www.josschuurmans.com

Dugg: The world's 50 most powerful blogs | The Observer

The Observer published this article on March 9, 2008, describing 50 popular and influential blogs.

"(...) blogging has never been bigger. (...) Here are the 50 best reasons to log on (...)"

(Via Charlie Schick, who made a nice rough analysis of the topics covered by these influential blogs, as well as their starting dates)

From those 50 blogs listed, I think I will consider feeding the following set to my RSS reader:

#3. Techcrunch

"(...) Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry. Founder Michael Arrington (...)"

#4. Kottke

"(...) One of the early wave of blogging pioneers, web designer Jason Kottke started keeping track of interesting things on the internet as far back as 1998. (...)"

#13. Treehugger

"(...) Treehugger is a green consumer blog with a mission to bring a sustainable lifestyle to the masses. Its ethos, that a green lifestyle does not have to mean sacrifice, and its positive, upbeat feel have attracted over 1.8m unique users a month. (...)"

#25. Mashable

"(...) Founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, Mashable is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and countless lesser-known social-networking sites and services, with a special emphasis on functionality. (...)"

#33. Crooked timber

"(...) With a title pulled from Immanuel Kant's famous statement that 'out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made', it's an amalgam of academic and political writing that has muscled its way into the epicentre of intelligent discussion since its conception in 2003. (...)"

#50. Copyblogger

"(...) founded in 2006 (...) Swelling with advice on online writing, it's an essential tool for anyone trying to make themselves heard online, whether commenting on a discussion board or putting together a corporate website. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Conversation with Memetracker developer Kevin Burton | Robert Scoble

"(...) Kevin Burton is a talented developer who has worked on a variety of startups already including Rojo, and now TailRank which he started to be able to see what bloggers were talking about. Here I sit down with him for an interesting conversation in the lobby of San Francisco's Palace Hotel. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: LunchMeet: Tracking Memes with Tailrank | Eddie Codel

Eddie Codel "(...) sat down with Kevin Burton, Tailrank's CEO and founder, and Jonathan Moore, brilliant engineer and hacker, at their home office to learn a bit about their services. Tailrank [and] Spinn3r. (...)"

read more | digg story

The End of Channels?

Summary: The two aspects of social media that I'd like to view as qualitative departures from the past are: (1) 'The Dilution of Channels' in that online conversations happen all over the place; and (2) 'The Wisdom of the Crowd', social software helping people navigate their way through online conversations.

[ADDITION, October 26, 2007: I've added one more charasteristic to the social media mix: (3) 'Participation'. See also the addition towards the end of this post]

My local professional communicators' association wishes to pick my brain on "social media". So it's about time I captured the concept in writing.

The media have, of course, always been "social". Any form of human communication (where there are messages sent by senders and processed by receivers) is social. The Internet is a disruptive technology that accelerates certain properties of everything social, in particular human communication, including what we call "the media". In other words, to some extent "social media" is a pleonasm.

Also the Internet has always been a social space.

For homework I Googled the term. The Wikipedia entry, Robert Scoble's entry, and some other references I found seem to position "social media" mainly as something that has more "capacity" than "traditional media": online means faster and more immediate, easier to interact with, easy to copy and share, unlimited space...

Quantitative or qualitative?

Are we really talking about quantitative differences only? Or should we make some qualitative distinctions as well?

The concept of "conversation" as in the Long Tail of Conversations

I'm preparing to have a conversation (okay, a presentation) at the MindTrek 2007 Conference in Tampere, Finland, early October. My topic is to do with the Long Tail of Conversations, and how we might connect people to the conversations across the Long Tail distribution graph that matter most to them.

(I was kinda getting there in one of my previous posts: 'Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations'.)

When I submitted my draft conversation (ok, yes, presentation), one of the organizers asked me to elaborate on my understanding of the concept of "conversation". That was really good feedback, because it caused me to realize that I was using the term in different ways for different purposes, and it forced me to think about defining them better.

So here we go, sketchy at best:

Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations

Excerpt: Where do you think creativity and innovation is born? And where do you think that the best-match conversations about the things you are interested in are taking place? The answer is: in Long Tail conversations!

