Posts tagged as: blogosphere

A CTO's guide to Web 2.0

A couple of days ago I had breakfast with a former Chief Technology Officer of a REALLY big telco. He had attended the RSS Alley Geek Dinner the night before, and I could tell that even though he was one generation ahead of me, we had a similar take on software and computer technology. He was in Boston to have meetings with various people as a way of learning more about Web 2.0, so I volunteered to get together with him the next day to share my definition from a fellow CTO's perspective. I won't give his real name, because I didn't ask his permission, and this post isn't really about him. It is more about what any CTO needs to consider when trying to run a software development effort in the current Internet environment. For the purpose of this essay, I'll call him Jack.

The funny thing is that Jack's previous company had about 4,000 times more employees and sales than my company, yet we had exactly the same concerns about the new philosophy of development and business surrounding Web products. The insane thing is that Jack's company was valued at only 100 times that of my company when we got acquired, but that was the craziness of February, 2000.

I talked to Jack about four broad areas of change that any CTO needed to think about, but they all came down to one basic issue, a lack of control. It isn't that CTO's have to be control freaks, although they should be. It is a CTO's job to think ahead to what can go wrong, and try to make sure those blocks don't interfere with whatever technology tasks the company needs to accomplish. In a way, a CTO is like the lawyer for a company's technology, always looking for pitfalls well before they are reached. Web 2.0 forces a company to adopt the one thing any good CTO should loath, dependencies. You have to allow your company to be dependent on other people's code, their voices, their data, and their personal motivations that can't necessarily be overridden by money. Let me go through each of these dependencies:

• Open Source. While much of Web 1.0 was built using Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and languages such as Perl and PHP, the philosophy of Open Source didn't become pervasive until the turn of the century. There are now Open Source components throughout a typical Web 2.0 application. For example, collective voting has applications in many areas beyond the traditional uses in sites like Digg.com or Reddit.com, and is now available through the Pligg software, which is Open Source. Other common Open Source components are found in blogging tools and wikis. Companies also have to consider the desire of their programmers to release their work for the company as Open Source. While this has obvious implications for intellectual property, it also creates a labor force of more productive programmers, because they can bring portions of their code with them when they change jobs.
  
  Jack was understandably concerned about quality control when using code that isn't delivered and supported by a commercial vendor, but the benefits of a larger and more open community of users can deliver a more robust solution than one used by a few hundred or even thousands of commercial customers. Building with Open Source code also means faster development cycles, so instead of working for years and trying to deliver a perfectly specified and tested system, a more incremental approach based on existing components allows you to work towards a solution in an evolutionary fashion. The reality is that a project that takes several years to reach "perfection" has so much invested in it that it may be impossible to stop and rebuild when problems are discovered, so they are just built over with ever increasing layers of patches. In the long run, a CTO using Open Source code does have to reject the traditional Not Invented Here syndrome, and accept a greater dependence on other people's code. The trade off in shorter development cycles is worth it in my opinion.
• Blogs. Web 2.0 also brings about a shift in the way a company's technology efforts are communicated to the outside world. Instead of thinking in terms of versions that are announced at long intervals through a traditional PR campaign, the use of corporate blogs helps customers stay much closer to the development process. This also means a cluster of independent bloggers interested in an area of technology can form around the companies working in this space. These tech bloggers have replaced the traditional trade press. It means that a CTO is dependent on voices that are not as tightly controlled as in the past, but these bloggers can also act as an important buffer when problems arise by explaining to the wider circle of users that the company is indeed working on solutions.
• XML. The most common form of XML currently in use is RSS, but OPML is on the rise, and RDF based standards, such as Atom, are also gaining ground. In the long run, some form of global database resembling the Semantic Web will materialize. The key to all of this use of XML is the availability of a company's data outside the corporate database. While much is made of the emergence of APIs, it is the XML data that is available from these APIs that will cause the real changes in technological architectures. Just as Web 1.0 was built on loosely joined websites connected through HTTP and HTML, Web 2.0 will be built on loosely joined data structures based on data produced by many sources. So instead of a CTO building an application on a tightly controlled proprietary database schema, it will be necessary to plan for dependencies on data over which there is no control.
  
