blogs

Now that we mere tech plebes have been blessed with yet another definitive "Top 100" list of bloggers, I can rest and relax, knowing that order has been imposed upon the universe.

...below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 to today....Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Am I alone in feeling that anybody who claims to be in a position to declare a "Top [capital 'T'] 100" list of bloggers somehow is denying the incredibly diverse reality of the intertubes? Surely there are many ways to measure a "top 100" list besides mentions on a single SV/SHR-centric tech site, no matter how popular. Certainly my list would be different than yours, or TechMeme's. Especially when it comes to tech blogging. Really, most of the really interesting tech stuff is not happening under VC funding -- which I feel renders it all but invisible to most of the SV blogmedia world. Isn't most of what is called "tech blogging" really blogging about venture-financed tech? That's quite a subset of all of technology, and "Top" only in a rather narrow sense.

Maybe they should call it "Top 100 Industry Bloggers"?

/rant

/yawn

No doubt many on this list are very interesting bloggers. For the most part, they haven't crossed my path. Precious few are among the 500 blogs in my RSS reader. I guess I'm just too geeky.

I've seen a lot of interesting stuff on the web, but really, for a regular show with snap, among the best is Epic-Fu. Check this one out from a few weeks ago:

Zadi Diaz has been a star for a while, but I'm just catching on, thanks to TiVo. Fun fun, and often really pretty weird. Good fun stuff.

Seth Godin is worth reading because he so frequently comes up with some interesting insights about this modern world that's evolving and growing before our eyes. But I think here he gets it this wrong:

If I had to pick one word to describe what's new, what's different and what's important about now vs. then, it would be "choice."

The choice of more products.
The choice of more retailers. Many a click away.
The choice of more consumers to ask for an opinion.
The choice by marketers over who to market to (precision increases).
The choice of workers to be virtual or flexible or change careers.

He goes on with some for-instances.

The thing is, I don't see choice as being some "new" 21st-century phenomenon. In fact, in many ways, there's less choice today than there was 25 years ago. There may seem to be more banks around, but what I've been seeing is massive bank consolidations. The local banks in my area are being absorbed by -- or absorbing -- other banks. I can buy insurance for my company from any number of brokers, but they're all selling the same thing, often the same underwriters, especially when it comes to health insurance. There may appear to be more credit card offers out there, but these companies have been consolidating so rapidly, I think I have one single card in my purse that has not merged and changed names in the past 2-3 years.

Bob Warfield takes on Seth's idea and riffs a bit on "scarce," as if it were the opposite of "choice," but then points out:

The web moves in punctuated equilibrium. Most of the time, choice is illusory. It consists of thousands of minor variations on what are just a few common themes. Most people crave consistency, because they can’t handle too many real choices. And yet thousands of minor variations are strangely unsatisfying. We can invest all the time, seek all the answers, work hard to get to depth, and we’re left wanting more, or at least wondering if this is it. Delivering something deeply different to break us out of the drone of all that mundane choice is valuable.

Seth does hit on one thing, though: "More choice in who to listen to (and who to ignore)."

That's true. However, I feel that is only a symptom of the real paradigm shift in our economy and culture today:

Voice.

Every day, in the "old media" of traditional broadcasting and newspapers, we see closed-minded -- and I'd say willfully ignorant -- attitudes expressed about how unimportant blogging and social media are. But they are speaking from platforms that are feeling a bit disempowered by the new media.

The new media are what have given people their voice. And it's not just that now we can hear what people used to just shout back at the television. We (the people) are changing. It's amazing what happens when you get a sense that maybe, this time, when you speak out you will be heard. That's profound. It's revolutionary.

People can talk back. Talk back to companies. Talk back to politicians. And, most important, talk to each other. We have more choices to listen to because we have more people saying things.

We have voice.

What do you say?

Blog Day is coming.

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.

With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

One of my favorite "old media" tech sites, Creative Cow, has launched a community blog site. With anticipation, I clicked on the link in the email announcement and as soon as the page loaded I had to laugh.

The Cow uses Drupal!

