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.

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.

Robert Scoble on Long-Form Blogging, New Voices

Video Courtesy Mashable! and embedded from Stickam.
Starting around 6:20 into the video...

Pete Cashmore: "... the key question I wanted to ask you, which is, we're asking 'Blogs - what are they good for?' Is the long form of blogs kind of outdated now, and are you and other personal bloggers kind of moving on to Twitter, to FriendFeed and Facebook? It seems like you're building a personal brand, and blogging, really, that long form that takes more time - you seem to be on Twitter, developing more on Twitter..."

Robert Scoble: "Yeah, but new voices are taking our place, right? Louis Gray... who the hell is he? He came out of nowhere and is on the TechMeme leaderboard."

Cashmore: "There is something I seem to remember..." (Likely referring to this discussion from January)

Scoble: "Absolutely. And that's part of getting attention. But he's doing great, thoughtful, long posts, and he's adding something to the blogosphere that we're not able to add any more because we're too busy flying around the world."

I certainly didn't expect this kind of praise from Robert Scoble, who has forged one of the most well-recognized brands in blogging, but it's much appreciated. I just hope that over time, we move away from "Who is this guy?" to the name meaning something. Appreciate the mention, Robert. (Also: Hat tip to Matt Shaulis at Shyftr, who alerted me to it.)
-- Louis

Did ReadBurner Acquisition Cause Conflict of Interest for Mashable?

On Friday, I was excited to announce that Alexander Marktl's excellent shared links aggregator and ranking site, ReadBurner, had been resurrected, following its acquisition by Adam Ostrow of Mashable, Drew Olanoff, and Eric Kerr. But given the social link aggregation space is a growing one with multiple entrants, including RSSMeme, Feedheads, LinkRiver, Shared Reader and others, some were concerned that Mashable's involvement in the deal would spell bias in their coverage, essentially compromising their editorial independence.

So rather than guess at what might happen going forward, I asked Mashable myself, sending an e-mail to Adam Ostrow, reporter Mark Hopkins, and Pete Cashmore. I specifically asked: "How do you think readers or competitors to ReadBurner could be assured that there's no funny stuff?" and "Is Adam now off the case for link aggregators?"

Unsurprisingly, the Mashable team had considered the potential for assumed bias prior to announcing the acquisition, and Ostrow said he was specifically hesitant to post the news on Mashable, "given how much I despise the conflicts of interest that some others engage in," he said. Ostrow also said that he was in fact going to remove himself from commenting on direct competitors, like RSSMeme and LinkRiver, and doesn't expect to be blogging on Mashable about ReadBurner much in the future.

In the event that there is announcement-worthy news on ReadBurner, Ostrow anticipates passing the news to Hopkins (or another Mashable reporter) and letting them determine its impact.

He adds, "As someone that sorts through hundreds of BS press releases on a daily basis, I think I'll have a pretty good idea of what's newsworthy and what's not, and limit myself to announcing stuff only when we have something cool to show off."

Hopkins also mentioned that with the ReadBurner acquisition, the Mashable team is especially sensitive to not overhype the announcement, and also to extend coverage to others in the space. A good example of this was Friday's story on RSSMeme's new widget, which Mark said was posted partly "to show we weren't going to play unfairly." He adds, "There is usually a ceiling to how high a certain niche can grow, but ReadBurner and RSSMeme both are nowhere near that ceiling in terms of users or traffic. These types of stories of this class of startup always generate a lot of interest and traffic for us, and if it builds interest in the genre, that's also good business for Adam."

Despite the fact it might be good business for Ostrow and his new ReadBurner team, Mashable, on its face, looks to be doing the right thing in addressing potential claims of bias. They anticipate some activities need to be "slightly adjusted to avoid an appearance of impopriety," Hopkins said.

The involvement of a blogger/journalist like Ostrow in a business transaction like the ReadBurner acquisition is unusual, but one I believe was born out of belief in a new technology trend, and love of ReadBurner specifically, one I wish I personally could have taken on, to be honest, if only I had the budget, and the technical know-how. While others in this space may potentially question Mashable's bias here, I'm not all that concerned, and we will have to watch and see their future coverage to see if they display transparency and objectivity.

Of course... I'm always willing to break stories here if folks are worried... What do you think? Was a line crossed, and have Mashable's comments assured you that everything will be on the up and up?

ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership

Alexander Marktl's debut of ReadBurner in January had rapidly propelled him and his service to a short-list of new Web tech All-Stars. In days, the Google Reader shared items tracker rocketed to popularity, gaining praise from all corners of the Web, many of whom, including me, had long begged for a universal directory of shared links and most popular items - seeing the ranking of such shared items as a democratized, transparent, version of TechMeme.

