Five Creatively Obnoxious Things to Do With Social Media

We're all too familiar with trolls or people who spout nonsense to get a rise out of you. The art of trolling is one much-perfected by few, and typically, despised by all. But there are less "in your face" ways to have someone scratching their head, trying to figure you out. Some are undoubtedly amusing, and I've been tempted to do them myself, if I didn't unfortunately have an inner moral conscious crying out for me to stop. This list is by no means inclusive, but none would be all that difficult to pull off, if you're in an incendiary mood.

1. Respond to very old e-mail as if there were no issues.

We've heard many people espouse the idea of "in box zero", but for most of us, it's not realistic. I've got e-mails I never answered in my in box going back a good part of two years. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to start at the top, and respond to the old e-mail, without apologizing for my lateness, and continue the conversation from where it left off. Imagine the hilarity!

2. Pick somebody random on Twitter who is fairly active. Follow them, and then block them immediately.

Most Twitter users will give a new "follow" at least a cursory glance, and many will reciprocally follow. They'll likely be scratching their heads when it turns out you've blocked them and it's impossible for them to follow you back.

3. Use Twitter or FriendFeed to shout out someone's name with no context.

I've seen this happen a few times, when people accidentally post a name instead of searching for it. (For example: here) If you saw somebody post your name to Twitter without any reason or follow-up, wouldn't it drive you a little nuts trying to figure out what they were thinking?

4. Put somebody on a custom FriendFeed list that contains profanity or an odd name.

Earlier this month, resident crank and good friend Steven Hodson of WinExtra noticed somebody had added his data to a custom feed called "curmudgeons". As you can set up any names you wish, and there are no known filters, you can let your imagination run wild with just what you can name the lists. Then put people you know obsess over their stats and click through like mad.

So far, I haven't thusly been abused. Some of the referrals I've seen have me in "gurus", "noisy", "personal", "thetechnologylife", "professional", "sm-bloggers", and "pay-attention". So far, so good, but there's no doubt this could change. I'm just trying to stay off Mark Hopkins' "irksome" list, myself. (See also: Hutch Carpenter: How to Mess with Bloggers’ Heads Using FriendFeed Lists)

5. Set up a custom e-mail account for Disqus with an auto-responder.

If you have a Disqus account, leave a comment on a blog, and get a reply, you should receive an e-mail notification saying the conversation has continued. If you create a new e-mail account just for this, say from OtherInBox, you could set up your e-mail to reply to all new messages, saying you're out of the office, or something akin to "I receive a lot of e-mail and will answer yours in the order it was received".

This response will itself be placed in the comment thread of said blog, and be the owner's responsibility to delete, or could even lead to them responding to your out of office and have it continue. Heck, if you make the auto-responder creative enough, they may think you actually typed it yourself!

These are of course just scratching the surface. What other annoyances have you seen, or done yourself, that can be pulled off without being too destructive in nature? Have you done any of the above, and will you start now?

Disqus' API Launch Extends Commenting Possibilities

At Blog World Expo last week, I said that those services which "played well with others" would do better in a collaborative, cooperative Web 2.0 landscape over those that instead held tight to their walled gardens (See tweet from @drewolanoff.) It is through the launch of an API and extensive developer activity that services like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter have grown, often at the expense of those that didn't. Tonight, the popular Web commenting service Disqus joined the fray, launching a full public API.

The API (outlined here) lets services and tools write custom comment import and export tools, or to develop unique plug-ins for their platform. (see the announcement and coverage by The Inquisitr.)

Disqus comments are already among the most portable, enabling syndication through RSS, and into lifestreaming applications of all sorts. But what I found most interesting was the note on custom plugins for customer platforms. What's to stop developers from making a custom Disqus-enabled engine that is secure, and for the enterprise, essentially the comments equivalent of Yammer (versus Twitter)? What I see happening is that many of the social tools we may be using for community and entertainment in our world are now on the verge of making it to the enterprise. With an open development platform, and possibly, the idea to customize the comments engine for services that have enterprise capabilities, this could be one way to break on through to the other side, so to speak.

This week's big commenting news was Automattic buying up Intense Debate, something many thought would make Disqus' world a whole lot harder. Tonight's announcement shows they aren't sitting still and playing the part of victim. I'm eager to see the new services and tools that get developed as a result of being Disqus-powered.

Seesmic to Release New Nokia Client, Sees New Video Every Minute

Yesterday evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur introduced the video conversation site as seeing significant growth and part of the real-time Web, utilizing video, for the first time, in an active way, rather than a passive way, as YouTube does. The result is a site that he says is used in more than 40 countries and sees a new video posted every minute, a number which has now reached more than half a million since May, from 30,000 different users. Also, he dropped hints to a new Seesmic client built for Nokia handsets that would enable full video conversations, including replies, to debut today.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Le Meur said Seesmic came to life due to a gap between today's text-based social software, including blogs and Facebook, and the more active nature of video. He said that while YouTube offers the ability to post comments and replies to videos, they don't happen all that often, and that through integration with tools like Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed, Seesmic can power the video conversation.

