Posts Tagged: blogging

Noticed — No Comments
11
Mar 09

Baym on Blogs vs. Twitter

Nancy Baym has hit the nail on the head with her post “Blogs vs Twitter? It’s the Interactivity.”  As the title states, she takes on the Blogs vs. Twitter discussion, highlighting differences and concluding (correctly) that Twitter isn’t the death of blogging.  I like points 1, 3 and 7:

1) Twitter isn’t a substitute for blogging. Some people may choose to Twitter instead of blogging, but I wouldn’t assume that anyone has that kind of either/or relationship. A tweet is not meant to accomplish what a blog post is meant to accomplish. Neither’s killing the other, they aren’t in competition anymore than, oh, say writing books vs. writing a blog.

3) Looking at a Twitter feed or profile isn’t the same as following someone on Twitter. People who don’t actually use Twitter think that you have to read all the tweets that are directed specifically @someoneelse.  If you follow from within a Twitter account, there’s a setting so you don’t have to watch that banter unless it’s between people you also follow. That changes the signal/noise ratio  a lot. Yes, there will still be tweets you don’t care about, but let’s be honest, can you name a single blogger who posts only posts you find interesting? I sure can’t.

7) Ugh. Can we just quit judging every new mode of communication that comes along and finding it wanting in comparison to the last one? Haven’t we been doing that for millenia? Don’t we always look back later and feel kind of silly?

If Nancy’s blog isn’t in your newsreader you’re truly missing out.  Read the full post here.

Thoughts — 8 Comments
9
Nov 06

Blogs and the Web 2.0 Bubble

I’ve recently become convinced that the Web 2.0 bubble, long thought nonexistent, is now upon us. However, it wasn’t the recent rash of implausibly extravagant fundings or the wonderfully humorous “Top Ten Lies of Web 2.0” piece that turned me; rather, it was some old-fashioned thinking about how information flows through markets.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a much-blogged ode to Michael Arrington, founder of the Techcrunch blog. The piece was filled with the requisite kingmaker fluff (“Like a latter-day Henry Blodget”), but what really got me thinking was the following passage:

Start-up iVentster Inc.’s gaming site, XuQa.com, got a positive review in September on TechCrunch. Afterward, two Japanese investors showed up at iVentster’s San Francisco office, saying they had learned about the company on TechCrunch. “We were definitely surprised,” says iVentster co-founder Ali Moiz. “If somebody travels that far and comes to see you because they saw you on a blog, it makes you think about how many people read that blog.”

In a nutshell, venture capitalists saw an Arrington recommendation, and acted upon it. In the client-starved VC market, this isn’t so surprising or shocking, is it? Perhaps these were just junior VC’s trying to drum up some leads – something that is a requisite even in an industry as vaunted and elite as venture capital.

Web 2.0 is unique. Because of low barriers to entry, more market entrants are producing more ideas. How much funding does it take to create a Web 2.0 company? Joshua Schachter spun up del.icio.us in his spare time. The founders of Meebo financed the company on their credit cards.

However, venture capitalists have long relied on barriers to entry to produce a feeder network – one that would screen and lithimus test ideas. For a company to get an audience with a VC, the founders had to have a track record, and possibly some angel funding – they had to carry some validation. To get this validation required knowing people, making deals, securing funds to develop technology – y’know, business stuff. However, in Web 2.0, the “business stuff” isn’t a barrier to entry – skill is the only barrier. College students can create immensely popular websites from their dorm room. A small regional project can become an huge sensation without a bloated staff. There are many more examples like this.

If the feeder isn’t relevant anymore, how do the sellers of finance begin to make decisions about who to fund? As it turns out, they’re using the same networks we are – blogs. If you look at a random venture capital blog, you’ll (generally) see the same blogs in the blogroll. VC’s love to read and link to the A-list, and therein lies the problem.

In the real world, businesses rely on third party information to make important decisions. Reuters, for example, is a company that derives 85% of its revenue from selling information to corporations. Many, many firms sell specialized intelligence on market sectors (investment firms, research firms, etc). There is an enormous industry built around the selling of trustworthy information. This industry doesn’t exist for Web 2.0.

