Blummy is Cool!

blummy_logo Somehow I’d missed all the talk about Blummy, until I saw Steve Rubel’s post today.

I was intrigued, so I signed up and gave it a try…and it is really cool. It’s going to save me some serious researching and writing time.

I have added Wikipedia lookup, Whois lookup, Alexa stuff, Google Blog search, IMDB search, the tinyurl maker and the Delicious playtagger add.

I wrote one for AllMusic.Com (it’s now available and is called allmusic).

Here are the other “blummlets” I will make shortly:

One for Allyoucanupload.com
One that will make an image link from any image

I am excited about Blummy. Give it a try.

Google and Firefox Go to the Dark Side

Google, looking for the its first hit in a decade and hoping to avoid the oldies tour, and Firefox, perhaps wanting to ratchet down all the love it has been receiving, have joined the Bloatware 2006 Tour, headlined by none other than Real Player.

The only reason I can think of why Google and Firefox would agree to partner up with Real Networks is because Real Networks isn’t Microsoft.

Note to Google and Firefox: Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend.

As of now, all of the comments to the Download Squad post linked above agree that this is a bad move for Google and Firefox. And all agree that Real Alternative should be used in lieu of Real Player.

I’ve long been on record as far as my opinion of Real Player goes.

Itchy Fingers in the Blogosphere

Amy Gahran has an interesting post today about the itchy finger syndrome- when you click the “Publish” button too quickly and post something to your blog that a moment later you wish you hadn’t.

She tells of this post by Dave Winer, which went through several post-publication edits, all of which were, for some reason, grabbed and posted by Ian Bettridge.

There’s a lesson here, as Amy suggests. But first a little related business.

I saw those earlier posts by Dave too, in my feed reader. But I didn’t save them, and I certainly wouldn’t post them. Anyone should have the right to reconsider what they write the same way they can reconsider what they say in a conversation. If I am arguing with Dave about something, I’d rather respond to what he says and agrees with than what he said and later retracted.

Back to the itchy finger.

As Amy points out, once you post something, it will get picked up by your blog’s feed. It will also often get picked up by Google and Technorati and sometimes by Techmeme and the other memetrackers. Once that happens, it is a part of the permanent record.

A related problem is that any modification to a post will generally go back into your feed as a new item. So if you do 3 edits to an original post, that post will show up in your feed 4 times.

While we all try to avoid it, everyone has to edit posts for typos, broken links, etc. from time to time, and this is viewed by most as an unavoidable part of the process.

But when you change substantive parts of your post, the original content is still out there in your feed. Amy is correct- there’s no way to get it back.

Having said that, I’m not sure that’s such a big deal in many cases. Had Dave been talking to us as opposed to posting, he very likely would have said the same sort of stuff, refining his stated position (stated being the important word there) as he thought about it and heard our reactions. He would have ended up at the same place, and we would have heard the evolution of his position.

As Amy points out, however, when you remove something because you have reconsidered your position, it’s a good idea to explain what you did and why. Having said that, I suspect Dave removed the post more out of a desire to avoid a hassle than a change of heart (I don’t want to get involved in this debate, but I will say that I did not find Dave’s original post objectionable and I think there is a marginal utility to extreme political correctness that is wholly lost to some.)

Avoiding an itchy finger is certainly a good idea when possible. But at the end of the day, blogs are about conversation. And most conversations start at once place and end at another. Even if you’re talking to yourself.

That’s not such a bad thing.

UPDATE: Amy has more thoughts about editing posts.

YouTube Wins Again

youtube Fresh from its win over MySpace in my Web 2.0 Wars championship, YouTube turns around and puts it to MySpace again with word that it has passed MySpace in the internet eyeball race, racking up a 3.9% share of internet visits compared to 3.35% for MySpace.

The GU sums it up nicely in a quote from some undoubtedly qualified guy from an almost assuredly important company (that is my tip of the hat to the gesture crowd, who can’t respond to my earlier debunking because (a) there is no valid response and (b) they would be admitting that they follow links if they did so, since they weren’t born with innate knowledge of my post any more that their readers were born with innate knowledge of their URLs):

“YouTube has a far more universal appeal, being pure entertainment with a global appeal.”

Amen, and congratulations to YouTube.

Adventures in eMusic

Every dog has its day. Today, it’s eMusic‘s turn to be the dog.

That’s not a criticism of eMusic. I just think it’s a little funny that the roving herd of bloggers (of which I am certainly one) has made its way around to eMusic in the never-ending search for an online music service that works. I’d link to Fred Wilson’s post about eMusic, but I grow weary of one-sided conversations and Scoble told us earlier that it’s not nice to link to Fred.