  As a long-time database guy, Jack found that disturbing. I share his concern, but what must be understood is that users will demand this type of cross application sharing of data, because it is their data that is being combined from multiple sources. Sure there is a greater possibility of failure, and this must be handled by a CTO to allow for soft failures, instead of hard crashes. The one great fallacy that the XML proponents adhere to is the perfectability of XML data. Their motivation in building a Semantic Web is the goal of a Web that isn't filled with invalid data. I don't think that will ever happen, so a CTO should plan for badly formed XML, as is already the case in the RSS world.
• Fear of excessive valuation. The traditional way to motivate developers, especially in a start-up situation, has been to offer them stock options. While that is still useful, the arithmetic has changed, because programmers who went through the Dotbomb have a deep fear of hype. A business journalist who was a former Dotcom employee recently told me that she still suffered from post traumatic stress disorder that prevented her from considering a start-up job. In the Web 1.0 period, there was an expectation of an IPO that would yield valuations in the hundreds of miliions of dollars. If a Web 2.0 company gets acquired for $10 - $20 million, that may be great for the founders, but it doesn't do much for a coder with a few thousand options. It is not just that the value of software companies have dropped. There is now deep suspicion of any claims of higher valuations in the future. Without the promise of getting rich, it is harder to persuade developers to put in the 18-20 hour days that helped build Web 1.0. This means that the CTO is more dependent on an employee's personal motivations, such as being able to build code that can earn them greater fame in the Open Source world.

Notice that I haven't mentioned any of the popular themes of Web 2.0, such as social bookmarking and tagging. These have their place, but I'm skeptical that there really will be a mass market for meta-meta-bookmarking sites. I don't think that the real contribution of Web 2.0 will be these specific areas of functionality. I do believe, however, that the tools and techniques I have described here will be used to build the next generation of products and sites, and that these will be what are used by the generation of users who are entering college now, and will be entering the workforce 4 to 5 years from now.

Is the blogosphere a conversation or a Rorschach test?

A couple of weeks ago I made what I assumed was an innocent suggestion that we set up a blog for memetracker authors to discuss their philosophies. I explicitly said "There is no right answer, but it would be great to see the motivations of these authors." Unfortunately, I also used what I quickly realized was a huge trigger for bloggers, "We need an advisory board to help arbitrate the selection of memetracker participants on this blog." This sentence was immediately interpreted as me trying to set up an advisory board to select who could build a memetracker and how they should work, as if that were really possible. I backed down from this blog idea as soon as I saw how I was being misread, but I was surprised as to why I was being misread.

Yesterday I got an email from Laurence Timms, author of the Chuquet memetracker, who had just read my post suggesting the memetracker blog, and wanted to discuss my idea of institutionalizing a single method of creating memetrackers. I was able to explain why this was the exact opposite of my intent, but I was again curious as to why he had formed this opinion. I believe that "the customer is always right," and even when they are wrong, there must be a reason why they formed their opinion. Laurence seems like a very bright guy, so what had I said to mislead him? I went back and reread the post carefully, and saw not just the "advisory board" trigger, but also the word "institutionalized." I had used it to explain that I wanted to see discussions between memetracker authors "institutionalized," meaning giving them a more structured method of talking, instead of spreading their comments to each other all over the blogosphere. Laurence admitted that he had read this quickly and formed the wrong impression. The irony of a memetracker author quickly skimming a post and reacting to keywords was obvious. I can now see that this is a common problem with blog readers. I do it too. When you have hundreds of posts to read, you skim them looking for the words that can give you their meaning.

A great example of this fast reaction model, is Kent Newsome. Kent, please read this entire paragraph, and take a deep breath before responding. Also, I'm smiling as I write this, see :). He was one of the first people to react negatively to my original memetracker post, and recently explained how quickly he reacted, "For example, when I saw Adam Green's memetracker blog post, I just about fell over my chair trying to get a response written and published." He made some very good points about the problems with an advisory board in relaton to this discussion blog, but I can't help thinking his first post was much more about his feelings about committees in general. Now Kent, this is the part I hope you have waited to read before posting. I like Kent's blog, and he seems very fair. I'm not trying to attack him or provoke a flame war. I'm still smiling :). I just think his reaction demonstrates the haste with which many blog posts are written, and the importance of the blogger's reaction to triggers, like "advisory board."

