My first thought was that it was a new feature of the OS. I was pleased, but not completely surprised, because I had a bit of a secret. You see, once upon a time I used a jailbreak on my phone. It was a heady time for me, running two apps simultaneously, recording video with Qik, and most importantly using a hack that turns the battery icon to a percentage view. And, once I decided to un-jailbreak, all my various interface hacks and other things vanished, except for that surreptitious little battery percentage toggle.

Through a couple of iPhone OS updates the battery hack stayed with me, apparently hidden away in some configuration setting or firmware file. And apparently, that setting triggered a feature that is only meant for the iPhone 3Gs when the firmware installed. Excellent!

What’s weird is that this is distinctly different from how it appeared on older firmware revisions. Gone is the ability to tap on the battery to toggle it to a percent.. now both appear, all the time. And of course, since I don’t have a 3Gs, there is no setting in the Usage menu for me to turn it off. Good thing I like it.

Now how do I tell my iPhone to play music through my bluetooth headset? sigh.

More discussions on this:

Phone 3.0 comes with battery percentage meter – The iPhone User Guide
How to get battery percentage in 3.0- [Archive] – Mac Forums
iphone 3g battery percentage.. am i lucky-
Battery % Hack – Mac Forums

This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

This is part 1 of Scribkin’s I Am Blogger series, which started out with this post.

A lot has been written about, and by, a guy who has seen his reputation in social media grow, often exponentially, over the past year.  He has been writing about technology and new media for just a hair over twice that time period on his own eponymous blog.  Oddly, his income is not based in whole or in part by his blog, as evinced by the lack of any advertising on it.

The man in question is Louis Gray.

You might be wondering, as I have, why he has kept at his hobby of writing blog entries up to three times a day, for at least a year without any significant readership or an aspiration of monetary compensation in the technologies he was covering.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is simple:  He loves to write, and he writes about stuff that interests him.  Fantasy football, TiVo, Apple stuff, iPods.. the list is diverse and changes over time.

Louis may have started his blog as a way to codify his thoughts on these subjects, but he was also ‘home schooling’ – in this I mean that all that writing was practice.  Sure, hardly anyone saw his first 100 posts until well after they were posted.  But when people did start to notice his blog, he had already taken his blogging game to a new level.  Full opinion pieces on technology, new media, and corporate politics.  In-depth statistical reports. Honest assessments of new technologies and software, as well as a number of exclusives.

No wonder people were drawn to his writing.

And Louis has become very popular, probably thanks in no small part to Robert Scoble ‘discovering’ him on FriendFeed and hyping him as only Scobleizer can do for a while. All that attention would go to anyone’s head, and they would probably parlay that fame into a better job, higher-profile gigs, etc.  Louis, however, stayed modest.  He decided to open his blog to other voices, other bloggers.

I should interrupt myself here and explain that, at least in social media circles, it’s fairly common to see ‘guest author’ posts on blogs.  They are a good way to expose an established blog’s audience to a new voice, and afford a little cross-promotion.  But here again, Louis never referred to his contributing bloggers as “guests,” he felt that they have a stake in the welfare of Louis’ blog as well.

For full disclosure, I am an author on Louis Gray’s team.

So Louis is a great guy.  But why is his writing compelling?  First, he has a very conversational tone.  It’s easy to dive in to anything he’s written.  He maintains a clear thread of thought through each piece, and he prefers to write from a perspective that isn’t just a re-hashing of the same news and memes that have been covered on other sites.  Often, he will present a different opinion, or attempt to reconcile the logic made on different sides of the same issue.  He is a mediator as much as he is a pundit.

Most of all, Louis hardly ever writes ‘from the hip,’ so to speak – you can be sure that if he is sitting down to write about something, he has given the matter a lot of consideration, and taking as much information as he has available to him (which usually is a lot more than I notice, I can tell you that!) and synthesized it into a thoughtful, comprehensive post.

Generally, it takes him about 20 minutes to write and less than an hour to post.  Another benefit of all that practice.

I do envy him that.

Word.Line by apesara

A few days ago, I got an email.  This email was from a fellow blogger that I was in the middle of a round of correspondence with.  This particular email.. it made me realise something about blogging, and about writing.

All the bloggers I know would write whether they got paid for it or not. We have a love of writing persuasively, and journalistically, and passionately.  We simply love the language.  And that drive to write means we get a lot of practice becoming better at our craft.

OK, enough waxing poetic about the Muse.  My point is this: We bloggers have power. And blog posts aren’t the only place we can employ that power.  That is what the email I mentioned taught me — as a writer, we can choose to write well to audiences great and small.

This may seem fairly obvious, but bear with me.  You send and receive emails every day.  But how often do you get a really well-written email, that really tells you someone sat down and spent a significant amount of effort crafting it, and then sending it only to you?

It doesn’t happen that often to me.  When I got an email like that recently, I felt, somehow, that I was in the presence of greatness.  As if a president or statesman from a time gone past, a time when fine writing was valued as much for its art as it was for its utility, had set quill to paper and hashed out a missive just for me.

I suddenly realized that this is why the electronic newsletter is still alive, and still great, despite criticism.  This is why writing a blog entry is important, no matter the size of your audience.  And this is why taking time to write an email with the same effort and thought is equally as important.

I’m going to spend a week doing something a little different here on Scribkin.  Although burdened with lack of preparation, I’m going to select  someone each day or two whos writing has made a difference to me in the past year, and attempt to give you my perspective on that person, and why I follow their writing.

Mutual Respect

My attitude was, mutual respect. You follow me, I follow you. I can learn from everyone. I still think it’s a good attitude to have, and I wish it was the right one. But increasingly, especially on Twitter, I don’t think it is. 

I’m going to rant a bit here, just warning you.

For months, I have been using FriendFeed and Twitter actively. At the beginning, I followed anyone who looked interesting and didn’t care about who followed me back. I maintained what I thought of as a fairly altruistic policy toward both services, just concerning myself with finding great people.

More recently, my active search for new great people has begun to taper. First, I found tools for both services that figure out who my ‘mutual followers’ are.. and I have to admit, they have shaken my original innocence.. people who I thought I had connected with weren’t following me. I was disheartened. 

I briefly thought of whining.. but that doesn’t feel right to me. It’s very difficult for me to impose myself on other people. That’s why I can’t effectively use services like Digg and Mixx.

Anyway, I maintained my mutual follow policy. On FriendFeed, I just try to keep myself ignorant of any gaming that happens. I follow those who follow me, and I hope they respect that. Twitter, though, is a different story. With the rise of tools like Twitterless and SocialToo, I can see exactly how much ‘gaming’ is going on.

Gaming

And Twitter gaming is seriously on the rise.

I could (and perhaps will) write a whole different post on how people are gaming Twitter.  But the behavior that is really irritating me recently are these folks that follow a lot of Twitterers and then, 10 minutes to two days later, un-follow all of them in the hopes that a certain percentage follow them back.

Why do they do this?  Because Twitter now has a follow ratio that prevents people from following X number more than they have followers.  It seems fairly arbitrary and people now see it as a challenge to defeat.

It irritates me no end. I’ve taken to blocking the people who exhibit this behavior with me. For example, recently one dude (TheBobBlog on Twitter) had the balls to follow me, send a robot DM when I followed him back, ignore a separate DM that I sent him asking about tumbling his photos, and then un-following me the next day!  BLOCKED.

Ultimately, I don’t want to be reactionary with a new follow/discovery policy going forward.  That’s why I have taken a step back and started thinking about what I really want to do going forward.. and help me in more ways than just addressing the gaming going on.

