Alpha Mind Blog

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…

My last post included 2 YouTube videos. I created the post using Live Writer and Wordpress.

Since it was a nightmare, and…

since I spent an extra hour on the post, figuring out how to do it, and…

since ShandyKing’s post (which comes up first on when you Google “wordpress embed youtube videos”) doesn’t solve the problem, at least for me, and…

since I love Wordpress, and…

since I love my fellow bloggers and want them all to succeed…

… I’m going to tell how I did it.

1. Create the post you want, absent the videos. If you are using a posting tools other than WordPress itself, do all you want in that tool and then send it to WP as a draft.
2. In WP’s post editing page, click “Save and Continue Editing”
3. Click “Preview”
4. On the preview, make a note of exactly what words you put last in your post.
5. With the preview window open, get the page source.- In FireFox, that’s ctl-U (or alt-V, O).
   - IE7 it’s alt-V,C.
   - In Opera it’s ctl-F3.
   - In anything else you’re on your own.
6. Paste the entire page source into a text editor (Notepad or something better), unless your browser already put it into an editor for you. (Opera has its very own editor, how cool is that?)
7. Go to YouTube and get the source code to embed the video.
8. In the editor, paste the code exactly where you want the video to be. (I always put it between a <p> </p> pair, having intentionally left a blank line in my post to insert it in.)
9. Now, (still in the text editor, NOT in WordPress) select all the code from
   - just after <div class=”entrytext”> to
   - after the last closing tag that encloses the last words
   of your post. (Sorry that’s vague, but for example, if your
   last words were part of a link, the “last closing tag” may
   be </a>, while if you ended with plain text, the last closing
   tag is probably </p>.)
10. Copy this text.
11. Go back to the edit-post window in WordPress. Switch from Visual to Code.
12. Select everything in the editing window. Delete it and paste the code you copied from the editor.
13. Click Save and Continue Editing.
14. If it looks right, go on to the next step. If it doesn’t look right, you have something to figure out that I can’t help you with. But my 1st guess would be that you copied too much or too little code from the text editor. 2nd guess: you didn’t get the WP edit window completely empty before pasting.
15. Back in the WP edit window, again select and delete everything. Again paste (your paste buffer should still contain the correct code, right?)
16. Now Publish.

The key was making sure you re-paste the code into the edit window immediately before publishing. Because when you previewed, WP made a hash of the code, and what it put there must be eliminated.

I didn’t say it was easy, right? You have to be comfortable enough with HTML tags to know just how much code to copy from the text editor. But with that caveat, it’s really not all that hard. And it works, at least for me. Whereas WP messes it up pretty much every time I try to do it differently.

WordPress is updating fairly often. I imagine WP will have this problem figured out in another version or 2 or 3. Meantime, this is what works for me.

BTW, I’m using WP 2.3.1. My browser is FireFox 2.0.0.11, running on Windows Vista

del.icio.us Tags: WordPress,YouTube,embed,videos,how

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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.