When Did Online Journalism Go Full Enquirer?

When I see people post stupid headlines, like, say, this one:

it infuriates me and makes me laugh, at the same time. When did the entire internet go full Enquirer just to cobble together a few extra page views?

Henry Blodget, editor of the semi-ironically named Silicon Alley Insider, wrote under that headline based on some comments by some cat named Ross Sandler (or maybe it was Adam?) of some outfit called RBC (maybe the Bebo one?) about how Facebook is a major traffic source for Google. How, exactly, this means that Facebook may one day murder Google is not clear. To give a morsel of credit where a morsel is due, Henry does point out the important little fact that “Facebook does have a big problem relative to Google, which is that it doesn’t have a business model.” Surely a little thing like a business model won’t keep Facebook from ending the life of a $105B company.

When you get past the idiotic headline, the point of the story is that Facebook is growing faster than Google. Of course a seedling is also growing faster than a massively larger ancient redwood, but who wants to get hung up on the math. Nevertheless, there is some semblance of a point and purpose to the article, all of which is of course secondary to and nullified by the attention grabbing headline.

But everybody knows you never go full Enquirer. Check it out. Jason Calacanis, “Mahalo,” look Enquirer, act Enquirer, not Enquirer. Bulldog obesessed, stupid Twitter offer. Narcissistic, sho’. Not Enquirer. You know Guy Kawasaki, “Alltop.” Self-promoter, yes. Enquirer, maybe. Spam on Twitter. But he charmed the pants off Metacafe and ran a book cover competition. That ain’t Enquirer. Robert Scoble, "Video Blogging." Nerdish, yes. Enquirer, no. Henry went full Enquirer, man. Never go full Enquirer. You don’t buy that? Ask all these sites, "Deadpool." Remember? Went full Enquirer, went home empty handed. . .

Evening Reading: 3/17/09

iPhone Love Fest: So the iPhone OS 3.0 preview happened, and in general it looks pretty good. I still don’t know whether the tethering feature will be in this release or not. There was a question about it, but the summary of the answer I saw was vague. I don’t give a hoot about background processing, but I really want the tethering feature.

Devolution Department: Speaking of that preview, here’s how to live blog. And here’s how not to. I do not like that little box with all the comments and whatnot. Everything is not broken. Newfangled does not always equate to better.

Deal Stopper Department: I have been experimenting with Ustream and thinking about doing a weekly video feature. But what in the wild, wild west is the deal with those pop-up ads Ustream puts in the video stream? That is an absolute deal stopper for me. Are all Ustream videos like that? That is horrible. I can’t believe anyone would use Ustream if that’s how all videos are presented. What am I missing here?

The Blogosphere Needs More Seth: Seth Finkelstein on the Wikipedia oligarchy. While I find Seth to be one of the most logical thinkers on the internet and generally agree with much of what he writes, I have to admit that I dig Wikipedia and use it all the time. Granted, I wouldn’t write my dissertation based on research done there, but I think it has a tremendous ease of use advantage over most of the other alternatives. And I don’t see the problem with taking money out of the pockets of the big companies that once had a virtual monopoly on the writing and selling of encyclopedias and spreading it around a little. It’s sort of a Mozart/Ramones thing for me: I’m sure Mozart was a more talented composer, but I’d rather listen to the Ramones. Seth’s undoubtedly accurate description of Wikipedia also describes every one of the so-called social networks: “cults where idealistic unpaid acolytes work themselves to burn-out, while a few people at the top benefit enormously.” Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen Seth on Twitter.

Underwhelming: I want to hear from someone who thinks the newly released Dell Adamo is worth $1,999 for the entry level model, with its 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2GB memory and a 128GB solid state drive or $2,699 for the upgraded model. Underwhelming is right. I don’t think I’d pay half that price for either of those models. PC World has a closer look.

Mass Stupidity Department: The Sci-Fi channel, one of my favorites, is changing its name to SyFy. Have the idiotic Web 2.0 naming conventions evolved into mass hysteria. Did I say that was a stupid name change? A dumb name change allegedly done for a dumb reason.

Interesting iPhone app: JotNot turns your iPhone into a document scanner.

