Showing posts with label blogosphere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogosphere. Show all posts

31 December 2008

Proud to be Lesser

Matt has some thoughts on blogs - including this one:

my primary interest is in digging up what's not already "popular." Unfortunately, I'm as guilty as anyone of recycling "news," but real traffic comes from breaking new ground, and I find that by scouring Digg and much lesser-known blogs.

...

no Drudge Report for me. Instead I'll be reading OpenDotDotDot and other "lesser" blogs. Hopefully this will keep translating into rising Open Road readership in 2009. Maybe we'll break the top-5,000,000 by 2012. One can dream....

Thanks, Matt...I think.

Actually, I feel exactly the same way: I'd much rather read Matt's informed writing on The Open Road - born of real analytical intelligence *and* hands-on experience - than the frothy nonsense served up by "leading" blogs.

The latter are most interested in traffic and in maintaining their position as blogosphere personalities: famous for being famous. They rarely contribute a deeper understanding of the world they write about.

That's what we "lesser" blogs are for.

05 November 2008

Blears Shoots the Blogger Messengers

Quoth Hazel Blears:

"But mostly, political blogs are written by people with disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.

"Until political blogging 'adds value' to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

Well, darling, could it be that bloggers unearth scandals and hypocrisy because that's mostly what you and your chums in the government seem to generate? Could it be that a more affirmative kind of blogging will emerge once your government drops its own unending flood of cynicism and spin and lies?

Because - and here's the shocking truth, Hazel - nobody is stopping "new voices" from emerging in the blogosphere: that's it's beauty, entry is frictionless. The fact that there aren't any such voices, or that nobody reads them if there are, is because of the noxious atmosphere you and your mates have engendered. Essentially, politicians get the journalism they deserve, so you stand condemned by your own observations.

20 June 2008

Associated Press Hoist By Its Own Petard

Mr TechCrunch can be slightly obnoxious at times, but on this one I can only applaud him:


now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).

Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.

If nothing else, this shows the value to the blogosphere of having a few A-list bloggers with deep pockets.

15 June 2008

The Bang-on Blogosphere

Further proof that things are shifting in media-land:

as Iain Dale, the Tory blogger who ran Davis's ill-fated leadership campaign, points out, while newspapers scorned the resignation the blogosphere largely embraced it: political chatrooms are overflowing with right-wingers offering to start a fighting fund, and left-wingers agonising over whether to support him. Even the Daily Telegraph's Saturday letters page was two to one in favour of the former MP for Haltemprice and Howden.

Could David Davis somehow have stumbled across something the establishment has missed, an untapped anger with what the public sees as a snooping, heavy-handed state that spies on it through speed cameras and CCTV and microchips on its rubbish bins, that tramples its freedoms and makes sloppy mistakes with its private data?

Update: Related thoughts here.

15 November 2007

W(h)ither Blogging?

Here's a thoughtful post:

Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn't that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we'll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.

I find this particularly interesting because my impression is exactly the reverse: I find more and more interesting stuff in my feeds. Not only that, but I find this humble little blog is also attracting more attention, particularly among the PR crowd. I've noticed a distinct change in attitude among the latter - unspoken, but clearly there - from regarding blogs as vaguely interesting but not very influential, to seeing them as just as important as traditional media.

I'd go further: the blogs seem to be taking over. At a time when more and more (dead-tree) newspapers and magazines are closing down, or going purely online, and when more and more online titles are starting to run bloggers as part of the mix, it seems to me that the barycentre of digital publishing is mostly certainly moving deep into the heart of the blogosphere.

Of course, the acid test will be during the next downturn, but I'm optimistic. Unlike the publishing excesses of dotcom 1.0, where magazines blossomed with the manic marketing of no-hoper startups, only to wilt themselves when that, er, fertiliser dried up, blogs are predicated on lean and mean. The only ones that will suffer seriously are those that are beginning to bloat towards the condition of traditional, inefficient publications. No names, no packdrill.

25 June 2007

Is Microsoft People-Ready?

It's interesting that the brouhaha over Microsoft's "people-ready" campaign involving top bloggers mouthing incomprehensible sound-bites about "people-readiness" has concentrated on castigating the bloggers involved. But what I find interesting is the light it throws on Microsoft.

The whole campaign is just so maladroit: using blogger stars in this way shows that the company simply has no idea of how the blogosphere - glorified echo-chamber that it so often is - works. This crescendo of self-righteousness on the part of other bloggers was inevitable: it's not like this kind of collective breast-beating hasn't happened before.

Which goes to show that in its dealings with this quintessentially people-centric medium, Microsoft is, to coin a phrase, deeply "people-unready".

