Maybe Dave read my post yesterday, because he seems to be looking for some middle ground.
Rogers Cadenhead responds, in Dave’s comments and on his blog.
Maybe these guys can get this worked out and then move on to the real issue: protecting RSS from the predators.
Stephen Bryant posts 5 reasons why Web 2.0 and big business don’t mix. I think he’s right and I think his post is a must-read for any Web 2.0 developer who is aiming for the corporate market.
One of my themes, of course, is that big business doesn’t care about Web 2.0.
Let’s take a closer look at one of Stephen’s reasons.
Enterprise software needs to be personalized for each company, and enterprises have also invested heavily in legacy software.
This may be the truest thing I’ve read yet on this issue. You could found a religion based on that statement. Most big companies are using old versions of old software, with a bunch of customized stuff (or stuff they think is customized) layered on top.
All this extra stuff makes it a royal pain to push new operation systems and new versions of applications. The party line is that some of the allegedly custom stuff (much of which is bloatware, but they don’t know it) won’t work with a new operating system or a new version of an application. The real reason is that (a) it’s hard to push new stuff out to thousands of computers and (b) corporate risk aversion. Regardless, the effect is that big companies fall way behind the new application curve.
And of course some new applications don’t play well with older operating systems, so you get caught in a cycle of obsolescence.
Which results in slow and old computers running slow and old applications.
Which means that big business is a long way from caring about the lastest and greatest Web 2.0 application.
Somehow I managed to lose my cell phone in Galveston the other weekend. It was on our bed when we left for a wedding. Cassidy remembers seeing it on there while we were gone. But when we packed up the next morning, it was nowhere to be found.
So I did what any right-thinking guy would do: I went out and bought a better one. My firm uses a Blackberry server to push email while we’re out of the office, so I had to beat back my Treo lust and get another Blackberry.
I got a Blackberry 7130e.
I was with T-Mobile, but when my firm’s T-Mobile representative decided not to follow up on my two calls, I decided to move to Verizon. Unlike the first time I moved my mobile number to another carrier, which was a huge hassle, this time it took about 45 seconds. I had service with my number before I walked out of the store. Nice.
The other reason I decided to go with Verizon is its national wireless broadband network. While many people buy the computer card to get this service, the 7130e can provide the same network coverage as the computer card via a USB cable that connects the phone to your laptop, and the cost is only $15 a month extra (as opposed to $59 a month for the computer card).
When I got home, I tried out the wireless broadband connection and it was fast and reasonably reliable. I’ll know more once I get back from some upcoming speaking engagements, but this seems like a really good deal to me. The one drawback is that you can’t use the phone while it’s being used as a wireless modem, but that’s not that big a deal when you consider the cost savings.
I’m sort of sorry I lost my cell phone, but as is the case with any gadget upgrade, I’ll get over it.
A few things in no particular order.
Disqualification
After seeing this indescribably juvenile ad, I regret and retract all the nice things I had to say about Tagworld.
If that’s the sort of brain-dead, lowest common denominator advertising they are doing, I want no part of it. So what if they are targeting young people. What kind of message is this sending them?
Tagworld won Round 4 of the Web 2.0 wars, but it’s just been DQ’ed for stupidity. Runner-up Tailrank will take its place in the playoffs.
Blogging Round-Up
Susan Getgood has a great roundup of recent posts talking about the evolving nature of blogs. She also says some nice words about a couple of my posts, for which I am deeply grateful.
Susan is doing a Blogging for Business Workshop at the University of Wisconsin on March 17.
The Argument for Partial Feeds
Amy Gahran explains why she streams partial RSS feeds. I’m on the other side of this debate, but if anyone in the world could talk me into using partial feeds, it would be Amy.
But the soft words
That are spoke so gently, yeah
It makes it easier, easier to bear…
-Otis Redding
I’ve been mildly following the great RSS debate, mostly via Mathew Ingram‘s posts. It seems Dave Winer and some other people involved in the development of RSS are fighting. I can’t tell who’s right, but it makes for some interesting reading.
