Mar 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
Anil Dash of Six Apart has an interesting post up in which he proposes that instead of simply linking to or quoting from blog posts, bloggers could actually embed a segment of the post they are citing — in much the same way that people embed YouTube videos etc. by inserting some Javascript. I’ve included an excerpt of the post here as an experiment, in part because I’m wondering whether this idea (which I found via a Twitter post from Steve Rubel) makes any sense or not.
Like Anil, part of me finds this kind of thing appealing — but is it just the geek part of me? It’s elegant in a way, but I wonder whether it’s more trouble than is really necessary (Piers Fawkes at PSFK has written about it as well, and Anil has commented on that post). After all, I can quote from Anil’s post by simply cutting and pasting text, like this:
I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site. But I don’t want you to do it just by copying and pasting it into your own blogging tool. I think there might be a different way to do it.
What benefits does using Anil’s method have? It includes a link to the comments on the post, which is nice (although it could get unwieldy if there were too many), but I’m not sure it’s a killer feature. And it has a nice colored border, of course. I experimented with Clipmarks.com as a way of doing something similar — since it allows you to clip and save a blog or web-page excerpt and then paste it into your blog automatically — but in the end it seemed too cumbersome.
Feb 20th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
If you follow the media business at all, you might have heard of Chez Pazienza — a CNN producer who was fired recently for having a blog. This isn’t that uncommon, sadly. In fact, it even has its own term: getting fired for your blog is called getting Dooced, after a blog of the same name got Heather Armstrong fired way back in 2002. So what happened to Chez is hardly unique. But for some reason it seems even more pathetic for something like this to happen to someone in the media — since blogs are effectively just another medium, one you might hope outlets like CNN would be experimenting with.
Heather Armstrong got fired for writing satirical blog posts about a place she worked. Why did Chez Pazienzia get fired? That’s not really clear. If you read his lengthy update about the situation — which I encourage you to do — he says it was made pretty obvious that while his blog technically broke the rules (which require that all outside writing be pre-approved by the network), the real reason he was fired was what he was writing about, i.e. the content of some of his blog posts.
It’s still not clear what was wrong with that content, however, other than the fact that he spoke his mind about various aspects of pop culture, the media, and occasionally political issues as well. I suspect it was when his posts started showing up at The Huffington Post (where some of mine also appear from time to time) that certain eyebrows started to be raised at CNN. But even that was never explicitly mentioned when he was given his walking papers. He was just shown the door.
As a blogger who also has a day job with a large media entity, I’m somewhat, er… sensitive to these issues, shall we say. I try to keep the things I write about on this blog focused on my beat, which is technology and new media, and when I stray from that I keep in mind that to some extent I represent the Globe and Mail and that they sign my pay cheques. That said, I think what CNN did to Chez Pazienza was pretty stupid. From reading his blog posts, he seems like a passionate guy, and a pretty smart guy as well. Isn’t that the kind of staffer they want?
Maybe he wrote some things that crossed the line into partisan ideology, things that CNN thought might make people question his ability to be fair or balanced as a producer. Or maybe he wrote some posts that the network thought made it look bad, by criticizing the popular media coverage of some issue. Either way, why not just go to him and ask him to tone it down a little? As far as I can tell, there’s no indication that anyone did that. And now, CNN just looks like a bully, and a stupid one at that.
Feb 18th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I know there’s probably been enough sturm und drang about Fred Wilson’s post on journabloggers and Mike Arrington’s response, in which he calls Fred “hypocritical, wrong and conflicted,” but there’s an undercurrent behind the furore that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit. Tony Hung puts his finger on it in this post, and Andy Beard mentions it in his as well. It’s the old “truth vs. traffic” dilemma, and while bloggers like to think that it was invented by the Web, it’s probably as old as journalism itself.
To recap: Tony says that Mike is using a blog/nerd fight to his advantage for traffic reasons, and that when TechCrunch or any other blog is controversial, they win (i.e., they get linked high on Techmeme and they get more traffic as a result). Mike also says in a comment on his own post that:
“we’ve found that the “hits” - the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion - are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens.”
and in a comment on Fred’s post:
“here’s a secret - a lot of what we write about generates the traffic. And every day I sneak in a bunch of posts about startups that get the benefit of that traffic.”
