In a provocative assessment of Google’s Google+ strategy of launching a “recommended users” list (a topic of its own), Robert Scoble shared an assumption behind his conclusions:

If you have great content you will get found by one of the folks on this list.

It’s an interesting claim. I've heard this kind of thing for years, and always wondered: Is it true? My intuition always said it's not. So last night I questioned Robert's statement in a tweet, and he replied:

@lauras it's pretty rare that good content doesn't get shared with others.

How do we know that it's "rare" that good content doesn't get shared? We know only about the good content we've already found. We have no idea how much good content has not been found. So how can we lay any odds as to how common or rare it is for good content to be found?

And "found" ... by whom?

I thought I'd lay out some thoughts on this and see what people think.

What does it take?

1. The content must be "good".

   We all know that there's a ton of bad content that gets much more attention than good content. But for good content to get found, the question assumes good content. What makes content "good"? That's a question that is addressed piecemeal in the following points.

2. The content must be on a viable platform, in a viable format.

   The content must exist in a form that can be consumed if it is found. A book in Braille is not going to influence many. Your handwritten novel may be fabulous, but the single copy's being on yellow pads, with all the words scribbled in your poor penmanship ill serves your great novel.

3. The content must be findable.

   If people can't get to it, you can't share it. For online content, it must be in a format to be indexed by search engines. For movie content, it must have distribution. Your painting that's viewable only from your livingroom is not findable by others except your house guests. (If only you had a gallery showing!)

   A Confederacy of Dunces was eventually published posthumously and found by a delighted readership and a satisfied Pulitzer committee, but what if John Kennedy Toole's mother didn't champion his manuscript after his suicide and convince a publisher to publish it? How many John Kennedy Tooles have passed through the world, leaving behind great manuscripts that never will be read?

4. The content must be accessible.

   How many provocative news articles languish behind a paywall, never to be accessed by the people who could most infuentially share it? How much great content in China is never found because it's censored? An Internet without Net Neutrality could render much content completely inaccessible due to preferential content mainstreaming deals by access providers.

5. The content must be understandable.

   It must use a common language. It must use existing cultural references. We can love the music of Beethoven because he touches us in musical language still used today, but we are lost hearing Javanese gamelan, and modern avant-garde composers might speak in musical references too modern or obscure for us to grasp. How much ancient Greek poetry can be enjoyed when Greek is no longer taught in university?

6. The content must have some audience.

   Here's the trick. Somebody must start the sharing chain. Likely it takes a lot of somebodies to achieve some sort of sharing critical mass. How many of the most interesting people you know don't have a popular blog, don't have a jillion Twitter followers, aren't in oodles of Google+ circles? I can't count them all on the fingers of both hands. There are simply too many to count.

   My own blog has a small audience, but perhaps is on the radar of just enough people where good content fitting all the criteria listed here could break out and be "found". But if I tweet about my post, I can perhaps reach a slightly larger audience (via a fraction of my Twitter followers). On the other hand, if my post is Drupal-related and appears on Planet Drupal, my audience is suddenly and automatically increased by an order of magnitude, meaning so many more people can see and pass along my content if they deem it to be "good".

   How many content creators have that kind of audience available, who in turn can share that content with yet other people? Yes, there are some popular thinkers out there really putting out good content. But let's face it, most of the popular stuff is pretty crappy.

   Which leads us to:

7. The content must stand out in the noise.

   And there's a lot of noise these days. In the above-referenced Google+ joint, Scoble states: "Most people can only follow 250 people. In fact, the average user follows far less than that." That's because of noise. How much great content passed right before your eyes on Twitter, flitting by before your attention was drawn? I probably see 1% of all the stuff that crosses my Twitter feed, and that's on a good day, and even then I actually read only a fraction of that. Most of what we see is noise. But I love the serendipity that comes from following too many people.