I used eMusic a ton back in the day. I can’t remember exactly when I started using the service, but it was around the time MP3.Com went from being one of the best music sites ever to one of the worst.

And I found a ton of great music on eMusic, including perhaps the best alternative country band ever, The Star Room Boys. I got a lot of good, legal music from eMusic, much of which is still on my music server.

The problem with eMusic back then and which, based on a quick look today, may still a problem, is that it had almost no major label content. Granted, it had some great indy label music, including a lot by the most under-appreciated label in America, Fat Possum Records. But after you went through the available stuff, the flow of music you wanted slowed to a trickle.

My suspicion about the limited number of major label songs arises from the fact that you can’t see the library of available songs until you sign up. There’s no good reason for that, and so the only reason left is a bad one.

There was a different system in place when I last used eMusic. First, it was unlimited downloads for a set monthly fee. Then is was vaguely limited downloads for the same monthly fee. Now there is the following tiered pricing:

40 downloads per month for $9.99 per month
65 downloads per month for $14.99 per month
90 downloads per month for $19.99 per month.

At signup you can get a free MuVO MP3 player or a 20% discount if you sign up for a 12 month plan. No thanks.

After you signup, you are encouraged to download some software that will let you download entire albums at once. Otherwise, you have to download songs one at a time. Being highly bloatware-adverse, I don’t want to put more software on my computer.

I am sounding like a critic of eMusic, and I don’t mean to. There is a lot to love about it.

For one thing, I absolutely love eMusic’s policy of selling non-DRM infested music. And I readily appreciate the fact that you can get a ton of good music without giving a dime to the record label cartel. eMusic is a central despository for that music, and that music is certainly worth paying for.

But if you want to pick up a classic record by Humble Pie or Steppenwolf, it’s not for you (although it does have an especially good selection of blues).

There is a place for eMusic, for sure. And I hope one day it is viewed as the forefather of online music distribution.

But we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.

Debunking this Gesture Nonsense

Robert Scoble posts today about the gesture business Steve Gillmor has been talking about for some time now.

It’s time to debunk this gesture nonsense once and for all.

Scoble tells of how someone emailed him about a fire in Montana near the town where Scoble’s mom lived before she died. The emailer knew Scoble would be interested because he read Scoble’s blog posts from when he went to visit his mom when she was sick. Somehow the fact of this email explains and supports (at least to Scoble) the whole gesture business.

To call posted or emailed content gestures is the worst sort of nomenclature for the sake of nomenclature. It is “pre-owned cars” times infinity. The only algorithm you need to find these so-called gestures are the web addresses for Google and Technorati. The “information retrieval system” is in place right now, and it has been for years.

The fact that someone who knows Scoble has a connection to a town in Montana emails him a link to an article he might be interested in does utterly nothing to support some revolutionary gesture concept. This sort of thing happens a million times a day. To say that such an email supports the gesture business is like saying the fact the sky is blue supports the fact that I am the King of England.

Lots of people find out lots of things every day via emails and water cooler conversation before they read about it on Google or in the paper. All this proves is that people tell other people things they might be interested in.

More importantly, the gesture theory can be debunked mathematically.

Scoble says he doesn’t have to link to a post he mentions by Fred Wilson, because:

“I didn’t link to Fred Wilson’s blog. Why? Cause if you really cared you’d have read it by now, right? I assume my readers know how to use Google and TechMeme. Cause you’re smarter than me and I can find Fred in both places right now.”

and because:

“Yeah, Steve Gillmor explained to me why NOT linking is better than linking. Tell me Fred, did your traffic from search engines go up today?”

It is a mathematical certainty that at least some people who read Scoble’s post and are interested in what Fred has to say will NOT go to the extra effort to do a Google or Technorati search to find Fred’s post. So the gesture nonsense will frustrate not only those people, who could otherwise have accessed Fred’s post by clicking a link, as well as Fred, who presumably would like interested people to read what he writes. In sum, the theory that it’s better not to link to Fred’s post is void on its face.

It is self-serving bullshit dreamed up by some guys to support their efforts to recreate an internet oligarchy that is both outdated and inconsistent with the beauty and purpose of the new internet. In many ways it is the reaction of the old to the advances of the new. Somebody moved their cheese and they are trying to build a time machine to help get it back.

If you want further proof, ask yourself this question. Why is this gesture business being promoted in lieu of linking, as opposed to in addition to linking? Couldn’t linking and gestures co-exist peacefully? Of course they could. But not if you treat the blogosphere like the Winchester House and obsess on building it and rebuilding it to your tastes to the extent that you never get to the point of enjoying what you have built.