In the absence of this industry we have come to rely upon the blogosphere, and particularly the A-list blogs, to serve as our information filter. Not a day goes by where Techcrunch doesn’t review a company – creating kings and dashing dreams along the way. However, when we stop to think about the quality of the information coming through the filter, it really leaves a lot to be desired. It was the Facebook feeds fiasco that revealed this to me – to a one (except for Mashable), the A-listers lined up to sing the praises of feeds. As we know, they couldn’t have got it more wrong.

How much can we really expect from these bloggers? How many Web 2.o sites can one person master? Look at how many sites Techcrunch or Mashable review – how in-depth can the understanding of the reviewed sites possibly be? These people are only human – and to expect complete understanding of all things Web 2.0 is too much to ask from even these proclaimed gurus. They are going to get stuff wrong, and quite likely, they are going to get stuff wrong frequently.

The dynamics of the A-list now serve the filtering purpose formerly relegated to the financial barriers to entry companies used to face. To get that audience with a VC, one needs the stamp of approval from the A-list. But can we trust the A-list? Do we really expect Michael Arrington to understand the mindset of an 18 year old college student? These A-listers are probably giving it their best shot, but they fall short of the mark in providing the type of information that financial decisions should be based upon.

The Web 2.0 bubble exists because information access is controlled by a few. The wisdom of crowds has promoted the A-list to the top – but as Terrell Russell states “Our wisdom of crowds sometimes presents itself as the yelling of the loudest.” Arrington and Malik aren’t yelling – they don’t need to – but they are unfortunately getting to speak for market segments outside their expertise. That this information is relied upon by investors has fueled the bubble that will only continue to get worse.

So what is the solution? Do we need a Reuters for Web 2.0? O’Reilly has recently stepped up to provide such a service, selling the Web 2.0 report for $375. This is a small step, and it is likely we’ll see more like it in the future. The true challenge for venture firms will be broadening their scope of information seeking. As long as Web 2.0 is geographically dispersed, and college students in a dorm room are sitting on billion dollar ideas, it will be very useful for firms to spend a significant amount of effort collecting better data. Using the A-list as a filter is being lazy – and the bubbly investments you get from it will be your punishment.

Research / Thoughts — 4 Comments
21
Sep 06

Wikipedia’s test for academic blogging

In January, I published a post that contained the findings of a study I did on Facebook. That post, entitled “Student Life on the Facebook” was widely read – it may be the reason you follow my blog today. Since then, I’ve posted other findings from my studies, in blog form. I’ve presented these findings in conferences and journals, and I’m currently writing them up into a comprehensive journal article.

Shortly after Student Life on the Facebook was posted, someone added it to Wikipedia’s entry about Facebook. A few times a day, someone clicked through from Wikipedia to my blog, and found my research on Facebook.

On August 16, the Wikpedia registered editor L1AM, leaving the comments “tweaking”, “cleanup” and “thining (sic) out links”, edited the Facebook Wikipedia entry, removing the link to my research. On that day, L1AM removed over 25 links to a variety of sources, from personal weblogs to mainstream media sources. L1AM also removed a number of paragraphs from the entry, contributing to a one-day edit in which 15% of the article was removed [1].

As Wikipedia was a very small fraction of my traffic, I didn’t notice that Wikipedia wasn’t linking to me until a few days ago. When I checked the entry and saw the edits, I was frankly surprised. While a number of blog entries remained, including a humorous piece on Facebook Etiquette by CollegeHumor.com, my work was deleted. No longer would people researching the Facebook via Wikipedia stumble on to my research (and publications).

While L1AM did not cite a particular reason for the deletion, I wanted to explore the potential rationale behind his decision. My particular case may be somewhat unique, but the notion of impartial academics posting real research data to blogs is hardly novel. Consider how many times a day a blog post passes through your newsreader with empirical statistical data – this shows that blogs are becoming a method of research dissemination.

