The problem with Blogging: how do you link out?
The problem with blogging is bloggers have no certain understanding of what are the dimensions for fair aggregation or curation. Let us look at this problem in three parts:
1. What is the ideal way of linking out? I think when you summarize someone else's post in a couple of lines and giving a link in between is the ideal way of linking out.
Some bloggers who are enthusiastic about certain topics, may summarize big blog posts using bullet lists or, as Valleywag did it with its
"100 word versions". This is okay too.
However, there are bloggers and websites who go to the extreme.
2. Can sites that send traffic excerpt whatever they want?Big sites like BoingBoing, AllthingsDigital or most prominently, Huffington Post excerpt huge amounts from a post. The underlying implication behind these is
we are doing you a favor by sending you traffic". This idea of self-importance is a big problem and many
bloggers are unhappy with the rampant scraping.
When big name bloggers pick up big parts of your post, an example
here, so much so that their readers think the big name blogger has written that, this becomes a problem. Jason Kottke has written about this in detail
here.
3. What are other aggregators doing?Sites like Google News, Slashdot, Digg or Fark take a news item, and other than Google News, which is automated,
put up a nice headline, add a one/two line summary and in case of Slashdot, a short juicy excerpt.All the new media gurus are singing praises of curation as being the future of online news and I think these aggregators are showing us the way to link out.
What do you think? How do you link out?
Labels: news 2.0, news aggregators
Local News from Google: Bighow Local Lite?
Following Topix.com, Google News now allows you to search for local news by punching in your Zip code or locality. The announcement from Google
says,
We’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources.
But, using Zip codes to search for stuff does not come naturally to us and Geo Coding of all the news sources in the world is in its infancy.
I haven't been posting on this blog for almost a month now.
Reason: I am moving across the country looking for people to put some seed funding into Bighow, which takes a two-pronged approach to aggregation and publishing.
So far, no progress and I think that is because I don't have a programmer since October 2007. No team, no money.
For example of better news aggregation, may I suggest these links from an unfinished Bighow.com?
Work on Bighow.com stopped while we were working on the publishing end. Work on automatic aggregation is next on the work list, along with 100 other items. :-)
Note: Being the only active tester of Bighow.com, the pages have not been since December 2007.
Bighow Countrieshttp://bighow.com/country/USA
Bighow Citieshttp://bighow.com/city/San%20Fransisco
Bighow Localhttp://bighow.com/local/Janakpuri
Bighow Groupshttp://bighow.com/group/Actually%20Useful%20Technology
Bighow Tags: Best of 2007http://bighow.com/news/tags/Best%20of%202007
Bighow Listshttp://bighow.com/news/tag/type/List
Bighow Tags: Best of 2008http://bighow.com/news/tags/Best%20of%202008
Bighow Tags: Worst of 2007http://bighow.com/news/tags/Worst%20of%202007
At its core, Bighow is a multi-platform,
'Publishing cum Aggregation' tool using which we plan to have a global news network of bookmarkers and reporters.
The future of news depends on quality aggregation, a promise for which I shall fight on.
Labels: bighow, google, news aggregators
How to be an Ego Blogger
There are three main ways, people make money with blogging. In brief, there are:
1. The Niche Blogger (problogger.net, digitalinspiration.com). In web 2.0 reportage field, Techcrunch has a big lead over many aspiring blogs, and is followed at some distance by readwriteweb.com, mashable.com, venturebeat.com, which are all readable blogs on web 2.0.
2. The Spam Blogger/network of blogs filled with rewritten material and optimized for maximum adsense earnings.
Too many to be named on one page.
3. The A-lister/Pundit Blogger, where you make money based on your accumulated reputation, through a variety of online/offline extensions.
Now, many people don’t have the relevant field expertise and general peer-respect that people like Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer enjoy.
I have seen many people who are in the so-called A-list of bloggers because they were the first to blog.
Aided by geography, some bloggers live in certain places that are humming with other voices eager to connect and are helped further by ingratiating aggregators like Techmeme.
Some people among these A-listers got there by chance and have discovered, just like the SEO guys figured out Google, that making a noise around you is perhaps the easiest way to remain in the news, that is, the currency of links keeps on flowing for these smarty pants.
These are the Ego Bloggers.So, if joining the A-list of the blogosphere is your kind of thing, being an Ego Blogger is the way to go.
How do you become an Ego Blogger and join the ranks of self-obsessed/navel gazing, mutually back-scratching group of pundits?
Follow this simple 7-course path.
Follow again and again until you have done it.
1. Catch on the back of a rising star and use it to promote yourself.Robert Scoble resurrected his flagging post-microsoft blogging career with his
exploits on Facebook, which was the rising star of 2007. There were some others who rode on Twitter's back.
