Blogstuff

This came to me on the train this morning - I was thinking about which tech blogs I like to read, and why, and how you might structure "what sort of blog are they" into a filter system - and then this simple 2x2 came to me:



The 2 axes I thought of are the:

- Tone of blog - is it continually breatlessly awestruck by whatever new new thing is emerging or perpetually cynical?
- Content of blog - is it part of the echo chamber, or is it giving out original thoughts

This led to 4 quadrants - so, and my thoughts on them, starting from the "Sweet Spot 2.0" :

(i) Original thought, but perpetually awestruck. This - in my opinion - is the path to "Gurudom 2.0", you are leading the way in saying what everyone desperately wants to hear. The two problems with it (I find anyway) are:
- I think it is to an extent intellectually dishonest - they must know that this stuff isn't always so shiny shiny - mustn't they?
- it ages fast - the lack of a critical aspect shows the writer to be naive in hindsight, and this is a fast moving industry.

Still, it works - its arguably the best way to clamber up the Blog Influence ladder.

(ii) Echo Chamber, Continually Awestruck - I look at these and think "whats the point" but in reality this is the A list blogger equivalent of a fan base, at worst they are the blog groupies. By and large harmless, but - as we have experienced - if you ever disagree with a Blog Guru or a Current Trend, these are the blogs that will attack you directly. This allows the Gurus to stand above the fray, so they have their uses.

(iii) EchoChamber, Perpetually Negative - Precisely because there is so much hype and snake oil in any bubble that running around with a pin pricking all the bubblemes is an easy gig. Possibly they serve the purpose of the Jester, but because the tone is resolutely cynical but without adding anything new, its sort of like candy - a bit of it is wonderful, but, like Private Eye its best taken in small doses or else its tales of the Valley wind up wagging your blogging dog

(iv) Original Thought, Perpetually Negative - in a way I admire these most - they are getting up there and saying stuff that is unpopular or unpalatable, and backing it up with sound, original argument. Over time though, they risk being ignored by the Faithful (always too negative) and even by the neutral as its the easier gig - the Accuntants play - see the price in everything, but not the value. One person I really do admire here is Nick Carr - perpetually curmudgeonly, but always soundly argued and thought provoking

Over time I find myself inclining to the right in my reading, and whereas once i sought out the bottom corner to run a counterpoint, I am increasingly of the opinion that that is where "realism" lies, as I think Gurudom 2.0 does risk breeding a sort of "Optimism Arms Race" - who can pimp the new new thing better, faster, further?

And what about Broadstuff, I hear you ask?

I think we have over time become more sceptical in the flow, (though it may just be we've stayed the same as optimism inflates?) - the analytical part of me (or the Santayana's Law part that went through Web 1.0 ) just knows that much of the New New stuff is pan-glossing over reality - but I'd like to think we do it with a sense of fun - "wittily sceptical" would be the aim. Whether this is the "correct" tone for a sober, mature New Media consultancy is unclear - but its by far the most fun to write

Also, I know how hard it is to continually provide original thought, and my respect for those of all persuasions who do has increased over the time we've been doing Broadstuff. Our standards have slipped to doing some original thought - one a week if we can - but also commenting on what is going around - the rule we try to follow though is only to comment if we know something about the area from real work we have done.

Oh, and if I could write half as well as the Economist does, I'd die happy

I guess in a way the risk is we sit in the space of the stuff I like to read the most now, so for diversity I now try harder to reach outside it.

Be fascinated to hear others thought (i) on what you think / like, (ii) how you might filter it and (iii) of what you think we could do better / differently.

OK, OK - I'll admit I read this on Techmeme over morning coffee and I know its considered dreadfully bad form to comment on a story once its there, but this is too good to ignore - its the most excellent rant about the silliness of Social Media, A Listers and our bubblecosm in general:

I have no problem if the NYT follows me in an effort to make sure I realize they have a Twitter account. But I'm OFFENDED when a person, a real human being, decides to follow me along with 10,000 other people.

What does this act say to me?

