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Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.
Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)
I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.
Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)
Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:
“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:
First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.
Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.
Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.
A comment on comments: Yesterday, I wrote the following on Twitter:
“FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic et al, are pointing in the direction of something. They aren’t the destination.”
Because everything I post on Twitter (and other places) is mirrored on FriendFeed, the “tweet” appeared there at the same time.
If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”
Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.
Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.
It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.
As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.
I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.
Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.
I wasn’t that kid.
But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.
For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.
I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.
The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.
I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.
That’s why I’m such a geek.
[Photo: cocoen via Flickr.]
Four years ago, an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested Internet advertising would match magazine advertising by 2007 and blow past it in 2008. What happened?
 The very short version: During 2007, almost $60 billion was spent on advertising that appeared in print while $11.31 billion was spent on advertising that appeared on the Internet.
The very long version: I don’t expect any readers of this weblog to remember a four-year-old rant I wrote (and here) about a Wall Street Journal article appearing in July, 2004. Screen grabbed on the left, the WSJ story carried the headline “Online Ad Dollars Set to Match, Then Go Ahead of Magazines (sub. required).” The article was based on a Jupiter Research report predicting that in 2007, Internet advertising spending would grow to $13.8 billion which, claimed the Wall Street Journal, “would match magazine advertising.”
My rant, which later became an article appearing in Folio: Magazine, was directed more at the Wall Street Journal reporter’s mis-interpretation of the research than it was at the Jupiter Research report. Their prediction was not really a comparison of Internet advertising to magazine advertising, merely their estimate of online advertising spending through 2007 and beyond. It was the Journal reporter who decided to mashup a comparison of future Internet advertising (based on Jupiter’s numbers) and its magazine number estimate.
However — and this was a major focus of my rant — the reporter (and Jupiter) failed to recognize that the Internet advertising prediction included all online advertising while the magazine advertising prediction excluded all business-to-business magazine advertising.
In my response to the article, I suggested that a better prediction of 2007 magazine ad spending would be the 2004 estimate by Veronis Suhler that $28.3 billion would be spent on magazine advertising (consumer and B-to-B) in 2007.
Fast-forward four years. Today, Advertising Age issued a report that included the actual ad spending (split by media) in 2007. As you can see in the Advertising Age pie chart below, $11.31 billion was spent on Internet advertising and $30.33 billion was spent on magazine advertising. Throw in the $28.22 billion spent on newspaper advertising and there was nearly $60 billion spent on print advertising last year.
Let’s break this down a bit. Let’s look at a comparison of the 2004 predictions vs. actual performance from Jupiter Research and Veronis Suhler regarding Internet and magazine advertising. As you can see on my comparison below, Jupiter over-shot their Internet advertising prediction while Veronis-Suhler undershot their magazine advertising prediction.
(Granted, Jupiter Research’s prediction during the most recent four-year span was dramatically better than their 1999-2003 prediction. In 1999, they predicted that online advertising in 2003 would total $11.5 billion compared to the $6.6 billion it actually hit.)
What does this mean? First, it means, (to quote a wonderful headline I saw this morning) “90% of all statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.” No doubt, the statistics in today’s report can be spun any way you want. I’ve spun them one way. Most bloggers would spin them in a way that suggests they are another nail in the coffin of the print medium. Frankly, the way headlines and intro paragraphs will be written can make most any statistics imply whatever you want — at least 50% of the time.
As for me, personally: I love Internet advertising. Without a doubt, it’s growing faster than any other form of advertising and I, personally, am benefiting from that. In 15 years, it has grown from zero to $11.3 billion, an amazing feat. However, my complaint is with the misuse of numbers by reporters and tech-oriented analysts — and, to be honest, just about everybody I know — to support a narrative that can be summed up in three words: Print is dead. As much as I love the Internet and all things digital, that narrative is probably not going to be true in the lifetime of anyone making that prediction.