But, like fellow All-Stars Barry Sanders and Michael Jordan in their respective sports, Alexander prematurely retired, and left us wanting more - in this case, saying real life had gotten in the way. But as with Jordan, this early retirement has not been the true end - setting the stage for a dramatic re-entrance, this time, with a little help from some powerful friends, including Adam Ostrow of Mashable, Drew Olanoff, and Eric Kerr. (See: I’ve Acquired ReadBurner: Attention Data is the Future of Social News

As of this morning, ReadBurner is no longer a gaping hole in the Web 2.0 sphere, but has returned with a splash page promising big things. The plan is to relaunch the site in a couple weeks with a more scalable back-end, improved design, and even more features requested by ReadBurner's demanding fan base - myself included.

And this development is tremendous. Many ReadBurner fans were up in arms over seeing one of the best sites to debut in 2008 get shuttered. Steven Hodson of WinExtra wrote, "ReadBurner - Please reconsider", and ReadWriteWeb simply lamented, "ReadBurner is Gone". The loss of ReadBurner left us with RSSMeme, a strong alternative on the Web, and Feedheads, ReadBurner's Facebook counterpart, and the original innovator in this space.

ReadBurner hasn't just found new friends. In fact, the site's found a new owner. Adam Ostrow isn't just bringing the site back. He bought it, for an undisclosed sum, from Alexander, in partnership with Drew and Eric. Now, the threesome, with Alexander acting as an advisor, will move forward and help ReadBurner achieve the amazing potential it always promised.

The excitement I had when I first uncovered ReadBurner and exposed the fledgeling site to the world is back.

When I found ReadBurner, after midnight on January 7th, I knew this little site had the power to change how we share and discover new sites and gauge momentum. In days it had its share of copycat sites (including RSSMeme on February 6th), and had gained media buzz from Mashable, LifeHacker, WebWare, the Download Squad and many others. It was fun to see Alexander's project grow to a full-fledged service, one too big and too successful to be held down by my little blog. Now, I feel like I've seen the baby grow up... and it's ready to set out on its own.

Welcome back, ReadBurner.

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.

Mashable Divides Early Adopters and Harsh Reviewers

A Web service's adoption cycle certainly has multiple stages - from its initial development, to seeding with bleeding-edge adopters and test accounts, gaining word of mouth and referrals, leading to more early adopters and tech aficionados, before being poked at by more mainstream folks, and eventually, technology laggards.

A key element of graduating a service to the mainstream is a positive review from an objective, trusted, third party. Once the trusted third party gives the service their blessing, it's a sign the masses can sign up and expect it to work flawlessly.

In a great post this morning, where I happen to be mentioned a few times, Mark Hopkins of Mashable admits to both wanting to be in the early adopter role, and find services first, but also, needing to play the more cautious role of harsh reviewer, a role shared by blogging compatriot Steven Hodson. Where I may express excitement about potential, they can express caution or annoyance if a bug gets in the way.

In marked contrast, when I find a bug in one of these new services, I typically have made a screenshot and e-mailed it to the developers... and I'm currently in the QA phase for a few services we'll be talking about in the next coming weeks, playing that role before it's time for their unveiling.

So... depending on where you live in the adoption cycle, you might love a new service's potential, or you may hate that it doesn't do everything you want immediately. But we know our role, and when Mark thinks these services have passed the threshold for a Mashable endorsement, that will be an exciting day for entrepreneurs who keep tweaking their code.

See: The Early Adopter vs. The Harsh Reviewer

Kudos to Mashable, and Three Links Their Way

Some companies will talk about change, and not follow through. Mashable is not one of them. After promising to offer an improved level of transparency and attribution, the popular social networking news site has done exactly that, revamping they way they report news, share linkage and introduce original sourcing. Over the last few weeks, Mashable has managed to seamlessly keep reporting the news while adapting to the new guidelines... and that's hard to do.

With that said, I wanted to draw your attention to three great stories Mashable is running right now.

---

Podcast: A Conversation with MG Siegler
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/l33t-reddit/

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins sat down with MG Siegler of ParisLemon to talk about our new joint venture of delivering an "elite" Reddit, aimed at offering the best in tech news, free of the usual nonsense.

---

Readburner’s Unofficial API
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/readburner-api/

Hardly a day goes by without Alexander Marktl's pet project, ReadBurner, making the news. Yesterday, as noted in my link blog, David Rothman posted a piece on Hacking ReadBurner URLs, which can deliver unique, and often unexpected, results. URL hacking is among my favorite past-times. Combine it with ReadBurner, and you've got some good fun ahead.

