I just got this email with respect to the copy I ordered the other day:
The following items were included in this shipment:
———————————————————————
Qty Item Price Shipped Subtotal
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1 Naked Conversations : How Blo $16.47 1 $16.47
———————————————————————
Item Subtotal: $16.47
Shipping & Handling: $0.00
Total: $16.47
Paid by *****: $16.47
——————————————————————–
I’ve been thinking and posting about all these new Web 2.0 applications a lot lately. There’s no doubt that there are some great applications our there, most of them free, that can greatly enhance, simplify and organize our lives.
But here’s what starting to bug me: does anyone other than us know about them? Is Web 2.0 about everyone, or just the geeks (like me) who follow technology closely?
I can’t even get my friends and family to use Flickr, so how am I going to get them to use any of these things?
After I posted my mini-review of the best of the Web 2.0 applications, I asked some of my non-geek friends if they saw the post. Many of them said yes. But when I asked what they thought, they almost universally said that they didn’t really understand what all those programs did, and that they didn’t have the time (they meant inclination, but were being gentle) to try to figure it out.
There’s an obvious and substantial payoff to learning how to use Flickr. Our jobs require us to use email and Word. But the payoff for a lot of these Web 2.0 applications is more subtle, more remote. If Flickr is on the wrong side of the effort line, where does that leave these other applications?
So I wonder if the rest of the population really cares about Web 2.0? Is it enough that the technorati follows the development of these applications and eagerly uses them? I bet even the technorati’s use of many of these applications tapers off over time. I love to try out these new applications, but maybe one in ten becomes a part of my core application list (Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati being the big three so far).
Maybe over time all this stuff will be second nature to all the moms, dads, students and teachers. But we aren’t there yet (by a long shot) and it seems to me it will take some time to get there.
What does this mean for Web 2.0?
Will it change the world or is it just a passing fad of the technorati?
Christopher Stern has an article at the Washington Post today about the telephone companies’ unbelievable new customer screw-job disguised as a business plan whereby the telephone companies, who control a lot of the pipes that carry internet traffic, want to sell faster throughput to certain websites. In other words, Google or Yahoo might pay the telephone companies money in exchange for faster speed through the pipes. Stated simply, if this insane plan is allowed to continue, the website of the company that pays the money will appear faster and more responsive than the company who doesn’t.
This may be the most consumer-unfriendly idea I have ever heard.
No one, from computer nerd to emailing granny, wants some dude in the sales department of some stock-price-falling, 20th century, former monopoly telephone company trying to direct them to particular websites by making them faster (and, as a result, making others slower).
This would be like the federal government allowing a state to sell lots of wide, fast roads to Target while leaving Walmart (not to mention all the mom and pop stores) at the end of old, crowded roads. People want to decide for themselves where to shop and where to surf.
Plus, once this happens, you can be sure these telephone companies will find other similar ways to make easy money. Toll pipes would probably be next- if they can make the website pay for speed, wouldn’t they naturally wonder if they can make the user pay a little too? One telephone representative already talked about “charging Apple five or 10 cents extra each time a customer downloaded a song using iTunes.” Charging Apple is one half-step away from charging the buyer.
No one, and I mean no one, wins here. If these companies don’t have a plan to pay for all this new (money making) infrastructure then simply don’t build it. That’s the way it works. You can’t change the game just because you aren’t winning.
Consumer groups, Yahoo, Google and anyone else with a brain cell to dangle have lined up to lobby Congress (why does grammar dictate that we capitalize that word- I don’t get it) for a “network neutrality law” that will prevent this nonsense.
On the other side are AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.
Who do you think has our best interest at heart?
I’m pulling for network neutrality.
While I’m on a music roll here, let me tell you about a great alternative country blog/website I came across.
Twangville is chock full of great music content.
And some very good Best of 2005 lists.
Anyone who realizes how great Kathleen Edwards’ Back to Me is will find a place on my reading list.
