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Regular readers will notice a tiny difference in the world of Currie.
There is lots more to do but this seems stable. Call it election readiness.
Written by jay on February 1st, 2007 with no comments.
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OK, someone has to beat Google…Ms. Dewey is not quite ready for prime time but you can see where this is going.
Written by jay on December 19th, 2006 with no comments.
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A few of you use and I hope find useful my Canadian Bullet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t: at the moment it has dropped my feed. I have been working on it and I am hoping it will work better as the election draws near.
This is affectionately known as an aggregator. I try to make sure that it only shows short excerpts and that the links go to the blog the excerpt comes from. This does not always happen; but that is the intent. It has ads and, without violating the Google terms of service, I can happily report that I may well make a beer a month if I stick to domestic.
In God blog land in the US it has dawned on the great and the good that RSS contains within it the possibility of the “splog” - that is an automated blog which takes content, slaps ads on it and sends it out into the world. This is seen as evil.
But, and who would have thought it, it seems that some people are taking whole blog entries and republishing them. Steve Rubel is pissed. But,
Beyond going to partial text RSS feeds - which I am loathe to do - I have really no other course of action right now other to email the site operators, which I have done.
micropersuasion
I can’t quite see what his objection to partial text, aka excerpts is; but the fact is that he has that option and chooses not to use it. He should because the aggregating software is not that brilliant. I always try to get excerpts for the Bullet, partially for copyright reasons, mainly because it is not that interesting to have great chunks of text on a summary site.
Mark Cuban, owner of Icerocket.com goes a step further.
At icerocket.com , we define a splog as any hosted website that only uses redirected or copied content and doesnt add any unique value. Aggregation is not value add. Why ? Because a search on any blog engine should uncover the unique content on their original source. If a blog isnt updated by human hands, we dont want it in our index.
blog maverick
Well, it’s his search engine and he can do what he wants to; but he is missing the point of excerpt aggregators.
If I want to find out what is going on in the Canadian blogosphere I can take a boo at the Bullet or Canconv. If I want to check out tech, www.memeorandum.com, where I got this story is untouched by human hands. Digg.com is all about gazillions of human hands. diggdot.us puts slashdot and digg together. Welcome to Web 2.0.
The thing of it is that automation, particularily when it comes to assembling summaries, is a critical and useful task for the web.
Aggregation is in its infancy. Right now people are trying to get a handle on how to present the information. Once that is mastered the real skill is going to hit - editing. Choosing the feeds, editing the product, fashioning commentary.
The blog Gods seem to want to strangle the creature at birth. They see the aggregators as scam driven attempts to grab Adsense dollars - if only. In fact, aggregators are going to quickly become the clearing houses for new media that the public needs to make sense of the firehose of information pouring down their cable connections.
One thing which the aggregators will do is make search engines less necessary. For people with a time budget, three or four key aggregators with editors they have come to trust will replace hours of searching. Which is not good news for search engines but may be excellent news for freelance editors.
In web 1.0 we had useful spots like Arts and Letters Daily and Blog Critics which were human edited and built. This was, to a degree, both a virtue and a necessity. At the time there was no other way. Now there is.
The Blog Gods will just have to get over it and learn to excerpt.
Written by jay on December 12th, 2005 with 10 comments.
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Anne Althouse is trying to grok PJs media again. Not much luck but lots of comments.
My sense is that there is a deeper probblem with PJ media - it is relying on a revenue model which has jumped the proverbial shark. Web advertising works a bit. The wee text ads will drive some traffic and, apparently, Vonage and the University of Phoenix have managed to create entire businesses using banner ads.
However, ad blindness and the unholy trinity of click fatigue (the phenomena where you really just can’t be bothered “checking out” the grooviness the ad offers), mercy clicking (ah, “x” needs a square meal I’ll just hit his ads and toss another nickle in his hat), and fraud (dear God, I need a square meal so I’ll just click this ad the one time…well, one, a hundred, who’s counting) have the capacity to destroy the text ad biz. Banner ads will always be with us but they too are limited.
The inherent contradiction is that the click through ad model requires you to leave the great content you are at a site to see. There has to be a better way.
One of Ann’s cemmentors points out that the most reasonable explaination of the lameness of PJM so far is that the launch, and I paraphrase, took the folks by surprise. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Most of the PJ media crew have day jobs. A lot of them are scattered around the country and the world. Herding those cats would not have been easy. Between meetings with the angel investors, some sort of site design, meetings with the moronic brand consultants, pitches to some ad agencies and just the general wear and tear of setting up a new biz, a launch date can sort of sneak up on a business.
And there is one other and rather contrarian consideration: the folks who were picked as the PJ media team had, to a greater or lesser degree, already made it. They are at the top of the rightish side of the blogosphere. Which means that none of them are particularily hungry.
Hunger fuels business as surely as launch parties. To really have a chance of making it in a wildly competitive business like new media the idea of an all nighter should not be unthinkable. The prospect of failure should have some consequence other than the amusement of the blogosphere.
Steve den Beste used to run a blogroll on the basis that he would leave five or six people up for several months. His theory was that with the exposure he gave those people they would - or would not - reach critical mass and become self-sustaining. It was both Darwinian and organic. The fittest survived; but they only survived because they had something to offer and were willing to slug it out day after day.