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Whoa, I just noticed on Technorati that it's Doc Searls' birthday today. Happy "round" birthday, Doc! (I just celebrated my 40th on 070707)]

Not perfectly sure how and why Doc Searls associates my excerpts from the Cluetrain Manifesto with Ben Peters' talk about close reading of text (particularly since I haven't heard Ben's talk), but I hope he means he can see that I've read the cluetrain closely  :-)

Doc: "1) I haven't read the book in years;"

I was somewhat suprised to read that, although surely the contents of the book are so much part of Doc's being that in practice, he may never really feel the need to go back and look things up. (I do.)

A use case for monitoring

(Photo by LeoL30)

Here's a use case for monitoring. I have to admit it was a mere coincidence that I noticed David Sifry's 'State of the Blogosphere' so shortly after he'd published it in the middle of the night of February 6.

This is an important conversation, I thought, and so I wanted to join in swiftly, while it was fresh. Passionately I read and re-read his piece, made some interpretations of my own and contributed two blog entries on the topic of Blogosphere growth, one immediately and another one the next week:

Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down? (February 6, 2006)

Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)

I was looking forward to part 2, but it caught me by surprise. David published it on February 13, and I noticed it only the next day. I blogged my comments as fast as I could, and dropped my first line on David's post after 26 hours. In the end I wrote two blog posts:

The Green Slider, a nifty piece of usability engineering (February 15, 2006)

David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle' (February 20, 2006)

So, what I would really like next time is: to be the first to know when David Sifry posts his 'State of the Blogosphere' piece. Now, I could of course drop David a line, but what I'm really looking for is a tool that alerts me, specifically for this purpose, by email or even SMS.

I don't think A Google Alert is going to cut it, as the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low. A Technorati watchlist? What happened to Spyonit?

So the use case is: I know something is going to happen (on the Web). I don't know when, but I want to be the very second person to know. Even if it's in the middle of the night - you can wake me up for it. But no noise please, only signal.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle' (February 20, 2006)
• Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)
• Google Alerts serve The Long Tail (February 1, 2006)

Technorati Tags: Blogosphere, monitoring, news, search, alerts, watchlists

David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle'

I suppose Technorati is mainly concerned with the metrics and search side of all things Blogosphere. Technorati helps people find information, rather then helping them create blog content or get their voices heard in Blogosphere conversations.

Still, In the second part of his 'State of the Blogosphere' (part 1 here), Technorati's founder and CEO David Sifry briefly touches upon the challenges that individual bloggers may have in attracting attention. What he offers, really, is nothing less than... hope :-P

He basically pep-talks people into blogging, offering the perspective of becoming part of 'The Magic Middle'. That's Technorati speak for the realm of 155,000 bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. By publishing regularly and with consistent quality, this is an achievable goal for many bloggers, David seems to suggest.

Well, it feels like a bit of a Catch 22, doesn't it? The Magic Middle makes up about 1.1 percent of those 13.7 million blogs that we could call "alive" (since 13.5 million blogs out of the total 27.2 blogs that Technorati tracks have been dead for at least three months).

Something tells me that, if enough average bloggers reach the 20-links benchmark, it will be lifted in order to keep the Magic Middle at around one percent of the blog population.

Still, David gives us two straws to clutch at. First, there is a particular quality to The Magic Middle:

"(...) "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music - these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing. (...)"

Translation: it's worth trying to get there.

The second argument is that, although - yes - network effects and a power law relationship do exist in the Blogosphere, the importance of these mechanisms should not be overestimated:

"(...) There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content. (...)"

"(...) [T]he number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak. (...)"

Funny thing is, as it happens, I'm not so worried about the amount of attention to my blog. I'm more concerned with the quality of the attention. The way the Blogosphere should really work is that, if your blog entry adds value to a particular conversation, it should surface in that conversation. So it's not about your position on the head or the tail; it's about whether the Long Tail works as it is supposed to.

If your contribution adds value to the conversation and, as a result, the whole conversation moves a little further up the tail and towards the head, then that may be a nice by-product. But for many niche conversations, even this will not be the most pressing objective.

