Technovia

Pheer my reach!

I am, apparently, the 15th "most heard" voice on the interwebs in the UK, sandwiched between Andy Murray and Robert Peston. Ummm, go me! I think?

What is mainstream media anyway?

Nick Carr:

"Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion."

I think Nick is both wrong and right here. The "top blogs" ARE mainstream media. But what people often forget is that mainstream media is mainstream for a reason: because the techniques and topics they cover are popular. So it's no surprise that the same techniques and topics emerge in the most popular blogs.

TypePad's new editor: a big improvement

TypePad has gained a new editor, and it's a massive improvement over the old one. Gone are the old separate fields for extended entries, in favour of a LiveJournal-style "cut" icon which splits your post at any point you desire. It's much more simple, and much more word processor-style. I like it. 

No, Twitter isn't a revolution in media speed

Lots of Twitterers commented on how they heard from Twitter first about the LA Earthquake, and how amazing it is. Not so fast:

"I'd suggest a far more likely scenario is that Twitter is the first place that bloggers and other chatterati first saw it, and as they are the ones who tend to talk about it in the blogosphere echo system which consumes nearly all their attention, that's clearly where they perceive it was first reported.....

The poor old mainstream media of course are hobbled by totally unreasonable requirements such as checking and confirming facts before its broadcast, unlike a social network."

(Via broadstuff.)

A news story is not a single page: it's a network

Monica Guzman:

"'I'm convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,"

This is totally true, and actually reflects a significant change in what a news story (or, for that matter, a blog post) actually is. Rather than think of a story as a single finished article, think of it as part of a network of the story, it's comments, and the comments and posts that it spawns across the web. As a writer, you write the story: but you also act as something like a curator for the conversation across the web, too.

A story is no longer a single page: it is a network of pages.

Relating this back to my post the other day, about how self-correction in blogging is a vice, not a virtue, this raises a simple question: is the job of a "journalist" is not just to write the story, but to tend and curate comments and discussions wherever they exist on the web?

I think that might well be the way things are heading. This then means going back to rework the original post in the light of the ongoing discussion, but also planting "seeds" into other nodes of discussion, too.

And here's the bad part for publishers: this is time consuming, and expensive, but it's also the only way to be truly step beyond the one-way model of "broadcast" journalism we've all grown up with.

Why self-correction in blogging is a vice, not a virtue

It's hard to understand why after ten years of blogging, people are still arguing that the difference between journalism and blogging is that journalists take time to get it right. But that's apparently what Robert Scoble was faced with at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference.

Robert goes into some detail of his experience on his post (more of which momentarily), but to anyone who's been around media and news it's pretty obvious that this is a canard. Journalists don't always take time to get it right: in fact, what some of them do is no more than take time to check they won't get sued for it, which is a very different thing. In the hunt for a good story, one which sells papers, truth is sometimes a secondary consideration.

Robert, though, raises some points which are also canardical (if that's a word), particularly about the ability for blogging to "self-correct". This idea of fast self-correction is an important one, and not just for blogging. The idea is simple: it's fine to go back to a story and amend it later, because the correction gets around the web as quickly as the original story. It's agile project management for knowledge: the first draft can be wrong, as long as you get it right at some point in the future.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this vision of constant redrafting of stories is very appealing to many journalists, too. It's even more appealing to editors, under pressure to get stories out fast and revise them later. The idea of working on a story for days, weeks, and even months is anathema to many modern journalists.

But the problem is that "a story" has a life far, far beyond the original post. For a popular blogger like Scoble, the original words are likely to be picked up and reposted hundreds of times.

Watching the development and correction of stories, there's something interesting that I've always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that's 100,000 people who believe the original story - and unless Scoble's readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that's a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

This situation is really compounded if the original post comes from someone without a vast readership, but which gets picked up by a well-read blogger. In this case, if the well-read blogger doesn't pick up on the correct, it's likely that the word will never have a chance of getting out - and the original, false information will be far more widely spread.

