Weblogsky: Blogging Archives

Windows Live Writer

This is a test post - I'm trying out Windows Live Writer. Even if it works fine, it doesn't feel particularly handy... but after my recent bad experiences with ScribeFire and Ecto, I'll be interested to see if Microsoft got it right.

Firings and shareholder value at CNN

CNN fired Chez Pazienza for blogging at Huffington post - not just because he broke a vague rule by blogging, but because of the content of his blog. [Link]

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Moveable Type upgrade

Just upgraded Weblogsky to the latest version of Movable Type, 4.1, which is a significant upgrade from 3.x. The upgrade seemed smooth, but because MT4 doesn't support the Rightfields plugin, I had to delete all the Rightfields tags from my templates. I was using Rightfields to facilitate photo upload and positioning, and removing the fields means that many photos will no longer appear on archive pages, once they're rebuilt. Coincidentally I recently stopped adding photos using Rightfields, favoring the native MT upload utility because it gave me more flexibility. (Note: There'll be a Rightfields plugin eventually for MT4.) The new MT has a slick new interface; still getting used to it.

Forget Jakob, blog from your heart and soul

Jakob Neilsen says one should write articles, not blog postings, not far from a conclusion I was, ahem, blogging a few days ago. Like so much of his writing, this latest from Nielsen has some useful info, makes some good points, but (like most pronouncements from consultants) comes across as inauthentic. I think Michael Heilemann has his number:

The problem with Jakob Nielsen–or perhaps rather his audience as it were–is that his articles, top 10’s and ‘usability tests’ are outdated, largely irrelevant and when applicable, made up of nothing but easily thought up logical conclusions aimed at the dull gray ‘we want to be hip with the youngsters, yo’ corporate market, from which he makes his money.

So if you’re hip, down with the beat and ‘happenin’, save yourself the headache, use your brain, not useit.com, and the rest should come easily.

As a blog strategist, I would never tell my clients to write a particular length or depth. The first rule is to be authentic, write what you know, write from the heart. Blogging the All-American Presidential Forum

Taylor Willingham asked me to live blog the PBS All-American Presidential Forum last night. Some people were live blogging from the event, but we were blogging from Austin, where I was at the Carver Library blogging along with Mike Aaron and Tom Moran. I noticed that my friend Liza Sabater was blogging on the scene in DC; when I pinged her she pointed me to a chat room at her site, Culture Kitchen... so I bilocated. All the live bloggers on the scene and in Austin posted to an aggregate page set up by the Media Bloggers Association. I posted quite a bit before the debate, during an hour-long local discussion at the Carver library, where mostly black participants were talking about race and society. The consensus seemed to be that presidential candidates had been ignoring race until last night's forum, where it was a prominent subject.

My posts are pretty buried at the Media Bloggers site, but you can find them more easily at Extreme Democracy. The early posts were mostly transcriptions of the local conversation. (I was all typed out by the time the forum/debate started.) The group at Carver was lively, intelligent, and often very funny... I'm not sure I captured all that, but it was a great discussion... the televised forum was less compelling.

Photo taken at Carver last night by Mike Aaron. I'm the guy by the screen, wearing a purple tshirt.

What? I'm not the only "Jon"?

This had me laughing. [Link]

This got me to thinking about how searchable my name is. Turns out that thanks to this blog and the fact that my name is plastered all over some former employers' websites I'm doing okay. Type in Jon Lowder, even without the quotation marks and my blog comes up first and a bunch of work stuff, my LinkedIn profile and other stuff related to me comes up in the first few pages. So I decided to see how I do with just Jon. There I don't appear until the 9th page of results (54th position) but that's okay considering that there are some pretty web-loved Jon's out there: Jon Stewart, Jon Udell, and Jon Lebkowsky. Wait...who?! I'm being beaten by a guy named Lebkowsky and who names his blog "Weblogsky"? At first I thought maybe it was a fan site for The Big Lebowski but I was wrong. Ends up its just a blog by a guy named Jon Lebkowsky, and from my short reading I'll have to begrudgingly admit that it's a good blog. Okay, it's a better blog than mine, but that doesn't help my ego.

Litterati?

Chip Rosenthal just sent a link to an article in the Austin Statesman that I missed just before SXSW Interactive, called "We lived and died by our blogs; now, not so much." It's an odd article that tries to be ominous/prophetic about the fact that some bloggers drift away from blogging, as though that was a big deal. One interesting quote: "According to research firm Gartner Inc., more than 200 million abandoned blogs litter the Internet." To me that's like saying that books or periodicals litter libraries. People will stop writing, distributing, reading, etc. in any medium, and what does that suggest? I think it's proof of life – as living entities, we change and evolve and, yes, sometimes we move on from some of our pursuits. [Link]

Tempus fugit, dang it.

My usually-persistent blogging has slowed to a drip, not because I don't have anything to say, but because hours are filling with meetings, leaving little time for writing. It's good to be busy and getting a lot done, but it's unfortunate that writing (along with other projects) has been swept aside. Some of the things that are occupying my time lately:

My company, Polycot Consulting. Along with partners Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders, I cofounded Polycot in 2001 as a web consultancy, but our timing was unforunate (entity formation was filed September 12, 2001). Web technology development, which had been my passion for years, was clearly not in demand following the Internet collapse of 2000, and the events of 9/11/2001 further delayed any revival of interest in web business. The limited demand was for web development, so that was our focus for years. We were consulting, bringing our intelligence about the web to bear on many projects, but almost always in the context of a development project. However not only is there renewed interest in the web, much of that interest is in the realm of what's now called social media, which has always been my real passion. It was only when I discovered that you could build communities in cyberspace that I became a career technologist, and I've always been drawn to projects that were about building social spaces (for communities, virtual teams, online social networks, etc.)

I took a four month sabbatical from Polycot to build a blog network for Worldchanging.com, and when that project ended, I decided the next step was to build a focused social media consulting practice at Polycot. I've been working on that for several weeks now. My Polycot partners, meanwhile, have built a development practice focused on creating social media environments using Ruby on Rails. They're taking a limited number of projects in that space (and we'll have some exciting announcements soon as current projects are completed). Now there'll be two Polycots, and while we may combine consulting and development for some projects, the consulting practice will also stand alone. In addition to social media/online community/social networks, we also consult on user experience and information architecture, findability, and conversion support.

I've also been increasingly involved with the Bootstrap Network, which started in Austin and is spreading across the globe. Bootstrap is the most effective social network I've seen, manifesting fact to face and online, creating a remarkable support framework for entrepreneurs and their companies. Originally created for founders of Bootstrap Companies, the organization now welcomes potential entrepreneurs who're in ideation, and it's been working with established companies that began as Bootstraps via the "Rebootstrap" project, which helps restore the entrepreneurial spirit.

And I've been working via EFF-Austin with Aspiration's Allen Gunn (aka Gunner) and a dedicated group of Austin technophiles to coordinate the first Penguin Day Austin, an April 28 event that will give local nonprofits an opportunity to explore free and open source software. In addition to helping nonprofits, the event will bring local techs together, including members of the revived Open Source Posse (which has connections to Bootstrap, EFF-Austin, and the regional Digital Convergence Initiative).

I'm also getting involved with the
Cleantech Forum for Austin, editing and blogging at Worldchanging Austin, and working on various and sundry other projects... so blogging's been hard to work into the mix. I'll try to do more, but on the run, and shorter posts.

Photo: Hiroshi Inoue (President of NaCl, where Ruby was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto), Jeff Kramer, and Jon L. at Polycot Consulting.

Thinking about a code of conduct for bloggers

Responding to the Kathy Sierra conversation, Tim O'Reilly has posted a "Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct." (Thanks to Laura Lemay for the pointer.) Tim posts some thoughts that emerged from group discussion at Etech. He begins by getting a handle on the problem with Chris Locke's response, which refers to the WELL's "You Own Your Own Words" policy. Locke chose to take his site down rather than deal directly with offensive comments. He says

I was a conference host on the Well 15 years ago where the core ethos was acronymized to YOYOW -- You Own Your Own Words. This has remained a guiding principle for me ever since. I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote. However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole site go away.

