Basecamp: Project Management via Blog

I took the plunge and signed up last week for Basecamp, a blog based prpoject management solution. We have so much going on at Corante (and a mess of announcements in the works) that I was starting to loose myself in the details.

The results have been really good. I quickly configured the service with Corante logo, etc., set up a dozen projects in a few hours, and invited about a dozen collaborators in various projects.

Basecamp is a great example of what specialized, blog-based tools can do for project coordination.

Here's a screenshot of the "Dashboard" view, which provides each user with a summary of information for all their projects.

The folks at Edgecamp enumerate 6 points on this screenshot

1. Your logo appears in the upper-left.
   
2. Late milestones are called out and linked.
   
3. Any milestones due in the next 14 days are plotted and linked on a calendar, starting with today's date. If there are no milestones in the next 14 days, the next 3 milestones are listed.
   
4. Projects that have new posts or comments since your last visit are labeled "UPDATED".
   
5. Projects that haven't had a new post or comment in 30 days are automatically moved to the Inactive Projects section.
   
6. The "What's fresh" log shows the last 25 posts, comments, completed milestones, and completed to-dos across all of your projects. Clicking one of the categories (eg. "Milestones") filters the list.
   
7. [not numbered on the screenshot] Track all projects in your favorite aggregator with the "What's fresh" RSS feed.

I really like the RSS feed; I have tried to turn off email notifications in general, as a result.

The blog, or "Messages" display, is a more or less no frills blog model, with comments and file attachments associated with the blog.

The file attachments caused me some hassles, and represents really the only complaint I have about the service as implemented. I had to configure a folder on the www.corante.com server for FTP access, and then configure a bunch of FTP settings within Basecamp, to get attachments to work. Seems that Basecamp is unwilling to allocate the storage needed, and provide backup, for file management. Not even for an additional fee. But the file attachments do work as advertised, once everything was set up.

The basic model is blog postings, along with the creation of milestones and to do lists. To-dos can be linked to specific milestones, and milestones can be linked to blog entries. As a result, the notifications serve as a constant reminder of what's coming in the near term.

The milestone display is limited to the next 14 day period, which is nice as a default, but I would like to enlarge to the coming month, two months, whatever, on demand.

The projects are of two types -- Internal, where only employees or contractors can see what's being said, or Customer focused, where your clients can participate. Pretty cool. And you can even tag some items in Customer projects as private, like a private to-do list, or blog posting, that your client can't see, but your team can.

The other missing pieces:

• Integration with Outlook -- they provide iCalendar support, but I would like to be able export or sync milestones and to-dos with Outlook.
  
• Calendar view of the whole thing -- blog entries, to-dos, comments, file postings, etc.
  
• Integration with IM -- they nicely allow you to enter a single (grrrr) IM handle, but they should also allow alerting through IM. If they talked to the nice Carr brothers over at 2Entwine, they could ping people on every service (if desired) whenever there is new content in general, or on specific projects. I don't always have my RSS feeds open, but I am always in IM.
  
• Email posting -- would be sensible to support an email posting (as much as I personally hate it), with a private email address associated with each project, including attached files.
  
• Controllable "dashboards" -- I would like to be able to define arbitrary aggregation of project related content, and define them as dashboards. For example, I would like to aggregate project information from various projects into a single dashboard, using categories, and filtering out all private information, and serving that information up to some defined list of participants. As an example, imagine pulling information from all Corante Research Projects that are tagged as "Public" and serving it up to all our Advisory Research clients, no matter what Advisory Service they have signed up for.
  
• Nested projects -- need subprojects. For example, I would like to coordinate with each client within the Social Tools Advisory Service individually, at a subproject level, but by the same token, I would like to have all members of the service to have access to some common information.
  
• Trackbacks -- obviously.

I am very pleased with what I have seen, and look forward to increased functionality in the future. But Basecamp seems to offer that critical mass of features that meets the 80/20 rule: 80% of everything you want to do can be satisfied by 20% of all imaginable functionality.

Ok This Is Getting Funny

Ted Rheingold [of Dogster and Catster]

[via email]

So as you may know I added a Diary feature to Dogster and Catster and they've been quickly adopted (over 2,250 so far), so I made a clearing house page for them. Can blogrolls, feeds and trackbacks be far behind? Why not I say.

http://www.catster.com/diary/dcentral.php
http://www.dogster.com/diary/dcentral.php

Watching what people write about is both a bit mundane content-wise but culturally fascinating. They communicate in a similar manner when they message each other, almost exclusviely using their pet as avatar, Using a persona to communicate online is ancient, but here I find it to be much more intimate without getting personal. It's a much more trusted, safe, environment to let your avatars spirit run wild, rather like the original user groups of yore

Just had to share. I go a bit crazy just talking to dogs all day ;>

Much woof,

T

HitMaps Part 3

I installed HitMaps on Get Real on 7 October, and four days later I finally got a hit someone in Japan!

HitMaps comes out of the closet

KMi's Jiri Komzak has extended the nifty little blog-gutter-tool that you now see along the upper left side of Get Real, which shows you the locations of everyone who has visited this page (after a once-nightly update, that is). You don't even have to click on the map: just visiting this page is sufficient... though of course you should click anyway just to see what it does! It uses IP -> latitude/longitude conversion, which although never 100% right is generally 'good enough', and allows you to zoom in just a little at the continent level. It also deploys Jiri's own clustering algorithms to keep the maps pretty compact and speedily displayed.

Best of all, anyone can now embed this tool in any page.... Jiri has just updated the KMi HitMaps page with a little 'Generate HTML' box so you can easily stick this type of map in your blog gutter (or anywhere else for that matter). The page also now includes a growing list of which sites are using HitMaps. Enjoy!

Threadorati is a Start, but not Enough: Chaterati!

So Marc and I are exploring the issues around using two dueling blogs to have a persistent and public dialog about something, and in this case, incestuously, we are discussing that very topic.

Marc Eisenstadt

[from Threadorati - not yet]

this very exercise has brought to light three problems, so here goes:

Problem 1 (my original beef): The Technorati/Feedster/Bloglines 'citations' or 'threadorati' are too indirect, and are inadequate renditions of the ebb and flow of the discussion. The context of the discussion just isn't there: for instance, the 'Threadorati' search for my own entry correctly brought up your commentary, but NOT the permalink, rather the top level of your blog...

Problem 2: The 'contextual quoting' tricks that are both familiar to and trivial for email and forum users are surprisingly klutzy for blog users. At the very least, copy/paste of the relevant entries loses any embedded hyperlinks (I had to manually re-add the ones shown above for Sifry and Weinberger for instance...)

Problem 3:From IE, I in fact couldn't even do an intuitive mouse-drag-copy over the relevant passage of a MoveableType blog - too much (irrelevant) text gets highlighted.

Responses, in order:

1. This is odd. When I look at other technorati searches, like the example shown from Stuart Henshall's Unbound Spiral, the "read full post" is available, which links to the specific blog entry. BUt when I click the threadorati link on the recent entry that Marc commented on, his topmost link is provided, but not the link to the specific entry. I don't understand this, but note that I have a similar and perhaps related problem at Marc's blog: when I try to use the MoveableType bookmarklet (the button embedded in my IE that creates a outline of a MT post) on Marc's My Dog blog, the specific blog entry URL is never captured, but only the topmost URL for the blog. It may be that Marc's blog is not configured correctly for these automated capture tools to grab the permalinks for the individual entries there.
   
2. Yes, its a pain to cut and paste the links embedded in quoted text. You can use the "view source" trick, which helps alot, if you want to retain all links.
   
3. This is a glitch in the Get Real (and other Corante blogs) template, a real pain in the ass. We are moving to a new template for Get Real later this week, which will cure this problem.

And a last point: Marc, it looks like your blog doesn't support trackbacks, which is an obvious crutch for this whole area of interactive discourse. We should be experimenting with two or more blogs that do.

But, leaving aside the specifics, I agree that the threadorati is not what we really want. Something more along the lines of an instant messaging chat room session, where the alternatiing blog entries are serialized, would be better.

Here's the depiction of what I would like to see from a hypothetical "Chaterati":

Of course, it would get more complex it you tried to array the contributions of multiple participants, although, just like in chat, you could just fall back to a sequence without mutliple columns.

Marc Eisenstadt Remotely Proximal

Marc riffs on the recent Handwave at Synchronous Social Software, although not about the synchronous aspect of what I was pushing at, but on the geolocation element:

[from Plazes, Gush, and Blog Comment Threading

His wish list goes on to include the 'best of breed' features of IM, geolocation services, RSS feeds, generic presence and trigger alert info, combining the capabilities of Plazes and Gush.

I have two separate sets of comments to make on this... one about the content, and one about where and how I make these comments (!).

Regarding the content: Stowe's wish-list is right on the money -- it deserves a more thoughtful reply than I can give it at the moment, so I merely wanted to flag a few other things swirling around in that space that are starting to address these same needs:

a) BuddySpace, naturally, with its location-centric presence info... not with 'live map' updates yet, but those are coming soon!!

b) Live IP -> Latitude/longitude information can be supplied more easily than the custom app you need to download for Plazes: check out the 'HitMap' in the upper right corner of my blog, which knows where visitors to my page come from, without them having to do anything.... cool, huh? This comes from KMi's Jiri Komzak, the same guy who implemented BuddySpace, and is described some more on KMi's HitMaps page.

c) Updating my colleagues regarding my past/current/future locations? Check out the map in the lower right of my blog gutter, which does exactly this, courtesy Bryan Boyer's IndyJunior!

Regarding Indy Junior -- too much work, man! Editing XML docs and figuring out the coordinates is too hard. But the guys at Plazes could keep a history of my logging in at various Plazes, and depict it as a part of my profile. They do parts of that already, including showing a daily update of new plazes on world and continental maps.

But then Marc wanders off into strange territory, first of all acting apologetic for his writing the post at My Dog, and not here at Get Real, where he is *supposed* to be guest blogging. But the tension inherent in the decision making about whether to blog here or there has led to some interesting speculations about the difficulties inherent in following cross blogthreads:

I'm continually amazed at the fact that blog comment discussion threads are such cumbersome beasts. I wrote previously with pointers to Jon Udell's comments on this and the new generation of Feedster and Bloglines citation bookmarklets. The challenge is to 'slice through the spaghetti' and obtain a sensible view of an emerging discussion thread, even though it is posted in disparate blog entries.

Citation bookmarklets are a stab in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome. Blogs have the advantage of preserving a sense of self-ownership (hence my posting here rather than in a comment on someone else's blog). Forums and discussion threads have the advantage of preserving some semblance of context. Feeds have the advantage of providing steroid-driven-navigation. There are times and contexts in which any of these may be superior to the others. I think a good challenge is to let the user 'in situ' construct a mix of perspectives, i.e. peruse an 'in-line' (constructed-on-the-fly) comment-thread while reading a blog entry, rather than having to play detective, peruse feeds, or invoke a bookmarklet.

Toward this end, I have been brainstorming over the last few days with Bertrand Sereno, who is experimenting with semantic blogging. He's looking at ways to link blog entries together with semantic tags rather than mere faceless links or trackback pointers: tags that say something about why I'm linking to another entry. A challenge I've posed to Bertrand is to begin at the bookmarklet level and allow the two of us (or more if others join in) to carry on our brainstorming by means of parallel or 'yoked' blog entries, from which our discussion thread can be reconstructed on-demand. Another thing Bertrand is looking at in this respect is the notion of 'free-form' tags a la Flickr and del.icio.us, i.e. tags that are not constrained to be from a limited 'semantically credible' subset in the eyes of some High Priest of Ontology, but rather constructed at whim, in order to see what kind of tagging system evolves.

But what about various blogthreads efforts, like Dave Sifry's Technorati search embedded in MT (which David Weinberger calls "Threadorati")? [Note: I have added threadorati to Get Real, just now, so we can see what happens.]

What's Next for Ev Williams?

Ev Williams, founder of Pyra Labs and the Blogger technology now part of the Googlopoly, has decided that is time for something really different:

Ev Williams

[from evhead: Next?]

Yes, I'm leaving my baby (or is it an adolescent by now?), in the hands of an awesome team we've compiled over the last few years. And I'm taking some time off to think. And...who knows?

Gosh, what else to say about that?

Necessarily, I must express that it's been an amazing, thrilling, life-changing, difficult, rewarding, surprising, and lucky ride I've been on. And "life-changing" is such an understatement. As I said on Blogger's fifth birthday, for doing the "same thing" for five years, it's amazing how drastically my life has changed. Not just my life, but me. I'm just a simple farm boy from Nebraska, after all.