20 February 2007

The Incorruptible Blogosphere

John Dvorak is the original angry old man of computer journalism. I've been reading his stuff for decades now. It's striking that he's increasingly off-beam compared to the "good old days" of his column in PC Magazine, when he more than anyone had his finger on the pulse of personal computing. But he's still a good and entertaining journalist (after all, when has being right ever been that important in this business?).

Here's a good example of Dvorak at his best, writing about the essential incorruptibility of the blogosphere - not, be it noted, of bloggers, but of the totality of them:

While many bloggers seem eagerly corruptible — almost inviting it — it's not going to make any difference because there will be 10 to 100 bloggers pointing the finger at them and another 1,000 analyzing the finger-pointing.

Spot on; this another reason why open, non-hierarchical systems work so much better than closed, centralised ones in these kinds of situations. (Via Smart Mobs.)

01 February 2007

WTF is WTF?

Dave Sifry has always been one of the do-ers in the world of computing. And as someone who has been at the heart of open source for over a decade, he can be counted on to be plugged into hot trends.

His latest wheeze, Where's The Fire? or WTF? - a play on the acronym WTF? - ought, by rights, to be really sizzling, and not just because of it's name:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere.

...

You can also write a WTF on any topic that someone would search for, and provide information and resources to them about that topic or subject. So, you might want to write a WTF about yourself or your friends names, or your company (or maybe even your competition!)

If you think that you've got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

As this indicates, WTF? hopes to tap into the power of both Digg and Wikipedia: user-generated, explanatory content that is voted up or down by peer review. At the moment there's not much there, and it seems to me that there's a crucial piece missing from the WTF idea.

The "blurb", as the basic unit of WTF is called, resides on Technorati's servers, not the blurber's: this means that blurb authors receive no compensation other than "glory". Unless there is some Technorati-juice being dispensed in the form of built-in links to the blurber's blog (and not just ones added gratuitously), I fear that most of the better bloggers will just say: "WTF?".

04 October 2006

The Iceman Cometh

USA Today has a chilling piece about the increasing number of libel cases being brought against bloggers:

Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. "It hasn't happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home," he says. "That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere."

Just think what it will do to the Technorati graphs.

20 July 2006

No Comment, No MT et al.

Comments are the ichor that courses through the blogosphere's veins. A blog with no comments is probably dead, and a blogger that doesn't comment on the blogs of others probably needs to get out more.

But if it's hard enough keeping track of all the interesting things happening so that you can blog about some of them, keeping track of all the comments to your comments has been practically impossible. No longer. As this TechCrunch piece notes , there are now no less than three rival services that will help you track comments. Maybe I ought to try one.

27 May 2006

The Bloggable is Political

An interesting story in the New York Times that hints at how gobbets of the blogosphere may be starting to emerge blinking into the strange world of meatspace, with potentially important political ramifications.

02 April 2006

Wiki Wiki Wikia

Following one of my random wanders through the blogosphere I alighted recently on netbib. As the site's home page explains, this is basically about libraries, but there's much more than this might imply.

As a well as a couple of the obligatory wikis (one on public libraries, the other - the NetBibWiki - containing a host of diverse information, such as a nice set of links for German studies), there is also a useful collection of RSS feeds from the library world, saved on Bloglines.

The story that took me here was a post about something called Wikia, which turns out to be Jimmy Wales' wiki company (and a relaunch of the earlier Wikicities). According to the press release:

Wikia is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia--the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wales and Beesley serve as board members.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights, but allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia's development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code.

In a sense, then, this is yet more of the blogification of the online world, this time applied to wikis.

But I'm not complaining: if that nice Mr Wales can make some money and feed back improvements to the underlying MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wikis, all to the good. I just hope that the dotcom 2.0 bubble lasts long enough (so that's why they used the Hawaiian word for "quick" in the full name "wiki wiki").

20 March 2006

What Open Source Can Learn from Microsoft

In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle over a posting that a Firefox 2.0 alpha had been released. However, this rumour has been definitively scotched by one of the top Firefox people on his blog, so you can all relax now (well, for a couple of days, at least, until the real alpha turns up).

And who cares whether the code out there is an alpha, or a pre-alpha or even a pre-pre-alpha? Well, never mind who cares, there's another point that everyone seems to be missing: that this flurry of discoveries, announcements, commentaries, denials and more commentaries is just what Firefox needs as it starts to become respectable and, well, you know, slightly dull.

In fact, the whole episode should remind people of a certain other faux-leak about a rather ho-hum product that took place fairly recently. I'm referring to the Origami incident a couple of weeks ago, which produced an even bigger spike in the blogosphere.

It's the same, but different, because the first happened by accident in a kind of embarrassed way, while the latter was surely concocted by sharp marketing people within Microsoft. So, how about if the open source world started to follow suit by "leaking" the odd bit of code to selected bloggers who can be relied upon to get terribly agitated and to spread the word widely?

