The Marketing 2.0 Revolution: Who Is Driving?

This evening, the San Francisco American Marketing Association put on a panel featuring the just departed from Google Kevin Marks, Jeremiah Owyang, Mark Silva and Robert Scoble. I took notes on the panel and posted them to FriendFeed. These notes are embedded below. The topic was billed as how tech bloggers are pushing the new version of Marketing 2.0, and strayed away from the core topic, bouncing to PR, social media, and how marketers and advertisers can take advantage of these new tools.

In a month, I will be back up here, participating with Guy Kawasaki, Scoble and others, discussing the potential demise of Marketing and PR, hosted by Mark Evans, who just so happens to be the president-elect of the SFAMA and father to triplets.

The Rumors Are True - I Bought Robert Scoble's BMW

What Was Once Scoble's... Is Now Mine
I don't consider myself a car person - and on both occasions where I have had to replace my car, it has been only after a mechanical problem's repair costs look to far outstrip the true value of the vehicle. That was true in 1999 when I returned my used 1991 Ford Escort GT, picking up a used 1998 Mercury Tracer, and true again this week, as I leave the Tracer behind, trading up to a used 2006 BMW 325i. The Tracer, with more than 140,000 miles on it, has served me well for a decade, but with its transmission toast, it was time to let go.

But, as with most things we've discussed on the blog over the last couple years, we turned to the Web to solve our issue, when it presented itself, starting back on March 28th.

Upon hearing I needed to pay upwards of $4,000 to fix my broken Tracer, my tendency would be to walk down the street to the nearest dealer and find something, anything to replace it. But instead, this time, I posted a note to FriendFeed, explaining the situation, and asking the vibrant community for feedback. In the discussion, seeing more than 80 comments, I explained I wanted to be more like my peers in Silicon Valley, but honestly didn't want to go in debt for the privilege.

In the middle of our back and forth, Robert Scoble swooped in with an offer I had to pay attention to. He posted, "Louis: we are selling our 2006 BMW 325i with 56,000 miles. Make me an offer. Well maintained and fun to drive."


The "New to Me" BMW Safely In Our Parking Lot
56,000 miles sounded a bit high, but considering Robert's visibility, it'd be bad for him to pass along a lemon. I was definitely interested. In April, I saw the car at an tech meet-up in Mountain View, and was even more convinced it was the right way to go, even after independently looking at alternatives throughout the Bay Area, to see if I could get a newer, better, car for the price Robert was offering.

In the meantime, Robert and I said we would target the end of May for a purchase. He was awaiting the delivery of a new Toyota Prius, and on Monday, it arrived. This put everything in motion, so on Tuesday night, we packed up the twins, headed to Half Moon Bay, and made the deal. Now, the car that was once Robert's is now mine (assuming my check clears the bank, and I have no concerns).

By Friday, a charity will come pick up my Tracer, and give me a tax deduction of a mere $500.


The Obama/Biden Sticker is From Robert. Should I Ditch It?
That I bought my BMW from Robert instead of a random car salesman or third party advertiser on Craigslist, eBay or the San Jose Mercury News speaks volumes in terms of how we can leverage our connections forged online. Though I've grown to know Robert well over the last few years, I learned of him through blogging, and he found out of my situation using FriendFeed. Much of our discussion about the transaction has been public, in fact, leading from the first offer, to his later posting, on April 15 that he was still planning to sell it to me.

Robert is happy that he has his new Prius, and no doubt happy he was able to pass along his car that he enjoyed to a good friend. Our family is happy because we managed to find a respectable, nice car without having to sell one of our kids or mortgage their future. And both of us are no doubt happy that we used the social networks we both have been promoting for years. Unfortunately for me, the BMW doesn't have any aftermarket enhancements that tap into the real-time Web. I was hoping Robert would have made the car one of a kind. But it's still a great deal and I'm glad I could leverage the Social part of the Social Web to get it done.

Once You Start, You Can Never Stop

Ever run into friends who tell you they want to start a blog, or are thinking of signing up for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or some other network, and you just know it's doomed to failure, because they won't commit to it? Starting is easy, but maintaining a pace can be hard. Whether for business or for pleasure, the number one thing I tell people about blogging is that once you start, you can never stop. Blogging is not something you do on a whim, or start and then abandon for the search engines of tomorrow. You must find a pace and always keep going - so if you start, be sure you've got a topic or ideas that are sustainable.

This week, thanks to work, family and other items hitting my schedule, I went a little light, not just here on the blog but on most of the networks - after a strong Monday. And while previously, I've told bloggers to "relax" as "nobody is keeping score", once you have established a pace, absence gets noticed. Today, while still at the office, I got a call from Robert Scoble, just checking in to see if all was well. And yes, it is. Just working and making sure everything is done before being out of the area all next week thanks to an upcoming tradeshow.

That Robert noticed shows how in tune he is on all the networks. I hadn't gone completely silent, but I did slow down my pace for a few days, and he caught me.

But while this was a mere blip in my usually regular posting schedule, it's one that happened well into my fourth year of blogging on this site, after nearly 2,000 posts, added on to tens of thousands of actions on FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. I'm not stopping. I'm not anywhere near done. But if you know folks who you think would walk away, see if you can stop them before they start, especially if how they present themselves has a chance to impact how your company or your project are perceived.

Rackspace Stock Undergoes the Scoble Effect Following Robert's Hire

In the two weeks following Robert Scoble's official announcement that he was to be joining Rackspace, Inc. and embarking on a new project called Building 43, the company's stock has jumped by more than 30 percent, rising at a pace three times that of the NASDAQ, as the broader market tries to recover from a horrific year. And while yes, the argument should be made the two are not connected, the rise in the company's stock has added approximately $300 million to Rackspace's market cap. If Robert were responsible for even 1% of the jump, he would already have delivered $3 million of net value to the company.


Rackspace's 2-week Rise Has Been Impressive
While Scoble hasn't been blogging as much as he used to, in his most-impactful years, simply getting linked to would deliver what smaller bloggers called "The Scoble Effect", as new visitors to the site could dramatically outnumber their regulars. And it's fun to think just maybe he can do the same for the Web hosting firm.

At the close of trading on Friday, March 13th, the last day before Scoble's news was unveiled, Rackspace stock closed at $5.98 a share. At the end of trading today, the shares closed at $7.81 apiece, a move up of 30.6% in two weeks. In fact, according to Google Finance, Rackspace stock has been up on 8 of the 10 trading days following his announcement.


Meanwhile, Microsoft Has Been Slowly Sinking
In contrast, Microsoft, the last public company where Scoble worked, having left their offices in June of 2006, has seen their stock decline more than 15 percent since he left. Of course, so has just about everyone else...

Scoble Joins Rackspace to Lay Foundation for Building 43

Times are tough in both old media and new media, as old media sites fight to try and stay relevant in the face of a rapidly-evolving sphere where disparate voices, from bloggers to social networks can command attention that was once only possible through corporate brands and news organizations. Robert Scoble, who has achieved one of the more visible personal brands online in the technology space, recently sat at the crossroads of this development, trying to make an old media brand (Fast Company) into a new one. The trial proved difficult, and as has been announced today, he's striking out again in a position I believe will have much more success - as he joins the Web hosting company, Rackspace, building a new plan he calls "Building 43". In his new role, Robert will have the chance once again to leverage his personal brand, offering new media expertise, to a technology company that wants to be seen as a thought leader.

Building 43 is named after the famous Google and Microsoft buildings, both number 43, intended to be what he calls a "decentralized community for people fanatical about the Internet". And Scoble won't be limited to simply posting a blog on the Rackspace site. You can expect the Building 43 plan to be diverse, on all the social media networks where Robert has been building a solid presence the last few years, including Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

When I talked to Robert by phone about his news a few weeks ago, I was impressed by the plan - not so much because it's a clear path to riches, because it's not, and all work will still be a challenge, but instead because it put him back in the trenches of Silicon Valley, doing and creating and evangelizing. (Although yes, his work at Microsoft was in Redmond, WA) The move by Rackspace will help the company be better known for innovation, and will undoubtedly raise their visibility as Internet innovators work with Scoble to be featured and interviewed. The end result could even mean that many of the people Robert and his team work with could end up being hosted by Rackspace, for starters.

There's a big difference between writing about the news and following the news and making the news. Scoble, who has a resume of working at tech companies like DEC and Microsoft, now gets the chance to be a part of a company that's doing just that, while letting him stick to what he enjoys. When he and I talked, he made it clear that this would not be a one person deal. Over time, he hopes to bring in more folks to be part of Building 43. Joining him at start will be his pal Rocky Barbanica, who also was part of his team at Fast Company.

You can find out more about Building 43 at http://building43.com/. TechCrunch's writeup on it is here: Scoble’s New Thing: Building 43 and Robert's is here: Robert and Rocky ride again at Rackspace.

Stand for Something and Become Someone

On Thursday, I was invited by Brian Solis to attend a dinner briefing in San Francisco with one of his clients. Shortly after arrival, other invitees began to dribble in through the door - a venerable who's who in the tech blogging space, including Jeremiah Owyang, Harry McCracken, Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur - making me feel very small indeed, not to mention a tad out of place. And while the client had an interesting offering (more on that soon), it was, of course, the side conversations between the attendees that drew the most value. (See the Photos)

Seated between Robert and Loic for dinner, I got the feeling there were Twitter users, bloggers and entrepreneurs who would have paid good money to trade places with me, but I wasn't out to sell anything or pitch anything. In fact, the best conversations I had were with Loic about why we do what we do, the reasons we don't push for ads on the blog, how we try to separate the work life and the blog life, and debate on whether I could be trusted with pre-release info on one product if I already used the competition or knew what they had planned.

To net down what was a great discussion, I primarily told Loic that:

1. Our reviews of products and services are honest, but primarily positive
2. We prefer not to write negative pieces, for our benefit and readers as well
3. That we can be trusted to keep things quiet when asked
4. We don't seek out or respond to controversy for page views' sake

And to me, all of those boil down to a major headline, which is "Stand for Something". Stand for being trustworthy and try to be remembered for quality, not controversy.

In the last few days, just following the conclusion of the dinner, you saw headlines about how Scoble has concluded his time at Fast Company TV - and speculation has started as to what's next for the visible technology evangelist. And yes, the issue was discussed a bit at the dinner as well. To be fully transparent, I knew about the change earlier in the week, from a phone call I had with Robert. And yes, he told me what's next, as well as some of the reasons for his leaving, which hasn't been discussed. But as a friend and someone I want him to trust, that's where it ends, as I believe the news is his to make and break - and if someone else beats him to the punch, it won't be me.

I could have stomped all over the relationship and posted the information Tuesday or Wednesday, but I thought it better to hold off - because the short-term burst of visibility and traffic would be outweighed by the longer-term negatives of breaking the confidentiality, and changing what you could expect from me on the blog.

At one point during Thursday's conversation, Loic said, "For some reason, I think you're someone I would trust." And this came even as we discussed the fact I helped raise the visibility of TweetDeck, a Thwirl competitor, when Iain first released his product. Would my previous posts on TweetDeck mean I would never give Thwirl the same opportunity? To me, it would not - with good examples being my coverage of Posty and PeopleBrowsr, when those products were launched or updated. Loic, and other entrepreneurs making news, should know that if they pass along confidential or embargoed information, that it won't be posted early, and it won't be sent to their competition. That's a big part of being trusted and standing for something.

For those longer-term readers of the site, you've seen me address the issue of writing negative posts, and another where I talked about what I believe as a blogger. I occasionally write these inwardly-looking posts to explain why I do what I do, and how I want to remain personal and understood.

Even though we don't have the strong traffic and visibility of some sites, the blog has gotten a good share of early access to services and to people. There are probably a dozen interesting products and services that I know are planning things before SXSW which have already gotten my interest. And every time I get an e-mail asking if I will respect a timeline, I write back "the next time I break an embargo will be the first time." As somebody who plays on both sides of the "make news" and "break news" wall, I get what people are trying to do, and the short-term rush of breaking the rules won't make me feel good for very long. And doing so can severely damage my reputation.

After discussing another issue, on how to deal with criticism, and ignoring those who would put you down for the sake of riling you up to get attention, Loic noted that we both try to be positive and avoid controversy, even if it can get you noticed. And that's likely a factor of why he posted a note to Twitter, saying, "You got me think again about quality versus quantity. Quantity matters less."

There's no question I would like to increase the quantity of posts here on louisgray.com. I wish there were a way to cover every single good story I run across with the same level of review and enthusiasm I can give the top stories. That's part of why we've gotten help from additional writers. But we will work very hard to avoid reducing the quality of the posts, even if it means we won't post as many, and we will miss stories as a result. And that's okay. Because I would rather stand for quality and stand for being trustworthy than to be known for throwing articles over the fence that could have been done much better.

As I told Brian yesterday, I greatly appreciated being invited to the dinner. It was at the dinner that I met Jeremiah and Harry for the first time, and it was also the first time where I could speak with Loic for more than five minutes. And as can always happen in a room full of people who really care about technology, we got to thinking again.

They say that everything you put online can eventually be found by Google. In August of 2007, well before most of you had seen this site, I said that your blog is your brand. So when you post things online, make them stand for something, and think about who you are and how you want to be interpreted. I want to stand for quality and trust, and we will refuse to compromise there.

Let the FriendFeed Data Mining Begin In Earnest

With the FriendFeed co-founders' pedigrees including Google as their last stop, it has largely been presumed the team knew the value of search. In March of 2008, the online social aggregator first turned on their search engine, but as the site grew in popularity and features, many users were calling for more granularity in search - asking to see search results within a specific time period, or, more loudly, to see results from entries that had been gauged as interesting from the community, based on total likes or comments. Today, FriendFeed delivered the popularity end of the search database, and people are already diving into the data to see what they can find.

For example:

If you search for entries that have both 100 comments and 100 likes:

There are 11 total entries. The first ever was when we announced the birth of our twins. Of the other 10, see here, 4 are from Robert Scoble, and a second entry is by me, about Robert, and his potential monetization of FriendFeed. Other single entries are from Mona Nomura, Thomas Hawk, Monique, Conformist, and Akiva Moskovitz, also on the announcement of a new baby.

So yes, FriendFeed loves Scoble, tolerates me, and loves babies.
Of those 11 items, one was a tweet (mine), 7 were native FriendFeed entries, 2 were blog posts, and one was Robert's Facebook status update.