As he told attendees, half of the service's traffic happens on the Seesmic Web site, and another half occurs through desktop clients, like Thwirl, which he acquired earlier this year. Seesmic is now also installed on 7,000 blogs, including this one, and TechCrunch, enabling visitors to leave video comments on stories, and embed the entire video thread.

Le Meur, who raised $12 million for Seesmic, said the actual costs of the site are relatively small, in the tens of thousands per month. Costs are largely kept low due to users' videos, on average being less than a minute, he said. But plans for revenue include a mix of advertising and pro accounts, which would have greater capability and customization. He also spoke highly of co-branded operations, citing a 20th Century Fox promotion that received 1,600 view replies, and said a new feature, called groups, would debut in coming weeks.

"We were very lucky that we raised $12 million, and we are very cautious," Le Meur said. "We can hold for years."

The goal of growing Seesmic isn't to flip the company and make a quick buck, Le Meur said yesterday, joking about his record of selling four different companies after saying that was a "bad goal to have". Instead, he wants to help power anytime communication by video from anywhere, getting as close to real life as possible, while continuing to learn from the user community as to what features should come next.

"I would like to pursue my vision of a worldwide talk show, where people talk together, no matter where they are, all on video," Le Meur said. "We are building something real different. We wouldn't have done video comments at the beginning, and now we are learning by the community. We have a very active community and get thousands of feature requests."

Le Meur, who has one of the most active, most-followed Twitter accounts in the world, said he saw the real-time nature of the service as incredibly compelling, and that the "instant Web" was changing everything. His goal would be to leverage the power of sites like Twitter and FriendFeed to reach more users and groups of users who find communities online, even if the video quality, so far, isn't the best ever - something that has surprisingly been a boom for online dating sites.

"The good news is that you actually look worse (on Seesmic) than you really are," he said, adding that Seesmic would be branching out to make even more people look worse than they really are, through the release of an updated Nokia client today, which will let Nokia users have a full conversation, including video replies, using only their handsets.

BackType Goes Forward With Comment Tracker and Search

A little over two weeks ago, I reported on Disqus' platform updates, which brought new features, including the ability to show a "comment blog" that displays all your comments on the platform from around the Web. Today, a new service called BackType has opened up to go beyond Disqus, finding my comments (and yours) from many different commenting platforms and assigning them to a single stream. The service also lets you follow other BackType users, and search across the BackType community to find popular topics of discussion, no matter which blog, or which commenting engine, they take place on.


BackType Shows Comments from Those You Follow Around the Web
At times, reader comments can be just as thought provoking, if not more so, than the original author's blog post. Disqus made some noise this week with the introduction of the ability to "reblog" comments as individual posts, and last month, Fred Wilson of A VC openly wondered if there would come a time when comments were treated equally with posts on popular news aggregators, like Techmeme.


You Can Search BackType for Comments that Contain Keywords
With comments carrying so much weight, it's no wonder some bloggers are up in arms when they've seen their comments move to RSS feed readers or social media sites. But to date, no single service has given comments equal weight, until the arrival of BackType.


You Can Select People to Follow on BackType
When you register for BackType, you can add your blog, or your page on popular comment engines, like Disqus. You can also click on the "People" tab to see the most followed users of BackType, see their commenting frequency, and click through to see their activity. A few BackType users of note, at launch, include Andrew Weissman, Chris Brogan and the aforementioned Fred Wilson. On each person's page, you not only see their most recent comments, but you can also click on the blog icons on the right side of the page to see their comments on specific sites.

Like on Twitter, FriendFeed or other social sites, you can both follow BackType users, or be followed, and you can see the statistics on each user page. Given the site's new status, the most popular people barely break a dozen followers, but I can see how following someone's comment stream could be a lot more rich than their 140-character updates on Twitter.

If you like the idea of a comment blog, you'll really like BackType. If you like seeing what your friends and peers are doing around the Web, in full sentences and paragraphs, not just microupdates, then BackType makes sense as well. You can follow me at http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

Disqus Takes Commenting to the Next Level

Over the last few months, no blogging comments engine has received as much attention, or gained as much perceived blogger momentum as has Disqus. While alternatives exist, Disqus' clean interface, tracking capabilities and the team's aggressive approach to customer support have begun to make them the alternative to standard blogging comment engines from Blogger, Wordpress and TypePad. As I previously documented, moving to Disqus has greatly improved the interactivity between me and my readers over the last few months, and I remain extremely optimistic about the company's ability to gain market share.

As many other sites have now reported, Disqus rolled out version 2 of their software today, addressing some concerns held by holdouts who believed implementing the engine would hurt their SEO rankings, while also delivering strong platform integration with Wordpress, a new developer API, and a significant reorganization of Disqus.com to deliver immediate access to an individual's comments to track and manage.

