should every company have weblogs -- "like asking, years ago, should all employees have email"
"If your employer is approving all posts, that's not a weblog"
Michael Gartenberg talks about Jupiter's experience with weblogs -- it's interesting because he's talking from experience, not just reciting theory.
He gives the good answer about the complaint that weblogs are ego-driven. All publishing is ego-driven.
"People renew the service because they read the weblog."
"Hype is good, we're putting on a conference."
"Blogging can get you fired"
Sam Ruby, who works at IBM: weblogs will subvert the corporate hierarchy
Adina: Is it going to be like the telephone? (Where early telecom executives wrote memos deploring people's use of the phone for trivial personal conversation?) Or is it going to be like radio, where the corporate oligarchy took over the medium, early in its history, by buying the law.
I'm in Boston for a few days, for work and play.
Tomorrow, I'm on the Managing a Business Blog panel at the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference.
Looking forward to hearing more good examples of things people are doing with social software in the real world.
And then going to the BostonBlogs dinner. And then going back to Austin.
Tom Coates has something sensible to say about the "wikis are ugly" tempest in a teapot.
I think there's a an underlying theme behind a lot of reviews of this kind and it's a rather old fashioned idea of fixed and stable products. The Wiki is considered a thing that works in a way, rather than a rough accumulation of various versions of the same rough concept - each of which has some benefits and some failings. Each of which could be nothing more than the first stage in a longer and more fruitful path of evolution. Each of which could be stripped down to its core and integrated with other sites - small bits of meme DNA grafted into message-boards or weblogs or even more static editorial pages. There is no product to review with finality- there is no here here (as Gertrude Stein might have been misquoted). So we dig around and we take what we like and we make new things - some will bed down and spread, others will not. Many will be spliced with each other once more..."
From the Lazyweb Birds of a Feather session at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference.
GeoLocation that reminds you want you wanted to do when you get somewhere. I've always had a terrible time remembering things past context switches. It would be so cool to be able to add a geocode to a to-do reminder, which would pop up when you reached that location. This is probably hackable today, with a GPS-enabled PDA.
Cross-platform calendaring. Even better, decentralized calendaring. So I don't need meetup to centrally organize my emergent meeting. I can have a blog-conversation, and can schedule a meeting or teleconference with people. Yes, let's do lunch. My blog will talk to your blog.
:-)
I think SSW is a style of application, rather than a category of applications.
(from a discussion on the definition of social software, over at the mailing list)
Examples:
You could build a recommendation engine that was social software -- such a recommendation engine would enable recommendees and recommenders to meet each other. If AllConsuming.net added a collaborative filter that showed blogs reviewing books that I was interested in, that would be a recommendation engine as social software.
You might be able to build a CRM system that was social software -- if customers and salespeople were able to see the information, and collaborate with each other. By contrast conventional CRM systems are based on assumptions of structured workflow and hiding the sales-person's intent from the customer. These assumptions are so deeply embedded that they're hard to see.
from a response to Pete Kaminski.
Dave Sifry comments about the draft specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), proposed by Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower.
Dave is concerned that a category standard would fall prey to the problems of ambiguity and scamming that killed HTML META tags.
As I noted in comments on his post, Dave is absolutely right at the scale of the web or the blogosphere.
However, I think that categories will be much more valuable at the community level. For example, Austin has a meta-blog, aggregating posts related to Austin. People in other cities are starting to do the same. If we could map sub-categories, we would be able to create a cross-regional directory. There are local editors who keep the system from being spammed, and make decisions about how to map categories.
So, I think that the system can work in the context of defined groups and defined applications.
The only thing that ENT is missing is a way to alias categories -- Austin's "music events" maps to Ann Arbor's "concerts." Presumably this could be implemented at the application level.
In Crain's B2B Marketing Magazine, Rich Karpinski writes about the use of weblogs in business marketing.
The article cites Macromedia, iView Multimedia, Cape Clear Software, and Collaxa as companies using blogs to communicate with customers.
The article talks about the challenge of using a personal medium in a way that keeps the company's marketing message, and the value of using blogs to communicate with a human voice.
via Doc Searls.
As linked by Slashdot, BuddyZoo provides statistics about your AIM buddy list.
With it, you can:
* Find out which buddies you have in common with your friends.
* Measure how popular you are.
* Detect cliques you're part of.
* See the degrees of separation between different screennames.
This kind of map, I think, would be more useful in a flexible, open environment than in a rigid, closed environment.
In a rigid, closed environment, like American high schools, people already know what cliques they're part of (jocks, nerds), and don't have a lot of choices about changing them.
In flexible environment, you could visualize groups that you were a small number of degrees of separation from, and join the group, by participating in an activity, joining a conversation, or getting an introduction.
In an open environment, you might learn things about the social network that you didn't already know.
Jon Udell writes about the value of overlapping scopes in networks of people, and the particular value of individuals who are able to bridge scopes.
If I am seeking or sharing information, why do I need to be able to address a group of 3 (my team), or 300 (my company), or 300,000 (my company's customers), or 300 million (the Usenet)? At each level I encounter a group that is larger and more diffuse. Moving up the ladder I trade off tight affinity with the concerns of my department, or my company, for access to larger hive-minds. But there doesn't really have to be a tradeoff, because these realms aren't mutually exclusive. You can, and often should, operate at many levels. [Practical Internet Groupware]
This suggests another layer in Ross Mayfield's network valuation.
The value of a network isn't just in its size, and the number of potential groups.
The value of a network is also in the connections among the different groups.
I wonder if there are optimal values?