As I prepare to take off my "head Blogger guy" hat, which seems permanently sealed to my scalp by now, I need to give a huge thanks to the people who've made the last few years what they were. I'd name names, but I'd never get to the end of the list, so, in general categories: The original Pyra team, the current Blogger team, and those who helped me out in-between, my investors and advisors (formal an in-), all the awesome Blogger users and supporters, the whole blogging community -- developers, competitors, and drivers of the vision -- and, of course, the great folks at Google. Not to mention my friends and family who witnessed and helped many a stressed-out Ev (see picture).

Thanks!

Lurkers, Lurkers, Everywhere

Got an email today:

Dear Customer,

This message is just to remind you that the trial period of your ViewletPoll will expire in 7 day(s).

You have 1 active ViewletPoll(s):

Question: Would you ever use a service like PaperNapkin.com?
Brief stats since last reset (9/8/2004)
Views: 423
Visits: 282
Votes: 5 (1.77 % of visitors)

Don't lurk! Get engaged. Life is short. It's not a rehearsal.

Plazes Blazes New Trail

I saw that a number of folks (including Joi) recently gawked at Plazes, a new social networking/proximity/mobility offering.

Joi Ito

[from Plazes and Wallop]

Yes. Yet another social networking site... I decided to play with this one for awhile before blogging it to make sure it was significantly different. I think it is. Plazes takes your IP address and tries to figure out where you are. If you are in a new "plaze" you can register it by entering the address, uploading pictures, making comments. You can see who is online and where they are. You can see people by how far away they are from you. I imagine that once it gets going, most common hang outs will have lots of comments and pictures and you will be able to find people in your vicinity to hook up with. It's a bit like a laptop version of dodgeball. I'm "Joi" on Plazes.

I'm not all there yet with the model of use, but there is a swarmth (karma) system involved based on creating new "plazes" -- the more you create the more swarmth you get. Presumably you can apply this in some way, but how you exploit swarmth is unclear to me at this time.

I encountered a now fixed Windows bug when I first installed, so it wasn't working until I reinstalled a new beta today. To bad. I could have tagged a few Starbucks in NYC Tu-We.

The service uses a "friends/others" duofold profile model, which I like. I have posted all my IM services there, and made them public, while I make email private, available only to friends.

Relevanta Launches

Greg Narain has been laboring with a group of collaborators at Pokkari for the past months on a new project, and yesterday unveiled at least part of what has been brewing:

[from SocialTwister.com: Announcing Relevanta: Reputation for the Blogosphere

Pokkari, Inc. announces the release of its next-generation blog aggregator, Relevanta. Unlike other aggregation and search services that strive to index the Internet at large, Relevanta focuses on specific conversations. Relevanta collects and correlates these conversations in a clear, concise fashion which promotes better evaluation and collaboration among users.

Blogs and other forms of emergent media are quickly rising in popularity and influence. As more and more individuals elect to create and participate in this new, exciting form of journalism, issues arise when attempting to evaluate new sources of information. Lacking a context to gauge the material and perspective on of the author, interested parties are forced to either accept material as presented or perform exhaustive research to validate the facts.

Relevanta introduces a democratic, community model into the news consumption and distribution process. All members of the Relevanta community have the ability to contribute information, commentary, and valuations of both the authors and their written works. In addition, Relevanta’s underlying database provides automatic linking of keywords and provides members with extended data and background information.

With this new set of data, no longer are articles and other forms of content isolated entities Building and mapping relationships between news sources and the articles themselves are natural features afforded even the casual visitor. "Since the Internet first appeared on the mainstream's radar consumers have been plagued by one burning question: 'Is what I'm reading good and accurate?'. Relevanta helps answer this question using community intelligence." notes Jared Klett, CEO and Co-Founder of Pokkari, Inc.

[from Rumors of Kinja]

The premise behind Blogisphere is that the missing insight for creating a working business model around blogs is to focus on what the readers need, and build a system to support readers: to make reading blogs easier and more rewarding.

This model would be based on the now well-established principles of collaborative filtering and slashdot style reader-based evaluation of content quality. And like Slashdot, the goal is to foster communities of readers, united through shared technology. Today, we find that this is emerging in an unconsolidated and haphazard way. Providing a better reader experience – one that will integrate with existing authoring systems, but provide a uniform and consistent reader participation model – will provide a strong incentive for readers to use the system. And later on, the authors will follow.

Notes from iBreakfast: The Business of Blogging

I spoke Wed in NYC at Alan Brody's iBreakfast. I got to see some familiar faces (Greg Narain (Get Real and elsewhere), Henry Copeland (Blogads), Salim Ismail (PubSub Concepts)), and meet some new people as well.

Here's some fragmentary notes from my 10 minutes of fame:

As I was walking to the meeting this morning, I noticed an ad on the bus stops promoting a new TV show. The message was "The rules have changed; but the game's the same." I maintain that the rules in media are changing so much, that game is not the same.

But I am very close to the world of blogging, having grown up in it over the past four years. I an highly biased, subjective, and therefore I have a very close to the ground perspective.

Like blogging itself, I am going to offer a series of observations, perhaps uneven and fragmentary, and there is no conclusion, per se. Always beginning, never finished.

Gregory Bateson noted in 1964 that "a business [or a market] is best considered as a network of conversations.' This is perhaps more relevant today, when we have seen the emergence of an new infrastructure (Internet) and the various social tools that engender participatory media. Blogging is one element of that new matrix.

This is a profound revolution, which will ultimately upset a wide variety of applecarts. Established media companies, the basic premises of marketing, and the dynamic of companies (and governments) broadcasting propaganda to their market -- all these things will change. This disruption offers the opportunity to various upstarts to come in and grab market share in all these segments.

A few words about the medium and its message:

• Blogging is all about dialog among the members of a community, whether implicit or explicit.
  
• Blogging is democratic -- the good stuff is picked up through the wisdom of crowds (as Surowiecki called it), and the bad stuff gathers dust on some forgotten server.
  
• Blogging is interactive -- readers are not passive tubers on a couch, they are writing as they read, they are deciding what is the lead news story of their day, they decide how front page inches should go to what topics, subjects, and issues.
  
• Blogging is unmediated -- in general, it is the author writing directly, in the first person, for the readership.

So now, we can approach "the business of blogging" on two sides: how to make money out of the blogging phenomenon (like Corante is trying to do), and how can established businesses exploit the blogging medium in their established (non-media) markets.

How to Make Money form The Blogging Phenomenon

• Lee Bryant's (Headshift) observation is that Blogging works from the bottom-up, so the organization of people around blog-based communication networks has to reflect that dynamic. Large organizations that simply try to take blog technology and use it as a broadcast publishing medium will fail, ultimately.
  
• The world is really made up of millions of relatively small networks of people, not two dozen enormous markets. Markets are better served by tightly focused, extremely rich social media, rather than today's norms.
  
• Blogging is driven by personal brand: authority and trust. This cannot be manufactured, and cannot be imparted to newbies just by affixing a media brand to them.
  
• Blogging will change everything it touches: classified, the blurring of oped and so-called factual journalism, and the duality between advertisers as content and context.
  
• Blogging is technology driven, and we are not done yet. There are serious fortunes to be made by brining together the right tech mix into new products. In particular, the integration of social tools -- instant messaging, streaming content, and the like -- with blogging.
  
• The media companies are losing their control of the media markets, and knowledgeable and erudite bloggers are being able to directly influence market behavior. This transition will accelerate, and then the media business will reformulate itself around the new paradigm.
  
  How Business can apply Blogging
  
• Open an authentic dialog with the marketplace
  
• Burn all the brochureware, and let your product people openly discuss plans and goals. Engender a community of involved and smart users -- they will provide better customer support than you can, and they will do it for free.
  
• Your markets are smarter than you: create a forum where you can listen instead of talking.
  
• Build blog networks to support the actual lines of communication on the company: forget the org chart. Let teams build and manage themselves from the bottom up.
  
• In today's economy a brand is no longer a promise, it is an invitation.

More on "Online Status Indicator"

Jabber

Message from Edge City: My Blog In 2000

Back in 2000, I started a blog (although that term wasn't in use -- at least not widely) called Message from Edge City. One fateful day, six months or so later, the company I was hosting on -- convey.com -- closed its doors, and turned off the servers. My content was lost forever. Except for the evocative glimpse of what I was digging into at the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archives:

Most of all, I miss the story that I wrote on Internet (Swatch's Beat) Time and reviews of dozens of products and services.

Blogging Community Sold On eBay

Peter Quintas pointed me to this Aug 7 eBay auction, where www.BlogOnTheWeb.com was auctioned off for $2,425: (see eBay item 3831940548 (Ends Aug-07-04 11:24:27 PDT) - BlogOnTheWeb.com 1400 Bloggers revenue website PR 5).

You are bidding on www.BlogOnTheWeb.com, a very popular blogging community with a catchy name. It has almost 1500 bloggers and over 7000 posts and almost 4300 comments. People can sign up for their own blog very easily as you can see at the site. It gets around 10-20 new bloggers each day without doing any promoting or advertising. Tomorrow is here; everybody is blogging, and those who aren't are looking for a blog home. The site also features image galleries and has a Goggle page rank of 5 at http://blogontheweb.com. We average over 1,000 visitors a day. It currently brings in revenue from Google Adsense. We are unable to disclose the numbers so as not to violate the Google TOS. Please do not ask, because we cannot tell you.

The reason we are selling is we have gotten into the plant business and need the funds to help get our business going even more, and this is our most valuable asset.

Eats, Blogs & Leaves

I recently read the wonderful Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, and like many others writers I loved the book on many levels, not the least of which is my own abiding interest in punctuation. I am not alone in blogland for noting Lynne's passing comments about the Internet:

Lynne Truss

This is an exciting time for the written word: it is adapting to the ascendant medium, which happens to be the most immediate, universal, and democratic medium that has ever existed.

Jennifer Garrett

Be kind to your reader. Capitalization and punctuation are the easiest ways to indicate exactly what you're trying to say. It's time for a little tough love, people: Anyone who types in all lowercase needs to be taken out back and beaten. You are not e.e. cummings; you are not being "artistic." You're just too lazy to hit the shift key. If you can't be bothered with the extra keystroke, I can't be bothered to read your site. Don't turn off readers before they even get to your words. (A refusal to capitalize is just one grammar horror that can be spotted at first glance. I can also spot an overuse of the ellipsis at 50 paces. There are two reasons to use an ellipsis (and neither one is because you don't want to write a transition): Use an ellipsis to indicate words omitted from a direct quote or to trail off intriguingly. If neither of these are your intention, try a period. Dot. Full stop. Terminal punctuation can be your friend.)

And in the quest to find a voice, we shouldn't neglect the need to write grammatically, as Garrett points out (although punctuation is not part of grammar, really, but just typesetter conventions that have assumed the rule of law):

Jennifer Garrett

I'm not asking that you be able to name the preterit, imperfect, and subjunctive forms of the verb 'to be.' You don't need to know the 17 reasons to insert a comma into a sentence. (Although, if you did know all 17 reasons, that would be totally hot.) The best way to better grammar: Simplify. If you don't know whether or not to use a colon, a semicolon, or a dash, cut that sentence down! Brevity is the source of wit, after all.

Joyce Park Interviewed at Red Herring

The blogster who got 'shitcanned' (as she put it) from Friendster for blogging about the company is interviewed at Red Herring, although we don't learn anything we haven't already heard:RED HERRING | No Friendster of mine. But we do see a picture of Joyce.

iBreakfast on The Business of Blogging: NYC 22 Sep 2004

I will be participating in a morning presentation, the 22 September iBreakfast Club Meeting, in New York City. The topic is The Business of Blogging.

[via email]

Wed, Sep. 22, 7:30-10am:

Companies Talk About the Profits in the Blogging Boom

Blogging has taken off- with the presidential campaign adding fuel to the fire. But what about the profits? These industry leaders say they are there: the user profile is older and more affluent than most people realize. Viewers give serious attention to the blogging leaders and the companies that support them. Just how much attention and how much that is worth - and where this is going - is the subject of this season's opening event. Once again, we explore the opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors and marketers in the evolving digital marketplace.

HENRY COPELAND, CEO, BLOGADS.COM
ISHWARI SINGH, CEO, A1technologies.com

Moderated by Alan Brody

The email didn't include me (I hadn't gotten involved yet), and Salim Ismail (CEO of PubSub) emailed me to let me know he would be participating as well. Salim and I "met" on a recent webcast that Alex Williams of Decisioncast moderated. I also spoke at BlogOn on a panel with Henry Copeland, so I can be sure that there will be a lot of interesting and challenging opinions being shared at this breakfast. Strangely enough, none of the content in the email is at the website yet, except for Henry's name.

I plan to hold a cocktail party the evening before the breakfast, somewhere in NYC, so if you are interested in being invited, ping me (stowe - AT - corante.com, subject: NYC 21 Sept Cocktails).

Talkativeness and Influence

Over the Labor Day weekend, I spent some time reading James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" -- perhaps the best thing I did, actually (aside from the mere survival value of coming back on the Friday night redeye from the West Coast).

I am certain that any number of the themes in the book are worthy of commentary and analysis, but something that Surowiecki wrote regarding the impact of talkativeness on small group decision making led me to reflect on the various theories about the business of blogging:

James Surowiecki

[from The Wisdom of Crowds pp 187-188]

Even when its virtues seem self-evident, an idea needs a champion in order to be adopted by the group as a whole. That's another reason why a popular position tends to become more popular in the course of deliberations: it has more potential champions to begin with. In a market or even a democracy, champions are far less important because of the sheer number of potential decision makers. But in a small group, having a strong advocate for an idea, no matter how good it is, is essential. And when advocates are chosen, as it were, no the basis of status or talkativeness, rather than perceptiveness or keeness of insight, then the chances of the group's making a smart decision shrinks.

Talkativeness may seem like a curious thing to worry about, but in fact talkativeness has a major impact on the kinds of decisions small groups reach. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. Studies of group dynamics almost always show that the more someone talks, the more he is talked to by others in the group. So people at the center of the group tend to become more important over the course of a discussion.

This might be okay if people only spoke when they had expertise in a particular matter. And in many cases, if someone's talking a lot, its a good sign that they have something valuable to add. But the truth is that there is no correlation between talkativeness and expertise. In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their own knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified. And since, as political scientists Brock Blomberg and Joseph Harrington suggest, extremists tend to become more rigid and more convinced of their own rightness than moderates, discussion tends to pull groups away from the middle. Of course, sometimes truth lies at the extreme. And if the people who spoke first and most often were consistently the people with the best information of the keenest analysis, then polarization might not be much of a problem. But it is.

There has been a rash of interest in the business of blogging recently. And some of the themes that are cropping up from various proponents are troubling, given the poor correlation between talkativeness, on one hand, and expertise and insight, on the other:

Frank Barnako

[from Frank Barnako's Internet Daily, 1 September 2004]

There are lots of ways to make money with Weblogs.

Henry Copeland's Blogads.com is helping politicians raise campaign funds. Nick Denton's Gawker Media is accumulating huge audiences with an editorial mix of sex, politics and gossip. Brian Stelter sold Cablenewser.com to a company that wanted more traffic for its media industry career subscription site. PVRBlog.com generates ad revenues and sales commissions off the interest in TIVOs (TIVO).

Jason Calacanis wants to do it the old fashioned way, with advertising. And he is making no small plans for his would-be new media empire. Launched eight months ago, Weblogs, Inc. is publishing almost 50 blogs covering subjects including telemedicine, Apple Computer (AAPL) digital music, and the Dallas Mavericks.

Calacanis, the former publisher of Silicon Alley Reporter, a print magazine which covered the heyday of the Internet in New York, said some of his blogs are generating as many as 100,000 page views a day. "For a trade magazine, only a few months old, it's huge," he said.

Weblogs' most successful product is Engadget, concentrating on consumer electronics and tech products. It is written and edited by Peter Rojas, assisted by seven other contributors. Calacanis says the use of a "blog team" is critical for a consumer-focused publishing venture.

"Blogging is in large part showing up," he said. Readers make judgments based on a publications' appearance and editorial consistency. Does it get published every day? "Step one, you have to be there, and there everyday," Calacanis said. That means posting dozens of messages a day. Applicants to write for his Unofficial Apple Weblog are being told they must post news dozens of times every month.

But I want to stress that talkativeness -- posting dozens of content-free blog entries mostly involving a link and a bland, nearly insight free sentence along the lines of "This is cool" -- is not a substitute for deep insight.

While it maybe human nature to equate a big mouth with real understanding, this is a great place to allow our rational minds to overturn nature. In the world of blogging, media types may want to exploit this false correlation between frequency of postings and the community's likelihood to mistakenly associate the barrage of bloggage with authority and credibility. And giving Jason his due -- monitoring the number of posts that authors make is easy, which judging the quality or importance of posts is very, very hard indeed.

At Corante, to the degree that we can be said to direct our various contributors at all, we certainly aren't going to exhort them to produce more entries in the name of more entries alone -- even if that technique naturally dupes the gullible. We are searching for a different path to influence the communities and markets we are involved in: true expertise and deep insight. And we may get talky at times too, but it won't be for its own sake, or to pull the wool over people's eyes.

Corante Real-Time Collaboration Experience at Inbox East: Atlanta 19 Nov 2004

I am really excited about a new event that I am honored to be involved in: Corante's Real Time Collaboration Experience held in collaboration with Inbox East.

The Inbox conference runs 17-19 November 2004, and will be held in Atlanta's Cobb Galleria Centre.

The Experience involves a workshop and trade show pavilion, and will be held on the morning of 19 November. Be sure to register with this code -- CRTE04 -- to get a $100 discount!

I have asked my old pal, David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies to play the role of co-host, so we should be having an illegal amount of fun there. Here's the current prospectus, such as it is:

THE WORKSHOP

Your Host: Stowe Boyd, Corante
Co-Host: David Coleman, Collaboratives Strategies

Setting Context: The Wheel of Real-Time Collaboration

Stowe will be leading the workshop using his 'late show' format, involving short and focused presentations, strong reliance on interview and dialog, and demos of breakthrough technologies. In this first session, he lays out a conceptual framework for real-time technology and its impact on today's world.

Market Trends in Real-Time Collaboration

David Coleman will present various trends in the real-time marketplace and their relevance to the enterprise and individual.

The World That Instant Messaging Is Making: New Directions in IM

Stowe and David will discuss and demonstrate a number of innovative instant messaging technologies.

Convergence and Collision: From Apps to Stacks

This session is devoted to the convergence of technologies like IM, web conferencing, voice, video, content, and other real-time collaboration apps into complex enterprise architecture stacks. It will include 'policy/vision' statements from major industry representatives.

Real-Time Social Tools

This session is devoted to the convergence of real-time collaboration into social media and social tools. It will demonstrate a wide variety of real-time social software.

Summary: A Roadmap for Real-Time

This wrap-up session by David Coleman is devoted to detailing a roadmap for the enterprise adoption of real-time collaboration technologies, and then a final wrap-up by the host, Stowe Boyd.

Note: attendees will receive an executive report of the same name, co-authored by the Host and Co-host.

This is in a sense the first real official announcement about Corante Events, about which we will have a lot more to say in the upcoming weeks. We intend to launch a wide variety of real and virtual events over the next few months, and we invite our contributors and readers to help us to make them innovative, timely, and rewarding.

And remember, if you're signing up for Inbox be sure to include the registration code - CRTE04 - to get a $100 discount!

Friendster Blogger Fired: The Price of Openness

Ross comments on the new furor over Friendster alledgedly firing Joyce Park for blogging (see Many-to-Many: Fired From Friendster for Blogging).

Joyce Park

[from Shitcanned]

So I was terminated from Friendster today. The reason given was blogging.

The levels of irony on this are pretty deep. For one thing, I wrote a fairly well-known paper last year about the need for semi-permeable blogging. For another thing, by all accounts the particular posts that led to my termination were this one and this one (although feel free to check my archives for any other incriminating information). I try really hard not to blog about anything that is not a matter of public record... but I guess that's not protection any more. You get Slashdotted, make Udell's column, lose your job. And finally, it's especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves...

Let me note that I loved working for my VP of engineering, Jeff Winner, and I loved my team with all my heart. I worked really hard for that company, and I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of.

As Ross points out we are unlikely to here the Friendster side of the story.

This is just the newest event in a noxious trend, which is the corporate backlash to blogging. Blogging is disruptive, shedding light on the inner workings of the corporate hive, and those that believe that business is best conducted in the dark will naturally lash out and sack those that try to open a dialog with the market.

Expect more heaadlines like this.

A self-styled friend of Joyce's states that many have opted to drop thier Friendster accounts in protest.

Video Blog Comments

Just when I was kvetching about not understanding how to video blog effectively, I find this blog entry that supports video comments: solitude.dk | August 2004.

Interesting.

Video Blogging Update: Userplane A/V Mail Redux

I (finally) got around to trying the Userplane A/V Mail tool again, and it appears that I just had some strange glitch in the process that caused weird buffering delays. None of the other samples I have created (like that below) or that I have seen from other users have that problem.

What I would really like to use the system for is video interviews, so Mike Jones is looking into that. I am much happier talking to someone else, rather than staring at the camera.

Gush 1.2 Preview Version Available

Dudley and Wes Carr at 2Entwine have released the 1.2 Preview Release of the Gush instant messaging client (see Gush Blog: Gush 1.2 Preview Release).

The single biggest change is the extension of the client's existing RSS feature set with the option to create new or reuse existing PubSub Concepts aggregated feeds.

Above, I created a new feed within Gush -- of course you have to have or create a PubSub account. I did find an interesting (painful) bug in the PubSub interface -- it stripped out the quotation marks! Apparently PubSub are working on a fix, but in the meantime I recommend defining all feeds at PubSub. Apparently, this glitch has been fixed already! Once connected, all your existing feeds are pulled into Gush automatically.

Below you see the "instant messaging" feed I defined (click to see fullsize image). Note the little side aggregation on the right hand of the defined feed, which are the headlines of all the defined feeds at my PubSub account.

The guys at 2Entwine have laid out a roadmap for additional features, some of which I really, really need, like multichat, file transfer, and nested groups.

Keep it up, boys.

Bloggers Are Special

ChangeThis

[from ChangeThis :: Bloggers]

Bloggers are special.

A jumble of slanted, shouting voices have overcome our airwaves, infiltrated our newspapers, filled every corner of our waking lives, and they aren't going to stop. It's affecting all of us. You may have noticed that every argument seems just a little more heated than the last--is it any surprise, when each one of has been listening just a little bit less? It's a sign of more to come.

But now, people are listening to bloggers instead. Blogging is the populist response to the media hegemony: a sea of independent voices.

Scoble's "Corporate Weblog Manifesto"

Scoble reduces the complexities of corporate blogging down to a short set of homilies, over at ChangeThis :: The Corporate Weblog Manifesto. He stresses truth, and getting close to the grassroots, and suggests that Doc Searls is never, ever wrong. But #19 is off tone:

Robert Scoble

#19 BOGU. This means "Bend Over and Grease Up."

I believe the term originated at Microsoft. It means that when a big fish comes over (like IBM or Bill Gates) you do whatever it takes to keep him happy. Personally. I believe in BOGU'ing for EVERYONE, not just the big fish. You never know when the janitor will go to school, get an MBA, and start a company. I've seen it happen."

By the way, this was my first encounter with Change This who are hosting this and many other interesting manifestos. However, all the manifestos are in PDF format, so the cost of waiting for the Acrobat plug-in to start up is noticeable -- but worth it.

Video Blogging: Userplane A/V Mail

Here's my first effort at video blogging, using Userplane's A/V Mail tool, now in beta.

You'll notice a significant delay after hitting the play button (after the buffering 100% zips by), because (I think) the entire video is downloaded before the play begins. This lag is really too long, but I guess streaming requires something more sophisticated than the Macromedia Flash applet.

To use this I would have to create a series of short videos, instead of one long video, because of the buffering issue. I am planning to video blog the presentation I gave in Nice a few weeks ago, as an extended entry. More to follow.

Radicati and Ferris Lotus Stalwarts Going At It

I get a sick kind of pleasure (and I don't know why) about the fracas between Radicati and Ferris analysts various Lotus stalwarts over the content of a recent Radicati report that disses IBM's Workplace strategy and supports Microsoft's market approach.

What has happened is an enormous mess:

• Ed Brill, a Lotus executive, posted a link to the report on his weblog, and his readers began reading it, and commenting on it.
• A Radicati analyst (or analysts) posted responses to the criticisms under a psuedonym.
• Various folks uncovered the ID of the Radicati employee, and traced the fact that the same email addresses were used to demand that anti-Radicati bloggers should be fired, including Ed Brill. Various IBM excs recieved such emails.

