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If you’re like me — and I know I am — you have hundreds of feeds in your feed reader and not enough time to wade through them all. Finding a way to sort through them all and get to the posts that are most “important” or interesting is a conundrum that I and many others continue to wrestle with. It’s why Techmeme.com continues to be so handy, despite what some see as its “echo chamber”-type flaws (for the record, I am a big fan of Techmeme).

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Waterloo-based AideRSS — which launched today — are taking a page from Google’s book in an attempt to solve the RSS problem. In the same way that the search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to sort pages based on who links to them, AideRSS uses a filtering system called PostRank to show you the posts in a blog’s feed that are getting the most attention in the form of readers, links, comments, Digg submissions and so on (Josh Catone has an in-depth look at Read/Write Web and Ilya describes PostRank on his blog).

Ilya was kind enough to give me a trial account to AideRSS, and while I haven’t had all that much time to play around with it (vacation in an Internet-challenged location got in the way), I think the company is onto something. I’m not sure if I want AideRSS to determine which posts I read all the time — I like a certain haphazard, serendipitous approach as well — but it is definitely worth monitoring, and like Google’s PageRank it will likely improve over time. My smart mesh friend Ethan Kaplan of Blackrimglasses has some thoughts here.

I know this isn’t a gamer blog or anything, but if you play Halo at all (or have ever played it and liked it), then this could be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen — a full-scale, working Warthog, complete with four-way steering and dual mounted machine guns. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

In case you were wondering where Marc Andreessen got the material for his continuing blog series on startups, it looks to me like a lot of it probably came from his experience with Opsware — which has just been bought by Hewlett-Packard for a whopping $1.6-billion in cash. As Marc describes in his post, the deal is the culmination of more than seven years of toil, from starting the company formerly known as Loudcloud in 1999, to going public just as the tech sector peaked, to almost going under, to rebuilding the business and making it a leader in the industry. If anyone has paid their dues, it sounds like Marc has — and he just turned 36. In case you’re keeping score at home, it looks as though Andreessen will make about $165-million on the sale.

Just discovered that Amit Agarwal, who writes the excellent Digital Inspiration blog, has created a site with ASCII art images of 100 popular bloggers, including yours truly (I’m the one in the second row without a head).

Nice link bait, Amit 🙂

Still at the cottage, and crawling through my feed reader from time to time on one of the slowest dial-up connections since the mid-1990s, which is where I came across a post by my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0, who asks whether newspapers should become local blog networks.

Scott makes what I think is a persuasive case for why the answer to that question should be yes. Blogs, he argues, are just a content-management system with a dumb name — and newspapers (smart ones, that is) could use them to expand the nature of what they do online in interesting ways.

Joel Spolsky is a smart guy who writes a great blog called Joel On Software — a blog on which he recently posted something that is completely wrong. Okay, not completely wrong, but more wrong than it is right. And I’m not just saying that because I have something against Dave Winer — I don’t. But I think Joel is wrong to tell us that we should learn something from Dave when it comes to comments on blogs.

This is something I have written a fair bit about — most recently here — because I think it’s an important question. In fact, I think it was one of the first big issues I tackled when I started this blog (that post also involved Dave Winer, who got mad at me for criticizing him over not having comments). A debate went around and around at that time about whether a blog without comments is still a blog, and my position then was — and still is — that a blog without comments may technically be a blog, but it is missing a giant part of what makes blogs powerful.

As Clay Shirky points out at Corante, there may be dozens (if not thousands) of examples of how comments are stupid and the people who make them are morons, as Joel alleges in his post. But at the same time, there are also plenty of examples of posts (including some of my own) in which the comments held more information and generated more thought and debate than the post that sparked them.

To be fair to Dave, he does allow comments — just not many of them, and only occasionally. That’s clearly the way he wants to run his blog, which is fine. And there’s no question that having comments requires some management, or what I call social gardening. But I think blogs — and blog readers and writers — are better for having them.

I’m on vacation again — for the week — and will be posting from time to time, but likely not with the same frequency. That’s because I will be here:

or watching something like this:

or doing something like this:

Through some bizarre confluence of events, we have not one but two restrospectives on two separate citizen journalism or “crowdsourced” media projects today — Backfence, which recently announced it was shutting down, and Assignment Zero, which was the joint venture between Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired magazine, run by my mesh friend Jeff Howe — as well as an overview of the whole citizen journalism concept by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, whose own local journalism project, Bayosphere, failed and was absorbed by Backfence.

