Melly over at All Kinds of Writing is visiting her parents in northern Israel. While there, she has been blogging about the sirens, rocket attacks and the general state of terror that exists there.
She is a great writer and her blog is a must read for those who want to get behind the headlines and see how people’s daily lives are affected by war.
Thanks to Mike Miller for telling me about Melly’s blog.
Steve Rubel has an interesting post about generosity in the blogosphere. It seems that Steve had lunch recently with Keith Ferrazzi, author of the bestselling book Never Eat Alone. Keith made the comment that to build a network (the business and social kind), you have to be generous. That got Steve thinking about the blogosphere and the importance of generosity there.
Steve concluded, and I agree, that the generous bloggers are the most influential. Steve identifies Robert Scoble and Mark Cuban as generous bloggers- blogger who create great content and generously link to others. I’d add Steve (for sure- remember the day he took off to visit with podcasters on a first come, first served basis), Doc Searls and Guy Kawasaki to that list.
All of those guys are flat earth guys who welcome new voices and want to use the blogosphere- and their position in it- for the common good. I won’t get on my soapbox again, other than to say that blogs are nothing more than extensions of our pens and our words. Anyone who isn’t kind and generous on the internet probably isn’t all that kind and generous in real life.
Blogs are like cars- they create a false sense of invincability that releases your inner asshole.
Yet the same forces that make people good networkers in life make them good and influential bloggers in the blogosphere. The reasons why Robert, Steve, Doc and Guy have so many friends in the blogosphere are the same reasons why Keith Ferrazzi became the youngest partner in Deloitte Consulting’s history.
Contrast that to the ones Steve describes thustly:
“Then there are others – and I won’t name them – who are not generous. In fact, even worse, they are grievous. They syndicate snippets rather than publish full text RSS feeds. They don’t credit other bloggers who they clearly steal content from. They are filled with just nasty criticism, rather than a balance of ideas and constructive advice. They focus solely on themselves and not an iota on others.”
I don’t know who Steve is referring to, and it doesn’t matter. But when I think of people who are not generous in the blogosphere, I think of guys like Steve Gillmor who spend much of their time trying to separate themselves from other bloggers- via artificial paradigm shifts and country-club tactics. The greatest irony of 2006 so far was when Steve referred to those who dare to disagree with him as trolls. Most of us think of people who disagree with us as great candidates for a conversation. But that’s just it- inward looking people don’t want conversation.
And then there are the pseudo-intellectuals like Andrew Keen (who is the blogosphere’s version of the party guest who can’t stop talking about how smart he is long enough to notice the PhD’s shaking their heads as the walk away). Or the Nick Carr types whose many thoughtful posts get lost in the flood of Mary, Mary posts made in the name of fame or traffic.
All of those guys are well known. But so is the blustery guy at the party. You know them, but you are not influenced by them.
You are influenced by the people who realize that being generous is a win win proposition.
It’s good for us, and, as it turns out, it’s good for them too.
Something to think about.
I tell my friends all the time how important it is to always back up their data. That to choose not to back up is to choose to lose data, and all that.
But yesterday, when I was making some changes to the left and right columns of my blog, I didn’t take the time to back up my current template before I made those changes. I am pretty good changing the html and scripts used to pull and display information, so I figured I’d be in and out in less than a half hour.
What I didn’t count on was the second half of my template page getting accidentally selected and deleted by mistake, along with those few lines I intended to delete. I still don’t know how it happened, and only realized it had happened when I went back to my blog later and there was nothing but random code on the page.
Big honking problem.
I have many old backups of my template, but none from the last few months. So I had to spend about 3 hours figuring out what was missing and rewriting the template. That is not a recipe for a relaxing Saturday afternoon. At least it was raining cats and dogs, so I wasn’t missing anything fun.
At the end of the day, my improvements were added. Here’s a summary of what I did and how I did it:
1) I added an automatically updating “recent links” list using Dave‘s advice given in a Comment to my WordPress Blues post. I tried that approach a year or so ago, and only got 3-4 links in the list. Technorati must have fixed it in the meantime, because now it seems to work reasonably well. One beauty of the blogosphere is that it allows you to have smart friends from all over the world who can help you out. Thanks Dave!
