Ken Stewart, writing at Louis Gray, tells us how to use Friendfeed as a productivity tool.  I think how productive you can be whilst Twittering away or clicking around Friendfeed has a lot to do with your (or your boss’s) definition of productive, but that’s not the topic I want to talk about.  I want to explore whether these “conversation aggregation services” increase or decrease the quality of online conversation.

Initially, I was pretty skeptical about these services.  I have tried to enjoy Facebook, but I don’t.  Same with Linkedin.  I just don’t think they’re fun or interesting.  Or even particularly well designed.  Maybe they’re good places to find a job or market your goods or services, but I’m not hiring or job hunting and I definitely don’t want to be marketed to while online.  In fact, because I am so ad-adverse, I almost never watch live TV.  At a minimum, I’ll wait 15 minutes or so and watch the show on my digital recorder (what do we call these things post-TIVO?) so I can skip over the commercials.  It’s the same way online.  I have applications that block banner ads.  Other applications that filter spam.  I go online to find content that’s fun and interesting- not to be subjected to ads, disguised or not.

At first, I felt the same way about Twitter.  It’s the latest online darling-without-a-business-plan.  Even after reading post after post singing its praises, I didn’t feel the attraction.  Until recently.  Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve made an effort to get the full Twitter experience.  I made a background for my Twitter page, began to Tweet more and, more importantly, began to read more Tweets and follow more people.  To my surprise, I have found the experience enjoyable, and even managed to have some meaningful, though brief, conversations.  While some of the former blogging celebrities (if that’s not an oxymoron) are just as non-engaging on Twitter as they were during the Gatekeeper Wars, there are so many people on Twitter, you can generally wrestle the microphone away from those who would monopolize it.  This is more egalitarian and a very good thing.  Twitter works for me, at least for now.

Completely thanks to the great music I was hearing via John Asher, I started to experiment with Blip.fm.  I wish the site still allowed you to upload audio files to their servers, but even so I think there is real potential here.  The sharing of music seems to be evolving towards a more flexible, less restrictive system- in practice even if not under the law (yet).  Assuming this trend continues, I think Blip.fm could be a great service for both artists and music fans.  Maybe one day a business plan will appear out of thin air and they will again allow audio uploads.  In the meantime, it’s a fun service.  I’ve found a few folks there who share my musical tastes, and I expect as I spend more time there, my experience will get even better.

I have also tried Friendfeed, because I kept getting emails that someone had subscribed to my Friendfeed (apparently I signed up when the service was in beta and forgot) and because a lot of people I respect kept telling me that Friendfeed was the greatest thing since Pownce (I keed, I keed).  I must be at the apex of my social networking adventure, however, because I don’t get Friendfeed.  I know that it compiles my various content from this blog, Flickr, Twitter, etc., but how exactly that improves online interactivity is not yet clear to me.  At some point, I inserted Steve Rubel’s Friendfeed into my feed reader in place of his blog feed.  You get a lot more content this way, but, candidly, there aren’t too many people I want that much content from.  Nor do I think there are that many people who are interested in turning their Kent spigot on that full.  Even so, because so many people love Friendfeed, I keep wondering if I’m missing something.  Maybe I’ll figure it out eventually, like I did with the iPhone, Twitter and, almost, but not quite, Macs.

What I do know is that the more time I spend on these various services, the more it seems like I am chasing conversation snippets all over the interwebs.  It feels like I’m in a room where several conversations are going on simultaneously and I’m twisting my neck trying to keep up.  It’s supposed to feel more centralized, but it feels less centralized.

And it’s killing, or at least replacing, blog comments.

Blog comments are somewhat centralized, which makes keeping up with a particular conversation thread pretty simple.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen a significant drop in the Comments here and the comments I make elsewhere.  I can’t help but think that this is a result of the effort and content being placed at these various third party services.  I’m not necessarily saying that this is a bad thing, but it’s different.  And even though I am having more short and sweet interactions, the sense of depth is lacking.  The blogosphere has always been an inefficient conversation medium, but lately it feels even more so.

Sure, you can centralize some of the scattered content via widgets and other applications.  I have my Tweets in the left column of my blog (though it was way harder than it had to be to customize the widget to suit my tastes).  If I can get Blip.fm to lose the ridiculously large and space eating graphic that it puts in its widget, I may add that content to my blog as well.  Friendfeed has a very flexible widget, but I’m not sure how to use it- just like the service as a whole.

All of these services make it easy to publish content, and to interact, at least on a superficial level.  The quantity is certainly there.  I’m just not sure about the quality.

Liz Strauss has a very good post on increasing your visibility in the blogosphere.

Like retailers, bloggers benefit from and should seek visibility.  Obviously, this assumes you have the goods to sell, and no one should open their store or blog before it’s customer-ready.  But once the doors are open, visibility is the key to traffic.

