Category Archives: blogging

Googley iPhone Goodness

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It is obvious that Google is going to embrace mobile applications very, very powerfully in the coming year and it looks like Google has a great first iPhone effort with their new search application featuring a lot of automated guessing so you can avoid the most painful part of the mobile experience – typing.

Of course things are *really* going to get interesting this fall or early next year when a new Google mobile phone will come out.    Although Google has produced branded hardware for some time in the form of search appliances these had an extremely limited distribution.   The upcoming  “G Phone” will be a *huge* success if it offers iPhone functionality at a lower price.   I think the latest assumption is that a Google phone will be made by HTC for Dell though I have not checked in on this recently.    I think the Google branding factor will be incredibly powerful, and predict that *most* users will choose  a “Google gPhone” over an “Apple iPhone” assuming similar features and cost.    This isn’t to suggest the iPhone market cannot exist alongside a gPhone, and clearly the iPhone is the mobile device to beat, so the game is very much on right now in terms of smartphone competition.     Sprint’s new “Instinct” is an excellent device with many advantages over the old iPhone (e.g. Geolocation), though I think we’ll see functionality in these devices converge as early as next year with no compromises for users.   Computing is rapidly moving to mobile.

Here is a demo of the iPhone application at the Google Mobile Blog

Google blog

Twitter less?

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Seems to me that Twitter is, in fact, a very important issue with far too much discussion about downtime and not enough about why Twitter appears to be replacing blogging, Facebook, and email as the communications paradigm of choice for the digital elites, which often means  the rest of the online world will soon follow.

Twitter’s system failures have become so common that several of the silicon folks like Mike Arrington are suggesting that people should be moving  to other services – most noted is FriendFeed which now allows “room” conversations as a way to sort noise from signal and talk with a group about specific topics.   I think if they’d come along at same time FriendFeed would be winning the war for the hearts and minds of the legions of twitterers, but Twitter has such a foothold as the microblogging / communication tool of choice it’ll be hard to unseat Twitter unless their services fail to improve over the coming months.   Improvement is likely given their recent Venture capital injection which effectively valued Twitter at about 100 million – enough that money will  soon pour in as needed to beef up their shaky infrastructure.

Why is Twitter important?   It’s really a form of A.D.D. blogging – fast and furious with links out to full treatments which can be read only if they really look interesting.  Because Twitter caters to short attention spans and also throws everybody in regardless of laptop color or digital creed, it’s going to keep catching on fast with the business and tech crowd.   I am NOT convinced it’ll be a big hit for grandma or even Nascar dads, who will see Twitter for the time waster it tends to be…

Yikes.. my Twitter Deficit Disorder makes me think a blog post of more than 143 letters won’t generally get read anyway, and makes it harder to write.

Buy before the rumor, sell before the news?

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One of the really intriguing aspects of the blogOspheric chatterfest is how the big markets tend to react to rumors from key business related blogs.    When TechCrunch reported yesterday that talks between Microsoft and Yahoo had resumed Yahoo stock increased, only to fall after several other blogs reported the rumors as false or weak.

Although I have no reason to believe that Mike Arrington or Henry Blodget are trading options based on their market-moving blog reporting, I’m not at all clear it would be illegal for them to do so as long as they were reporting “real” rumors.

Henry answered at his blog that posting a false rumor to manipulate for investment purposes would likely be seen by SEC as a violation but this leaves a lot of gray areas open for an aggressive options trader/journalist. 

Here’s what I just asked Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch:
Mike just to set the record straight the ValleyWag poster “Mike Arrington”, who claims to have made 10k trading on Yahoo rumors, is fake … right?

More importantly I’m very interested in your views on legality/ethics of trading Yahoo options based on the rumor mill. Let’s say you heard a solid rumor that MS was about to offer $37 for Yahoo and Yahoo was going to sell. Could you legally trade on that before you posted it? One second after?

What if you emailed *me* right before you posted, I think I could legally trade based on current SEC rules, right?

P.S. What kind of Single Malt Scotch do you like? : )

Although I have no plans to manipulate any markets, it is reasonable to assume that if a market can be legally manipulated it *will be* manipulated, and soon. 

AP Retreats from the North Bridge, but the shots were read around the world

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The AP’s tiny battle with Rogers Cadenhead over copyright issues appears to have ended with a whimper and no bang as the AP met with Cadenhead and has issued a vague statement about upcoming standards.

Rogers noted today:

I think AP and other media organizations should focus on how to encourage bloggers to link their stories in the manner they like, rather than hoping their lawyers can rebottle the genie of social news.

He’s right regardless of how the courts will be interpreting upcoming cases of copyright infringement.   Unlike the music industry where a case can be made that bootlegging leads to lost revenue, blogging AP stories arguably *improves* APs distribution and presence in journalism.   AP is shooting itself in the foot, if not the head, when it fights bloggers with copyright lawsuits and takedowns.

