There’s a lot of good conversation going around today about eliminating the echo chamber- the blogosphere phenomenon where one person says something and tons of others more or less repeat it back to her in a responsive post, like some geek chorus. Chris Pirillo started things off with his 10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber. Mathew Ingram, Darren Rowse and others added their thoughts.

Avoiding the echo chamber is a blogospheric phrase than means write good, original and interesting content. It means doing more than just tossing up a link and saying “me too.” It’s the same principle that applies to old media writing- what’s interesting in print is interesting online, and vice versa.

But as many of the commentators point out, it’s hard.

It’s hard mostly because it’s just hard to write what I call the 10/90 post every day, or even every week. Additionally, a little echo is inherent in the written word. Unless you are writing a completely original thought, something inspired you to write your post. Since the person reading your post may not have read the post that inspired you, good writing skills and fairness require that you summarize and attribute your starting point.

The trick is to do it briefly, without making the summary the principal part of your post. It’s not always easy, but I try to summarize and attribute in no more than a few sentences. The first paragraph of this post is 3 sentences and 61 words long- and that might be stretching it. The important part is that, after the summary and attribution, you go on to add a new thought or perspective to the conversation- one that goes beyond restating what has already been said.

It would be a mistake, however, to take echo-avoidance too far, since doing so could lead to a failure to recognize those who laid the foundation for the discussion. It could also play into the hands of those who try to pervert the conversational nature of the blogosphere for their own purposes. It would be easy, as well as dishonest, for those who argue that links are dead to appropriate echo-avoidance to further their hidden agendas- which generally involve self-aggrandizement and control. Believe me, my children don’t fight over their favorite toys the way some of these people fight to maintain their self-proclaimed status in the blogosphere.

More importantly, links and affirmation are the way we listen to each other in the blogosphere. And for the new bloggers out there, the best way to get inbound links is to link like crazy to other good content.

The take away is that you can join existing conversations, link, summarize and attribute without creating an echo if you do it correctly. In fact, if you don’t try it, you have jumped from the echo chamber onto the island.

While I agree with much of Chris’s advice, I am troubled by his advice to stay away from your RSS feeds. For me and many others, the beauty of blogging is the distributed conversations it engenders. Don’t confuse conversation with echoes- they are not the same thing.

On the other hand, Chris’s advice to step outside your comfort zone is great advice. I can’t tell you the number of times I have made last minute edits of my posts in the name of comfort. While you need to be logical and at least somewhat consistent, the posts that make you the most uncomfortable are often the ones that generate the most conversation.

But there’s another aspect of the echo chamber that I find even more troubling- when the voice that comes back from the cave is not your voice, but that of someone else repeating what you said without attribution.

Shelley Powers has a post today about this very issue, in the context of that blogosphere country club equivalent, Foo Camp:

“I read in comments this week about how a recent attendee at Tim O’Reilly’s FOO camp was the originator of all the discussion about there not being enough women in tech conferences such as Tim’s camp. I was surprised, and yes, hurt to find out that it only takes about 6 months and 100 weblog posts or so to wipe out all I’ve written on this issue. It’s humbling to realize how easily you can be forgotten; humbling and clarifying because you realize that history in weblogging is fluid, and always being re-written; usually by the same proponents of how honest and decent this all is.”

An echo chamber is one thing, but assuming someone’s position in the debate is something else entirely. The former is not ideal. The latter is simply wrong.

Adding insult to the injury is when the assuming voice the tries to exclude the original voice from the conversation. Shelley continues:

“I also had to face this week the fact that my views are unwelcome in several weblogs and by several webloggers. It bothers me less to not be linked than to not be part of a discussion.”

It’s not gatekeeping- it’s worse.

I don’t know the specifics of the Foo Camp business because I don’t get invited either, but I have seen this sort of thing happen many times in the blogosphere. Sometimes it’s inadvertent, but sometimes it’s not.

So while I’m all about good writing and avoiding unnecessary echoes, let’s be thoughtful about it.

