Recently in Blogging Category
I've been thinking (and talking) about community a lot recently, and it was while speaking to about 50 people at a seminar held by Sift last Friday that I had an epiphany: most media people don't realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don't think of it as a conversation.This is clear from our traffic figures. Those blogs that do really well are those that are aware of there being a wider web world outside our sites' confines and which talk directly to the readers. Those whose traffic is abysmal are those who show no awareness of a wider conversation around their topics and who adopt a "wisdom from on high" tone of voice.
And perhaps some of the failure of the latter blogs is my fault. I've been so embedded in online community activity for well over a decade that I instinctively think of the internet as a social place. Thus, I fail to articulate that clearly to people for whom this is a much more recent idea. But, to me, there's no doubt that blogging is all about personal voices interacting with one another, not about personal voices lecturing. And that's something that the media usually misses.
Continue reading Why Media Gets Community Wrong.
You can find the Seesmic Plugin for Movable Type at the MT Plugins Directory.
Today, from 9am, and all day, 3 of our community editors, alongside my colleague Andrew, our head of user content, will be using CoverItLive to talk about their day, what they actually do, and interact with anyone interested.
You can follow the day's proceedings, starting in just a few minutes, on Engagement 101.
The victims volunteers include Isabel from Farmers Weekly, Stuart from Flight Global and Simeon from Community Care.
(If you're wondering what this "chogging" business is, it's a term coined by Andrew as a cross between chat and blogging. I was keen not to associate the term live blogging too directly with CoverItLive, as I just knew that I'd have to spend the next six months explaining that the app isn't the be all and end all of live blogging to our journalists.)
Paid Content's interview with Olivier Creiche of Six Apart. Some interesting thoughts on the usage and evolution of Movable Type (and why they flogged Livejournal to the Russians):
Our big traffic winner for last week? Biglorryblog reporting on the fuel protests:
We really must get a nice design on that blog, now we're on Movable Type 4.
Back in London, back at work. And this is what has been occupying me today:
- Movable Type 4.1 has been working very well for us during my week away. We're into "steady as she goes" mode, until we go up to 4.2 next month.
- The bad family news seems to have mysteriously, but pleasingly, changed into good family news
- This blog is now protected by Typepad Antispam, rather than Akismet. I hope this will solve problem discussed in posts passim.
- Is is me, or is Twitter really up the spout?
- What is this Plurk of which you tweet?
Calling all blogging journalists - Paul from the Online Journalism Blog is doing some research into how blogging has changed the way journalists work for a book he's writing.
You can take the short survey online, and help contribute to the greater sum of human knowledge.
It'll give you a warm glow inside.
Darren of Problogger finally articulates something that has been bothering me for a while: Aksimet, Automattic's comment spam filtering system, seems to be throwing up a lot of false positives of late.
I've been using Akismet on this blog for a couple of years and we've been using it on the RBI blogs for around a year - and generally it's been good. But too often of late, I've been getting e-mails from people saying that they'd left comments, but they never appear on the blog(s). I hope that they get on top of this soon, because I'd rather have more false negatives than any false positives. When you're having to scan the spam folder in case of false positives most days, your trust in a spam-fighting system is shot, because you're not that far from just doing the despamming manually.
We're doing lots of work on video at RBI in the moment, much of it shepherded by Andrew. One recurring theme we here is how we need to do really high quality stuff - and usually they mean technical quality rather than content quality.
Our highest trafficked blogger - Flight's Flightblogger - proves how much of a nonsense that attitude can be, by providing his readers with something done using the built-in webcam on his laptop:
Update: Charlie Beckett expresses exactly what I'm trying to say here about video formats:
Stop doing that thing where you try to create a sumptiously produced theatrical experience called studio-based news. Give me something more like Rocketboom. Give me content not packaging.
It's important in life to know where you fit in. And now, thanks to Alan's post on Broadstuff, summarising the London Twittersphere, I know exactly where I am:
And I bet a good chunk of the people reading this are in that little area of overlap, too.