Two Paths

The way I see it, there are two ways I could go. I can go all-inclusive: Open the floodgates and follow thousands of people on both services a la Robert Scoble and just filter out the stuff I find interesting on the back-end; Or I can go exclusive: Start hand-picking those people I find interesting, go in-depth with them and re-grow my social circle with care.

Either way, I would not actively try to influence who is following me. And I am aware that going to exclusive route can have some negative backlash if folks place a lot of emphasis on mutual follows.

However, I am starting to think it is worth the risk.

Why?  A few reasons:

• I fear I am missing too much from folks I respect as well as new people I follow, due to the increased amount of noise.
• I am spending more and more time just trying to keep up with what is happening in FriendFeed, much less exploring what the folks on FriendFeed are doing on their own blogs and other services.
• I wonder if I am missing opportunities to connect more with great people, as the crowd I follow gets ever larger.
• I find myself getting frustrated just using the social media tools that I found so enjoyable a scant few months ago.

Taking A Risk

So, you might notice a change as I radically upset the balance of followers to following.  And if that’s the limit for you, I don’t blame you.  But I can promise I’m not ‘holing up’ and disconnecting – just the opposite.  I won’t be surprised if I end up following more people than I am now.. but I will have arrived there with a different methodology, and hopefully with more to offer those following me.

• It forces Twitter users to think of brief, hopefully elegant ways to transmit (or ‘tweet’) their thoughts.
• It forces creative solutions to common problems such as sending an accompanying web address (or URL) with a tweet.

I could probably add a few more points on how this limit also defines how conversations happen on Twitter but that would be a whole different post, which has probably been covered many times by now.

For the Shorties

Let’s focus on the second point though.  Almost immediately after Twitter started picking up steam, URL-shortening services that already existed (and many more specifically for Twitter) started gaining in popularity as well.

These services, such as tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, bit.ly and many more, all do basically the same thing.  They take a standard uncompressed (and hopefully easy-to-read) URL and associate a new, coded, very short URL with it.  They do this by acting as a ‘redirect’ between you clicking on a shortened link in Twitter and ending up on the destination page.

The Pros

The benefit is clear: more of those precious 140 characters is available for actual message, less is taken up by the web address.  There are other benefits as well.  Some of these services allow customization of the shortened url (using a key word for example), and others offer statistics on just who clicked on the shortened URL and when.

The Cons

The drawbacks are also clear.  For one, you have no idea where a shortened URL goes before you click on it.  This has given rise to hugely popular internet memes such as the RickRoll, which basically is a shortened URL pointing to this YouTube video but in a tweet or other location that doesn’t indicate anything about where the link goes.  Walla, click on the link and you get rickroll’d.

Efforts have been made to make the redirect process more transparent, such as adding a custom version of the shortened URL that sends you to the redirect service with a full-text link to click on.. but these hardly get used because people want instant gratification, not the requirement of clicking through to the actual page or waiting 5 seconds, etc.

Another somewhat haphazard solution so far has been browsers and other tools that ‘expand’ the short URLs back to their original targets in-line, or at least show the target in a pop-up.  The problem has been these have been single-shot solutions for the most part, working for one particular service but not the others, and/or only working for certain sites, such as Twitter.

Prediction

So, I am predicting that we are going to see a more concerted effort in the form of a browser plug-in (say for Firefox?  Fingers crossed) or maybe a whole new browser that handles these compressed URLs natively, perhaps expanding them inline or in a popup, no matter what site you are on or what service the URL was compressed with.  In addition, publically available statistics could be gathered from the redirect page at the same time the uncompressed URL is harvested, transmitting that info back to the recipient as well.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, and so I am prognosticating that it is already being developed.  Hopefully we’ll see it soon.

Final Thought

On a final note, I’d just to think out loud, and wonder why Twitter doesn’t improve their 140-character algorithm so that it does not add the characters inside a web URL and, while we are at it, any username mentioned in the tweet (preceded by an at-sign: @) or a hashtag (preceded by a hash-sign: #).  I mean, if you are only giving us 140 characters, why can’t they all count toward message?

Tangent Post from Louis Gray: BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)

Wait.. what?

I’ll break it down.  FriendFeed is a space mountain.

To wit, interacting with FriendFeed is like interacting with a mountain in space, in that it takes an enormous amount of effort to get the mountain to do anything, but once you have it moving, it’s not stopping anytime soon.

In metaphorical terms, that is what is required to really appreciate FriendFeed as an experience. To extend the metaphor further, we could say that the space mountain (or asteroid, perhaps) isn’t frozen out in deep space.  It’s more like a solar comet, spinning about a trajectory closer than Mercury.  This mountain is active.  It is almost paradoxical that a place that is so overwhelmingly active can start out being fairly slow going for the noob.

So, keep this in mind.  We can’t all be Mona — don’t give up if you aren’t a FriendFeed hero overnight.*  It’s best to start putting in your effort steadily, in the form of following interesting people, commenting on entries, showing yourself through stuff you find online via the bookmarklet and feeds.  But most of all, interact.

Comment and like.  A lot.  At first, you won’t get a lot of response from anybody.  But keep plugging away, and people will notice, and the discussion and interaction will start happening.

Consider this:  Even the least liked people on FriendFeed are well known simply by dint of their diligent effort.  Oh, they enjoy their status as underdogs, but the point is that even with many many people blocking them, they still generate conversation due to their notoriety.

So, buckle up, be patient, and enjoy your ride.

* Tamar Weinberg on FriendFeed follower activity level.

I love to explore new software. New social media web applications are no different – I like to learn about them, try them out, and be inspired by them. Some, like FriendFeed, become a tool that I use every day.

Especially in a field named ‘social media,’ most of you are the same as me in what you want to get out of it, but perhaps for different reasons. I am guessing that most of you are more interested in the social side.. you are on FriendFeed because there are interesting people there. And that’s cool. But that’s only half of the interest for me. I also love to explore and understand what makes software tick.

I’m not saying I don’t like people; far from it. I’m not a misanthrope! I’m just saying that my outlook on going to a party, mixer, networking seminar or other social event usually registers somewhere between uneasiness and dread.

The point with all this is to say that I know myself fairly well: I’ve always been a loner. It takes work for me to maintain social contacts and be suitably reciprocal and engaged with a lot of people. Frankly, it wears me out, probably a lot faster than for most of you, where I’m guessing it is more like second nature.

And that is what I mean by the burden of social media. For me, even when it is a joy, sometimes it is also a burden.

Applications like LinkedIn, Plaxo, not to mention social community sites like MySpace and Facebook are all about enabling networking and expanding your community of friends and acquaintances. When I started using these sites in earnest after SXSW Interactive in February, I was positive they would completely fill in the gap where I came up short in networking and socializing.

After 6 months of using one social app or another every day, I can safely say that none of these tools is a panacea for the introverted man. It’s not that they don’t work, they do provide a lot of leverage in different ways for those willing to put in the effort. But they do in fact require effort.

In some ways, the playing field is not leveled by these tools. For example, If I put in effort, that effort is magnified on a social media site. I may go from making 5 or 6 contacts in a certain industry or social circle to making 15 to 20. And that is great. But someone who could easily make 25 to 50 contacts without a social media tool would see their work multiplied ten times or more. They could easily have 250 or more contacts.

My point here is that, I have been putting in a lot of effort, and for a reclusive shlub, I think I’m doing really well in this funny online universe of FriendFeed and Facebook and Twitter. I can’t complain. In fact I want to thank each and every one of you who look for me on a new social media site and make the effort to link to me there! But I need to make sure that I am directing my energy toward creative endeavors as much or more than building a social network.