Interesting blog department: Seth points me to this as a possible Web 2.0 Jon Stewart. Funny and interesting.

Rhetorical question of the day: If some unknown person was behind Alltop, would it get a tiny fraction of the coverage it gets? Non-rhetorical answer: of course not. Whatever it was that made Guy Kawasaki such an internet celebrity (it had something to do with Apple, beyond that I have no idea), I think getting Alltop the coverage it gets in the blogosphere is a much bigger accomplishment. Imagine what Guy could do with something really cool.

One more time: If you’re interested in free, easy to use online storage, give Dropbox a try. If you sign up via the above links, both you and I get a little extra free storage for the referral.

Hanging by an iPhone

beach0309 We spent the weekend and today down in Galveston, celebrating the first weekend of the kids’ spring break. It was my first trip to Galveston since the hurricane, and things looked about like I expected. There is a lot of damage yet to be fixed, and quite a bit of damage that doesn’t look likely to ever get fixed. For example, there’s one house nearby that has an entire exterior wall missing. You can literally see entire rooms, with furniture and all. It looks like a dollhouse someone left out in the rain. On the other hand, most of the obvious parts of the city are open and appear to be engaging in business as usual. Casey’s had a big crowd tonight, and though there was a long wait, there were unused tables in our room. Maybe this was a Monday night staffing issue, or maybe it was because the people at a nearby table came absurdly close to getting into a fistfight with a waiter. I was like a little slice of the blogosphere, island style.

Because I was only there for a couple of days and because the local unsecured wi-fi quotient is painfully low post-Ike, I decided to leave my laptop at home and rely on my iPhone to keep me connected to the office and the internet in general. It worked reasonably well, but a few things were very apparent to me.

One, email, including corporate email, is a lot better via the iPhone that on a Blackberry. Blackberry lovers will freak out over this, but it’s true. Email is easier to read and write, and the handling of attachments is better than it was a year ago (when I last had a Blackberry) and at least as good as on a Blackberry today. I carried Blackberries for years, and the simple fact is that the iPhone is a far superior device, even for business stuff.

But, there is room for improvement.

When I tried to write this post from the island, it again became clear to me that there is no decent blogging software for the iPhone. I again beach0309a tried to use iBlogger and again I gave up in frustration. I wish Microsoft would release a Live Writer iPhone app, but I’m not holding my breath. In the absence of that unlikely event, the space is wide open. If someone released a reasonably full featured blogging app- that would support photos and maybe a Photobucket integration, they could own the space from day one. The fact that there is not a single decent blogging application for the Mac, however, does not bode well for the iPhone. It also became painfully obvious to me that the iPhone really needs the tethering feature, so you can use it as a wireless modem to connect your laptop to the internet. That was, by far, the most useful feature of my last Blackberry- and a feature I miss dearly.

Some iPhone apps work great and almost circumvent the need for a laptop, but sans wi-fi some of them are pretty spotty. Tweetie worked the most consistently, though my partially self-imposed Twitter exile did not allow me to take advantage of it (unlike the hand picked music I used to manually post there via Blip.fm, Live Writer automatically Tweets my new blog posts, so for the time being I’ll just use it as a billboard, like everybody else). On the other hand, neither of my RSS readers (Feeds and Byline) worked worth a crap over the telephone network (about half and half between 3G and Edge in the Beachside area of Galveston). I got so frustrated trying to read my feeds, I thought about giving up the internet altogether and subscribing to a newspaper for the first time in a decade. We can huff and puff all we want, but until those who aren’t in the heart of a big, big city can access online content reliably, online content will continue to be a luxury and not a necessity. Dropbox, which despite being my online storage service of choice, still inexplicably lacks an iPhone app, worked pretty well via Safari. I was able to access data over both the 3G and Edge network.

The camera, with a little help from Darkroom, also worked reasonably well, though the iPhone desperately needs a flash.

Make no mistake- the iPhone rocks. But take it or any other mobile device to the edge of the grid, and things get a little dicey.

Who Will Be Web 2.0’s Jon Stewart?