Does the person really want to follow my conversations? Obviously not - they are on a blind follow-fest and I am an appetizer.
This is no different from the heydays of MySpace when some people collected 10K plus friends. Aside from Tila Tequila who now has an absurd and annoying reality show - it's an obnoxious and futile attempt at social media stardom.
I use this as an anecdote. My beef isn't with Twitter, but with the shameless self-promotion that occurs 24/7 on the web, to which Twitter is another tool. Conversation is being comodified - and people think they can become 'experts' in online conversations.

Guess what: "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

Shame on you, popping our rosy views like that - there I was thinking that all those A Listers valued me as a unique and special friend

How much of the internet is produced by social media experts re-hashing what others have already said on the web in their own words? Better yet, how much do they charge to teach you how to re-hash those same words?

You mean A Listers copy lesser known people's ideas and publish them sans attribution - well I never !!!

There needs to be space for successful blogs beyond Tech and Politics. I know there are lots of mommy-bloggers and food blogs, etc - but the most successful blogs right now are either tech or politics. Just take a look at the Technorati top 100 and try to disagree with me. Then consider this: Half of those tech-blogs are navel gazing, writing about either
A. Tools that enable + empower new media.
B. Other A-list bloggers.

More fool us for reading them then.......

So how about a Campaign for Real Blogs then, how about turning off all your A Listers for a month, starting May 1st. No Scoble, TechCrunch, Gadgetzines etc for all of May. Eschew Techmeme.

Go on, go on strike - find the other flowers in the fields.

Deirdre Molloy left a thoughtful comment on an earlier post of mine, which she then expanded on on her blog Innovation Cloud, noting the Seven Ages of Blogmedia:

Here’s my verbose response (but it’s a mammoth issue - my lame excuse)

(1) Initially, in terms of connecting blogosphere conversation together there was trackback, but then along came the traditional publishers and they couldn’t deal with the (spam / gaming) issues, nor incorporate the lessons of online communities’ design or etiquette so far. Thus the promise held out by trackback (see Nico Macdonald, ‘Comment is Free,’ but designing communities is hard, Online Journalism Review, 17th July 2006) was quashed.

(2) Then trackback spam arrived (your favourite Alan) - possibly the final nail in the coffin of trackback’s potential (if we agree pingbacks are the watered-down substitute).

(3) In turn, beyond mere feed readers, more sophisticated aggregators like Netvibes and other “thin portal[s] of widgets” (to quote Mike Butcher on a post about Sleevenotez he wrote on Vecosys, since deleted by the blog owner) entered the arena, along with cross-platform microblogging. The social web and mobile stuff more generally - rather than just the blogosphere - at least became more manageable [see also Jaiku, though it's gone quiet since Google acquired it late in 2007, and interesting lifestream propositions like Rememble].

(4) But before we could take a breath, social networks went zoom, and we were pouring tons of valuable-to-trivial content, discussion and links (it’s all a continuum, right) into the likes of Facebook and Bebo. But it was hellish-difficult/impossible to connect this back out to the open internet, the ahead of its time [and much lamented] BlogFriends for pouring back in-and-out notwithstanding.

(5) Now we have the next wave of aggregators: Friendfeed, favorit, Plaxo’s Pulse feature, the recently souped-up MyBlogLog et al.

(6) And hot on their tails - for the blogerati - Cocomment, Disqus, SezWho, and IntenseDebate became part of the equation, some of whom even have social network integration in their pipeline apparently [my, that sounds rather painful]

(7) This doesn’t even factor in the photo and video outfits out there - Seesmic, Qik, Flickr video, Google Video, Vimeo, BlipTV [gratuitous interview and Beers & Innovation RSS Frontiers video linkage], Moblog and the like; especially the cross-platform players among them. Who has even mentioned or interrogated their part in the connected web in this month’s discussion? Yep, time to remove the old-skool web goggles.

So now that the conversation has left the blogosphere [ReadWriteWeb, 20th March 2008] where does that leave us?

If the walled garden is crumbling, but our attention is ever more stretched, and our conversational quality and digital health suffering, is the model of aggregating eyeballs doomed or due for a fresh lease of life from the most innovative but implacably dominating mover in this space?

I was thinking of how best to answer this when I saw another article today on Read Write Web essentially claiming content is not king, but a common commodity.

What this means for us as bloggers and new media creators is that the very technologies that we have grown to love are the same forces that are turning our efforts, be them our words, our videos, our music, our photos, or anything we create, into a commodity - something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value....