* Too tightly coupled, and there is groupthink, with little diversity and innovation.
* Too loosely coupled, and it is more difficult or impossible for the group to behave in an emergent fashion --to reach agreement, to co-ordinate action, to swarm around a big idea,
The cool thing is, with networked media like weblogs and wikis, it should be possible to experiment and measure.
Blogshares is a fantasy market where you bet on shares of bloggers, and the value of your shares is multipled by the number of links to the blog.
I totally don't get this game.
It takes political-network blogging, and makes the rich get even richer by betting on top players. It's the power-law squared.
There's no way to win unless you're Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan.
If you're a blogger, and want to win the Blogshares game, and you're not Andrew, then you bet against your own blog, and drive the value of your own shares down.
By contrast, if you're "just blogging", then you can win if you have more readers than you would reach by email. You can win if you meet people through comments that you wouldn't have otherwise met. You can win by building relationships in the social and creative networks, even if you're not Susannah Breslin talking about pornography.
In sports, if you're not an Olympic athlete, you can play on a local team, or you can run for personal records and fitness.
Why play games that you can't win, any way you look at it?
Ross Mayfield has an intriguing article about using network metrics about the number of connections in a network to value social capital.
I think there is an insight here, but I'm still puzzling over the concept.
The concept of valuation raises a few key questions:
* value to whom?
* is there any meaningful medium of exchange between levels?
A peer-to-peer file-sharing network is very valuable to end-users, but (as currently implemented), reduces value for broadcast distributors. (I think there are plenty of things that broadcast distributors could do to take advantage of p2p instead of suing customers, but that's a whole 'nother story)
I'm represented by two senators, shared with 18 million residents of Texas. I have a small number of close friends. Those types of relationships aren't fungible.
In a money economy, you can say that two pairs of shoes have the same value as a single electric lawnmower.
Is there an analogous way to value different types of social relationships?
Somebody once said that putting in an ERP system is like setting your business plan in concrete.
Mitch Ratcliffe explains how technology systems should be chosen and designed in order to avoid initial-state biases.
Mitch's insights suggest a number of design lessons for social software:
Mitch:
Participation and modality biases... define how and when users should contribute to the group’s dialog; this may take the form of forcing people to use a form or that they learn some esoteric mark-up language to participate—maybe some of your team is most comfortable using email, but cannot do so to submit information to the workgroup application (why do they have to change? Because a programmer said so? Not a good enough reason when those people earn $80,000 a year already and do just fine communicating by email)
Adina:
Email should be supported as a basic user client, and we shouldn't force people to learn esoteric markup languages.
Mitch:
Semantic biases, evident both in the range of options available for categorizing information, from labeling every new topic as a “problem” to be solved instead of a business opportunity (this evolving from the quality-assurance based practices of software programmers) to limited ranges of choices in pop-up menus that prevent the group from straying outside the well-defined lines that the program lays out.
Adina:
Draw on wiki practices for user-defined and refactorable information architecture.
Mitch:
Time and skill biases, based on the presumption that every user has the same amount of time each day to participate in a group project to assuming that it takes everyone the same time to perform chores in the interface (that they all have the same skill level with the technology).
Adina:
Implement attention management features that remind users of information they want in front of them, and enables them to go find information they want when they look for it.
Implement interfaces that are designed for the task, that enable new and impatient users to get things done, and that enable experienced, task-focused users to get things done.
Mitch:
Historical bias, the preservation of outmoded knowledge because of the rigidity of technology. What if your company has moved from making buggy whips to airplanes and the software you use still is designed for a buggy whip company? Often, it is the failure of software to evolve with the organization that makes it utterly useless—this has happened in many media companies, where digital technology was designed for outputting paper or television signals and has locked companies that could be exploiting the Internet and on-demand multimedia networks into outmoded business models.
Adina:
Enable users of information spaces to molt: to cast off the outgrown shell of last year's information, keep the living core, and build a new shell that fits the organization's current shape.
Tom Coates on the discussion to code ratio.
Alternately, Jon Lebkowsky posts to a mailing list on the subject, keep the tools simple, and think about how best to use them to get things done.
Peter Merholz is back with a new, Quaker-influenced blogging philosophy -- only speak if you can improve on the silence. In honor of Peter's new philosophy, I have launched a new blog.
More on Ross Mayfield's analysis of new generation of web-native online community tools :
It seems to me, though that these different services don't represent standalone categories.
They're features. They work best together.
I find blogs much more interesting to surf than profile databases like Ryze -- you get a much richer picture of a person's interests and personality from their blog.
It would be great to be able to navigate from a blog to the person's contact information, add that person to one's list of contacts, and invite them to be your contact (connecting the weblog with Ryze).
In the early days of word processing software, there were popular standalone spell checkers and standalone font packages. These tools got rolled into the standard word processor package.
I'm not saying necessarily that all of the tools will inevitably be glommed together, like a bloated Office Suite. Some features will merge into integrated products and services. There will continue piece parts, connected by open interfaces.
I think that these services work better together than separately, and are part of one emerging Social Software category.
Ross Mayfield analyzes the new generation of web-native online community tools :
which displace older models like bulletin board systems and usenet.
Jon Lebkowsky replies that much of the "new online community" is not so new.
We're building new tools which are refinements of the old tools, and the social practices are clearly an extension of stuff we've done all along – we're just getting better at it.
So, what's new?
Jon thinks that the new web-based forms are more extraverted than walled gardens like the Well, and topic-focused forums like Usenet and mailing lists.