The most comments any post with the word bacon in the title has had is 80. (via Lindsay)

The most comments any post with the word sex in the title has had is 64. (via Mona)

15 Different Entries Have Been "Liked" More than 200 Times (see query)

In fact, the first entry ever to get more than 200 likes was an entry announcing a Jabber/GTalk IM bot for FriendFeed. Oddly, it got 445 likes and only 3 comments. Hmmm...

Of the 15 items, 5 were from Bret Taylor, FriendFeed co-founder, announcing new features. 3 more were fun items from Mona. Scoble only makes it once, though his note on January 10 did get 312 likes and 464 comments, which was epic.

Of the 15 items, 5 had both comments from me and likes from Robert. 4 were Bret Taylor entries. The fifth was Akiva's baby announcement. Matthew, a tad older, is already practicing his pickup lines.

Only one blog entry has ever received 150 comments on FriendFeed.

Avoiding accidental script anomalies, only one post has ever gotten 150 or more comments on FriendFeed. The conversation is completely in Italian about a cat, I assume.

Most blog posts don't get tremendous numbers of comments. (see query)

Aside from the previously mentioned Scoble monetization post, only one post I have ever made has hit 60 or more comments - a post in July on Web racism. And earlier that week, we managed 50 comments for the discussion of friending people online well outside your age range on the low side. Matt Dickman's guest post from last week also exceeded the 50 comment barrier. In contrast, Robert Scoble has six posts that reached the 50 comment mark on the site.

Also noted: 10 internal shares of mine reached 50 comments, while 46 internal shares have reached 50 likes. Of those, 26 were baby pictures of Matthew and/or Sarah. Such exploitation!

Only 4 Tweets have ever received 100 likes on FriendFeed. (see query)

Two were from me - one announcing the arrival of the twins, and the other, when my wife said she joined Facebook, but didn't add me as a friend. The other two? Akiva announcing the arrival of his baby, and Kevin Rose fooling e-mail correspondents by pretending his computer was an iPhone.

Eight FriendFeed entries with the word iPhone in the title have 50 comments. (see query)

Of those eight entries, three are from Robert, one is from Mona, and others are from Tina, Lindsay, Bret Taylor, and Chris Pirillo.

Seven entries with the word "Cat" in the title have 50+ likes. Dogs win with nine such entries.

I already predicted that search and the real-time Web, on both Twitter and FriendFeed, would be a big deal in 2009, and this step takes us even closer to being able to dig deep into the immediate (and historical) reactions of one of the Web's most unique and vibrant social communities.

You can see some more data mining fun in Scoble's feed.

Watch for the Telephone Game in Your Short Attention Span World

One of the recurring themes on this blog has been how to handle a seeming overflow of information. We've discussed creating a social media consumption workflow. I addressed a new concept I called continuous parallel attention. I said how you handle the information overload Is up to you and later said there is no social media overload and cautioned bloggers to relax, because nobody is keeping score. But we still see problems crop up when a story gets passed from person to person and details get lost. It's the modern equivalent of the popular "Telephone" game we all played as kids, where the last phrase was never close to how it started.

Take a look at an example from this weekend, after Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote a piece saying FriendFeed had seen site growth that reached almost 1 million visitors in December of 2008.

Seems straight forward enough. The data came from Comscore, which shows a higher growth rate for FriendFeed than do other services, including Quantcast and Compete.com. Compete reports 700,000 visitors or so to FriendFeed in December, by the way.

But then, Robert Scoble, a good friend, good blogger, and fellow FriendFeed user relayed the story a little differently, saying that the report said FriendFeed had surpassed a million user accounts.

Using that as the baseline, Robert stated the 26,000 or so subscribers to his feed represented one of every 39 users. (See the FriendFeed thread here) But that only exacerbated the flub. Having used the site myself for quite some time, I'd be shocked if there were more than a million registered accounts, and FFHolic estimates the number to be closer to 200,000 total accounts, one fifth of a million. This of course makes Robert's penetration even higher, as that means one of every eight users follows him, but that's not the major issue.

If you're FriendFeed, and you know your actual user count, you can't exactly issue a correction saying that you "only" have a quarter million users. And if they did announce such data, which they don't, it might seem to be a letdown now that the higher, incorrect number has been released.

The service is now becoming a destination site as users share links on Twitter, their blogs, Facebook and elsewhere, so it's no surprise that the unique visitor count is higher than the number of users. After all, if I visit from home and on my wife's laptop and the office, doesn't that count as three unique visitors?

This is but one example, and I know practically all of us have made the mistake of reading stories too quickly, or coming to conclusions and extrapolations based on only partial data. For example, Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece tonight saying I was "Wrong About Twitter Funding", but he had only seen one of the two posts, which had taken point/counterpoint positions. That's not a victim of the telephone game, but he is a busy guy, like the rest of us, and no doubt overlooked one of the items.

When we're reacting to other items, or relaying them, we should be careful that we're not making new stories based on data that's not true. We're all going fast, and maybe reading a ton of RSS feeds, seeing thousands of Twitter updates, and rushing in an effort to post quickly. But there's something to be said for watching for the telephone game.

Scoble Starts His FriendFeed/Twitter Monetization Strategy

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble came under criticism in late December when TechCrunch's Michael Arrington said he had neglected his blog, in factor of spending time on FriendFeed and Twitter. Arrington said It’s Time For A Friendfeed Intervention, saying he was contributing to the popularity of those services but getting nothing for himself, adding, "How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch." Well, thanks to a tip from one of Robert's Twitter friends, it looks like he is trying to capitalize on his popularity on these new services, through embedded Amazon affiliate links.

Whether it is a one-time experiment or a sign of things to come, tonight Robert sent a note to his now 25,000 FriendFeed followers, and nearly 50,000 followers on Twitter, saying: Want a news tip? Amazon Kindle is sold out. Hint here:, and adding on FriendFeed:

"I just bought a version 1.0 machine. It's sold out. Will they make more? I doubt it. So, why are they still accepting orders? I just bought one and will let you know what shows up. I'm hearing that new version comes in next few months."

After that introduction, he gave a personalized affiliate link, which would give him a percentage of the sales made during the session of any of his followers. (See the FriendFeed thread here)


Note the Scobleizer tag in the destination URL...
As simple as that sounds, the power of Amazon affiliate links on the Web can often be underestimated. John Gruber of Daring Fireball made nearly $6,000 in just over a week by encouraging his blog visitors to buy Mac OS X 10.5 from his affiliate link instead of directly from Apple.


Scoble is caught "red handed" without disclosure...
Robert probably won't make $6,000 from this experiment tonight. Assuming he also gets 7.5% referrals from Amazon, It would take $80,000 worth of orders to get him a similar return - meaning 223 of his more than 50,000 followers would have to buy the $359 Amazon Kindle for him to reach that mark. But if he continued to drop Amazon links into his FriendFeed and Twitter stream, it could be some good spending money over time.

Of note, when Gruber asked for users to visit his affiliate page, he was very clear about what he would get from such a purchase. Tonight, I noticed and asked Robert myself if this was his "FriendFeed revenue strategy". His answer? "You caught me red handed!" I don't mind him trying out the idea, and think it's an interesting approach, but I would have preferred disclosure.

---

Update: As anticipated, this topic is being discussed on FriendFeed on my feed as well as that of Robert, who says I missed some important points. Also see: Free Rides Can't Last Forever from Dennis McDonald and Network World's Paul McNamara: Blogger Catches Scobleizer With His Hand in Amazon's Kindle Jar.

The StatBot Crunches My Google Reader Link Blog

Following last week's discussion around 10 ways you can maximize your Google Reader Link Blog, Yuvi from The Statbot went to work and pointed his super-geeky analytical skills at my own link blog, which I've been filling with shares for the better part of two years. Given I can only look at my Google Reader trends over the last 30 days, his data has brought a lot of insight.

You can see the full leaderboard for the last 10,000 shares embedded here via Zoho:



Excluding the fact I often share my own items (not a big surprise), an interesting mix of sources emerges. Yes, you see TechCrunch, Inquisitr, ReadWriteWeb and other A-List blogs leading the top 10, largely due to their prolific publishing schedules, and ability to attract tips from developers early in the process and time to chase down rumors. But below the top 10, there is a heavy mix of personal blogs, from Hutch Carpenter, to Jesse Stay, Chris Brogan, Rob Diana, David Risley and Mike Fruchter, who all place in the top 25.

In the 25-50 tier, you see John Furrier, Mona Nomura, Kara Swisher, Kyle Lacy, and Sarah Perez, mixed in with company blogs like those from Socialmedian.

In all, 379 different sources are represented in the last 5,000 shares, and 577 in the last 10,000... which shows a fairly diverse data set.

What I like about this data is that it is personal and it is natural - something that organically has developed over time based on my own interests - and is not intentionally manipulated. Yuvi also ran the data on Robert Scoble's leaderboard this week, which you should check out.

If you're not reading the Google Reader linkblog, you can find it here.

What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users

That I like FriendFeed and so does Robert Scoble and so do a few thousand other Web-addicted Silicon Valley-centric people doesn't matter very much. That thousands more have signed up to the service and imported their data doesn't matter very much either. That the service has a ton of bells and whistles and some smart people behind it and manages to have some great uptime, compared to other services, also won't make it successful. Because what I'm seeing, and continue to hear, is that the site is too busy. It's too intimidating for new users, and some who have even stepped up to give it the old college try are asking for help (See: Om Malik of GigaOM).

Why? Because as great as I believe the service is, the learning curve is sharp. People aren't getting its utility right away. They aren't finding friends right away, or understanding why they should spend time to participate. Others are intimidated by the sheer volume of updates coming from people seemingly embedded in the Web, be they Robert, myself or many others.

In December, Robert wrote a piece, "10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not", where he outlined some of the top-level differences between the two services. And while he was jokingly saying Twitter's lack of features made it a better option for some people than FriendFeed, there was truth to it.

Given FriendFeed is relying largely on word of mouth from users, and press from bloggers and other tech publications to help raise awareness, and hasn't yet invested in a Marketing department or a more official outreach strategy, they can consider this abbreviated Marketing Requirements Document to be pro bono:

FriendFeed Must Have a Lite Version for New Users

New users signing up to FriendFeed, by default, see all updates from all friends who they are following, as well as updates from friends of a friend. This means that even if you start out following only a few dozen people, be they those automatically synchronized with your Facebook account, or recommended well-known Silicon Valley digerati, you can be flooded with updates from Twitter, Blogs, bookmarking sites, external commenting sites, BrightKite location notices, photos from Flickr and other sites, videos from YouTube, and even items from Amazon.com wish lists. And not only do you have to see all this from the people you know, but you'll even have to see updates from friends of those you know, if your friends have made an action on their updates.

What needs to happen is that FriendFeed must tier their offering, for "small", "medium" and "large" consumption. The Lite version would probably start out with blog postings, Flickr photos, and native FriendFeed entries. The default behavior should be that you would need to "opt in" to see a service, rather than be forced to opt out or hide every single one of them as FriendFeed adds them. FriendFeed already supports more than 50 different services, but the excitement this may bring to power users is just overwhelming to new folks.

The data should still be available in a tab that says "Show Me More" or "What You're Missing", etc., but you have got to not aim the firehose at those who aren't ready.

FriendFeed Should Help You Find Your Real Friends Better

If you weren't referred to FriendFeed from an existing user, you're starting off from scratch in the friends department. FriendFeed helpfully offers you an array of popular users, based on other subscribers' activity, but it's highly unlikely you're on a first name basis with all of them, and they're probably not "really" your friends.

Assuming you register your Facebook account with FriendFeed, it will check your existing friend base and see if they are registered with FriendFeed, and automatically add them to the people you follow. You also can find your friends by importing your address book from GMail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. But as many found when Google Reader assumed those you e-mailed most out of GMail were your real friends, that doesn't exactly solve it either.

FriendFeed should do a few things here. First, they should enable you to cross-reference those people you follow on Twitter (which is a noisy option). Second, you should be able to synchronize those you follow on LinkedIn as easily as you do your friends on Facebook. If you're linked on LinkedIn, maybe you should have the option to follow them on FriendFeed, getting you connected with colleagues. Third, and most importantly, FriendFeed should have content-based intelligence. You should be able to list your interests, much as Facebook does, and get recommendations for who discusses those topics. Fourth, you should be able to add details to a profile, including hometown, schooling background, etc, and get friend recommendations very similar to Facebook's often spot-on "People You May Know" feature.

You would also have the option to get weekly e-mails with updates on "People You May Know", much like LinkedIn shows you that new colleagues and classmates have started to use the service.

FriendFeed Must Be Doing Outreach and Communication With Inactive Users

Having always been active, I wouldn't have encountered the team's doing this, but I have seen a significant number of people who have had very little activity on the service following initial registration. They may not have had comments or "liked" anything in months. But they sure do count when it comes to total users, and their data is quietly pouring into the service!

FriendFeed should be actively courting these stale, abandoned accounts, and updating them on new features, or highlighting site usage case studies. It's practically a pastime on the Web to register for new sites, but it's not doing the FriendFeed community any good to be browsing and acting on the items of digital ghosts.

FriendFeed Should Help to Get New Users Engaged More Quickly

Long-time users have a distinct advantage over new users in terms of feeling engaged on the site. As with high school, or any other forum on the Web, you have regulars who get in a state of comfort, communicating with the same people who interact in small social circles. New users who join the site do so invisibly until they start acting on other people's items. New users who understand the service and register their feeds may see almost no activity as they are not added or even seen by other users at first, and the comparative silence on their own feeds is sometimes enough for people to feel ignored and leave.

FriendFeed could, instead, choose to have an area dedicated to new users who have joined the service over the last 1, 7 or 30 days (as they do with top items), and assuming you can fill out any identifiable data, as mentioned above, around hometowns, school, and interests, these new users could be grouped. (e.g. 25 new users within 30 miles of 94086 joined in the last 7 days)

FriendFeed Should Deliver A Desktop Application and iPhone App

The introduction of TweetDeck has changed the way many people use Twitter. It takes all the different options of Twitter and put them in a highly-customizable app, incorporating DMs, Replies, Groups, and Search. I've heard people say they won't use FriendFeed until it gets integrated into TweetDeck, and the current third-party apps for FriendFeed pale in comparison to the Web offering. The iPhone offering is good as well, but doesn't feel as polished, and lacks options one would expect in an app written for the device.