Today’s narrative — as it was back in 2004 and 1999 and 1954 when TV was going to kill print and radio and movies — is that the Internet is going to bury all other forms of media one day. Today’s narrative is that Internet advertising is growing at a far larger percentage (which even a middle-schooler should understand is easier to do when you have a lower base on which to grow). Today’s narrative is that newspapers are going to be dead in, what, a year of so? Certainly, they won’t last for an entire decade, goes the narrative. According to Steve Ballmer, “…there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.” (He later said he could be off on the number of years, claiming, “…If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point . . . “
Of course, he also said the iPhone would flop.
Personally, I am doubtful about the longterm viability of the kind of print product the national chains of newspapers produce. Outside the sports section, I find little of value or interest to me in my hometown daily churned out by one of those national chains. And as I’ve said many times on this blog, I think many business-to-business print publications that focus merely on the transactions of their industries will be replaced by online properties that can provide a better, more timely flow of such information.
So, yes, I do think print will constrict while the Internet grows — over time. But die? Not likely.
Early blogger Moses announcing,
“God told me bloggers love
linking to top-ten lists.”
Andrew Sullivan is pondering aloud what many other early and prolific bloggers (I confess) are wondering these days: Are we losing our ability to read (and write) in the long-form.
Two quotes:
“When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on. I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that I’m used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgments, hoping for a name I recognise. I start again. A few paragraphs later, I reach for the laptop. It’s not that I cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it….”
“…Some have suggested a web sabbath – a day or two in the week when we force ourselves not to read e-mails or post blogs or text messages; a break in order to think in the old way again: to look at human faces in the flesh rather than on a Facebook profile, to read a book rather than a blog, to pray rather than browse.
I could point to lots of early and prolific bloggers who have “struggled” with where blogging fits with other forms of self-expression — both long-form and short. I appreciate when long-time bloggers openingly share their inner debates regarding whether or not they should keep blogging at the same pace.
However, unlike Sullivan (and the Nick Carr book article that spurred his essay), many of those I follow are not pining for the return to long-form, but are being pulled by shorter and shorter forms of communication and expression. Yesterday, for example, Fred Wilson wrote, “I think its time to acknowledge that long form blogging every day may be coming to an end.” He was reflecting on his recent use of “micro-blogging” tools like Twitter and Tumblr. Steve Rubel has written several times on the topic and has cut-back considerably on his blogging as he has stepped up his usage of microblogging services like Twitter and FriendFeed.
Other bloggers are heading in the other direction. Jeff Jarvis (who still blogs and tweets prolifically) is writing a book (For the record, I don’t recall ever reading anything from Jeff questioning whether long-form, short-form, video — or using chalk on the sidewalk have priority over any other form of self-expression). Hugh McLeod will also have a book coming out soon. Hugh is one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of sharing-out-loud his personal conflicts with different forms of what I call “conversational media.” He is an early adopter and tremendous role model for effective use of each new service, but he’s also an artist who struggles (aloud) with how such new forms of communication can impact — both positively and negatively — his work.
Historically, my favorite blog post on the topic of giving up blogging was written by Dave Winer on March 3, 2006. The topic was “Why I Will Stop Blogging” by the end of 2006. Of course he didn’t. And I personally have thanked and continue to thank him for not. His continued blogging has led to some great ideas that he’s constantly developing. It’s also led to some very focused political commentary that has probably helped interest many in the political process who previously have been less focused on the topic.
Personally, I definitely see “blogging” evolving. I’ve never really liked the word “blog” (despite the name of this blog) and have always said that “blogging” may not last, but having a platform where an individual can “broadcast” (or, as Doc Searls describes it, send and e-mail to the world) will be around forever. For example, on our company website, Hammock.com, every employee has a “People Page.” They’re very blog-like and even run on MovableType. But no one is required to use them — and for some, they’re merely a bio. We’ve specifically said, this isn’t your blog, and have provided guidance on how to use such a platform in a work context. I use mine to say whether or not I’m in the office and comment about work-specific topics. (We have other blogs on the site where people are encouraged to write about professional topics — and activities related to work. And we’ve encouraged and assisted employees in setting up personal blogs.) Like Fred, I also have a Tumblr-powered website — RexHammock.com — that is completely unrelated to anything I do professionally. I am very random about what I post there. It has no theme other than I’ve found something interesting that I want to share with the half-dozen or so people who have discovered the site.