Tim responds:

Chris' comment echoes the libertarian ethos that many bloggers and internet pioneers share. However, we now have one more clear object-lesson on what you get when you start a site that not only tolerates but encourages mean comments: there's a quick race to the bottom. It seems to me that there's a big difference between censorship and encouraging and tolerating abuse.... Yes, you own your own words. But you also own the tone that you allow on any blog or forum you control. Part of "owning your own words" is owning the effects of your behavior and the editorial voice you foster. And when things go awry, acknowledge it. It would have been far better for Chris to have deleted the post, and said explicitly on the blog that it was unacceptable, than to have silently shut down the blog and removed all entries and comments without explanation.

Blogging where speech isn't free

Ethan Zuckerman blogged a panel I put together for SXSW Interactive. [Link]

Blogging is important because it breaks the monopoly on information claimed by the press, letting people get around the dictum, “Let’s not talk about certain things.” [Shahed Amanullah] argues that “the freer the discourse, the more moderate the Islamic practice is,” and hopes the sort of discourses that take place in blogs will eventually be a moderating influence. To allow this to happen, we need to “use technology to pry the doors open from the outside”, using tools like Tor and Psiphon. We need to read and publicize the work of bloggers, showing governments like the government of Egypt that the world is watching. And it’s incumbent upon us to advocate for persecuted bloggers.

Last night Shahed received the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award for his work at alt.muslim. (Photo: Shahed and Ethan in the green room before the session.)

Blogger Emeritus?

Austin 360 listed the panel I'm moderating at SXSW Interactive as a "pick," referring to me as "Blogger emeritus Jon Lebkowsky." The definition of emeritus is "retired." Okay, I may be showing my age, but I'm definitely not "retired" or anything close to it! [Link]

Wordpress.com: we don't permit ads

I was surprised to learn, from one of my acquaintances on The WELL, that Wordpress.com (the Wordpress hosted service) doesn't allow her to post Amazon Associates links. They go so far as to filter those links and any other form of advertising. Someone evidently told her that there's some sort of security issue, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They just don't want users posting ads, unless they're VIPs. As much as I like Wordpress, this really rubs me the wrong way... I'm enough of a libertarian to see this as excessive control. It's also annoying that Wordpress uses the term "VIP," which is like saying the average Wordpress.com user isn't important enough to do whatever they want with their blog.

I think I understand why they have (i.e. Matt has) adopted this policy. If you've ever seen a blogspot blog that was created just for link spam and ads, you'll get it. But I think preventing the average user from posting an Amazon associates text link is excessive control.

Ecommerce and blogging

"A VC" says he'd like to make every online merchant a blogger. [Link]

Everything that works for bloggers will work even better for e-commerce merchants.

That's why I would make anyone who is an e-merchant maintain a blog where they'd learn about search optimization, link tracking, social media optimization, word of mouth marketing, buzz tracking, feeds, flares, mybloglog, and a host of other important stuff that doesn't cost a dime to do and brings traffic.

The sad thing (but also a fact of life on the Internet) is that the spammers have all figured this stuff out and the services like Google, FeedBurner, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, MyBlogLog, and others now spend a good deal of time thinking about how to keep the spammers out (or at least minimize their impact).

WorldChanging Blog Network

Much of my focus these days is as the lead on an ambitious project for WorldChanging.com. We're creating a WorldChanging Blog Network, which will eventually have regional blogs with local teams scattered all over the globe. The first few to be launched will be aligned with WorldChanging's book tour in the U.S. and Canada. We're looking for bloggers; more information here.

Dispatches from Blogistan

Suzanne Stefanac's Dispatches from Blogistan will be released any day now. Suzanne interviewed me for the book; the interview's posted at the site.

The Internet’s becoming a massive operating system with all kinds of data accessible everywhere. Consider the evolution: we had machines that weren’t connected, then we connected them, then we created something like ftp to share data, and engines like Archie and Veronica to find what data’s out there… then gopher to index it, and html/http so you could publish and link. Now we have the semantic web and the collaborative approach (under the label “social software” and “Web 2.0”) so that, as you say, the information topography is fluid, spontaneously and socially defined. The best strategy is adapt is probably humility, because there’s so many smart people in the game. The dumbest strategy is greed, and what goes with it – we have people trying to build “Web 2.0” sites without any clear idea what that means, for instance, because that’s the wave and they think they’ll make a million or two riding it. However it’s going to be harder and harder to make big money building any kind of business, and it’s back to what I said before – there’s so many smart people. So many will build compelling operations (maybe for-profit, maybe non-profit). Many of those folks won’t be greedy, they’ll be willing to work for bread on the table and a reasonably good life.

What do pickpockets do when nobody has pockets?

Journalism without journalists?

Nicholas Lemann has just published an essay called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists," which inspired Jay Rosen to write a long and pretty rich PressThink. I was going to blog Jay's comments, but I've tripped over my issues with Lemann's piece.

Lemann says

In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against – journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man.

Lemann builds his own straw man here – who are these "prophets"? I know many bloggers advocate or practice citizen media, and none of them seems dedicated to this fight that Lemann describes. Many are authors and journalists themselves, and their vision is not that they and other bloggers would "fight the enthroned few," but that they would at best partner with established journalists, or at least augment their reporting. Lemann goes on to say

Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.

I don't agree with his assumption that "the blogosphere" aspires to "replace rather than add." I'm not so sure bloggers are conscious of either intention, actually. I don't start my day thinking I'll one-up the traditional media, or add to its body of "objective reporting."

Suffice to say, I don't think Lemann quite gets blogging, probably because he devotes his attention elsewhere. This wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't so eager to generalize about what "most" bloggers believe, and what "most" blogs represent. He quotes a few small "citizen journalism" efforts, then trivializes citizen journalism, saying that it mostly "reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns." This is like sampling a few smalltown newspapers to support an argument that traditional journalism is "proudly minor in its concerns."

Criticisms aside, I agree with Lemann's conclusion: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." I would also add "help interested bloggers learn more about the craft of journalism," and I think that will happen. I also spoke with a friend who's a journalism professor at a state university recently, who said they're rethinking their entire curriculum as a result of new media developments like blogging.

As Jay points out, regarding his project NewAssignment.net, the real future of journalism is in "bring[ing] full-time reporters into productive alignment with smart mobs of citizens." (See "Blogs grow journalism," January 30, 2005.)

Technorati's upgrade

I've been using Technorati since early on; now it's three years old and has just completed a major upgrade that makes it, for bloggers and blog readers, one of the most useful sites on the web. Originally a search engine focused on blog content and traffic analysis, Technorati has added and improved features... here's Dave Sifry's summary from his post about the upgrade:

Technorati is 3 years old! What an amazing trip so far.
The World Live Web is all about people - We're here to help make sense of all the interesting stuff we do in real-time.
Technorati's rolled out a major update to our site and to our back-end systems.
We've made some major speed and accuracy improvements in core search.
Link counting is a lot more accurate and timely.
We've personalized the homepage so you can get a look at all the stuff you care about on one page.
While we love expert bloggers, we've also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.
We've added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.
We've made some big changes to blog profiles - allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking.
We've made things easier for advertisers and partners, and we've been overwhelmed with demand. We're building out our capabilities, and if you're interested in advertising, drop us a line.
This is just a start - there's more to come in the coming weeks and months, including better charts, more real-time spam detection and elimination, more real-time media indexing, microformats integration, and additional localization and language support.

Technorati hasn't always worked perfectly, but that's the 21st century for you – we're living a perpetual beta existence. The good news is that it keeps getting better.

Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a report, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers, baed on a national phone survey of bloggers. [Link] Some of the findings:

The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.
Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.
Bloggers often use blog features that enhance community and usability.
For most, blogging is a hobby, not an activity that consumes their lives.
Seven in ten bloggers post when inspiration strikes, not on a set schedule.
LiveJournal tops the list of blogging sites in this survey.
Most bloggers post material for themselves, but one-third blog mostly to engage their audience.
Few offer an RSS feed, possibly because many bloggers are not aware of the technology.(!)

