In France bloggers have been investigated by police for inciting the riots.
Also, my audiocast on the riots for the New York Times website. (My first podcast-style effort)
Blogs and sms messages were apparently used to coordinate violent action on a large scale.
What should authorities do?
Is there an alternative to censorship?
My Technorati ranking has become #104 and I’ve officially fallen off the Technorati top 100. Powerlaw, schmowerlaw. If you don’t blog often or maintain a stream of interesting content your ranking will quickly drop. Even at a lower level of output, my ranking has gone from my previous 40’s and 50’s to below 100. Obviously blogs that continue to be interesting like Boing Boing keep the #1 position, but the amount of churn at the lower levels is encouraging. Although I didn’t conduct this experiment on purpose, it’s interesting data. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how much sheer number of posts vs interesting posts can increase rank and traffic. More posts means more pages to view as well a higher likelihood that someone will link to you.
source: Falling below the fold
Kevin MarksTechnorati passed 20 million blogs today. The 20 millionth was Les CE2/CM2 Anquetil, a blog from an elementary school in Reims, France, in the heart of Champagne country. They started the blog to celebrate running 2 miles in a Relay Marathon.
That’s a lot of blogs. I wouldn’t say “20 million can’t be wrong” (because history tells us otherwise) but blogging is clearly more of a trend now than a “fad”.
source: 20 million served
I remember someone telling me a story about the delivery of the first copy of MS DOS to Japan. (I don’t know if this story is true, but it’s a good story.) The shipment contained a copy of DOS on paper tape and a blank roll of tape. They taxed just the blank one because the one with DOS on it was “used”.
So… Does this make Amazon.com a “used comment salesman” and Six Apart a seller of “new comment space”?
I’m of course mostly joking, but I think this represents two completely different views on the “media” business. You can sell the blank media or “used media”. Either the comments are the product or the ability to create comments is the product. This is what separates the professional world from the amateur world… But good amateur can exceed crappy professional in quality. Production and distribution are becoming lower cost, and two opposed views of the world are colliding harder. Clearly, clever people have managed to arbitrage/manage both of these models, but they surely produce very different types of laws, processes and world-views.
source: Used tape
Posted by Thomas Crampton
Inevitable with the narrow-casting of magazines that Germany now has a magazine about divorce.
Reminds me of the launch of a magazine in the US for gay parents. (Apologies for this being a Times Select link.)
These magazines, Rosenkrieg along with And Baby magazine, show how publishers often miss obvious socioeconomic groups due to prejudices or oversight.
Both gay parents and divorcing couples are willing to pay large sums of money for information relating to their situation and there are many advertisers keen to hit those demographics. For years, however, no magazines addressed those issues.
Be interesting to compare the categories of popular Blogsites with the available publications to see where the low barriers to entry of Blogs has discovered a demographic ripe for a glossy publication.
This once again shows the strength of interacting with consumers (readers) during conception of a project.
source: Narrowcasting Magazines to Hidden Markets (Divorcees and Gay Parents)
Posted By Thomas Crampton
Blogs have lowered the barriers to entry into the marketplace for ideas: With what implications?
It formerly took powerful ideas (Marxism, Buddhism, Democracy) or those backed by capital (ie: printed in publications) to galvanize large audiences.
Now anyone, of any age, anywhere with Internet access and time can put their ideas into the marketplace.
The result is that not only do Blogs/Internet open the way to easily transmit mediocre ideas (such as this posting!), but they also open the way for a new style of collaborative thinking. (Will we start seeing idea mergers and hostile idea takeovers? - to absurdly follow the market analogy.)
This new marketplace brings certain strengths and weaknesses.
Will it increase ideologies or weaken them?
Seems clear it would de facto support a pro-technology ideology. Bloggers may find they resemble one another in some ways more than they resemble people in their own countries.
That said, large groups of people can have both intelligence and a mob-mentality.
Will Blogs/Internet change our methods of thinking?
