Saturday, August 30, 2008
[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Beta FriendFeed to the Rescue? I've been fighting an ongoing battle with myself. I love talking politics, and I like stirring the pot with controversy.
You might have noticed this week that I've been a bit more grumpy and irritable than usual. It's because of junk like this:
It takes no brains to bring this sort of stuff up. Allen's comment is akin to "you forgot to put the apostrophe after the s, rather than before, in the second sentence of the third paragraph." It's arguing for the sake of arguing. If there's a good factual debate, or even a decent informed difference of opinion, I'm all about it.When it's this sort of thing, it's annoying, particularly when it's the first comment. It ends up leading to stuff like that last comment, because it sets a negative and destructive tone.
The irony is that this was a fluff piece about VP candidate Palin's Chuck Norris jokes, a brand new meme on FriendFeed and Twitter. It's a particularly stupid question from Allen, because I had him on a panel with me in Washington DC earlier this year where I introduced myself to the room as the political editorialist for Mashable. It isn't like he doesn't know what's going on.
Of course, now that FriendFeed is no longer private beta, alpha, or whatever it was at the time, there's a lot more people on there. As Veronica Belmont noted this evening, a lot of the conversations have been devolving into slug fests lately. Not fact based or informed opinion debates. Out and out in your face, this is who I am and I don't care if it offends you slugfests.
It's annoying as crap.
At any rate, I've tried one last ditch thing to save the FriendFeed experience for me. Within the new Beta, there's an option to set up lists of folks that you can theoretically categorize those you're following.
Here's my brand new arrangement:
Except for a few known troublemakers, I'm extending the benefit of the doubt to everyone and starting them out in the "Non-Irksome" list. I'll give it a week, and start rapidly paring down folks and throwing them over to the "Irksome" list as needed.
It isn't really personal, but I just need to cut down on the level of irritation being injected to my info-stream. I'm not particularly a fan of anyone in this presidential race, but that doesn't mean I don't have an ideology, beliefs and sensitivities. In the course of the general level of Obama zealotry going on in the tech community right now, abandonment of reason, tact and fact is at all time highs.At any rate, I don't want to get into the nuance of that, or I'd just bellyache and complain for a few screenfuls. Bottom line, I don't want to end up hating everyone from my industry, so I'm going to try to segregate myself from their joyous worship of Obama for the duration.
Hopefully this works. I'd hate to block FriendFeed for three months, but given the amount of armchair punditry going on surrounding this election cycle, there might not be another option.
I'll try to let you know next week how it goes.
Labels: allen stern, veronica belmont
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 12:03 AM[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
The New Kind of Journalism 1: Primer This post is the culmination of the themes I've started in the following posts:
You might want to read them for the full backstory. This post is long, and is going to involve a time commitment, but it's thorough, and I'm going somewhere with this story. Read it on your lunch break.
Perhaps I'm starting with too grandiose of an assumption, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that the old forms of media distribution are limping along to their graves. I could spend a few paragraphs belabouring this point, but there are plenty of other places on the Internet and in the blogosphere you could find those statistics.
What I think is clear is that the blogosphere has given rise to a new form of journalism that sits somewhere between editorial and "just the facts, ma'am." One of the most popular accusations I see from folks whenever a piece of press they don't like that "it isn't real journalism." In the tech blogosphere, a sub-variant of this accusation is that they've made the lowest order of blog posting: a ValleyWag-ish posting.
In both cases, these accusations are akin to the ever-popular YouTube and Digg debate tact: "Your a fag." It shows a lack of awareness of what modern blogging is about and a void in the accuser's arsenal of actual salient points to make.
There Currently Exists a Glut of Information.
The problem with news today is that straight news content is a commodity. Even opinion is a commodity, but in particular, documentation of the events of the world and the individual niches where news happens is commonplace. If I asked you for a resource to find the latest information on what's going on in the very specifically targeted world of online video podcasting, I could probably get a resource list of at least thirty blogs, ten or online magazines, a TV show or two, four or five video shows, and countless audio podcasts that regularly cover that information.