2) I added a tag cloud using ZoomClouds. It is easy to set up and configure (I had to make mine very narrow to fit in the column). The links lead to a page on the ZoomCloud site where the relevant portion of your RSS feed is displayed. I wish it linked to the actual blog post, but ZoomCloud has to pay the bills, so I can live with it the way it is.
3) I fixed my Last.fm plug-in to J. River’s Media Center (the best media player on the market, yet one that is ignored by many writers), so my playlist will appear on my Last.fm page. I also designed a weekly top artists chart, which I am not going to display all the time, but which I will post from time to time. Here’s how it looks:
4) I deleted all of the old feed buttons in favor of the standard one, and put it, my email subscription form and a new mobile feed via Plusmo at a better location, to encourage more visitors to subscribe. If you aren’t subscribed to Newsome.Org, how’s about clicking that little orange button over there?
5) After considering removing it altogether, I moved my Skype button to a less obvious place- below the fold. Anyone who ought to be Skyping me will know it’s there, and it will hopefully keep me from getting too many young, drunk and clueless calls.
6) I added an automatically updating list of people who recently Commented on my posts. Note that it isn’t the last 10 to Comment anywhere- it’s the last 10 to Comment on a post that is still on the front page. Not my preference, but that’s the way the system I found works.
The idea of a lot of the new features is to give people who link to me and Comment on my posts some instant and automatic return traffic. I am good about responding to people who link and Comment, but when I get busy or distracted, I don’t want links and Comments to go unrecognized. After all, blogging is about community and about back and forth.
Lastly, I updated my music and book lists. Many thanks to Donncha Caoimh, who recommended Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure in a Comment. That is the most helpful photography book I have ever read. Bryan knows how to teach exposure. I just wish there were a few more photos of his extremely fine wife in that book. If you’re a guy and you’ve read it, you know what I mean.
Donncha is a fantastic photographer. Visit In Photos to see his amazing photography.
Back to backups. While I was finally able to get things back up and running with the new content in place, my failure to backup my data made a 30 minute job a 3 and a half hour job.
Do as I say, not as I (sometimes) do- go back up your data.
Stephen Baker over at Blogspotting makes a very good point about the blogosphere and its credibility, or lack thereof.
Steven Streight commented to another post on Blogspotting, saying that the blogosphere is losing credibility. He compares the expanding blogosphere to the over-expansion of radio and TV stations that led to a decline in the quality of content.
To an extent, I agree with that analysis. I get well over a hundred stations via DirecTV, but there are close to a hundred that don’t interest me at all. I probably do 85% of my watching on 10% of the channels. While I don’t listen to traditional radio anymore because of the ads, I only listen to around 10 of the 100+ XM Radio channels. The rest of those channels and stations either don’t interest me or, in some cases, annoy me.
But just because I don’t listen to the other channels doesn’t mean they have no value. It just means that they attract a different audience. My kids barely tolerate my TV shows and have a limited tolerance for my music. They like some of those channels and stations I would never watch on my own.
I think watching people play poker on TV is about the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard of, but since there are 80-90 poker shows on at any given time, a lot of people must like it. On the other hand, I find Survivor to be compelling television, but many people look down their noses at any sort of reality TV.
Different strokes and all that.
It’s the same with blogs. While I tend to agree with Steven’s description of MySpace as the toilet of the blogosphere, I also know there are millions of young people who love MySpace but would find my blog to be the cyber equivalent of watching paint dry. Or even worse, watching golf on TV.
The blogosphere is merely an extension and expansion of the water cooler and dinner table conversations that are held all the time in all sorts of places. Some of those conversations would bore me to death. Others I would find very interesting. But my circle of interest is not the benchmark for worth- either for the water cooler or the blogosphere.
Saying that the blogosphere is losing credibility is like saying the spoken or written word is losing credibility. It’s not the medium that matters- it’s the person at the other end of it.