What's really new is that, instead of talking inside a community, we're talking across communities. Weblogs (and the feedback that go with 'em) face outward, they're public discussion. You can search them and do aggregation, so there's many ways to pull conversations together. There are tools for high level analysis, so you can see what people are talking about, what subjects are catching fire.
In fact, the old and the new forms may work best together. As Pete Kaminski said, weblogs are like front porches.
Weblogs can serve as the front porch to of a community, complementing more private discussion spaces.
Sam Ruby suggests using a thumb-rating system to train your blog aggregator to find more blogs you'd like.
Mark-Pilgrim-is-God has, of course already implemented this for his own site.
This could take advantage of opinion tags. Another good reason to implement opinion tags.
As long as we don't call them thumb tags.
PC Forum is running a lively conference wiki using Socialtext's Nice Little Wiki.
The conference also has a trackback metablog, aggregating posts from PC Forum bloggers.
Folks are also fotoblogging using Fotolog and PreClick.
Social software is the next best thing to being there.
The Howard Dean campaign has a weblog, and it looks like they're doing a good job of using the web to build a network of support.
They're using Meetup to organize a local network.
The blog and Meetup are both soliciting money for the campaign.
The blog is written by supporters, not by Dean himself, but they seem to have access to the candidate. They're doing a Slashdot-like interview, gathering questions from readers to report to Dean.
A recent post shows that the blog-campaigners get the point. They're using the web to help organize a national grass roots network and national funding.
A big reason why McCain lost in 2000, besides SC, was that he lacked a nationwide campaign structure that might have benefited from his NH win. The combination of the very crowded early primary schedule and the massive nationwide influx of volunteers (see Meetup.com) supporting Dean have made it possible for the Dean campaign to build a national campaign much earlier.
Seb's been "thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily."
As I said in comments to his post, I think this is a great idea bottom-up, closely tied with communities who define the categories. A group of Austin Bloggers or Emergent Eemocrats or movie lovers finds that they have a topic or set of topics in common, and creates a set of categories that can be used to aggregate posts. The categories come out of the community.
I'm more skeptical about implementing this top-down. An information architect friend was telling me that even professional categorizers categorize things differently over 50% of the time. I don't think there's any scheme that's going to work to auto-create categories, outside of the context of human communities to define those categories.
Blog popularity indexes like Daypop and Blogdex showed that The Raging Cow story was one of the top-linked items last week.
If you haven't been paying attention, the Raging Cow campaign was created by a marketing company attempting to influence bloggers to blog their endorsements for a new soft drink.
At first glance, the marketing company was probably ecstatic about the amount of publicity generated by the campaign. With a closer look, many of the blog posts derided and mocked this attempt to generate "astroturf" support in a grassroots medium.
The problem is that the indexes rank stories according to the number of links they attract. They can't tell whether the links mean that bloggers LIKE the story or HATE the story.
There's a lively discussion about adding a hyperlink attribute that would express an opinion about the linked content -- love it or hate it, thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
There's a new Blog Tribe Metablog which aggregates posts about blogging.
We built the metablog using Version 2 of the Austinbloggers infrastructure. Bloggers add a trackback ping to their posts, and those posts are aggregated into a central blog on the topic.
Version 1 used TopicExchange from Phil Pearson. TopicExchange uses trackback to aggregates posts to a URL at the TopicExchange site. This is very handy, if you simply want a list of posts on a topic. If you want to create a site that has richer formatting, you can aggregate the posts into your favorite blog tool using RSS. Unfortunately, that introduces a time delay.
So we developed Version 2, which uses a Python script developed by Chip Rosenthal, to instantly aggregate an abstract of the posts that issue the trackback pings, and to post them to a MovableType blog. Version 2 also has a right-column sidebar of announcements. The template contains a second MTEntries section running down the sidebar which displays posts having the category "announcements."
The AustinBloggers site has moved on to Metablog Version 3, which uses Chip's custom-written CMS and server-side includes to display the page.
But the Blog-network site uses Version 2, so it can be easily maintained by people who know Movable Type.
If you have any more questions about how this works, feel free to ask me.
One of the promising conversational threads at the Emergent Democracy Happening was the discussion of tools.
There are various types of tools that would help political action emerge from decentralized online communities.
Tools that make it easy to form self-organizing groups. Groups need to be visible to the public, enable people to join easily, and be managed by the participants. Discussion groups are great, but can be rather intraverted and hard to join. Trackback is a great way to build a community from decentralized bloggers, but there's no easy way to contribute identies to form a self-managed group.
Tools that make it easy to increase the intensity of interaction.
Online conversation is great, but higher-bandwidth modes, like phone and face-to-face meetings often help build relationships and commitment levels.
The Happening" infrastructure -- a conference call supplemented by online chat and wiki, made it possible scale interactive conference call in size, by making it easier to call on speakers, and to scale the discussion in time, by creating a persistent project space that lives on after the event.
Meetup.com has a handy centralized service that uses a website and email updates to enable people to sign up for groups, and meet in person once a month. But the contact information is managed centrally by Meetup, and the venues and dates are selected by Meetup. This doesn't give groups enough control to manage themselves
Tools that help communicate with governments. By making it easy to send citizen letters and campaign contributions to politicians.
MoveOn.org has a fantastic centralized service that uses a website and email updates to notify citizens, and enable them to speak up or donate. It would be great to have decentralized versions of those tools, available for groups to manage themselves.
Tools that amplify memes. Daypop and Blogdex identify and amplify the ideas that are kicking around the blogosphere. It would be great to have less centralized versions of these tools, with the ability to illuminate the zeitgeist in Austin, or with regard to say, environmental issues.
