Blog posts have staying power

By Mack D. Male · March 10, 2009 at 11:47pm

Fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Brian Solis. He talks about the declining authority of blogs and attributes the loss to the “statusphere” – essentially micromedia services like Twitter and FriendFeed. This is the key passage:

Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

Ignoring the fact that he talks about Technorati a lot (I never use it anymore), I think Brian makes a good point. Even just looking at my own activities, I definitely respond less to other blog posts using my own blog than I used to. Instead, I tweet about them. Actually, I would say Twitter is affecting my social bookmarking activities too! I save things in Delicious far less frequently now, choosing instead to tweet them.

What does this mean for bloggers? Mainly that it’s more difficult to track the discussion about a blog post. Brian mentions a number of services in his post that you can use, but they’re not yet what I would call foolproof. They are getting better though.

This trend toward micro-responses doesn’t make blogs any less important, however. Probably the opposite, actually. I could tweet all day about a topic, but my tweets would be largely lost the next day. Blog posts have staying power. That’s probably why I still get more traffic from Google than from Twitter.

Anyway, give Brian’s post a read.

Blogging killed by Twitter? I don’t think so

By Mack D. Male · October 21, 2008 at 10:55pm

I’ll give Paul Boutin credit for writing some seriously good link bait, but that’s all his recent essay for Wired is worth. Paul argues that we don’t need blogs anymore thanks to Twitter (and for good measure he mentions Facebook and Flickr too). He advises anyone thinking about starting a blog to think twice, and anyone who already writes one to pull the plug:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I guess Paul is a “glass-half-empty” kind of guy.

Of course it’s difficult to get noticed in the blogosphere – there are so many blogs out there! Of course something you write is going to attract comment trolls – you can’t please everyone! Of course blogging takes more time and effort than Twitter – but that’s because you’re writing so much more!

But none of that is reason enough to give up on blogging.

Obviously I’m a big fan of Twitter, and I do spend quite a lot of time posting there, but I don’t think I could replace my blog with it. I find the two are complementary – quick comments and updates go on Twitter, longer thoughts go on my blog. That system seems to work well for me.

Same goes for the consumption side of things. Tweets are searchable instantly, true, but good luck following a thread. Short conversations between a couple of people are okay, but anything more and you’ve got problems. Blogs don’t have this problem of course, thanks to comments and trackbacks. And let’s be honest, Google indexes blogs fairly quickly anyway.

Paul says:

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.

I’d agree with that. Twitter has lots of buzz right now, that’s undeniable. Just as the election in 2004 helped blogs increase in popularity, the current election is giving a boost to Twitter. What I don’t agree with is the notion that Twitter’s success sounds the death knell for blogs.

I think blogs remain incredibly valuable and will be with us for a long time to come.

Analyzing my posting habits

By Mack D. Male · May 1, 2007 at 1:47am

I have been blogging for about three and half years now, and lately I’ve been wondering about my posting habits. Do I tend to post at a certain time of day? How about a certain day of the week? I certainly don’t try to – I just post when I have something to share.

I ran the numbers tonight, and here’s what I found (click on a graph to enlarge). The percentage on the Y-axis means “percentage of my posts”. For days of the week:

Looks like my post frequency drops off on the weekend, but not as much as I thought it might. For hours of the day:

Looks like I am definitely a late-afternoon/evening blogger! This is quite a bit different than the blogosphere as a whole.

When I do these numbers again, I’ll have to figure out how many posts are made on days where I post more than once. I’d also like to find out what the average number of words/characters per post is, but that calculation is a little more involved.

Kind of a neat exercise, I have to say. It’ll be interesting to see how these statistics change in another three and a half years!

We call it April Fools DAY for a reason!

By Mack D. Male · April 18, 2007 at 11:09am

We don’t call it April Fool’s Week. We don’t call it April Fool’s Month. I don’t know how we can make it any clearer, but April Fool’s Day is just one single day people! Here’s what Wikipedia says:

April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day, though not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1.

So why then, are pranks becoming so common post-April 1st? Last week the hoax was that a podcaster was taking over for Imus on CBS. This week the hoax is having a trademark on the term “podcast” in Canada. Who knows what we’ll see next week. I’m sure there are others I haven’t come across too.

What’s the point of posting a hoax more than two weeks late? It does nothing but cause confusion, however temporary it may be. I suspect the people posting these late pranks are simply trolling for traffic. And in that respect, I guess it works. However, I think “scanning” is becoming more and more common as a result of the thousands of posts and articles created each day, so it’s becoming easier to fall for a hoax.

This comment from “Se7en” on Scoble’s post is worth thinking about:

Sigh, and bloggers wonder why they aren’t considered credible.

I’m all for some humor once in a while, and I believe you need to read things critically no matter what date is on the calendar. That said, I think April Fool’s Day pranks post April 1st just plain suck. Please don’t post them.

O’Reilly’s Code of Conduct – Stupid!