FriendFeed Needs to Better Define What It Is and How People Use It

Scoble (yes him again) recently posted a video on how you can be a power user of FriendFeed, showing 20 things it's useful for. (video link)

But it took him almost half an hour! No offense to Robert, but the service has got to become a lot more simple than 30 minutes worth of explanation to get new users engaged. All sorts of companies, from consumer to enterprise, utilize case studies and customer demo videos to explain aspects of the service and benefits, and they should be done in segments as small as 30 seconds to no longer than 5 minutes.

You can see FriendFeed's early efforts to answer questions from users on their lengthy one-page FAQ. They also have a FriendFeed Feedback room on the site, which augments the service's now largely stale Google Groups forum. But "how to" videos are either non-existent or made incredibly hard to find. The "why" to use FriendFeed and how power users or more mainstream users use FriendFeed case studies are missing altogether.

FriendFeed Must Have a Sense of Urgency

2009 does not look like it is going to be friendly to companies that are long on hope and short on revenue or momentum. The team can innovate better than any other that I have seen, per capita, but the appearance is that the service is doing so in a relaxed, jovial way. Questions about a business model seem theoretical and eventual, rather than immediate. And no clear visible activity is happening that makes me think the team is working on a more aggressive way to increase awareness and adoptability of the service - all while many curious adopters are turning away from the noise.

Lacking This, What Is Happening?

Simply put, people aren't getting it. I understand the team's Google-born mentality of "build it and they will come", and the hope that if the user experience is so good, people will gravitate to it over time, or that word of mouth will be all the marketing they ever need, but usage growth has stagnated compared to other faster-growing services, like Facebook and Twitter. (See Quantcast or Compete, who both agree on the flat to downward trend.)

As one of the more visible, more active users, I tend to have a lot of activity on my feed. It's a factor of participating, having been visible early and consistently championing the service. But even the most active items rarely approach a few dozen actions, be they comments, or likes. And this number has not grown much over the last several months. Assuming FriendFeed were growing and doubling in size consistently, I should be seeing a great article, picture or update getting hundreds of actions, as the user base grows, but they're not. Popular items get 20 to 30 likes, and top ones approach 100, about the same amount of actions as the number of comments on a single TechCrunch post, even though simply "liking" an item takes much less time.

I recently ran a third party tool that compared those people I was connected to on Twitter and FriendFeed, letting me match up my lists. I was surprised to see how many people I knew on Twitter who were also using FriendFeed, or at least had registered, but had not been active. Account after account after account had seen no activity in weeks.

While I have a core of very active users who I see every day and can expect to engage with, I see those initial quiet signups as a lost opportunity, for both them and for FriendFeed, and before the problem gets worse, I think the team should make the revitalization of these abandoned accounts a priority, along with easing the transition of new accounts, reducing the dramatic potential for noise, and starting to market themselves. There's a reason I keep getting asked by people for help on getting up to speed on FriendFeed. I get it because I've been embedded for more than a year, and it really shouldn't take so much work.

Arrington? Le Meur? Scoble? Everybody's Right About "Authority".

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

This weekend's blog flareup on whether Twitter should track the "authority" of a user, based primarily on the number of followers, has a number of people up in arms. One side says it makes sense. After all, Technorati and Google have always tracked influence. Others say the following number can be easily manipulated, and has no weight. First of all, before we address the issues, why am I writing this on LouisGray.com and not my own blog, StayNAlive.com?  It largely comes down to numbers.  LouisGray.com has near 4,000 RSS subscribers, while my blog only has 500.  Aside from the fact that I enjoy the team of great writers I work with on this blog, I have a much louder, and because of that, more authoritative, voice here.  More people listen with a larger audience than those with a small audience.  And like it or not, all bloggers trying to compete play the numbers game - that's simple marketing.

Background

Recently Loic Le Meur wrote a post, suggesting that Twitter Search sort their results by most popular on Twitter.  So, for example, if Robert Scoble has more followers than Michael Arrington, Scoble's posts will appear higher than Arrington's in the search results.  Scoble responded with a blog post suggesting Lemeur was wrong, saying that the number of people you follow is more important than those who follow you.  Today, Arrington reignited the flames with another follow-on post, supporting Le Meur, effectively saying the controversy was much ado about little, that it wasn't a separation from the haves and have nots, but instead, a simple recommendation to add to Twitter search.

So we have two business men, trying to find more readers and users to build revenue for their businesses (Arrington runs a content business, TechCrunch.com, while Le Meur runs a Video publishing service, Seesmic).  At the same time we have a video blogger, Robert Scoble, trying to find new content, which in turn generates revenue for the business he works for by building unique content.  He's very good at that, but They're both right.

Of course Arrington and Le Meur want more followers, and preference placed on followers - they benefit by doing so.  Their experience, as businessmen trying to generate revenue for their business, shows that more followers can both directly and indirectly translate into revenue for the businesses they own and run.  Arrington, after today's article, will generate even more readers of his blog because of the discussion going on about this on Twitter and FriendFeed.  That converts to more followers, which in turn sends them back to TechCrunch.com.

If I launch a new feature for SocialToo.com (Disclosure - I am CEO and co-founder of SocialToo.com, a service that, among many other features, enables you to auto-follow those that follow you on Twitter and other networks.), I have 4,000 followers I can now announce that to.  A year ago, when I was only at a few hundred, that announcement would not have made anywhere near an impact.  Now, with a sound business model, I have the potential to convert many more users to drive both traffic and revenue to the service.  The same goes with Arrington and TechCrunch, and Le Meur and Seesmic.  They're smart businessmen.  Notice Guy Kawasaki, another smart businessman said the same thing.

At the same time, it makes complete sense that Scoble places his value on the people he follows. Scoble's value is in the information he learns.  It's a sound strategy for a journalist, a PR professional, or a blogger.  After all, I met Scoble through following him on Twitter and FriendFeed (in person even!).  I also met Guy Kawasaki by following him on Twitter, as did I Chris Pirillo, and following the Tweets of the two of them was the premise behind me starting SocialToo.com.  There is value in that as well.  Scoble, and others can be experts, because of the people they follow - that is powerful.  It should also be noted that Scoble has a lot of followers because of this strategy.  This really is a "Chicken or the Egg" argument!

Social Networking is About the Experience for the Individual

The power of Social Networking is that it allows each individual to develop their own personalized experience on the web.  By the people they follow, they get the content they want.  By the people that follow them, they are given a voice outside of that personal world.  Scoble is right - you are defined by the people you follow.  I've talked about that here before - relationships define the individual.

However, a relationship is a two-way connection.  In the end it's those that follow you that can vouch for who you are, and what type of person they perceive you as.  If anyone were to steal my identity, I now have 4,000 people that can vouch it's the real me.  Of course there are ways around this, but it's still a form of identity, and will solidify even more as technology evolves.

I am a smarter person because of the people I follow - I've mentioned before that I separate those I pay attention to from those I follow.  That's how I follow smart people.  At the same time, I can ask any question now, and get multiple answers to that question from my 4,000+ followers.  I couldn't do that when I had only a few hundred.  I'm also smarter because of the people the follow me!  The people that follow me are very valuable, and make me a more authoritative source, just as the people I follow do.

I really don't think there is any right or wrong answer here.  I think Scoble, Arrington, and Lemeur are all right - it's important to follow smart people, yet at the same time your followers are just as important.  I don't think either one is any more valuable than the other on a general level - it varies on a person-to-person experience, and that is why you see them arguing over it.  That's the amazing thing behind Social Networking - there is no right or wrong answer because each individual can define their own!

In a perfect world, Twitter Search would provide multiple filters, some based on followers, some based on people you follow, some based on the number of people you converse with directly in your network of friends and followers.  The more personalized that search becomes, the more valuable it becomes to the individual.  "Authority" is determined by the individual.  Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close

It's a year-end tradition for many media, blogs and individuals, to predict what will happen over the next year. Some prefer to make their guesses fairly straight-forward in an effort to be right (Example: Apple will release new notebooks with a faster processor at MacWorld) and others will make their guesses seemingly outlandish, so that if they're right, they're seen as virtual psychics. Others, somewhere in between. At the conclusion of 2007, I made ten predictions that I thought would be fun, and as we're coming on the one year anniversary of that post, it's a good thing you didn't bet your home mortgage on my list. (What? You say there are other issues with your mortgage? Oh.)

See: 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

In the spirit of reducing my ego, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Wrong. I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it's largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner and took the position in August.)

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

Wrong. I thought Facebook would use its expensive stock and buy up some smaller companies. Digg continually sounded like it was shopping itself, but it never sold, and the company's CEO often denied talks were occuring with anyone. Also, given the stock market crash, Facebook is no doubt valued much lower these days, making a stock transaction less likely.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

Wrong. So Far. In September, TechCrunch and others reported that eBay planned to sell StumbleUpon, but no sale has taken place yet. At this point, also, with Yahoo! crumbling, they are less likely to take on the service.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Wrong. Twitter focused on growing and not crashing this year. Still just text.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Wrong. I hardly hear anything about Boot Camp these days, likely because VMWare Fusion and Parallels have become entrenched, and nobody cared about Apple's "restart" alternative. My comment that Apple would "slowly take over the market" in this space also looks quite dumb, as did the expectation that Windows applications could boot alongside Mac apps. The question is, why not?

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

Wrong. And it's too bad! Sure would change things a bit if somebody could figure out how to check a box and have graphical ads or text ads disappear.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Wrong and Right. AssetBar, in its attempt to replace Google Reader, failed fast. FriendFeed, however, did much better than I could have guessed at the time I wrote the post. Obviously, I played a small role in evangelizing FriendFeed through it coming out of beta in early 2008, but it got bigger than even I expected. My comment saying that "neither would be acquired by the end of 2008" did manage to be true.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Right. While there are some bloggers who prefer video and are using it, from Robert Scoble at FastCompany TV to Loic LeMeur at Seesmic, it hasn't become as second-nature as standard blogging or mciroblogging. And so far as I know, nobody is making money on this in a consistent way.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

Mostly Wrong. Netflix didn't blink against iTunes' charge. They instead branched out with their "watch instantly" feature and partnered up with TiVo and others. Blockbuster is still a disaster, and I certainly am not going to the box office thanks to so many alternatives. But iTunes video rentals cannot be said to have hit Netflix and others all that much.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

Wrong, So Far. Robert joined FastCompany at the beginning of the year, and is putting up some interesting content. That said, FastCompany has seen changes in focus and leadership, and I am curious to see how his show evolves in 2009. Scoble continues to be a mainstay on the social Web and at industry events of course, so even if 2009 sees him somewhere else, it won't be far from the limelight.

So wasn't that fun? Now you see you can largely ignore my predictions, or maybe, I should try harder to be right. Maybe, if I'm good, I can put a 2009 prediction list up by the end of the year...

15 Secrets of FriendFeed's Power Users

By Daniel J. Pritchett of SharingAtWork.com (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The FriendFeed social network is a powerful resource. With it you can connect to some brilliant people and learn new things as they learn them. Converse with interesting people around the world around similar interests. Stream together separate news sources into a single place and then kick off some great discussions about them. Read on for fifteen ways that other users are making FriendFeed a more valuable tool for all of us.

1. Promote other people's shares with likes and comments. Robert Scoble does a great job of directing his tens of thousands of readers to worthy content via his Comments+Likes page as well as his Google Reader shared items.

2. Promote other users' profiles to get them broader exposure Mike Fruchter puts out a regular series of "FriendFeed users to follow" on his blog.

3. Run an excellent room. Zee moderates some hugely active rooms like Startup Success and Apps. Hutch Carpenter created a different style of room: The Enterprise 2.0 Room doesn't have much user interaction but it splices together E2.0 news from a variety of sources like Twitter and Delicious.

4. Share videos. Not everyone is here to read blog posts and text blurbs. Rahsheen does a great job of publishing personal and humorous videos on a regular basis.

5. Cross-link as much as possible. If a related discussion springs up elsewhere on the internet, cross-link the posts so that people picking up one part of a thread can join in the conversation.

6. Build a well-liked FriendFeed add-on. Benjamin Golub's FFtoGo was so well received that Ben got a job at FriendFeed!

7. Pictures get attention, so post directly to FriendFeed when possible . This can include repurposing Google Reader shares. Take a look at these pictures to see how much more activity my native FriendFeed posts get than my RSS imported posts.

8. Stream in your other social media profiles when appropriate. If you use FriendFeed often enough you'll find yourself crafting your Tweets and your Google Reader shares with FriendFeed in mind. "How will this share display on FriendFeed? How can I make sure FF readers know what this link is about and why they should click on it?"

9. Advertise FF and your stream outside of FF. Zee has made his FriendFeed profile the centerpiece of his personal homepage. Louis Gray has his FriendFeed profile in a sidebar widget on his site. Get your own widget on the FriendFeed tools page.

10. Bring a good mix of content. Some of us tend to focus our FriendFeed activities around a particular niche that interests us. Others take a wider approach and share wonderful things from all over the internet. Check out Mona Nomura, Cee Bee, and Mo Kargas.

11. Share the things that make you unique. I love the fact that FriendFeed has a lot of librarians like Jill who are ready to jump in whenever I post a misguided thought on information science.

12. Tend your shares. Respond to comments on your posts and the posts you've commented on. Keep the conversation going and you'll add lots of value to the community.

13. Bump someone else's post rather than creating a duplicate. You've just read a great blog post and you want to share it with the FriendFeed community like the selfless poster you are. Before linking it directly, why not search and see who else has posted this? This is a great opportunity for you to "Like" an existing post and then add a useful comment of your own. Doing this will probably find you a few new worthy people to follow. Example: GMail's new Themes feature got a lot of simultaneous reactions. You can take your pick of posts on this topic and join an in-progress conversation.

14. Give a hat tip to the source that brought you any re-shares. This is good practice for any medium. Sometimes I'll find a good link on someone else's blog but then share the original article with a comment like "thanks Ted for finding this" and a link to Ted's related post.

15. Contribute to the FriendFeed Feedback Room. Anyone can do this and it's a great way to help the FF community. You'll be impressed at the quick responses of the FF staff.

More, more more!
Contributors are discovering new ways to interact with FriendFeed every day. Why not leave a comment describing your most valued FriendFeed practices?

Read more by Daniel Pritchett at SharingAtWork.com.

