The Future of Web Q&A Panels Should be Cake

Last week, Recode's veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher visibly held an aggressive interview with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been on something of a meandering press tour over the last few months, which has led to more questions than it's seemingly answered, as he has avoided specifics, and not taken full responsibility for many of the negative impacts the platform he created has spawned.

Despite Kara's noble attempts, this round didn't fare much better, largely due to Twitter's failing as a medium for such a debate. The #KaraJack hashtag, expected to be the core space for her serves and his returns, with a fair share of unforced errors, was difficult to follow in real time, with Twitter's poor design getting as much visibility as the discussion itself. Taylor Lorenz of the Atlantic called it impossible.

Twitter was not designed for this, and barring dramatic redesign or new product spinoffs, it won't be.

The most impactful press interviews are typically done live, be it for radio or TV, while other forums, like Reddit, have made Ask Me Anything (AMA) events a free for all with viewers getting as much access to the subject as anyone else. But #KaraJack wasn't supposed to be a free for all, with every tweet seeing replies from the masses, or requiring dedicated TweetDeck columns and search queries. It was supposed to be on a stage of sorts, with bright lights seeing yet another tech CEO sweat and try to avoid withering under Kara's query onslaught - the type of event you would see at an All Things D or TechCrunch Disrupt, or if you insist... at SXSW.

Some recent Cake panels of note

That's not to say panels can't be done on the web - for they can be, and done well, with a moderator having the option to interview a subject (or multiple subjects), with progressive question and answers, and audience reactions, but not interruptions. I know this, because I've seen it done. A quietly intriguing web service called Cake, created by Chris MacAskill of Smugmug and General Magic fame, has been working on a topics-focused, troll-free, community that offers a unique approach to panels.

Cake, when not doing panels, focuses on topics of interest.

If you're unfamiliar with Cake, the site's content is much like if Medium met Flickr - not a surprise from a site with roots in photography, like Smugmug, which coincidentally bought Flickr from Yahoo! last year. You can use Cake for long form posts, as I did last year after seeing my dad purchase a gun, making me rethink the safety of family visits, or you can just share a photo. Each post allows for Slack-like reactions, but also, comments, from any user - with a focus on finding similar interests, be it on Photography, Tech, Travel or anything else - not uncommon on the social web.

Cake posts showcase total reactions, which reactions, and related topics.

A site for sharing on the web is not new, nor is the idea of one focused on topics. Their manual approach to curation and high quality discussion is noble, but becomes challenging at scale, should they get there. But what is working is their approach to panels, which would have been a great home for #KaraJack, instead of Twitter.

Cake panels work because they remove the noise from the discussion and keep it in one place. Like Reddit AMAs, they can be scheduled and announced in advance. But unlike AMAs, a moderator can invite an individual or group of people to a panel, and when the panel begins, they are the only ones who can make posts or replies. The audience, for once, is silent. No shouting @replies, like on Twitter. No hashtag spam. Just the questions and the answers. And if you want audience engagement, you can create a parallel post on Cake to solicit questions or have discussion as the panel is ongoing.

Imagine a #KaraJack where only Kara or Jack could post.

Trying to design a conversational medium that is all things to all people is a mess. Twitter has struggled with experiments with tweetstorms, moments, live video, doubling character counts, trending topics, short form video and more. Twitter is great at real time news and short updates. Their search, after years of struggles, is actually very good. But it's not a good place for a smart panel like #KaraJack.

A Cake panel showcases who is on stage, what it's about, and engagement.

In the last few months, there have been panels with venture capitalists, the founder of GrubTubs, the man behind 20 years of Steve Jobs keynotes, and former General Magic employees, as well as dozens of others. Each of these panels has a clear formula, with a topic, an introduction, and then the back and forth of discussion that brings a feeling of a shared space, even if geographically distributed.

Do I expect future conversations with Twitter's CEO to happen on Cake? No. Of course Dorsey would want to use his own product. But #KaraJack didn't do Twitter any benefits, showcasing one of the service's many holes. There is a better alternative to Q&A like this out there, and I hope we can see more innovative panels coming.

The social web is long overdue for some real innovation, beyond photo filters and disappearing content. We need smarter conversations and less noise. Panels are a solid start.