The Jon Stewart, Jim Cramer interview is compelling television (be sure to watch all three parts). It’s an interesting case study on media and industry relations, and should be required for anyone who invests, directly or indirectly, in the stock market.

I’m not a Cramer-hater. I have sporadically read and watched him since the good old days when TheStreet.Com had a TV show and I had a TIVO. He’s cost me a lot of money, but so has every other media outlet I ever listened to. For that matter, so has Morningstar (thanks a lot for those Citigroup and Bank of America recommendations). I think Cramer’s current show is way over the top, but I also understand his point that he’s trying to bring these topics to a younger generation. I guess someone needed to be the Jason Ellis of the financial sector, and he took the job.

The thing that kept standing out to me during the interview, however, is the idea that there are two financial markets. One run by the rich insiders who have all the knowledge and pull all the strings, and another funded by the 401(k)’s and investment portfolios of the rest of us. The latter serving not to secure our future, but to support the accelerated wealth accumulation of those who control the former. If any part of this is true, it completely sucks, and makes the fairness of the stock market suspect.

And when I saw the clips of Cramer and others allegedly manipulating the stock market, it all sounded very familiar. It sounded just like the venture capitalists, marketers, sycophants and other hangers on who invest in and promote all these Web 2.0/social networking/whatever applications. Think about it. Today’s hype about Twitter and Facebook sounds a lot like yesterday’s hype about Lehman Brothers, AIG and Washington Mutual. The stock market pundits don’t promote those stocks any longer, just like the Web 2.0 hype-machine no longer raves about those former world changing services that wound up in the Dead Pool. Those who believe that they may make money by promoting these stocks and applications aren’t concerned about how things go for the end user. They just want to create buzz to increase the likelihood of a payout. Everybody’s bullshitting everybody else and, after the insiders cash (or get bailed) out, the end users get left holding the bag.

We need a Jon Stewart too.

I have tried to do my part, to the point that a lot of the hype-machine won’t have anything to do with me. But my podium is small compared to the consolidated podium of those who want to control the message. Until the skeptics reach critical mass, the questioning voice gets drowned out by the hyperbole.

Plus, people just don’t want to hear it. This part troubles me the most.

When I have a thought or an idea, I want people to test and challenge it. The guys who work for me know this. They have learned that I will be disappointed if they don’t vigorously test my thoughts and ideas. In fact, my ideas get more scrutiny than theirs. And that’s just the way I like it. If I can successfully defend my idea against a passionate lunch table attack, then I feel better about it. If I can’t, well maybe I need to go back to the drawing board. Additionally, I really enjoy spirited debate. It’s fun to argue and spar over ideas, and truth is best found through that process. Not by nodding our heads eagerly to whatever cockamamie plan someone comes up with.

But, again, lots of people don’t approach it that way. My wife frequently tells me that her friends are put off or offended by my challenges to their statements or ideas (actually, she tells me I can come across as an asshole). What’s fun and useful to me is viewed as rude or impolite by them. Sometimes I try to keep my mouth shut and let bad ideas die their own slow death, but it’s hard not to help the process along. If she read this blog, my wife would say that was an assholish statement, but I don’t mean it that way.

I think people caught up in the Web 2.0 let’s change the world and get filthy rich in the process euphoria are equally uncomfortable defending their positions. Some of them because they genuinely don’t like conflict. Lots of them because they are afraid it might decrease the likelihood of getting paid.

Manners and gentility aside, we need a Jon Stewart. We need a bunch of them.

Scoble Puts His Head in the Clouds

This is going to be all over the web, so I better go ahead and get my take out of the way.

TechCrunch has reported, and Robert Scoble has confirmed, that Robert’s new venture will involve building a “content and social networking community” for his new employer. . . Rackspace. No, that’s not a boob-oriented porn site. It’s an IT hosting company based in Austin, Texas. I’m interested in the content part, because as much as I don’t like most video blogs (simply because time is precious and I can always read faster than you can talk), I think Robert has a unique position in the blogosphere- he’s loved by the oligarchs and generally trusted by the content-reading class (mostly because unlike many of his friends, he didn’t turn into a prick when he became semi-famous). On the other hand, the “social networking” thing sounds like a mandatory toss-in to up the SXSW buzz.