On Sunday, prior to today's announcement, I spoke with the company's CEO, Daniel Ha, who said much of today's rollout was targeting those people concerned with their comment data being externally hosted on "the cloud". The service's new API enables full synchronization between Disqus and your local comments database (for Wordpress and Moveable Type only today), which has a side benefit of working well with search engines, such as Google.

Most interesting to me in today's announcement are the changes at Disqus.com. As I've discussed before, comments are often made, and as Disqus comments can flow to e-mail, to FriendFeed, or other lifestreaming services, context becomes crucial. Now, each registered Disqus user has a personal "comment blog", which can show previous comments, as well as replies, to provide context. For example, you can see mine here: http://disqus.com/people/louismg/

Disqus is now installed at more than 30,000 Web sites. When I asked Ha about the service's penetration in markets outside the typically insular tech blogging community, he said, "We have a very great presence in the tech blogger segment, but the most prolific discussions come on political and finance blogs. There is a lot of heavy usage back and forth."

Disqus, which held a party this most recent Saturday at their new office, employs three people full time, with an intern, who will be leaving the company at the end of the summer, much to Daniel's dismay.

The blog comments space is not one where Disqus has a monopoly yet, by any means. SezWho and Intense Debate have a good following, as does WordPress, of course, but today's developments raise the bar yet again for competition as Disqus becomes more entrenched as the standard.

Me-Too Software and Web Apps Often Find Their Own Niche

As the price to develop Web applications and communities has decreased, and investment in people is less-demanding, it's no surprise that we've seen a boom in sites with significant similarities - be they social networking, lifestreaming, status updaters, online file storage or virtual worlds. While the rule holds true in software as it does in Silicon Valley, that the vast majority of products may meet a less than optimal fate, the potential payout continues to draw development, with new brand names hitting our RSS feeds on a daily basis.

The seeming onslaught of new services had the omnipresent Chris Brogan asking frustratedly yesterday, "Who's writing all these me too software apps? Do they feel accomplished?" Brogan later gave the services Kwippy and Yokway as examples of two services that had recently come across his view, adding, "(I) just dont' see why we need yet another of something we have in spades. Where's the innovation?"

Sometimes, in this age of instant analysis, determining the differentiation and purpose of a new site can be hard, especially as the bloggers and technology reporters try and grasp the new site and place it in the context of existing applications that are more well-known. (See: Inquisitr: Yokway: Sort of FriendFeed Meets Del.icio.us for one example)

Whether it's in the name of differentiation or competition, it's rare that a developer or startup team will be aiming to make a carbon copy of an existing site. RSSmeme debuted, after ReadBurner, to show the most shared items in Google Reader, and progressed differently, offering a custom FeedFlare and featuring deeper index with more linkblogs than ReadBurner, while ReadBurner partnered with multiple RSS engines, including NewsGator and Netvibes. Facebook was like MySpace and Friendster before it, but initially just for the college set and later high school, before opening up, and later adding a development platform.

There is a long history of services and software that have striking similarities to one another. That a product exists doesn't mean that any potential competing product should walk away and cede the market, delivering a monopoly. As Disqus' CEO Daniel Ha told me back in June, the existence of competitors like SezWho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit help let him know he's in a worthwhile market to pursue, even if it's a rare blogger who has plans to implement multiple commenting engines. The existence of Digg didn't stop Mixx from debuting, and the existence of HotBot, Lycos and Excite didn't look like too much of a hurdle for Google to get going.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek, in the FriendFeed comment thread spawned by Brogan's question, said, "Until someone dominates the space you will see a lot of similar applications," while Clint Ecker wrote, "The market will bear out the niche products and the unsatisfactory ones will fade away and disappear until the community has selected the 'best' service."

But even the selection of a "best service" doesn't mean there won't be more developers trying to crack the market. Plurk and Identi.ca are two recent approaches to microblogging, taking on Twitter. And Cuil's entry into the search market came at a time when Google's enjoyed its largest market share ever. The likelihood of these challenger sites to replace the market behemoths is very small, both short term and longer term, but just about every site and service can develop a dedicated community who swears by it - arguably making the developers' efforts worthwhile. You recently saw this happen when the niche community sites of Ballhype and Showhype, arguably Digg clones, were acquired for $3 million.

From the outside looking in, developers don't see themselves as copycats. Instead, they likely see opportunity, finding weaknesses in a competitor's offering, or finding a new way to seemingly offer the best of both worlds. And just because they aren't enjoying a majority market share in a given metric by a certain time period doesn't mean their efforts were in vain. There's no hard and fast law saying you need to sign up for every lifestreaming service, every social network, every microblogging client and every RSS reader, but as more options and alternatives are out there, there will be a small group of people who prefers the new entrant, whether it be for its GUI, its compatibility with plug-ins, widgets or extensions, or implied productivity.