I do the same thing. I've gone off half-cocked a few times since I started blogging, and I'm sure I'll do it again. I now understand when reading and writing posts that this rapid reaction problem must be taken more into account. The funny thing is that memetrackers exacerbate the problem. I remember when InfoWorld magazine went from monthly to weekly publication. The entire software mail-order business shifted gears and started cutting prices at a much quicker pace. In the same way, memetrackers now encourage bloggers to rush out their reactions to a hot topic. It's as if we are all Slashdot readers racing to get in the first post. Maybe we can all adopt a policy of taking a deep breath, waiting 30 seconds, and then rereading the post carefully, before reacting to something that hits one of our buttons. No, I'm not say "everyone must adopt this policy", breath slowly, and read the word "maybe" again. :)

Nativetext: Delivering RSS feeds to the rest of the world

Yesterday I had the strange experience of finding a link to one of my posts on a blog that was part Dutch and part English. My quote was in the original English, but the commentary by the blog's author, Fred Zelders, was in Dutch. What's could this mean? If a reader of this blog could understand my quote, why not write the whole blog in English? Today I had lunch with James Cann, founder of Nativetext, who explained that this phenomenon is exactly what he wants to harness as the engine to translate the blogosphere from English into many other languages. James told me that there are bloggers like Zelders all over the world who see it as their mission to bring English blogs across the language barrier to their native country. Zelders probably speaks fluent English, but prefers to use his native language. His readers are the same. Beyond this boundary of multi-lingual bloggers, however, are many more readers whose English isn't good enough to read my blog without having it translated.

What James hopes to do with Nativetext is provide a set of web based tools that will make it easy for a blogger like Zelders to grab an RSS feed for a blog he is interested in and produce a translated version. In effect, Nativetext would be a multi-lingual Feedburner which takes English RSS feeds and serves copies of these feeds in many other languages. The interesting part of James' idea is that he doesn't plan on paying either the author of the original English feed or the translator who produces the new version. He'll also allow owners of the original feed to take the translated versions and serve them on their own sites free of charge. In fact, James is honest enough to admit that he doesn't even know how he will get paid.

I can hear the snarks warming up now. Yet another kumbaya singing, don't worry about money, Web 2.0 flight of fancy. Personally, I think James is right in not worrying about a business model. He is trying to solve a big problem, and if he suceeds, people will be throwing money at him. He can come up with a business model then, whether it is charging corporations, magazines, or newspapers to translate their content and passing a percentage on to the translators, or selling the whole thing to Rupert Murdoch. The important thing is creating an infrastructure that will attract a community of users to do the translation and provide quality control. Why should they do this work for free? Because they want to bring the blogosphere to citizens of their country, and maybe gain some recognition for doing so. Why should bloggers allow their blogs to be translated for free? Because they are already giving away their content in an RSS feed, so this just means more subscribers.

Now an interesting question emerges. At what point in reading this did you think about using Nativetext to go the other way and translate Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese blogs into English? Did you even consider it? I actually didn't until I was halfway through writing this. I guess I'm just an ugly American, but now that I have thought about it, it is pretty exciting. Do Chinese tech bloggers think Google is out of control? What are French political bloggers saying about George Bush? I can't wait to find out.

I see a Tech Memeorandum Sunday coming

Conditions are ripe. There is no real news. There is the whole Ryan King-Doc Searles "who invented camps" thread, and Kent Newsome's link love thread, which is so close to my blog cluster post in tone and content, I wish I had seen it earlier so I could have included a link to it. Some time about 8:00pm EST the blogosphere will tremble and Memeorandum will consolidate the whole thing into one Gather-like mega thread.

Building a blog cluster

I sat down for coffee with a friend the other day who was starting a new blog and wanted advice on getting readers. I explained a simple approach for building a cluster of bloggers around an area of interest. The steps are easy, and should work every time. The tricky part in writing about this is all the trigger words. Using words like formula, plan, scheme, pattern to describe this way of acting, and the results as success, traffic, links, career advancement is guaranteed to raise howls of indignation from the blogosphere. The funny thing is that the volume of the howlers is closely correlated with Technorati rank. Maybe the people who are most popular now didn't have to do any work to reach their current level, maybe they have a natural gift, maybe they are so pure of heart that God grants them readers. All I know is that the people I talk to, as opposed to the people who cry foul on their blogs, hate the idea of writing a blog that nobody reads.