One of Robert’s goals will be to:

[H]elp the entire cloud computing industry get more adoption, users, customers. We’ll cover technologies from Rackspace’s competitors like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, GoGrid, IBM, and others. Our philosophy on Building 43 is a rising tide lifts all boats, so we’re going to look to get you the best advice on both how to build your business better on the Internet as well as have fun, too.

As Newsome.Org readers know, I am interested in the Cloud. However, I think the Cloud will have a hard time gaining the trust of the corporate IT departments and their bosses when it comes to proprietary and confidential information. I’m going to invite Robert and the head of my company’s IT department to discuss this on one of our future podcasts.

I’m also not sure this qualifies as following my suggestion that Robert become the brand, as opposed to promote the brand. But there’s no way to tell just yet. At first blush, it sounds like Rackspace is paying Robert to be a newer, more social-networked and subtle evangelist- like he was during his glory years at Microsoft, in return for the web presence boost Robert can deliver. On the other hand, if Rackspace is paying Robert a lot of money under a long contract to do what he loves to do, maybe this is the best thing in the world for Robert. I’m pretty sure it will be good for Rackspace, though I wonder how they will quantify the tangible results in this horrible economy.

In sum, I’m not overly jazzed by this news, but we won’t know how good or bad it is until we see the sort of content Robert produces.

It should be interesting to watch, figuratively and literally.

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy

Nobody is going to see this since my RSS feed is dead, but what the heck. . .

twitfb1 As those who have been ignoring my desperate Tweets know, my RSS feed, which is pushed through FeedBurner, has been incredibly slow for the past few weeks. Posts that used to show up in a matter of minutes have been taking 3 hours or longer to show up. All of this makes me a little like the morning paper- by the time my content gets in front of people, it’s old news. RSS needs to get closer to real time, not closer to newspaper time.

I think the delays are caused by some problem with FeedBurner. Since Google began to move publishers over to the Google hosting architecture, FeedBurner has been very unreliable. People have complained. And complained some more. At first, my results were mixed. Sometimes, my feed would update right away. Other times it took forever. After reading this promising post, I updated my Live Writer configuration to ping FeedBurner and some other services whenever I publish a new post. That worked for a while, but over time the delay got longer and longer and longer. Looking for tech support was futile. There is no discoverable path to any sort of meaningful FeedBurner support. All roads eventually dead-end at the ironically named FeedBurner Help Group, where frustrated users howl into the void.

The Montessori thing may work for little kids, but it is a cop-out when it comes to customer support.

I thought all of that was plenty horrible until last night, when my feed completely died. That’s right, it went from unbearably slow to completely dead.

After neither of last night’s wonderful posts ever showed up in my feed, I realized a frustrating problem had become a pull your hair out and bang your head against the wall sort of problem. Upon exploration, I found that the Atom.xml file automatically generated by Blogger is empty, resulting in this delightful little message:

fberror0313

I can’t begin to explain how much that makes my day.
Like its little brother, FeedBurner, all roads to Blogger tech support dead end at the equally ironically named Blogger Help Group. While stumbling around there, I learned that I am not the only one mourning a dead RSS feed. You would think that the Blogger folks would be all over this issue, and maybe they are, but you sure can’t tell it from the help group. Again, other than this guy, there is no evidence that anyone at Blogger is minding the store. It would take someone about 10 seconds to post that Blogger is aware of the problem and is working on it.

All of this just makes me tired and frustrated. Maybe I need to bite the bullet and pay someone to write a WordPress template to replicate what I have now (and really like) and to move my content over to that platform. I am going to email Aaron Brazzell and see what he thinks.

I know this, I have $100 of Paypal money for anyone who can get my feed working and updating in near real time without losing my existing subscribers.

There are problems we have to have and ones we don’t. Trying to revive my RSS feed and wondering if anyone at FeedBurner/Google is going to call a Code Blue is a problem I shouldn’t have.

