Brij’s One More Idea

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 -

BART: Lis, everyone in town is acting like me. So why does it suck?

LISA: It's simple, Bart: you've been defined yourself as a rebel, and in the absence of a repressive milieu your societal nature's been co-opted.

BART: I see.

LISA: Ever since that self-help guy came to town, you've lost your identity. You've fallen through the cracks of our quick-fix, one-hour photo, instant oatmeal society.

BART: What's the answer?

LISA: Well, this is your chance to develop a new and better identity. May I suggest .. good natured doormat?'

BART: Sounds good, sis. Just tell me what to do.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Would appreciate feedback on tweet blogging (flow versus sidebar).

 Last 10 tweets from @brij

 Retweet: @stevebaker Tim Berners-Lee: “You can look at a blog, but what’s impacting the world is the blogosphere.” at 06/18/2008 09:47 PM

 [PHOTO] One rape every 29 minutes. Shame India! Watching news at Indian restaurant in Cupertino.
http://messagedance.com/message/show/ad5866ab145a91dcc01b523464b54c72 at 06/18/2008 08:22 PM

 Child abduction drill, reporting live from the streets of Wellesley, MA http://www.messagedance.com/WPDPhoto at 06/18/2008 07:43 PM

 [BLOG POST] Reddit goes open source with CPAL license, probably caused major LOL in Diggnation Reddit is releasin
http://www.onemoreidea.org/reddit-goes-open-source-with-cpal-license-probably-ca… at 06/18/2008 07:33 PM

 1and1 customer support emails can put Colbert show to shame. Time to move on. I had to chase down their CS head on LinkedIn at 06/18/2008 05:33 PM

 RBS - all chickens come home to roost! [u]
http://messagedance.com/message/show/262d76d580ccf3f0458e7a88e6975832 at 06/18/2008 04:17 PM

 [PHOTO] Type in about:robots in FF3 to see this - thanks @danishkhan
http://messagedance.com/message/show/292854f0c22533033b5cebbc490a8f90 at 06/18/2008 05:44 AM

 What is common between Daily Kos, MichelleMalkin, BetaNews, HotAir etc? - Bipartisan willingness to AP-ee at 06/18/2008 05:24 AM

 for events like this, media units should have dress code as well http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7460005.stm at 06/18/2008 05:21 AM

  @danishkhan better luck next year. I can feel your pain #LakersFor2009 at 06/18/2008 04:32 AM

Blogged with MessageDance | Reply On Twitter

Apnews.com can change citizen journalism as we know it. I am sharing this news article from iPhone using apnews.com.

Update: added pictures using browser client.

User interface optimized for publishing and sharing news stories will win.

Blogged with MessageDance using iPhone | Reply On Twitter

Blogging is time consuming. Folks who have interesting things to say are super busy. It's good to see more innovation in making blog posting more efficient and time saving.  I have talked about in the past why blogging tools have to evolve to make blog posting simple and distributed. In order to make blogging simple we added Reblogging feature for Google Reader users, added multiple email support so you can really push complex blog posts from any location,

There are many more ways to think about making post task easy. Today Zemanta introduced very interesting features in this category. I really like link discovery and image gallery. This validates the point that current blogging tools are not optimized for busy professionals. Increasingly everybody will feel the need for this kind of tool. Good work Zemanta.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

It's always refreshing to see  good discussion on the big picture. Fred Wilson started this thread sharing his social media vision.

This vision is brilliant in it's simplicity but it's a big shift in the grand scheme of human expression. I am sure there will be enough theories on how far reaching change this simple transformation will bring. We are in first inning here. We have seen the impact of social media on main stream media, we are yet to see that play out on other sectors such education, business (B2B or Enterprise 2.0?) and health.

Blogging 1.0 is almost complete and we are going through the birthing process of micro-blogging. Between these two spectrum, there are many forms and shapes of expression tools.

This vision is a long march but there are some interesting opportunities in near future. If you belong to entrepreneurial camp, then there are interesting problems to work on. Let me explain that by expanding on this social media pyramid shared by Don Dodge:

We keep hearing about this 1-10-100 ratio. This supply chain of content gets into action when that lone creator starts the thread. Since this ratio doesn't really translate into any actionable imagery I started calling this submit-to-scroll ratio. Submit-to-scroll ratio is really a contributer-to-lurker ratio. Reason I prefer this terminology as this helps in thinking more about Submit contexts. Slapping Submit sticker in every possible interface we can significantly increase number of creators.

By doing that we can expand Don's pyramid chart to this possibility:

By just focusing on creating more contexts for new users to hit submit button, we can expedite our march towards a fully participatory media.

Social media tools are still lacking when it comes to inviting new social media users. I don't have handy numbers but my guess is that lot of people who moved from Twitter were already familiar with blogging. Big opportunity lies in letting new users join social media way of expressing. When we started MessageDance, our vision was to focus on users who are very comfortable with email as an authoring tool. Extending email content into social networks, blogs and twitter is what we ended up doing. It feels good when users praise our effort for letting them use most well known Submit button!

If you want to add to social media revolution, think about contexts where we can invite new creators. New interfaces for allowing them to hit Submit button. It still amazes me to see many talented people not blogging due to all sorts of silly reasons. Behavior change will happen with the help of new interfaces.