Dan’s overview, in a nutshell, is that citizen journalism has come a long way but has much further to go:

“There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape. And, most important, there’s a flood of great ideas.

But we have a long, long way to go. We need much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain — and some notable failures are discouraging.”

After much talk about the failure of Backfence, former CEO Mark Potts finally takes a long look at what happened and tries to draw some lessons, including the need to:

“Engage the community. This may be the single most critical element. It’s not about technology, it’s not about journalism, it’s not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It’s about bringing community members together.”

Potts also talks about the need to trust the community, and to treat the entire affair like a conversation, instead of trying to impose external controls on it. And Jeff Howe has both a Wired piece and his own blog post on the end of Assignment Zero, which he describes as “a highly satisfying failure.”

“Although Assignment Zero produced a strong body of work, consisting of seven original essays and some 80 Q&As, the real value of the exercise was discovery. We learned a lot about how crowds come together, and what’s required to organize them well. But many of the lessons came too late to help Assignment Zero.

In the 12 weeks the project was open to the public, it suffered from haphazard planning, technological glitches and a general sense of confusion among participants. Crucial staff members were either forced out or resigned in mid-stream, and its ambitious goal… had to be dramatically curtailed.”

Well worth reading, all of them. If failure is educational, then we are all learning a lot. And as Eric mentions in the comments, the Washington Post has also just launched a new “hyper-local” journalism experiment called LoudounExtra.com.

Update:

For more on Assignment Zero and the lessons learned, be sure to check out this post from Tish Grier, who acted as the project’s deputy director of participation and has some worthwhile thoughts. David Cohn, who was a key participant, also has a post on the project.

(Reading this New York Times story on VeohTV reminded me of the feature I did on Joost that ran in the newspaper on Saturday, so I thought I would cross-post it here for anyone who missed it.)

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the dynamic duo who revolutionized the online-music business with Kazaa and then the voice-over-Internet business with Skype, have their sights set on doing the same thing to the television industry with their latest creation: an Internet-based “network” called Joost.

Joost – formerly known as The Venice Project – streams TV-style content over the Web using “peer-to-peer” technology in which each viewer’s computer becomes a hub that streams the content to others. The service is in a limited “beta” trial, and is expected to launch later this summer.

The Scandinavian co-founders (Friis is Danish and Zennstrom is Swedish) had two very different outcomes with their previous ventures. Kazaa was sued into oblivion – the company paid a $100-million (U.S.) settlement earlier this year – while Skype was sold to eBay for $2.6-billion (U.S.).

Continue reading “Joost tries to be the anti-YouTube”

As Duncan Riley points out, the Wall Street Journal’s article celebrating the 10th birthday of blogging is a little late, considering Justin Hall — who I and others believe was the first real blogger — and even Dave Winer were doing it as far back as 1994 (although that was before Jorn Barger coined the term weblog). In any case, it’s nice to see the WSJ taking note of blogging as a real phenomenon, rather than just doing another drive-by criticism of it. They even feature my pal Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0, who does a video essay on blogging and journalism. And as Jason at Webomatica points out, it’s interesting to see that Mia Farrow has taken up blogging (and is a Boing Boing fan), or that Tom Wolfe sees blogging as important enough to dump all over in his classic style. Meanwhile, Mark Evans has his 11 lessons he’s learned from blogging, his answer to Marc Andreessen’s recent list.

Update:

Aidan Henry and Tris Hussey have responded to Mark’s (and Marc’s) post with their own list of lessons. I’m still working on mine 🙂

I am on vacation for the next week or so, and so posting is likely to be light — and in the interim, here is a musical interlude from one of YouTube’s most popular attractions: “Funtwo,” who turned out to be a young Korean man named Jeong-Hyun Lim.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjA5faZF1A8&w=425&h=350]

It was a couple of days ago now, but Nat Torkington of O’Reilly had a great post about the kerfuffle (or was it a schlemozzle — or a brouhaha?) over Google’s Health blog and how the blogger in charge there took a run at Michael Moore’s movie Sicko in an attempt to sell the virtues of Google’s AdWords. If you’re interested in all of the back story, there’s a post at Search Engine Watch with details, and the blogger’s mea culpa is here.