Sean Gallagher

[Lotus Bloggers and Analysts Brawl, Bogus Postings Alleged]

Radicati said she was surprised by the harshness of the initial response to the white paper. "I'm pretty appalled by it," she said. "We'd never seen the discussion stoop to this level [on blogs] before, particularly the viciousness in which things were discussed."

The white paper, a summary of five recently published reports from The Radicati Group, was critical of IBM Lotus' handling of its roadmap for its Domino messaging server and the upcoming IBM Workplace collaboration platform, calling it an "end-of-life" strategy for Domino and predicting that "many Domino users will migrate away from the platform."

Radicati said the analysis was based on surveys and interviews with corporate executives with purchasing decision power, and an analysis of the information provided by IBM and Microsoft.

"The people who are writing on blogs—those are Lotus diehards, IT managers and midlevel people who've built their career on Lotus," Radicati said. "They're not necessarily the people who hold the purse strings. I think that's where some of the disconnect is."

This affair provides an almost textbook example of the sort of grassroots marketing support that vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems hope to gain by projecting their corporate presence into the blogging world.

At the same time, it also shows how complicated that interaction can be. To be successful, a company's community relationship should be built on honesty and trust—or at least on trust.

I am almost afraid to point out the various white papers I wrote last year, agreeing with the Radicati views on IBM's confused marketing message relative to Microsoft. In February November 2003 [Ed Brill's comment led me to correct this], I wrote First Take: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, where I said the following:

Undoing Sametime: The Battle for the Enterprise

In past years, IBM Lotus Sametime was the solution to beat for enterprise instant messaging, but Sametime is undergoing a wholesale restructuring within a larger IBM product family. Built on the reputation and functionality of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform, Lotus established a leadership position for enterprise real-time collaboration, both instant messaging and web conferencing, with its Sametime product.

As a part of IBM’s move to obsolete the venerable Notes/Domino technology, Lotus Sametime – as well as other collaborative technologies pioneered by Lotus – is being repositioned as a component of WebSphere, IBM’s enterprise application platform. IBM has been reorganizing all collaborative technologies around WebSphere, to the point where Lotus has become little more than a brand under the WebSphere umbrella.

Sametime is being reformulated as two products, Lotus Instant Messaging and Lotus Web Conferencing. Note that nearly all the sophisticated real-time communication capabilities are only available in Lotus Web Conferencing. These include audio and video chat, application sharing, and other advanced features that are native to Live Communications Server.

One element of confusion surrounding IBM’s plans for real-time collaboration is the future of the two products that have been refactored from Sametime. While they are currently sold through a single license, IBM’s is positioning the two as independent products. In the future Lotus Workplace, who knows how they will be licensed or managed? IBM is unclear on this matter.

At the beginning of 2003, Sametime was clearly the market leader for enterprise real-time collaboration. However, in the past ten months IBM has worked to reformulate Sametime as a WebSphere component and is quickly moving away from the Notes/Domino platform. These activities have been the major focus of SameTime development in 2003, instead of providing new functionality.

Consider that in the same period Microsoft has brought the Live Communications Server to market, integrated with the Office 2003 release, and providing very attractive features and functionality when compared with SameTime.

In particular, IBM seems to have turned its back on the desktop, and the productivity benefits for information workers that arise through real-time desktop collaboration. WebSphere provides a portal-style integration strategy for IBM customers, and IBM seems committed to getting its customers to turn their backs on the “in-context” collaboration that naturally emerges from integration of real-time collaboration with Office tools. Even at the January 2003 Lotusphere conference, established and knowledgeable Lotus business partners were questioning the WebSphere strategy, and conjecturing that some of the technological lead that Sametime had over its competitors would be lost as the result of IBM’s strategic priorities taking precedence over product enhancement. It looks now, ten months later, as if the discouraged business partners that I spoke with were right, at least with regard to the impact that the WebSphere strategy would have on Sametime’s technological leadership.

So, although I would seem to be speaking on the side of the malefactors in this recent analyst cat fight, I have to agree with the thrust of Radicati's analytic sentiment, if not their blogging etiquette.

[Pointer from Shared Spaces]

[7 Aug 2004 -- Note: I have struck out the references to Ferris, since I was informed by Michael Sampson that it wasn't Ferris folks, but others, including him (at Shared Space) that got all spun up in this thing.]

[7 Aug 2004 -- Also note: Ed Brill suggests that my comments regarding IBM's 'retreat from the desktop' are, at best, out of date, and at worst, simply wrong. I am open to persuasion! So I hope to interview Ed later this month, and get the walk-through on IBM's Workspace strategy and client technology.]

Gonzo Versus The Grays

Mark Glaser writes in the Online Journalism Review about some of the changes in use and attitudes towards blogging from many different parts of the professional world. Especially appropriate to the recent discussion of Gonzo Media is this tidbit:

Mark Glaser

[from Online Journalism Review]

Grueskin starts with the assumption that bloggers have the privilege of linking to WSJ.com stories, whether it's to criticize or praise them. And he doesn't believe journalists must have an adversarial relationship with blogs.

"Many traditional journalists have come to see blogging as an either-or proposition -- you're either a blogger or you're a conventional reporter or columnist," Grueskin told me via e-mail. "I see blogging as a nascent phenomenon that is a threat to journalism only to editors who treat it as such. I think the key is finding ways in which we can each do what we're best at, and look for ways to cooperate. Truth is, bloggers depend a great deal on traditional media. But, I'm coming to find, we can depend on them."

If you think it's all about love and kindness, think again. Grueskin says traffic generated from blogs to the free features has been "substantial" for compelling stories. While he couldn't be specific about numbers, Grueskin said the links from blogs sometimes rivaled the traffic generated by links in Yahoo Finance.

For now, the little line skirmishes are interesting, almost entertaining. In the long run, however, Big Media will be pushed over the this side and a significant re-calibration of attitudes/aptitudes will occur.

One last gripe in this little struggle - all readers of RSS are not Bloggers. Seems many have taken to forcefully attach the use of RSS to the blogosphere and it just isn't (completely) so.

More on 'Gonzo Journalism'

A flurry of comments and discussion arising from the recent piece on blog journalism.... One reader sent in a comment (that for some reason causes Moveable Type's comment system to burp... odd), so I am posting it with further observations.

Tom Biro

[via email]

On your 'gonzo journalism' point, I think you're spot on - as a blogger, I think I might actually 'care' more, in some cases, about the overall topic that a reporter is covering in an article I link to/write about. Not to the point where I'm biased one way or another, but I believe I'm able to perhaps take the thought process and investigation that the original author performed and add some value so as to not be purely derivative (a major point of contention between mediafolk and bloggers) - or just acting as a filter. The key, in my eyes, is taking the thought process out of people's heads that bloggers aren't out for their jobs - well, not directly, at least - and that a blogger linking to your work is actually a sign of respect or a sign of critical thinking.

If I "fisk" something that you've written, it should show that I can factually disprove something you've written, or take every point you make to task. If I link to an article about a media merger, I try and add something to the point, whether it be opinion or comparison to a similar situation, etc. - which may or may not have been originally planned for the item I'm linking to. Furthermore, I'm attempting to drive readers from my blog to the article being discussed because I believe it's worth their while - AND might be something the reader mightn't of found on their own. The big issue is making sure people realize that you are stating OPINION in some cases - bringing the "I" into the post. Sometimes bloggers break news stories - it's key in those cases for people to try and follow a format that a traditional media journalist would want to link to or use as a source. If you're looking for credibility, that's a simple way to get it. While using your trusty AP styleguide might not be the only way to do things, it can't hurt.

This doesn't have to be a "battle" in any sense of the word. Thanks for writing this piece - very productive, IMHO.

Tom Biro
The MediaDrop

It's ok to be biased, Tom. Emotional association with issues is the source of meaning and ultimately knowledge of any sort. The hypothetical impartiality of journalists is a myth, and my point was that it is this myth that will become the pivot point in the war between conventional and gonzo (blog) media.

The myth is that journalists are impartial about the stories they cover, but people cannot be impartial. Journalism is all about a certain perspective, a broadcast dynamic where the editorial board tells you what's important, and how much time you are supposed to apply to each topic on the front page. Leaving aside content -- where tone and perspective are more obvious -- the structure of traditional media is itself a statement, declaring a one-way information flow from the media out to the couch potatoes.

This central myth has to be confronted: inevitably we will all know it is false, and has never been true. It may have served a purpose when media was controlled and controllable, but now media is decentralized and decentralizing.

In today's world, we should want partiality, we should want authors who openly care deeply about their obsessions, and who put their desires foursquare in front of their audience/community.

You cannot belong by being an outsider. The new media is all about authentic voices coming from a community, engaging in an open dialogue, and belonging there. This is a transition that will be hard for some journalists to make, but ultimately, old outsiderish journalism will seem archaic, like listening to Edward Morrow broadcasts of WWII.

The Standoff Between Blogs and Journalism

The Democratic National Convention is bringing the formerly simmering dichotomy between blogging and journalism to a boil. In my rant yesterday on Strange Attractor, I attacked a vocal critic of Suw Charman's gonzo introduction to the new blog, but granted that he was uncovering something central in the war of words between the two "sides" in this ideological battle: journalism's belief in objectivity and editorial oversight versus blogging's reliance on subjective voice and individual authority.

The flapdoodle that cousin danah has started about bloggers being dissed by the traditional media priesthood is exactly the same issue:

danah boyd

[from Demeaning bloggers: the NYTimes is running scared]

As i’ve written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NYTimes pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as “low-brow” and unworthy of reading, while the NYTimes will present the real “high-brow” convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more “adult” perspective of “real” journalists.

The entire spin of the article focuses on how bloggers are like children in a candy store - naive, inexperienced and overwhelmed by what is now available to them.

This latest skirmish was picked up by many, including over at The Industry Standard, where an optimistic, live-together perspective is being presented:

Esme Vos

[from Journalists vs. bloggers: is that really so?]

With the official recognition of bloggers as members of that sacred tribe, the Press, at the Democratic National Convention, a war of words has broken out between the high priests and the newbies. Danah Boyd feels that the New York Times ran a demeaning article about bloggers. Other bloggers have weighed in saying that the mainstream press is afraid of them.

I have a different opinion. Journalists who have written on muncipal wireless broadband tell me that my blog, Muniwireless.com, has helped them research and finish their stories quickly. Blogs that focus on specific issues are now great sources of information for journalists. By visiting one site (example: Corante) they have access to the experts and accurate information much more quickly than in the past.

Through blogs, newspaper and magazines also find freelance writers who can contribute articles on specific subjects. Granted a lot of blogs are just stream-of-consciousness diary entries, there are enough that can add value to a newspaper's content.

But I think nothing brings this controversy into sharper relief than the exchange earlier this week between David Weinberger and David Mears, a veteran journalist now turned "blogger" for AP, at a Media Circle breakfast.

David Weinberger

[from The Media Circle]

I asked Mears, "So, who are you supporting for president?" He said that he wouldn't tell us that because "how could you trust what I write?"

"Then how can we trust what you write in your blog?" I asked.

Mears gave an articulate defense of the canon of journalistic professionalism, and of the craft and value of objectivity.

Of course I respect that. How can you not? We need professional journalists. But for most blogs, we want to know what the writer's starting point is. That's not because we're subjective journalists. It's because a blog is a conversation among friends, and when you're arguing politics with your pals, it'd just be weird to refuse to say where you stand.

You're right, blogging's not "subjective journalism," per se. Blogging is gonzo journalism, where who we are, what we are, and what we care about is as much a part of the story as what we are writing about. And, of course, the same is true in so-called objective journalism, except the belief system and perspective that underlies the purported objectivity is implicit, and therefore cannot be addressed directly.

More importantly, the editorial agenda of the traditional media -- what has made modern journalism such a potent force -- is all about deciding what is important and how much of the front page or the news hour to devote to it.

The world of blogging brings these decisions back to the individual, based on the personal balancing of trusted voices. Each of us can decide what issues are most critical, how to apportion our attention to the affairs of the day, and which memes are worthy of follow-up. We are taking the remote control out of the hands of the editors, and they don't like it. It will eat into their advertising, big time. It is no wonder, given what is at stake, that the established priesthood will rail from their pulpits, and make light of what is a truly profound power shift in the making.