Wikipedia presents a clear set of guidelines as to what is considered a reliable source. As you might imagine, this covers a wide variety of source areas; since we’re concentrating on blogs, here is the blog (self-published source) policy:

A self-published source is a published source that has not been subject to any form of independent fact-checking, or where no one stands between the writer and the act of publication. It includes personal websites, and books published by vanity presses. Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, and then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources.

Exceptions to this may occur when well-known professional researchers self-publish within their fields of expertise or when well-known professional journalists publish their own material. In some cases, these may be acceptable as sources, so long as their work has been previously printed in credible third-party publications and they are writing under their own names and not under pseudonyms.

However, editors should exercise caution for two reasons: first, if the information on the professional researcher’s blog (or self-published equivalent) is really worth reporting, someone else will have done so; secondly, the information has been self-published, which means it has not been subject to any independent form of fact-checking.

In general it is preferable to wait until other sources have had time to review or comment on self-published sources.

Reports by anonymous individuals, or those without a track record of publication to judge their reliability, do not warrant citation at all, until such time as it is clear that the report has gained cachet, in which case it can be noted as a POV.

I’ll parse this a little. Blogs are generally not considered an acceptable source for Wikipedia entries, unless:

  • The blog is written by a well-known, professional researcher writing within his or her filed of expertise, as long as their work (though not the work in question) has been previously published by credible, third-party publications.
  • The blog is written under the researchers own name, and not a psuedonym
  • Other sources have reviewed or commented on the blog topic

Wikipedia’s policy is broad and general, as it should be – but the generality presents difficult confounds, especially for early-stage academics. The initial test of well-known – what does this mean in academia? And who is the judge of this? Furthermore, what is the notion of peer-review in the blogosphere? This is a critical question. Every day, hundreds of people receive my posts in their feedreaders, and it is only once in a while someone calls me out as a fool. Since I am not being called out, have I passed peer review? Or is peer-review operationalized only when a blogger with a higher Technorati rank links to me?

I feel it is critical to at least ponder these issues because the fact stands that young academics will be blogging research in the future. They will do it to share early-stage findings, to find new colleagues, to expand their networks – at the same time, sharing valuable, usable data. Will Wikipedia turn a dark eye to this growing corpus of valuable research?

Of course, my article wasn’t deleted because it was blog research. The editor L1AM left other blogs, which suggests his purge was oriented towards stuff he didn’t like, get, or feel was worthwhile. Looking at L1AM’s edits, it is remarkable how much of Facebook’s history was edited out that day. If you’ll allow that my research was valuable to the Wikipedia entry, we can clearly see a flaw in this editing process.

The flaws I see are twofold. First, and foremost, it is poor editorship. L1AM decided to hack up the Facebook article one day, he didn’t leave much in terms of justification – he just did it. According to Wikipedia policies and philosophies, the magnitude of change he made should have been accompanied by a good deal of discussion, commenting, and documentation. None of this occurred, which would seem to be poor editorship.

The second flaw is a little more nuanced, and it deals with how the community regulates the editing process. Wikipedia articles grow over time. I believe that for a majority of articles, the majority of content is added up front, with new content adds and deletes spread out over time, creating the logarithmic long-tail we’re used to seeing. One can think of this process as a honing in, or “getting right” – edits should become smaller and smaller as time progresses.

When L1AM removed 15% of the Facebook article, he did a massive scale edit. The edits clustered around L1AM’s edits were much, much smaller – single word or line changes. If we are to assume that the 15% of the article that L1AM removed had been vetted by the community, how would the community would respond to this significant loss? As it happens, the community simply went on, and L1AM’s changes were not challenged. This leads to my question – is there a quantitative metric we can place to determine failures in Wikipedia’s process? If the editorial process allows 15% deletions on strong, established articles, does this mean the editorial process has failed? Shouldn’t edits be getting smaller over time?

Of course, this is interesting to think about in the wake of Citizendium. While I’m spending good wage-earning years of my life being poor to get a degree that says I’m an expert, I’m definitely one that believes in the validity of crowd work. Terrell Russell’s has a good middle ground on the expertise in Wikipedia issue – though nothing short of the Citizendium solution would deal with the breakdown in the editing process observed on the Facebook article.