   But if everyone is following only 250 people or fewer, how interconnected are we, really? Does your headline grab attention? Does your post have a striking image? Does your so-well-crafted jewelry look too much like discount store junk for anyone to notice its fine qualities? Has your essay topic been played so much that your most-insightful points aren't enough to gain anyone's attention?

   This last leads us to:

8. The content must be timely.

   This doesn't apply only to the insightful post on the latest political event can't be posted weeks after everyone has forgotten about the event. It also means that your content must fit the concept of what's "good" in that era. Vincent Van Gogh died a pauper; we can say his paintings were "found", but did he ever know it? Much of our filtering mechanisms are conscribed by popular culture – popular media culture, popular political culture, popular academic culture, you name it. The most-shared good content will fit within those contemporary frames – not "ahead of its time", not out of fashion, not when the event is forgotten, not when the moment has passed. Many a bon mot would have been more bon had they not been "esprit d'escalier".

9. The implied author must have an appropriate identity.

   Your public image of you (as opposed to the "real" you – c.f., Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction) is how many will decide whether you're worth paying attention to. If they've decided yes, your content gets higher consideration. If they've decided no, your content is dismissed out of hand. If they don't know, well, then it depends on your perceived identity and how it "fits" into the context of things – or how it "fits in", period. Scoble points out that "Most content on social networks is developed by only 5% and most of the audience listens to the top 5% of that." The most popular bloggers link to each other, because they perceive each other as credible enough to read.

   What about those not already in the echo chamber? They must have an identity that appeals. Despite all the public touting of how we live in an age of "tribes", we tend to vastly underestimate the value of having an identity appropriate and acceptable enough to influence others. And yet what is social networking but a way of forming tribes to filter out the noise? If you don't "fit in" the tribal filter, you're part of the noise as far as others are concerned.

   Sometimes that's just by circumstance. Sometimes it's by preconceived stereotypes. For years, women have known that (many) guys don't link. In the tech world, a start-up with venture capital backing is taken much more seriously than a start-up with no backing; not only the venture capital PR muscle, but the very fact of having gotten venture backing at all helps start-ups stand out from the noise and be perceived as worth paying attention to. Joe Coder comes up with a fabulous new app and nobody pays attention, unless the app gets some sales traction; Pete Programmer with Acme Ventures backing gets buzz before the app is even approved by Apple.

   I would argue that perhaps the biggest impact Acquia had on the success of Drupal came from nothing more than the fact that Acquia got venture backing, which put it and Drupal on the radar of tech bloggers and journalists, who then put Drupal on the radar of many who've since adopted Drupal for their projects. And yet some of the most profound and influential content about Drupal has happened outside of that paradigm. But those content creators didn't have the right identity to be found. (This is nothing against Acquia as a company. Acquia does much more than raise the visibility of Drupal, don't get me wrong. But seeing the rather sudden "discovery" of Drupal once Acquia announced funding was really hard for the rest of us to miss. [Disclosure: My business does business with Acquia. Many Acquians are my friends.]

   In another example, in Google+, you must have the right kind of identity to even participate. If you have the "wrong" identity, how likely is it your "good" content will be found?

10. The content must last (long enough).

    Paintings rot. Books dry up and blow away. Great movies of the 1930s and 1940s disintegrated or burned in vaults. The fire of Alexandria took away how much greatness from even the possibility of our discovering it? This challenge will never leave us, even in the digital age. How ironic that an essay noting the ephemeral nature of digital content can be found only via the Wayback Machine!

In a perfect world, there are fields of dreams

The success of good content (no matter how you define "good") depends upon each of these links. If one breaks, odds are that content will languish in obscurity. If everything lines up perfectly, then all you need to is build it and they will come. For those of us on the Internet, we have it pretty good – better than ever in history, perhaps. Content creators weren't so lucky thousands of years ago. Even a couple of decades ago.

