The Buzz Bots Brouhaha and Other Empty Statistics

On Tuesday, ReadWriteWeb and a number of other tech blogs (including Mashable) stirred themselves into a tizzy around a report from social media measurement firm PostRank, who reported that almost 90 percent of content in Google Buzz, the company's nascent social network, came from news feeds and other non-native sources. Their self-congratulatory conclusions, kicking dirt on the service which hasn't hardly had a chance to grasp for air following body blow after body blow after a stumble out of the gate around privacy, came with phrases saying Buzz had "fallen short of capturing the hearts and minds of the social web", and another, "Much of Buzz’s content may be hand-crafted — it just doesn’t originate on Buzz."

Oh dear! What a terrible thing! Prepare the wake! I would be honored to act as a pallbearer, if given the opportunity.

PostRank's data served only one purpose - to count the total number of entries from all individual services being aggregated by the downstream collection service (Buzz). It is no secret, and I don't think anybody has successfully ever argued against it, that every single network that has the potential to import Twitter entries can easily be dominated by updates from that service. It was true with FriendFeed. It is true with Ecademy. It can be true with Facebook, depending on who you follow, and there is also that potential with Buzz. Twitter entries are light, easy, and update often. Even the most avid bloggers post more entries to Twitter than they do on their own site - as they post their own blog entries in addition to other updates, so it is no surprise that many people see their own feeds dominated by their Twitter. Add in Google Reader shares, which are very well tied in with Buzz, and you can see how this so-called "automated" "bot" behavior can start to ratchet up the stat-o-meter.

But the data (and reporting) was an inch deep, and it very poorly associated the world of automated feeds with the world of automated non-human behavior on other social networks which is nefarious. (Twitter bots, for example)

Aggregation services are built to aggregate data from disparate networks. It's practically their core definition. However, many of them also offer the option to create net new content. Buzz lets you make very detailed blog-like posts if you like. It's a great engine for sharing pictures, or YouTube videos, or simply adding a link from a Web page, and adding your observations. These so-called native entries are what amassed the approximately 10% of all updates seen as non-bot behavior by the survey.

As I mentioned back in March, native entries to Buzz get the most engagement. Some people, such as DeWitt Clinton from Google, make fantastic high quality posts on Buzz, and can get dozens to hundreds of comments. So do native entries from highly-visible people like Robert Scoble, and very active supporters of the community, including svartling and Leo Laporte.

I recognize that the vast majority of my own updates on Buzz are feeds. I love feeds. RSS or Atom, whatever you like, I recognize they are great tools. I will not stop sharing my items from Google Reader on Buzz unless the community goes silent, or tells me to stop - but between my Reader shares and my native blog entries, my own 4 native Buzz entries represent a miniscule 2% of my last 185 Buzz updates (according to Buzz-Charts).

This doesn't mean I haven't supported the platform, and it doesn't mean people are not engaging. In fact, according to the Buzz-Charts site, the last 185 posts received 478 total comments, or between 2 and 3 replies for every single entry. Some got none, and others got much more. But every single share was originated by a human, and every single comment was a so-called native entry.

PostRank surveyed Buzz with the subtlety of a political pollster operating under payment by the Committee to Re-Elect the President. (CREEP) While it may be factual that many people imported their Twitter entries and other automated feeds to Buzz, the Buzz community knows to largely ignore those items, or to not follow those people who are using the service in a poor way.

Real Buzz Data That Shows Real Engagement By Source

Buzz-Charts shows a much different story. In their graph of actual replies (comments) on all entries in Buzz, they found that of 24,584 posts that gained comments, 13,520 of them were native Buzz entries, a full 55%, not the measly 10% created. In second place, Google Reader shares showed 3,978 entries with comments, or 16%. Add on Buzz Mobile's 1,572 active threads (6.4%) and those top three conversation starters represent more than three quarters of all active threads, more than 18,000 of the total 24,000.

In contrast, all those automated Twitter entries that PostRank said was 62% of Buzz? They only had 837 active threads, or just over 3% of active threads. That means more than 90% of all Twitter entries that hit Buzz are ignored. Given you can't really have conversations in Twitter in the same way you can Buzz, and the person's entries already seem disjointed, that's probably just fine.

So we now know the community can self-select and self-filter, and that Buzz users comment on native entries and Google Reader shares more than anything. But let's go back to what a "bot" is anyway.

According to Tweetmeme, that ReadWriteWeb story was retweeted 662 times on Twitter. Is that any different than making a share in Google Reader? Even if a human clicked that button, are those not 662 bot entries into Twitter? In addition, the main RWW feed (@rww) is dominated by entries from TwitterFeed. That very post about Google Buzz bots was fed by a bot to their Twitter account. So the underlying hint of "Buzz loses and Twitter wins" is dead on its face, if this is the measure.

Do I want Twitter updates in my Buzz? Not really. I can go to Twitter for that. Also, in March, I talked about the trend toward disaggregation and putting native data in native sites. There is a huge benefit of getting that right. I took Twitter out of my Buzz for a reason. But Reader shares obviously have a good role in the community, and they are part of my curation activity.

Want to get a real good idea of what is happening on Buzz, with real people? Spend some time with a statistical site that really knows Buzz at http://buzz-stats.appspot.com/. Run your own chart to see if you're as feed-crazy as me, or who the top 100 people are on Buzz for getting replies to their content. PostRank didn't do themselves a service with their shallow report, and neither did the guys who regurgitated their data, and then retweeted it, or let their bots do the dirty work for them.

Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives

If you are the subject of the news, people will judge your actions and how you react to being in the spotlight. If you are the distributor of the news, how you message that news, and how accurately you report that news, will also be dissected. On the Web, especially in our sliver of Silicon Valley, where real time is becoming the standard, analysis of said news is itself happening in real time. From many corners, often from the more technically-oriented folks on the Web, I am seeing discussion around the tech news industry's alleged failings, inaccuracies, and usefulness (or lack thereof). While some of the feedback no doubt has merit, it too comes in simplified form, without offering potential solutions, taking into account how the creators and publishers of this tech news blogosphere are incentivized and rewarded.

