rizzn's personal blog

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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Om Malik Launches a Podcast

Elisabeth Lewin noted over at Podcasting News that GigaOm has jumped into that new craze all the kids are doing – podcasting.

“…this week that Malik and Co. launched a regular podcast. It is a welcome (though perhaps not groundbreaking) addition to the tech podcast landscape.”

“Informal, short, and sweet, the podcast features Om and other bloggers talking about such topics as Google’s Android, CES and MacWorld, and whether “VoIP isn’t dead, it’s just stale.” It’s a welcome addition to the other opinion and analysis posts on the site.”

Just a note to Om and company that I’ve got little to do with my days until I start a regular gig, and that I’ve got nothing but time (and raw savage talent) to apply towards an appearance on said podcast.

I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet having been banished to being offline by AT&T, unfortunately, but if it’s anything like it sounds like, it should be a lot of fun, and I’d love to engage in some informed and interesting discussions anytime about the world of online video, something I enjoy Om’s network’s coverage of at NewTeeVee.

posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 1:33 PM

Remember how I almost gleefully reported the other day that I was BACK ON THE TUBES! and would resume regular updates?

It is chronicled in a series of Tweets that I began on Saturday, but are very typical of the type of experience I’ve been going through since I ordered AT&T high-speed Internet December 26th.

As most of you know, I moved to Dallas on the 27th, and on the 26th, I ordered a transfer of my phone and DSL service to our new Dallas address. In addition, I took the opportunity to upgrade my service in Dallas to their new UVERSE TV/DATA offering.

At the time I ordered, the UVERSE service was unable to be installed until the 29th, and since it would supercede my high-speed $10 a month DSL line for the same price (for the data plan), I said “Go ahead and transfer the DSL for the duration, and we’ll turn it off when the UVERSE gets turned on.”

I mention that because it apparently is the key factor as to why I’m still currently net-less until at least January 8th.

Rather than chronicle the entire set of issues, I’ll summarize – I spoke to every single department in AT&T, and their bosses and their boss’s bosses at one point or another. Every person I spoke to gave me a different solution. If you want a good soliloquy describing this experience, do a Summize search for rizzn #att, or read below this post.

Inevitably, the call always ended somewhere around 4:30 PM CST or so with the statement: “that <insert specific name> department is now closed for the day, and they’re the only ones that can help you. You’ll have to call back tomorrow.”

Occasionally I’d get served up extra surprises, like the operator hanging up on me for no reason, or getting transfered to a random voicemail box.

Over the course of seven days, I spent a total of 12.5 hours on the phone, or roughly equivalent to a part time job.

In the end, it turns out the reason the whole thing didn’t work out for me was because you can’t have two pending orders for data services on the same line or for the same address. I’m not sure why this is, since it is possible that I’d want to shotgun two services, but they simply don’t allow it.

At the end of the whole deal, I got them to escalate my install date to the 8th (one day before my birthday, ironically), so that I might have some Internet at that point, but they can’t guarantee it’ll work at my address until a technician comes out.

The whole thing wasn’t able to be solved until a level three tech from the DSL support line (one of the sole Americans in that department, apparently (not that I’m racist, I just like to understand the person on the other line when I have a problem)) got together a five way conference call with me, the provisioning department, the orders department, line support, UVERSE and me.

This post here only glosses over the generalities, so I may have to follow up with something that truly captures my emotional state – suffice it to say that my neighbors one county over were certainly aware of my displeasure with AT&T on Saturday.

They’re locking up the Big in Japan offices, so I’ve gotta run – in the mean time, enjoy this twitterstream from Saturday. It’ll give you an idea of what I went through.

Well folks, it was a rough few days. Not physically, of course, other than the exertion of moving all my belongings 100 miles, but the hardest part was the lack of Internet access. The image you see to the right here is of my dinky little MetroPCS phone – the one that barely gets me online so I can send updates to Twitter and check what’s going on into my GMail account.

Just shy of a week is the longest I’ve ever been offline in the last ten years (aside from when Hurricane Wilma blew through South Florida), and when it’s not a survival situation, it’s amazing how much that hurts. The lack of ambient awareness of what is going on in my world, the online world, is definitely palpable.