And content creators aren't so lucky in media that doesn't happen entirely online. In Hollywood, for example, one of the old saws preached by the successful is, "If you write a great script, it will get made." They justify this by the fact that good scripts are extremely rare in their world – so rare that bad scripts have to be produced into movies because there are not enough good scripts to feed the production/distribution machine. (This perspective also validates their own sense of self-worth: If they "made it" in Hollywood, it's because they did good work, right?) Yes, the good scripts that actually get their attention have some chance of getting made. But do those good scripts tell stories that studio executives think people will pay to see? Do they have good roles to draw marketable stars? Do the stories tell a political message the executives are comfortable with?

And what about all those scripts that never get read by the Hollywood decisionmakers – the people who not only can say 'no' (of which there are many) but can also say 'yes' (of which there are very few)? One of the most common entry-level positions in Hollywood is that of "reader". The reader reads undiscovered scripts that are submitted (to the agency, to the production company, to the studio) and writes "coverage" that becomes the actual measure for assessment by others. Culling is done by the reader directly, and by others who don't read the script but only read the reader's coverage of the script. There are who-knows-how-many great scripts that never get past this stage.

How much good art that exists in your community do you know about? How many good white papers have been posted by authors you're not predisposed to find credible? How many good novels have a cover you find unappealing and never pick up?

If you're a content creator, so much of your success is out of your hands. You need some degree of luck or providence. Seneca wrote, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Corollary: Luck cannot happen if you are not prepared. But you cannot make luck happen. All you can do is be prepared, and be persistent at that preparation, and not blink if the opportunity comes.

That is how great content is found.

What do you think?

[Photo by "Ken & Nyetta (Creative Commons)]

If it isn't in your possession, is it really yours?

Google shut down several blogs without prior notice:

“We’d like to inform you that we’ve received another complaint regarding your blog,” begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. “Upon review of your account, we’ve noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger’s Terms of Service ... [and] we’ve been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.”

Jolly as Google may be, none of the bloggers who received these notices are “understanding” in the least....

...“When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog,” explained product manager Rick Klau.

All that content is presumably gone. If the site owners want to get at it, they have to convince Google to let them. That doesn't sound much like ownership to me.

What do you think?

(See the Twitter reactions tagged #Musicblogocide2k10.)

[This post appears on BlogHer.]

I did it. After months of bitching out loud to my friends and colleagues, tweeting about it and blogging it, I dropped AT&T (and thus the iPhone) and got back on Verizon with the Motorola Droid. I thought it would be a rough transition, but it turned out to be not so bad. In fact, the Droid is a pretty slick device. But, like any "smart" tech these days, it's not truly yours until you've customized it, put your mark on it. And on the Droid, like the iPhone, that starts with the apps.

Now, I've had my Droid – I've named her "Zora" (and you Blade Runner geeks can guess why) – for only a few days, so I haven't gotten far in the app exploration. I've generally avoided paying for most apps (which is why paid apps are the topic for a subsequent post), but there's a lot to be had for free.

Here are a few....

(Reader note: Search for these in your phone's "Marketplace" app. You can download them directly from there. [Note on the screenshots: Yes, they're photos. It seems that the only ways to take Droid screenshots from within are either via a Windows machine (which I don't use) or via apps that reviewers say are unstable. A little power-home method, as with the iPhone, would have been nice. Maybe in the next Android OS release?])

Voicemail

Google Voice

Forget Verizon's Visual VM. The reviews are pretty brutal. And Verizon charges you an extra few bucks a month for it. That's right, charges you each month!

You have a Droid. Embrace it! Use Google Voice for your voicemail! You can set conditional call forwarding for when you don't answer or are already on the line. Have calls sent to your Google Voice account ... and get your messages transcribed for you as well! (You can still play the messages.)

A dedicated Google Voice app gives you a very slick GUI to browse through and play your messages.

The transcripts can be rather odd, though. That's definitely still very alpha.

(Don't have access to Google Voice yet? Check with your friends. Every Google Voice user gets 3 [or more?] invites.)