On Sunday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, as he often does, started a discussion around what he termed "fast food content", saying that "hand crafted content is dead", summarizing a piece that lamented sites which steal content without attribution, and more darkly, sites that employ people to rewrite others' content, without adding anything new or doing "real reporting", the kind one learns in journalism class, or is required to do when working for a "dead tree" newspaper or magazine.

Given Mike's focus, running one of the more widely read tech news sites on the Web, his concerns lie around those who borrow much of his and his writers' content and publish it as their own. But I have also given a lot of thought, especially of late, to the vast number of tech news sites and blogs that are out there covering the same stories, and are jostling amongst each other to beat their competition by a few minutes - opting not to win on quality, but instead, on time. In this case, it's often not another tech blog's news that is being borrowed, but official announcements from companies.

One of the easiest things for tech blogs to do is repeat updates from the official blogs of interesting companies, add a few internal links to previous coverage they have done on that topic, add a paragraph or two of analysis, and hit the post button. I've no doubt done it myself over the last few years, even with this self-awareness, but you can see the process unfold practically every day. Watch for phrases like "According to a post on the official Twitter blog..." or "In an update on Google's blog this morning"... as many of the better-known sites all post their own interpretations of the news that came from the top.

This, in my opinion, is the very definition of the "fast food news" Mike is talking about, and time spent both producing it and consuming it could be put to better use - as in these cases, links could serve just as well as full articles.

I am by no means an ombudsman for tech media and the tech news consumer. I am but one person who takes in a lot of content, and produces a little on my own. But I see a few other areas where the tech news engine is falling short for news consumers, news makers and the news authors themselves.

I believe "fast food news" also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the 10th site to report that Twitter got hacked last night didn't really add a lot of value to readers.

In fact, when Twitter did get hacked Thursday night, Mike (again) had a solid post that added information, and, as he gained more knowledge of the incident, he updated the same post multiple times throughout the night. Because he was the first to the scene, with real data, his post had meat, while many, many others that followed were just echoes of the obvious.

So why is this happening? There are a few reasons:

First, the advertising model that forces many sites to drive page views and social interactions, through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter retweets, is turning many tech news sites into post mills, staffed largely by inexpensive writers and freelancers. Instead of deep analysis posts that require interviews, backgrounds, and research, these sites are instead home to excerpts from YouTube, polls, user surveys, and whatever happens to be trending on Twitter that day. Quality is exchanged for quantity.

Second, many of these sites operate under the guise that they are the only site their readers see. Just because one major tech site covered a story 30 minutes before doesn't mean they should assume their readers already know. That is why if you do subscribe to many technology blogs, as I do, you can expect the vast majority of them to report the same story around the same time - instead of choosing a specific focus that can set them apart from the competition.

Third, thanks to competition and personal interactions, not every site likes the others. Years of infighting and annoyances, thanks to individual posts, personalities, or business priorities means that some sites really dislike each other. They won't link to one another. They will ban the competition from their user conferences, and when they aren't taking potshots, they will act like the other doesn't exist. Thus, if the competition "breaks" a story, the other will post it anyway, or try to find a wrinkle that makes their own version of events "improved" or invalidating the other.

Fourth, the rise of aggregation sites makes piling on to the news something that is rewarded. If all competitive blogs have covered a major story, many others will follow suit, be it to get into "discussion" on Techmeme, to see TrackBacks on the originating posts, or to come up when the popular terms are searched for on Twitter, Google and other engines.

In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

That's why you see people like Alex Payne (of Twitter) complain, saying "Rarely does technology journalism produce informed, correct, relevant, and readable content. This is a sorry and damaging state of affairs." in his rant from March (Towards Better Technology Journalism), and why Marco Ament, the lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper creator, this week, wrote: "Over the last few years, I have unsubscribed from nearly every tech-news feed. I have never regretted the decision afterward, and I haven’t missed anything important. Tech news needs help. Badly. It’s truly terrible."

Keep in mind that it's not unexpected for the more technical among us to dislike the way their works are interpreted. Engineering distrusting marketing is practically a requirement and a religion. But we know they are somewhat right. As much as we can complain about the public relations industry as a whole, many flaks often find that their offers for reporters to speak with the CEO or an official representative of the company go without interest, either due to time issues or a lacking skill set. It's always a lot easier just to ask for the press release ahead of time, and an embargo date.

In an ideal world, those who are acting as our news filters would take the extra time necessary to ferret out news before its time, would ask those making the news the questions they didn't want to answer, would understand competitive landscapes, and wouldn't worry about getting a post up in a few minutes to hit a quantity threshold, without it first passing a quality threshold.

Lest we think Alex and Marco are the lone cries for help, you can see other comments this week from The Angry Drunk, and from Google's DeWitt Clinton, who posted to Twitter, "Don't worry. Save some time. Your story doesn't need a shred of truth to it. It will be retweeted just the same." in response not to a tech blog story, but a mainstream media piece that had missed the mark. (He later, in contrast, praised Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for solid reporting)

Content producers need to make choices in terms of what it is they cover, and where their field of expertise lies. If not breaking the news, or having access to the technology elite, there are many other ways to make your voice heard, through analysis and personal use cases, as well as the option to find new stories. Content consumers too have the choice as to where they get their news. I would hope that those people who are being spoon fed repeats of others' original reporting, or are waiting, jaws agape, for recaps of company blog posts, recognize what it is they are really missing.

Given the low cost structure needed to create content, it doesn't look like there is going to be a painful consolidation any time soon. In the meantime, the system is set up to reward those who publish quickly and pile on - for extra effort doesn't bring home the page views. There are going to be pockets of the Web that harbor original ideas, a focus on quality and data, and there are going to be other places where copying, scraping, and shortcuts are going to rule the day. I know what I hope to be. The question is, can we do our part, as publishers and consumers, to somehow reward those that do things right?

Cancer Messed With the Wrong Dude. Drew Is Making It Pay.

In early June, I told you about how my friend Drew Olanoff had encountered some bad news. In what has no doubt been a life-altering experience, Drew was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and scheduled to undergo a series of chemotherapy treatments to take on the illness. At the time, I also told you about his unique strategy to fight back, using #BlameDrewsCancer, a Twitter hashtag and accompanying Web site, to organize the power of social media in his personal quest to give the Big C a big F.