A Decade of Silos Has Throttled Open Content Distribution

The 2018 Social Media Flow is Driven by Content Silos

In the ten-plus years since I started this blog, one of the clearest trends on the Web has been for destination sites to want to control the user session and experience. In parallel, sites focused on aggregating content from external sites or highlighting the best of the web - serving as a filtered pass through, have struggled. Many are gone.

While significant efforts were made during the forging of Web 2.0 to drive open standards and allow for data to flow from one site to another, through RSS, Pubsubhubbub, Atom, XMPP, or whatever your preference, 2018 on the social web is a much more challenging place to write once and publish everywhere.

As I view the publishing space, I often turn to four big challenges that have to be solved for a platform to be a success to both authors and readers:

1. Creation

A platform, be it for photos (Instagram, Flickr, Google Photos, etc.), short updates (Twitter), long form (Medium, Blogger, WordPress, etc.), video (YouTube) or a mishmash of all (Facebook, Google+, etc.), needs to make it easy for the content creator to share what they want, in the form they want, and have the output be what they intended. This is true whether we are talking about desktop or mobile creation.

2. Distribution

Once the content is created, it has to be sent somewhere. If you write a post and hit publish, how do people find it? Is it sent to a third party network where they are hanging out? Is it sent by email? Do they get a notification on their phone? Does it flow down their timeline, as they have new items to consume? Or is it just another flat file, waiting to be indexed by Google and other search engines?

3. Discovery

Readers want to find new content. They seek relevance, freshness, and community. This mirrors the three pillars of social sites I highlighted back in 2009, and echoes that readers want intriguing views that mirror their own preferences. Like I'd predicted in 2006, the Web has become a divided place, where we all flock to our groups of like minded people, and disavow opposing views, but we still are eager to find more who reinforce our position. We still crave new friends and stories and we want to find them quickly.

So how good a job do these apps and sites do of surfacing new people and ideas? Do they have an aggregated site with highlights and popular people or posts? Is there a place to find more obscure viewpoints and new voices?

4. Consumption

Since the smartphone revolution, kicked off by Blackberry and the iPhone and now led by Android, more people are constantly connected and reading news from their mobile devices. In many countries, the mobile device is the only window to the Web. Does the content flow well for mobile consumption and new ways to navigate from screen to screen, update to update? Or is it best suited for a leanback tablet experience or for the desktop?

What typically happens with content platforms is the content fills the available container. Twitter is a clear 140 or 280 characters. Social hubs like Facebook and Google+ favor large photos and a short introduction. Instagram is all about the photo with a small description. Blogger and WordPress and Medium are as long as you want to go. One has to consider if users and screens keep up.

2009's promise of sharing everywhere wasn't meant to be.

We've Come a Long Way from Aggregating Streams and Sharing the Web

As content started to be created in a wide array of social sites, aggregation services like FriendFeed helped bring people's streams together. Bookmark services like Delicious helped people save the highlights from the Web and amplify the world's favorites. Users voted up posts from Digg and passed them along with StumbleUpon. The most voracious consumers lived in Google Reader and didn't miss a single post from the RSS feeds they were subscribed to.

It was too good to last.

The largest social platforms were not content in simply being links to external sites. Facebook focused more on original content shared on the platform, with less priority given to send traffic off site. Google Reader shut down, and while Feedly and others stepped up, the world of RSS never recovered. Delicious died. Digg is a shadow of itself. FriendFeed was obliterated. LinkRiver closed. Socialmedian closed.

In the wake of all these gateways' demise, taking content from the open Web and getting it in front of new viewers is more challenging. While I've always said you need to be where the users are and can't force them to come to you, what could be automated is now requiring manual intervention at practically every step.

Just What Am I Talking About?

The alpha and omega, yin and yang of social outlets (for text, anyway) are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is much bigger and much more profitable, but don't get distracted. People creating content for the Web also need to make sure that content fares well downstream on Facebook and Twitter. You can write it for the open Web, but you then have to take explicit action to share the content downstream - or set up automation to either site, usually backed by RSS. At that point, whether you get discovered or not is up to each site's algorithm, which has leaned more in favor of implied interest rather than chronology of late - meaning you can see viral content from hours or days ago before you get the newest stuff.

