blogging
Call me a fool. I got a comment on my blog and spent a good ten minutes or so trying to figure out if it was real or SPAM.
I’m sure all you bloggers have spent a couple seconds or two before you realized, “Nope, it’s not real.”
This one was good. I hate to propagate it but the comment was bland but on topic and they (it) left an email type signature pointing to http://www.larisajoyreilly.com/
When I visited the site I got more skeptical. Then did a google and knew that nobody comments that much!
Plus double posts at sites like this:
http://www.chrisbarr.net/blog/index.php?p=95
How long before machines can fool people and SPAM is no longer intelligibly different than your average bad comment?
Dec 08 2006 07:56 pm |
blogging and
gestures |
2 Comments »
With the help of a non-responsive Jason Calacanis, who later unwittingly responded through the very podospheric phenomenon which he outlined in a recent Gillmor Gang, and the hyperbolic responsiveness of Steve Gillmor, by means of linguistic attrition, the epitome of negative metadatic gesture, I’ve concluded what has been a troubling week of uncertainty with a newfound clarity.
I am talking, specifically, about implicit meme propagation and affinity proliferation.
Let’s break that down:
A link to another blogger can be explicit or implicit. A vote on Netscape.com is explicit. In the case of audio, you can explicitly talk about a subject in a positive or negative way, but even if you say, “I don’t like Splenda.” you are implicitly propagating a meme. A comment on a blog post or a link to one implicitly infers value at the other end, even if the value is to point or comment on something you don’t like.
Implicit gestures are what propagate memes, moreso than explicit actions.
By comparison of the sum total of our implicit gestures ( a gesture is usually implicit by nature, so I don’t need to specify that), we can see affinity groups form on the long tail portion of the gesture graph.
By using social networking applications to bring these affinity groups together, or direct like information to these groups through behavioral targeting, we can create fluid and virtuous circles of trust and value transfer.
That is the new economy.
And I tend to conclude that sites like digg are fun, but only a stepping stone toward the attention filters and value exchange systems of the very near future, because the implicit is what has and will rule, because it can be trusted and can’t really be faked.
The explicit will always be subject to gaming.
Some interesting news from my company.
A group of employees and investors have asked to purchase Southern Connecticut Newspapers Inc. from Tribune.
We publish The Advocate and Greenwich Time newspapers.
While I think local and private ownership could be a good thing under the right circumstances, I also know that the current editorial department does not have the level of understanding to effectively direct an online strategy.
The union employees mentioned in the article are the editorial department.
If my role here continued after such a transition, I would push heavily for an online strategy that embraced RSS at it’s core. Full text feeds would be the norm, not the exception.
I would promise that the link in the story above would never change or be put behind a walled archive.
I would embrace other communites like Flickr and del.icio.us and would open our own platform through the use of APIs.
I would immediately start the transition from a page-view model to one of relationships and gestures.
I would embrace and help to grow the local blogger community, as equals, not lessers.
The sites would be more of a hub of local information flowing two ways, not the one way channel we currently provide.
I don’t always see eye to eye with our current owners and strategists at Tribune, but they may be better equipped to handle the needs of a successful local news site.
Their own challenge is being able to move and adapt quickly enough, something I know they are trying to address.
In short, the freedom to move quickly that independence affords, is only valuable if you are able to act intelligently on that freedom.
Oct 31 2006 11:20 am |
newspapers and
blogging |
No Comments »
Jarvis wants to know whether he should confront Edelman on the Wal-Mart blogging fiasco.
Doesn’t Edelman already wholly realize what a mistake it was?
If not, would you hire the company for your PR?
What’s left to talk about?
Can’t Rubel take care of this?
Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.
The Old Media Doomsday Clock has been moved forward from eight minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.
What do Blogging and “The Little Rascals” have in common?
There are a lot of pie fights. Generally, nobody gets hurt in pie fights, but a lot of people look silly.
Even Wikipedia knows about the famous Our Gang pie fight from 1929’s “Shivering Shakespeare.”
What pie fights have you seen in the Blogosphere lately?
Oct 17 2006 05:36 pm |
blogging and
littlerascals and
piefights |
Comments Off
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
The Human Rights Amnesty report claims the war on terror is draining attention from other issues.
Perhaps the governments of the world need to join GestureBank. They gotta be in it to win it.
Then, apply a filter based upon the anonymous pool of attention metadata and figure this all out.
There are some important discussions happening this week about open formats for attention metadata.
ET better phone home because the clock is ticking on everybuddy. The “Duh” Vinci code is unraveling.
I’m closing comments soon. My contact info is mobile:203.219.5159 email:mattatglistndotcom IM:mterenzio@gmail
Dear everybuddy,
When I got home from Syndicate, I had an email from Adam Green. He wanted me to help out with a session at OPML Camp about the relationship between OPML and Attention.
So I’ve been thinking even more about Attention.
If you’ve read this blog, you know those two topics are pretty big for me, but this blog is really about conversations.
And I think I’ve done a good enough job making my point (at least to myself) about the importance of conversations in the new economy.
Now I must move on and tackle a related but different subject.
I’ll continue to post during OPML Camp here, and then I’ll wrap things up.
Not sure of the name of my new blog or where it will be, but I have a few ideas.
If links weren’t dead, I’d have to thank Dave Winer for the biggest traffic day, when he pointed to a one minute snowstorm movie. (step aside RocketBoom)
Thanks to all who participated here, especially James Corbett, Alex Barnett and Danny Ayers.
I’m sure the conversations will continue when you find my new home.
Sincerely,
everybuddy.org
P.S. The Old Media Doomsday Clock will continue to be active.
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