Feedburner acquires Blogbeat

Clueful Weblogsky favorite Feedburner has acquire blog analytics company Blogbeat. "The deal will allow the company to provide publishers with tools to better understand what headline feeds blog site visitors are reading." [Link]

The case of the missing blacklists

Very mysterious... Movable Type includes Spam Lookup to control comment and trackback spam, and Spam Lookup includes default IP blacklist services bsb.spamlookup.net and opm.blitzed.org, and default domain blacklist services bsb.spamlookup.net and sc.surbl.org. Unfortunately, these services seem to be unreachable or nonexistent, so I'm assuming the lookups don't work. Movable Type still lists these as the defaults. Please comment if you know of other suitable blacklist sites.

Wonkette goes mud-wrestling

The witless new Wonkette (supposedly an attorney named David Lat, and I wanna know why they didn't change the name of the blog to "Wonk") is no fun, and even worse, he (she? it?) is into posting smears, tossing mud and muck at "Red State" Democrat Mark Warner, rumored to be considering a presidential bid. Maybe the Wonk (who blogged formerly as "Article III Groupie" at Underneath Their Robes, likes to sling mud for exercise (Ana Marie says she left Wonkette because she was tired of sitting), or maybe he's partisan. It could be, though, that he's trying to clear the way for the presidential race of his dreams:

I have a weakness for dramatic, intriguing figures, and strong, powerful, brilliant women. So my favorite Bush administration official is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and my favorite senator is Hillary Rodham Clinton. If Hillary and Condi ever face each other in some race -- for example, a presidential race, as Dick Morris has fantasized about -- I will pretty much drop dead from sheer excitement.

It could also be that co-Wonk Alex Pareene is the maker of mud; he says "I was pretty convinced we were degrading the discourse," though not referring to this specific puddle of mud.

SXSW Geek Lunch: Blogs v. Disasters

Brian Oberkirch, Evelyn Rodriguez and I were all involved in online responses to disasters (Southeast Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina). Evelyn was vacationing in Chi Chi, Thailand when the tsunami struck; Brian was living in Slidell, Louisiana when Katrina struck; and I worked with online initiatives that followed both disasters (blogging at Worldchanging and helping coordinate the Katrina PeopleFinder Project). We're going to talk about "Blogging v Disaster" at one of SXSW's "geek lunches" on Tuesday at Manuel's in downtown Austin. Specifics are posted at Upcoming.org, where you can rsvp.

Blog Conversational Index: say what?

Stowe Boyd says we should measure the worthiness of our blogs by something he calls a Conversational Index, which you derive by dividing the number of posts by the sum of the number of comments and trackbacks. The lower the number, the better your CI... you hope for a CI less than one, in Stowe's world.

I have some thoughts.

This is an incentive to end the war against comment spam, because the more I get, the better my comment index. *8^)
Am I more effective because I draw more attention from vocal people, and other bloggers? How do we measure the lurkers? How do we measure the quality of responses, and the cluefulness of responders?

Jeff Jarvis: Interaction vs. Reaction

Jeff Jarvis has a good post about the real value of interactivity. "Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority." Indeed. (This resonates with a conversation I had recently with a reporter from the Austin Chronicle.)

Corporate blogging: threat or menace?

Weblogsky pal David Kline asks "why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize?" I didn't know anybody'd predicted such a stampede; I would've told 'em it's unlikely. Even in the most open and loose corporate tribes, there's trepidation about various forms of interactivity online. Transparency is hard, and once you open yourself up, you have to clarify, and clarify your clarifications, and it seems like an infinite time/energy sink, impossible to control. Some of us like that sort of thing, most don't seem to. Especially those who've been programmed to believe in one way, carefully-controlled information flows. It's just gonna take a while. And, responding to Jeremy Wright's issue of a clear ROI: eventually a business that doesn't blog will be a business that doesn't sell, so it's worthwhile to kick the tires on the Cluetrain, even if you're not quite ready to board.

Dan Gillmor on Washington Post Comments

Dan Gillmor's been posting about the Washington Post's removal of comments capabiltiy from its blog. In his latest on the subject, Dan says that the Post failed to set up its comment system with sufficient due diligence. They allowed freeform comments without authentication/accountability, as noted in a comment from a reader at the Center for Citizen Media blog. My own comment:

High volume comment sites, just like sites with forums, inevitably need some form of moderation or monitoring, but that need is mitigated somewhat by an authentication requirement. The need's still there, though, and often overlooked. My guess is that the Post didn't budget for comment moderation and didn't know where to find skilled moderators, so they backed off. An authentication requirement and 8 hrs/day of moderation, along with a real commitment to interactivity, would solve their problem.

Universal container: one size fits all

Jesse Garrett calls this the last blog story angle.

The label blog describes the form, not the content. Blog is a universal container for many kinds of content: correspondence, articles, essays, notes, novels... and if everybody's blogging, the term "blogger" doesn't mean much.

Or, perhaps, the meaning will change... we don't call everyone who can write a writer.

The Chronicle on the Statesman's Blogs

The Austin Chronicle has a good piece by Kevin Brass about the Statesman's blog experiments, with a quote from yours truly. [Link]

Newspapers want to maintain a level of control in a format that thrives on a lack of controls, says Jon Lebkowsky, an active member of the local blog community. "The editor filter has value in the journalism context, but the lack of those filters is valuable for blogs," Lebkowsky said. To attract dedicated bloggers, he says, newspapers would have to alter their fundamental mindset, "to change their sense of what journalism is." If they can't let go, "it's not really blogging. It's just a newspaper using a different content management tool."

While the idea of "citizen journalism" is a quaint idea for college professors to bat around over lattes at Starbucks, the best bloggers � the ones drawing interest and audiences � tend to be, at the very least, semiprofessionals, laser-focused on a particular industry, company, or community, not soccer moms with a zest for writing newsy diaries. Bloggers like DailyKos, Wonkette, Gawker, and even the slimy Matt Drudge provide a daily blizzard of insider information and tips, serving as repositories for gossip and buzz as much as hard news analysis.

Feeding ads

Inevitable: marketers are beginning to plant ads in syndication feeds. [Link]

One attraction of RSS ads may be that feed syndication is still in the "early adopter" phase -- meaning that feeds' audience members are not typical Web surfers. For the most part, they have actively set up feed readers and subscriptions -- they've "raised their hand and said �I'm interested'," as Ben Fox, senior product manager in Yahoo�s search marketing division, puts it. "You know from a marketing standpoint that they've invested in their content."

Year-end #3: some of the most interesting (if not best) posts

One more year-end post: a list of some of the more interesting Weblogsky posts throughout the year. This was painful to do, mainly because I saw various errors, mostly sloppy html, especially around blockquotes. <grin>

Thanks for reading, and for your occasional comments.

January 2005
Tagsonomy and "out of control": Social tagging.

February 2005
We're Only In It for the Money: ethics of blogging.
Journalists Killed in Iraq: Eason Jordan's suggestion, at the World Economic Forum, that journalists had been targeted by U.S. troops.

March 2005
Perspective on Multimedia: a piece on media convergence, actually written in 2004.
Municipal Broadband: Access for All: Texas Legislature's proposed prohibition of municipal networks.

April 2005
Workaholics: people who work 60-80 hours a week may not actually be working... then again, what's work?

May 2005
Stormy Weather: not real weather, but economic weather.

June 2005
Echo Chambers: strong partisanship creates echo chambers.
DemocracyFest 2005: my take on a progressive political conference.
Group Relationship Management: when you think of CRM as constituent relationship management, in NGO and political worlds, you also need another layer for managing group relationships. A second GRM post here.
Identity Metasystem: a proposed framework for handling identity across the Internet.
Social Networking Doesn't Work?: critique of a CNet piece on social network platforms.