So here are the simple steps:

• Pick a few basic themes that interest you, and on which you think you have original opinons.
• If you find it hard to start writing new posts, follow a reactive approach where you are commenting on others with similar interests at first.
• Every time you find a blog in one of your interest areas, subscribe to it in your aggregator.
• When you have time to write something, read the most recent posts in your aggregator, and pick one you agree or disagree with.
• Write a post that includes a link back to the original post and possibly a short quote. Then add at least one paragraph of original writing based on your research or opinions on the subject.
• The person who you linked to will notice it in one of his or her vanity searches, so watch for them to link back to you some time later.
• After linking to a blogger a few times, wait for an opportunity to send an email that either makes a joke or says something that belongs more in direct communication than on a blog.
• If that person responds, then make a habit of building a back channel of communication when things get heated in your mutual area of interest.
• In time you should see a cluster of bloggers who are linking to each other in your area. When one of these bloggers appears on a memetracker site, be sure to link to that post. If members of the cluster value your participation, they will link to you when they post on this issue. The memetracker algorithm should notice this and add you to its database.
• If you have a good back channel relationship with a blogger, don't be afraid to ask for a link when you post something you feel is really interesting. A group of linked posts will attract more interest from the memetrackers.

If you can write in fairly complete sentences, and have a decent sense of humor, this [substitute synonym of choice for formula] is almost guaranteed to work over time.

Blogging as a spiritual pursuit without any consideration of having readers is perfectly fine, but there is no law that says this is the only acceptable behavior. I'm afraid that people who insist it is may have other motivations of which they are unaware. If you do want readers, don't be afraid to do a little extra work to gain them. To make my ethics perfectly clear; I oppose lying, cheating, and stealing, but building relationships out of mutual self-interest is acceptable. Notice I said "mutual." As long as you are adding value to the conversation, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Let the cries of "Suck up!" begin.

Revenge of the M-list

I chose this site's title and tagline, because I am fascinated by the social and technical forces causing change on the Internet. One aspect of that fascination is the role of the blogosphere's A-list. At first there was a single list covering all bloggers, but as the blogosphere has segmented along lines of interest, such as tech and politics, distinct A-lists have emerged. But the principle has stayed the same, within each niche there is a small clique that is read the most, and gets the most traffic and links.

It is easy to see how this clique's rank is maintained by reading Robert Scoble's blog (no general link is required, because you are already subscribed). I've never met Scoble, but I'm sure I'd like him in person. I don't think he'd let you not like him in person. He does, however, have an annoying habit of writing "That's great [A-lister]!" posts, a phenomenon known as getting scobled. For example, today he starts his post on the new Tech Memeorandum design with "Hey, Gabe, love the new design of Memeorandum!" For the technical quibblers, Gabe Rivera is not an official A-List blogger, since he rarely blogs, but his site gives him honorary status. (Oops, mustn't piss off Gabe. I love the redesign too, Gabe!)

Scobling is practiced by many A-listers, which is best demonstrated by the huge A-list threads that develop on Memeorandum whenever Mike Arrington has a party or releases a product. Since traffic and therefore rank is determined by the number of links, scobling is clearly self-reinforcing. This leads to accusations of A-listers being guilty of gatekeeping. Darwin explained this in terms of mating habits, where members of the same species have common behaviors, such as times of activity and feeding patterns that encourage intra-species sexual activity. Ironically, even hate sites reinforce the rank of A-listers.

This begs the question, how did A-listers get on the list in the first place? Darwin's response to the same question applied to origin of new species was that some new competitive pressure or geographic isolation must have emerged to cause the standard lines of association to break down. In the blogosphere this takes the form of a new technological advance in the tech world, or a new scandal in the political world. I've seen many blogosphere analysts use this argument to explain how an A-lister emerged after a burst of blogging surrounding a story of extreme interest.