Nat’s post (which I found via Media Influencer) does a great job of dissecting what went wrong with the Google post — and why that kind of thing is an endemic risk with corporate blogs:

“I feel sorry for Ms Turner, whose post has a painful logic to its existence. Blogs let you communicate directly with your audience. Of course, we’re too busy building product to communicate with our audience, so let’s hire a marketer to do it for us.”

What happens then, Nat says, is that the marketer tries to assume the voice of a blogger — that is, an authentic personal voice — but because what they are really trying to do is push an agenda, it all comes out pear-shaped:

“When inexperienced marketers get a blog, they all blog the same way. Their voice is as authentic as a Twinkie is organic.The time-honored marketing blog post formula is simple:

1. Find something topical. In Ms Turner’s case, it was the release of Michael Moore’s new film.

2. Identify the shiznit you wish to pimp. In Ms Turner’s case, it was Google’s Health Advertising services.

3. Find a line (however tenuous) between the two and the post just writes itself!”

Sadly, I have seen too many posts that fit that exact same formula. And it has the exact opposite effect as the one intended. Instead of making the company or the blogger in question look smart and clued-in, it makes the company and blogger in question look ridiculous and lame.

“So, to recap, the recipe for a disaster is easy: hire marketers with no authentic voice, ask them to pimp offal, and when they’re busted for it make them force out an apology in which they blame it on their authentic voice.

You too can make the front page of TechMeme for two days running with three easy steps, though you might get wet sleeves fishing your career prospects out of the toilet when you’re done. You’re welcome!”

Brilliant.

Peng Shulin was cut in half after getting run over by a truck in 1995, and lost the lower half of his body. Doctors did skin grafts to seal up his torso, but he has been bed-ridden for years — until now. Scientists at the Chinese Rehabilitation Research Center created a kind of plastic housing for his torso that is fitted with two bionic legs (and some cool Adidas shoes as well, apparently), and he has been using the device with a modified walker. I wonder if Johnny Eck would have liked something similar — probably not.

As I mentioned in my recent Globe and Mail column on the Facebook IPO rumours, I don’t think there has been so much frenzy around a tech startup and its valuation since the Google days, although the debate over YouTube’s value (thanks in large part to the always game Mark Cuban) runs a close second. We now have valuations that run anywhere from a mind-boggling $10-billion — and this is for a company with annual revenue of about $100-million, at last estimate — all the way to zero. The big debate lately has been whether Facebook’s poor performance on the advertising front makes it worth less (or worthless), or whether it just means that advertising isn’t the route to profit for a social network, as my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 describes here. I, for one, hope that Facebook does do an IPO so that we can let the market decide what the company is worth. Sergey Brin says he’d be happy to talk to Facebook but isn’t planning to buy it, and thinks it is building a great company on its own.

Like most bloggers, I think I tend to take the power of the link for granted. I write things, I link to other bloggers and to websites, etc. etc. — that’s how it works, right? Carry on — nothing to see here. And yet, every now and then something comes along that reinforces just how powerful a simple link can be. The latest example was a post I came across at The Blog Herald, written by Jason Kaneshiro, who writes a blog at Webomatica.com.

Not to get too self-referential or anything, but Jason talks in the post about how a link from me helped inspire him in his early days as a blogger, a topic that he arrived at after reading a similar post by Lorelle Van Fossen of WordPress, called “Changing a Life With a Link.” I have to say that Jason’s post means a lot to me — in fact, his post may even have as much significance to me as my original link did to him. And yet, I gave virtually no thought to the link when I posted that original item to my blog. I had no idea who Jason was, or what his blog was all about (although I did check out a few of his posts to get a sense of who he was). I just thought he had made a good suggestion, so I linked to it. End of story — or, as it turned out, beginning of story. Apparently a link I gave him made a difference to The Last Podcast as well.

As I mentioned in a comment on Jason’s post, that’s what is so great about the blogosphere. Who Jason was — or how long he had been blogging, or what his background was — was of no interest to me. It was quite literally irrelevant to whether his post made sense or not, just as it was irrelevant to me who Tony Hung was when I first started reading his blog at Deep Jive Interests (Tony is also the editor at The Blog Herald now).

And if nothing else, Jason’s story has reinforced in me the desire to link to as many different voices as possible. I already do my best to find new blogs and links, instead of always linking to TechCrunch or CNET or places like that, but I could do better. I remember my blog friend Kent Newsome (who got mad at me recently for a link I inadvertently removed) had a project called “Second Opinion,” in which he tried to get bloggers to link to new voices, and I thought it was a great idea — and still do. Links are powerful things.