Ten chemo treatments into the promised dozen, Drew is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The doctors have given him a very positive diagnosis, which doesn't mean he's completely put cancer in the rear view mirror, but he has turned the corner. Even when he is feeling the inevitable fatigue, aches, nausea and other side effects of his treatment, he is progressing closer to this specific finish line.

But even if he gets an all clear from the doctors, what cancer didn't realize was that he isn't going to be finished. In the last four months, the #BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon grew from a gimmick to a movement, one that even sported a 24-hour "blame-a-thon" in Philadelphia this September, and a tie-in with the Lance Armstrong-headed charity LIVESTRONG. Drew and the BlameDrewsCancer team have extended their efforts to aid a fellow cancer battler, Ethan Zohn, and have started #BlameEthansCancer. As Drew's personal battle ebbs, the movement will take on a new name - simply Blame Cancer, so you can continue blaming all of life's little problems on one big one that made the wrong choice by picking on the wrong guy.


Drew With the Twins in 2008 (L) and With Matthew Saturday (R)
As I've gotten to know Drew over the past year-plus, I am continually impressed by his "no prisoners" approach to getting tasks done, and his creativity. Where others would have whimpered and begged for sympathy, Drew fought back and did so with all the tools he had at his disposal.


Drew Sucking Thumbs With Sarah Saturday (L) and Sporting a Balloon Hat (R)
Just this last week, Drew made a stop in the Bay Area - armed with a new idea. Taking his idea to Twitter headquarters, and tipping Mashable on the story, Drew announced that he was going to extend the charitable impact his battle has had by auctioning off his valuable @Drew Twitter name to the highest bidder. He set the bar at $10,000 in donations to LIVESTRONG, hoping a celebrity like Drew Carey, Drew Barrymore, Drew Brees or another famous Drew, would make an offer.

On Friday, Drew stopped by our home. In the time since Drew and I became friends, our families have become friends as well. I visited him at his parents' home in New Jersey (to his surprise) earlier in the summer, and if you turn the calendar back to 2008, he was actually the first babysitter that Matthew and Sarah ever had. The twins took to him like he was one of the Grays, climbing all over him and playing with toys. (As you can see in the pics)

The next day brought a big bombshell. On Saturday, Drew Carey bid $25,000 for the @Drew name, and in a bigger commitment, promised to increase his bid to a massive $100,000 if he were to reach 100,000 followers on Twitter by Drew (Olanoff's) birthday this November 9th. And even though Carey started at only 13,000 followers at the time, he is nearing 50,000 in only a few days' time. It's incredible.


Drew Carey Digs Deep for LIVESTRONG
The story has blown up - beyond our corner of the blogosphere, and into the mainstream press. Take for example:

• CNN: Drew Carey may bid $100K on @drew Twitter name
• Huffington Post: Drew Carey Bids $100K For Twitter Name
• Perez Hilton: Drew Carey Tweets For A Good Cause

Many startups around the Web would kill for that kind of coverage, and Drew has made it happen through creativity and persistence - two major reasons I believe that Cancer is reeling from this attack. All through the last few months, I have been blaming Drew's Cancer for stuff. I have had people ask me who Drew is and what the story is about his cancer, for those who haven't been paying attention. I have seen friends of mine who don't know Drew blaming stuff on his cancer. And I don't care if it looks a little out of whack from the usual tech stream I try to provide. This is real life, and Drew is a real friend and a real inspiration to me. So let's help Drew Carey reach one hundred thousand followers, and push the heck out of the other Drews on Twitter to try and beat his proposal.

Automated Tweets Don't Always Mean Less Genuine Tweets

With the introduction of an updated terms of service last week, Twitter once again had people buzzing about what was accepted behavior on the fast-growing microblogging site, and what crossed the line. In one of the site's frequent list-based articles dedicated to the San Francisco company, Mashable claimed one of the targets of the update was what they termed "bots", which were updated by RSS feeds moreso than by humans. In the post, Jennifer Van Grove specifically used the popular IMDB account as an example of one that should "live in fear of death". But all drama aside, I don't think that's Twitter's intent, nor do I believe that the sole delineation of whether an account is pulled by RSS instead of through text, for example, calls for the label of "Spam".

The truth is that a significant number of news-based accounts are clearly automated, very often by the use of RSS, because Twitter has become more than just a place to send updates. It's infrastructure. And even if these accounts aren't automated through RSS, practically all of the top accounts are full of a stream containing only headlines and links, with Mashable being no exception. (See also: TechCrunch, Techmeme Firehose and ReadWriteWeb for example)

It's clear that while "The Twitter Rules" say that "If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates" is one criteria for being labeled spam, it cannot be the only criteria. We must believe, and I do, that Twitter would know how to separate the good from the bad in this type of a case.

The truth is, and I have said this many times, that you should participate and make your data available where your audience may be. And often, even if you are initiating content in one place, the audience may be somewhere else - like Twitter. As a result, it makes sense to move that content to Twitter to give them access.


TwitterCounter Shows Growth for @lgshareditems and @scoblefaves
A recent experiment I kicked off on Wednesday was creating a dedicated Twitter account for my Google Reader shares and Delicious bookmarks at @lgshareditems. This combination has always been available on FriendFeed (and Facebook), but not Twitter. In parallel, Robert Scoble, also a guy well known for trying new things with social networks and data, has been tracking favorite tweets from those he follows with a dedicated account called @scoblefaves.

I have watched both accounts creep past the 100+ follower stage, even though both accounts are new, and both are exclusively feed-based. Each is a new way to try and utilize human filters and pass the results to Twitter, with the difference being that I am betting on content from outside of Twitter, and Robert is betting on other Tweeters. I bet both have strong value to separate audiences looking for news and tech updates - even though our data sets are different.

My shares to @lgshareditems are equally as genuine as my posts to @louisgray. While I may have more personal updates at the @louisgray feed, I do also post my new blog updates there, as well as my Delicious bookmarks, to give those authors additional exposure. And as noted above, practically every self-respecting blog and news source can see their Twitter feed to be extremely link heavy. So I expect it will take a lot more than you seeing a lot of blue underlines in my feed to be in danger of getting the big boot from Twitter, no matter what their TOS says.