Twitter

As with all of the apps here, I limited by experiments to apps that got 4 out of 5 stars or better from users. That left two main candidates for Twitter.

Twitdroid Twidroid

I like this one. Very basic. It makes me miss Twittelator Pro on the iPhone. But it suffices. And I can set my own notification sound if I get a message.

My main caveat, however, is that this app requires access to your email attachments. Why do its creators, zimmerman and marban, require this? What are they after in your email attachments?

Seesmic

This is a stable Twitter app. I just don't like it that it dumps you at the top of the Twitterstream. You have to scroll down to see what's new. That's weird to me.

And Seesmic requires access to your Contacts. Why, I have no idea, as it does not seem to integrate with Contacts. I can only guess it's the trade-off: hand over your data on your friends and in exchange you get this free app. Am I wrong here?

Music

Pandora

The Pandora app is very familiar, except it boots up with this dire warning about using up your data quota on your cellular plan. (Be sure to get the unlimited plan with Verizon. It's $30 per month, but worth it.)

Shazam

Again, the familiar app to identify tunes. Nice to have!

Amazon MP3

This is a nifty app just for finding music downloads. Since iTunes is out of the picture, and you can't play any DRM iTunes music on your Droid, this can be a handy app to have! Especially if, like me, you tend towards Amazon for your main music downloads resource.

News

AP and USA Today

These will appear identical to what you've been seeing on the iPhone.

Reuters

With a different interface – the sections are separate columns which you get to by horizontal scrolling, like switching desktops – it takes some getting used to. But it's good to get news from a source other than AP.

BBC News

Yes, they're on the Droid, too.

NY Times

Unfortunately the NY Times does not have a Droid app. (But there's always the website, and the iPhone app was always really slow anyway.)

Battery Management

There are a few key apps for ensuring that your Droid's battery runs the longest between charges.

Advanced Task Killer Free

This app allows you to selectively shut down apps that are running in the background. Those apps might be polling web services or calculating your GPS location – shut 'em down! This is the kind of tool that Apple doesn't allow on the iPhone anymore. Too bad. It's a great power saver, and also helps keep your phone running smoothly.

Quick Settings

A quick shortcut to the major power-suck features: screen, GPS, ringer, WiFi, mobile data, Bluetooth. Toggle them on/off as needed. Very handy for going into the movie theater!

Battery Refresh Beta

In the early going, it helps to train your Droid's battery – i.e., charge it fully and then drain it fully. Of course, it's not always convenient to let your Droid drain out its charge in its own good time. Maybe you're about to leave the house for several hours. You don't want it going dead on you while out and about.

You can use this app to drain your battery quickly. It basically fires up your GPS, brightens your screen, kills the screen saver, pings your cell service, all to drain your battery in a hurry. Bingo! Now it's ready for a new charge.

Games

Not much to offer you here. I looked for decent free apps for Hold'Em, Blackjack, Free Cell and Klondike Solitaire, and found two for Klondike. Both work alright, but one has larger cards that are easier to read.

Klondike Solitaire

The strange thing about this app (and the others I've actually tried) is that the deal deck is on the top left of the screen. Since most people are right handed, that means you have to reach across the screen to deal. More than once I've accidentally hit the home or menu button doing that. Why didn't they put the deck on the top right? I don't know.

Oddments

DroidLight

This nifty app uses the LED flash for a flashlight. No need to light your way via screen light.

Movies

Does for the Droid what OneTap does for the iPhone. And there's Fandango for buying tickets.

Google Goggles

Enhanced reality through your phone. Point the camera at a location and get Google info on it. Wow!

Google Sky Map

Point the camera at the stars and learn about the constellations!

PicSay

Add icons, hair, glasses, thought bubbles to your photographs. Silly but fun.

Owner

This is a nice app that displays a message on the phone's unlock screen. You can put custom text and select specific fields from your "me" contact card to display. This way if someone finds your phone, they know how to reach you.