Of course, there are a couple things to note. The Facebook article might be an outlier on Wikipedia due to its popularity. The fluctuations and lack of editorial control may simply be from the fact that popular articles break Wikipedia’s model – as opposed to the model being inherently flawed. The communities around less popular articles may demonstrate more of the classic, long-tail characteristics. I’d love to see some data on this.

Getting back to the original topic at hand, I’d also love to see how many blog citations there are on Wikipedia. I can’t think of any good way to extract a rough ballpark. I would assume that blog appearance on Wikipedia clusters around emergent phenomena – the Facebook being a prime example.

As we go forward, many more of us will be sharing valuable, good research on a variety of topics via our blogs. Sure, that research will eventually go to print and die a lonely death inside a non-accessible digital library – but should Wikipedia keep its head in the sand to the research until that point? While traditional scholars may argue one side, the realities of information needs and flows, especially about emergent phenomena, may create an imperative for posting early research to blogs. Will Wikipedia change its policies to adapt accordingly?

[1] Based on pre- and post-edit line counts of content in Wikipedia Facebook article. I’m not sure this is a great metric, so I am open to better suggestions.

Thoughts — 7 Comments
25
Aug 06

Natural A-Lists, or How Digg is Like the Blogosphere

The news website Digg is an extremely popular Web 2.0 application, rivaling the more “traditional” news outlet Slashdot. Digg, as opposed to Slashdot and most other sites, operates in an editor-less fashion; stories are submitted to be Dugg, and stories that are Dugg often enough are promoted to the front page. A story sent to the front page of Digg gets a remarkable amount of traffic, and the story submitter gets karma for having a story promoted. While Digg’s model, in its simplicity, is less than revolutionary, the open, egalitarian approach to a community news site has proven attractive to many.

From time to time, a story will get promoted to Digg’s front page lamenting the “downfall of Digg.” The general complaint is that Digg is no longer egalitarian, and that cartels of power users control what is raised to the front page of Digg. The power users, it is argued, bond together to jointly Digg each others stories, and they cyclically enjoy the karma and traffic provided by their success in promotion.

Without a question, this occurs. Diggers do band together and form cartels, somewhat limiting access to story promotion. However, what if this behavior was purely a function of the network, and not something more sinister?

As I’ve previously explored, the problem with the blogosphere is discovery. With 65 million blogs out there, it is impossible to sift through them all to find good content. As a result, we rely on natural screens that emerge in the network – or, we rely on those we know. For example, there are probably 1000 blogs out there just like Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion. However, the reason Rubel gets traffic and A-list status is because of our lack of initiative in discovery. We look around and see Rubel’s blog linked frequently, and listed on the sidebars of blogs we trust – this ‘link capital’ increases our likelihood to start reading that particular blog.

Indeed, we probably could go out and use a discovery process to find blogs like Rubel’s, but why spend the time? In addition, the shared conversation that can be had between two readers of Rubel’s blog is valuable – almost as valuable as if we all were getting the theoretically best content at all times (assuming we ‘discovered’ all blogs like Rubel’s).

However, our laziness and unwillingness to filter all blogs to find the best content is only half of what it takes to create an A-List. The second half of the equation is the fact that A-listers are just like us. A-List bloggers don’t spend all day going through all blogs to find the best content. As Rubel wrote in his Underground Blogosphere piece, it is evident that many bloggers do this for him – filtering up links so it appears that he actually spends all day surfing cool websites. Not the case at all! A-List bloggers operate just like we do – so their linking behavior mirrors ours.

Hence, the A-List is naturally occurring. We only have so much time to process content, and the sheer volume of content, means we, nobodys and A-listers alike, have to rely on the natural hierarchies born in the network. Indeed, the A-list exists because of our inability to cope with the size of the blogosphere – not because of any evil cartels.

