DISQUS

Even putting aside the (entirely valid) ROI question, I'm still left wondering about the overall strategy here. A one time traffic spike is nice enough, but it looks like their traffic is working its way back down to its prior level.

This feels to me like a sideshow hitting down for a couple of days, rather than a strategy; it's a gimmick, in the sense that it's non-reproducible and doesn't appear to lay any foundations for developing their online presence. As the novelty of "oh, look, skittles.com is (twitter | facebook | wikipedia | flickr | youtube) today" wears off, you're left with something that offers even less reason to visit than a standard corp. product site. There is literally no "there" there.

Seems like microfame has virtually always existed--I wrote a piece on it in journalism school nearly ten years ago--and we're just seeing the social media instance now.

Once you put aside the "traditionally famous," you very quickly enter the micro- or niche-famous. Rock climbing was the example I used a decade ago: there are people who are absurdly famous in the climbing world but can walk through an airport without turning a single head.

These are people who regularly appear on magazine covers, have endorsement deals and do appearances...basically all the trappings of traditional fame, except that its a very limited sphere. If you're a climber you know of these people, but if you're not you'll probably never hear their names.

If you don't like climbing take your examples from academic disciplines, niche music (I play the bagpipes and there's a world of micro-famous people there), or what-have-you. Every community has its share of contextually famous people.

I just recently re-entered the world of people who have a "personal Web page." I'm in the camp of people who create a lot of stuff here and there across the Web, and I got tired of trying to decide which URL made sense to pass to others in a given situation (and, for that matter, tired of trying to remember all the URLs), so I created a sort of homepage for the first time in years.

The page, however, is nothing but a hub: simply links to the sites that I've created or use regularly (http://absono.us). I've seen a number of others take a similar approach, as well; so much of our activity online is tied to specific sites that pointers make more sense than a ca. 1999 home page.

My resume? On LinkedIn, no point in retyping it. Cool links I've found? All on del.icio.us already. You want to know what music I like and listen to? The Hype Machine already keeps track of that for me, why would I maintain another list?

The Web offers us far better tools to capture the different aspects of ourselves now, making links and pointers a much simpler, low-friction approach to offering an online presence.

Excellent to hear, Greg -- though, d'oh: I should have told you to put 250labs.com as a referral, so I got some free hosting out of it. :)

Greg -

I'm hosting this stuff on a MediaTemple gridserver account. While it's not as flexible in many ways as having a dedicated server, I've been very happy with them over the past year or so.

You might try getting in touch with Scott Schnaars -- he set up a bot using this code as a model and has been working through some issues with getting it running on a GoDaddy hosted account.

You're the "Twittering King?" Man, Calacanis is going to be *pissed*... :)

If you haven't already seen it, I'd recommend taking a look at Chris Pirillo's recent post "We’re Taking an Open Direction with Web Communities: Are You In?"

For the community of community owners, operators, moderators, and members: we need better options, and I believe we need them to exist on open platforms. We all have different tastes and we all use different tools, but I think we all can accept that community software should help us grow and flourish. One potential platform for us is found in Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) that can be molded into a powerful, integrated suite of community experiences - something that can help us make sense of all these social networks we belong to.

As I recall, both Brad Feld and Fred Wilson (among others) have blogged about hating boring Powerpoint presentations a number of times over the past three or four years.

My sense is that many VCs accept sitting through boring PowerPoint presentations as a price of doing business, but that they'll happily and publicly admit that they hate, hate, hate them if you ask.

And, as you discovered, many are happy to share their loathing without waiting to be asked...

I think that with social media, as with all other media, the responsibility is shared.

"You" (i.e. not you in particular, but all of us) as author have a responsibility to make the effort to ensure that the information you're providing is accurate, though what that means varies from case to case: sometimes "I trust the person from whom I got this information" may feel good enough, and other times "I need direct confirmation from someone involved before I believe this" may be the line.

"You" as reader have a responsibility to exercise the same sort of judgment when reading: authors make mistakes, authors have their own perspectives, and authors may even provide incorrect information for their own purposes, nefarious or otherwise.

I don't feel it's reasonable to entirely abdicate this responsibility in either role, but if I had to choose I would that one has greater responsibility as an author. You are implicitly vouching for the accuracy of information by choosing to share it; if you're talking about a rumor, make it very clear that it's a rumor -- provide your readers with enough information about how you got your information that they can fulfill their part of the bargain and judge for themselves.

When thinking about social networks I'd be inclined to consider the hype cycle (I believe the term comes out of Gartner) as a factor.