Related Reads

• At CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), Barbara Krasnoff talked with developers about which platform they prefer, iPhone or Android, concluding:

  At this point, it's unlikely that Android will ever catch up with Apple as far as the number of apps for their smartphones is concerned. And as far as I'm concerned, it's becoming a difference that makes no difference -- to the individual user, the gap between 20,000 apps and 100,000 apps becomes meaningless.

  However, what interests me is whether the type of apps available will start to reflect -- or already reflects -- the two differing philosophies. One offers a tight, disciplined process that takes a long time for developers to negotiate, but guarantees that each app will work on every device. The other makes it a lot easier for developers to create their apps, and doesn't make them wait long periods of time for approval -- but also demands that they try to account for a number of varying UIs and devices.

  Which would you prefer?

  I have to disagree on one big point. My feeling is that, in the end, it's unlikely that iPhone will be able to keep up with the Android world. iPhone won't go away, but with Android running on all kinds of phones on all kinds of services, that market is just going to outsize the iPhone realm. Combine that with the open nature of the Droid market and you have a dominating paradigm. There's just more diversity –and just more, period – in the jungle than in the zoo.

  The challenge is just filtering. Howe do you find the best apps? Right now, it's through review lists like this one.

• Jessica Dolcourt of CNET links to their "Android Starter Kit", which has editor reviews of many of the apps above and several others, and adds:
  

  Just two notes of caution. First, beware the brightness of your screen--in our experience that's Android's number one battery-slayer. Second, if you're interested in avoiding notification overload, it's worthwhile to configure most apps you download to adhere to your alerting wishes.

• Gina Trapani writes about how to tether your Android phone:
  

  There are three ways to tether your Android handset and get sweet internet love even where there's no Wi-Fi in sight: the risky-but-free rooting method, the still-geeky-but-not-as-bad free route, and the $30 easy way. Here are the pros and cons of each.

One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often."

Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience.

This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week.

Get on my Wave!

I've been trying Google Wave for this past week now. It's been a bit hard, since hardly anybody I know is on Google Wave, and of all the people I invited, only two have received invites so far. (I got 8 "invitations" that turned out actually to be "nominations" once sent. Sorry, Google, but invitations and nominations are different things.) So I've had only limited exposure to what Wave might offer. One on one, it's pretty much a glorified instant messenger.

Then I was tipped to searching for "with:public" ... which brings in results every wave that has been posted for the public. There I found all kinds of waves on all kinds of topics.

Popping into random, seemingly interesting waves reminds me of the early CompuServe days, wandering around chatrooms, communicating with random people. Wave does afford the opportunity to get more in these wave connections than you might in a text-only IRC-style chatroom, but it takes time to engage. Do you have an abundance of time? I don't.

The biggest user experience change in what people might be used to is that you can see other people typing their messages in real time, as they type. You learn quickly can type and who bumbles around, who can do stream-of-consciousness and who is constantly editing every few words.

Shira Abel (whom I met on Wave) likes this real-time aspect:

And while some people would hate seeing what someone is writing while they are typing I’ve actually liked it from the few conversations I’ve had on there. It allows you to see the thought process – how fast or slow someone is typing shows how strongly they feel about something. Whether they take something out before pressing enter shows even more. Seeing the typing while it’s happening is the tone of the message. However, I would recommend that Google make the option to not see the typing for the Robert Scoble’s of the world – but please keep it for me. Living in Israel so far away from many of the people I collaborate with, having that little extra bit of psychological insight is actually very helpful in my opinion.

One of the biggest problems with Wave is getting drowned in wave after wave of threads (or "waves"). You have to create folders to organize them or you'll just get lost.

And call them waves all you want, it's pretty hard to surf them. Linking to other waves involves finding the other wave and drag-and-drop.

Google's help docs are their typical weak, uninformative obviousnesses that don't really illuminate much of anything. Embedding waves outside of the wave system is, so far, an arcane procedure I have not yet discovered yet. I'm still wondering how to install a robot. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek for this preview?

