Alpha Mind Blog

From Mark Driehorst, a fine post about a problematic issue in social media: lynch mobs.

I saw things get ugly on YouTube this summer, as a virtual lynch mob formed against LisaNova, one of YT’s most popular directors.

Here are two of my responses…

…the serious…

…and the silly (but not a lot less serious than the other, really):

As you can tell from looking at the videos on my YouTube channel, I got way too involved with LisaNova this summer. But it was the quality of her best videos that got me involved with YouTube in the first place. And she and I had had a pleasant exchange of emails before she became YT’s most notorious “spammer” (in quotes because although she spammed I can’t think of a word that really says what she is). So I was quite distressed when she got so much hate thrown at her that she took more than a month off.

I don’t like spammers. Not at all. But I like lynchings even less.If “thought leader” has an opposite, I think “lynch mob leader” is probably it.

Thx to Kami Huyse for the link to Mike’s post.

And, oh, if you haven’t discovered LisaNova yet, here are two of my favorite videos: Teenie Weenie RAW & UNCENSORED, and Breaking News!!!

So, Alex Iskold is a dude that gets it. Today he writes much the same thesis as formed the core of Unfashionably Late: That late entry into the blogosphere (or any other social media space) decreases one’s chances of getting noticed. In Alex’s case, he focuses on monetization, which I wasn’t concerned with. The fact is, that whatever one’s motivation for blogging (or facebooking or YouTubeing, etc.), the later one gets in the worse are one’s odds of success.

Alex poses a question: Is the long tail of the blogosphere solid? Or is it in danger of falling apart?

And I answer:

In Unfashionably Late, I liken the blogosphere to a multi-level marketing scheme. It always pays more if you get in early. Most MLMs eventually become very unattractive, because it’s easy to see the market is saturated.

But, “falling apart”? I don’t think so. Reasons:

1. Many Markets: The blogosphere isn’t one MLM. It’s a multitude of them; 1 for every topic times 1 for every slant on the topic times 1 for every intended audience times…. (you get it.) Even if 30 MLM companies die this year, the MLM as a business model will stay healthy as long as there’s a single product category whose market isn’t fully saturated.
2. Saturation Doesn’t Kill Markets: Even MLMs that have pretty well saturated their markets are still going concerns. (Amway & Shaklee come to mind.)
3. Many Motivations: Even if it could be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog, people will keep blogging because not all their motivations are monetary.
4. All Is Never Lost: It can never be shown conclusively that there is no money to be made from a new blog. There are ways of succeeding even in a mature market (think of how Japan entered machine tools, farm equipment, etc.). Just as there are ways of breaking into Hollywood even though the odds are very long.
5. Always Somebody Showing the Ass the Carrot: As with MLMs, there are those who make their money by selling the long tail, and they will continue to provide incentives (however bogus) to get people to live in the long tail.

What I fear most is that the quality of the blogosphere will continue to deteriorate, because eventually the long odds will deter anybody who’s smart enough to notice them.

Talk about superb use of a symbol: Scoble was given a gift of a Webvan pen. He says Paul Lindner “handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype.”

Bravo.

I was deep into launching companies when the bubble burst in 2000. There were some voices then calling it a bubble, but not very many, and most of them outside the dotcom mainstream.

This time around it’s different. People who have played key roles in making Web 2.0 happen are sounding notes of caution. Like Scoble and Steve Rubel. It’s a healthy thing.

I’ve been a little acid toward those who first started throwing around the term Kool-Aid as applied to social media. But now, with the coupling of shaky business models and astronomical valuations, what’s being called Kool-Aid isn’t social media or its evangelism, but such truly scary stuff as the last bubble was made on.

But back to communications, which is what this blog is about (even if I sometimes forget). The Webvan pen is such a potent symbol I’m going to ask Scoble to get a really good still shot of it. Then we can all post it over our monitors and on our blogs. To remind us not only to look beyond today’s hype. But also as a reminder of what makes for a powerful message.