July 2005
Dvorak on Creative Commons: he gets it so wrong.
Object-Centered Sociality: online social networks should have a purpose other than hanging out.
Cindy Sheehan, War and Denial: Sheehan overcomes ongoing denial about the U.S. war in Iraq.
Terrorists and the Internet: "What should we do?"

September 2005
Heard in today's news: one of many posts about Katrina, this one about Mike Brown's gaffe – "FEMA had no idea the New Orleans Convention Center was housing thousands of refugees who'd been without food or drink for 100 hours."

October 2005
A personal note: reassessing.

November 2005
The cost of war: a rant about Ken Mehlman's "lies and half-truths" (per Joshua Micah Marshall) about the war in Iraq.
Blogging Enterprise: notes on a public appearance. Some related background notes in a post on Identity Crisis.

December 2005
Business Week on Generation @: more about social networking.

Year-end #1: Web 2.0

The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here.

One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's
article in Wired, and having been acknowledged and explained, it's better understood by more people.

The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom).

Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them.

If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^)

Eyeteeth

These two images give you an idea why Eyeteeth blog is becoming one of my favorite destinations. (Read the blog to find out more...) Global Voices London Summit 2005

The Global Voices London Summit today gave the GV bloggers a chance to meet and talk about the state and future of the GV web site, including a chance to give feedback to site wizard Boris Anthony and the inevitable discussion of blogging relative to journalism. Dean Wright from Reuters, who was part of that discussion via videoconference, expressed an interest in working with bloggers. Dina Mehta talked about the Southeast Asian Earthquake and Tsunami blog... I'm still reading, there's a wealth of information in the record of the event, and this was just one day (as Ethan commented, it should have been three).

Global Voices is important, perhaps essential. The USA is in a state of economic decline, and the developing world is growing. Balance depends on understanding and collaboration, and you won't get the communication to support that from traditional media or politicians. It'll come from ordinary people in extraordinary times, publishing their thoughts and perspectives via the blogosphere.

Locked out of the USA

Hossein (Hoder) Derakshan, an active and insightful blogger originally from Iran but living now in Toronto, has posted his Goodbye to America. The Border Patrol googled his blog, talked to him at length, and evidently decided that he was attempting to take up residence in NYC. They won't let him come back for at least six months.

Now the result is that, apparently, I can't visit the States at least for six months and even after that I should prove I'm established enough in Canada. I also have to explain why I failed to register my departure when the bus driver didn't stop while crossing the US border to Canada....It's sad to see America is not the land of the free anymore.

Blog!

I led a discussion with David Kline about his new book, Blog!, on the WELL. David and his co-author, Dan Burstein, interviewed several bloggers in several fields ... primarily politics, business, and media. (David also interviewed me on blogging and activism.) The interview and the book are full of insights about the state and future of blogging, and are a must-read for those who are trying to grasp the depth and breadth of the blogosphere.

Blogs won't change human nature. But to my mind, a world in which millions of people now have voices that can be heard is better than a world in which only the chosen few "experts" or "pundits" or media do.

True democracy is messy. And it's true, there's still a lot of narcissistic "talking at" rather than "discussing with" going on. But I liken that to the ego-centric stage that early toddlers go through. Ordinary people -- people who have no special access or reach -- are learning what it means to now have a voice. As we mature and become more confident that what we say is valuable, if only to ourselves and to perhaps a few dozen of our readers, then I really truly believe the "noise" will be pierced by ever-increasing dialogoue and meaning.

Civility comes from confidence and self-assurance that you do, in fact, have the right to speak. Early practitioners of the new social invention of democracy a couple of hundred years ago were not very civil at all. Per capita, there were probably as many nutcases and angry narcissists as there are now. But by the mid-19th century, the average citizen could think of no better form of entertainment and enlightenment than to spend 12 hours listening to a Lincoln-Douglass debate. These were common men and women who attended these events, who eagerly read partisan newspapers, and who lived peacefully with their neighbors who read entirely opposing partisan newspapers.

Does this save the world? Usher in a permanent era of peace? End war?

No. But at least the world increasingly becomes *our* world, a world that reflects the voices and concerns of many millions rather than thousands.

Inside the Bowl

Inside the Bowl is a New Orleans blog started by Steve Seebol and Elizabeth Kahn, who've just returned to New Orleans. It's the first specifically post-Katrina blog I've seen, and I think it's going to be a powerful force for the reconstruction of the spirit as well as the physical infrastructure of the city.

....Many older people who evacuated could not deal with the stress. They left, but in many cases their health problems were more then they could handle. These deaths are not in the official death total, which is really just a body count. These people died in Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge or lord knows where. They might have passed away anyway, but the storm didn’t make it easier.

One of those who died, while evacuated, was my friend and father-in-law Fred Kahn. Fred had been sick for awhile. But when faced with the arduous task of leaving the city that he was born in, he rose to the occasion with oxygen tank at hand got in the car and left for the 7 hour trip to his daughter’s house in New Iberia, LA. We were all staying there for the first 3 weeks, and it was painful to watch Fred’s energy wane and his concentration falter. He knew there was a storm and that the world was no longer the way he remembered it, but he wasn’t sure what was going on directly around him. Fred was in exile 2 months slowly losing ground before he slumped over while watching a football game and left us. It makes me very sad that he had to endure so much hardship at the end of his life. He was a sweet and decent man. We miss him.

Blogrolling away

Adina Levin's post on blog rank and popularity mentions "the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism." I'm ignoring the "male-centered" part as irrelevant, but coincidentally I was staring at my blogroll today and thinking it's obsolete. When blogrolls first appeared I felt they had value as pointers, because I was finding new blogs by clicking through others' blogrolls. That's no longer the case... I'm finding more new blogs than ever, without reference to blogrolls. I often don't even see a blogger's homepage, because I'm reading via aggregator or selecting a permalink that somebody posted. So I've taken my blogroll down. I still have uses for blogrolling.com, though - marginal links, like the music list I maintain in the right margin of Weblogsky.

Tim Berners-Lee: the web was created for blogging

Berners-Lee doesn't exactly say that the web was created for blogging in a recent BBC News interview, but he comes close. (Thanks, Dennis! [Link]

ML: I'm interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities. You weren't thinking car rental, you weren't thinking blogging, I assume.

TBL: Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

Technorati sold?

Word on the street is Technorati, David Sifry's innovative search engine for blogs, will be sold to "a large search engine company." You can count those using one hand; BL Ochman think it's Yahoo. I won't speculate (but if I did, I'd say Google). Then again, it's just a rumor.

Speaking of Sifry, he's posted an interesting "Blogs and Mainstream Media" chart (that speaks for itself):

This is the kind of data that makes Technorati so valuable.

Staci Kramer on BlogHer

BlogHer was, I gather from the reports I've read, a unique conference, possibly because it wasn't just the usual suspects having the usual conversations. I wasn't there, so I've been looking for a good overview; today I ran across a rich account of the conference at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review, written by Staci Kramer. Staci has some thoughts about why this conference was different:

It would be easy to ascribe the difference to the overwhelmingly female majority, but it goes deeper than that.

Part of it came from the cross-section of bloggers self-selected as participants or attending as invited panelists. We could -- and did -- break into smaller groups (one time slot was set aside for "birds of a feather" groups) but we were there for reasons that pulled us together more than they pulled us apart. Plus, we were determined to make it work.

There were intense feelings, and "...it wasn't all sweetness and light. Anger, frustration, disagreement, disappointment – all made frequent appearances during the weekend and after." From Staci's report, I get the sense that BlogHer was great because it was a truly authentic experience for most of the participants, and authentic experiences are rare anywhere these days, especially at the myriad conferences focusing on talking-head panels pontificating for 45 minutes followed by ten minutes of questions. Sounds like everybody was talking – and listening – at this one.

"Social gestures" vs links: better thinking about blog value

Earlier I mentioned how there's finally a study of blog readers . Now, thanks to Mary Hodder et al., there's a richer sense of the measure of blog value than we get from links alone, which can be very misleading.