I'm brainstorming here: this is just a start. Would love to continue the conversation. What do you thinK?
Steven Johnson has an interesting and insightful take on the ant analogy in the "emergent democracy" conversation.
To me, when you're talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it's the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It's more like: "follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links."
The software ants follow simple rules to find and gather the patterns created by human decisions and human actions.
I like this. It's an example of the "Google principle". The Google algorithm is great, not because the computer determines which web pages are important, but because the computer gathers and adds up millions of pieces of information about which pages humans think are important.
Seb questions the purity of group-forming from weblogs, since in the cases of successful groups, there were already interested, committed potential leaders.
Groups with a sense of identity do form visibly chiefly through blog interaction. Witness for instance the recent formation of such entities as the group-forming community, Austin bloggers, EdBloggers, the Emergent Knowledge Management Research group, protest blogs in Venezuela, and the copyright term action reform group. However, I'm not sure that these could qualify as pure examples of emergence, because in each case, there are individuals who have crystallized a vision, assumed a leadership role, and made it happen through purposeful design. But it could be argued that something had already emerged before those visions occured to them.
1) Catalysis. A catalyst doesn't create the reagents itself. It simply lowers the energy required for the reaction, and makes the reaction happen faster and more often.
2) Humans, not ants. This isn't a pure "emergent system" where the pattern is created by giving a simple rule to a simple bot.
Sure, all of the groups Seb mentioned bring together people who already had plans and skills. The question is, how likely would they have been to find each other; how quickly would they have been to organize without these tools.
If weblogs can catalyze group-forming among people who were well-intentioned but disconnected, that's a big and welcome change.
Kellan, Snowdeal, deus_x, and raster write about digital insecurity -- the anxiety you feel about asking a colleague to be your "friend" or "contact" on
The reason is that there is no context for asking. The question doesn't correspond to a social form in real life.
In real life, you don't ask someone if they'll be your friend (not if you're older than 5 or 6).
1. You start a conversation, and the conversation continues.
2. You join an established group (work, social, hobby), you participate together in shared activities, and enjoy the company of other participants.
3. You invite someone to something, or you accept an invitation.
Online friend lists, like Ryze and its conceptual ancestor Six-Degrees, really are socially weird. You ask someone to be your friend without any of the social context of a shared activity or conversation.
There are good online analogs to the first two friendship-starters. We're still working on good online analogs to the third.
On the public internet, you don't need permission to join a conversation. You send someone e-mail, or reply to an email. You leave a comment on someone's weblog. If either person isn't interested in continuing the conversation, they don't reply.
Discussion groups and mailing lists are are online analogs (and often online add-ons) to joining a real-world group. You join EFF-Austin, and sign up for our mailing list. You can set up a mailing list or discussion group pretty easily -- but those are pretty heavy persistent structures.
We still need easier and and more natural ways to create ad hoc groups.
You can send an Evite, but that's more of a formal invitation to an offline event. Meet-up is ok -- hundreds of groups meeting monthly in cities around the world. You sign up to a group, and then get reminders of the meetings. But it's backwards and kind of totalitarian. Only Meet-up has the contact information -- the group members don't have each other's contact information. Meet-up chooses the places to meet.
We need a range of easier and more natural ways to create ad hoc groups, invite people to the groups, let people join groups. The digital equivalent to hey, let's go to a movie, or let's go out hiking.
TopicExchange is a lovely example of this. Create a topic, and anyone can contribute blog posts to the discussion.
DJ Adams distributed book club looks like a good start at ad hoc book clubs.
I don't think we need better FOAF metadata descriptions of the nuances of relationship. "I have now moved Bob from the category of FriendlyAquaintance to ModeratelyGoodFriend". Instead, we need better groupforming mechanisms, so people can become friends naturally.
Folks are worried about creating a mess of useless and undifferentiated information with GeoURLs. To solve the problem, people are proposing controlled vocabularies, or auto-categorization approaches (I'll talk about auto-categorization in a future post).
Prentiss Riddle articulately expresses the concern here:
I think GeoURLs are delightful but I don't understand how people can proceed down this path without addressing questions of scale and of additional metadata (e.g., a taxonomy with an associated controlled vocabulary) to permit useful lookups.)What happens if every business, blog, or blog entry -- in the standard metaphor, every lightbulb -- has a GeoURL? Aside from the question of whether a central GeoURL server can handle the load, won't the concept soon cease to be useful if every GeoURL report consists of a jumble of 500 "things" in the immediate neighborhood?
Josh Schachter, who created the GeoURL service, writes (in comments conversation with Prentiss on the GeoURL site):
obviously, geourl is just a first pass at the idea. the problem with, as you mention, letting people choose where into the "controlled vocabulary" they fit is that it will be abused. you'll note that the meta keywords tags are basically unused due to spamming abuse. so basically you'd need google-like powers to sort through it all. perhaps we need some sort of zen of what should be geourl'd and what shouldn't? some sort of policing mechanism? obviously this becomes complicated very quickly indeed.
Maybe it's not necessary to worry so much.
With classic transactional applications, it's imperative to have distinct categories. In a hospital database, it is important to clearly distinguish which user has the role of "Doctor" and which has the role of "Patient."
But GeoURL and metablog applications are just content. A little bit of ambiguity won't cause the wrong person's appendix to be removed.
At the Austin Metablog, we're starting with no categories. Human editors will categorize posts. We'll see which categories emerge,and then maybe decide how to automate them. The categorization emerges from the application as it matures.
The meta tag system for web sites failed miserably, since people learned to game and spam the system. But web site meta tags were intended to be a general-purpose system. There was no domain or community to confine the use of meta tags. So the system got out of control.
