by Mathew on April 10, 2008
I’m sure someone at the New York Times has to be feeling pretty smug right now — after all, look at all the attention the paper’s story on bloggers is getting from the blogosphere. Obviously, the Times has learned the first rule of getting attention from blogs: talk about blogs. The Times also seems to have learned the second lesson, which is related to blog “trolling,” namely: associate blogs or blogging with some kind of apocalyptic or otherwise incendiary statement, viz. “Blogging kills.”
It’s true that the NYT didn’t actually use that phrase, but the story about two deaths (Russell Shaw from ZDNet and Marc Orchant, whose last gig was the ill-fated Blognation) and a near-death experience (Om Malik) in the blogosphere might as well have had that headline, as Marc Andreessen notes in his hilarious roundup of future potential New York Times headlines about blogging (including “Hitler probably blogged”).
Mike Arrington helps the Times out by saying he has gained 30 pounds, has a severe sleeping disorder and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown — which may be true, but could just as easily be said by someone who has become obsessed by major-league football during the playoffs, or someone whose hobby is building miniature ships in bottles. It has nothing to do with whether they spend every waking moment typing on a keyboard or obsessively checking Techmeme.
For me, the low point in the piece — which goes on to talk about how some bloggers for sites like Gizmodo spend dozens of hours blogging for pay from their tiny apartments — is when the Times coaxes this incendiary quote from blogger Matt Buchanan: sometimes, he confesses, he is so tired “I just want to lie down.” Stop the presses! (best quote comes from Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who has trained as a Thai kick-boxer: “I’ve got a background getting punched in the face… that’s why I’m good at this job.” Definitely should have been higher up).
by Mathew on October 10, 2007
Lest anyone think that it is totally clueless when it comes to the whole social-networking thing, eBay has a kind of mashup of MySpace and Digg-style features that has been grafted onto the shopping site. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these social features are all mixed up with the main focus of the site — which is, after all, shopping. That’s part of the problem.
So when you go to the “Coffee Lovers” neighbourhood, for example, — which eBay suggested I might be interested in, despite the fact that I wasn’t logged in with my eBay user name — the URL is actually “espresso machines.” The implication is clear: come here to our beautiful neighbourhood and chat about coffee… and then please buy one of our lovely espresso machines. Is that the kind of basis for a social network that will have any kind of traction? I’m not sure (neither are shopper, really, and I don’t like to spend a lot of time talking about my prospective purchases. But maybe that’s just me.
It reminds me a little of a social network that Chapters Indigo — a large Canadian bookseller — . It has all the requisite features, with recommendations and friends and links and so on, but it appears to be a bit of a ghost town so far. Maybe that will change, I don’t know. But as I I don’t think you can just create a community (not a real one, anyway) by just building something and then flicking a switch. That’s not how real-world communities are formed, and it’s not how online ones are formed either.
by Mathew on September 30, 2007
An interesting piece in the New York Times today (although it was in the Fashion & Style section, which I thought was a little odd). I’m not sure if the topic signals some kind of evolution in the way the Times looks at the blogosphere or an evolution in the blogosphere itself — or maybe a bit of both.
It’s about people who have become known — “Internet famous” — not for having a popular blog, or for being a YouTube star, but for commenting on other people’s blogs and content (no doubt an academic somewhere will call this “meta-blogging.”) As the Times piece puts it:
“Since many blogs have a readership of one — or, at best, the writer, his mother and some guy he sat next to in seventh grade who found him on Google — piggybacking on a more popular site offers a wider audience for a keyboard jockey’s gripes and quips. Not everyone is up to the task of creating a blog with the kind of consistent tone and provocative topics that attract visitors.”
The Times piece profiles a Metafilter commenter known as DaShiv, as well as Seth Chadwick, who posts on a food-related site called Chowhound. But my favourite quote comes from Marshall Poe, a professor of new media at the University of Iowa, who describes the motivation of commenters in this way:
“You are one of the millions of people who sit at a computer all day… every hour you have 10 minutes where you’re not doing anything productive at work, and you can’t look at porn. So you make a comment and fulfill this desire to show yourself off as a smarty-pants.”
The Times piece also talks about a commenter on Gawker, where the site picks and chooses who will be allowed to comment, and so a competition has developed where people try to post the wittiest comments so that they can join the club. Now that’s social networking. And DaShiv explains why he prefers to comment at Metafilter rather than starting his own blog.
by Mathew on September 29, 2007
Every now and then, I come across a blog post that hits so close to home that I just find myself nodding, wordlessly, as I read it. Choire Sicha, the editor at Gawker and former editor at the New York Observer (whose name is pronounced “cory see-ka,” in case you’re interested) wrote just such a post on a topic close to my heart: namely, newspapers and blogs.
Choire’s post is entitled “Newspapers Now Stuffed Full Of Blogs, But No Clue Where To Put Them,” and he scans the landscape of newspaper blogs from the New York Times and the Guardian to the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, and finds plenty of blogs, but poorly organized:
“Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They’re organizing by form, not by content. Readers just don’t come to a newspaper’s website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what “form” it’s in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don’t.”
I’m not sure Choire is quite right on that one. I admit that ghettoizing blogs doesn’t seem quite right either, or grouping them together just because they’re blogs. But I also think that if the word means anything to people at all, it means a personal take on something — and one that encourages (hopefully) reader interaction in the form of comments, etc. I often look for blogs because I know they will give me that, and I expect others do as well. Choire makes a good point about lots of bloggers “screaming into the void,” with nary a comment on them — presumably because readers can’t find them. In many cases, I suspect that this is because the papers in question are making fairly poor use of things like prominently displayed RSS feeds, keywords that are hooked into Technorati or some other blog indexing engine, and the ability to ping blog search engines with new posts.
Jeff Jarvis makes the point that blogs may not even belong on newspaper sites in the first place. Jeff is a big believer in the idea of keeping blogs separate, and forming a loose federation with a newspaper (which is what he does with his PrezVid blog), and I think that is an interesting way of solving the monetization issue while still keeping the blogger’s voice separate and distinct.
Plenty of room for improvement, let’s put it that way :-)
by Mathew on September 24, 2007
I realize that the headline on this post will make no sense whatsoever to 99 per cent of the population, but I’m not about to let that stop me :-) It appears that Leah Culver of Pownce took a shot at the folks behind Digg over a new social-networking feature that she suggests was copied from Pownce — and to add insult to injury, she used a Digg post to do it.
What makes this story so odd, as Valleywag and TechCrunch point out, is that Leah is part of (or was part of) the Digg inner circle, and helped create Pownce with Digg founder Kevin Rose. She also reportedly used to be in a relationship with Daniel Burka, a (Canadian) UI designer who has worked on both Digg and Pownce. I realize that all of this strays into the Perez Hilton, celebrity-gossip end of the spectrum, but I still find it fascinating. Was it an inside joke? A 3 a.m. post that shouldn’t have been published?
More importantly for fans of Digg and Pownce, does this imply that there is tension between Kevin and Digg co-founder Jay Adelson? The picture Leah refers to in the Digg post (which I assume was a screenshot of the feature she mentions) has vanished from Flickr, which implies that she may have changed her mind — or been talked into taking it down. As we all know, however, nothing on the Internet is ever really gone.