As an early adopter, I'll usually be checking out most of these services, and I welcome more. It's not about finding how much they're all the same, but determining the differences, and seeing what I can do that's new. I might, sometimes, never use a service again, if I don't find it to do what I had hoped. But often, when I check back in a few months later, I'll find a small community that's calling it home, or see the development didn't stop at day one, making it a richer experience. So, development community, keep it coming. Let's see those new apps, the new innovation, and the new services. It will never be enough.

To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question

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

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

Writing Once, Publishing Many Times, Makes Context Critical

Whether Web services leverage RSS, send e-mail confirmations or are indexed by keywords in specialized search engines, it's not too uncommon for any activity you make online to set off a series of actions. When taken out of context, something you said in one place won't make as much sense somewhere else. A sentence fragment or a response might be completely confusing to one audience or at a certain time. With this in mind, best practices would suggest writing in full sentences where possible, and offering context.

Two Examples:

Sending replies in Twitter

Often, I will be following "Person A" and they will be following "Person B", but I won't be. If Person A sends a note to Person B, Twitter may often catch that as a reply, and clicking through the "in reply to" link will give you Twitter's best guess as to what Person A was responding to. But this doesn't always work.

Here's how it often happens:

Tweet 1: Person B: "@persona, are you up for seeing Wall-E at the Metreon?"
Tweet 2: Person B: "AFK for 15 minutes, got to get dog food."
Tweet 3: Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go. See you at six."

To the Twitter user following Person A, clicking the "in reply to" would make it sound like the pair were off to consume some Kibbles 'N' Bits, as Twitter usually grabs the latest tweet from the person to whom the tweet was sent as the message.

What would have been better is if that 3rd Tweet had read:

Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go see Wall-E. The movie sounds great. I'll see you at six."

Now, if I'm following only half the conversation, I get the idea, even without having to click through, and I won't think you are a huge Alpo fan.

Also, Tweets are read in more places than just Twitter these days. If I had set up a Summize search for "Wall-E", I would have seen Person B's initial tweet, but not the second one, from Person A, unless they put Wall-E in the response. And if I were following Person A on FriendFeed, the tweet with details would make a lot more sense, when jumbled in the rest of their activity.

The idea of writing in full sentences or giving context is to understand the audience for your messages is larger than you realize, and you should write for the followers on the periphery.

Making comments using Disqus

When I make a comment in Disqus, at least five things can happen:

• A comment is added to the originating blog.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the blog owner saying a new comment has published.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the person I am replying to if I am in a thread.
  
• A copy of that Disqus comment is added to my personal Disqus page.
  
• The full copy of that comment goes to aggregators like FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing.

Because the Disqus comments can go in so many places, it is especially important to try and highlight the name of the person I am responding to, give context to the reply and to write in full sentences. This way, the comment, wherever it may be seen, can make sense. When I make a comment in Disqus, I am thinking about the fact it's not just publishing to the blog author and commenter, but to those people who have not yet been part of the conversation. This you can see from my Disqus stream on FriendFeed or my profile on Disqus.

For a good idea of how the world uses Disqus, check FriendFeed's public stream of Disqus comments:

Here's one that has no context:

Svartling:"No sorry. But you can look here: Link"

Here's one that works well:

Svetlana Gladkova: "Very true Shey, I have seen it pretty often that a post from Profy receives, say, 30 likes on FriendFeed and a dozen of comments, and our server stats only shows a dozen of people actually visiting the post to read it and leave a comment on FF (if that is the place they prefer to leave comments). It is annoying when I realize that people only use FF to create some presence for themselves by liking and commenting titles instead of actually consuming the content they pretend to like - I think it is even worse than fragmentation of comments that FF initiates."

As aggregators play an increasing role in how we gather information on the Web, it's now possible for our comments on Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Reader shared items, as well as those from other services, to become part of our lifestream. In addition to Twitter and Disqus, two of the major examples, we should know that every time we say "LOL! I totally agree!" when we could have said, "Wow, thanks for sending me to this YouTube video of Conan O'Brien's Friday monologue. You're right, John McCain is old!", you're losing the opportunity for readers who find you in a different place to be part of the conversation.

Much of the time, one-sided conversations without context are called noise. You can actually reduce noise through carefully crafting the signal around the noise. It takes a little bit extra work, but it's well worth it.

I Woke Up to My First Disqus Comment Spam Attack

In the two and a half years I've written on this blog, comment spam has been an occasional problem, but nothing alarming. When I was using Blogger comments with Haloscan, I could moderate and delete when needed. When I used Blogger's native comments, I had the occasional piece of spam, but it was unusual. Now that I'm using Disqus, it's still very rare. But this morning, when I checked my e-mail, and found 94 new messages, I knew something was wrong. I'm simply not that popular.

Sure enough, somebody had broken through.

In less than an hour's time, the poster had added more than 30 comments to Disqus, all on different blog posts, all very old -- a clear example of a blog comment spammer on autopilot.


My In Box this Morning (Click to Enlarge)
And like any good spam these days, its message made very little sense, with a note to "make money" and dozens of lines in Farsi (or Arabic, I'm not an expert).

