Blogging
Posts related to blogs and blogging.
Today microblogging service Jaiku announced that they have been purchased by Google. I came across the news via a barrage of Twitter updates this morning, and it wasn't long before everyone started wondering why Google chose Jaiku over Twitter. It seems that most people feel Jaiku is the superior platform technology-wise, but the community at Twitter is better. I'd more or less agree with that statement. For instance, I chose Jaiku to display "my status" on the right side of my website instead of Twitter because the reliability and performance of Jaiku was just so much better. It still is.
Marc Orchant has a great post on the topic. Scoble thinks that Google made the move for Jaiku because of Facebook. He suggests that Google is gearing up to launch some major competition for Facebook on November 5th. That may be true, but I like what Ross Mayfield had to say better (though he too mentions Facebook):
But perhaps the greatest direction they can go with this is lifestreaming.
With Google's savvy around structuring the unstructured, picture lifestreaming evolving into something that infers permalinks for social activity. One day your Google homepage may be a stream of your friends and what they are doing, sharing, and adopting.
Yes! Enough of this manually updating my lifestream already, let's make it update automagically. Even better, give everyone a lifestream by default. That idea gets me excited.
A follow-up post from Scoble highlights that Google has built themselves a "very strong position in the RSS ecosystem" as they now own Google Reader, FeedBurner, and Jaiku (which imports/aggregates RSS feeds). Very good point indeed.
Now the question is - who will snap up Twitter?
Twitter launched a killer new feature last week, the very aptly named "Track." Sometimes when I am thinking about something, I wonder how many other people are thinking about that something at the same time. With Twitter and the new Track feature, there's a way to find out:
You can follow friends on your phone through Twitter, but what about concepts? What if you wanted an update anytime anyone mentioned your name, your favorite band, "NYC," "earthquake," or "Steve Jobs?" In real-time? What if you were attending an event and wanted to know who else was there?
That's what Track lets you do. It's dead simple to setup - just send "track mastermaq" to Twitter, and you'll start receiving all messages that mention my nickname. This is really powerful stuff. In addition to the usual ego-tracking, I am also tracking edmonton and podcasting. It's like a whole new world has opened up!
If you've been holding off on trying Twitter, I strongly encourage you to do so now. Especially if you're in the marketing industry. Where else can you get notifications every time someone mentions your product or service? This is the future, today.
Now if only Twitter was more reliable...
It seems that no matter how hard I try, I am never as organized as I want to be. There's always something I didn't get around to doing, or something new inevitably comes up. I am getting better though, and there's a few tools I use to make it easier. I use Outlook 2007 every day for my email and calendar, but I've never been a big fan of the tasks functionality in Outlook. For that, I'm an extremely happy user of Remember The Milk.
Remember The Milk (RTM) is a web-based task management application. Here's what they say on their about page:
We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.
You've really got to try RTM to understand why it's so awesome, but here are three of my favorite features:
- Keyboard Shortcuts
That's right, this web application supports keyboard shortcuts! It takes some getting used to, I suppose, but once you know the shortcuts you're set. Pressing "t" will open a text box to allow you to type a new task. Pressing "n" deselects all the tasks in the current view, etc. Very handy.
- Smart Due Dates
In most applications, selecting a due date is a pain in the ass. You've got to open a little calendar control, navigate to the month you want, and then click on the day. With RTM, you get a text box that you can type virtually anything into. Seriously. Want to make the task due tomorrow? Simply type "tomorrow" or even "tmr". How about next Friday? Simply type "next friday". Once you've used this, you'll wonder how calendar apps could ever have worked any differently.
- Twitter Support
As a self-described Twitter addict, I was incredibly happy to see RTM add Twitter support recently. Now I don't even have to be near a computing device to use RTM! Instead, I can simply send a text message via Twitter to add new tasks, find out what's due today, and more. Twitter's direct message feature is what allows this magic to happen. Once you have RTM configured and added as a friend on Twitter, you can simply send "d rtm pick up milk" to add new tasks. Makes task management on the go a cinch.
You can learn more about RTM here. RTM supports multiple languages, task list sharing, offline access, and tons of other cool stuff. Did I mention that RTM is free? Quite amazing really, though they did recently launch a "Pro" account that costs $25 per year. With the Pro account you get priority support, new features (none as of yet), and "a warm fuzzy feeling for supporting RTM". Heh.
If you're looking for a good task management application, I definitely recommend Remember The Milk.
My latest article at last100 was published today, titled: Windows Media Center - a Microsoft success story? If you've been reading my blog for a while, then you probably know that I'm a bit of a Microsoft fan. I think they're a great company, and I like their products (for the most part). Sure they do some stupid things from time to time, but name a big company that doesn't!
Anyway, back to the post. I've written a few Microsoft-related posts for last100 in the last month or so, and I don't think I've said anything terribly negative in any of them. A few of the posts became really popular on Digg, and the feedback was mostly good. I was kind of surprised, to be honest. Communities like Digg, by their very nature, don't like big companies. Or perhaps more accurately, the community members don't. Well, I finally got buried on Digg. My latest article made the front page, then quickly disappeared. I guess I had it coming!
Essentially my post demonstrates that Windows Media Center has become very successful. I don't really attempt to explain the reasons for the success, aside from glossing over the features and that sort of thing. It seems most people think that WMC is only successful because it is installed by default on many new computers. Even if that's the case, does it matter? I don't think it does.
Forget about how it happened - the simple fact of the matter is that there are more than 50 million computers out there with really great media center functionality. Even if the majority of users don't use that functionality today, that doesn't mean they won't tomorrow. There's something to be said about saturation. Not enough people know about media center features. And maybe they shouldn't have to. If everyone had media center PCs, they could just start using the functionality without thinking about it.
Oh well, getting buried was bound to happen sooner or later. I wonder if they make a t-shirt for this!
Twitter announced a round of funding last Thursday, from Union Square Ventures and a few others. Michael Arrington did some digging and is fairly certain the amount was $5 million on a $20 million pre-money valuation. That's not too bad, especially when you consider that Twitter is perhaps most famous for not having a business plan.
No business plan?! It's true. At least no formal business plan. Biz Stone tried to assure everyone last week that the company has in fact thought about a business model, but I am not sure how many people bought it. The investment started a small "you don't need a business plan" meme in the blogosphere, and it really got me thinking...do you need a business plan or not?
Paul Kedrosky says you don't need one, and thinks that "business plans are overrated, and profits perhaps even more so." Don Dodge says that "investors invest in people not business plans." Fred Wilson, one of the investors, admits that they "don't know yet" what the business model will be for Twitter. He claims they have time to figure that out. Charles Hudson says the meme is "crazy talk" and thinks it is worth writing some ideas down. Robert Scoble says that "if you REALLY think you can get funded without having a business plan you're probably smoking something illegal."
After reading dozens of these posts, and looking back at what I learned from the business plan competitions we competed in last year, I've come to the following conclusion: I think business plans are useful for internal use, and mostly a waste of time otherwise.
I think what Charles says in his post makes a lot of sense. There are certain questions that entrepreneurs should answer and write down. Really though, no one needs to see those pieces of paper. When it comes time to market your business or your idea to someone else, you've got to tune your message. And you've got to market yourself more than anything else. That's why it's a waste of time to have a complete, polished business plan (unless you're in a competition I guess). If no one is really going to read it but you, does it matter what it looks like?
I think the trick is to remember that investors are people too. You need to relate to them, and you need to excite them. A heavy, thick document is probably not the best way to do that.
We haven't really updated our business plan since the competitions in 2006. That's partly due to the fact that it's tedious, and partly due to the fact that we haven't had a need to. A smaller executive overview, a quick slide deck, or an actual conversation are far more useful.
There's a difference between a business plan and a business model, however. I still think it's important to have some ideas about how you are going to monetize your product or service. And it's important to know that there really is someone out there willing to pay for whatever it is you've created. Even better if you know who that someone is.
The realization that a traditional business plan is useless simply reinforces the idea that getting face time with investors is important. And for technology, that generally means the United States. Or perhaps BC or Ontario, but definitely not Alberta.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Congrats to Twitter on the funding!
I wonder how long it will be until we all have green overload - I am guessing it'll be sooner rather than later. These days, you're simply not hip and with it unless you're proclaiming how environmentally friendly you are. That goes for individuals, companies, and all other organizations too. Trying to cure cancer? Great - so long as you go about it in a "green" sort of way. Okay maybe it's not quite that bad, but it's getting darn close.
Did you know Discovery is launching an entire TV channel dedicated to the green movement? Apparently the New York Times had the story back in April, but I just came across it tonight while reading about Leonardo DiCaprio's latest project:
DiCaprio is set to executive produce “Eco-Town,” a 13-part reality series which will follow state and local officials in their quest to build an ecologically - and economically - sustainable town in Kansas, aptly named Greenburg.
Yep, even famous movie stars need to add a shade of green to their images. No one is safe from the big bad green machine!
A television channel is one thing, but a niche blog is quite another. If the recently launched earth2tech blog doesn't scream "go green or go home" nothing does:
Earth2Tech is a publication devoted to intersection between the tech industry, their eco-moves and the next generation of tech innovation that will combat climate change.
When will it end?
You'll recall that last week the first post in a two part series I wrote for last100 on Microsoft's Internet TV strategy was posted. I'd say the post did very well, receiving over 20 comments from readers and 300 diggs. Today, part two is up:
The product to keep an eye on is definitely Mediaroom (and Mediaroom on the Xbox 360). There’s a reason Microsoft chose Mediaroom as the brand instead of simply Microsoft TV: they are looking to the future of entertainment, where TV is just one piece of the puzzle.
You can read the entire post at last100, and you can digg it here. As always, let me know what you think!
I was fortunate enough to land a guest posting gig over at last100, a blog dedicated to tracking the digital lifestyle. My two part series is about "Microsoft on your telly" and my articles take a look at where Microsoft is and has been in the television market, and where they are going. You can read the first post here. Please let me know what you think!
If you've never heard of last100, check it out. From the About page:
The name last100 refers to what industry insiders call the “last 100 feet” problem, which is the gap between the typical home’s computer and its living-room TV set. Whilst the digital living room is a primary focus, we’ll also be covering other areas of the digital lifestyle (VoIP, portable media, mobile web etc).
I love the name!
Looks like my first post has received a bunch of attention on Digg too, so feel free to digg it (up to 95 diggs right now). All I can say is I am glad the Digg mob is focusing their attention on Microsoft rather than on me!
I've decided that I am going to switch my blog to WordPress. I am running Community Server 1.1 at the moment, and while it works well enough I know I'd be happier with WordPress. When I have time and have solved the issues with doing such a switch, I'll make the move.
There's a very large, very vibrant, and very active community surrounding WordPress. For example, it's rare to find a blogging tool that supports Community Server - all of them support WordPress. Ditto for widgets and other third party services. Most of all though? WordPress just works the way I want it to.
I've used .Text and Community Server for this blog (and DasBlog waaaay back in the day). Blogosphere.ca is still running .Text if you can believe it. My Dad's blog and the SportsGuru blog we co-author run on MovableType. I've played with Blogger, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, and other hosted engines. I've seen WordPress used over the last couple years, and was particularly interested when Scoble switched. I started using WordPress quite extensively a couple weeks ago when I started WindowsMediaBlog.com. It became clear to me very quickly that WordPress is the way to go. Easy to setup and configure, easy to manage.
These are the goals I have for the switch:
- All posts, comments, trackbacks, etc. migrated to WordPress.
- All existing URLs will continue to work. The switch shouldn't break anything.
- Existing content will be "cleaned up" a bit (tags stripped and stored in the database using a widget, for example).
I've looked around a little, and have come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve these goals is to write some code. WordPress cannot import from Community Server, and an RSS feed isn't flexible enough to include comments and trackbacks. BlogML is promising, and it might help to an extent, but only with #1. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear from you!
My blog will likely be the last that I'll switch to WordPress, actually. EclecticBlogs, SportsGuru, and the Blogosphere.ca blogs will all be migrated first, in varying degrees (Blogosphere will likely be a fresh start using WordPress MU and a static archive of what currently exists). By the time I get to my blog, I should be an expert!
Thoughts? Suggestions? I'm all ears! I'll share my migration experiences here as I go.
I mentioned in my last notes post that I'd write about Pownce, so here it goes. Nothing can top the iPhone in the hype department, but Pownce has come close recently. And unfortunately for Kevin Rose and his crew, it doesn't live up to any of it, unlike the iPhone (note: I don't have one). Ted was a little mean over at uncov, but for the most part I have to agree with him.
Let me get this out of the way right now - I really like Twitter, but I've been just as annoyed as everyone else with their crappy service at times. It has gotten much better lately though. And my first impression upon hearing about Pownce was - what does it do for me that Twitter or Facebook or instant messaging doesn't already do?
Here are some thoughts on Pownce:
- It works kind of awkwardly in Opera. Scrolling is not smooth, and clicking on the "home" button at the top takes way too much effort (you have to be right on the text or something).
- Spam. By default, Pownce thinks it's cool to send an email to your inbox each time something happens. Problem is, you have to click through to see any details.
- Crazy invites! Who are all these people that have requested to be my friend? I have accepted them all, but I only know a few of them. This hasn't happened to me with Twitter.
- Maybe I am blind, but I don't think Pownce has ever heard of RSS. I'm surprised their blog has an RSS feed. Seriously, why can't I subscribe to anything?
- Lack of mobile support. That's the second best thing about Twitter as far as I am concerned, so it sucks that Pownce is web/desktop-only.
- The best thing about Twitter is the API - Pownce doesn't have one.
- The file sharing feature of Pownce strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.
Honestly, Pownce is a horrible attempt to aggregate the functionality of a bunch of services into one place. Twitter is better for messaging (heck so is IM). Email/IM is better for sending files to individuals, services like box.net do multiple people. Facebook is better for creating a network of friends, and for creating and sharing events. del.icio.us is better for sharing links.
And here's the thing: I already use all of those services, so why would I switch to Pownce? It would have to be ten times better than all of those services to make it worthwhile. It's clearly not.
Sorry folks, but if it weren't for Kevin Rose, Pownce wouldn't have received a fraction of the attention it has thus far. I realize I am contributing to that attention, but I see this post as a sane reply to these idiotic ones. Two of the authors of those posts admitted their gut feeling was to hate Pownce. My advice? Learn to trust your gut.
Another thing: who gives a shit what technology Pownce was written in? Only the very geeky will know what django is. Twitter had the same problem - who cares that it's written using RoR? Make it work dammit. And to anyone who thinks Pownce will get tons of people to install Adobe AIR - get a grip! AIR will be installed very widely, yes, but it won't be because of Pownce. I'm all for getting my geek on, but shiny new web frameworks distract from having a solid, usable product.
One more thing (heh I sound like Steve Jobs...): why not use Leah Culver (Pownce's lead developer) to your advantage, Pownce? If her photo appeared in every Pownce review I've read, or on every page of the site, I might feel better about the service. Heh, sorry for getting chauvinistic, but come on, I'm trying to find something that would get me to use Pownce. And besides, would you rather look at Leah or Kevin? Thought so. Maybe that's what we need for Podcast Spot - an attractive, female lead developer. Hmm...
Okay, that's it. If for some reason you're dying to try Pownce, I have some invites left, just send me your email.
UPDATE: I just found some feeds! Turns out you have to visit someone's public profile to see an RSS icon of any kind. Dumb!
Ever hear the name Guy Kawasaki before? If you're at all involved in the tech or marketing industries, chances are you have. He's a pretty famous guy, credited with "bringing the concept of evangelism to the high-tech business." He made his name at Apple, where he was responsible for marketing of the Macintosh.
Lately Guy has been blogging, and launching a new company called Truemors. Here's a description from the website:
The purpose of Truemors is to democratize information. We made it so that people don’t need to be a journalist or even run a web site or blog to “tell the world.” Think of Truemors as a friction-free news site.
Reaction to the site has run the gamut from extremely positive to extremely negative. That doesn't seem to bug Guy though, who recently posted "By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09." After listing a bunch of facts and figures, he says:
One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company.
He then ends with:
I end with a truism (as opposed to truemor): There’s only one way to find out if your idea will succeed, and that’s to try it, so go for it.
Lots of people have written about his post already, but I just have to add my two cents.
He's absolutely right with that last point - if you have an idea, you have to go for it! There's no other way to determine if it will fail or succeed. And you'll learn a lot in the process too, as Guy pointed out.
The idea that you can launch a company for $12,000 is bullshit though. Guy may only have spent around $12K on Truemors, but that doesn't take into account the value his name brought to the whole project. He knows it too:
Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”
It's obvious, but it is worth mentioning. TechCrunch wrote about the site three times, and that was before it even launched! Even ignoring the rest of the press Truemors got, those three posts are invaluable, and Guy can thank his name for them.
Guy makes it sound like it's now dead easy to build and launch a company for hardly any money. From my own experience, and from everyone I have had the opportunity to learn from over the last few years, that's just not typical.
I'm not saying you need $1 million, and I don't want to discount the fact that Guy earned the value his name carries over 24 years of hard work, but his experience is clearly unique. I find it hard to believe that most entrepreneurs will have a similar experience. I sure haven't! I'd love to have over 260,000 page views at Podcast Spot in a single day.
Anyway, I'll stop now. If you'd like to read an interesting counterpoint to Guy's post, check out Valleywag.
(This is a total aside, but I think my friend Alex looks a lot like Guy. He's an evangelist too!)
Lots of talk today about Google's $100 million acquisition of RSS management company FeedBurner. Congrats to the FeedBurner guys! I do have to admit though that I am bit sad that FeedBurner is now a Google property. I guess they were too valuable to remain independent forever though. From TechCrunch:
Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.
The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.
Must be pretty sweet to get an all cash deal. TechCrunch confirmed it today, but it looks like Valleywag had the story right last week.
Not everyone is happy about the deal. Todd Cochrane does a good job of spreading FUD in his post. Todd, you need to worry less!
I have been blogging for about three and half years now, and lately I've been wondering about my posting habits. Do I tend to post at a certain time of day? How about a certain day of the week? I certainly don't try to - I just post when I have something to share.
I ran the numbers tonight, and here's what I found (click on a graph to enlarge). The percentage on the Y-axis means "percentage of my posts". For days of the week:
Looks like my post frequency drops off on the weekend, but not as much as I thought it might. For hours of the day:
Looks like I am definitely a late-afternoon/evening blogger! This is quite a bit different than the blogosphere as a whole.
When I do these numbers again, I'll have to figure out how many posts are made on days where I post more than once. I'd also like to find out what the average number of words/characters per post is, but that calculation is a little more involved.
Kind of a neat exercise, I have to say. It'll be interesting to see how these statistics change in another three and a half years!
Yesterday, Tim O'Reilly posted a blogging code of conduct. It was created as a result of the Kathy Sierra thing. Quite a few people think it's a good idea, other's don't. Mike Arrington is part of the latter group:
The code of conduct and the mass of bloggers lining up behind it scares me a lot more than the hate comments and death threats I’ve received in the past. I won’t support it.
Mike is absolutely, unequivocally, 100%, DEAD ON.
The blogosphere doesn't need a code of conduct. What a stupid idea.
Recently there was a big furor in the blogosphere about some hate mail that Kathy Sierra received. She cancelled a scheduled conference appearance as a result. Obviously it's sad and disappointing when anyone receives hate mail, but why is Kathy's case any different? I'm pretty sure that people receive hate mail all the time (and lots of comments on blogs around the web this week seem to confirm that).
I don't often agree with Dave Winer, but I do today:
People aren't going to like this, but it's true -- when a woman asks for a riot she gets one, and almost no one comes to the defense of a man who is attacked. Who's more vulnerable? Well, honestly, it's not always a woman.
Those who provided the riot Ms Sierra asked for, unknowingly, I'm sure, attacked at least one person whose health is pretty fragile. I wonder how y'all feel now that you know that. I wonder how you'd feel if that person died in the midst of the shitstorm. Someday if we don't change the herd mentality of the tech blogosphere, that is likely to happen. I don't want to be part of the herd on that day, that's why I won't join herds.
Hundreds of people (perhaps thousands) have posted about Kathy's situation and how they think it is awful. How many of them actually mean it? I don't know, but I think there's a pretty large echo in here. Especially among the so-called A-listers this week, it definitely seemed to me that speaking out against the hate mail was simply the "in thing" to do.
I never intended to post anything about this topic. I certainly wasn't about to follow Robert Scoble's lead and stop blogging for a week. I don't think Kathy's case deserves any special treatment. I didn't want to contribute to the useless echo. In the end I decided to post this simply for my own future reflection.
Here's some related stuff if you want to find out more:
Here are a few interesting video-related posts I have come across in the last day or so:
Vlog Blind Date
This is a really funny and well done video featuring Justine Ezarik. She goes on a blind date with...it's a surprise! You have to watch to find out. The video was made to promote JumpCut from the looks of things (and with their help, evidently).
The mesh Video Contest
Want to go to mesh for free? Have a talent for creating great video? Then this contest is for you! All you've got to do is submit a video that captures the essence of Web 2.0 - "whatever that means to you." If you win, you get flown to Toronto for free, with the hotel and conference tickets all taken care of. It's a pretty sweet deal.
Comparing "Soar" and "Wow"
In this post, Long Zheng takes a look at two commercials: one for Windows XP, and one for Windows Vista. It's quite amazing how different they are. While both are good, I think the Windows XP one is better.
I think Robert Scoble is a really smart and passionate guy, but man does he ever herd a lot of sheep! In the last few months, Twitter has grown incredibly fast. So fast that Obvious Corp. is trying to offload Odeo so that they can focus on Twitter. And it seems to me that the growth is largely due to Robert pimping the service.
I don't really have a good way to back this up, other than noticing the trend in my aggregator. Before Robert started talking about Twitter in almost every post on his blog, it was rare for me to read about Twitter in any of the other blogs I subscribe to. Lately though, it's like clockwork. There's probably one blogger a day who announces they have "given in", "succumbed", or otherwise been "forced" to join Twitter. It always goes something like this:
I heard about Twitter a long time ago and thought it was useless. Now though, I have decided to try it out, and Scoble's right, it's great!
They don't always mention Scoble, but often you can trace it back to him. Maybe he should be asking the Obvious boys for referral money!
The one notable exception to the trend (remember, this is just based on the feeds I read) is Darren Barefoot, and even he mentioned Robert!
In my last post I was sort of wondering who Edmonton bloggers are and what they are talking about, but perhaps just as interesting is what bloggers are saying about Edmonton. If you do a quick search for Edmonton at any of the many blog search engines, you'll find a large number of results. Here are some interesting ones I picked out:
And of course there's a ton of discussion about the Smyth trade.
So I guess the answer is yes! Bloggers are talking about Edmonton.