Back to Digg, however, we see the same thing occurring. Thousands of stories are submitted to Digg each day, more than any one person could read. As a result, digg users rely on coping mechanisms to deal with the volume of stories submitted. This coping mechanism is the establishment of friend parings in the network. When you friend people in Digg, they immediately act as a content filter for you. Digg is very much like the blogosphere in that you friend your friends (the people you know) and celebrities (Kevin Rose, Digg A-List). Look at the sidebar of your blog…if you’re a traditional blogger, you’ve got some links to people you know, and some A-list blogs you read. It is the same thing in Digg.

The assumption that Digg is purely egalitarian falls apart just as any assumption that the blogosphere is egalitarian. A-lists are created because we simply don’t have time to negotiate all the content around us – so we link to those we know, and those we know as good content (the A-List). In essence, the A-lists that occur are purely natural, and something we need to find commonality in the network. If the critics of Digg truly wanted to break the A-lists, they would need to convince everyone on the service to screen all of the stories. Since we are time-limited, we can’t do that – so the A-lists will always emerge.

Blogs and sites like Digg create an illusion that networks are flat. In a perfect world, where we all had the time to screen content, the networks would be much more flat. However, since that is not the case, A-lists emerge, and they play a valuable role in the network as a point of betweenness centrality. Sure, A-listers could change this a little by foisting upon themselves a responsibility to link out a little more, but fundamentally, A-listers are just like the rest of us.

Teaching / Thoughts — 9 Comments
15
Aug 06

Blogging: Academia’s Digital Divide?

Lately, I’ve found myself reflecting on the role of this blog in my academic career. Granted, my academic career is somewhat nonexistent, but perhaps one day that will change. To that extent, I must think about how my present-day creation will affect my future possibilities. Remembering the Chronicle piece “Bloggers Need Not Apply“, it is hard not to second-guess the value of my blog, or academic blogging in general. I figured that it might be useful to enumerate some of the valuable effects of academic blogging, and imagine how these might one day be integrated into mainstream academia. So, as a list – some of the benefits of academic blogging:

  • Blogs help researchers find one another. Traditionally, researchers “found” each other through academic publications. They would then meet up at a conference, pat each other on the back, talk about collaborating, etc. As a graduate student, I don’t have a very strong publication record, nor do I have money to travel to conferences. I am essentially locked out of the traditional academic model. However, Google drives a ton of traffic to my blog; in that traffic are researchers who are conducting background and primary research. I can’t tell you how many interesting researchers have contacted me, left comments, or tracked back to my blog; I’ve made many valuable contacts this way. I’ve also many many valuable international contacts this way – people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.
  • Blogs can be a place to share research. Indeed, this is a controversial point, so let me share my back story. When I started researching the Facebook, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my findings. Largely, I was conducting the research as background – using it to formulate a more formal research agenda. However, in doing the Facebook research, I came across interesting findings, and there was a public need to understand the Facebook. I shared my research, and it was widely read. Indeed, this was the same research I would have sent to a conference or journal, but it was dressed down a little, and thrown online so people could access the research immediately.I’ll be the first to admit that blogging research findings is somewhat of a gray area. However, if you look at Pew or other think tanks, you’ll see they consistently promote summary research findings. They put key findings into the public via a blog post or press release, hoping to generate buzz. In a sense, I’ve done the same thing, though my intentions were really to get something out there that would be useful to people as they attempted to understand the Facebook.

    In the right context, the blog can be a very valuable place to showcase research. The research goes into Google, people can repost it, and there can be a public conversation about the research. I can’t tell you how much of a bummer it is to know that the best academic work is tied up in controlled-access journal that are prohibitively expensive; perhaps the personal academic blog can be somewhat of an antidote. To sum, I do believe blogs can be a valuable place to share research – the ethics haven’t been completely worked out, but as more and more academics use blogs as venues to promote their research and distribute early findings, the more we’ll understand the accepted ways to blog research.