Bonnie Sandy seems to have made more headway:

Extending the functionality…

Apparently there are bots and robots to extend the functionality of Waves… that feature has to be simplified before the release to a wider audience.

Robots (To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)- that did not always work. Robots add functionality Chatbots Conversion Games Groups Integration Language Polling Search / Aggregation Utilities Wave Management figuring out if they are functioning is a bit confusing.

I NEED To Figure out how to use the Drop.io Robot. I aced the Posterous robot, which post a wave to Posterous , but I have no idea if the others are working, in process or done. So I spent a great deal of time just steering at the screen.

Gadgets directions- To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom text box.

This was simpler not all worked but enough to truly give an appreciation of the scope of wave. Html and Iframes allow for widgets and pages to be added. From that point each wave became a stage on which I could present ANYTHING. Wave will be to designers and multimedia communicators what twitter was to those that write!

I don't know about that last part. As a designer, Wave is very hierarchical and serially threaded — not much of a canvas for visual thinking. But maybe someone will bring that in via extension or robot?

Shira concludes:

[A]t the moment Google Wave has little to no use for me. Other than the “Geek Street Cred” I get for having it, I don’t work with anyone else who is on there. It’s not open for the masses. So yes, I’m on Google Wave and I’ve checked it out a few times. But as my time is scarce, I don’t see myself using it regularly at all. In fact – the first person who invited me on Google Wave hasn’t used it. And that says it all.

If you don't quite get what Google Wave is, here's the developer's preview. It's over an hour long, but if you are sincerely curious, this is something to see.

List me!

Twitter rolled out a new feature to a subset of users: Lists. Here you can define lists and then add people you are following to the lists you create.

If you have the feature enabled on your account, you also see how many lists other people have put you on.

What becomes immediately obvious is that this will become a major recommendation engine — a reputation system. What better way to find interesting people than through the recommendations (or at least categorization) by others?

I've discovered many new people to follow just by surfing around the lists. It's neat to know at least something about what people tweet about — art, music, politics, tech, etc.

We'll see how the list usage starts to happen once everyone gets the feature. I'm sure it will start to become spammy — what easier way to spam people than to add them to a list they cannot block? But this could become a new way for people to find connections.

I'm sure Twitter Lists are going to be great fodder for the "Top X" fetishists who just love the "who's is bigger" competitions.

Rebecca Leaman offers Twitter Lists 101 that covers the basics.

Jade Craven has 8 things you should consider before creating your Twitter lists:

1. People may be offended by not being included on a list.

Some of my friends created lists like ‘awesome friends’ and ‘top bloggers.’ They used these terms as generalist lists but some people took offense at not being included on a list.

This is very similar to the follow/unfollow situations that happened before people started to embrace groups on other clients.

So, what can you do to avoid offending?

• Have a disclaimer on your twitter landing page

• Make your list private

• Organize lists by geographic region – ie, Melbourne bloggers.

Neicole Crepeau sees this as a good move for Twitter, business-wise:

Twitter’s growth rate has recently slowed down. According to Hitwise, its phenomenal growth rate slowed to .17%. In part, this appears to be due to an inability to retain new users (60% leaving in the first month of use, by some reports).

Lists represent an opportunity for Twitter to reignite its growth. Lists can help Twitter grow by providing three important improvements:

* A better UI that makes the stream easier for users to digest.
* A positive first experience for new users, where they immediately see the value of Twitter
* A way to spread the word to more non-users and broadly entice them, through List links on blogs, business sites, and through sharing.

She goes on to elaborate on each point.

In the second of a multipart series of posts on Twitter Lists, Adele McAlear looks at the impact of this feature roll-out on the greater Twitter development community:

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

Have you been trying out Google Wave or Twitter Lists? What's been your experience?

[This post also appears on BlogHer.com.]