The most promising technology is technology that helps The Long Tail function.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, David Sifry, Long Tail, Magic Middle, Blogosphere, authority

The Green Slider, a nifty piece of usability engineering

In part 2 of his 'State of the Blogosphere' (part 1 here), Technorati's founder and CEO David Sifry illustrates how Blogsphere growth contributes to information overload as one of the big challenges of our times.

Then he introduces new Technorati tools, including a nifty usability feature, The Green Slider, which offer views to conversations in the blogosphere through filtered levels of "authority".

His point about information overload may be somewhat blasé, but is therefore absolutely spot-on:

"(...) In a world of over 50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day, keeping on top of and in tune with the most interesting and influential people and topics is the new frontier beyond search. (...)"

While I keep entertaining the opinion that collaborative filtering or some other form of artificial intelligence will be the key to hyper-personalized news selection, the logical evolutionary step towards this ideal is currently taking shape as a combination of tagging, social bookmarking, link popularity, rating and ranking.

David articulates conventional wisdom when it comes to filtering information:

"(...) People often ask, "what blogs should I read?" And often times a good answer is, "you should read the posts from the leading blogs in topics that of interest you. Blog Finder and Explore make this possible for the first time on a wide variety of topics--- and in so doing we hope will the blgosphere more approachable, useful, and comprehensible to more people than ever before. (...)"

Actually, I find the authority filter that David introduces much more interesting than Technorati's Blog Finder or Explore features. I fail to see how the latter are much different from regular tag or category searches, with results ranked by link popularity and chronology.

But yes, the authority filter seems promising. As David describes it:

"(...) [It] is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. (...)"

"(...) I've found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like "George Bush" or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance," David adds. "I find that it often helps me to also answer the question, "Who is the most influential blogger talking about XXX this week, and what did she say?" (...)"

If nothing else, at least it's a rather nifty little usability feature, that green slider!

[UPDATE, Feb.15, 07:42 Finnish time:]
Couple of interesting comments on David's post:

• Easton Ellsworth sees the green slider as a better advanced search: "(...) Rather than make users go to an "advanced search" form to enter a given threshold number of links, you just let them slide up and down between blogs with more and less incoming links. (...)"
• George Nimeh asks: "(...) As defined, doesn't the "authority meter" reinforce the status quo and favor the existing A-list? (...)"
• Editor B: "(...) The current slider prejudicially favors "authoritative" blogs by including them at all the lesser levels.  I can't filter them out (...) [W]hy not offer the option to see *only* posts with "little authority"? (...)"

[UPDATE ENDS]

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)
• A business model for collaboratively filtered news? (February 8, 2006)
• Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down? (February 6, 2006)

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Blogosphere, search, authority, information overload, filtering, usability

Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead?

One more thing that struck me when reading David Sifry's first part of the 'State of the Blogosphere': "13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created," David writes, and also: "Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs."

He concludes: "[E]ven though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity."

That's an optimistic interpretation. Do these figures mean, however, that about half of the 27.2 million blogs that Technorati tracks, or (27.2 - 13.7 =) 13.5 million, are dead?

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down? (February 6, 2006)
• Rashmi Shinha's cognitive analysis of tagging (November 28, 2005)
• Technorati's CEO on blogosphere growth (November 24, 2005)

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Blogosphere, dead blogs

Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down?

Blogs are now doubling every 5 and a half months, Technorati's Founder and CEO David Sifry writes in his 'State of the Blogosphere' entry today. Am I correct in concluding that we have a 10 percent "slower" growth today than in October, when David reported blogs were doubling every five months?

If true, this could signal that the exponential blogosphere growth curve may start bending towards an S-curve, familiar from hype phenomena.

David takes the pulse of the blogosphere every once in a while, particularly on the growth of the blogosphere, based on the weblogs that his company tracks.

He did so previously on October 17, 2005 (on which I blogged in November), on August 1, 2005, on March 14, 2005, and on October 10, 2004.

David's observations in summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Rashmi Shinha's cognitive analysis of tagging (November 28, 2005)
• Technorati's CEO on blogosphere growth (November 24, 2005)
• BusinessWeek: 'Blogs Will Change Your Business' (May 16, 2005)