cori schlegel's shared items
First what do I mean by great blogging?
1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).
2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.
3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.
Most blogging, like most journalism is pretty easy-going as you'll see in some of the responses to the three examples below. That makes it harder for people to do the right thing.
So here are the three examples.
1. Allen Stern asks if others are uncomfortable that the President-elect is posting his videos to a commercial website, thereby favoring one company over another. (Most people answered no, some people put him down for asking the question. I said I support his concern.)Update: Dan Farber addresses the issue head-on. As any reporter will tell you, the appearance of impropriety is every bit as bad as the impropriety. The incoming President can be forgiven (briefly) for favoring one company's product over another, but the dominance of that product is, imho, the opposite of an excuse. The President-elect should help create competition. I think competition is so important it should be written into the Constitution (it's not there unfortunately). The fact that the CEO of the company is on his board of economic advisers is a problem in its own right, and is compounded by Obama's favoring his product over competition. Yes, it matters. It really does.
2. Duncan Riley says, despite my kind words for Gabe Rivera, his algorithms are hidden and not clonable, and that there's a difference between sharing the feeds of the most-quoted sites and the sources he scans. He's absolutely right about that, and it's a question that should be dealt with, one way or the other. Either Rivera should disclose his algorithm and sources, and keep it current, or people should stop considering his sites anything other than his personal opinion about what's important. And even if it were just his personal opinion, its disrespectful of his readers to not say what his criteria are. People are scared to question Rivera because the algorithm is hidden, so they fear that if they're critical they'll stop getting pointers from TechMeme or Memeorandum, and because of his close relationship with Mike Arrington, whose site has always dominated TechMeme. These are things that would never be tolerated in the MSM, and shouldn't be in blogging. Riley has the courage to say so and that's appreciated.
3. Marc Canter expresses disappointment in the people who are being appointed to the Obama transition team related to tech policy. His points are all valid, I've had the same concerns. It makes it easier to express those concerns because Marc went first.
We owe these people more than the gratitude for having the courage to say what's obvious. So many others would rather look away from because powerful people don't want their secrets revealed and have ways of punishing people they don't like. Once one person sticks their neck out, it's easier for the second person to. To me, that's what blogging is about. Saying what needs to be said.
Update: Already getting pushback about the MSM line. I was thinking how most newspapers endorsed a Presidential candidate. They didn't just say "You should vote for Obama" -- they explained why they were saying that. This helps the reader understand the bias of the organization behind the newspaper, and their reasoning process. If the editorial board supports one candidate, it might be hard for them to tell you bad news about that person, or good news about his or her opponent. People have a right to know how you arrived at your decision, and if you're not saying why, that should also be explained. As far as I know, Rivera has never said one way or the other. Even so, I find value in his sites.
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Tom Matrullo brings this info from Jon Husband and ZDNet to our attention:
Europe’s heritage went digital on Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.
The EU’s Digital Libraries Initiative really should shame US academicians who store away their knowledge behind the pay-walls of JSTOR. Here’s another area where the US in a fit of congratulatory revelry can cheer: “We’re number two! We’re number two!”
In the spirit of trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again, I’d like to see a number of simple changes made by the new administration, changes that will help restore constitutional government, changes that will support a return from Neocon American-chauvinist Imperialism to a more “reality based” style of governance.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
I’d like to propose a few simple changes that will improve the way our country works and the way we relate to each other. These are presented in no particular order. Each stands alone. Each is important. My simple change for today is:
RENAME THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
I have no clue what to call it, but the proto-fascist “Homeland” thing (see “Das Heimat”) has got to go. Probably the whole department needs reconstruction. Since they’re getting new letterhead stationery anyway, what with th enew secretary and all, wouldn’t the time be right for new name?
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Update: Friendfeed today released support for its Beta Real-Time feature. The API adds the ability to fetch realtime streams based on the Home, Room, and Friends List updates as they occur. While Friends Lists offer a way to port social graph data of your Twitter Follows to the Friendfeed platform, co-founder Bret Taylor said that was not yet available through the API “though we should add those methods in the future.”
Friendfeed’s launch of realtime services has set off a serious horse race on the micromessaging platform. While the New York Times contrasts Twitter and Yammer as eyeballs versus revenue, or consumer v. enterprise, Friendfeed finds itself positioned as an attractive candidate for building scoped message hubs without an IT oversight requirement.
Yammer’s appeal is the quality of its offering, which extends across Web, desktop, and iPhone instances. The Adobe Air client is elegantly deployed, with a preference page for updates that specifically defines the location of scroll-up notifications (I configured it to the lower left to avoid Twhirl’s hard-coded territory), the length posts remain visible (not adjustable in Twhirl), and the number of full text items (defaults to first 3).
If you’re an XMPP fan, you can setup IM from the Web client (Twitter has killed IM) in a simple 2-step process that pings you in Gchat and confirms in the Web client. The iPhone still awaits Apple’s push technology to round out the suite, but the spit and polish of the client suite neatly defines what Twitter and its third party support will need to do once they are challenged in the marketplace.