The Creative Cow has been a fabulous resource for tech talk on video, HD, DVD. It's a truly grassroots effort, forged in the 1990s, when many in video, television and film were spinning from (or left hanging by) the enormous upheavals that took place as "desktop" postproduction and digital video cameras started to disrupt the long-standing hegemony of the multi-million-dollar production houses. What system do I buy? What video card is best? How do I change my BIOS to get the most video performance? My system has been EOL'd by the manufacturer -- what now? Oh no, the blue screen of death -- what now? How can I make this effect? Anyone know a sound recorder in Santa Fe?....

My blog account has not yet been approved, but I see that they've adopted a wysiwyg editor. (TinyMCE? Oh dear!) Still, it's nice to welcome a "web 1.0" powerhouse in old media into the "web 2.0" world.

Over recent years, we've seen how social media and "web 2.0" sites have changed how we use the internet. Now we're starting to see how we use the internet change how we think about and interact with non-internet things.

Take politics. If you've been paying attention to the news lately, you've seen how presidential candidates have implemented community-style websites as key parts of their campaigns. A quick glance at the BlogHer Politics & News blogs shows more and more posts relating to how the very fabric of campaigns is changing as candidates and their campaign staffs learn how to navigate the waters of the blogosphere.

The blogosphere isn't just covering the political challenges of the day -- it has become a big political challenge of the day.

Of course, this kind of thing isn't quite new. The disruptive nature of "web 2.0" has been the focus of forward-looking businesses for some time now. On SiteProNews, Kalena Jordan writes that social media is "The Instant Brand Killer":

The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there's the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet. And if their experience is bad, the noise is generally louder. To protect their reputations it's not just journalists that companies have to impress these days. It's anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Love it or hate it, the user community now has enormous power over the online reputation of a company or brand.

Not surprisingly, businesses and individuals alike clamor for the attention and mostly enjoy the limelight that social media can bring. Others hate the intense scrutiny that often accompanies the popularity. An example is usability blogger Kim Krause Berg's unpleasant first experience of Digg - I Don't Digg Being Dugg (http://cre8pc.com/blog/archives/198).

Users aren't the only fickle creatures. So are voters. Now, after working primarily the margins in prior years, we're seeing social media play a similarly disruptive role in politics -- especially presidential campaigns -- as it has in business, by taking control of the message away from the campaign managers and placing it into the hands of the people ... all of the people.

Whoops!

The mix between political and blogging communities can get rough, and the politicians aren't always coming off well. It doesn't seem like they were quite expecting that. What with the choice by several campaigns to make their announcements online first, rather than on network news or talk shows (or comedy shows), perhaps the campaigns didn't quite know what they were getting into -- especially with regards to the inevitable trolling and flare-ups that can happen in the political blogosphere ... or how some loud, well-financed political operatives can get at politicians who've committed themselves to listening.

As a result, DC insiders are already getting gun-shy when it comes to the internet. Get a kick out of this post from Liza at culturekitchen:

I was told by a party insider they could not link to this blog because I used the word "panties" in one of my posts.

Yes people. Like 9 year-olds, Democrats are skittish of the word used for a girls' cootie catcher.

Do I have to be a multi-millinaire political socialite or a couple of guys dressed in blog drag for it to be acceptable? What of the DNC linking to the aforementioned blog back in 2004 when it had a media dilettante who's shitck at said blog was to endlessly pepper her posts with sodomy jokes?

Does choosing not to link to this blog have something to do with common decency or is it just out right censorship?

What will happen to the American political culture that has been safely ensconced in the one-way announce-only paradigm of the mainstream media, as it continues to interact with a voting populace that has platforms to talk back? It's already proving a volatile mix.

And we're only just getting started in this campaign.

Recently, Lynn d Johnson wrote about a new political website, techPresident:

The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who's got the fastest growing group of friends on Facebook.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we'll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

One sample:

Marianne Richmond at Blog the Campaign in 08 takes a look at the blog on Hillary Clinton's site and find something missing: Hillary.

Mitt Romney is trying his best to replicate Barack Obama's Facebook popularity. However, the University of Arizona's student paper, the Wildcat, points out: "Of the 36 posted photos of Romney's life and campaign, he seems to only interact with white people. (Note to the Romney 2008 campaign: These things can be both an asset and a liability.)"

It will be interesting indeed to see how the carefully managed, massaged, powdered and spun presidential campaigns fare in the wild and wooly world of social media, where you don't need to buy expensive airtime to be heard, where spin from ads and corporate media has limited effect, and where news can spread like wildfire.