Apologies again for my semi-hiatus from blogging. I’ve reached level 40 (I now have a robo-chicken mount) on World of Warcraft and have completed (ahem) 80% of my research. One of the things I’ve been thinking about while not blogging is… blogging. A number of people have asked me to help new bloggers by giving them advice. In retrospect, I was giving people very specific advice based on my personal style. I thought I’d share some of the tips.
1 - You’re probably stupid - Well, maybe not stupid, but at least ignorant. Often you are the last one to figure out that you’re not as smart as you think. Assume that someone will think you’re stupid and will kindly point this out in the comments. Preempt that by assuming you’re stupid and uninformed. In other words, be humble and don’t try to write something conclusively smart-sounding. Start a discussion where someone smarter than you can step in easily.
2 - You need help thinking - Focus on the parts that you can’t figure out. Ask people to help you think. Most of the people who comment on my blog are helping me think. In other words, don’t say, “Blah blah blah. I’m an authority. Now talk amongst yourselves while I go pat myself on the back.” Say, “Gee, I’m not that smart, but here’s something interesting I’m noodling on. I’ve gotten this far on these pieces. Help me out here… someone?”
3 - Take a position - Wikipedia is about neutral point of view. Blogs about points of view. You can always admit you’re wrong later, but posts that don’t have a point of view are boring and people are less likely to comment. “Here is what people are saying about Web 2.0″ is less interesting than “I think the word Web 2.0 is stupid.” However, remember rules 1 and 2.
4 - Link - Read other blogs a bit before posting. Link as much as possible. Try to participate in the conversation instead of soap-boxing.
5 - Write early write often - Don’t wait for your ideas to be completed. When you have some inspiration, get it out of the door quickly. Update the post or write new ones as the thought or story unfolds.
Having said all that, I don’t follow my own rules. Like this post and the last post… But this is the advice that I would give myself.
source: Blogging style
As the Web 2.0 bandwagon gets bigger and faster, more and more people seem to be blogging about it. I am increasingly confronted by people who ask me what it is. Just like I don’t like “blogging” and “blogosphere”, I don’t like the word. However, I think it’s going to end up sticking. I don’t like it because it coincides with another bubbly swell in consumer Internet (the “web”) and it sounds like “buzz 2.0″. I think all of the cool things that are going on right now shouldn’t be swept into some name that sounds like a new software version number for a re-written presentation by venture captitalists to their investors from the last bubble.
What’s going on right now is about open standards, open source, free culture, small pieces loosely joined, innovation on the edges and all of the good things that WE FORGOT when we got greedy during the last bubble. These good Internet principles are easily corrupted when you bring back “the money”. (As a VC, I realize I’m being a bit hypocritical here.) On the other hand, I think/hope Web 2.0 will be a bit better than Web 1.0. Both Tiger and GTalk use Jabber, an open standard, instead of the insanity of MSN Messenger, AOL IM and Yahoo IM using proprietary standards that didn’t interoperate. At least Apple and Google are TRYING to look open and good.
I think blogging, web services, content syndication, AJAX, open source, wikis, and all of the cool new things that are going on shouldn’t be clumped together into something that sounds like a Microsoft product name. On the other hand, I don’t have a better solution. Web 2.0 is probably a pretty good name for a conference and probably an easy way to explain why we’re so excited to someone who doesn’t really care.
While we’re at labeling the web x.0. Philip Torrone jokingly mentioned to me the other day (inside Second Life) that 3D was Web 3.0. I agree. 3D and VR have been around for a long time and there is a lot of great work going on, but I think we’re finally getting to the phase where it’s integrated with the web and widely used. I think the first step for me was to see World of Warcraft (WoW) with its 4M users and the extensible client. The only machine I have where I can turn on all of the video features is my duel CPU G5. On my powerbook I have to limit my video features and can’t concurrently use other applications while playing. Clearly there is a hardware limit which is a good sign since hardware getting faster is a development we can count on.