The Battle For Your Hearts And Minds

Suw Charman's entry yesterday led to an interesting interchange with a reader, Anselm, who was advancing an agenda that is larger than Suw's initial blog entry, or even the Strange Attractor blog itself.

[from my comment]

Your deconstruction of Suw's 'Welcome' post seems like a social analysis of an invitation to dinner: "What are the overtones of 'bring your own beer'? Does 'RSVP' mean that they really don't want me to come? Is 'Sincerely' a subtle insult?"

Come on. Get over it.

But on the other hand, there is a real parallel in your critique with events brewing elsewhere in the world of new media. The desire for subjectivity and immediacy rather than objectivity and deliberation -- that you seem to be asking for -- is a centerpoint of the conflict between traditional journalism and social media (blogging).

And yes, we bloggers write from 'the perspective of how the world pivots' around us, and yes, for our own selfish amusement and self-improvement, absolutely regardless of what other people think. Welcome to the twenty-first century. The world does pivot around us, each and every one. There is no objectivity, and waving it around like a sacred relic does not make it so. People should think for themselves, and reject the mind control implied in 'objectivity' where deep-seated social conventions or the decisions of disembodied editorial forces sidetrack dialogue and stifle contention. This also means that we don't wait until we have figured it all out: we write, even when our thinking is not finished yet. We are always beginning, and never finished.

One of the benefits of blogging as a form of communication is a dialogue with a community of interested readers. That dialogue can be messy, can be bristling with unpalatable or contradictory ideas, and may not perfectly fit the presumptions of the casual reader. Occasionally, the dialogue may be a shouting match. And it can include 'little e-hugs' with people encouraging bloggers to press on, despite the trollish voices telling them to stop.

In the long run, however, the value of a blog is measured by its impact over time in the minds of the community members. It can't be judged based on its first posting, or even its first month of postings. Blogs take time, and involvement, and yes, even vocal nay-sayers howling at the moon.

Brand Shifting

I am attending BlogOn (do I ever do anything beside travel to and fro to conferences, you might ask), and one meme continues to emerge from the blog sludge that is being pushed around: how does blogging shift the meaning, perception, and utility of brand?

I maintain that a metaphorical shift of brand is taking place, analogous with the time shifting that real-time communication has engendered. Being able to touch people in real-time has changed everything in business conversation; similarly, moving the positioning of product or service from broadcast into many:many dialogue will force a reappraisal of brand. It will no longer be a promise, as someone stated yesterday in the BlogOn bootcamp, it will be an invitation.

Stand-Alone Journalism

Interesting turn of phrase from Chris Nolan -- Stand-Alone Journalism -- as a way to denote the difference between blogging and traditional media outlets:

Chris Nolan

[from Politics from Left to Right: It's Not Just Blogging Anymore]

For a while I, and many others have been dissatisfied with the term “web logging.” That focuses on the technology, not on what the technology produces. So, after a little thought, I’m calling what I and others do Stand-Alone Journalism. Why Stand-Alone Journalism? Well, it’s accurate. A journalist – or a small group of reporters – can work on the web to produce what they want as they find it appropriate. And readers are equally free to read the work of individual journalist as they see fit, on their time, not on schedules set by TV networks or the newspapers.

But I don't think that standalone jounalists (let's lose the hyphen, ok) need to beg, asking readers to drop a nickel in the paypal jar. If you have attracted even a small number of targeted readers, someone will pay to advertise to them. Or alternatively, sell those same readers some higher value information or service. For example, Chris Nolan should definitely be running a seminar on how to become a successful standalone journalist ('blogger'), although heshe would need someone else to do the section on advertising.

Here, at Get Real, and Corante I envision a technology platform to support a better reader experience, one that readers would willingly pay a dollar a month for. Which is enough, since we are just lowly, lowly standalone journalists after all.

[Note: Thanks to Joanne Kisling who straightened me out on Chris' gender.]

Biz Stone: How to Network With Blogs

I was poking around at Blogger, looking for supposed 'social networking' features -- which i haven't found, by the way -- when I stumbled across a Biz Stone entry: How To Network With Blogger. It is a pretty good recitation of the implicit social networking features that blogging gives. The piece also included a pointer to a funny post at Craigslist that I missed:

Kottke.org

[from Wanted: personal social network coordinator]

Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.

Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.

[...]

Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, "heavy", or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.

Back to the romp I took at Blogger: I was struck by the mismatch between the now-traditional website style navigation and trying to find information buried in various blogs. I transited to Blogger by browsing manually to www.blogger.com, which is a 'brochureware' style website. There is a really good intro to the value prop for blogging in a sequence of pages there, but most of the critical marketing and developer sorts of communication is buried in a set of blogs. But they are hard to find, and there is no apparent 'blogdex' or card catalog to help explore them.

You'd think that someone like Google would be piloting in that direction, coming up with a new metaphor for blog-based search, or blog information access, or blog information discovery.

At the very least, though, Blogger should post a catalog of the company blogs, and a 'front page' a la AlwaysOn Network so that information is shuffled together into some manageable, accessible format.

Gary Turner Hangs It Up

I see that Gary Turner of Memoria Technica is hanging it up, and clsoing down his blog.

I got a chill reading his oblique disclosure about why:

Gary Turner

What's brought this sudden change of heart? Frankly, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% on the ball with this, it's an identity crisis that was quietly baked in from the very beginning but which lately, has been surfaced and exacerbated by my recent spate of meetings. In short, my blog self is not my entire self and I must say that I've been cool with that as long as both of those two selves never happen to appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue and this is something I'm finding uncomfortable to reconcile.

This isn't a profound real life personal identity crisis thing, it's just something that I've recently come to notice and realise is a conflict in my blogging terms of reference, and it's a conflict which seems to have mortally wounded my blogging self.

[Update: 6/3/2004 5:15pm EST

I should have mentioned Greg Narain's 'Blatigue' -- blog fatigue -- when talking about Gary's condition.]

Meckler on Blogs

JuliterMedia CEO Alan Meckler got interviewed recent, and he is lukewarmish on the future of blogs, even though he says they generate leads.

Steve Rubel

[from Alan Meckler: Few Blogs Will Generate Money]

MP: What's your view of the blog vertical business model that Nick Denton's Gawker Media and Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. have developed? In some ways they're emulating what you created with Internet.com way back when. Business 2.0 reports Denton pulls in $250k per year. Not too shabby for blogs.

MECKLER: Very few blogs will be able to generate money. Within the Gawker and Weblogs Inc. empires one will find a handful of blogs that can generate income. Therefore I am not a big fan of the concept as a way to make big income. Blogs associated with network sites like our Jupiterweb, on the other hand, can in fact tangentially generate revenue because the readership is likely to want to find out more about a writer and this in turn can lead to lead generation. We see this with our Jupiter Research division. Several analysts write blogs which are free. Readers of these blogs might be impressed with the opinions expressed by one or more of our analysts -- and this can lead to sales leads.

Referred by pc4media, who disses Hylton and me here at Corante:

And why doesn't anyone ever mention corante.com when they talk about blog empires? I think Corante needs an outspoken personality.

Amazon Launches Plogs

I read at Boing Boing that Amazon has launched personal logs (Plogs) as a mechanism to personalize the user experience.

I can't tweak very much, can't change look/feel, move things around -- just toggling on and off the monetary value of purchases made -- and I can't actually add any content. Wouldn't it be sensible to have my own reviews, etc.?

Is this only a mechanism to push information to me? Even so I like the format. But there is no RSS feed, so I guess you have to actually go and read the damn thing.

And the whole social angle -- seeing updates to your buddies' wishlists, for example -- isn't integrated at all.

They have a long way to go. But I like the direction.

[Update: I have had a few requests to show a screenshot , since it seems some folks (like Peter, and Kottke) haven't been given plogs yet. Click on the thumbnail below:

]

Kinja - Blog of Blogs?

I read in the current Wired more about the missteps surrounding Kinja, which was a big dissappointment for me, relative to the underbuzz that had been building up about it, and the thought that it would be more like the 'blogisphere' notion I dreamed up with pals last summer (see various Kinja pieces).

Steven Levy

[from Wired 12.06: How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business?]

[Nick] Denton's biggest play has been in the works for two years: Kinja, a "blog of blogs" that enables even tech-challenged clods to become master blog consumers. The idea is to present a single free site that lets surfers punch in their favorite weblogs and thereafter receive a steady stream of items from them. What's more, they can publicly post a digest of favorites for others to admire and learn from, or choose from preselected - and ad-friendly - digests of the most popular blogs. Denton's bet is that Kinja will draw more eyeballs than all his writer-based blogs combined, as well as synergistically boost the pageviews of his other properties. And, of course, snare even bigger advertisers.

Another possible revenue stream for Kinja might come from its ability to note the preferences and behaviors of blog readers. Companies like Technorati, a Web site that maniacally monitors blog consumption, are already exploring the idea that the big payoffs from weblogs might be their ability to act as cultural thermometers. Down the line, Kinja might sell temperature readings to research-obsessed corporations.

Denton hired Pyra cofounder Meg Hourihan to develop the product, which was set up early last year with the stealth title "The Lafayette Project." Denton chose to proceed gingerly, and the effort - apparently by some disagreements on direction - wasn't done until April of this year.

Kinja's tardiness exacted a penalty. Back in Silicon Valley, an entrepreneur named Mark Fletcher began Bloglines last July, getting the first rev up after only three months. His goal is similar to Denton's: create a way to organize your blog-reading that's easy even for nongeeks. Using a viral word-of-mouth buildup, he claims "tens of thousands of users" on a site that's been adding improvements month by month. Fletcher's take on Kinja? "Late to the game and not enough features."

Denton admits the early returns are "so-so" but thinks it's early in the game.

Gates on Business Blogging

I guess things are going well at the Microsoft TheSpoke and Channel 9 blog projects: Bill Gates has announced that blogging is going to change business.

Reed Stevenson

[from Microsoft's Gates Touts Blogging as Business Tool

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.

Gates' comments on blogging technology were the most extensive thus far from Microsoft's chief software architect, signaling that the world's largest software company is waking up to the potential of blogging as a potential threat and also as a new business opportunity.

Blogs, short for Weblogs, have been around for several years, serving as online journals for Web-savvy disseminators of information ranging from personal ramblings, product reviews, to social commentary.

The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, however, is attracting greater attention from businesses as a means to communicate more directly with their employees, partners and customers.

Google Blog

Seems like a long time ago that I wrote about the market ramifications of Google purchasing Pyralabs (of Blogger fame). Now, a lifetime later (15 months have passed) Google has gotten around to having an official blog: see Google Blog.

Its hard to judge a blog after only a few entries, but a few comments. The first entry is signed by Ev Williams, the Blogger Program manager and founder of Pyra, welcoming us, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. But the other two entries are unsigned. Is it a unnamed, faceless PR staff at work? I would have hoped for interaction with specific real people. If not Eric, Sergey, and Larry -- who are 'first named' in the first blog entry as if we all know who they are although they are not explicitly present, as if we, the readers, are already members of the Google cult-of-personality -- then other tangible and responsible peoples' names should be on the entries, taking responsibility.

The flap outlined in today's WSJ (in Tech Journal) regarding Google's decisions to pull an entry dealing with outsourcing of engineering jobs to India, suggests that even a iconoclastic icon like Google can find itself painfully and publicly pulled between the conflicting goals of openness and corporateness.

What does it mean for a publicly traded (or soon-to-be) company to have an 'official blog'? Will it just be marketing propaganda or brochureware packaged in a different folder format? Or is it going to be an active dialogue with the marketplace? Which marketplace, by the way? How could a behemoth the size of Google have only one official blog? Won't it actually need hundreds? Or at least dozens? One per product line? Who will watch the content, to make sure it passes SEC muster? Who will watch the watchers?

These and a thousand related issues will need to be aired and resolved before the openness/corporateness divide can be bridged. But I retain the conviction that the final bridgework will rely on blogging, and other social tools, and in that regard Blogger and its competitors are looking at a big future, although the societal impacts of increasing openness in the business scene -- as a needed element of transparent corporate governance -- are likely to lead to wild oscillations in our perceptions of what goes into appropriate, effective, and legal corporate public relations.

First Take: Picasa Hello and Blogger

The recently announced integration of Picasa Hello with Google's Blogger service is fairly seamless, and works pretty much as you might expect, if you had given a lot of thought to it.

The Hello client is a cleverly implemented fusion of digital photo sharing with instant messaging (see earlier review), made really compelling when supported by the Picasa digital photo management product. The ability to share digital pix with buddies and friends through a 'chat' model, based on the metaphor of a scrollable and savable filmstrip is really great. (And now is being widely copied, it seems.)