Mike also told me last year — when I interviewed him as part of a mesh conference keynote — that he always wants to be first, because if he’s not first then “it’s a lot more work.” Does that mean he is willing to jump into print with something quickly even if he hasn’t pinned it down 100 per cent? He admitted that it does (although he also made the point that trust must be gained over time, and can be easily lost).
But in making that admission, and talking about traffic as a motivator, all Mike is really doing is admitting to the same impulse that newspaper editors have been driven by for the past 100 years or so. In fact, the early days of newspapers — when there were hundreds of scandal sheets and political bully-pulpit rags pushing their respective biases — resembled nothing so much as the current state of the blogosphere.
That tradition continues today with tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily Mail in the UK, and with blogs like TMZ and PerezHilton.com. Got a hot rumour? Print it first, ask questions later. Even reputable newspapers can fall prey to that impulse: I remember a story that hit the front pages of dozens of British papers (as well as my own paper) about a guy who made custom wooden gibbets for hanging prisoners, and claimed to have sold them to various African despots.
It was a great story — except that it turned out to be complete fiction. Did we or the other papers check it out before printing it? Sure. But maybe we didn’t check quite as hard as we might have, because it was such a great story. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing Mike Arrington to a tabloid or a scandal sheet or anything of the sort. I’m just saying that the quest for traffic, and the tension between that and “the truth,” is not a new one invented by the blogosphere. It goes on all around us.
Feb 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I have to give VC blogger Fred Wilson some props for calling out what he calls “journabloggers” like Mashable, VentureBeat, GigaOm, TechCrunch and so on. Fred’s point — one that others have made as well — is that it’s easy for such sites to fall into the trap of posting salacious headlines that aren’t fully backed up, whether because they want to be first, or because they simply want to boost traffic.
The example Fred uses is a VentureBeat post about visual-search site Like.com (formerly known as Riya), which Matt Marshall says has seen its traffic climb to the point where it is beating competitor ThisNext — a claim that Fred takes issue with. He also mentions a recent post from TechCrunch, and his point seems to be that Matt and Erick Schonfeld could have done a bit more research to back up some of their claims.
Matt seems like a stand-up guy, and I know Fred didn’t bring it up to pick on him, or on anyone else for that matter. I think it’s good to point out when the bloggers we read aren’t thinking things through fully or are falling short (and that includes me), provided it is done in a constructive way. The great part about the blogosphere — which Fred didn’t really mention — is that it’s easy to flesh out a post when that happens.
VentureBeat, for example, responded to Fred’s concerns (which Matt commented on at Fred’s blog) and added them to the original post. That’s a substantially better response than Fred would have gotten from traditional media, I expect. Steven Hodson at WinExtra makes a good point: if the top “journabloggers” get too comfortable or lazy, all that does is open up opportunities for new ones, which is good.
Feb 14th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but Richard MacManus has a post up at Read/Write Web that I thought was pretty interesting, about an email he got from Business Wire, in which the press release service brags about its ability to bypass the blogosphere and traditional media and go directly to the markets it is trying to reach, by showing up on Techmeme and other aggregators, as well as in search results.
This may sound like a lot of hot air from a PR service, but as Richard notes in the post, there is ample evidence of press releases showing up at the top of conversation threads on Techmeme. Richard also has some quotes from Gabe Rivera, in which he talks about how that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — provided they are well written — and how some blog posts amount to poorly rewritten press releases anyway.
It was that last point that really struck me. Why shouldn’t press releases get better play than some blog post that basically takes the key facts and repeats them? If a press release gets across the information and has it first, then it deserves to be there — and as Richard notes, as press releases get more “social” and add links and even video, they become more like blog posts, and are even more likely to hit Techmeme.
Memo to the blogosphere: You might want to keep all that in mind the next time you try to get some juice out of posting a rewritten press release. That kind of thing works in traditional media, but it’s probably not going to fly for very long in new media.