Finally, I have this theory: People don’t read past the first paragraph of a blog post (or the first sentence of an e-mail). If you are reading this sentence you are completely blowing my theory. You are to be commended and you prove that at least one person — you — still has an amazing attention span. Congratulations. Now, go read a book and enjoy your day.
Oh, and Happy Father’s Day.
Over the years, it’s been fascinating to watch the light turn on for certain people regarding what’s taking place in the marketplace of “content” (excuse me, Doc). For example, today, Paul Krugman writes an “a-ha” piece after using an Amazon Kindle for a couple of months.
Quote:
“Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.
Whenever I read something like that, I have to take a deep breath and admit to myself that not everyone has spent the past 20 years obsessed with this topic. Whenever I read something like that, I wish I had a place to point people to a few seminal writings that have provided similar a-ha-moments to really geeky folks (like me) — but a long time ago.
If you have some more writings that provided an a-ha moment to you, please add them to the comments.
Here are a few of my go-to ones:
1. The Esther Dyson essay, “Intellectual Value,” written in the July, 1995, issue of Wired magazine. (Krugman quotes Dyson in his piece today, but does not link to it.) Go ahead, commit it to memory. It’s like the Gettysburg Address.
2. The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, grew from this now “read-only landmark website.” (Here’s a place to read the book for free.) It pretty much foresees everything that marketing is becoming. It’s like when Luther nailed his 95 theses to that door in Wittenburg.
3. While not a specific article, I find myself referring often to the concept Paul Saffo coined “macro-myopia.” It relates to forecasting the impact of new technology and means, roughly, “in the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate” the impact of new technology. This is an idea I’ve written about several times over the years (on the Cluetrain listserv in 2000, here in 2002 and in 2004 when Paul explained his role in adding to a concept developed by Roy Amara, Ev Rogers and others. The importance of the concept today is this: When those of us who are obsessed with technology see something that we know is going to change everything, we delude ourselves into thinking the change will be overnight. Technology adoption has a very predictable cycle and even those technologies that look like instant hits are likely catching a wave that was two-decades in the building.
Two bonus long reads for those who find comfort in realizing all these new ideas have been around a long, long time.:
4. The 1945 article, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush (synopsis).
5. The Machine Stops, a 1909 science fiction novella (12,000 words) by E.M. Forster.
The Important Part: Despite the fact most people have only been using e-mail for the past 15 years, it has become a dominant channel of business communication — and definitely the most mis-used. A couple of interesting thoughts on e-mail have hit my radar in the past 24 hours. First, this check-list from Seth Godin with some practical (and humorous) considerations you should take before hitting that send button. Second, (via a Twitter ‘tweet’ from Steve Rubel) I saw these blog posts by Luis Suarez, a knowledge management expert at IBM, who is 14 weeks into an experiment of giving up business e-mail.
The Take Away: E-mail is not going away anytime soon, but the people who used e-mail before you ever heard of it are moving onto other methods of staying in touch with one-another. Some of this is generational - Facebook and text-messaging trump e-mail for those under 24. Some of this is frustration(al?) - an effort to reduce the noise-level that has resulted from spam and the ease some people have with hitting the send button. Your not going to moving on from e-mail anytime soon, but the next few years will see a significant evolution in how you use and manage e-mail.