Topsy's Social Search Will Benefit Big Blogs, Influential Tweeters

Combining the world of search and the world of microblogging, including Twitter, is a popular thing to do these days. With Twitter Search having its hiccups, entrants like Twazzup, OneRiot and TweetMeme have all joined the game of trying to find the best content on Twitter, or finding the most influential users. In the last few days, Topsy, which bills itself as a "new kind of search engine" powered by the social Web, has gotten a good amount of visibility, especially due in part to an aggressive recommendation from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch - who is a big fan.

Topsy is interesting in that rather than finding the best result due to external hyperlinks or having "one right answer", as Google and most other search engines do, Topsy instead relies largely on the number of times a URL is shared (or tweeted) around that specific keyword.

For example, while searching Apple on Google sends you to Apple.com, Searching for Apple on Topsy instead sends you to watch Apple's TV Ads for the "Get a Mac" campaign. You can guess that when the new ads debut, they are frequently sent around Twitter, pushing that link to #1.

Similarly, Topsy is influenced by recency, which explains why a similar search for Microsoft has articles on their Bing search product competing with Google rather than the vanilla Microsoft homepage you would get with Google.

But, as with Google, not all things are equal in the world of microblogging. If you have an account with hundreds of thousands of followers, thanks to a position on the site's Suggested Users List, you will no doubt have much more influence on how many times items are retweeted, and therefore, a much higher impact on Topsy. That means then that accounts like TechCrunch and Mashable, who are in the SUL, are highly featured, and other competitors, like VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb, do not fare as well.

The impact of a big account can be seen both on individuals and topics.

Stories on TechCrunch.com are #1 on Topsy when searching for individuals like Eric Schmidt, Dave Sifry and Reid Hoffman, each a leader in tech, covered by the network. In parallel, Mashable holds the #1 overall position for individuals including Mark Zuckerberg., while ReadWriteWeb finishes #1 for Paul Buchheit.


Top Topsy Results for Eric Schmidt


Top Topsy Results for Mark Zuckerberg


Top Topsy Results for Reid Hoffman


Top Topsy Results for Dave Sifry
Essentially, Topsy is the delivery of "authority-based search" that Loic Le Meur was asking for at the end of 2008, but done so in a way that doesn't explicitly say so.


Top Topsy Results for Tesla Motors
On topics, you can see TechCrunch holds the top position on Topsy for Tesla Motors, as well as the #1 position for LinkedIn, #2 for Socialmedian and Google News as well as #3 for FriendFeed, with Mashable finishing #4 on that search. In each case the coverage of the company trumps the company's site or official comments.


Top Topsy Results for Apple's iPhone
In turn, Mashable holds the #1 Topsy result for iPhone, and the #3 spot for MySpace.

That's not to say there is anything inherently "wrong" with these results, but they are definitely different, and if Topsy should take off, the influence of larger blog networks and the Suggested User List on Twitter will expand further. Should search results lead you to the one true answer that delivers you a bland corporate page, or should they instead lead you to social news impacted by a large community?

RSS Overload: Don't Complain, Do Something About It

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

There seems to be a trend lately of posts regarding RSS overload. A lot of people are complaining about being overwhelmed with their Google Reader, and some are even advising for you to stop using your RSS reader altogether. I say, hogwash. Do something about it and take back your Google Reader. Now is the time to reclaim it.

Some suggest to use Twitter and FriendFeed as the alternative. If your scope is limited to one or two particular subject matters, this may be fine. You can easily follow the relevant news sources by following them on Twitter and FriendFeed. The imaginary friend feature on FriendFeed was basically intended for this purpose.

The beauty of the imaginary friend feature is that you do not have to follow that person on FriendFeed. Chances are that person might not even be on FriendFeed, instead all you need is the blog's RSS feed and your set. You could follow that particular news maker/blog on Twitter, but you would be sorting through an already noisy feed of updates from the rest of the people you are following. Yes you could always set up a second Twitter account for just that reason, or you could directly go to that person's Twitter feed for the latest updates. That to me seems like too much work though, and is unnecessary.

Google Reader, for me, is the most effective power tool in my social media arsenal. Why? Simply because I don't have to visit hundreds of websites per day to get the information I seek. It's a competitive advantage when it is used right. Less time spent on numerous websites equals higher productivity. It enables me to work smarter not harder. I consume information at an increasingly high rate, maybe higher than some other people. To get the most of your Google Reader, it requires periodic maintenance. Just as your car requires an oil change every 3,000-5,000 miles, Google Reader is no different. That's the discovery aspect of it. Do I need to even go into the distribution aspect of it, sharing? Perhaps that's a topic for another post.

There is no need to feel overwhelmed by the unread count:

This is just an application. Why are we letting it get the best of us? We feel overwhelmed with the amount of bills we need to pay every month, or the amount of emails we may need to reply to in a timely manner. These things are overwhelming at times. An application that was built to discover and distribute information is a blessing, not our enemy. We see the unread count of 1,000+ items, and automatically anxiety kicks in. We feel like it's game over, we lost, and there is no turning back. The feed reader has won. Without going deep into the human psyche, there is a solution. The solution is called "hide unread counts", a feature that was recently integrated into the recent Google Reader overhaul.

Garbage in equals garbage out:

I'm subscribed to about 800 feeds in Google Reader. Without RSS, I would have never known the existence of these sites, or much less have the time to visit these sites on a daily basis. RSS has enabled me to broaden my horizons like no application has ever done before. Knowledge is power, RSS makes me smarter every single day. Do I really need to be subscribed to all of these feeds, of course not. Initially I would subscribe to every blog I visited that gave me some sort of value. I could easily trim my subscriptions down to 200-300 feeds and get the same value out of my Google Reader. A lot of these feeds are content clones, they simply regurgitate the same breaking news as the next site. At most I need a handful of these sites, primarily 2-3 is enough. I don't mind seeing another site's angle on the same story, and often they will contain more info that was missed or left out from the first site which is breaking the news. It's never a bad idea to get different perspectives on a story.

This is why I have begun to start going through my feeds and deleting the ones who are strictly content clones.