But GeoURL and metablog applications are build around specific communities with specific applications.
On another community metablog project we're working on (that we'll talk about soon!), we're planning to use a defined set of categories. We think this will work because it's a specific application, with a particular relevant set of categories.
Communities can add policing mechanisms when they are necessary. If people start to spam Austin Metablog, we can start thinking about human moderation, or automated moderation. There's no need to develop strict security policies in advance for every possible misbehavior.
For people who've done content repositories for many years in other domains, please talk to me about which wheels we are reinventing!
via conversations with Greg Elin
Marc Canter picks up on Ben and Mena's plans to include "friend of a friend" ID and relationship logic in Movable Type.
Marc connects this to an ongoing conversation about Digital ID. "Persistent digital ID's is a foundation building block needed for social networking and what I call 'the mesh'. (I got the link from Euan Semple)
The problem with proposals for top-down digital ID is that they don't do anything good for individuals -- they give governments and businesses more power for intrusive marketing and surveillance.
The problems with all the proposals for bottom-up digital ID is that they don't give any immediate return to individuals. You fill out a form on your desktop computer, and the data is encrypted, and then what? Bottom up movements have gotten no traction; there's no incentive to the individual to play.
Blogspace is different. People are already using weblogs to connect to their friends and build new connections with people with common interests.
A FOAF-based blogroll gizmo would automatically build a blogroll with data about the friends and aquaintances in your blogroll. Somebody could provide hosted services for bloggers using simpler tools.
This semantically rich information could be crawled, parsed, and mapped to reveal beautiful and useful patterns about the relationships between people and ideas.
The application will spread across the network, because it meets a need that people already have -- to keep track of each other's blogs.
Thereby creating the critical mass for other decentralized, user-driven id services.
Watch blogspace.
DJ Adams has created a distributed book club application that "finds if anyone has been talking about any of your favourite or current books", by crawling AllConsuming.net. This creates an RSS file, "which represents a sort of 'commentary alert' feed for that user and his books."
From the "to do list" in DJ's code:
Would be nice to be able to retrieve:
1) user book list for *all* book types (completed, purchased, etc)
2) book *comments* (recorded in allconsuming) as well as blog mentions
This is wonderful! This is one of the things that I started blogging for.
via Euan Semple
I'm travelling (New York and New Jersey), with spotty internet access through Sunday.
Forecast: light blogging.
Phillip Pearson just posted the first version of the Internet Topic Exchange, a very cool service that enables the creation of composite blogs out of trackback pings.
A few weeks ago, Chip suggested creating a composite Austin blog to cover Austin politics, following the Peterme conversation on city blogs. We could cover other topics in addition to politics -- music, restaurants, etc.
There's already an AustinBloggers site, which has several authors. But that requires individuals to post directly to that blog. This is a different idea -- post to your very own blog, and the AustinBlog will aggregate your Austin-related posts.
I created a demo site, here which has some of my Austin posts from recent months.
All we need to do to post to the blog would be to add this trackback to the posts on our own blogs about Austin. http://topicexchange.com/t/austin_blog/
The resulting content will be available as an RSS feed, which we could pull into a standalone MovableType-based blog (for example, and if I get the RSS plug-in working correctly). This could be formatted more nicely than the native wiki format.
People who don't use trackback can enter their URL in a web form here or use the MT trackback server (not sure how that works yet.)
I'm travelling this week, so I can't work on a standalone aggregate blog until next week.
I sent an email to everyone I remember participating in the AustinBlog conversation over the last few weeks. Others are welcome to to the party.
iCommune is a program that lets iTunes users share songs over the internet. (via Euan Semple
Which is very nifty -- as long as both people have iTunes.
Meanwhile, Marc Canter argues in favor of universal broadband content standards. He argues gamefully about the benefits to:
* On-line media storage systems
* Media management systems
* Media tools, devices and playback systems
* Online communities
But each of these players has more interest in proprietary models than common standards.
It will take some sort of mass decentralized application (like blogging) to drive standards againsts the interest of the existing vendors
The topic-based model (RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming and the BlogThreading models have different strengths and weaknesses.
They are both good, they aren't the same.
Topics are great for aggregate blogs that assemble posts about coffee shops, Austin events, or other specific subject.
Threadneedle is better for aggregating a human conversation, whose topic meanders under a named thread.
A topic-focused blog won't get you a human conversation (that would be ai-complete). A human conversation won't get you a subject-organized index (not without editing after the fact).
- Adina
p.s. Shelley writes a good summary of her progress and other developments in BlogConversation tools here.
There's great discussion going on here about creating weblog aggregated from individual bloggers' categorized posts.
This would be a fun way to create an Austin blog out of the various AustinBlogger posts that talk about local events and places.
And a conversation about Shelley Powers ThreadNeedle application, which will create threaded discussions out of trackback threads (if I understand it right).
Which we could use to create a single threaded discussion out of the distributed conversation about geoURL applications.
I'm still reading up on the conversation, please correct me if I've summarized wrong.
Ross Mayfield has a good summary of a discussion about cognitive and emotional dimensions of trust.
As I said in the comments to that post, I like the notions that:
* trust is built over time
* trust is a parametric space, with different kinds of trust (personal trust that a friend will be reliable and sympathetic; professional trust that a colleague will produce quality work).
But I start getting suspicious about social science methodologies that attempt to quantify and parameterize trust. Organizations that rely heavily on this kind of analysis in Professor Stephenson's work may have more problems than a consulting sociologist can help with.