This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I got an email this week from Pete Quily, asking if Edmonton had anything like the kind of directory he is looking for in Vancouver. Here's what he wants:
With the large number of techies/bloggers/web workers/geeks/wired folk/internet businesses/pick your preferred word in the Vancouver area, why isn’t there a comprehensive directory of such people and organizations/nonprofits/businesses?
I want that for Edmonton too!
So just like I have been doing with edmontontech, I have started tagging blogs at del.icio.us with the tag edmontonblogs. This is really more of an "in the meantime" kind of activity, because as Pete points out, an actual directory website would be much more useful. Maybe I'll build it one of these days.
I actually have an excellent domain name for it - blogosphere.ca. As you can see, we haven't touched it since 2004. It probably wouldn't be too hard to throw together some kind of directory with OPML and feeds broken down by city. BlogsCanada had potential, but it seems to have died. Another similar site is the Canadian Tech Mob, but it's tech only, and nearly impossible to navigate (seriously didn't webrings die in 1999?).
Okay I better go before I start writing code. I'm off to Calgary in the morning for a meeting!
We just finished recording the keynote session with Anil Dash at Northern Voice 2007, and I am now in the "Blogging 101" session. The recording is going fairly well, and the audio recorders have picked up the presenters better than I expected given all the background noise you get when everyone has a laptop in front of them! We recorded the keynote in video, and it looks very good. Dickson is uploading it now I believe, so it should be up soon.
Yesterday was a little chaotic for us, as expected. Moosecamp is a very ad hoc kind of event, so we weren't sure about what to record. For that reason we ended up recording more than we planned, though some of it sounds kind of random. Fortunately the schedule today is well defined and static, so Sharon took the initiative and helped us decide who is recording what. Audio episodes will be up very shortly after the session, video will take slightly longer.
Hopefully I'll get to blog more today than in the last couple days, but at the very least I wanted to get this quick update posted. Also, if you want to check out the quick interview I did yesterday after Moosecamp with Darren Barefoot, you can watch it here.
I just read Jim Allchin's final post over at the Windows Vista blog, and I have to admit, it's kind of sad. He has been in charge of Windows development at Microsoft for so long, I'm sure he won't know what to do with himself now. I mean, it must be pretty hard to go from running the Windows team to just relaxing, right? Running the Windows team has to be one of the hardest jobs around. They are always behind, always getting dumped on by the press, always fighting the bad guys, etc.
Jim's post conveys this very well, with a funny overview of what a "typical day" might look like now that he's retired. I guess he knows it'll be hard to transition. This one is my favorite entry:
9:30 AM: Spent 45 minutes looking around the house for the big refrigerator with the free soda just like Microsoft – was unable to find it.
When I visited the Microsoft campus a couple years ago that was easily one of the coolest things. Big refrigerators all over the place with all the Coke you could ever want. It was wonderful!
Anyway, here's my "thanks Mr. Allchin". My fellow Windows fans and I appreciate all that you've done. And hey, no need to stop blogging! Start a personal blog!
Darren Barefoot is presenting a session called "Why We Blog" at Northern Voice next month, and as part of his preparations he has launched a short online survey. There's only sixteen questions and it's pretty quick to fill out, so if you're a blogger, why not help him out? I just completed the survey so I can affirm that it is quick and painless. Oh, and there's prizes too:
One randomly-selected person who completes the survey will win an iPod Shuffle.
Another randomly-selected survey completer will win two Lonely Planet books–Micronations and Experimental Travel.
I obviously want to promote the survey, so I’m also giving away one CAN $50 gift certificate to a randomly-selected person who blogs about it. Just link to http://www.whydoyoublog.com and you’re qualified to win.
So if you are a blogger or have been a blogger in the past, fill out the survey here.
I have been spending far too much time on Facebook lately, so I couldn't help but notice the vertical banner ads for classmates.com that appear on the site. And I can't figure out why they bother. I mean, I signed up for classmates.com probably six years ago, and never visited the site again.
Well until this week, when I went back to see if it still sucked (so I suppose you could argue their advertisement worked to an extent). And yes, it does still suck. I understand why there are two gas stations on every corner, and why you can usually find a Wendy's or Burger King wherever there is a McDonald's. They have really similar offerings. Is this the case with Facebook and classmates.com? I don't think so.
Facebook and classmates.com just might be the best examples of Web 2.0 and Web 1.0, respectively.
They are almost polar opposites. Facebook is clean and fast. Classmates.com pages are slower and cluttered. Facebook is entirely free, while classmates.com is primarily a premium service. Facebook has features like photos, blogs, and mobile support. Classmates.com has message boards and biographies. Facebook is new and hip, classmates.com is old and tired.
It seems to me that at their core, the two services serve the same purpose: connecting people with friends (and especially classmates). In my opinion, Facebook does a much better job. It's easier, and costs nothing. Classmates.com appears to be quite successful though, so I wonder if people use the two in different ways.
If they are in fact used for the same purpose, then I wonder if advertising on Facebook is at all effective for classmates.com. I can't imagine it would be, but perhaps I'm missing something here.
As you probably know, Engadget is one of my favorite blogs. I read it all the time because I know I'll find something new and interesting. And as last Tuesday proved, I'm not the only one who reads Engadget! It has been widely reported that Engadget had 10 million page views that day (with CES and the Steve Jobs keynote going on). Managing editor Ryan Block says the numbers were actually higher than that, and sets a few things straight:
Again, we quoted that traffic was “into 8 figures”, counting the rest of the Engadget network (Mobile, HD, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish) and that’s even more still. I’m not going to discuss numbers, but I was very proud of what we accomplished, and I’d have been proud if we only did 10m.
He also says they had increased uniques, suffered absolutely no downtime, and attributed most of the reliability and performance to WIN's Blogsmith platform. Whatever the actual details, it's clear that Engadget did amazingly well on Tuesday.
Congrats to Ryan and team, and keep it up!
I finally registered for Northern Voice 2007 today. The annual conference has become a tradition for me, and this year the timing is perfect as it falls on the tail end of reading week. The organizers posted the schedule yesterday, and even though it is still a work in progress, it looks good. I don't see a keynote however - perhaps it will fill the time gap from 9:30 to 10:15?
If you'd like to attend Northern Voice, you can register here.
Google released their annual zeitgeist for 2006 recently, and the top searches proved to be quite different than those found on Yahoo's annual listing. Google's top ten terms are mostly technology-related, while Yahoo's are entertainment-related.
Also different were the news searches. Coming in at number four on the top searches for Google News is podcasting! Who knew so many people were interested in learning about what is happening in the podcasting industry!
Here are my favorite podcasting news sites:
I also subscribe to a bunch of search feeds, and news feeds from individual companies too. And every now and then you get some news from more general sites like TechCrunch or Digg. I thought this list would have been longer though. Perhaps there is room in the news space for podcasting?
Back in September I wrote that in my opinion, TechCrunch had started to lose its edge. I based my comments strictly on the kind of content that had been appearing on the popular Web 2.0 blog. Since then I would say the content has improved. Not that I have been tracking it that closely, but it seems as though it has improved.
TechCrunch appears to be having other problems though. Last week Michael Arrington had something of a meltdown, which you can read about at Valleywag. And just yesterday Michael announced that writer Natali Del Conte was leaving TechCrunch after just three weeks:
She’s gotten an offer from another company (again, I’ll let her make any announcements on that), but was willing to stay on part time with TechCrunch. I appreciate that, but I want our writers to be completely focused on TechCrunch and not working with competitors. She also told me the comments were really getting to her, and the turmoil from last week (TechCrunch UK, NYTimes debacle) played a part as well.
That announcement did follow some good news for TechCrunch though - it entered Technorati's top 5 for the first time.
I put a question mark in the title because I think Michael should see this as an opportunity for TechCrunch. I think he should spend some time to find the right editor, and I would also suggest revisiting the comment policy. Some of the most valuable information is found in comments, but they need to be effectively policed too. Perhaps implementing a community rating system a la Digg would be wise.
Hopefully we'll see an even better TechCrunch soon!
Techmeme is a fairly popular aggregator for technology news from around the blogosphere, but I've never really liked it. I hadn't thought about it before, but I think the main reason I didn't like it was the layout. On Monday that changed, when founder Gabe Rivera launched a new layout option called Techmeme River:
River pages are compact, with no news clustering, but include permalinks to standard pages where Discussion and Related items can be found.
In summary, River eases a number of common power user pain points, all with a basic long list of headlines. Enjoy!
I wouldn't consider myself a Techmeme power user, but I do find the new /river layout much easier to use. I find myself visiting Techmeme far more often now. Check it out!
I guess the fine people at Time still haven't learned that the word "person" refers to a single, individual human being. Last year they named Bill & Melinda Gates and Bono the "person of the year" and this year, it's you. That's right, Time says you are the person of the year for 2006:
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
All joking aside, there's a certain appeal to naming "you" the person of the year. I mean, it was a big year for that dreaded phrase - user generated content. And like it or not, some of the biggest stories of the year were a result of individuals expressing themselves on the web. Everything from videos at YouTube, to profiles at MySpace, citizen news around the web, podcasting, and of course, blogging.
Though Time has been naming a "person of the year" since 1927, this year's cover is sure to be one of the most interesting:
The magazine has put a mirror on the cover of its "Person of the Year" issue, released on Monday, "because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the Information Age," Editor Richard Stengel said in a statement.
So congratulations to you!
...all I want to do is blog. Read and post. Repeat. And then maybe podcast too! Unfortunately it's final exam season, so it can't happen. One exam down today, another tomorrow, and my final two on Tuesday. At least I have a bit of a reprieve over the weekend.
Of course, by the time Wednesday rolls around, I'm almost out of time to start my Xmas shopping!
February is one of my favorite months of the year. It's short, classes stop for an entire week, and in Vancouver there's a great little event called Northern Voice. The 2007 edition of the conference was announced a while ago, and today I see that registration is officially open:
Frankly, all of us Northern Voice organizers have gotten behind the eight-ball a bit on this years conference. We all keep getting busier-we're approaching some kind of busyness event horizon where we'll just cease to exist. Regardless, our ducks are back in a row.
Such an honest group! In addition to opening registration, they have extended the speaker submission to Friday, December 1st. If you'd like to register for Northern Voice, you can do so here.
It was three years ago today that I started this blog. And after three years of posting I can honestly say that I enjoy it more now than I did when I began.
A few days ago Darren had an interesting post where he looked a bunch of popular blogger's very first posts. They aren't what you'd expect in a lot of cases. My first post was fairly introductory, but that's because I actually had a different blog for a month before this one got started. Unfortunately, it has been lost (at least I can't find it anywhere), and that's why I consider this one the start of my blogging career.
Sounds funny doesn't it, a blogging career? Well call it what you will, I'm just getting started!
I really like Tina Fey - I think she's incredibly smart and obviously very funny. I didn't watch 30 Rock last night, but I am hoping to catch it soon, because it looks like it will be a pretty good show (and I like Alec Baldwin too). I went to the website to see what time it airs, and I realized that Tina Fey has a live blog:
After tonight's east coast premiere, sign on here for the live blog Q&A.;
Hi, this is Tina Fey. I'm in New York at a little party we're having for our cast and crew. We're eating chicken wings and getting ready to watch the show and I hope you're doing the same. Especially the chicken wings part.
I'll be back after the show to answer your questions. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves while you watch.
And chat amongst themselves they did! That post has over 1100 comments on it! By the end of the evening, Tina had made over 20 posts talking about 30 Rock, SNL, and her movie writing career.
I think this blog is an incredibly smart thing for NBC to do. In a way, it is like a return to the golden days of television, where everyone would watch the same show and then chat about it the next day at the watercooler. Now obviously not everyone is watching 30 Rock, but the blog brings back that conversational aspect to watcing television. And I realize there are popular TV show forums and things online, but they are created by fans, not by the producers and creators like this blog is! It's television conversation on a whole new level.
Very cool, and I hope they keep it up.
The news broke on Wednesday that Toronto-based b5media, a blogging/media network started by Jeremy Wright, had landed $2 million USD from Brightspark Ventures and J. L. Albright Venture Partners. b5media describes itself as "a gobal new media network" with over 150 blogs on a variety of topics. Today, National Post reporter Mark Evans announced that he is leaving mainstream media to join b5media as VP of Operations. I wish Mark the best of luck, though I don't think he'll need it - I think he made the right decision.
I have known Jeremy for a while now, and I'm a long time reader of his blog. I've had the pleasure of meeting him a few times (such as at Northern Voice) and he has always struck me as an intelligent, fairly down-to-earth kind of guy. That's not to say he's completely grounded though - you might remember that Jeremy was the first blogger to auction his services off on eBay. There's a lesson there though - Jeremy is an innovator, and he really understands blogging. I know he'll do great things with b5media.
I am not sure what b5media plans to use the money for, but maybe they can purchase a laptop or two for Jeremy? That guy has the worst luck with portable computers.
I'm really glad that Jeremy has become successful with b5media. He's had his fair share of tough times in the past. Congratulations Jeremy!
I think it's funny when companies say they are operating in stealth mode, because it is really hard to do. Before this morning I had never heard of Powerset, so I guess they were in stealth mode, but the cat is out of the bag now. Here's what they say about themselves:
Powerset is leading the next generation of internet search. Powerset is a Silicon Valley startup currently operating in stealth mode. Please check back in the near future for more information about the company and its products.
There are so many blogs covering this company today, it's ridiculous (and I guess I'm included in that now too). Most of the coverage contains things like "so much better than Google" or similar comments. Is that really such a good idea? I wonder if the company is happy about all the attention or not. They say there's no such thing as bad press, but when you are getting setup like that? It's going to be hard to meet expectations.
Today I started using a new aggregator for my web feeds. Well, sort of. I downloaded and installed the beta of NewsGator's Desktop Sync, and now I can read all of my feeds inside IE7 RC1. It's beautiful! Here's the details on Desktop Sync:
Desktop Sync is a system tray application that keeps your feeds, folders and read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. This means that any application that uses the Windows RSS Platform will be automatically synchronized with your NewsGator Online account!
Yeah baby! That's what I'm talking about!
The product is the evolution of a demo that NewsGator head honcho Greg Reinacker did back at Microsoft's MIX06 conference.
I have now used NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox (formerly Outlook Edition), FeedDemon and Desktop Sync. As you can see, having the synchronization story that NewsGator provides is incredibly important. Of them all, I think I like Desktop Sync the best. It allows me to read my web feeds in IE7, which means I can take advantage of everything I have inside my browser like favelets and other tools, but without losing the sync capabilities of NewsGator Online.
The application seems really solid for a beta, give it a try!
I've been subscribed TechCrunch for quite a long time, and I rather enjoy reading about the various companies and technologies they profile. Lately though, I've noticed that TechCrunch seems to be reporting on "big company" or "big media" things far more than the little stuff. A good example of this is what happened today. I opened up my aggregator for the first time today, and there were five posts in the TechCrunch feed:
- Live.com and Yahoo! bulk up for local search brawl
- Zune Unveiling Tomorrow
- NBC to put new primetime shows online for free
- Major Google/Intuit Partnership
- Skype Video For Macs Launches Today
See what I mean? These look like headlines from CNET News.com, not TechCrunch! Now don't get me wrong, these are all very interesting posts, and TechCrunch always has some inside information or extra analysis which is worthwhile, but they didn't get to 113,000 subscribers by covering the big guys. They got there by finding and sharing the smaller companies and products that no one else could find.
Which begs the question - is TechCrunch becoming more like a mainstream business news site? Can we expect more of the "big company" type posts? Has TechCrunch lost its edge?
Okay dear readers, help me out here. I typically add a new blog every few days (give or take) to my aggregator, and remove a few every now and then. Whenever I come across an interesting post, I see if the blog has any other interesting posts, and if it does, I add it. However lately I haven't had as much time to find new blogs, thus, I am asking you to suggest your favorite! What blog can you not live without?
PS. Please don't suggest a blog that has recently launched a jobs board. If I see one more of those things I am going to go crazy!
Just a quick note to mention that I changed the "enter the code you see" control (known as a CAPTCHA or HIP control) found on the comment form for my blog. Instead of letters, numbers, and a bunch of random characters, all you have to enter now is a three-digit number. Should work more reliably I hope.
The same change has been made on the Paramagus Blog, my Dad's blog, and all of the Blogosphere blogs. If you encounter any problems, please let me know.
In case you're wondering, the control I am using now was created by Timothy Humphrey for Community Server. It appears to work fine in CS 1.1, CS 2.0, and the old .Text 0.95!
You know how people say things like "it's such a small world"? Well, it's true. As a few of you noticed, I was quoted in the National Post today in a story on Suresh Sriskandarajah, a University of Waterloo graduate who has been arrested and faces charges related to an FBI probe of the Tamil Tigers. Turns out he was one of the Microsoft student representatives in 2004 (as was I), and we both attended the same training weekend in Toronto. I ended up taking a group photo at the time, which reporters from the National Post found yesterday and asked permission to use. I sent the photos I had in higher quality, and they used one of them for the front page of today's paper. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo credit, as I didn't reply to their email asking if they should use my name or not until after the paper had gone to press. The photo will also be used in tomorrow's Ottawa Citizen.
I can't say that I know Suresh, other than meeting him that weekend back in September 2004. My quote is pretty spot on:
"He seemed like a normal guy," said Mr. Male, who kept a souvenir group photo of the occasion. "We had a lot of fun together that weekend.... Nobody really stood out."
I don't know what is going to happen to him.
The whole experience just shows what a small world it really is, thanks in large part to the Internet. In a matter of hours, a simple photo I had posted from an event almost two years ago made it to the front page of a national newspaper. The other thing is - do I really know someone who could be a terrorist? I don't know if the FBI are right or not about Suresh, but if they are, that's a scary thought isn't it?
Made me stop and think for a moment - who else do I know that might be a terrorist? I quickly caught myself, and metaphorically slapped myself in the face. If I lived my life wondering who could be a terrorist, I'd only be making Bush's campaign of fear successful. There's no harm in being cautious, about anyone, but I think if people become paranoid we're going to have problems.
[Oddly enough, the story in the physical paper I picked up about an hour ago is different than the one online. In the physical paper, on page A3, the part with my quote has been replaced with more about Suresh's work abroad.]
Long time readers of my blog will know that BlogosphereRadio was my first foray into podcasting, created way back in September of 2004. In my initial post about the site, I said it would probably always be a work in progress. I guess that was sort of correct - the site has been dormant since roughly March 2005. The idea has lived on though, as BlogosphereRadio was definitely the inspiration for Podcast Spot (at least in the beginning).
I have been doing some cleanup work on some our servers lately, and I realized that I hadn't touched BlogosphereRadio in a very long time. Things were broken, etc, so I made some changes. The forums are now unavailable, and the "play" links don't work. I fixed the download links however, so you can now download any of the shows in both WMA and MP3 format. I also stuck a little "dormant" message at the top of most of the pages.
I can't see a revival of BlogosphereRadio being likely, but never say never. My intent for now is to leave the site up for archival purposes and nothing more. I won't be adding to it, so don't bother subscribing to the feeds.
If this is the first time you've heard of BlogosphereRadio, download my favorite episode.
If there is one thing that was drilled into my head in the last 8 years of my education, first in high school and then University, it is to always cite your sources. No matter if they are actually quoted from or not, if you used a source while researching something, cite it. Like so much of what I have learned at University however, that's simply not the way it works in the real world. Case in point, a recent article on podcasting titled "Podcasting at a business near you". It was written by Alex Dobrota, and published in the Globe and Mail on July 6th. Here's an excerpt from the beginning:
Podcasting, which involves the distribution of personalized audio or video clips over the Internet to computers, laptops or digital audio players such as iPods, is becoming a new medium of communication in the corporate world. It's being used to replace internal memos, blogs, e-mails and even trade shows. The up-and-coming technology is cost-efficient -- in some cases, it requires little more than a microphone and a computer. And, as a marketing tool, it holds the potential of reaching a young and savvy audience, experts say.
Maybe the problem is that a journalist can simply put "experts say" and get away with it. In any case, I do believe I should be cited as a source for that entire paragraph. You see, Mr. Dobrota called me at around 1:30 PM on June 22nd to ask me some questions about podcasting (I remember this exactly because it was just moments after I got back to the office after the Oilers Tribute Event). He made it seem like I was being interviewed, which isn't all that unsual given the publicity Paramagnus has received in the last few months. Evidently I was wrong. He started out asking what podcasting was, and the follow-up questions he asked made it seem as though he really didn't have any idea what was so special about it, or why it was different than streaming audio.
After about ten minutes of covering the basics, he started asking questions about why businesses would get into podcasting, or if they already were. I mentioned the well-known case of IBM. I also said that basically, podcasting is great for businesses because they get an excellent return on investment - it costs very little to get going, and you can reach a huge audience fairly easily. I also mentioned that it was a great way for old stodgy businesses to seem hip and cool with the younger iPod carrying generation. Sounds kind of like the excerpt I mentioned above doesn't it? Yep I thought so too.
I actually emailed Mr. Dobrota on July 1st, to ask if he had written the article. I never did get a reply from him, which makes this all the more aggravating.
Maybe there's lots of reasons why he and other journalists can simply put "experts say". You know, word count, page layout, that sort of thing. I just can't help but think though, that with all the fuss about the blogosphere being a place full of unsubstantiated rumors, we're missing that our so-called "mainstream media" don't follow the rules either. Perhaps we should force journalists to publish a blog, properly citing their references, linking where appropriate? I don't think it's a bad idea. It might even have saved Dan Rather his job.
At the very least, had Mr. Dobrota kept a blog with his sources and references properly detailed, I might still have some respect for him.
"Why listen to a podcast when you can get ten times the content when you read?" That's the question Peter Davis recently asked, and I'd like to attempt to answer it. Scoble chimed in with his response, essentially saying with communication, you should use the right tool for the job. Maybe that's text, but in other cases, it might be audio or video.
Here's why I think you should listen to or watch a podcast, even if you can get ten times the content when you read:
- The Right Tool For The Job
Like Scoble, I think that sometimes audio or video is better suited to the job than text. I'll just cite his example too - I'd much rather watch a short video about Halo 3 than read an essay on it. It really depends on what you're trying to communicate.
- Mobility
Can you read an email or the newspaper while you're driving your car? I certainly can't. But I can listen to a podcast. Do you carry all your books and magazines with you everywhere? Probably not, but I'll bet you carry an MP3 player! There are a lot of scenarios where podcasting on the go works and text simply doesn't.
- Show Some Emotion!
Try to write a really emotional blog post. Or a post that is sarcastic. It's not as easy as you'd like to believe! Most times, your emotion or sarcasm will be misinterpreted. Audio and video allow you to convey emotion, sarcasm, and other things using tone of voice and body language. Sometimes it's not what you say, but how you say it.