Of course, this is not a blogging versus journalism problem: it's simply something that will always be true of fast publishing systems which are democratised, in the way the web is now. It doesn't matter what the original source is: if it's widely read and commented on, a later corrected version isn't carried in the same way. By the time you correct, the attention of people has moved on.

Blogging Jumped the Shark?

Blogging Jumped the Shark?:

"Jason never blogged. He shilled, whether it was Mahalo he was shilling or Jason. I stopped watching his act long ago; in fact, I'm amazed at how many people still follow him given the lack of any interesting content. Mahalo was the Time-Life books of the blogosphere, nothing more."

(Via Chuqui 3.0.)

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Just lately I've found myself getting depressed about the state of the Internet, to the point that I've been decoupling myself from some of the aspects of the net that I've come to find getting me down.

There's Twitter, with its endless stream of attempts to condense complex ideas into 140 characters. There's blog spats, and blog wars, and blog this and blog that. Comments which add nothing to a discussion beyond a realisation that the commentator wants you to know he's an alpha male.

There's talk of FriendFeed, or whatever the newest latest shiniest thing is - to the point that claiming that newest, latest, shiniest thing might (just might) not be all that great gets you told in a patronising way that "you just don't get it, because you're not an early adopter like us".

Every event is surrounded by a storm of words, yet so few of those words add anything more. There's so little insight, so little real criticism (in the positive sense of that much-maligned word) and almost no attempt to dig a little deeper, below the skin of something.

It's a vast, great pool of shallowness - and like all vast, shallow pools, sooner or later it starts to smell of stagnation.

If I sound fed up, it's probably because I am.

The only bit of the Internet that is within my personal circle of influence is this blog and the various trails I leave around - comments, Twitter posts, shared items. So I'm just going to stop posting things that I think add nothing. If I have something to say, I'll stop, think about it, maybe post it when I've dug into it a little more.

If you want to know what I'm finding cool or interesting then subscribe to my Google Reader shared items - either by adding me as a friend in Google Reader (ianbetteridge@gmail.com), or by subscribing to this feed.

No more quick reactions. Let's all do some thinking.

Joanne McNeil on Boing Boing's "erasure" of Violet Blue

Link: Tomorrow Museum » Archive » William Gibson Completely Deleted from BoingBoing Archives.

"This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging"

As far as I can see, Joanne made absolutely no attempt to contact anyone at Boing Boing to find why Violet has been deleted from the archives.

Accusing someone of “bad journalism” while failing to do any additional research over and above reading a Valleywag story is pretty bold, don’t you think?

UPDATE: From the BoingBoingers.

How to make FriendFeed useful: Drop the Twitterati

I've been somewhat sceptical about FriendFeed, the aggregation system which makes it easy to subscribe to and comment on everything your friends are doing online. The sheer volume of links, comments and so on that flow through it make it a pain in the behind to actually use, with the signal overwhelmed by the noise.

And then I discovered the secret of FriendFeed: drop the Twitterati. You know - the group of people obsessed with social media who've made the jump from Twitter to FriendFeed and spend most of their time talking about how FriendFeed is better than Twitter, how FriendFeed is better than Google Reader, how it's better than Facebook. Their next step will probably be to talk incessantly about how FriendFeed is better than cupcakes.

So out went Scoble, out went Steve Rubel (sorry Steve), and out went Louis Gray. Basically, if you'd mentioned "FriendFeed" more than once in the past day or two, or posted anything of which the basic content was "hey, FriendFeed - it's going to be BIGGER THAN GOD" out you went.

The best thing about the whole process is that it doesn't mean that I miss out on interesting things that these guys post: friends will "Like" the interesting stuff, which means it shows up in my stream. It's like having my own team of friendly editors, culling the waffle.

FriendFeed is now about 300% more useful. Rather than dipping into once every few days and finding that, yes, everyone is still talking about FriendFeed, I'm finding new and interesting stuff, from people I don't know. Isn't that what it's really supposed to be about?