Category Archives: Blogging

Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight

Yahoo is carrying the following Reuters’ article: Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight which talks about the role that blogs could play in the upcoming Supreme Court nominations. Pretty standard stuff, but I thought the following paragraph was interesting:

Not all blogs are created equal. Many will become “ideological echo chambers” that people read to reaffirm their beliefs, Clemons said. Others will fuel passions on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. A few will rise above the pack and become sources of information and not just an advocacy forum.

What I would like to know is which of the traditional, brick and mortar media outlets rise to this high standard?

Brainwagon Radio: Happy Birthday, Grokster and Gnomedex

Carmen's Cube

Where your host sings Happy Birthday to his wife and then goes on to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Grokster, and his feelings on the cult of personality that seems to be forming around blogging, as is exemplified by Gnomedex.

Links from the show:

  • The best blog on the doings of the Supreme Court would seem to be the SCOTUSblog.

The Cult of RSS

I keep scanning the news being blogged on Technorati about Gnomedex 2005, and frankly, I’m still mystified. There seems to be a whole bunch of people who are united in their desire to promote RSS.

Did I miss something?

Don’t get me wrong, I use RSS everyday. I’m a big fan of bloglines to monitor lots of blogs. But we are just talking about a simple XML based text format. Yet as simple as it is, it also has a pretty confusing specification, as is witnessed by the relatively large number of projects which accept incompatible versions of the specification. It is used as the basis for applications which rely on polling to catch updates, which can generate lots of unnecessary web traffic on servers.

And yet, apparently large numbers of individuals converge to laud its creators. I just don’t get it.

Personal Expression is Just a Fad…

Every once in a while, you read something that makes you just shake your head. Dave Slusher mentioned David Coursey’s anti-podcasting article. I’m not so opposed to his opinions on the grounds that he’s a knee-jerk-off (although he does seem to fit the description) but rather from the simple fact he’s hopelessly off target in his criticism.

If you go and spend a few minutes reading his article, you’ll find that he’s really all over the map. First off, he begins with a rant about iTunes and iTunes Radio Stations. What this has to do with podcasting is anyone’s guess, but he goes off four the first four paragraphs about it, so he must really have felt it was worth saying, given that he introduces his article with it.

And then drops the topic entirely.

He then accidently strays into something which I actually think is likely to be the truth:

Over time, I expect the “most listened to” Podcasts will be products of existing media companies that use Podcasts as a means of repurposing content.

While I don’t think this is entirely correct, it doesn’t immediatey fail the sniff test. After all, existing media companies do possess large libraries of licensed and copyrighted content that they can draw on which are unavailable or expensive for others to acquire. Even independents will be tempted to adopt the trappings of traditional media companies as they grow in popularity, so the “successes” in podcasting will likely be less different from big media than you otherwise might imagine.

That is, of course, if you are looking at the most popular end of the curve. The question is really what happens in the Long Tail.

The existing media industry works really well at the big end: selling hundreds of thousands to millions of units of works. It basically has no real coherent strategy for creating and distributing content to a few hundred to a few thousand individuals. It is in this end that I think that unconventional business plans and to a certain extent, just creating media for its own sake will rule the day. Ordinary media outlets will find it difficult to adapt their business to operate in this more rarified environment, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t find players in this arena. After all, the barriers to entry and the risks are signficantly lower than trying to follow the traditional path to wide media distribution, even if the payoff is somewhat more limited.

Coursey then strays off into what I think is really a short sighted argument:

Personal Podcasting, like personal blogs, is a fad and will fade. Just like personal sites were a fad in the early days of the Web. People experiment because content creation can be fun, sort of like finger-painting was back in preschool, but people also run out of creative energy, and the maintenance of a site, blog or Podcast becomes a chore. And the content gets boring, and the audience goes away.

First, I don’t know what Internet Coursey is using, but I’m baffled why he thinks that personal websites have gone away. The Internet is chock-a-block full of them: we call them “blogs” and everyone seems to have one these days. Yes, many of them peter out because they do become chores for people, but for many, they are not chores: they are significant outlets for personal creation and expression. I suspect the same will be true of podcasting.

He goes on:

Pioneer Webmasters quickly found that creating an interesting Web site required more art and photography skills than most of them possessed. They also learned that creating and maintaining an interesting site was a lot of work, with little reward.

I must admit, I do spend a fair amount of time each day working on my website: gathering content, tweaking software, uploading digital photographs and the like. But to me it’s fun. Interesting. Even exciting at times. Would it be cool if I got hundreds of emails or comments each day? Maybe. But even with my modest level of success, I consider it fun, not a chore. It’s just part of what I do.

Coursey closes with this gem:

I’ve been in the media all my professional life and have spent years trying to understand audience behavior. I can’t always tell what the masses will like, but I am pretty good at calling losers. And as a mass medium, Podcasting will be one of them.

Allow me to use the Brainwagon Universal Translator:
UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR ENGAGED
TRUST ME, I AM GETTING PAID TO WRITE, SO I MUST KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. THE EXISTENCE OF A MEDIA WHERE INDIVIDUALS ARE GRANTED THE SAME PRESTIGE THAT I ENJOY SIMPLY CANNOT BE TOLERATED.
THESE ARE NOT THE DROIDS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
DISENGAGE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me, old man.