Twitterank's Leaderboard: Odd, Mysterious and Broken

The launch of a leaderboard for the once-feared Twitterank was inevitable. After all, in the online world, if you can measure something and give it a score, then by all means the next step is to rank people from high to low, and provide a leaderboard. It's happened with blog "influence" (Technorati). It's happened with mentions on Techmeme. It's even happened with how frequently people's items are shared on Google Reader (Feedheads, RSSmeme and ReadBurner). As ranking one's Twitter influence has been tried several times by a bunch of different sites, from Twinfluence to Twitter Grader, Twitterank was practically destined to join the crowd. On Friday, the site launched a "Top 50" list and after watching the dust settle a bit, I have to be extremely amused by the results.


Every ranking system has its flaws. And considering Twitterank's algorithm is both secret and changing, according to its author, Ryo Chijiiwa, initial hiccups are no surprise. But glancing at the top 50 tells me that Twitterank must measure influence in a very odd way, contrary to just about every other measure I've seen out there.

For example, according to Twitterank, the #1, highest scoring person in all the world is Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. (@laughingsquid) Scott's account garners a score of 237.591. His own Twitter account shows he (as of Monday after midnight) is following 1,636 people, has 19,307 followers, and has made 5,285 updates. This does not rank him among the top 50 on Twinfluence in total reach, but he does reach #20 on Twitter Grader.

In the #2 position on Twitterank is Brian Solis (@briansolis), who weighs in with a score of 235.847, and Twitter activity of 582 following, 8,033 followers and 3,524 updates. This activity garners him the #43 position on Twinfluence and #22 overall on Twitter Grader.

While Twitterater's top list does have a lot of "household names" like Dave Winer, Michael Arrington, Jeremiah Owyang and Steve Rubel, there are some big oddities, including at least one account that has never sent a message on Twitter at all.


Let's be honest, there's no way I should be this high.
For example, Loic Lemeur (not pictured, but at 226.91) actually ranks below me in the rankings, despite his following and being followed by almost five times as many people, and sending ten times the amount of updates. Meanwhile, Leo Laporte gets a 179.87 ranking, well off the top 50 list, despite having more than 60,000 followers, behind only president-elect Barack Obama and Kevin Rose of Digg (that I know of). And the ever-present Robert Scoble gets only a 188.63, also keeping him off the Top 50.


Leo Laporte, with 60,000 followers, misses the leaderboard?


And Scoble, Mr. Twitter, doesn't break 200 either?
So how does that make any sense? I was going to guess that Scott Beale ranked highly thanks to his high followers to following ratio, but Leo Laporte's ratio is an astonishing 120 to 1, so that, in theory would rank higher. And Scoble's real numbers are off the charts in almost every metric.

Another canary in the coal mine - the account of @google, which ranks #13 overall, according to Twitterank's Top 50, but has only 366 followers, isn't following anyone and has never updated their Twitter account.

So... @google, a user with no updates, has a higher Twitterank than does Scoble, who tops out at 39,000 followers, and more than 15,000 updates. Whatever you think about the content of Robert's tweets, whether they be too frequent or too off-topic, to say that an unused account is among the top in the world is as they say in the Web world... a big FAIL.

That Twitterank has an algorithm which measures something is clear as it gets some of the names you'd expect, but there are still a lot of questions around this service. Right now, it's basically a toy, and has little value.

Making Your Blogging Much More than Just "You"

On Sunday, Chris Brogan asked an important question: "How Often Do You Promote Others?", asking how often many of us are highlighting lesser-known people, sharing their items, or promoting their work, to expand awareness. One of the people Chris gave credit to was Robert Scoble, who Chris said "points me to new stuff all the time".

It's no secret a lot of my own online activity is the result of having watched watching Scoble's efforts. It was his pushing toward Google Reader, creating a link blog, and linking out to people big and small that has guided some of my own behavior. So, as I mentioned on Chris' stream in FriendFeed, here's what I'm trying to do:

1. Highlight new services when they debut, to help give entrepreneurs a running start.
2. Highlighting five new bloggers each month who I believe are undervalued.
3. Adding new guest posts to the blog to showcase talent.
4. Sharing dozens of sites on Google Reader each day.
5. Interacting with many new people on Social Median and FriendFeed.

It's true I could always do more. I know I haven't been doing my part to make as many comments on other people's blogs as I used to. I'm not adding as many new voices to my FriendFeed as I used to, or as many new RSS feeds to Google Reader and Toluu as I once did. And I wish I had more time to test some of the brand-new services that flow into my e-mail. But we are absolutely not going to forget that despite "the blog being your brand", that it doesn't begin and end with me. I hope you can take the time to check out Chris' comments and see what you can do to promote others.

His Post: How Often Do You Promote Others

Techmeme and TechCrunch's Detractors Prove It's Hard to be On Top

One downside of being in a visible leadership position is that you often have a bulls-eye on your back. Sometimes it's from your competition. Sometimes it's from people who feel what you offer isn't benefitting themselves personally, and other times, it can arguably be your biggest fans, who want to change what it is you do to serve their whim of the day. In the tech blogosphere, there is no single blog more influential and visible than TechCrunch, and there is no single aggregator or news site more influential and visible than Techmeme. That the two's fortunes are at times seen as being closely linked only helps to fuel the flames of frustration by those eager to see change, be it through finding alternative sources for news, or, instead, asking for either site to change its tone, its breadth of coverage, or its methodology.

From a third party point of view, it seems the day in and day out potshots against both Techmeme and TechCrunch have taken their toll on the most visible representatives of each site. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera is well-known for his sarcastic, evasive, answers when his site's reputation is questioned, and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is often described as short-fused and sleep deprived. Recently rumors have circulated saying Arrington wants out of the blogging business, and is looking to sell, no doubt in part due to stress of the "always on" atmosphere and ruthless competition. Of course, rumors are simply rumors... but given most PR firms have gotten to the point where reaching out to TechCrunch is part of their standard shtick, it's likely not as fun fielding all the inquiries and sticking to others' schedules as openly writing once was. And TechCrunch has burned through its share of strong writers, with talents like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley leaving, one on good terms, and the other, not as well, as it turned out. (See: On Arrington, My Final Word)

The two sites' major detractors tend to rail on common topics. TechCrunch can be seen as egocentric, and Arrington is perceived to have a bee-line on exclusives. Techmeme similarly has been described as elitist by those who don't get included, navel-gazing by those who think it's too insular, biased by those who feel they have been overlooked, or a single person's playground, by those who feel Gabe's claims to automation are overblown. And some industry blog veterans who regularly appear on Techmeme have even taken to saying it's not as relevant and influential as it once was, replaced by other sources of news.

The complaints around either service became so commonplace that a new word, bitchmeme, was made, loosely defined as "bitching about Techmeme", usually on the weekend, when some tech bloggers had no news to write about. The phrase since took on a life of its own, meaning any silly conflict between blogs that took place on the weekend.

TechCrunch and Techmeme get as much grumpiness tossed their direction as they do because they each own a valuable niche in the blogosphere, and are expanding their lead, rather than relinquishing it. While you could say that TechCrunch competes with ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOM or others, they have cemented themselves as the go-to site for new services entering the market, and even their opinion pieces are widely read, with almost a million unique RSS subscribers taking note. Techmeme's best competition at this point is BlogRunner, with Hacker News, Dave Winer's TechJunk, Duncan Riley's QMeme and more organic sites like RSSmeme or ReadBurner coming up in conversation. But Techmeme's original perceived competition, like TailRank and Megite, are mere shadows of what they initially promised. Meanwhile, TechCrunch is bringing on new writers, and posting more stories than ever (See: The Statbot: TechCrunch Statistics A-W), and Techmeme is going more mainstream, with news sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times featuring more prominently than most individual bloggers.

And with this leadership position, the sites don't have the luxury of acting without criticism any longer. Gabe almost has a part-time position made for himself just to go from blog to blog and explaining that in fact, Techmeme is not evil, and that it is relevant, explaining that TechCrunch has built a reputation as a reputable source for tech news, and therefore, is adequately represented on his site and in the leaderboard. Seemingly every day, Gabe is having to answer questions on Twitter or FriendFeed from people like Robert Scoble (or me in one example, when I wondered why a hot topic wasn't getting airtime). Meanwhile, Arrington gets called nasty names, mocked by Valleywag, and yelled at on Twitter.

But if you take a step back, TechCrunch's goal is to be a technology blog focused on Web 2.0, and it's doing that. Techmeme's stated goal is to be like the front page of the memes that are happening in the tech blogosphere at any given time, and for the large part, it does do that. While there is some uncertainty as to all the criteria that makes up being part of Techmeme, or rising up and down the page, or when something makes the site, it typically takes discussion, not only on the original site, but through links from other blogs, on Twitter, and other sharing sites.

The argument could be made that you could possibly find your technology news faster in another way. Maybe you could find it on FriendFeed, and get a broader scope of sources. Maybe you prefer the democratic approach of ReadBurner and RSSmeme. Maybe you want to go through Google Reader yourself, or rely on others' shared link blogs. But there is no question in my mind that Techmeme is relevant, as is TechCrunch, and being mentioned on either site continues to drive traffic today.

I also believe that Techmeme does a very good job at being available to those bloggers who aren't elite household names. Just tonight, we saw a blog that was born only three days ago make the site, and Yuvi Panda's work on The Statbot shows one third of all Techmeme headlines come from the "Long Tail". Techmeme is accessible to bloggers who write quality content and spur discussion. While I'm absolutely active in places like FriendFeed and Twitter, I don't believe that discussions from FriendFeed belong on Techmeme any more than do popular Twitter posts or popular YouTube videos. Techmeme has specialized in bringing us top tech blogging news, and it's doing it.

The bottom line? If you don't like Techmeme and you don't like TechCrunch, stop reading, or go out and make your own. The best way to show they're no longer relevant is to take them down yourself through competition. But today, they are both standing strong whether you like it or not. I just hope Mike Arrington and Gabe Rivera are enjoying what they do as much as when they first started, and that the daily body blows haven't gotten them so jaded that they want out, for that would be a big loss.

The Talk About Rules for Social Following Is Getting Out of Hand

As the world of online "friends" is getting increasingly blurred, and many of us are joining social network after social network, expanding our realm of friends to mean much more than just those we know in real life, artificial rules of etiquette are being created for when you follow someone or add them as a friend, and when you don't. And when two people have different, unequal rules, there is a potential for conflict, or hurt feelings, even when we have the option to step back and realize this is all very silly. No one hard and fast rule works for everybody, and I would expect that the "rules" are different for each network, given the impact "following" can mean.

This whole ruckus about "You didn't follow me! I'm going to unsubscribe!" led me to playfully suggest a new approach this evening:


(See the FriendFeed response to my Tweet here)

The issue of who to friend started well before social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace took hold, and before Twitter and FriendFeed changed the game in terms of how adding somebody as a friend could open a floodgate of information.

Early demands on who to add as a friend were problematic even in the early days of AOL Instant Messenger. Making my AIM address open to family and close friends was one thing, but soon, casual acquaintances would want my AIM address, and logging on to the service left me at their whim for contacting me, or seeing my status. Soon, I was hiding my service, pretending to be away from the desk, or blocking the very same people who still thought we were AIM friends.

With Friendster, the issue of "friending" again came up. Would I accept the friend request from a college roommate I really wasn't all that fond of? What about if there was a girl I had a crush on, who I wanted to follow, but I didn't want to "friend" in case she figured it out? (Complicated, I know)

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

There became issues with Facebook only accepting 5,000 friends. Twitter saw people set up rules to auto-follow anyone who followed them, even as it became common to follow thousands or tens of thousands. FriendFeed has seen many do the same, even though to follow a person there means not just Twitter updates, but blogs, photos, videos, and dozens more services, in addition to integrated comments.

Soon, the concept of auto-following, and gaining prominence over following a huge number, or being followed by a big name became the norm. While it might make sense for a Robert Scoble or a Duncan Riley to do it, for the rest of us, the firehose of data can be choking. And by opting out of the automatic following process, we can be called on the carpet for not acting the way others expect us to.

A few key examples:

Rahsheen Porter:
The A-List Doesn’t Care About Your FriendFeed
echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null
FriendFeed: Should I unsubscribe from people who don't follow me back ?
Pixel Bits:
Subscribing, unsubscribing, do you like me? Do you hate me?

This issue is highlighted by services which show you the disparity between those you follow, and who follows you. For Twitter, there are sites like Twitter Karma and Less Friends, and recently, one was developed for FriendFeed, called FriendVenn. Of note, I've used Twitter Karma to get my lists in sync, but haven't been able to use FriendVenn, as it's limited to 3,000 total connections so far, and I'm ahead of that mark, even if I didn't follow anybody on FriendFeed at all.

There's nothing wrong with seeing the disparity in bulk, rather than on a one by one basis, but it's more of a curiosity than a call to action in my mind.

On Twitter, I used to be quite selective about who I would follow. But over time, thanks to the improvement of Summize and Twitter's frequent downtimes, I'm not using the Web interface to watch Tweets, but only to send notes. Now, there's really zero impact to me to following a bazillion people. If it makes them feel good, then I have no problem adding them to my stream. But in reality, unless they say my name, or a search query I'm watching in TweetDeck, I'll probably never see their updates.

FriendFeed is a different story altogether. FriendFeed's best environment is the Web interface, where you see all updates. A FriendFeed follow is a lot "heavier" than a Twitter follow, as you get all the updates from all the disparate services. This means that while you can casually follow tens of thousands on Twitter, it can be a bit overwhelming to follow even a few hundred on FriendFeed, unless you're absolutely comfortable with missing out on some updates. As a result, I've been a little slower to follow people there, even as my in box on some days can be flooded with new followers.

The way I choose to follow people on FriendFeed was first, people I knew, or engaged with elsewhere, second, following people who engaged in my activity through comments and on the feeds of the others I followed, and third, friends that those I follow engaged with, and whom I shared interests.

This more tentative approach means I have only 300+ people I follow on FriendFeed instead of 3,100 or more. I believe that by adding more and more, the fun and engagement will surely be lost, just as it was on Twitter's Web interface when I added so many people, or in Facebook, where I get new friend requests daily from people I'll probably never meet. I expect there are probably some good 250 to 500 new people who I'll find interesting on FriendFeed who might be following me now, but I want to make that choice after seeing their activity, not just on automatic.

Am I really going to overweight my social networks with ladies? Probably not, as fun as that sounds. But am I going to overweight every network with every single follower I possibly can, again, probably not. The way I use Twitter and FriendFeed or Facebook or LinkedIn or any other service that relies so heavily on connections is the way that I do it, period. It's not necessarily the way you should do it, and no one right way is right for all people. But if there is a point where I'm not following you, and you are following me, it's probably not personal, and it shouldn't be made personal. To each their own.