In the category of things I really ought to have blogged about before now:
Computer Weekly is running its first ever IT blog awards. The team are looking for the best of the technology blogs, particularly those with a UK slant. There are seven categories, from Web 2.0 and business to IT project management, and nominations are open until the end of the month (31st May)
I'm part of the judging panel (for my blog knowledge rather than my technical knowledge, thankfully) and wrote an opinion piece for the magazine that appeared in print last week, with the dual aims of plugging the competition and plugging the idea of blogging. And that was fun. it'd been a year since I'd written something just for print. I even got to have one of those glowery, serious mugshots over the top of my column. Ah, another dream fulfilled...
Anyway, if you know some good tech blogs, please go and nominate them.
This is rather fun. Stuart Clarke, the community editor of Flight Global, has created a screencast of Movable Type 4.1 for some of his US bloggers:
Yesterday was one of those days where I felt like I'm stranded in two disconnected worlds. On one side, I have people in my RSS and Twitter feeds discussing the dispersion of conversation into the likes of FriendFeed and Disqus. And on the other, I sit through meetings where we discuss how to drive more traffic to our forums. These two discussions have one thing in common: they're about discussion in the live web. But they're utterly disconnected, as if the two groups were utterly unaware of the other's existence.
And perhaps they are. There's a tendency amongst the bleeding edge web people to dismiss older forms of social media, just as people on the other end of the bell curve tend to lump them together in one, undifferentiated mass.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that there are three distinct layers of social conversation on the web, and people tend to exist primarily in one of the three. And I need to develop a language for myself to dicuss these ideas, both with the neophiles who chase after the latest and greatest, and with the tentative newcomers who are just getting their heads around these new forms of media.
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
Continue reading The Online Conversational Onion.
Inspired by the good folks at the Liverpool Daily Post, the earthy folks at Farmers Weekly are liveblogging their afternoon over on the Food for Thought blog.
Far too knackered to type, so here are my rambling thoughts on the day via Seesmic:
An e-mail arrives from one Private Fraser of the Home Blogging Guard:
TheOpsMgr's DivestmentWatch blog has been taken down, seemingly at the behest of RBI management.
I've written about it and posted the cached copy
And so he has.
My, what an interesting few hours it's been. We went live with MT4 circa 11am this morning. While, on the whole, its been plain sailing, a couple of issues have cropped up. We've been getting internal server errors in the user interface, which Nicholas has tracked down to issues with FastCGI and the mt.cgi script. Thus we've disabled FastCGi on the servers handling the posting interface, and are hoping that the problem will go away.We're also having to set up some URL rewriting to handle elements of the change from Windows to Linux that mean case-sensitivity in URLs is an issue.
Oh, and one of our bloggers has used the problems to make a point. Transparency's good, right?
The journalists at the Liverpool Daily Post are extra-busy today - because they're liveblogging the production of the paper.
The insights into the pressured environment of a daily publication are suprisingly gripping, so far. (I've never worked on anything more frequent than a weekly.) However, the thing I'm finding most entertaining is comparing and contrasting deputy editor Alison Gow's official post and her personal one.
Building on the success of our local elections coverage, when our exclusive live blog gave online readers the opportunity to interact in real time with our journalists at counts across Merseyside and receive instant information, the Daily Post is running a live blog from 7am today until the presses roll during the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Staff will update the live blog throughout the day and everyone who logs on will be invited to comment on the work as it unfolds, ask questions or share information with the editorial team.
Continue reading Liveblogging 24 Hours of Regional Journalism.
Well, it looks like the long wait is finally over. The training is complete, the load testing done, and the templates upgraded. If all things go according to plan, we'll be running our blogs on Movable Type 4 from tomorrow afternoon.
Wish us luck...
Watch me stumble over technical stuff on Seesmic:
Incidentally, the last post was all done using that 3 Mobile dongle I'm testing. Normally, I'd just leap on the BTOpenzone WiFi while in a Caffé Nero, but I thought I'd put the mobile broadband through its paces.
