Blogs

Dan Farber reports that Mike Arrington said at Chris Pirillo's Hawkeyedex that "Web 2.0 is not an echo chamber".

Dan Farber reports that Mike Arrington said at Chris Pirillo's Hawkeyedex that "Web 2.0 is not an echo chamber".

Dan Farber reports that Mike Arrington said at Chris Pirillo's Hawkeyedex that "Web 2.0 is not an echo chamber".

Pinch hitting for Pedro Bourbon... Manny Mota! Mota. Mota.

Imagine having a fund that will soon be able to spin-off 8 billion dollars a year and NEVER RUN OUT OF MONEY. With that kind of capability, I might be inclined to leave my day job a little sooner than 2 years from now. That, and the folks at the old company would probably be happier too.

And now you know why wealth creation can and should be a force for good.

... and critical post about the opening of small, introspective, "non-commercial" and/or guerrilla commercial "unconferences", with the same-bunch-of-faces-talking-to-the-same-audience and navel-gazing in a feast of egomaniacal self-congratulation and small-group wannbe adulation season... But what's the point?

I do marvel at how this week's WhatTheCon and next week's Hawkeyedex keep getting the notice they do. I'm thinking of starting up VanityFest next year... It's probably already been service marked.

My Concept? Everyone sends in $300 in registration fees but does not actually attend the event. We send take-out meals to the registrees and they listen to podcasts (all of them by me) of what the conference would have been like if they had been there. No announcements of any kind will be allowed and there will a strict "no blogging" rule.

By the way, if you don't know what the heck I'm talking about in this post, consider yourself lucky. No links have been provided; to protect the innocent.

High profile bloggers, floggers and vloggers continue to "make news" merely with a shift in their presence. Only this time that presence is largely virtual and their audience is only a subset of the greater populace at large.

The concentration of notice that blogging stars are garnering -- in what curmudgeonly, computer journalists call the "attention space" -- seems peculiarly American. If media is going to be so different this time then why do we need stars? Why is this revolution so different from motion pictures or radio or TV?

I was reminded of this while listening to this extraordinary edition of This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte. Leo is a great broadcaster; however TWIT 57 is chaotically awful. Cheers to Leo for putting it out. I stopped listening somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes into it and moved on to some IT Conversations stuff. Listeners have complained about the sound quality (Leo has offered the raw mixes of each participant to the web at large for a remix) unfortunately the show was not about sound quality but sound quantity. You either yelled like a Calcanis or you needed to be obsequiously turtle-necky.

While computer media needs to be contrarily compelling, it needs to be more a show case for the art of humanity than a yell-festing spectacle in some uber-retail megastore. Americans have Fox News to void that fill. I think in his heart Leo probably understands that. Still, spectacle assuages ego much more than community and so we experience this "look at me" thing over and over and over. The best computer media is that pass-around, viral stuff -- not the star-building wannabe rocket-booming stuff. If I want to watch John Stewart or Samantha Bee, I'll just turn on John Stewart or Samantha Bee.

Finally. Something to wake me from my slumber.

Reading about this here and here, I was immediately struck by this question:

Why is Scoble leaving the biggest stage he will ever -- I mean EVER -- have?

People will say money or stock options, and they were probably factors. It may have more to do with his son, which might be the best reason in the world. I sure hope it's about family because Mr. Scoble, you achieved notariety in the tech world with Microsoft the likes of which will not be seen again.

And with that, perhaps I have answered the question. What more could Robert do for Microsoft? It's not like MSFT stock options would hold him there, given that 1999 is so seven years ago. It's not like he hasn't been banging the drum for the company as loudly as any one man can. A life transforming experience like the death of his mother would stir him to his core; it might cause him to think more about tomorrow and less about today.

Here's the thing. It's a personal choice and if it blows up in a month, it will still be the right choice. Life is a twisty thrill.