I'm an avid reader of both ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, but for the most part they are both content clones. I check RWW first, as it's a higher caliber of quality and writing, and, sure enough, the same regurgitated content appears on Mashable, and 50 other sites. I have since unsubscribed from Mashable and the other 50 content clones. Nothing personal, it just does not give me any value anymore. Remove the clutter from your Google Reader, there is no reason why you should not. I mention it's good to get different perspectives on a news item. It's often the lesser-known blogs who will give this to me, not the 100 pound gorillas who are competing for pageviews just to get a story published every five minutes. I want quality content, not headlines and 200-300 words of text that equates to a press release with some type of spin put on it.

Productive reading means organization:

Google Reader also allows you to set up folders. Take advantage of this. Create folders and set up a tiering system. Dumping all of your feeds into Google Reader without the use of folders, makes it clutter central. Set up folders for must reads, or folders based on topical interest. You could create a folder system for "daily”, “important”, and “other”. Only you know what will work and what will not work for you. This makes consuming RSS a breeze, and probably will give you a better Google Reader experience as well. If you must keep the clutter, put it into a folder, so that it is out of sight until you are ready for it.

Use what the power readers use, keyboard shortcuts:

This feature is a plus for productivity, especially for those of you with larger amounts of feed subscriptions. Save precious time by quickly exploring your reading list without moving your hand back and forth between your keyboard and mouse. The full list of Google Reader keyboard shortcuts is located here.

Keep a backup OPML file:

I use a site called Toluu just for this purpose. Toluu is a powerful feed discovery service, but it's also good tool for storing rss feeds. I keep my must read feeds only stored at Toluu. When I come across a feed that I must subscribe to, I input it into Toluu first, second comes Google Reader.

When all else fails, reclaim your Google Reader and start from scratch.

In order to do this, you need to have an OPML copy of your RSS feeds. If you already have a Toluu account you are ahead of the game. If not, sign up for their service and start inputting your must read feeds only. Remember to leave the garbage out, there is no need to start from scratch with the same garbage that overwhelmed your Google Reader in the first place. When you have your OPML file, head over to Google Reader and delete everything, so that you have a blank slate. Now you can import your OPML file into Google Reader, and presto you have just reclaimed your Google Reader. From this point on make sure you are using folders, tagging when necessary and most importantly cautious about what you add to Google Reader. Ask yourself is this feed really worth subscribing to, if so, add it to Toluu first, then into the appropriate folder in your Google Reader. Keeping a pristine and productive Google Reader is not easy, even a power Google Reader like myself needs to do a complete cleansing from time to time. I get to this point every 5-6 months or so. Since I have been using folders and organizing my Google Reader, I probably wont need to cleanse it as often, once a year should be suffice. It's all relevant to the amount of information you consume and digest. I tend to be on the excessive side.

If anyone would like an invite to try Toluu, please leave a note in the comments along with your email address, either Louis or myself would be glad to send you an invite.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

No, Tech Blogs Should Not Shut Up About Twitter

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Pete Cashmore at Mashable asks: Should Tech Blogs Shut Up About Twitter? Allow me to state for the record: no.

Cashmore, responding to some not-so-nice comments about Mashable on Digg, muses whether or not tech and online media blogs have "let our Twitter infatuation spiral out of control." However, he also notes that "Twitter, clearly, is the next big thing in social networking."

First of all, let's take a quick look at the recent history of "next big things" in social networking. MySpace absolutely dominated tech news and the blogosphere circa 2005 and 2006 (how soon we forget!), which transitioned to equally staggering coverage of "MySpace killers" and, of course, Facebook. Facebook apps and Facebook's meteoric growth are both reasons why it continues to enjoy a great deal of attention today.

Even though Twitter's audience size is relatively smaller than the MySpace/Facebook level kicking off 2009 (though its growth rate of 752% in 2008 was monumental), there's enough buzz, innovation, and compelling storylines surrounding the 140 character-based communications platform to warrant an intense level of coverage.



Are some/many blogs chasing Twitter stories just to get in on the hype and drive page views? Of course, but that's true of all big stories across any subject area.

All of that said, I relate to Cashmore in that I've thought about my own level of focus on Twitter. However, as I discussed over the new year's break, I've tried to focus on areas within the online world and social media that intrigue me without worrying about outside factors, so if I personally focus "too much" on Twitter, so be it!

Now, here are reasons why I think that Twitter deserves lots of obsessing and coverage in 2009.

It has the potential to go "mainstream"
There are pretty good arguments on both sides for whether or not Twitter has the potential to go "mainstream" (check out a great discussion of this topic here). I would argue that it does have the potential, which we can roughly define as 10 million users or so. Either way, Twitter's explosive growth and massive potential warrants ongoing coverage.

Twitter apps, plug-ins, and add-on services
Twitter's open API has opened up a flood of innovation around building tools and services that benefit the Twitter community. Much like Facebook's development platform, Twitter has smartly tapped into the resources of the "crowd," allowing its audience to become tied to and invested in the success of the underlying platform.

It's where the geeks, influencers, and increasingly the cool kids are at
Even though Twitter has been around a little while (by webby standards), it's early adopters and geek enthusiasts have not abandoned it, even though bright and shiny objects such as FriendFeed came calling… along, let's not forget, with a bunch of would-be Twitter killers such as Pownce, Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk.

It's starting to spill over into mainstream media and regular (read: non-insane online addicts like us) life
CNN is promoting Twitter, comedians joke about Twitter, moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas are just starting to get into the swing of it. Quoting myself from last month's the Twitter mainstream debate: "It is intuitive enough that "civilians" can hit the homepage, register, post their first post and add a few friends within a minute. They can also quickly "get it" and see benefits." In other words, Twitter is for real."

It's an important part of the overall storyline
We're in an interesting period right now. I'm tempted to say "unique" but every phase or era is unique in its own way. What we do know is that the economy is in recession, but that the underlying issues have little to do with the tech sector. But what has happened is that the downturn has shut the door on the loosely-termed web 2.0 era, which had already been in its silly season anyway.

I like to say that we're in a post-web 2.0 era. It's not web 2.0, it's not web 3.0 (whatever that will come to mean, led by crazy semantic web or mobile technologies, or something). What we do know is that web communities, social networks, or whatever you want to call them, continue to evolve.

Think about it. Even though MySpace is still one of the most popular websites – and a social networking website at that – on the Internet, no one really talks about it anymore. MySpace is part of the past, while Twitter is right in the center of the conversation of where things are now, and where they're headed.

