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 p