April Fool’s spoof re newspapers, social media
The Guardian says all its articles will be published on Twitter, in 140 characters or less. Very well played.
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, Microblogging, Online media, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
Google in an ethical screw-up
Google has a screwed-up UI that causes people to buy PPC ads they don’t want to buy. But Google doesn’t refund all the money wasted this way. Bad Google.
| Categories: Google, Online marketing | Leave a Comment |
Twitter shows some directions for growth
TechCrunch pointed out a Twitter jobs page. The specific job TechCrunch mentioned* isn’t up there any more, but at the moment I write this, 18 others are (copied below). That’s considerable growth, given that the same page says Twitter has fewer than 30 current employees. Note the emphasis on search and the mention of Japan.
*Care and feeding of celebrity tweeters. Celebrity tweeting is actually a subject I’ve written and even been interviewed about several times.
As of this writing, the full list is: Read more
| Categories: Microblogging, Search engines, Social software and online media, Specialized search, Twitter | 1 Comment |
Where I think the information ecosystem is headed
The debate about the future of the information ecosystem rages on. As you might surmise from my choice of words, I’m on the side that says something new will rapidly evolve to fill niches vacated by the demise of a teetering economic model. To a first approximation, there are two major reasons to believe this:
- People have deep-seating cravings to opine, educate, and otherwise expostulate. Many will gladly do it for free. And labor represents the lion’s share of information-industry costs.
- What’s more, a significant fraction of news is something large organizations have a vested interest in releasing. To the extent that’s true — and there certainly are major exceptions in areas such as debunking and investigatory journalism — ordinary enterprises can be and indeed already are a major source of resources for the information ecosystem.
Here are some of the species I believe will thrive or at least survive in the part of the ecosystem focused on enterprise IT news: Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Online media, Social software and online media | 18 Comments |
The grand discussion on the future of journalism
The past few weeks have seen a huge outburst of commentary about the perilous states of the newspaper business in particular and journalism in general. Having been a little busy, I haven’t found the time to chime in seriously. That said, my views include:
- People are increasingly unwilling to pay money for news or commentary.
- People are increasingly resistant to conventional advertising.
- Therefore, traditional journalistic business models are indeed fried, both in their original media and online.
- However, lots of people are willing to provide some of the functions of traditional news media — whether news, commentary, or both — with very different economics. For example, my blogs are a classic “freemium” operation: I don’t get paid for writing them, pittances from Network World and Intelligent Enterprise excepted. However, they drive a huge fraction of both the credibility and leads for my real businesses.
- To the extent there ever was one, the wall between news and commentary is crumbling. This is true in print, broadcast, and online media alike, and indeed was happening before the internet became a big part of most people’s lives.
- But the blurring of news and commentary can be and is overdone. E.g., press releases get mixed into news headline feeds all the time, and that isn’t necessary.
- The old graph, in which events passed from fact to reporting to mass dissemination, in a fairly linear and simple manner, is becoming much more complex. Not coincidentally, the technology to handle that complexity is evolving rapidly.
Highlights of the recent discussion include (but in no way are limited to): Read more
| Categories: Online media, Social software and online media | 4 Comments |
Infobionics attempts something sleazy
Infobionics is attempting low-rent, sleazy search engine optimization. Below is the text of an email I recently received on their behalf: Read more
| Categories: Online marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO) | 23 Comments |
Yet more NoFollow whining
Andy Beal has a blog post up to the effect that NoFollow is a bad thing. (Edit: Andy points out in the comment thread that his opposition to NoFollow isn’t as absolute as I was suggesting.) Other SEO types are promoting this is if it were some kind of important cause. I think that’s nuts, and NoFollow is a huge spam-reducer.
The weakness of Andy’s argument is illustrated by the one and only scenario he posits in support of his crusade:
The result is that a blog post added to a brand new site may well have just broken the story about the capture of Bin Laden (we wish!)–and a link to said post may have been Tweeted and re-tweeted–but Google won’t discover or index that post until it finds a “followed” link. Likely from a trusted site in Google’s index and likely hours, if not days, after it was first shared on Twitter.
Helloooo — if I post something here, it is indexed at least in Google blog search immediately. (As in, within a minute or so.) Ping, crawl, pop — there it is. The only remotely valid version of Andy’s complaint is that It might take some hours for Google’s main index to update — but even there there’s a News listing at the top. This simply is not a problem.
Now, I think it would be personally great for me if all the links to my sites from Wikipedia and Twitter and the comment threads of major blogs pointed back with “link juice.” On the other hand, even with NoFollow out there, my sites come up high in Google’s rankings for all sorts of keywords, driving a lot of their readership. I imagine the same is true for most other sites containing fairly unique content that people find interesting enough to link to.
So other than making it harder to engage in deceptive SEO, I fail to see what problems NoFollow is causing.
| Categories: Google, Online marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Spam and antispam | 2 Comments |
Plinky: The microblogging apocalypse is upon us
Plinky — a tool to help people come up with things to microblog when they don’t actually have anything to say — has launched. I’ve posted an anti-Plinky rant in response. The gist — but with plenty of links so that you actually know what I’m talking about — is:
[Plinky] is like throwing a cocktail party, getting the conversation going, then encouraging your guests to run out in the street with megaphones spreading their drunken chatter. Except in this case what people are drunk on is not actual booze, but rather the promise of “social media marketing” and “building your personal brand.”
| Categories: Microblogging, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
The Twitter fail whale has resurfaced
I’ve had a multi-week service saga trying to get my Dell desktop computer fixed. So I Twittered about the fact that my last email on the matter of multiple freezes/cold reboots per day hadn’t been answered for 3 1/2 days. A Dell representative almost immediately messaged me. Then, like so many service representatives, he asked me to repeat what I’ve said many times before (only now 140 characters at a time).
Except I couldn’t get the direct message through for a while, because I ran into the Fail Whale. Nor is that my first recent encounter with same.
If Twitter goes back to being maddeningly unreliable, I will likely go back to living without it.
After multiple weeks with a malfunctioning computer, I am NOT in the mood for even petty problems like this. Arggh …
| Categories: Twitter | Leave a Comment |
Daniel Tunkelang idealizes Twitter
Daniel Tunkelang has a couple of recent posts decrying what amounts to, at least in his eyes, the abuse of Twitter. (My word, not his.) For example, he writes in criticism of Loic LeMeur:
Twitter is a communication platform, not a marketing platform, and there’s a subtle difference.
But I’d disagree that there’s a bright line separating the two. In particular, I think most business blogs serve or should serve as both, in no small part because the areas of marketing and communication overlap heavily. And in my opinion Twitter (microblogging) and ordinary blogging aren’t that far apart.
Earlier this evening I posted praise of the BI expert Twitter community — of which Daniel is indeed a member — even while admitting that unlike other members, I “follow” too many Twitterers to actually keep up with their posts. Daniel refers to following patterns like mine as an attention Ponzi scheme, Read more
| Categories: Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 12 Comments |