So a couple of months ago, at a dinner at Les Blogs, a group of us (including Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls and Halley Suitt among others) talked about what it would mean to make an index that could give a clearer sense of a blogger's reach and influence, that might upend the inbound link counts to give some clarity to what is now opaque and hard for us to see blogs we are unfamiliar with but want to find context. Actually, the service was taking a while, and with 30 or so bloggers in the room, eventually things turn to blogging. We started talking about the issue of inbound links and how, counted up and reported as a kind of "attention index," as a show of interest or attention or conversation, they weren't very interesting or telling on their own, partly because they lump together all types of links, no matter when the links were made or where they are from (blogrolls or posts).

Part of what we want is a rich user generated ontology resulting in topic groups that is constantly adjusting to find what's delightful, useful, interesting across blogs. And a more complex metric for understanding those topic groups and individual users as they blog memes and interact with each other, with some context around those bloggers, would help quite a bit.

Who reads blogs?

I've been complaining about the lack of good stats on blog readership. Looks like we have better data; just received this press release:

50 Million Americans Visited Blogs During the First Quarter 2005, According to New comScore Study
First Comprehensive Study of the Actual Online Behavior of Blog Visitors Now Available

RESTON, Va., Aug. 8, 2005 - comScore Networks today released a report detailing the scale, composition and activities of audiences of Weblogs, commonly known as "blogs." The report, which was sponsored in part by Six Apart and Gawker Media, found that nearly 50 million Americans, or about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited blogs in Q1 2005. This represents an increase of 45 percent compared to Q1 2004.

Other key findings of the Behaviors of the Blogosphere report include:

Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in Q1 2005, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
Of 400 of the largest blogs observed, segmented by eight (non-exclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

"The fact that we found 30 percent of the online population to have visited blogs clearly underscores the commercial importance of consumer generated and driven media," said Dan Hess, senior vice president of comScore Networks. "It's noteworthy that while the blog audience is already quite large and growing, its demographic composition relative to the total population will appeal to many marketers."

To view the full Behaviors of the Blogosphere analysis, please visit Just rec'd the press release: To view the full Behaviors of the Blogosphere analysis, please visit http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf

SEO

You know you're a real geek when you dream about Search Engine Optimization. I dreamed last night that somebody wanted to bring me in to consult on SEO, and I told 'em "You only need to know one thing: don't bury the lede!" This is journalist jargon, explained here under "structure." On the web it's not so much a question of getting the right lede as getting the right information on the page so that it'll turn up in relevant searches. Search engines don't focus so much on the keyword metatag, which ain't that important anymore (probably because so many people tried to work screwy metatag voodoo (reflected in this list of keyword myths compiled by Jono Craig).

Actually, I could never see myself consulting on SEO best practices since all you really need to know, you can find in online references like the WikiPedia page on subject. However I could imagine consulting on content development for SEO, or strategies to improve page ranking (by getting linked by other sites that already have a good page rank). But there's no SEO voodoo - you "optimize" by being very good at what you do.

Alex Steffen interviews Cory Doctorow WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen interviews Cory Doctorow (wearling his EFF hat) about the "copyfight" with WIPO.

Information goods are a critical piece of the development picture. Every successfully developed country made use of free information goods. More accurately, they all went through a stage when they were a pirate nation. America spent a century as a pirate nation, ripping off the intellectual property of every country around it, and in particular, of Britain, because when you're a net importer of intellectual property, signing on to multilateral copyright and patent agreements is signing on to exporting your wealth off-shore. When you're a net exporter of intellectual property, it makes economic sense.

The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes which could give developing world countries the tools they need to serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the commercial and the humanitarian fairly.

But WIPO completely failed to do that, and it went on being a completely captive agency, simply making more copyright, more patent, more related rights, more trademarks on the grounds that all of these rights were themselves a good, regardless of the impact they had on people -- whether they were denying access to patented pharmaceuticals in poor countries that desperately needed them and couldn't afford to buy them at the market price, or simply creating copyright regimes that made basic education more difficult to provide in developing nations. WIPO and the World Trade Organization's intellectual property instruments together foisted a lot of policies on the developing world that required them to adopt knowledge goods laws that were incredibly dangerous to their body politic.
"Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime"
Peter Merholz gets credit for reducing "weblog" to "blog," as in "we blog." But who came up with the term weblog in the first place? Jorn Barger, most likely, with his Robot Wisdom Weblog. Paul Boutin describes a recent close encounter with Barger.
Barger crossed over from Usenet to the Web in 1997 and set up his own site, which he dubbed the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He began logging his online discoveries as he stumbled on them - hence "weblog." I barely understood what he was talking about, and still I read him giddily. Barger gave a name to the fledgling phenomenon and set the tone for a million blogs to come. Robot Wisdom bounced unapologetically from high culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn.
Rasiej VideoBlog

Weblogsky pal Andrew Rasiej has a video blog for his campaign... he's running for Public Advocate in New York. Most recently he's advocating for universal public wireless Internet access in NYC. Weblogsky readers in New York, take note – and vote! [Link]
"The Downing Street Memo and the Court of Appeal in News Judgment"
With the Downing Street Memo(s) we have another case where bloggers drove press coverage in the US, according to Jay Rosen. [Link]
Now if there's something newsworthy coming out of the U.K. but neglected in America the political blogs in America and other activists online keep talking about it. Quickly the story's unjust obscurity will reach a political player who can change that by acting in a newsworthy way, lending fresh facts and additional reason to cover the story.
Eek! another presentation on BLOGGGGGGING!

Photo by Doc of Robert Scoble, from a presentation at reboot7. Okay, conferences are fun, and it's great to spread the word, but do conference nomads get anything else done? (I admit it, I envy those guys.)
Legal Guide for Bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a set of resources on the legal rights of bloggers.
Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That's why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.
Hoder's going home
Iranian blogger Hossein (Hoder) Derakhshan is going home to Iran for a visit. He's understandably concerned about the risk of going back, since he's been openly critical of the Iran's rulers, who had who arrested journalist Sina Motallebi and held him for 23 days, partly because of his blog. Motallebi attributes his release to attention from bloggers and j ournalists:
They didn't expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I'm an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I'm not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn't be strong pressure to release me.

But the community of bloggers came together and helped me, and spread the news around the Web, and became united. There was a petition with more than 4,000 signatures on one site. And there was coverage of the story in the foreign media. And there was pressure from other countries that were concerned with human rights. I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.
Hoder's done even more than Motallebi to push for free speech and more in Iran, so his trip clearly has risks, though there's also hope that he "will come back and tell the world how vibrant, alive and amazing Iran is these days, and how the world can help Iran move toward a more transparent and democratic system." He's asking bloggers and others to support his effort – first, by making contributions toward the cost of the trip; second, by providing support if he "gets into trouble." He has a list telling us what we can do in that case – spread the word, get the media involved, etc. And "Don't be surprised: Under duress, I may confess that I've been on the Bush Administration's payroll to undermine the regime by helping to spread use of weblogs; I've tried to weaken moral values of young Iranians by promoting western culture and values; I've been part of a secret network of Israeli and American spies; I've distributed large amounts of money to Iranian dissidents, activists, bloggers and journalists inside in Iran so they can topple the regime. Nor should you be amazed to hear me say that I've been running a virtual brothel in Tehran from my apartment in Toronto; I've been trafficking heroin and cocaine to Iran; and I've been secretly dating Natalie Portman and Kyra Knightly and have even an illegitimate child with Rachel Weisz." [Link]
Bloggers block
Joi Ito fears he's he's boring, and as a consequence he's developing "blogger's block." Rebecca MacKinnon riffs on Joi's concern. I've been concerned about Weblogsky because I simply haven't had time to post, and each post takes longer because I'm taking more care... and as a result I've passed on potential items that were compelling and would've been fun to write about. I suppose many of us are finding we have increasing readership and feel increasing responsibility to deliver the goods; then again, spontaneity and gonzo fascination are Good Things, and we shouldn't forget what attracted us to the form in the first place!
Join the nonrevolution!
A New York Times article, "A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip," describes Nick Denton's Gawker Media and Denton's cynicism about the "blog revolution," about which he says "The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed." So if there's no revolution, the Times reporter, getting that something is happening, calls it a nonrevolution.