.....However, we can't on the one hand support the commoditization of other media - happy to download music either via P2P or for pocket change and cry when DRM restricts its copying - and then, at the same time, purport that our very own creations, like our blog posts, or even more absurdly, the comments around those posts, have some sort of value that is above and beyond them becoming commodities as well.

Well, many do have this irrational view - welcome to the irrational world of the FreeTards

Leaving this aside, Deirdre's point is (implicitly) answered by the Read Write Web story - individual blog content is worth the square root of F* all, but en masse it has value - mainly by grabbing attention time from us, as that is a fixed good in the medium term (my future NPV divided by hours per day), hence that is what every New Wave play is trying to wrest away from the last lot.

So will the New New Aggregators - Friendfeed etc etc - be the endgame? As I noted in my earlier post, I fail to to see how our blog posts and your comments, fragmented over multiple services, is a more compelling service than todays' "Good Enoughs" unless one of them achieves high market dominance.

As Phil Bradley notes, what we really want is where he can write all his comments on his blog aggregator, and it is represented on my blog so I can see all comments he makes, and we can both see the conversation. But quite why you or I will sign up for N current aggregators to give each one some Partial Differentiated Attention is unclear. Not only that, but it is clear from the weekends' discussion that no way can they do this and fund themselves without falling foul of millions of small-cap copyright problems.

Thus, I think there is (at least) an 8th Age of the Blogcosm - an open service - or all this lot opening up to each other - that does all this, and aggregates (or bypasses) all these aggregators.

I know its dreadfully bad form to comment on a story once its made Techmeme, but its only Saturday and this one may qualify as a "bitchmeme" Lite so it might be OK as its only supposed to be here on Sunday .

In essence the issue discussed is allegedly (its actually all about Friendfeed shock horror ) that these aggregators are taking commenting and all that away from the blogs, and "the conversation" is happening elsewhere. In fact, one of the commentators on the blog post commented that:

Now, when I post something to my blog, not only do I have to keep an eye on and be active in the comments there, but also on "X" number of these social sites that are aggregating my full feed with their own comments. Of course, that means that I have to sign up and be a member of that site, or risk not being involved in conversations about content I created in the first place. Simply put, that's too much freakin' work!

Indeed - we ain't going to chase down 101 aggregators to answer comments, and I suspect most rational bloggers won't either (hmmm...thought - is that an oymoron) - so here's my thesis; anyone who wants to talk to the blogger will probably do it on the blog still, or on a social network they use.

Broadstuff uses Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed et al just as distribution mechanisms for people who like to aggregate their posts that way - we also use email and RSS to do this job. We have readers split across all these distribution mediums.

And for this reason I think all these Feedread type aggregator plays that are trying to create their own platforms are medium term f*cked (no matter how much PR $5m can buy ) as any form of large scale service - they are just too disjointed, the only way it works is if one of them gets totally dominant market share - but by dominant I mean not only among similar aggregators, but among them and microblogging site users, RSS feedread users, email users etc.

But - and here's a warning - our stuff is Creative Copyrighted - so if anyone tries to monetise it by selling ads around it, or aggregating it and selling it on to corporates as market research, then we will get grumpy. Got that?

Maybe what would be more useful than a Friendfeed downstream aggregator is a "reverse aggregator", where people who want to comment on any one of these media can do so and it pops up on the blog page, allowng other commentators on other aggregators to see the conversation.

Dave Winer thinks the End is Near (referring to the race to be big media by the Big Tech Blogs)

I pulled out of the tech industry and started blogging in 1994 or 1997 depending on what you count as the start so I could get away from the crap. Now Mike Arrington is talking about turning TechCrunch into CNET. That's a sure sell signal. Get me the f*ck outta here. Beam me up Scotty. This isn't Kansas anymore Auntie Em.

His chief ire is raised because he feel all the main blogs, and smaller ones that comment in this space, are an echo chamber - pointing to this piece why there is Little Original Thought on blogs:

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort. The problem, however, is many bloggers are often short of time, which means it is difficult to come up with insightful thoughts. As Louis Gray talked about in a recent post, many bloggers are time-strapped what with blogging and being on other social/content vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, RSS readers, etc. If you’re doing all that, when do you have time to think Big Thoughts?