If somebody has opinions, mannerisms or agendas that bore me, I simply turn the channel or click away. I may doubt that person’s credibility, but I know that somewhere someone is saying, writing or blogging something that I would find more compelling.
I just have to find the right water cooler to fill my cup.
Doc gives his thoughts about my blogger conference post and makes some good points.
I suspect that some of the unconference approaches will eventually bleed over to the nontech business world. It’s not really the unconference approach that I have a hard time seeing in the nontech world, as much as it is the focus on blogging as a widely accepted business tool.
Doc echoes the point made by one of my Commenters that it’s not blogging as the business, it’s blogging as a part of a business- the idea that blogging can add value as an additional business tool.
I totally get that with respect to some industries. Certainly journalism (look at all the newspapers that have already embraced blogging to one extent or another), marketing, PR (Steve Rubel is the walking, talking embodiment of that), etc.
What I’m still not buying is blogging as a tool for traditional businesses that sell traditional products and services. The people who manage these companies are going to have to cover a lot of ground to get from content blockers that don’t let you visit ESPN to employees blogging on the clock. Not to mention all the corporate policies about what is and isn’t fair game for blogging about that would have to be written and enforced. And then there are all the labor and lawyer problems that would arise if an employee got disciplined or fired for unacceptable content, etc.
In sum, most businesses don’t trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.
Which means (and I’d love to hear Steve‘s thoughts on this) that even if a traditional business has a blog, it will likely be written by a trusted insider and carefully designed to promote the company line. It would end up being nothing more than an alternate form of a company brochure and press release page. It would look like a blog, but it wouldn’t really be one.
Is that better than no blog at all? I don’t think so, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe blogging as a corporate self-promotion tool is perfectly OK.
Maybe I’m still missing something.
What do you think?
I did a new podcast this afternoon, which will be up later tonight or tomorrow. I talked a little more about my questions involving these blogger conferences.
Here’s the Techcerpt.
There are two blogs that day in and day out find and present more fun and interesting stuff than any others in my blogroll:
Randy Charles Morin (iBLOGthere4iM)
Along with my morning paper (Techmeme and Tom Morris), they are becoming the first feeds I read every morning.
Take today for example (no links here, go to their sites to see this stuff)…
Randy has a link to an interview with the guy who tried and failed to cancel his AOL account, a bat eating centipede, a huge sandstorm in Iraq and a bike mishap you have to see to believe.
Robert has a guy with a javelin through his head, alive and talking about it, a sales call gone bad, and Prince Phillip letting one rip at a birthday party.
Links like these are why I love the internet.
OK, let me begin by saying that I am not trying to be critical. I am trying to understand.
But I still don’t get it. I have been loosely following Dave Winer’s reports from BloggerCon, as I have loosely followed reports from previous conferences.
I give around 12-20 speeches a year, usually at either legal or real estate conferences. These conferences are attended by real estate lawyers, brokers and business people, during the work week and at the expense of their companies. Why? Because the attendees get continuing education credit, which is required to keep their law or broker license. And because other people in the business will be there and you can network and even make some deals. For example, after one of my speeches a month or so ago, the general counsel of a big real estate company walked up, introduced himself and hired me on the spot to do some legal work for his company. That doesn’t happen every time, but it doesn’t take too many encounters like that for my firm to conclude that conferences are good places to fish for business.
Business. That’s the word that I keep thinking about.
Now, back to the blogger conferences.
I’m sure they are fun for those who are really into blogging. I’d love to go to one, but I would have to travel a great distance on my own nickel and burn precious vacation time. Don’t a lot of the attendees have real jobs? Are their employers letting them go to these conferences on company time? At company expense?
What is the benefit to a company of an employee attending a blogging conference?
Do these conferences provide continuing education credits and if so for who? If not, how do they attract a business audience?
Since most of these conferences are on the west coast, do most of the attendees come from nearby, or far away? I speak on the west coast 2-3 times a year, but if I started attending conferences out there (as an attendee), my firm would quickly tell me to find somewhere closer and cheaper to get my continuing education hours.
Who decides the topics? I like Doc Searls a lot, but I have to say that it would be a little hard for bloggers to change the world, since 99% of the world either doesn’t know what a blog is or considers it an online diary.