It's got a good beat that you can dance to
Okay, maybe it doesn't. But the point is that if you hang out on Twitter, you feel a pulse of activity that lets you know that people are meeting, engaging, and chitchatting.

People who love Twitter love it because it fits a need in their life. And as I've written about before, a key reason why its strong growth continues is because its flexibility allows it to fit different kinds of needs for different kinds of people.

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

Blogs' Never-Ending Battle of Page Views vs. Conversation

In a perfect blogging world, the very best writers with the very best content would get the most visitors, page views and subscribers. Every visitor would leave comments, send the links to friends, click through ads, and engage in thoughtful dialog with the author. And authors would be more than happy to pass along credit to other blogs for finding stories early, link to lesser-known voices, and admit when they got things wrong. But, alas, this theoretical utopia doesn't exist, and as a result, there's always a gap between what authors expect from readers and vice versa. And this gap can at times send even the best among us muttering to ourselves or launching into screeds when wronged.

The truth is, if you ask just about any blogger who has been active for a while, they could tell you some of their best posts withered into the dustbin of history, while a quick post that took no thought grabbed completely unexpected attention.

A couple examples on either side were visible this weekend:

On the up side: Adam Ostrow of Mashable posted to Twitter:

"looks like I posted one of my most successful (in terms of traffic ... thanks digg) posts ever on 2 hrs of sleep from Vegas hotel room."

On the down side: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also posted to Twitter:

"omg pageviews are SO low on both of the posts I've put up today. dreadful. must write a big one next. i try to do 1 fabulous thing each day"

Adam and Marshall are among the most visible authors to post to their very popular blogs. ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are professional blogs with a staff of reporters, that rely on ad revenue to make money - making the battle for page views much more important for them than for those of us who look at blogging as a hobby, or at least, not the prime source of income.

Whether they receive a small handful of visits, or thousands per day, it's a rare blogger who doesn't look at their statistics, or at least at broad trends that tell which posts were the most popular, and whether visits are trending up and down. For the better part of the last year, I even took to posting my statistics at the beginning of each month, only recently having chosen not to as some people misinterpreted my goals as being promotional, as the numbers increased over time.

But statistics aren't why I blog. (See: Why Do I Blog? An Introspective Look and What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations for more about that.) For me, I like engaging in conversations about technology, trends, and business, and providing commentary, while learning from smart folks around the Web. That's why it's less important to me whether comments take place here or on Friendfeed and other aggregation services, and that's why you don't typically see me begging for Digg votes.

In fact, the only time I ever made the Digg front page, back in April 2007, was when I noted that Google's Earth Day logo was an homage to global warming. It was a post that took maybe 15 minutes, and got a lot more attention than I ever had anticipated. Since then, the closest I ever got to the Digg front page was when in July, I announced the introduction of TweetDeck. It actually reached the precarious top position of "Upcoming" before dying on the vine.

Knowing one's statistics and caring about writing articles that find an audience aren't bad things at all. Seeing which articles are most-widely read, and which topics spur engagement are often key ways to let your readers guide what you should be covering. But when page views drive ad dollars, and income, the entire foundation of why people blog changes - as blogging moves away from conversations and more toward revenue creation.

Following Marshall's comments on Friday, there was a short discussion on FriendFeed that covered the push-pull of conversations versus page views. After I asked if it was "really about pageviews or about getting a good story and discussion", Marshall answered, "it is about good stories and discussion generally - but pageviews are also important. I do this for a living..." which had Svetlana Gladkova of Profy hoping for a long thread on "blogging for a living vs. blogging for passion", which she saw as core to the debate. The debate wasn't settled.

If all ads on all blogs disappeared tomorrow, cutting off the revenue air supply to professional bloggers, it would be interesting to see how many of them would keep going in their spare time. How many of them would change what they cover, or change the way they write headlines, or link to other peers, once money was removed from the equation, assuming they kept writing? Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, in a Monday article, quoted Gabe Rivera of Techmeme as saying that in today's competitive landscape where page views are king, that sites like "Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don't--they only link if they have to." Linking is part of the conversation, something we talked about at some length this time last year, when I said Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control.

It seems the only way to take page views out of the equation, and reduce the number of Shouts I get from Digg on a daily basis from authors trying to promote their own blogs' articles, would be to find ways to compensate writers that are not linked to advertising. But trends seem to be going in the opposite direction. Gawker Media has famously offered to pay reporters by the page view, a practice that came under fire from many corners of the Web, but continues, even as those who question the landscape are some of its biggest practitioners. In fact, back in 2006, ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, in an article called Page Views 2.0, wrote, "It's funny that this page views model is at its foundation almost identical to the Dot Com days (bubble 1.0). Drive as many users to your site as humanly possible."

We all know how the Dot Com days and bubble 1.0 ended. We've already debated whether ads and blogs are a good mix. But the idea that conversations and commentary can trump the importance of the almighty page view looks to be losing out. It's no wonder that blogs looking to keep their costs low in a time when users are clicking on ads a lot less than they had hoped are often hiring inexperienced, inexpensive, young journalists looking to take a bite out of old media.

I know I couldn't quit my day job and try to make money from blogging, and I wouldn't want to be a slave to the page view. But for those who lay awake at night designing Google AdWords copy and trying to think of the next big headline that will take Reddit, Digg and Yahoo! Buzz by storm, sending a swarm of readers that send page views through the roof, I wonder if they miss the simpler time when they could write more for themselves and engage with their readers to share a story and ideas, before feeling pushed to get their next article out the door in an assembly line of online copy or finding themselves redesigning the site to optimize for page views and increased ad displays. That's worth having a conversation about.

DISCLOSURE: In addition to his work at Mashable, Adam Ostrow is also the CEO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


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Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


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You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


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Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


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For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

Matthew's Story: From CenterNetworks' Future to Fired In A Month

Finding a writing position at a brand-name blog is hard to do, especially without having a significant resume, not to mention any references. So when Allen Stern of CenterNetworks offered my newborn son, Matthew, a position on his excellent blog, we of course struck at the deal. But in just a month, what at first seemed like a dream come true turned out to be a sordid tale of broken promises, unsafe working conditions and tears. A week after Stern publicly announced Matthew's firing, as a family, we've decided to tell our side of the story.