My first market research job involved writing up the results of HR surveys in a large telecommunications company.
The results showed that employees did not trust managers and managers did not trust employees. The HR survey was repeated on an annual basis, showing that managers and employees continued to distrust each other.
This company had big problems with management and human relationships. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on survey research to quantify the distrust between managers and employees wasn't the best use of money.
Pages full of survey results and armies of consultants don't replace and can't create honest leadership, aligned incentives, and day-to-day warmth and respect.
Trying to add the "email this entry feature." Please ignore strange behavior you may see while I futz.
We could use GeoURLS to create the Global Coffeeshop blog.
Mark-up blog entries with the GeoURL for the coffeeshop. Then be able to look up coffee-shops in any part of the world.
cool idea. Nasty, closed implementation -- a proprietary service from the phone company to create blogs only from its own customers, vs. software and an open API to blog pictures.
That kind of openness probably isn't possible in the closed cellphone world. Wonder what Russ Beattie thinks about it, as a mobile guy and blogger.
via Dave Winer.
This would be a nifty application for city-based arts festivals, like the Edinburgh Festival or SXSW.
The programmers could encode the program by venue. Then individual bloggers could create entries related to performances and plans at a particular place.
The first thing people are doing with GeoUrls is mapping blogs -- a standard way of doing what nycblogger does -- so you can see which bloggers are in a city or a neighborhood.
Other nifty applications would turn this around and create blog entries for a place -- a spot on a hiking trail or a restaurant.
This seems like an open version of the HP CoolTown scheme to give urls to places. But simpler and better. Just a layer of location ID -- not tied to hardware platform and device interaction model.
Lots of LazyWeb fodder.
Welcome to my new blog home. I'm excited to be here, with search, category archives, integrated comments, and the chance to play around with MovableType hackery.
I still need to tweak the categorization of some of the older posts; should be cleared up in the next few days. The book archive is working -- click the book category at right and see a list of all the book reviews on the site. (Yay!)
Please let me know what you think; and please update your blogroll or bookmarks if you haven't already. Comments and suggestions welcome.
The reason I get all all excited about weblog clustering is that the "winner-takes-most" aspect of the log scale graph is NOT what is most interesting about weblog networks.
If it were, then the net would be like network television -- a few top broadcasters, and an infinite number of passive viewers.
It's not. The weblog network is a mesh of communities with overlapping and shifting memberships; each subcommunity has its connectors and popular voices.
When we focus on identifying the "most central node" of the network, we turn a world with multiple centers into a hierarchy.
In a comment on the post below, Howard Greenstein refers to nycbloggers, a site that aggregates New York blogs. I love the map that locates NYC bloggers by proximity to subway stops.
Relates to a conversation I was having with Peter Merholz about sites for local blogs, which he writes about here. One of Peter's insights is that blogs are a great way to report trivia that gets bypassed by traditional media: "I'd love to know that I ought to avoid the intersection of Sacramento and Oregon because there's a massive pothole."
The comments to Peterme's post include links to other regional blog sites, including Los Angeles and the UK.
Ross Mayfield writes about some nifty work by Valdis Krebs to map the network of relationships at Ryze, an online business networking group, and the weblog tribe on Ryze.
Here's some more analysis that would be really interesting:
a) identify clusters of blogs -- blogs that share a number of blogroll blogs in common (first filter out the most popular blogs).
b) use text analysis to identify the topics the clusters have in common by identifying words they use much more frequently than average.
This would identify groups of New York bloggers, Java bloggers, warbloggers, etc. Groups wouldn't be mutually exclusive; lots of people would belong to more than one cluster.
Blogrolling.com exports blogrolls in RSS and OPML format, so that might be a workable dataset. They have 6915 blogrolls with 108278 links.
The math to do this is pretty far over my head -- so this one goes out to the Lazyweb!
From a comment to Mitch Kapor's Chandler weblog.
DUCKY'S LAWS OF EMAIL
1. People are more efficient when related messages are grouped together and the groups are in rough priority order.
2. People want to be able to see all their "to-do" messages -- ones that they need to read, respond to, or act upon -- easily.
3. (or maybe 2b). When a message has no more pending actions, people want to remove it from their list of "to-do" messages.
4. People want to execute actions with one or fewer clicks.
5. Old messages are a valuable resource.
6. The faster and better a Search tool is, the less important it is to file messaages.
7. Fuzzy-logic or "scoring" filters are much more accurate than the "sudden death" filters that most email clients now have.
8. Most people won't customize their own setup, but are usually willing to import customizations that other people have made.
9. Messages that are to you and only you are usually more important than messages where you're one of many recipients.
10. Some people (e.g. customer service reps) answer the same questions over and over, but computers are not quite smart enough to be able to figure out which response is appropriate.
and MORE
On an experimental MovableType weblog I've been playing with comments syndication. I would love to be able to subscribe to comments when I'm following a conversation, instead of manually pinging the weblog, and would be happy to syndicate comments feeds to others.
So far the "comments syndication" examples I've seen from Bill Kearney and Phil Ringnalda have involved syndicating all of the comments for a given weblog.
Instead I'd like to be able to syndicate and subscribe to a single conversation at a time -- isn't that how you particate in blogconversations?
I'm still futzing with it, will let you know when and if something works.
follow up to a thread at the Austin bloggers meeting. Somebody at O'Reilly read Mark Pilgrim's blog and offered him a column at XML.com. Where he wrote this transparently clear introduction to RSS.
People get to my site searching for Jumpline and "leather bound Moby Dick and Kenmore vacuum cleaner manual.