I can’t tell if Gillmor and his crew really believe in this gesture business, or if this is some L. Ron Hubbard-like attempt to meld science fiction and mythology into a new internet religion.

What I can say is that this gesture/non-linking business is the most extreme form of arrogance I have seen in a long time.

The bottom line is that these guys don’t want to link, and they are working like mad to create a philosophy that will support their refusal to do so. That or this is some epic inside joke at the expense of the rest of us.

Either way, the only gesture I see is some guys who, for one reason or another, have the microphone waiving their middle fingers at the rest of us.

In Praise of PostSecret

Most people who read my blog already know about PostSecret, but some may not. And I’m fixing to change that.

PostSecret is one of the most popular blogs in the world. Only is isn’t really a traditional blog. It’s one of those ideas that seem so simple, yet almost indescribably brilliant. It’s one of those ideas that you can’t believe you didn’t have, yet you know you never would have thought of it.

People anonymously send in the picture side of homemade postcards. Postcards that have a picture or drawing and a message. Something the sender wants or needs to say. It sounds dull, until you start reading them. Then it becomes incredibly powerful. Some of the images and messages are just routine observations. But some of them are stunning in their insight, their sadness, their remorse.

You have to see it to appreciate it, but once you start reading PostSecret, you will never stop.

Link Love on a Slow Night

Randy Morin thinks we should do a little chain linking on a slow night in the blogosphere. I’m game.

What you do is simply repost this blog entry as-is on your blog and add your website to the top (or bottom) of the chain of links below. Then email the blog entry to a couple blogger friends. For participating, you’ll get a little link love, a.k.a. Google juice.

1. http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/
2. http://www.newsome.org/

Update:

3. http://www.chipsquips.com/
4. http://tracytakespics.blogspot.com/
5.http://jack-of-all-tradez.blogspot.com/

Links & Comments: Another Badly Needed Application

I’ve already provided one roadmap to riches via my killer podcast application post.

But if you want to start on a slightly smaller scale, here’s another one.

Someone needs to build a cross platform, highly configurable online application that will pull recent inbound links from Technorati and Google blog search, weed out duplicates AND allow the user to select which ones appear in a list that can be easily added to a blog or other web page. It would be a centrally administered and more feature rich version of the list I manage this way. You could also do the same thing for a list of recent inbound comments (pulling the comments directly from the blog- not via a central location like coComment), and allow both lists to be administered from a single web page.

Why you say? Two reasons: spam and demand.

Almost every post of mine gets picked up by at least one spam blog and often 2-3 of them. Contrary to what Scott Karp says, Technorati is doing a ton better at weeding out spam links and keeping accurate link counts, but it is a full scale war, fought every day. Spam is like roaches, there is no way to keep them all out, and so you still have to rely partially on a kill them when you see them approach. That’s why Scott’s, mine and undoubtedly a ton of people’s link counts go up and down like the cast of the Gillmor Gang.

If I am having this problem, I am sure a lot of others are too. A quick survey of some other reasonably popular blogs confirms this.

If there was a way to validate the inbound links that show up in that list, sort of like you can do now with comments and trackbacks, it would allow people to weed out those links before they show up. And it would take away some of the incentive to spam.

People would flock to this program, and people would happily pay a few bucks a month for it. Look at all the great work done at Freshblog and other places trying to find a way to do things like this within the confines of various platform limitations. Give us one stop shopping, and we will give you money.

I’ll type my fingers off about it here, as would hordes of other appreciative bloggers.

Those of you lucky enough to be on WordPress may rightfully say that there are plugins that already do this for you, but there are plenty of people like me who are stuck in Hotel Blogger and elsewhere who would use it. Plus, we’re all about cross-platform, right? So if you build it well, we will come. From Blogger and from WordPress. From all over.

What are you waiting for. Go build it and I’ll get ready to send you my subscription fee every month.

Farmgate on the Future of the Cowboy

Farmgate, one of my daily reads, has an article today on the status and future of cattle farming.

The long and short of it is that drought conditions combined with rising corn prices courtesy of ethanol demand are not doing the cattle farmer any favors. An average $49 profit a head (small to begin with) has turned into a $97 per head loss.

LGMI, which Farmgate describes is accurately as “crop insurance for cowboys,” is available in 20 states, including Texas, and can help a little. But it has deductibles and inclusion limits.

The bottom line for cattle farmers is that for the time being a thin margin is getting thinner.

It gets harder and harder for the farmers who have fed this country for 230 years.