Alpha Mind Blog

I hate to say something or someone sucks. It’s a vulgar, nasty expression. But sometimes it’s just the thing that has to be said.

Take my recent post about Technorati, for instance. Within thirty hours of my posting, Technorati showed every link to my blog that I knew existed when I wrote the post. (Yes, I admit it’s not that many, but hey, I’m still new.) Still no explanation as to how they found those linking pages after they were already several days old, or why they hadn’t been found earlier.

Perhaps it’s my imagination running away with me, but maybe, must maybe, someone at Technorati monitors what bloggers are saying about the company, found my post, and investigated the problem.

Strictly speculation.

But if a company is wise enough (and I believe this is indispensible wisdom) to monitor how bloggers are talking about it, what’s the first search it should do every morning? Well, for me it would be

“[Company_name] sucks”.

It’s by far the most common form of rant about a company.

So maybe it’s not what happened at Technorati when I kvetched about them. But it’s what I hoped might happen. And, for whatever reason, the end result is what I wanted.

And, Technorati, if you’re reading this, thanks for finding my missing links.

Trafcom News: How teens communicate in 2007. A fine post by Donna. Laughed out loud.

The whole post is funny, but am I alone in thinking it takes a very serious, perhaps grave tone at the end?

And let’s all think about these teens coming to work in our organizations in a few years.

Part of the post’s thrust is that teenagers are failing to learn, or are unlearning, key communications competencies:

Teens have lost the skill needed to ring a bell or knock on a door. No more: “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver, can the Beave come out to play?” Instead, today’s teens stand on the front porch, or in their cars if they are 16+, and call the person inside the house, using the mobile phone conveniently glued to the palm of the hand.

If Donna reads her own post the way I read it, then, there is a real foreboding in that ending. If kids don’t know how to knock at a door, how many other skills will they be missing when they enter the workforce?

Of course, Donna may not see things as grimly as I. Perhaps I’m seeing (more than others do? more than is real?) that our new technologies for instant communication lead to superficial communication. If I can use my cell phone to avoid meeting the Beave’s mom at the door, then, while I still know the Beave, I’m missing an important piece of deep information about him, to wit: what’s his mother like and how does she behave at the boundary of her domain? I hope I don’t need to explain how this is information about Beaver. Without it, my understanding of him is just slightly diminished, my relationship with him slightly less rich than it might have been.

(photo by permission Jana Werner)

Dave Winer on the future of Twitter:

I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were.

I’ve been trying to avoid Twitter for some time now. Blogging eats time, and one of the ways I cope is that I studiously avoid testing every new social media tool that I learn about in the b-sphere.

But something happened yesterday that tells me I’m going to have to learn about Twitter. What happened?

I checked my stats and found I’d gotten almost as many referrals from Twitter as from Seth Godin’s blog.

I didn’t even know Twitter could link. That’s how careful I am to preserve my ignorance and husband my time.

I suspect it happened because of Scoble. Here’s Winer again:

…if I were a Scoble fanboy, I would love that he posts every event in his busy life to his Twitter channel.

Last week I left a trackback on Scobleizer, and I think Robert might have Twittered it, for whatever reason. At least I know that two of the referrers were

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer (etc).

If Robert was the originator, he certainly has some fanboys (and girls) out there, because I got referred by 8 Twitter URLs for a total of 55 requests. For my newish, scantily-read blog, this is a flood.

Since I need to know how readers get to my blog, I’m going to have to check out Twitter. At the prospect of which I sigh, even though the reason (increased traffic on my blog) makes me smile big-time.

I know where Lee Hopkins is, but where is Technorati?

Yes, it’s time for a little whining. Or ranting. Or whatever.

In Unfash (I’ll be using this nickname for my e-book Unfashionably Late from now on. If we all live with a word as ugly as “blog”, surely we can handle “Unfash”.), I said

…here’s how famous I’m becoming:

After twenty-two posts in 4 weeks, nobody has linked to me. The feed for my main blog, “The Alpha Mind,” has two subscribers other than the four which are just me trying out different aggregators. And it appears my blog has been read by no more than twelve persons other than me.