This vision of social media where every online user is creating something is a major shift. We are lucky to be participating in this migration.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Kenneth Chang has written a wonderful story on how Phoenix Lander team is using Twitter.

Dave posted about this development yesterday on Tuesday. Followers take off has been rapid.

I am glad this news demonstrates how new technology is helping NASA connect with younger audience. NASA looks cool and Twitter looks useful to the mainstream.

Blogged with MessageDance using iPhone | Reply On Twitter

First of all it’s open source and that will help create necessary motivation to add innovation around this API.

TechCrunch has good things to say about this plugin.
Download TypePad AntiSpam plugin from here.

Blogged with MessageDance using iMail | Reply On Twitter

I like the sound of it. I have been selling virtues of open source strategy for some time and I know it works.

Facebook will have a convincing claim for leadership in emerging internet operating system if they let other developers run with significant chunk of social networking shell. Shell which hosts all social graph processing. Allow other developers to enhance and implement. This maybe a move to counter Open Social but indirectly it can affect Ning.

Facebook is primarily a database repository.  For database company to go open source means what gets distributed will be marginal. This codebase cannot threaten core offering, which is all  about enriching and protecting social graph (Scoble is always right!). Which means APIs for read and write can go totally open source but actual data repository will be hard to release. Privacy issues will be real.

If I allow conspiracy theory to run for a while then I see a nice complement to Microsoft's cloud computing initiatives. Also possibilities for tight desktop strategy with WPF/Silverlight APIs linked in. Mother and satellite node picture always gets product managers drooling and I can definitely sense similar temptation here.

With enough user base and third party apps in Facebook.com, they seems to be  just ready to pursue bigger architecture ambition.

[Pic thanks to Gapingvoid]

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

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.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Trying to understand evolving signals around silent web. Web which we users leave behind when we share our profile data, friends information and information related to transactional experience.  I think something significant is just around the corner. These signals are coming up in memes such as Implicit Web, Atomization of conversations, Interface for telling and news feeds.

First the idea of Implicit Web, which is a fancy name for a model where systems and online services act on your digital information without explicitly asking for your interaction. Josh Kopelman, First Round VC,  has really amplified core ideas of Implicit Web. He used simple use case to demonstrate how systems are now silently working on our data and creating opportunities for smart orchestrations.

Implicit Web trend received unanimous nod at recent Churchill Club discussion -

Later on Josh expanded on Implicit Web theme by giving examples of “atomization of conversation” meme.

• Why call someone and tell them you're coming to town?  They've seen it on Dopplr. 
• Want to tell someone about your recent trip to England?  Don't bother, they've seen the pictures on Flickr. 
• No need to call me and ask whether the new movie I just saw is any good — you've seen my review on Flickster. 
• Want to know what music I'm listening to right now? — check out iLike.
• Is someone you know suffering from an illness or injury? — stay connected and informed (and offer support) at their Carepage.
  
• Did your friend just open a bottle of wine?  You can stay up to date on what they like (and don't) by following their CellarTracker reviews.
  
• And if that didn't cover it, don't worry, you probably saw it in my Facebook Status updates or Twitter feed.

Online services leveraging user information and then feeding value-addition back in user's social context is what results in atomization of  conversations. Status distribution in lifestreaming format but all acting on the data pool of implicit web. User A saying to User B, just give me your feed and I will know what you are up to!

There are two ends to this. Machine enhanced conversations consumed by my social network and my own intent as smartly captured by new tools.

This discrete transformation of our intent is what is really interesting. Though this drags us into semantic territory. Beauty of this transformation is that it's riding on our natural motivations (What are you doing?) and does not require major format/tag surgery.  It's happening right now under the banner of 140 constraint in Twitter, search-for-interestingness motivation for picture tagging in Flickr or SEO motivation to make sure that the gist of your expression is captured in your blog post title. There are many more examples like that.

What has really expedited the trend towards atomization of conversation is this new input interface, which is greatly influenced by mobile handset constraints.

Interface of constraint, which Cliff Gerrish calls it Interface for telling, is where we are going to see Implicit Web getting most of it’s innovation. I think Cliff's description is by far the best one I have seen in recent time.  This new interface of constraint is really the one which is ensuring best capturing of intent at the entry point. Commonplace expressions like "this restaurant sucks" released from iPhone triggers a chain of event and engages my complete social network. My friends get to see my expression in different contexts - Facebook news feed, Yelp restaurant review, Twitter status, picture in MessageDance so on and so forth. 

Interface of constraint is the starting point of implicit web and this constraint is a business rule which translates user's intent in a flurry of conversations. This is a very significant development and this puts systems like Twitter at the center of next generation computing architecture.  As Adam Green , CEO of Grazr, puts it Twitter is the IBM punchcard of the 21st century.

Implicit web, atomization of conversations, interface for telling and constraint-based read/write designs are all linked. Apply this new understanding in every social applications out there and you will see opportunity for refactoring lot of existing designs, I think that's where you will see, in next 2-3 years, many new startups to come in and create new values. That's where entrepreneurs step in

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter