So I get this question from my friend: 'Brij, what's up with blogging slogging?'

This friend got hit by news will find you trap and found this I-quit-blogging announcement by Jason Calacanis unnerving.

There have been rumblings of sorts on where this whole blogging slogging is going. Today also on Techmeme I saw two posts analyzing this same topic from two different, and apparently honest, angles.  David Risley rightly thinks we are in a change phase and little bit of 'community humility' will go a long way in bringing back the fun:

Yes, it is changing. A super saturated niche like tech blogging is evolving into a conversation that takes place as much on social media like FriendFeed and Twitter as it does on the blog. Not all blogging niches are like that, but tech is particularly saturated as a niche. The guys who end up being leaders in today’s tech blogging are the people who offer real value on all of their communication lines (blog + social media outlets) and who are personable and actively interact with others. Any tech blogger who is looking at it as a competition or who worry incessantly about the so-called "a-list" is just not going to do really well.

If you can’t change with the community, then I guess it might be easier to bow out and start blogging about something else.

 Loren Feldman has a very revealing take on overall  technology world. Emperor has no clothes but he is more right than lot of people out there.

Now my answer to my friend was rather boring. I told him blogging phenomena is evolutionary, some A-listers now need to work on their family, some are just burned out, adsense economy is a welfare economy and you can't pay your bill with it etc etc.

Short answer was that people will continue to need car (blog), they may or may not like going for Hummer or Porsche (star blogs).

Though I wasn't very pleased with my answer, felt I should have been deep and used some difficult to understand words! Later on I managed to dig up this conversation between Bart Simpson and his high-IQ sister Lisa. I think this conversation captures the dilemma faced by these rebellious blogger Barts.

I have taken liberty with emphasis and link. Enjoy -

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First I thought I will put  picture from Roland Joffe's classic The Killing Fields. I realized that will be offending to some people so I thought why not just emphasize what is burning in my eyes. I mean burning when I scan Techmeme from top to bottom.

Few disclaimers to start with. I have big respect for all these bloggers and journalists. They do fine job in enjoying themselves and in that process educating the great unwashed long tail. So by highlighting few words here and there I am not passing any judgment here. If you want to fault me for any thing then probably it should be my lame attempt in being funny.

To me the combination of three separate Techmeme headline with somewhat linked verbal symbolism did it.

First the BBC news piece. Jakob Nielsen shared his research study where he found online users are getting way more antsy.  Most website designers are naturally unaware of this and expect users to like their shiny gradient layout.

Users are setting expectation level from the best. Google search engine's sub-second response time is a big subliminal play. Every other website gets dissed because they are not as fast as Google. At least not as good in instant gratification as Google is. Gratification level offered by Google search engine is a new default happiness level. Every other website has to  offer superior or alternate instant gratification in order to suck less. Consistently fail in doing that and you invite WTF, F#$K OFF, SOB, and what not. I have faced it in couple of occasion, when MessageDance site was struggling to get IE support (we still suck on IE6 but we don't feel too bad about it).

Anger and frustration around wildly popular Twitter is a case study of it's own kind. I will not comment much on that. You can read Techmeme headline to get the idea. I had issues with people using "kill" or "killing" in headline but I guess that works well to raise passions couple of notches (not to say that it doesn't help page views!).

Last news item just happened to be there below Twitter cluster. Tim O Reilly's analysis is, as always, spot on. It's just that his choice of words (along with two other headlines) made for a strange eew!

Otherwise weekend is coming along just fine. Weather be damned.

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Today when Apple announced iPhone SDK, I got very excited about the possibilities. I think we are witnessing a birth of next generation computing. Computing era which will be defined by touch-computing, rich media, immersive experience, design elegance, and extreme mobility.

John Doerr’s pitch for iFund, during iPhone SDK announcement event, was a marketing call to catch imagination of next generation entrepreneurs. Brilliant move by marquee investor firm. They did Java fund during previous cycle. It didn’t amount to much but it did impact every second/third tier startups R&D budget allocation. Same thing will happen for iPhone. Follow-the-money trick will put iPhone on every startups radar. It definitely worked for Facebook!

iPhone is definitely on MessageDance radar. We have got some big plans related to rich media sharing using mobile devices. iPhone gives us best hardware/software combination to drive client-side rich media sharing. Below are some of the photos I took as part of my photowalking experience. Photowalking is just one example which can be fully explored using iPhone.

If you are just thinking about bootstrapping your new venture, spend some time thinking how iPhone resets user expectation. That will explain what new software and business categories it can create. For example, creative use of accelerator can potentially give Wii run for it’s money. I am excited.

To me this reminds me of another Google service. Anyone remember Google Base? Back in 2005 big promise was something like this:

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Google probably recovered it’s Base investment in search dollars but end user enthusiasm didn’t match initial projections. As always adoption test is key.

Fast forward to 2007. Google is attempting to out-open Facebook with different kind of promise and with apparently cannibalized jotspot codebase.

Unlike other folks I see bigger impact of this news on the third party app market (Om is right on target here). Widget makers like iLike, Rockyou etc will have to take sides now. More effort on widget maker part should be rewarded by platform owners with better data-sharing and better ad economics. That to me is a bigger story here. There will be category of widget makers like premium, enterprise, basic and great unwashed long tailers. They will get access to data and APIs based on their level of allegiance to the platform god.

Battle for openness is like deja-vu all over again. Not sure how many folks out there remember Powerbuilder, X-windows, Oracle Forms, Visual Basic etc. Time and again you see major players  using big words like OPEN, INTER-OPERABILITY, PRIVACY, DATA PORTABILITY, USER EXPERIENCE etc to exert their platform influence.