For a real world example of the glut of information that exists, take the last few posts I've done imploring the community for information regarding the tech scene in Austin. The comments and my inbox were literally flooded with new sources to add to Mashable's OPML file of blog resources.
The creme rises to the top, though, and what has proven to be the creme in the meritocracy of the Internet is qualified and accurate opinion and analysis coupled with solid facts. As a corollary to this, what pushes a source over the top in terms of popularity and prominence is a thriving community with a health ongoing discussion taking place.
The New Journalism is the Old Conversation.
You can't talk about this topic without bringing in a bit of the history involved. The flash point where the public at large realized that the blogosphere was a place where news could be broken was the Rathergate scandal. For the purposes of this illustration, the process showed that the spontaneous conversations that take place in the blogosphere can be a much more powerful mechanism for fact checking, research and resource gathering than the double, triple, or quadruple sourcing and quoting procedures in place with traditional media institutions.
In the case of LittleGreenFootballs, and a few other blogs that tracked the fallout from the Rathergate scandal, it took less than a few hours for the memos Dan Rather and Marla Mapes used to "prove" President Bush faked his service records to be suspect in nature. It was a day or two for the memos to be conclusively proven as fakes. All of this took place in the chaotic conversations "below the fold," so to speak.
Of course, both Marla Mapes and Dan Rather were nationally humiliated and relieved from duty subsequent to the incident, but the process story is what I want to focus on here - despite the fact that this all took placed on what can be charitably described as a blog with a conservative political slant, facts and truth (devoid of politics) were distilled more quickly than any Old Media institution could make happen (even opposing Old Media networks with presumed financial incentive to make their competitor CBS look bad).
The Conversation Works for a News Discovery Process, But What Works for Business?
If you take a look at what sorts of purely New Media institutions are succeeding online right now, you need to focus mostly on the tech sector. There are certainly a number of blogs and online magazines that are doing pretty well for themselves, but many of them are either evolutions of an Old Media institution or recent acquisition of an Old Media company. I'm not such a purist that I deem them unreliable sources of information, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to put them in a category not labeled New Media.
Inside the tech sector pure New Media category, you have companies like TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, ValleyWag and VentureBeat sitting at the top of the heap. These are news organizations that came from nothing a few years ago, focus on news as a conversation, and all have very similar blogging styles with very diverse audiences.Your average post in any of these publications falls into one of a number of categories:
Event Annoucement: Large publications regularly host... and finally News Posts: This is where New Media differentiates itself from the Old. News isn't any longer about a 500 word posting with witness and color quotes and triple checked sources. In the blogosphere a financial premium is placed on speed and analysis. That second bit is often the part that is left out by detractors of New Media.partiesbusiness networking events. These posts serve to announce for, sell tickets to, or show pictures/video from these events.
List Posts: The 12 Reasons Most Bloggers are Bald. The top 25 Electronic Devices for that Scruffy Beard of Yours from Pete Cashmore. The 30 Best Social Networks for Underwater Basketweaving. They're good ways to get your readers to bookmark your sites, and are (in a way) a karma building exercises for bloggers. They show you're creating more than transitory, news-cycle-based value for your readers.
Editorial/Pure Opinion Posts: Every person on the planet has an opinion. Bloggers at major publications who have been judged as capable of providing accurate analysis are more than willing to dispense it on their very tall soapbox. The bloggers who can peer into their crystal balls and discern trends and futures are the ones who are theoretically judged adding the most value.
Miscellaneous Features: These include podcasts, videos, interviews, guest posts, how to's, etc.
Inherent to the format is an implied expertise on the subject matter focused on by the blog. This leads to less of a need for expert opinion to be constantly consulted for validation of the story.