Therefore, I am going to make some changes to this site, Scribkin. I am going to re-dedicate it more toward writing what I am good at, which is more primers and tech-based stuff, and not fret so much about the social side. If an article warrants linking to an awesome article or other bit of writing that someone else wrote, fantastic. But if I feel like my energy is driving me toward writing something more introspective, I will run with it. My ultimate goal with this site is to become a better writer, to write more proficiently and clearly, and to provide a service to my readership.

So you will be seeing the site going in new directions as I discover new technologies that fascinate me, or topics that I feel I have something interesting to write about. I am also going to try to not worry so much about readership, page counts, etc. I think investing my attention in those things draws energy away from writing.

They say that most book writers are extremely interoverted, and masochists to boot. I believe it. More, I can empathize with it.. I seem to draw more clarity of purpose and more energy when I step back and gather my thoughts together. So, this might mean you will see me less active on FriendFeed especially, but I think in the long run it will be good because I will be giving back more worthwhile and interesting content to my subscribers this way.

I apologize for the personal tone of the article, and I hope you all choose to follow me on my path of self-improvement, but I completely don’t blame you if you do not.

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

Me the Writer

However, while I am there, my short term memory shuts down and my mid-term memory is impaired.  I know this about myself.  It happens whenever there are a lot of bright, shiny distracting things in my environment.  Now, if I was a stockbroker, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But as a writer, it is pretty devastating to my ability to write anything cohesive.

I’ve been reflecting on my post quality from the point where I started my blog, 4 or so months ago.  At first, quality went up, as I got more comfortable with my writing and I came up with new ideas and new subject matter.  More recently my posts have become less frequent and sometimes lacking critical information, like references to similar posts, even sometimes key observations.

For me, There is definitely a strong inverse correlation between participation on FriendFeed and post quality.  I have to internalize the information I gather and make sense of it.  When I feel it is time, it isn’t hard for me to write a great article.  But if I try too hard, or try to write an article when I am distracted by a thousand other things, my article suffers.

And then, correspondingly, I also feel depressed because the work I have done seems wasted.

Stream or Digest… or Both?

They say there are two types of people in the world, those who organize things into groups, and those who don’t.  With that advice in mind, I am proposing that there are two broad groups of people divided by their ability to process information:

• Stream: Stream folks live in the now, the breathe in the information, they put things together as they happen, they can make use of the information right away.
• Digest: Digest people love to accumulate information, ruminate on what they have learned, and then when they are ready, can push out some quality analysis and insight.

Of course, nothing is that simple.  I’m going to turn this scalar into a vector by adding a different axis: critical thinking.  I believe people’s ability to think critically is also affected by what mode they are in when they receive information.  For example, I personally am not critical when I hear new information.  It is only when I have had a chance to mull what I have learned later that the critical thinking kicks in.

Speaking of modality by the way, I do believe we all have the ability to operate in either mode, or both simultaneously if we are lucky.  But I think we all prefer one mode over another most of the time.

To further illustrate my point, I have tried my hand at one of those popular domain graphs.  See it below.

Thus, I would consider myself a digest personality, at least when I want to write and contribute what know or have learned back to the larger community.  I definitely like playing in the stream mode though, but I’m definitely no editor.  I’m better at being the historian, and occasionally make a decent pundit.

Other People

Everyone is going to see themselves in the chart above differently.  However, I can gamely make a stab at a few standout folks on FriendFeed and in Social Media at large:

• Robert Scoble: Robert is always critically evaluating anything he absorbs.  I would say he’s usually an editor, and switches to pundit to write his blog posts.
• Louis Gray: I think Louis a strong archivist in the stream, and switches to historian or pundit when writing.. though, of all the folks on FriendFeed, Louis can move into direct critical thinking at times.
• Corvida: One of the few folks I really follow outside of FriendFeed, Corvida stays a lot in stream mode and uses her archivist talent to write about new stuff, or pundit when voicing an opinion.
• Mike Fruchter: Michael seems to be in stream mode most of the time, occasionally moving up to editor as needed and writes mostly from a historian persepective.
• Duncan Riley: Duncan stays directly in the pundit zone almost all the time.
• Cyndy Aleo-Carreira: Cyndy is almost always in editor mode, trending toward pundit when she writes.
• Steve Hodson: Steven definitely spends most of his time either as a pundit or an archivist.
• Franklin Pettit: Franklin can be very quiet (at least on FriendFeed) but I know he’s gathering info so I would say he stays in digest a lot, moving up to historian for his blog posts.
• Edythe (Polly): Edythe loves a very broad variety of things on FriendFeed, making her most comfortable in stream.  She will occasionally jump to editor.
• Mitchell Tsai: Mitchell is probably the most pure archivist I’ve seen on FriendFeed.
• Shey Smith: Shey is heavy stream and editor mostly, moving to historian for his blog posts.
• Sarah Perez: Sarah is finely tuned to write in editor mode, sometimes switching to historian, but usually not dwelling in pundit too much.
• Hutch Carpenter (BHC3): Hutch seems to spend a lot of time in stream and will dive into pundit as necessary.
• Allen Stern: Allen splits his time between archivist and editor, and jumps often to pundit for posting or video.
• (Jeff)isageek: Jeff loves the stream, and either hangs out there or archivist.
• Mark Dykeman: Mark comments a lot on things he likes, making him an editor in the stream, and a pundit when writing.

Thanks

I wanted to thank NiceFishFilms (Michael Sean Wright) for writing about different perspectives on FriendFeed and giving me the seed for this blog post.   It’s great to see new faces and new blogs, and I’m definitely going to follow him!

If I didn’t list you above, I’m sorry!  I am really interested on knowing how you rate yourself (whether you are listed or not).  Keep your eye out, I am going to re-post this with the graph so you can rate yourself on FriendFeed.  Thank you!

I’ve had a really exciting idea growing in my head for about a week now.  I guess it germinated when I overlooked giving some credit for an idea on a previous post.  Since then, I’ve been more aware of the people involved in stuff that I find interesting.  To that end, I wanted to give back a bit.

For the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on different social networking applications and the people I have met on them.  I’m going to write to my strengths by focusing on presenting a primer of the service in the first of each article, and the people in the second half.

I hope to have my first article written tonight or tomorrow.  I will follow up every three or four days, and continue until I’ve covered all the services I use actively.  After that, I may follow up as I get involved in a new community.

Please feel free to speak up, suggest a community I may have forgotten about, or even if I missed you!  Obviously, following hundreds of people on certain networks means I can’t give everyone equal time.  But not to worry, I promise to really make an effort to find really quality folks. 

Writer Wannabe’s

In fact, even bloggers don’t often like referring to themselves collectively as bloggers.  It’s almost too easy to say, he’s not a writer.. he’s a blogger. As if blogging did not call upon the same internal resources as writing.  You could argue the long form, of course… most bloggers will never write a novel by themselves, nor are they especially motivated to.

However, even journalists who write for newspapers or online trade mags and journals tend to look down upon bloggers.  Sure, there are differences to how a journalist and a blogger operates.  For one thing, a journalist has a copy editor and a deadline.  They have to cite sources.  They write for pay, and often need to try to stay unbiased, because otherwise what they are writing is called an editorial.

Blogging for Fun and Profit

But blogging isn’t just about writing whatever the hell you want on your own little piece of internet real estate.  Sure, that’s a perk, but the trade-off is that most of us don’t get paid. If you want to make blogging in to a business (also often called monetization), you have to make some fairly dramatic changes to your approach and motivation behind what you blog and why.