I think there is also a more gradual phenomenon that I call the revenge of the M-list. When a new area of interest develops, such as what we are now seeing with OPML reading lists, a group of mutually linking bloggers emerges. If one of these bloggers is an A-lister, then the majority of the links point to his or her posts on the subject. If, on the other hand, the inter-linkers are all middle ranked bloggers, let's call them M-listers, they tend to link to each other fairly liberally. As new people become interested in the subject, they find these clusters of posts (memetracking sites do a great job of revealing M-list clusters), and also link to many of the blogs in the cluster, since there is no one recognizable A-lister to link to exclusively. In time the M-lister who is most prolific on this subject, but not necessarily the best writer or scobler, acquires even more links. Eventually this blogger becomes the authority on the subject, and even A-listers take note and deliver links. The resulting accumulation of links are enough to reach A-list status. Thus we have a slow bubbling up from the middle, rather than the overnight success story so often told by analysts.

There is a simple experiment to test this theory. First all the posts appearing on a memetracker can be extracted, and the bloggers separated by Technorati rank into A-list and M-list. Then the inter-links can be analyzed to see if M-listers do indeed form clusters of links with other M-listers. We already know that A-listers inter-link, but that can be tested for as well. Finally, these groups of M-list linkers can be followed over time to see if any individuals rise in rank to A-list status. A group of M-listers not in a cluster should also be followed as a control. I'm planning on working on Technorati rank analysis of Tech Memeorandum posts this week, so I'll see if I can contribute some scripts or XML data files that can assist in this experiment.

Suck up follow up

Guy Kawasaki has posted a brilliant response to the A-list bloggers who were shocked that anyone has to suck up to a blogger. They surely didn't suck up to anyone to reach their exalted posts, and now don't expect anyone to suck up to them. No. Everyone who attends their book parties and barbeques are close personal friends with no ulterior motives.

Visit Guy's page to add your own caption to his suck up cartoon. This is perfect Guy, skewer them and keep smiling the whole time. Guy helped reinvent PR in his early days at Apple. For anyone who didn't get to see it then, you have a treat in store for you as he takes on the A-list as his way of getting to the top of it.

OK, OK, Advisory Board was a bad choice of words

The worst problem about being the new kid in class is that I don't know who used to date whom, and who got drunk and passed out at the prom. So I sometimes (often? No, I think sometimes is closer) find myself saying something that makes everyone cringe. Paul Montgomery has pointed out that my saying there should be an advisory board to help add people to the memetracker blog I wanted to create was a bad choice of words, and he's absolutely right. I see that there has been so much angst over power trips, that any perception of an attempt to grab power is bound to rub people the wrong way. I should have realized that. What I meant was that just having a few people participate was not a good idea, and having anyone who can write a script that handles RSS may also be too broad. So having a few people help arbitrate seemed like a good idea. I have to keep being reminded that the top ranks of the blogosphere is nothing like the kumbaya creed it espouses, and power plays are assumed by all actions. Paul is also right that it should be a wiki. So does anyone want to create a wiki on memetracking and make it available? Having made the suggestion, I will politely back into the corner where I belong.

How not to suck up to a blogger

Guy Kawasaki has listed some of the techniques that you can use to get bloggers to write about your new product. My favorite from Guy's list is to send an email with the following message:

It's easy to see why Guy is the first person enrolled in the tech evangelists hall of fame. He also has some important advice on how not to suck up to bloggers: Let me state this advice more forcefully. NEVER spam a blogger. In the past week I've received three emails aimed at getting me to write about a new website, two one of which is clearly are a bulk mailings from people someone who may never have read my blog. I could be flattered to be on a list of tech bloggers who are considered spam worthy, but I have a very low threshold for spam. When it comes to my personal account, I always apply filters immediately that trash email from the sender's address. I'm going to start applying the same practice for email sent to this blog's address, but I'll take it one step further. I'm going to produce my own tech blacklist of companies that send me spam about their new product. If a company lands on this list, I will never mention them in a post, forever. I won't include Megite and Edgeio this time, but they have it has now been warned.

So, am I becoming a blog diva? Do I think I'm so popular now that I have to ask to be left alone? Of course not. I love getting email from people building cool new software. I'm just afraid of what will happen if every new Web 2.0 company starts following the lead of Edgeio and Megite. I can just see it now, some PR flack at a Techcrunch Silicon Valley party bragging, "Dude, we spammed all those tech bloggers, and you should see the links we got back!"