A constant accusation levied against New Media is that the rush to get the story first comes too often at the expense of correctness. There is a lot of nuance to best practices in the blogosphere that could remedy that, but the gist of the solution lies in the fact that the blogosphere is more like a conversation than it is a means of broadcast.
As is said many times in defense of blogging, corrections and further color commentary almost always come in the comments field, and in the ensuing discussion around the web in tools like Google Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter. There's an art form to eliciting comments, and a straight news piece simply won't do it. Even on the most highly trafficked of newspaper websites, straight news pieces get little to no comments, while the blogs (written in the authors' voice) on the same site will get mountains of interaction.
The Void is Growing Faster than it Can Be Filled
We've yet to see the first major media news organizations to completely drop off the map, though there are a great many that are teetering at the brink as we speak. It's hard to say, then, what it's going to be like in a world without AP, Reuters, The New York Times and other sources of global embedded reporting.
We'll find out soon enough, though, since their revenues and budgets are shrinking to the point where they can't support global news operations the way they currently do. Blogging and New Media news organizations are only part of the replacement. Successful blogs are only going to report on narrow niches of information where there's likely to be a business market to profit from.
Add to this fact that when it comes down to it, the blog content management system is generally a piss poor way to consume straight news. The RSS feed that it generates is great for it, but tell me, honestly and truly, when Mashable was producing upwards of 40-50 news posts a day, didn't you feel a bit overwhelmed and annoyed at all the clicking and scrolling on the website?
As most blogs who have grown to the size of Mashable (or larger) have realized, we're not really looked to for a place on breaking news on every thing that may be going on in tech. We're looked to as a place to make sense of the news.
What Comes Next?
The reason that I promised this post about three weeks ago and am only delivering it just now is that the more I wrote here, the more this became like a book than a blog post. What's even worse is that this has started to become more of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and the topics are forking out in front of me. I've literally spent the last three weekends in a row writing four or five entries that are all about as long as this one.
Here are the focii of the next set of articles in this vein of thought, and a short description of where I'm going with it:
- Even News with Analysis is a Commodity: I've talked about the financial and engagement reasons why there must be spin and analysis in news based blog postings. Still, opinion and informed analysis is almost dirt cheap these days. The next evolution (at least how I see it) in how the "A-List" blogs treat news will trickle down to every last blogger who is doing anything tied to a news cycle. The best part is there's a business model here! (I know, they can revoke my Web 2.0 card for that. You won't tell, will you?).
- Just as the Content Evolves, So Must the Delivery Method: This is a topic so important, it's almost urgent that I get it out as soon as possible. I'm talking about video and audio. The landscape is changing so rapidly now that it's becoming a character flaw to be in the business of professional New Media content production and not be doing something with audio or video.
- The Role of Micro-Blogging: I've recently broadened my focus back away from the two big ones (Twitter and FriendFeed) to examine older platforms like Tumblr, Jaiku and Utterz as well as some of the new federated solutions. We're heading toward a unique convergence point here, and everyone who blogs will at some point in the future be using these tools as a part of their content creation process. Without exception.
Any feedback you have would help me shape this series moving forward, and would be greatly appreciated.
Labels: The New Kind of Journalism
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 9:33 AM[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
A Quick Note Serving Little Purpose
I've just re-hooked my Utterz account to my personal blog. This post serves as a quick test to see if it works, as well as a note to say that my long awaited post on "The New Kind of Journalism" is coming out in the morning (a few hours from now).
Some thoughts, non sequitor:
1) The more I play with Utterz, the more I remember why I liked it when Greg Blonder told me about it early last year.
2) The NKoJ post is part one in what looks like at least a four or five part series. Yeah, it's like that.
3) I'm pretty tired, and the sun is coming up. I'm headed to bed.
Some thoughts, non sequitor:
1) The more I play with Utterz, the more I remember why I liked it when Greg Blonder told me about it early last year.
2) The NKoJ post is part one in what looks like at least a four or five part series. Yeah, it's like that.
