Blogging

Betsy Schiffman at Wired writes a story about Mike Arrington’s deal with the Washington Post, and mentions that ” it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about.”

This, of course, sends the TechCrunch macho-dickwads into a froth, and they come back with this:

Nice characters, eh? I’m sure their mothers - who they probably still live with - are very proud.

My blog friend Mathew Ingram has a post up on the new features in Google Reader, which provide the ability to add comments to items you share, and share any items via a bookmarklet. Mathew thinks the features are “kind of lame”, particularly when compared to FriendFeed. However, I think that Mathew is missing a few things.

The thing about FriendFeed is that it’s incredibly Twitter-centric, and provides something that Twitter readers have been complaining about virtually since the services was born: a threaded comment view. This means that it turns Twitter into a pretty decent discussion system, something that it sucks at at the moment. This is why it’s become popular with Twitter users - it meets a need that Twitter itself has steadfastly refused to meet.

But comparing it to Google Reader is a pointless exercise, because the two products are designed to do very different things. Google Reader allows you pretty good granular control over anything that comes in RSS form, and allows you to sort and categorise information whichever way you want. The folder structure means that, for example, I can concentrate on my work-related feeds when at work, and save reading friends till later.

FriendFeed gives you a “river of news” view with locked-in comments (although, to be fair, they seem to want to open that out - hence the ability to post back to Twitter, and, forthcoming, the ability to post back to Disqus). The only granularity you have is to click on the feed source - you can’t tag or categorise feeds effectively.

Does that matter? For people wanting “Twitter Pro”, the answer is no. FriendFeed provides proper discussions for Twitter in a much more useable way than anything else. But that doesn’t make FriendFeed a good RSS reader, unless all you want is a single stream of news/noise. Of course, that’s exactly what Dave Winer has been arguing for for ages, with Scoble agreeing, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Scoble has been a big FriendFeed champion.

It’s also worth noting something that I think a lot of people have forgotten: Google already owns a service which does everything that FriendFeed does, and much more. It’s called Jaiku, and I expect that Google will be starting to make something more of it in the not-too-distant future.

RSS aggregation as a friend filter:

“So - a lot of services allow you to grab all of your RSS feeds from all over the shop, and republish them in a central aggregated feed.

The resultant feed - of bookmarks, tweets, flickr pics, LastFM music, blogposts, yada yada - is noisy. REALLY noisy. In fact, unless you know someone really well, it’s just too much information and you drown in it.

But there are some people for whom that much information is good, and comforting. I’d keep an eye on everything my other half was up to, for instance - not for stalking reasons, or because I want to surveil him, but because it’s nice to know whats going through his head - it’s his presence when he’s not around - as Leisa would say, it’s Ambient Intimacy.

But other people - no, I really don’t want to know their every move - I’d like perhaps a once a month update of key items.

So a social aggregator with degree-of-intimacy - where you can pick and choose elements of a person’s behaviour to subscribe to. This should couple with a few smart bits at the back which would desubscribe or deemphasise sections of a person’s feed according to your consumption behaviour. Not reading all of Friend X’s long screeds, but most of their tweets? Eventually the long screeds will drop off your updates.”

Ugh, how annoying. Although I mostly use the wonderful MarsEdit for editing posts to this and other blogs, occasionally I used to use the old Wordpress Bookmarklet. However, that went missing in Wordpress 2.5, and - according to the Wordpress guys - it won’t be reappearing until version 2.6 comes out. 

Help, though, is at hand. If you’re using Safari or Firefox, the old version from 2.3 still works - unfortunately, it appears to not work in for Opera users. 

There’s an interesting conversation going on over at WinExtra about bloggers having “contact policies”, such as the one that Stowe Boyd recently implemented. Having worked in journalism for many years, I sympathise with some of the stuff that Stowe and other high-profile bloggers are going through. It’s very hard to manage your time when you are being approached a lot by PRs and others wanting your attention. Certainly, Stowe’s idea - that shorter is better when it comes to pitches - is one that has been a golden rule for contacting journalists for a long time.

What’s interesting to me is the reaction of many of the commenters, which is best summed up in this post by Brett Nordquist:

“These bloggers are turning into the big media they love to rail against. But there’s a silver lining here. If they continue to put up roadblocks, people are smart enough to route around them.”

