Is the blogosphere a conversation or a Rorschach test?
Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006
at 7:30 AM
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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. :)
OK, OK, Advisory Board was a bad choice of words
Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
at 11:09 AM
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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.
Forming a memetracker community
Posted on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
at 11:23 AM
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I was traveling on Saturday and driving all over Mountain View on Sunday collecting party supplies, so I completely missed the Battle of the Memetrackers challenge that Steve Rubel staged over the weekend. I don't agree with his methodology, but that is beside the point. What was more interesting was the dialog engaged in by Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum and Kevin Burton of TailRank in the comments of Steve's first post on this challenge and a later one as well.
Gabe: "The software deliberately omits links to posts ("memes"?) that it discovers, in order to improve readability. The idea is that not every post that links to X deserves to be read as commentary on X."
Kevin: "Gabe. So are you saying you indexed the posts and discarded the links? Memeo misses posts which I personally found relevant and wanted to follow."
Gabe: "Kevin: yes, indeed. That's not to say I index everything, but not all posts indexed are shown. For instance, the "links for 2006-02-19" type posts don't make for good reading and are routinely filtered."
Kevin: "Gabe. We ignore posts of the type "links for 2006-02-19" as well. I consider most of these invalid though. What I was mostly talking about was legit posts. TailRank picked up links which were legit which you didn't add to your cluster."
Personally, I find this stuff fascinating, which may say a lot about me. I'd love to see this type of discussion institutionalized in some way, and hopefully have a few of the other memetrackers brought into the discussion. What I'd like to propose is the creation of a group blog on which Gabe, Kevin, and a few other memetracker creators could discuss their philosophy of what a site of this type should do. There wouldn't be any discussion of algorithms and "secret sauce," but surely issues like whether a thread should be removed after 24 hours is worthy of discussion. (Gabe says yes on this, Kevin says no.) There is no right answer, but it would be great to see the motivations of these authors. The posts could be at any frequency, and hopefully the colloborative effort would alleviate the defensiveness Gabe sometimes demonstrates and the combativeness Kevin seems prone to. Comments would be turned on for this site, which would be where the rest of the blogosphere would have their say.
The benefits to the readers of these sites would be better products, and hopefully the creators of the sites would find the same benefit. Another benefit to the site creators would be a better understanding by the public of their individual philosophies. I'm actually more interested in the benefits to creators of new memetracker sites. It should be clear that this genre is in its infancy, and I can only imagine what would happen is some bright coder were able to observe this discussion over a decent period of time, internalize the issues, and then build on that understanding. Everyone would benefit.
We need an advisory board to help arbitrate the selection of memetracker participants on this blog. John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, and Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media have agreed to join me in this effort, and I think we may need one or two more. For the sake of fairness, this group should be replaced periodically.
Appropriately enough, the discussion of this idea will probably appear on the memetracker sites.