Still, I imagine it did me a bit of good being offline. More time with the kids, the wife got to see more than the back of my head for extended periods of

time. I had time to re-arrange my sock drawer. I was even driven to dust off a copy of SimCity 3000 and build a nice little seaside town.

I’m presently officing out of the Big in Japan coworking space at the famed Dallas Infomart, a smart open office that often plays host to the various Dallas <InsertWordHere>Camps. They’ve got a smoking fast Internet connection and a bunch of nice people from various web, mobile and tech startups and established companies in and out all day.

I’m here because AT&T still hasn’t connected my DSL line as promised, though I expect it to be on any day now (the latest promise is by 8 PM tonight – we’ll see).

Until then I’ll be coming down here fairly regularly to check in, and when the connection comes up at home, I’ll be back to my regular blogging frequency at /socnets and /robots.

In addition to job-hunting, I’m also packing for a 100-mile move and celebrating Christmas.

I’ve hooked Twitter into my MetroPCS phone. I’ll have a how-to later on the contortions I went through to make it work. Until then, if you need me, just Tweet @rizzn or call me with the number on the sidebar of the site here - and have a happy and safe Christmas, and I’ll see you on the flipside!

OK, so if you didn’t know I stormed off from FriendFeed in a huff during the election, very likely you were paying attention to more importan t things at the time than me. Like the election.

But yeah, I stormed off. You can read my un-caged beast over here and here if you so desire.

I’m back on FriendFeed. Here’s the thread where you can go join the others in ridiculing my lack of resolve.

Robert Scoble Requires an Intervention. No, not the one I suggested at some point a while back. Mike Arrington suggested this evening that Robert Scoble needs a FriendFeed intervention, and that his blog and position as a thought leader has suffered as a result.

I don’t think I spent nearly that amount of time, but that’s because I know (as does Robert, if he’s strictly honest with himself) that it wasn’t a straight 7 hours a day. You FriendFeed (unless you’re Mona) while you do other stuff. You leave the window open and monitor other stuff while you work. I know that’s how I use it – otherwise I simply couldn’t get paid for the work I was supposed to be doing.

But like Robert, I’d imagine I spent, if you count all the hours you have the window open, around 2,000 hours if not more, since I worked way more than 7 hours a day, and generally had FriendFeed open for more than those seven hours (not to mention I was active on the service far earlier than Robert </geekcred>).

Since I took a couple month sabbatical from the service, I was able to really see the difference in how it affected my blogging. In terms of frequency – I was able to go back up. There’s no doubt that there’s a time-suck involved. Of course it didn’t help that I was blogging both professionally and on the side here at Rizzn, but once I was able to step back from FF, I was able to put some of that time back in here into other projects.

In terms of traffic, after the initial spike wore off, it was much more difficult to get any sort of traction on posts I wrote.

I say that, keep in mind, in full agreement with Steven Hodson’s assessment that there’s a very narrow margin of what works on FriendFeed. He and I commiserate regularly on the fact that certain posts, though they be wonderfully composed and thought out, will never be as popular as bacon.

That’s sad, but that’s life. Overall, I trended upwards in my readership, but it was a much more difficult trek upwards. The threshold for a post gaining traction was much higher, and ironically dependent on FriendFeed, to a certain extent.

I have Disqus comments enabled, and usually whenever the first couple comments file in from FriendFeeders, the post rapidly starts to spread. When I was separate from FriendFeed, the traction only seemed to occur when a FriendFeeder happened to comment. Several times I had readers come by and leave a few comments, but since they weren’t FriendFeed users, the posts languished in relative obscurity.

In effect, I need FriendFeed (now, more than ever, since I’m going it alone instead of blogging on a highly visible site).

I never was as prolific as Robert was – mostly because I value my signal to noise ratios, whereas he revels in the noise. I personally think he overdoes it in that respect. I get just as much value out of FriendFeed as he does, I expect, because I’m more discerning with my follows.

In the immortal words of Jane Buckingham: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

I’m on FriendFeed because I want the news to find me quicker, and I want my news to be found quicker – while it’s still news.

So, bottom line, I’m back, and like Mike Arrington said about Twitter, I now say about FriendFeed: “I now need FriendFeed more than FriendFeed needs me.”

[This has been cross-posted from my new blog, /socnets>. If you’re not yet subscribed, you oughta be.]

