Category: Blogging

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.

Bill Gross writes:

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.