Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Blog

Twitter and Politics

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:02:51 GMT

Well maybe it should be “Twitter and strong opinions” but this post was inspired by watching Twitter during the political conventions. And also by something I Twittered upsetting a friend. It was a strong political opinion I guess you could say. But it all started me thinking.

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are, well, I guess you could say far to my left politically. They loved everything that was said at the Democratic convention and hated pretty much everything that has been said so far during the Republican convention. The feelings were the other way around for the few right wing people I follow. But the tone of the left leaning people really upset me. It seemed so very nasty. I suspect it wasn’t meant that way. Well maybe it was. But the point is I don’t really know. As little context and other clues that we have in email and blog posts there is even less in Twitter. There is that whole 140 character limitation.

Politics, like religion, is of course a particularly emotional and polarizing thing. It can be highly nuanced as well but nuance does not translate well to Twitter. What makes it worse in Twitter is that people easily forget who is reading. Most of the people following me probably don’t know me that well. I definitely don’t know many of the people I am following very well either. Many of them I have never met in person and know strictly from blogs and Twitter. In some cases only Twitter. Do I want to judge these people with only Twitter as a source of information? I think not. I’m pretty sure I don’t want them judging me with only that context either!

I’ve decided to avoid as much as possible making political or religious comments on Twitter in the future. Twitter is no instant messaging to an individual – it is a sort of micro blog. Good (read smart) bloggers are careful about what they blog and how they say things. Even still it is easy to get into trouble. But Twitter is I think more risky if only because you have less time/space to include context and make things clear. With Twitter I think you also have of an opportunity to clarify things, to make things right.

I’m not sure how much people are aware of the risk. Do the people I followed last night know that they presented a very negative image that influenced me against their favored party and candidate? Probably not. I imagine they think they presented “truth” that should be convincing to people who disagree with them. That is the other reason I want to hold back – I see more possibility of turning people away in 140 characters than convincing them of anything.

And somehow I keep thinking of that old proverb “it is better to remain silent and appear a fool than to open ones mouth and remove all doubt.” How soon will it be before someone loses their job over something they say in Twitter?

Blame The Parents

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:36:23 GMT

I’m a Preacher’s Kid. That means different things to different people but for many of us who are actually in the role one of the things it means is that if we do something wrong it is likely that our parents, particularly the preacher in the family, who will pay the most serious price. Yes I know people who have lost their jobs because of things their children did. And still more who found life very difficult for the same reason. To some extent the same is true of people in other public positions. Teachers, political officials being the most common. I would argue that they don’t usually have it as bad as preachers do though.

This week of course a lot of people are out to get Sarah Palin because of actions her daughter has done. The Palin’s 17-year old daughter is pregnant. Gasp horror! Lots of people are suggesting, if not outright saying, that this shows that Palin should not be Vice President. As a PK I’ve heard all this before. And it upsets me quite a bit. The girl is 17. Kids of 17 make mistakes like that all the time. Kids from all walks of life make it. Blaming the mother or some how suggesting that having a daughter who makes a common mistake is somehow not fit for public office is outrageous. It is unreasonable to hold parents personally responsible for their children's mistakes.

Being a parent and being the son of someone whose profession brought extra-ordinary attention to things I did the unfairness of this is blatant to me. It is completely unfair to both mother and daughter. They are both under enough stress as it is. This helps no one. I really feel for the girl by the way. At 17 no one should be under national scrutiny for something like this. Oh but it is because of who her mother is some say. So what? It is still unfair to the girl. This is and should be a private family matter. Her parents are being supportive of her. Good for them. Praise them and hold them as a positive example that should be emulated. She’s keeping the baby, again with support from family, which is yet another positive thing. If you are going to bring it up then the morally right thing to do is to accentuate the positive. Caring family following through on stated pro-life belief by supporting mother and child to be. Isn’t that what we want? As it is the media we are seeing and the critics we are reading seem to be aimed at stigmatizing unwed mothers more than they already are and extending the “shame” and “failure” on to parents. I fail to see the good in that!

There is yet another lever that this all offends me. Most of the people who are bringing this up and pointing fingers and suggesting it reflects poorly on the parents are the same people who think that cheating on one’s wife should not be an issue. They are the ones who say that single parent families should not be thought of as a bad thing but as an example of female empowerment. They are the same people who will forgive all sorts of failings in their own candidates but nothing at all in the candidates they oppose. I’d be happy to discuss the issues with people who honestly believe that this issue should rule Palin out. All the have to do is first show they are non-partisan in their objections by stating out that there is more than enough similar reasons to rule Hilary Clinton and Bill out for any future high political office. After all using ones position of power to get a young White House intern to have sex is at least as bad as a hormonal teen getting pregnant with someone she plans to marry. And a wife trying to cover it up is at least as bad as a mother being willing to support a pregnant unwed mother.