Time posted: 7:57 am |
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The Important Part: The people at Facebook describe your list of “friends” (contacts) as being your “social-graph.” Others use the term “social network” to describe in broad terms, your network of connections with other people. Chances are, you call that list of connections your “address book.” In the previous century, you may have called it your Rolodex. Your ability to export that list of contacts from your computer out to web services (geek word of the day - “portability”) is one of the building blocks of a future web where you can go onto any new site or service and instantly discover everyone using it who may be a friend of your second-cousin, Herbert. Today, Google announced that the newest update of the Mac operating system includes a preference in the “Address Book” program that will keep the Mac address book synch’d with the contact list on ones Google G-mail account. Why is this significant? There are lots of really smart people and groups working on standards and practices related to how someone “asserts” their online identity and their connections with others — and how web services should respect how individuals utilize such personal data. However, until the day comes when all of those standards and practices are worked out, your personal e-mail address and your phone number are serving as a form of “de-facto” identifier of who you are. Likewise, your list of e-mail contacts are filling the gap on identifying your social network. And until the powers-that-would-like-to-be all agree upon what your portable “social network/graph” is going to be and how it’s going to work, your address book has become a stand-in. That’s why, when you sign onto a new social networking site, they ask if you want to allow them to bounce your e-mail contact list up against their list of registered users. That way, you can discover who among your contacts are already using the service.
Take Away: For Apple Address Book users who used to have to “export” and “upload” your contact list manually, you now have one-click portability (and on-going syncing) to your Google G-mail contacts list of your most important “social graph.” And from your Google contacts, you can blast that social graph to infinity and beyond (or whatever Google Friend Connect is).
Related rambling: About a year ago, I talked about the concept of e-mail address as universal identifyer in a lengthy post.
[Photo credit: jcroach, Flickr.]
The Important Part: Since May 14, you can click on the “More” link at the top of a Google Maps location to see photos (via Panoramio.com) and explanations (via Wikipedia) of points of interest. For example, here is a map of Nashville with the “More” features selected.
View Larger Map
The Take Away: Users of Google Earth will recognize the “More” feature as a pathway to the “layer-fication” of Google Maps. It is also a great example of a “nonlinear” approach to presenting information (or, as the engineering-types say, “data points”). I predict that before long, the “More” tab will include a check-box that has the word “News” on it. It will provide a geographical mash-up view of stories indexed by Google News. That’s not much of a long-shot prediction, however, as the news-layer feature was added to Google Earth last week.
Update: A mere 24 hours later, and Google has another announcement - that Google Earth can be viewed via a new browser plug-in. This isn’t going to replace Google Maps, just make Google Earth a little more accessible and capable of being integrated with third-party applications. Unfortunately, I can’t give the plug-in a review since currently, it’s only available for Windows users.
 The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and online), Heather Green and Stephen Baker have written a great overview of where “social media” (not just blogs, but all the conversational media and social networking tools and platforms out there) are today as it relates to business. Not, as over-reported in the technology blogosphere, about the business of social media. And not about the tools and features and investment opportunities and anything else gee-whiz that’s going on. This BusinessWeek story is about how all these activities and connections and conversations that are taking place online are changing the way business is conducted.
The Take-Away: The article may not be eye-opening to a crowd who spends all day reading tech-blogs and camping-out on Twitter, but it’s a great article to forward to a “C-Level” person at your company or organization who you think could benefit from a high level view of what is transpiring — from a “media brand” they know.
The Less Important Rambling: Over the past three years, I’ve gotten to know BusinessWeek writers (and bloggers) Stephen Baker and Heather Green pretty well. I haven’t actually met them face-to-face, but we’ve shared conversations about Heather’s wedding, Stephen’s book and a myriad of other “important” and trivial matters. We’re “friends” on all those online networking things you’ve ever heard of (and many you probably haven’t if you’re not a Web 2.0 wonk). Because of that, it may seem weird, but I actually know more about what Stephen and Heather are up to than many acquaintances — and friends — I know “off line.”
For example, because we follow each other via Twitter and Facebook, I knew they recently worked on updating a story from May, 2005 with information and insight that has emerged during the past three years. In that second link, they’ve literally annotated the first article with contemporary statistics and knowledge. That’s a brilliantly creative reporting technique that I’ve never seen before as it uses visual cues from the Word document “change tracking” feature so readers can easily see where the new information has been inserted.
If it weren’t Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, I might be tempted to keep rambling, but I have much less important things that are beckoning me at the moment.
Today, I’m officially declaring — after eight years of denying it — that this a geek blog. If you read it because I write about magazines and marketing and social media, that’s fine. Those are the topics I write about, but you need to know that this blog is not really about those topics, it’s about technology.