For one thing, you have to put on a lot more hats.  If you look at your standard book or even newspaper or magazine column writer, they prefer to stay on the cerebral or creative end of things, allowing publicists and established media channels promote their stuff for them.  Of course, like most things there are a thousand unknown writers out there for every famous one, but the promotional vehicles and channels have been there for scores of years already, and exist to allow the writer to write.

This is not true in the case of blogging.. it’s a new field, in a new ball park.  Bloggers have to work to be recognized for every part of their art, the writing, the promotion, the recognition.  There are no book tours for bloggers.  There is no talk show circuit for the most part.  Bloggers are having to re-invent all of that stuff from scratch in order to be acknowledged and, in a word, paid.

That means that bloggers are not just writers.  They are marketers, too. And networkers, social connectors.  They are new technology mavens and visionaries, pundits and critics all rolled in to one very tired body.  The cost of admission is low and dropping, but the price for success is staggeringly high.

Just Say .. Yes?

Does this mean a blogger should throw in their hat and go home?  No, not necessarily, but you should be at least acquainted with the realities of being a blogger, and the boulders that lie in the road to success.

For example, even when you get a bit of recognition, you have to deal with a ton of people who think you will work for free.  Just read Michelle Greer’s take on it.  If you put yourself through 8 years of medical school and become a doctor, do people start calling you and asking for free surgery?  Most likely not.  If work your way up to the senior editor’s desk at the New York Times, do you decide to spend half of your day doing work for free?  Hardly.

And yet, along with being constantly reminded that bloggers aren’t actually writers, even when they get a nut they suddenly are expected to share that nut with everyone.

And the Moral Is…

You got me.  I have no moral in this tale.  The ending hasn’t been written.  As I said, we are paving the path, burning the channels that will help bloggers and writers (and I am firmly of the opinion that bloggers by and large ARE writers, just as some writers are great and others suck, so also are bloggers).  I think the momentum is there for bloggers to make their own media channels, via podcasts, new TV, web radio, RSS and other technologies, to become legitimate.

And perhaps, turn Whuffie into something real!

The long tail.  For a relatively simple chart, it appears a lot of additional explanation and rumination is needed to really understand it.  And of course, what is more illustrative than a helpful chart?

Rewind back about 10 years ago, and a similarly iconic graph was getting a lot of attention: The bell curve.  Here, too, a relatively simple diagram was tossed out like a life-saver the hapless reader, drowning in a sea of information.  You can infer much from a bell curve, but apparently its mysteries, like the long tail, are only revealed through extensive research.

Personally, I got the concept just by looking at the chart (in both cases).  I think this is perhaps why these two ideas are so catchy.. we want to try to apply these concepts to any novel situation we encounter.

Basically, in the book The Long Tail (summary here), says that there is a market for less popular products but one that requires a different marketing strategy in order to address and work successfully with. For example, you can immediately apply Amazon.com as an example of selling to the long tail.  They have an enormous number of different products (your local Wal-Mart would have to be as big as a small town to have all those products in one place), and they don’t expect to sell out of every item.  However, the selection makes them a very popular first stop for people looking for something specific.

I tend to think of the long tail from the bottom up, though.  As a product, a concept, I know that I’m well into niche territory.  This isn’t a surprise and in fact I started my blog deliberately fairly narrow so that I would not be competing with bigger, better funded, and (let’s face it) better blogs out there. 

Why, then, do I catch myself time and time again feeling anxious and competitive?  Or feeling envy at those who are achieving some measure of success through their own efforts?  Occasionally, it’s enough to put me off blogging altogether.

One of these times recently, I posted with exasperation to FriendFeed,

“I’m in a blogging slump. I can’t even get myself to blog about it. Ha.” 

Thankfully, the response I got was encouraging and sincere, and I really need absorb some of the advice (like exercise and taking walks).  One of the simplest bits of advice came from Louis Gray, who said,

“It’s not a contest. Just be yourself.”

So now, my right brain will repeat that advice like a mantra to my left brain:

It’s not a contest.  It’s not a race.  My niche is my home, not my silo. 

The success I am seeing with others?  Sure, some of it may be due to deal-making, lucky breaks or other factors, but would I read writers that were in it just for the money? Probably not.  The people who are willing to step on others? No, not after I found out they did.

The people I follow have their own thoughts, their own passions.  They do different things well.  Sometimes, they know this about themselves and they capitalize on those strengths.  Other folks, well, they are writing to make a point, or in order to understand something, or help me understand.  A million reasons. 

But the folks that are in for the long term, the ones that have a following, and are still one-person operations?  They love to write.  They do it because they enjoy it.  They would write if it paid the mortgage or an occasional dinner at the local Greek restaurant.  Even if it was an expense out of their own pocket.

When I think about why I am writing, that is what motivates me.  Because it comes naturally to me, and I enjoy it. I like to know if people respond to what I am writing.

Let me bring this back around to the long tail.  How does my motivation for writing have any bearing?  In my opinion, it has all the bearing.  Personally, I can’t write if I feel like I am just doing it to compete.  If I go down that road, I will get burned out and I will never ‘win’ whatever nebulous price I think awaits me at the end.

Somewhat ironically though, if I write for me, if I write because I love it and on things I find interesting, I know that this will resonate and those articles will carry me slowly up the long tail to success. Whether I ultimately want success or not, I can’t tell you right now.  But I know if I focus on it too much, it will slip away, like trying to squeeze an ice cube. 

We knew the world was ready to receive the heirs to The Who. All we had to do was to keep doing what we were doing and we would become the biggest band since Led Zeppelin, without a doubt. But something just didn’t feel right. We felt we had more dimension than just the next big anything, we had something unique to offer. The innovation was what would suffer if we went down the standard rock route. We were looking for another feeling.

— Bono on The Unforgettable Fire’s new direction. (via Wikipedia)

Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson Read more about this book…

Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray Read more about this book…

Apparently, people assume too much and don’t promote enough.

You know what they say: If you assume, you make an a out of Su and me. And believe me, Su doesn’t like being an A. So don’t do it.

If you think a product is great, promote it! Tell people. Write up an article. Whatever. But don’t say, “Gee, yeah, I really loved that last week when I used it for 5 minutes and now you’ve missed the bus.” Because that is what you are saying. To me. And to Su.

Su doesn’t even have a car. Now he has to walk.

So what the heck is TinEye? Is it that decorating show, you know, the one with the people? Hardly.

If you assume that the Tin Man has eidetic memory and a talent for finding pictures that look like each other, you’d be getting close to what TinEye does.

In a nutshell, TinEye leverages some proprietary tech that Idée has been working on for creating digital fingerprints of images. This technology is mated with a high-speed matching engine and a database of hundreds of millions of public domain pictures to give you fast image matching based on a source picture.

You know what, I’ll just link in Scoble’s little QIK interview with Paul Bloore, the CTO of Idée, and you can see a little demo of the product in action as well.

After using the product for a while, I have to say I’m impressed. Currently, with its sub-set of all the pictures out there on the internet, it can’t find a lot of pictures uploaded to, say, Flickr. But if you do a Google image search and then drop the URL of the image you are interested in, it will find that picture wherever it resides on the internet.

For example, I searched for a picture of George W. Bush and dropped the URL in TinEye. Here is the result (click image for larger size):

It found the image in 272 different locations on the internet! It also gives the size of the image, and lists separate links to the same source image by domain. I do wish they would give you the option to re-sort the results by different criteria, such as image size, file size or bit depth.

So, if you want to know if a particular picture appears somewhere else on the image (say for copyright reasons), this is a great tool to have.

