Posts with tag "blogging"

Sitting in coach on the Techmeme train

Category: Technology
.
Single comment
.
Posted 1904 days ago

Louis Gray had a rather interesting post today dissecting the numbers; which he does so well, of the Techmeme Leaderboard and how placement within the Leaderboard is as much about the actual news as it is about the players. As Louis notes the heavy hitters at the top of the Leaderboard have been there since almost day one and are unlikely to be unseated from that throne of popularity none to soon.

In the past I have written about the Techmeme Leaderboard from the point of view of it potentially making it harder for bloggers to climb the ladder of popularity because of the predominance of MSM controlled blogs and our own blogging powerhouses. Over time though when someone has emailed me about the Leaderboard and the few times I have looked at it myself my thoughts have begun to change about the value of something like the Leaderboard over something like Technorati.

I realize some have called for a Leaderboard that excludes things like Wall Street Journal or New York Times and at one time I might have agreed with that but I don’t any longer for one very simple reason. Professional bloggers have for the longest time been saying that they are on par with anything that the MSM can put out but before the Techmeme Leaderboard there was no real way to measure the success of professional blogging endeavors against the best that MSM could throw at us – but now we do and the last thing we should be doing is crying foul.

If anything we should relish in the fact that we can put the best of the blogging professionals up against the best of MSM and still come out on top in regards to reader popularity. Sure it is difficult for individual bloggers trying to make their way as professional among the big boys of both publishing medium but if you stop for a second and look at the Leaderboard as a whole we really aren’t doing that bad – in fact some are doing damn good.

Within the top 20 we have Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped right along side paidContent.org and AppleInsider. Not bad placement for a single writer on a specialized blog. It gets even better as you go further down the list as you have Mathew Ingram and Louis Gray (#49 & #50) sitting just below the Times of London and doing better than the San Francisco Chronicle. Not to be out down my own blog WinExtra is doing none to shady at #65 which puts it just below Financial Times and PC World but above MacRumors and the Washington Post.

The take away from all this is that the Techmeme Leaderboard is a perfect measuring stick of popularity not just of blogs but more importantly overall publishing success in a field that now includes both new media and old mainstream media and rather than bitch and whine about the Leaderboard supposedly being taken over by MSM publications; which if you really look you can see this isn’t the case, we should be welcoming the challenge to prove that blogging is as good if not better than the tired old media in the most important area – readership.

How to scare little children – show them a video blog

Category: Technology
.
5 comments
.
Posted 1906 days ago

Monsters in the dark in your video One of things that is really cool about FriendFeed is the wide variety of things you can see and read. Whether it be posts themselves to what people are reading right up to videos that people have posted to their blogs. As cool as this I really have to take a moment and point out something.

Some of these video blogs are scary enough to give little kids nightmares. I’m not talking about the content of the videos themselves. No I’m talking about the presentation. Have you really looked at how some of these videos look?

First off you have some person staring down at you like they are ten feet tall. What’s with this looking down to the camera anyway. Isn’t it possible to look straight forward or are you going for the intimidation factor here? I always feel like I have to scrunch up in my chair to get away from that towering over me impression.

Then there is this whole thing with lighting. Like .. what’s with the recording in semi darkness with what little light there is throwing enough shadows around the face to make you look like something crawling out of a cave. Would it be so hard to take a few minutes and make sure the lighting doesn’t remind one of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle lab.

Remember folks there are little children out there who are going to see these things at some point – do you want to be responsible of giving them nightmares?

It’s hard to do original when there’s nobody to listen

Category: Technology
.
12 comments
.
Posted 1907 days ago

I get a real kick out of it when people start pontificating on why the tech blogosphere is becoming nothing more than self-fulfilling chamber filled with the dull echos of me-too posting that attach themselves like leeches to the supposed brilliant writings of the blogosphere mucky mucks.

It is even funnier when these so-called blogging heavy thinkers use the post by a really intelligent blogger who probably couldn’t careless if he saw the top 100 of Techmeme or not. I’m not sure how well known Mark Evans is within the tech blogosphere as I only found him because of FriendFeed but the moment I read one of his posts his feed became a part of my daily reading.

Whether I agree with Mark or not it doesn’t matter because in the end his posts make you think. Much like the one he wrote today that Mr. Winer used as a launching pad for another one of his self-gratifying diatribes; and which also became this weekend’s bitchmeme. As for Mark’s post – well as much as I would like to suggest that he is whacked out of his mind, the truth of the matter is that he is right.

However there is one other thing that Mark missed in his fine breakdown of why there is this lack of originality.

Reading Audience.

This is the one thing that probably 90% of all bloggers currently typing their little hearts out are missing. Without an audience you could write War and Peace or author the next great Magna Carta and it won’t matter one iota. What is the point of pouring your heart and soul into a post when you can almost be assured of no readership to appreciate it. In turn you can dash off a 20 line post that insults or verbally slaps around one of the blogging upper crusts and you had better hope your server is up to snuff to survive the onslaught.