Obviously blogging has a long way to go before it will have the mainstream respect typically reserved for mainstream journalism.    Part of gaining that respect will be bloggers taking on more responsibility and accountability with respect to attribution and quoting.  Meanwhile the legacy news industry must come to grips with the fact that blogging isn’t just news and analysis, it is a dynamic and powerful global conversation that will throw off any chains as fast as they can be applied.

Social Learning 2.0

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Here is a great website about the intersection of education and the internet. One of the concerns of the main author is that educational institutions are ill-prepared to cope with the hurricane of new media information as well as potential new online approaches to teaching.

This is a really fascinating topic partly because for hundreds thousands of years formal education has languished under the province of a priestly class of educators operating pretty much in the same fashion since the Greeks introduced the professor to student lecture model of teaching.   Although it’s not a *bad* model, I’d strongly suggest we could do a lot better, especially given the plethora of new online tools readily on hand at no cost to almost everybody.

Where an old, legacy class about global markets would dredge up boring examples from dated textbooks, a new class could use real time stock information such as the Archipelago bidding environment, currency quotes, breaking news, and so much more.   In science students should be actively participating in blogs specializing in topics like Global Warming, artificial intelligence, and biology as well as interacting with other students around the globe.

A professor friend of mine who taught an online accounting class said there were challenges with the lack of personal contact, but benefits from student interaction and the fact he could answer the same predictable questions with an FAQ rather than having to deal with them over and over, basically freeing up more time for individualized instruction on the complicated topics.

As with so many online topics education is evolving rapidly within the rapidly evolving overall environment, so it is very hard to predict where things will wind up.   However I think it’s easy to say there is a lot of potential for improvements on the current outmoded lecture models, and the internet kitchen is cooking up new solutions every day.

Online Abuse Part II: Pownce TOS Violations

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Ariel Waldman is a prominent tech blogger and also the community manager at Pownce.  She has ignited a huge online debate about Twitter failing to police a harassing commenter at Twitter, comments that appear to have come from a person who had been harassing her for some time. 

I’ve really been leaning to her point of view though I’d like to see the dialog and I’d like to see the community working harder to make sure this type of abuse is dealt with more harshly.    Ariel seems to think Pownce does a great job here.

However, at Ariel’s own Pownce page commenters are calling Sarah Lacy the C** word, with only a small admonishment from Ariel and no removal of the comment.     Ariel can correctly say that ongoing harassment is a lot more serious than a “one off” insult, but the use of th c**  word plays heavily in her critique of Twitter’s response to her harassment.

The point here is NOT that Ariel is wrong here or that she should be banning everybody at Pownce that uses the c* word, though maybe that is a good idea as you can hardly make a case this noun can’t be replaced with less objectionable material to get any point across.   Ariel presumably has the power to ban comments and/or users as the community manager at Pownce.  

The point is that the community standards *including Ariel’s* are far too low.   Twitter is only a small part of the problem here.   The problem is … all of us, and only all of us can fix this.

 

Blog Revolution Note XXIV

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At SoundBiteBlog I stumbled (or rather twitter-comment-followed) an excellent post about how much the poisonous / ranting writing styles of many blogs help them succeed.   The author wonders if nice blogs can finish first …

The short answer is “sure”.  A good example is Matt Cutts at Google who rarely has a bad word to say about anybody at his blog yet has one of the most read technical resources on the internet for Google search issues.   Fred Wilson’s A VC is also a blog with heavy readership and a friendly tone.    Marc Andreessen at blog.pmarca.com  is another and there are many, many more.

However I think the key blogging success issue is ranking, and there are many ranking problems in blogging paradise.  Blogs that rank well will be read more often and in turn will confer more rank via linking, so the  *linking style* of most of the old timer blogs  has really inhibited the broader conversation.   The best posts about any given topic are rarely by A list blogs anymore but these posts are rarely seen because the ranking structure favors older, more linked blogs over those with less Google authority.   

The old authority models work much better for websites – where high ranks for a general category make sense  – than for blogging where authors tend to cover a lot of topics.    TechCrunch will appear with a higher rank than almost any other blog if a technology topic is covered even if their coverage is weak, wrong, or misguided.    A thoughtful and well researched post about a critical topic is unlikely to surface if it is written by an “outsider” and escapes the RSS feed of somebody prominent, or sometimes even if linking to that post is seen by the “A lister” as giving a potential competitor too much free juice.   Note how “up and coming” tech blogs like Mathew Ingram link generously while most A list blog writers – who are now often hired writers, paid to be seen as a key breaking source of news – are far less likely to  cite other blogs.    Ironically I think success has really diminished some formerly great blogs.    John Battelle is one of the most thoughtful writers on the web but now he’s way too busy with Federated Media to keep Searchblog as lively as it once was.  