I’m really happening this comes out of closed beta soon, however, if you are clever you may already have noticed that the FriendFeed link at the beginning of the article has a special URL you can use.

I’m going to try something new in this post.  Aaron Brazell wrote an article on Technosailor recently noting the differences between western and eastern writing styles, especially when it comes to a column or opinion piece.  In my never-ending quest to explore new avenues, I will try my hand at a more eastern-style column.

There is a difference between passive acquisition of knowledge, and active application and sharing of that knowledge.

We all learn, as we grow and explore our world.  We learn by experience, positive and negative reinforcement, and eventually, by the lessons learned by others.  This knowledge serves us to make better decisions and infer indirect connections.

Some people love knowledge for knowledge’s sake.  They love to acquire information, to store it, index it, put it into context, and that is fine.  However, the motivations of these people are only knowable to themselves, and perhaps some future historian or researcher who tries to replicate the mind-set of such an acquirer posthumously.  This type of person does not share what they have learned.

Thankfully, the more common type of person has a more workable approach to information gathering and synthesis.  In order to function in a modern society like ours, a lot of context and historical precedents must be learned to know why things happen the way they do.  Usually growing up in our society does organically get them ready for this, and any additional quests for information are relegated to more specific goals.   They learn to become more proficient or more skilled in a certain knowledge area.  They tend apply this knowledge more, for their own benefit and those around them.  They take a more active social role toward information and knowledge applications.

Our society has grown up with a unique social medium called radio.  Obviously, everyone has heard of radio, it’s been around for over a century at this point.  It has changed its role in relation to American society since its inception, having been relegated as a secondary entertainment medium next to television, and more recently being pushed even further back now with the advent of the internet.

It has, however, always offered a choice to the listener: They can passively listen, humming along to their favorite tune or listening to the news of the day, or they can take a more active role, tune in to a program that allows people to call in and contribute their opinion to a topic in real time.

This idea of opening up radio for the listener to contribute is extremely powerful.  This channel has been around since telephones have become ubiquitous and its popularity still allows radio stations to remain profitable (albeit on the cheaper AM band) even to this day.

With television, society mostly skipped the social feedback loop that exists between AM radio and telephones.  Although forays have been made to make TV more interactive, they have been largely unsuccessful due to expense, or lag, or technical difficulty.

The internet has neatly solved this decades-old conundrum of passive entertainment versus active involvement.  On the internet, there are a myriad of ways to become involved with discussion, knowledge contribution or redistribution, synthesis, and sharing of archived information.  Although the technical hurdles for participating on the global internet culture are high, they are not as disconcerting as those of interactive TV and they are actively being lowered all the time.

The social channel has existed on the internet since the beginning.  Even before what we call the World Wide Web, people were engaging in remote discussions about hundreds of different topics on services such as Usenet.  Unfortunately, when Tim Berners-Lee laid out his hypertext-enabled vision of the web, the intrinsic social element, the ability to mark-up the content of sites, was not universally adopted along with the other technologies.  If this was a result of fears over making web sites too malleable or vulnerable to defacement, or other reasons I can not say.

In the past few years though, there has been a steadily and perhaps even logarithmically growing trend for adding a social channel to more traditional publishing mechanisms that have already existed.  Where once you might have visited a web site to read the news of the day, you now can comment on the news, or read the comments of others.  This once-intrinsic ability is starting to come back into its own, and in a big way.

One such medium that was built from the ground up with an active social element is FriendFeed.  Presented with a mysterious grin perhaps, it bills itself as a social aggregator.  Getting started is simple – you merely feed it some of the other services you already use, such as Flickr or Digg, and it pulls these in to a river of news and updates from your friends and acquaintances.  You are then able to comment, enjoy or even re-share anything that you see.

This simple concept has seemingly been thought out from a small service to a burgeoning community with tens of thousands of folks interacting continuously with it.  It would seem to be a logistical nightmare, but on the surface FriendFeed does a very admirable job of maintaining a simple, responsive and, more importantly, engaging and addictive demeanor.

Forgive me for not providing a link, but recently I read in a FriendFeed comment that the service was no more than an AM radio call-in show for the internet age.  This comment, perhaps meant as dismissive, stayed with me.  The parallels between FriendFeed and talk radio are there – a comment or link is thrown out, the pundits and peanut gallery get a hold of it and provide their two cents.  The conversation turns, sometimes in a wonderful, exciting direction, sometimes darkly negative.

This result, though, is almost secondary to the actual point:  The coversation is there.  The conversation turns.  It breeds more conversation, more sharing of knowledge, and more synthesis.

In this light, I hazard to say that FriendFeed, while perhaps emulating the humble radio call-in show trades the local and redneck nature that tend to mark such shows with a national or even global community, revealing, yes, perhaps narrow views, but also extremely worldly and wise views.  It merges these worlds with apparent ease and a unique mechanism that seems to prevent the quick formation of cliques and walls – silos, perhaps – that seem to happen in other social mediums.

History will tell us if this bold experiment in to social knowledge sharing and synthesis will maintain its momentum, grow, or perhaps result in catastrophic failure.  It is however, quite in fact, unprecedented in its ability and scope.

In conclusion, you may be a gatherer of information, or you may not have a strong social interest, and that’s ok.  However, if you do think such a medium is worth your time and effort, I can virtually guarantee you, in terms of knowledge, information, and social contact, FriendFeed will reward you ten times for the effort you put in.

Take a look at my headline shot. That’s Steve Gillmor, famous writer and technology news pundit. Talking head on the Gillmor Gang radio show. Insightful, critical, and accomplished.

Also, a poser!

Sorry to pick on Steve here, but when I saw his name in the FriendFeed recommendations it inspired this post.

What is a poser? It’s actually a pretty storied word in BBS and internet circles. It comes from the French word Poseur (link from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary):

Basically, in online culture, a poser is somebody who is a pretender. They act like they know or are something that they are not.

Getting back to Steve and similar, I don’t have a problem with them at all, as people. I don’t even want to bring their credentials into question. But three data points on FriendFeed tell me that they are not only harmless internet tourists, signing up for FriendFriend and then wandering away, never to be seen from again.

1. The first data point is up there. Steve has only added two services to FriendFeed. One is his blog, the other is Twitter, which he is extremely active on, not that there is anything wrong with that.
2. The second data point is his activity. On his friendfeed page, it says this:
   Comments: none this week, 2 all time
   Obviously not a very active user of the service.
3. Steve is popular enough that FriendFeed thought he would be a good person to follow. And, if you check out how much conversation his tweets generate, it’s true – he’s popular.

Steve and other industry folks who have their toe in FriendFeed but don’t use the service actively earn the badge of FriendFeed Poser. They eschew the service, but have still signed up, added their platform of choice and a headshot of themselves, and then vanish back to their lairs.

They are essentially telling us, yeah well I don’t like FriendFeed, but I’m still going to use it for PR until my primary publicity vehicle stops working (in this case Twitter).

I believe this is wrong.

Why? Take a look again at Steve’s tweets on FriendFeed. Often times, just by having these two services (and, let’s face it, Twitter mostly), he is generating conversation. People find what he has to say interesting and worthy of comment.

But he is not listening. He couldn’t care less.

If you aren’t replying to him or commenting on Twitter (which is down at the time of this writing) or his blog, he doesn’t care how much buzz he’s generating.

So, my advice to you internet pundits, either crap or get off the pot. Why not pull yourself off FriendFeed completely until you want to interact? I’m close to just blocking FriendFeed posers as matter of policy.