Here's a better method. When a blogger writes something that you like, or that might relate to the area in which you want to launch a product, send an email with a supporting comment, or a joke about the content of the post. If they respond, then follow this up some time later with another. Even better, do this on your blog. Then, when you have a product you want to hype, go ahead and send an email, but you still have to make it an individualized message. At least have the decency to get your programmer to build an email merge that includes some details related to that specific blogger.

So feel free to contact me (adam AT darwinianweb DOT com) about your new site or product. Just be warned, if it is clearly a mass mailing, it will backfire.

(Update: Mike Arrington has reminded me that I must have submitted my email address to the Edgeio landing page at some point. At age 50 I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday, so I obviously forgot this fact. I've crossed out the references to Edgeio, which I'm sure is a great product. My bad. Young people still say that, don't they? In fact, Mike has offered me a phone demo. Maybe he'll even let me sit on his couch some day. )

Mary Hodder is right about advisory boards

Mary Hodder's post on the FON advisory board correctly points out the problems with compensating advisors with stock. I don't know what the perfect solution is, but she does point towards it:

If the stock isnt worth the bother and implied conflicts, shouldn't bloggers adopt a code that says "I can blog or be financially compensated, but not both"? If companies really want advice more than PR, and I believe Mary when she says this, then they won't mind losing the benefits of that blogger's influence if they have to pay them for their time. If bloggers don't care about the money, and I believe the FON advisory board when they say this, then they won't mind swearing off any future financial gain.

The only thing I object to is trying to have it both ways. This most clearly shows up when the word "yet" creeps into the disclosure. When a blogger says "I haven't been promised anything yet", or even worse "I haven't been paid anything yet," so it can't possibly influence me, he implies that either he is stupid or thinks we are. A better solution would be for bloggers to tell companies at the start, "I won't ever take any money from you, so I will be able to blog about this", or "I need to be paid for my time, so I won't ever be able to blog about this."

Doc: Let one new blogger through the gate each day

Doc Searls is involved in a discussion with Seth Finkelstein over the role of a-list bloggers as gatekeepers, and he seems genuinely concerned about this problem. He asks how he can change this. "I'll just add that, if ya'll want to subvert some hierarchies, including the one you see me in now, I'd like to help." The answer is simple Doc, just find a good post from a blogger you haven't noticed before and link to it. You can direct a firehose of traffic to a blog by doing this. On the basis of karma alone it is a good idea. Think about how you would have felt if one of the cool crowd in high school had asked the buck-toothed kid to sit with them at lunch.

Edgeio, Tech Memeorandum and buzz management

Mathew Ingram makes an interesting connection between the current FON fuss and the launch of Edgeio, a company led by uber-techblogger Mike Arrington. It isn't a conflict of interest or lack of disclosure on Mike's part, he has been completely upfront about his connection to Edgeio. It is more a matter of Mike's ability to control the buzz, because of his prominent position in the tech blogosphere. As a devoted observer of Tech Memeorandum, I can assure you that if Mike, or one of his pals, like Dave Winer post on Edgeio, it is almost guaranteed to move to a high position on TM. This in turn attracts additional bloggers who are both eager to pile onto a TM story with good placement and to solidify their friendship with Mike. One reaction to this is probably a theme that has appeared in reaction to the FON story, which is that these aren't journalists, so who cares? Well, how about companies that are trying to compete with Edgeio, and don't have the backing of such powerful bloggers? This goes beyond the issue of a-listers acting as if they are still in high school, it is about serious money and people's professional careers. Again, I'm not accusing Mike or Dave of any wrongdoing. Both of them made their financial interest completely clear, and Dave is supporting a friend, which is even more important to him than the money. I'm sure glad, however, that I'm not trying to form a company to compete with them, because they have a powerful control over the buzz. This may be like complaining about the weather, but hey, I've been a Bostonian for over 25 years, and that is something we do all the time.

FON fuss may have been blogola

I couldn't figure out the explosion of postings on FON that took over Tech Memeorandum on Monday. Now the WSJ has a story claiming that FON may have primed the blogosphere pump by putting some key tech bloggers on the payroll through an advisory board. Were all of the bloggers who posted on this story on the take? Of course not. Did some members of this advisory board post about FON without disclosing their financial relationship? The WSJ thinks so, and that could be very bad. I smell Forbes and BusinessWeek cover stories at the least. Even worse, this is an election year, and both the Democrats and the Republicans would love to change the subject to someone outside of Congress being paid off.