People get just plain crazy around the famous. Especially the famous-and-opinionated. Around, say, that guy who writes Scripting News.

Today Winer’s explaining why he deletes some comments from his blog. And my question is: Why should he even have to defend himself?

His blog is his. Period. He can shut it down if he wants. He can erase the whole thing. As I can do with mine, as you can do with yours.

The reason he’s defending himself is that the same trolls who leave the vacuous-nasty comments he deletes will also go elsewhere on the web and say the same vacuous-nasty things about him there, except that elsewhere they have the added ammunition that “Winer deletes comments Mommy, make him stop!”

Damning Scoble by faint praise of Winer

Some vacuous-nasty stuff can be pretty nicely dressed up as thoughtful commentary.

Submitted in evidence, this post, seemingly in sincere praise of Winer, but primarily effective as a knock on Scoble. The post (to which Scoble’s reply in the comments pretty well nails the matter), would be in the running for lamest blog post of November, except that the author realized the lameness of his communication and was big enough to apologize for it.

But still, what was said was said, and it was lame as all get out. The post didn’t just knock Scoble, but did so on truly laughable grounds. The message was that Scoble doesn’t do that which, as far as I can tell, Scoble absolutely lives to do: find new cool things and people, and bring them to the attention of others. And he does it pretty effectively. If anything, he overdoes it—when he’s at his hottest, reading Scobleizer + his link blog is like drinking from two fire hoses.

Both Dave and Robert have done things I’ve questioned. I’ve complained about one of Winer’s behaviors publicly (I know: to say that blogging here is public is something of a stretch. But it wasn’t here, it was on the For Immediate Release podcast.)

But I’ve never seen him really disrespectful of anybody who hadn’t earned it. And I’ve never seem him try to disappear anybody who was offering substance, even in disagreement, and who was truly willing to own his/her words.

BTW, the reason this topic exists at all is that Dave is trying out a new commenting tool on Scripting News, and he wasn’t 24 hours into the trial before he had an obnoxious troll. He may have had more since, and deleted them while I was looking the other way.

PS. I’m trying out a different commenting tool here from what Dave’s trying out there. By all means leave me a comment and check out Intense Debate.

PPS. I’ve never done a post about both Winer and Scoble before, but I’ve wanted to. I was appreciating DaveNet when Radio Userland wasn’t even a gleam in his eye. I sometimes wish he’d go back to doing longer, Davenet-style essays. And one of the reasons Dave is cool is that he gave us Robert, who would be doing heaven-knows-what if he hadn’t done marketing for Userland.

PPPS. I mentioned longer, DaveNet-style essays. But my all-time favorite wasn’t very long at all.

Okay, so I got up this morning after a glorious extra hour of sleep, and there in my Eudora inbox is a note from Josh Morgan, co-founder of Intense Debate.

Intense Debate is another blog comment thingy, similar to DISQUS. Josh had seen my post about DISQUS last night, and wanted me to know about his product.

So, I checked it out. And I decided to install it. And now it’s installed.

Leave me a comment!

I’ll be discussing DISQUS and Intense Debate in an audio comment on tomorrow’s episode of For Immediate Release (if Shel and Neville decide to include it.)

But first an open message to Josh and his team:

Dear Josh and Team,

Hey, it must have been easy to monitor DISQUS on the blogosphere. Not many false positives among the Google Alerts. But “Intense Debate”? Good luck monitoring that.

Best to you all,

Max

DISQUS adds qontinuity where it was much missing.

Go check out Scripting News where Winer is testing it out.