The folks at Picasa and Google have come up with a collection of integrated elements to make Hello talk with Blogger; literally. To make the connection, you have to add 'BloggerBot' to your Hello buddylist. Then, to post pictures to a Blogger blog, you share the photos with BloggerBot, just as if he were another person, more or less. However, the interaction with the bot leads to a number of additional controls presented in the UI, such as the option (one I recommend using) of creating a brand new Blogger blog as the place to post your digital photos. Check out stowepix.blogspot.com to see the photos I posted. The augmented IM interface also supports adding captions for the photos, which also worked.

I had less luck trying to use an existing blog, although I created one only minutes earlier through the conventional (although newly improved!) Blogger interface. I never was able to get the snags out of that, although I gave up after only a minute or so, being a lazy and weak-kneed analyst at heart.

This was also my first peep at the new Blogger, which looks like it has remained true to its lowest common denominator model, and if anything has simplified what was almost the most minimal of conceivable blog feature sets. I must confess, that like other reviewers, I find myself wondering about things like trackbacks, predefined lists (like Typepad Typelists), and the like. It definitely needs more than this to get me to recommend it. I can't seem to enable comments for the photo blog I created, although comments are turned on. I will reserve final judgment, but at first glance it looks like hardly any work has gone into extending the feature set (although I don't recall comments being a built-in of Blogger before), so I am presuming that they spent a great deal of time and energy on performance, scale, and reliability -- all below the hood. I am willing to hold my breath a while, I guess, but this is pretty tame stuff.

The Revolution WILL Be Blogged

I read a Mother Jones piece by George Packer on blogging, and although I think it really is more about political blogging, rather than blogging in general, I find myself being partially persuaded by Packer's characterizations, but not his conclusions:

George Packer

[from The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged]

The style of thickly descriptive storytelling, based on heavy reporting, immersed readers in the arc of an election year, achieving a sense of unity between the protagonists and the spectators, so that the campaign seemed to involve the whole of American society in the theatrics.

Blogs, by contrast, are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.

I also think that Packer is right: blogs are indeed "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" and those are characteristics that typify successful media of our time. However, traditional journalism attempts to dissociate the author from the story. The pre-Heisenburg notion of an impartial, fact-finding, objective journalist who merely transcribes as history unfolds -- that idea is gone, or at least going.

While all experience of the world is private (until shared, at least), I don't believe we are trapped to find only stunted and insular insights in blogland. The form factor of blogging is shortish snippets, as opposed to longer pieces, and to gain a sense of the writer's mastery requires more of the reader than traditional journalism: the reader must return, and read again, and again, perhaps, to understand what the writer is up to. It is a serialized experience, and hoping that it could be condensed or smoothed into something else, smoothing into something more conventional means you are missing the point.

At any rate, no doubt about it, the revolution will be blogged, whatever revolution you may be thinking of. I guess in this case, the implicit argument is that the failure -- if that's what it is -- of Dean's populist revolt should be laid at the feet of the bloggers and the emergent democracy vanguard.

What may be missing from Packer's thinking is the participatory and involving aspect of most blogs -- something that is missed, or glossed over, if you apprach them with the eyes of a traditional reader. Every blog implies a community of readers, and their involvement -- to the degree that it jumps out -- changes the experience of reading totally, turning what may be thought of as "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" into something else entirely.

Dana on Ev Williams: Give It Time

Dana (over at Moore's Lore) thinks we should hang Ev Williams because of the recent Blogger release. I haven't yet fooled around with the Picasa integration (see yesterday's story) but it looks like the push is toward mass market appeal, as opposed to more features for weenies like us.

The jury will have to remain out a while on that one, and perhaps it will be better to look at the next series of releases, to see if the numbers creep up and if defection rates (always very high for blogging tools) go down.

Picasa Partners with Google's Blogger

Got very interesting email this morning, announcing a new partnership between Picasa -- the digital photo management company, whose Hello IM/Photo sharing app I reviewed here last year -- and Google's Blogger service. I haven't yet fooled with the integration, but I plan to.

Wendy Corn

[via email]

Dear Stowe,

Picasa, Inc., (http://www.picasa.net) the leading digital photo organizing software which allows photographers to organize, manage and share digital photos, announced today it's working partnership with Blogger.com, a subsidiary of Google, to allow Blogger members to post photos and captions directly to their personal online journal or Weblog using Picasa's innovative sharing tool Hello.

Hello (http://www.hello.com) opens a private peer-to-peer network connection for instant sharing of photos and immediate feedback through Hello's chat function while Picasa facilitates users to organize and share their digital photos. This integration gives Bloggers a fast and easy way to expand and express themselves through their Blogs while increasing visibility on the web through photos. In order to post photos and captions, Hello users simply send their photos to the username "Bloggerbot" and immediately their Weblog is automatically updated.

Please consider sharing this news with your readers by adding a link to Picasa and posting the press release below. If you are interested in writing a feature story or would like to review Picasa/Hello please contact me. For more information please see the press release below.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Wendy R. Corn
On Behalf of Picasa

The following press release is not yet available on the Picasa website, as far as I can see.

Continue reading "Picasa Partners with Google's Blogger"

Blog and Wiki Research

Participatory journalism is becoming more real, with evidence like the following:

Leonard Witt

[from PJNet Today: Emergence of Blog and Wiki Research

When we have our Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conferece on Aug. 3 in Toronto, we want to discuss research possibilities. Here are some research examples from the recent 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin:

Blog, Blog, Blog: Experiences with web logs in journalism classes

by Eric M. Wiltse, Senior Lecturer, University of Wyoming



Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource

by Andrew Lih, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong

When the Audience is the Producer: The Art of the Collaborative Weblog

by Lou Rutigliano, Masters Student, University of Texas at Austin

See other symposium research papers here.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for pointing us to the research.

Silk Road Acquires Moblogging Technology

I was pinged this morning by Peter Quintas, who told me that Silk Road has acquired some moblogging technology:

Peter Quitas

[from tourniQuet]

I'm so exicted about this technology and offering that I wanted to share the scoop... We've acquired a mobile blogging solution that integrates directly to the network operators. The technology can be served through 2 models, the typical SMTP send-like-an-email model, or through MMS, a more robust and secure channel. This is a HUGE capability for enterprise use.

Some highlights of the latter model:

• Information on user agents (devices/users) are easily available
• Robust authentication, authorization, guranteed message retrieval
• High security, SSL and digital signature based integration possible

More to come soon...

Joe Hildebrand on Gush for OSX

Joe Hildebrand of Jabber mentioned that he had blogged on Gush.

Joe Hildebrand

[from Jabber Architecture: Gush on OSX]

Gush is already the best-looking [Jabber] client on OSX, in its very first release. Nice job.

Another Go With Gush

The folks at 2Entwine have released v1.1 of Gush, with a long list of new features, in particular support for gateways to connect with AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, presence notifications, and improved RSS support in the included blog reader. I reviewed an earlier version a few months back (see Gushing for Gush).

I have shifted over to testing Gush v1.1 extensively, and I have imported AIM, and MSN contacts into the client -- aside from a few small confusions, it seems to work (although the AIM nicknames got scrambled somehow, and I had to rekey them). Like Trillian, Gush now can serve as a single client, linking to all the networks, plus Jabber, which is the native protocol.

I really like the notifications panel (look right), which is a window that hovers within the app's desktop, and indicates your buddies comings and goings.

The RSS reader has been drastically extended, and supports thumbnails and full size photos from RSS feeds. Really awesome.

Like I said in the earlier article, I would like everyone to download this client. The ability to create 'announcements' for the various groups on your buddy list is a real breakthrough. With the integration with AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as external Jabber accounts, Gush supports broadcasting of those announcements -- a feature that I like, but which I learned about the hard way last week. I thought I was sending an announcement to Gush users, but my entire AIM contact list learned about my plnas for a West Coast trip. No sweat, and I like the ability to broadcast to a group -- no matter what service they are on! However, to be able to browse the announcements as if they were blog entires, you need a Gush client, and I guess, a Gush login id.

Get one, and send your contact info along to me. I am trying to develop a buddy list for Get Real readers, and user that as a means of keeping in the loop with you'all... better than email, for sure. And Gush -- while habit forming -- is still free.

My Trip To BloggerCon II

I had a great trip to BloggerCon II. Aside from the fact that Harvard is not prepared for an overly warm day in April (air conditioning was inadequate for the mob), the event was otherwise great. Saw a lot of existing friends and "equiantances."

The high point of the symposium for me was the session on "The Business of Blogging" (not to be confused with "Blogging in Business"), led by Jeff Jarvis. I was amazed to discover that we at Corante are in the vanguard of bloggers, inasmuchas we are already deriving measurable revenue from ad-based sponsorship (see the right column, if you haven't noticed them already).

My participation in Jeff's session led to several chats, later, with bloggers and reporters about the fact that the new media of blogging is adopting (or absorbing) some of the traditional financial models of traditional media.

Julie Haggerty

[from The New York Times]

But the most talked about route to profit was selling advertisements that pay by the month or by the number of blog visits. Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs on the Web with its musings by four freelance writers, is considering adding sponsors as a way to offset its server fees of about $1,000 a month.

But observers wonder how advertising - the lifeblood of mainstream newspapers and magazines - will affect the grass-roots-sensibility of Boing Boing and other blogs.

"It all comes down to personal integrity," Mr. Jarvis said. "If you trust and like and read Boing Boing because you trust and like and read it, there is no reason you wouldn't continue to read them because someone is paying for their server."

Bloggers, like Stowe Boyd, who posts at www.corante.com/getreal/, have no problem reviewing products with one hand and soliciting sponsors with the other. Mr. Boyd, who came to the conference from Reston, Va., makes most of his income as a consultant on collaborative technologies, but credits his blog with about $3,000 in advertising revenue each month. "They can't get me to turn around and promote their product," he said. "It's all my agenda."

Before advertisers will flock to blogs, Mr. Jarvis said, bloggers will need to develop data on who is visiting their site, and how often. "I don't want to blow up a bubble here and say this is going to be huge," Mr. Jarvis said." The beauty of it is it is small and it's in the hands of the people."

Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds, a service that provides classified advertising for Web logs, is even more confident. He predicted that blogs that are making $5,000 a month will be making five or six times that a year from now. Soon, advertisers will be able to say "I want to buy ads on 25 different Web logs in Southern California written by women who drive humvees," and have the perfect audience at their fingertips, he said.

I was unaware that so few bloggers are making money -- in fact, for many semi-successful bloggers the hobby can take a big bite out of their wallet when a spike in readership leads to additional fees from a hosting provider.

Two important outgrowths of the conference for me:

• Jeff Jarvis' session led to a straw poll suggesting as a next step that we form a 'blogging business association' to establish guidelines, collectively bargain for insurance (and other services), and lobby for the 'blogging fringe' of the media marketplace.
  
• I hope to kick off a seminar series (with the sponsorship and support of Corante) to help bloggers turn the corner on becoming a 'professional blogger' -- for which a full definition is still in development. There is no replacement for great content, but content is not enough. I hope to show others how to put the pieces together so blogging can more than just a solitary obsession, and perhaps enough of a paying proposition so you can quit your day job.

For more information on the seminars, or to get information in general from Get Real, please register in the 'Subscribe' box in the left margin.

BloggerCon

Headed off to BloggerCon tomorrow for a day with friends and colleagues. Hope to see you there!

Channel 9 - Microsoft Blogs to the Development Community

I got several pings in the past day or so about Microsoft's Channel 9, a group blog set up to better connect to the developer community. Looks interesting, although there is a lot of chatter within the userbase about the site itself -- how its configured, the UI, and so on -- that suggests it is very much a work in progress, although very promising.

One news piece at Computerworld on the site demonstrated the conflation of the "social networking" term to include various non-networking social tools, like blogs and wikis.

[ from Microsoft's Channel 9 gets social with developers - Computerworld]

Microsoft Corp. has quietly expanded its Microsoft Developer Network with a Web site that combines a host of social networking technologies in a move to improve communications with outside software developers.

The Web site, called Channel 9, uses weblogs, mobile blogs, wikis and forums as well as other technologies to reach out to developers. The site was created by a group of five engineers and technology evangelists at Microsoft; it was named after the United Airlines in-flight audio channel that allows passengers to listen in on cockpit communications.

But there is no explicit social networking technology whatsoever. The term will soon be so overused that no meaningful residue of its initial meaning will remain.