Regardless of where we all are within the blogosphere we would be liars if we didn’t admit that we write because we want people to read those posts, to talk about those post and to inspire a conversation around those posts. The reality is that unless you strike it really frikken lucky it ain’t gonna happen. So instead we start riding the Techmeme train or become parrots on the shoulders of the top echelon of bloggers in the hopes that some of their glory will rub off on our own posts.

Whether we like it or not we become the me-too bloggers but that isn’t always so bad because as Frederic at The Last Podcast says

the me-too bloggers are an important part of the Techmeme ecosystem, because they are the ones who make the interesting stories float to the top.

Plus if you think about it since the original post by Mark hit Techmeme Mr Winer pulled a me-too by using the post for his own advantage and to keep his name in the news for the day. So if it is good enough for Mr. Winer to pull a me-too then it can’t be all that bad for the rest of us can it

I wouldn’t dance on the A-List grave just yet

Category: Technology
.
5 comments
.
Posted 1909 days ago

Ain't no fat lady singing for the A-List yet I just spotted a message posted by Steve Rubel on Twitter where he was pointing to a fresh post on the Broadstuff blog titled Here’s another profession that might disappear in which Alan Patrick proclaims that the end is in sight when it comes to all those A-List tech bloggers out there.

As Alan puts it in his post

And the issue at the core is simple – the only reason there are c 10 or so “A List, cover most everything in tech” blogs is because by and large they are using offset economics, ie they are publishing at under a sustainable economic cost. However, that means there is just a glut of people covering the same small set of stories to the same small, geeky audience – i.e. there is oversupply, and that means consolidation – there are very few commodity industries where more than 3 majors can make a living. So one thing is for sure, in a few years there will be far less of them.

The argument being that there will come a point when all these big name blogs will come to resemble the mainstream media that they were originally an alternative to.

That might possible be true to the extent that blogs like TechCrunch, Engadget and GigaOM will at some point cross the boundary from being one of those cute things called a blog into being like mainstream media outlets – if they don’t get bought up first. However the A-List really has nothing to do with any individual big name blog or the people running them.

The A-List is a metric by which blog popularity is measured. For every blogs that falls off of the A-List there will be one to replace it. The A-list is blog agnostic – it doesn’t care who is doing the writing – it only cares about how many people are reading and in turn how many are trading those links back and forth.

There are blogs in the B-List or even the C-List that could wake up tomorrow and very well find themselves up in the rarified air of the A-List. Even if Technorati closed down there would be something spring up to take its place for the simple reason that we are a competitive bunch and the A-List is our badge of honor – good or bad.

Blogs come and go and those currently high flying on the A-List are no different they are just doing a better job of making the money while it is there to be made. For all we know c|net could buy TechCrunch tomorrow or Engadget could get sold to AOL but the one thing you can be sure of – the A-List won’t be going anywhere.

Note: as pointed out to me by Frederic at The Last Podcast the fact is engadget is already owned by AOL so I kinda blew that analogy all to hell

What is so hard about making the conversation easy

Category: Technology
.
Comments are off for this post
.
Posted 1909 days ago

As much fun as blogs might be it is a simple truth that they are only as good as the comments that are made on any given post. This is something that beginning bloggers are told over and over – along with content is king. As such most bloggers will do what ever they can to make the process of making comments as easy as possible.

If this is the case why is it then that some of the big media type blogs; and some blogging platforms, make it such a daunting process. Its not like providing an easy to use commenting system is all that hard after all us lesser known bloggers do it without even thinking about it.

I started thinking about this when I was reading one of those ZDNet blogs and saw their commenting process; which in turn reminded me of a post by Eric (aka //engtech) over on Internet Duct Tape where he related the very painful process of trying to post a comment to the ZDNet blogs.

After entering the comment he wanted to leave he clicked the Add Your Opinion button and was faced with this (click for larger view)

As Eric says in his post

Congradulations ZDNet, you have a captcha worse than Typepad (and that’s saying a lot). No wonder the conversation is leaving the blogosphere.

It is not just the agonizing process they make you go through to add a comment either. It also the pointless format they use to see what comments have been made.

ZDNet comments

While the having to click through to another page to read the actual comments might do wonders for their advertising page views it really is nothing short of being extremely irritating.

There is no need to put your readers and potential commenters through this type of crap. Personally I think it is things like this that lead to conversation fragmentation far more than things like FriendFeed or Twitter.

I hate the term mommybloggers

Category: Technology
.
15 comments
.
Posted 1910 days ago

Why did you call my mommy that? I know I am probably going to catch hell for this but hear me out first. As I understand the term mommybloggers it means women with children who blog mainly about women who have children and are bloggers. Yes some might talk about technology, some might talk about politics and some might talk about .. well just about anything.

And yet they are all lumped into a classification of being mommybloggers. Well pardon me but that has got to be the stupidest most sexists classification of any that I have seen in the blogosphere. It is so wrong so many ways from Sunday that I just am shaking my head. Do we have fatherbloggers? No and we shouldn’t either because that would be just as stupid.

Maybe I am off base on this but why are women even putting up with this gender segregation when it comes to blogging. They don’t do in the business world – can you just hear the uproar if a woman was called a mommyCEO or a mommyBrain Surgeon. Personally I think this is one classification that should be taken out behind the woodshed and shot.