- Ease of Creation
You're probably thinking I'm nuts, saying that it's easier to create a podcast than write a blog post, but in some cases it's true. The tools to create a podcast will soon be as easy to use as blogging tools, and when that happens, the creation time really depends simply on the content. Most people can talk a heck of a lot faster than they can type, and with regards to video, a picture really is worth a thousand words! Sometimes it might be easier to get your message across in a podcast. Heck, I should be podcasting this post!
- Multitasking!
I've always got some sort of background noise going on, as it helps me concentrate. Sometimes I just block it out, while other times I'll sort of half listen and if I hear something interesting, I'll pay attention. The idea here is that I can play a podcast in the background and continue working, and if something being said catches my interest, I might pay a little more attention. Can't do that with text. I've called this multitasking, but you can think of it as passive podcasting consumption!
Don't be fooled by the comments on Peter's post and elsewhere - this discussion is about more than just those who listen in the car and those who don't. Podcasting is an extremely viable communications technology, for a wide variety of scenarios.
To be clear, I'm not saying one should always use podcasting. The most important of the reasons above is to use the right tool for the job. Developers are told this all the time - use the right programming language for the task at hand! Same holds true with communication. If you can communicate something better using text, go for it. If some sound or a short video is better, maybe podcasting will work for you.
Peter is correct in stating that podcasting is not as efficient at delivering information as text is. However, if you consider the amount of overlap that exists in text (look at Google News for a news story, or the hundreds of blog posts on a given topic) it might start to even out. At least for the time being, podcasting does not suffer from the same "echo chamber" as text does.
Now hopefully I've offered some good reasons for why you might use podcasting over text. There are many more reasons that podcasting is great, but they go beyond a comparison with text, so I'll save them for another post. There's still a long way to go to make podcasting incredibly useful, but it definitely has some inherent properties that make it pretty attractive.
It has been quite a while since I've said anything about the .NET Wizards, but I think it's time. As some of you are undoubtedly aware, there is a new user group in town - the Edmonton .NET User Group (or EDMUG.NET). They've had a couple of meetings so far, and have two scheduled for the end of June, so they're off to a good start. Now, before I get into what I want to say, let's get a few things out of the way:
- This is a really long post, so be prepared.
- I love Edmonton, I love .NET, and I love meeting new people, both online and off.
- I have become extremely busy with Paramagnus over the last couple of years, as has Dickson. We're having a blast building our little software company though, so we don't regret being busy at all.
- There are a lot of great .NET developers in Edmonton, and they deserve a great developer community.
- We always tried our best with the .NET Wizards to treat people with respect, cater to their varying levels of knowledge, and make the Edmonton developer community a great one.
My intent with this post is to set the record straight on the .NET Wizards. To clarify some things that I feel are getting confused, and to have on public record my thoughts and opinions on what has happened, what is happening, and what is going to happen in the future. To do this, I'm going to tell you a story.
Some History
The Edmonton .NET Wizards User Group began life back in the fall of 2003. Dickson and I were really heavily into .NET at the time (and still are) and we wanted a way to connect with other .NET developers in Edmonton. Additionally, we had just come back a couple months earlier from TechEd 2003 in Barcelona, Spain where we represented Canada in Microsoft's first ever Imagine Cup programming competition, so we were especially excited about creating the user group. We registered the domain name in September and a non-profit organization in November, and got started planning events and stuff.
One of the first problems we encountered was a location for our events. As we were both students at the University of Alberta, we decided to host our meetings there as we could get a room for free. We still had to pay for use of the projector and computer though, and we did so out of our own pockets. Over the next year or so, we setup a user group booth at MSDN events to try and attract developers, and held many events on topics such as "J2EE and .NET Interoperability", "Building Mobile Applications with the .NET CF and SQL CE", "Web Services Security", and "Whidbey and SQL Server 2005."
Our events in 2004 and most of 2005 always seemed to have less than amazing attendance, though we did manage to have some great events with speakers like John Bristowe and Dan Sellers, and we gave away lots of books and other prizes to Edmonton developers. I think we probably gave away more stuff than other user groups did, because I also happened to be the Academic contact for Microsoft at the UofA, so I ended up receiving double the swag. We tried food a few times, but couldn't seem to get an amazing turnout.
As a result, we had a "planning meeting" in the summer of 2005, to try and get some input from people on where they thought the user group should go. We held less of our own events in the first six months of 2005 than we did in 2004, and basically organized things around the MSDN tour events. Which did people prefer? After a while, we finally got a good discussion going, and it turned out that most people wanted smaller events, with presenters from the group. In September 2005 we got started. We put up a wiki as our website so that everyone could edit it, and we had a series of smaller events on things like Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2005, Generics, and Game Engine Design. We also started a certification group, though it didn't last long.
EDMUG.NET is born
Which more or less brings us to March of this year. Our last event was March 14th, where John Bristowe returned to Edmonton to talk about WinFX. Shortly thereafter, the business plan competitions Dickson and I were in took over our lives, and we never planned an event for April. Then, on April 9th, we received an email from Donald Belcham, basically informing us that EDMUG.NET was starting. His email kind of surprised us, as we had been informed a few weeks earlier by MSDN that some people in Edmonton wanted something different. We decided to meet with Donald over coffee, and we felt pretty good after the meeting. Here is a summary of the outcome:
- EDMUG.NET held no ill will towards us, they just wanted to try something different.
- They decided to hold their events on Thursdays as ours were usually held on Tuesdays.
- We discussed the future of the .NET Wizards, including one option which would make us a sub-group of EDMUG.NET, focusing on "the cutting edge" stuff.
- We agreed that we didn't necessarily want to compete.
- We also chatted about our experience in creating and running a group, and the things Donald and his team had experienced to date.
- Dickson and I explained to Donald that we felt it was time for someone else to take over and offer a different perspective on things anyway.
- We wished each other luck.
Dickson and I decided to take a break, and let EDMUG.NET get underway, so nothing much happened until the first EDMUG.NET event on April 27th, which I was able to attend part of. It had great attendance, and was a pretty successful first event. I said hi to Donald and team, but didn't get a chance to really chat with them.
Their second event was held on May 25th. Unfortunately neither Dickson nor myself could attend, but it seems they encountered some negative feedback - something all user groups will receive at some point.
Here is where things get interesting.
Get to the point Mack
I'm glad to see Donald handled the negative feedback very well, dropping the "fuck's" like they are going out of style. Anyway, I don't know his relationship with Mike at Sideline.ca who had the complaints, so I won't comment any further besides my sarcastic remark just now. It is from their back and forth as well as some comments made offline, that I noticed some things that I need to comment on.
- Donald calls "the old user group's content inadequate". It has also been said that we tended to focus on things you couldn't take back to work and use right away.
- Mike thinks the .NET community needs rekindling, and said that the previous group did not take action on feedback.
- Both Mike and Donald agreed to "hold EdmUG to a much higher standard than what the DotNetWizards had," which apparently means a "stronger and more knowledgeable community."
- When EDMUG.NET first launched, Mike thought it was "sure to kick the hell out of the previous excuse we had for a .Net user group here in town." Donald says he was disappointed with our "inability to capture and drive the local .NET developer community."
- I get the general feeling that the work Dickson and I did has gone largely unappreciated.
I've been known to have a short fuse at times, but in general, I'd like to think I'm a fairly easy going guy. That said, there are some things that just piss me off, and the list above is one of them. Here are my thoughts on each point:
- I think the idea that our content was inadequate is totally wrong. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, we had some great speakers with great topics here in Edmonton with the .NET Wizards, as I mentioned above. And while our topics at the end of 2005 and first part of this year were definitely "cutting edge", the same simply cannot be said of our previous events. Look again at the list of topics I mentioned earlier, many of them are things you could use right away. I also couldn't help but notice that one of the two upcoming EDMUG.NET events is about "Atlas", a beta product, otherwise known as "cutting edge" or something you probably can't use at work the next day.
- Mike is right, the .NET community here in Edmonton needs to be rekindled. He's dead wrong though, that we never took action based on feedback. The very reason we had small user group events in the last year was directly from feedback! The wiki we replaced our old site with was a direct result of feedback. If anything, we couldn't get enough feedback. In my experience, people are generally happy to say everything is fine and go start their own group than give any constructive feedback when it's needed.
- I never go into anything without setting my standards extremely high. For this reason, I sometimes come off as arrogant, when really it's just that I always try to be confident that I can reach for top and make it there. With a reply like Donald gave him, I don't know why Mike thinks that EDMUG.NET's standards are so much higher than ours. Dickson and I always wanted our user group to be the best. That said, I don't think a "more knowledgeable" community has anything to do with high standards. Setting your standards high for a user group is trying to please everyone, which as we all know, simply isn't possible.
- Depending on your metric, we may have failed to "drive the developer community" forward. On the other hand, we created a place that Donald and his team could get together to plan and create EDMUG.NET, did we not? We held events and had some great speakers, did we not? We managed to connect some developers from Edmonton, which is much better than what existed before we came along.
- Sure Donald said in our coffee meeting that he appreciated what we did, but never once has this been said publicly by the EDMUG.NET team. People like Mike are quick to bash us, but don't seem to appreciate that we attempted to create something good in Edmonton for .NET developers. I don't need a pat on the back, because I'm happy with what Dickson and I have accomplished with the .NET Wizards, but I really hate unfair and unbalanced commentary. A simple "they did some good things for a while" might have been appropriate.
So what now?
I think EDMUG.NET will probably be pretty successful. They've got some very well-connected developers on board, and they seem much happier to spread the word about EDMUG.NET to their colleagues than they did about us. Donald recently started a series of posts talking about his experience starting EDMUG.NET, so check them out if you're interested. I wish them nothing but the best of luck moving forward, as I think Edmonton deserves a great user group.
Dickson and I have discussed the future of the .NET Wizards a few times, and right now we're happy to focus on Paramagnus and attend the EDMUG.NET events when we can. At some point in the future we might revisit the issue and decide to hold some events on really bleeding-edge stuff, things we can do some interesting demos with, just as an alternative to EDMUG.NET's events. Or, we may revisit things and decide that we're happy with the .NET Wizards no longer existing. Don't expect anything until at least the fall though.
I think the only way to measure the success of a user group is to look at the community it creates, online, offline, it doesn't really matter where. Attendance is not the right metric, because there are hundreds of reasons why people attend or don't attend events. Content is not king, because you can get content pretty much anywhere these days with books, websites, blogs, and more. You might think speakers are a good measure of success, but they are tied very closely to content, and at the end of the day, it might be easier to get in touch with a local developer than an extremely busy speaker across the continent. It's the community that matters.
It's also extremely hard to measure the success of a user group based on community, which is why the attendance metric is always used. There are other things that matter though besides the size of the community. Are people being connected? Did you learn something about a fellow user group member that you didn't know before? How "vibrant" is the community? Are people attracted to the community? Do people want to get involved? Do people want to improve the community? There are lots of things to look at.
Were we successful with the .NET Wizards? I think we were. I certainly have no regrets about anything, and I believe we created a great community here in Edmonton. EDMUG.NET have now taken it upon themselves to take it to the next level, and as a member of the .NET developer community here in Edmonton, I hope they find success.
Unfortunately there are lots of negative stories in the media about Oiler fans, but we're not all bad. There are so many amazing fans in Edmonton, I am just continually amazed at the things they create! If you're looking to get pumped up, there's lots of fan created media online.
Bruce Thiessen aka Dr. BLT sent me a link to a song he wrote for the Oilers, called "Oilers on Ice". Bruce describes himself as a "Canadian-born and raised prairie boy" and he does the Oilers proud with his song.
Still on the topic of music, 91.7 The Bounce has seven different Oiler songs for you to enjoy, including one with Georges Laraque! Not to be outdone, The Bear created a song for Fernando Pisani using the music from Abba's "Fernando" track. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be online yet, but I'm sure it will be eventually.
What about the vehicles? If you live in Edmonton, you've no doubt seen the trucks driving around with oil derricks on the bed, and other vehicles similarly decked out in copper and blue. Even our public transit system, ETS, is showing their Oiler pride. There's lots more pictures on Flickr too.
Want to see the antics of crazy fans? Look no further than YouTube. As of the time of this post, there are 276 videos that show up in a search for the Edmonton Oilers. Unfortunately there are quite a few videos of Don Cherry too ;)
Here's a small list of some of the other stuff out there:
There's lots more great stuff, just do some searching! Go Oilers Go!
News is flying fast and furious that the blogosphere's most famous blogger has decided to leave Microsoft to be a videoblogger at PodTech.net. I'm really quite shocked at the news, and as Chris Pirillo notes, most of the blogosphere won't even find out until Monday! Scoble himself is yet to post any extensive commentary on the move, save for this:
This is a rapidly-evolving part of my life. I just made this decision and it got out before I was completely ready to talk about it. I invite you to meet with me at the VLoggerCon tomorrow evening at 3 to 6 p.m. in San Francisco where we'll talk about it further (and I'll post again tomorrow about what's going on in my life and why I made this decision).
I wish him the best of luck, but man, what a blow to Microsoft. Or a huge mistake on their part if they didn't try hard to keep him. Some might argue that Scoble has single-handedly made Microsoft a "nicer" company in the last couple years. He is the reason they have adopted technologies like RSS, and his Channel9 initiative has been amazing at kickstarting the trend at Microsoft to open up to the community. Scoble is not the kind of employee you can replace.
Here's a bunch of notable "first mover" posts on the news:
I am looking forward to Robert's post on this. There must be something truly special about PodTech for him to leave what he liked to call "the best job in the tech world."
You might think that a blogger leaving his current job for a new one isn't news, but I think you're dead wrong if you hold on to that belief. Scoble leaving Microsoft is huge, and I don't think we'll truly understand the effects of this for quite some time.
UPDATE: Robert has posted about his decision. There's also an excellent Reuters article on the story. Isn't that crazy? A blogger switching jobs makes Reuters. Told you this was big news!
Now that Mesh is over, I'll need to begin reviewing the things I heard discussed, the things I learned, and the different perspectives on things I already knew. Conferences like this one always give me so much to consider - I never leave empty handed or bored.
As I mentioned previously, the conference wasn't quite what I was expecting. It was far less geeky than I had anticipated. Even the two "15 Minutes of Fame" sessions were not demos, but rather introductions or high level overviews. Things like Ajax or Javascript or Ruby on Rails were rarely mentioned, and even then only in passing. More people had paper notepads and pens than laptops for taking notes (there were still a lot of laptops, don't get me wrong). All in all, the audience seemed much more "business-like".
I think this conference was good for me. I got some interesting perspective on "Web 2.0", and I met some very intriguing people. I also think the conference is good for Canada, we need events like Mesh to remind us of the talent and opportunity that we have - we don't need to go to Silicon Valley. At the same time, Mesh reminds us of the areas that we could and should be doing much better.
Thanks to Stuart, Mark, and the entire organizing and planning team for putting on a superb conference! I look forward to next year's Mesh (and yes I think there can be one, even if we no longer talk about "Web 2.0", because the discussions held over the last two days are still relevant).
The last session of the day that I am attending is with Mike McDerment, Chris Messina, Matt Mullenweg, and Stowe Boyd, who will be discussing whether or not they thing Web 2.0 is changing the software industry. Here are my notes (my comments in italics):
- Matt describes a web service as a web page meant for a computer.
- Mike is confusing web services and web applications maybe? What Mike means is a service like Basecamp, where users pay a monthly fee to use the service.
- Stowe likes the term/phrase, "the freemium model", where base capabilites are free and you turn on a for fee model after some limit is hit. I like the phrase too, and the business model. It's a natural way that people get hooked and then like a service so much they'll pay.
- Matt points out that a nice thing about these services is that you don't have to worry about security, or upgrades, or any of that sort of thing.
- The significance of consuming apps online instead of in a shrinkwrapped way, is huge, according to Stowe. Products will get much better, much more quickly. It's like the difference between American Airlines and JetBlue.
- Matt thinks the unsexy name for freemium is shareware, and it's been around for a while. The difference now is that we have broadband.
- Chris thinks wifi is also a huge change, and that we have laptops everywhere.
- In three years, Stowe thinks the software landscape will look increasingly web-based. People will have connectivity all the time, on increasingly more capable mobile devices.
- What Chris wants to see is interfaces and interactions with software that translates into something real.
- People are the center of the universe, not data, not information. Stowe thinks the buddy list is the most important metaphor for the future. He says RSS aggregators follow the wrong model, we don't need bits of information coming through a pipe, but instead we want to know what Chris has written lately, for example.
- Good question from the audience about innovation exhaustion, what happens after the 38th signal? How do these web apps become useful for real people?
- Stowe: another trend, small companies.
- If you can make things intuitive, you wont have as many people bug you, says Matt.
- Chis says microformats is an area he's been doing a lot of work right now.
- Matt says at the end of the day, formats and standards don't matter. He says they should arise afterward as codifications of market trends. All of the great standards were not written first, but followed an existing market trend.
- Stowe says we don't need a replacement for Office on the web.
- Stowe thinks apps with the social stuff built in will be the most successful Web 2.0 apps.
- The "social architecture approach", look at the social stuff during design.
Very interesting session, lots to think about after this one.
This should be an interesting session, all about creating a viable web business. On hand is Malgosia Green, Michael McDerment, Albert Lai and Leila Boujnane. Here are my notes (my comments in italics):
- Leila says it's not trivial to get someone to pay, its hard to get out of the "free" hell.
- Michael, from FreshBooks, says that they had to change their name (they used to be 2ndSite or something) because the old name had many shortcomings. The name was not memorable, did not describe the business or industry, etc.
- Albert says to make sure you do a trademark search, and trademark your name.
- Albert says to ship early, and ship often. He also thinks that you shouldn't build desktop software unless you have to.
- Malgosia says not to get attached to your code. Sometimes rewriting is vital. Alex agrees, you can't be afraid of shifting gears.
- Don't be afraid to reach out to the community, bloggers will talk about you if they like what they see.
- Enable people to help each other.
- Michael says the support department is the sales department, they don't really have a separate group for sales.
- Support, development, and marketing are like the holy trinity of online web apps.
- If the application is for something leisure-related, upgrading from a free account to a paid account is'nt as common as something more focused on business.
- Malgosia says to be humble.
- Michael thinks that just as important as knowing what you know, is knowing what you don't know.
There seems to be one session per conference that I don't pay an incredible amount of attention to, and this one turned out to be the one. Some interesting ideas, but everything is really applicable only on a per-business basis. What works for one of these panelists isn't going to work for everyone. That, and there's more than one way to skin a cat.
I got to this session slightly late, but that's okay. Jason Fried and Rick Segal are tackling the question of whether or not Web 2.0 companies need venture capital. Jason is, of course, from 37signals, a Web 2.0 company that didn't take VC. Here are my notes (my comments in italics):
- Jason says everything they do is profitable.
- Rick agrees with Jason, if you don't need the venture capital, don't take it. Institutional money changes the dynamics of what you're doing.
- On the whole, Rick thinks that 37signals is an anomoly. The norm is folks come up with an idea, and then need some cash to get going.
- If you don't lose your limited partners' money, they will love you. There's a myth that you need to make millions and millions, and its probably not true.
- Jason says the answer to "how do you monetize this" is "you charge for it." If you build tools that people want and like, you can charge for them.
- If you pay for something and you use it, you'll see the value. There is a disconnect between buyer and user in the enterprise.
- Rick says in general, free sucks. The problem is that we've trained people to do free, and getting people to pay for something is a non-trivial task. Rick says generating revenue quickly is important.
- Jason says "we like to emulate drug dealers", you give people a little bit for free and get them hooked. Most of 37signals' business is from upgrades.
- Jason says know what you want to do, and build something that you can manage without requiring the headcount to swell. You need to have people on board who share that vision.
- Rick says there are definite opportunities in Canada. However, there is not enough chest pounding that this is a great place to start a company. This company has a wealth of talent, and there is capital.
- Rick's standard offer to any entrepreneur is 30 minutes, no harm, no foul. Rick thinks that every entrepreneur who wants to take a shot should get to take that shot.
- Jason says to hire the best talent you can, no matter where they are. He says you don't need to go to San Francisco.
- The main way to keep costs down is headcount, according to Jason. Also, don't go buy the server farm before you have any customers. Jason says you should be able to build any product with three people, max. If you need ten people or even five, its too complex, so keep the team small.
- The way to build an audience is by teaching, according to Jason. Either you outspend your competition, or you outteach them.
- Finding like-minded people is more difficult. 37signals has done it through the open source community.
- Rick says that in Canada, there's lots of opportunities for the "put me in coach" deal, and those people will often work twice as hard. And these people become like-minded, because they are looking to you for guidance.
- Jason thinks resumes are a waste of time. He doesn't care where you went to school or if you finished school, as long as you do great work. It's about fucking time someone important said this, thank you Jason, I couldn't agree more. The school system is largely a waste of time (with regards to tech) as far as I am concerned.
- Rick believes very strongly that the Canadian VC market is not taking enough risk, doesn't fail enough, and doesn't take enough flyers. The problem is that the community is very small.
- At the high school and post secondary level, we need to allow people to try things in entrepreneurship, says Rick. If anyone gets a startup camp going, Rick wants to know about it, and he'd be happy to get people and money there.
- There's lots of potential downsides to taking money. You might get pushed out, you might be forced to go public, etc.
- Rick says when he does a valuation on the company, he does two things. How much capital is going to be required to create that success? How can he stage those dollars into the company? Rick doesn't do participating, preferred, double dip shares or anything. The best deal possible is common shares. The worst thing you can do is make someone feel like they didn't win. At the end of the day, Rick wants the entrepreneur to feel like he/she has a partner.
- There has to be a liquidity event for a VC, so after you take money, Rick says there is a meter running to get to that event, so the entrepreneur has to want to sell, or go public.
- Web 2.0 boils down to service, according to Rick. They are successful with passionate customers.
- Jason says that founders shares look good for entrepreneurs nowadays.
Tara Hunt is on stage now, to present the third and final keynote of the day, talking about building a community. Here are my notes (my comments in italics):
- Tara says she left thinking there wasn't a tech community in Toronto, but thinks that things have changed now.
- She wants the session to be interactive. Who doesn't? Every presenter says that.
- Tara blogs because she is creating her own personal history.
- Tara says the consumer revolution is here. We know better than to listen to marketing lies. There are bad customer experiences, and too many unsatisfactory choices. We're people, not consumers.
- Once we make a choice, we're locked in, such as with DRM. There are too many messages - ads in the bathroom, on the train, etc. People are pissed.
- People have good choices now.
- Okay, this is actually interactive for once, gj Tara. A side effect of that, however, is that its harder to take notes ;)
- We're having a discussion now about a video Tara showed. The video, on YouTube, was of a teenage girl (bowiechick) showing off the capabilities of her Logitech webcam. Some people wonder if the video is actually some sort of marketing on the part of Logitech.