And it's more-or-less fine. The only real weakness is the painfully slow photo uploading. I tried uploading a pic both directly to my blog, and to Flickr, and uploads in both cases were pitifully slow.
This is a real weakness of the service for me, as a generally pic-heavy blogger. The resized pic on this post was somewhat quicker to upload, but still, it wasn't really an acceptable speed for such a small image.
Anyway, I'm off to catch a train. I'll try to update this post from the train...
Update: Just managed to get a connection, as we pulled out of Charing Cross. Will it last, though?
Update 2: Just arrived at London Bridge, and all is good.
Nicholas, the chap in charge of the technical side of our MT4 upgrade, emailed this story about the BBC's blog upgrade this morning. They've beaten us to Movable Type 4, probably helped by the cunning use of those good folks at Headshift.It's nice to see that another big blog platform has been successfully upgraded, though, and I did find their stats interesting. Jem Stone gives their numbers at about 12,000 blog posts - about half of what we've published - and 1 million comments, which is many, many times what we've achieved. That suggests that the Beeb blogs are getting better engagement than us, which wasn't a huge surprise to me. We still have a lot of work to do on creating the sort of blogs people want to engage with, not just read. That said, as a colleague pointed out, the BBC's audience is probably many, many times ours, so in terms of ratio of comments to visitors, we may not actually be doing that badly.
Anyway, congratulations to the folks behind the BBC blogs. And, um, if you hit any major problems, could you warn us in the next week or so?
Hmm. I haven't updated you all on how the Weeks of Hell are going. And the answer is...
...surprisingly well. We now have a couple of versions of our Movable Type servers fully upgraded to Movable Type 4.1 and running on Linux rather than Windows. We're now in the testing phase, as the little glimpse into my in-box on the right shows. There's two lots of testing happening: each market is testing its blog templates to check that they perform as expected under MT4. And then we're doing some automated stress testing to check that the new server config can stand up to the growing pressure we're seeing on the existing server.
Next week I should be starting training the key bloggers in the new interface, and the new options on offer. So far, there haven't been any major stumbling blocks. Fingers crossed...
Jon Ostrower, who is our most successful individual blogger as Flightblogger, appeared on CNN a couple of days ago, talking about the recent aviation safety scare in the US.
Nice work, Jon. Shame about the bouffant 'fro. Oh, wait. He's already dealt with that.
Nice work, Jon. Shame about the bouffant 'fro. Oh, wait. He's already dealt with that.
A sobering moment: my World of Warcraft blog, which is a "for fun" hobby thing, has just passed this blog in both subscriber numbers and daily visits. I've just overtaken five years of work here with five months of work there.Ah, well. I should have expected this. Let's face it, more people are interested in gaming than in the intersection of blogging and journalism...
Good morning all.
I'm posting to this blog in a whole new way this morning. I'm actually typing this in Facebook, using the new Blog It Facebook app released by Six Apart over night.
Now, it's not massively sophisticated. No WYSIWYG. No tagging, or categorising. With a bit of luck we'll see some of those levels of sophistication developing as time goes on.
And, much to my surprise, it supports for more platforms than the 6A Trio (Movable Type, Vox and Typepad). You can post to both the .org and .com flavours of WordPress, to Blogger and to Livejournal as well. And you can set it to auto-notify services like Twitter and Pownce when you post.
It's a neat little way of linking your blog and Facebook more closely, though, and that appeals to me.
I'm posting to this blog in a whole new way this morning. I'm actually typing this in Facebook, using the new Blog It Facebook app released by Six Apart over night.
Now, it's not massively sophisticated. No WYSIWYG. No tagging, or categorising. With a bit of luck we'll see some of those levels of sophistication developing as time goes on.
And, much to my surprise, it supports for more platforms than the 6A Trio (Movable Type, Vox and Typepad). You can post to both the .org and .com flavours of WordPress, to Blogger and to Livejournal as well. And you can set it to auto-notify services like Twitter and Pownce when you post.
It's a neat little way of linking your blog and Facebook more closely, though, and that appeals to me.