On a mobile phone, notifications are the holy grail of getting someone's attention. (See: Life by Numbers and Notifications from 2014) It's not uncommon to get notified when someone tweets, but it's very uncommon to ask for a notification when a site makes a post.

In parallel, the feedback loop from such networks, as well as Instagram or others, is near instant and acts as an incentive for the author to initiate their content on that silo natively. Post a 20-tweet storm to Twitter, and immediately start seeing those likes and retweets roll in. Post a story to Facebook and wait for the Likes and comments. Post a news story or a blog post, and ... wait. Wait for visitors in Google Analytics? Wait for the post to be shared downstream? Wait for the story to be indexed in Google News and search?

The elimination of Google Reader, FriendFeed, and Digg as amplifiers of Web content, alongside the attention absorption by Facebook and Twitter makes it harder for Web authors to get visibility - and they they aren't dropping their content into the real time stream.

So What Does the New Flow Look Like?

In 2009, it seemed pretty easy to me. Post on the blog. RSS would take it to FriendFeed and Google Reader. FriendFeed would post to Twitter. Twitter would post to Facebook. Then I'd run around and answer comments wherever they were distributed. (More on distributed conversations from 2009)

Now, I can still post on the blog. And the RSS link is the same. I even get the small bump of engagement on Google+ from the blog's page automatically adding my content there. But then, to make sure I cover all my bases, I then make another share of the same content to Medium, for those who love their site, and I've even found good engagement on LinkedIn, by making a third post of the same content on their channel. It's a different audience, but, if on topic, they share and engage.

So that's three posts. Meanwhile, I still have to share the story on Facebook and Twitter separately, hoping that someone will break their consumption flow and engage on my content downstream.

It feels like more work to get less return. And yes, I recognize that some may not miss FriendFeed because they never used it. Maybe others think Digg got replaced outright by Reddit, and gains similar traffic. Others prefer Hacker News. So aggregators do exist, obviously, but hubs aimed at surfacing new content, as opposed to highlight content on the site and keeping readers there, have declined.

To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. I applaud (there's the joke) Medium's approach to reward users with claps, for at least they're trying something. We should all be trying.

Disclosures: Yes, I work at Google. Sometimes, I help the Blogger team. I used to work on Google+ and have many friends on those teams still. I miss Google Reader every day. FriendFeed too.

Gawkk Delivers Video Discovery Engine With a Social Center

It doesn't take a scholar to recognize the commentary around most YouTube videos appeals to the lowest common denominator. As is common with many Web services that have gained mass popularity, the discussion on YouTube more closely resembles a junior high locker room than an exchange between friends and family. At times, the nonsense spewed underneath the most popular videos is practically enough to make a person avoid the site altogether.

In contrast to the banal free-for-all at YouTube, where the inmates are in control of the asylum, we have seen the rise of more personal, friend-centric services to exchange links, images and video through social media in the last few years, including sites like FriendFeed, Twitter, Ballhype and Socialmedian. A new name to be included as part of that conversation is Gawkk, a social video discovery and sharing site, which pulls in the most popular videos across the Web from services including YouTube, Hulu, Break.com and others, and sets up a platform to see what videos your friends have shared or commented on.


A Gawkk Video from Hulu, With My Comment
The service, created by former Direct Hit co-founder, Gary Culliss, lets you subscribe to channels as diverse as CNN and the History Channel to The Simpsons Channel, Law & Order, and even Budweiser Commercials. You can also browse the site's many different categories, see the most popular videos of the day, or simply follow the channels your friends have subscribed to.


Some Popular Videos Found on Gawkk, via MSNBC and Hulu
As a Gawkk member, you create your own personal channel, and can add videos to your channel by hitting "Save" underneath any video. You also can create an activity stream by voting videos up or down (like with Digg) or through your comments.

For example, my channel can be found here: http://www.gawkk.com/louisgray/channel and my activity feed can be found here: http://www.gawkk.com/louisgray/activity.