Earl Moore posts about the difficulty of finding time to blog amid life’s larger responsibilities- like the job, the family, the outdoors and having fun. Richard Querin adds his thoughts as well. It’s a challenge for sure. While I don’t always do it well, here’s my approach to blogging, which shares much in common with Earl and Richard.

Early in the morning, before work, I read my RSS feeds (via Bloglines), Techmeme, my personalized My Yahoo page and my personalized Netvibes page. If I see something I want to write about, I’ll either begin a draft post and save it to finish later or, if I’m in a hurry, bookmark it via Del.icio.us.

My ability to read or post from my office depends entirely on my schedule for that day. If I’m in the office, I can generally finish and publish a quick post over lunch. Because I often have lunch meetings, I try to have several posts finished and in the queue to be published, so all I have to do is take a few seconds to publish them during the day. At any time I generally have 5-6 completed or nearly completed posts sitting in my queue for this purpose (a series, like my Web 2.0 Wars, is very good for stacking your queue). Writing a bunch of posts in advance sounds like a pain, but since I do a lot of my writing late at night on weekends (after the kids go to bed), it happens naturally.

If I’m in the office all day, I try to read my RSS feeds over lunch and then again near the end of the day. One thing I regularly do throughout the day is tag things, again using Del.icio.us, that I might either respond to that night or include in the next day’s morning reading post. At night before I go to bed, I do a draft of the next day’s morning reading post so all I have to do in the morning is add any new items that I come across during my morning read.

Late Friday night, after the kids go to bed, is generally devoted to doing my weekly podcast. I keep a mental list during the week of the songs I want to play. The tech talk is generally ad libbed, based on whatever I’m writing or thinking about at the time.

It’s not a perfect system, and sometimes I get woefully behind. But the more I write, the easier it is to keep things moving along.

I really like Richard’s notebook (the non-computer kind) idea. I may give something like that a try.

How do you manage your blogging?

Tags: blogs, blog building

Stowe Boyd talks today about fame as a motivator for blogging. His piece originates from the recent gatekeeper debates and was inspired by an article in the New York Times exploring the general concept of fame as a motivator of human behavior.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, and I want to add my thoughts, specifically as it relates to fame as a motivator for bloggers in general and, because Stowe mentioned me is his post, me in particular.

Here’s the quote from the New York Times article I want to start with:

“People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.”

I think that’s generally true. Paris Hilton seems to me to be the the poster child for this sort of motivation. Of course the financial rewards of fame, however undeserved, can lead some to hide one goal behind another.

The other thing that occurs to me is that to be “widely known to strangers” is the badge not only of fame for fame’s sake, but also of being a visible and valued part of a process. The postman in our neighborhood is widely known to and valued by many, but he’s not famous.

In other words, inclusion in a process can make you known to strangers but not necessarily famous.

Is fame a motivator for my blogging? It’s a fair question.

We must be careful, however, to remember that those of us who lament the gatekeeping issue all have our individual motivations. Fame, inclusion, jealousy, logic and just the love of a spirited debate probably all fall in the mix somewhere. The key is to sift through the collateral motivations and identify the emotive reaction that leads you to pound out a response whenever the issues arises.

By pound out, I hope to mean write a heartfelt, but thoughtful, rebuttal. Not just calling the other side assholes like Mike Arrington does. Or dismissing them out of hand, like Scoble sometime does. When I am arguing with someone in real life and they call me an asshole, I know I have them beat.

I don’t blog to be famous. In my mind that would be like playing jacks to get famous. As I pointed out in the post that got this last debate started, you can be the most read blogger in the world and nobody in the real world will ever hear or read your name.

And I certainly don’t blog for money. I am on record over and over again about the folly that is blogging for riches.

But, upon reflection, there is an element of recognition that, if I am to be honest, does come in to play, at least indirectly.

