Incremental Blogger

Robert Scoble writes a fairly long post about blogs and the PR industry and how the PR industry is promoting things the wrong way when it comes to tech blogs–or the blogs are getting pulled into their strategies. I think Robert’s trying to get at ways that can make blogs better and more interesting–possibly returning to their roots.

Here’s the thing I think Robert skips over: It’s not just the PR people that are disrupting classic tech blogs, the journalists are too. In fact, over the last few years, I’ve argued several times that much of the talked about online growth has been around journalistic endeavors. The writers and publishers have moved online. No problem here; they should have. However, it’s meant that with this transition there’s been money in the game and quite understandably people have migrated from being tech enthusiasts to journalists. Can’t blame people for moving to where the money’s at. But with this transition I think the flavor of tech blogging has gotten muddled.

In no particular order, here are my pet peeves about how this trend towards tech journalism has tainted some tech blogs–particularly the largest ones:

1) The journalists blog like journalists. What do I mean? They report what’s going on. OK, that’s fine, however, quite often their sources are another blog post from some other person journalistically blogging about someone’s comment or news leak. So what you say? Well, more often than not, the journalist blogger will repeat the key news (quite respectfully usually) reporting the key facts that the original blogger found. You know what? A tech blogger wouldn’t just do this. They’d simply say, “Look at this. So and so found out some info” and then provide a link to it. They might go on and add some commentary, but they wouldn’t think they’d have to lay out the whole story, which the original site did just fine. A journalist is going to repeat the whole story and effectively try to keep the reader on their site. A tech blogger will link.

2) Publishers of sites that want to make a living often do things to keep people on their site only. Tech bloggers aren’t as concerned with this. Ways of doing this are:

a) Link to their own articles rather than outside original sources.
b) Provide partial feeds so the reader has to go to the full site to see the full article.
c) Don’t link out, even if they credit another source. Big media blogs do this more commonly, but I see this enough to irk me more than I’d like.
d) And from the point in #1, journalists repeat news from other sites when a link will do.

3) A journalist’s mission is to report; a tech blogger’s mission is to spread their enthusiasm and knowledge for something. It’s not that a tech blogger is simply more benevolant. I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s just that a tech blogger knows they are biased–because they are enthusiastic about something–and shares it. A journalist focuses on reporting. (I will add that for some strange reason tech journalist bloggers seem to rant with some of the loudest. I don’t get this at all. You’d rarely see this in print media, though maybe on the radio or in video. Still, I don’t get it.)

4) Journalists like to point out the conflicts. Yes, tech bloggers will too. However, a tech blogger is just as likely to share info that resolves some conflict or problem. The reason? A tech blogger wants to nourish something. A journalist wants to get the next big story and attract readers and get clicks on their ads. Conflict keeps the click flow going–today. Archiveable information isn’t as much about clicks right now.

5) A journalist is more concerned about the number of readers; a tech blogger is more concerned about the richness of their community.

Yeah, this all is probably a bit of an oversimplification, but hey, I’m an engineer-minded, tech blogger and not a journalist-slash-analyst-slash-PR rep blogger, so I’m allowed. And, you know what, for some reason a smiley face just seems like a highly appropriate way to end this post :-).

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is looking into acquiring Digg. I have no idea one way or another, but I can imagine that Google is considering the possibilities. It has to, as do all companies.

However, I hope Google doesn’t fall into the Digg trap. Here’s why: The raucous nature of its commenters. Sorry folks, but Digg has fostered a community of commenters that’s just wrong. Let someone else play in the mud, but my recommendation is for Google to stay above and out of it.

Now, I realize things can be tamed. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with Hotmail. It’s nothing like it initially was back in the early days. Anyone doing ecommerce back when Hotmail started knows what I’m talking about.

My concern here is that Google is already playing on the edge with commenters on YouTube. It’s getting pretty trashy there. So adding Digg might not be too much of big deal to them. But it would be to me. And I think it will eventually be to advertisers.

I’ll put it this way: Along with Google’s “do no evil” mantra, I think Google ought to add a “be responsible” clause too.

By the way, same advice to Microsoft. I don’t care how big it gets. It’s not worth it. Just because you can make a few bucks off of something doesn’t make it right. Let someone else pick it up as an edgy novelty. You don’t have to. There are so many more things you can focus on that can make our lives better. Put your energies there instead.

Henry Work over at TechCrunch lists out about 100 top tech bloggers that he culled from TechMeme’s Leaderboard. I’m sure it’s obvious to those of us that follow tech news that this isn’t exactly a great way to determine much of anything–except for those who are commonly on TechMeme. This probably says more about the editorializing of the TechMeme algorithm than anything else.