At the end of the day promise of open has to be as honest as disclosing actual dollar value companies place on user data. Monetization is not open and it’s not even portable. Get real.

As if too much of a success has to be a cause of concern. Is it in our nature to doubt and hit our head whenever we see too much deviation from the average?

I think answer lies in the unfulfilled promise of web1.0. John Doerr spoke too early when he said “The Internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet”. Google is just methodically executing on that promise. Not all the dominoes are down and many verticals are still standing tall. They will soon face information economy’s biggest weapon - advertisement driven attention arbitrage.

There is still lot of scope for Google to grow. Search is a numbers game and just wait for land of potentially infinite keyboards to join the internet. China, India and Russia. Whenever we will see blowblack, then Google’s scale and distributed computing will really shine.

That doesn’t mean they cannot screw up. Their execution risks are of different kind. I would put government intervention right at the top. As they sit on more and more of user data and become central to all communication channels, they will be both target and partner in all government schemes. Move-on ad controversy is just one example of that. They will be getting caught more and more in ugly political cross firing. They have power base which can deem them as a virtual political party, or virtual nation or may be a new age ideology.

Other risk they have is in staying true to their culture. In many ways Google’s culture is of quirkiness and boldness. They get free PR because of that. If they loose that culture then there will not be much to differentiate between Microsoft and Google. They need to make sure they keep throwing outrageously bold goals. Anything which dilutes that culture is a huge risk.

Also I doubt there is any threat from search startups. Tell me how many companies beat Microsoft by writing a better OS? Zero.

What matters is how many companies are tying their destiny with the adwords/adsense ecosystem and there are many. If Facebook can build better ecosystem, probably there will be some nervousness around it.

Reality is not many companies are trying really bold ideas. Most of them are playing catch up to Google.

So I would say follow their boldness graph. Any talk of “margin protection” or “capital efficiency” by their triumvirate should be a sign to sell. Till that time enjoy the ride!

Where presence is the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period. This does not include the related discussion links.  This latest techmeme service is clever. List creation based on presence puts importance of time at the center of media monitoring framework. You are in for a short time window and you have to keep hitting to sustain your presence (unlike Pagerank based popularity)

Detailed explanation of the presence methodology -

A source’s presence is the probability that a random Techmeme headline at a random time over the past month was published by that source. The Leaderboard ranks sources by presence. What is a source? Sidestepping knotty issues of ownership and affiliation, sources are simply identified by the branding a publisher chooses. So blogs are generally distinct sources from their parent site. Thus, Saul Hansell writes for two different sources: Bits (the NYT blog), and the New York Times proper, even though the New York Times Company publishes both. The same goes for CrunchGear and TechCrunch and other blogs contained in blog “networks”.

I think sharing OPML for enabling mashup is a brilliant move. This will be key as Techmeme and Google news begin to overlap on the type of sources they cover.

Google explains the difference between a news article and a comment:

Compare this with today’s Forum discussion (look for “Illegal Worker Crackdown” on this page). I am sure Google has good intentions here but they are trivializing a very very complex issue and randomly offering voice to whoever approaches them. As a big and responsible organization they need to publish guidelines for accepting comments and not just be random, like the way they are in approving adsense account. Stakes are higher here.

News trustworthiness is a key driver for ensuring fair functioning of democratic processes. Google is  tampering with it without properly disclosing the formula. Comments are opinions and opinions make editorials. Does this mean Google is now getting into editorial business?

My fear is this - there is no proper check there to stop people from saying - “this got to be true because it was there on Google news!”

Update: Mathew Ingram has a very interesting take on the Google announcement that they will now source original stories from the wires directly. He quotes a rather chilling commentory from Reuters:

Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.

Google’s attempt to reduce duplicate article reads like an extention of their core search quality initiative. If implemented correctly, this will result in more casualty for the mainstream media.

I doubt if on this particular issue, readers are going to shed any tears.

All those numbers are growing and will increase dramatically as China and India gains broadband penetration. Population matters and That’s where internet is still very very interesting and smart companies like Google are fully aware of that. Google made good investments there and takes that market very seriously.

Recent discussions around Mark Cuban’s attention grabbing assertion was meant (I think) to emphasize slow progress in a specific area of high quality  content distribution. He obviously sees huge opportunity in that space but like any other entrepreneur he can’t single handedly grow the market by lifting the infrastructure layer. He has to wait and that’s  frustrating. I read Mark Cuban’s interview on Pho mailing list and found that to be a very accurate description of problem affecting niche segment.

Internet is interesting in new geographies. Look for new participation and then think about how their participation will create opportunities for new applications. For example by next decade,  difference between Hollywood and Bollywood will be less important as destinations like YouTube will become destination of choice for entertainment creation, distribution and consumption.

To me if I can do “add me as friend” or “poke me” in mandarin and get a response back in English, probably that day I will feel that internet is boring. That day is many years away and will require quantum jump in language and cultural computing technologies.

Here is one crazy idea for Mark. Go to India and buy ICL and cut a similar deal with equivalent sports franchise in China. Buy them, bring those teams to US, run a promotional mashup with baseball, run content over your network. Basically import Cricket, export Baseball and do it over the internet. Get into the emerging market eyeball business. Get the distribution power and then promote your content to billions of viewers there.

That funny idea aside, I think internet is just waiting to get into our cultural and social space. I am not counting on this to be boring.