3) I'm pretty tired, and the sun is coming up. I'm headed to bed.
Mobile post sent by rizzn using Utterz.
[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Seth Godin: "Automation is Bad! Don't Do It!" Seth Godin posted one of his trademark short esoteric blog entries today, this one about the "depersonalization of mass media:"
Here's the thing - this is an easy post to make. It sounds very pro-consumer, and in the world of PR, marketing, advertising, and even customer service this is what's called outside the box thinking. That's fine, that's good, and admittedly needed in that business.Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.
Radio ads used to be live, personal and spoken by an individual.
TV ads used to feature actual people, demonstrating something, usually live.
Phone calls involved a live speaker, talking, with permission, to another person.
Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...
The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.
The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.
My name is Seth Godin and I approved this message.
There's a very Luddite undertone to all this. Everything he's listed after TV ads could also be classified as anti-automation. This is a wrong message to send.
Automation isn't automatically bad, and without it, our lives would be a great deal more difficult.
Software and hardware technology is rapidly approaching the level where in limited interaction situations, it's difficult to tell the difference between a human and computer. Don't believe me? Hit "0" on your land-line phone and ask for the DSL support department. Most of the time, that system is completely automated by computers.
In other situations, computer guided interaction is far more efficient than dealing with a human for both the company involved as well as the consumer. Again, don't believe me? Dial 1-800-GOOG-411, and get the number for the gas station on the corner. Try to do that talking to nothing but humans, and you'll end up on hold for at least a half hour, and spend around 15 minutes while the operator for the gas station's parent company tries to figure out exactly what state you're calling from, let alone what neighborhood.
We have the technology to intelligently apply in ways that make our customers' and potential customers' lives simpler, more enjoyable, and yes - even more personalized.
Technology and automation isn't the bad guy. It's your friend.
All I'm sayin' is don't blame the robots - haven't you seen Terminator? Not a good idea.
Labels: seth godin
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 11:53 AM Tuesday, August 26, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
I Have a Helmet That Goes With The Title
Sometimes, even I'm shocked at the leftarded, Orwellian newspeak that comes out of peoples' mouths.
Here's the backstory: Blogger and radio show host Alex Jones, someone I consider to be a leftist in the same way that David Duke is a rightist, led a mob that verbally attacked Michelle Malkin (and physically attacked those who'd stop him) for being, well, Michelle Malkin. This took place Tuesday afternoon outside the DNC in Denver. I wrote it up on Mashable because I think it reflects poorly on New Media and blogging in general when we can't go out in public without creating a news event displaying our immaturity.
Suprisingly, most of the comments have been supportive - even on Digg. The article is getting tons of votes there and at Yahoo Buzz. I love it when I hit on a good nerve like that.
Unfortunately, some folks don't like it. There's a few comments on the Mashable post talking about how horrible I am as a person and blah blah - the usual I get from the Mashable crowd. I'm pretty immune to that, at this point.
There's a fellow named Anthony Stevens, though, who was inspired to write a multi-paragraph hit-piece on me that went up within minutes of me posting the original article. It started out with the paragraph:
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins of Mashable gives us another peek into his proto-fascist leanings with a breathless article about the LEFTIST MOB THAT ATTACKED POOR MICHELLE MALKIN in Denver.Can someone explain this term, proto-fascist? It sounds a bit like something from Star Wars, but I can't be sure.
At any rate, the guy is obviously off his rocker, and doesn't deserve a response on anything other than creative imagery with his clearly Alex Jones-inspired terminology.
As a side note, however, I asked some folks, and it turns out that there are other definitions to the word "attack" aside from physical violence. Just puttin' that out there.
Update: An anonymous tipster has emailed me in response to this post, and they've assured me I was correct in my vague assumption a proto-fascist was from Star Wars. Turns out? It's the name of the monster in the trash compactor.
Labels: anthony stevens, proto-fascist
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 11:34 PM Monday, August 25, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Digital Bill of Rights - Are You Kidding Me?
