Twitter is TechCrunch is the Blogosphere

Twitter seems to model TechCrunch:

Graph

and TechCrunch eerily seems to model the blogosphere as a whole:

Graph

Is this meaningful?

Networked Journalism Summit

Wow, what a long blogging hiatus for me.

Well, I’m back and tomorrow will be blogging and posting audio from the Networked Journalism Summit, run by David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis.

Jeff wants people to go their and try to start fires, rather than just have high level discussions so I’ll be promoting two-way feeds as the future of news. We’ll see how that goes.

Chronicle of a newspaper site reformation

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.

http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com

Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned

G Lists and ad hoc groups

John Tropea has a couple of posts that echo one of my last posts about ad hoc groups, and I think he’s right when he says OPML is the vehicle to achieve this.

He says:

Now what I say is why do we have to go to MyBlogLog to see all this when the Recent Reader widget could be an annotated Grazr widget, like Twazr.

I’ll go one better I think. Why do you even need to go to your own site? Why not a dynamic feed in your reader? Or better yet, both.

And,

Further to this a Grazing List is an ever changing list of feeds, and this is what the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget is, a perpetual changing list of people/blogs based on these people/blogs visiting your blog site

Yup, and why not a dynamic feed based upon conversations you are in as well? Every RSS item is open and two-way, to whatever extent you wish. Comments are dead.

Lastly, he is frustrated about these services not working together and accepting the de facto standard for reading lists, OPML,

can’t I just plug in this OPML into a service, just like SYO.

I hear ya. IF we can make some progess on Identity and the use of XRI for discoverable services about oneself, I don’t think you or I should even have to upload our OPML. Just keep one file up to date and all sorts of services can use it.

Voila!, ad hoc groups based upon your Glists (Grazing Lists, Reading Lists, Listening Lists, Viewing Lists)

Ad Hoc groups are key to media dying

Kent Newsome and Tom Morris both opine about how Techmeme and Techcrunch have become less satisfying than going directly to the sources themselves.

Well, yes those sites have become media themselves and we all know that media is dead.

I like Kent’s idea that the Techmeme algorithm is actually working so well that it’s exposing a Web 2.0 flaw:

Maybe the Techmeme algorithm has deduced that all of this Web 2.0 stuff is really just the media business in some new form. If you have no product to sell, what are you? If your primary or only revenue source is the sale of ads, what are you? You’re not science. You’re not a seller of goods. You’re media. You’re the new TV. A million pages of user generated content broadcasting your AdSense banner over the new air.

I also have to give Kent a hand for referencing Mike Brady. It’s an interesting reference since that popular show was about ten years past the era when it should have succeeded. That type of humor should never have been popular by the late sixties and early seventies, yet it was.

Likewise, mediation should be dead, but it’s alive and well at these sites. Why is this?

Well, I still don’t think we have the tools to manage our own information consumption. Lots of people have been talking about them, but not too many delivering.

Tom is right when he says:

If you are in the media business, you need to fully grok the consequences of AdBlock and BitTorrent. You don’t have to like the consequences, but I imagine most of you haven’t even understood the full consequences of a system whereby anyone can share anything with anyone else without seeing any adverts in the process.

The only problem is we still need a whole new generation of software to help us manage and find information that we like.

A major part of that new software or services is social. For now we have just come to rely on a few bloggers that we trust, but this means we get a lot of junk and miss some important stuff too.

I think applying VRM to news and information will help produce some new tools that gcan deliver the information we need when and how we want it.

Also, I’m still thinking that ad hoc group creation, moderation and subscription will also revolutionize blogging in such a way that that we can slip in and out of conversations, file sharing, and marketplaces fluidly and instantly.
A kind of Share Your OPML writ large.

Identity is the first step toward that end, and then a spec to allow adhocracies to form. It’s not so difficult and SSE might play a role.

There has to be a simple way for people to form groups, and a relatively simple way to develop web applications that use this power.

