Blogstuff

...or so it would seem from this list of the UK's Top 20 influential bloggers. After the top 7 or so (by and large BBC bred or fed, or ex BBC blogerati - which with their scale is not surprising) it seemed to start to go rather wrong to me (without going into the whose ins and outs, but I thought I could name at least 5 that are more influential / bigger trafficked / more quoted etc than some on this list ....TechCrunch UK for starters) so I looked at the method of calculation:

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube, and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of the United Kingdom’s most visible and connected individuals. It then narrowed the list to 20 by analyzing and documenting individuals’ presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community.

And then doubled the score for anyone from the mainstream Meedja organs, it seemed to me

Sadly they didn't go into more detail - how do you rate a Techmeme appearance vs 1,000 Facebook friends for example? Clearly the science of understanding new media influence is in its infancy, in that respect its a very good start and a basis for discussion and argument (no doubt its aim ). But you do get the feeling that its skewed just a tad towards online columnists, despite the evidence that this sort of model's influence is fading - and wtf has putting holiday snaps on Flickr got to do with influence??

Maybe we need a Campaign for Real Blogs (to be sponsored by the namesake for Real Ale, natch)

(From the Broadstuff Bah humbug these grapes are all sour Dept )

Update - to the people who hit the 1 star rating - I'm sorry if my message is unpopular, but the influence algorithms these guys used were demonstrably very poor (hint - just check Alexa and Google links for the top blogs registered here against say TechCrunch UK, Guido Fawkes, or even our blog) and probably give the MSM a feeling of comfort that doesn't exist in reality.

To those who hit the 5 rating, the cheque is in the post

I was reading JP Rangaswami's take on the latest death of blogging, and had just commented on my take, when the idea hit me that (as I wrote on his blog comments):

I had this vision of us individual bloggers being like all those “intellectuals” (in inverted commas ) frequenting the Cafes of Paris, drinking absinthe and plotting seduction, sedition etc - Le Blog Epoque

..and watching the passing parade, making comments, trading in jokes, having the occasional spat, creating great works etc etc etc.

i.e there is this intellectual ferment going on, irrespective of the unseemly rush of the Big Blogs to ape the mainstream Media they once despised. There are a huge number of conversations, commentaries, going on between the "Small Cap Blogs".

The joy of this technology is that we don't all have to be in Paris sipping absinthe and espresso (hmmm...or is that sadness), the conversation still flows. And every so often, people meet up in person - like at Tuttle Club in London, or in this case earlier this week when I met JP, Doc Searls and Thomas Howe and James Enck at Telco 2.0 - all bloggers I have conversed with over the months an years.

About every 6 months or so, the "blogging is dead" meme comes round (last time there was a major outbreak was in June). Well, here it is again - articles from my in tray from The Economist and Nick Carr. One would have thought that being dead once already this year, being so twice would be careless, even for a Zombie!

But essentially they are saying the same thing - blogging, as we know it, is shifting towards mainstream media - big blogs are staffed by teams of blogonists, are Ad funded (with all the issues that entails), have increased Pagebloat (there are some blogs I don't read any more because of that) and indulge in the practice of blogonanism* (self linking).

In fact, whisper it who dares, but the big blogs - in true Animal Farm nature - have become the pigs they once abhorred. Of course, it was ever thus. Nick Carr gives the example of the Radio Hamateurs in the Interwar years:

As amateur broadcasting boomed, utopian rhetoric soared. Popular Science wrote, "The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one." The amateur broadcasters, the historian Susan J. Douglas has written, "claimed to be surrogates for 'the people.'" The democratic "radiosphere," as we might have called it today, "held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science."

But it didn't last. Radio soon came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production. By the 1920s, radio had become "firmly embedded in a corporate grid," writes Douglas. A lot of amateurs continued to pursue their hobby, quite happily, but they found themselves pushed to the periphery. "In the 1920s there was little mention of world peace or of anyone's ability to track down a long-lost friend or relative halfway around the world. In fact, there were not many thousands of message senders, only a few ... Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both."

Those that cannot remember the past etc...........

Apparently now that raw, first impression style of early blogging is taking place on "microblogs" such as Twitter. But having been on Twitter awhile, it is my view that it is also growing up - it went from inane to interesting, but it seems to increasingly full of self promoting PR types....but the joy is you can Turn Them Off!

Now we were (relatively) late to blogging, starting in 2006. (Well thats not true, actually - we dabbled with it in 2002), but - as with Twitter in its early days, didn't bother to participate because it was basically cr*p content - people making asinine observations about trivia. And like Twitter did (at about this time last year), blogging started to become more interesting c 2005 - frankly, because more people started coming on board and they forced the conversation quality up a few notches

So where does it go from here - well, in my view the Ham Radio story is probably not quite the endgame, as blogs - in my view - are more like magazine content, as (i) it is higher grade than Radio conversation, and (ii) it is persistent. Thus, I think blogging will have a series of outcomes:

- Big Magazines - The Huffposts, TechCrunches etc. There will also be rationalisation. I don't bother with more than one in any segment. In fact, imho their quality is declining as they take on armies of poorly paid bloggers - I don't have them on my RSS any more, I read Techmeme as these blogs just push out too much content. I prefer The Economist, NYT's Bits and a few others as frankly, the people writing are better. On my RSS now I mainly have....