Unfortunately for those visitors, Google doesn't have a filter for sarcasm and irony.
Denise Howell and link trail...
You, dear reader, have pristine attention to detail, and never fail to close quotes in a blog post hyperlink.
I unfortunately slip every once in a while and leave off the close-quote, creating an unreadable post that can't be removed from within the weblog editing interface. Fortunately, it's possible to remove an offending post using the XML-RPC interface to the major blog tools.
Since I'm enough of a klutz to make this mistake on more than one weblog, I wrote a small python utility that can remove dead posts for an arbitrary weblog, using the form: kill("blogconfig_filename",badpostnumber). It builds on Mark Pilgrim's python wrapper to the blogger API.
Let me know if you're interested, and I'll post it for download. I will also be reassured to know of the existence of fellow keyboard klutzes.
Greg Elin, who really needs a weblog whose brand new weblog is here, from a mailing list
Most of the efforts of "electronic publishing" have been about how to make READING a better experience. But the READING experience is actually very well solved by linear text (e.g., books, articles, etc.) So the big money went into systems for more varied DISTRIBUTION of information already being written. And those systems failed.
But personal web sites were an instant hit -- people paid money to have them. And now Weblogs appear to be here to stay. And Weblogs make it easier to WRITE. (They are also easy to read, but in large part because they are easy to WRITE.) The tools that have made money on the Internet/Web are tools that have improved the WRITING, the authorship, experience. (And the large media giants have only tried mostly to develop tools for the MANAGEMENT of written information, that is PUBLISHING WORKFLOWS.
None of the blog chat/ IM tools I've tried has worked so far -- need to take the Yahoo button down at left because it doesn't work.
The blogchat beta technically worked, but it took a multi-step process. Not only did you need to open a browser with your blog up, you needed to go to their site and log in with a password. Also, the sound notification feature requires flash, and I don't have flash working in Mozilla. So you need to be looking at the window to see if someone is trying to talk to you. I'm never staring at a chat window, waiting for someone to talk to me! When I had it turned on, I missed people, and most of the time I never got around to turning it on during the day.
The Yahoo IM is easier. When your blog window is up and you're live with IM, it shows that you're available. But it doesn't work. I never get the messages (if you tried to send me an IM I wasn't ignoring you -- I didn't get the message).
If you've successfully troubleshot the Yahoo IM feature, please let me know.
I really like the idea of starting conversations with people who are reading the blog; wish I could get the tools to work.
(What is the past tense of troubleshoot by the way? Troubleshot? Troubleshooted? Debugged? Gotten the damn thing to work?)
Chis Gulker did some research, and found that...
If you want more readers, you should become famous and, lacking that, write frequent, long posts about stuff that you know well. Encourage inbound links, but don't worry about outbound.
Here's a little python script that can post to a blog entry via email.
It can be configured to post to any weblog that supports the blogger API, using the python wrapper written by Mark Pilgrim.
Why would someone build a model of the starship Enterprise in legos?
Because of micro-fame, says Tom Coates. On the internet, everyone can find the 15 other people who are interested in the same obscure hobby.
"There's now an audience for the strangest and smallest little projects. All the disconnected people around the world who might find a Lego Enterprise cool are suddenly connected up. It's worth making that tiny little thing you thought would be quite cool once, it's worth writing the dumb ideas down that you thought no one would ever listen to. Because the odds of finding people who will care about them, will gel and relate to you, will celebrate your idea or project and make you famous (tiny-fame, micro-idol), is radically improved. The future will be full of dumb projects, tiny ideas, silly concepts - each celebrated by their own bespoke fan-base... And human creativity will have taken a massive leap forward...
New blog database shows who links to your blog and lets you watch your rank in the blog hierarchy; and provides a for-pay service to track your blog ranking.
What I like: lets you discover inbound links.
What I don't like: treats blogs like a high school popularity contest.
The single-peaked popularity ranking obscures "subcommunity" patterns -- there are knots of java bloggers and political bloggers and Austin bloggers; and plenty of bloggers who participate in multiple communities (like physical life).
When Blogdex started picking up a lot of Persian blogs in its top rankings, the designer considered reducing his coverage to english-language blogs only. That's exactly wrong. The right thing to do is to reveal blog blogcommunities, and identify leading voices in those subcommunities. Hmm... Valdis Krebs probably knows how to do this...
And raw popularity seems beside the point. Some of my favorite blogs are low-traffic blogs from people who don't do much self-promotion. This blog is a place to write about the various topics I'm interested in; not filtered by which topics are most popular.
It reads your blogroll and gives you recommended sites that you might like, using data from Phil Pearson’s Blogging Ecosystem.
Like Amazon's recommendations, you can tell it which recommendations you've read already or aren't interested in, and it will update the list of recommendations.
Mark does an insightful thing with the algorithm, which works by:
looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100)
So the gizmo doesn't just refer you to Doc and Dave and Dave and Slash -- it finds less overwhelmingly popular sites that you might be interested in.
This overcomes a flaw in the arguments of Linked and Nexus, which both focus on the winner-take-most chacter of small-worlds networks, and ignore the interesting ecological roles played by sub-hubs.
Blogstreet searches a database of 28,000 blogs.
Blogstreet can show which blogs are related to other blogs. If you type in a Blog URL, Blogstreet will show you a list of related blogs derived from their blogroll, and the list of blogs that blogroll it. This would be even more helpful if the neighborhood was assembled using topics and other references. After all, it's easy enough to blogrollsurf already.
This coming weekend, I'll be migrating the weblog to Movable Type.