- pinko principle #1: inbound, rather than outbound messages
- pinko principle #2: be a community advocate (not a company evangelist)
- pinko principle #3: 100% authenticity
- pinko principle #4: serve niche markets
- pinko principle #5: follow open source principles
- Tara says to stop using the term "viral"
- Snakes on a Plane...check it out. We just watched a CNN news segment on the upcoming movie.
- You can't put this stuff in a list, it's organic.
- You have to be part of the community you serve.
Apparently an alarm has been tripped somewhere in the MaRS conference centre, so there's a flashing light and a repeating loud beeping, which has brought the conference to a halt. Every now and then a lady comes over the loudspeaker to tell us that the cause of the alarm is being investigated, causing great humor for all attendees. Apparently the Toronto Fire Department is en route.
We're on a fifteen minute break now. You just never know what will happen at these events ;)
Today's second keynote features Mathew Ingram talking with Dr. Paul Kedrosky about venture capital and Web 2.0. Here are my notes from the session (my comments in italics):
- Is this another bubble? In a sense we've returned to 1995, two browsers got funding! (Maxthon and Flock) In a sense, it feels like we're renacting a lot of the same things that happened last time. "It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp." Mathew says Web 2.0 is making the same mistakes faster! Paul says he sees the same plan four times a day, which is always a sign of the bubble.
- Paul says there's a strong argument to be made that the first bubble (not tech, but way back) wasn't a bubble at all, but rather a reaction to policy. We're really good at overpainting bubbles.
- Mathew says there seems to be a lot of money, and people have to make investments. Paul says we're at record levels for VC, in terms of capital under management. There's as much more money out there now as the last bubble, it's just much more concentrated among the so-called top tier.
- In the venture industry is a rigged market, in that the best venture investors fish from a well stocked pond.
- Mathew wonders if you need the money VCs have? Paul says if you don't need the venture capital, don't take it. If you can build a company that doesn't require capital, you'd be an idiot to give part of it away for VC involvement.
- The nice thing about a lot of the consumer-centric Web 2.0 companies is that you can do them very cheaply. Well, sort of I guess. Cheaper when compared to ten years ago, sure. People still cost money!
- Paul says there is very little barrier to entry now. He says its sort of like being pecked to death by ducks!
- Given that its so easy to start a company, how can they raise all this money if they don't have a business model? Paul says YouTube looks like a very early mockup of a television network of the future, so its a very interesting company (though they should stop stealing other peoples stuff). Paul thinks you can come up with a business model later.
- Look at Google, the precedent is well set, maybe you can stumble your way into a business model. You better have scale though.
- Questions from the floor are starting early. What about progression, say to B2B or enterprise? Paul says its definitely starting. He thinks the spread from consumer to enterprise has gone from 99% and 1% to maybe 60% and 40%. One of the most interesting companies Paul likes is DabbleDB, a classically Web 2.0 company oriented towards enterprise.
- Any examples of good, profitable models? Paul says a good Canadian example is PlentyOfFish.com, who are pretty profitable. Paul thinks they are doing about $15,000 a day.
- Is VC in Canada lagging for Web 2.0? Paul says that everywhere he goes, it seems they think they have a seed financing gap. Even in Silicon Valley! In Canada in particular, the level of wealth per capita isn't high enough, so yes there is a gap. Under the current structure, it's hard to do seed investing out of a large fund.
- While it may be easy to build a Web 2.0 company on credit cards, you can't build a sustainable, successful company. Thoughts? Paul says that's true. Later often doesn't happen for venture capital firms.
- How many things that get investment are actually features and not products? Paul says its epidemic proportions. He says it is easy to start thinking that features are products. People feel they have plausible deniability though, because things are getting sold, and big companies are doing it, just look at Google.
- Has Skype made some VCs rethink their strategy? Paul says investing and venture capital is trend following and number following, so absolutely.
- The death of the IPO has caused some big change in the venture game. So a big acquisition (like Skype) that looks like what an IPO might have been, they'll all jump.
- Is AdSense the only model? Paul says there is a preoccupation with AdSense, for sure. In a sense, Google is the single customer. The cashflow is great, but there are other ways to get paid, even just multiple ad networks or subscribers.
- Paul says we are back at the advertising level online that we were in 2001, and it's still just a drip in the bucket in terms of the total ad spend in North America. Paul thinks network television is starting to lose it's monopoly, there are some cracks in the dam.
- Paul says in Canada, we need more big exits in a dense area so that people have some examples to follow. In the Valley, people see other people being successful and think "I gotta get out there and do that!" It's a chicken and egg problem in Canada, and as (missed his name) from Bessemer says, "we don't have enough chickens or eggs."
- Paul says the Boston area investors have a history of investing up in Canada.
- Paul thinks that venture folks remain as preoccupied with how you'll spend your money as ever, if for no other reason than it's an important discipline to have, to go through the steps of planning. You'll find venture firms are more creative than usual when structuring deals.
- Paul says institutional VCs are more flexible and creative lately, not stuck on doing the same old thing.
In the first keynote of the day, Stuart MacDonald will be chatting with popular blogger Steve Rubel of Edelman about the future of marketing. Here are my notes from the session (my comments in italics):
- Throughout the conference they have been showing short ads for Mesh, made by a company called Storystream, whose tagline is "ads you want to watch". I'm not sure what the point is, but they are fairly interesting and sometimes funny.
- What does micropersuasion mean? Steve says its no longer about Superbowl ads, but rather about one person with a voice and the same impact. One individual being just as persuasive as anyone.
- Steve says public relations has to mean exactly what the words say, relating to the public. The PR professional needs to know how to interact with people as people. Bloggers have many different motivations, you have to consider a person's motivation and how to help them with it.
- Stuart remarks that blogging is harder than just issuing a press release, it feels like "a military campaign with no end." Steve says that's not the best analogy, it's more about befriending the community. The new model is "further the conversation."
- This time, for the first time, the Edelman annual survey showed that a peer is the most authoritative person, no longer a CEO or someone else. People like to find people like themselves.
- Steve says advertising is still working, let's not kid ourselves. Marketing isn't dying, PR isn't dying, it's just that new disciplines are appearing.
- Stuart asks if Steve gets a lot of fear from clients, and Steve says we get fear from the whole industry. Sooner or later though, you have to face that fear, and when people see there are ways to succesfully engage that conversation, they'll get over the fear.
- The community will tell us who is credible and who isn't, Steve says.
- It's not a numbers game, you don't need to go for the blogs that have the largest numbers. A deep level of engagement with a particular audience is better, that's the new model.
- Steve has seen some companies setup budgets for community marketing, so people are starting to pay for this kind of PR, and others will follow.
- Steve says blogs can surely generate a lot of traffic, and many campaigns these days are measured using traffic.
- We learn as we go, that certain things will work and others wont, but we need to remain transparent.
Now, some questions from the floor:
- Blog posts are being circulated to political people, do you see this with companies? Steve says the companies that get it use services like Tailrank, but he doesn't think posts are printed out and spread to executives.
- What is happening with MySpace? Steve says it is more than just MySpace, it's all social networks. There are centers of gravity that pull people in, like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Whatever you do with social networks, needs to be on the terms of service of the community, in a way that's polite and accepted. Social networks are a great place to engage people, but you need to engage in a way that furthers the community.
- Someone asked about Strumpet. Apparently it is a blog that wonders how long Steve will last at Edelman. Steve says that as a blogger he recognizes that he lives in the public, and with that, you gotta take your lumps. The lesson to marketers is that you've got to take the bad with the good.
- Question about Second Life and the opportunity for marketing. Steve says for him, Second Life came out of nowhere, and he thinks the potential is terrific, provided you can find a way to engage in a way that is accepted.
- Do bloggers need to learn any new skills to better communicate with PR people? Steve says they don't need to learn new skills, they need to be people.
- Steve says what he would measure is conversations, engagement with the most influential people.
- How do you represent the masses when its the educated tech elite doing the talking? Steve says the old stuff doesn't go away, but there's a new group of people you focus on more deeply. (I don't think he quite understood the question.)
- What about "pay for play" in the blogosphere? Steve thinks it is fine if accepted, but right now, it's not accepted at all. The way to know what will work is to read blogs, to keep track of what people are talking about.
- What are some of the techniques used today to calculate community ROI? Steve says you could use touch points, web traffic, inbound links, the rank within the search engines, etc. Ultimately it comes back to sales, did people buy more product? Clients right now might want measurement in a way that doesn't exist yet.
- Who did the biggest rain wreck? Kryptonite? Sony and DRM? Steve says it is anyone who created a fake blog, like Captain Morgan, character blogs. Steve thinks characters are great for ads, not for blogs. Blogs are about authenticity.
- Tris asks, what about character blogs for entertainment purposes? Steve says why do a blog and not something like a Flash microsite? Steve doesn't think there have been many great successes with it.
- Steve is getting hammered over the character blogs right now. Steve says a character blog is a shield, it says to the consumer, "I don't want to get down and dirty." The best blogging companies take real people from the gut of the company.
- Jeremy Wright just made a good point - "If Darth Vader blogged, I'd read that every bloody day." Steve says well, let's try it and measure it and see if it works!
- Stuart says that without data, it's just opinion. And don't be afraid to fail.
- Where do you think this is going? Steve says its heading to a shift of advertising dollars from one-way communication to two-way. In three years there will be metrics, more case studies, processes, more failures, and a new budget created for generating conversation. We'll see indexes like the the most talked about brands in the world.
- Step 1: know where your customers hang out. Step 2: develop the infrastructure to listen to the conversation. Step 3: engage the audience in a dialogue. Step 4: empower the audience, figure out what they want to achieve, and help them do it.
- Steve says if you want to do "I talk, you listen" then do podcasting, or microsites, or something.
- Will blogging bring more truth to advertising? Steve thinks so, he says "the blogosphere is the greatest fact checking machine ever invented." It will force companies to be more honest.
- Some guy just basically said blogging hasn't reached the masses. Um, hello? Over sixty million blogs worldwide? Probably double that if you count all the ones in China that we don't keep proper track of. I wish Steve would have said something to that effect.
Just got settled in the auditorium for day two of Mesh. Tris Hussey and I just remarked that the conference is much more business focused, which is a good thing for Canada, we really haven't had that yet. We're starting late, but I think it's because there was hardly anyone here at ten to 9, unlike yesterday. The auditorium seems to be filling up now though.
We've got back to back keynotes this morning, followed by a break, then fifteen minutes of fame, and another keynote bringing us to lunch.
Last session of the day is all about media and it's future, particularly that of newspapers. Participating is Mathew Ingram, Angus Frame, Tomer Strolight, and Tomi Poutanen. Here some notes from the session (my comments in italics):
- Why is Craigslist successful? Because newspaper classifieds are restrictive and expensive. Apparently the site steals $50 million of advertising from newspapers a year.
- Angus says you need to get people to change their understanding of what the daily paper is. A big change was adding breaking news to globeandmail.com, so that the paper isn't only publishing once every 24 hours. The next goal is to have the Globe understand that control has to change; allowing readers to comment on articles, for example.
- Angus says its tough to get this new kind of thinking into the daily activities of a newsroom such as The Globe's.
- Tomer says that while not everyone is on board with doing things online, the organization is. This means they (Toronto Star) are doing things like a Craigslist competitor.
- Mathew wonders if its easier for Yahoo to become a new media organization. Tomi says absolutely. Yahoo doesn't create a lot of content, but works to make sure the infrastructure is right. The vision is to enrich peoples lives by allowing them to find news, share it, etc. Yahoo is by no means a traditional media company.
- Yahoo has a ton of partnerships with publishers, because they drive a lot of traffic to them. Tomi says things are changing, you can no longer just print Reuters articles and call it a newspaper. Angus says what's being missed in the acceptance of huge change, going from the newspaper as a whole as a product to just the importance of a single article that might appear on Yahoo News.
- Angus says aggregators are going to be the dominant stop for people looking for information. So you have to make it worthwhile for people to go to The Globe. The strengths for The Globe are journalists, and the audience, which provides a unique opportunity. You can't aggregate the package.
- Tomer says that now the publishers have information such as which stories are most popular, what are people following, etc. He says the change is unbundling, so newspapers need to find new ways to make money.
- In a lot of ways, traditional media was about pushing stuff out there. Comments, voting, patterns, etc gives much more data than previously possible, so writers can find out instantly if people liked their articles.
- Tomer says that in the past, you could have an entire career in journalism writing stuff that no one ever read and be none the wiser. That doesn't happen anymore, due largely to the availability of so much more data.
- Tomer says you have to find a unique value proposition, and not trying to change the newspaper into commodity content. Newspapers have to get leaner to meet people's time constraints.
- Angus says it is very common for publishers and writers to underestimate the intelligence of their readers, who might have something to add. Writers shouldn't shy away from that opportunity!
- Angus says that the online reader is very similar to the offline reader, the newness of the medium has worn off. One is not really more or less tech-savvy than the other.
- There's no doubt about it, people go to where they feel the information is the best, according to Angus.
- What about registration for newspapers, even if it was free? Tomer says it was a lose-lose situation for everyone. After registration was removed, traffic rose by 50% after three months.
- Are newspapers moving towards reporting or opinion? Angus says everyone is trying to add something more of value, so yes, a lot more opinion as part of the drive to make something unique. There is more opinion on everything now than there ever has before.
- Yahoo highlights the content that is most popular among readers. Yahoo is also more editorial while Google's competing news product is entirely algorithmic.
- Any thought to becoming a news aggregator? Angus says no, The Globe is a niche player in the Canadian media market. The idea of partnering and linking to content sources that complement what the Globe already offers is the main change to go after. Tomer says there's no way to compete with Yahoo and Google, so why would you become an aggregator?
- Angus hopes the whole idea of a walled garden is long dead.
Here we go for the next session, talking about where broadcasting is going, with Barnaby Marshall, Amber MacArthur, Jian Ghomeshi, and Andrew Baron. Here some notes from the session (my comments in italics):
- Barnaby started off with a survey of the audience. It seems satellite radio is not that popular, but lots of people like iPods and have bought music on iTunes. "Buying music is the new piracy."
- Jian says, at the end of the day, while the platforms may be changes, the major players won't. This is both telling, and somewhat disheartening. I disagree here. BoingBoing anyone?
- The New York Times print may be dying, but the New York Times itself will not. The traditional media have done a great job of scrambling to diversify. Really? Name another great example besides News Corp. Murdoch is the only one who really gets it.
- Andrew says the music industry has lost control. Apple is the now the single entity that is determining prices, etc.
- Rocketboom could not have existed a few years ago, but now that its possible, Andrew thinks we'll start to see things change.
- Amber thinks the most interesting thing is reach. You really can't compare the number of eyeballs in Canada to the number of eyeballs worldwide, and that's a big difference between old and new media. Amber says old media needs to be believe in the power of new media.
- Amber says NBC asking YouTube to pull content is pretty shortsighted. You have to get in the game, or you're going to get left behind.
- Jian says that Pandora is a great example of a service that allows people to get excited about something while putting up with advertising. He doesn't believe however that you can boil music down to mathematical equations.
- Jian says Yahoo Music is overly confident in suggesting their goal is the death of terrestrial radio. He thinks people still want to own something, they don't want to rent.
- Someone in the audience just brought up my mantra, though he calls it ubiquitous wifi. I call it wireless everywhere. Why do I need an iPod or a satellite radio? Barnaby says Google's project is incredibly disruptive, and Amber says satellite radio will die if it happens. Jian thinks that wireless in the automobile will be the turning point.
- Why will traditional media not die? Because they can buy the new media, seems to be Jian's answer.
- Andrew says the big companies are going to be sharing, they won't be in control.
- "Is Seinfeld any funnier in HD?"
- Jian thinks on demand in general is what's shaking in the industry.
- To do things like The Sopranos or 24, you need the best writers, the best actors, etc. And no matter what the platform is, that stuff will be successful.
- Amber says that even if a lot of people can do it, only a few can do it well.
- Someone says that people are habitual, they get home, sit on the couch, turn on the TV. "Editorialize to me because I don't have time to think!" Is traditional media really going to die?
Just got back from lunch, and I decided to attend the session about bloggers and journalists, featuring Matthew Ingram, Om Malik, Michael Tippet, and Scott Karp. The Editor-In-Chief of Dose is sitting right behind me, which is kind of cool. Should bloggers be treated as journalists? Here some notes from the session:
- Scott says bloggers can be journalists, sometimes. And blogs can be journalism, sometimes. Finding that middle ground is the tricky part. News gathering has to happen in a lot of places where it requires an institution or money.
- Matthew seems to think the recent participatory journalism survey on The Economist is a good example of something you wouldn't see on a blog, because of the time and effort involved. Basically, they have the resources available whereas most bloggers simply don't.
- Om will give the people that pay him first right of refusal on breaking stories, but will post on his blog if he can't reach them (say if news breaks at 2 AM). Om sees the blog almost as a reporter's notebook, more than anything else.
- Michael says that from the perspective of consumers, this dichotomy is ridiculous. They just want pictures, stories, they want the stuff. When you've got 500 photos of an event coming in, you get a sense of what's really happening. Most of the stuff reported on NowPublic is big spectacle events, things like Katrina, etc.
- Michael says trust is important, he trusts the Globe and Mail, but he also trusts his friends.
- Matthew says that on Google News, many of the articles are repeated, because many outlets use something like AP, so its refreshing to see photos from someone actually on the ground.
- Om says this whole user generated media thing is a big myth. Say if you take photos on holidays, you've got maybe 20 good photos out of 500. Om says that 80% of the time, user generated stuff is crap, and it applies through any media. Om says there is a reason that people turn to established media outlets, like credibility and packaging.
- Scott thinks user generated media functions in a spiking fashion, once in a while, something strikes a nerve. Matthew says it also makes it easier to find stories of interest in the future.
- Om says that user generated media is just like forums, we've finally figured out how to do forums correctly, but you can't make a big deal out of it.
- Om isn't against participatory journalism, but sometimes too much is too much.
- Michael says the goal is to find likeminded individuals, not necessarily to have the front page story on NYTimes.
- Om: Look at American Idol - not everyone can sing, but everyone loves to vote.
- It's more citizen editors than citizen journalists.
- Om says, find me someone in this room who doesn't have an agenda. Is there really objectivity?
- Michael says he likes to gather a plurality of viewpoints.
- Om says people who aspire to be editors online in the future are going to be aggregators. Trusting users to make the right call is the only way to go, that's why Digg is doing better than the NYTimes.
- The biggest thing that Om has learned is to be willing to apologize, you self-correct in real-time. Be flexible to listen to your readers, and just say sorry when you're wrong.
The second keynote of the morning is with Rob Hyndman and Dr. Michael Geist, who will be chatting about the web and society. Here are my notes, with my comments again in italics. I think Michael looks a little like Billy Crystal.
- Oooh a slidedeck! Michael Geist is opening with a presentation, and he's using pictures on slides just like we saw at Northern Voice. Seems to be a popular format. He's talking about Sam Bulte and the copyright fiasco that happened over the holidays. He's an excellent speaker. I guess the bloggers defeated Bulte in the last election. Or did they?
- Three lessons we can draw: new voices, new stakeholders, new copyright.
- There is a tendency at times to focus on the negativity of what's taking place (spam, porn, etc). There is some remarkable stuff taking place: content creation, content sharing, good news story.
- Readership of papers is flat in Canada, in decline in the US.
- Canadian retail sales of books remain constant. Records for vide games. Declines for music.
- "What is more long tail than Canadian content?"
- Michael's question is what's the policy to ensure this great stuff continues, and in fact, to encourage it?
Now we're getting to the conversation.
- Rob says "after hearing Michael speak, I feel like going out to run a marathon, the world is gonna be okay." Agreed.
- We're looking at new legislation being introduced probably this fall. Michael says that US-style law is protection for things like DRM. The tools and laws don't work.
- What about iTunes, it requires DRM, doesn't that tell us something? Michael says it tells us something about the labels, only willing to do it when DRM came around. It will be unfortunate if we end up in a world with only iTunes.
- Where is the Canadian content? Apple doesn't need to negotiate deals with the smaller companies, so these things are missing.
- We saw some movment in France to try and rollback DRM, are there signs that there is some flexibility? Michael says users already have control over content, the question is whether we're going to lock them up for it. A growing number of countries are recognizing that policies put into place in the 1990s are outdated, and don't reflect the current state of the web.
- We're seeing a move to a more collaborative method of content creation. What does this tell us about the ideal model of intellectual property protection? Rob says he isn't anti-copyright, but we need to understand that some of the reforms are not about copyright, but protecting markets. DVD region encoding, for example, has nothing to do with copyright.
- Question from the floor: do we need new copyright policy in Canada or not? Michael says the starting point is "do no harm." There are some opportunities: we have a fairly limited fair use right, which is stifling to new business, for example. There is an opportunity to do good, but we can do a lot of harm along the way.
- What is the current political reality? The Canadian Recording Industry is about as good a lobbying group as there is. When musicians finally speak out, it's a breath of fresh air, but you can't undo twenty years of lobbying in two weeks. Matthew Good and the Barenaked Ladies are leaders in this space. There's a new coalition of artists.
- Question about the SOCAN levies: Michael says their vision of levies really went to liabilities. It's unlikely we'll see a lot of people push in that direction.
- Another question: Do you see young people getting more politically active if their fun is limited? Michael says it is tough to say, but if there is an issue, this is it. More and more people are starting to see this as their issue, for example, the musicians.
- Michael says there will unquestionably be infringements, but that's why we have a system, so that we have a set of rules and we have certain abilities when someone clearly violates. This may be a very smart room, but none of us is smart enough to see what the world will look like in a few years. But I would argue that all of us is smart enough, the wisdom of crowds!
- This is not just a copyright issue, net neutrality plays a big role. Michael says it is absolutely an issue here in Canada, for example, what happened with Telus during the lockout. If you have economic incentive to block content, and no laws in place to say you can't use market power to do that, then we've got problems.
- Michael says we need to rethink policies that are developed with the idea that everyone will want incentive (say getting paid for blogging).
Here are some notes from the first keynote of the day, featuring Om Malik and a discussion between Om and Mark Evans of the National Post. Items in italics are my thoughts and comments. They are discussing the future of media:
- Kind of cool, two green couches up on stage for this conversation.
- Can the old world of media survive, and if so, how do they adopt? Om says he doesn't see the difference between old world and new world at all. As long as the information is delivered.
- Traditional media faces challenges because some people simply shouldn't be in the traditional publishing business Om says. He thinks it would be impossible to replace things like the NY Times or National Post or WSJ.
- Are bloggers journalists? Om says people in that debate have too much time on their hands.