.. last.fm and Pandora are both great but, like Twitter and FriendFeed, have completely different goals. Pandora works behind the scenes to tailor a stream to you. last.fm throws everything together in a huge pot and gives you the sliders to make a great listening experience. They call this "scrobbling" (actually, the AS in LAST stand for "Audio Scrobbler") .. anyway, like a stew, the more stuff you put in it the better it is. Add a bunch of people, hook up last.fm to your itunes, go nuts!

By thinking about the approaches of the two applications, and how to describe the difference as concisely as possible, I realized that this concept can be applied on a broader, more general scale:

With most internet-based social applications, they become more interesting and useful as the number of people you interact with also goes up.

Go ahead, call me a little slow.  It’s probably a blindingly obvious thought.  But after I had it, I started applying it as a hypothesis to different social networks.  I realized that most social media applications such as Twitter could easily be categorized into the the more friends, more fun category, but not all of them.  Pandora would be an example of a social app that does not require more friends to be more enjoyable.

So, for most social media applications, simple rules can be followed if you want to make the service more interesting, rewarding or worthwhile:

1. Befriend, invite, follow, reach out to, stalk, or use whatever verb the service you are joining calls adding people.  Do it as much as possible.  Tens of people, hundreds of people.  Don’t worry if they aren’t close friends or you don’t know if they will end up being creepy.
2. Poke around with the service.  It might have some stated goal, such as rewarding you with some abstract concept such as points or ningis or karma.  Generally, ignore this and see what you can get out of the service.
3. Find uncommon uses for the service.  See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job.  You never know.
4. Try to find ways of cross-linking this new service with other, more established services you are already a master of.  Your blog, if you have one, is a good place to start.  Or Twitter.. everything links back to Twitter.  Or see if there is a Facebook plugin.
5. If you really love the service and you think you will use it, invite your friends from other services  to it.  Notice that this advice is not point #1.  Jumping in the deep end is fine, but your other friends may not be so eager to go with you every time.
6. Don’t worry about extracting your social graph or bailing from the service if you feel like its time to move on.  In the former case, you probably can’t, unless they explicitly support it. In the latter case, a service stops being fun if you feel you have to use it out of a sense of obligation.
7. Last but definitely not least, don’t pay money for a service you have not tried yet.  Unless you are convinced that you love said service, you don’t want to commit money to it.  This is not to say that services you find awesome must always be free.  You are not owed a free ride and the logic behind paying for a service is pretty straightforward:  Somebody made something you like, and you would prefer to keep using it without significant changes or intrusive advertising if at all possible.  Your contributions will help that outcome.

You may ask yourself, this sounds like a grind, what’s the point?  Why should I keep doing this on one service after another?  And the answer is: 

There is no good reason to do it.

You will have to see if exploring a new service or application is something you like to do.  If it is, welcome to the social media club, my friend.  Those of us in this little club often need little to no provocation to hand over our personal (or at least carefully crafted fake) information to take a free ride at the social media carnival.   Sometimes you get the Ferris Wheel, and sometimes you get the spinning barrel.   Diving in and trying it out is the most direct and useful way to know that for sure.

You will find your answers to why you are on these merry-go-rounds as you gain experience with them.  You might decide one is awesome for networking, while another is great for conversation.  One is an amazing music-sharing community, while another is just brilliant at lifestream aggregation.

And, when you are sick of the endless circles and the cotton candy, you can always take a breather and fall back on those tried-and-true antisocial applications that exist just for you.

In fact, I think it’s absolutely amazing how last.fm built clients for the Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms, and then does all the heavy lifting: cataloging song titles and artist names, playlists, and recently played tracks. Lay on top of that its ability to carefully keep track of what you are listening to (a technique they call audio scrobbling) and tie that all together on the back end with the ability to compare and listen to other people’s catalogs, and you have a killer app.

There is one thing I tripped over, though. Being the brilliant hacker that I am, though, I found a workaround. But when I pondered why the limitation was there, I could see their logic but I still believe it’s annoying and bone-headed on their part.

The fault has to do with the flash radio player widget that they offer. Here is the problem in a nutshell:

• If your web browser is logged in to the last.fm service (i.e. has a web cookie) you can create a flash-based radio station widget that you can place on a web site or blog so that other people can listen to tracks you enjoy. No problem so far.
• If you have not upgraded to their $3 a month subscription the widget creator will mysteriously fail to render your custom flash widget.
• If you dig around a bit, you will discover that you cannot, in fact, listen to your own radio station unless you subscribe.

Ok, so I can follow this reasoning, I guess.. they don’t want you listening to your entire library of scrobbled songs via the internet for free. If they allowed this, everyone would do it. Why get an iPod?

However, they leave the door open for you to create a flash widget with any other last.fm user’s radio station, including people who also do not have a current subscription.

Again, I can follow the logic, they want you to love the service so much that you will subscribe. How do you love the service? By listening to other people’s music, and finding new awesome music. Great! Love it!

Only one little catch guys: I want other people to listening to MY radio station on MY site! The way they have it set up, I can’t freaking use their own awesome widget to do that! I’d have to have some other last.fm user log in and create a widget for me. Or, I guess, get a subscription.

Baaah. I am leet.

So what I did, is I went ahead and created the widget with Steven Hodson’s radio station. Then, I took advantage of the open nature of the widget to search and replace for every instance of his name, and put my last.fm user name in. Poof! I got my widget!

You can see (and listen to) it on the scribkin contributor page.

Of course, I can’t actually listen to it myself.. unless I log out of last.fm or use a browser without a last.fm cookie. Yeah, I believe they need to re-think their artificial limitation here, but I’m not going to complain too loudly as long as I get my widget.

PS – I did want to add that I am seriously considering getting the subscription anyway, because the service is simply really great. And I don’t mind paying for great.

With plenty of hubris, I was pleasantly dreaming of my easy entry into a work-from-home lifestyle, writing insightful, hard-hitting prose for a thankful employer and fawning audience.  If only they saw in me that spark of brilliance that I would sound too egoistic to point out directly! I thought to myself.  I perused my writings on my blog.  Why couldn’t this be my job?  I love it, I’m good at it.. perfect!  .. right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. My daydream started to evaporate when I saw a discussion on the income potential of professional bloggers, spurred by this WinExtra article from Steven Hodson, which talks about the cost of the latest gadgets.   That led to this Profy article written by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, about the strange economy of silicon valley.

Strike one: bloggers often don’t get paid a lot, if at all, and the job can be a grind.  Also, San Francisco is an alien world akin to the vacation planet in Star Trek.

Next up, I saw this Profy article on FriendFeed.  In it, Cyndy recounts that a female blogger had quit her job due to heckling on the blog she was working for.  While I agreed with the message of the article, I was saddened by the fact that this was a reality of being a quasi-famous pro blogger.

Around that time FriendFeed was getting warmed up on the topic of blog hecklers, and (although of course, now I can’t find it) there were several comments about extended periods of vitriol sustained by many of today’s more popular bloggers.  And when I say extended, I’m talking months to years where bloggers had to ignore or put up with baseless accusation and peanut-gallery criticism while the blog owners dared not take a side in case they lost readership.

So that brings me up to this weekend.  Steve Hodson is back, having written an impassioned article about testy grammar comments on a guest post he did for Mashable.  His detractor then followed up with another patronizing comment.

Personally, I find Steve’s writing very readable, but then again I am not that careful about noting grammar inconsistencies, leaning more toward trying to glean what the article has to say, rather than how it is said.

I’ll just say this about grammar and sentence structure: Have you ever read a book by Stephen King?