Second Life (SL) is sort of the next step in development. Instead of trying to control all real-money and real-world relationship with things in the game like Blizzard does with WoW, SL encourages it. SL is less about gaming and more about building and collaboration. However, SL is not open source and is a venture capital backed for-profit company that owns the platform. I love it, but I think there’s one more step.
Croquet, which I’ve been waiting for for a long time appears to be in the final phases of a real release. Croquet, if it takes off should let you build things like SL but in a distributed and open source way. It is basically a 3D collaborative operating system. If it takes off, it should allow us to take our learning from WoW and SL and do to them what “Web 2.0″ is doing to traditional consumer Internet services.
However, don’t hold your breath. WoW blows away SL in terms of snappy graphics and response time and has a well designed addictive and highly-tuned gaming environment. Croquet is still in development and is still way behind SL in terms of being easy to use. It will take time for the more open platforms to catch up to the closed ones, but I think they’re coming.
Web 3.0 is on its way! Actually, lets not call it Web 3.0.
source: Web x.0
Dan Gillmor’s in town and having a bloggers meetup at the Apple Store in Ginza from 20:00-21:00 on the 26th of September. I’m going to be out of town, but if you’re around, it should be a lot of fun.
I find Japan to be extremely “faddy” and the media and consumers tend to jump onto new toys very quickly. Trends tend to die very quickly as well. Things that you are excited about only temporarily are often referred to as “my boom”. For example, you might say, “blogging is ‘my boom’ right now.” There are now television ads about blogs. The other day I heard a radio commercial where they read out the URL, but added that you could post comments and send trackbacks. Yes. Trackbacks. I have yet to hear a radio commercial in the US on a normal major FM show (maybe there are some) asking people to send trackbacks a site. It wasn’t even a geek site. I think everyone here is finally jumping on the bandwagon.
That’s why it’s not strange when reports constantly ask me whether I think blogging is a fad, assuming that this “fad” will disappear along with the tamagocchi and pokemon in due time. Many reporters still look at me a bit skeptically when I try to explain that it is a trend, not a fad or some cool new toy. Watching the Japanese consumer machine trying to devour this one will be interesting.
Having said that, I’m sure many people outside of Japan also feel that blogging is just a fad.
Boris just upgraded this blog to Movable Type 3.2 which just came out. It has a bunch of new features and is very stable. One important new feature is advanced community management that deals with comment spam. Anyway, for people who have been waiting to upgrade, I think it’s time. The upgrade is pretty easy and free for current licensees of 3.x. The new license also allows an unlimited number of blogs. If you need help, Boris is helping people out (for a fee).
Disclosure: I’m an investor in Six Apart and Chairman of Six Apart Japan.
Susan Crawford is doing a great job blogging FOO camp. Better than any notes that I’m taking…
Hilary Rosen [WP], the former president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is guest blogging over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog.
She follows Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on the slate of excellent guest bloggers during Larry’s summer vacation.
Thanks to Jin Ho, Heewon, Goo Dong-Eon, Xenix, Qho, Young Wook, and BK for a very interesting dinner discussion and explaining the Korean blogging scene to me.
Korea is reported by the OECD to have the highest high-speed Internet penetration of any nation. Korea has an extremely vibrant gaming, blogging, mobile phone and youth culture scene and I was eager to find out more about what was going on. I scribbled a bunch of notes over coffee during the day and over dinner. Please excuse any errors since I have not been able to fact check everything. If you could point them out and let me update them, I would appreciate it.
According to articles in the press, there are 5-6 million blogs. These are not to be confused with hompy. Hompy (a derivative of home page) are personal home pages with photo albums, guest books, avatars, background skins, and background music. There are approximately 10 million hompy pages. In a city with a population of 10 million and a country with a population of 45 million, that’s quite impressive. Companies seem to be making money selling background music and items for hompy pages. Most of the posts are focused on photos and one line comments on pages of friends. They are generally closed communities and are focused more on real-time presence-like communication rather than diary or dialog.