- Mark says a lot of newspapers are still struggling with the online business model. If they haven't been able to embrace the web, how can they embrace blogs and podcasts and things? Om says if they don't, they face a bigger problem, which is a whole new generation that only consumes their news online (sounds a lot like me).
- Om says that Forbes.com is really saving Forbes' bacon right now.
- The hundreds of newspapers that will disappear are probably bad newspapers, Om thinks. It won't be papers like the New York Times - "that said, I'll be glad to see a lot of newspapers go."
- Om says blogs are killing off the trade press more than anything.
- Mark asks about television, watching what you want when you want? Om says the mainstream market doesn't really care, there haven't been that many Tivos sold. He says TV is still a passive medium, people just want to sit there and watch whatever's on, for the most part. Regular people don't care about Tivo's.
- Apparently Mark Evans likes The Sopranos, and has a bunch recorded on his PVR, ready to watch. I've still never seen an episode of that show.
- Mark asks about the Three C's - credibility, content, and cash.
- Om says getting discovered is harder than attaining credibility. People can make judgement calls if they find the blog. Credibility comes from the content you create, and in the end, people recognize what's good and what's bad.
- Mark thinks newspapers can survive in local markets, for local advertisers. Om thinks there is an opportunity for local-focused startups.
And now, some questions from the floor.
- Are we underestimating the capacity of the day-to-day world of print, where you basically have a free license to spam?
- What about Craigslist? Om says the newspapers are up against free classifieds, but otherwise, Craigslist is a different kind of beast.
- "When information is free, the only thing of value is point of view." Do you think that's a helpful paradigm? Om says context is more valuable, you have to put everything in context, and most of the time, people fail to do this. People confuse opinion with context. Om says context is the single biggest thing missing in the news today.
- Imagine a future in which you get the news on a digital paper. How far are we from that world? Om has no clue.
- About the economics of blogging - how is one to establish themselves financially? (Boris Mann beside me says, join a network, next question! Agreed.) Om says he is part of Federated Media, which is an aggregated network. What we need is a new kind of advertising paradigm. Om says advertising is seriously lagging in the blogging space. Mark remarks that many reasons people blog now are not financial, they just want to get their point of view out there.
- Question about net neutrality. Om says from a blog publishing point of view, its not much of an issue. Mark wonders if it is a way for traditional media to protect themselves online, because they can pay. Om says there is room for independent media, they don't need to be streaming high def!
- Question about transitioning from tradtitional newspaper to online. Om says lifestyle, sports, and business support the paper. In the online world, you can finetune things, maybe using AP or Reuters for international news instead of your own team. Om says the concept of magazines is not going away anytime soon.
- How do we effectively change that paradigm of advertising. I can turn off my ads on a website using Firefox - how do advertisers deal with that? Om: Internet Explorer, 85% market share. I would say that since Google pretty much owns Firefox, and their business is advertising (not search!), I wouldn't expect it to get any worse than it already is. Om says he can't believe the number of people that click on his Google ads. Mark: "who are these people?!"
- Om says the blogs that provide value with stick around, and the ones that don't will go away. "Every user comes with their finger poised on the back button." Boris remarks that RSS hasn't come up once yet. How many people in this audience visit Om's blog on the web? Probably most use RSS.
- Ah what do you know, the next question comes up, and Om answers with RSS. The question was about monetizing information, can we actually do it? Om says in reality, there is a fundamental change happening, with a new format of information distribution and consumption, and the business model needs to be worked out.
- What does it look like in three years? Om says it will look pretty similar. NYTimes or WSJ might hire some bloggers, but things aren't moving as fast as people think. You will see the biggest media experiment.
- Boris gets to ask a question: he says he only uses RSS, he never visits the websites. Blogs are conversations, Boris can't have a conversation with the National Post! So no question, but just comments, but he made a good point, and Om agrees. Om says RSS is a challenge, but its a huge opportunity. Whoever can figure out a new advertising model right now stands to make a lot of money. Mark says old media is failing miserably at creating a conversation.
- Om says Web 2.0 is a new way of thinking, not some fancy new javascript bits. Is it really all about advertising? I think there's so much more to Web 2.0.
- Seems people get their news mostly from the same services. Are you concerned about how that affects the conversation? Om says the real intelligence of blogs is in the comments.
Not surprisingly, this session went slightly over time.
Stuart MacDonald is on stage welcoming everyone to the conference. He says they want the event to be a two-way conversation, full of meshing, instead of the typical "we talk you listen" kind of conference. "Think of yourselves as participants, rather than attendees," they say.
Introductions to the organizers, thanks to the sponsors, etc, etc. Housekeeping stuff, there is free WiFi, and there is power in the floor (though we can't figure out how to open the panel). Please turn off your BlackBerry's (apparently they make a clicking noise?). On with the show!
Let's Mesh!
Just arrived here in the auditorium for Mesh 06, and I'm ready to go! I've got my Oilers jersey on, sticking out like a sore thumb amongst all the khakis and dress shirts, but that's cool. I'll have lots of pictures to post throughout the day, so check out Flickr. There's lots of people here already, with more and more coming in.
I haven't seen as many people I know as I did in Vancouver yet, but that's to be expected, as most of the attendees here are probably east coasters.
It wasn't looking good last night after I went to sleep - I woke up coughing and ended up being seriously ill. Fortunately it only lasted for about an hour. I felt fine before, and I felt fine afterward, so maybe it was something I ate? In any case, I'm back to normal.
My aggregator of choice has a new name! NewsGator Outlook Edition is now known as NewsGator Inbox, and the first release candidate is now available (and stay tuned to the blog for future updates). I've been playing with it for a while, and it's very solid. I for one really like the name change - the whole "Outlook Edition" is not as easy to say as Inbox. The change does make me wonder if they are planning to release a version for other mail clients, like perhaps Thunderbird or Entourage. This is just speculation on my part though, I don't have any insider information unfortunately.
Another bit of NewsGator news hit the wires recently too, this one about the synchronization story with Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista:
NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS Platform Company, today announced plans that its suite of RSS aggregators will synchronize with the upcoming releases of Microsoft Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7. The synchronization will enable users to ensure that Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 users stay up-to-date with all their subscriptions, whether they are accessing them via the Web, mobile devices, Mac OS-based computers, and other platforms.
Honestly, I don't know why Microsoft hasn't outright purchased NewsGator. Seems like a deal that would make a lot of sense. In any case, the announcement is great news for users of NewsGator products like myself.
I've also been testing the new FeedDemon beta (another NewsGator product that supports synchronization) and I quite like it. I now use it on my desktop, to complete my own personal synchronization story:
- NewsGator Inbox on my Tablet PC
- FeedDemon on my workstation
- NewsGator Online when I'm using a public computer
Synchronization is powerful, yet its one of those ideas that makes you go "damn, why didn't I think of that!"
Dickson and I have been working on a blog specifically for VenturePrize (and Wes Nicol too) and it's finally ready for public consumption! Basically you can read all about our experiences in the two competitions, starting way back in October 2005 when we first decided to take part in VenturePrize. The address is:
http://ventureprize.paramagnus.com
With the exception of the March posts, all entries have been posted after the fact. So a post from November was actually written in the last two weeks, even though the post itself seems like it was written in November. We did our best to go back in time and remember what we were thinking and feeling so that the blog is authentic. I don't think we'll be adding any more "back posts", unless we remember something worth sharing, so the blog is "live" moving forward.
There are two main reasons for this blog. First and foremost, it is for us, so that we can look back and remember the experience. It should also come in handy when asked about timelines in the future, as it is often difficult to remember when things happened. The second reason is that we hope our experience will be useful to future participants of the VenturePrize and Wes Nicol competitions. Learn from our mistakes, and improve upon the things we did!
The blog is entirely comprised of text posts right now, but we're planning to add some media content at some point too, podcasts, pictures, etc. Enjoy!
The conference ended almost six hours ago now, but we just got back from dinner. We went to Moxies with Robert Scoble, Maryam, Rob Greenlee, Eric Rice, Alex Williams, and a bunch of other really cool people. Dinners are always interesting, because things are a little more casual than at the conference, so you get a better chance to chat. Eric told us all about Second Life, so I am going to have to check that out. Robert commented that everyone is playing either World of Warcraft or Second Life!
I think the conference itself went very well. It had the same feel as last year's, which is much less tech oriented and more social-impact oriented. Still lots of great people, with great ideas and some very interesting presentations, which is what makes Northern Voice great. There was a similar mix of males and females as last year, though I get the feeling that there were far more Americans this year.
I wasn't surprised to see so many Apple laptops in the crowd (there usually are at tech events) but I was surprised to see so many people using Microsoft Word for taking notes. That just demonstrates to me that not enough people know about OneNote. And of course, there were still lots of pen and paper people.
I'm not sure I learned anything really new at the conference, but I definitely gathered a good list of things to think about and consider, and that's probably more important anyway. I'm already looking forward to next year's! If you'd like to check out my pictures from the conference, I've created a photoset at Flickr.
Thanks to Darren, Boris, Roland and all the other organizers and volunteers for a great conference!
We're into the last session of the day now, this one on the five ways your blog can change the world. Here are some notes:
- Sounds like we've gone from four presenters down to one due to some family issues that have come up. I didn't catch his name though.
- Yes! He asked what kind of change we want to see in the world, so I stuck up my hand and proclaimed my well-worn mantra, wireless everywhere! Seems as though people agree.
- There are lots of ways you can take part in some effort to change the world, using things like badges (graphics) or common tags.
- Seems if you really want something spread quickly, get it on Boing Boing! That's not the point of the example he is currently sharing, but it is remarkable how that blog can spread information.
- This is kind of funny, he's got one of the other presenters on the cell phone with the device held up to the microphone! This is because she didn't have a microphone to use Skype. Sounds like a telephone interview or something you might see on CNN, kinda neat, and yet pretty low tech!
Lot's of examples of different projects, like that We Are Sorry campaign after Bush was re-elected, etc. I haven't been paying that much attention, so I am sure I missed a few things here and there - be sure to check out some other posts on the aggregation servies. I think the links mentioned will be posted on Northern Voice too.
Here are some notes from the Geek Out session administered by Robert Scoble, Will Pate and Kevin Marks:
- Sounds like they have some topics to discuss at first, followed by some good questions at the end.
- Kevin is talking about microformats, specifically tagging. We're also getting a demo of the Blog Finder and Explore features on Technorati. Microformats can be used for tags, events, names, addresses, etc.
- Kevin just entered "canada" into the Explore feature, and every post on the page was from my blog. Something cool about seeing your blog appear on the big screen in a presentation :)
- Scoble is talking now, about sharing information through del.icio.us and using other Firefox extensions.
- We're going around the room sharing favorite Firefox extensions, some of which include: Session Saver, Fangs, PDF Download, Download Status, Signatures, Fasterfox, Web Developer, Firebug, etc.
- Will Pate is talking now about his blog, and how he uses Drupal for customization. Specifically he is focusing on the aggregation of content capabilities.
- Kevin just showed an awesome animated graph of the long tail of posts in response to a question about the A list and how to break in. Basically if you get a single inbound link, you're above average!
- Scoble reiterates that he's interested in mapping, and thinks that within a year someone will have "put this room up on a map". He's talking about taking the basic mapping capabilities and making them extremely relevant and useful.
- Will wants better tools for "normal" people, things like posting from within Microsoft Word, etc. He also says user interface is very important!
- Scoble is interested in the photo sites like Riya and Bubbleshare.
- Someone asked about Web 2.0 and all of the new products we're seeing, and both Scoble and Will seem to think we won't really see a slowdown of new ideas, even though the big three pick up companies along the way.
- Scoble says the new advertising based business model will allow a lot of new companies to grow. Sounds a lot like the idea behind Live.com if you ask me!
Back from lunch (we went to Quizno's in a nearby mall) and I am in Eric Rice's session titled Everything Casting. Here are some notes:
- "everything"casting: doing whatever you want, for whatever reason, in whatever medium.
- your thing, your product, your "it", your epsilon
- Four primary elements or categories: content/concept/purpose, medium/materials, audience/behavior, sustain/making money.
- Content: personal/intimate, art, informational, performance/rock star. You need to have at least one, sometimes you can do all four!
- Medium: text, audio, video, photos. For all the religious opinions on the medium, it doesn't matter. Some are better than others, depending on the context, sometimes you can mix them together!
- Audience: passive, active passive, participatory, active participatory. You can be in any of these moods, and it depends on where you are, the type of medium available, etc.
- Sustain: zero, fame, barter, cash. It's perfectly okay to not make money, and in fact, it's usually hard to make money from things you love doing - think of sports, or playing video games, etc.
More good discussion! Eric will be posting the audio of this session, as well as the slides. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons, so you're encouraged to use it!
Staying in the same room, where Mike Tippet, Mark Schneider, and Robert Ouimet are talking about the changing face of journalism. This probably going to be similar to what was talked about yesterday during Moosecamp. Here are some notes:
- We are experiencing an existential moment in the news.
- Readers can now make their own news, and they are going online to consume news.
- Michael Tippet essentially gave an overview of NowPublic and the circumstances that allowed it to exist.
- Robert Ouimet is from CBC, and is talking about how news is changing.
- He asked how many people in the room watch the 6 oclock news - very few hands went up!
- Mark Schneider is now sharing his journalistic background. He says the truth of the matter is, the news is really sick. There's a toxic quality about what we are consuming. The news organizations themselves have been tainted.
- Now we're on to discussion. Not many notes on this session - it was very interesting, but much harder to write stuff down. I am getting hungry for lunch too, maybe that has something to do with it!
- Mark says there is something called NewsML (markup language) in the works.
- Robert: focus is important, and is taught to journalism students and employees, but is an exercise in rejecting everything else.
Really great discussion in this session!
I decided to switch rooms to check out Nancy White's session on Snow White and the Seven Competencies of Online Interaction. Some notes:
- I'm also chatting live in the NV Back Channel. You can join if you want! Dickson just commented that he hates IRC...I guess he's run into too many viruses!
- Our world is far more unbounded - we're creating our own reality.
- Nancy is kind of telling a story like Julie, using images on the screen as she goes.
- We have the ability to let this magic happen by changing our organizations.
- Communications Skills - scan, see patterns, write, image-inate, vocalize, intuit; write blog daily, test, draw, record, summarize, listen
- Learning with others - learning as a practice, gift economy, collaborate, open hand...
- Ramlinger - 6 Network Functions: filters, amplifyers, convenors, facilitators, investors, community builders
- Nancy: note, make a competency about tools!
- Facilitation for: relationship, identity/reputation, presence, flow
- Shouting creates quite a different environment online than in meatspace. Learn about improvisation and creatively abrasive!
- Convening Conversations - invite, name the question, initiate, design for local choice, nurture
- Intercultural antennae: broadly defined, heart variations, "default" culture - look, read, live/work/play, bridge!
- Tolerance for Ambiguity - OK with not in control, not knowing, move forward without certainty
- Ability to switch contexts - connectors, networkers, multiple perspectives, outsiderness
- Self-Awareness!
- So what? Undeterred by failure, care for the whole, willing to be vulnerable, value the human system first
- The struggle is the solution. Grieve for the cost of what exists now. Treat the conversation as action. See the reality in the current situation.
- Edith Wharton - There are two ways of spreading the light: To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Dave Sifry and Tim Bray are on stage now, getting ready to do their presentation, apparently with no visuals! Sounds like they will be accepting questions from the crowd as well.
- Kind of a cool interview setup, Dave and Tim sitting on stage.
- How many people are bloggers? Everyone raises their hand. How many people don't have a Technorati ego feed? No one raises their hand!
I'm going to try and capture some of the Q and A here but don't expect exact quotes - I'll be summarizing essentially.
T: Why do we need blogs?
D: [Explains why he started Technorati.] Mailing lists suck! Started looking around to see if there might be a better way and came across a dynamic web publishing system, a blog. I immediately became a stats whore, I wanted to know what people were saying about me! The problem was fundamentally the way search engines are built - in essence built on the model that the web is the world's biggest library. Even today we talk about the web as if it were a library - web pages, documents, indexes, etc. What I wanted was the immediacy of conversation. Traditional search engines don't really understand the concept of time. This doesn't mean that the web as a library metaphor isn't a good one. What I realized was, pages are created by people. Authority does not denote veracity! I built Technorati because I wanted to know who was talking about me.
T: What leaps out at you from your state of the blogosphere series?
D: We don't pretend to say we're tracking every blog that exists, but we're working hard to get all of the public ones. Korea for example, we don't track quite as well. There's about 27.6 million blogs, and that grows by 75,000 every day (about one new weblog per second). How many blog after three months? Just over 50%, about 13.7 million. About 2.8 million post once a week or more, and just under a million post once a day or more. There are about 15 new posts per second. The blogosphere is incredibly many-to-many. People like Instapundit or BoingBoing are starting to look a lot like the mainstream media, where they get a lot of links and just can't respond to every comment, etc. It's the people after these top ones that are much more interesting; their traffic is still manageable enough to carry on a conversation, yet they are still authoritative. The idea behind Technorati's Blog Finder feature is to try and help these people get discovered.
Audience Member: How can we deal with the fact that the world of tagging is messy and there's multiple languages, etc?
D: When you setup the system so that it's easy to do, an emergent system starts to occur. As long as tagging is easy, emergent thinking will occur.
T: I think we can agree that's the only hope too, no one can create a big dictionary.
T: Blogging is changing so much, what can go wrong?
D: Wow! The growth cannot continue forever, because there's only so many humans in the world! We're still very much at the beginning though, and there are some enormous challenges like spam, splogs, spings, etc. As Cory Doctorow said, all healthy ecosystems have parasites! Net neutrality, is one of the most dangerous threats to the net. This is the idea where telecom providers try to do preferrential pricing.
Audience Member: How many spam blogs are being created by robots?
D: About July of 2004 is when they really started to appear, and there's two kinds; the ones that do SEO type blogs, and those that are scraping content to try and make money. The way to solve this is to get down to the economics of why people do this. And it has to be an ecosystem approach, different companies have to work together.
T: I think it is hitting the long tail less hard than the head of the tail.
T: [Asked something about RSS and advertising I think.]
D: Your RSS aggregator is not "push"...it goes off at some regular interval to pull down information. And they all understand when something is "read" differently.
Audience Member: What about federated networks?
D: It's a shift in the economics of publishing. We're starting to see, in effect, a guild system. It comes down to, can you write with quality and can you work effectively with advertisers to make money?
Scoble made a comment about advertising at this point.
D: I think advertising sucks, but imagine you could see ads you actually want to?
Okay I am back to just some notes:
- Google Bowling - people will create spam sites that point to competitors so that they get kicked out of the index.
- Tim says he observed bored children in the audience, and reminds everyone of the kids room.
Julie Leung is up on stage now to present her keynote Starting with Fire: Why Stories are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales. Julie always has an interesting presentation so this should be good.
- Just as she did at Gnomedex, Julie has started by sharing a story from her past, using pictures to illustrate her words. I'll pick out some of the key quotes from her story.
- "We are surrounded by stories. Nature reveals why stories are important."
- "It is in our nature to seek stories. We are our stories."
- "Stories can be indirect, yet powerful. Stories are perfect for complexity."
- "Stories are tools of change."
- "Stories heal us emotionally."
- "We come together around stories. They continue culture, and they change culture."
- "Stories are essential because stories are essentially human."
Julie is now sharing some of her principles for blogging stories:
- What is a story? They usually have a beginning, a middle, and an end. However "one way", is for traffic signs! She highlight's Robert McKee's book "Story".
- Change the familiar! Avoid cliches, but also try to take the ordinary and give it new color and new meaning.
- How to begin? When beginning a story, listen and link to others.
- Take notes. Include sensory details.
- Use the power of pause, blank space, etc.
- Blogging has a freedom you can't find in other places - a story can be any shape or size. You can break a story into many pieces, and each can become a blog post.
- Hiding! Make it suspenseful, as in life, we don't know all of the story until the end.
- Experiment to continue growing as a blogger.
- Voice comes naturally, and you'll find it as you experiment and share your stores.
- Have fun, be creative, and play.
- It's the raw and sometimes the imperfect that speaks to us the most.
- Linking and commenting make stories real. The story is corrected, confirmed and can lead to collaboration. It takes two to make a story, the teller and the listener.
- Blogging is transforming story telling.
- Be generous and creative with links; they can add another dimension to stories.
Now Julie is sharing some examples of blogging stories:
Julie says: start with fire, start with the hearth.
Darren Barefoot just started giving his opening remarks in the theatre here at UBC. Looks like there's quite a few people who decided to sleep in this morning - lots of empty chairs in the room!
This year the conference has a "kid's room"; a place where parents can take their kids and self-organize to supervise. Everyone has been asked not to take photos of kids or blog their names without their parents permission.
Coffee comes at 10:15 AM, even though Megan just ran to Starbucks! Time for Julie...
So the icon is a little different, but we're still at Northern Voice. This session is a demo - Robert Scoble is going to be sharing Windows Vista (hence the graphic!). Here are my notes:
- Scoble's just getting things setup now, looks pretty sexy so far, people are watching and chatting. I can hear a few people in the audience saying "that's just expose" or something - the Mac bunch is out in full force!
- This is not a scripted demo! Chris Pirillo is helping out. The build used in this demo is only two nights old!
- They are starting by showing a video of two machines, XP against Vista, to see the stress on the system. Windows XP is failing under the stress - essentially they simulate 100% CPU usage with different levels of priority. Now for Vista: much, much better!
- Underneath the covers, things are quite a bit different.
- Chris has been talking with the UI team to make sure all of the artwork, icons, etc. are updated.
- Aero is supposed to evoke a feeling of "more space" on the desktop.
- Scoble is not showing the tablet, media, or any of the other custom versions.
- You now have the ability to do per-application volume levels!
- Entire networking stack has been rewritten, and the performance is about 40 times better between Vista and Vista compared to what it was with XP. There is a 2-10 times performance between Vista and Linux machines.
- Customization for colors and that sort of thing is much, much improved. No more Blue, Silver and Green - you can choose anything! Chris says he's been hammering away at making sure that the fit and polish makes it into the product.
- Apparently when it crashes in the beta builds, a dialog box appears that says "Blue Screen" :)
- Search really is everywhere, in every window.
- When you edit photos, the original and the edit are both saved, so you can always go back to the original photo. And RAW is handled by default.
- The new IE7 is "open search compliant" - something created by A9. Chris says this is basically RSS search.
- Printing has been completely revamped, so printing is easier and much more accurate.
- IE7 converts everything to RSS 2.0 and uses a transform to display it in the browser. When you subscribe, the feed is pushed to a central store. Windows Mail is the aggregator by default, though IE does save the feeds and stuff. Outlook 12 has an RSS aggregator using the same feed store.
- The RSS rendering in IE7 also strips out anything that might be a security concern.