This is a geek blog, okay.
To prove this, I’ve decided to display my "wikio" badge that says this blog is "ranked" #180 among the gazillion technology blogs in the world . I must confess, I was somewhat surprised when Lisa from Wiko e-mailed me to encourage me to display that badge as I’ve never really thought of this blog as being a "technology blog." As I said, I thought it was more of a marketing blog, but it’s only ranked #118 in that department. Heck, in the industry I actually work in (an industry now being called "content marketing"), my blog is only ranked #60 . Actually, that’s a good thing, as it means there are now at least 60 better blogs about a topic no one was blogging about but me for most of the years I’ve been blogging — and I’ve always known I was doing a terrible job "covering" it.
For years, I’ve known that I was confusing people who need to pigeon-hole blogs into a specific topic. That’s why you’ll never find my blog ranked high on services that try to designate a cluster of "top blogs" on a certain topic.
But it’s getting to the point where, if you blog, you have to declare a major .
So, today, I’m declaring a major: technology.
Knowing that technology is the most blogged about topic there is (except, perhaps, knitting), I figure being #180 provides me with enough geek-cred that I can wear my badge proudly.
But I must admit, the real reason I’m displaying the badge is a column in the New York Times today by David Brooks .
Brooks is at his best when he weaves cultural threads into trend tapestries that can be understood by those who may know something is taking place, but can’t quite figure out, "the big picture." (His book Bobos in Paradise is a great example of his skills at this.) Today, in his Times column, he takes on the task of trying to interpret for a general audience why geeks are now cool.
Quote:
"…new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds."
Hey, that’s me.
I’m a geek. This blog is about geeky things. I now have proof.
The last person on the blogosphere needing me to echo-chamber him is Robert Scoble, but this post is a wonderful challenge to something that is so embedded as conventional wisdom, I thought of it as truth before reading what Robert wrote. The CW is this: There’s too much noise on the Internet and what we really need is something that helps us reduce the (buzz term warning) signal-to-noise-ratio. But (now that Robert has enlightened me) the fact of the matter is this: If we (and if you’re reading this on an RSS news feed or on my blog, you’re a part of the “we”) weren’t noise junkies, we would be getting our information via the telegraph.
Robert’s post is in praise of noise — for noise, says Robert, is where you discover patterns and tidbits that become news.
Ironically, it can be argued that Robert is saying he enjoys being a filter for the rest of us — serving as a hunter, gatherer of the information that the rest of us may find of interest. We know we don’t have the time, access or endurance to hang out with all the geeks Robert hangs out with — so we entrust him to put up with all of that noise and hassle so he can share with us a firehose of tidbits he picks up. In turn, the thousands of people who follow Robert serve as a filter to discover his “best-of” stuff so those who can stand even less noise, can pick it up in a more-quiet way, via Techmeme, for instance.
Some people hate noise so much, they’ll actually wait 30 minutes for news to hit CNN. And still others have such low tolerance for noise, they’ll actually wait until the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are printed and delivered in the morning to learn what happened today.
And, still others, love the “quiet” so much, they wait until next week and read about stuff in Time or Newsweek.
If you’re reading this, it’s hard for you to claim that you’re not somewhat of a noise junkie. And, despite what Robert says, if you get your news via Techmeme or Google News, you’re still more of a noise junkie than most of the people you know who get their news from CNN and USA Today.
Robert lives far out on the extreme edges of the long tail of noise. The best reporters always do.
Using the idea of “noise” as a metaphorical framework for understanding how much of a filter you want before learning something that in your world may be considered “news,” is a great way to start understanding that the Internet and all this stuff we call Web 2.0 is as much about information and data and conversational flow as it is about technology.
Bonus link: Another thought-provoking post today is from Fred Wilson, who writes about data flow.
Next-day bonus link: Jeff Jarvis on why Twitter is the canary in the news coalmine. Another day, another metaphor to explain Twitter.
Via ReadWriteWeb.com’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, I learned about — and downloaded — a new “Adobe Air” application called Snackr that is total news-junkie crack. I’ve already had to turn it off because it’s one of those things that sucks out every last ounce of attention span your soul can muster.