My Gawkk Activity Stream
Unlike YouTube and Hulu, Gawkk does not actually store the video media on its site. Instead, it acts as way for users to share video they have found from anywhere on the Web and share it on the site (using a bookmarklet, found here). Videos are brought to Gawkk both by users themselves, or imported from the many external sites, which are then organized into thousands of public channels, chronologically, by topic, from TV shows to actors. As a member, you can subscribe to any number of channels, and even have the option, at signup, to rate each channel from one to five stars to signal your interest, and also indicate what other channels you might like.


Rating Each Gawkk Channel, Choosing to Subscribe


My Gawkk Channel Subscriptions
Videos that receive the most "up" votes are promoted to the home page for the entire community to see, just like the most popular items on Digg, Ballhype, Reddit and other social voting sites. The hope is that by breaking out of the muck that is YouTube, you can enjoy sharing video with friends and finding common interests.

You can find me on Gawkk with the ID of louisgray (as with most other services). And if you want more friends than just me, find who else is already on Gawkk by checking your online mail address book.

BackType Adds Digg, Reddit In Path To Comments Nirvana

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Christopher Golda and Michael Montano, founders of BackType, and talked with them about the growth of the site, and their continued efforts to become the blogosphere's number one repository for comments, tracking, search and alerts. Among the first steps they promised, and have already delivered, was the option to add comments you make on social services Digg and Reddit to your profile page. Along with the site's recent integration with FriendFeed, BackType has risen in visibility and functionality, even as few are using the site to its fullest potential.

As Golda and Montano explained over lunch Thursday, the site was originally started to track comments activity by friends they followed from around the Web. With so many different commenting systems out there, from WordPress to TypePad, Disqus and more, no one service provided a full history of individuals' activity, and they saw an opportunity to create a product that was built around comments and the people who make them, rather than individual blogs and their readers.

As BackType has gained awareness, the founders have so far been surprised by the high number of people using the site for social media marketing - tracking keywords for their company and the competition, but it's become a natural evolution of a service that can gauge a company and its products' visibility across the Web. Extending the services that BackType tracks, like Digg and Reddit, makes the product's database more robust and diverse.

Additionally, the rapid integration of BackType to FriendFeed has helped raise the product's visibility, they said. Now, assuming the blog you comment on is being tracked, any comments you make on the Web, assigned to your e-mail address and name, can be pulled into your FriendFeed stream, like Disqus and IntenseDebate have been doing for some time. (You can see my BackType stream in FriendFeed here)

Interestingly, at least for now, the BackType integration into FriendFeed does not track comments from Disqus or IntenseDebate. Golda and Montano offered FriendFeed a "Disqus and IntenseDebate free" version of the feed, as to not avoid overlap from those who had already turned on those services, but FriendFeed took that as the standard, meaning users who want all comments still need to integrate both services. (For example, my Disqus feed is also live.) This might change later, but FriendFeed would need to make the update, and their "to do" list is no doubt long.

As BackType's database has grown, so too has its functionality for companies looking to track their keywords across the Web. I've even set up an RSS feed from BackType for the company where I work, so if we are mentioned in a comment somewhere, our PR firm will see it and have the opportunity to respond or evaluate quickly. You can set your own alerts by e-mail on the BackType.com site or use their Trends site to see the velocity of updates. (Examples: Google, Seesmic, and Obama.)

Smart marketers and public relations people are already searching news, blogs, and Twitter to monitor their brand. To track the brand across comments throughout the Web using BackType is just as important. While you can still follow people and discover what they're saying at the blogs they frequent, and discover new sites, I think BackType will become a more integral part of people's social media monitoring than anyone ever expected. Adding Digg and Reddit, while small additions, just makes their sphere of tracking even more thorough.