If you have, you know that he has a rambling, descriptive writing style that plays fast and loose with all sorts of grammar and punctuation rules.  Does anyone care?  Absolutely not.  In fact, if you took that away it would looks that essential something that makes the book a Stephen King book, and consequently, not very interesting to read.

Strike two: no matter what it pays, making it moderately big as a blogger means having to shrug off criticism and invective, whether it is true or not.

Recently, Louis Gray went to dinner with Daniel Ha, the founder and lead developer for the comment system back-end that I use on this blog, Disqus.  Louis also uses Disqus on his blog.

Anyway, the next day, Louis took the time to write up what he could reveal from their discussion.  It was a good read and it got me excited about where Disqus was headed.

Not everyone was as pleased as me.

Specifically, someone had called Louis out for not asking the hard questions to Daniel on Disqus, and subsequently stating that Louis’ article was a puff piece, and Louis was a sell-out and using his blog to promote his favorite causes.

It turns out this person is well-known in the blog world for having a modus operandi of basically scanning for a topic, and then writing a scathing article about some random quasi-famous blog in order to draw readership to his own blog.

Strike three: in the world of internets, negative attention can sometimes be as rewarding as positive attention.  Some people know this, and they take advantage of it.  You can never be sure of someone’s motivations for being critical, but somehow must accept the criticism nonetheless.  Maddening.

I have to admit that this past week, with its focus on the seedy underbelly of the shiny blog beast, has rather tempered my enthusiasm to dive into the blogging business full-time.

I still think wistfully about being able to work from home, on my own schedule, and having each new entry be received with cheers and ovations, but for now, perhaps quietly working away in an air-conditioned cube for an employer that treats me with respect is a great place to be in.

PS – I’m still waiting for my Disqus shirt.

Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner, Shane Birley Read more about this book…

On Writing by Stephen King Read more about this book…

Argument For

I have a fairly small blog, and like most bloggers, am addicted to stats.  So I do notice when I get an upswing in traffic to my site.  Naturally, when I write a post (and especially a good post) I see my total visits and pageviews jump.  More recently, I have been lucky enough to have the occasional grouping of two or three good posts on sequential days.  This has allowed me to observe the aftershocks and interactions of these popular posts.

To me, the analogy of throwing stones into a pond comes pretty naturally.   Usually I’m tossing in smaller stones and they get a couple of ripples.  Every once in a while, I toss a big rock in and see a splash and some waves, maybe even reflections off the shore.  If I get a couple of big ones in, not only do I see the waves, but it seems that I get some reinforcement too – one of the articles becomes the lure to bring people to the site, and then they notice the others.

How does knowing this help me?  First, I can capitalize on my popular posts in a two ways:  I can have links to other good articles in my sidebar, and I can add related articles from my site to the bottom of new posts.  Second, I can time my article releases and group topics together to encourage people to come back several times over a short period, hopefully driving up site recognition.

But there are longer-term (and more obvious) reasons to update frequently.  In order for people to make your site a regular destination for them, one they want to bookmark or return to frequently, it is important to have new content up.  What would happen if a site like Gizmodo or TechCrunch just stopped updating for a day?  People would go to a different site to get their fix.  They are, in fact, in a fight for their existence with their primary weapon being freshness.

Argument Against

The most publicized reason why frequent updates is bad is because potentially, it can burn a blogger out.  Or worse, it could kill them.  Some may argue that paid bloggers that have died did so because of other factors such as diet or genetic predisposition, etc.  But having to meet a strict timeline for publishing quality posts is very stressful, and stress has been proven to affect health and ultimately lifespan.

I can argue against the freshness rationale too.  Oh, not for the sites mentioned above – they are pretty much stuck in the freshness game.  But smaller blogs, like mine, are much more dependent on their RSS feed subscriber base.  Why?  Because we are too small, too many, and too erratic in our posting schedule to make it worth visiting every hour, every half day, or even every day.  RSS removes that requirement.  A feed subscriber has their feed reader up, and it lets them know within minutes of a new post.  Then, they can read it at their leisure and jump to the site to comment.

If nobody hits the site regularly to see if there are new articles, that means that anything I do on the site to drive readership up is going to be limited at best.  Even the sidebar tips, above, are not going to have a huge impact once people have a feed set up – they will never see it.

Also, adding and removing RSS feeds, while not difficult, is significantly more effort than not visiting a web site.  In the former case, you actually have to tell your feed reader to remove the feed.  In the latter case you do nothing. So, human nature what it is, people will continue to keep a site feed in their reader way past the point where they notice the blog has stopped updating, or even if they stop enjoying the content.

Thus, the incentive for added stress and posting more frequently, let alone the fact that the post quality might suffer, is not really that strong, considering the against argument.  It is reasonable to argue that your continued health and quality updates compensate for frequency.

This is not to say that not posting or not being consistent is that acceptable.  Reasonably, one can expect that if they slack, they will see a gradual decrease in their readership over time.  But it should be correctable, and with some other techniques like being involved in sites such as friendfeed or twitter, shouldn’t cause permanent harm.

Conclusion

My conclusion is, for the pond that I am in and the fact that I am the only blogger, frequent (more than say, two times a day) updates don’t make a lot of sense.  It won’t bring a lot of eyes that will stick with the blog, and the health risks may not be worth it. However, some of the other techniques that I have outlined here like writing to a theme, or adding related posts to the articles will have a beneficial effect and are worth doing.

For me, it is best to concentrate on quality and uniqueness first, then techniques for keeping someone on a site after they decide to follow a link or a recommendation.  Also, driving them to subscribe is key.  If I ever get to the point where I have more than one blogger on staff, it will be time to re-visit those priorities.

Update: Removed a paragraph that did not add to the topic.  I challenge you to remember what it said!

My Fascination with FriendFeed

Recently, I’ve been on FriendFeed quite a bit. In fact, I’ve been using FriendFeed to the exclusion of any other social network, such as Twitter or Facebook. There is something fresh and compelling about the service, yet familiar as well. I think the familiarity comes from how the interface works, it reminds me a little of a lot of different social services I have used in the past.

• Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) – Before the internets, BBSs ruled the phone lines. Incredibly dynamic for the time, people would log in to a BBS (usually one user at a time) and reply to messages, upload and download files, and perhaps chat with the sysop (system operator). Although we have come a very long way since then, there was a indescribable sense of community and feedback on BBSs. I have felt this more on FriendFeed than any other service.
• Chat Systems – I’ve used a few in my time. Real-time chat has an interesting, transitory, yet compelling feel to it. FriendFeed is similar, especially after the addition of rooms. However, chat systems don’t really have any affinity settings, you follow what is said by everyone in the room. Also, any external content must be brought in by hand.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) – IRC was an early (and subversively successful in many ways) attempt to replicate chat system or chat room functionality on the internet. See Chat Systems above. I would make a separate bullet for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and the like, but for this conversation they are similar to IRC.
• Forums – Forums are a framework for providing conversations around a topic. However, Forums attempt to keep a fairly permanent record of anything that is contributed, and the conversational flow is far from the dynamism found in FriendFeed. Plus, any external content must be added manually. Unlike chat systems, it is more worth the effort on a forum since it can be indexed by a search bot and found later.
• Twitter – The obvious comparison, of course. The big similarity here is that you interact with other people that you follow and who follow you. However, apart from the fact that stuff scrolls past, these services have more differences than similarities.

So already, FriendFeed feels a little like an old friend. Or perhaps a young friend with an old soul. Of course, it brings a lot new to the table, like content aggregation, social network features, content sharing and an advanced API. But at least for me, that explains what makes it more fascinating than, say, Twitter.