Cyworld, which sounded like the leader for hompys has a feature they call “scratch scrap”. This allows you to copy/paste content from other web pages easily to your hompy. On of the problems that I see with this is that this simple built-in feature does not provide a link back to the original source. It is rumored engineers who designed this left and joined Naver, one of the leading blog companies and created a similar feature for them. Generally speaking, it sounded like people don’t link very much. They are still mostly plain html and not css + xhtml. There seemed to be some trackback implementation, but it is not yet as widely used as in the US or Japan. As far as I could tell, none of the blog systems used any of the standard APIs, and some had RSS feeds. Blogs and hompys don’t seem to be pinging any pinger sites, which makes them nearly invisible to the outside world. In addition, many sites block search engine bots from crawling hompys and blogs.
It appears that one of the biggest problems is that there are several 800 pound gorilla type portals that remind me of AOL during it’s powerful years. They try to create walled gardens of users. With millions of bloggers and hompy users in each community, they are focused more on integrating inside of their portals than open standards or linking across portals. There are some independent blog services and aggregators, but they still seem to be focused on community and somewhat inward facing networks. A not-so-visibile majority of blogs in Japan and the US are also this way, but the public facing citizen journalist or pundit-style blogs seem to be very sparse in Korea.
One of the reasons might be due to the success of OhmyNews. I visited OhmyNews as well, and they are truly an online newspaper powerhouse. You can read about them in detail in Dan Gillmor’s We the Media, but they are a edited news website with droves of citizen journalists who submit articles. They have courses in writing for the citizen journalists, tip jars that people can pay them through, editors to help with the important stories, lots of influence and visibility and offline community activities. I can imagine that someone who had something political or pundit-like to say might easily choose to write for OhmyNews than to start a blog. This doesn’t describe everything, but I’m sure that OhmyNews has attracted a fair number of the potential media blogger types.
I still have a lot to learn but the incredible difference in the blogging scene and the apparent happiness with what the people had considering the widespread adoption made me wonder if the Korean blogs would ever look like American or Japanese blogs. (Many aspects of the Japanese blogging scene seem to be following in the footsteps of the US blogging scene, albeit with some differences.)
Update:
4- jaz @ June 2, 2005 10:43 AMhey joi. the function is called “scrap,” not “scratch”
what it allows you to do is to display a particular post from someone’s mini-hompy (cyworld) - if the permission setting of that post is set to “allow scrap” - not from just any website. there’s a watermark-like feature that goes with it, which displays the original author’s name and the link back to the origianl mini-hompy.
Sorry about the error. I was told however, that most bloggers and hompyiers didn’t cite or link. Someone said that the big portals encouraged because it allowed all of the content to be searched inside the portal, rather than offsite. Does anyone have any more information on this?
source: Korean Bloggers
I just heard an excellent presentation by Krishna Bharat of Google News. He explained how Google News works. It basically crawls news sites, finds “story clusters”, ranks the sources, figures out how prominently each source is running the story, figures out whether its a big story or a little story, figures out geographic references, and builds the pages for the various geographic and language editions. He was talking to an audience of editors so there were many questions about how the “editing” process worked and many people couldn’t seem to believe it was algorithmic. Some people seemed afraid that Google News would replace them. The point that he made and was clear from the process that he explained is that it uses the decisions that the editors of the various media make about what story to run and where in deciding how important a story was. It was basically aggregating the decisions of the editors, not replacing them. Without the editors and the “front page process” Google News couldn’t decide what story to lead with. At least in its current form.
The derivative conclusion you can come to is that Google News is just amplifying or reinforcing systemic biases in MSM editorial and NOT helping to address these issues. I think this make Google News very news media friendly and also provides an opportunity for bloggers and projects like Global Voices to still have a very important role. I guess that if Google New started incorporating more of the alternative press, they could shift the bias.