The good news is that Disqus gives me a way to delete the garbage. Usually, the service will alert me that a comment is flagged as spam, giving me the option to e-mail my desire to "delete" or "approve" the note, but this gibberish made it through the filter entirely. So I had to go to my Disqus dashboard, and delete each entry one by one. There was no way to delete the whole group or delete all by a specific author, as far as I am aware.


I know Wordpress bloggers swear by Aksimet and other solutions. Some even eagerly trumpet the thousands of spam messages blocked. So far, I've never had the need. Are you seeing spam commenting pick up, and if you're using Disqus, how do you handle it?

Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next

Tonight, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Daniel Ha, the CEO and co-founder of Disqus. One of the advantages of being in the Silicon Valley is that in many cases, I can actually engage with and meet the people who are moving the industry forward, and while I don't consider myself a big-league hob-nobber, the occasional social visit can be rewarding. I won't jeopardize future meetings by giving away the company store, but I definitely came away from the evening feeling even more committed to Disqus and the company's strategy than I was before.

As you already know, I first added Disqus to my blog with Daniel's help, after finding I was unable to integrate the service into my Blogger template. He went above and beyond the call of duty to get me up and running, doing such an excellent job that the effort was noted by Mashable.

This customers-first attitude shown on the Web was evident off-line as well. Daniel more than once apologized for the brief downtime Disqus suffered last Friday, saying that he had awakened to a swarm of e-mails from frustrated users, not to mention my post, and said that we were right to call them on it, as Disqus comments are now such an integral part of our blogs. He assured me the team knew the issues behind it and was working diligently to make sure another similar outage would never occur. Disqus' popular sidebar widget was to blame, putting a great deal of strain on the service, which has since been lessened.

Also, during the meal, Daniel asked me a question that he says he loves asking users, "How can we make Disqus work even better for you?"

Had I been properly prepared, I could have brought an index card along with responses at the ready. Duncan Riley, for instance, wants trackbacks and FriendFeed integration. I asked for better statistics and analytics, and had questions on how older posts were displayed on my Disqus dashboard. But the truth is that I'm already quite happy with Disqus, and have grown to expect to see it on other blogs, making myself less likely to comment on other sites that don't offer the centralized comments feature.

On a personal note, I was struck by how young Daniel was. At the old age of 31, I'm now reaching the point where just about every Major League Baseball player I like is younger than me. But the CEO of a company I think could have a big impact on the future of the Web being 22, and a UC Davis computer science graduate just this year? That's not fair, and I'm not used to it. Coincidentally, my youngest sister also graduated from Davis on Saturday, sharing Daniel's class year.

Daniel started Disqus in 2007 with friend Jason Yan while in Davis, and this month, doubled the team, adding two new coders, Andrew Badr and Devin Naquin. (See: The New Guy and Hello, world!)

Andrew's already busy letting people know about upcoming features, promising the addition of trackbacks "sometime in the next week.", on the Oracle AppsLab blog. He also answers many people's fears as to the portability of the data, saying, "Better options for import and export are in the works, and will be part of our next major release."

As I wrote at the end of May, Daniel has helped lead Disqus to the forefront of blog comment services in a short time, partly due to his aggressively pursuing relationships with partners. While some companies have targeted Disqus with competitive pot-shots, Daniel said that having others in the field helps to reassure him that it's a good market to pursue. If nobody else was interested in the space, he would undoubtedly be wondering just why.

Disqus is well-known to be funded by Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures and Paul Graham with Y Combinator, among others, and while some VCs may try to demand immediate revenues or even profits from even the smallest of ventures, Disqus is not yet under such pressure. They've definitely had talks about how to monetize and start bringing in money, but if you thought they were about to start with advertising, you'd be wrong. Disqus will not always be a zero-revenue company, but Daniel says advertising's not in the plans.

For a service that's already got what I believe to the best solution with threaded conversations, a strong GUI and centralized activity, Disqus is continuing to work hard to maintain their lead. Andrew's comments point to near-term release of importing, exporting and trackbacks, and Daniel seems to have an extremely level perspective on what could be a challenging environment for anyone, let alone a 22 year-old entrepreneur. I believe we need a lot more people like Daniel focused on delivering a great customer experience with real benefits, who are less focused on the day to day fights between competitors than they are on getting the service perfected.

Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud

I am a happy Disqus customer. Implementing Disqus comments on this blog, enabling people to track their conversations around the Web, show personal custom avatars and thread conversations, has been among the better things I've done with the blog. Since installing Disqus, total comments have increased, I can get a better sense of my most frequent participants and they can connect one to one. My Disqus comments, and those of others, can even be shared on FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services.

My enthusiasm has not been unanimous across the blogosphere. Some have been concerned that Disqus' hosting the comments on their own site reduces the control a blogger has on this critical element of their site. Others say that Disqus effectively "steals" the SEO value of those comments, robbing you of the Google juice that's yours.

And to date, I've defended Disqus in every way. I'm not an SEO nut, so I can shrug my shoulders at these so-called issues. Until today.

