Alpha Mind Blog

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.

Within minutes after my last post, I got an email from the Sage user list. It wasn’t someone trying to help me, but someone with a problem of their own. Two minutes later, he wrote again to say “never mind.” But, wotcha know?–his problem solved mine!

He had messed with his Feed Folder setting in Sage. I’m pretty sure I had not messed with my Feed Folder setting, but something had, and I just had to set it back to the right folder. Everything works.

Now I have the combination I want: Sage to aggregate my feeds, and, in the same Firefox window, Performancing to allow me to instantly blog any page I’m looking at. (And Performancing does it faster than the Wordpress interface, because it’s only doing database calls to do the post, not feeding me a page on which to edit.)

Until Murphy strikes again, I’m in blog heaven!

Over a year ago I scrapped the very annoying Awasu feed reader and went with Sage. Today Sage died. So, asks the tech support guy in my mind, have you changed anything?

Well, yes, just a bit. I upgraded Firefox to 2.0.0.1. I was then advised to upgrade Sage, which I did. I then installed the del.icio.us plug-in. Now Sage shows nothing but blank windows. All the feeds I’ve ever subscribed to are gone. I know that the bookmarks for the feeds still exist, because when I uninstall delicious, they reappear under my Firefox Bookmarks menu. So I can get at them using Firefox, but only if I leave delicious uninstalled, which I’m not sure I want to do.

I’ve written an email to the Sage user list. We’ll see if I get any help.

Meantime, I am so desperate for a feed reader that I downloaded Awasu again and tried it out. It took me 40 minutes to lose patience with it and uninstall it. When it needs to open a new window to read a page, it opens IE by default, and I hope never to have to use IE again. It can be set to use “Mozilla,” and I don’t even know if this is supposed to mean Firefox, because when it’s set that way (and the required Mozilla ActiveX control in installed), no new windows are ever opened. Nothing happens at all.

I’ll be trying Google Reader, but already I see a problem with it: there’s no OPML export function, so that any list of feeds I build for it can go nowhere else. I’ll give it an hour, perhaps, to see if it has any features so wonderful that I’m willing to overlook this grave defect. My hopes are not high.