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.

Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality

When you really want to concentrate, do you need a quiet room with no distractions, or does playing loud music help you focus? Can you hold a conversation while typing? Can you read blogs and write e-mail while watching TV? I do. And I must. For with all the information available these days, and my personal unwillingness to miss out on conversations or media consumption, I've done more than embrace what many call "continuous partial attention". Instead, I believe I have a goal of achieving "continuous parallel attention", whereby no single task is given primary focus, but instead, multiple tasks gain the same focus.

The common definition of continuous partial attention can be simplified to a person being focused on a single primary task but monitoring background tasks. This can be driving with the radio on, reading a book with a baby sleeping in the next room, or writing a proposal with Twitter on in the background.

Some do this well. Others don't.

Nearly 100% of the time I'm watching TV, I've got my laptop in my lap, with the TV screen's lower half ending just above the top of MacBook Pro screen. In contrast, if I try and talk to my wife when she's writing an e-mail, she probably won't hear me, and once I interrupt, she stops typing.

Last month, I talked about my social media consumption workflow, explaining how I started off my day, working essentially left to right to be sure I processed the information flow in the right way. This issue came up again this morning, when Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester revealed his own morning habits. In the ensuing FriendFeed discussion, I said I too try to knock out much of the activity at the beginning and end of the day, but also keep up what I call "continuous parallel attention" in between.

With continuous parallel attention, essentially multi-tasking, no single activity is getting priority over the other. I am writing e-mails at the same time I am listening to music, at the same time I am getting RSS feeds and seeing Twitter updates or seeing the FriendFeed page reload. Ask me the lyrics of the song, and I can tell you. Ask me what was said on Twitter, and I can probably tell you. Through continuous parallel attention, you're not giving one activity the short shrift due to time or priority, but instead, making sure every activity gets the right focus.

If you drive into the office, but you are thinking about the next blog post, or the next meeting, or even where to go for lunch, that's not mind wandering or being distracted. That's parallel attention. Your radio might be on and you're singing along. If a squirrel darts out in front of your car, you'll still hit the brakes. If a commercial comes on the radio, you still change the station. All in parallel. Your driving doesn't get worse. I'd argue I even drive better with loud music I know, where I'm pounding the steering wheel with every bass drum beat. I work better when I've got multiple things at once, in parallel.

The same is true for engaging with social media. Have you seen Robert Scoble's video from Media Bistro earlier this week? (See: Center Networks: Video: Robert Scoble on the "Worldwide Talk Show")

Robert doesn't linearly go one by one to consume his social media. He is running his RSS feeds, his Twitter feeds, and his video, all in parallel. The human brain is an amazing sponge, ready to take in new information, and if you practice, practice, practice, you can train it, like a muscle, to be ready for exercise. Achieving continuous parallel attention in social media means you don't have to stop one task to pick up the next. You just keep going. Yes, I saw that RSS feed. Yes, I read that e-mail. Yes, I saw your tweet and your FriendFeed post. But I also got all my work done, caught up on our TiVo shows, and picked up the groceries. It's not because I go without sleep (though I need less than most)... it's because of this parallel focus. You should try it.

Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.

Some of the most confused buzzwords in Web 2.0 are those of aggregation and lifestreaming.

As evidenced by the many different sites that have debuted offering a single location for differing online activities, harnessing together RSS feeds from Web services and presenting them as one, delivering a base foundation for aggregation is not all that hard.

Plaxo did it. Profilactic did it. Iminta did it. Socialthing did it. FriendFeed did it. Facebook is starting to do it.

But simple aggregation is not enough. What FriendFeed got right very early on in the game is that it's one thing to get all the services in one page, and quite another to make them interactive, so friends can talk to friends and peers can show peers what they like. Back in November, I wrote, "I first became interested in FriendFeed as the service could aggregate friends' Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it's grown to be much more."

FriendFeed became more because of two things: participation and discovery.

FriendFeed let me respond and interact with the services my friends were sharing. It also allowed me to discover new services, new friends and new sources for information. Through FriendFeed, I've found new blogs to read, found new online social circles, and engaged in real-time with people who are completely unreachable, even by e-mail or Twitter.

Now, as the early adopter crowd has found the FriendFeed religion, despite the occasional grumpy holdout, they're now finding that the real potential in FriendFeed, as with other Web services, comes through participation. It's one thing to passively aggregate your online activity in a single place, and quite another to thoughtfully add comments and like items you find interesting, and think your friends will. Robert Scoble, now as prominent a FriendFeed advocate as I ever have been, has highlighted this factor in The really interesting FriendFeed page to watch tonight, where he notes FriendFeed has set up separate "discussion" pages that aggregate comments and likes. (His | Mine)

Google Reader became the leading RSS feed reader for me not just because it was a strong, quick, offering, but because of the shared link items blog. Twitter is actually useful due to tracking of @Replies and the ability to see others streams intermingled. But to sign up to any of these services to broadcast, and not to participate, shortchanges the process.

There's a reason I've made more than 1,200 comments in FriendFeed since signing up in October, and why I've "Liked" almost 700 different items. It's not because I have a bot set up to do my dirty work. It's because it helps both those I follow, and those who follow me. Take away that participation, and FriendFeed becomes as quiet as a library, and just about as exciting.

So if you're not quite sure where to start with FriendFeed, with Google Reader, with Twitter or any other social network, get started and participate. That'll make all the difference.

The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

Yuvi Panda, a 17-year-old technology whiz kid from India, has been behind detailed analysis of many high-profile blogs, including Engadget, Robert Scoble, Raymond Chen, Techmeme, Digg, TechCrunch and Matt Cutts. Last month, we connected, and he did me the great favor of looking at louisgray.com, helping me gain more insight into my links, trends and topics.

Now, Yuvi is ready to take what's been a hobby and open it up as a service, for those looking to get custom analysis of their site or other social communities, including Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed. Today, "The StatBot" launches, promising a new, statistical look at Web communities including Slashdot, Fark, Engadget, Wikipedia and Firefox. As Yuvi promises on the StatBot site, "The list is endless. Wherever there is a community, I’ll measure it."

First to debut under The StatBot microscope is Robert Scoble's Twitter account.


TheStatBot shows Robert's Tweet Pace Is Increasing
Through April 27th of 2008, The StatBot looked at 10,598 tweets from http://twitter.com/scobleizer, spanning 523 days, and comprising 175,543 words, with more than a million characters.

The StatBot shows Robert has already posted almost 5,000 Tweets in 2008, double his historical average. And he's erratic - at times posting hundreds of individual messages a day, and then during lulls, posting less than 10. Robert uses @Replies from Twitter for nearly two out of every three messages, and has sent @replies to more than 2,200 Twitterers, lending more support for my hypothesis last week that a great deal of Scoble's activity was borne due to the high number of people he is following.

This type of fun and interesting analysis is now no longer at his whim, for us to wonder about how reports could look if we just had the time. With the launch of The StatBot, you can now work directly with Yuvi to have him analyze your blog, and your online activity, or to drop a note into his suggestion box.

And with today's note, Yuvi does more than pick apart the world's most well-known Tweeter. He hints at greater things to come. He expects to debut new reports every two days for the next few weeks, and adds a teaser at the end of his first post.

When Yuvi picked apart my site last month, Eric Berlin wrote, "What a great analysis. An automated service that produced this level of detail would go like hotcakes round the blogosphere." Well, it's here, and it has a name: The StatBot. Check out The StatBot at www.thestatbot.com or follow it on Twitter here: twitter.com/thestatbot.

You Can Only Pitch Me In Reverse Polish Notation or Pig Latin

As the world of journalism/old media gets increasingly blurred with bloggers/new media, some of the larger news-breaking bloggers are finding themselves inundated with pitches from companies looking for additional exposure. In an effort for some top bloggers to reduce the total noise sent their way, some are spelling out the right way and the wrong way to pitch them. But for any company looking to make a name for themselves, how can they possibly remember who wants to be communicated how?

Take a look at some of the more high-profile bloggers who have, at one point or another, said there is one approved way to get their attention:

---

Stowe Boyd of /Message writes Via Twitter, "The Only Approved Way To Pitch Me" is via TwitPitch.


On his blog, he writes, in Twitpitch Is The Future, "Companies will be directed to this page to get the idea, and those that try to stick with the bulging email approach will suffer a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule: After three times of being warned, they go into the spam category."

Upside to him: Less e-mail, more clarity on whether something is being sent his way to write about.

Downside to the company: Their pitch is visible to everyone, making it clear they are shilling, and exclusivity is eliminated.

---

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb says the site gets "piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email." His recommendation for would-be article subjects would be not to send an e-mail, not to call, not to use Twitter (even Direct Messages), not to use Facebook or Instant Messenger. Instead, he wants you to use RSS!


His idea there is that PR folks should send RSS feeds for client blogs and news releases, so when updates are made to their blogs, he'll see it, at his leisure.

Upside to him: Less e-mail, and the ability to enjoy/actually use Facebook, IM and Twitter without getting pitched.

Downside to the company: No understanding as to whether ReadWriteWeb actually "saw" your pitch, absolutely zero pre-pitching, and zero exclusivity. This way, RWW wouldn't get the news until it was out. In fact, Marshall says this is only for things that are public with no embargo, even pushing people back to e-mail for those.

---

And last year, Robert Scoble famously said Facebook would be "a new kind of press release". In the face of a growing e-mail tsunami, he said Facebook wall messages would be passed to his Nokia phone. He says, "now we have a new way for PR people to let me know about their apps. Write it on the wall please. Facebook: the new press release."

Of course, this only works until every PR person figures it out, and Robert would end up with the same information glut, just moved somewhere else.

Upside to him: Lower e-mail flow and fewer phone calls.

Downside to the company: Not every company uses Facebook or considers it professional. Facebook pitches would get lost amidst others wishing Robert a happy birthday or any other notes, and again, they would lose any chance at exclusivity or an embargo, after pitching in public.

---

So what do we have here, just in these three examples? We have three prominent bloggers with three very highly differentiated, inefficient ways of soliciting engagement with public relations and companies. While it's extremely popular these days to dish on old media journalists and claim print is going the way of the dodo, even the biggest reporters at the high-profile media outlets can still be reached by phone or by e-mail. They're not making you jump through hoops to get their attention.

To me, while its likely bloggers are looking to make their own lives easier, and looking to utilize available technology tools to bring clarity to the process, it looks like a sign of weakness. Can't handle the data glut or the outreach coming your way? Somebody else will. Somebody else with the ability to write as quickly as you can, with the right tone and a big enough audience, who can be reached by e-mail or by cell phone, or by Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed or anything, will write that article and get that news coverage you miss.

Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won't. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won't work.

UPDATE: Elliott Ng, in the comments, gives us some good links, including Brian Solis' article on PR 2.0: In Blogger and Media Relations, You Earn the Relationships You Deserve and Rafe Needleman of WebWare complaining on Twitter about being pitched via Plaxo.

3 Months Into Being a Twitter "Nice Guy"

This coming Sunday, it will have been three months since I did what I once said I would never do, when I signed up for Twitter, enabling me to send short messages out to the world in 140 characters or less. And while I still haven't immersed myself as part of Twitter Nation, preferring not to bore friends and strangers with my most minor thoughts and activities, I have found it a useful tool to keep updated and interact with others quickly, if not always efficiently.

As with any communications tool, Twitter can be abused or used well. There have been recent discussions of spam accounts increasingly signing up and "following" everyone on the planet. Elsewhere, aggressive social media leaders like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis alternately complain and embrace the tens of thousands they've added to their Twitter stream. Some post song lyrics they're hearing on the radio. Others ask questions to their followers. Some use profanity for emphasis. Most do not.


My note from this morning... (link)
At its base, Twitter is a tool much like instant messaging, but permanent, and searchable. In the space of 140 characters, I can share URLs I've found on the Web, highlight my own recent blog posts, or talk publicly to people from around the world. I largely use my Twitter account to alert followers to blog posts ahead of the RSS feed (if they are subscribers), or adding comments to conversations that have developed, whether they started in Twitter, on FriendFeed, or in our blogs. Less frequently, I'll say if I'll be traveling, or if I've achieved a new milestone, like 500 Twitter followers or 1,000 RSS subscribers.


A favorite comment from Shyftr's Matt Shaulis (link)
Not exactly the most exciting of all streams, if you ask me. But what I have tried to do is not flood the system. I don't want to be the guy who "tweets" too much, or becomes uninteresting, so when I do comment, I want it to have substance, or call attention to something that does. On Wednesday, I was impressed by a well-written piece from Dan Blows on his blog called Twitter: The Web’s Playground, where he noted people can adopt different personalities on Twitter. Some are nice guys. Some are bullies. Some are seniors, and others, fashionistas. I was included, in addition to Mathew Ingram, and Scoble, as one of the "nice guys", and that's a great crowd to be part of.

Over the 90 or so days I've been a Twitter user, I've, so far, sent fewer than 300 updates, about 3-4 a day. And while I started out being very selective as to who I chose to follow, I've updated my stance, now reviewing each new "follower" and seeing what they have to add. Now, by default, I follow them as well, and can always unfollow them if they get too off-topic, too noisy, or just aren't my type. As Scoble has mentioned a few times, some of the real power in Twitter can be how many you follow, even more so than how many follow you - so long as it doesn't become too overwhelming.

I've even started using some tools to help make sense of the Twitter kingdom:
1. Tweetscan: louisgray or "Louis Gray"
2. Tweetclouds: louisgray
3. Alpha Twitter: www.alphatwitter.com
4. Twitter Karma: http://www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/


A fun find through Tweetscan. (link)
Responding to Twitter via FriendFeed has also added to my using Twitter. From FriendFeed, I can post both on that site, and have it act as an @reply on Twitter. The only downside so far is that FriendFeed doesn't yet make sure I stay within Twitter's 140-character limit, so when I mess that up, I look pretty silly. But I'll live, and expect they'll fix it soon, just like they have with so many other small issues in the last six months.

So, with three months of Twittering under my belt, it's not been the evil I once thought it was, and yet it hasn't been this panacea that changes my life for the better either. It's a tool for quickly sending updates and talking with people. And in the end, there's nothing wrong with that. You can find me at http://www.twitter.com/louisgray.