- What JP Rangaswami calls "Small Cap Blogs" (Like Nick, JP etc). As Sun's Tim Bray notes:

...mid-level individual presences such as my own having a few tens of thousands of readers, and with regular outbursts of blog-to-blog conversation. I'm not sure what the right word for this landscape is, but I'm pretty sure that "dead" isn't it.

These will cover everything that magazines today cover, and more.

- Niche Blogs - smaller blogs addressing micro interests

And as both Nick and The Economist note, some people will continue to write web diaries (the original blog type), but most will be aggregated onto Facebook and similar social platforms simple because its easier.

And where are the avant garde today? In my view they are on Videoblogs like Phreadz, Seesmic, Qik et al.

*That was a self link, by the way

...it drops my link count from c 200 to c 140, despite a whole bunch of new links from the Web 2.0 Expo presentation. Ah well.....leave your blog to go abroad for a few days at your peril

I see James Surowiecki, author of the Web 2.0 staple "The Wisdom of Crowds" is again starting financial and economic blogging at the New Yorker. As he notes:

To wit: My first Financial Page column for The New Yorker appeared in March of 2000, which just happened to be the month that the Nasdaq hit its all-time high and then started to plunge downward. In other words, the start of my column was an almost perfect contrarian indicator of the market’s performance. If the same is true this time around, then the start of this blog would be an excellent sign that we’re nearing a market bottom, and that we’re getting ready to bounce.

We live in hope.....

But even more, I look forward to his thoughts on the similarities between the Wisdom of Crowds, and that Financial Bubble classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

I feel really sorry for the geek kids who, by sheer bad luck, put up a party video just as the Silicon Valley Sophists decided to tell their charges that the Party Was Over - Officially. The video went viral in the worst possible way, drawing the ire of TechCrunch - and no doubt the envy all of us older folks who recall what it was like to be 25, lithe and carefree

(This 1938 Media sendup of The Video is very good....)

But these are not the people who caused this crisis - that was a financial bubble. As one of the commentators on the TechCrunch piece put it:

“I really don’t understand why anyone thinks a bunch of some 20-something kids having fun on vacation is tasteless. Though I don’t know for sure, I don’t think any of them got rich laundering crappy securities to unsuspecting investors. And I’m 100% sure they weren’t doing this on their employers dime or time.

If you’re trying to latch onto a poster child for the egregious behavior directly related to the financial meltdown, it’s not in Cyprus. It’s in New York. The tech industry wasn’t the cause, and a group of kids who happen to work in the tech industry and happen to be on vacation on their own time and money shouldn’t have anything to do with the market correction. To infer such is simply biased journalism.”

And these are not even the Geeks who should be shot - the people at fault there are these same sophists who pimped and funded me-too companies (or in some cases they weren't companies, just products) with cr*p "free for all" business models and even crapper (sorry - crappr) names. "There is no bubble in Technology", they said.....

The sad lesson here though, is that this is the inevitable result of the tendency of Generation Y to splash stuff up on the global media as if it were still a home video club. Once its up there, it stays there! This is the total loss of privacy that these aggregation sites feed off. Did I do stuff as dumb as this at 25? Hell no - I did far worse Was it captured on video to parade round for ever? No.

Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg noted he thought there was a Moore's Law for Privacy - as in every 18 months our concern about privacy halves - I hope lessons like this go some way to repealing it.

This weekend we migrated Broadstuff over to its very own server owing to the traffic it now gets, unfortunately we lost the link to the last post so its now reconstituted below but with a new page ID.

While we were doing this I read a post by Steven Hodson about type of Bloggers - in short, he defines 4 main types, in ascending order of monetisation:

- Do it for fun
- Do it for offset profit eg consulting etc
- Single/small teams doing it to earn income
- The Big Blogs (are these really blogs, or just online media - they don't really behave like blogs any more)

Its a good article, and two areas I thought I'd like to comment on:

Many bloggers who buy their own domain will then need somewhere to host it and this is where they often make their first mistake (I’m still living with this one). They will more than often go with the cheapest hosting package they can which is generally something called Shared Hosting. Well, when you see that run far far away from it because if you go that route that decision will come back to bite you right on the ass. Don’t go for the most expensive hosting package of course, but make sure that you have a good solid upgrade path that can be done with the flip of a cyber switch.

Our experience is that the last sentence is key - as our blog has grown, we have moved from very shared, to flexible capacity, and now to its won server - being able to do it remotely, on the same hoster, has made things much easier. The other thing we'd say is backup, backup, backup.