Just a bit ago, Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch posted a public call for a Digital Bill of Rights. Unlike Steven Hodson, I won't say that this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but only because I had a very similar idea myself when I first logged onto the net in the 90s and saw all it was capable of.
The difference was back then it was the 90s, I was a 14-year-old, and I had very little wisdom or life experience to give the ideas I had any sort of meaningful perspective.
I had intended to do a video on it this evening, but my computer's acting up - just as well, since Steven grabbed me for an episode of his discussion points podcast.
Download the MP3 here.
I'll break it down in text for those of you without 23 minutes to spare:
Most of what Erick said is pure puffery. Many of the things on his list are mutually exclusive from one another. Others don't need to be rights because they aren't things that could be legislated away. The list is far too US-centric - the Internet is international.
Most importantly, asking for these things to be guaranteed as rights is tantamount to trampling the rights of others. If I start a website, and there is codified law that says I must follow certain laws to say, guarantee privacy of folks who may leave a comment, doesn't that impede the free exchange of information (another thing he calls for)?
It delves down a rabbit hole of complete contradictory nonsense. None of it appeared to be very well thought out.
In other words, it's perfect for Digg. I imagine it should be showing up on the front page there in a couple of hours.
At the end of the podcast, Steven and I brainstorm a little bit on a solution that would go towards providing us some of the things on this list we do want while still respecting rights and privileges we enjoy on the web.
Labels: erick shonfeld, steven hodson
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 7:09 PM Sunday, August 24, 2008[Blog] | [Home] | [Robots]
Too Much Engagement Here's something I never thought I'd say: There's such a thing as too much engagement in a social community. A couple days ago, I wrote over at World Domination something that's a symptom of my growing irritation this election season: "How Do You Tell Your Friend He's a Moron?"
Really, it's a symptom of another issue, though, and that is the fact that tech reality has a well known liberal bias. I can't venture out into FriendFeed or Twitter these days without being mobbed by hordes of screaming Obama nuts. It isn't something I can block or hide, either. On O'Biden day, I tried. I went about the business of hiding as much of the "OMG, BIDEN IS SLICED BREAD" tweets and posts as I could, but conversations were cropping up everywhere around it.
Conversations about how great socialized medicine is from people who've never studied the effects of socialized medicine on the economy of a country. Conversations on the wonders of Obama's tax proposal from folks who've never studied tax codes. Conversations on how great communism and socialism is and why we need it in America.
Essentially, I've been thrown in with armchair politics gurus. The majority of these people don't seem to study politics and policy unless there's a national election (and even then, their study doesn't include anything but the campaign propaganda).
In short, it's as if I've been transplanted to your typical Daily Kos/Huffington Post message board.
When I signed up for FriendFeed and Twitter, this wasn't what I had in mind, and it points out a fatal flaw in the lifestreaming service as a message board concept. Folks that I really enjoy having discussions about tech with, I absolutely deplore having conversations about politics with.
I'm really have no desire to spend every waking Internet hour pointing out the falsehood, error, inanity and offensiveness of what most of these folks are saying. I'd much prefer to actually talk tech with these folks, or alternatively talk politics with folks who will say things they know to be true because of research they've done rather than because they heard a candidate or pundit say it once.
I'm going to give some of these conversation agents sime time to die down on the liberal buzz - probably a few days. If my sad guestimation is correct, though, this smug talking point regurgitation isn't going to end until after the election. There's a strong possibility I'll be disengaging from these networks in the meantime; I simply don't think I can stand three straight months of mindless zealotry from folks I otherwise respect.
Update: For those of you who continue to Obama-gush, O'Biden-ate, Bush-bash, or McCain-ify... may I suggest you follow the suggestions put forth in the following video? (Google Reader folks, you wanna click through to the blog for this one...):
Today Now!: How To Pretend You Give A Shit About The Election posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 11:47 AM
|
||||||||