I rarely talk about my real job on this blog, because it is largely unrelated to what I write about and a lot of what I do is subject to rules and agreements regarding confidentiality. But the fact is that I am very well known in my industry. I’m not going to belabor the point, but I’ll give one small example. Not long ago, some of my partners and I went to another city to interview some lateral hire candidates. When we walked into the conference room to introduce ourselves, the senior partner of the group we were interviewing commented that they already knew me because “everybody knows Kent- he’s famous.” We all laughed, but the fact is that I work on a lot of high profile stuff, I do a lot of writing in old media and I speak at seminars and conventions across the country.

I also have written a bunch of songs, a few of which are on records and I was a major player in the internet message board space during Bubble 1.0.

None of this makes me truly famous, but it does result in being widely known to strangers. In the real world.

But very little of that pre-existing recognition translates into the blogosphere.

On the one hand, that is appealing to me, because it gives me a chance to earn my stripes again. But sometimes, deep in the back of my mind, I find myself getting a little irritated when people who would be very pleased to include me in any real world conversation ignore me in the blogosphere. That sounds petty even as I type it, but it’s true. I don’t dwell on those thoughts and I try to ignore them, but they happen.

I don’t think that’s about fame, though. I think it’s a matter of what you’re used to and your expectations, right or wrong, that you’re as smart and valuable in the blogosphere as you are in the real world. I joked in a post the other day that if I were starting over, I’d blow my vacation money on a few conferences so the people who currently link around my detailed analysis in favor of 10 word posts by their buddies would think I was one of their buddies and ignore other detailed analysis in favor of my 10 word posts. I was trying to be funny, but there’s an element of truth to that. A lot of these so-called A-Listers see and hear each other at these conferences and build friendships and mutual respect for each other.

I have no doubt that if I spent a few months going to these conferences, meeting these folks, having dinner with them and getting to know each other beyond the occasional email and cross-blog conversations, I’d get to the top of blogger’s hill in no time. But I can’t do that, so I have to take the harder trail. That’s not unfair. It’s just the way it is.

Blogging for me is not about fame and it’s not about fortune. Whatever I end up with in those regards will be determined by real life, not by what I blog about, who I link to and who links to me. Nor do I feel disconnected or alienated. I would hope my posts about family life and all the fun stuff we do with our friends would be evidence of that.

For me, the primary motivation in blogging is to converse with people who share interests of mine that aren’t generally shared by my real world friends; to learn about things that interest me; and, now that I have some readers, to be active in bringing new voices to the conversation.

I’ll repeat once more my recent slogan: the blogosphere is not an equal opportunity place. Life isn’t either. It’s OK that they aren’t, as long as you don’t try to pretend they are.

It sounds like I am disagreeing with Stowe, but I’m really not. I’m only saying that my motivations for blogging are different than those described in his post.

I’ll leave you with another of Stowe’s patented home run paragraphs, from the end of his post:

“The crowd — occasionally wise, but always judging — collectively decides who to look at, to listen to, to pay attention to. And some play to the crowd, trying to grab that attention, and hold onto it. Some succeed. There is a scissors-like inner logic to this, and the outcomes are decidely not equal to merit, effort, or wants. But a statement that sounds like a poet explaining chaos theory is unlikely to comfort those that feel shorted by a capricious and uncaring law of the universe. And those that have achieved fame will always want to believe it is by their own merits, not because the whole lunchroom is rubbernecking at the guy with the loudest voice sitting with the cheerleaders.”

That, friends, is a beautiful summation of the blogosphere- and life.

I have been thinking about the best way to mine the blogosphere for the good, new voices that are coming online every day, as well as more good established bloggers. One tool that I have not used nearly enough is the Del.icio.us “For” tag. I’m about to change that, for me and maybe for you too.

You will see that I have added a “Submit a Story” link to the Site Index in the left column. That link is a jumplink down to the submission form at the bottom of the left column. I dug into the Del.icio.us API this afternoon and wrote a form to automate link submissions. All the reader has to do is be registered at Del.icio.us, add the link and click the Submit button, and it will automatically show up in my “Links for You” list at Del.icio.us. Without the convenience of a form, users have to manually tag links. I think this way is much easier and I hope it will encourage more conversation, with both new and established voices.