Starting last night, I was surprised to find my e-mail empty of Disqus comments flowing to my in box. Checking the blog, I found many heartfelt comments on the passing of our dog yesterday. But Disqus wasn't sending me the updates. I logged in to the service, and ensured my preferences were set to notify me, and they were.

This morning, the situation is much worse. No comments are showing. The Disqus widget on the right side of the blog is missing. And every Disqus comment that every person posted on any Disqus-powered site is gone. This highlights the concern many have had on trusting the cloud and putting your data in the hands of others. It's always good to make a copy, especially if you don't know their infrastructure, or the company doesn't have a decades-long track record.

I trusted Disqus to host my comments, to run the show, to power my blog and to take on the challenging task of being my connection to my audience. Now, they're down hard. Their blog hasn't been updated to say what's going on, and the last update we got from Disqus' Daniel Ha is that he was playing poker 10 hours ago, via Twitter. I just hope he didn't bet the future of Disqus on a pair of 3's.

In this time where users are turning their data over to the cloud and trusting the underlying Web services, downtime can be a killer. The second half of responding to downtime? Transparency. And right now, Disqus is failing at both.

See also: FriendFeed discussion on Disqus downtime.

Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?

The issue of comment fragmentation has been rearing up every other week or so since the initial discussion flared up in early April, but of late, I've been thinking about the purpose of comments in the first place. When you make a comment on a blog, is it to respond to the blog author and say they did a good job, especially if comments are currency, effectively making a longer version of a "thumbs up or thumbs down," are you looking to further the conversation with the blogger, or are you instead using it as a reply, without anticipating a response from the author?

This morning, I posted a question, using Google Talk, to FriendFeed, saying:

“Are blog comments a "conversation" with the author, or just answering and responding to the author? Do you expect the author to respond to your comment?"

For me personally, on those posts I do where there is a lot of conversation, I'm pulled in two opposing directions - the first, to reply to comments and engage with readers, and the second, to instead not reply and avoid dominating the comment thread. With Disqus tracking my every comment on the blog, I can make myself look like a fairly noisy egoist in no time. So, it is tempting to see the comments on posts as only replies, and fight the urge to respond. Typically, I end up replying to those comments that ask new questions, or spur the conversation forward, but of course, I read every single one.

When I post to other blogs, I don't usually expect a reply from the author. The bigger the blog, the less likely the response, and for small blogs, responses are almost a guarantee.

In response to my note on FriendFeed, the answers were strongly weighted toward conversations, rather than replies.

Brian Sullivan said, "The most successful bloggers it seems to me are conversational."

J.C. Hutchins said, "I always assume that author will read my comment, but rarely respond. Always feels validating when they do, though."

Susan Beebe said, "Blog Comments = Conversations with the world; AND yes, most importantly the author. I do not expect the author to respond to me; however, I am always really glad when they do!"

Of course, if every comment on every blog gained a reply from the original author, the most popular bloggers would spend just as much time responding to comments as they would creating new content. And if you take it one step further, if those replies also generated replies, in theory, the conversation would never end.

As Steven Hodson of WinExtra wrote in Comment Fragmentation isn’t the Blogger’s Fault earlier today, "In the end though we have absolutely no control over where the conversation; if there even is one, will take place." That works both in terms of the blog author not fully controlling where comments take place, and also from the commenter, who cannot force a conversation through leaving a reply. Now that comments are being bandied about like currency, both at the blog and through a myriad of RSS readers and social aggregators, maybe it's time to think about the whole structure of blogging and commenting in the first place.

Saturday Night News Briefs: May 31, 2008

More and more often, I'm running into items I want to share, but might not be detailed enough to generate a full post. So here are a few things that caught my eye over the last few days. If it makes sense, maybe I'll make this a recurring feature.

FF To Go Adds Rooms Support

About 10 days ago, Benjamin Golub offered the first bona fide mobile FriendFeed solution, delivering FF To Go. The next day, the FriendFeed team threw him for a loop with the addition of rooms, letting users break out into smaller groups to talk about specific items. Golub wasn't all that far behind, and has now enabled support for the new rooms, which you can see both when using the mobile interface and via the Web browser.

Some good ones to try:

Elite Tech News: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/l33t
LouisGrayish: http://www.fftogo.com/room/louisgrayish/
* Not my creation... but we'll use it. Why not?
Social Media: http://www.fftogo.com/room/social-media/

Daniel Ha of Disqus Proposes A Commenter's Rights

Although I thought we'd discussed this issue to death back in April, the last two weeks have seen flare-ups around who owns a comment, whether comments should be placed on the original blog or other aggregation services, and whether a publisher has the right to delete comments for any reason. Daniel, whose service is now gaining a great deal of prominence in the tech blogging community, suggests that commenters should have the ability to edit or delete comments and retain access, even if they've been deleted from the source blog. He also recommends portability of those comments to other blogs, including their own.