I could see a business use for these conference if vendors/potential sponsors had something to sell to companies, or even to a large base of consumers. But almost all of the blogging-related tools and applications are free. So there’s nothing to be sold (other than ads, and I won’t go there today).
It seems to me (and again I am not being critical) that a lot of the conference buzz begins with some smart and lucky people who got rich in tech, don’t have to work at a traditional job and are looking for something to do. Sort of an alternative to fishing or playing golf. In other words, people with time to kill are trying to dress blogging up as something serious and business related. So far, I’m not buying it.
All of this is not to say that I don’t value blogging. Obviously I do. I just think some folks are trying to make it more, or at least different, that it is.
I think blogging is pretty worthwhile as it is, without the need to dress it up like something else.
For example, one commenter at the BloggerCon Emotional Life sessions described one of the great beauties of blogging:
“Something I’ve found is that I’m shy and not quick to walk up to people, so blogging was very helpful as an ice-breaker. I now come to a place like this where i know people already, with common things we can talk about.”
Exactly.
One of the things I like about my blog is that it allows me to converse with and become friends with people all over the world I would otherwise never have met. From Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble to Phil Sim, Tom Morris and Mathew Ingram to Rick Mahn and OmegaMom. It’s not about how many readers you have. It’s about what you have to say, and so many of the people on my blogroll are profoundly interesting. I am blessed by knowing them.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, I know in the real world is the least bit interested in tech. I am, and my blog provides me with a large, diverse and knowledgeable group of people to talk with and learn from about tech-related topics. That’s a wonderful thing.
But it’s still not a business.
Another thing I use my blog for is a learning aid. Right now Darren Rowse, Richard Querin, Thomas Hawk and others are helping me learn about my newest passion, photography. I am reading a great book on photography right now that someone suggested to me in a Comment. I really need somebody to tell me how to use the light meter on my camera. I don’t know anyone to ask in the real world. But I just asked hundreds of people and I suspect I will soon get a kind and patient answer.
Beautiful. Fun. But not a business.
Mark Cuban has removed the ability to Comment from his blog. I think that is a mistake and I hope he reconsiders. Here’s why.
Comments are not primarily about the reading. They are primarily about the writing- letting your readers know that you care what they have to say and, more importantly, giving your readers a place to share, debate, vent and, yes, even call you names if they want. Most of the time, the ensuing discussion is fun and interesting. Sometimes it’s not.
If you decide for a while, or even forever, that you don’t like what people are saying, just ignore the comments. Just because a comment is on your blog doesn’t mean you are bound to respond. The conversations between the commenters create a sense of community- even if not always a positive one.
More importantly in Mark’s case, turning off comments is inconsistent with his persona as the new, improved, accessible CEO. It’s less blog maverick and more blog conformist.
It’s old school masquerading as new school. In sum, it just isn’t cool.
What makes Mark so popular (and, granted, somewhat of a target for the discontent fringe) is the very accessibility that his blog comments permit. That and the fact that he refuses to be silenced by the NBA powers that be.
Let people have their say. The goodwill and positive buzz will far outpace the temporary buzz kill of a few bad names.
And while you’re at it Mark, go sign Josh Howard to a long term deal. That guy is a player.
Mathew Ingram is reporting that Om Malik is quitting his job too (or at least going from senior writer to a contributing editor), having received some “funding” (where can I sign up for some of that?) and elected to blog full-time. Paul Kedrosky mentions this as well. Steve Rubel offers some marketing advice for Om’s new venture.
The way I figure it, anyone who can make hell freeze over can certainly make a go at blogging for a living. Like every other blog reader in the world, I read Om regularly and find him to be a thoughtful and reliable voice in an often chaotic blogosphere. In fact, I often look to Om to confirm rumors I read about first elsewhere. Credibility goes a long way in business, particularly media, and Om has plenty of it.
Best of luck to Om.
Now I’m off to see my VC guy at the corner market to see about a little funding for me. The Texas lottery is up to $17M.
Newsome.Org 