I actually emailed Dave and asked for permission to email him a few short questions, like I do in preparation for many articles here. But he never responded (of course), so I’ll have to try to figure all of this out second hand.
On the one hand, Dave seems to share my skepticism about advisory boards. Put a check in his column.
On the other hand, either the other side is so off in left field that Dave has thrown up his hands or Mathew’s correct when he says Dave needs to take the Otis Redding approach and Try a Little Tenderness. Pending further review, I’m going to have to put a check in the other column for unnecessary fighting.
So the best I can tell, Dave says this Advisory Board doesn’t exist (which clearly it does, but its authority is in question), while the board keeps on doing its thing, taking votes and whatnot.
I’ve said before that I have no problem with people who are direct and speak their minds, even if it means they tell me I’m wrong about something. But extreme directness works a lot better in a dinner table conversation about current events than it does when you’re trying to get something done as part of a group. Whether that group is an advisory board or a board of directors or the human race, if you want or need people to be invested in the process, you simply can’t yell at them and call them stupid. Even if they deserve it.
I’m not interested enough in this squabble to try to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong.
But I will say this Dave. Sometimes you can be right and still be wrong.
If you’re not careful, the issue will become one about personalities as opposed to issues. Once that happens, all that will matter to the sides is attacking the other and absolutely nothing will get done.
So let’s all sing a little Otis, shall we?
I really enjoyed The Blog Herald and am sorry that Duncan Riley sold it, but he (or whoever wrote this post) is simply wrong.
Just because no one has devised a profitable way to cram a bunch of RSS ads down our throats is no excuse for partial RSS feeds. Particularly when we can read another paper that provides full feeds.
Matter of fact, I suspect that part of the reason why RSS ads don’t work is because (a) no one clicks on them, and (b) the advertisers know that. Just because they don’t work the way publishers wish they would is no excuse for forcing readers to the web site for the full story.
Newspapers who understand this will provide full feeds and take readers from those who don’t.
As Steve says, in the future, “we will look back and laugh how quaint it was that we received our news on dead trees.“
We will also think it quaint that publishers tried to drag us back to their ad-infested web sites by dangling half of an article in front of us.
Now that my link count problem has been at least temporarily fixed, I can resume my role as a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati.
Dave Sifry just announced some cool new features.
Technorati Favorites: You can add you favorite blogs (up to 50) to a personalized Technorati page. For some reason some of the feeds in my opml file wouldn’t import, but that may be a problem on my end, since I had to use Bloglines’ brain damaged export function.
Here’s my current Favorites page (the first 40 blogs in my opml file, plus 10 that didn’t quite make it). It’s a cool idea, but I wish you could have more than 50 feeds.
You can also search your favorite blogs via the Favorites page. Technorati has created widgets and buttons you can put on your blog to allow someone to easily add your blog to their Favorites.
OPML Exports: There are now little buttons at the bottom of each Blog Finder search that allow you to export those blogs into an opml file.
Adam Green has announced his desire to create some sort of a group blog about memetrackers.
I have very mixed thoughts about this, but most of them are not positive.
On the one hand, I use the memetrackers a lot and would be in favor of anything that helps them become even better. On the other hand, Gabe and Kevin seem pretty active right now when it comes to talking about memetrackers whenever they are discussed (and I’m sure Matt and others would join in if asked), so why do we need a central place for them to talk about this?
I was a part of the conversation here and on Steve Rubel’s blog that Adam cites as the inspiration for this new group blog. If these conversations are already occurring naturally in the wild, why do we need to try to grow them in a lab?
Isn’t the nature and goal of the blogosphere to promote distributed conversations? Maybe if Adam allowed comments on his blog some of the conversation would be occurring there right now.
Would those guys really want to blog together about the future of a space they are battling to own? Would Coke and Pepsi do a soda blog?