During the discussion, Dan Gillmor pressed Krishna for more transparency on the algorithm and the list of sources and I seconded the motion.
Some good notes of the sessions on the editors blog.
source: Inside Google News
You thought I had blog-block? Actually, my autoblogger was just broken.
source: Autoblogger
I just read through my daily dose of blogs in my aggregator and scanned the email from people asking / telling me to blog stuff. I realized that there are a great number of things that I would have posted to my blog a year ago, but I won’t now. I have argued a number of times that this is my blog and if you don’t like it don’t read it. However, as I read criticisms in the comments and on other blogs about what I write, I have become increasingly sensitive about what I say here. The criticism is often valid. “Check your facts before you post.” “Read before you write.” “Don’t be so self-obsessed.” “That was stupid.” “The tone of your post was offensive to me.” “So this guy posts every time he’s ‘off’ to somewhere new. Is he boasting about his travel?” I know it shouldn’t, but these voices yap at me in my head and cause a kind of chilling effect. I fear that my jokes will be misinterpreted and the irony lost. I fear that someone will take offense. I fear that a post will sound boastful.
Of course, this is just a rehash of an old discussion of collapsing contexts, but I find myself struggling with this bloggers block more and more these days. I find myself hanging out on the IRC channel chatting about things that in the past I would be blogging about. I definitely feel like my blog is going edgy to broad and boring.
What do you think? (And to be clear, I’m not fishing for compliments here.) Do you think I should post silly and sometimes no-so-well-developed posts or do you think this rigor of taking more responsibility and being more politically correct is a good thing? In a way, this bloggers block could be viewed as a developing bloggers ethic in my head and something normal and good.
source: Becoming boring
Dan Gillmor has just launched his grassroots journalism site. “Bayosphere …of, by and for the Bay Area.”
Congratulations Dan!
source: Bayosphere
I just visited my friend Tom Crampton, a reporter for the International Herald Tribute, who just moved to Paris. Today was his first day in the Paris office. He showed me the computer system that gave him access to all of the stories and pictures filed by reporters and photographers all over the world. The computer system also had all kinds of databases including the news wires. The stories had “slugs” which were the shorthand names of the stories named after the actual lead slugs they used to use. Some had notes that said, “DO NOT SPIKE” which comes from the spike that editors used to have on their desk that dumped stories were spiked onto. These slugs were printed up onto “skeds”. They let me sit in on the editorial meeting where all of the editors got together and discussed what stories might lead and which stories ended up on the front and second pages. Many of the stories hadn’t been written yet. What was interesting was that, at least during the this meeting, there was a lot of non-verbal communication. There was clearly a lot more thinking than talking going on. It was the sound of NPOV.
It is definitely unfair to compare this process to blogging, but there were similarities. I scan my news feeds in the morning. Then I look at what other blogs are posting. Then I think about various things that might come up during the day that I might blog about and decide what if anything I will blog. It’s a lot about timing, context and a larger narrative.
Some of the issues about what to lead with and what to balance with remind me a bit of the Prix Ars Electronica jury process (which danah just blogged about) where we chose 1 Golden Nica, 2 Distinctions and 12 Honorary Mentions from 400+ nominations.
I snagged a copy of tomorrow’s IHT Japan edition which is just now being printed. I will be able to read tomorrow’s paper on my flight back to Japan, which seems pretty cool.
I talked to the editors about blogging and explained that I’m a big fan of the IHT and thought a lot about how bloggers can work together with MSM and what we could do to transform their business model and preserve their craft.
source: Visiting the IHT
Had a wonderful time yesterday at Les Blogs in Paris and enjoyed meeting all of the new people as well as old friends. I haven’t been to many blogger conferences for awhile so I found the presentations and discussions a good way to catch up on what people were doing and thinking. Thanks for organizing this Loic.
Take a look at the lesblogs tags on Technorati and Flickr for pictures and posts from the conference.
I’m off to Tokyo today for some meetings and eventually a few days off next week.
source: Off to Japan