Mmmm. There's a delicious, tasty journalistic thought meat from Kevin Anderson over on the Strange Attractor blog. Take this brain canapé:
It's one of the things that many journalists don't do enough of when they blog: Listen. That's one of the important skills for a blogging journalist. Blogging is not just publishing my thoughts. I can do that in any old media. Blogging is about the conversation.
Mmm. Spot on. As is this:
But isn't good journalism supposed to amplify the signal, find it in the noise? Aren't journalists supposed to help find the important data points, turning points to help people and themselves make sense of the world? It's an abdication of our professional responsibility if we stop trying to find the signal and become the noise.
The reason this has so much resonance with me is that all too often I see journalists heading off exactly the wrong path with their blogging. Instead of bringing the focus of their journalistic skills into the conversational publishing arena, I see them bringing the worst aspects of blogging (shrill, unformed opinions) into their journalism.
And that's a damn shame. Because journalists really to have a role to play in this conversation - to be the fact finders, the assumption-challengers and question-setters. They have a duty to step back from the partisan debate and be the voice summarising, clarifying and fact checking. The full-time professional with a good set of journalistic skills can enrich the debate, but only once they fully take on board the conversational nature of the medium and then work out how best to apply their pre-existing skills to their blogging.
It's going to be a long day: looks like we have a problem with the database server underlying our Movable Type installation, and it's been down for much of the weekend.
Technology is such a bitter-sweet joy, isn't it?
Technology is such a bitter-sweet joy, isn't it?
Ah, first day back at work after several days off sick, and right into server upgrade hell. The good news: we have a fully working "snapshot" upgrade of our current Movable Type Enterprise install into Movable Type 4 with Enterprise Solution. Hurrah.However, there's something to do before we go live. Testing. (Oh, and training, but that's grist for another post.) We have to do a robust set of tests on this new server configuration, before we push it live. If we don't do it in a structured, formal way, we don't get to push it live.
Now, that's fair. We didn't test the initial install properly when we started, and have been suffering the consequences of some, uh, "challenging" install decisions since. However, reinterpreting testing guidelines designed for software we write ourselves becomes challenging when we're working with bought-in software.After a period of time where we were all talking at cross-purposes, I'm now reasonably confident that we have a plan in progress that will make sure we get the server performance we need. But it's pretty much eaten my day. Ah, well. A late night in the office is to be expected when you've just been off sick for two and a half days.
RBI folks reading this can learn more detail on my internal blog. And the rest of you, uh, can't. That's why it's an internal blog... :-)
This is interesting:
It's a nice visual summary both of what this social graph business is all about, where it's going and the desire for people to have a "hub" for it. I'm hoping that the Action Streams plugin I'm using here will move that way for me, but we'll see.
My, my. We are seeing some interesting times in the online publishing world, aren't we?
Mr Arrington of that widely admir'd and provocative pamphlet Techcrunch has discoursed at length about the coming juggernaut of the blog publishers. There's big venture capital money heading in the direction of the most promising guys, and a whole new way of thinking to go with it. Quoth Arrington:
So, what's happening here? We're in a transition phase.
Mr Arrington of that widely admir'd and provocative pamphlet Techcrunch has discoursed at length about the coming juggernaut of the blog publishers. There's big venture capital money heading in the direction of the most promising guys, and a whole new way of thinking to go with it. Quoth Arrington:
And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you'll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?How are mainstream publishers reacting? They're trying to sponge free content off bloggers. Um, good luck with that guys.
So, what's happening here? We're in a transition phase.
Continue reading It's Change Or Die Time For Media Companies.
Mr Martin Couzins, the web editor of Travel Weekly, is holding a workshop on digital journalism today. I'm busy liveblogging it, but behind the company firewall, alas. I will posts up some highlights here, though.
One of my colleagues (in the most broad sense of "works for the same employer in a distant sub-division of the business") has started blogging about the RBI Divestment as it happens.