Blogger has been a great way to get started quickly, but I always wanted the opportunity to play around with the form and the tools, and Moveable Type is more open.
Does anyone have an opinion about whether to go with http://www.alevin.com/bookblog or http://bookblog.alevin.com? Please send comments, or, if the comments engine is off, send me email at alevin [at] alevin [dot] com. For the curious, those urls don't have anything there yet, and alevin.com just points you back here :-)
By the way, I've turned the comments feature off for the last few days because enetation has been struggling to keep up with the server load. I hope that Rob is able to get enough money to keep the servers up and running because it is a very useful service.
In the conversation over at O'Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes that he simulcasts his mailing list as a weblog.
I like this idea, though my personal preference is the inverse of Giles; I try to keep the number of inbound mailing lists down to a critical few, and prefer going out and browsing a wider variety of blogs and list archives. Keeps the inbox cleaner and the guilt level down.
I was planning on writing a utility to generate an email version of the blog once the site goes live with Movable Type. The added wrinkle is that I want to set up the lists by topic, so people can subscribe to posts on personal updates, or complex systems, or technology, or politics.
In the weblog, Giles has an interesting proposal for a service that would convert mailing lists to newsfeeds and back, along the lines of Aaron Swartz' rss2email utility, but operated as a web service accessible to non-hackers.
Nice idea, but vulnerable to the type of performance woes that afflict popular free services.
From Diego Duval, of the Abort, Retry, Fail weblog.
Open source, license to be determined. He says its working and will be posted for download next week.
It's written in pure Java2, we'll see how it works on my limping Win98 laptop.
Tim O'Reilly wants to send email to his weblog too.
This weekend I wrote a small Python program to post entries to MovableType via email. I used Mark Pilgrim's Python wrapper for the Blogger XML-RPC API, PyBlogger, and Mark Lutz' examples of Python email programming. The 'mailblog' pulls mail from a pop3 email address used only for blog posting. The script also works to post to Blogger, but Blogger Pro already has the feature.
Benefits:
Drawbacks:
Went to the Austin Blog MeetUp tonight. It was good to meet fellow bloggers; Kathryn, Adam Rice, Prentiss Riddle, David Nunez.
There were several interesting conversational threads....
* On blogging and personal disclosure. We talked about Mark Pilgrim's
moving blog-published story of addiction and recovery, which got him
fired from one job and hired at the next, and about Kathryn's experience
with friends who reacted very badly to blog entries causing a conflict
that hasn't yet been resolved.
As for my thoughts on the topic: I am not much of an exhibitionist. Part
of this is wimpiness; I don't want to write things that I wouldn't want
potential employers to read. Part of it is concern for you, the reader;
my private fears, worries and doubts are compelling to me, but I don't
imagine they would be interesting to anyone I don't know in real life.
Part of it is a desire for security: it feels safer to share personal
stories, in person, with people I know well and trust.
* On maintaining social norms in online community. There seems to be a
continuum starting with small discussion groups where people use their
own names, in which people maintain face-to-face social norms; to larger
mailing lists, where people sometimes flame, but social norms can keep
misbehavior in check; to large forums that use automated tools to help
implement social norms (SlashDot moderation); to large, anonomyous
forums which devolve into incoherent hostility (Usenet, Yahoo messages).
* On blogging and community. We talked about using comments and log
reports to get a sense of feedback from blogging, and brainstormed a
couple ideas to increase blog-related community. It would be wildly cool
to be able to aggregate blog comments into a distributed threaded
discussion. I was thinking about how to implement this last weekend; and
found that that the MoveableType crew is working on it. It should be
some combination of talkback and RSS syndication/aggregation. That way,
people who happened to be reading the same book at the same time could
share a conversation. Prentiss suggested a sort of LivePerson IM for
blogs; where a reader could click a "talk to the blogger" button and
chat. That would need to be implemented with IM-style controls:
invitations to indicate to readers when the blogger was available, and
"keep out" features to repel antisocial visitors, so that a "hey baby
wanna" visitor would go away instantly and permanently.
* On Moveable Type and CSS. Adam kindly explained some subtleties of
about using CSS elegantly to support the structure of your information.
I spent last weekend learning basic CSS, and plan to spend some time
this weekend playing with MoveableType, the better to categorize the
blog for people who are interested in some topics much more than others.
* On MeetUp. The revenue model for MeetUp is to make referral fees from
the venues where people meet; so MeetUp suggests a ballot of places to
meet, and visitors vote. This time round, MeetUp suggested a Starbucks,
a bowling alley, and a video arcade. Not as bad a ballot as "Saddam
Hussein", or "slow, painful death from torture", but still not great.
Two venues wholly unsuitable for the group, and a chain coffeeshop in a
city with plenty of fine independents. Hopefully, MeetUp will accept
suggestions for independent businesses.
Despite the flaws in the venue selection, it was a good and useful
service; helped people find each other based on a common interest, and
automated some of the labor-intensive aspects of organizing a meeting,
like sending out reminders, with location, address and phone number.
What with the dot.com bust, people downplay the internet; but there are
plenty of ways still that the internet provides helpful new tools for
people to connect and the interenet.
And a couple of reflections on the meeting.
* You know you've been in Austin too long when the weather is perfectly
pleasant (mid-60s), yet you go out underdressed.
* MeetUps need colored table tents to attract people who don't know each
other. Prentiss and Kathryn, and Adam and I met separately, and we
didn't meet each other until David Nunez showed up, whom I recognized
from EFF Austin.
* I know better than to have caffeine at 9pm. It was cold outside, and they
were out of decaf, so I ordered a chai latte for the warmth, and it's 2am now.