I’ll give Henry this, if we’re talking “Web 2.0″ for the most part, then TechMeme’s Leaderboard probably gives a good idea of the major trends in the industry. But there’s so much more to tech than TechMeme covers. Lots more. That’s one reason I started Thredr, because there are topics I (or my friends) like to follow that don’t show up on TechMeme. What kind of topics am I talking about? Well, you have to go no farther than Microsoft-oriented software developers. Most of the news around what’s going on in this group rarely makes it to TechMeme. So does much of the news around the iPhone or MIDs or the OLPC. Yes, there are sprinklings of news, but there is so much more to read about, to learn from.

And then there are tech bloggers that are sure not to make any typical tech blogger list. For example, what about Chris Anderson’s DIYDrones.com. Come on, you can’t get any techier than flying robots can you?

So my list of top tech bloggers is probably much different than anything Henry would come up with. That’s fine. That’s why thredr means so much to me and my daily reading habits.

Michael Arrignton is getting concerned over the twists and turns in the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition. Fred Wilson is getting uneasy too. Both are getting quite a bit of attention on Techmeme. Funny thing is that Michael and Fred are concerned for exactly the opposite reasons.

Fred is concerned about companies after an acquisition. Is their value really preserved or maximized in the acquiring company. If not, maybe it’s time to look elsewhere. Michael is going the opposite direction and churning over whether it’s a wise move to hold out for more money when a company has made a bid to acquire it–particularly if the predicted path to increased value involves splitting up current products or services. What happens if it’s a bad decision?

What do I think? They are both right and wrong; you simply can’t predict the future.

One thing is for sure. If anyone–Yahoo included–follows their advice, there will blog posts that make it to the top of TechMeme that say how unsmart Yahoo is being. And if Yahoo doesn’t follow community advice, likewise there will be top TechMeme posts arguing that Yahoo should take this or that move as they’ve suggested all along.

ReadWriteWeb looks at some alternatives to Techmeme for finding tech news. A few of the suggested alternatives: Rssmeme, HackerNews, and FriendFeed.

Yeah, and thredr didn’t make the cut :-). No big surprise there. Checking Google Analytics, yesterday it looks like there were 27 unique visitors. Almost half from Los Angeles interesting enough and all others scattered about the world. No matter, I use it all the time to keep track of various topics that interest me and so far I haven’t seen anything that’s more iPhone friendly–which is one of my top ways to check online happenings.

I’m also a bit surprised that alltop and popurls didn’t make the list, but maybe they are a different beasts.

Oh, and no mention of Twitter, my other fav.

It must be Tuesday (or at least it was yesterday), because there’s one more news aggregator site online now. This one is called NewsPond. TechMeme, TechCrunch, Mashasble have the breaking news. After all, this is a “2.0″ friendly site and that’s where the 2.0 news usually is. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Newspond is TechMeme-like in that it pulls together and ranks news stories and blog posts. However, unlike TechMeme it has a decidely un-Google-like design, comments, and many more topics than TechMeme.

While working on Thredr I can see how NewsPond came up with these design decisions to not only differentiate it, but also to try to make it more “attractive” and useful.

The UI really sticks out. A tad on the thick side, it makes you wonder if it’s not time to forgo the “efficient” Google look and render pages more like magazines. Personally, it’s not either here or there, but I wonder if that’s what people want and expect now. Are the days of the light Google layout over? Me thinks not, but we’ll have to see.

I do like Newspond’s support for multiple topics. This is where TechMeme needs to go even further. A bit about this in a moment.

What about the commenting system? Good idea. I think it brings people back to Newspond–although again for me I don’t find this the most useful. But I can appreciate it’s social value. We are in the 2.0 era after all.

OK, so back to the issue of multiple topics. For those that have been following Bob and my work with Thredr, this is a big deal to me. This is why I started working on Thredr in the first place.

I love TechMeme, but unfortunately it doesn’t give the level of coverage I want and need for the types of news I follow. In particular, I want to track the top conversations going on in the Tabletsphere. TechMeme has bits of this, but there’s much more out there. So “necessity” being the mother of invention, I decided to write my own TechMeme-like conversation collector. It’s still under development–as a part-time project–but I’m actively using it to track Tablet news and we’ve put it online (even in its unfinished state) so others can use it if they’d like.

Like Newspond and unlike TechMeme, thredr supports a collection of topics–which by design are fairly easy to expand. So far the topics thredr tracks include: All things Apple, Finance, Tablet PCs/UMPCs/OLPCs/MIDs/Surface, Photography, and the Microsoft developer community. We hope to be adding more topics down the road and even opening this up to others.