By Mack D. Male · April 9, 2007 at 10:33pm

Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly posted a blogging code of conduct. It was created as a result of the Kathy Sierra thing. Quite a few people think it’s a good idea, other’s don’t. Mike Arrington is part of the latter group:

The code of conduct and the mass of bloggers lining up behind it scares me a lot more than the hate comments and death threats I’ve received in the past. I won’t support it.

Mike is absolutely, unequivocally, 100%, DEAD ON.

The blogosphere doesn’t need a code of conduct. What a stupid idea.

On the Kathy Sierra thing

By Mack D. Male · March 29, 2007 at 9:16pm

Recently there was a big furor in the blogosphere about some hate mail that Kathy Sierra received. She cancelled a scheduled conference appearance as a result. Obviously it’s sad and disappointing when anyone receives hate mail, but why is Kathy’s case any different? I’m pretty sure that people receive hate mail all the time (and lots of comments on blogs around the web this week seem to confirm that).

I don’t often agree with Dave Winer, but I do today:

People aren’t going to like this, but it’s true — when a woman asks for a riot she gets one, and almost no one comes to the defense of a man who is attacked. Who’s more vulnerable? Well, honestly, it’s not always a woman.

Those who provided the riot Ms Sierra asked for, unknowingly, I’m sure, attacked at least one person whose health is pretty fragile. I wonder how y’all feel now that you know that. I wonder how you’d feel if that person died in the midst of the shitstorm. Someday if we don’t change the herd mentality of the tech blogosphere, that is likely to happen. I don’t want to be part of the herd on that day, that’s why I won’t join herds.

Hundreds of people (perhaps thousands) have posted about Kathy’s situation and how they think it is awful. How many of them actually mean it? I don’t know, but I think there’s a pretty large echo in here. Especially among the so-called A-listers this week, it definitely seemed to me that speaking out against the hate mail was simply the “in thing” to do.

I never intended to post anything about this topic. I certainly wasn’t about to follow Robert Scoble’s lead and stop blogging for a week. I don’t think Kathy’s case deserves any special treatment. I didn’t want to contribute to the useless echo. In the end I decided to post this simply for my own future reflection.

Here’s some related stuff if you want to find out more:

Are bloggers talking about Edmonton?

By Mack D. Male · March 1, 2007 at 10:20pm

In my last post I was sort of wondering who Edmonton bloggers are and what they are talking about, but perhaps just as interesting is what bloggers are saying about Edmonton. If you do a quick search for Edmonton at any of the many blog search engines, you’ll find a large number of results. Here are some interesting ones I picked out:

Scribe posted some images of Edmonton landmarks – I like the last one.
Here’s a video tour of our city, from Muchmor Magazine. It’s actually quite good if you ask me.
Justice wonders why Edmonton has the #1 homicide rate in Canada. I don’t know, but it sucks to have that distinction!
midlee says s/he loves Rabbit Hill, a ski resort just outside Edmonton.
The SaveOurClimate blog mentions that Edmonton will be one of six cities across Canada to hold a Canadians for Kyoto rally on March 11th.
April thinks Edmonton is beautiful, despite the impressive list of places she has visited recently, including Greece, Switzerland, and France.

And of course there’s a ton of discussion about the Smyth trade.

So I guess the answer is yes! Bloggers are talking about Edmonton.

Edmonton Bloggers

By Mack D. Male · February 28, 2007 at 11:51pm

This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I got an email this week from Pete Quily, asking if Edmonton had anything like the kind of directory he is looking for in Vancouver. Here’s what he wants:

With the large number of techies/bloggers/web workers/geeks/wired folk/internet businesses/pick your preferred word in the Vancouver area, why isn’t there a comprehensive directory of such people and organizations/nonprofits/businesses?

I want that for Edmonton too!

So just like I have been doing with edmontontech, I have started tagging blogs at del.icio.us with the tag edmontonblogs. This is really more of an “in the meantime” kind of activity, because as Pete points out, an actual directory website would be much more useful. Maybe I’ll build it one of these days.

I actually have an excellent domain name for it – blogosphere.ca. As you can see, we haven’t touched it since 2004. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to throw together some kind of directory with OPML and feeds broken down by city. BlogsCanada had potential, but it seems to have died. Another similar site is the Canadian Tech Mob, but it’s tech only, and nearly impossible to navigate (seriously didn’t webrings die in 1999?).

Okay I better go before I start writing code. I’m off to Calgary in the morning for a meeting!

Read: Pete Quily

Techmeme River

By Mack D. Male · December 17, 2006 at 5:49pm

Techmeme is a fairly popular aggregator for technology news from around the blogosphere, but I’ve never really liked it. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think the main reason I didn’t like it was the layout. On Monday that changed, when founder Gabe Rivera launched a new layout option called Techmeme River:

River pages are compact, with no news clustering, but include permalinks to standard pages where Discussion and Related items can be found.

In summary, River eases a number of common power user pain points, all with a basic long list of headlines. Enjoy!

I wouldn’t consider myself a Techmeme power user, but I do find the new /river layout much easier to use. I find myself visiting Techmeme far more often now. Check it out!

Read: Techmeme River