In case you want to see what I'm saying on BackType, follow me here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

Liking the Dislike: Social Networks Don't Force the Love

Newton's third law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Many technologies have ratings features built in with equal and opposite choices these days, from the thumbs up and thumbs down on your TiVo remote control, to rating songs from zero to five stars in iTunes, and of course, deciding whether to Digg or Bury. But as social networking tools don't necessarily need to subscribe to Newton's laws, not all services offer diametrically opposed activity. You can't offer a negative share on Google Reader, canceling someone else's share out, for example, and FriendFeed limits you to "liking" items, making users oddly "like" things they hate, if only to draw attention to the item. Social Median, which is increasingly looking like FriendFeed, added the ability to "like" and "dislike" items on Monday, through what they call a "mood button", drawing more attention to the battle between love and hate. (See a discussion on FriendFeed about the new feature here)


Social Median gives articles mood, based on the like/dislike ratio
With so many people consuming as much content as we are these days, with more Web sites, RSS feeds and social networks to imbibe, services are making it ever easier to make our feelings known in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort. While a year or two ago we may have left a comment and engaged with the blog author, these days, we're just as likely to vote up the number of stars on their Outbrain widget, share the item in Google Reader, or just click "like" on FriendFeed, essentially "checking the box off" on what was required for me as a reader, taking the easy way out. Often, this is done even by reading just the headline, and not the full article. (Do you really think people are reading all the items they Digg?)

Social news sites like Reddit, Mixx and others tend to simply show the sum total of votes by its members, subtracting the down votes from the up votes to determine an item's popularity. As a moderator on the Elite Tech News Reddit, I recently found myself looking at what the community had selected as the best news items. Usually they will have anywhere from only 1 to 3 points, but by looking deeper, the actual up and down votes are more like 12 to 9, or 11 to 10. Negative voting is almost always approaching 50 percent.


Ballhype says, "Don't be a hater"
I'd always thought if I didn't like something, I should just skip it rather than calling out that I don't like it. I do bury some items on Digg, if I find them to be duplicates, from shady Web sites, or, punitively, if I see the authors relentlessly pimping for votes on Twitter, but those are exceptions, rather than the rule. So who are these people who are just as likely to vote items down as up? So far, typical social networking behavior has let you play the role of hit and run, disliking an item and taking off, if you have that option, letting you do so anonymously, even if the system knew it was you. In fact, Ballhype would put up an alert to "Stop being a hater" if you gave too many thumbs down in a row.

Social Median's new approach to "Mood" not only lets you "dislike" an item, and see the percentage of people who dislike it, but you can see just who voted it down, adding a level of accountability to your vote. I am curious to see if the community takes to "dislikes" as quickly as they took to likes on FriendFeed. It's always easy to be in a group of friends who like something, but if you say you dislike something, it begs a follow-up. Why did you dislike it? Was it the subject matter? Was it poorly written? But again, that takes you out of the realm of doing as little as possible, and actually needing to answer the questions. I bet the community would vote thumbs down on that idea!

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

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.

ReadBurner Podcast Talks Comments, Twitter, FeedBurner Ads

After a few months participating in the Elite Tech News podcast each Sunday evening, I was excited to be invited by Drew Olanoff and Adam Ostrow of ReadBurner to participate in their ReadBurner Weekly Live podcast this evening.

Although I already knew the two guys were sharp from my previous interactions with Drew and Adam via e-mail, Twitter and seeing their blogs, it was absolutely a pleasure to talk with them both about the big issues of the week. My only regret from the call was that Skype and TalkShoe didn't get along all that well, so when you listen, you'll hear me drop off the call four separate times. Frickin' Skype...

Topics included:

• Once again, the diversity of new places to make comments, away from the original blog.
  
• The integration of AdSense and Feedburner to post ads in RSS.
  
• How to bring RSS to the mainstream?
  
• Twitter's continued uptime issues.
  
• Continued improvements to ReadBurner, including chiclets and the addition of a "Breaking News" feature.
  
• What would Techmeme look like without content from the Techmeme leaderboard? (101+).

You can find the archive on the Official ReadBurner Blog or download the MP3 file directly here. It weighs in at 27 megabytes. Be sure you "fast forward" five minutes, as it appears the recording was turned on well too early.

Also, as for the Elite Tech News podcast, the team completed another successful call Sunday, with guest panelist Tamar Weinberg. You can find it on Mashable: Elite Tech News #10: Crickets.

Elite Tech News: Episode 8: Featuring Allen Stern

Yesterday was another Sunday evening, which meant another night spent filling the Web airwaves with geeky tech talk about blogging trends, where comments belong, and whether one service's success necessarily means that others will have to fail. But Sunday's agenda was aided by the addition of a blogger I've respected for a long time, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, who just hours earlier, had issued a great bit of self-parody with a hit bound for Web 2.0 history, "Twitter Come Back".