There’s an expectation here that bloggers won’t react in the same way as journalists to contact, and a disappointment in those that adopt the defence mechanisms which allow them to survive under a huge flood of unsolicited information - much of it irrelevant to what they talk about on their blogs.

Is this expecting too much? I think it is. Unfortunately, too many PR professionals treat bloggers the way that they treated journalists, as items in a check list to be “approached”, and that will inevitably breed an adversarial attitude amongst well-read bloggers. There are PR people out there who know a lot about blogger engagement (for example, Chris Reed of Fishburn Hedges, who I interviewed for an article on BT Insight), but it often seems like there’s still too many around who do things the old-fashioned way.

I’ve been reading Scoble’s blog for years - way back since he was working at NEC and evangelising Tablet PC to everyone that would listen. I like Robert. Even when he’s at his most excitable, it’s a genuine excitement rather than a “how can I make money?” excitement, or - worse - a “people need to understand how important I am” excitement.

But, much as I like him, I just unsubbed from Robert’s Friendfeed. The reason? Too much stuff. Too much trivia. Too much noise, not enough signal. Too much Twitter (short, largely irrelevant to me) not enough blog (longer, more thought-provoking).

And that is really the problem with FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, and all the other micro-content aggregators out there. I’m just not that interested in most people’s lives. I don’t want or need to know if they post a new picture in their Flickr stream - I can check their Flickr page when they have something interesting to tell a pictorial story about.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve kept my number of Twitter contacts pretty low - basically, people who I’ve either met or had some kind of conversation with (even just in blog comments). I simply haven’t got time or interest in keeping up with what Arrington (or whoever) thinks is important, but not so important that it requires more than 140 characters to express.

So sorry, Robert - and anyone else who I think is burying me under the trivia of their lives. I’m sure it’s important to you, and I’m sure there are interesting bits in there, but if it’s really important to me it’ll find me. I don’t need to scan everything you do.

Technorati Tags:
Robert Scoble, Twitter, FriendFeed

I’m curious to see who gets caught out by this one

You’ll probably have noticed that I’ve updated the blog to Wordpress 2.5 - using the Auto-Update plug in that I’ve talked about before, it was very easy. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to move away from Disqus as a commenting system on this blog. There’s nothing wrong with Disqus - in fact, it has many nice features - but having comments in someone else’s database makes me a little nervous. 

Bobbie Johnson on the response to Billy Bragg’s idea that Bebo should compensate content creators:

“I think that this sort of response is largely ignorant and intended to self-publicise, but it’s more than that. It’s also wrong-headed, dangerous and - rather than being revolutionary as wired warriors like to paint it they’re actually complicit in supporting the dominance of bigcorp.”

I’ve said before that the biggest beneficiaries of Web 2.0 and UGC will be big corporations, who will look on it as a way to get content without paying for it - something that BigCorp has been aiming to do since the dawn of business.

For anyone with a grounding in classical economics, this is entirely understandable. The owners of social networks and major blogs are, essentially, capitalists in the classic sense: owners of the means of production (or, in this case, distribution). As such, it is in their interests to maximise the value of the means of production while minimising the value of labour, which to them is a cost rather than a source of income. It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer, a musician, or simple someone who injects content into their service in the form of your profile: they will argue until the bitter end that what YOU bring to the table is of  little or no value, while what THEY bring to it is worth millions.

But something about all of this reminds me of something Danny O’Brien wrote, many years ago, about Wired:

“We were talking about something that Louis had said, something that made Tony uncomfortable. Louis had talked about Wired being for ‘the digerati’ - ‘guys who’d been teased at school for being geeks, and who are now earning millions while their schoolmates flip burgers’. Wired UK, Tony insisted, was going to be for everyone - even the burgerflippers. I stuck to the Louis line. I said, these people are defining the future - you’ve got to write a magazine for them. So why, said, Tony, can’t everyone define the future? Isn’t that what it’s really about - everyone at last, defining their own future? Can’t this magazine help create a place where everyone can take these tools and use them for themselves? What Louis is doing, he said, smacks of revenge - of comeuppance. He’s turning a global change into a vengeance tale.”

In Arrington’s world, too, the future doesn’t belong to everyone: it belongs to the global entrepreneurs like him, who were smart enough to create the new “means of production”. For people like Arrington, you’re either an entrepreneur, or you’re “audience” - endlessly-replaceable eyeballs which matter only in as far as more audience makes for a bigger valuation on the company.