---

RatingBurner Ranks Blogs According To RSS Numbers
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/ratingburner-ranks-blogs-according-to-rss-numbers/

Mashable's Stan Schroeder also followed up on our piece on Rating Burner from last night, highlighting the new site's ability to rank blogs by RSS numbers. As he writes, "... it’s a ranking system with positive sides and flaws like any other, and I guess it can’t hurt to have another one."

---

All are worth clicking through and reading. Make sure you do. And Mashable, nice job.

Mashable Addresses Attribution in the Blogosphere

From Mashable contributing editor Adam Ostrow's personal site:
Thoughts on Attribution in the Blogosphere:

Some excerpts:

“Growing responsibilities” is something I think the whole blogosphere is still coming to grips with, and a reason we need people like Louis Gray, as much as it might suck to become the whipping boy for an industry-wide problem."

"... we’re already putting in place measures at Mashable to make it clearer where a story comes from when we’re not the source. For starters, we're going to phase out the “via” links that are commonly found on many, many blogs in tech space."

"In retrospect, I’m actually glad that Louis Gray called us out on the attribution issue, because it now allows us to take a leadership role in making changes for the good of the industry. Along those lines, being able to react, respond, and implement policy adjustments within 48 hours of what some people might view as a PR disaster is one of the many reasons I love being in this space. We can always do better, and hopefully this will help us do just that."

Background for the small handful of you who missed it:

The conversation starter: Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz

The update: Mashable Promises to Upgrade Linking Policies

Adam, Pete and the Mashable team, I wanted to publicly thank you for taking on a hard topic and being so transparent about working toward enhancing the way you work within the blogosphere. Your post and comments here and elsewhere were a real help to letting others know your intentions, and continually striving to improve. Greatly appreciated.

Mashable Promises to Upgrade Linking Policies

For the original post launching this topic, click here.

Open discussion in the blogosphere is an important element, necessary to promote change where change is needed. Sometimes, the way this discussion can be initiated will hit people the wrong way, making some believe that if you come down on the unpopular side of the issue, that it's personal, when that's not intended. And there's no doubt that the way I addressed a few frustrations I had with Mashable's coverage and attribution had at least one person seeing red, labeling me "arrogant, insulting, immature and irresponsible" in an e-mail.

But aside from their viewpoint, the conversation started up by last night's post has many thinking about how the blogosphere can grow up and take on traditional media "best practices" for linkage, research and attribution. Coming from a media background myself, I certainly have ideas in my head as to what are the right ways to go about reporting, linking and attribution, and while there's no way I'm perfect, I do the best I can to follow them - as no doubt, most people do.

To make it clear, I don't dislike Mashable, period. I don't dislike their writers or their management at all. In fact, I greatly enjoyed talking with Pete Cashmore last night and seeing his comments, as well as those of Adam Ostrow, and am pleased to see the team is going to rally and review their editorial linking policies after this kerfuffle, as he posted in the comments, and via e-mail.

I don't take the viewpoint that some others took that it was high time to unsubscribe from their RSS feed or to boycott them. I have zero proof, as others claimed, that the site has broken embargoes, and I strongly believe each of the people involved are well-intended, but may sometimes be feeling the pressure to post quickly, and needed something like this to make best practices a company policy.

So while Kent Newsome called this "Louis Gray vs. Mashable" in his notes tonight, that's not what I was going for. I was going for "Louis Gray fights in favor of best practices" where Mashable gets a one-time black eye that quickly fades... or something.

So how did the overall blogosphere take the conversation, after it unexpectedly hit TechMeme, putting it in front of the eyes of thousands? Let's take a look.

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Peter Black said, "Although Mashable is a site I read religiously and link to frequently, I think Louis Gray's point is fair and well made" in a post simply titled: "Mashable" .

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Todd McKinney said in "MS bashing may be fashionable", "It’s just sleazy to see the proliferation of internal links and content thievery among the commercial a-list in the blogosphere. These guys should be setting the standard here."

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Mathew Ingram devoted an entire post to the coversation, in "I’m glad Louis Gray called out Mashable", saying, "... something has always kind of bothered me about the site, and I’m glad that Louis Gray finally wrote about it: Mashable often isn’t that great at giving credit to the blogs and writers who found an item first."

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Ian Betteridge of Technovia called my post a "well-deserved kicking", saying "While everyone messes up an attribution every now and then, Mashable seems to have shown too much of a pattern to doing this for it to be anything other than editorial policy."

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Prosthetic Device, a new blog to me, wrote, saying "If you create original content, you need to be mindful of your online presence," calling Mashable a "bigger online gorilla", in her post "Disintermediation and Web 2.0".