  • Blogs make academics better writers. Writing is difficult. For every beautifully written paper I read, I come across two or three that are almost unreadable. It is an axiom of the writing community (creative, academic, journalism) that the way to be a better writer is to write more often. Every post I write gets sent to a few hundred people – knowing this, I’m forced to write better – in terms of content and grammar. As academics, we are communicators – and blogging/writing consistently only improves our communication skills.
  • Blogs leverage the community’s wisdom. A lot of what I put on my blog is stuff I come up with in the shower or the car. Blogs are great venues for these big, crazy ideas, because you’ve got a community of readers who will check, interact, argue, disprove or validate you. Maybe one day you’ll decide to test one of those big ideas, and you’ll already have the benefit of a community that has vetted your ideas.
  • Blogs are great places to share accomplishments. Blogs are an excellent way to let your community know about things like papers, talks, conference attendance. Think about it – as your audience is opt-in, they actually care about the stuff you do, and they might actually read your papers! Also, it is becoming quite common to “subscribe to a person“, in the sense someone follows your blog to keep up with you. Who knows – maybe someone who is subscribed to your RSS feed will hire you someday – you want to keep them aware of the cool stuff you’re up to. At a more basic level, however, we subscribe to each others feeds because we are fans. I want to know what people are up to, their accomplishments, changes in their lives.
  • Thinking aloud is valuable. My blog wanders through my various interests. Social networks, identity, virtual communities, academia – and through this public thinking, I’ve been able to reflect upon these interests. As I begin to think about my dissertation, I can look back on my blog and know that I’ve thought through a number of things, refactored and moved on.

In my opinion, all of this is extremely valuable. Connecting with researchers, formulating an agenda, bouncing ideas off a community, thinking aloud. Its extremely difficult to think about myself without a blog. That said, how is it that blogging could have such a bad name in academia – is blogging academia’s digital divide? Let’s explore this a little.

  • Academic blogging is misunderstood. As evidenced by the Chronicle piece, the underlying assumption is that blogging is only the sharing of public grievances. Unfortunately, blogging has its stereotypes, but I believe they are being broken down methodically. People can blog professionally. People can divorce their political views from their blogs. There’s no requirement that a blog be a non-filtered braindump of everything in one’s life. That’s not how I blog, and I respect bloggers that are topical and try hard to create posts of value.
  • Academic blogging is generational. At SILS (an information science school), a minority of professors maintain blogs. However, as I look around at my cohort in the program, I see lots of students with blogs. As long as these students get value from their blogs, there’s no reason to assume that they won’t carry blogging forward with them as they advance in their careers. Our generation will begin to break down some of the barriers to blogging in academia.

Considering the value my blog has added to my academic experience, I tend to believe that academic blogs will eventually mainstream. Their acceptance will take some time, but the value provided by blogging – in terms of connecting with others, the public debate, the real dialogue that emerges – will be self-evident. Of course, some things will never change – being a good blogger will always take effort, and not all of us need to blog. However, as we see models develop for academic blogging, it stands that more and more of us will want to take advantage of the benefits.

Thoughts — 5 Comments
27
Jul 06

The Scale-Free, Underground Blogosphere

I’ve been tracking the comments on a post Steve Reubel made today entitled “The Underground Blogosphere“. In it, Reubel describes the daily avalanche of email “pitches” he receives from bloggers sending him links. On cue, a number of bloggers complained, assuming Reubel addressed them directly. In fact, Reubel’s post isn’t an attack or sinister in any way – he is simply publicly coping with his status in the blogosphere. I think we may be able to learn a few things from Steve’s post about identity and the nature of the blogosphere.

First, a little background. Reubel’s blog is currently ranked 59 in the Technorati index. To put this in perspective, David Sifry’s last estimate of Technorati’s index size is 37.3 million blogs. Indeed, Reubel and his blog are in very rare air – he literally sits atop Mount Everest in the blogosphere. In achieving this very respectable and noteworthy goal, Reubel has also achieved an interesting place in the network of the blogosphere.

As Barabasi and Watts have shown, large networks, such as the blogosphere, tend to display hub and spoke characteristics. That is, large amounts of traffic tend to flow through central hubs, whereas lesser traffic flows through the spokes in the network. Indeed, this is just like our nation’s air transportation network – places like the Hartsfield, O’Hare, LAX and the NYC airports are the hubs; those hubs begat smaller hubs like Pittsburgh and Dallas, and so on down until we get to the regional airport near your home that doesn’t even have instrument approach. For any number of reasons, networks cluster and distribute traffic unevenly. The patterns that emerge look like a power law, though Barabasi has shown that these networks have scale-free tendencies (see Shirky for a more robust explanation).