If we are now the machine, which candidate will we choose before the election even takes place?

[Cross-posted on BlogHer.]

Since they launched it a week or so ago, I've been playing with the Technorati Favorites feature. I know that this kind of centralized site tracking is nothing new, but call me a curmudgeon for not appreciating Yahoo's pernicious tracking of all your browsing everywhere. Yes, there are alternatives, but this is where I am this week. (I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow, though.)

One problem with the favorites is that Technorati leaves so little space for actual content. Count me as one of the people who has a monitor larger than 800x600, and find a lot of dead space on the page. This screenshot I took just now has about 550px of live content, and the rest of the roughly 1300px of width is dedicated to a sidebar laden with ads and promotions (about 220px) and a whole lotta white space (some 500px worth). For a page that's supposed to be my resource for tracking sites I like, it's not very efficient.

(Side question: How many Technorati-savvy users actually use 800x600 monitors these days?)

With such limited real estate available, I think I'm going to have to go back to a desktop solution, even though that doesn't feel as fun. At the very least, I think I'm going to have to drop BoingBoing from the list -- they are just too prolific. My faves page has become a BoingBoing feed. I'll just have to go there on my own.

I just thought this was rather hysterical:

And slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by the idea of "a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power." They say that "the experience should really be instantaneous". They say that they should be able to "house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)" which leads to a world where "the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache". And, they say that they want "transparent personalization" that uses user "data to transparently optimize the user's experience ... implicitly."

And then....

Update: It appears Google suddenly removed the PPT file. Ugh. Well, sorry, but, unless you moved quickly, looks like there's no way to see it anymore.

Update: Google just made a PDF version of the slides available.

Unfortunately, this new PDF version of the slides no longer has the notes attached to each slide, so you can't see some of what I was referring to in my comments above.

...which only goes to show that, despite what Google claims, your local cache can often prove to be more reliable or trustworthy than some corporate-approved centralized copy.

But maybe everyone will thank Google for optimizing there experience in this instance....

The notion that PowerPoint has helped forge modern business thought is an old one. (The idea is that since business management makes decisions using PowerPoint presentations, the decision-making process gets boiled down to a few bullet points -- what would fit on a PowerPoint screen -- and this can preclude more in-depth discussion and analysis.)

So what about in the blogging realm? Are blogs being streamed into a certain format? I'm not talking about efforts to make all online content conform to common content structures. This is about how we're seeing blogging change.

Much attention is paid to the economics of it.

But what about the technology of it. On BlogHer, mir ponders this:

First of all I read the really intense discussion about "growing a pair" the other day on Blogher.

Then I read the post about Dropping the A-list mentality and the discussion of maybe, women converse and communicate in a different way online.

Then I read Danielles post in which she self-identifies as a negro, and then wonders aloud what audience-impact her choice of descriptor will have.

Finally I read What is technorati anyways? and picked up some ideas about tagging, and popularity.

So what's my point? My point is that i guess I am framing my role here, not just as the editor of book and literary blogs, but as someone who combs through the data and sometimes pulls out important factlets about the words we use. What they are good for, the damage they can do, and the fact that a vocabulary used in a techno-social setting is a very powerful thing indeed.

Then she asks:

I am fascinated by the way colloquial language creates order or disorder on the web, and also how only words that have weight survive. What does that mean for the unpopular tags?

Unlike a library, where books stay in view long after they are relevent, how are tags creating a heirarchies of taxonomic/linguistic power in web content?

How (if we want to), can we subvert a power structure that is based on algorithms and on usage, rather than the real strength behind language, which requires that the reader understand the words (if not the authors) intention, and the context the word is being used in?

Some interesting things to ponder here.

Yesterday, Technorati responded to my inquiry:

I've taken a look at the issue regarding picking up your pings for "www.pingv.com" and "blogher.org". After making a small adjustment, I've sent our spiders to revisit your pages and your blogs have been indexed with your most recent posts.

This leads me to believe that perhaps their spiders were not optimized for these sites. Whether that's related to Drupal or not, I don't know. I appreciate their timely response. (Marianne Rchmond has praise for Janice Myint, who was the rapid responder to my trouble ticket as well. Thanks, Janice!)

All of our Drupal-powered sites (including BlogHer, pingVIsion and this humble blog) seem to be tracking properly on Technorati now.