Blogosphere
Blog posts about blogs and blogging. Related subjects include:
Blog user interfaces
Over on A World of Bytes, I’ve started highlighting interesting tech blogs people might enjoy. However, I chided each of my first three selections for UI failings. A comment thread quickly ensued, and social media maven Jeremiah Owyang asked how he could make his blog easier to read. This post is a followup to that discussion.
Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.
In particular, I suggest:
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 5 Comments |
Evidently I’m a social media expert too. Who knew?
Network World asked me to do an online chat. That isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is that they asked me to focus on social media. My views on social media boil down to:
- Get off the stick and blog!
- Social media are a part of life, especially if you have any valued employees under the age of 40. Get used to it.
- The “dangers” of social media are the same as the dangers of other forms of internet communication. If your employees can’t use email or web surf safely, you’re dead anyway. So stop fretting.
The long form of my views on social media — with a little data warehousing thrown in — may be found here.
In somewhat related news, Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal showed his exquisite good sense by quoting me carefully about online presence, and expanding upon my points at length.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
A startup that could improve all our lives
Apostrophee aspires to hugely improve the experience of cyberspace, by applying grammar and spelling correction to online content, especially blog comments and forum posts.
Too bad the article is a spoof.
Reflecting on why it has to be spoof could be somewhat enlightening. 
| Categories: Blogosphere, Fun stuff, Humor, Social software and online media | 1 Comment |
Micro- and full-length-blogging use cases overlap greatly
Steven Hodson ranted on Mashable that Twitter is not a micro-blogging tool. His case was, in essence, “Blogs are thoughtful and Twitter isn’t, so the two aren’t comparable.” I disagree. Hodson was over-glorifying blogging, while trivializing the broad variety of Twitter use cases.* Consider, if you please, the following list of use cases that are met both by Twitter and by conventional blogging:
- Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging. Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
- Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
- Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too.
- Communicating news.
- Expressing analytical opinions.
- Promoting your services, opinions, and links.
*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize. That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability. Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 1 Comment |
Over 80 percent of blog posts are probably spam
Doug Caverly highlights a Matt Mullenweg quote indicating that about 1/4 of all the blogs ever on Wordpress.com were spam (aka splogs). Now, that’s probably a higher fraction than for the blogoverse overall, because:
- Wordpress.com provides costless hosting; using your own domain costs money.
- Besides being free, Wordpress.com hosting may provide a little “google juice”, which is the whole SEO point of spam blogging.
But there’s one more factor. Splogs have much higher posting frequency than real ones. 10-20+ posts per day is not uncommon, and 50-100+ is not unheard of. That’s 5-10X the post frequency of even the more active human-written blogs. So let’s assume:
- 10% of all blogs are spam.
- 10% of all blogs are actively written by humans.
- 80% of all blogs belong to humans, but are updated very infrequently if at all.
In that case, over 80% (and indeed probably over 90%) of all blog posts are made by machines rather than by human beings.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Search engine optimization (SEO), Social software and online media, Spam and antispam | Leave a Comment |
Sturgeon’s Law, and the future technology of social technology
Social technology has been hugely important to me since 1991. I met Linda on a Prodigy bulletin board. Blogging is crucial to my business. Mailing lists have led Linda and me to two vacations, most of our computer gaming, multiple TV shows (especially Buffy/Angel), and a whole lot of books. I find LinkedIn useful at times, and for the past few weeks I’ve been Twittering up a storm. My love life, work, and entertainment all are rooted in technology that gets people communicating with each other.
I’m not just saying that for street cred. My experiences also illustrate two important points – people use many different kinds of social technology, and social technology is very important to them. When you feel or hear negatives about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blog reading or whatever – those are indictments of particular services or technologies, not of online social networking in general.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | 4 Comments |
A very fast splogger
The first post ever on Strategic Messaging went up at 2:49 am. Within four hours, I had my first splog trackbacks, all from the same site. The strategicmessaging.com domain itself had just repropagated through DNS hours earlier, and had no incoming links other than Whois and the like.
Pretty impressive spamming. Not that it did him any good, of course, except insofar as he was stealing a bit of my content …
Beatblogging recognizes that communities take work
Beatblogging is a plan to let reporters build social networks out of their list of sources. On one level, that’s no different from setting up a forum to let readers post about stories. But of course there’s a big difference; the reporter is actively involved eliciting and acting upon content provided.
So I have a better, albeit immodest, analogy — Beatblogging is a whole lot like what I already do. Go to my search page and search on Olivier Jouve or Mary Crissey or Mike Stonebraker (most particularly) or Andy Astor or Bill Hobbib or Stuart Frost. You’ll find quite a bit of community participation from exactly the people who are my sources.
Could it be a lot richer than that? Sure. But these are busy people, watching what they say for marketing reasons, and in some cases competing directly with each other. It takes a fair amount of wheedling to get even as much out of them as I do.
Frankly, with all the blogs and home pages and so on people have today, I’m not sure there’s a point in building yet another destination social network. Fostering discussion on existing blogs and the like may make more sense. We’ll see.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
The integrated marketing communications blog
Following up on a piece earlier this year, I just published a Monash Letter called “Online Marketing Shortcuts.” As always, it’s proprietary to Monash Advantage members, but I’ll share one key idea here. That’s the integrated marcom blog, which is pretty much the single most efficient thing a marcom department can do to communicate multiple messages to multiple audiences. Here’s a brief excerpt from the Letter:
Marcom does a lot of different things. But most of it can be categorized as the dissemination of four kinds of information and opinion:
Customer success evidence – since everybody cares a lot.
Technical strategy and theory – especially for high-end evaluators and influencers.
Technical facts – for anybody who cares.
Other kinds of facts and news (e.g. events, major executive hirings, awards, etc.) — in case anybody cares.
By a combination of original articles and pointers to pre-existing resources, one blog can provide major help in all four areas.
Most important, a marcom blog gives many opportunities to enhance customer success story-telling. For example, you can:
- Call attention to stories you publish or place elsewhere (on your own sites, in the media, whatever).
- Add detail and context to the stories you publish elsewhere.
- Follow up when there are deployments or expanded usage at previously announced customers.
- Summarize customer stories presented in conference speeches.
- Allude to customer stories you’re not allowed to publish in full standard multi-page success story formats.
- Aggregate information about groups of customers – e.g., ten installations over 50 terabytes or 15 sales to retail/CPG.
- Point to information your customers themselves reveal.
FeedBlitz search is totally fried
If you take our integrated feed — and you should* — and you happen to pick the email option, that’s delivered via FeedBlitz. I subscribe myself, of course, and today I happened to check the option “Search Monash Information Services” (Monash Information Services is the name of the feed). That goes to this search page.
*That’s what this link is for. Or this one.
Curious to see how results compared to those from our own cross-site search, I tried a search on a company I write a lot about, namely “Netezza.” Nothing came up. Then I tried “Attensity.” Ditto. And “text mining”. Still nothing. In fact, there aren’t even any results on “Monash”.
I think some repairs may be in order …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Search engines, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