(via Paul Kedrosky)

Update: I've written an extensive post on just what was said by the bloggers involved. The result of this research has caused me to strikethrough the words "the payroll through" above.

My favorite new blog

The best blog I've discovered in a while is by Paul Montgomery, the founder of the new Tinfinger search site. There is too little data in the search engine to properly evaluate it, but Paul has a clear and precise writing style that I really appreciate. He also isn't afraid to take on some of the sacred cows of blogging. He can be tough without being nasty or snarky. Totally subscription worthy.

Aggregating the aggregator aggregators

Mike Arrington collects a list of all the meta-uber-aggregators. There must be a more powerful word than "echo chamber" we can use. It sure isn't a conversation as others have described it. How about the "Sessum Principle?" I have a great idea for a new site. I've started extracting the links from Tech Memeorandum for use in mashups. Maybe I could do the same for all the other meme hunters, and then I could cross reference them to create the ultimate list of blog buzz. No, wait, that would be even worse, wouldn't it?

The blogosphere is dead, long live the blogosphere

Jeneane Sessum adandons the role of "tech blogger" long enough to remember when she was a person who blogged. Funny, heartfelt, bitter-sweet, all rolled up into one great post.

It's almost a shame that this will end up on Tech Memeorandum, because the race to game TM is exactly what she is crying out against. So, if you feel the urge to pile on to this one, stop and ask yourself why, and think about what has been lost. I've only been blogging a few months, so I guess I have no right to say any of this, but Jeneane has made me see what has been lost.

Jeneane, whatever has changed, you are "writing" now and you sincerely touched me, so maybe it isn't lost.

Mike Arrington bares his soul

This seems to be the day for blogebrity revelations. Techcrunch's Mike Arrington has exposed the trials and tribulations of being the most powerful tech blogger in the world on his personal Crunchnotes blog. Very revealing. It's like reading Jack Nicholson's blog and seeing him complain about not getting laid.

I didn't realize that there is an actual A-List

I always thought that the A-list for bloggers was metaphorical. Now I see that it really exists, along with a B-list and C-list. I feel like I just stumbled on the Free Mason's site and found the actual plans to take over the world. (via Jeneane Sessum)

Bloggers and assumed context

One problem in dealing with bloggers that have been well known for awhile is that they have an assumed context that they and their readers understand, but can't be found without reading the entire archive. I first noticed this at the Social Architecture conference last fall. I sat next to an A-list blogger at dinner, and kept asking questions that she assumed everyone knew the answer to. She seemed so non-plussed that I finally said "I'm sorry, you are obviously very famous, but I've never read your blog. Can I just ask questions as if I didn't know everthing you've written?" I've started to fall into the same trap. I had lunch with a blogger this week, and we kept trading citations from our respective blogs. I saw this type of citation speak at Harvard, where grad students would respond to someone in class by simply saying "Hegel," and everyone would nod. I was like, "Yeah, so what about Hegel? What did he say? How does it apply?" Sometimes an assumed context can actually get in the way of an engaging conversation.

Now that I've gotten your attention

Shelley Powers has clarified her initial reaction to my observation on the differences between male and female bloggers. She is now convinced that I was being a "dork." She's right, and my Chick Blogs post proved it. So if I knew I was running the risk of offending some people why would I do it? Because I'm writing this blog to learn how the Web has changed in the four years I dropped out of the computer industry to go back to school. One of the most important changes has been the emergence of the blogosphere. I am learning how the blogosphere works by immersing myself in it.

That still doesn't explain the condescending "You go girl," or the even more risky "Chick Blogs." What I have learned so far in blogging is that asking direct questions gets absolutely zero response. I tried that at first and nothing happened. Now I'm learning the shape of the blogosphere by prodding it around the edges. When I saw the difference (yes, I do think there is a difference and I'll get back to it later) between the reactions of male and female bloggers to the use of RSS by Top10Sources, I thought this was an interesting boundary to explore. What was really interesting is that I got links back within hours according to Technorati. So I commented on that with the chick blogs post that finally pushed Shelley into slapping me back down. It is worth mentioning that I corrected myself in that post when I realized that I should have used the term "person" instead of "guy" in an earlier post. I thanked Anne Zelenka for the correction too.