BlogPulse Offers Insight into Blog Trends, Conversations and Influence

While BlogPulse has been around since 2005, I have largely ignored it, relying on Technorati, Google Blog Search and my own internal metrics to gauge momentum, trends and how conversations get shaped. But in light of this weekend's discussion, I was drawn to the site, and found it offers the best, closest, picture to how the story developed, who linked to who, and how a story can gain influence.

You can even see which people, famous or otherwise, are getting cited most frequently, or are the most "bursty", showing they are climing the ranks. (Key People for April 13, 2008)

Part of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BlogPulse highlights the top blog posts, news stories and videos on the Web each day, and offers the ability to search for trends, track conversations across multiple blogs and get profiles of a site. Interestingly, I was alerted by Technorati to the fact that Friday night's post was somehow labeled the second-highest "top blog post" by Nielsen, and Scoble's follow-on "Era of Blogger's Control Is Over" ranked fifth. This was tabulated by the blog posts gaining the most external links. You can see the top forty for today listed on their site, ranging from technology to politics. Unsurprisingly, the weekend discussion on Shyftr figures prominently, with Scoble and me being joined by Tony Hung.


What makes BlogPulse most interesting, at least to me, is the ability to break out conversations between blogs, like a family tree, seeing who linked to who, and how while I may have kicked off the discussion, its clear that Scoble and Hung have their own spheres of influence. Of course, as some reactions linked to all sites, it's not a perfect measure, but BlogPulse is the best I've seen here. (See: BlogPulse: Conversation Tracker)

But BlogPulse does more than just track the conversations. Like Technorati, BlogPulse can show charts, displaying if one topic or another is capturing the fancy of the blogosphere as a whole.

Here is the chart showing Shyftr's spike over the weekend:


The same chart for FriendFeed:


And for Twitter:


And if you're so inclined, you can even search for yourself, like I did.


Drilling down further, BlogPulse offers site profiles for the many blogs they index. The front page of the site claims nearly 78 million identified blogs, with more than 80 thousand net new in the last 24 hours, with almost 700,000 new posts indexed. Now that would make for a big fat, RSS to-do list, would it not?

Looking at my BlogPulse profile, common keywords in my recent posts include "TechMeme", "Blogosphere", "Subscriber", "Momentum", "Anticipated", "Linking", "Embedded", and "Screenshot", to name a few. BlogPulse also offers graphs showing the number of posts per day, and how often the site has been cited in the last month. The chart for my site is below:


Can BlogPulse replace Technorati, as many have expressed frustration with the one-time blog search king? Maybe not, but it certainly has a lot of very interesting elements that I like. While it's not new, I'm definitely going to be paying a lot more attention now to BlogPulse than I ever did before. After a crazy blog weekend, it's offered us the best picture of how it all unfolded.

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

RSSMeme Helps Bloggers Know What Their Readers Like

RSSMeme, now two months old, has carved out an interesting niche in the shared links aggregation market, first forged by Mario Romero's FeedHeads application on Facebook, and later seeing ReadBurner and RSSMeme crowd in for availability on the Internet as a whole.

One of RSSMeme's so-far unique options is for a blog author to drill down and see how frequently each of their own blog posts have been shared on Google Reader link blogs. For those authors who have a variety of topics, RSSMeme can help gain yet another level of insight into what readers are finding most interesting, as well as saying what topics should be avoided in the future. As RSSMeme has the largest easily accessible library of Google Reader shared link blogs, it provides a good sounding board for the many popular tech blogs users are subscribed to.

To be counted among the most popular shared items on RSSMeme, an item would need at least 50 shares to achieve the weekly leaderboard, and nearly 100 shares for the all-time leaderboard. But for small fry like me, I can tell that one of my own items can be considered "popular" when it has as many as a dozen shares, and most popular items occasionally cross the 20 threshold. (See my RSSMeme page here)

Looking at my dedicated RSSMeme page, of the 20 items listed there, I had a total of 232 shares (as of 5 p.m. Sunday), for an average of 11.6 shares per item. Of these 20 items, five had as many as 18 shares or more apiece, including "Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag (18)", "LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel (20)", "In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break (19)", "Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed (19)" and "ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership (21)". Each of these items had a technology/Web feel to it, as did those items which fell just behind.

On the other side of things, three posts only had one measly share. Of those three, two were stories I wrote about baseball, and one was about having to use my old PowerBook. As Yuvi Panda, the once and future stat king, wrote me not too long ago, "One thing that you seem to like writing about but people don’t really pay too much attention to is sports." Looks like he was right.

This level of disparity becomes even more pronounced with the more popular subscribed blogs.

TechCrunch's last 20 items range from 3 and 4 shares for a pair of stories on Yahoo! to 72 and 81 shares for a pair of stories on FriendFeed. (See: RSSMeme: TechCrunch)

ReadWriteWeb's last 20 items show one item on Microsoft's SilverLight gained only 2 shares, while a review of Toluu racked up 45 and Sarah Perez's comments on good UI design got 70. (See: RSSMeme: Read/Write Web)

And Robert Scoble bottoms out at 2 shares for highlighting a recent video with Mashable, but peaks at 86 for revealing the secret to Twitter. Other hot topics gaining about 40 shares each was a post saying FriendFeed would trump TechMeme or Google Reader, and saying TechCrunch's Michael Arrington had the wrong goals for assembling a "Dream Team". ( See: RSSMeme: Scobleizer.com)

RSSMeme has done more than just tally the most popular shared items on Google Reader, and display publicly available link blogs. You can now visit any shared blog's dedicated page, and get a visual approximation for how frequently the site's readers are hitting share in Google Reader, and what topics those who read RSS feeds like.

If you have a blog with an RSS feed, I encourage you to go to www.rssmeme.com, do a search for your name, and see what your readers like. It'll even tell you who shared what, and isn't that the kind of direct feedback you're looking for?

louisgray.com: A Brief History of the Site

Editor's note: I've been thinking a lot about how I first found Web services or made them part of online life. Some, I have perfect answers for, and others, not so much. I hope to talk more about some of these experiences in the coming weeks. But I thought it'd be interesting to play show and tell with just how louisgray.com got started, with all the missteps along the way.

And soon... we can talk about all the other cool services and how we got there.

1999 - 2001


I first bought the louisgray.com domain on December 30 of 1999. I didn't do much with it in the first round, building out a set of static pages that essentially acted as an "About Us" site, featuring comments on sports, tech and stocks. Amusingly, I'd patterned the look and feel of the site off one of Google's "About Us" pages, hence the coloring and clean look. I didn't expect Google to get as big as they are now, but I liked their design even back then. Of course, if I used that look/feel now, it'd have been obvious.

But I didn't give the site much attention. At one point, I even let it expire!

(See the Archive.org Backup from February 2001)

2004 - 2005

I bought louisgray.com back again in 2004, from a new registrar, but again, didn't do much. In fact, given I'd largely deleted the old files, I had to crawl through archive.org to find the old content and graphics, and rebuilt.

(See the Archive.org Backup from August 2004)

In 2005, I messed around with launching a blog with Six Apart's TypePad software, but I didn't get all that far. Eventually, I'm sure I broke it, and I abandoned the plan, but didn't give up on the idea. In fact, most of what I did with louisgray.com at this time was serve as a repository for my ANtics Oakland A's comics, featured on AthleticsNation.com.

2006


In 2006, I finally found a solution that let me blog to louisgray.com. A little fatigued by the non-tech content on my family's shared blog, in existence from 2004, I forged out on my own, very slowly, mostly offering an echo chamber that consisted of talking to myself about the A's and Silicon Valley news. I certainly wasn't breaking news, but instead, treating it as one person's commentary on the day's news.


(See Archive.org for Mach 2006 and October of 2006.)

First Half 2007 - The Scoble Effect

Writing for my seeming one-person audience was at times frustrating. But somewhere between mid-2006 and early 2007 I had this epiphany around Web 2.0 and leading bloggers. I started leaving comments on some sites, and engaging. At times, I felt like I was catching up in terms of the quality of the content, talking about the news of the day, but I wasn't getting any traction.

In January of 2007, I let my frustration spill over a bit. Robert Scoble wrote a memorable post called "Pissing off the blogosphere…, where he recapped complaining that large blogs like Engadget weren't linking his way. The first to comment on his story, I wrote, "... for what it’s worth, you are one of the A-listers who everybody who does link links to. As you know, all us Z-listers are pumping out content every day and it could be nobody notices…"

Robert, only minutes later, wrote, "Louis, just subscribed to you. I appreciate it is tough for a new blogger to get noticed. I wonder how we can solve that?"

Clearly, I got Robert thinking... as for a later post that day, he asked, "Do A-list bloggers have a responsibility to link to others?, where he offered to visit and subscribe to good tech blogs, mine included.

This made me excited, but nervous too. For if I didn't start writing about stuff that Scoble wanted, he would unsubscribe. He wouldn't share my items in his link reader, and that'd be the end of that little experiment. Luckily, I started to arc my coverage even more toward tech, and more toward those things he liked, including Google Reader and RSS.

January of 2007 was also a big move behind the scenes, as I moved off RapidWeaver, a Mac OS X software application, and onto Google's Blogger, where we remain today. It's not WordPress, but it does exactly what I need it to.

Second Half 2007

18 months into the new blogging experiment, I continued to fly under the radar for the most part, with the exception of the occasional surprise on TechMeme and rare Scoble link. But I also started to find friends with similar interests who covered similar things, people like Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica, MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Kent Newsome of Newsome.org and Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast. This little sub-community served, in my opinion, to help push each of us further to do better and keep up the pace. Even if just a few dozen of us were trading ideas and sharing comments, it was something. In this time, I was also buoyed by seeing my subscriber base grow from less than 100 to about 200 by end of year.

Early 2008

Not much use recapping this. It's early yet. But I've talked openly about some of the momentum we've had, now that we have a better idea of what we want to talk about, and now that we have new services coming to market, wanting to be part of the discussion and engaged. I've been delighted to see services I talk about go from 5 users to 500 seemingly overnight, or to see others excited about finding new sites with my help. And while I once felt stress to remain relevant, I feel a lot more comfortable now, that we're engaged and actively part of a larger conversation. And now that we're here... you know, as Paul Harvey says... the rest of the story.

Scoble's Link Blog Slows to a Crawl

For the better part of 2007, Robert Scoble trumpeted his Google Reader shared items link blog as a potential alternative to TechMeme. As a subscriber to his link blog in my Google Reader, I could typically look forward to a dozen or more new stories each day from blogs I'd never heard of - leading me to a lot of great new sources, many of whom I added to my subscription list.

But then, almost coinciding with his leaving PodTech in mid-January, with sporadic interruptions just prior, the link blogging slowed to a mere crawl, in comparison to his previous activity. Scoble, a busy man, was not only working on starting up FastCompany TV, but was flying all over the world, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, back to the West Coast, and off again to Switzerland this week. And while he found time to stream video on Qik, post to Twitter, and occasionally blog, his link blog was comparatively a low priority.

On January 29th, via Twitter, I asked him about this:
He responded in kind:


My question to him had come after an 8-day gap in the link blog. On January 29th, he shared one item. On January 30, one more. On January 31st, he seemed to approach regular form, with eight links. February started off with a little rhythm as well, six on February 2nd, ten more on the 3rd, and four more on Monday. And again, a return to silence (just two days so far). You can also see Scoble's link blog is not among the leaders in shared items according to ReadBurner's rankings, where it no doubt once would have been.

How does that compare to previous months? Well, on January 15th, Scoble shared 21 items and 17 on the 14th. December 30th was 16 items. December 28th was 15 items. December 27th was 26 items.... and you get the idea. In fact, AideRSS reports Scoble shared 455 posts per month on average, with a total of 2,279 posts since Jul 24 of last year, when the service started counting. (You too can use AideRSS to count these up.)

Did the blogosphere all of a sudden get less interesting? Did Robert stop reading feeds altogether? Has Robert raised the standard for sharing items? Did subscribers complain about the frequency? Maybe it's a mixture of all these things. Maybe he's just reached a point where he's gotten too busy, or the new post-PodTech world keeps him further away from Google Reader than when he was at PodTech.

Regardless of the answer, I hope he soon finds the time to get back to his link blog. I know I've found it a very good resource, just as nearly 300 others have liked the Elite Reddit which some of us B-Listers are working on. There's something to be said about the world of tech news being filtered with real eyes instead of a machine.

Also see: Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent

ReadBurner Keeps Improving With Stats and Upcoming Items

I always knew the first service to crack the code of showing the most popular shared items in Google Reader, along with who shared them would be a fun utility. The catch? I used to think it would be Google who would be the winner. But now, with ReadBurner almost two weeks old, I've already seen the site change the way I think about and interact with RSS feed aggregators and shared link blogs.

In the last two weeks, Alexander Marktl has made his experiment into a useable, enjoyable site, filtering it into no fewer than five different language families, adding RSS feeds, revealing the individual sharers, and adding profile pages for each individual user.


Meanwhile, he has added a new page dedicated to "Upcoming" items that haven't yet reached the popular stage, just as Digg does.

The sum of all these changes? Even more reasons to keep checking in on the site - and two major shifts have occurred in my thinking over the last few weeks because of ReadBurner.

1) Google's Shared Link Blogs are a Big Barrier for Competitors

When AssetBar launches for good, there are some tremendously interesting services the site will offer that nobody else does today. But assuming I leave Google Reader for AssetBar (or any other service), my shared link blog from Google Reader will go dark. That, in turn, will stop my updates from being included on ReadBurner, Shared Reader and other services.

Even if AssetBar shows the most popular shared items, it will likely be doing so in a way where its data will be parallel from Google Reader, and therefore, won't be counted in ReadBurner, Feedheads, Shared Reader and others. If my shared link blog is important enough to me, I wouldn't make the move.

Even though Google hasn't done much with these shared link blogs, they already post a barrier for new companies.

2) I Finally Know Who Reads My Blog and Shares, but Doesn't Comment

ReadBurner, by revealing who is sharing blog posts from louisgray.com, shows me the link blogs from people I've never known. Even as my RSS feed reader subscribers ticked upward, my subscribers are largely an enigma. A small fraction of them make comments here, or send me e-mail. Now, I can go to ReadBurner, click on the names of people who have shared my items, and find them for the first time.

This alone is a very powerful thing.