Google and other aggregators (like TechMeme) in part use metrics similar to Google pagerank to define TechCrunch as more reliable because they have more incoming links, more history on the topic, and more commenting activity.   This is not a *bad* way to rank sites but it tends to miss many high quality, reflective articles from sources who do not actively work the system. 

Solutions?  I still think a blog revolution is needed more than ever to re-align quality writing and new bloggers with the current problematic ranking systems. 

In terms of the ranking algorithms I’m not sure how to fix things, though I think Gabe should use more manual intervention to surface good stuff rather than just have TechCrunch dominate TechMeme even when their coverage is spotty and weird.   I’m increasingly skeptical that TechMeme is surfacing the best articles on a topic – rather it seems to give too much authority to a handful of prominent but superficial stories.    As others link and discuss those stories we have only the echo of a smart conversation.  

I don’t spend enough time searching Technorati to know if they are missing the mark or not, but I like the fact they are very inclusive.   However like Google and I think Techmeme, Technorati has trouble surfacing content that is highly relevant and high quality but not “authoritative”.

For their part, Google needs to do more to bring blog content into the web search results.   Last year at SES Matt Cutts was explaining to me that they are doing more of this than ever and I’m sympathetic to the fact that fresh content into the SERPS will lead to spamming problems, but I’m finding that I often get more relevant results from a blog search at Google than a regular search.   This is more the case for breaking news or recent events but it has even happened for research topics where the blog search has led me to expertise I don’t find in the web listings.

Why do blogs suck? A Blogging Revolution Needed?

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Wait, no, I love blogs and blogging!   

However several folks in the  blog echo-chamber are suggesting correctly that there are problems with this  echo-chamber and problems with the many “me too” posts out there by people who want to be in TechMeme or otherwise get linked.     I actually think TechMeme’s got it close to right because creator Gabe Rivera has facilited the conversation algorithmically rather than allowing only the “insiders” to decide who is linked to and thus who gets to participate most actively in the tech buzz of the day. 

Tech blogging has become something of a mess even though there are advantages to having tech themes discussed ad nauseum in that I’d argue you can shake out the BS faster that way.  

Mark Evans has a thoughful post about why he thinks original blog thinking is so rare.    I don’t agree that original thinking is hard for most bloggers who tend to be a pretty thoughtful gang, but agree we don’t find enough good thinking on blogs.   Why?   Because we have created a problematic blog ecosystem that relies on human frailties and short attention spans.     I think it’s kind of a “welcome to the human race” thing and is not fixable.

 I wrote over there:

I don’t think original thought is all that difficult for many bloggers, rather most people tend to read a combination of groupthink and antagnostic dialog.  Thus the most read posts and blogs are not the most thoughtful.

I find that when I venture away from the major tech blogs I find the far more thoughtful posts – yours right here for example.

Ideally there would be a new blog revolution that would aggressively work to reconnect the thousands of new bloggers based on merit and thoughtfulness rather than old links from old sites with old thinking.  Sort of a human and algorithmic “revoting” for the best blogs.  I wonder how well the old “A list” would fare in that revote?  

Google: We see no evil.

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I’m very disappointed in the Google board’s recommended decision to reject a shareholder request for a human rights committee and anti-censorship rules.

These decisions make Google’s claims to be improving search around the globe ring somewhat  … hollow:  Official Google Blog: Making search better in Catalonia, Estonia, and everywhere else

Here are the details:
www.investor.google.com/documents/2008_notice_n_proxy_statement.html

I have a longer post about this  this over at WebGuild

Over there I wrote:

This is a sad day for Google and the recommendation is a death blow to their now transparently specious “Do No Evil” mantra. Google has an obligation to promote human rights within the reasonably confines of their business structure and goals. In this obligation, they have now dramatically failed.

Yahoo Microsoft: Is the fat lady almost singing at $34?

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Henry Blodget is whining that the Yahoo Microsoft deal is back to where it started, but I think Henry’s wrong … again!     

I’m glad Henry was wrong about the rumor that Yahoo’s Q4 would beat expectations because it was part of the reason I bought YHOO then, and even though the stock dipped due to a bad Q4, it surged on Microsoft’s offer of $31 per share so I’m well in the black.   But now he’s wrong to say the deal is not almost done.  I think this Yahoo Microsoft merger is coming very soon to an internet near you.

Citibank Analyst Maheney upgraded Yahoo this morning, anticipating a boost in the MS bid to $34.   Hey, maybe he read my blog post of about 6 weeks ago where I suggested Microsoft raise their bid to $34?    

Unlike Henry, I think this is not back to where it all started at all!

Yang didn’t want to merge, now he sees it as almost inevitable.  Yahoo board wanted more, now they know anything past initial offer is gravy.  Part of the show was probably the board protecting itself against lawsuits from the unlucky minions who bought their Yahoo at $35+, some at over $100.

Barring a Q1 miracle that would recalibrate Yahoo prices without help of MS bids, I think the fat lady is now almost done singing on this deal.

 Disclosure:  long on YHOO