Some reactions we’ve gotten about thredr: It’s look is too plain; too Google like. That’s my fault. Bob keeps reminding me that this isn’t 1999 anymore and to get with it. Yeah, you can tell I’m an engineer. I want to focus most on the content. But I get the point. I need to work on this. It’s not all that obvious to me what it should be like anyway. I figure what’s really needed in the design will bubble up. I’m kind of slow that way :-).

And personally, I like the thin look. It works really well on my iPhone, for instance, which has become one of my favorite ways to check for news on the go or even at home. I can check it in 15 seconds and then move on if there’s nothing of interest at the time. I think this pattern is going to become more common for more people too. So I admit I’ve kept the design somewhat mobile minded. 

People want to create their own sets of topics. I agree. That’s the reason I wanted to work on this project in the first place. Bob is working on the pieces to make this happen. There’s no ETA yet for this, but when he gets it going, we’ll let you know.

What about comments or voting or some other social design? We haven’t put in anything yet. Still thinking. Here’s my problem with this. As soon as you have a commenting or voting system, you have to have a sign in process. Not only do I hate to log into yet another system, at this point I don’t want to deal with any of that from an infrastructure standpoint. For now, it’s all about the content. Tomorrow, maybe this will be different and we’ll leverage readers to suggest, prune, merge, rank, split, and comment upon stories. That’ll have to come later.

And one more thing. In Michael Arrington’s comments about Newspond, I think he misses a big point as to why these news aggregators make sense. For those of us that digest lots of news, we often turn to RSS readers, however, the plain simple truth is that we quickly wind up with too much stuff to read and then stop reading altogether. I’ve heard this from many people. I’m guilty of this too.

What I find most useful is a digested view that gives me the “top” news stories of the day. TechMeme does this very well, particularly for Web 2.0ish type of news. I’m working on thredr to make it worthy in this respect.

What’s so amazing to me is how many news aggregators are popping up. When we started thredr, it seemed like nothing was going on. Now it seems like a new one is launching every week. I wonder what next Tuesday will bring :-).

(By the way, if you do try out thredr, yes, I know the RSS feeds are broken outside of viewing them in Safari. I’ve been meaning to fix that. And yes, I know that there’s no UI element to take you “back” to the home page. I need to fix these. Sorry.)

I integrated Channel9 forums better with thredr.com. Now popular threads (those with several recent comments in them) will bubble up in the list of “interesting” conversations going on with Microsoft-focused developers. Here’s a snippet of a couple forum discussions that made it to the list. Nothing big, but nonetheless, things people are actively talking about.

I had a few minutes in the evenings this weekend to add a couple features to thredr.

Now there are permalinks to each story, which is useful for linking to the content in blogs. There’s still no way to manually navigate back and forth in the archives though. That’ll be a project for next weekend.

I also added RSS feeds for each of the topics. There are some bugs, but for the most part it works. One problem? There are some illegal characters that need to be encoded. I tried to fix this, but I think I was too tired to think clearly and get it right. Again, this will have to be a next weekend project.

Oh, and I adjusted the ranking a bit for each of the stories listed. Some people were commenting that older, active stories were staying on the top of the list for too long. I increased the weighting that “pulls” older stories down the page. Hopefully that’ll help.

One last thing: Layne experimented with adding advertising to the pages. Some approaches looked OK, although, it was easy to create ads that are too overwhelming. It’s going to take some thought to get a better mix. I’m not sure anyway if advertising is the way to go right now anyway. There are so many other issues to work out and frankly there aren’t enough readers yet to make it all that worthwhile. Layne’s a better judge of that, however.

And lastly, I’ve gotten some feedback on the “thredr” domain name. Many people don’t get it. The name is too obtuse or hard to pronounce or confusing. Yeah, the problem is there aren’t very many short, one or two syllable domain names available that only cost a couple dollars :-). We’re cheap.

I decided to move the Tablet PC conversations “down a level” on thredr.com. Now when you go to the default html page on the server, you get a generic page which lets you pick which category of conversations you want to check out.

In the prior version you’d go directly to the Tablet PC conversations list. Sorry for the extra click.

Guy Kawasaki and the Truemors team released a new aggregator service today, called Alltop.com, which lists the top five most recent headlines from a variety of leading sites which are divided up into categories, such as celebrities, politics, and sports.

To me, the headlines are made interesting mostly because of the list of sites that are tracked in Alltop. Because the sites they include are quite active, they can give you a good snapshot of what’s going on right now. There’s more to it than that, however. In some ways, it’s also a recommendation engine: “Here are the sites we think you should consider if you’re interested in topic XYZ.” I’m sure people digging for new, fruitful sites to visit will enjoy stopping by Alltop.

