As of the time of writing, I'm the top 23rd Plurker in London. But what, I hear you ask, is Plurk? Well, it's an interesting cross between Twitter and a forum. It has the same philosophy of short posts, but instead of a rolling stream of updates, Plurks from my friends are presented in a timeline:
Recently in Web 2.0 Category
As of the time of writing, I'm the top 23rd Plurker in London. But what, I hear you ask, is Plurk? Well, it's an interesting cross between Twitter and a forum. It has the same philosophy of short posts, but instead of a rolling stream of updates, Plurks from my friends are presented in a timeline:
Tish of the Constant Observer shares her Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Developers. I know some of ours might not be keen on number 3:
3. Must enjoy technology. These days, the tools of digital media are (or should be) easy to learn. Your community manager will understand -- and be able to adapt quickly to -- upgrades in tools. She or he also might suggest new tools, and will learn new tools pretty quickly.Meanwhile Howard Owens shares some tips for newspaper people new to community management. I like this one:
Participate. When a reader posts incorrect information, offer up a correction or clarification. When a reader posts an assertion that would benefit from factual support, ask for it. When someone makes a statement that reminds you of an interesting quote or event that didn't make your story, leave your own comment about it. Your participation not only makes the conversation more interesting, and keeps people coming back, it gives you credibility when it comes time to play cop.One day I'll figure out why that one is so hard for journalists. And then I'll become a consultant and make a fortune... :)
- 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?
Here's how I would (tentatively) articulate them:
I was trying to work out the other day how long I'd been participating in virtual communities of various sorts, I think the answer is "13 years", starting with a mailing list for a game back in 1995. This is a topic I ought to revisit. I might even explain how I became the Ashtray on the Edge of Oblivion.
But then again, maybe not.
- "I get annoyed when people suggest that the only people who can deliver
news to the public are newspaper journalists. I believe that is an
arrogance based upon fear." - Joanna Geary.
- "Er, sorry to be the one to break it to you guys (and it was all male), the horse hasn't just bolted, he's built his own nice new stable in your garden." - Sarah Hartley
- "In case some of the mainstream media haven't got this yet - 'THE WEB DOES NOT OWE YOU A LIVING'. It doesn't care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else." - Andy Dickinson
The BBC is carrying what amounts to a "no shit, sherlock" story: Web is in its infancy, say Berners-Lee. And I suspect that the creator of the web is busy wondering why anyone thinks that this is news. (Update: It appears that quite a lot of people are thinking the same thing)After all, the web is a scant decade and a half old, yet most of the innovations that people are using daily, from streaming flash-based video, to social networking, have only come to prominence in the last half-decade. And, as Alan makes clear, that's just a blink of the eye in terms of most technological adoption.
We're only just beginning to understand what the implications are of moving from a static web to the live web (as Doc Searls has so delightfully termed it). His presentation at Le Web 3 '07 has stuck in my head for the last few months, and has finally bubbled its way into something meaningful in my conciousness. And here it is: .
Now, that's a much more positive angle on the broadband industry than the UK is showing. Virgin's call for the BBC to contribute to the bandwidth costs of the successful iPlayer is just ludicrous. For one, the BBC is already paying its own supplier, and at the other end, the customer is already paying for the bandwidth. If the ISPs were genuinely committed to serving their customers, they'd have been following the rapid growth of audio and video streaming and downloading amongst their users, and putting plans in place to facilitate it. Penalising another company for being popular with their customers is just not the way forward.
This is an important debate for those of us in the media to keep a watch on. This fundamentally affects both the major future content delivery platform for our work - and our costs for accessing it.
- How you might facilitate real-time metrics for journalists
- How to maintain passion as a medium endures, and what we can learn from the mistakes made as business magazines matured
- How job titles can be the biggest barrier to organisational change
- Is routine the enemy of passion?
- What can we learn about physical working spaces from online social media spaces?
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.
And talking of boring, here's my test video:
Something more interesting next time. Promise.
Update: Here's one of the spring snow:
One of my colleagues mentioned this at the editors' conference we had last year, to something akin to a stunned silence. I don't get the impression that her point really sank in with many of the people present. And it's not like it's a new idea. People have been talking about the web's ability to explode conventional content structures for half a decade.
This is, and always was, an inevitable consequence of the structure of the web: the link. Any page can link to any other. And as the social internet has developed we have more and more ways of recommending links to others: e-mail, instant lessening, blogs, bookmarking sites, forums, Twitter, social networks and so on. And that was the point of the video I posted the other day - people aren't going to come and visit you in the same way they pick up and read a magazine, they're going to come to you via a link shared in any number of ways - or through that 800lb gorilla we know as "search",
First of all, as I comb my e-mails for details of Movable Type problems and bugs past, I really wish I'd been keeping an internal blog from the start. Then I could just click the "server issues" tag and have a handy list to print out and give to the testers.
Secondly, I've realised just how much of a mental re-engineering needs to go on for journalists to adapt to the Web 2.0 age. Traditional publishing fundamentally had one process: research, write, edit, publish. Online journalism provides us with a range of tools, so you still research, but then you pick whichever medium best suits the story: text (long or short form), image, audio, video (streamed or recorded and edited). So, instead of a linear production workflow, you actually have a branching one, with critical choices to be made. And then you start factoring in interactive media, and the complexity goes up another level. That's a huge, huge change in the job. No wonder it takes time to enthuse people about this.
Here's how I demoed Seesmic:
And, here are the responses:
Now, I reckon that that they're missing the point and Mr Rogers will have the last larf here. The video isn't mocking user generated content in general, just that slightly cheesy way TV and radio solicits user feedback to give them a thin patina of interaction, which is wholly fake. Compare the "reckons" on TV to the debates found in blog comments or forums, and you'll see how shallow these efforts really are.
I hereby coin the phrase "cargo-cult engagement" to describe this phenomenon. My licensing rates are very reasonable...

