Technovia

How Modernism 2.0 is taking over the web

Modernism 2.0 - A new weightless nowhere of silent autism - broadstuff.

"So that's Modernism 2.0 - disposable culture, quality is defined by its audience, here today / gone tomorrow, content with zero useful thought but lots of strident opinion, often merely an attempt to flog consumer stuff, and driving an obsessive need to become ambient with the new new toys."

Ouch. Another sentence that I wish I'd written. I'd actually argue that the current vogue for opinion over argument is the triumph of the post-modern approach which claims that all opinions are equally valid. If opinion is as good as argument, then why bother with all that hard work of building a case, presenting facts, and so on?

Which takes us nicely to Twitter, a medium which forces you to distill an argument into 140 characters - something that's pretty much impossible for anything with more meaningful content than "Isn't it a nice day?"

Quote of the day

From Alan Patrick.

"Dave Winer may love his River of News, but time starved people would rather have a thinner Stream of Relevance"

Service interruption on Sunday

Depending on what time I get back from the weekend's visit, there may be a period of downtime for this blog on Sunday. I'm transferring Technovia from running on Typepad to my own hosted version of Wordpress. All permalinks should remain working, and no posts or comments will be lost, but while I move the domain over there will be a period when it's not available. The RSS feed will also be unaffected, thanks to the lovely people at FeedBurner.

Update: I've decided not to go ahead with the transfer this weekend - basically, I quickly realised that I just won't have time to do it, so I'm putting it off for now.

John Biggs: On Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging

CrunchGear's John Biggs takes a look at "Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging":

"I doubt Walt Mossberg would run around turning off TVs or getting really drunk. I doubt David Pogue would take pictures of booth babes. But these sophomoric shenanigans — along with rumors, rants, and fanboyism — are sadly the bread and butter of blogging. Otherwise a blog is just a press release regurgitation machine."

And that's the problem. If all you can bring to the table is bad behaviour, all you are is a badly-behaved press release regurgitating machine. You're not the reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson.

Having said that, I think John underestimates the level of debauchery that professional journalists are capable of. While, as he puts it, "Business Week rarely have to sprinkle out sawdust in the break room", I can think of more than a few occasions when tech journalists I know were guilty of puking (or worse) in the kitchen sink. The big difference? You knew when not to be an asshole. Clearly, no one at Gizmodo is teaching the kids that.

Naughty, Naughty Scoble

Scoble, on Twitter:

"Oh, oh, Facebook blocked my account because I was hitting it with a script. Naughty, naughty Scoble!"

Bad boy, bad! But then again, Robert, we did tell you that Facebook sucks...

Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, Facebook

Poor, FORTUNE

In its blog post on the shuttering of Think Secret FORTUNE magazine manages to miss the point quite nicely:

"The case drew national attention because it raised important questions about press freedom and whether First Amendment protections extend to blogs."

It might have "raised important questions" about blogs - but only in the minds of people obsessed with the distinction between journalism and blogging. In fact, it was clear from the start the Nick Ciarelli followed journalistic method far more effectively than many so-called professional journalists. The fact that Think Secret was an online-only publication with dated stories was the only resemblance it had with most blogs.

"At the time, Apple was apparently unaware that “Nick dePlume” Think Secret’s publisher, was an undergraduate at Harvard. Nicholas Ciarelli was 13 when he launched the website from his parents’ home in upstate New York."

If Apple really was unaware of this, then it was the only part of the Mac industry that had missed out on this obvious fact. I met Nick in press rooms at quite a few Macworld shows, and I find it absolutely impossible to believe that Apple wasn't aware of his age.

Why using Technorati to look at the influence of mainstream media on blogging fails

One of the most popular memes amongst proponents of blogging is that the majority of posts are entirely new, having nothing to do with issues or pages from mainstream media. Last year, Chris Anderson attempted to put this point across when opposing what he called "The Derivative Myth":

"This is the Derivative Myth. It usually goes like this (and again, I don't mean to pick on Malcolm, who didn't say the following and no doubt meant his comment above to be at least partly tongue in cheek): Blogs, which are mostly written by amateurs, couldn't possibly do what We Do. Instead, they mostly just comment on what we do, supplying low-value-add chatter about our stories that must not be confused with Proper Journalism or other Quality Content from us Professionals."

However, Chris claimed, if you looked at links on Technorati, this was demonstrably false:

"Let's look at some numbers. Technorati shows that there are currently 555,000 posts linking to the New York Times. Nearly 800,000 posts mention the Times in one way or another. Sounds like a lot? Not if you pull back and look at the entire blogosphere. Technorati is currently tracking 2.7 billion links."

Chris went on to include a list of the most-referenced mainstream media sites, which showed that even the BBC - top of the list - had only 0.3% of the links on Technorati. Thus, he claimed, people simply weren't talking about things they read in the media.

There's only one problem with this thesis: as I pointed out in a comment at the time, Technorati tracks only first-order links, which means that any post which references another blog post which references a mainstream media story doesn't get counted towards mainstream media's total.

Here's a simple example. This morning, I checked my news feeds and looked through Scoble's link blog, finding a link to an interesting-sounding story about how women are now buying more technology than men. Scoble's link led me to a blog post on The Raw Feed. This, though, was just a small post linking to the original story, which, you've guessed it, originated in the mainstream media (in this case, a story on The Independent's site).

Technorati would have given The Indie a single inbound link for this, compared to probably tens for The Raw Feed and hundreds to Scoble. This is one of the ways in which the echo chamber can occasionally work to amplify a story by piling links on a popular site, rather than the original source. Those who only read Scoble's link blog might never have known that the original source was mainstream media. Only by clicking through a chain of links does the heritage of a piece of information become clear.

Technorati Tags:
Blogging, Robert Scoble, Chris Anderson, Mainstream media

River of News fails

The user experience has been a disaster (Scripting News):

"The NY Times has totally ignored the NY Times River, which makes the Times work on mobile devices with ease of use that they so often report is eluding them"

I don't know how many times that it's worth saying this, because Dave isn't listening but... "River of News" approaches don't work for everyone. In fact, for the majority of people - the kind who aren't constantly scanning the feeds - River of News fails miserably. It had no concept of importance other than "Most recent", and in news that's almost never the most important factor to someone.

If a bomb goes off somewhere in London, it's more important to me than other events. I want that front and centre of my news, more than anything else - more recent but unconnected stories are no use to me. If they push the important stuff off the front page, then I am missing things which I need to know.

River of News effectively abdicates responsibility for judging what's important to a reader. Whether that's done by human editors or machine algorithms isn't important - what matters is that in order to well-serve readers, it must be done. River of News simply fails to do it.

Technorati Tags:
Dave Winer

blogging light

Blogging will be light over the weekend, as I'm away in glamorous Kent.

Kindle: What about RSS?

An interesting little note on GigaOM:

"Disclosure: Our RSS feed is part of the Kindle device, and we are under NDA to comment about its features."

Am I to take it from that that Kindle is also an RSS reader? And that certain blogs have already been "approached" to be part of the default set of feeds? That would certainly explain why Scoble is under NDA too.


Technorati Tags: amazon, kindle, Robert Scoble, GIgaOM