There are probably a ton of handy plug-ins that do this for people using WordPress, Movable Type and other blogging platforms, but for those of us who don’t have a handy plug-in, I have been trying to figure out how to get a semi-automated list of “Most Recent Inbound Links” to appear on my front page. It’s a work in progress, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far. You can see the list in the right hand column.
First, I began bookmarking inbound links that I notice via Technorati and Google searches (those links are in the left hand column under “Other Blogs”) at Del.icio.us with the tag “inbound” (any tag will work as long as you only use it for inbound links). Since I use Firefox, the Del.icio.us extension makes this very easy. I don’t add any comments (one of the optional fields when you make a Del.icio.us bookmark) because I just want a list of links, but it would work fine with comments if you want to show excerpts, etc. The bookmarked inbound links then show up on the “inbound” (or whatever tag you use) filtered Del.icio.us page. Mine is here.
Note the RSS button at the bottom of that Del.icio.us page, indicating that there is an RSS feed for those bookmarks. Next I had to convert that RSS feed to javascript so it can be displayed on this page. I tried a bunch of different approaches, but the one that (so far) works the best is to run the RSS feed through Feed Digest, play with the display options via your Feed Digest Control Panel (I got rid of the default table structure and just made it a list of links with the date above them). Once you get the links to display the way you want (which Feed Digest makes pretty simple), you’re almost ready to go.
You can drop the javascript generated by Feed Digest right into your page if you want. When I did that, however, it didn’t display correctly and messed up my formatting.
So I made a separate html page- inbound.html, fixed the formatting on that page to my preference and added a server side include (like I use for the CD and book lists in the right hand column) to fetch and display that page.
It seems like a roundabout way to get there, but it seems to work so far. I’m going to test it out for a few days and see how I (and those who link here) like it.
It is only semi-automatic, however, because you still have to bookmark your inbound links via Del.icio.us. Like most people, I check my inbound links fairly often looking for cross-blog conversation opportunities, so I don’t find this to be burdensome. Plus, it serves as a filter for spam links.
There may be better ways to get there (short of changing my blogging platform). If so, I’d love to read about them in the Comments.
One of the many things I like about Fred Wilson’s blog is his musical tastes and the way he writes about music. The best new song I heard last year (Josh Rouse’s Dressed Up Like Nebraska) was discovered via Fred’s blog.
So the other day I noticed those new, red song and artist charts on the left side of his blog. I went and dug around the Last.fm site a little and decided that sharing playlists this way would be a great way to learn about new music. So I signed up, downloaded the plug-in that allows Last.fm to track what I listen to on our music server (other than the occasional A-Teens song by Cassidy, I’m the only one who ever uses the server, so almost all of the music on there is mine). I added Fred and a couple other people I know as “friends” and am looking forward to sharing playlists and discovering some new music.
You can see my Last.fm page here and via the link in the left hand column of this page. Check out my playlist- it’s alternative country, classic rock, blues and blues rock focused. If you share my musical tastes, sign up at Last.fm and add me as a friend. I’ll reciprocate and we can start mining for new music.
Dwight Silverman posted a reminder today about a great PC World article from 2004 that addresses a lot of the PC myths that I get asked about all the time. Whether you are a computer expert or someone who struggles to send an email, you should read this article.
Among the myths addressed are:
1) Magnets’ effect on data
2) Cell phones on airplanes
3) Cookies (not the kind you bake)
4) Turning off without shutting down
5) Opting out of spam
6) Turning off your PC every day
7) Laptop batteries
It’s interesting that their experience opting out of spam is similar to that of my friend at work.
One I wish they would cover is that using online sites will not immediately result in a theft of your money and identity. So many of my friends refuse to register with ANY online sites or services because they believe someone will immediately steal from them. Dwight, please bust this myth so my friends will sign up for some of these great web 2.0 applications!
I just uploaded the latest edition of our RanchoCast podcast.
The theme is the Dillard & Clark show. I play a couple of Dillard & Clark gems, a Gene Clark solo number, the first recording of Wild Horses (trivia: it was not the Stones’ version), some Syd Straw, one by The Buckets, some other good stuff and an original blues number.