Another of those great Common Craft videos, as spotted by Robin.
Sure beats the one-pager on "Explaining Twitter" I was about to write.
(You can follow me on Twitter, if you're so inclined)
I'm seriously considering going along. I'm not actually a freelancer or small business owner, but you never know what the future might bring...
You can find out all you need to know at the Going Solo site. Early bird discounts until this Sunday (£140), and then a reduced rate (£190) until the middle of March.

Important, Your help is needed!Wow! Really? Better read on:
Six of your friends have pending dating requests:
Crickey! They need my help to date? Wow.

I'm removing you as a friend on facebook but just writing to let you know its nothing personal! You have so many status updates or blog posts every day that like half of my news feed is purely from you and there's no room left for news from my other friends.
The strange thing about this is that I haven't actually logged into Facebook in something like 10 days now. I'm not a great user of the site and, while I'm not tempted to commit "Facebook suicide", I only login in response to prompts from friends to do/reply to things.
The service has been revamped somewhat since I last had a play, and the new view which compiles replies in the timeline makes it much easier to pick up interesting new conversations than it was before. It gets ever more interesting, for a service in Alpha.
Dan recently asked how many RSS (or atom) feeds I subscribe to, and how I manage them.
Let's start with how many. Well, in my main subscription group, I have just shy of 400 feeds. I have two other subscription groups, but I'll come back to them in another post. Those feeds generate up to 1,000 post per day.
Yes. yes, I know. I have a problem. I'm an addict. So we'll gloss over that and move on to Dan's second question: How do I manage them?
(The rest is behind a cut to spare those whose eyes are glazing over already.)

Everyone I talked to about Blognation at Le Web 3, after the controversy a couple of weeks ago, seemed to think the site was dead in the water.
Nice idea, but rather short on money and management…

In the fine tradition of Le Web 3 softball interviews, Sarah Lacy just gave Kevin Rose of Digg a warm, fluffy loving feeling up on stage, and she asked him again and again why he's so awesome. I made a few notes in between the moments of nausea:
There was "no Web 2.0" when Rose started Digg. He would have been happy with it paying his rent through AdSense. At the time there were a handful of editors controlling the front pages - he wanted to empower the masses. (The masses being the top 100 users, presumably)
He recommends that you don't start three companies at once. He also thinks that people raise investment capital too early sometimes - when they don't need it. Scares me when ideas are unproven. All three start-ups grown organically. Rose was working a day job when started he Digg. Pownce, was launched the same way.
Lacy asked how he keeps control of the company now venture capital is involved. Apparently it's a matter of picking the right investor. Yes, but how?