Oh I’m not one who believes that Bill’s sexual dalliances rule him out for public office. Alec Baldwin (noted left wing extremist) convinced me of that in a letter to the editor years ago. Anything I’d forgive someone I like I should and would be willing to forgive in people I don’t like.

The Good Old Days

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:18:10 GMT

Well of course the good old days were not that great in many ways but in other ways I miss them. I’m talking about the early days of computers – say 30 years ago or so. Back then computers lived in locked air conditioned rooms with raised floors. They were only loosely connected (networked) if at all. The only people who could get close to them were highly trained professionals. “Regular people”, if they used a computer at all did so through a tightly controlled access. They were mostly limited to specific applications with functionality that was limited to what they needed to do as defined by others.

Users pretty much could not mess up the computer. They didn’t have access to the tools or the privileges to do so. Tech support was easy. Companies had people who could answer questions about the software which was limited. If there was a hardware problem there was a hardware contract that brought in someone to fix or replace it. Data was all backed up at a central place. Oh it was a simple era.

For those of us who could program it was a very cool time. We were special people. And we didn’t have to spend our weekends helping friends and family with their computer problems. If we got a call in the late at night or on the weekend from someone with a computer program it meant we were going to get more money in our pay check. Not only that but the person on the other end of the call was at least something of an expert – someone who spoke your language. Some times I miss those days.

Oh in my heart I know that it is great that my Dad can use his laptop to send email to his kids and grand kids. It’s wonderful that he can write his sermons using a word processor. Sending him pictures over the Internet means he gets to see pictures of his grand children more often and more easily. I love getting pictures from my son while he is still in New Zealand snowboarding. It’s pretty cool that I can keep track of non-tech friends and family via Facebook. Being able to Twitter with people all over the world is pretty amazing and I’d miss it if it went away. Like wise the ability to share information via blogs or discuss local politics using threaded discussion forums opens the world to more people. So I wouldn’t go back to the old way. Well most days I wouldn’t. :-) But some days … well some days I miss the simplicity and the feeling of being special because of computer knowledge and access.

Would you like to …

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:06:48 GMT

So I have learned a few things about women over the years. One of them is about “would you like to …” You see women will ask a man “would you like to” and follow it with something no man in history has ever wanted to do of his own free will. Now when a man asks “would you like to” he is asking if doing the said thing will make the person more happy than not doing it. For example “would you like some food?” Or perhaps “would you like to go to the baseball game.” If one answers “no” that is fine. It was a real question.

A woman uses that sort of question the way a man asks “would you please do me a favor and …” In other words the ask is for something the askee wants the asker to do that they may or may not want to do.

I learned rather quickly that when a woman asks a question like this she really expects a “yes” answer regardless of the request. At first I thought that meant they wanted a man to lie. In other words, the wanted the man to say “yes I would like to do that” no matter how distasteful the task was. Well I was half right.

They do want the man to say “yes” but they don’t want it to be a lie. They want to man to actually want to do the thing. Really! Now that can be hard for a guy to understand. We don’t really want to lie but we do get asked to do things we really would rather not do. So to learn to live with myself I decided that a woman was really asking a different question. “Would you like to change the litter box?” translates to “Do you love me enough to change the litter box?” Now that question I can honestly answer (to my wife anyway) “Why yes I do!”

That way I don’t have to lie and my wife is happy because I change the litter box. It’s the difference between a literal question and an idiomatic interpretation. I pass this bit of wisdom off to you guys who are not yet married or who are recently married.

Web 2.0 Tools I Don’t Use

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:07:01 GMT

There is only so much time in the day and frankly I don’t always make the best use of it anyway. So there are some Web 2.0 tools I just don’t use. Mostly because I just don’t see enough value in them for the time they would take. I could be wrong about some of them and maybe I just don’t “get” them. But here is my list.

Second Life – Yes I have an account and I’ve wandered around it. The idea of lectures online is one I understand but since I use tools like LiveMeeting on a regular basis I don’t see the added value of Second Life. Well there is that free price but still.

Delicio.us I just don’t get tagging. I’m sure there is value here and perhaps one day someone will sit me down and demo lots of good stuff but for now I don’t have time. When I find stuff I really like I blog about it.

FriendFeed Yes I know that Robert Scoble is raving about it and I’m sure it is wonderful for him. But what would it replace and is the change worth it? I have no time to really dig into it and frankly I’d need a better explanation of why I should drop something else to replace it with this. My needs are different from Robert’s.

Flickr – Sounds really cool but I don’t take all that many pictures. And when I do I either email them to a few people, post them on Facebook (rarely), add them to my personal home page or even add them to my Space here. I do have an account and perhaps one day I’ll give it a real go but right now it seems like a great tool for other people. For people who are “in to” photography.