A serious re-think of PJ media would make sense; but what would make more sense is to put together a tiger team of largely unknown bloggers to drive the site. There are lots of smart, right, writers who would be happy to pick up $150 for a four hundred word post. I can think of half a dozen without trying. Around that core you build back to the bigger scheme. Oh, and lose the office. You don’t need it and you haven’t earned it.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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The term “taking the Boeing” is blog talk for being bought out by the ever clueless MSM. Usage: Andrew Sullivan has just taken the Boeing with his deal at Time Magazine.
Today’s launch of Open Source Media Inc. including our very own Daiman Penny , Pieter Dorsman (shared with Holland) and Angry in the Great White North (and good on you guys!) is both exciting and a bit of a non-event. The excitement lies in Charles Johnson of LGF and Roger Simon herding the cats on the rightish side of the blogosphere into what may well be an answer to the wildly, if improbably, successful Huffington Post.
The non-event is the remarkably 2002 feel to the whole thing. When there are sites like Memeorandum and digg competing for attention it would have made some sense to have a bit more of a W2.0 feel to the whole thing.
Now, buried in the site is the nugget that, on the 14th, OSM completed a 3.5 million dollar venture round which suggests that the bills will be paid. What is not obvious is how hiring the people Glenn Reynolds links to amounts to a business plan.
I was asked a few days ago to name my blogfather and the technical answer to that is Andrew Sullivan because reading his blog I figured I could do much the same sort of thing. But the blogger who has influenced me most and whose departure for animie blogging left a huge hole in my ways of understanding the world is Steven den Beste. He is not impressed,
When I look down the passenger list about to board the the borg cube, it’s a little bit worrying how many of my favorite blogs are included. This could become a new single point of failure, depending on contractual obligations and how the corporation ends up getting managed. None of those details have been widely revealed yet; today’s dog-and-pony show was all about feeling good and getting publicity.
What will happen to these people when they are assimilated? Ace of Space HQ, Austin Bay, Baldilocks, Belmont Club, Captain’s Quarters, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing, Dean’s World, Donald Sensing, Ed Driscoll, Instapundit, Jawa Report, LGF, Live from Brussels, Manolo’s Shoe Blog, Medienkritik, Michelle Malkin, Patterico, Samizdata, Tim Blair, Vodkapundit
That’s about two thirds of the blogs I read regularly. Hewitt and Jarvis and Pejman and Pixy and the guys at Silent Running and ChicagoBoyz are still free, but will they in their turn surrender to the borg?
If this turns out to be a portal plus an advertising syndicate, then that will be fine. But if it’s more than that, then I’m worried. For instance, if all those people end up paying less attention to their current sites in order to provide more material for the portal, that’s very bad news. The portal won’t have the same flavor and the same freedom that those blogs have now.
den beste
What seems to have happened is that various flavours in blogging have felt issolated in their independence. On the left there is the shelter of the Daily Kos in the States or Rabble in Canada. On the right just the chill wind of independence.
The freedom den Beste mentions is precisely the reason why people blog. But the lure of actually making some money doing what you like doing, the possiblity of having a little more status and a few more readers, the invitation to a New York launch - seductive as Hell. And, there is no reason at all to suppose that OSM is going to curtail the freedom of the people they have selected. In a sense the selection pretty much assures the opinions will have a consistency and a position which people of a certain political ilk will find comforting.
Which is all good. But a little sad. Something like the closing of the frontier and the arrival of the railway. Before long the high plains riders and the outlaws will be townsmen and solid citizens.
Or not. While the lads are having a few cocktails in New York there is another generation of web savvy, politically able, technically competent people making another web. In fact, they may well be creating what the web should have been all along if only it had had the bandwidth. On this web being on an A-list is interesting but not terribly important; being quick and understanding that the web is not an online clone of MSM but rather a different medium altogether is important in W2.0 land.
OSM is poised to pump a few more bullets into the twitching carcass of the NYT and the LA Times and network TV and the generally tired and declining magazines which were household names thirty years ago. W2.0, on the other hand, is getting ready to replace the old media with the new.
If I had seen more of that sense of the new in the launch of OSM I might have been more excited. Of course things may improve. But Memeorandum is in my tool bar, OSM isn’t.
Written by jay on November 17th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.
a vc
A really good consideration of the nature of attention and the fact that there are only a limited number of channels that anyone can keep in their head at once.
My own belief is that the real opportunities in Web 2.0 are going to be for editors. People who have the time and the expertise to act as filters for all of the material out there.
At the same time, Web 2.0 adventures such as memeorandum are critical. These use code to sort and value blog posts and they will be a vital tool in an editor’s arsenal. Ultimately, though, I am inclined to think that there will be real value in editors who find and contextualize (awful word) material for particular, small (no more than 10000 subscriber audiences.
The question of how such editors will be paid is interesting. As a general rule, people who visit a website daily quickly become “ad blind”. They virtually never hit any of the ads on the page. They might read them; but they do not actually follow through.
However, if there was a seemless way of paying for the editor’s skills that might be worth something. Currently we have the kludgey and rarely used PayPal button. In fact it has to be easier than that to make a micro payment. I have a few ideas how that might work.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with 1 comment.
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