The use of the term "chick" was a calculated risk. Before I posted it I did some research, and I found plenty of female bloggers using the term. I was also making an allusion to "chick lit," which is one of my favorite genres. I knew I ran the risk of getting deeper into a hole (here I go again, I've learned that can be a dangerous word also because of the possible metaphorical uses), but I wanted to see what would happen. I still got positive links back, except for Shelley. But her post was clear enough to set me straight, so "chick" is out.

Now, what about my original premise that there actually are differences between male and female blogging styles? Since I've now got Shelley's attention, I'll use her latest update as an example. I find it revealing that she said I was "being a dork," not "was a dork." The distinction must be deliberate, since she seems to care a great deal about precision in language. I think a male blogger would not have made that subtle distinction between my specific actions and my permanent character. Shelley is giving me a chance to learn my lesson. She also manages to emphasive my gender by using "Mr. Green" four times in referring to me. That has a great clenched teeth tone, while still maintaining a facade of politeness. Well written, Shelly, and I'm not trying to be condescending, I mean it. Finally, she says that "diverse discussions" are more valuable. That sure seems like an acknowledgement that there are differences between male and female bloggers. Exactly what are those differences if it isn't about being "nurturing?" Well, I guess that is what I have to learn. I hope other women help me with this effort. As my kids would say in a Seinfeldian reference, "We're growing, and learning, and we may even hug."

Everyone has their own Googlebase

The initial reaction in the blogosphere is very different from mine. Most people are reacting to the mere fact that Google has a "database," and filtering it through their personal view of Google, Ebay, Microsoft, etc. Few are actually looking at how it works, and the ones who do often say that they are intimidated. Dude! have you ever SEEN a database?

One problem, which Bosworth may have realized more than I, is that today's end-users may actually be less application savvy than even the average user in 1985. Many of them, especially bloggers, even A-list bloggers, use the computer purely as a communication and publishing device. They are extremely adept at IM, blogging, email, IRC, and even the new areas like tags, but they probably have no reason to use Excel, and I wonder how many users under the age of 25 have ever seen Access or any other database of similar complexity.

I'm not proclaiming the dumbing down of the average computer user, just the shifting of their experience to text oriented, social interactions. So are they ready for the type of database I want? Will they ever be? Surely if we have to start with tags and work our way back up to even flat files, which are still way beyond the capability of Googlebase, this is going to be a long education process. But there are still going to be application developers. Will they be solely professionals? Will we not see a new wave of user-developers emerge on the web as we saw during the PC revolution?

I still think Googlebase has to become much more, and that they realize it. For example, to drive the Google maps API, which is red-hot right now, you need a list of locations. Surely they understand that that list should be stored in Googlebase. So they must be planning to deliver the ability to store and manage lists. Which means they must deliver the capability of a flat file database at a minimum.

Book Note: The Renaissance Computer

In chapter 6, "The Early Modern Search Engine," Thomas Corns shows that the new technology of print represented a threat to the power of the monarchy. He quotes the instructions of James I to the authors of what would become the King James Bible. (Note: you might find the text more understandable by reading the letter U as a V.)

The "Geneua translation" James I referred to was the Geneva Bible, which was the principle vehicle for the spreading of the Protestant faith in the sixteenth century. It wasn't only the text of this bible that allowed the individual to approach God on his own terms without the intervening authority of the state church, it was the extensive marginalia and commentaries included with the text that showed him the "right" way to read the bible. (A sample page of the edition of the Geneva Bible mentioned by James I is here, and the complete text with commentaries is here.)

The analogy to the transition from the Mainstream Media to the world of blogs is clear. Where the MSM largely served as a pipeline for communicating the messages of those in power, the blogosphere adds a layer of commentary and analysis that can change and even refute this message. Corn doesn't necessarily see this layer of hyperlinks as beneficial. Although he is speaking specifically about academic uses of hyperlinks, his comment can be applied equally well to what can be called the "tyranny of the blogosphere."