Now, after wiping this egg from my face, I have to confess that the only fact in that quote that was true on the day I wrote it was that I only had two subscribers. (And I’m being awfully trusting of FeedBurner when I say even this.)

First I’ll deal with my small readership, so I can then get to the serious business of kicking Technorati around the block.

I had made a mistake in my .htaccess file, and I wasn’t seeing statistics for blog.alphamind.biz, where this blog lives. I was only seeing statistics (please don’t ask me to explain) for those parts of the alphamind.biz domain which contained no content of importance. I don’t even know why there were twelve discrete calls for pages there, but those calls weren’t for my blog.

When I fixed the .htaccess problem, I found that in fact there had been over thirty readers of my blog the week I wrote the above. Still not a large number, but more than I’d stated.

Now, as to links to me…

The very day I published the e-book, I found that one of my favorite blogs had linked to mine a few days earlier. I clicked the link, which took me to the appropriate page on Alpha Mind. I then clicked my shortcut button “Technorati This in a New Window”, and up came Technorati telling me there were no links to that page.

I haven’t counted the number of times the same thing has happened since then, but it’s been at least “several”. The link at the top of this post is to a post by Lee Hopkins that links to my blog. Again, I follow Lee’s link, and then confirm that Technorati doesn’t know Lee (or anybody else) is linking to my post.

Technorati, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

I followed a link to the page you’re telling me nobody links to! And the link that I followed is five (5) days old! Are you awake?!

While Technorati checks its alarm clock (in my dreams), I am wondering what the cyber equivalent of sniffing one’s own armpits is, so I can do that.

What is going on? Why does Technorati not find pages that link to me?

By the way, Technorati indexes my own blog posts pretty quickly—I’ve never had to wait five days to find my own material on Technorati. It just never finds anybody who links to me.

(sniff.) I’m bummed.

Google, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

Technorati is not getting the job done! You guys know from links and crawlers and everything Technorati is trying to do and failing. Will you kindly take over? Please?

Okay. I dry my eyes and get on with life. And assure anyone reading this that you’re not the only one at my party. Honest. Some people are even linking to me, and one day you’ll know about it.

Oh, and Lee… Have you checked your deodorant lately?

“I wonder what Robert (Scoble) would think of his name being used as a unit of currency…” (Shel Holtz on the For Immediate Release podcast, 3/1/07.)

Fear not. Now that Quaker Heritage Day is behind me, Robert will know. He may need to finish up at SXSW first.

Thanks to Neville and Shel for not one but two plugs for Unfashionably Late, in which the economic unit “the scoble” is introduced.

After some time away from it, I can now go back to Unfashionably Late and see just what is in there.

The summary:

Is blogging a waste of time? This can only be answered if you know what return on time you want to get. Simplifying greatly, I suggest that in the blogosphere, the coin of the realm is the link. But since not all links are equally valuable, I introduce a unit of link quality, the “scoble”, defined as the average value of a link to your blog from Scobelizer. (A link from a newbie might be worth 0.001 scobles, and a link from Huffinton perhaps 4.2 scobles.)

I suggest some reasons why the economics of blogging may be deteriorating. Put in my economics-of-blogging terms, it may be that, as the blogosphere grows, it takes more hours to earn a scoble than in the past. Possible reasons:

1. It costs more time to get a top blogger’s attention. Why? Top bloggers are very busy being top bloggers.
2. It costs more to enter the game at all. Just to be perceived as a good blogger, one needs to shore up one’s position in sixteen skills.
3. It costs more because there’s a lot being written, but of decreasing quality, so that one spends more time finding the conversations that are worth entering.
4. It gets more stressful as the sphere gets crasser, cruder, and uglier as it matures.
5. The cost of entering the game is not just skills, but learning. And learning blogging gets more complex as time goes on. I cite online lists (which aren’t even complete) of 16 blogging software offerings, 63 aggregators, and 19 podcatchers the newbie can try out. Then one has to learn about tagging, blog searching, and other tools. Then one has to learn a mess of concepts, manners and mores, gossip and argot. Blogging has come to cost a lot of overhead in addition to just reading blogs and writing posts.
6. If one seeks links from non-top bloggers, there are too many bloggers out there who have no clue, and you can waste a lot of time on these.