Until then, we rely on trusted people and services, and some of these become like old media themselves even if spun in a new way.

Bloggers are humans!

Ben Mcconnell points out that Bloggers are humans, not some institution that needs to be cultivated. (sounds like Soylent Green)
Pay attention to your customers, and and a few of them are bound to be bloggers.
That’s cultivating a real relationship, not some PR scam.

If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?

Mit Advertising Lab points out the struggle of RocketBoom:

“Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. “It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now,” said the daily video blog’s founder, Andrew Baron.

More evidence that Scott Karp is on the right track that content creation is no longer a business.

As I’ve said before, much of the value of old media was in the distribution mechanism, not the content, and now that distribution is free, content is a commodity.

If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?

Only the enablers.

Right now, value is in the sites and services that enable users to do something, like share photos, network with others, or blog for free.

Perhaps these services will be commoditized some day as well.

That’s when the Cluetrain will have arrived. When nothing stands in between the buyer and seller, the speaker and spoken too.

Newspapers need to come out of “hiding”

A recent Scripting News comment by someone named Matt (not me) brings up an interesting topic we’ve been discussing at our local newspaper website, http://stamfordadvocate.com.

Matt points out that Dave Winer shouldn’t fault the reporter for a misleading headline, because it is written by the editor and the reporter has no say.

He’s right. That’s usually true.

The problem is, that’s probably an area where newspapers need to adjust the way they work. As Scott Karp puts it, they need to decide what kind of publisher they are.

You see, what the newsroom folks call “editorial process,” means that many levels of filters and processes are applied to stories to ensure correctness, as well as fill the needed space.

Every editor must admit that they have cut parts of a story due to lack of space despite it having weakened the story. Sometimes cuts are made to strengthen an article too.

In general, these processes are not a terrible thing, whether they work all the time or not. But they aren’t necessary for something to be good journalism.

In an online world however, it could cause problems because of the immediate feedback loop, as in the case of Dave Winer and the NYTimes reporter.

No one ever said to themselves, “That New York Times editorial process got it wrong.”

They say, “That stupid reporter got it wrong.”

Now that we have come to want (and expect) the news writers and creators to answer our accusations of innacuracy, the MSM can’t hide behind the shield of “editorial process.”

As I see it, they have two choices. Either they don’t use reporters names, or loosen up on their editorial policy.

They won’t accept either. The first because of ego, and they second. . .well, for another type of ego.

You see, that would make them bloggers . . . and human.

Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger

I’ve posted another hack I contributed to O’Reilly’s “PHP Hack”.

Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger

I know Twitter is getting a lot of attention. I’ve been blogging from IM to everybuddy for years with BuddyBuilder.

I’ve decided to relaunch the project and make it open source. This should be interesting. OPML upload, River of news style rss aggregation will be key features of the relaunch.

News Wars or Wall Street Wars?

I watched the Frontline piece called Newswars, the other night.

While everyone agrees that a major reshaping needs to take place in the newspaper business, my intial reaction wasn’t as one-sided as Jeff Jarvis, perhaps because I am a Tribune employee, and knew some of these people firsthand.

Jeff is right; major cuts can be made on the print side of most newspapers without lowering the output of “real news.”

However, it’s also true that the economics of Wall Street might not be the best driving force when it comes to making newsroom decisions.

If that were the case, the whole country could just send one reporter to Iraq and we could all share her view.

Of course, views are plentiful in this day and age, but for a company the size of Tribune, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to have more than one newspaper covering a national war.

That said, I’m in total agreement that the organization as a whole is overlooking what real value it can provide for it’s readers and site users.

The real value does indeed rest in it’s local communities and journalism. I sometimes wonder if that’s always going to be enough.

In the Frontline story, I think it was the WAPO exec that said print revenue and circulation was declining, but he wasn’t sure how quickly Online would catch up.

It will never catch up.

There are too many competitors online for that to ever happen.