The form is not hard to write, if you’re used to writing forms into APIs. The good news is that now you don’t have to. I’ll email the content of the form to anyone who wants it. Just let me know (preferably by linking to this post and sending me your link via the form as a test drive) and it will be on its way. If you really don’t want to do that, of course, you can grab it via a page source view. All you need to do is change my Del.icio.us user name to yours, and you should be good to go.

And, of course, if you have something interesting that I might want to discuss with you, now there’s an easy way to let me know.

Specifically, if you are a new blogger (say at least 10 posts and fairly active) on a topic that I cover (tech, music, family life, etc.), send me your link. I can’t promise I’ll get you to the top of blogger’s hill, but I’ll at least show you where the trail starts.

UPDATE: I couldn’t find a way to do a mass delete of bookmarks at Delicious and deleting bookmarks one by one is a pain, so I created my own form that will email me the submitted information. The link to the form is in the same place near the bottom of the left hand column.

Tags: blogs, blogging, new blogs, delicious

Remember a long time ago (in blog years) when we had the last debate about Gatekeeping? In the midst of it all Shel Israel offered up a tale about some lady who started a blog and got famous as proof that anyone can become an A-Lister. I guess Shel figured he had so befuddled us with his logic that the debate was put to rest, out of confusion if not consent.

Now we’ve had another gatekeeping debate in which some A-Listers respond with contempt at the very mention of the issue, while few take the time to view the issue objectively. Nick, Seth and I, among many others, attempted to have a conversation about it in the comments to Nick’s post as well as the comments to Chip Camden’s post. I guess it looks like we’re hopelessly confused again and so, presto, Shel graces us with another homily.

This time it seems that the fact Shel found Nick’s post via “one Sterling ‘Chip’ Camden” somehow proves that the blogosphere is so flat that if you stand on a sardine can you can see the back of your head. I’ll leave for now the condescension of the word “one” and the fact that in the very post in which he claims that A-Listers have no gatekeeping power, he is quick to call himself one (along of course with Doc and Michael), as those nuggets are really not germane to my point.

Let’s think about this a second. The fact that on one occasion, Shel found his way to a post by Nick via a post by Chip means that the notion of a gatekeeper is, to quote Shel’s pal Robert, bunk? This is somehow true even though Shel makes it a point to say that he doesn’t read Nick’s blog and only acknowledges it when Nick starts a conversation that he (Shel) simply can’t avoid? I bought and enjoyed Shel’s book, but I suggest Shel leave that logic out of his writing portfolio.

In fact, my primary conclusion after reading the so called A-Listers’ explosive reactions to what was nothing less than a thoughtful and well written post by Nick (regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions) is that someone IS complaining a bit too loudly. It’s just not who they think. You don’t need Gertrude to tell you that the higher you go up blogger’s hill the louder it sounds.

And then Shel turns to Seth. He says he has subscribed to Seth’s blog “for a while.” That’s a good thing. An iron-clad, logically indisputable thing, however, is one of the recent comments Seth made in response to a surprisingly mean-spirited comment by Hugh MacLeod in the comments to that post by the “one” Chip Camden (sorry, I tried to let it go, but couldn’t)- a comment that uses a close first cousin of the logic Shel tried with his most recent homily.

Hugh says:

I’ve been a pro writer for almost 20 years. The successful writers I know personally, without exception, take responsibility for their own experience. Seth doesn’t, as far as I can tell.

To which Seth replies:

I suspect this says something more about you, rather than being a moral lesson of global import. It’s akin to “The rich people I know personally all attribute it to their faith in God”. That could be a true statement as far as it goes, but the objective meaning is not what you intend.

To which I say, the fact that Shel stumbled across Chip’s post on his way to Nick’s post has no bearing whatsoever on whether there is or is not an oligarchy in the blogosphere. Just like the fact that Hugh, who is rightfully well known for his blogging and drawing, knows a bunch of self-responsible professional writers has no bearing on the notion of self responsibility for Seth or anyone else.