In fact, the article doesn't address the potential revolution in media and communications. It's really about blogs as business, whether you can make money with a blog, and Denton, one of the few to do so, notes that "no one, least of all him, is becoming rich publishing blogs." Bloggers who are looking for business models could be described as freelance writers trying to disintermediate through self-publishing in a market that's pretty level for all comers at this point. Few individuals will make money blogging, but some will use blogging to reach other, more lucrative gigs, a few will find ways to be viable or at least pay the rent &ndash' I hear that boing boing attracts $40K a month in ad revenues. Some are like me – I like to write, I can relate it to my business as a web/social software consultant/developer, and I try to find minor ways (Google Ads, Amazon Associate links, CaféPress schwag) to make a few bucks as compensation for time spent writing and updating. Not particularly revolutionary, though, because I've been doing similar things since web technology appeared in '92. It's just that the tools are better now, and more accessible, and the time sink is less.

Meanwhile there really is a revolution, I think, and it's about gathering so many voices online, in a kind of public commons where anybody's voice might rise above the rest, if only for a moment or two. And where you can aggregate the many voices and discern some sense of vast cyberspace room. As more people publish mindshare will be more fragmented; traditional sources of media will have smaller audiences. Your average 2012 man on the street may be following a dozen small blogs and surfing many more, and doing so in the time he would have committed to television and print media in 1992. And he could be spending part of that time creating his own stuff, as well.

Of course there's a whole other political impact of networks and social software that we could address as potentially "revolutionary," but that's a much longer story.

(Thanks to Nicole-Anne for the pointer!)

Technorati tag: blogging
Global Voices
The Berkman Center's Global Voices Online project is ramping up. I just posted about it at WorldChanging.
Glossy Simulacrum
Business Week discovers bloggers, publishes a pretty good rundown, kinda gets it... " How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it." jonl gets indigestion. Web 2.x, here we come... [Link]
Blogger Relations
Several correspondents have sent me emails about Issue Dynamics' new "Blogger Relations" practice, which "includes a robust blog monitoring service. Currently, the monitoring service provides organizations with 'actionable intelligence' - giving clients an effective and economical way to sift through the vast amount of blogosphere information, distill what is truly relevant and timely, and take appropriate action." Muniwireless quotes Glenn Fleishman's description of Issue Dynamics as "a group that specializes in creating the appearance of grassroots and independent support for ideas on behalf of their clients. They don�t hide this specialty." According to IDI, they'll be monitoring blogs for "non-traditional or 'below the radar' public statements from policy experts and thought leaders," and to give "clients the ability to track and respond to blog postings quickly, before they grow and 'jump' to traditional media sources - and to the world." Should be fun.
Austin Business Journal on blogging
I was interviewed for an article on blogging in the April 15 issue of the Austin Business Journal, called "Been around the blog?"
...Lebkowsky at Polycot says that if a company chooses to launch a blog, it's not guaranteed to be an effective communication tool in the marketplace.

"You have to have a certain openness and authenticity, which means that you can't control your message as you do with other marketing and public relations channels," he says. "You have to be prepared to add content regularly, and you really should be prepared to invite comments from the public, which can also mean dealing with angry customers or difficult questions in public.

"Handling this sort of thing well can have a net positive effect, but handling it badly can be disastrous. If there's a legal issue, you should always consult your attorneys, but try to find a solution that's conversational and non-threatening, if at all possible," Lebkowsky says.
The blog lady and the Pope
I knew blogging had sunk in as part of the mediascape when, on Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, the prolific Arianna Huffington was listed, not as a mere writer, but as a blogger. She's only blogging once a week (and like many high-profile political bloggers, she's getting tons of comments).

Arianna has a nice blogroll; I followed the link to Marc Coooper's blog, where I found a post about the inane media coverage of the Pope's death, which reminds me of the running Saturday Night Live gag (Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!) three decades ago. Cooper links to an essay, "On Not Mourning the Pope", by Christopher Hitchens and says
Hitch further reminds us of this juicy irony: The same yammering media airheads who have spent the last week breathlessly proclaiming that it was the �Polish Pope� who had single-handedly dealt the death blow to World Communism are the same geniuses who, less than a year ago, had credited Ronald Reagan with this same superhuman achievement. Then again, these are the same folks who told us Diana Spencer was �The Princess of the People� just as Wojtyla is now �The Pope of the People� (someone should buy the networks a thesaurus).

The bigger story the gushing media misses, says Hitchens, is not the Pope�s anti-communism but rather the striking similarities between today�s crisis of the Church and the crisis of Stalinism a half-century ago.
Hitchens' essay ends with a paragraph that should certainly be factored into the case for the Pope's canonization:
Unbelievers are more merciful and understanding than believers, as well as more rational. We do not believe that the pope will face judgment or eternal punishment for the millions who will die needlessly from AIDS, or for his excusing and sheltering of those who committed the unpardonable sin of raping and torturing children, or for the countless people whose sex lives have been ruined by guilt and shame and who are taught to respect the body only when it is a lifeless cadaver like that of Terri Schiavo. For us, this day is only the interment of an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long, and whose primitive ideology did not permit him the true self-criticism that could have saved him, and others less innocent, from so many errors and crimes.
This reminds me of the "punch line" from Anthony Burgess' novel Earthly Powers, though I can't tell you why without spoiling your experience of the book.

(Technorati tag: Blogging)
Journalists vs Bloggers again?
Bloggers and journalists have the potential for a natural partnership, but we have to work around a negative perception of bloggers that crops up occasionally, most recently in this feature at DesMoinesRegister.com, by Erin Crawford, about a whacky theory that "Jeff Gannon" is actually Johnny Gosch, and Iowa paperboy kidnapped in '82. What I found interesting in the story is this paragraph:
If you have the time to read a few hundred Web postings, you will see how Johnny Gosch and Jeff Gannon, two completely unrelated individuals, became the same person on the Web. The way the theory developed says much about the anything-goes nature of the blogosphere and self-proclaimed reporters on the Internet, who seem to find accuracy and proof a nuisance in uncovering fantastical conspiracies. (Italics mine)
This is like judging the entire field of journalism by the writing in tabloids like Weekly World News and Star Magazine. I don't know whether to grin or groan...
Interview with Jason Calacanis
Here's a link to a Quicktime of my SXSW interview with Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc.
What's up, Doc?

Hanging out at PC Forum, Marc Canter captured a great photo of Doc (with Dick Hardt, left). [Link]
Blog Diversity
Steven Levy writes in Newsweek about a blogosphere "dominated by white males," but he's really talking about the so-called "A-list bloggers," not the however many millions of bloggers who could be predominantly women, as far as anyone really knows - I don't think there's been a study to say otherwise. Levy, a terrific journalist, clarifies his focus, so the article's not really misleading.

My one quibble would be that members of the supposed "A-list," who may be using the blog format, tend to speak with mainstream media voices. I don't exactly think of them as bloggers. I'd really like to know more about the demographics of the larger blogosphere.
Sifry's "State of the Blogosphere" Report

Technorati's David Sifry is tracking blogosphere growth based on Technorati stats.
Bloggers go pro?
Jason Kottke's going to blog full-time – at least, he's going to give it a shot. [Link]
But Mr. Kottke said he wants kottke.org to be his life focus, though he is not sure if the dream can come true. He said he doesn�t hate advertising, but resents its intrusive nature. "There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you," said Mr. Kottke. "Advertising introduces a third party."

Other prominent bloggers applauded Mr. Kottke�s step but expressed doubts about its success. "He�s taking a no-advertising approach and good for him,� said Mitch Ratcliffe, a veteran Internet personality. �I don't think it�s viable, but it is a push in the right direction."
Kottke hopes that his considerable audience (25,000 visitors per day) will contribute a suggested $30 per year. If only 10% contribute at that rate, he'd still make a decent living....
We'r'e only in it for the money!

