- Currently Listening to:
- Depeche Mode — Policy of Truth
The web today is a-flutter with calls for new “standards” to fight back against the increasing problem of hostility in the world of blogging. This comes on the back of a spate of unpleasant, unprovoked attacks on various bloggers because of their politics or views on seemingly harmless topics.
Tim O’Reilly and Jimbo Wales have jointly put forward a proposal to tag websites with somewhat quaint badges, showing what level of discourse you can expect to see. This idea seems doomed to failure to me, despite the big names that are pushing it through. As they stand, the draft “Code of Conduct” has a number of problems. For example,
We do not allow anonymous comments.
We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.
Identity spoofing is ridiculously easy at the moment, so this recommendation just can’t work. At least until initiatives like “Identity 2.0” and OpenId take off.
On the badges, Jeff Jarvis writes:
[The blogosphere is not a medium.] It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do.
Indeed. I posit that the big win here will come from improvements in policy enforcement, rather than up-front policy declaration. Everyone already knows they’re not supposed to act like a jackass.
The NYTimes article linked above notes
A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors. They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.
The problem here is that deleting moronic or venomous comments does nothing to stem the tide of trolling that a particular post is going to attract. It merely hides the problem under a rug for a short time, before someone, on finding their comment deleted, decides to write something even worse, perhaps in a place where the original poster doesn’t have such sweeping editorial control.
Online discussions are entropic, and it only takes one misinterpreted or snide comment to transform the complexion of a thread into a chaotic flamewar of no merit. Chaos begets chaos, and maintaining the quality and order of a discussion requires both time and vigilance.
A few years ago I saw an interesting approach by Sam Ruby, very nicely illustrated through an anecdote here by Mark Pilgrim. The theory:
In social sciences, there’s a theory called the “broken window” theory. It states that a little ongoing maintanence — like fixing windows as soon as they get broken — can have dramatic effects. It also states that the smallest sign of destruction, if left untended, tends to bring about more destruction. Even in a “good” neighborhood, where normally people wouldn’t dream of being randomly destructive.
This is powerful thinking, and the most effective way to deal with the problem that I have seen. Passages in comments are selectively marked as “flamebait” by the site’s owner, which then appear as text with a strike-through to anyone reading the comments. This allows a site owner to Bowdlerise a comment in line with their site’s own (stated or no) comments policy, and leaves a tangible signifier to anyone else thinking of commenting that there is a single voice patrolling the comments and keeping order.
Things could be so different now
It used to be so civilised.
I’ll be upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.0 soon, since the list of what’s new looks so good, in particular the new Ajax-ified admin panel. Update: Done. Works well.
- The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke | Copyblogger
Your blog is the face of your business, the voice of your brand, the bait that attracts a following.
And yes, you give away as much as you can with it, selflessly and abundantly.
But until you have a product or service to sell, and until the blog connects to that enterprise in a way that actually begins to generate actual revenue in addition to pumping up your online reputation and ego, your blog is nothing other than you expelling positive energy into the universe.
- The Redesign, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Certainly at no point was I ever asked what I would like to see improved on this page. My requests over three years, often suggested by readers - for a continued-reading feature that does not require a new page (the new one sends you into a mass of prose where it's very hard to find where you left off), for a much more user-friendly search function, for one-click running summaries of long threads (torture, gay rights, Obama, health reform, Window views) etc, have all been turned down, even as just three people produce 300 posts a week to the point of exhaustion and generate between 55 and 60 percent of the Atlantic.com's entire traffic.
- My Blog, My Outboard Brain - O'Reilly Media
I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I'm writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I'm speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.
As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables be
- The second post · phiffer.org
New York is understandably overwhelming to newcomers. I found the city to be thrilling when I first got here, but I completely understand this kind of negative reaction. More than most places it takes a lot of work to get by here. You have to have patience, humility and empathy for your fellow drones. You have to make time for friendships and hobbies to avoid falling into a work-only lifestyle. There are so many amazing things happening here, all at once, all the time, that most of my anxiety from living here comes from existing in a state of perpetual missed opportunities. I do what I can and try not to take the city too seriously.
- Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass « PEG on Tech
The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.
Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
Posterous is extremely well engineered. There’s nothing wrong with it. Every single thing about it is well thought out. But it’s not just that it’s less pretty (though it is). It’s just not designed as well as Tumblr is.
- 10 Golden Rules of Social Media
- Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month [Update]
Here at ReadWriteWeb we scraped a feed from our MyBlogLog page of the new users just added to our community, then reached out to thank them for their support and welcome them personally. That was just the beginning of what could have been a very valuable source of data. Imagine getting a feed of the LinkedIn job titles of all your recent readers and presenting that to a blog's advertisers. Both analytically and financially, there was so much potential in MyBlogLog. See our 2008 post The Significance of the MyBlogLog API if you're a social web geek and want to have your heart broken.
- Make Money Blogging « ProBlogger Blog Tips
- New rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest « BuzzMachine
Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.
- Twitter Blog: What's Happening?
The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"
- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Why the mainstream media is dying
Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.
The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains.
- Jacking Off: Day 2 as a Blogger
- Deconstructing the Tim Ferriss four hour work week | Upstart Blogger
It inspires you to be part of the new rich who work 4-hours a week, are independent of location, and earn enough money to do whatever they want to, e.g. travel the world, speak Chinese, etc.
It shatters the notion of the conventional rich, who slog their whole life to earn mountains of money, only to retire old and unfit to do anything they wanted to. A BMW is bought with their hard-earned money, the rest of which stays in the bank as the owner wiles away his retirement vegetating and getting fat on some beach, on the road to ultimate boredom.
- YouTube - 3 Bloggers Share their Blog Tips from Blog World Expo
- YouTube - Steve Pavlina Six Figure Blogging
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