At first sight, this seems to be anathema to a culture based on openness, but there is no real contradiction. It is not a matter of hiding anything, merely making the manner of its appearance more tantalising - titillating, even. The people still get their software, the developers still get their feedback. It's just that everyone has super fun getting excited about nothing - and free software's market share inches up another notch.

22 February 2006

10 Things to Build a Blog Readership

1: A clear idea of what you are trying to do

If you want to get and keep an audience for a blog, you need to have a clear idea about a couple of things: what you are writing about, and who for. The word “blog” may derive from “web log”, but if all you do is write a kind of haphazard online diary, only your mother will read it. Don't be fooled by the top bloggers: even though they often seem to be jotting down random thoughts about their day, there is terrific method in their madness – which is why they are top bloggers. Even if they don't articulate it, there is usually a strong underlying theme to their posts. Until you become an A-list blogger, and can do it reflexively, you need to think about what you are trying to say, and to whom, all the time.

2: Strong, interesting and consistent opinions

Having a clear idea of what you are trying to do is not enough: unless you have something interesting to contribute on the subject, people who visit your blog once will not return. The good news is that it doesn't really matter what your opinions are, provided they are strong, well-expressed – and consistent. People like to have a mental image of what a blog is doing, and where it fits in the blogosphere: once you've established a certain tone or approach, don't keeping changing it. It will only confuse your readers, who will get annoyed and move on.

3: The ability to think fast

This is related to the previous point. You not only need strong opinions, you need to be able to form them quickly. Blogs are not the right medium if you want to ruminate deeply about something and then post a 10,000 word essay some months later: time is of the essence (the “log” bit in web log). You need to be able to form snap judgements - but sensible snap judgements, and consistent with your previous posts. Although not crucial, it also helps if you can type fast: the sooner you get your opinion out there, the more likely it is to be a fresh viewpoint for your potential audience.

4: A self-critical attitude

So you've had an idea and typed it up: don't press the Publish button just yet. First of all, read through what you've written: check whether it's clear, and whether you could improve it. In particular, cut out anything unnecessary. People tend to skim through blogs, so you've got to make it as quick to read as possible. Once you've checked the whole thing (good grammar and correct spelling are not obligatory – blogs are informal, after all – but they do make it easier for visitors) ask yourself one final question: is it worth posting this? One of the hardest things to learn when blogging is the discipline of deleting sub-standard posts. A weak post leaves a bad impression, and lowers someone's opinion of the whole blog. If in any doubt, scrub the post and write another one.

5: Marketing skills

Once you've posted something you're happy with, you need to let the world know. One common misconception among fledgling bloggers is that quality will out – that the world will somehow guess you've written some deeply witty/profound/amazing post and rush to read it. It doesn't work like that. Instead, you need to get out there and sell your story. The first thing to do is to make sure that all the blog search engines know about your posting (an easy way to do this is to sign up with Ping-o-matic). Then you need to start posting on other people's blogs to drive some traffic back to yours.

There are two ways to do this. One is to post on anything about which you have an opinion: most blogs let you include your main blog address as a matter of course. The other is to include in your comment a direct link to one of your posts – only do this if your post is strictly relevant to what you are commenting on. One technique is to use a blog search engine like Technorati to find other blogs that are writing about the subject matter of your post: then visit them to see if you can make a sensible comment with a link back to your own blog. However, use this approach sparingly or your comments may simply not be posted.

6: Self-confidence

Even if you've left plenty of hints around the blogosphere that you've just put up an interesting post, you may well find that there's little activity on your blog. Relatively few people leave comments on blogs (and many of those are just publicising their own postings), so the absence of comments doesn't mean that nobody's visited (see below for a good way of tracking all visitors). But you musn't give up: around 50% of all new bloggers throw in the towel within three months of starting, so if you can last longer than this you're already ahead of the field. Moreover, the longer you keep going, the more posts there will be on your site, and the more interesting material for anyone when they do visit. Rather than viewing all the unvisited posts as waste of effort, consider them as an investment for the future.

7: Thick skin/Self-restraint

After you've waited what can seem an age to get a few comments on your posts, you may be disappointed to find that some of them are, shall we say, less than complimentary. It is a sad fact that among those most likely to take the time and trouble to write a comment on your posts are people who feel strongly that you are a complete idiot. Assuming their post is not libellous or obscene (in which case, just delete it) the best thing to do is to reply as sensibly as possible. Do not return in kind, do not retaliate, do not mock: if you descend to their level, you just look as stupid as them. If, on the other hand, you are seen to be responding in a mature and intelligent fashion, visitors will value your blog all the more highly because they will attribute those same characteristics to the rest of your site.