The bigger problem I have with this concept, however, is the potential for exclusion. Perhaps unintentionally, but the potential is there. For crying out loud, they have formed an advisory board to decide who should be able to participate.
That takes a second, not a committee. Gabe, Kevin, Matt, Laurence and anybody else who has built a memetracker.
Not yet addressed, but looming large over all of this, is who else gets to participate in this group blog? Just the memetracker founders or a select group of other people? If so, who selects them? The same advisory board or another one?
What happens if we need to change a lightbulb?
I hate to rain on someone’s parade, but I don’t like where this seems to be going.
We’ve talked about the gatekeeper thing.
We’ve talked about rules for good blogging.
And some of us have tried to add more voices to the conversation via “affirmative traction.”
But I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about the main reason blogging is so hard. We’ve talked around it. Others have probably addressed it in one form or another. But let’s just put it out there on the table and look at it for a bit.
Blogging is hard because of the grind required to stay interesting and relevant.
Day in and day out, day after day, night after night, you have to keep working. Read, write, comment. Over and over. A lot of the time, it comes natural and it’s fun, but sometimes it doesn’t and it isn’t.
Courting the Fickle Eyeballs
Fraser Kelton and I kicked ideas around about traffic and RSS subscriber numbers the other day. I did a little of the same with Doc Searls via email. My new conclusions are the same as my old conclusions. Readers are fickle and you have to work to stay relevant.
Yes, you can build a blog. I have sort of (though not entirely) disproved my own theory in that regard. If you write long and hard and interesting and funny enough, you can and will get links from Scoble, Om, Doc, etc. And those links will lead to readers.
If you build it, they will come.
But Will They Stay?
Some of your readers will become your friends. This part of blogging is really a cross-blog social networking thing that is, as I have said before, the natural evolution of the internet message board. We trade ideas, comment on each other’s post and generally carry on a conversation.
That’s a wonderful thing and it’s one of the main reasons I keep doing this.
But the other 98% of your readers don’t know you from Adam’s housecat. To them you are just a name in an RSS reader with a post or two to be scanned. They won’t keep reading because they like you. To the contrary, they may stop by once or twice, but if they don’t affirmatively like what they see, they’ll move on. It’s the same with blogs as it is with restaurants. You’ve got one or two chances to turn a visitor into a customer.
Going Up is Hard, Going Down is Easy
And just like any other upward climb, it’s not just about moving up the hill. It’s also about trying not to fall back down the hill, due to exhaustion, boredom or both.
Take Steve Rubel for example. He’s built a one-man blogging empire, because he follows his Four P’s. He’s a good writer, with demonstrated expertise in his area, and he seems like a nice guy. That and a ton of hard work on his part turned his blog into the destination site that it is today.
But what if he got lazy and stopped writing or decided to write only about his dog or something? Would he stay on top of bloggers hill? Almost certainly not. Over time, his thousands and thousands of readers would lose interest and move on to the next trendy spot. Of course he’d have a few dog lovers to take their place, but his blog would be a very different and a much less populated place.
And he’s at the top of bloggers hill. The exodus from this blog or another one still on the slope would be even faster.
Is the fact that my dog’s photo is at the top of this page the thing that’s keeping me out of the Technorati 100?
The Downward Spiral
The grind is exactly why so many blogs are abandoned after only a few weeks or months. It’s why even many of the blogs in Scoble’s feeds have fallen into the downward spiral of neglect.
It’s hard to have something interesting and relevant to say every day, much less several times a day. And if you’re still climbing up bloggers hill, the path is steep and if you aren’t moving forward, you’re probably losing ground.
So What Does It Mean?
It just means that like a lot of things, blogging is hard. It’s hard for all the reasons we’ve talked about over the past few months: because of the gatekeepers, because of the people who whine about the gatekeepers, because someone didn’t answer our email, because somebody else sent us an email, because of the blog networks, in spite of the blog networks, because some of our posts are boring, because the RIAA is suing dead grannies.