The fierce competition between East Coast and West Coast blogs these days is rivaling the old time feuds between East Coast and West Coast rappers. Based in New York, Stern has long been seeking the opportunity to open a Silicon Valley bureau, so this spring, when he learned we were expecting twins, he struck early, asking to sign up "whichever of the two kids was bigger". I naively accepted, not knowing that his request was due to the incredible stress that blogging and filing stories can be for a newborn.


Matthew Signed On to CenterNetworks In Days
Matthew and Sarah arrived on June 20th, he weighing a robust 5 pounds, and she, trailing at 4 pounds, 3 ounces. That made Matthew the candidate of record. The next four days were a whirlwind of deal-making, contracts being faxed from coast to coast, with little being given up on either side. Finally, the agreement completed, Matthew announced his signing, and was photographed with the world-famous CN sticker. The next day, Stern announced it to the world, and while he said "Of all the people I've hired over the years, this negotiation was the toughest," his listed demands were later proven to be a slap in the face.


Stern's Initial Set of Promises Included a New iPhone

But Stern Later Went Back On His Word

Over the next two weeks, Matthew made significant headway with CN, reaching out to Bay Area startups, reviewing alpha versions of Mac software and Web services, and even, somehow, transcribing quarterly conference calls. But while Stern publicly lauded his efforts in an update, the long hours, fatigue and strain were already becoming quite clear. As you can see from the follow-on post, Stern had openly reneged on the promised iPhone 3G, saying Matthew would get it "under no circumstances", despite it being promised in the initial agreement. Similarly, the promised crib with LCD panel and Wii Fit never materialized, which Stern attributed to "inventory shortages". Making matters worse, Stern would frequently call Matthew's home number at the start of East Coast business hours to talk strategy, despite it being only 5 a.m. Pacific.

The long hours and stress saw Matthew often falling asleep in front of his keyboard after filing a news story. He soon began to complain that he was unable to relax and casually visit his favorite sites, fearing an irate Stern would notice the gap in submissions and send yet another series of e-mails with even more assignments. And with every "like" or comment he placed on FriendFeed, Stern would just lose it - saying he was slacking off, or even worse, claiming he was manipulating activity on the site through creating hundreds of fake accounts. But it wasn't true, and try as Matthew would to explain he was just trying to catch up on the world outside of CenterNetworks, Stern wouldn't listen, ranting about how Mashable had scooped him on some new Facebook widget, or how ReadWriteWeb had gotten an exclusive look into a new AIR application that sent updates to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, on Matthew's watch. The once promising job with significant career potential had spiraled into despair of inter-office politics and accusations that left Matthew depressed and unwilling to spend time with his sister or peers.


Matthew's Long Hours At CN Took Their Toll
It all came crashing down early last week, on July 21st. The first sign was when Matthew's CenterNetworks e-mail stopped working, and the daily shipment of Barnum and Bailey animal crackers didn't arrive. Then, two of the stories Matthew had filed were printed under Stern's byline, without his being mentioned as a contributing reporter. But Stern wouldn't take phone calls and Matthew was left to fend for himself. The next day, we realized what had happened. Stern, in a public missive, fired Matthew, without contacting him or myself, and continuing his rant about how Matthew was slacking off and creating FriendFeed accounts, accusations later proven untrue by FriendFeed interns Dan Hsaio and Ross Miller, who looked into the the service's logs following the allegations.


Stern's Hallucinations Fueled the Firing
Over the last eight days, as a family we've had to do a lot of soul-searching. Matthew, for one, swears he's had it with the blogging business, though it's not clear what line of profession he intends to take next. And if that weren't enough, on Monday, the long-promised Barney poster finally arrived, a stark reminder of one of the many unfulfilled promises by Stern and his crew. What should have been a case of spotting talent early, and helping to guide a young prodigy through the ranks instead was one that smacked of servitude, double-speaking and unhappiness. While we know we have a legal case against Stern and CenterNetworks proper over the unfulfilled iPhone, lack of proper advance notice of contract termination, and unfair child labor practices, we're going to swallow our pride and move on as a family. It's been hard, but we felt the right thing was to leave with our heads held high, without dragging this out through the morass that is the American judicial system.

So Pete "Peanut" Carreira, Stern may be whispering sweet nothings to you now and calling you a serious Seesmic star, but watch your back and protect yourself before what happened to Matthew happens to you as well.

FriendFeed Friday Tips #6: How To Determine Authorship

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, how to integrate with Google Talk, and how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog. Today, a new wrinkle: determining an item's original source.

At its foundation, FriendFeed is an aggregator of Web activity, from you, and from your friends or peers. Activity on the Web that you aggregate can be of two types: data that you create yourself (blog posts, Tweets, Flickr photos, etc.) and data that you like which others have created (Google Reader shares, YouTube favorites, etc.). Typically, it's fairly easy to distinguish between those pieces you're sharing and those pieces you're creating, but in the last few weeks, there have been some notable errors made, so with more people flocking to the popular service, it's time we had some clarification.

Your FriendFeed stream typically consists of service icons, an active verb, and the service itself. The verbs themselves give away whether you were the author or simply, a fan.

Services Where I am the Content Creator

1. Louis Gray "posted" an entry on louisgray.com.
2. Louis Gray "posted" a message on Twitter.
3. Louis Gray "commented" on a blog post on Disqus.
4. Louis Gray "posted" a message on FriendFeed.
5. Louis Gray "published" photos on Flickr.
6. Louis Gray "updated" their job title on LinkedIn.
7. Louis Gray "had a new status message" on Gmail/Google Talk.

Services Where I am a Fan of the Content

1. Louis Gray "shared" an item on Google Reader.
2. Louis Gray "bookmarked" a page on Del.icio.us.
3. Louis Gray "dugg" a story on Digg.
4. Louis Gray "stumbled upon" a site on StumbleUpon.
5. Louis Gray "favorited" a video on YouTube.
6. Louis Gray "liked" a story on Reddit.
7. Louis Gray "loved" a song on Last.fm.

It seems pretty straight forward. In the first group, I'm posting, commenting, publishing and updating. In the second group, I'm bookmarking, sharing, liking, loving and favoriting. But in the last few weeks, there have been some notable incidents where the groups got confused.