Next, I suggest that in some respects, the new and small blogosphere of 2002 (when I first blogged) was a healthier environment and can be partially reproduced. I begin with the blogging education that Robert French is giving his communications students at Auburn U., and suggest several ways of turning that semi-closed environment into a “blog academy” which can train new bloggers without overwhelming them, and can get them some readership at the same time.

Finally, I suggest that a tool is needed, a telescope by which we can identify good bloggers (since there are so many dreadful ones out there.) I suggest the following metrics:

• Reciprocity of linking (does the blogger reciprocate a reasonable percentage of links?)
• Reciprocity of linking to newcomers (Is this blog helping newer bloggers?)
• Serendipity (does this blogger turn up new stuff?)

Technorati or Google could implement these in a weekend. (My money’s on Google to do it.)

There are a few other traits that tend to belong to good bloggers: they use real names, accept comments in which links are permitted, and deploy only enough snarkiness to have a nice edge, not so much that their posts just amount to name-calling.

Finally, I challenge somebody, anybody, to make some of these things happen, and restore some of the beauty of 2002, when I met Radio Userland and fell in love.

That’s Unfashionably Late in a nutshell, sans pretty pictures, amusing anecdotes, and the all-important reminder to breathe. These SparkNotes should help you pass next week’s quiz, but I do hope some of you will sit down and read the book itself.

Had a problem. No stats for my most active site! Bad!

Gazed at the problem for a while. Finally decided to write Dreamhost tech support. First spent half an hour making sure I was doing everything right, had checked documentation, etc.

Sent the message.

Went to the kitchen, sauted a batch of onions for a stew.

Came back to PC, Jason at Dreamhost had solved the problem. The time I spent in the kitchen was less than the time it took me to write the email asking for help.

Jason rocks! Not only that, he rocks fast!

When I found my post about Dee Rambeau’s “farewell to blogging” growing past 10,000 words, I decided to make a little e-book instead of posting it. I also decided not to put links in the pdf file, because readers would have driven themselves crazy following links; they’d never get my own essay finished.

The links that would have gone in the essay if I’d let them, are here:

Creative Commons licensing.

Dee Rambeau’s farewell post on his own blog.

Amanda Chapel’s post about the burst bubble of business blogging.

Wikipedia article on “irrational exuberance.”

The folks Amanda calls “rabid” in her “bubble” post:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Steve Rubel
• BL Ochman
• Shel Holtz
• Debbie Weil

MLMs: Multi-Level Marketing.

Wordpress, fine blog tool. I’ve stuck with it through two blogging careers.

Build a Better Podcast, my short-lived podcast about podcasting.

The quintessential A-listers I use as examples:

• The Huffington Post
• Seth Godin
• Om Malik
• Guy Kawasaki
• Dilbert

Darren Rouse’s post on 15 requisites for the professional blogger. The post, by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, which Darren takes off on.

My own post on editors, which won me my 2005 scoble.

Scoble’s post linking to mine.
Financial Times. It shows up on my driveway daily. I read it most days. It’s excellent.

Wikipedia entry on Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London.

Wonkette. Not, oh please, to be confused with Strumpette, whom I also mention in my essay, and whose link is above.

MIT Sloan School of Management.

The allegedly sleazy ADM.
The HP Way.
George Orwell Resources.

Lists of tools:

• asymptomatic.net, blogging tools.
• aggcompare.com, rss aggregators.
• podcatchermatrix.org, podcast aggregators.

Social Bookmarking:

• del.icio.us.
• digg.

Wikipedia’s list of social software.

More social sites: squidoo and AmIHot.

Grant McCracken’s first post on “Cloudiness.” He’s done more since then.

Paul Graham’s essay “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

Hobson and Holtz, their fine podcast, “For Immediate Release“.

Kathy Sierra passes on a video of a newborn horse. I also used a photo from her post. Glorious!

Dee’s Post at Marcom Blog explaining his no longer blogging.

Radio Userland, the first blogging tool I ever loved.