2. Do something outrageous. Call people names and benefit from resulting useless linkfest on Techmeme.
Sadly, for this you have to be on the A-list. The question is: how low can you go?
3. Insert your name in as many things as possible.For your consideration, the 'mememe(put your name here) awards/predictions/index'
4. Start with praising these great people on their blogs and in your posts.
Hopefully, they will award you with a link. Warning: chances of success with this are very. very low.
5. Do some coding and photoshop magic and start by announcing you have received 100,000 page views in the past two days (Don't forget to put this on Digg as well).
6. Follow Techmeme throughout the day.Not only, you will be following a time-honored A-lister tradition, you might get some story pointers as well.
7. If all else fails, move to San Fransisco, if New York is too far.Together, these two cities form the Twin Capitals of the Blogosphere.
Somebody should put all the blogs on Technorati Too 100 and the Techmeme Leaderboard on a map and then we will know more on this.
Labels: blogging, news aggregators, techmeme, tip
Are aggregators like Techmeme making us dumb?
The dumbing down of the blogosphere is already under way. General purpose, mass-led aggregators like Digg are no better than a young techie male's’ version of a supermarket tabloid. Reddit started strong with politics but is not fast going under with Ron Paul fans and NSFW pics. Del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool is better but, as is the case with all aggregators, searching for the best in the latest takes effort.
Google News does not give you great news. Essays and opinions are sparse and most headlines are pure pile ons.
Speaking about
pile ons, I was pretty enthusiastic when Gabe Reviera’s Techmeme came on the scene, promising to point to the crème-de-la crème of online tech writing (Techmeme, aka Memeorandum has its sister sites for celebs, politics and sports). For a while it was convenient reading the latest deep think about technology and business.
Then I started writing for my own blog in October 2006 and at first I was thrilled to notice 4-5 (never more) footfalls from Techmeme and then I discovered that because I had inadvertently chosen a link already present on Techmeme and had taken time to comment, I think it was a post by Om Malik, that the Gabe Rivera’s algorithm determined that I was ‘someone’ and I must say it wasn’t flattering.
The first response of any budding blogger would have been to comment and link to Techmeme regulars like crazy but I soon found that barring a few writers, most of the stuff on Techmeme was, well, drivel – product launches, service improvements, A-listers grappling with each others for no other reason than “look at me! I am important!”.
These days, I find few new things to write about. The idea of commenting on Big Bloggers to garner attention never appealed to me and I am not proud that I did this for the first few months while blogging.
Besides, I have less times to
'opine'.
During times that the Valley deems to be earth-shattering, iPhone launch, Facebook, earnings report for the big three, you saw nothing but
pile ons – a glorified version of Google news.
The point is I found less valuable stuff to read on Techmeme than in my own RSS reader. It is a playground for a select few, among whom people who do provide insight can be counted on my left hand fingers. Among the regulars on Techmeme, people have started painting them as being in the bed with PR people.
Todd Cochrane writes about
how they are gaming the whole elite blogger concept :
…a recent post on TechCrunch.com achieved a top listing on TechMeme.com only after 3 other sites had linked in to the story. While I watched that story grow to have nearly 25 sites linking to it the long tail effect is a Public Relations Managers dream.
You have an “A” list site like TechCrunch that rarely writes a negative review, you then have a auxiliary base of 25–100 blogs that link to the same review as their sourced material. Than Google comes around and indexes all the sites.
What you have just achieved is a #1 spot in the Google Search Results for an article on a product update or new site release. While this is not PayPerPost it is definitely “Public Relations Gaming” of the Tech Blogging community.
So,
can there be a possibility that some so-called A-listers have made deals with SEOs and PR people? I don’t know but I support Todd’s contention that we should move back to our RSS readers for a better understanding of the news.
It is better to have a lot of good essayists and analysts (Jupiter Research, Kelsey Group) in your RSS reader.
If you can’t get a good night’s sleep without a dose from the aggregators, may I suggest popurls.com (better variety – Metafilter, Slashdot, digg, etc.) or your choice of from Origianlsignal’s bouquets of sources?
And for all you Techmeme fans, stop linking to Techmeme regulars. As it is, there is no way you are going to earn a living from deep think blogging and that means
you must not let others (A-listers and PR people) benefit from your labors as well.
A short guide to the perplexed to differentiate from the good and bad on Techmeme:The good onesNick Carr, Dave Winer, Shirky, Cringely
Tech BusinessGiga Om, Valleywag, Center Networks, Techdirt, Slashdot
The attention whores/self promotersCalacanis, Scoble
The Banal (aka Press Release/pay per post)Techcrunch, Product news
The Facebook GangDave Mcclure, NYT (and hordes of desperate application developers)
Labels: news aggregators, social news, techcrunch, techmeme
Techmeme’s leaderboard: A-listers, rejoice!