UPDATE (3/14/09): Thanks to the awesome efforts of Chuck (one of Google’s Blog*Star experts – similar to Microsoft MVPs), I think I have a work around for this problem, at least for those of us who use FeedBurner. Here’s what I did.
First you need to figure out your Blogger blog ID. You can find it by going to the Blogger Dashboard and clicking the “New Post” button. Then look at the address bar (at the top) of your browser, and you’ll see a number:

bloggerid1

See, my blog ID is 5523094. Find yours, copy it or write it down and then go to the FeedBurner page. Click on your feed, select “Edit Feed Details” at the top left, copy or write down the existing “Original Feed” link (just in case) and then replace the “Original Feed” link with this one, changing XXXXXX to your blog ID.

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/XXXXXX/posts/default

Don’t change the Feed Title or the Feed Address information.

You will probably have to republish any blog posts that were published after the problem arose. Once I did that and refreshed my feed in Google Reader (via the button right beside the “Mark all as read” button), my lost posts showed up and, at least as far as I can tell, everything started working again. I may still have the delay problem noted above, but at least my feed is breathing again.
Hurray for Dr. Chuck!

UPDATE (3/14/09): Rick Klau of Google tells me that the issue has been fixed and is getting implemented now. This is really good news, particularly since it shows that there are smart and responsive people minding the Blogger store.

Fatherly Advice, Spoken in Perfect Irony

When I see a La Quinta, I have been conditioned to look for a Denny’s. When I see Batman, I know Robin is nearby. And when I see a ridiculous post by Dave Winer, I know a smack-down by Rogers Cadenhead will soon follow. Today was no exception.

I long ago made the journey from interested, to annoyed, back to interested and ultimately to apathetic about Dave, but this is just too good not to mention.

This time, Rogers puts a beat-down on Dave for disguising another self-embrace as a fatherly warning to Twitter about launching people who aren’t part of Dave’s inner circle into the Twitosphere via Twitter’s Suggested Users list. Oh, that and allegedly failing to mention that he previously did the same thing with Radio UserLand– one of the millions of things Dave apparently invented eons ago. I don’t think Thomas Edison got the run for the light bulb or the record player that Dave gets for whatever it was he did back then, but that’s another story.

I don’t know or particularly care whether or not someone got paid to put a former MTV veejay’s feed (you know the story is dated, since I don’t think MTV has played a music video this century) in the default Radio UserLand (whatever that is or was) subscriptions. But I am tremendously entertained by a couple of the things Dave said in his post.

I also find it interesting that Mike Arrington took the time to comment on Rogers’ post and remind everyone that Dave sent traffic to TechCrunch back in its infancy and that secret deals happen all the time. Mike’s attempt to defend Dave while reminding everyone else that they are above the contempt of commoners doesn’t strike me as all that helpful to Dave’s case.

When I first read Dave’s post, it was clear to me that Dave’s latent complaint is that he wasn’t on Twitter’s suggested users list. Oh, and that some little people supplanted some of his buddies who feel entitled to be at the top of the Twitter heap, even if they have to pay to get there. If that sounds familiar, it’s because these people guarded the blogosphere with the same zeal, until they abandoned it in a fit of Facebook/Twitter lust.

But the best part of Dave’s post is this glorious nugget:

Bottom-line: This isn’t the way the Internet works. The guys at Twitter should know this. I think they’re living in a bubble, and creating one at the same time. No one likes someone who pops the bubble while it’s still building. So be it. We need to get that power out of their hands, or they need to disclaim it.

For Dave, probably the least inclusive of the blogosphere insiders, to tell Twitter that this is not how it works and that Twitter needs to give up the power to control online influence may be the single most ironic (and hilarious) thing I have read in months.

Here’s a further irony. I actually agree that Twitter should not select and promote suggested users. It’s another form of the sort of gatekeeping that I have consistently criticized. But the need to disagree with the self-and-crony-serving way Dave makes his point is greater than the desire to agree with his manifest, if not latent, point. In other words, saying the right thing the wrong way is a sure way to convince no one.

I can’t tell if Dave believes all this crap or if he thinks people are so dumb or sycophantic they’ll just take whatever he says at face value.

Either way, it’s priceless.

Evening Reading: 3/12/09

First a couple of updates, and then today’s rants.