DISQUS adds nice commenting capabilities to blogs. Works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and MovableType. Allows:

• readers to rate comments
• comments to be sorted by rating
• a comment to be specifically designated a reply to another comment
• comments to be threaded (a consequence of the last bullet)
• an RSS feed to be made just for one blog post and its comment stream, so that if it goes long you can easily keep following it (remember the incredibly long series of comments on O’Reily’s Blogger Code proposal? Or Kathy Sierra’s farewell? Each would’ve been better threaded and with its very own feed.)
• the thread to be subscribed to by email instead of RSS, for those who prefer
• a DISQUS user’s comments, no matter on how many blogs, to be aggregated in a single RSS feed. I.E. you can subscribe to my comment feed to read everything I say, all over the blogosphere.
• API access to the DISQUS back end.

I’m sure there are other goodies there I haven’t gotten to yet.

Whatever else I learn about it, I’m having a blast just commenting scripting.com. Winer’s been a hero of mine for years, but commenting his blog has been a pain. Now that it’s easy, and in the expectation it’ll be temporary, I’m cuttin’ loose, commenting every post he puts up.

I’ll try to get DISQUS working here tomorrow. No promises. I have a video to edit, an audio comment to record for FIR, and four blog posts queued up.

It’s been a great week so far. Tonight I’m going to try to catch up blogging it.

First, Monday morning, a very stimulating conversation over breakfast with Chris Pareja, founder of B2B Power Exchange. A great exchange of ideas about social media and different paradigms for business networking.

We both believe pretty strongly in face-to-face networking (it’s one of the hallmarks of B2B Power Exchange). But I’ve had a lot more of the experience of building true friendships online, so I believe in that more than Chris does. I also believe in taking real-world networks onto the web, an idea that I think was new to Chris.

I’ve been to one B2BPE event, a breakfast meeting in Oakland last month. It was great. Very well-planned, and although there was no way to influence who would be there, it turned out to be an interesting group. At least one guy there is likely to turn out to be a great complementary offering I can steer my clients to.

Tuesday was the highlight of my week: the geek dinner Hugh MacLeod set up in San Francisco. I could have written about it for two days after, it was so rich. Details coming next….

So, here I am all excited to take part in Owyang and Scoble’s cool micromedia meetup today.

I even logged in and reserved my spot.

I have a very succinct and possibly funny video in my camera.

In my bag.

Next to me.

With no stinking firewire card to capture it.

With at least 25 minutes between me and the nearest firewire.

With a client having an emergency that’ll occupy me for the next three hours.

With the meetup 2.1 hours away.

Sigh.

But I’m stubborn and I’m participating anyway. Read on:

The future of media is where these kinds of connections will actually work for nearly all the people who attempt them.

Sigh.

Then again, the future of communications will continue to be largely asynchronous.

And so, how about those of you who come by here subscribing to my feed so that tomorrow you can come back and see my succinct and possibly funny video?

Later y’all. Bissoux.

And while you wait you could sample some of my other videos, here and here.

So, I was more than half right.

When I cornered Hugh at Tuesday’s geek dinner, he told me that while he’s not a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, he really likes Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of Fear and Loathing. Which after all was what I really had in mind.

I enjoyed Hugh’s talk about his work in his video with Scoble.

Kami Huyse is making me rethink the bloggers’ code of conduct. The idea of a code was put forward by Tim O’Reilly after Kathy Sierra decided to shut down her Creating Passionate Users blog due to harassment.

The Bloggers’ Code died not with a bang but a whimper, and I was happy to let it. But Kami has got me thinking about it again with her post on ethics among journalists and PR practitioners. The point of her post is that few in either group even read their respective codes of ethics. According to Kami, this is a Bad Thing.

But if journalists should be reading and abiding by their own code of ethics, and if bloggers are the new citizen journalists, then shouldn’t they be reading and abiding by their own code? And wouldn’t that involve having one?

O’Reilly’s draft code had a lot more to do with simple decent conduct than with our taking seriously our roles as journalists. But a code like his would have started us down that path, and maybe that’s where we need to go.

(The foregoing is part I, the simple part of this post. My next post will get a little trickier, going into the depths of what my Alpha Mind blog is all about.)