Meg Hourihan and Kinja

Just my luck. Now that I have *finally* established contact with Meg Hourihan at Kinja, it turns out she will be leaving in the next few weeks.

Nick Denton

[From Nick Denton's blog]

Might as well get all the news out in one day. Once Kinja's bedded down, Meg Hourihan will be moving on. Meg's been project director since the start of the site, and what you see is her creation, along with the engineering team of Gina, Jim, Mark and Matt. I'm just the guy who writes the checks, and insists on pretty icons.

We're not going to refill the position, but have been searching for a Chief Technology Officer. Now that we've launched, most of the issues we'll face over the next few months will be to do with hardware, and scaling the system. We need a CTO with experience running high-volume high-availability sites. We have a couple of candidates, but the search is still open. If you're interested in the role, or know someone who would be a good fit, please email me at nick@gawker.com. I'll send the job specs.

As for future directions of the product... Meg, as well as remaining as chair of Kinja's board, will continue to consult. 37signals, the interface design consultancy, will be taking an ongoing role. And you can also send me your wishlists.

Kinja Beta

I saw (in a NY Times piece by David Gallegher) that Kinja has gone live with a beta, and after fddling around with it for few minutes (see my digest) I had an aggregation of a few of my favorite blogs up and running.

Kinja turns out to have none of the social networking flavor that I anticipated (see recent blurt: "Rumors of Kinja"), but instead looks like a blog aggregation for those who a/ don't know anything about blogs, or b/ don't want to use more compact representation of blog content.

Still have to wait and see if Kinja is plotting something around social networks. Check out the screenshot -- looks like there is something social going on with "friends and favorites." Where its headed, I don't know. And Meg Hourihan won't answer my emails...

Earlier today I stumbled across Pluck, which is an IE plugin RSS aggregator that runs in a panel in the browser. Way easier to use than Kinja.

Fractal Blogspace

I was tracking something down at Don Park's Daily Habit, and noticed an arresting graphic: a fractal blogspace for Don Park.

I am in there -- small, but noticeable if you click to enlarge the image.

The graphic was generated using technology developed by Levitated. Go check it out.

Blog Survey: Summary of Findings - Fernanda Viegas

I saw that a recent survey about blogging had been developed and analyzed by Viegas, who is a PhD candidate working in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.

The bottom-line:

"Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public's imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one's life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. [emphasis mine] Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends' feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent."

Another indicator of the changes that social tools have -- new ways to hurt people, get sued, or lose your job.

The Economist on Blogging in the Enterprise

I saw that the Economist looked closely at Socialtext's Wiki/Blog fusion technology in the recent Blogging Goes To Work [premium content requires subscription]. I mentioned SocialText's tool in my most recent Darwin column, Wicked Good Wikis, and the Economist piece seems to take a similar slant:

"While bloggers—half of whom are teenagers, according to one survey—are convinced that they are changing the world, not everyone agrees. There are, whisper it, even some people beyond the insular world of the “blogosphere” who have not even heard of blogging at all. Ross Mayfield, the founder of Socialtext, a firm based in Palo Alto, California, wants to move blogging beyond its usual constituency of teenagers and wide-eyed political activists. His company is taking a novel approach, arguing that blogging might actually be useful in business.

Socialtext makes a corporate version of a wiki—a web page that can be edited by any reader (the word means “quickly” in Hawaiian). Wikis offer a middle ground between e-mail and a conventional web page, which makes them useful for collaborative projects, particularly those involving far-flung teams. Rather than maintaining multiple copies of a document and sharing ideas by e-mail, a wiki allows members of a team to pool their thoughts more easily. Wikis are not particularly new, but are now beginning to demonstrate the potential to replace other forms of groupware.

“When I first heard of wikis, I brushed it off as a weird, messy thing that was out of control and never would be useful,” says Peter Morville, head of Semantic Studios, a consultancy in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He now thinks more highly of them, having successfully used them on several projects with clients.

Socialtext takes the wiki concept and adds to it some corporate bullet-proofing. It can be used to create a conventional blog, yes, but more importantly it tracks different versions of documents, so that people working on a project can see each other's changes and go back to earlier versions. It also has administrative tools that allow wiki entries to be viewed and sorted in different ways.

Socialtext launched its product at the end of last year, and already has dozens of customers. One example is Soar Technology, a Michigan-based software firm. Jacob Crossman, an engineer at Soar, has been using the Socialtext software for a six-person project. Though there is still room for improvement, he says the software will probably become the collaborative tool of choice at his company. A use for blogging? Perhaps the teenagers are on to something after all."

Tribe.net: RSS Output From Tribe's Message Boards

Marc Canter pinged me about a newly launched feature at Tribe.net: support for RSS output of Tribe's message boards.

This is an interesting fusion of bottom-up information from Tribe members and the RSS model for blog (and other sources) content aggregation. I have written about the power of this sort of group content aggregation in many venues. It's great to see that the social networking leaders are moving so quickly.

More on Kinja

Marc Canter pointed out to me that Meg Hourihan was talking up Kinja a year ago, and that I was probably demonstrating to all and sundry how much of a hayseed I am, since I was unaware of the Kinja project until recently. True, true.

I have also stumbled into some notes that Cory Doctorow scribbled at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference 2003 listening to a presentation that Meg gave there on Kinja's design context.

Blogging is Generational

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that an astonishing proportion of Internet users are contributing content:

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about content-creating activities. These users, on average, have done more of the content-creating activities than others, with a mean of 2 activities. This group is quite similar to the Young Tech Elite, detailed in our recent Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States report. (2)

These creators are much younger than the other two types of creators, with an average age of 25 (compared to 58 in the Older group and 40 for the Omnivores). They are slightly more likely to be male (56% of the group). Race and ethnicity are not much of a factor—this group looks like the Internet population at large, with a slightly larger percentage of Hispanics. Eighteen percent of this group identify themselves as Hispanic, compared to 11% of the whole Internet-using population.

The youth of this group informs many of the activities that they do. Instant messaging is extremely popular with this group, with two-thirds saying that have used instant messaging. Online game playing is also prevalent in this group with more than half participating in this activity. Statistically, young people are a more mobile as a group than older Americans, and Power content creators are no exception. This group is far more likely to search online for a job (63%) or a place to live (50%) than other creators.

In another nod to youth, this group also downloads music at a much greater rate than their other content creating compatriots, and are far more likely to report posting audio files and artwork to a Web site.

Power creators might also be called the Bloggers—12% of this group has a blog and close to a third (29%) has ever visited one, compared to less than 3% of other creators, and much lower levels of reported blog visits in the other two groups.

Power creators are also the most likely of all creators to have broadband Internet access—40% of power creators have high-speed access.

Rumors of Kinja

I have caught a few hints about Kinja -- a new approach to blog readership/aggregation/search -- but the website is locked down. Best clues are at www.megnut.com, the blog of Meg Hourihan, one of the founders of Pyra (Blogger).

"I am now the co-founder and president of Kinja (aka the Lafayette Project). Kinja will use the editorial selections and commentary of weblogs to provide a new type of personalized news service. We hope to create a compelling, relevant, and simple weblog reading experience. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about what we're up to."

"It’s Hard to Read Blogs, but Easy to Write Them

Existing blog technology – as typified by Blogger, Scribble, Greymatter, Big Blog Tool, Movable Type, and Radio Userland, for example – is geared toward the creation and editing of blog content. They are designed to support the activities of the authors, and actually only accomplish that at a primitive level. Surprisingly, many of the features that blog writers would like – reader comments and ratings, polls and other interactive capabilities, notification -- are currently incompletely implemented or provided by third parties.

However, while better blog authoring tools is desirable, it is unclear how any collection of features that are solely geared to improving the lot of writers will lead to a real business model. There are too many low-cost or no-cost competitors. Writers will need some real incentives to shift from whatever they have grown comfortable with.

On the other hand, reading blogs is a pain. I don’t mean the activity of reading a single blog, once you know about it. That’s easy enough. It’s just a web page, with various controls provided.

No – the hard part is being a consistent reader of many blogs. Readers have to keep tabs on each of the blogs they like using different techniques – some manual, some email based. Even more difficult is trying to find high-quality content pertinent to some interest. Blogdex and other indexing systems provide a start in this regard, but I dare you to wade into the world of blogs and try to find quality content about “Travel Writing” or “Microsoft XP” unless you already have a thread or a pointer. And even if a reader has determined a selection of the world’s thousands of blogs that are of interest, there is no good way to create a “DailyMe” – a compilation of recent information from a variety of designated blogs – accessible to a reader or a group of readers.

Support for RSS -- Rich Site Summary (RSS) – in various blogger services is a starting point for ‘push’ style of content distribution.

But what is needed is a pull model – where readers’ activities pull information from various blogs, not a mechanism for publishers to pull content. It’s the subscribe side of the equation – the reader’s side – that needs support.

The premise behind Blogisphere is that the missing insight for creating a working business model around blogs is to focus on what the readers need, and build a system to support readers: to make reading blogs easier and more rewarding.

This model would be based on the now well-established principles of collaborative filtering and slashdot style reader-based evaluation of content quality. And like Slashdot, the goal is to foster communities of readers, united through shared technology. Today, we find that this is emerging in an unconsolidated and haphazard way. Providing a better reader experience – one that will integrate with existing authoring systems, but provide a uniform and consistent reader participation model – will provide a strong incentive for readers to use the system. And later on, the authors will follow."

John Battelle On "Why Blogs Mean Business"

John Battelle distills his argument for the central role of blogs in business at Business 2.0:

"Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it's cool to read them, but because those who don't read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions."

Blog Advertising: Cheap and Effective

Frank Barnako of CBS Marketwatch included the following blurb in today's email blast:

"Blogs pay off for Kentucky candidate

A $2,000 investment in advertising on a dozen blogs helped fuel a successful Congressional campaign for Ben Chandler. The marketing effort for the Democratic candidate in Kentucky's sixth district returned $80,000 in two weeks, money that was funneled into radio and cable spots and is credited for Chandler's late surge to victory on Tuesday, Wired news reported. Campaign manager Mark Nickolas figured readers of political blogs, while not in the district, were likely to be interested in the race to help a southern Democrat recapture a seat in the House. Blogs included in the campaign were the left-leading Daily Kos, Political Wire and Eschaton."

WaveMarket Debuts at DEMO

I heard that Wavemarket was the darling of DEMO, with their location-based mobile WaveAlert tool showing SF traffic jams and a speed trap.

From the company's product page:

"The three components of WaveIQ [WaveMarket technology platform for mobile operators] are:

• WaveSpotter turns cell phones into location-enabled broadcasting and viewing devices. You can zoom around our map-based interface and interact with location-based content, like other blog posts, or even yellow page listings relevant to your location. You can now immortalize when and where you proposed to your spouse, or where you sited a celebrity, or just the best donut shop in town.

• WaveBlog, is where you go to see postings from anywhere that interests you. So, if want to know where the hippest place in town is tonight, just check out the entertainment channel and find out. Or, for how to get there, there's a traffic channel. The number of posts, pages, and channels we host is unlimited, but it's all organized by place and time so you get where you want in just seconds.

• WaveAlert enables wireless operators to notify you when are near something important to you, like a speed trap before its too late, or a good friend who happens to be in your area. Now you get the information you want when you need it based on your location and interests. For the first time WaveAlert solves the tremendous technical challenges required for these services by dramatically reducing location polling rates while also efficiently scaling to millions of subscribers."

Silkroad Debuts Enterprise Blog Technology at DEMO

SilkRoad Technology, a company founded by Andrew "Flip" Filipowski, today announced Silkblogs, an enterprise-oriented blog technology.

In deploying the first level of collaboration tools, such as instant messaging, e-mail and Web conferencing systems, organizations took the step towards sharing, accessing and distributing this information. The next generation of contextual collaboration demands empowering geographically dispersed business users to update, manage and share information immediately. At the same time, organizations must also enable knowledge-seekers, those searching for knowledge within the enterprise, transparent access to the information. Weblogs provide the easiest and most cost-effective way to share, access and react to information quickly.

“As enterprises move to the next generation of information-sharing applications, collaboration will be at the core and the foundation of these solutions,” said Andrew ‘Flip’ Filipowski, CEO of Silkroad technology. “We have seen that Weblogs are the easiest and most effective means to disseminate large amounts of important information quickly. To insight action on this knowledge, enterprises must provide a forum for employees to collaborate and react quickly, driving faster response and results. With SilkBlogs, we are first to market with this type of solution, and believe we have solved a tremendous problem facing companies today.”