But mostly it’s hard because of the grind.
Susan Crawford has an interesting post today about the “me-TV” that has resulted from today’s wide selection of media outlets.
It seems Michael Powell, the former chairman of the FCC gave a speech yesterday at the University of Colorado. Susan talks about one of the themes of his speech: that there are so many media outlet choices that we have lost the communal media experience.
I’m not sure what communal media experience really means (it’s one of those “pre-owned cars” phrases), but I think it means that we don’t all get our news from Walter Cronkite. Which, for better or worse, is true.
The part that I do understand and agree with is the notion that there are so many targeted old media outlets that you can find news that matches up perfectly with your existing beliefs and preconceived biases and, as a result, avoid having to really think about the issues.
But this is nothing new. There have always been a ton of organizations, some with captive media outlets, that are happy to spoon feed beliefs to the masses. This is precisely why I stop listening to anyone who tells me, near the beginning of a conversation, that he or she is a republican or democrat. I don’t want to hear why the other side is wrong. I want to hear both sides of an issue and try to arrive at a solution that might actually work.
Too many people want to avoid the middle truth in favor of the lunatic fringe.
As Susan points out, the same thing has happened to a large extent with old media. She mentions Fox news as one example. Air America is another. You can find someone semi-famous to tell you you’re right, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But if you really think you’re right, shouldn’t you want to hear the other side of the argument just to make sure? Sadly, the answer seems to often be no. My take on it, of course, is that the political parties have conscripted the minds and mouths of far too many people who run around spouting off viewpoints they have memorized, but not tested.
There used to be this guy on the radio in Houston. He was the most right-wing, holier than thou person I have ever heard. His predictable responses and black and white approach to every issue made me not only dislike him, but also start to wonder if I should change my views on the things I agreed with him about, just so I would never be on his side in any debate. But I know a lot of people who thought he was the smartest guy around. Well, until he got indicted for indecency with a child. Then they didn’t think he was so smart.
This sort of extreme viewpoint is not limited to the right. You can find the same sort of gibberish on the other end of the dial. I quit listening to KPFT in Houston just so I wouldn’t inadvertently hear Democracy Now. It’s just as extreme, only in the other direction.
I tend to relate more to the liberal viewpoints, but someone needs to tell the liberal commentators that just because it can be said doesn’t make it feasible. In its continuing effort to discredit the right, the left has lost touch with reality. Their stories generally sound better, but in a fairy tale sort of way.
The actual solutions offered by both sides are few and far between. Most of the talking points force fed by the political parties are more about attacking those who disagree than trying to do any real good. And the content of the associated media outlets reflect this.
I had already written the part above when I noticed a discussion of another theme of Powell’s speech on David Isenberg’s blog. Apparently Mr. Powell believes partisanship is out of control too. David paraphrases:
The Washington DC political process is more broken now than at any other time I’ve seen in my life. It has collapsed in on itself. I went home and asked my father [Colin Powell] if I was missing something, and he agreed with me that the process has collapsed into pure partisanship. The power of the incumbency has grown. People are not concerned with what’s right or what’s in the nations interest, they are purely interested in killing their opponents.
This political and philosophical polarization is one of the major reasons why I remain hopeful and excited about the citizen media movement. The citizen media movement, by virtue of the way it is presented, forces a much needed move to the middle. Because there is not just one Walter Cronkite in citizen media. There are millions of them, and each of them has a roughly equal platform from which to be heard.
And unlike when I see a story on TV, if I read something on a blog that I don’t agree with, I can immediately add a comment and/or post a counterpoint here and link back for a cross-blog conversation. People who disagree with what I say here can do the same thing. And it happens. It happened last night and it happened over the weekend. And it’s happening right now.
Is it chaotic? Maybe, but it’s better to pick at the plate of many than be force fed from the plate of one.
Newsome.Org 