It turns any OPML file (in this case, a file that lists the source URLs of RSS feeds) into an animated screen ticker that runs along any edge of your computer’s desktop. Imagine a stock ticker, but with news headlines from the web sources you’ve designated. At any point, you can click on the headline and ticker stops and reveals the summary excerpt of a post. (Later: Actually, the full feed is displayed — even more amazing.)
In other words, it’s like an RSS reader that is set up in a River of News mode, but in this case, the headlines are actually flowing.
On second thought, for those who attempt to describe RSS as a “push” technology, ala ““PointCast,” this will be your best example, so far.
On third thought, it turns every thing you follow online into something like a giant animated twitter feed.
It’s cool, but don’t download it. It’s crack, I tell you. It’s crack.
Before I write anything else, let me emphasize that I believe the real news here is a major earthquake. As I write this, the news reports indicate 900 high schools students are trapped beneath rubble. As a parent, I know where my mind and heart are as I read such news.
Admittedly, how the news broke on this story is an extremely esoteric sidebar, however for those who are passionate users and observers of online media and the way in which participants in an event can “broadcast” their observations, the role of Twitter as a form of first responder medium in this tragedy is already being analyzed in the technosphere (good examples: MG Siegler at VentureBeat, The Onlline Journalism Blog and the ubber-blogger/twitterer Robert Scoble) and even by some mainstream media tech-news observers like this quote from the BBC’s dot.life blogger, Rory Cellan-Jones:
“Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.
Again, this is a sidebar to a breaking story, but (as I’ve written about for a long time) the folks “playing around” with Twitter are creating something that is not just about “play.” It may remain an “edge” medium — a global police scanner for the news obsessed — but I stand by my predictions that Twitter will become the source people will turn to in the early, confusing moments of breaking news stories. As stories develop, the traditional models of reporting will kick in, but Twitter — because one can post to it via text-message, IM, e-mail, (and via secondary services, voice-to-text, audio, video or photos posted elsewhere can be converted into or alerted via “tweets”) — is a powerful eyewitness and message-relay platform.
And for the record, if I’m ever “inside” a breaking news story, Twitter is where you’ll find me.
Later: Search rock-star Danny Sullivan points out that the US Geological Service had information on its website within three minutes of the first “tweet” on the topic. I don’t think anyone (and certainly not me) has suggested that Twitter is a new “authority” on the news of earthquakes or any disaster. Obviously, news will get disseminated with or without it. That Twitter is even in the food-chain is what’s noteworthy today.
A new feature that will be recognized as a tumblelog by the tiny fraction of the world’s inhabitants who might know what a tumblelog is, has been added to Google Reader. Wisely recognizing that tumblelog is a far-edge concept, Google chose not use such a term in announcing the feature on the Google Reader weblog.
I would spend a sentence or two describing why I think it is odd that Google is getting into tumblelog hosting through its RSS newsreader platform, however, the explanation would be so esoteric that even my eyes are glazing over at the thought of how geeky my reasoning is. It has to do with having a feature as a part of an RSS reader for sharing items one finds via means other than an RSS reader — but like I said, who cares?
Maybe it will be a great feature for someone. But I’m scratching my head at who might use it other than current Google Reader users who already have a “share” feature. Wouldn’t someone who might actually comprehend what’s going on with the tumblelog aspects of this feature prefer to display such sharing gestures at a URL like rex.tumblr.com than, say, http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02167497403971826980?
Or perhaps I’m having difficulty understanding it because I rarely use Google Reader.
Sidenote: If you want to see a tumblelog, RexHammock.com is an example. It’s where I share items I run across that are bigger than a bookmark and smaller than a blog post and less fleeting than a tweet on Twitter. And another thing: if something makes it to my tumblelog, chances are it has nothing to do with business or technology or media or anything remotely related to this weblog. And wisely recognizing that few people I know use the term tumblelog, I don’t refer to it as a tumblelog except in blog posts about the topic of tumblelogs.
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