And Alexander's not done. ReadBurner just launched a "Stats" page highlighting the most active link bloggers, the most common sources for shared items, and most common authors - the very beginning of exactly what Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and I have been asking for Google to do for the better part of a year. (See below screenshot)



Whether this addition was spurred forward by a similar feature debuted by "Shared Reader" I saw in the middle of last week or not isn't certain, but it's impossible to know. After all, "Shared Reader", after a very public debut, both here, and on Mashable, looks to be down at the moment. Good thing ReadBurner is still up and innovating.

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.

---

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.

Robert Scoble to Kick Off Fast Company TV Wednesday

Lost in the din of CES last week and MacWorld this week was the conclusion of uber-blogger Robert Scoble's time at PodTech. As of Monday night, Robert Scoble reported he is "unemployed", at least for 24 hours, as he moves from one venture to another - starting Fast Company TV with friend Rocky Barbanica.

As announced by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington back in December, Scoble made the decision to leave PodTech, where he produced the ScobleShow, amid uncertainty surrounding the company.

Reached by phone Monday night, Scoble said he would be revealing more about the new Fast Company TV venture late Tuesday, risking going head-to-head for bloggers' attention with Steve Jobs' impending announcements at MacWorld.

Jokingly, Robert said, "Steve Jobs can have ten hours atop TechMeme and then we'll get it after that."

While some I had talked to in the Valley had speculated Robert and Rocky would go their own way, not joining Fast Company after all, Scoble said the prospect of running a business wasn't what he wanted to do. While he said there were six different companies fighting to land the duo, in the end it came down to two options.

"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." (See: Join us at Doug Engelbart’s house)

On Tuesday, Robert, with son Patrick en tow, will be headed to the Moscone Center to see Jobs' keynote live. Near midnight, we should see a post on Scobleizer.com outlining the new venture, and Fast Company TV will become a reality shortly afterward.

The Data Ownership Wars Are Heating Up

You would have to have been in a cave or without Web access today to have missed Robert Scoble's one-day forced exit from Facebook, initiated after he utilized some pre-release software from Plaxo to pull down his friends' contact data. Without wanting to pile on that already fatigued story, it's an interesting salvo in what will be a heated, prolonged, battle between all the service providers, and their users, over who should gain access to what data, who owns it, and what they should be allowed to do with it.

Facebook's reasoning was that his efforts violated the company's terms of service. It's all well and good to bring your data into the site, but don't you dare try and get it out. FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit, doing some TOS sleuthing of his own, asks in response, Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook? After all, Facebook users are all giving the site access to the same type of user information deemed so valuable, and just as in violation of the terms of services as Robert's stunt was.

And Facebook isn't alone in this yearning to import contacts from other services. LinkedIn does the same thing. So does Spokeo. You can synch up your Webmail contacts, or import a .vcf card from any application, like Microsoft Outlook or Apple's Address Book. But isn't this data yours? Shouldn't it be just as easy to get the data out as it was to get it in there in the first place?

This is bound to get even more intense in the coming year and beyond. Just look at what happened when the Google Reader team got a tad over-aggressive in deciding for you how you might want your shared link items distributed. There were calls from all corners of the Web for privacy and for Google to renounce the practice. With data being so easy to generate, and so portable, for different services and devices, and with so many companies' intellectual property effectively being from user generated content, they have a vested interest in keeping you and your data in, and the ability to export out.

With that being true, it's remarkable when some companies approach the issue in a much more transparent and beneficial way. Take Assetbar, for instance. In the company's product description, they write, "Don't worry, your data is yours. You can always delete everything and even export it as a .csv or XML file!" Assetbar knows that the data you brought in and you commented on, the data you shared and the private messages you created are yours.

I believe that users aren't going to stand for companies deciding just how they should be allowed to interact with their friends and their information. They are going to demand portability. They are going to demand transparency, and they are going to demand a rapid response when things go awry. That Facebook eventually got back to Robert today and restored his account is fine, but if he wasn't one of the highest-profile bloggers on the planet, there's no way it would have happened that quickly. This time, Facebook just may have done enough to save face. But there will be a next time, and a next, and a next, unless the policies change.

On the same wavelength, Scott Karp writes about:
The Coming War Over Data On The Web

Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent

I covered most of my near year-end statistical data on Christmas Day, when I said a lot of my visitors in 2007 were not only coming from Google, but looking for information on Google. But there are still a few pebbles left to be uncovered. As I quickly looked at the year's statistics - through 5 p.m. today, a unique referral caught my eye.

Almost 1 percent of my visitors in 2007 came from Robert Scoble's link blog. In aggregate, after each of the Google properties, MySpace, BlogLines, and Feedburner, Scoble's link blog sent about 5,000 visitors in 2007, in little dribs and drabs, usually about one to two dozen visitors per item he chose to share in Google Reader. In all, there were 51 posts I made in 2007 that he shared, which delivered 10 or more unique visitors.


While the URL strings from Google Reader aren't pretty, they still work, as you can see in the quick screen grab above from my report from Analog.

It's always interesting to me to learn how we first find out about people, and find their blogs.

The way I first found Robert's blog? The infamous "Brrreeeport" experiment from early 2006.

As this blog was getting off the ground, I was peeking at Technorati, and this nonsensical word caught my eye as a common search term. After finding Robert's blog, it was off to the races for me. Clicking off to GigaOM and TechCrunch and eventually on to folks my own level was a serious rush, and I was dumbfounded I hadn't found it before. Somehow, I'd been so siloed as to not have the light bulb go on until early 2006.

You can see my first mentioning of this here in March 2006: Top Ten Sites for NextGen Tech Info

Others have told me they found my blog either through one of Scoble's posts, or from the link blog. I know it works. While I doubt I have the power to deliver people 1% of their yearly traffic from my link blog, that's one major reason I keep mine going. I want new people to learn what I'm reading, and find new sources for information. I read Scoble's Link Blog, and often open the links in a new window, and eventually find myself subscribing to their RSS feed in Google Reader. That's one of the major tenets of the new Web - sharing, following, and discovering.

So Robert, thanks for the 1%. And if you were one of the 1%, thanks for visiting. I hope you'll stay.

To subscribe to my link blog, start here.

10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Amid the discussion of Google's sneaking in a social network, little has been said about Google Reader potentially tabulating and reporting the most commonly-shared items and most popular feeds. I believe that in 2008, Google Reader will start reporting the most popular feeds, clicked items and shared items. By the end of 2008, it will become equally important for bloggers, if not more so, to be atop this list, instead of on TechMeme. Google will also integrate this information for both Facebook and iPhone, competing head to head with Mario Romero's excellent Feedheads application.

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

With the company being valued at $15 billion, Facebook can offer around 5 percent of the company to Kevin Rose and team at Digg and net them pre-IPO shares of what's sure to be a white-hot 2009 offering. The all-stock transaction would value Digg above $500 million, the highest possible exit for the company. Public companies, including Microsoft, will counter with $300 million of real money and be rebuffed.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

eBay has done absolutely nothing with StumbleUpon since the service's $75 million acquisition. Unlike PayPal, which was a natural fit, StumbleUpon has no fit within the ecosystem of eBay. A more acquisition-savvy businesses, like Yahoo! or News Corp, will end up with the property by the end of the year. Expect this to accelerate alongside management changes at eBay and continued fallout after the Skype disaster. What it will do is pocket eBay some serious cash. This time, StumbleUpon goes for north of $200M.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Moving outside of its 140-character niche, Twitter will enable bored microbloggers to show exactly what they are doing with still photos and 15 second video clips. Despite the novelty wearing off, many will continue to do so, gaining us precious photos of the window over their computer desk, overexposed facial closeups and pictures of their breakfast. The service will be integrated with Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Some time in 2008, Apple's Boot Camp application will no longer require a restart to run Windows applications. Users will be able to natively run Microsoft Outlook, Project, Access and all other Windows-only applications alongside their Mac OS X applications on any new Mac. While developers may decry the competition to Parallels and VMWare Fusion, Apple will remain quiet, and slowly take over the market.

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

By the end of 2008, either Firefox, Safari or Opera will natively ship with the ability to block all ad banners and Google AdSense. Publishers and bloggers will make a lot of noise about it, while secretly avoiding ads themselves. A significant percentage of early adopters will change browsers solely for this feature.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Early adopters always looking for an edge will move away from Bloglines and Google Reader in search for something more cutting-edge. Many will turn to FriendFeed and Assetbar, following the latter's launch, to find a rich feed reader with social networking features. However, neither service will enjoy a significant market share prior to the end of 2008, and neither will be acquired by the end of 2008.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Despite advances in video capture and broadband speeds, Web users will not gravitate toward long-form video blogs, choosing instead to stick with text and photography. Only the rare extreme niche businesses will find any success with utilizing video for blogging.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

The introduction of video rentals on iTunes will not only force a dramatic subscriber exit for Netflix and reduced rentals at Blockbuster, but will also further slow attendance at movie theaters nationwide, as consumers find the service good enough, and much less inexpensive than a night out.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

After joining FastCompany in early 2008, Robert Scoble will be at first jubilant, have initial success, and then plateau. While he will remain tremendously popular, there will already be discussions by the end of 2008 as to where he will end up in 2009, giving ValleyWag and Uncov, among others, plenty to gossip about.

Other 2008 predictions:
Jeremy Toeman: Technology Predictions for 2008
Paris Lemon: The Year Ahead 2008: 17 Predictions
The Economist: Technology in 2008
Mahalo: 2008 Technology Predictions
Center Networks: 2008 Predictions from CenterNetworks

Dave Winer Launches FlickrFan, Synching Photos With TV

Dave Winer, a true Web pioneer behind many of the major innovations of the last decade, including blogging, RSS and podcasting, to name a few minor ones, has fallen in love with the ability to bring a stream of photos via Flickr to your big screen television. Now, he's released a new app, in beta, for you to enjoy the same.

The new product, called FlickrFan, essentially connects your Mac screensaver with a stream of Flickr photos you have subscribed to, like RSS, and displays them on your TV or your Mac desktop. Of course, to get them to your TV, you need to attach your Mac, as he and Robert Scoble have done with their Mac Minis.

As with RSS, the possibilities here are wide-reaching. You could subscribe to photo streams from famous photographers and artists. You could follow friends or family, or famous people. But now, beyond the little screen of your computer, you have a new target - the big screen. Scoble swears by it.

It's only available for Mac users now, and we don't mind. Should be fun to watch its continued development. (Download it now)

Oh... and my boring photos are here.

The Crunchies 2007: My Voting

According to TechCrunch, more than 82,000 nominations were given for companies and products that best deserve industry recognition for their effort in the past year. They were then whittled down to a final 100 in a wide variety of categories.

Here's how I am voting:

Category: Best technology innovation/achievement:
Vote: Move Networks

Category: Best Bootstrapped Start-up
Vote: FriendFeed

Category: Best New Gadget/Device
Vote: Wii

Category: Best Business Model
Vote: Zazzle

Category: Best Design
Vote: SmugMug

Category: Best Enterprise Start-up
Vote: Zoho

Category: Best Consumer Start-up
Vote: LinkedIn

Category: Best Mobile Start-up
Vote: Twitter

Category: Best International Start-up
Vote: Netvibes

Category: Best User-Generated Content Site
Vote: Facebook

Category: Best Video Site:
Vote: Joost

Category: Best Clean Tech Start-up:
Vote: Tesla Motors

Category: Best Use of Viral Marketing:
Vote: StumbleUpon

Category: Best Time Sink Site:
Vote: Pandora

Category: Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place:
Vote: Kiva

Category: Most Likely to Succeed:
Vote: Wordpress

Category: Best Start-up Founder:
Vote: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Category: Best Start-up CEO:
Vote: Dick Costolo (Feedburner)

Category: Best New Start-up of 2007:
Vote: Tumblr

Category: Best Overall:
Vote: Facebook

Robert Scoble also posted his Crunchies Votes. We agreed on only 7 of the 20 categories.

What I'm Reading and Sharing on Google Reader

With 225 feeds filling my Google Reader every day, there have to be some good sources for news across the blogosphere. According to Google Reader trends, over the last 30 days I have read 16,711 items and shared 387 items. The total number of items and feeds is up only fractionally from my last update (in October), while I'm sharing about 30% more items on my link blog. Admittedly, I'm probably being more free with my sharing to get it noted on Friendfeed, which I'm now using voraciously.

But of these 225 feeds, which ones are getting on the Link Blog most frequently?

My Top 20 (and how many shares) for the last 30 days are as follows:

Silicon Alley Insider (27) * Scobleizer.com's Shared Items (27) * TechCrunch (24) * LouisGray.com (19) * WinExtra (17) * Mashable! (17) * Read/Write Web (13) * ParisLemon (11) * GigaOM (10) * Google Blogoscoped (10) * Scobleizer (10) * Google Operating System (8) * Engadget (8) * The Last Podcast (7) * Mathew Ingram (7) * Epicenter (7) * CenterNetworks (7) * Scripting News (6) * VentureBeat (6) * Fortune: Apple 2.0 (6)

Most of these you have seen me mention time and again, especially my fellow B-List Bloggers. But Silicon Alley Insider continues to put out good news, and most days you can see Henry Blodget and others delivering scoop after scoop or making comments on business and tech in a way some of us simply can't, whether we're too Silicon Valley focused or just not in the line of gossip. CenterNetworks and Read/Write Web are also very heavy in the signal vs. noise ratio. Also of note, as Robert's said a few times, his link blog is consistently delivering more relevant news than his own blog, as he's become an excellent filter for the many feeds he takes in on a daily basis. As for the rest, they're all worth visiting. I read every single story they publish every single day.

To get those I cherry pick, add my link blog to your Google Reader here.

Video from PRSA's "Media Predicts 2008"

PodTech recorded Wednesday's PR event, including notables from CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Robert Scoble.

As you recall, my original comments can be found here: Silicon Valley Media Notables Divide "Hot" from "Not". Other responses included that of Marketonomy, Sam Whitmore and Kara Swisher.

Worth watching if you're interested in technology, journalism, new media or PR.

Silicon Valley Media Notables Divide "Hot" from "Not"

This evening, I had the opportunity to attend a fun panel put on by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, featuring some of the Valley's top reporters, from the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CNBC, Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, and uber-blogger Robert Scoble. The panelists, all "Hot" in their own right, shared with the PR-heavy audience what they thought were the biggest hits of 2007, and what's next in the coming year.

Virtually all panelists said 2007 could be summarized through the success of a few companies: Apple, Google and Facebook, to name a few, the rise of the iPhone, user generated content, social networks, Twitter, and advertising-driven firms. But some said a tide was going to turn with the change in the calendar year, away from consumer-driven technology, and toward enterprise. Also, many expected a combination of bad news to hit the Valley and the economy at large - a market downturn, a recession, and bursting of what could be seen as the advertising bubble, with many companies riding the second wave to Web upstarts to disappear altogether.