8: Stamina

If you are serious about blogging, you are making a major, long-term commitment. At the beginning, you will need stamina (as well as the self-confidence mentioned above) to keep churning out posts even though few seem to be reading them. But it's even worse, later on, as you gradually gain a readership. Because now there is an implicit contract between you and your visitors: they will keep reading you, and give some of their valuable time and attention if – and it's a big “if” – you continue to post. This doesn't mean every day without fail – though that would be ideal – but it does mean several posts a week, every week. Above all, you need to establish a rhythm that visitors can depend on.

9: Humility

One of the most daunting aspects of blogging is that whatever rank you achieve on Technorati or elsewhere, you are only as good as your future posts: if you begin to post less, or start skimping in your posts, you will inevitably lose the readership you have built up so laboriously. This is obviously related to the last point: you will need stamina to keep any position you have earned. But another danger is that as you rise through the blogging ranks you might start to believe in your own importance: after all, the A-list bloggers do indeed wield great power. But that power comes from the readers, and as soon as arrogance starts to creep into posts, that audience will diminish, and with it the power. It is noticeable how humble many of the top bloggers are towards their audience, constantly thanking them for their attention and loyalty.

10: A day job

Don't delude yourself: you will never make enough money from your blog to give up the day job. Just look at the A-list: almost all of them do something else as well as blog (though quite how they find the time is one of the blogosphere's great mysteries). By all means use Google's AdSense on your site – its online Reports are invaluable, because they give an up-to-the-minute figure for the number of visitors your site has had each day. But as these will show, the sad fact is you are only likely to get one click-through per thousand visitors: even with valuable keywords paying up to a dollar a time, you will need absolutely vast traffic to make a living from this.

Blogging won't ever be your main job, but it might well help you get a better one. The thing to remember about blogs is that they are a great way of marketing yourself to the world – especially the parts you never knew might be interested. This is something else that you need to keep in mind when you write your blog: the fact that at any moment a future employer may be reading it.

(These comments are based on twenty-five years of journalism, including fifteen covering the Net, colliding with a few months of active blogging. Obviously, they are very early thoughts on the matter, based on limited experience. I'd be interested in the views of other people - especially those with more blogging under their belt - on what are the things you need to build up an audience for your blog.)

20 February 2006

Freedom, in Other Words

Recently the blogosphere went slightly bonkers over a story that "the Korean government plans to select a city and a university late next month where open-source software like Linux will become the mainstream operating programs." It seems to have been the concept of a "Linux city" that really caught people's attention (though surely "Linux city" must refer to Helsinki?). But the significance of this announcement is perhaps not quite what most people think.

As the article rightly pointed out, there's nothing new in the idea of a city powered by free software: the much-ballyhooed Munich conversion to open source was along the same lines. And there are plenty of other, smaller-scale deployments that show that free software is up to the job. But there is another element in this story that is in some ways more interesting.

Yes, open source can now offer all the usual elements - operating system, browser, email, office apps - that people need for their daily computing; but even more impressively, it can do this in many languages. In other words, there is now a multi-dimensional depth to free software: not only in terms of the apps that have been created, but also with regard to the languages in which many of those apps are available natively.

For example, Firefox boasts versions in languages such as Asturian, Basque, Macedonian and Slovenian, with several others - Armenian, Gujarati and Mongolian - listed as "Not Yet Available", implying that they will be. OpenOffice.org does even better, offering versions in languages such as Albanian, Azerbaijani, Galician, Khmer and Sango (new to me). There is an even longer list of languages that includes others that are being worked on.

And if that doesn't impress you, well, you must be pretty jaded linguistically. So consider this: for many of these languages, you can download the program for three platforms: GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. "Get The Facts", as Microsoft loves to say; but the ones it cares to give are partial, and they strangely omit any mention of this factual strength-in-depth that only free software can offer.

Indeed, there have been various cases where national governments of smaller nations have all but begged Microsoft to port some of its products to their language, only to be refused on the grounds that it wasn't economically "viable" to do so. Which just goes to show how complicated is the warp and weft of software and power, culture and money.

Viability has never been much of an issue for free software; if it had been, Richard Stallman would never have bothered starting it all off in the first place. As far as he is concerned, there's only one word that matters, whatever the language, and that's freedom. As the sterling work underway to produce localised versions of open source software emphasises, that includes the freedom to work in your own tongue.

08 February 2006

Word of the Week: Podfading

Podfading describes the kind of burn-out that podcasters are prone to - when the effort of recording yet another podcast proves too much, and they just give up.

Of course, the same effect can be observed more generally in the blogosphere. According to Dave Sifry, in his latest State of the Blog Nation analysis, "13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created." Since there are around 27.2 million blogs according to Sifry, this means that nearly 50% aren't still posting after 3 months. Blogfading, anyone?