Is it dreadfully unoriginal to comment on a post? Broadstuff has been going for c 18 months now, and I have a few thoughts on this. In our case, time strapping comes from client work - but this also yields original thoughts and analysis - but that is not a daily occurrence - so we post that stuff when it comes. But quite often you see someone writing something, and you can see you can add something to the story, or you have an angle - and that imho is vaild.

2. Many bloggers just want to be part of the conversation before it moves on. Here’s what happens in many cases. You see a hot story and you’re keen to jump in but not willing to simply leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Solution: Pound out a quick, no-frills post that makes you feel good about being on top of the hot story even if it’s piling on. I’m willing to guess that 50% of the posts about a red-hot story on Techmeme (e.g. Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo) were posts that just parroted the news reports.

As noted above, I think if you have a point of view on a story, then it is valid to blog. If you are just noting something without moving the story on, why not just post a link? When to blog vs when to leave a note is interesting - if its more than a paragraph, I blog it. There are also a number of "blogs" where you can't comment, so thats fair game for blogging.

3. Writing original content often provides a low return on investment. Let’s face it, traffic is what drives many bloggers, which explains why checking your stats on a regular basis is a key part of blogging. When you write original content that falls outside the hot news of the day, there’s a good chance it’s not going to get much love or traffic.

How come? The biggest reason is everyone is spending so much time reading or writing about the big news of the day, your original, thought-provoking post gets buried. As a result, it’s easy to think “Why put so much effort into writing quality content when there’s instant gratification (and traffic) by jumping on the bandwagon”.

Yes and no - what I've found is that original content doesn't have a quick burn, but over the months those posts garner traffic and are a large source of links - and the occasional pickup and re-hash by the odd A - List blog even

4. Unless you blog for living like Mike Arrington or Erick Schonfeld, or you’re a tech reporter like Mathew Ingram or a conference junkie like Robert Scoble, you don’t have steady access to people and new ideas that often spawn original blog posts.

Actually, the blogosphere has a lot of original stuff coming out of it - if you don't just look on Techmeme . I do find an increasing amount of interesting links also come from my Twitter community now.

I also think that Dave et al are guilty a bit of bemoaning the passing of the older days.....and the rise of new names, new blogs etc. And it seems commenting on others has been around awhile...

Back in the old days before any of you were blogging, we (the olde skool bloggers) used to write about them watching us watching them watch us watch them. Permalink to this paragraph

It's happening again...

Nothing wrong with it, it's human nature.

Ecclesiastes Law strikes again

24/7 Media has written an article valuing the 25 largest blogs, which are (summarised by Susan Mernit):

The Gawker Media: $150 million. 30 million monthly unique visitors.
MacRumors: $85 million. 544,000 visitors.
Huffington Post: $70 million. 4 million unique visitors per month.
PerezHilton: $48 million. 10.1 million uniques.
TechCrunch: $36 million. 3.2 million unique visitors and 14.6 million page views.
(tied): Ars Technica $15 million. Over 800,000 visitors.
(tied): Seeking Alpha $15 million. 400,000 visitors.
(tied): Drudge Report $10 million.1.1 million visitors.
(tied): Mashable $10 million. 5 million page views.
GigaOm: $8.4 million. 225,000 visitors.
Boing Boing: $8 million. 8.7 million page views.
Silicon Alley Insider: $5.4 million. 200,000 unique visitors.
ReadWriteWeb: $5 million. 300,000 visits but growing extremely fast.
Paidcontent.org: $3.5 million. 134,000 unique visitors and growing quickly.
(tied) Search Engine Land: $2.7 million. 225,000 unique visitors.
(tied) Smashing Magazine: $2.7 million. 325,000 visitors.
DListed: $2 million. 350,000 visits.
Daily Blog Tips: $1.8 million. 20,000 visitors.
(tied) Techdirt: $1.5 million. 400,000 unique visitors.
(tied): Neatorama: $1.5 million. 300,000 visits and growing very fast.
(tied): BuddyTV $1 million is too much about television. 800,000 visitors.
(tied):The Superficial $1 million. 522,000 visits last month, but dropping sharply.
Talking Points Memo: $860,000. 233,000 visitors and rising fast.

