A thread I started at CivicSpaceLabs on upgrading Philly Future. For reference.

BBC’s Newsnig8t: A balance sheet of the blog

The BBC is having a discussion about what it should do about blogs. This takes place in the wider context of the breakup of the broadcasting model. People are reporting stories for themselves using blogs and mobile phones (with the 7/7 bomb, not the G8, being seen as a tipping point). The Guardian’s foray into blogs has been impressive but seems to me the wrong track: trying to weld a corporate identity onto the content and capture it within a corporate system on their own platforms. A blog is the free and individual writing of a single person, or group of people, untrammelled by rules or a given “mission statement”; the blogosphere is a series of communities of blogs, where what is of value comes to prominence because of self-selection and word of mouth rather than promotion: in other words, because enough people believe it helps them get to the truth. Blogs are acting like the ibis on the shoulder of the buffalo to mainstream journalism right now. I do not predict the demise of the broadcasting model but I can’t see a linear progression for it either. How it interacts with blogging, and mobile content, is not the interaction between two technologies but between two kinds of content. The challenge for broadcasters is not to produce faux blogs; ditto the challenge for journalists. It is to respond to the content need, indeed the content gap, demonstrated by the existence of blogs. The problem is: maybe it can’t respond fully. The added hitch is: it is going to be more difficult for public service broadcasters to engage in this because we are hidebound by extra rules on impartiality as well as fairness and accuracy. It seems to me that the world right now, for good or ill, is craving partiality…or at least honesty about one’s stance. The popularity of Fox News is testimony to that: Fox and blogging are part of the same phenomenon and it is not totally welcome to traditional journalists in the UK. But that is not a reason to stop experimenting with blogging.

Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher was recently at a panel with Peter Hirshberg, a marketing guy at Technorati.

SiliconValleyWatcher.com: “The selling of the Blogosphere Technorati’s big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs”:

…Technorati has done an enormous amount of work in supporting the early blogging communities, and it has been a strong evangelist for bloggers everywhere through its promotion of blogs and bloggers.

…The subject of the panel was “How the Blogosphere is changing the game in PR and marketing” organized by the PR company Horn Group and nicely moderated by Shannon Latta, a partner of the Horn Group, and the panel included Horn Group’s in-house blogger Blake Barbera, who writes an increasingly popular blog: Wet Feet PR.

…What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati’s expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals.

…Mr Hirshberg talked about the current tracking services that Technorati offers, and new products coming that will offer a deeper analysis of web blogs and will assign a value of authority, and other tags. All the better to more accurately distinguish how important a blog post is, the sphere of influence of a particular blogger, and the many number of ways to slice and dice the wealth of blog data Technorati is collecting and selling.

“It’s all about getting the right algorithm” he said at one point, arguing that Technorati’s sophisticated automated services would enable corporations to find out what is being said about them, their people, products, and to respond to bad news very quickly, by engaging bloggers in conversations.

…Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the “wrong” message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate “SWAT” team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

“You need to become involved in the conversation,” Mr Hirshberg strongly advised his audience.

…A lot of blogs are semi-private, their authors are mostly talking with their friends and family, and the discussions are not intended for broad publication.

…This produces a relaxed intimacy of conversation that marketeers prize very highly. And now they can track and eavesdrop on millions of such relaxed conversations, thanks to Technorati’s services, (not cheap either.)

Doc Searls, does a round up, and has a few comments to share.

Mike Sanders, puts it bluntly.

Jeneane Sessum has been having issues with Technorati and is wondering why other bloggers haven’t spoken up.

allied: When We Are Hypocrites

…I’m getting a little miffed.

Because when it’s someone like Dell that fails to deliver, more brick than click, the bloggerati jump up and down and demand satisfaction. They call in the legit media and launch a feeding frenzy.

But when it’s me and the folks who comment here about Technorati’s weeks of non-usability, you hear a lot of wind. Is that because we’re supposed to all be friends? Not bite the hand that ranks us? Because Dave Sifry’s busier launching Live 8 sites and sending bloggers backstage, and announcing top 100s, than he is making sure that we can search beyond the new Technorati wasted-space homepage?

Is it okay to take Dell to the matt while making sure one of our own is immune?

No it’s not.

MAKE: Blog: ODEO – Mini-review and Screenshots:

I’m really impressed with the ease of use, download tools, recording (great use of Flash com server, finally!) cross platform and niceties of ODEO- I think this is going to get a lot of people publishing and downloading podcasts. ODEO + iTunes 4.9 + iPodder 2.1 + iPodderX + AudioBlog + LibSyn + everything else that’s going on right now, we’re finally going to fill our 40GB portable audio players, and will all be recording a lot of important things to share.

BusinessWeek: “The Myth of Open-Source”:

Q: Why is it a myth that a startup will get developers to hone the product for free?

A: Think for a second, who works for free? I think it gets perpetrated because it’s such a nice myth — you would get love and peace, the old hippie dream you know? And it’s mostly true, but across all of software, not just open-source, you have a pyramid of productivity. It’s an art still — a black art of creating great software.

At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times — in some cases 100 times — more productive than the rest. It’s true in proprietary developments like Microsoft and true of open-source too. The value is the QA [quality-assurance testing to make sure the software works and finding and fixing bugs]. They cover more ground than we could ever test.

Putting aside the QA, there are 20 people who write the kernel, and guess what? These guys are all professionals. If you get free, you want a lot of it. If you give free, you’re going to give until you’re tired of giving, and that’s exactly what happens in the open-source community.

Based on Rafe’s suggestion I picked up O’Reilly’s “Head First Design Patterns” and it was well worth reading.

Rafe had this to say on the book:

…So I’m in the process of reading the book, and I rate it as the best computer book I’ve ever read in the “instructional tool” category. I generally find it difficult to learn new things from books, I prefer to take a more hands on approach that involves tearing into code and looking at documentation when I have to. This book has been the exception to the rule — it’s designed to apply the most innovative thinking on how humans learn, and the approach is effective. The one danger the book runs into is appearing to be gimmicky, but if you can get past that, I think you’ll be impressed.

While I won’t call it the best computer book I’ve ever read in the “instructional tool” category (that honor would go to “Effective Java” by Joshua Bloch) it comes very close. Long term it might supercede it if for me as while the book may have its examples written in Java, I can immediately see how it applies to work I do in other environments like Flash and PHP.

Update: Rafe stopped by to say: “I loved Joshua Bloch’s book too. I just didn’t think of it as the same kind of book as Head First Design Patterns, since it’s a collection of best practices rather than a book that sets out to teach you about something step by step.”

Makes sense. These two books aren’t truely birds of a feather.

Now I’m off reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” and Friends of Ed’s Kris Besley, Sham Bhangal’s Foundation Flash MX 2004. Ya see – I’ve learned Flash backwards. Actionscript first, UI second. Weird, but if you knew the projects I worked on – you’d understand.