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Joe Duck saw the discussion as "Another shot in the blog revolution", extending the conversation by linking the volume of stories to cold hard cash, saying, "I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades - sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization."

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Backing up Mathew Ingram in Canada was Tris Hussey of Maple Leaf 2.0, who, in a post called "Cross-linking and attribution are critical to conversation and social media", said that "small blogs can be “discovered” when they are given the acknowledgement and props they deserve."

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Frederic of the Last Podcast backed us up in a post called "No Attribution", and said that beyond money, the issue may be that there are just too many tech blogs out there covering the same thing, making researched reporting too dang hard. He writes, "There seems to be a lot more emphasis on breaking news today than delivering any sort of critical reflection about the news."

All told, the comments throughout the blogosphere, combined with many of those on last night's post, have me believing there is a serious amount of distrust of the biggest sites out there - and Mashable's not alone in drawing suspicion. Other commenters volunteered TechCrunch and Engadget as being skimpy with external links and attributing original sources for news. Regardless of who is to blame for questionable practices, I'm glad the blogosphere presents us with a platform to talk about it, and to actually make change. I am pleased with Mashable's near-instant response to the issue, and have faith that Pete and his team will work harder to be part of the continued evolution of the blogosphere as it grows up. Hopefully, I haven't burned so many bridges as to be left out of the process.

For additional commentary on the Mashable attribution issue, in other languages, try:

Blog En Serio: También los grandes pecan… y más de lo que pensamos (Spanish)
Porto Alegre: E Continua a Discussao (Portuguese)

Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz

In the tech blogosphere, there's a clear delineation between those who are actively creating the news (the developers, engineers, and business people), those who are reporting the news (those blogs who follow journalism standards and do actual reporting) and those who simply follow along - either by referencing other people's work, or simply duplicating it. Mashable, billing itself as the #1 social networking news site on the Web, falls almost exclusively in that third camp.

Over the last few weeks, I've been at times shaking my head as I've seen the site's reporters deliver an absolute minimum of original reporting, underdeliver on giving credit to those finding the news first, and in one blatant example, stealing quotes from a story I had written, without giving attribution, and not making edits when notified.

Mashable is one of the big names in the blogosphere, ranking #8 overall, according to Technorati. The site has achieved this ranking through an army of reporters who deliver a high number of stories around the clock. While the stories themselves don't often gain a high number of comments, and don't usually offer new information that couldn't be found elsewhere on the Web, the sheer volume has made them a must-subscribe tech news filter for many subscribed to their RSS feed. (Myself included)

Due to Mashable's popularity, the site very often gains credit for finding a story, when in fact it was almost always found first somewhere else. And the site's design and story templates favor giving the original source of the story as little credit as possible - often tucked away, so well-meaning repeaters of Mashable's news miss it altogether. This month, I've been burned by this a number of times, as you can see:

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#1: The ReadBurner Discovery and Launch

On Monday, January 7th, I was the first to uncover ReadBurner's development, in a story, "ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items". I found the site, did as much research as I could about it, and summarized my findings. After I had traded multiple e-mails with the site's developer, Alexander Marktl, I posted a follow-on note, ReadBurner's Unplanned Big First Day Shows Real Promise.

Later that night, Mashable posted a story, "ReadBurner: Google Shared Items Memetracker", which noted my finding the story, and linked my way, but the reporter oddly acted as if they had been aware of the site's being developed, saying, "Readburner is a site that has been playing at the edges of my feeds for several weeks now. I think I vaguely remember submitting my linkblog to a developer a month or so ago.", making it look like they were part of the story. Wrong. The only person to do exactly this was Arvin Dang, back on December 17th, when he had asked for a list of Google Reader Shared items, in an attempt to consolidate them in one place. (See: TechTalk4U: Tips to help you consolidate and share your RSS)

This incident wasn't wildly egregious. But Mashable's size made other prominent sites simply list: "Source: Mashable" when they in turn wrote up ReadBurner.

SearchBlog: Readburner
VentureBeat: Readburner lets you see what is shared on Google Reader
WebWare: ReadBurner Turns Google Reader's Sharing Features Into Communal Bookmarking

None of the above sites linked back to the original story.

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#2: Robert Scoble Announces His Move to Fast Company.TV

On Monday, January 14th, I knew it had been Robert Scoble's last day at PodTech, and while I knew Michael Arrington of TechCrunch had said Scoble was moving on to Fast Company, I wanted to be sure. It'd have been a serious scoop if he was going somewhere else. So, I did what any first-year journalist would do. I called him!