So far so good, but I was drawn to the assumed CPM's (ranging from $10 to $30 per page), which, as Susan also notes, are just a tad high:

I have some problems accepting these valuations when I know how much trouble many blogs have in getting decent advertising revenues--and how much run of network gets sold for a dollar or less in CPM, and even less in CPC.

Susan is too polite... I just don't believe them, based on my experiece of CPM rates over a number of web assets and blogs. Divide it all by 10 and you are probably closer to reality, after taking unsold inventory into account - and thats probably being generous.

Quite how the original writers came up with those numbers they don't say, but what is more interesting is how some ostensibly erstwhile blogs are picking it up and running it uncritically, which says to me that some of the commentators in this game are not that familiar with the basic economics

(By the way, GigaOm is valued at $8.4m on 1.4m pageviews/month - now we get a bit over 1/5th of that traffic (according to our logs, not Alexa I hasten to add), so if anyone wants to hand over c $1.6 m right now, we're all ears )

Well now....a real hooha on TechMeme re Blog Networks raising VC money, started off by TechCrunch (as always )

More blogs are raising venture capital, we’re hearing from people they’ve pitched. Newcomer Silicon Alley Insider is looking for a $3 - $5 million round, if reports are correct. And PaidContent is pitching for a second round in that same range (PaidContent raised a round of “less than $1 million” in 2006). We’re also hearing that PaidContent is trying to sell the company for $15 million or more, and just bail out with some spending money.

There is of course the standard litany of denial of cash raising, being for sale, the amount etc etc as per usual in these things, for example here on PaidContent:

I can’t say this clearly enough: he is wrong on ALL counts. Let me elaborate:
-- We may raise some more money but it is nowhere in the range Mike reports.
-- We raised considerably less than a million in our first round from Greycroft partners...we didn’t disclose the round, but all we said was it was less than a million.
-- No, we are NOT looking to sell...not now, not in the near future.

But underneath the standard hoopla there is one fundamental strategic issue - they are all doing basically the same thing, ie reporting on the same limited pool of stories to the same fairly limited audience in much the same way. Add to that the issue that there are few real barriers to entry, and that many of the new entrants are "enthusiastic amateurs" - ie low cost, high quality and prolific - and you have a fairly textbook strategic problem - there is too much supply.

And even worse, modern search and aggregation makes it increasingly easy to find and rate that long tail....and tell all your friends too.

In other words, Mr Arrington's main thrust is right - there will be a consolidation, one way or another, at some point. When depends on how long people will work on a wing and a prayer to good times later. Whether it is his Harlem Blogtrotters model that will win is debatable, I think the model is more a last men who can hold onto the lifeboat.

No wonder there are calls for unionisation and other ways to raise the drawbridge to protect the current incumbents!

But, as any economist will tell you, this will hasten consolidation...........

Yes, 2008 is going to be a blog eat blog world out there

Update - Kara Swisher does a very good take on this....one might think she wasn't taking it all seriously

Sarah Lacy has said something that quite a few people in the UK have been saying over the last few days, ie that - based on what we were seeing on the blogs and on Twitter, anyway - quite a lot of what happened at SXSW wasn't really pushing the envelope of any new thinking.

Sarah notes:

With my experience as a backdrop, however, I did come away with a handful of observations about the state of the emerging, consumer-focused Internet we refer to as Web 2.0.

1. There's a dearth of innovation online right now. The Valley typically works in peaks and troughs of creativity. In the early 2000s, the Web 2.0 movement was in a stunning state of breakthrough innovation. This is the period that gave rise to some of today's most successful sites and companies such as Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and Flickr.

These days, many of Silicon Valley's best and brightest are working hard to turn their visions into sustainable businesses, or they're toiling away within the larger companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that bought them out early on. Before long, many of the folks who built Bebo into the third-largest social network after News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace and Facebook will be striving to help Time Warner's (TWX) AOL make good on its $850 million purchase (BusinessWeek.com, 3/13/08), announced Mar. 13.

Now sure, it could be the combined sour grapes of us wot were stuck in Blighty and a lady who was e-burned for her interviewing style, but this post of Sarah Lacy's is pretty independent of the backchannel chat that was going on back here.