- Apparently the Gadgets will be Firefox compatible.
- Beta 2 is coming in the next month or so, release sometime in August with a release candidate sometime in the middle, which means users should have it around Christmas time.
- The concept of tagging and stacking files is definitely in the product. People using the product so far are losing the concept of hierarchies, which is good for everyone!
- Vista looks awesome!
To end, Chris announces that he has OS X running on his ThinkPad (the developer build). And now we better leave before the Apple lawyers descend...
Next up is Dave Sifry's session on leadership and entrepreneurship (yep, he's the founder of Technorati). Here are my notes:
- There's a distinction between leadership and management! The latter is a function of the former.
- You've got to be a little insane to start a technology venture! You have to have passion.
- Dave: "I'll never fill a position just to fill a position." Think of the A-level person hires a B who hires a C scenario.
- Product-Feature-Company: when you have an idea, is it a feature, a product, or a company? Can you write your business model on the back of napkin? Or at least, the back of an envelope - goal should be cocktail napkin.
- Dave says "don't do it" to outside investment. There's nothing quite like getting a cheque from a customer. Hold off on outside investment as long as you can!
- If you do go the outside investment route: get a good lawyer, give homework to your board, etc.
At this point Dave went around the room and entrepreneurs introduced themselves and their businesses and shared a leadership or startup hack. There are so many good ones I couldn't possibly share them all here, you kind of have to be here. I am surprised at how many entrepreneurs are in the room!
Dave's rules for entrepreneurs (from his first or second slide) meant to be discussion points:
- Find your passion
- Team, team, team
- Lead, don't manage
- Develop Leaders (80% on yout top 20%)
- Prepare for the scalability traps
- Back of the napkin it!
- Remember, it is a business
- Vision is easy, execution is hard
- Fail fast
- Be of service
The next session I am attending is Kris Krug's first Photocamp (I think there are related sessions), kind of a mini Moosecamp just for photography. Apparently northernvoice is among the most popular tags in Flickr for the week. This is an hour long session, followed by a photo walk to Stanley Park later tonight, so it should be interesting.
- The number one piece of advice Kris has is to take lots and lots of photos.
- Derek K. Miller says that being familiar with film cameras teaches you a lot about how to use your digital camera.
- Almost expired film will give you some interesting color compositions! People seem to really like film, though as Kris notes, it is very expensive.
- Derek says film is not going to go away, but it will be incredibly niche. No one in their right mind is going to buy a film camera. Kris notes its harder and harder to find places to get film developed now, even at places that sell film!
- Roland suggests using ShoZu for sharing pictures from your cameraphone.
- Someone from Flickr is saying that you should have a camera with an adapter ring so you can attach polarizers and the like.
- Learn all the buttons on your camera! On a DSLR, there is usually a button that lets you preview depth of field changes and stuff.
- Scoble says for portraits, a good lens is around 100mm. Kris says a 50mm f1.8 Canon plastic lens is probably the best for your money.
- The shot will be 30% sharper at the middle of the aperature than completely wide or completely narrow. Good tip from Scoble!
- A typical sensor in a digital camera is 2/3rds the side of a professional digital camera sensor, which effectively makes a 100mm lens a 160mm lens. Someone else notes that the smaller sensor isn't just a digital thing, it has been around in film too.
- The camera body is just the conduit for the lens - Kris spends most of his money on the lens instead of the camera. Don't buy an EF-S lens, definitely go for EF, according to Kris. The good stuff happens in the glass!
- Another person suggests that there's nothing wrong with EF-S. A key factor is budget, as there are lots of different things that make a photo great or not.
- RAW format is lossless, and applies white balance and effects AFTER the fact, so they need to be post-processed. They are also huge files. RAW really means coming right off the CCD sensor, as raw as possible.
- Kris says to check out VanDigiCam.com.
- Another tip is that you can rent expensive camera gear!
- Will Pate's tip is to pick one thing, and learn all about it. Pick something like "framing" and stick to it. Isolate the variables!
- Tip: play around with the rule of thirds! Break the shot into a tic-tac-toe grid and don't always put the subject in the centre.
- Tip: play with bracketing! That is when you take one shot, then a few more shots at over and under exposure so you can pick the one that works best. Find the bracket mode on your camera and play with it!
- Tip: consume photography! Look at photos that you like. Take photo walks and you'll learn about about lighting and stuff, especially if you can go with a professional!
- Tip: change your perspective! Don't always shoot at eye level.
I realize that I am very much a point and shoot kind of photographer. I really should read up on all of the sorts of camera settings I can change.
Bad news - something is wrong with Megan's laptop. We took a quick look, and its either corrupt system files or some sort of hard drive failure. Too lazy to switch rooms, so we're sticking around for the session in this room, which is all about community. So far it seems much more discussion oriented than presenter oriented. Here are some notes:
- Scoble says to him, community is just linking, and it has paid off in spades.
- Someone else says making connections is what's important. Conversations between people is what networking is all about.
- Your blog: writing yourself into existence - writing about things you're interested in. What are the conversational topics of interest?
- Debbie, who is writing an undergraduate thesis on blogging communities, has found that despite the fact that the Internet can cross boundaries of time, space, etc. people end up building networks with people in their same geographic regions.
- Someone notes that the community becomes much larger through RSS.
- Scoble agrees with another fellow that the extended community is what is most important and valuable. I guess there's physical networks in some places more naturally than others. Another lady says that someone has to take the initiative.
- The process of invitation: how is it different for blogging? Someone notes you can essentially invite yourself, which is different than many other communities.
- Someone suggests that it's important to know something about the blogger in realspace (or meatspace).
- If you don't blog, you can't really relate to the feelings and networks that can be created in virtual and then real space.
- Someone says that to him, community is when the people involved make an effort to know the other members - it's more than just linking together.
- Kevin Marks suggests that access is what makes community important; access to experts, thought leaders, etc.
- Lloyd from Flock wonders how we make the conversation accessible? Maybe its too hard to be part of a community?
- Comments are an important part of community it seems, very quick almost impromptu conversations.
This has been a very cool session, I like the discussion way of talking about a topic.
Lunch is a meal I generally skip, so I got to spend some time talking to Robert Sanzalone during the break. He's presenting a session on podcasting and video blogging - here are some notes:
- Robert says podcasting kind of came from Apple...I disagree, but I see where he's going with it. Apple has the iPod and rolled in support to iTunes, so they give the impression of being the first.
- Blogger is a great tool to get people blogging - all you have to do is link an MP3 file. I suppose in the most simple terms, sure, but there's more to that. You need the enclosure tag.
- Robert suggests using Audacity for recording and editing, some other audience members suggest using GarageBand if you're on a Mac.
- Sounds like Robert likes video - he has used MovieMaker and says it works quite well. He suggests that if you have a digital camera with video capabilities, you can produce videos. I suppose...but the quality there is not so good.
- Who is your audience? Robert says that's a problem with the "tech" community, they don't always consider the wider audience.
- A video tool/service he likes is vimeo.
- Another service he likes is YouTube, because it transcodes the video for you. In a way I suppose, but it's not like you can download the video. A service that does have downloading is Revver - looks like they transcode everything to MOV format.
- Robert says a service that does some more of the pieces is blip.tv. You can connect it with Flickr too. It still stays in the format you upload it in though.
- The service that does the best job, according to Robert, is Dailymotion.
- If Flickr does video, none of the other services will matter - is the general feeling it seems.
Lots to think about with video, I still don't think we're ready for it.
Time for another session - Dickson and Megan have gone to a different one this time. Oh, and I notice Scoble's tablet is actually a newer model than mine (I think...larger screen too). Here are some notes on Bryan Rieger's session on structured content (this is essentially a Semantic Web concept):
- Very interesting use of lego to represent how structured blogging produces blocks. Say a block for the title, one for the text, one for tags (which are already a microformat), etc.
- Microformats: designed for humans first, machines second. Keep it as simple as possible. Solve a specific problem.
- Developers: support both commas and spaces!
- Typically a structured blog post looks the same as any other post, which is good for users.
- Why bother? Some reasons: search, commerce, and many other things we haven't begun to think of yet...
- Current structured content types: licenses, tags, reviews, lists, calendars, events, media, people, organizations, etc.
- Some places to check out are http://microformats.org and http://structuredblogging.com.
- The tools have to support these formats, and for the user, entering these things has to be quick and easy!
- We're creating this content for humans, so why the effort in creating something for machines? Well, one person says it makes presentation much simpler, across various machines and interfaces.
- Boris Mann suggests this is all about accessibility, and again, the tools have to support it.
- Bryan says a larger problem than tools support, is why would people do this? We need to get people to want to do this!
- Are we extending blogging or RSS? Bryan says neither.
- Someone mentioned that there's a project to create a structured version of Atom, so you wouldn't need an RSS feed, as it would essentially be built in. I assume you just throw a stylsheet in front of the Atom document for browser rendering.
- Interesting discussion about how HTML has already gotten us so far, perhaps the solution to structured content is simple...
- Scoble thinks the "way in" for structured content is with maps, allowing a blogger to put a review on a map at a specific address.
So we slept in a little this morning, and we took our time. Compared to past trips, this one has been relatively relaxing thus far! We finally made it to UBC's downtown campus (entirely underground in case you didn't know) and got our lanyards. Kind of neat idea - in addition to your name and web address on the nametag, there are four lines for "tags".
We're in Mark Hamilton's session called We're all journalists now. Right next to us? Robert Scoble with the same tablet pc as I am typing this on. Here are some notes on the session:
- Some people in the room seem to think that there is great power in having tools that make publishing very easy and always on, while others thing that creates a larger problem of filtering and managing new information.
- Scoble makes the point that he can write about a product and a week later 3000 people have signed up for that new product, and that this method of distribution did not exist ten years ago. Others disagree, saying the scheme has always been here, we're just confused with "blogging" being new.
- Someone mentions the long tail - noting there are three or four bloggers for every topic, and this has a huge impact on commerce.
- Mark says the democratization of media is very confusing...there are so many different perspectives. He also notes that he has 3.7 days of podcasts on his iPod, and that the creators of those podcasts are not going to stop and wait for him to catch up, they are going to continue producing content.
- Mark touches on the fear of not being connected - you feel like you've missed something if you don't keep up, or if you forget your camera, etc. Some conclusions he's had: in terms of mass media, we have never been as well served as we are now, but it still has a whole bunch of flaws; there are so many different and new types of journalism like video blogs and sites like NowPublic; journalists are starting to realize that collectively, the audience is smarter!
- Journalism right now is messy, just like tagging. Things are changing. Maybe it's going to be messy forever?
- Chris Pirillo is wondering whether "amateurs" should be called journalists? What about journalists who go through formal training and that sort of thing? Mark notes that strictly speaking, there is no credential for a journalist, anyone can walk into a newspaper and become a journalist. Chris says, "if I can apply a bandaid, does that make me a doctor?" People are fighting him on this one, but I tend to agree...just because you're a blogger doesn't mean you're a journalist.
Thank goodness for wireless :)
I guess selling blogs isn't as surprising nowadays as it used to be, but I was still a little shocked when I found out earlier today that Duncan Riley's popular Blog Herald had been sold. The word on the street is that the blog sold for around $70,000 USD. From Jeremy Wright:
Why did Duncan sell it? I’ll let him give the full reasons, but the biggest and best were that he was no longer enjoying writing it as much as he used to, and that there was a perceived conflict of interest with a blog that was in a blog network reporting on blog networks.
Duncan’s been considering this move for a while now, but could never get enough interest up with the people he was talking to to make it worth his while. I told him I’d help out, broker the deal and take some of the stress off his shoulders. It’s always hardest to sell something you care deeply about (I know, having been there), so we both felt having someone who wasn’t directly involved with it doing the selling would be best (ie: me).
My congratulations to Duncan and my best wishes for the future of the site. I hope he gets what he wants out of it!
I remember a little over a year ago when I was doing BlogosphereRadio.com, the Blog Herald was one of my primary sources of information. It takes a lot of hard work to consistently post the most up-to-date news and analysis, so I have great respect for Duncan. I haven't frequented the site as often lately (though I remain subscribed) mainly because my attention has turned to podcasting. I hope the new owner doesn't destroy everything Duncan has accomplished thus far.
Do I think it's worth $75K? Not so sure on that. I guess if the blog has the traffic - the right number of eyeballs - you could justify the price. The big question I'd have if I was the buyer is, how can I see a return on this investment?
I guess time will tell.
I finally got around to registering for Nothern Voice 2006, taking place in Vancouver on February 10th and 11th. The second day is a "regular" conference day with scheduled sessions and speakers while the first day is called Moose Camp, a self-organized conference (attendees plan the day). I am really looking forward to the conference for two main reasons - last year was great, and the list of attendees already looks amazing. Moose Camp should be pretty interesting too, and am I hoping to take part in some fashion.
Megan and I are returning attendees, and this year Dickson is joining us too. The three of us will be in Vancouver from the 9th until the 12th. We don't really have any solid plans for evenings or the 12th, so if you want to get together let us know! Worst case we'll do "the tourist thing" on Sunday like we did last year.
See you there!
You might have read lately that Microsoft and Mozilla have decided to standardize their icons for feeds on the one used in Firefox. The Microsoft RSS Team reported they would adopt the Firefox icon a couple weeks ago:
We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds.
The Outlook 12 team has announced they'll be using the same icon. Great news!
I think it is great news indeed! A standard icon will go a long way towards making web feeds even more mainstream, especially since I would expect many other companies to now adopt the icon as well. I have added the icon to my website, which you'll see on the black bar above, next to the web feed icon. I haven't yet decided if I'll get rid of the web feed icon or keep it. I guess the new icon is really the "web feed icon" now!
The new icon is a departure from the RSS or XML icons, which is very good. Here's what I wrote in August:
There's some really simple reasons that we should be calling them web feeds. When you ask your friend or co-worker about something on the Internet, do you talk about visiting an "HTML page" or a "web page"? Does your web browser (not "HTML page browser") load up "HTML pages" or "web pages"? Clearly, you talk about web pages, and that's what your browser loads. There are three very good reasons we use the term web pages...For the very same reasons, we should be using web feeds, not RSS feeds.
Now that the graphic no longer says "rss" or "xml" or any word or acronym at all, I think it will become much easier to adopt the name "web feed". And yes, we still need a name you can say in words, just like Prince was still called Prince after he adopted an icon to represent himself!
As many of you probably are aware, my aggregator of choice is NewsGator Outlook Edition. I like it because I always have Outlook open anyway, and I can take posts offline and read them when I don't have an Internet connection. It's also handy to take advantage of the search folders, flags, and other features of Outlook. Since installing Visual Studio 2005 and switching tablets, NGOE has not worked. I am told there is a conflict that they are working to fix, and I expect it'll be working again before long. So in the meantime, I've been using NewsGator Online, or Web Edition, and I've made the following observations:
- I really miss the ability to read stuff offline. You don't realize how much you use it until it's gone! And since I always have my tablet with me, I don't find being able to access my subscriptions anywhere just because they are online all that handy.
- I rather like the Web Edition's "mark all items on this page as read" feature. It would be good if the Outlook edition had a similar feature that hid items you've already read. Each post in the Web Edition also has a "mark as read" button, but unfortunately the item doesn't disappear, it just is grayed out. Would be much better if the item disappeared!
- I find the online interface clean, but very pale. Sometimes it's hard to read because everything is so white and grey.
- The "My Clippings" feature works well and is akin to dragging a post to a different folder in Outlook, or perhaps flagging it.
So I guess that while it works quite well, I'll probably go back to my Outlook version when the conflict is all fixed up.
As some of you know, I have been the Technical Editor of SLIC for a couple years now. SLIC, or School Libraries in Canada, is the Canadian Association for School Libraries' journal for teachers and teacher-librarians and has been an online journal since I joined. I haven't said much about it on my blog, but I thought our most recent issue was rather interesting!
The latest issue is titled Teacher/Teacher-Librarian Collaboration, and in addition to a collection of articles written by teachers, teacher-librarians, and other contributors, we have for the first time published a weblog! Aside from the fact that we probably won't be making any new posts, it is a real blog, complete with web feeds, comments, and all of that other good blog stuff. Definitely a good way to talk about collaboration! Here's the description for the new issue:
This issue of School Libraries in Canada examines the importance of that most elusive of ideals, the equal partnership of classroom teachers and teacher-librarians. The articles present the research findings on the effectiveness of collaborative teaching practice, discuss strategies, offer suggestions, and tell tales of passion and sorrow, frustration and success. At the heart of it all is a way of teaching that requires and models mutual respect, trust, cooperation and the power of shared vision. From the dry data to the practical experience, our writers share the importance of our work to the success of our colleagues, our students and ultimately our schools. This issue also includes SLIC's first weblog - a venue for the community of teacher-librarians to discuss the challenges and rewards of collaborative teaching practice. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to explore the issues surrounding collaborative teaching practice with teacher-librarians across Canada and around the world.
This is just another example of blogging becoming more and more commonplace. Indeed I think educational institutions have been quick to warm up to blogging as it's a really versatile medium - it's perfect for class projects, teacher updates, school news, or even teacher and teacher-librarian collaboration!
Wikipedia is without a doubt one of my favorite websites. Even though I have only ever made one or two contributions to Wikipedia, I find the site invaluable for research. The vast amount of information immediately available is hard to overlook for research of any sort (there are 848,598 English language articles as of this post). If you have a question about something, you can probably find the answer at Wikipedia.
Called "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future" by Wired Magazine in March of 2005, Wikipedia has enjoyed much success. The Wired article is just one of many mainstream media articles praising the site, and there are many thousands if not millions of bloggers and others who use and recommend Wikipedia each and every day. The New York Times offers some numbers describing Wikipedia's success:
The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.
It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.
Lately though, despite all of the success and impressive usage numbers, cracks have started to appear. Two questions, both of which have been asked before, have once again been brought into the spotlight - just how reliable is the information found on Wikipedia, and where is the accountability?
Consider what happened to John Seigenthaler Sr.:
ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?
The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."
If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.
Whoever added that false information to the article did so anonymously, so beyond publicly stating the truth, Mr. Seigenthaler really had no recourse. So there's the issue of false information, and how to stop people from entering it. Wikipedia works on the premise that mistakes are caught by later contributors, and regular users who monitor changes. Clearly, that doesn't always work.
If reliability and accountability weren't enough, how about ethics? Should you edit the entry for something you were involved in? The question was raised earlier this week when Adam Curry attempted to make some changes to the entry for Podcasting. Dave Winer explains:
Now after reading about the Seigenthaler affair, and revelations about Adam Curry's rewriting of the podcasting history -- the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn't there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?
Dave makes some very good points. Upon first reading his entry, I though the question of historians and third-party observers was very obvious and a simple way to resolve these kinds of issues. The more I thought about it though, the less sure I felt. Requiring historians and non-participants to write the entries simply because that's the way we've always done it may not be the best way to move forward. Thanks to Wikipedia and the web in general, we have the ability to turn the conventional wisdom "the winners write the history books" completely upside down. By editing websites like Wikipedia as events are taking place (such as the creation of podcasting) do we not have a better chance of capturing a more realistic view of history? If all sides of an issue can enter their views, do we not have a more accurate and complete entry? Of course, we unfortunately need to deal with flame wars in many of these cases, but maybe that will change as the process matures.
The issues I mentioned above are currently getting a lot of attention, and are pretty natural in the evolution of a system like Wikipedia. I don't think anyone should be surprised that questions of reliability, accountability and ethics are being asked. And if you really stop and think, you'll probably realize that the solution to all of these problems has been around for a very long time. As with all websites on the Internet, it is up to the reader to use his or her best judgement in evaluating the accuracy and relevancy of the informaton on a web page. Searching the information available at Wikipedia should be no different than searching the information available in Google - reader/searcher/user beware.
Via Derek I came across Peter Chen's preliminary statistics from his podcasting and videoblogging survey. He makes it clear that the results are preliminary, and that follow-up data is being requested with more analysis to come. Having said that, the results are quite interesting! Here are some highlights I picked out:
- Looks like the majority of podcasters publish content weekly. (48.77 %)
- Average episode length is just over 29 minutes.
- The average number of minutes spent producing an episode is almost 260! That's an incredibly high number that we hope to reduce with our solutions. I know how much time it takes - that's one reason I stopped BlogosphereRadio to focus on building the tools!
- About 61% of respondents say they have no business model - they do it as a private endeavor. Sounds like my Average Joe Podcasting post was spot on!
- English is overwhelmingly the most commonly spoken language. (85.75 %)
- One stat that surprised me - around 83% of respondents were male. For some reason, I expected that to be a little lower. I think it's because of the recent push in blogging to find female voices; I probably figured that podcasting would benefit.
Very intriguing results. I look forward to seeing what Peter comes up with next. I also wonder just how representative these numbers are - there's no margin of error or anything posted (probably because they are preliminary results).
Back in April of 2004 I was posting about something I called "splogging". Basically it was the repeated and never-ending activity of leaving comments on someone's blog post, essentially, spam comments. At the time, it was funny, because I was using this against friends! Eventually spam comments became a real problem, and it was no longer funny. I first experienced huge amounts of spam on my blog in October of 2004, which forced me to introduce a Human Interaction Proof control, commonplace on the web now.
The term splog is changing though. No longer does it mean spam comments (which, fortunately have declined in numbers). Instead, it refers to fake blogs setup for the sole purpose of creating link farms. Here's what the sploggers do:
The splogger executed a script that ran searches on blog search engines for specific keywords, said [PubSub's Bob] Wyman, notably names of some of the A-list bloggers, like Dave Winer and Chris Pirillo. Then the splogger took the results, went to Blogger-BlogSpot and, using the service's application programming interface, or API, automatically created tens of thousands of blogs that contained text from the bloggers' real Web sites, Wyman said, along with links to the mortgage and other sites.
People querying the well-known bloggers' names in blog search engines, and people who track these bloggers and their write-ups via services like PubSub, Technorati and Feedster, then received feeds to the fake blogs, jamming RSS readers with useless links, Wyman said.
I am by no means an A-list blogger, but I have noticed it happening to me too. If you search Google for mastermaq, the results are littered with results for fake blogs. Most of the ones that affect searches for me are not hosted at Blogspot, but some are. And that's where most of the problem has originated from.
The problem has gotten really bad lately, as described in the CNET News.com article I quoted above. Who knows what will happen, but we need a resolution! To get things started, Chris Pirillo has posted Ten Suggestions for Google's Blogspot. I particularly like suggestions two and six - no brainers in my opinion.
Google has released another long awaited and much talked about product into beta - Google Reader. I am not a big fan of online news readers, mostly because I like to be able to take posts offline to read in class, or other places that I don't have Internet access. That being said, Google Reader is actually quite nice. From the website:
Reader automatically gets the latest news and updates for your favorite sites. You can sort your reading list by relevance, which will guess what's most relevant to you based on how you use Google Reader (such as which items you decide to actually read).