Techmeme has introduced something called the
Leaderboard, which will list 100 sources that had the most number of headlines appearing on the Techmeme homepage for the past month.
This new leaderboard is positioned squarely against Technorati’s Top 100 blog list, which has long been an indicator of blogging influence, and includes blogs who have attracted 3700 links during the past 6 months.
There are some who say that ranking bloggers on the basis of links is not ok.
Links can be bought, managed, whatever…
There there are people who will point out that
many top bloggers enjoy the first-mover advantage and rankings like
Technorati Top 100 and now Techmeme’s Leaderboard don’t reflect true and original opinion of the blogosphere.
Come to think of it: When Gabe Reviera, who founded Techmeme, came up with his indexes for his chain of selective topic aggregators, he must surely would have taken into account the Technorati Top 100 list (advantage no 1 for existing bloggers) and his own preferences (advantage no. 2 for silicon valley types and other sources).
Aggregators are never perfect.
This ‘A-lister upon A-lister’ arrangement leaves little scope for new voices and opinions to break in.
Chances are if a blogger wrote about the problems the iPhone had wouldn’t have made a blip on Techmeme’s homepage unless that blogger happens to be from Giozmodo, Engadget, Crunchgear and other and I don’t mean these aren’t fine blogs.
This A-list Economy forces writers, including this poor hack to take something a big-time blogger has written and then add to it, the implications being that your opinion is worth nothing for Techmeme and its type unless you toe somebody’s line.
That’s the A-listers’ tax most bloggers have to pay in order to be noticed.
There is always a gatekeeper and the gatekeeper has different shades for different people.
People will contend that only ‘original’ A-listers have something valuable to say and then maybe small bloggers like
yours ruefully will decide not to write so much and not to suck up to anyone anymore.
Aggregators be damned.
Related Reading:
Rules of the Superstar EconomyDownsides of the A-list pheneomenon: Link Bait is easyA-Listers: Navel Gazing dies hardLabels: news 2.0, news aggregators, techmeme
Newspapers, go Digg yourself
A Cover story in the Economist was titled, "Who Killed the Newspapers?"
No one did. The papers killed themselves.
Like Ostriches with their heads stuck in stuck in sand, they see nothing but darkness brought out by Google News, in other words the newspapers CEOs are too lazy to put on their thinking hats.It wouldn't be a bad idea to
outsource the newspapers' CEO's jobs to India, China, Philipines, Eastern Europre and what have you.
The
recent deal done by 4 wire services with Google News is a stab in the back for the papers. The wire services get some money from Google for displaying news and are promised ad revenue from resulting traffic as well - the fee part is okay, but no one is making big Google ad money except some enterprising bloggers and blog networks.
Now, newspapers will be stuck with
'second hand' news wire stories and with huge salaries budgets to boot.
The only out is to be creative about generating advertising from online services:
For starters, they can
form an AP-like cooperative again and create something like
'Digg for the best News Writing for the day' - having the best of both worlds, Digg-like user freedom (free to vote, free to comment) free to submit their own content and Newspaper like
editorial curation - this can be a contender in the face of Google news. the stories are better and the aggregation (& story piling) is meaningful.
Despite its weaknesses, Digg is popular because it sends traffic to submitters, provided the stories are good (some Gaming doesn't harm at all)
It is another matter that the traffic seldom results in ad revenue and so the papers will have to find creative ways to generate advertising - the Guardian model of
'Dailycandy Style Special Offer from the paper' are a way to start.
If you need more validation: Recently, British Papers were reported to have increased their American readership.
The reason?: A big part of the traffic was sent by DrudgeReport.com, which is one of the pioneering aggregators.
News Indexing is hot and newspapers ought to get in it.
Digg, Drudge Report, Guardian - there is a solution in there somewhere.
Related MediaVidea StoriesBloggers' Page as the new Op-Ed pageDigg Bashing: A RoundupWhat if Top Digg Users were all JournalistsLabels: Digg, news 2.0, news aggregators, social news
Google News & Comments: Google’s smart ploy to please news publishers
Google News, the
favorite whipping boy of ostrich/ignorant news publishers, has found a way to keep the blow-hards happy.
Soon, a closed group of participants, basically all who are mentioned in the news story can publish their replies on news appearing on Google News, adding clarifications and what have you.
Here’s what the
Google news team has to say about this decidedly
Web 1.0 move,
"We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report."
Michael Arrington calls it
Google’s Hypocrisy, walling off comments for normal users. (which reminds me to ask Michael about accepting my comments on Techcrunch)
Josh Catone avers,
Rather than encouraging an open discussion on news topics, Google is perpetuating a closed debate between newsmakers and journalists. And they're using a clunky, slow medium (email) to do it.