I have no gripe with Hugh, and I have no gripe with Shel. I am just exercising my ability to, as Shel puts it, “interest enough people enough of the time.”

Because my original post, which was addressing the reach of the blogosphere as a whole as opposed to the varying reaches within it, was part of the inspiration for Nick’s post, I want to say for the record that I don’t believe anyone anywhere has any duty to link to me or anyone else. While I’m a ways down the hill from Shel and his proclaimed peers, I have a lot of readers. Sure I aspire to have more, but my argument has always been more about being a part of the conversation than about engaging in the inefficient process of badgering links out of Shel and his ilk. Sure, I have said many times that bloggers listen with links, and sure I have been frustrated at times by getting linked around. But links for me are always secondary to being a part of the conversation. Evidence of participation, perhaps, but a by-product of the goal- not the goal itself.

Since we are using Chip’s post as part of the official record on this round of the gatekeeper debates, I’ll restate a comment I made there that sums up my position on this nonsense.

I’m not so much interested in having the blogosphere operate differently as I am in calling bullshit when people try to say it operates differently than it actually does.

What gets my dander up is when someone like Mike (and Shel for that matter) who got to the top of the hill, in part, due to relationships with the Scobles and Winers of the world, tries to say the blogosphere is an equal opportunity place.

It ain’t. Life ain’t either. It’s OK that they ain’t, as long as you don’t try to pretend they are.

Tags: blog, blogging, blog+building

Mike Arrington responds to Nick Carr’s The Great Unread post by asking “Is Nick Carr the new Robin Hood, or Just an Asshole?”

That sounds to me like an annoyed king trying to scatter the peasants that have gathered outside the castle walls. Perhaps the great conversation that is occurring in the comments to Nick’s post sounds to Mike like the rumblings of an angry fiefdom who should simply throw down their torches and return to the fields.

If the king opened the gate to the castle, I imagine a conversation something like this:

King Mike: I am your king.
Peasant Nick: Well I didn’t vote for you.
King Mike: You don’t vote for kings.
Peasant Nick: Well how’d you become king then?
[Angelic music plays… ]
King Mike: Cory, Steve and Hugh, their blogs plastered upon Techmeme held aloft their linkcounts from the bosom of Technorati, signifying by temporal providence that I, Mike, was to join them. THAT is why I am your king.
Peasant Seth: [interrupting] Listen, geeks sittin’ at computers distributin’ links is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical journalistic ceremony.

Mike says that Nick “has no idea what blogging is all about” and that “at the end of the day those people with interesting things to say tend to get listened to. Those that don’t…don’t.” You’ve got to be kidding me. Yes, you can muscle your way into the club- no one is denying that. But if Mike thinks that a blogger’s audience is determined more by how he writes than by how many of the castle dwellers throw him bones, then it is he, not Nick, that is confused about how blogging works.

There are a lot of people who can think and write a lot better the Mike, Nick and me, who will never be read because they are stuck at the bottom of blogger’s hill looking for the trail. Too many people on the hill start believing their own bullshit and forget that.

Then Mike goes on to say that, as long as you’re allowed to talk, it doesn’t matter whether you’re at the table enjoying the feast or taking a 5 minute break from working the fields:

“It’s not so much about how one blog can rise through the ranks and get popular. What I love about blogging is the fact that an ecosystem exists, where conversations spring up about anything at all, involving all who wish to participate (through blogs, comments and trackbacks), evolve and move on to other things.”

That is a text book example of talking one’s position. It’s easy to say money doesn’t matter when you just won the lottery, just like it’s easy to be on a diet when you just ate. I don’t think Mike would be so philosophic about all of this if he were stuck out in the fields and not at the head of the table.

Mike chastises Nick for being bitter. I sense much more bitterness in Mike’s post than in Nick’s. I guess the king is allowed to be bitter.

The rest of us are too busy plowing to be anything but tired.

Tags: blogs, blogging, blog+building