In our quick call that evening, Scoble told me that he was indeed starting FastCompany.TV, that he didn't believe the move was a secret, and that the news was not under embargo, therefore, freeing me to write about it. I did that evening, in a post, "Robert Scoble to Kick Off Fast Company TV Wednesday."

As part of this post, I included the following quote from our phone call:

"The serious options were Fast Company, and us running our own thing," he said. "What brings me joy is interviewing people, hanging out with geeks and blogging. Doing my own thing would mean having to run my own business, and that's not as fun as interviewing Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse."

The next day, Mashable wrote their own story, titled, "FastCompany Launches Online Video Network Under Scoble".

As part of their story, Mashable included my exact quote, not giving attribution in any way.

“The serious options were Fast Company, and us running our own thing,” he said. “What brings me joy is interviewing people, hanging out with geeks and blogging. Doing my own thing would mean having to run my own business, and that’s not as fun as interviewing Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse.”

I called BS, in the comments saying, "How is it made clear that the quotes used for this story were lifted from a story I posted yesterday after actually doing "real journalism" and calling Scoble myself to get these answers?"

The author, Mark Hopkins, wrote that by posting a link to my story earlier, that he had given sufficient credit, even though the quotes were lifted. In an e-mail exchange I had with him that evening offline, I told him the appropriate thing to do would be to cite the quote came from somewhere else, by listing "he told louisgray.com" or "Louis Gray reports he said", for example. At the time, he agreed to make a change, and said, "The new version of the story has already hit the web, and the feeds tend to propagate about an hour or two out when it comes to edits, usually."

But almost a week afterwards, I don't think that's actually happened. The first, offending, unedited story is still there. (See: Mashable)

It wasn't any major outreach on my part to reach Robert that Monday. His cellphone number is widely available, and there's no reason Mashable couldn't have gotten their own quote if they wanted one. If time was an issue, giving the site credit would be the very least they could have done, and leaving it unfixed for days after promising a change is very frustrating to see.

In case Mashable wanted to learn how a professional blogger gives attribution, check Robert Scoble himself. In his announcement post, "Why we’re going to FastCompany.tv", he writes, "Louis Gray got the story first," and makes the whole line a link, in his lead paragraph. That's how you give attribution.

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#3: The Discovery and Launch of Shared Reader

On Wednesday, January 16th, not a week and a half after ReadBurner was forcefully debuted, we saw the emergence of a new Google Reader shared feeds aggregator, "Shared Reader". And, for the second time in ten days, I was the first person to find out about it and write about it, doing so early that morning in a post, "Shared Reader Latest to Take on Google Reader Shared Item Rankings", submitted only three hours after the developer had made it live.

Sure enough, it wasn't but a few hours later that Mashable followed on and took the news as their own, writing a near duplicate post, titled "SharedReader: Attack of the Google Shared Items Memetrackers.

And again, for the third time in two weeks, you would have had to be a detective to figure out that the exact same blog which found ReadBurner, which also was the first to confirm Scoble's moving to FastCompany.TV was the first to find Shared Reader. How did Mashable give credit? Not through giving louisgray.com credit for the double scoop, but instead, a throw-away line at the very end of the story that said, "[via louis gray]", with only the word "via" being a link.

If Mashable truly wanted to support the full blogosphere instead of promoting their own site, with vacuous reporting, they would have made the link prominent. They could have included the headline. They could have made the link higher, or even put two and two together to say, "Wait a minute, the same guy who found ReadBurner found Shared Reader. Boy that's interesting." But instead, they took a three letter word, made it a link, and put it after the story, where hardly anybody saw it, as my referrer logs can attest.

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So what should we do? I'm almost afraid to announce anything new on this site, without fear that Mashable is going to rip me off again, post the news as their own again, steal quotes again, and keep pushing traffic their way instead of back to the original source. I called out Mashable back in September in "Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control", and it looks like they still haven't gotten the message.

Think I'm alone or that Mashable is the only offender? Check out ParisLemon's call to arms: Ars Technica, You're a Member of the Internet, Start Linking Like It. There is a major problem in the tech blogosphere leadership where the basic tenets of journalism, sourcing and attribution are ignored.

Mashable is a good aggregator of news from other blogs. It has some great people behind it. But if they're to be taken seriously and respected as they grow up, change is needed. At the very least, make it a rule to never steal quotes from other blogs without delivering attribution. And find a way to actually watch trends to make an educated guess on what the news means or where it's originating. Are there patterns in message or source? That's real journalism and will help the blogosphere be taken just a little more seriously.

And yes, if this means Mashable never links my way again, or copies my stories outright, I think we'll live. We've got more scoops coming in the next few months, guaranteed, and we'll find more reputable people to help follow along.