Content in this post has been edited and transferred to the Current Thinkers List at currentthinking.com. You can find Ethan Johnson in the blogging and writing category in the list.

Tech community chatter is rife with blather about the latest technorati report from David Sifry. The stats that technorati collects are useful but they are not the kind of numbers that trumpet the Level! of! Interest! that many techie-type bloggers are raving about.

According to Sifry, the numbers show that 9% of all blogs are spam. This is an assuredly low estimate. Any number of relevant test searches can verify that. Try a search related to some popular tech topic and see if you don't get a return of 50 to 60% spam blogs or duplicitous phantom search sites in the top 100 items returned. If you get 20% bunkum, you're doing pretty well. The telling statistic is in the number of blogs that are updated within 3 months of initial tracking. Only 55% of all blogs are active after that time period. So forget the "there's more than 35 million blogs!" statistic.

What about the contention that 3.9 million bloggers are updating at least weekly? If, as I surmise, a spam or junk blog wants to be perceived as "relevant", they will be sure to update on a timely basis. My searches are turning up a preponderance of junk or auto generated nonsense across a range of engines. Services like PubSub have become inundated with splog traffic and are becoming increasingly ineffective. Even if all 3.9 million of the weekly updaters were legitimate humans posting original material the vast majority of that stuff is oriented toward either:
- banter ("yor hairdoo is kewl")
- rant ("politician so-and-so is worse than Hitler...")
- innuendo (vox populi gossip, see also "banter" above)
- repetition (check out all the "me too!" posts on tech.memeorandum.com, heck even this post may qualify...)

What statistics from the universe of collections cannot capture is relevance. For instance, it is purported that 60% of all baseball cards created -- ever -- have been created since 1999. What does that mean for collectors? Anything in that latter period is of virtually no significance whatsoever. Volume of content does not determine its value. The fact that technorati.com can slice and dice words is significant in establishing a type of filter for assessment of site content but it fails as a measure of quality. Blog posts highlighting how many blogs there may be succeed only in highlighting that metrics cannot trump intellectual assessment. Throw all the science of algorithms you want at a pile of words, the art of those words can only be assessed by sentient readers.

In the blogging world, most words posted are of absolutely no value whatsoever. Most blogging content makes even horoscopes look like significant literature. Pick 1000 blogs at random and verify for yourself whether there is anything worth monitoring on a regular basis. Your final list will differ from mine but I am confident that we would agree that 90% of the sites are completely useless. That would leave us with a subset of 100 blogs from which each of us would find no more than 10 that are worth following and only 1 of which merits a regular read. Only a bare fraction of all web sites that purport to be legitimate blogs contain useful, relevant, literate and cogent writing.

What about truth? Clearly a spam blog is not intended to reflect any kind of relative truth; its sole purpose is to deceive. Can an earnest writer be factually wrong and still be readable? Of course, but a reader's tolerance is only measured by a preponderence of perceived truth over a collection of writings. Not much takes place in the blog universe that passes for critical discussion. Individuals tend rather to smear than discourse, to vent rather than reflect. Good criticism is often received with the sensitivity of a 5 year old.

Most readers search out the comfort of an opinion that matches their own rather than to seek assurance in the continuum of reflected thought. That does not mean that we should not be willing to make immediate and profound value judgements regarding things like hate speech, nonsense, trivia or content devised to entrap. Rather, one should also assess voices -- thoughtful voices -- that reflect a range of opinion. If there was any sort of community inherent in the blog space, surely it would lead us to question, reason and discuss. Sadly, most of us are more familiar with a flame than a warm glow.

This is well said;

"...blogging is no more a cause for bubble growth than the pen or keyboard."

Or how about;

"Blogging is not a new and different activity. It's merely an easier way to publish and manage internet content."

Both from Newsome.org

The other nice thing about blogging is that you can quote things that are self-affirming. But hey! How come he got tech.memeorandum action and I didn't? Whaaaaa!