He's actually using it as much as a springboard for discussions about company acquisitions and changes as about this actual divestment itself (as "not much to report yet" gets pretty old, pretty quickly..) but it an interesting wee read.
He's actually using it as much as a springboard for discussions about company acquisitions and changes as about this actual divestment itself (as "not much to report yet" gets pretty old, pretty quickly..) but it an interesting wee read.
Oh, don't you love it when you open up your RSS reader, and find something that encapsulates an aspect of your life? Ladies & gentlemen, Mr Howard Owens:
Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.
Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.
Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.
[From Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond repuporsed print news | Howard Owens]
This is exactly what I face when I go into a room full of our journalists to do a blogging workshop with them. I always start these sessions by allowing them to tell me what they think blogging is, and I've only once had anyone come anywhere near the broadest truth. Instead, they almost always focus down on what they see as uninformed political ranting. It's just another thing journalists have to unlearn to become any good as bloggers.
Finally, I have a little taste of WiFi. I'm sat in the Big C, a cancer support centre attached to the Norfolk & Norwich hospital, and I'm picking up the Norwich Openlink WiFi. First of all, apologies to anyone finding the pics I've posted from the iPhone this morning. I'm trying to simulate the sort of images a journalist could grab while wondering around a conference or a day's reporting, but the day I'm having today isn't quite on the same level of interest.
That said, I'm certainly finding using Flickr's e-mail to blog functionality a really easy way of getting visual reporting up on the blog. E-mailing photos is significantly easier on an iPhone than any mobile phone I've used before. The phone's resolution isn't fabulous, but more than good enough for images on a blog.
There's some lessons to be learnt - don't try to take pics while holding a coffee and a bag of croissants, if you want the picture to be level, for example - but I can see this being a viable reporting tool. And grabbing five minutes on WiFi to tag and categorise the posts helps, too.
(Nice to see that the Big C has a blog - set up yesterday morning!)
At the risk of beating a dead horse, there are a few points arising from the Mark Zuckerberg / Sarah Lacy interview at SXSW yesterday that I'd try to guide journalists I work with towards. Jeff Jarvis has already done an excellent take on this issue, and I'd encourage anyone interested to read it, but there are a few specific points I wanted to go into in more detail. Interested parties might also want to refer to this piece by Mike Butcher, analysing Lacy's coverage of the UK startups market, as background.
1. Engage
Sarah Lacy is taking a battering in the blogsphere today. And she has no direct means of replying that isn't mediated by others. She can be interviewed on video, phone in to TWiT or post angry tweets, but she doesn't have a blog to respond in kind. Her website is a classic brochure site, and she uses Twitter in a broadcast manner (Follows 33, followed by 817).
For a journalist who works in the social media arena - or who is trying to build a reputation in this area - this is an error. It makes you look like a typical dilettante mainstream journalist, picking around the edge but never truly getting involved.
2. Know Your Occasion
Both at Le Web 3 '07 and in the video of yesterday's SXSW interview, Lacy displays a very common interviewing technique amongst attractive female journalists working in male dominated industries: flirting. What ever you think of the ethics of it, it works. I've seen former colleagues at Estates Gazette deploying it to devastating effect, culling stories from over-eager young property chaps, desperate to impress the pretty young thing in front of them and quite forgetting that she has a mind like a steel trap. That works in a social, intimate environment. On stage? It's just plain embarrassing.
Also, the way she uses personal opinion and anecdote to try and draw out and relax the interviewee is a pretty common feature writer interviewing technique. It allows you to engage with your subject on an emotional level, and they're more like to open themselves if you've opened yourself first.
The problem with this on stage is two-fold: first of all, the audience doesn't care. Really. You're there to draw out your interviewer's views and opinions in a limited time period. The more time you spend expressing your own views, the less they're getting of what they really want. In a magazine, you chop out the bits about you. You can't do that on stage. Secondly, it makes you look, at best, self-involved and, at worst, arrogant. In an occasion when you are secondary to the interviewee, that's bad.
Continue reading 4 Things Journalists Can Learn from the Lacy/Zuckerberg Interview.