Kara Swisher, author of AOL.com (a must read, featured in my bookshelf), was one of the stars of the evening, proving herself intelligent, quick, witty, sarcastic and perfectly willing to mock Second Life, Facebook widgets or the other panelists at any opportunity.

At the other end of the table was Robert Scoble, with Amazon Kindle alongside, playing the part of the only true digerati on the panel. His brazen openness and willingness to engage with his readers through his blog, through Twitter and Facebook, and request to be contacted by cell phone, was in stark contrast to others all too tired of PR pitches - most who said they preferred e-mail. He was one of the few to bring up private startup companies he likes, including Kyte.TV, and vehemently disagreed with CNBC's Jim Goldman on whether Microsoft was seeing a string of success with Vista, Zune and the XBox. And when he stated he read 800 RSS feeds a day, the response was one of shock from his fellow panelists, who jokingly compared him to the notoriously always-on Marissa Mayer of Google.

The far-ranging discussion chided the US government for being too focused on "the friggin' flag", as Swisher mentioned, instead of working to get the country in a leadership position on broadband and wireless, while nations like Vietnam, South Korea and Europe were able to get their act together. She postulated that had the development of the United States' interstate highways been managed in the same way, we'd be on cobblestones.

Other comments were that ad-driven media companies will see a spike in spending to the tune of $100 million around the 2008 presidential election, a one-time jump that will go away, painfully, in 2009, that Yahoo! better get off its kiester and figure out what it's going to do with all its users and products, and that Google just might continue disrupting every new market it enters, including wireless.

While I'd met some of the panelists and others in the room before, it was my first time meeting Scoble personally, but given our online discussions, talking with him had an immediate air of familiarity and friendship, one forged through shared experiences and points of view. (He was no idiot...)I'd be eager to sit in on more discussions like this, and to see if these notables were right with what they expect for 2008.

Scoble Violates Apple Fanboy Rule #1

Macs sometimes break.
Macs sometimes crash.
Mac applications sometimes don't work they way you think they should.

Apple doesn't always have the best strategy (in my opinion) for promoting its lesser-known features or less-adopted product lines.

They're not perfect.

• I returned my new MacBook Pro less than two days after I got it for repairs. (1 | 2 | 3)
  
• My last PowerBook had its keyboard repaired once and its logic board replaced once.
  
• I bought 4 or 5 power adapters for my last PowerBook because they kept wearing down.
  
• My wife's iBook was repaired at least twice for Logic Board issues.

Going back further in time, I once had a devil of a time upgrading from Mac OS 8.6 to Mac OS 9. Installing Mac OS X Public Beta was not without its issues. My first iPod's battery life didn't seem to last all that long. My iPod Photo occasionally craps out and seemingly is trying to die.

That's all true. But while someone with an agenda could say this is all great evidence that I should ditch the platform, or that Macs aren't as good as I say they are, it's rubbish.

In June, I wrote on The Apple Blog a note stating "Five Lesser-Known Tips on Being an Apple Fanboy". The first tip? "Never Admit Fault With Apple Around Non-Mac People".

The reason? People love to pile on and are looking for any excuse they can to show that their decision was right and yours was wrong.

With Apple's increasing market share, new converts to the platform, like Robert Scoble, are finding what we all know. Macs are great, but not perfect. And sometimes, they're not happy about it, and they're all too ready to call Apple out for issues they've found. Robert, in a missive posted today, says when Macs fail, that Mac users tend to blame themselves instead of the platform. (Dave Winer backs him up)

I don't agree. What I believe is that when Mac issues arise, their irregularity makes it more acceptable than the day to day challenges of Windows. Also, in most cases, I can figure out the issue myself, instead of being forced to live with it. For the above hardware issues, I obviously couldn't, and I made Apple fix their problems.

So while Robert likely believes he's helping Apple and their users to "expose" the problems he's had with his Mac, it doesn't do all that much. Instead, what it does is give potential switchers a good reason to not do so if they were on the verge of finally leaving Windows behind. I'm not saying be absolutely quiet about issues. I know I haven't. But recognize all the positive things that are gained from moving to the Mac platform and all the innovation coming from Apple, and imagine how dismal the computer industry would be without it. It's stark and cold.

Maybe Robert didn't get his Apple fanboy membership card yet, or maybe he didn't apply, but I do believe he's sending the wrong message. That Apple won't publicly respond to him doesn't help either, but they've yet to figure out a great relationship with the blogs. Maybe some day that will change.

Fun With Technorati Chart Matchups

A week ago, Technorati turned over a new leaf, with the return of charts throughout the company's blog search service. Very quietly, the company also has enabled Web surfers to compare trends between keyword pairs, by using the VS command.

This "officially unsupported" command (per ex-CEO David Sifry), allows for comparisons of what's hot and what's not, over a specific time period, to a stretch as long as six months.

(The code: http://www.technorati.com/search/TERM1+vs+TERM2?authority=n&language=en)

Running a few comparisons myself, we saw more people are blogging about Slashdot than I had anticipated, especially relative to Digg, that the iPhone shot like a meteor to eclipse the iPod, and that a battle for higher profile between Robert Scoble and TechCrunch or Jason Calacanis and ValleyWag just might never be resolved. It's that close.

For all charts: Note the peaks and dips for weekends, as well as the scope of the chart. The most popular keywords register in the thousands, while less frequently discussed items just crack triple digits.

First Up: iPod vs. iPhone



In the Search World: Yahoo! vs. Google



Building a Community: Digg vs. Slashdot (Big surprise here!)



Social Networking: Facebook vs. MySpace
(MySpace plunging, with Facebook eking up...)



Long-Time Tech Titans: Apple vs. Microsoft



New Age Blog Titans: TechCrunch vs. Scoble



Let's Be Friends Edition: Calacanis vs. Valleywag



Mix and match the terms and see what you come up with. Others I tried included "baseball vs football", and Plaxo vs LinkedIn. What can you come up with, and do these charts accurately track the blogosphere's momentum as you see it?

Will RSS Readers Ever Report Detailed Referrals?

It wasn't all that long ago that much of the blogosphere was abuzz around the power, or supposed lack thereof, from A-list sites and TechMeme. How come they were only counting a few hundred visitors? It could be, in my opinion, due to the growing use of RSS readers, like Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines, which mask the URL of the referring feed if a visitor clicks through.

Instead of telling site owners what feed, and what post, a visitor originated from, RSS feed readers trumpet their own URL as the source for the link. As a result, instead of giving TechMeme, Scoble or TechCrunch the credit, it's Google Reader who snakes the statistic. And God forbid a small site link your way that only has a few RSS feed readers, but one who liked your content. In that case, you'd see a visitor from the feed reader to a specific subpage, but not know who was linking.

Yesterday evening, after my flight from Dallas, I clicked through on my Blackberry to obsessively check my blog stats, and I saw an uncommon spike in traffic, sent my way from a post on Scobleizer linking to my Feedheads article. While I know that more than 500 unique visitors came my way in the last 24 hours from his note, scobleizer.com only is given credit for 40 to 50% of that amount in my site statistics, as you can see in the side graphic, which shows the share of referrals among my last 4,000 visitors. Instead, Google Reader, BlogLines, Twitter and other RSS feed engines snaked the rest.

Ideally, an RSS feed reader would pass to the site owner enough information as to ascertain which feed was being viewed, and even better, which post fed the link. It could be that this data today doesn't rest with the feed reader, but instead with today's browsers, and the URL passed to Web server logs is dictated, not by the feed reader, but instead by Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari, but I'm sure somebody smart (like Dave Winer) could figure this out and help us get more detail.

Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads

One of the more useful Facebook applications out there, enabling you to integrate your Google Reader shared items with your Facebook profile, and view most frequently shared items, has recently, quietly, undergone a rebranding, to "Feedheads".

While the application's author, Mario Romero, hasn't said anything about the change, it's possible that he made the change to avoid confusing people into thinking the application was produced, or endorsed, by Google. Another possible reason for the change? It now appears that Mario has added the option to include shared items from NewsGator, in addition to Google Reader.

Previously labeled as a "Google Reader" application, the application changed names sometime in the afternoon on Sunday, October 14th, to "Feedheads". You can see the change transparently occur on the right in a screenshot from my Facebook mini-feed.

The application, one of the few useful applications on Facebook, as has been well documented, says it has 348 daily users (myself included). Should Robert Scoble's hopes ever come true, and enough people use the program, its aggregate power could be very strong, in effect becoming a democratized Digg of sorts, where you could opt in to view your own friends' shared items, rather than that of the mob.


A Tag Cloud of My Shared Items in Feedheads

If you're on Facebook, and you're an avid Google Reader Shared Links user, sign up for Feedheads. To see my shared links in Google Reader without getting into Facebok, click here. To view my Facebook profile instead, click here.

In Absence of Google Innovation, A-List Ranks Feeds

It's been more than seven months since I first asked Google to tabulate the most popular feeds, and the most popular shared items on link blogs within their Google Reader service. While Google has made improvements to Reader in that time frame, including the long-awaited addition of search, and integration of Trends data, the statistics many hold dear are still missing.

In that vacuum, A-List bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Robert Scoble and Gabe Rivera have teamed up to use their own resources, and make a faux Top 100 of their own.

Arrington posts a note today of the Top 30 list he and Gabe came up with (Top Blogs On Google Reader). The list shouldn't surprise you - Engadget and TechCrunch lead, with Wired, Slashdot, and other household names following behind. Meanwhile, Scoble does his own number crunching, and also puts TechCrunch and Engadget among the leaders.

Though he asks, "How many Google Reader Subscribers Do You Have?", I don't exactly want to answer, for I am but a small speck in the blogosphere, in the double digits, when some of the mega-blogs are over 100,000.

But truthfully, while the A-List titans likely enjoyed putting the numbers together, it's a mockery that they're left doing this independently when Google obviously has enough resources to deliver the data. It comes down to either not knowing how (unlikely), not wanting to (maybe), or choosing to do something else. So what is it they're doing?

Google Reader Chokes On Scoble Shared Items

Robert Scoble has been one of the most vocal advocates of both Google Reader, and the "Shared Items" feature within Google Reader, and I wholeheartedly share his enthusiasm. I'm currently subscribed to 216 RSS feeds. According to Google Reader trends, over the last 30 days I read 16,515 items and shared 280 items to my link blog.

But it seems, like Facebook's 5,000 friend limit, Google Reader can't handle the sheer mass of shared items Robert shares. I added Robert's shared items to my Google Reader some time ago, and while I've found his selections strong, it's not uncommon for Google Reader to tell me I have new items from that feed, but have them unable for me to see.

For example, in the below screenshot, all my items, with the exception of 8 shared items from Robert, are read.



Yet, clicking on his feed, I am told that, in fact, there are no new items in his feed.



Even going directly to his shared link blog URL doesn't display the new items, but instead marks a point frozen in time, likely the last time Google resynched his feed.

I've never seen the Google Reader team mention a limit as to the total number of feed items in a shared link blog, or any feed. But while I'm subscribed to other link blogs, I've only experienced this behavior with that of Scoble. Could he be running up against an unwritten rule?

Tech Blog Link Power: Spiky Visitors or Sticky Visitors?

Download the Full-Size Image

While many tech bloggers live for the instant, drug-like satisfaction of hitting the Digg front page, or getting picked up by StumbleUpon or Slashdot, that rush of one-time visitors doesn't last long, and they won't come back again. A Digg visitor is usually one that won't comment, won't bookmark, and won't remember your URL.

Repeat visitors to tech blogs usually aren't forged by traffic spikes from well-known news hubs. Nor are they from search engines. It's a rare blog or Web site that can drive both high levels of both one-time visitors and repeat visitors. In fact, in my experience over the last two years of technology blogging, the very best sources for repeat, engaged visitors are:

1. Robert Scoble / Scobleizer
2. TechMeme
3. My own comments on similarly-focused blogs
4. Links from other B-List Bloggers
5. Shared Link Blogs (such as those from Scoble, Webomatica and others)

In fact, while I don't want to give Robert all the credit here, I have seen his hand in some of my highest-traffic posts. Often, his addition of my posts to his shared link blog or his own blog later leads to other bloggers linking, which pushes my post to TechMeme, in turn, leading to more follow-on posts and residual traffic.

But I can't just sit around and "write for Scoble", hoping he'll throw pixie dust my way. In order to engage with the crowd and encourage return visits, I need to link to others, make comments on other similar blogs, and make tools for engagement, like my RSS feed and MyBlogLog, easily accessible.

Thus, I've broken the Link Power Index into four sections:

1. High spikiness, low stickiness (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Megite, Slashdot)
2. Low spikiness, low stickiness (Google, Facebook, Technorati, Yahoo!)
3. Low spikiness, high stickiness (RSS, word of mouth, comments, LinkedIn, B-List linking)
4. High spikiness, high stickiness (Scobleizer, TechMeme, Shared Link Blogs, MacSurfer)

Last month, "BeachBum" asked, in regards to some of my less-desirable visitors from Google Images, "Do you find that the porn traffic converts or do they just come and go?". The answer is no. None of them convert. Unless I start writing about porn full-time, they're not coming back, and that's okay. While a one-time visitor may have found a keyword sequence on Google that had your blog listed #1 overall, it's unlikely they're your demographic.

In fact, surprisingly, links from B-List and A-List bloggers have been more useful to me than links from more mainstream media. While I was flattered to see coverage of one of September's posts on MSNBC.com and the Houston Chronicle, they didn't drive the traffic of a strong link aggregator, and their visitors, as far as I could tell, were one-offs.

If you want a one-time spike of traffic, go ahead and write to make the front page of Digg (Yuvi Panda's Round 2 analysis of Digg's front page shows how...) or get a group of friends to Stumble your content. But to cultivate readers and engage with the blogging community, you should comment often, share ideas with your peers, and hope somebody with real pull, like Scoble, or MacSurfer, notices your effort.

The above image is how I've interpreted sticky traffic vs. spiky traffic to louisgray.com in the last year-plus. Do you have any comments or insight? Am I off the mark, or have you seen similar behavior? Please let me know, and feel free to use the image yourself. Links back are always appreciated.

Also on this topic: Chris Brogan: Scoble Effect Better Than Digg and Search Engine Land: December 2006 Statistics Review