Should bloggers take money for writing about sponsored products? JD Lasica explores the question in a very good article for the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. Lasica focuses on the controversial Marqui Payblogger program that's been sponsoring Weblogsky since December. Every week, I post something about Marqui, often based on content that Marqui provides. The twenty Marqui bloggers take diverse approaches to the agreement to post weekly, but we all disclose our relationship with Marqui. Journalists wouldn't do this because it might create the appearance, accurate or not, that there's a conflict of interest. So when bloggers do something like this, it's more fuel for the discussion of blogging vs journalism. Jay Rosen says that debate is over, but, well, it ain't over 'til it's over. However I don't think it's a debate of journalists vs. bloggers, it's a debate of bloggers who want to be thought of as journalists (and paid accordingly) vs. bloggers who the freedom to wear any or many hats.

JD summarizes the Society of Professional Journalists� Ethics Code, "which instructs journalists to:

Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money..."

However, he says, "Bloggers sometimes act as journalists, but they uniformly say they hew to different standards than professional journalists." He summarizes those standards:

"Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency � of actions, motives and financial considerations � is the golden rule of the blogosphere.
Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.
Be honest. Write what you believe.
Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.
Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity � lost trust is difficult to regain."

The Marqui experiment has been very open on their end; they haven't told us what to do, which makes sense, given the lack of precedence or standards for this sort of thing. I figured I was like a smalltown newspaper editor who also has to be a reporter and write all the ad copy, because there's only one of me, some days even less. Others had different approaches, like Mitch, who simply thanked Marqui each week for its sponsorship.

It wasn't an ethical dilemma for me, at least at first. I do have a bit of an issue now, though. Though skeptical at first, I began to see over time that Marqui has a good system. Then Lucy Tanner of Marqui called and asked if my company, Polycot, was interested in partnering with Marqui. Polycot has its own CMS, but we use other products, too, depending on the project. We may very well go for it, which is less of a quandary since my contract as a Marqui blogger is near its end. I can simply choose not to renew.

As a journalist, would I work for a company that sponsored my blog - that I was paid to write about? Probably not. As a blogger, though, I'm less conflicted. My life as a businessman and my life as a blogger are mashed up, and the rest of my life is in there, too, and it's all a continuum for me. I'm pretty honest, and hopefully credible, and I can't really see any reason not to work with Marqui if it makes business sense.

I have written as a journalist before, I understand how it works. That wasn't exactly the kind of writing I wanted to do – a lot of the stuff I've written has been gonzo, not objective. I didn't follow the formula, but writed what I wanted to write.

Lasica speaks for me when he says

If bloggers are paid by a corporation to write about the company, they�re no longer acting as amateur journalists. Journalists cannot and do not accept payments from sources.
Bloggers, on the other hand, are free to do so, and it�s up to each reader to decide how to judge that. "If you�re a blogger or writer, OK, take the money," Rubel said. "But understand that you�ve crossed a line with some readers."

Just don�t call yourself a journalist when you�re cashing that check.
Blogopsherics
Notes from the Blogsophere... Doc quotes James Robertson, who says that Eason Jordan lost his job, not because of politics, but because he embarrassed CNN. Look here if you don't know what I'm talking about. // My friend and co-editor Mitch struggles with the idea of consensus, with constructive comments from Jodi Dean and Sam Rose, who haven't quite taken leave of their consensus yet. // Joi posts that a Tulsa newspaper has threatened to sue a blogger over what appears to be fair use. // Ross Mayfield differs with John Dvorak, who says that Google shouldn't host Wikimedia projects. // The Shirkmeister sent us to a terrific jwz rant... Groupware BAD, users GOOD, calendars USEFUL. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software). That quote made my day... and this:
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.
Blog yourself out of a job?
Bloggers may be jeopardizing their employment, especially if they blog about work, according to CNN/Money. [Link]
Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer, says there's a false sense that employers can't punish their workers for voicing personal opinions -- on their blogs or anywhere else. "People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case," he said.

There are a handful of exceptions. Several states, including California, specifically protect workers from retaliation for their political views. Other states have broader protections covering "off-the-job" activities, said Palefsky.

Even those safety nets have limits when it comes to bad-mouthing the boss. "If you're going to be talking about your employer, it's hard to call that 'off-the-job' conduct," said Palefsky.
Wikinews Chat
The collaborative writing project WikiNews invites bloggers to an open IRC chat on how Wikinews can interact with weblogs. The chat's at 4pm Central Time Saturday, February 5. [Link]
Blogs grow journalism
Ed Cone compares traditional journalism in the age of the Internet to a building, in C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, "that is bigger inside than it is outside."

"Whenever I think I've mapped its new contours," Ed says, "somebody shows me another wing."

Ed's talking about the recent Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference at Harvard, where journalists and bloggers were jamming about the relationship of the two approaches to publishing, and the evolution of the weblog as a citizen journalism. Reputation and credibility are key issues for journalists and bloggers both, and organizations are emerging (e.g. Center for Online Investigative Research) that hope to explore the relationship between bloggers and professional journalists and the issues of ethics and credibility they have in common, especially as journalists begin more and more to incorporate intelligence from within the blogosphere. As Ed says,
This idea that there is more knowledge outside the newsroom than in it, that as writer Dan Gillmor puts it, "my readers know more than I do," is of course the point of bothering to report stories in the first place. What's new is the ability of individuals to publish their own words, as well as audio and video, cheaply and easily on the Web. Experts and eyewitnesses are no longer consigned to audience status. They don't have to wait to be interviewed by professionals but can push information out at their own discretion.
He goes on to say
What media organizations, including the News & Record, are trying to figure out is how to add value to this flood of personal publishing without being drowned by it. Even as the new media enhances the old, it has some very disruptive possibilities. While Rick Kaplan, president of MSNBC, said at the conference that Web logs actually increase the ratings of his programs, online services such as Craig's List and Monster are already eating away at the ad revenue that pays for things like that Times bureau in Baghdad. Meanwhile the new media players are trying to figure out revenue models of their own.
[Link to Ed Cone's editorial.] [Link to Ed's blog.]
Marqui: Blog Business Summit
Weblogsky sponsor Marqui was also a cosponsor of this week's Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and the Marqui folks were liveblogging the conference. Some highlights:

In Robert Scoble's keynote, he says that "blogs are useful because they reveal – and enable &nash; 'passion concentrations.'"
Regardless of whether someone agrees or disagrees with the opinion of a blogger, if the topic is something readers are passionate about, they will migrate to and participate in that blog.

Robert says this is why so many journalists are keen on blogging; it gives them insight into what topics and trends seem to be most interesting to readers. Similarly, businesses can use blogging as a window into what customers are saying. No surprise there, but he went on to say that this type of "window" is now being used by some to predict how well a product will fare in the market based on feedback in the first 24 hours. For these same reasons, blogs can now dramatically amplify a product's failure or unprecedented success�a la the Halo 2 phenomenon.

Janet posted more notes on Scoble's keynote yesterday:

The brave new world of blogs:

Opportunities: They'll come to you because of your passion and authority in this new world.

Ethics: The blogosphere will 'clean itself out' from lies or mis-representations quickly - usually, within hours. (Remember the Swift Boat Veterans hubbub?) Don't lie in a blog, there are smarter people in the audience than you are.

Momentum: Evangelize your product or service through 'connectors.' If there's a target blogger you'd like to reach in your area of influence, talk to the 5-10 bloggers around your target. They'll blog about it, and your target will notice. (It only takes five people talking about a subject to capture Scoble's attention.)

Fear: The fear of blogging and being exposed? (Or there's a worse fear - what if I blog and no one notices?) Blog. Then blog some more. Keep at it. Keep linking out, and people will pick up on your efforts.

And while we're at it, what if conflicts erupt? (I'm remembering being called "pond scum.") According to Scoble, humans love a good story. Go ahead and be provocative - conflicts between opposing viewpoints engage readers.