Now, all of this is different than what Bob and I have been working on with thredr. Our system leans more to a TechMeme-like strategy where the most “active conversations” or “threads” are brought to the top of the list. There’s “editorializing” if you will in terms of which sites/feeds are tracked and what the ranking algorithm does, but other than that, like Alltop and TechMeme, it can run unattended. We’re also reaching out to more content than just blogs and news sites. For instance, we’re including YouTube videos and (as of now) a small set of forums.

Another difference with TechMeme (and it appears AllTop for that matter) is that we’re focusing on smaller sets of content (micro-conversations), which brings up its own issues. Fewer feeds mean fewer connections, which can lead to more brittleness if not careful–or boring results. It also means the architecture can be quite different and in fact lends itself to other features which we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks.

I like the looks of AllTop. They’re way ahead of what we’ve been doing and I look forward to seeing how it works out. We only have a development server running at this time and lots of code to write before we sleep. :-) 

Long time Microsoft Tablet team member and now MSDN/Windows developer center owner, Eliot Graff, is blogging. No idea if he will be blogging about Tablet PCs, but he does include the term in his title and tags. I’ll be watching to see if any good tidbits appear in his postings.

Welcome to the blogosphere!

Is this going to be one more thing?

[Via www.thredr.com/apple.html

Lora just asked, “How do you pronounce ‘thredr’ as in thredr.com?”

It’s pronounced the same as “threader.” Yeah, we know it’s missing an ‘a’ and an ‘e.” But what’s a couple of vowels among friends?

I think I’ve found my favorite way to browse the Tablet PC/UMPC conversations list: on an iPhone.

My first stab at it was less than satisfying. The page was too small. Turns out there was an easy fix. All we had to do was add the following meta tag to each html page, which tells Safari how to scale the page in relation to size of the screen:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″/>

With this simple addition, pages now scale nicely so that by default the text is readable. I just tried taking some pictures of the iPhone showing the conversations list, but I don’t have a good setup yet, so instead I’m using the iPhoneTest.com iPhone emulator here and taking screenshots from it. (Be sure to use the Safari browser for best results.)

Here’s the Tablet PC list as of this evening much like it appears on the actual iPhone:

The Tablet PC conversation list is currently the default page on the server, but it’s also available as: http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.

What’s really cool and convenient is setting up a home-screen icon for the page so you can get to it with a single tap after powering on the iPhone. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Safari browser from the home screen by tapping on the Safari icon.
2. Tap on the url edit box in the browser and enter:
http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.
3. Then tap on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen and in the pick list that appears select the “Add to Home Screen” option.
4. You will then be asked to give this bookmark a name. I use “Tablet PC,” but any short name will do.

That’s it. Now when you go to the home screen you’ll see an extra icon that looks like a bit of zoomed out text with the bookmark name that you entered in the last step.

Now when you want to check what’s going on in the Tablet/UMPC world, you just pick up your iPhone, wake it up and tap on your custom icon. This brings up Safari with the conversations list ready to scroll through. Did I mention it’s addicting to use your fingers to flick through lists on the iPhone? Well, it is. At least for me.

Now as I’ve mentioned before, we’re working on a couple other custom micro-conversation lists too. There’s one that tracks Apple talk at http://www.thredr.com/apple.html. It looks like this on the iPhone:

As you can see in this screenshot, the conversation threader supports YouTube videos. When one appears you can tap on the link to watch it–although on the iPhone not all videos are available because they have to be re-encoded for the iPhone video format. There’s no Flash as of yet on the iPhone.

Well, here’s one other list that I have added to my iPhone home screen: http://www.thredr.com/msdev.html. It tracks a wide variety of Microsoft-oriented developers. (We still have many more to add to the watch list, but there are some good ones already.) Anyway, what better way to monitor what’s going on with Microsoft developers than on an iPhone :-).

What makes the iPhone so great for checking a list like this? It’s quick and easy to get to it. Waking up the iPhone or powering it up from a cold start is fast and getting to the page is only two or so taps away. The slow part will be downloading the content if on the EVDO network, but for the most part that’s not too bad. Plus it’s easy to flick through the content by sliding a finger up and down the page. And if the content is too small, it scales up nicely in landscape mode. Just flip the phone sideways.

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could flick the page side to side to switch topics :-). (Probably would be too slow on an EVDO network, but it would be cool.)

For some reason I’ve been unable to access the dev server we’ve been using for the Tablet conversation tracker, so we decided to set up a second dev server. You can see this one at: http://www.thredr.com. We’ll be updating the contents on both sites for awhile as we work through bugs, but this second server means that if you don’t like what you see on the other server, you can check out this one instead :-).