Clay on Computerworld Article re Blogging in the Enterprise

Clay writes over at Many2Many about blogging in the enterprise:

"... technology tends to be an amplifier, so streamlining things often makes a bad culture able to to get worse faster. If a company distrusts employee initiative, blogs won't help much, except maybe in that "precipitate a crisis" way -- they are tools, not magic pixie dust."

Email Is Where Knowledge Goes To Die

Seb Paquet pointed me to an interesting piece: Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal by Bill French.

"On a daily basis almost every knowledge-worker reads news and other sources of business content and then creates comments and observations that other business associates, colleagues, customers, and vendors consume. The usual and customary method for creating annotations and observations is by e-mail. I have nothing against e-mail - in fact - my philosophical perspective is that SMTP and e-mail processes represent valuable collaboration tools for enterprises that cannot be discarded, but may certainly be optimized. However, the place where e-mail content comes to rest is problematic - e-mail is where knowledge goes to die."

And I love that line: e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.

It's Just a Tool, Boys

Great piece by Jeff Jarvis (thanks to David Weinberger's pointer) that pokes fun at the amazingly dumb discussion about the role of blogging in so-called "Real-Time Democracy":

"Well, this chitchat assumes, wrongly, that (a) the Internet is for fringe opinions and (b) Internet users are Dean supporters. The logical extension of that is that Dean is fringe, but I'll leave that straightline aside. This is still stupidly generalizing.

IT'S JUST A TOOL, BOYS. Tools have no ideology or loyalty. Whether pamphleteering or phone canvassing or direct mail or the Internet or weblogs, they're just tools that are used wisely or not. Dean learned quickly and used them wisely. That says a lot about Dean -- and his people -- and little about the tools, you tools.

: Frustrating just reading that.

I'll tell you what the world needs: Another show: Meet the Blogs."

My So-Called Blog

Emily Nussbaum's recent NY Times magazine piece, My So-Called Blog, explores the ways that kids -- highschoolers -- are using new media, like blogs and instant messaging -- to socialize.

"Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison."

Dave Pollard's List of 10

Just when I was sure that one more top ten predictions would drive me nuts, Dave Pollard offers a list that lines up so directly with my own rantings that I almost wish I wrote my own list.

"4. Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president."

Mo'time: IM-enabled Blogging

I have long been interested in the apparent overlap in RSS newsfeeds and the possible application of instant messaging to alert blog readers to new entries. It seems I am not alone in that regard.

I recently spoke with Howard Liptzin, of Tipic, a European player in the instant messaging space. The company has developed an XMPP-compliant instant messaging product which interoperates with Jabber and other XMPP solutions.

But the reason for my call wasn't instant messaging, per se; it was the announcement around Tipic's new blogging solution, Mo'time, which is a simple but powerful hosted blogging solution, much like Blogger or Typepad. What caught my eye is the integration of instant messaging as an alerting capability. As Howard puts it,

"The guiding vision behind Mo’time has always been to give users more powerful tools to let them feel that they are actually “on the air” with their blogs, and that the blog itself is but one facet of the experience. Everything about the platform is designed to heighten the user’s experience of being connected to a community in real-time, using tools that have been proven to be the most popular with current users -- instant messaging, web logs and wireless devices.

Thus the architecture was conceived to coordinate our members’ subscriptions to the blogs that interest them (including their own) with an Event Dispatcher that will feed news of updates or comments to a user-preferred delivery device. We created a browser-based Jabber (XMPP) compliant instant messenger (that pops up only if the user activates it) to be the primary recipient of event alerts while the user is online.

The alert comes in with the name of the author, the blog, the first few lines of the content and a hot link to the source. The Event Dispatcher can also send out email digests and Mo’time users always have a Web-based digest of “what happened while I was out?” one-click away. It’s a next-generation aggregation system."

The idea of persistent chat rooms -- like Yahoo Chat, for example -- is similar to the persistence around blogs. How many times when you were reading a blog have you wondered who else was there, virtually next to you, reading the same story? Posting a comment is not quite the same as conversing with a concurrent blog reader.

And as a blog author, I would like to see much more integration of IM with blogging: for example, a one click ability to post an IM session to a blog. Some folks find IM interviews difficult, but I have grown used to the medium, and actually favor it over telephone calls, where people think they are speaking grammatically but they aren't (which you learn when you read the transcript). Also, the lag time between an IM session and posting a story might be as short as a few minutes, while transcribing telephone recordings may take days.

Howard says that Tipic is committed to developing these sorts of instant messaging integration for Mo'time. I can't wait to see it...

The Case for Business Blogging: Conversations with Your Market

DC's New Media Society asked me to join in a panel presentation on 9 September 2003, called The Case for Business Blogging: Conversations with Your Market (which I also got to provide the title for). Be there or be square.

Traction reviewed by Rafe Needleman

Rafe Needleman kicks the tires of Traction "A Better Way for Businesses to Blog", which I have been digging into for the past couple of weeks. I had a number of long conversations with Jason Frankel at Traction, after reading a mention that Clay Shirky wrote (I think at many-to-many).

The technology is much more advanced that Blogger or TypePad, and includes a lot of functionality that goes way beyond the typical micropublishing style that we have grown accustomed to. Several of the application area that the company has pushed into -- such as competitive intelligence -- have shaped the feature set and pushed it into a new category: blog-based content management.

Other blog solutions (most notably pMachine) are likewise scraping the edge of this emerging category.

I keep wondering why the biggest document and content management companies remain asleep at the wheel while these upstarts are redefining the way that businesses will communicate.

Blogging and the Rise of Blogournalism

Interesting article at Business Week by Spencer Ante about pay-per-view blog-based journalism.

I am particularly interested in the info about BlogNetwork, whose founder, Mihail Lari, distributes cash to the most popular writers. He was the one who pointed the article out to me, via Ryze.

Disclosure: My company's Blogging Network is featured as an example of the networks being created since we're the first to successfully charge a subscription fee for access to the network, 50% of which goes to the bloggers each subscriber reads in the proportion they're read. We wanted to come up with a fair, equitable and easy way to reward bloggers for their writing.

Merger of Blogs and IM

Strangely enough, I haven't bumped into these companies, but was twigged to them by a recent article at Instant Messaging Planet: MindSay and Tipic.

Mindsay has built a complete blogging infrastructure and provides an AIM interface to allow the creation and posting of blog content. A nice feature, but not that exciting, really. Kind of like the Blogger feature that allows sending blog content through email, although I can imagine using the email interface more (which I have) since Outlook supports spell checking, and AIM doesn't.

Tipic is an instant messaging company, building enterprise IM on the Jabber (XMPP) protocol, with operations and most sales in Europe. Theoretically, they have launched a new service -- Mo'time -- that fuses blogging and IM in more signficant ways, including support for IM notifications of comments on blog entries, and readers can be notified by IM when new content is posted. This sounds cool, but when I tried to click from the Tipic website this morning (which seems to be running *very* slowly) the link provided for Mo'time (the obvious www.motime.com) didn't work -- the server must have been down. Now it seems to be up, but it is running *very very* slowly.

I plan to follow up with this service, and find out more. Sounds interesting.

Email Dialog with Howard Liptzin, of Motime

Howard got the pointer I sent earlier today regarding my initial experience at Motime. His comments:

It was quite nice to have had the exposure on Instant Messaging Planet but it may have been just a touch too early. We are still working under hood, so to speak, to optimize the IM functions and what we call the event dispatcher.

So, yes, the site is currently *very very * slow because we are working on it as I write this. I’d be happy to let you know when we have completed this phase (in the next few days, I hope). When we finish dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, we’ll officially launch.

I was really happy to read your take on the general issues with respect to personal publishing and instant messaging. It coincides perfectly with my thinking. I anxiously read the first reports of the AOL platform, along with everyone else, with its references to an IM integration. When I read, however, that all it is so far is an IM-2-blog interface, my reaction was “so what?” This is a redundant ability at best and, as Dave Winer has suggested, maybe even a bad idea. The care given to both writing style and content (and oh yes, you’re right, also spelling) in IM is well suited to the real-time experience, but much less so to a publishing format. Anyone who has ever had to slog through an unedited transcript of an IM conversation will immediately understand the problem of making it easier to post from IM... ;-)

OK, it may be nice-to-have feature, but not much more. And I do not look forward to seeing lots of lengthy blogged IM dialogs!

All of us who have tested the motime platform have also tested the range of other blogging tools. Our strongest reactions are that publishing on other systems just feels lonely compared to ours. Changing the direction of the flow, Blog-2-IM, makes using our platform a very “un-lonely” experience. That’s the key -- social experience.

In addition we are trying to build-in as many social aggregation tools as possible (subscriptions, invites, group blogs); this is a product aimed squarely at non-professional users and first-timers, in other words, just regular folks.

Sorry for being so long-winded, but I had to strain to stop myself here. Having just read your blog and company website, it is crystal clear that you have already intuited the logic of this integration and the myriad of other possibilities that it offers.

I’m delighted that you took the time to write to us and happier still that I have had the chance to make your online acquaintance. I’ll keep you informed of our progress, if you wish me to so. I’m sure that you would enjoy taking motime out for a spin!

Sincerely,
Howard

P.S. I am currently working in Italy, so please take the time difference into account in case of phone or IM contacts...
P.P.S. The Bill Seitz quote on your blog is true in about 99% of cases, imho. Very well put.

Howard -

I will fiddle with Motime this week, if I get a chance. Looking forward to talking at length, soon.

- Stowe

AOL Journals: Blogging for AOLers

I read that AOL is (has?) released its AOL Journals -- basically blogging for AOL users. From the comments of Dan Gilmor and Jeff Jarvis it seems that AOL's offering is very easy to use. Jarvis is especially involved in an on-going comparion with TypePad.

I haven't yet written any commentary about TypePad, although I have moved www.aworkingmodel.com to my TypePad trial. Coming soon.

More on AOL Journals

Reading detailed notes on AOL Journal from Jeff Jarvis, I thought to add this post:

"The really awesome possibilities of AOL Journals will arise from presence-enabling and IM-enabling blogs. Knowing that "boydstowe" -- my AIM screenname -- is online right now when you read this comment, might lead you to directly contact me to clarify or expand. And of course, if AOL 'gets it' (like Dave and the other distinguished blogheads said that they do) then AOL will begin to add functionality incestuously, so that AOL chats can be directly posted to blogs (which I already read about elsewhere).

I recommend that TypePad and Blogger (and the other pure play blog companies) start figuring how to incorporate IM technologies ASAP.

My BlogShares have been Hijacked!

I set up my blog on Blogshares a few months ago, and didn't do anything with it. Turns out that someone has bought all the available shares (4000) in my blog except the 1000 shares I got for startup.

My blog value has gone up a lot recently: up to $ 51.32/share!

While there -- and I still don't know how to buy anything with the measley $500 I have -- I came across a reference to something potentially more interesting than the fictional blog stock market. The same folks behind blogshares are also touting BlogCoop, which looks to be a swarmocracy-based business model for the composition of cooperative businesses online.

I will be digging into what is going there, soon.

Ancient Blogs Unearthed

Anyone who has stayed up late enough at night with me, howling about injustice in the universe, has heard my woeful tale of Convey.com. This was my earliest experience 'blogging' -- although that term wasn't current in 1999 when I started using the system to publish 'Message from Edge City' -- a blog dedicated to the same junk I am interested in today.

I recently was talking to the Michael Blaber at Kubi Software regarding a (harmless if wrong) claim that IDC authored the first white paper on email-based peer-to-peer collaboration about their solution (which is cool, by the way: click here for the review of Groove and Kubi I recently wrote).

At any rate, I told Michael that I had written a review of the original Zaplet technology in my Convey.com blog. But when Convey.com went out of business, I lost all the content. That's the heartrending part.

The front page of the blog can be found at the Internet Archive: click here.

Make Room For Blogs

A report I wrote for Cutter entitled "Blogging: The New Face of Corporate Intelligence" has been published as "Make Room For Blogs." Oh well. You can get a copy, but only if you request guest access to the service, which is business intelligence. Click here to be interrogated.

"Blogs in the Workplace" at the NY Times

I spoke with Bill O'Shea when he was researching this article now on-line, but I didn't do much aside from providing a few pointers, so I am not upset not to be quoted.

Its intriguing that the article's URL has a section that is "partner=USERLAND" although there doesn't seem to be an Userland ad anywhere. Hmmm....