The amount of information on the web is rapidly increasing. Use Reader to discover new content you don't want to miss. When you come across something worth sharing, quickly email or blog it from within Reader. Star or labels items you want to save for yourself.
I don't think it's as obvious as it should be to add a subscription, but once you have that figured out, the interface is very friendly. I especially like how Reader cycles up and down through the items in a subscription - very cool.
Six Apart has a sneak peak at their future plans for blogging, called Project Comet:
Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type. Project Comet is focused on creating an advanced weblogging technology platform combining the best elements of all our products, giving people the ability to easily stake out, build and share their own place on the web.
The Project Comet page also suggests that your blog will be able to incorporate music, photos, and video among other forms of media. Makes me wonder if they are going to work with established companies and services like Flickr, or if they'll try to roll their own. The FAQ is pretty vague:
Powerful technology that effortlessly incorporates all the digital elements of your life in one place - text, photos, video, music, and voice - so they are available for you to share with anyone you want at anytime.
An announcement like this from Six Apart is long overdue. The purchase of LiveJournal created a ton of possibilities for the company, but I thought they might have come up with their master plan a little sooner. In any case, they have a FAQ page, a press release, and a post from Mena Trott.
I should have been paying more attention a few weeks ago! August 29th was Grilled Cheese Day at Slashfood. You can still read the 31 related posts, full of recipes, ideas, and pictures of grilled cheese sandwiches. It's enough to make you hungry!
If that wasn't enough, I discovered that there's actually a "Greatest Grilled Cheese Sandwich In America" competition! You can see all of the category winners and recipes at their site. Again, if you're hungry, go eat before you visit the site. The pictures look incredibly yummy.
If grilled cheese isn't your thing but you're into pizza, stay tuned to Slashfood on the 26th (next Monday) as they celebrate Pizza Day!
Just saw on Darren's blog that Northern Voice is happening again in 2006. Here are all the details so far (from Darren's post):
- It’s a two-day conference now, with Friday being a self-organizing thingy in the tradition of Foo Camp and Bar Camp. Saturday will be similar to last year’s conference. You can register for either or both days.
- It’s going to be Friday, February 10 and Saturday, February 11.
- It’s slightly more expensive than last year, but still absurdly cheap at CAN $30 for either day or $50 for both.
- It’s back at UBC Robson Square.
- We’re seriously considering holding a potluck dinner on the Friday night.
I really enjoyed Northern Voice 2005, so I am definitely looking forward to the second one. I really like the idea of Moose Camp too, that's a good idea. Here's the new website (I think the old green is nicer than the blue).
Google today unveiled Blog Search, which as you might expect searches blogs and is in beta:
While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn't had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings. In fact, while all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search, none has done much with blog search until now.
Google's new service (in beta, naturally) is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search. "We look for sites that update pinging services, and then we crawl in real-time so that we can serve up search results that are as fresh as we can," said Goldman.
Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis.
Yet another entry into the growing list of blog search engines. Unfortunately, Google's new Blog Search doesn't seem to do anything special. It looks and acts like Google though, which make it attractive for a quick search. Can't help but wonder when the MSN and Yahoo versions will come out now.
Speaking of web feeds, how about spreading the word about your web feed? One of the best ways is to use a pinging service. I came across a new one tonight called Pingoat (hat tip to Mark Evans) and I quite like it - it's so fast! What in the world is Pingoat?
Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog's popularity.
The other cool thing about Pingoat is that it supports a huge list of pinging services - far larger than Pingomatic. Check it out!
Lots of discussion going on lately about whether or not Microsoft, and everyone else for that matter, should call RSS feeds "RSS" or "web feeds". It all started with the first beta release of Internet Explorer 7, in which the term "web feeds" is used. Instead of delving into the complete history of this little debate, I'm going to instead point you to the excellent roundup by Ed Bott. Dave Winer, creator of the RSS standard, chimes in and says, "Don't screw around with things you didn't create and don't understand."
The debate is not much of a debate, in my opinion. There's some really simple reasons that we should be calling them web feeds. When you ask your friend or co-worker about something on the Internet, do you talk about visiting an "HTML page" or a "web page"? Does your web browser (not "HTML page browser") load up "HTML pages" or "web pages"? Clearly, you talk about web pages, and that's what your browser loads. There are three very good reasons we use the term web pages:
- Saying "HTML page" is awkward. The masses like comfortable and simple, not awkward and complex.
- Calling a web page an "HTML page" is, technically, misleading. You'd be hard pressed to find any page on the Internet right now that consists of only HTML.
- Conceptually, a page that is only HTML, or combines HTML and JavaScript, or combines HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, etc., are all the same thing. When you load a web page, you don't think about the technology behind it.
For the very same reasons, we should be using web feeds, not RSS feeds. The term "web feed" is comfortable and simple. It doesn't exclude RDF, or Atom, or RSS with extensions, and so it isn't technically misleading. And finally, a web feed is a web feed, regardless of the technology that powers it.
There's other reasons "web feeds" is better than "RSS" too. For the technology to become as natural and invisible as web pages, it needs a simple name. And the technology is so very young - who's to say that something newer won't be created that does the same thing, but in a different or better way? Think Atom 1.0 here.
There's really no reason to publish more than one web feed, and thus no reason to call them anything else. Certainly the applications which consume web feeds should support multiple technologies, like both RSS and Atom, but publishers shouldn't really have to worry about what technology to use. They should, just as with web pages, pick the technology best suited to the task at hand. You don't have separate browsers for HTML and HTML with CSS - same goes for web feeds.
If you're reading this post on the web, you can no doubt see that I am pretty hypocritical. No where on my site will you find the term "web feed", and I publish both RSS and Atom feeds. Well, my excuse is that until recently, I hadn't given much thought to the terminology I used. Heck, I even use the orange "XML" icon for my "RSS" feeds (talk about confusing!). Now that I have given it some thought however, I'll definitely be making some changes. Look for a web feed button soon!
Ever see a beer commercial without a hot girl in it? It's a rare occurrence indeed. So too is announcing a new gadget without booth babes! You know what I'm talking about right? The hot asian girls that show off the new gadgets at conferences, expos, and other excuses to have a booth with babes. Problem is, you would have to actually go to all of those conferences to see the girls gadgets, and that can be costly!
But fear not! Today I came across the tech babe asia blog, where booth babes and their gadgets are posted in all their glory. It's one of those websites that makees you wonder, why didn't I think of that?! Enjoy :)
There seem to be a decent number of bloggers who take "blog breaks" or "blog vacations" every now and then, usually to catch up on life and re-focus on why it is they write a blog in the first place. Famed blogger Scoble recently returned from his latest blog vacation, and noted:
See, a good blog is passionate and authoritative. Lately I've been going through the motions. Just blogging to keep blogging.
Over the past week I focused on rediscovering myself. What do I like to do? This is my blog. It better be fun. For me. Or else I'll stop doing it.
I agree - it better be fun for me. Fortunately, I've never felt the need to take a blog break, but rather, have been forced to at least twice because of server problems (which we are doing everything possible to prevent from happening again). This last time was the longest period for me without blogging, and so I made a number of observations:
- I realized that one of the main reasons I like posting to my blog is because I am creating content. I like the idea that people are reading what I am writing.
- I also realized that I don't need my blog to create content. Even though I wasn't posting to my blog, I could still post pictures at my Flickr account, or bookmark and tag links at del.icio.us.
- I sometimes post things here about my life, or things I have done recently. The reason I do this is so that friends, family and colleagues can easily read my blog and see what I've been up to, even if we don't get the chance to talk. Some of my friends have remarked that as a result, one tends to become cut off from social interaction and thus is harmed. I am pretty confident I have reaffirmed that isn't the case, as during the blog break, I didn't talk to anyone more or less than normal (except that I got a lot of IM's asking when the servers would be back up).
- As much as I like creating content, I think I have found that the main reason this blog exists, the main reason I post to it every day, is that I like to have a "play by play" for my life - for what I am reading and finding interesting, what I am doing, and what I am thinking. What was I doing two weeks ago? It sucks that I wasn't able to post it to my blog, because now I'll forget it. I like the idea that if something newsworthy happens tomorrow, I can look back in two years and remember what I thought at the time. That's pretty powerful stuff to me. For instance, I can look back and see that on August 8th of last year I didn't post anything, but that was probably because I was busy with my parents, who were in town. How did I remember that? Because I posted on the 7th about going to see The Village with them.
- I figured that if I wasn't posting, I wouldn't be reading blogs as much either. In fact, I kept reading as much as normal. Maybe it was because I could tag interesting things at del.icio.us, or maybe it was just that reading and posting to blogs aren't as linked as I had assumed.
I guess the main observation from my little blog break is that I enjoy maintaining my blog, posting new things, and having others read them. I suppose the true test will come when I take a voluntary blog break, instead of a forced one, but for now, I'm happy to continue blogging.
A tool that has received considerable attention from the digerati over the last few weeks is Dave Winer's OPML Editor. I decided I should jump on the bandwagon and give it a try, so I downloaded it tonight, and blogged my obversations as I used it:
I am not entirely sure what I'd do with another blog, but I must admit there is something oddly appealing about having a weblog that is just a document. Instead of going through the whole post editor thing, you just add a new line, which is kind of cool. It's intuitive, and I think new users would feel very comfortable.
Essentially, editing a blog like a document is intuitive, but this tool is not!
Yeah, turns out the tool itself is incredibly difficult to use, and not very user friendly at all. I realize that it is meant more as something to kickstart the community, but still. Also, I don't think it is a 1.0 product yet, so I would expect to see some more work done to it.
Reporting on a Blogspotting interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher, Mark Evans thinks that the blog search market is "ripe for Google to steal the business":
Fletcher's hitting exactly on what I've been harping on for months that there has to be a better mousetrap for blog search. Despite all the attention it receives, Technorati - with all due respect - is being overwhelmed by its willingness to post everything and anything. Someone really smart is going to come up with an algorith/methodology that combines a blog's traffic, relevancy and high ratings to product superior and effective blog search results.
I disagree.
One of the greatest features of Technorati is that it shows what everyone is saying right now (ignoring their growing pains). Why should my search results or the tag page only show content from the so-called A-Listers (that's what you're getting at with traffic, "ratings", and to a lesser extent "relevancy")? Their content should not be given priority over anyone elses. It's not like PubSub only watches the A-List feeds, nor does Weblogs.com only show when the A-Listers have updated their blogs.
I've talked about the definiton of blogs before (via Jeff Jarvis): Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.
Why should the conversation be limited to or enhanced for a select few? The so-called A-Listers already have problems with including everyone else, we don't need a search engine to make things worse.
Perhaps what's required is not better search results, but better ways of viewing and interacting with those results so that they are more meaningful and can be processed more efficiently.
I stumbled across TagCloud tonight, and I am really quite impressed! If you're into tagging and folksonomies and the like, you'll probably find it interesting too:
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.
Here's the TagCloud for my blog. Basically, it gives you an idea of what I've been talking about lately in my posts. Very cool stuff, I must admit.
Lots of discussion going on right now about Technorati. This piece by Doc Searls does a very good job of bringing you up to speed on what has been said in the last few days. What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't add my two cents?
One thing I like about Technorati is that they are not afraid to setup special sites, like they did for both Live 8 and the London attacks. I think that bringing all of that information onto a single aggregated page is useful. However, like Jeremy, I find that Technorati really lags behind the other services in terms of accuracy. I subscribe to keyword feeds from Feedster, Technorati, Pubsub and BlogPulse, and I would honestly rank Technorati at the bottom of those services. The others find more items, and they generally find them much faster. Actually I am somewhat amazed at how one service can find a post and the others won't. Happens more often than you'd think.
I have also been disappointed with the service provided by Technorati. My site has not shown up in their Tags feature for a long time, so I sent a couple of support emails. I never heard back though. The only thing I got was an automated response, and nothing further. It's frustrating. Note the date:
I sent one more recently too, but never heard back from that one either.
I like Technorati, and I have long been a user, I just think that whether they mean to or not, they create far too many opportunities for improvement for themselves.
The latest version of my favorite news aggregator, NewsGator Outlook Edition, was released last night! I'm really happy with the way it works. Here are some of the new features, as described by Greg Reinacker:
Read/unread/deleted status of individual items is now synchronized between Outlook edition 2.5 and NewsGator Online (and all other applications using our system - more on that in a bit). Folder hierarchy is now synchronized between Outlook and Online. It's all as it should be. As someone on the beta said, "it all worked exactly as I expected it to." Nice.
There are lots of under the hood changes too, so it runs pretty fast, and very stable now. If you're like me and you spend a lot of time in Outlook, there is no better aggregator than NewsGator. And with the purchase of FeedDemon, it's only a matter of time before that application is also integrated into the new synchronization platform.
You can read the official announcement, the update Q&A;, and download the new version.
Some notes from the digital law session hosted by Denise Howell, Buzz Bruggeman, and Jason Calacanis:
- Very cool website that lets you subscribe to new patents: PatentMojo.
- Denise: Law firms are starting to wise up to the fact that maybe they need to look at communication differently, and blogging is leading the charge.
- Jason: If you get a letter from a lawyer, pick up the phone and call the lawyer to find out what they are really after, because the letter generally won't tell you that. You have to try to understand their position.
- Jason: "I force [laywers] to file papers, because it's a significant amount of work." Good strategy to find out how serious they are. Also, Jason says to extend discussions, because the longer you can extend them, the more likely things will go your way.
- Denise: "Jason is a warrior on the frontlines of participatory law."
- Hanging up the phone is Jason's favorite technique for dealing with attorneys.
- You have to be careful about how you phrase things on your blog. Unless you absolutely know something to be true, phrase it in such a way that your source is clear (using words like "alleged", "claimed", etc). Also, if you make a mistake, be sure to update quickly. And don't ignore comments!
- Incorporating your blog doesn't reduce the chances of getting sued, because filing a complaint is relatively inexpensive.
- Jason: If you get a letter, post it on your weblog and talk about it.
- Buzz: Don't throw anything away.
- Jason: If you care about a project enough to put effort into it, document it.
- Jason: Don't do any business deals without having everything in writing, it's really not worth your time.
- If you're a podcaster looking to use some music, whether recorded or live, pay attention to the proposal recently released by the copyright office that attempts to have a one-stop shop for purchasing production licenses. Jason's personal advice: Follow the definition of fair use, and keep the percentage of what you use down to something reasonable.
- Denise: The problem with fair use, is that its decided on a case by case basis.
- Jason: If it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for you. Denise: And it's good enough for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals who decided thumbnails such as the ones you would find on Google Images are fine (75 pixels by 75 pixels or less?).
- Some related links for this talk at delicious.
When I last wrote about the Huffington Post, I expressed that it seemed like a very cool experiment. It has now been just over a week since the site launched, and I thought it would be good to take another look.
I've been subscribed ever since it started, and let me tell you, there's never a shortage of content. There are always new items popping up in my aggregator, so I rather like that. There are a few things I don't like about the feed however:
- On the newswire posts, you have to click through to the website to get the link to the story. Major pain! Link to the story from within the post please!
- The posts come down into my aggregator with the Author name, so including that name again before the content of the post seems redundant. Might be required for online aggregators though?
- I subscribe to the raw feed, so I get blog posts and news items. It would be nice if they appeared different somehow.
I suppose I haven't really decided whether or not I like the content. I have found a few interesting posts, but I find you have to dig a bit. I'm not the only one with comments on the site though! Larry Borsato notes:
Let's face it though, the Huffington Post isn't much of a blog; they don't have comments or trackbacks, so they aren't really trying to engage in a conversation. They have a user agreement, and they are protectionist about copyright, though they do acknowledge fair use (since they expect to use the content of others). It's more like a celebrities-only op-ed page, and the don't accept letters from readers.
Good point. Blogging is all about the conversation, and it's a shame that the Huffington Post is doing such a good job of stifling that. The problem is noted on the Neo Warmonger blog too.
Actually most of the comments I have seen so far have been negative. But I suppose we're still talking about the site, and that's all Arianna and her friends can ask for. How does the saying go? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Is there a similar saying for parody? Check out Huffington's Toast. Ah that made me laugh :)
Darren Barefoot reports that Elections BC has decided that blogs are simply campaign advertising:
“Under the Election Act, it will fall within the definition of election advertising, and we would ask them to register,” says Jennifer Miller, of Elections B.C.
Miller says the volume of sites is overwhelming, and doesn’t rule out asking for a change to the Election Act. “If we feel certain parts of the act can be amended to make it more effective and efficient, we will definitely make that recommendation,” she says.
I tend to agree with Darren - "Where does editorial become advertorial?" I think the decision to require blogs to be registered as advertising is unwise. Who's to say that a newspaper editorial is not actually advertising in disguise? I hope this doesn't set any sort of precedent.
Arianna Huffington launched today the Huffington Post, which is a 300 person group blog. The tagline of the new site reads "Delivering news and opinion since May 9th, 2005." Who's opinion you ask? Arianna has signed up quite the list of contributors:
Her marquee names -- Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Geffen, Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks, Bill Maher, Larry David -- aren't exactly hurting for ways to get their message out.
Huffington's Hollywood pals -- who also include such writers and producers as David Mamet, Norman Lear, Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin -- are just the neon attractions. She is also touting Walter Cronkite, Gary Hart, Arthur Schlesinger, Mort Zuckerman, Vernon Jordan and Bobby Kennedy Jr.And while the blog is heavy on left-wingers, she has reached out to the right, luring the likes of John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, Tony Blankley of the Washington Times and National Review's David Frum.
To my knowledge, this is a pretty unique experiment for the blogosphere, and one which I am sure will be watched very closely. The site has some investors, but the point of the Post does not seem to be making money.
She envisions the blog as a big dinner party, with chatter "about politics and books and art and music and food and sex." Huffington insists her effort isn't just about the boldface names; she's lined up some college kids and a friend's 11-year-old daughter. "My dream is that we'll create new blogging stars," she says.
I hope it's worth reading. I've subscribed for now!
So often when someone attempts to explain blogging, they end up making it more complex than it actually is. I know I have been guilty of this. So it's refreshing to see such a succinct definition from Jeff Jarvis:
Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.
I love it! It really is all about the conversation, so this definition is spot on. That's why blogs are so powerful - they are extremely conducive to having a conversation.
You know a story is big and important when someone takes the time to create a fake blog. In a somewhat related story, the Pope may be getting a feeding tube too.
[Via Waxy] [Tags: terri schiavo pope blogs feeding tube]
One of my favorite tools for looking at blog conversations is BlogPulse. They announced today that they just finished an upgrade, and the new version has "faster, cooler features and more than 9.3 million blogs identified." That's a lot of information to track! BlogPulse is faster too - "in the last 24 hours, it analyzed data from 301,320 blog posts. In that same time frame, BlogPulse discovered 38,817 new blogs."
Some of the new features include 6 months of data instead of 60 days (shown in the above graph), easier access to data visualization, and improved link searching. Their Conversation Tracker is a nifty little tool too. Check it out!
[Tags: blogs blogging blogpulse]
I was thinking recently about the NHL and the problem it faces as a result of cancelling the 2004-2005 hockey season. People have stated that the league's failure to come to an agreement with the players is just the beginning of the end for professional hockey. Hockey as a product will struggle even more if it returns next season than it has already. And it fascinates me to read about the countless hours both sides waste in their negotiating. Most recently, the NHL made two offers to the players who promptly responded that they were not impressed. How long has this been going on now? Do you even remember what hockey is? How can we get both sides to come to an agreement? And how can the NHL save hockey?
The NHL should start a blog. And I don't mean marketing crap in the form of a blog, but an actual blog with posts written by people involved in the running of the league and in the negotiations with the NHLPA. The league has in the past been anything but open and transparent. Closed door meetings, "no comment" answers, secret phone calls, the works. As a result, their customers (that's you, the fan) have grown to ignore and ridicule the league almost as much as the greedy players. And if their lack of transparency keeps up, their customers will only become more indifferent. How can you re-launch a product when your customers just don't give a damn about it?
If the NHL were blogging, I think they'd see a number of benefits:
- Communication with their customers!
What's the best way to keep your customers interested as you try to improve your product and prepare it for consumption? Find out what your customers think. Involve them in the process, and let them guide you. And not just customers, but partners too!
- An improved public image!
Who would look more like the bad guy after a round of negotiations goes nowhere? The NHLPA who is closed, private, and bureaucratic, or the NHL who carries on an open dialogue on their blog? Clearly, the respect and admiration the NHL would gain from blogging would give them the upper hand in negotiations with the players. Not only that, but the NHL would be seen as a forward thinking organization, cutting edge even.
- Education and understanding
Just as going into the locker room between periods gives you greater insight into how a team is feeling and thinking, an NHL blog would give fans better insight into the stresses the league apparently faces. Another example is Microsoft's Channel9 - readers have the ability to learn why Microsoft makes certain decisions and what's coming down the pipe. The NHL currently lacks such educational capabilities.
- Eye opening experience
Perhaps by starting their own blog, the NHL would be interested in reading other blogs and would start keeping track of what is being said about hockey and the league by the fans. The big thing here is learning to listen. Hockey is a product that does not change to reflect customer wants and desires, and there is no reason for that. Want to impress your customers with a re-launch? Find out what they want first.
I am sure there are many more benefits as well, but those listed above came immediately to mind. The cost of getting involved in blogging is almost zero, and the return on investment is incredible. I think everyone would benefit if the NHL started blogging - the league itself, the players, and most importantly, the fans.
If I were the NHL, I'd be franticly looking for ways to "save hockey" and make it a viable product again. So if you're reading this NHL, start a blog!
[Tags: nhl nhlpa hockey blogs blogging]
Just finished the first Edmonton Weblogger meetup, and it went quite well! We went to Cargo & James Tea and most of us ordered coffee, go figure. On the plus side, there was wireless Internet! If you didn't make it to this one, we hope to see you out at the next one!
We asked everyone who came to answer, "what is the funniest thought you've ever had after you were done doing the nasty?" Here is what they said:
Dickson: "When I woke up it was all over!"
John: "I want my money back!"
Felicia: "I should never have attended that weblogger meetup."
Megan: "Thank god for twins!"
Mack: "Where did they go?"
Melissa: "I'm never wearing pigtails again."
See you next time!
[Tags: weblogger meetup]
No, it's not a food or drink. It's del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager. Here's some details from the about page:
del.icio.us allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.
I remember first hearing about del.icio.us a long time ago, but never actually tried it until last night, and I have been using it pretty extensively since then. It's already quite useful and very simple to do! Not only can I track the sites and pages I read and might want to refer back to later, but I can monitor keywords and see what other people have found too. You can check out my page at del.icio.us, and you can even subscribe.