Joining Allen and me was the show's moderator, Mark Hopkins of Mashable, and the ever-cranky but always fun Steven Hodson of WinExtra.

Despite our having a smaller array of participants, in the absence of Frederic Lardinois, Jason Kaneshiro, Tony Hung and MG Siegler, tonight's episode did not run short on time, or on energy. Our focused foursome managed to discuss:

Comcast's acquisition of Plaxo
Disqus and Seesmic Partnering Up
Whether FriendFeed and Twitter Are Signal or Noise
If the Scoble Effect Is Stable or Decreasing
Duncan Riley's First Week at the Inquisitr
Does One Company Winning Mean That Somebody Else Has to Lose?
Web 1.0 Monetization, Blog Advertising and Competition

Our producer, Art Lindsey, gave this week's podcast the title of "I Can Haz FriendFeed?" Don't blame me. I'm just the messenger.

It was great talking live with Allen, having previously only engaged on e-mail, Twitter and through blog comments, and I look forward to our gaining the opportunity to have more guests over time.

See also: Elite Tech News Podcast Week 4 On Tap

Elite Tech News Podcast Week 4 On Tap

I had the first opportunity this evening to dial in to the Elite Tech News podcast, hosted by Mashable's Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins, covering the hot topics of the week's activity on the custom elite tech news Reddit.

This week's discussions centered around mobile phones as distractions to walking or driving, how stolen data is so plentiful that the market has evaporated, the ongoing Yahoo!/AOL/Microsoft/News Corp dance, Last.fm leading to new music sales, and the weekend's hot topic of commend fragmentation from blogs to FriendFeed and RSS readers, like Shyftr.

Also participating on the call were WinExtra's Steven Hodson, Webomatica's Jason Kaneshiro, and Frederic Lardinois of the Last Podcast. MG Siegler of ParisLemon and Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests were unable to make it this week, but should be regular contributors.

You can access the full download of the podcast on the TalkShoe site: L33t Tech News

Also, to get the Elite Tech New Podcast in your iTunes, subscribe to the podcast for free. Once this week's is posted, you'll be all caught up. You can also listen to the last few weeks' archives.

In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

In mainstream print journalism, a good headline can be remembered for decades, whether for its unintentional incorrectness ("Dewey Defeats Truman" -- Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1948), its unconventional approach ("BASTARDS!" -- San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 12, 2001), its editorial wit ("Headless Body In Topless Bar" -- New York Post, April 15, 1983), or its emotional angst. ("Ford to City: Drop Dead" -- New York Daily News, October 30, 1975)

With social aspects of blog consumption becoming increasingly important, as well as the meteoric rise of RSS feed readers to take in information, a good blog headline can mean your story will be read instead of others on the same topic.

A good headline can mean the difference between getting ignored and getting Dugg, and as seemingly everyone is adding new feeds by the day, the sheer overload of information virtually guarantees a high number of your readers may never get to the full body of your story, if the headline doesn't grab their interest, or even turns them away.

Today, it is well accepted that Google Reader is the most widely-utilized RSS feed reader out there. While some have said it's not capable of handling the most avid feed consumers, I've yet to see one built more robustly. Helpfully, the service also offers a full set of historical statistics.


My Google Reader data as of this evening.
On a typical weekday, my stats show I'm seeing 700 to 900 items in my Google Reader, and need to make a quick judgment call on whether I'll read the full story, click through if it's a partial feed, hit share, or move on.

Just how little time do I have to make that decision? Assume that I read every post for 1 minute apiece. This would mean I spend 12-15 hours a day just in Google Reader. Take that number down to only 10 seconds, and you're still looking at 2 hours a day. What about three measly seconds? Taking a mere three seconds per headline means I've carved out 45 minutes a day just for feed reading, assuming 900 items. On the low end, that would be 30 minutes a day for 600 items, including those you actually read, and don't just scan the headlines.