This is part fourteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.
We’re halfway through the list, and here are the best of the N’s:
Neopoleon.com (RSS Feed)
Neowin.net (RSS Feed)
New Media Musings (RSS Feed)
Neopoleon.com is Rory Blyth’s blog, which has some great writing and some incredible original and topical comics. It’s one for the daily read list.
Neowin.net looks more like a battlestar than a blog (this is one well designed site), but if you want good tech news and lots of it, it’s the place to start.
New Media Musings is J.D. Lasica’s blog. J.D. is once of the founders of the new media movement, which is part and parcel of the move to the edge I love to read and write about.
Honorable Mention:
Naill Kennedy’s Weblog (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it)
Technorati Tags:
scoblefeeds, blogs, rss
Today’s topic about the new gatekeepers is a close cousin to the guards at the clubhouse door I’ve been talking about for a while. I’m happy to see others thinking about this, even if they approach the issue in a slightly different manner.
Scott Karp has a very interesting post today about one of his posts that got legs yesterday and his efforts to sneak past the guards and into the blogging clubhouse. Like him, I and many others are standing in line waiting for the bouncer to either let us in or get distracted so we can dart past him.
Scott talks about the glut of good bloggers and the transition of the old media onto the web and ultimately wonders if there will be new gatekeepers standing between the non-blogging readership and the content we all keep plugging away writing. He says that in many ways the guard at the clubhouse door plays the gatekeeper role formerly held by the old media that stood between readers and the content. I think that’s right, but I don’t think all of the guards are doing it on purpose. Clearly some are (see my prior rants for more on that). But for many, I think the gatekeeper role is just a function of their early arrival, hard work and resulting popularity. To understand the gatekeeper, you have to know how and why the gate was erected. Sometimes to keep you out. Sometimes it’s just the nature of things.
So how will our readers find us, other than by the grace of the almighty link?
Sites like Technorati (which I love almost as much as Flickr) help, but Scott suspects (as do I) that Technorati is used mainly by, well, the technorati. The challenge for us is to be found by the non-geek readers who vastly out-number the geek ones. As old media becomes new media this question will have to be answered. We need to make sure the answer isn’t another version of the old system.
Scott’s take is that the A-Listers guarding the door may, if we aren’t careful, largely determine what the typical reader sees- via links and whispered cross-blog conversations.
Mathew Ingram has a different take on it, viewing the popular web destinations more as turnstiles than gatekeepers.
I think there’s an element of both gatekeeper and turnstile to it. Gabe Rivera had a stroke of brilliance when he created Memeorandum and let the algorithm determine what appears there. It may indirectly play to the strengths of the A-Listers, who get way more inbound links than the rest of us, but there’s no subjective decision to keep us out. Like Mathew, my posts generally appear there pretty regularly, except for those odd and frustrating 3-4 day periods where my posts seem to disappear from the radar completely, only (so far at least) to return a few days later.
But there is definitely a very real pecking order in the linking activities of the A-List bloggers. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, and I have been fortunate enough to get links from some of them (thank you). This pecking order, as it may and will change over time, however, is what may create a new breed of gatekeepers.
Perhaps gatekeeping is just the inefficient blogosphere market’s way of determining the best blogs. But it is an inefficient market and there is always a very real chance that you can get stuck on the wrong side of the gate.
As you can tell, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about all of this. On the one hand, I feel sort of good about things, having had some conversations with a lot of really interesting people (including some of those elusive A-Listers). So part of me feels really humbled that I have been allowed to participate. But in other ways, I feel like an outsider looking in- that I could write the most thoughtful and innovative post in the world and it would get passed over in favor of some off-hand comment made by an A-Lister.
That’s why I hope we can minimize the role of any newfangled gatekeepers. Because if the playing field is fairly level and we can’t get where we want to be in the blogosphere, there’s no one to blame but us. We can handle that. But if the playing field is not fairly level, then all we’ve done is knocked down one wall and built another.
No more walls.
Newsome.Org 