Return of Design – Individual Color

I’m not color saavy savvy enough to actually design a good color scheme for websites. What I did years ago was come up with a particular blue (#336699) and just chose to use it as the predominant color for my website. I keep thinking that it would be nice to add some different colors, but frankly, I never get around to it.

Today, I discovered that returnofdesign.com had a cool webpage which you can use to find nearby hues, variations in saturation, and complementary colors. For instance, here is the page for brainwagon blue. Very nifty!

Anti-Spam Experiment

Yesterday I did some thinking bout how to prevent more of the spam that floods (or at least leaks into) my sight, and decided to give a whirl to SecureImage, a plugin that implements a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) . You’ve seen these before: type in the mangled numbers and letters that you see in the box. I’m considering this a test: if you think it is a huge nuisance and I should take it down, leave a note here (okay, you’ll have to do it once) or send me an email at my usual mailbox.

Here’s to a spam free future. At least for now.

Comment Spams Per Day

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had 1300 or so comment spam messages enter my queue. I thought I’d make a graph to see what they look like.

Comment Spams Per Day

I don’t believe this includes spams which are automatically blacklisted: there are messages that I had to mark as spam by hand.

A Minute with Dan: Don’t Mention Democracy | Bayosphere

Dan Gilmor had a short .mp3 response to the news that Microsoft was cooperating with the Chinese government to censor weblogs on MSN. I ranted about this a couple of days ago, it seems that Dan is of like mind.

A Minute with Dan: Don’t Mention Democracy | Bayosphere

“It’s easy enough to understand why our craven corporate giants are doing the dictators’ bidding. But Microsoft and Google, like so many others, rose to enormous wealth and influence by leveraging the freedom they enjoy in the United States. They may be serving their shareholders’ interests. But what they’re doing is not honorable. Why does money trump honor? Is this really the American way?”

Amen, Dan.

Why Daily Blogging Is A Good Idea

or, at least not a bad idea.

Amy Gahran over at Contentious wrote a nice article entitled Why Daily Blogging Usually Is a Bad Idea which raised some very good points. But, in true contrarian fashion, I find that my reasons for blogging are somewhat different than hers, and therefore I come to somewhat different conclusions.

Amy claims that we are drowning in information overload. She’s right of course. There is a ton of information out there. I monitor about 120 weblogs (used to be 150, but I trimmed a few that turned out to seldom generate posts which were of interest to me). Using Bloglines, that’s about as many as I can muster. I figure I spend about an hour and a half of my day reading blogs instead of spending it watching American Idol or the latest reality TV show.

Amy clamors for quality. It would be great if there was more of it, but then she goes on to say:

The only reason anyone should publish anything is that they have something worth saying – something that their target audience will probably value.

Fine sounding words, but somewhat different than my philosophy. Frankly, I have no idea what the average visitor to my website finds of interest. I know that I get about 300 of them each day. I can monitor keywords that they use to find me with search engines. I can see how many repeat downloaders I have for my podcasts. I can try to gather all sorts of information, but really, when all is said and done, I have simply no idea who the visitors are.

Given that I don’t know who they are, how could I possibly judge what pieces that I choose to write about are of value?

So instead, I write my blog for me.

It includes things that I find of interest, and if you look at my weblog, you know that I find all sorts of things to be interesting. There are a couple of themes (intellectual property, independent media and the like) but there are also rants about baseball, books I’ve read, trends in computer gaming, bits of computer music that a couple of my regulars might enjoy, just a vast potpourri.

Is any of it of value? Almost certainly yes. I was talking to somehow who found my recent link to Jef Poskanzer’s treatise on spam to be very useful in helping him design a new router project that he’s selling. I didn’t know this particular piece would be of value: I just thought it was interesting.

Most of the time I have no idea what posts are going to tickle people’s fancy. Some of the things that I most enjoy gather nary a peep from my listeners. Some of the things that I barely care about seem to generate the most traffic to my site. I simply can’t tell when I first get an idea for a posting what category they fall into.

So, I’ve stopped trying, and merely post everything that pops into my head.

Amy also tells us to not overestimate our own importance. Believe me, I am suffering from no delusion that my blog is important to anyone but myself. If anyone else finds it interesting, useful or inspiring, then that’s just gravy. In my weaker moments, I stare at graphs and wonder why particular days seem to have more traffic, and go back and look at what I talked about and ponder the notion of doing more of that, but I quickly get bored by that prospect. My own intellectual endeavors tend to skip and leap, and therefore, so do my blog entries. Trying to sculpt or optimize my blog entries to chase some popularity points ultimately bores me. Even the relentless pursuit of quality ultimately bores me.

My philosophy of blogging is simple. Blog if you want to. Blog when you want to. Blog for whatever reason you want to. When someone says “don’t blog if you’re not willing to do X”, then ignore them. Somebody in the long tail will find something interesting in what you have to say. Don’t make it harder for them to find it.