RSS feed reading at that volume only truly becomes trivial if you think you can read and determine an action for the average post in one second. One second per post could take you all the way down to a stressful speed reading demonstration of 15 minutes a day. (Don't even try and get me started on how folks like Robert Scoble, who read more than I do, manage to cope.)

Contributing factors to whether I share a post on my link blog include the newness and uniqueness of the information, the quality or brand of the source and conversely if it's a new and emerging blogger, the amount of interest I have in the topic, that I perceive my readers to have in that topic, and the quality or content of the post itself.

But also a factor? The headline. If I happen upon two stories on the same topic, of interest to me and my readers, where the source is equal, it can be the headline and first paragraph that make one item shared over another. And as it is only the headline that is displayed in my Google Reader shared items on my blog or on FriendFeed, that's sometimes all the consumers see as well.

The issue of headlines becomes especially important for sites like Digg, Reddit and the like. Reddit, in fact, shows only headlines, begging for an up or down arrow. Digg shows a headline, and a submitter's authored one paragraph description. When you see stories that have hundreds or thousands of Diggs, do you really think all of those folks clicked out to the story, read it, and returned to Digg it? I doubt it.

Outside of social news submission sites, you can also see the importance of the headline on places like TechMeme. Items in the TechMeme discussion links show only a headline, and the story's source. Often, there can be 5-20 different stories from different sources on the same topic, making the headline, or the brand of the source, be the deciding factor for which post to click.


An example TechMeme discussion from tonight.
In 1998-1999, while wrapping up my senior year at Berkeley, I worked at a Web site focused on Internet and Silicon Valley history, called Internet Valley. My boss was certain that Web site consumption would change, and that the era of long textual pieces without styling was dying, in favor of pieces highlighted by bold, italics and colors. His theory was that Web users would "skim" and no longer "read" articles.

While his design tendencies were abysmal, he was right about people changing the way they consume news in this firehose of information. Now, it's obvious that you can lose them from your headlines alone, so for as much work as you may put into your writing, and getting the data or sources right, give your headlines their due.

How I Found or Started Using A Dozen Web Services

I was talking with a friend the other day about one of the Web services I use on a daily basis. When they asked about how I first learned of the site, I couldn't really remember. Did I get invited? Did I just log in? Did a friend tell me about it? No idea.

So, I thought I'd take a look backward and share how I found out about some things, or what the driving reason was to join others... and maybe you can tell me any interesting stories you have along the same lines.

(Presented in no particular order...)

1) MySpace (www.myspace.com)

I don't use MySpace, per se. I certainly don't have a MySpace page. But in 2005, when I was hosting the Oakland A's themed ANtics here (instead of on PhotoBucket), I saw a lot of traffic from random MySpace pages. Enough folks thought highly enough of the comics to post them in comments or their profile, so I got a dummy login and can now click through to see what people are saying about them. And this... I promise you... is the only way I ever use MySpace.

2) Facebook (www.facebook.com)

Like with MySpace, I avoided Facebook as long as I could. The social network seemed more appropriate for my younger sister, a college student, than it did for me. When Facebook opened up, I still resisted, but I couldn't help being lured in by all the talk of Mario Romero's Feedheads application, which tagged the most popular shared items in Google Reader. I got a Facebook account almost solely to use his application, and then ended up sticking around. I still don't consider myself a major Facebook user, but have gained a good number of "friends" on the site, and play Scrabulous with the family.

3) Feedheads (facebook.com/feedheads)

See #2, basically. Robert Scoble lusted after Mario Romero's excellent application, and his reviews were so glowing that I was willing to join a social network just to get it. The fact that this functionality hasn't yet been written into Google Reader directly still baffles me.

4) Twitter (www.twitter.com)

I first publicly swore I would never use Twitter, and then later, after asking the community's opinion, reversed my stance and joined the service. The honest #1 reason I joined? Because I felt in the wake of my highly visible argument with Mashable, that just maybe the entire event could have been minimized with a few well-placed "tweets" to Mark Hopkins. While we had tagged each other on e-mail, the responsiveness just wasn't as fast as it could have been with Twitter, and that helped me jump the shark, to avoid a recurrence, although admittedly the argument eventually made me a lot more friendly with Mark and the Mashable team than ever would have otherwise.

5) FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com)

It's funny, I can't tell you if I was ever invited to FriendFeed by anyone in particular during their closed beta period. But in a discussion on Robert Scoble's site about Feedheads being his favorite Facebook application, one commenter asked, "What do you think of Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com), and their Facebook app ?", saying it did even more than Feedheads could. I went back to Facebook and saw the FriendFeed application did exactly as advertised. (Oddly, my Apple Mail tells me I got in on October 17th, the same day I first announced Feedheads getting its new name, while the comment's time stamp is October 18th.)

6) Spokeo (www.spokeo.com)

I had never heard of Spokeo until I met with their VP of Marketing at a Plug and Play tech conference last fall. The demo was enticing enough for me to sign up. (See my initial coverage here) The site's still interesting, and it's been fun to watch their development, but given the lack of interactivity, I've defaulted to FriendFeed for sure.

7) Reddit (www.reddit.com)

A few years ago, I was asked to be emcee for a local talent show. While there was no way I would have even thought of attending, let alone participating, the option to be in control was too much to pass up. I think the same thing happened with Reddit. I'd largely ignored the service, in favor of Digg, but when Reddit allowed for custom Reddits to be built, and MG Siegler of ParisLemon came calling with the idea for an elite Reddit, I jumped on board.

8) ReadBurner (www.readburner.com)

It's almost not fair to post this one, now that Alexander Marktl has taken it down, but I saw some oddities in my referral logs, coming from a server hosted on the Amazon Web service. I clicked through and it was amazing to find this incredible service without a domain name or any Google traction. (See the first story from January 7th here) For two months, ReadBurner shined like the Phoenix, but came crashing down to ash after the developer let real life get in the way.

9) LinkRiver (www.linkriver.com)

Another referral logs hero.

Adam Stiles had been using LinkRiver on his own site for some time, and I had largely ignored it, thinking it was one user's pet project. When overnight, it went from adamstiles.com to linkriver.com, I realized it was ready to hit the big time. A few e-mails later, and I was in touch with Adam to find the real story.

10) RSSMeme (www.rssmeme.com)

After ReadBurner debuted, other services came in the site's wake. None was more excitable than Benjamin Golub, who seemingly overnight crafted a link blog aggregation clone. Not hours after the site had debuted was Golub tweeting about it on Twitter and sending me Direct Message after Direct Message. Eventually, I said "enough" and checked it out. Despite initial rough edges, he's developed the site and grown its link blog base to the point that it is the unquestioned leader here.

11) Yokway! (www.yokway.com)

This was a fun one. Yokway! still isn't out, and won't be for a week or two. But I found a reference to the near-term appearance of Yokway! on one of the tech blogs I read. After I searched Google, and found the site was closed, I did another search on Google's Blog Search, finding one mention of Yokway!, in French, from February 1st. The author helpfully gave a backdoor access port, and a few clicks later I was in and checking out the service, which will be very cool when it debuts for real.

12) Athletics Nation (www.athleticsnation.com)

I include AN here as it's become a major part of my Web experience every spring and summer. I was visiting the Daily Kos Web site one day in early 2005 when Markos Moulitsas casually mentioned Sports Blogs Nation, and the Athletics Nation Web site. I clicked through and was dumbfounded... it was as if a light had been turned on and I openly asked where the site had been all my life. A single site... dedicated to A's baseball, full of knowledgeable fans. It was amazing. I've been an A's fan for 20 years now, and an AN fan for 3. Soon thereafter I became part of the site's editorial team and have contributed stories or comics since mid-2005.

There's no possible way I can dig deep into my e-mail or blog history and find everything. I do know that beyond these dozen services, I joined LinkedIn way back in 2003, on a colleague's recommendation. I was buying computers off eBay back in 1999, and was using PayPal back in 2000 to buy game tickets. Amazon shows me I ordered a set of books in 1999 using the same ID I have now, though I can see e-mails to my mother about the service dating back to 1997. There's also no perfect way to find out when I started using Google Reader or TechMeme, or the first time I ever started reading TechCrunch and Scoble... but sometimes it's worth looking backwards a bit to remember just how we started using these things, even if it now seems like we always have been.