I would add one more item to Liz’s list.  Be visible on your own blog.

One person simply cannot create enough content to create any sort of community vibe.  You need other people, with other perspectives, to help.  And the way to do that it to engage people in the Comments to your posts.  This is easy to overlook, and I have done so myself more often than I like to admit.  The way to build a true community is to create a site where every post (or at least as many as possible) operates like a little message board where people can discuss the topic at hand.

You also have to respect the visibility of others.  If someone increases your visibility by linking to you, or commenting frequently or your posts, return the favor.  Some folks try to capture the market on conversation, but the better approach is to treat your corner of the blogosphere as a virtual pub crawl, where you move from one interesting place to another.

Blogs or pubs- it’s more fun with a good crowd.

Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!
– George Jetson

Louis Gray has a very good read on the Technorati authority system, which for the two of you who don’t already know, tabulates the number of links from unique blogs (i.e., only one link from each blog counts) over a 180 day period and uses that number as an approximation of your authority within the blogosphere.  This system, while flawed, is presumably an attempt to address what Ken Jennings was talking about yesterday when analyzing the semi-final of the Grand Slam game show he seems to be in the process of winning:

Clearly, it’s hard to come back from any deficit whatsoever in Grand Slam. Players are just checking out of the games too early. Not intentionally, but the mysterious human brain must just be better at algebra and anagrams when it knows it has the confidence of a little time cushion. (I’m reminded of those studies showing that girls do just as well as boys on math problems when they get an empowering lecture first, or that minority students do worse on standardized tests when they even have to write their name or identify their race at the top of the page. Confidence gets those cerebral juices flowing.) This is a problem as a contestant; it’s an even bigger problem if you’re a network exec. What good is your split-second lightning format if one player always ends up winning by a full minute or two?

The game is simple and elegant as it is, but I wonder if it doesn’t need to be tweaked somehow so that early-round wins have less effect on the overall final-round clock.

The idea behind the Technorati system is to keep the blog rankings fresh, so that those of us not at the top of blogger’s hill will feel like we still have a chance.  It’s Technorati’s way of giving us that confidence booster.  The thing is, though, it doesn’t work.

Unless Technorati takes Louis’s advice to heart and resets the link counts every day, which certainly would result in a few more Appalachian State-like upsets, those bloggers with the mindshare and the momentum will always get more links than those of us without it, whether the measurement period is a few days or a month of Sundays.  Lots of folks would have us believe that every 180 days is a new game with the promise of a road victory over the incumbent A-Listers in front of their 109,000 fans.  But just like Ken Jennings is very, very likely to beat all comers in games of knowledge and intelligence, those who currently have the links, and the reputation that, rightly or wrongly, follows all that attention, are going to get more links and claim more “authority” under the Technorati system.  Some will point to the occasional statistical anomaly, but mathematically, it’s true.

Leaving aside the age old question about popularity as a stand-in for authority, what’s to be done about it?

That’s a really hard question, because, generally speaking, those who claim links don’t matter are the ones who either have more than they can handle (to paraphrase Raising Arizona) or who claim to embrace self-imposed isolation as a protest against the whole links as societal affirmation thing.  Other than a general feeling that links do matter, I don’t have a wholly satisfactory answer.

My Swivel Feeds experiment has certainly taught me that there are a lot of really talented and interesting people out there blogging away in relative obscurity while other less talented writers, many of whom post regurgitated versions of the same thing in some cross linking, sleep-inducing dance of the who cares, continue to rack up links and reader counts.  I’ve certainly tried to bring attention to some relatively undiscovered gems, but it’s an inefficient process at best.  The obscure leading the obscure further into obscurity.  Or something like that.

I suppose the best approach is, as always, to take the middle ground.  Links do matter and should be encouraged, but conversations and the friendships that develop around them are also important.  There are 10-15 bloggers, maybe more, who I have over time come to view as friends (not the Facebook kind, but the real kind).  I can tell when a new person has joined that group because I always check their feeds daily, even when I don’t have time to read all my feeds.  If I get secretly irritated at you when you haven’t posted in a day or two, that means you have transcended the blogosphere and become important to me on a personal level.  That is the sort of authority that matters.  Not so much the number of links from unique blogs.  It’s not a perfect answer, but given the variables involved, I think it’s the best one we have.

The blogosphere is imperfect and uneven.  Like life.  There’s only so much we can do to change either one.  But like life, the way to improve the quality of the experience is first and foremost to avoid buying into a system designed for the betterment of a few to the detriment of many.  Drop out of the rat race.  Step off of the Technorati treadmill.

And, in their place, align yourself with good and interesting people.  Not as a clique, but as a community.  An open gathering of those with shared passions and goals.

Good friends made for good reasons makes the trip easier, safer, more fun.

And sometimes together you can actually make a difference.