On day two of the summit there was a discussion of guidelines and recommendations for employees who are blogging for their organizations.

My compatriot Mitch Ratcliffe also posted about Scoble's talk, and Marc Canter/Chris Pirillo.
"We're all going to be ok."
I've been listening to the realtime webcast of the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference at Harvard's Berkman Center on Internet and Society and participating via the chat room. Today's discussion has been great. Brendan Greeley posted about "A Beautiful Moment" this moring. On the side I've also been learning more about podcasting from David Berlind and talking a bit about blog as medium (vs the incorrect impression some have that "blog" is a type of content... it is a medium with many types of content). The conference is well-documented at the site.
Take Back the News!
Conservative warblogger John Little (Blogs of War) has created a platform for citizen journalism, Take Back the News. Dan Gillmor posted a pointer; the concept is potentially a good platform for the kind of grassroots journalism he's been talking about. It's looking so far like a good objective repository of news links with comments. Marjolein Hoekstra posted a detailed overview of the site at Robin Good's new media site.
Ethics, Blogging, and Journalism
Do bloggers undermine their credibility by posting with an obvious lack of objectivity? Should bloggers aspire to some standard of journalistic objectivity? Those are the kinds of questions Bill Mitchell touches with his post on Questions of Ethics at the blog for Harvard's upcoming conference on Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility. I planned to be a journalist 37 years ago, when I graduated from high school, but took another path... partly because I wanted to write subjective pieces. I muddled about with various kinds of writing - fiction, gonzo (subjective) journalism, essays and op-ed pieces before I started writing for the web. Some of my writing has been absolute crap, meaning I could've used more time with a good editor along the way, but I do think that I can get closer to the truth by revealing my biases. I think the biases are always there; objectivity is a laudable goal but unattainable, in my opinion. If you aspire to be honest, authentic in your approach to blogging, then you'll have credibility, objective or not.
Britt Blaser on "The Commons of the Tragedy"
Good piece by Britt: The Tsunami made citizen journalism via blogs even more visible and valuable. Blogs are more persistent, perhaps obsessive, about the stories du jour. The news and the historical record are so much richer as a result. [Link]
Fortune on Blogomania
Under "10 Tech Trends," Fortune has a swell longish article, Why There's No Escaping the Blog, which features a great photo of Xeni: What does it all mean!!??
These are still the early days of blogging, and the form is still morphing. Blogs that host music and video are popping up, people are starting to blog text and photos from their phones, and sites like NewsGator, using a technology called RSS, allow people to subscribe to blogs. Plus, an arms race is building behind the scenes. Venture capitalists last year invested a still tiny $33 million into blog-related companies, but that was up from $8 million the year before, according to research firm VentureOne. Blog ad companies, which place ads and pay per response, are enabling bloggers to earn money from their sites. And blogging publishers have emerged. Two of the most prominent, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton, are going head-to-head with stables of popular blogs (Engadget and Autoblog vs. Gizmodo, Gawker, and Wonkette, among others). More important, some of the most competitive companies in tech are throwing their weight behind blogging.
Weblogsky Top Ten List for 2004
This top ten list is based on the various stories I blogged throughout the year – these strike me as the most interesting subjects.

I also tacked on a 'best of' music list, a few albums that impressed me in 2004.

The Howard Dean Presidential Campaign. I made a lot of posts on the subject, like this one from last January on Dean, Software, and Democracy

Social Software for nonprofits. In February I posted a link to "What's a Blog, and Why Should Nonprofits Care?", an article by Zafar Shah, a VISTA volunteer working with Austin Free-net. I was involved in conversations related to this subject all year, especially since one focus of my company, Polycot, is social software for nonprofits, activists campaigns, and small companies. I also thought and blogged a lot about software for identifying and managing social networks (Friendster, Orkut, etc.) Several items on this subject in March: detail about a meeting in Austin with several local talking, mostly about LinkedIn. I blogged my response to David Weinberger's Why I Hate Friendster. Also blogged links to other blogs commenting on our Aesthetics of Social Networks panel at SXSW Interactive. In April I posted a link to Andrew Leonard on social networks, where he says "the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good!" I also posted a response to John Dvorak when he wrote that social network systems were "dead."

Digital Democracy Teach-in, an O'Reilly conference immediately preceding the February Emerging Technology Conference. I was on the steering committee and one of the panels. Audio here. I blogged "Gatekeepers No More: The Grassroots Challengs the Journalistic Priesthood" and Joe Trippi's talk.

SXSW Interactive. I helped put together the Wireless Future track at SXSW Interactive and organized some other panels; didn't have much time to blog, other than a few notes about the panel on Blogging, Journalism, and Politics, and a debrief published at WorldChanging.com.

I made several posts about Fahrenheit 9/11, including this response to Christopher Hitchens' critique.

Cory spoke at Microsoft about "Digital Rights Management," which describes a set of technologies created to break other technologies so that various packages of proprietary digital media have limited use. If you want other uses, you have to pay for them. The motion picture and record industries say that they want to protect their intellectual property - i.e. content that they bought from those who created it, artists that they supposedly want to protect but who often get a tiny fraction of the return on their investment of creative energy – often less than they contracted to receive, because the film and music distributors famously make "accounting errors" that often go unchallenged because of the legal expenses involved. Okay, I'm ranting, and Cory's rant is better. I blogged more from Cory this week.

Brian Wilson released his great concept album Smile this year, almost 40 years after he made the initial recordings. Why so long? I posted about that here, with a link to a Newsweek article about the release. Here's another item published just before the release date.

Mitch Ratcliffe and I put our book Extreme Democracy online when we couldn't get it published before the election. We're hoping to publish a revised version in book form in late spring 2005.

The goddam election. "Don't complain, organize!"

The Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami. First short post was the day after Christmas, followed the next day by a pointer to the SEA-EAT site set up to coordinate relief. I posted a lot more at WorldChanging.com, starting with this summary on the 27th, a collaboration with Rohit Gupta and Dina Mehta. A real nightmare; blogging about it made me feel a little less helpless. Just a little.

Can I squeeze in a #11? I have to mention the folksonomy, defined in Wikipedia as "a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace." The two sites I use that employ this scheme are de.licio.us and flickr. I haven't done as much with de.licio.us, where tags are used to characterize bookmarks, but I'm beginning to see the value of planting bookmarks in a shared space. I'm much more active at flickr, a photo sharing site, where I've uploaded several hundred photos by now. (I had a free three month trial with a pro account, which has gone away, but I plan to upgrade to pro shortly. At the moment 100 of the photos I've uploaded are visible.) Tagging is a great way to categorize photos, though flickr, which is also a social network site, also has photo groups.

Music: not a top ten list, but a few that made an impression in 2004:

Drive-By Truckers: Dirty South. The Truckers blew me away at the Austin City Limits Festival. Their songs are powerful, intricate, beautiful explosions of southern angst and elation, sometimes reminiscent of The Band (which is the the subject of one song, Danko/Manuel, about the two members of The Band who died of a heart attack and suicide, respectively.

Gomez: Split the Difference. Gomez was also great at the ACL Festival; this album is kind of a weird hybrid: pop blues?

Wilco: A Ghost is Born. I was more immediately impressed by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Ghost grew on my, and after a half dozen plays I'd moved in and got comfortable.

Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose. A great country rock album from Loretta Lynn, produced by Jack White of the White Stripes. Who'da thunk it?

Jim White: Drill a Hole in that Substrate and Tell Me What You See. I discovered Jim White this year and bought all of his music, including this, his latest CD. I liked his other albums better, but the whole body of work is fascinating. He's a great songwriter and the arrangements are psychedelic.

Thievery Corporation: Outernational Sound Jazzy world music mixes from Rob Garza and Eric Hilton. This one makes me smile.

Catherine Braslavsky Ensemble: Chartres - The Path of the Soul. Ancient and Contemporary Sacred Music recorded live at the labyrinth of Chartres cathedral. Simple but powerful and inspiring.