Blogosphere
Blog posts about blogs and blogging. Related subjects include:
Notes, links, and comments, October 24, 2010
Time for a notes/links/comments post just for Text Technologies: Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Online media, Sentiment analysis, Social software and online media, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
Ike Pigott on the future of reporting
Ike Pigott argues that, as the number of conventional journalists plummets, corporations will have to hire their own “embedded” journalists to fill the void. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Mark Logic, Online media, Social software and online media | 5 Comments |
TechCrunch offers to pay a source’s legal expenses
A recent TechCrunch post recapitulates its dispute with CBS and Last.fm, reiterates its confidence in its accusations, and closes with
And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.
That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Online media, Social software and online media | 7 Comments |
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 |
Blog user interfaces
Over on A World of Bytes, I’ve started highlighting interesting tech blogs people might enjoy. However, I chided each of my first three selections for UI failings. A comment thread quickly ensued, and social media maven Jeremiah Owyang asked how he could make his blog easier to read. This post is a followup to that discussion.
Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.
In particular, I suggest: Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 5 Comments |
Evidently I’m a social media expert too. Who knew?
Network World asked me to do an online chat. That isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that they asked me to focus on social media. My views on social media boil down to:
- Get off the stick and blog!
- Social media are a part of life, especially if you have any valued employees under the age of 40. Get used to it.
- The “dangers” of social media are the same as the dangers of other forms of internet communication. If your employees can’t use email or web surf safely, you’re dead anyway. So stop fretting.
The long form of my views on social media — with a little data warehousing thrown in — may be found here.
In somewhat related news, Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal showed his exquisite good sense by quoting me carefully about online presence, and expanding upon my points at length.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
A startup that could improve all our lives
Apostrophee aspires to hugely improve the experience of cyberspace, by applying grammar and spelling correction to online content, especially blog comments and forum posts.
Too bad the article is a spoof.
Reflecting on why it has to be spoof could be somewhat enlightening. 😉
| Categories: Blogosphere, Fun stuff, Humor, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
Micro- and full-length-blogging use cases overlap greatly
Steven Hodson ranted on Mashable that Twitter is not a micro-blogging tool. His case was, in essence, “Blogs are thoughtful and Twitter isn’t, so the two aren’t comparable.” I disagree. Hodson was over-glorifying blogging, while trivializing the broad variety of Twitter use cases.* Consider, if you please, the following list of use cases that are met both by Twitter and by conventional blogging:
- Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging. Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
- Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
- Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too. 🙂
- Communicating news.
- Expressing analytical opinions.
- Promoting your services, opinions, and links.
*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize. That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability. Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 1 Comment |
Over 80 percent of blog posts are probably spam
Doug Caverly highlights a Matt Mullenweg quote indicating that about 1/4 of all the blogs ever on WordPress.com were spam (aka splogs). Now, that’s probably a higher fraction than for the blogoverse overall, because:
- WordPress.com provides costless hosting; using your own domain costs money.
- Besides being free, WordPress.com hosting may provide a little “google juice”, which is the whole SEO point of spam blogging.
But there’s one more factor. Splogs have much higher posting frequency than real ones. 10-20+ posts per day is not uncommon, and 50-100+ is not unheard of. That’s 5-10X the post frequency of even the more active human-written blogs. So let’s assume:
- 10% of all blogs are spam.
- 10% of all blogs are actively written by humans.
- 80% of all blogs belong to humans, but are updated very infrequently if at all.
In that case, over 80% (and indeed probably over 90%) of all blog posts are made by machines rather than by human beings.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Search engine optimization (SEO), Social software and online media, Spam and antispam | Leave a Comment |
Sturgeon’s Law, and the future technology of social technology
Social technology has been hugely important to me since 1991. I met Linda on a Prodigy bulletin board. Blogging is crucial to my business. Mailing lists have led Linda and me to two vacations, most of our computer gaming, multiple TV shows (especially Buffy/Angel), and a whole lot of books. I find LinkedIn useful at times, and for the past few weeks I’ve been Twittering up a storm. My love life, work, and entertainment all are rooted in technology that gets people communicating with each other.
I’m not just saying that for street cred. My experiences also illustrate two important points – people use many different kinds of social technology, and social technology is very important to them. When you feel or hear negatives about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blog reading or whatever – those are indictments of particular services or technologies, not of online social networking in general. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 4 Comments |