Update 1: I played around a little more with Photobucket, and have concluded that, jacked up interface and all, Photobucket combined with this Firefox add-on is very useful. You can right click on any image, upload it to Photobucket and then immediately share or embed the image. It’s quick and easy. I found one of the vintage Outpost of the Week awards I used to give out back in the mid-nineties. It took about 4 seconds to upload it and get the link to add it here. I have to admit- that is sweet.

Update 2: Dave Wallace continued his quest to free Rancho Radio from the unnecessary walls of Live365 and seems to have deciphered a permanent stream URL. It seems to work, at least in iTunes. The artist-song information doesn’t show up for me when I load the stream directly, but that’s not the end of the world.

Here is a great parenting article from Grass Stain Guru, a new blog by Bethe Almeras. Highly recommended.

Here is a very serious article about the 10 Biggest Intellectual Fights of All Time. The web is a stern and serious place. In some alternate reality a huge internet war rages over Marsha vs. Jan, and whether Mannix was a better PI than Barnaby Jones.

On a much more interesting note, a scientist explains Star Trek warp speed. Excellent!

Here’s a list of classic DOS games that can be played online. I would LOVE to be able to play The Perfect General II, Starflight and Master of Orion again.

If I can’t do that, it’s almost as fun converting PDF documents to Word. For free.

Here are the 32 most commonly misused words and phrases. I’d put your/you’re at the top of the list.

In the too little, too late department: Second Life clamps down on sex and violence. Isn’t it weird how often the words sex and violence are used together?

If everyone who is there for the sole or substantial purpose of making a buck was kicked off of Twitter, would Twitter be a better place. I think so. Absolutely.

Photobucket is Still a Mess, But Less of One

In my last Evening Reading, I mentioned that I was going to give Photobucket another look based on the new sharing features. I would love a place to store and serve photos I want to use here and in the various so-called social networks, and was hoping Photobucket had improved its interface and navigation since I last tried it.

It has, a little. But there’s still room for improvement. I can build computers and doghouses from parts. I can write (buggy) code. Heck, I can name all four Teletubbies. What I can’t do is wrap my mind around this:

pbmess

I keep looking for ads for Ouch my Balls!

toomanyads

I see that I previously uploaded 2 images, because it says so at the top left, and I can see thumbnails in the middle, under the cut off “bulk uploader” box. Unfortunately, I was only able to delete the thumbnail on the left. The thumbnail of the other one (some jumbled up screen snip from days gone by) has the staying power of Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. The file itself appears to be deleted, since when I try to share it (and the sharing stuff is very nice, at least in theory), I get an image telling me so.

Let’s try to upload another image. Hmm, here’s one of me and the girls at the Father Daughter Valentines Dance I grabbed from the Houston Chronicle (hope that’s OK Clayton). Let’s try to upload it, resize it and share it here:

Well, it uploaded, but didn’t get resized (I can do that here). Other than the resizing thing, that was pretty easy.

So what about all this new sharing stuff. Let’s try to share a photo on Twitter. Here’s one of me chatting up Liz Taylor back in college. Take that all you Twitter celebrities. Oops, Twitter doesn’t seem to be one of the sharing choices. Thank God Bebo is so I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Those stuck in a time warp will be happy to know that Friendster is also an option. I’m going to try to add this to my Hall of Ancients album on Facebook.

It worked. This little photo is now on my Facebook page. It would take a horde of PhDs to figure out how to get it from there to my Hall of Ancients album, so I’ll let it stay where it is. Right there with the Young Frankenstein quotes.

Back to Photobucket. I see all these references to Albums. I guess Albums are the equivalent of Flickr sets. There are clearly some things Photobucket does better than Flickr- like sharing and sending your photos to Bebo (yeah!)- but it seems cluttered, disjointed and hard. For example, the Album Organizer seems like a completely different application. I was able to create a new Album, but it was not a clear and obvious process.

I have the feeling that Photobucket has a lot of features. So does Photoshop, but I’m not going to spend my life trying to figure them out. This stuff needs to be more intuitive and easier. And better integrated.

In sum, Photobucket is still a bit of a mess. But like that dude in The Holy Grail, it’s getting better.