[Tags: del.icio.us bookmarks]
Here's more on the "not enough women bloggers" topic:
The perks of alpha bloggers—voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes—are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organizing selection process.
As I said before, I don't think there is a "problem". If anything, I'd say its more of an early adopter syndrome. And before you argue that with 8 million blogs we're past that stage, let me remind you that there are hundreds of millions of instant messaging users and even more email users. Saying that "there are not enough women bloggers" is probably akin to saying "there are not enough women emailing" when only 8 million email addresses existed. Absurd.
[Via Newsweek] [Tags: female bloggers blogs] [Categories: blogs]
Are you busy tomorrow night? No? Great! Join us for the Edmonton Weblogger Meetup! All the details can be found at the Meetup site. Please RSVP and we'll see you there!
Off and on for a while now, there have been rumblings that there are not enough women bloggers out there. For the most part, I think that the "problem" of not enough women blogging is just a figment of the imagination of women's activists. If we really want equality, we need to stop singling out the women in every situation, and blogging is no different.
So basically, I have become tired of the argument, and have generally ignored posts about the topic lately. But this post from Rory Blyth is one I just couldn't ignore:
It isn’t so much that there aren’t a lot of women blogging (there are), but that there aren’t many female tech bloggers...Before anybody goes and tries to come up with a solution to the “problem” of too few female tech bloggers, determine first if it is a problem. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but it’s foolish to assume without weighing differences between the sexes that it is.
Well said.
When will celebrities learn? Don't videotape your wild-monkey-sex sessions!
Here's the lawsuit, and here's the reply. And here's some comments from Gawker's largest competitor. What the heck, while you're at it, here's the Fleshbot post.
I was reading some stuff at CNET News.com, and came across an article entitled "The coming crackdown on blogging". Turns out the article doesn't have THAT much to do with blogging after all.
Author Declan McCullagh talks about efforts to extend "a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet". Such an extension would count hyperlinks to a candidate's website as a contribution for example, and the impact on blogging is a question of whether or not blogs would be given press exemption. Bradley Smith, the gentleman interview by McCullagh, says the time is right to act because both Democrats and Republicans used the Internet to their advantage in the last campaign.
Here's my question - how is this relevant? First of all, I don't consider the Internet a form of media, like newspapers or radio for example. The Internet is more like another world, complete with it's own newspapers, television, radio, etc. For that reason, I do not think the Internet should be treated the same as a form of "traditional media". Secondly, the Internet does not equal the United States and the United States does not equal the Internet. What about people in other countries linking to a candidate's website? Certainly the interest is there.
Trying to regulate the Internet is a bad idea. We've seen this many times over the last decade. When will the lawmakers learn?
Robert Scoble is always talking about the power of RSS, and even though it all sounds great, it's just not the same until you experience it. And I just did. Yesterday I posted about pheedo and the changes they made that I didn't like, or get notified about. I took the ad code out of my page and was generally just upset. I don't like my page design being messed with.
Today, Adam Kalsey from pheedo left a comment on that post with an answer to my complaints and questions. He posted a link to a page describing how to customize the ad code. Wonderful move Adam, thanks so much! As a result, pheedo is back on my page, and just as Adam said it would in his comment, it looks better than ever! Thanks Adam.
That's the power of RSS. Of conversational software. A better experience for customers, and the power to do better for companies.
For those of you that don't know, pheedo is an RSS advertising company. They must have also acquired BlogSnob, which I used to have on the right side of my page. I say used to have, because they recently changed the way it looked without notifying me, and it made my page design all weird. Not only that, but I logged into my account to see if I could change it back, and no such luck.
I think that was a dumb move on their part. And I won't be using their service anymore because of it.
Michael Gorman, who is president-elect of the American Library Association (I am the webmaster for a division of their Canadian counterpart, CASL), has been getting a lot of backlash lately for some comments he made regarding blogs and bloggers. I simply haven't had time to read what he said until now, but if you're interested, it's worth taking a look at.
READ: Revenge of the Blog People!
This is just pathetic. First, look at my dad's blog at EclecticBlogs. See the design and everything? I am the one that designed it for him, and he has been adding stuff ever since, like the quote, poll, etc.
Now look at this blog. See anything familiar? He hasn't even taken the time to replace the damn graphic at the top of the page! There are a few other things he has done that, quite frankly, piss me off. First of all, he didn't ask permission. Secondly, he did not link back to the site (at least not as far as I can tell, it might be in a single post, but that is not good enough). He has not replaced the alternative location listed on the page, which still points to Martin's RSS feed. And most importantly, he has linked the page to Copyscape! What nerve!
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Had he simply used the layout and color scheme, that would have been one thing. But to leave elements of Martin's site on his own? That's just not right.
I'm stuck up in Edmonton, but at least the weather has been nice! In Seattle for the last two days the Blog Business Summit has been taking place, and they already are planning the next one. You can find out more and fill out their survey here. In the meantime, check out Technorati results and Feedster results for the conference.
Megan and I have looked at the details for our trip to Northern Voice in February and we want to get everything booked and confirmed relatively quickly. So if we have talked to you about making the trip with us, please let us know whether or not you are coming by Wednesday, January 26th.
And if you do decide to come, make sure you register for the conference. I should add a countdown script or something on here, I am getting excited!
The good folks at Nothern Voice just announced a schedule, complete with speakers! I am currently slated to be a panelist for the "Working with Multimedia Content" session. Actually, I have known this for a while, but wanted to wait for the official announcement before blogging it. I am not entirely sure how the panel is going to work yet, but I know there will be a few brief speaking moments and even some demos, so it should be fun.
I am really amazed at the job the organizing team has done. There are some pretty amazing people scheduled to be at this conference, including Robert Scoble, Tim Bray, Jeremy Wright, and Tod Maffin, among others. Megan and I will be attending for sure - if you are interested, you should come! Its only $20 to register!
One other thing to mention - BlogosphereRadio will be podcasting the event! We are not entirely sure how it is going to work yet, but we will for sure be doing some impromptu interviews in between sessions, so look for that. Ideally we would record and podcast every session, but aside from resource constraints we want to try to remain as invisible as possible so that attendees can focus on the speaker/content and not the equipment!
I'll probably have more on this as the conference draws near, but in the meantime, make sure you register!
This is just awesome to see - a major news outlet supporting social media technology. CNET's News.com now supports trackbacks and pingbacks:
CNET News.com is pleased to introduce support for TrackBack and Pingback as additional tools to help readers follow the flow of interactive content. Anyone linking to a CNET News.com story who sends the proper notification will get a link back in return.
Makes me much more likely to link to a story at News.com than to the same story somewhere else that doesn't support trackbacks. Now lets hope more media outlets follow suit!
If your memory is better than mine, you'll recall about a week ago I posted about a lot of comment spam appearing on my blog. Since then I have diligently been running my SQL script which removes the spam comments. Tonight, I came across CommentSPAM.org, and as a result, across the Clearscreen HIP Control 1.0 for .Text. Basically it adds one of those "enter the letters you see here" boxes to my comments form, so that posting a comment requires human interaction. Works great! If you have a .Text blog, I highly recommend it, easy to setup, very useful!
Up yours comment spammers!
I am pretty pissed right now. The spammers have moved from email to blogs. I know this isn't JUST happening, its been going on for a while now, but in the last two days, my blog has been hit hard. I don't mind if real people are leaving comments. What I cannot stand are automated programs leaving comments for dugs or poker or whatever. In the last two days, over 100 of these spam comments have appeared on my blog.
I really don't want to have to turn off comments completely. Since .Text has not been updated in ages, it lacks any sort of spam protectection. For the moment I have just written an SQL script to go through and remove all of the offending comments, but this will require constant attention from me, which isn't ideal either. If it gets really bad, I might have to delve into the source code and rig something up myself.
My guess is that things will only get worse from here :(
Looks like the politicians are not the only ones hopping on board the blogging bandwagon:
Although political blogs have received the most attention, advertising agencies and communications professionals are using blogs to create discussion about ideas within their industries.
The biggest fear is of an uncontrolled message slipping out, said Steve Rubel, vice president for client services at CooperKatz & Company in New York, a public relations agency with clients including the Association of National Advertisers, JPMorgan Chase and Wendy's. "Do they allow comments or do they not? Is there an implication if it is a publicly traded firm? Who is the one who should blog for us? How might that choice be received in the company?"
All problems that should be considered, but which must be solved. Blogs are to 2005 like websites were to 1999 - if you don't have one, you're going to be left out, behind, and forgotten. I personally think that trackbacks, comments, and feeds should be standard on ALL blogs, but that isn't happening even today so I doubt it will in the future. Without those community or interactive features, another question can be posed that Steve Rubel did not ask: Will our blog seem contrived?
[Via CNET News.com and NYTimes.com]
You know that site Hot or Not? The one where you see pictures of people and you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10? Well, I never would have guessed it, but apparently they have a Hot or Not for blogs. That's right, you can rate a blog HOT or NOT!
Now if only I knew what made a blog hot...
Signed up for BlogExplosion last night and so far it seems to be working quite well! I heard about it a week or two ago, and we mentioned it in one of Blogosphere News episodes. Basically, you visit other people's blogs and in return you get lots of traffic to your own blog.
I am not sure how much of the traffic is quality traffic, because it's pretty easy to just cycle through the blogs without actually looking at them. Anyway, if you want some extra traffic, give it a shot. Sign up here!
I finally registered for Northern Voice today, as it seems pretty certain that I will be attending - probably with Megan and Andrew. If you want to register, or want more information, click "The Moose Is Loose" button on the left.
Not sure if anyone noticed, but I have an orange button on the left there that says "LiveMessage Alerts!" If you click the button (or click here if you're too lazy to shift your eyes a few centimeters to the left) you can enter your MSN Passport (like what you use to sign into Messenger) and then you'll recieve MSN Alerts whenever my blog is updated! Very cool feature!
In case you don't know what MSN Alerts are, look here. Basically, you can recieve a short alert to your email, your mobile phone, or to your MSN Messenger (assuming you are signed in).
If you want to get the feature for your blog, visit MessageCast. Sign up is pretty painless, but it seems to me they could have eliminated one of the rounds of email it sends you, seems kind of cumbersome. Also, the service is in beta apparently, so who knows, it might even cost money in the future. Cool for now though!
Okay well maybe not the NEWEST, but one of the newest. I recently decided to join BlogCritics.org since I post quite a few reviews on my blog anyways. BlogCritics is just another outlet - basically I can post my reviews from here that I think are appropriate. For example, my first post at BlogCritics is a repost of my Ashlee Simpson Review and you can see it here.
I have been taking a look at the BlogCritics site for a while now. It is an interesting idea, and perhaps the only way I'd improve it is to not host another entire blog, but instead subscribe to a "BlogCritics" category on a bloggers existing blog. Less opportunity for revenue then however. Anyway, I will try it out and see how it goes!
You know, there are some good ideas, and then there are the ideas that make me want to create viruses to send to the people that came up with them. A new service called "blogversations" is one of the latter ideas. Before I start bashing it, you might want to know what it is:
Blogversations are a new, not evil way to market your products and services through discussions. Leverage your authority and audience to earn money - without losing control over what you've got to say. Turn your ideas, criticisms, opinions, and reader share into money - and not muddy up your site with clunky ads in the process. Engage your audience with thought-provoking issues and questions. [Source: Blogversations]
At first glance, sounds good right? A site that lets bloggers earn some money for holding discussions! Well take a moment to think it over. Is that really what we want? Companies "sponsoring" a discussion?
I personally think Blogversations is the type of service that will bring an end to blogs. Who cares if bloggers get to retain control over what they say? Companies should be making products that people WANT to blog about, not paying people to blog about their average widgets. And what would happen if everyone started posting only sponsored posts? Besides the quality of the blogosphere declining, no one would read the posts anyways. Who wants more ads? Not me!
To all the bloggers out there that try it, good luck. I just hope it doesn't last long, for all of our sakes.
I was looking in the Calendar and realized that the last day of classes before Reading Week is February 18th. Which is perfect, because I am seriously considering attending the Northern Voice conference which is taking place on February 19th.
So I decided to look up some travel costs. I expected the bus to be quite a bit cheaper than flying, but as it turns out, its not! Even with a Student Discount applied, return fare on Greyhound from Edmonton to Vancouver is $280.23 and the duration of the trip is 18 hours and 35 minutes. So I'd have to leave Friday afternoon to get there on time, and if I left right after the conference ended on Saturday I'd get back at 11 AM on Sunday.
Compare that with flying. I could leave at 7:50 AM on Saturday and get to Vancouver a half hour before the start of the conference. If I really wanted to, I could even leave right after the conference and be back in Edmonton around 9 PM. Total cost for a return flight on either WestJet or AirCanada? $397.93. So for an extra $100 I won't have to sit on a bus for two days.
Of course, if I were to go with someone, the Companion Fare from Greyhound would make the combined travel costs much cheaper. And if I am going to Vancouver at the start of Reading Week, I'd likely stay for a couple days :) Just thought the pricing difference (or lack thereof) between the bus and plane was interesting!
I think the IOC needs to make some major rule changes. First and foremost, they need to remove the judged "sports" from the Olympic GAMES. Crap like synchro-diving, figure skating, and trampoline have got to go. It just sickens me to see these judged sports take place.
Perhaps more realistically, the IOC should change the rule that bars athletes from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites, including blogs. The only exception is if an athlete has a personal website they did not setup specifically for the Games.
Their rationale for the rule makes sense - the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first. But hello! Did they miss the Demoratic National Convention? Are they not paying attention to the preparations for the upcoming Republican National Convention (including blogs!)? Maybe the IOC needs to wake up and see that blogs are here to stay. Regulate it like these political conventions, but don't disallow it completely!
I haven't been blogging as much lately, nor have I been around on MSN, but my parents are here so I have a valid excuse! Anyway, I was at home most of today doing some work and catching up on things, and I came across Northern Voice. It is a one day, non-profit blogging conference that's being held at the UBC downtown campus on February 19, 2005.
Registration opens September 1st. Looks like a very interesting idea, and judging by the website it appears to be very well planned (and well in advance too). Perhaps I will have to consider attending - if not as a speaker (I could chat up Blogosphere.ca) then as a delegate. Gotta represent good old Alberta!
And of course, if I decide to go I'll have to whip up a display picture!
That's right, my publicly traded blog is worth over $13,000 in BlogShares currency! Found a very neat site today, BlogShares.com, which is a fantasy blog shares market. Basically, its like a real stock market, but instead of companies you have blogs. You can check out my blog profile here, or click the listed button to the left.
Want to see some other blog listings? Here you go, some of the most popular Blogosphere.ca members:
As far as I can tell, it works like a normal market, the blog becomes more valued as more shares are purchased. Also, looks like inbound/outbound links have some sort of effect on the price as well. I am still learning, but its a very good idea, and kinda fun! Give it a try!
Does anyone else think we are in the middle of "The Blog Revolution"? I certainly think its happening right before our very eyes. Not convinced? Consider these facts:
Okay so I think that's proof enough that weblogs are moving into the mainstream. But how about one more tidbit? Ignoring Blogger.com and some other sites, as well as personally hosted sites, the latest estimates peg the number of blogs at over 4 million, 1.4 million of which are said to be active (updated on average every two weeks). Predictions expect the number of hosted blogs to exceed 10 million by the end of 2004.
So thats good, lots of blogs are being created by "average" people. At the same time, we are seeing the mainstream media adopt blogs, as well as companies like Microsoft. So I suppose the queston is - is that good for the blogosphere? Will the mainstream media attempt to "monopolize" the blogosphere like they have traditional media? (If I published a newspaper, you'd believe the Journal over me - in fact you'd likely ignore my newspaper altogether).
I just hope this revolution and spotlight on the adoption of weblogs doesn't spell the end for simple, fast, and powerful personal publishing. In many ways, I think weblogs are our last hope for keeping the media honest!
That's right people! The term that was coined on this very blog can now be found in an official dictionary! Jeanie, you will forever be a symbol of the victims of splogging, you should be so proud!
Splogging is now an official word of the PseudoDictionary, check it out here.
Tonight Dickson, Chu and I inadvertently created a new activity! It is a cross between blogging and spamming, so I appropriately named the activity "splogging". To see it in action, look here.
Well for those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that it has been a goal of mine to get more people blogging! I can proudly say that Dickson and I seem to have accomplished that goal with Blogosphere.ca.
Here are some stats about the site so far:
- 21 bloggers
- 48 posts with 103 comments
- 210 unique visitors
- 14,728 hits
All in all, not bad for the first five days if I do say so myself. We have a number of cool things planned for the community, so keep an eye on it. Of course if you would like to blog with us, email me or Dickson.
Anyone remember the email Dickson and I sent out last week looking for names for a potential blogging site? No? Well you should read your email more frequently!
Anyways, we have decided on a name. We are going to be bringing you www.blogosphere.ca very soon! If you would like a blog at this new site, just email me or Dickson and we can hook you up. Don't be left out, join the blogosphere!
For anyone who cares...we will be using .Text as the blogging engine, so the most common blog features are supported, like RSS feeds, permalinks, comments, trackbacks, etc. Couple of examples, my blog, Dickson's blog, and .NET Wizards Blogs are all running on .Text. Blogosphere.ca will be quite similar to the .NET Wizards Blogs.
Hi there!
We are writing to tell you about a project we are planning and want you to be a part of! We want to create a cool place to have a blog. Not sure what a blog is? You can take a look at ours for an example:
Dickson - http://blog.dicksonwong.com
Mack - http://blog.mastermaq.ca
You can post whatever you want! Topics of discussion, a diary, whatever you want, its up to you! Nothing is censored!
Now whats that you say? We're crazy, there is already places like blogger.com? Yes we know, but are they cool? Are they run by your friends? Can you ask blogger.com to change something if required? Nope! And thats what we want to create! A cool friendly place for you to blog.
So here's the plan:
1) We buy the domain and host the blogs
2) You give us your username and we setup your blog (takes around 10 seconds)
3) You blog at will!
All we need from you is help picking a name! Here are some ideas we have had so far:
CanadianBloggers.com/.ca
MapleLeafBloggers.com/.ca
Blogeh.com/ca
Blog-Eh.com/ca
Have a suggestion for a name? Let us know! Think we are crazy and this isn't something you would do? Let us know!
And most importantly, this site will be free for you to use!
Thanks,
Mack & Dickson
Scoble has a really interesting post on corporate blogging. I think he makes a number of excellent points, and I hope there are some companies out there reading him. If companies blogged, they would seem less like some corporate entity, and instead more like a friendly resource.
Take for instance Creative. I have a SoundBlaster Audigy, which is a really great sound card, but also has its fair share of issues. Just run a Google search and you will find out about the "Squeal of Death". Well instead of hiding away and leaving customers out to dry for the longest time, if Creative had a blog they could have posted messages along the way. "There is a problem? Okay lets look at that." and "Yes we see this issue, more and more people are experiencing it." and most importantly "We are working hard to come up with some new drivers". That last one gets me, for the longest time there was NOTHING on their site. A blog could have at least made me feel like they were TRYING.
On of the projects I have been working on is a new website design for Paramagnus. I think I will definitely be including RSS and Atom feeds in that design. Especially as a small software company, I can see blogs as a very effective way for us to do marketing (Scoble mentions this power of weblogs too).
Now that I have been "in the blogosphere" for a while, I have learned quite a bit about the subject. One of the most important aspects of blogs, is their unique publishing capabilities. Most blogs do this using one of two formats (or sometimes both) - RSS and Atom.
Some might say that there is a turf war going on between the two syndication formats. Yahoo has supported RSS, and Google (which owns blogger.com) is supporting Atom. I think that the topic is entirely irrelevant, for the following reasons:
- Dave Winer (creator of RSS) has said the format is frozen at 2.0
- Atom is an open specification and will continue to grow
- Lots of tools already support both formats
Personally, I like the way Atom is going. RSS is currently the most popular throughout the blogosphere, but I expect that as people start to see the improvements Atom offers (and as RSS ages), a switch is probable. One thing is clear however, at least one of these formats is going to be extremely popular if blogging continues to grow.
On that note, I really don't like that some tools (such as Xanga) do not offer any feeds, RSS or Atom! All blogs should have a subscription feature of some sort (and not the sign up to continue to read online kind). One of the great things about blogs is that you don't have to visit a website to read them!
Well finally, at long last, Dickson has created a blog! You can check it out
here. And you can also read his first post
here. Let the blogging games begin!
You know it's time to get a blog when even the UofA Library
has RSS feeds!
My good friend Andrea is now a blogger! You can check out her blog where she even mentions me! Now come on people, start blogging!
Well I finally fixed the error with my blog that prevented me from posting using tools like w.bloggar or the new BlogJet which I am giving a spin! Turns out the 'services' folder in my IIS was an application, so removing the application made everything work smoothly again :)
BlogJet is really nice, looks like a Windows XP application. Doesn't seem as powerful as w.bloggar however, and it's creators intend to charge for future versions.
Today I was meeting with a good friend of mine, Jennifer, who happens to be in the field of education. She had a photocopy of an interesting article published yesterday in the New York Times entitled “My So-Called Blog”. While the article tends to focus on the younger bloggers (teenagers around 15) it raises some interesting points about the effect blogging is having on society. Throughout the article, the word journal is used much more often than blog. Perhaps this has something to do with the age of the bloggers? I read quite a few blogs, granted most of them are related to software development, but I generally don't get the feeling that a blog is a journal, at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe the meaning of the word is changing :)
In the same vein I came across this post today from Shawn Morrissey which introduces “Blogging the Market”:
Overall, it's an optimistic view of the power of weblogs to challenge business marketing and strategy, internal communication, innovation, etc. provided through examples and analysis.
I haven't read the paper (which appears to be rather lengthly) yet, but I will probably have to at some point - my interest in blogs and society is too great to ignore such a find, even if it is slightly manifesto-ish.
At long last I have created an online image gallery for my MSN pictures. If you have a request for one, MSN me or drop me an email and I will see what I can do. If you like the pictures, and if you like them enough to use them, also let me know :)
You can see them by clicking here.
Well I finally got around to upgrading to .Text 0.95 tonite. I tried just after
Scott released it, but ran into problems and didnt try again until just now. Looks like everything is working smoothly! Except that I can't seem to get w.bloggar to open up my blog...
I found an interesting post today about a blogging survey conducted by the Blog Search Engine. Some very interesting statistics, definitely worth a read!
Found via the .NET From India Weblog.
I am extremely interested in blogs and how they are changing the way we interact. For one thing, they have changed the technology behind the web, I would be interested to see how many people get their news via an RSS feed of some sort nowadays. Blogs are also changing social interactions however, as explained in this excellent post by Jonathon Delacour.
“Since 95 percent of people are imitators and only five percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”
If you have any links to blogs and their social ramifications, let me know!