The Huffington Post, a liberal web publication I’ve taken to task a number of times in the past, has once again come under fire for what is being described by some as “grubby” and “gray”.

Here’s what’s happening: You know how large publications like BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times frequently have syndication agreements in place with beat bloggers, and will run their content with a small amount of branding?

Huffington Post has been doing essentially the same thing, though without any permission.

If you want a great summary of some other folks commentary and details on this, the Duncan Riley at the Inquisitr has the deets, but I’ve described the general idea of what’s going on.

Here’s my thoughts: in this day and age, I’m not surprised nor am I particularly offended by HuffPo’s practice, here. Not only are they essentially doing what’s been done for ages in the blogosphere, but they’re also doing what we’ve let aggregators of our content do for a very long time.

I won’t go trot out my usual argument about the imaginary lines between a web based app and a web publication we define by how the bits arrive at our screens (though it’s a very valid argument, just one that doesn’t seem to get me anywhere, usually).

Instead I’ll point at two examples of where this is presently happening, and we really don’t seem to care all that much:

Nick Halstead’s Fav.or.it: We’ve all talked about Fav.or.it a lot, and for many of us it’s a nice little piñata to trot out every once in a while whenever the purists like to complain about content being used without permission. I’ve done it. I’ll go into how my opinions have changed on that in a bit, but the bottom line is that but for a little bit of protest here and there, nobody really seems to have tried to do anything about it.

To the best of my knowledge, no lawsuits have been filed against Nick et. al. Likewise, no one’s tried to DMCA their content back down. They’re not rip-roaring along on an endless growth pattern, according to the metrics I look at, but they’re not exactly hurting either.

Point being, apparently having your content out there syndicated in part or in whole acts as source of some kind of advertising. Who knew?

My Link Blog: This is something I can talk about with a bit more authority than Nick’s project.

As I described it when it first launched, I’m syndicating all the items from my Google Reader Shared Items feed on a limited basis here at Rizzn.com. When I looked around at the number of reputable organizations that syndicated without permission the full text of others’ feeds, I took the advice of one of my readers:

When I launched it, I almost hoped it would garner a little bit of controversy, particularly given my previously loudly shouted positions to the contrary on it, if not a bit of community discussion.

So far, it hasn’t done much of either. Turns out, most people come to my site to read what I have to say, not others (imagine that). In fact, most people that come through to my site to read an article written and syndicated on my linkblog, they generally (according to my stats package), click through to the original site to leave a comment, in lieu of commenting here.

And those of you who know me know I’d love to nail them to the wall, if at all possible.

But the way I see it, they’re doing these other sites a favor. Being linked prominently on a site like that which has as much traffic as HuffPo means having a lot of traffic. I know, I can personally attest to how much traffic being linked to by both highly popular political sites as well as sites in general around the popularity level of HuffPo is.

It’s generally a good thing, and in the end a mutually beneficial relationship between both the linkee and the linker.

Since I’m sorta doin’ this all professional-like, I’ll just say, in response to his highness Arrington, that he’s full of garbage. I couldn’t say this a week ago, but I can say it now (since I’m once again a free agent): he breaks embargos all the time, and he’s lying if he says he doesn’t.

Another tactic that I’ve been told he uses: he won’t agree to an embargo if the intro email is detailed enough, and then publish a “rumor” based on what’s in the email.

This, of course, helps his credibility since the “rumor” turns out to be true. Having seen it in the past take place before my very eyes (while still respecting the embargo he’s reporting the “rumors” about), I can see how the tactic as described looks like something pretty accurate from where I’ve sat.

Meh, we’ll honor them. It’s pretty stupid for me to say no, being a little guy again, instead of a big-leaguer.

I do have a request, though, for folks who send me releases… can you make them more interesting? There are few things more annoying than trying to slog through marketing speak written as a story.

There’s just no reason for them to be written like stories. I like bullet points, and maybe some good quotes from pertinent players, if they’re usable and not 100% buzzword.

I’m not a huge fan of the embargoed press release, but it’s not the worst thing in the world like people make it out to be.

Sometimes people break them, sometimes they don’t. It’s not the end of the world. That junk irritated me the first few times it happened, but there’s only so many times I can get mad over something so trivial.

So send your embargos over here to Rizzn.com. And not TechCrunch. Because we’ll honor them, and they won’t.