Robert French at Auburn University. His students’ blog there: Marcom Blog.

Scripting News. I started reading Davenet in 1998, and I still enjoy reading Dave when he takes the time to write anything longer than 20 words.

Scobleizer. Robert Scoble’s blog, the basis of my new economic unit, the scoble. A scoble is the average value of one link to your blog from Scobleizer.

Skype. Rocks and isn’t a time sink, like the next two.

MySpace. Sorry, but I always navigate very briskly away from sites that play sounds at me unbidden.

Second Life. You have got to be kidding. God has given me maybe 85 years, if I take after my mom’s side. I have already stuffed 4 or 5 careers into that, and I want to get in about 3 more. So I have time to go build a house of bits in a world of pixels, and hang out with people who have that little to do? Nononononononononono! No!

Lee Hopkins. A good man fallen among Second Life, but still okay.

Google Alerts. They rock. Google is probably the company that will be smart enough to implement what I suggest in this essay.

Photo Credits: (partial here, complete in the book)

StockXchng Stock Photography web site, from which I took many pictures for the essay. Below I list the web sites of individual photographers whose work I used and who have their own sites. In the e-book, I list the StockXchng pages of the others who upload their photos there.

Teacup photo: Matthew Bowden. Gillingham, Kent, UK.

Dead Parrot Photo, from Wikipedia’s entry on “Dead Parrot Sketch.”

“Price Tag” photo: Hilary Quinn. Cork, Munster, Eire.

“Arborial Marsupial Road Sign”: Laurent Cottier. Lausanne, Switzerland.

World Socialist Movement web site.

“Diva and Filly” photo: Kathy Sierra, link given above.

Telescope photo: Martti Vire, Rauma, Finland

Yikes! It’s been a whole week since I found Kami’s post about Dee Rambeau’s posts about why he was quitting blogging. I read Kami, read some comments, followed some links, and started posting.

7,000 words later, I saw I was writing something I could never permit to be a post on my blog. It has become an e-book, the link to which is at the bottom of this post.

Here’s what happened. Dee Rambeau posted to his blog that he was done blogging. Says it’s a waste of time. Says the blogosphere is getting noisier, the quality of content going down.

There’s been a bit of reaction and some overreaction to Dee’s posts, both the one I just cited and the one he left on Marcom Blog, the blog of those communications students at Auburn.

What I didn’t hear is anybody really talking about the time economics of blogging. I hear this and that about the ROI, or lack of same, for corporations that blog. But the simple, personal economics of time spent blogging, I’ve heard nobody discussing that.

So I thought about it myself. I realized that entering the blogosphere is a little like entering Second Life. You trade in some real world currency for the coin of the realm you’re entering. In the blogosphere, that coin is the link, but links aren’t identical in value.

So I’ve invented a unit of link value, which I call the scoble, and I set out to work with it.

I adduce some theoretical reasons why the economics of blogging might well be deteriorating. Dee Rambeau might be the canary in the coal mine (although in the essay, I didn’t mention a canary. I did use M. Python’s dead parrot.)

The mini-book I wrote is rather light-hearted—I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’ve got blogging all scienced out. I made some feeble efforts at humor because the picture I painted was in some ways kinda dismal. (I was, after all, dabbling at the Dismal Science.)

All is not gloom, however. In the end I make some concrete suggestions for improving blogging’s future. Now that I’ve written it, I realize what I thought was a major software product design is in fact just a tweak to what Technorati and Google already have. Google could implement what I suggest in a weekend. I hope they do!

Final note. The e-book is link-free. The links that would have been in it if it had remained a blog post will all be in my next post.

Here’s the book: Unfashionably Late: Why Every Book About Blogging Written Before 2009 Is Already Obsolete (Except for this one, I give this one three weeks.) Enjoy.

Just finished reading Jason Van Orden’s excellent new book Promoting Your Podcast. Highly recommended for newbies. There’s so much to learn just in order to create a decent podcast, it can be daunting to take the next steps, the ones that get you heard. Jason does a fine job of hacking through the jungle of feeds, directories, statistics, and community-building.

Thanks go to Lee Hopkins for recommending the book.