The post, in its entirety, can be found here:
Disqus Blog: A Commenter's Rights

SocialMedian Undergoes Redesign

Still flying somewhat under the radar, Jason Goldberg's news-focused social media and aggregation site, SocialMedian, got a serious make-over yesterday, enabling mini-profile pop-ups for other members (as FriendFeed recently did as well), offering a site toolbar with drop-downs for news networks, topics and people, and simplified ways to both "clip" and "snip". The service continues to expand its member base and grow increasingly interesting. The updated design is very clean and useful as well.

See: socialmedian Re-Design!


Click for larger version
In those times when I'm not getting to the blog as quick as possible, feel free to check out my Google Reader Shared Items feed or watch my FriendFeed profile, where everything is flowing these days.

Disqus' Partner Strategy: Is FriendFeed Integration Up Next?

Today's news on SezWho's acquisition of Tejit stirred up, appropriately, a number of conversations around the Web regarding blog commenting platforms, and comparisons between SezWho and Disqus were common. But while some tried to paint the two products as competition, Disqus founder Daniel Ha publicly looked to open talks with SezWho, while, elsewhere, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit confirmed that he's reached out to the Disqus team to make conversations on the popular social aggregation site two-way, which could mark yet another important name on Disqus' growing list of successful partnerships.

In fact, I didn't have to look far to spot Daniel's conversation with Jitendra Gupta, the CEO of SezWho, for it happened in the comments section of my coverage this morning.

See: SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy: Comments

Although in coverage of the announcement both here and elsewhere, Gupta had made comments about Disqus' removing blog comments from the original site, and centralizing them on their own, rather than declare war against SezWho, Daniel instead played peacemaker, writing, "Congrats on the acquisition. Sounds like you guys are doing something a bit different than us. We should talk about doing something about this fragmentation. Game?"

This led to Jitendra's offering to grab drinks with Daniel, and the two now look like they're indeed game to set up a conversation which could lead to a great deal of collaboration between the two players.

Meanwhile, as FriendFeed continues its rapid growth, gaining significant mindshare, in part due to excitement displayed by top bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Fred Wilson, Loic LeMeur, Thomas Hawk and Steve Rubel, the fact that comments on FriendFeed aren't also migrating to the author's blog posts hasn't sat well with everyone. It's uncommon that a few days can go by without one blogger or another begging to have the comments on FriendFeed come back to their site, whether through a blog plug-in or some other way. While I believe a community should be able to hold parallel conversations, not all agree.

Buchheit, in response to a post from Wilson titled Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out, said that he had reached out to Disqus to solve this commenting silo.

"I've been in contact with the Disqus team, and I hope to add the option to copy comments though to Disqus in the not too distant future," Buchheit wrote, also adding, as I believe, "Many of my (FriendFeed) comments aren't relevant in the original context... In many cases, (FriendFeed) is enabling new types of comments that would not (or should not) have occurred in the past."

By forging a partnership with Disqus, FriendFeed users could comment on FriendFeed items, and have comments also post to the originating blog, just as other services, including Fav.or.it and Plaxo have implemented. Combined with the recent introduction of video comments from Seesmic, and the above conversation with SezWho, you can see Disqus' strategy develop, to be open to partnerships of all kinds, establishing their service as one of the most versatile, almost default, in the nascent comment replacement market. It's very smart, and one that will get them a lot of good will in a blogosphere ready to accept new, innovative, approaches to communication.

SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

This morning, SezWho, a content rating and reputation management service, announced the acquisition of Tejit, a small company providing semantic analysis of user generated content through its discovery engine. The purchase is intended for SezWho to deliver even more precise reputation scores for contributors in an online conversation, honed by analysis of their activity throughout the Web, be it through blogs, forums or other social media.

In advance of the announcement, I had the opportunity to talk with SezWho's CEO, Jitendra Gupta, in a call Monday night, outlining the goals of the service, and how the combined offering will differentiate itself from services like Disqus. In our conversation, Gupta touched on many of the hot elements of the Web today, including distributed conversations, search engine optimization, and FriendFeed.

"Conversations are getting distributed, and the user organization is key," Gupta said. "Not even the New York Times controls the conversation across different sites and different people. Because of the democratization of Web 2.0 from blogs to Wikis, there is no one platform that will be the single platform because of the variety of tools that is available."

SezWho's goal, made stronger with the Tejit purchase, is to find out where these conversations are happening, no matter where they are, and build a reputation score for those engaged in discussion, to help others get a good idea for who they're dealing with.

"What we have to do is offer user-centric organization to where all these conversations are happening," Gupta said. "We say conversations are happening everywhere, but how can we make those better? Everybody is creating content. Who is credible and who's not? What is good and what is not good?"

Some of the core tenets of SezWho's offering are centered around keeping the power, including search engine optimization (SEO), with the blogger. While Disqus is a strong commenting platform and offers its own rating systems, the service has at times been criticized for hosting the comment activity off the blog itself, and instead, on Disqus' servers. For those who care about such things, they don't necessarily get the SEO benefit of the comments, which they might if they used Blogger, TypePad or WordPress' native commenting systems, each of which is supported by SezWho.