On To The Good Stuff!

The format I am going to employ here is to take it one tip at a time, and then explain why it should work for you. I will warn you that some of these tips could potentially be very annoying and disruptive, so I haven’t personally tried them all. However, experience and a bit of logic makes me think they should work.

1. Make Sure Your Profile Has Some Credibility

You know how I said that some of my tips may be a little dirty? This is one of them. Different people have different ways of vetting the people that they follow. Some will follow anyone who follows them. Others will only follow their friends. However, many take it case-by-case, or look for some criteria:

• Upload an avatar picture. This is very important. Either one of yourself, a picture of a person, or a an eye-catching cartoon or abstract image. Don’t upload anything offensive. As anywhere on the internet, people will be interested in looking at a girl picture more than a boy picture.
• People will often look for certain service icons in your profile. If all you have is Twitter and Flickr, pack it up and go back to the minor leagues, kid. I’m not saying you have to add every service that FriendFeed supports, but having more than 5 looks pretty good. You will want to make sure you have at least one or two Blog RSS feeds, a LinkedIn profile and a different established social network such as Upcoming or Last.FM. Having these gives the impression that you like trying out services and using what’s available on the internet.
• Choose a nickname that is inoffensive and easy to remember, and make sure your name is a real name, at least a first name. If you are using a bunch of numbers or something random, people will be confused or turned off.
• Some people will go to extra effort to see if you have liked or commented more than say, 5 times since you signed up. At the beginning, this is pretty much impossible to game.. As you use the service these numbers will accumulate.

2. Follow People

This sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But I suspect there are a LOT of people out there who joined the service, maybe had FriendFeed look at their address book to see which of their friends had an account, added a couple of people, and then waited. After getting bored, they added some of their other services, refreshed a few times, and got bored again.

The solution? Follow people. It doesn’t matter who. If you want to apply a template of some sort, you can, but actually, the more random the better. The reasoning up front isn’t that clear but once you start to get popular, you will notice a sort of herd mentality that FriendFeeders like to call the echo chamber. The more you can break out of the echo chamber the better. Might as well start from the beginning.

Here are some tips for getting started finding people to follow:

• Under the friend settings tab, there is a recommended link that will take you to a page that lists a bunch of people. Subscribe to all of these. Then refresh and you will get a new page. Subscribe to all of them too. Keep doing this for a while.
• If you have already subscribed to a few people (by using the above method or some other way), you should see them listed under the friend settings tab in my subscriptions, or in the right-hand navigation bar in the me tab. From either place, click on a few people and you will see who they are following in their right-hand nav bar. You can subscribe to more people from there.
• Ok, doing the first two methods going too slowly? No problem. Either go to one of your friends’ pages, and then click on see both over on the right-hand nav bar (to bring up all their comments and likes) or go to the everyone tab. Now just hover over any name you see. You can subscribe right from within the pop-up bubble that appears.
• Combine all three techniques to follow a lot of people. For now, don’t worry about how many people are following you.

3. Comment and Like

This is very important. You are trying to make yourself noticed. This means you have to contribute in two ways, and commenting and marking as liked is one of those ways. You need to walk a line between being obviously spammy and being really active. To this end, here are some pro comment and tag tips:

• Contribute to established conversations and popular entries, but also comment on and like stuff that hasn’t been noticed yet. People quickly get used to seeing what a FriendFeed entry looks like without a comment or like. Just by liking an entry, you push that entry to the top, you make the entry more visible, and you associate your name with the entry. It’s a win-win-win!
• If you want to be noticed by people, not only do you want to comment on or like their various feed entries and FriendFeed updates, but also be sure to add, comment and like their friends’ entries too.
• When you see that FriendFeed has glommed a bunch of similar entries together, such as tweets or Google Reader shared items, be sure you click on the more button to look at those extra entries. First, you might find a hidden gem there that would have been overlooked, and second it gives you more chances to comment and like stuff.
• Try to be as helpful as possible when commenting. Your observations and thoughts are great, and if you are really funny, sure, use that, but if you can answer a question, or provide a link to a resource, or point out something new, you will get attention.

4. Make Sure You Are Contributing

This one is pretty simple. Only two pieces of advice here. Make sure the services you list have stuff coming in to FriendFeed, and also give that FriendFeed Bookmarklet a workout. Why do you want to do this? This adds to your cover story. Your cover story may not necessarily be a lie, but if someone visits your user profile page and it’s empty, warning lights will go off. You don’t have to go crazy here but at least 5 or 6 things a day, all services combined.

5. Promote Your Own Stuff

Ok, we are really getting into the voodoo now. This is an advanced tip that will let you get more eyes on your name. This is a grab bag of techniques so be sure to mix them up.

FriendFeed uses a secret algorithm to figure out when glom updates from a service together and present them as a truncated list with a more button. People like this because otherwise you would see nothing but tweets, but for you this works counter to what you want. Here are some tips to defeat this behavior:

• You can’t like your own stuff, but you can comment on it. This also effectively breaks the update out of the pack. Don’t use this every time, but if you have, say, 5 Google Reader shared items glommed together, comment on one or two of them. This will push them up to the top of the stream and show a comment, besides.
• Luckily, if you use the FriendFeed bookmarklet, it allows you to add a comment on anything you bookmark. So people will be used to seeing FriendFeed updates with comments. Ergo, use this as much as you can in lieu of other services. Every time you use the bookmarklet, the update will actually be seen by your followers, with a comment already attached.
• Use the FriendFeed bookmarklet’s ability to grab up to three images per link. Another technique you don’t want to overdo, but this is a real attention-grabber. Shared items that have an attached picture or graph almost always get a comment or a like. Don’t forget about this one!

6. Use Rooms

This is a bonus tip, and probably the one that requires the most effort on your part. Rooms are the double-edged sword of FriendFeed, and in fact most chat systems that use the room concept. Rooms can be active, fun and interesting, or they can be completely empty. Think of a room as a bar or a nightclub.. carefully consider every aspect of the room’s presentation and interaction with the larger FriendFeed community. Food for thought:

• If you decide to create a room, make sure it has a nice avatar. This is a light touch but worth the effort.
• Make sure your room is both novel and compelling. It can’t be too broad, but it can’t be too niche either. Things that are popular in the world are going to be popular in a room too, I suspect. Like photography or hobbies or cell phones.
• You have to work at keeping a room interesting. This isn’t Field of Dreams. If you create it, it won’t suddenly get popular, unless you are very lucky. You will need to attend to the room, inviting people, adding content, seeding discussions, maybe even having contests or giving stuff away.
• If you don’t have the time to work on a room, find a hapless lackey. There are plenty of people out there with boundless enthusiasm and charming naiveté. Use this to your advantage by making a room popular, and then allowing someone to help you keep the level of excitement and discussion high. How do you think Rob Malda and Kevin Rose made it big?
• Rooms can be public or private. If they are public, they are essentially sideband clones of the main feed. If they are private, you have much more control over who gets invited, who gets in, and what happens in the room.
• If you make a private room, it will require a completely different strategy than a public room. You will need to carefully consider how to get the news out that your room is awesome, and get people excited about being invited. Here’s a suggestion: Team up with a well-known personality who will talk your room up, but be careful to control access yourself.

Conclusion

I don’t feel too guilty for sharing these tips with you, my eager reader. Sooner or later, these and more effective secrets will be discovered, so why not be out in front of the pack a little? Go forth and have fun. If you found this article useful, share it. Digg it. Mixx it. I’m not proud, this is how I get readership!