The other point I'd like to comment on is value creation - Steven makes these points:

....so if you are the type of person who likes his or her technology with a splash of reality be prepared to find the road forward a tad on the difficult side.

and

any smart business minded blogger would realize that by concentrating on make their blog an authoritative voice in any space could potentially make them an attractive purchase.

While we've found the same as Steven, ie that a blog that tries to inject some reality into what can be an overhyped space (like this blog as well as Steven's) is less attractive to PR / Marketing types who want to promote stuff today, we do believe in the longer term it will create value by being more trusted, and that in our view will have its own value as we believe it will attract higher value customers, and (maybe one day) higher value Ads.

Had to laugh after reading this post from Mr Scoble (link via Alexander van Elsas, who also wrote a post about it) - he has (shock horror) failed to find economic wisdom on FriendFeed. Question is, if you were looking for the keys to the current crisis, would you:

(i) Find it among the sorts of people Mr Scoble likes to listen to ?

(ii) Find it on a Geek-Speak system like Friendfeed?

(iii) Recognise it even if it was there?

ie looking for economic wisdom on Friendfeed is a bit like looking for lost keys under lamp-posts. To explain:


Finding it among the People Mr Scoble likes to listen to - he published a list of people he reads and rates last week - I won't pretend to know all of them, but of those I do know and read I'd say their expertise is mainly technology and their philosophy on life is by and large Silicon Valley Sufi-ism (or is that Sophistry .

Find it on a System like FriendFeed - there are two issues here:

Firstly, Friendfeed is a hangout for early adopter alpha geeks, it does not have the breadth of view that say blogs or even Twitter does, so its unlikely to have a "Wisdom of Crowds" effect.

Secondly, Friendfeed's format doesn't lend itself to serious exploration of hard ideas. Blogs do, and Twitter makes no pretence in the matter (though he haiku-like shortening discipline does bring its own rigour) but Friendfeed is essentially a comment aggregation device, and most people, if they have anything complex to say, prefer to put it on a blog post.

Recognise it when you see it - here again there are two issues.

Firstly, in the nicest possible way, most geeks who inhabit all these lovely new media are not economists, so are unlikely to be able to tell who is right and who is wrong (heck, geeks have to be economically illiterate - no sane economist would do a tech startup - high failure rates, discounted salaries and low margins in the most cases). By the way, RWW does a nice "This is what a geek Needs to Know" over here.

Secondly, economics is apolitical - it kinda doesn't care whether you are right wing Libertarian or left wing Marxist, it only cares about what works - or more usually, what doesn't, which makes it deeply unpopular for politicos of all stripes of course (ditto economics and social theories). The truth is, its too early for the correct approach (whatever it is) to be appreciated by all the warring parties at the moment. If I may be so bold - the "correct"answer to this crisis - judging by the things that have worked in similar conditions, say FDR's New Deal etc - is likely to be more - ahem - socialist than the average US free-market libertarian is likely to want to hear (In fact, my experience of living in the US is that the US Left is more capitalist that Europe's Right).

It reminds me a lot of Corporate Turnarounds in the early days - there is far more attempting to assign blame and shore up ones own positions for the tough time ahead than actually fix the underlying problem. My old friend (and grizzled turnaround hand) Norman Burgess once encapsulated it in a phrase we forever after referred to as "Burgess's Law"

First the incumbent management fires the workers, then the market fires the management. Only then can we start to really fix the problems

Technorati has released its 5th State of the (Blog)Nation report this week. We of course are fascinated by The Money and how it cascades down the Long Tail, (see initial post here) and the main piece on that will be in Day 4 of the report, tomorrow. Day 3 had an interesting table on expenditure on blogging:



What is somewhat interesting is the huge difference in average spend between European and the US & Asian blogs - $2k vs sub $1k. This is all the more intriguing given the extremely low median spend of European blogs. The implication (given that spend is clearly a strong poisson or power law distribution) is that a small number of Euroblogs are spending a fortune compared to both the US and Asian Pro-Blogger and the average euroblogger's pittance.

The piece of value left out here, however, is the time element. The study also shows that 2/3 of bloggers spend c 4 hours+ a week at it, so over a year thats c 200 hours (assuming that one does not blog on vacation), which, at say $50 an hour (c $350 a day, c $70k pa) is an input of c $10k pa. 45% of bloggers do double this, ie a labour input of c $20k pa. Of course, I could be massively overestimating the market value of bloggers, so assume $35k pa and its $5k and $10k respectively - still a far larger input than any of the above material investments.

The reason for this - as TechCrunch notes, success in blogging is not about beautifully crafted writing or erudite knowledge - the quality is nearly all in the quantity:

Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment

Lying down a bit with the stats here allows me to calculate that the average blog post takes roughly an hour therefore, probably a bit less.......(this one, if you are interested, took 29 minutes in which 1 cup of coffee was also produced and consumed)

....in the heart of our database - we have lost all todays and yesterdays graphics and yesterdays posts until we can rebuild tonight.

Update - rollback complete as of 8 pm.