Quoting Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Danny Sullivan
writes,
Since there's going to be valuable information in these comments, shouldn't Google open these pages up to others to crawl, as Gabe Rivera from Techmeme urges?
The PR bonanza Danny asks a more important question:
Are public relations firms considered "participants" in a story, if they represent someone or some company mentioned?
Echoing Danny’s views, vis-à-vis PR guys, John Murrell suggests that we might soon witness a
boom in PR hiring.
Google sets its own rules. Only Google can decide what is okay and what is not.
The new comments move, promising to give 'voice' to PR guys, suggests that Google has succeeded where Federated Media failed with its brand of “conversation”, where it tried to use the services of A-list bloggers to
‘spokesblog’ for Microsoft.
With its latest move, Google has made the PR guys happy, forcing some of them to make delirious judgments - you will also understand why I don’t give a hoot for what PR blogger Steve Rubel thinks. If Google did venture into
original content, putting ‘Walled Comments’ would be a pretty lame way to do it.
It will be far easier and useful if it hired some good editors from these complaining news organizations, getting them to select, submit and moderate a
better version of Digg, running on top of Google News, taking into account Google Reader stats as well.
Related Mediavidea posts on Google NewsHow Google can Gobble DiggWhat would we do without the News IndexesCliffnotes on News 2.0 for Sam ZellComing Soon: Old Media' s last standLooking for the future of newsLabels: controversey, google, news 2.0, news aggregators
A cliffnotes on news 2.0 for Sam Zell
Sam Zell might have made his billions in the real estate business, he knows exactly what the RIAA people knew about the net, nothing.
He is making the same old useless
tirade about the search engines stealing the papers’ content.
A quick primer for Mr. Zell:
1. The aggregators/news search engines do not carry ads.
2. The aggregators/news search engines help bring traffic to the news sites.
3. The aggregators/news search engines help readers make informed decisions by showing up a broad choice of headlines on a particular story. Why are you afraid when you can boast of quality. If you are not for quality or exclusiveness, how long do you thing you can survive in the news business?
4. There are a million (maybe more) news outlets in the online world. How do you guess readers will come to your site?
5. Every reader is also a news publisher.
6. Google does not make much money stealing others’ content. Maybe , he can start with reading this
guide from Seomoz.Update (10/4/2207)Donna Bogatin writes that
Google News is NOT newspaper driven, meaning its core business is search.
I forgot to mention that Google news also includes
blogs and other small news sites, which are thankful for the traffic.
Labels: news 2.0, news aggregators
Topix.net becomes Topix.com and follows Wikia’s path
Topix.net is undergoing a change, involving that much-hyped word, citizen journalism. This change process could easily be termed as "
How Topix ditched a working .net address and got a personality..."
Topix.net was basically an aggregator of news from over 50,000 sources, claiming to cover 500,000 topics. Like other aggregators based on clustering (Google News, Techmeme) Topix touted its own special algorithmic sauce.
Moreover, it searched for news and classifieds on a ZIP code basis.
However, the only success Topix may have had was the Topix Forum service. People were still not sure about the effectiveness of the 500,000 topic pages.
One problem with the topic pages is that the news is often not up to the mark. The pages were not great like Techmeme which uses lesser sources and is more interesting to read. For example, look for Social software news in Topix and you will find what I mean - boring and often stale news.
There was no personality. Your RSS reader worked better.
Moreover, the claim to cover 500,000 topics is redundant. Google News and Yahoo News can search more than that in their news index but they do not advertise this.
Rich Skrenta and his group at Topix have decided to change things and come up with what else, but a copy of Wikia.com’s model – open source/citizen journalism pages for every zip code in Topix database. With this, Topix aims to drive its commenters onto local pages.
These ‘community-edited blogs’ will be supplemented by the ‘roboblogger’ concept, where automatic aggregation populates a city page if citizen bloggers are not coming in large number.
Now
why didn’t all other local news sites think of this? If citizen contributions are not coming in, hack your RSS reader - aggregate and populate the pages.
All this will be
ad-supported by Adsense. However, for Topix, the words will be limited to town or community names, enabling local businesses to get valu for money.
However, I am not sure things will be that easy. Commenting freely on topic pages is one thing – writing news items for the local town blog is other.
Plus, what about revenue sharing? For example, when I comment on other sites I am aware that the site owner gets to benefit from my efforts. However, when I write a story, I may expect something in return. On Wikia.com, the new submitter can at least remove his articles and pots them elsewhere.
Topix ought to spend some of that $15 million VC money on citizen journalists and give the faltering movement a proverbial 'shot in the arm'.
The fight between man and software is not over yet. We still have to see a mix of Google and Techmeme’s automatic ranking algorithm and NYT’s journalistic brain.
Labels: citizen journalism, news aggregators