Am I out in left field here ladies? If I am please let this cranky old fart know and why I am wrong.

I wonder if Mother Nature blogs or twitters?

Category: Technology
.
3 comments
.
Posted 1922 days ago

Mother Nature In last night’s From the Pipeline installment I mentioned a short post by Nick Bradbury on his blog where he pointed to a post by Stephanie Quilao called The real reason I left my career in tech. Then this morning slash afternoon I read how Louis doesn’t feel that he is reading or engaging with enough women bloggers.

Louis – take a moment and read Stephanie’s post or do a Google blog search for Kathy Sierra and maybe that will in part explain why women appear to be less inclined to be as involved with technology as us men are.

In fact as I said last night the post by Stephanie should be printed out and posted in every male cubicle and also stapled in painful places of tech company CEOs bodies. The problem is that I don’t think it would make one iota of difference in the way women are treated not just in the technology field but in just any profession; or at least the ones that aren’t considered to be women’s work.

Louis may have been a little more analytical and introspective; especially following the dustup his post yesterday about FriendFeed started but I was extremely bothered by Stephanie’s post to the point that it took me a long time to get to sleep; well longer than usual. But both her post and Louis’ post of today actually have quite a bit in common even though they are about two totally different subjects.

I remember first coming across Stephanie after her leaving her job as a Microsoft tech evangelist which I wrote about when it was happening. For awhile I even subscribed to her blog but eventually unsubscribed because I felt her blog was moving to areas that were outside of my interests. That was my loss; and one that has been rectified, as I had to find out about an excellent post that made me stop and think via someone else’s blog.

A lot of noise is made about those of us that write about technology living in a bubble but there is an even bigger bubble than that in the technology field and it is inhabited by men who think that our gender is the cat’s ass. It takes posts like Stephanie’s, the furor over the attack against Kathy Sierra and yes even the post by Louis to realize how much of a bullshit attitude this is.

Like Louis though I look at all the blogs I read and I find that there is definitely an imbalance from a gender point of view and that bothers me because I realize that I am missing out on an entirely different perspective of technology. Twitter and FriendFeed funnily enough are much more balance but that is because I think in those two instances it is the women who initiated the friendship requests.

While men involved with technology and the internet might like to think that they are gender blind I think the facts prove it to be far from the truth. Regardless of profession when women have made it to the top levels of their chosen profession you almost always have some stupid male suggesting that the woman slept her way to the position; but you will never hear that when a man does it.

It is a stereotypical attitude that is continually re-enforced on pretty well a daily basis. Even now the front cover news is about a call-girl and an ex-governor and how she is exploiting her so-called fifteen minutes of fame. Suddenly her music is the hot one to listen to – not because it is good or not but because she fucked a governor. Her MySpace page and social network activity are popular news items not because she is partaking in them but because she fucked a governor.

Even when women do take an active and visible role in technology we’re only interested in how much leg she might be showing; which Sarah Lacy got full force in the reports on her interview with Mark Zuckerberg. It was as if everyone in the audience; or those reporting on the event, were more interested is seeing if she would do a Sharon Stone leg cross-over. Do you really think that if a man had been doing the interview any mention of how much sock he was showing would be made – not likely.

Yet women face this type of sexual innuendos where ever they go. When it comes to women and success it is always sex sells or how much cleavage they can show where as with men it is how smart or clever they were. We as a society like to propagate the whole equality line but the reality is that there is no equality for women unless they have nice legs and big tits. No matter how as males we would have the world believe otherwise the fact is we continue to look on women as sexual objects and nice decorations to have around the office and make unwanted passes at.

Expanding your universe

Category: Technology
.
Comments are off for this post
.
Posted 1948 days ago

Expand your universe I was just getting caught up with my reading and looking through my list of feeds and wondered how many other folks out there also read feeds:

where their opinions and thoughts are diametrically opposite of yours
the blog was a guilty pleasure that you would never admit to reading
the blog owner is an idiot but you keep reading just incase a gem appears one day

If you can answer no to all of the above I would strongly suggest you reconsider and have blogs like those in your feed and continue to add them as you come across them. I say this for one simple reason.

If you only read blogs that make you feel safe or make you feel better you are denying yourself; and your readers, a chance to grow and learn. By staying within the safe boundaries of always reading blogs you agree with then you become your own personal echo chamber and people get bored with that real quick.

As well how can you learn and grow yourself if you are only regurgitating the same old opinions and thoughts day after day. By adding blogs that match up with the list above you are giving yourself a chance to have fresh material every day with which you can provide new and interesting blog posts for your readers. I look at my feed list and I can see at least half a dozen blogs that irritate the hell out of me and a couple more on top of that where I think the blogger is an idiot.

In the end though I keep reading those blogs because they take me out of my comfort zone and make me look at things differently. Along with this I am always adding new ones where what they write opposes what I think but they write well and intelligently. By doing this I in turn force myself to be able to try and more intelligently defend my own opinions or in those times where I have been proven wrong to admit it.

So what have you read today that pissed you off or made you think hard about your own opinions – and did you add that blog to your reader? I hope you did as well I hope you blog about it so I can maybe learn something new.