The reason I mention these enormously complex, fancy models is to simply prove to you something you already know – that bloggers like Reubel are the “hubs” in the network of the blogosphere. As a result, traffic naturally flows to Reubel – and to all of the other “top” bloggers in the network. Right now, as an example, my referencing of Reubel’s post is reinforcing his position in the network.

So here is my first contention with his claim – that the size of the “underground blogosphere” is very large. As the blogosphere is scale-free, the types of traffic that hubs see doesn’t scale linearly (or log linearly) through the network. If Reubel receives 100 pitches in a day, it is not a safe assumption that the 1000th Technorati blog receives 98 pitches a day, and the 10,000th receives 90 (and so on, reflecting a power law based on 37MM blogs). In fact, due to Reubel’s position in the network, the amount of pitch traffic he sees may be vastly disproportionate to the rest of the blogosphere.

Many of the links in a scale-free network point to the hubs. Indeed, many of the links going from hubs point to other hubs (there are 90 JFK-LAX flights a day, and only 10 JFK-RDU flights a day, as an example). We see this in the blogosphere when A-list bloggers only link to each other, and so on – a rich-get-richer effect. While Reubel’s cohort likely includes bloggers from all parts of the blogosphere, his sample is disproportionately skewed towards A-listers who share his experience. This cohort also sees a large “underground blogosphere.” What’s more, since the traffic in the underground network is largely unidirectional (non-reciprocated and flowing from low to high-ranking blog), this network isn’t reinforced (imagine if all the planes flew from RDU to JFK, and only one returned).

However, even if Reubel’s claims are off, there’s a larger issue here – how bloggers connect. In a blogosphere of 37M blogs, we’ve only got time to evaluate an absolutely miniscule part of the blogosphere. Indeed, the long-tail of bloggers has its audience, but the problem is discovery. The blogosphere dually rewards links brokered through A-list blogs; first, they have passed the editorial screening of the blogger (Reubel in this case), and second, they open up a blog to a new audience who may share common interests. Therefore, it is natural that people would attempt to persuade Reubel of their post’s worth; they aren’t really trying to gain Reubel as a fan as much as they are attempting to get .01% of his fanbase to discover them – a traditional long-tail approach.

If emailing a blogger is ultimately about gatekeeping a small number of fans to your site, what does this tell us about blogging, or peer-production in general? My Facebook research continually makes me think about why we do anything online. Why do we invest the time to create things like blogs, social network profiles, webpages? It is clearly so we can be heard, that we can have the affirmation of audience. Why do you blog? Do you blog because you want to improve your writing, be known to the technoscenti, get a better job, promote a political cause? We all blog for reasons, and those reasons are always personal. However, there’s nothing wrong with that; the folks who tried to explain away why they emailed Reubel (in the comment thread) amused me. We want audience; we want power-brokers to give us approval. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, because that’s how the real world works.

I’ve given Reubel’s post a very even read. While I disagree with his size estimate, I do think he is onto something. A marketer can never stop being a sociologist – as such, they are keen to observing interesting phenomena. 100 emails pitching links a day? That’s an interesting phenomena, but why do we need a conversation about it?

In the thread, a number of commentors reported how they found these “notes from the underground” to be useful. I’m certainty one of these people. I get a few emails a week from people reading my blog; some are marketers pitching products, some are other bloggers going off-the-record, and others are people who just didn’t feel 100% comfortable leaving a comment (or didn’t feel like making the effort to step through all of Blogger’s 9 steps). As I don’t get a lot of these, I’m able to look through these emails and see what is what, and respond accordingly. Through this process, I’ve managed to make some very meaningful contacts. I would hate to think that Reubel would have a muzzling effect.