Last year I was really motivated to make a reference list of all the stuff going down at SXSW. This year - well, lets just say sorting the wheat has been somewhat harder.

On her own Lacy-ration, La Lacy says:

Sure, Twitter has a downside: a unique ability to beam users' every unfiltered, nasty thought instantly over the Web, where it will live forever and prompt the mob to pile on. It's as close as you can get to reading someone's mind—and it isn't always pretty.

True, but its always entertaining

Update - Deirdre Molloy, one of the most astute people I know in this space, has written a better post than this one in the comments section.

On Sunday night I was watching the Twitterati v-burn Sarah Lacy, but when I read the actual interview notes I felt they had been a tad unfair, and I noted it was a virtually public lynching. So now I have actually watched the video, and for the life of me I can't see (i) what the hoo-ha was all about and (ii) where the supposed mass riot comes from.

My take - sure Sarah Lacy (who I don't know from Adam by the way) seems to have a huuuge...ego, and should not have pimped her book - thats just plain rude - but then she is far from the only one on that game, and this is far from the first sycophantic and rambling interviewer I've ever seen.

To quote TechCrunch (where I watched the video):

Here’s what I think really happened. There was an unruly group of attendees, mostly at the back of the session, who heckled Lacy (and Zuckerberg) during the interview. A few others joined in as well at different points. The heckling drew Twitters saying that some people weren’t happy with the interview. And then those Twitters spawned new ones, trying to outdo the previous ones. And then the “real journalists” jumped in head first and laid into Lacy, safe in the knowledge that they had Twitter messages to back them up.

What in the world drove these “journalists” to write this nonsense? Jealously over the fact that they weren’t on stage, or over Lacy’s new book? Perhaps they just got caught up in the fun of a witch burning. But whatever drove them to write those articles, it certainly wasn’t journalism. Nor was it professional. And, worst of all, it wasn’t accurate.

In fact, as far as I can see, she committed a major faux pas mainly because she did a more business flavoured interview in a room of geeks, and - shock horror - flirted !! And in front of geeks - what were you thinking, woman

Of course, the Facebook Fanboi's are still reeling at the sh(l)ock of seeing Their Hero exposed a bit ......

To me the real lesson is that Twitter flipped from being a Wisdom of Crowds thing to being a vector for a "Madness of Crowds" (aka Mob Rool) thing - and as any student of history knows, this is a Bad Thing, especially when whipped on by demagogues, tyrants, rascals and other A-listers . Its at times like this that great miscarriages of justice and judgement are made.

This was then accelerated by the crowdstorm nature of Techmeme - or rather by the clamp on of those who came most definitely to bury La Lacy (and in the process get themselves a prize shot at interviewing Mr Zuckerberg - surely not?).

Its an early lesson methinks of the inherent risks of "instant" media.

Update - Don't cry too much for Sarah, the PR cover-over is now in full swing....

Blimey - no sooner do I pontificate on Web 2.0's mean spirited evangelicals than a full lynch mob breaks out. I wasn't at the SXSW in that interview - and yes, I did see the Twitter stream - but there is a lesson here in the benefit of reflection.

In the cold light of 6,000 miles away, looking at the questions asked (see here on Centernetworks for eg) - they weren't that daft.

Granted, pimping your book is unforgivable (that's like presenters pimping their companies in sessions) but seems to me like C:Net probably had it down right - style rather than substance.

The reality is, I thought the substance of her interview was pretty strong. She asked a lot of good questions, including some that put Zuckerberg on the spot. He kept asking her how she had learned about certain points she was asking him about.

So in that regard, on paper, her interview would have been a success.

But it was her style that lost her the audience almost from the minute it started. She seemed flirty with him, trying to put on an air of being his buddy, when what the audience wanted was to listen to Zuckerberg talk.

Probably a good example of how the "wisdom" of a crowd can turn quickly to "madness" - especially if there was not a lot of sleep and quite a lot of alcohol etc to get over

(For the record I don't know Sarah Lacy, never even seen her, in fact my only recollection is that her website was pimping her book long before it was even written...but this all seems a little overblown, seems to me that "instant media" has a few downfalls)