1. Mark Hopkins Reports Sarah Perez Leaving ReadWriteWeb

On Wednesday night, Mashable's Mark Hopkins reported, on his personal blog, that the popular, prolific, Sarah Perez would be leaving blogging monolith ReadWriteWeb for SitePoint. (See the FriendFeed discussion here)


But it wasn't true. In fact, Sarah's former colleague Josh Catone was the one announcing the move to SitePoint. How did Mark get confused? It turned out that Sarah had subscribed to Josh's blog in Google Reader, and shared the item (see that share here on FriendFeed).

Clicking through to the shared item was arguably confusing. The post said it was time to announce where the author would be blogging after ReadWriteWeb, and the sparse Tumblr interface didn't have anyone's name on it. Mark, thinking he was onto a scoop, ran with it. Of course, he could have seen an earlier post where Josh linked to his farewell on RWW, but it didn't happen.


How could this have been avoided? First, it's unlikely Sarah would be sharing an item from her personal blog that wasn't registered with FriendFeed. The item clearly said "shared" not "posted", as outlined above. While many people, including me, will share items from their own blog to Google Reader, for it to show up first as shared before the actual blog item came through is unlikely.

2. Shel Israel Credits Me With Two Posts I Didn't Make

Shel Israel has weathered enough nonsense from the blogosphere over the last year, so this isn't any personal slight at all to bring this up. He's been very nice to me, saying in June that I was "consistently thoughtful, original and accurate". But of late, he's given me too much credit, where it's not due.

On July 5th, he wrote a post on the Google/Viacom decision, and drew largely from a post on Profy from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira. Throughout the first version of the post, he said "Louis went and read the decision several times...", and "thanks to Louis Gray, who took the time to do some digging." While the post has since been updated, it had given me all the credit.


His Tweet on July 5th remains up, as does his amendment.




But the very next day, it happened again.


Shel sent a tweet, saying: "Louis Gray (this time I'm sure it's him) says there are about 75K Friendfeed users http://tinyurl.com/GN000006."

But it wasn't me. Again, I had shared a link in Google Reader to a third-party blog, this time, from User21, written by Yuval Atzmon.

With many blog authors already worried about RSS scraping or not getting attribution for breaking posts, or losing comments to one service or another, it's important to be sure we give credit to where its due. I am not going to stop sharing RSS items to my Google Reader link blog, and I don't think Sarah Perez or the many of us who use these services will. I'm not going to stop favoriting items on YouTube, loving songs on Last.fm, bookmarking blog posts or Digging items. But I do hope the differences are clear. As much fun as it is to be recognized, I don't want to take credit for other people's work, and I'm sure Sarah doesn't want to take any more phone calls from interested blogs looking to hire her. So before you look to FriendFeed to determine who is the original source, look at the active verb, and then, if still not sure, click through to the item and see its origin. It shouldn't be too confusing.

The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

I am a strong believer in the power of linking between blogs, and I still go out of my way to link, especially to peers, to smaller blogs, and to developers of services I write about. At one time, I thought being linked to by the most prominent bloggers could have a significant impact on my traffic. And for a short time, it did. But now, I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I downloaded all my visitor logs going back to January of 2006, when I started regularly posting on the blog. While there's no question traffic overall is significantly higher now than it was one year ago or two years ago, the impact that even the biggest of blogs can deliver is lessened. I believe that this is due to a few things:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.
   
2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.
   
3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

This year, thanks to covering some of the hottest topics in the tech blogosphere, I've been lucky enough to have been linked to from some of the most-prominent blogs in the market, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Scobleizer, MicroPersuasion, Jeremiah Owyang, Mathew Ingram, The Inquisitr, Profy and others. I've also been actively engaged with those flying lower on the radar, including I'm Not Actually a Geek, SheGeeks, Regular Geek (see a theme?) and others.

But looking at my aggregate statistics from the last six months, not even the "big name" linkers drove a lot of traffic, relative to just about every other source. And in some cases, the top blogs that drove traffic were themselves relative unknowns who I've featured in my monthly obscure blog recommendations, themselves often being the beneficiaries of being on Digg or Techmeme.

Top Blog Referrals in First half of 2008:

1. I'm Not Actually a Geek: When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched
   
2. Scobleizer: Loving my FriendFeed
   
3. Regular Geek: Required Reading in Social Media
   
4. ValleyWag: Most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue, the seven-word version
   
5. TechCrunch: More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant.
   
6. Micro Persuasion: Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice
   
7. Mathew Ingram: Duncan Riley: Lessons in diplomacy
   
8. WebWare: A Proposal for Twitter: Shut It Down
   
9. ReadWriteweb: Content Is Becoming a Commodity
   
10. Mark Evans: Who's Louis Gray?

Definitely a lot of bigger names here, mixed in with some others. But the most interesting thing is that the highest among these "only" delivered just shy of 500 visitors over the first six months of the year, and the lowest passed less than 100. That doesn't even come close to a single day's worth of Google traffic, or a single day of having a post on Techmeme or Hacker News, let alone Digg.

Instead of blogs driving traffic, we have some more mainstream names, as shown in the below graphic from Google Analytics, highlighting sources for the last 30 days:


In fact, it isn't until the #10 position overall over the last 30 days that you get a total number of visitors that is less than the #1 blog referral over the last 180 days. And in most cases, I've not seen any kind of meaningful traffic from mentions on Mashable or ReadWriteWeb. Back in January, I was a little less than happy that Mashable wasn't giving linkage a lot of prominence, but even now that they are, the impact is extremely small. I got 77 referrals from Mashable on their story around Twitter brand management, and 53 more from a story on my being an early adopter, very insignificant in the large scheme of things.

Now, I'm not saying that this data proves linking is dead. I know links power Google juice, and they enhance Technorati rankings, and if done well, people can find new sources of data, but the ability for even a so-called A-List blogger to deliver a windfall of visits is much less than I had ever expected. It is now more important to be part of the social media sites that drive strong traffic - the Twitters and Techmemes and FriendFeeds and Stumbleupons and Reddits, if traffic is your goal. Those sites, combined with RSS activity in Google Reader and other programs are what will drive traffic. So don't wait around begging for Scoble or Mashable to write you up. It might not have the effect you thought.