The fact of the matter is that Reubel sees so much traffic he isn’t able to make the distinctions between what is good and what is chaff. Indeed, that could be personally frustrating, but it comes with the territory. One doesn’t get into the top 100 without a tremendous amount of personal marketing; it only stands that others want his place. Indeed, one day they will have it. Reubel wants a conversation about the underground blogosphere; in a sense, I’m participating right now. I’d hate to see the echo-chamber emerge and start calling for the end of such practice’s (which Reubel clearly hasn’t). The blogosphere is about conversation, whether that be over blog posts, comments or emails.

Noticed / Thoughts — 1 Comment
4
Jun 06

On Inspiration

Running a small “Web 2.0″ company is an interesting experience. I don’t suppose it is much different from running any other company, except for the fact you live and die by the blogosphere. Every day, a few times a day I check the various ClaimID watchlists – Technorati, Feedster, Sphere, Google News – and see what people are saying about ClaimID. It’s addicting, it’s time-wasting, and each time I hit refresh the anticipation feels like Christmas Eve.

ClaimID has captured the imagination of a lot of bloggers. It is such a simple concept that many are compelled to write – and of course, we read everything that’s written. You develop a thick skin because you have to – even though response to ClaimID has been overwhelmingly positive, I’d be lying if I said the negative posts don’t hurt. Anyone who has invested their heart and soul into an idea winces when someone you don’t know puts you down in public. It doesn’t happen often, but each time it cuts.

Learn from the blogosphere, they’ll tell you. It’s sound advice. Bloggers provide free feedback, bug reports, feature requests and publicity. We’d be nowhere without the blogosphere – it is our megaphone. The blogosphere is a truly democratic market of ideas – although hype can raise things to the top, the market has a way of regulating itself. Bloggers will drive people to your doorstep, it’s up to you to convert them to users.

People often compare the blogosphere to an “ocean” – a fitting comparison. Oceans can’t be tamed or controlled – they will take you wherever they wish. To that extent, you also never know what an ocean’s going to wash to the shore. Today, the ocean of the blogosphere washed up inspiration, inspiration like none I’ve encountered yet.

PostBubble is a new blog from ACS, a consulting firm, and Webreakstuff, a top design firm. PostBubble decided to cover ClaimID, and the review was like nothing I’ve read so far – the author truly comprehended the scope of the problem we’re facing, and trying to address with ClaimID. If you’re going to read one blog post about ClaimID, this is the one. Says the author:

Who needs normal? Normal is boring, normal is status quo, normal never gets the spotlight and normal is well, normal. But there is something else to be said about Normal. Normal means that everybody knows it, everybody uses it, and everybody has heard of it. Email is normal, searching on Google is normal, and driving a car to work is normal. When it comes to business, becoming normal is an objective.

I thought of all this when I was reading through the buzz on claimID and had the feeling that there were bees inside my skull. I saw the potential, I saw the value, and I saw the spark, but there was still something seriously wrong with my head and I couldn’t quite figure out what was missing from the picture. It finally dawned on me that all of this speculation and analysis was like trying to break down the meaning of life. ClaimID is one of those ideas that can’t be simply broken down because there is only one clear way to describe what they are going to do: claimID is going to become Normal.

…… Regardless of what they accomplish or how, it should be duly noted that claimID epitomizes the opportunity and excitement of the Web 2.0 world. Web 2.0 should not be copycat and should not be a blind rush towards what seems to be the next craze and market opportunity. Web 2.0 is not to stumble on a market void and backfill it with a half-baked product or service. Web 2.0 is to create something that nobody knows they need and that they won’t be able to live without. This is the real objective of Web 2.0 and when something like claimID comes out it should remind us all what we are really trying to accomplish.

The rest of the post is here. I’ve read it over and over and over. It feels so good when people get your ideas at such a fundamental level. So today, I found inspiration. Inspiration was washed up on my shores from the blogosphere, and it felt really good.

Postscript: I should note that inspiration has been coming frequently lately, and that’s a good thing. Celebrated designer Bryan Veloso also brightened our day last week, but Terrell beat me to the reply. Not content to rest on our laurels, last night we introduced a MicroID-based link verification service – something that will allow all ClaimID users to easily put verified claims on links. It marks a big step forward for our little company.

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