While it's framed in terms of introducing a new technology, I think the hype cycle is applicable to "social" tech/tools/sites that don't necessarily introduce truly "new" tech; because user adoption is a central element of any explicitly social software, publicity and attention can have really dramatic effects on both the perceived and actual value and effectiveness of the site/tool.

Stage 1. "Technology Trigger"
The first phase of a Hype Cycle is the "technology trigger" or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.

Stage 2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations"
In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

Stage 3. "Trough of Disillusionment"
Technologies enter the "trough of disillusionment" because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.

Stage 4. "Slope of Enlightenment"
Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the "slope of enlightenment" and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.

Stage 5. "Plateau of Productivity"
A technology reaches the "plateau of productivity" as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

Hey, Michael -

Joe Lazarus (on his Tumblog, of course) came right out and asked why reblog plugins are uncommon or nonexistent for the bigger blogging tools.

At first I was a bit skeptical, but quickly realized that I was overcomplicating the idea and it looks like I ended up thinking the same thing that you are.

I was actually thinking of bastardizing RSS for the data -- basically having a "reblog URL" that's a single-item RSS feed -- though I'm not sure that's the best idea. It has the benefit of pulling the entire post content (as a Tumblr reblog does), as well as retaining all the information you need to automatically provide attribution.

With a format defined, a Wordpress plugin then seems very manageable: each post has a reblog link/button/what-have-you similar to a trackback link. You modify the WP post page to accept a reblog URL, pull the content from the URL and prepopulate the post page correctly. (If you wanted to go crazy with the unsupported fun, you could even go the URI scheme route and have something like reblog:http://example.com/the-post-title/reblog/ to try to eliminate the copy/paste step.)

I'm going to try to play around with a test plugin a bit over the next couple of weeks, but I'm also very curious to see how you end up integrating the ideas you've outlined into what you're already doing.

- Whit

What's interesting about the Reblog button (and Tumblr as a whole, for that matter) is that it takes the creative "vices" of blogging and transforms them into virtues -- which in turn makes blogging more accessible.

In the "normal" blogging world, bloggers who just republish stuff created by others, rather than getting scoops or generating new content, are widely disparaged; in a Tumblog this behavior is explicitly encouraged via Reblog. You like what someone else posted, but don't have anything in particular to add? Cool, no problem, reblog.

Similarly, the "strongly typed" nature of Tumblr reduces the friction associated with blogging. As I wrote a month or so ago:

"The Internet is littered with long defunct, three-post blogs in large part because 'blogging' is generally viewed as 'writing,' and therefore every blog must apparently carry the burden of high school English classes: What’s my thesis? Have I developed my arguments? Spelling counts! Jeez, haven’t I written 500 words yet? Tumblr tries to eliminate some of that friction by scaling down the ambitions of blogging; if you just want to post a picture, post a damn picture and don’t worry about whether it constitutes a 'blog post.'"

I'm really looking forward to seeing how Tumblr and its community evolve.

Out of curiousity, do you (Scoble) have access to the privacy policy that covers Plaxo's retention and use of the data gathered through this feature?

I'm still just gazing in amused wonder at the sentence "previously I did not notice the creepy double-decker bus full of mannequins with an animatronic driver parked out front." Exactly how drunk were you on prior visits to this establishment?

It's probably worth keeping an eye on Yahoo in this area, too. Back at the start of the year they acquired the assets of SearchFox, which had a pretty nice personalized RSS reader.

I used the searchfox reader for several months and thought it was quite good; the only big concern I had was my usual (not specific to searchfox) "personalization" worry: in the absence of input from other sources, how quickly do you end up with a personal echo chamber, where you get more and more of what you're already interested in, and less and less of everything else that's interesting but outside your normal scope?

Not a killer problem, since there are a variety of ways around it, but worth noting.

Very nice -- harkens back to Ken Nordine's 1966 album "Colors," the first few tracks of which were created as commercials for the Fullers Paint company.

This info has probably flowed in via other channels, but apparently the data that Kottke was working off of is unreliable:

http://www.kottke.org/07/05/twitters-not-growin...

Apparently the folks at Twitter are going to be working on some visualizations, so the horse's mouth version should be available in a couple of weeks.

Not to say that the new data won't confirm the power of Scoble and Laporte, of course... :)

You don't think that it was the buzz coming from SXSW as a whole (with the dual 60" plasmas streaming twitter messages) that was the engine behind the March growth spurt?