Identi.ca and its Laconica compatriots may have garnered a dedicated developer-focused version of Twitter’s high-visibility crowd, but there’s no papering over the weaknesses of a single point of failure at the center of the potential platform. Evan Prodromou and his open source team have outperformed expectations in cloning Twitter’s API and leveraging Twitter’s abdication of Track and now IM. But where Twitter used to stumble and shudder around high volume events such as primaries and debates, more recently the service has stayed up while it’s Identi.ca that goes dark.
Identi.ca’s fundamental problem is the lack of a viral trigger to boost adoption to a critical mass beyond those who feel used and abused by Twitter’s disingenuous path to stability and a revenue strategy. Twitter has successfully made the case for becoming a common carrier of realtime discourse, regardless of the current absence of the carrot we all bit into. Identi.ca’s open source roots may convert a few of the choir, but for true competition to emerge, another attractor must be offered as bait.
Friendfeed seems a plausible host for such a disruptor of Twitter’s power base. What realtime enables, and Track accelerates, is the swarm behavior which evangelizes micromessaging. Without realtime, Twitter is a bulletin board in the center of the town, a virtual water cooler where the fodder of overnight is chewed and refashioned as punditry for the midday crowd. Just as Yammer is work product meets group IM, Twitter is brand protection meets market intelligence.
Swarm behavior, by contrast, turns the Twitter idea into a wave of innovation, the realtime expansion of idea into action, of early warning into rapid decision making, of business intelligence into strategic deployment of resources. Swarms are as interesting for how people don’t react as for what the original spark suggests. As we learn from experience how specific nodes participate in the information stream, we can evaluate today’s silence or muted contributions to derive competitive insight not possible before micromessaging achieved traction.
Friendfeed’s original value proposition was as an aggregator, taking off from Facebook’s activity stream to add a conversational oasis where behavioral signals could be mixed with a limited social graph and explicit voting to create some degree of authority and information fidelity. But nowhere was the speed with which Twitter grew mirrored in the resulting Friendfeed community; the lack of swarm characteristics kept the dynamics insular, the service a refuge for critics of message length, instability, and A List blogosphere class warfare.
Add realtime and suddenly the space is recast. As Twitter Track refugees tire kick, they notice the holes in their social graphs on the new service. Almost immediately questions bubbled up on Identi.ca and Twitter: How can we port our Follows? Why does it take 30 minutes for Identi.ca posts to show up on FriendFeed when it takes seconds from Twitter? Which services are faster than others in hitting the realtime canvas?
What’s innately disruptive about Friendfeed’s realtime services is that its competitors can be used to debug and flesh out the service as the community responds to the swarm behavior it enables. The easiest way to check who was responsible for the 30-minute delay from Identi.ca to Friendfeed was to disable that subscription and enable one from Twitter. Since many Identi.ca users employ a bridge to pipe posts to Twitter, the message path still works into Friendfeed when you unsub from Identi.ca.
Once the pathway is cleared and the relative inefficiencies of Friendfeed’s inserting other services such as FLickr into the stream are calibrated, the next step is to solve the social graph issues. Here’s where Friend Lists loom large, as it should be relatively easy to set up mini-home pages with high value follows. The loser here will likely be Twhirl, since aggregating follows from Twitter and Laconica instances can effectively roll up multiple windows into a single interface. Alternately, you can embed multiple streams on a console.
Once the promised realtime APIs are released, Twhirl and Identi.ca will be able to recover some of their feature set, and of course the business conversations necessary to achieve parity with Twitter and vice versa will be joined. Earlier yesterday Prodromou enabled direct reply to specific messages, and a comparable ability from within Friendfeed would leapfrog Identi.ca past Twitter until all three players achieve parity. Identi.ca copied Twitter’s initial reply_id functionality when it appeared several months ago, but Twitter will have to decide whether it makes strategic sense to make it easy to talk cross-platform.
Much has been made of the differences between Friendfeed and Twitter, but realtime is the great leveler. Once the basics are ironed out, the differentiator between individual services will be much more in their effectiveness in acting as host to enough of the routing points of the overall micromessaging infrastructure to be the driver of standards. Just as Firefox (even with Chrome’s assist) continues to be the fulcrum of browser standards, so may Friendfeed step into the role of mediator between public and private micromessaging services.
Such a hybrid of intranet and extranet services will go a long way toward triggering the entry of the platform players, as email and IM become services that could be absorbed by the realtime architecture. That possibility certainly redounds to the incumbents, but users may be resistant to having their access to an open network constrained by a bigco audience acquisition and siloing bifurcation of the cloud. And just as Twitter consolidated the Track threat by purchasing Summize, we may see overtures in either direction by Friendfeed and Twitter, by Microsoft, Google, and Cisco, or open source patrons such as Oracle, IBM, and even Sun in the case of Identi.ca or an XMPP competitor.
I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.
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