DISQUS

maynas eric hits it over the head with his comment. i actually propose we stop talking about "microblogging" and start describing twitter and friendfeed as "social SMS".

Steinnon, that's partially true. we writers do need to have that kind of ephemeral interactivity. just because you leave a comment on a site or have a MySpace page, that doesn't make you a writer.

there's a whole different skill set involved and set of intellectual muscles. and just like with any muscle they can get exhausted after years of use.

it's not an either/or proposition this writing thing. what we need to change is the way we treat blogs. they need to evolve into being aggregating platforms as well as broadcasting platforms.

oy, this comment i was going to post turned into a saga. read about over at my blog
( http://culturekitchen.com/liza/blog/to_robert_s... )


here's the comment i was going to leave here initially :

i was going to leave this at Michael's blog, but am going to leave it here, you know, to actually make the point am writing about :D

i've always thought of FF and Twitter as features and not actual platforms. in my book they're not even full services. they're really nifty features waiting for a service. features that, by the way, suck the money community, activity and eventually money out of a blog.

so michael was absolutely right and am aghast at the number of hours he says you've spent. i don't want to look at what my numbers may be.

it's why after working on upgrade and re-designed plans for my blogs, i basically scrapped what i had and went back to the drawing board. i want my blogs to be the platform from which i twitter everything.

i mean, i've never understood why you need FriendFeed when people can have people comment on his blog. FF is just an aggregator Robert. a community aggregator. there's nothing that they do that you can't do, technically, if you ran your blog on Drupal instead of WordPress.

Drupal has several aggregating modules that can turn any site into an FF. why they never took off? as usual, the problem with Drupal developers is that they think of functionality before ease of use. FF is the "Leech" module in Drupal with a really nice UI for creating the profile page.

but let's get back to basics : you like FF because "FF = Twitter + comments". it's the virtual water cooler chat we don't get because we work from home. i like to describe more like a cocktail party as well.

Twitter rocks for me (and FF rocks for you) because i don't have to be committed to a linear narrative the way have to with each blog post. so obviously the issue here is that we need a way to have comments on twitterings just like FriendFeed WHILE BRINGING THOSE CONVERSATIONS BACK TO OUR BLOGS --and that has to be done through the platform your twittering from. that platform for professional bloggers has to be ... ahem ... the blogs.

in my case what i'd like to have in the re-desing is the results i get with the current hookup i have for twittering : IM/Google Talk + Ping.FM.

if i can basically have my site function like a Ping.FM, then i'll be able to have the kind of microblogging fun i've found in twitter. of course the issu here is the aggregation of the "twitterbacks". if twitterings had permalinks that identified the orginating twittering from the replies, then we'd be in business. their sloppiness is there for a reason : they take away value from our blogs by denying easy aggregation.
anyhow, back to my technological solution.

in my case, even though there's a Ping.FM module for Drupal 6, i have to run my sites for awhile in D5 until we're able to finish importing static pages from a legacy site. so i either need to have someone back-port that module OR i'll have to look into maybe using some email function to have the pinging happening in real time through my blog. any way it happens though, it has to happen through my blog, not just through my IM or Twitkit UI.

anyhow, am glad Michael brought this up because, indeed, no service is a good service to bloggers if it doesn't bring back value to their blog. as it is right now, neither Twitter nor FriendFeed do that.

and am still amazed that none of these companies pay you for the value you bring them. i mean, i can understand not paying me because i can't pull 23K followers even though a lot of these startups think of me as influential enough to pitch me all the friggin' time. but you, my friend, bring something to these services that is worth you're weight in gold. pull out of FF. take all your content out as an experiment. am sure they'd get massively hit w/o your presence.

but there's also something more to think about Robert : you're eagerness to do this work for free hurts us all professional bloggers out there. it hurts our economy because, if someone like Robert Scoble will do R&D or marketing for a company for free, why wouldn't a shmuckette like Liza "blogdiva" Sabater?

as probably the most influential tech blogger individual out there, you need to ask people the hard question of, "how is this going to enhance my blog and make it more valuable". this is the very question i asked back in 2007 about Twitter when we were in SXSW and it was the very same question that nobody was able to answer.

this is one case in which the "trickle down economics" make sense to me. if you establish that your influence has a price, the rest of us will be able to capitalize more effectively on our influence as well.

interesting. i am not logged into the NYTimes site and i can't see those links. haven't tested it by logging into the site, but as of 5:55pm, those external links are gone from the front page for non-registered or logged in users.

wow!

that's a waaaaay no-no word. i consider it as bad as
the n-word.

Grrrrr! I'm missing on all the fun. Well, this wouldn't have happened if I had gotten invited. People know I am wont to call everybody on their bullshit :) Unfortunately, I am not known for tech but for politics ... heh.

go baratunde, go!
you go school that woman.

:D

That's true for now. I just feel that once Texas and Ohio happen that, if the polls are right and she still trails Obama, that she should really, really think long and hard about splitting the party just to win.

Many of us, even people like me who voted twice for her husband and twice for her as well, we feel that even if she forces a win of the nomination that she would be trounced by McCain.

LOL!
You win.

HOLY SHIT! Congratulations! I thought they had a moratorium on melanin over at The Onion. I mean, the last time I saw a picture of their editorial group it was seriously melanin-challenged. Funny, but melanin-challenged nonetheless. That said ... ahem ... I'M SO FUCKING JEALOUS!

There. Now I feel better. It's all about me :D

poke fun all you want but the truth is they even have boilerplate non-responses at the ready to people's complaints about their demands. i'll have to scavenge for those through my inbox and post them.

Welcome to my world. I have been writing for years about how the Google Gestapo has been harrassing me, from questioning my content (I right about feminist issues and am rabidly pro-choice) to the validity of the TLAds I'm running alongside GoogleAds.

You can find my articles at http://culturekitchen.com

Why do you assume the person is a he?

Spam comment and spam trackbacks is the #1 reason I switched to Drupal.

Neither MovableType nor WordPress can deal with the spamm attacks my blogs suffer everyday --at about 5K a day combined and in a slow day.

Just culturekitchen alone has come under attack with 1K spam comments and trackbacks an hour. Back in 2005, the last attack cost me over 1K in overage bandwidth and I ended up with over 25K spamments to delete --and that's on my high traffic blog, not on any slow posting, abandoned site.

I have been battling this now since 2005 and only see it getting worse with now the emergence of spamming cartels in China and Brasil. And yes, they are like the frigging mafia. Russian spammers are the worse.