DISQUS

Well said Alex. Would love to make it to the co-working space to work sometime.

hehe

just helping you test :)

There are other services providing food/shelter/job training.

Just because Google is providing this service doesn't preclude others from providing other services.

Sometimes people need a hand up and not a hand out. That was my case. And I'm thankful to have gotten the help I did when it came to a phone number and address to respond to job inquiries, etc.

Being once homeless I can assure you that voice mail is something that is more than welcome.

In order to get a job, to get an apartment, to establish anything - you need a consistent way of being contacted.

Living in squat after squat, sleeping on train after train, I can't tell you how much I am thankful for a few folks who took my phone calls for me.

That's not a joke. It was crucial to me getting off the streets. So was a mailing address.

Question - Why doesn't Slashdot count anymore? Please don't say it is the quality of the commenting or posters. Or that having a group of editors intercede in what gets promoted is somehow antiquated and wrong (because umm... Digg is now doing just that - except non-transparently).

Hi, While I think this is a great idea, supposedly coRank http://www.corank.com/ does this. More at Read/WriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/burying_th...

TMZ.com and perezhilton.com are perfect examples. for some reason others seem to avoid mentioning them as successful commercial blogs. I don't know why.

Congratulations to you and your family. I hope Maryam has a speedy recovery, that epidural sounded scary. Milan is a *great* name. Bless you all.

Howe's piece points to an important part of the puzzle - that building around communities of interest - while focusing locally - like CincyMOMS - brings real results.

What I've found with Philly Future is that it is easier to target smaller communities of interest within a geography, than entire geographical communities.

For example Philly Foods - Philly Sports - Philly Liberal Politics - all are potentially greater centers of community then a generalized Philadelphia community like Philly Future.

The more general your community effort is (to me news and community are synonymous) - the harder it is to gain traction.

Jeff Jarvis once said the web is about niches - he's right. Hyper local isn't a successful niche - it's just a strata to identify communities of interest - niches - within local geographies.

A question to ponder, as a blogger, have you ever linked to a single, interior, Facebook page in a post?

How about Digg?

While I agree online metrics are broken - Facebook is an inward facing community. You need to be part of it, to get value out of it.

Digg, on the other hand, gives value to visitors who just browse, like myself. I'm on Digg quite a bit each day - but I'm not a digger.

Whups... missed that last link of yours :)

And hence, I take ClayShirkyRule credits by quoting him first in a thread on social software:

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality: "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

IdeaStorm is brilliant :)

Gabe has indicated that sites that *link to Memeorandom, and send traffic to it* are considered more relevant to Memeorandum. The level of traffic is considered as well in its algorithms. see Gabe here.

You got a point. Sometimes, even amidst the entire online media revolution, it seems like what we're really doing is learning lessons that have been learned before.

The bias discussion is a 'change the subject' effort away from the one that matters. The bias discussion doesn't matter.

The trust discussion does.

IBM was very smart here agreed. So was Robert.

But if a viewer saw the PodTech video, would they know it was paid for?

Saying "Readers and viewers are pretty darn savvy at smelling spin." is an argument that deflects responsibility away from the author of the work from needing to be transparent and puts *all* of the onus on the reader/viewer.

Robert himself says "PodTech WAS paid for doing a video, and other work, for Intel. We should have clearly marked that as sponsored content. It was not."

He's right. And arguments to the contrary are just... mind blowing.

Does bias matter? No not really.

And arguments about bias distract from what's really important.

Trust.

How it's established. What it means.

Some *real* form of disclosure matters.

For the very same reasons that Robert thinks that disclosures should accompany each PayForPost piece.

A pleasure and good luck with Mesh 2.0.

Hi, Mathew, I'm Karl Martino and I helped organize the structure of the norgs: unconference we just had in Philadelphia.

"I’m just not sure our audience (or at least not all of them) are going to be as knowledgeable as the ones at the unconference you went to, and so we want to strike a balance between blowing up the panel and still maintaining some structure."

The act of trusting your participants (note they are no longer the audience), doesn't preclude structure. In fact, you still very much need it. We used Dave Winer's BloggerCon cheat sheet as a starting point [1]. Jeff summs it up very well when he says "Start with the end of the session, with the questions. And turn the questions around and ask the people in the room to share their knowledge, which is greater than that on the panel."

We're there some who knew the subject matter more than others? Yes. But that *helped* the exchange that occured here. It was eye opening.

You'll need a good moderator to kick things off and hold things together - a tough job to be sure. Food and as Andrew suggets and breaks - because discussions are intense (I can't imagine falling asleep at one of these).

1. http://www.bloggercon.org/iii/newbies