"We think there should not be one central repository, but we can instead be a useful benefit to the other sites," Gupta said. "From a Google point of view or Techmeme point of view, it's not clear that the content is fresh, or being updated. You're not benefiting from the SEO value."

The combined offering hopes to help you find out more about the person you're conversing with online, thanks to SezWho's tracking their activity and building a reputation and profile, based on their interactions on the many different sites throughout the Web. Tejit's offering will greatly increase the ability to get context around the data, and show how the reputaiton of one piece of content relates to another.

"We show these profiles around the people participating to show what else has this person done," Gupta said. "You don't want just connections, but credible connections. Who is this guy, and what is his credibility? We have the best reputation engine for establishing who is credible and who is not, and we take into account all the interactions on all these sites. We can interact and provide feedback, which leads to credible content discovery."

SezWho, prior to today's news, had 11 people, including 9 full-time employees, 2 part-time staffers, and a team of 4 engineers in India, and has raised just over $1 million in funding. Tejit is a 3-person company, and in the short time since its discovery engine was in service, it has already crawled more than 5 million blogs for analysis.

Disqus and Seesmic Teaming Up for Video Comments

It's only been a few weeks since I integrated Disqus commenting with my blog, but I've already reached the point where it would be hard to consider what life was like before Disqus came along. Overnight, with the help of Daniel Ha's excellent customer service, I went from flat Blogger comments that were a hassle to simplified, threaded, personalized comments in Disqus, which integrate easily with other services I use, including FriendFeed.

Today, Disqus is looking to take things to another level, offering integration with Seesmic for video comments. Now, all bloggers using Disqus as their comments engine have the option to enable viewers to leave a video response, and not just a simple text comment.

While video comments haven't yet reached the mainstream, TechCrunch, whose Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, deployed the feature not too long ago. By integrating with Disqus, this should provide Seesmic with a much wider base for distribution, especially among leading technology bloggers, who are rapidly making Disqus a standard.

I'm happy to report that as of this morning, this site is one of the first to integrate Seesmic video comments with Disqus. Soon, you just might even see me leaving midnight video rants around the blogosphere. If you're willing to take a risk, try out the new video commenting system, and let me know what you think!

My Social Media Consumption Workflow

Amidst watching some talk about how they are reducing time in Google Reader due to information overload, or switching away from one service for another, whether due to its features, the friends, the noise or the content, I've been thinking a bit about how I consume social media, and specifically, the order of how I do it, to be sure I've caught up on everything quickly.

There's no question the amount of information I consume can be daunting. Glancing quickly, as of this morning:

1) I have 270 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, sending between 500 and 800 items a day.
2) I follow 490 Twitter users.
3) I am subscribed to 269 FriendFeed users.
4) I have 210 Facebook "friends".

On the back of all this information coming this direction, I am pushing out information:

1) Posting one or two items here daily (1,300 so far)
2) Updating people on Twitter (334 updates so far)
3) Comments and Likes on FriendFeed (1,135 and 643 respectively)

In addition, there are a number of ways to engage and act on the data.

1) Adding bookmarks to Del.icio.us (630 so far)
2) Tracking activity via Technorati and Google Blog Search
3) Tracking comments here and elsewhere via Disqus
4) Trading e-mail with readers, entrepreneurs and peers

Add the above to a way a typical non-robot views the Web, including viewing news, sports and entertainment, not to mention everything to go with work and family obligations, and it can be hard to know where to start. While there's no question I'll vary from this process from time to time, below is a good idea of how I start the day in social media.


1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:
a) New Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook connections
b) Direct Messages from Twitter
c) New comments on the blog via Disqus
d) If Google Blog Search has uncovered references to the blog
e) If there are conversations about upcoming posts or new services to check out.

When e-mail activity is completed, I open the Web browser. While FriendFeed is my home page, I usually leave it on the first visit of the day, and head to Google Reader, to rapidly consume the Web.

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed.

Why is FriendFeed last in this order? It's because unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers. I don't necessarily want to be rushed when I'm on FriendFeed, but can take time to see what others have done throughout the Web, make comments and respond to others who have commented on my own activity.

Also, visiting FriendFeed last here means that my feed is "properly" filled, with shared items from Google Reader, bookmarked items from Del.icio.us, any updates on Twitter, etc.

5) Additional activity

All other social media activity is optional, and comes when it makes sense. That would include:
a) Submitting items to the Elite News Tech Reddit
b) Digging items from the Upcoming list of Digg's Technology section
c) Visiting Shyftr and posting comments or responding to conversations.
d) Seeing what's popular on LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme.
e) Checking trends and news on TechMeme and the TechMeme River.

Everybody has their own route to how they consume and act upon social media. This is how I tend to do it, so I feel I'm on top of things. Am I doing it wrong? How do you go about your social media workday?