Now I do use Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and I blog. And I read a lot of blogs. So I’m not a complete Luddite. But really there is only so much time in the day and I am trying to have something of a life outside of cyberspace. And there is this day job that seems to take a lot of time as well.

So anyway, I am open to hearing from people who think I should re prioritize some of my time and pick up one of more of the above. Or suggest something else I am ignoring.

Marketing Driven or Product Driven

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:32:36 GMT

A bunch of years ago I worked with (as in supported some of their computer activity) with Avon Products. The way they worked back then was to come out with a new product/sales catalog every two weeks. They started working on each catalog a year and a half in advance. The first step was to figure out what products to sell and what prices to sell them at. The next step was to have people developed and create those products at that price point. Yes, you got it. They didn’t start with what products they had but what products they wanted to sell. That pretty much defines a marketing driven company to me.

The product driven company starts with people who develop products deciding what to create and then having the marketing people figure out how to sell them. Most computer/software companies seem to be in this category.

I’m not convinced that one way is better than the other but they are different. In the first case if the products do not sell it is fairly reasonable to blame the marketing people. After all they made the decisions of what products AND how to sell them. Unless the development process fails to live up to what marketing asked for they are, if not blameless, less responsible. On the other hand in product driven companies there is often a lot of finger pointing when a product fails. Since product developers usually run the company in a product driven company and we know how self confident those people can be (I’m in that category and guilty of thinking I know best on occasion) it is easy to blame the marketing people. “We have the best product and they are not selling it right!”

I’m not sure this is always fair though. Years ago when I worked for Digital Equipment they came out with a technically great PC called the Rainbow 100. I loved mine. But the market didn’t because it was not 100% compatible with the IBM PC that was out and which was the thought leader in the market. I remember a technical person and a marketing person arguing about it. The technical person said “You guys would be just as happy if we resold IBM PCs under the Digital name.: The marketing person replied “Yes, that we should sell and make money on.” The technical person just could not get that customers would prefer a product he “knew” to be “inferior.” We see this all the time though when the market picks one product as being better and the people who developed it just don’t understand (VHS v. Beta anyone).

I think that in the long term a company needs a balance. Marketing and product people have to work together. But in the long run I think if a company is going to lose the balance in one direction or another the marketing driven company may be more long lasting and even more profitable. On the other hand the product driven company may be the way to really drive innovation and the state of the art.

Working Outside

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:53:29 GMT

This is where I have been working today.

It's a warm sunny day following a number of very rainy days. I needed the sun and the fresh air. With good wi-fi and portable phones (and one extention cord) why not? Isn't technology wonderful.

Teachers and Students on Social Networking

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:26:31 GMT

A lot of discussion on Twitter and edu blogs about this news article. The short version is that a school board has banned teachers from communicating with students via social networking sites. Frankly that seems over the top to me. I do agree that teachers need to be careful about the nature and tones of their communication with students. But if you are going to ban any sort of communication I’d think you’d want to ban communication that doesn’t leave a trail rather than communication that does leave a trail. But no one is going to ban person to person voice communication are they? :-)

My own policy back in the day was to save all email correspondence with students for at least a year after they graduated. Anything they sent me and any thing I sent them. I usually recorded IM conversations as well though not always. I would probably have been better to save it all. I never needed to use these records but it was good to know I had them.

Facebook and MySpace were not issues 5-6 years ago but they are today. My policy with regards to Facebook today is that I accept friend invitations but do not send them to students. I know others who turn down invitations until after graduation. I can understand that but I’m not sure that is what I would do. Lots of students today use the message feature of Facebook more than regular email. I can see value to that. I would however be very careful about leaving comments and Wall Posts. Those I might even completely avoid. I hope it goes without saying that teachers, anyone really, should be very careful about what they post on the Internet and especially where students may see it.

Kathleen Weaver brings up text messaging in her blog. Is texting any different from a voice telephone conversation? On one hand there is more accountability since anything you receive as a text can be shown to other people. There is a trail. That should, in theory, be a good thing. Well unless one texts something stupid. Although the short nature of text messages may mean that some messages are too open to interpretation. But we do expect teachers to be smart about things don’t we?

Kathleen also brings up Twitter. I hadn’t thought much about that. I wouldn’t have a problem with students following me on Twitter but I can see why a teacher would want to avoid following a student. On one hand there is such a thing as too much information. :-) But more importantly I think there is a good reason to let students have some space away from teachers and parents as long as they are being responsible. I never want to be the scary stalker teacher/old man.

In general I think that school boards should avoid making black and white policy decisions about these web 2.0 and social networking tools. Clearly they should not make rules about things they don’t understand and for many of them that means social networking sites. But how often does not understanding something prevent anyone from making rules about it?

The Problem With Comments

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:14:14 GMT

Another thing that Robert talked about in his post on tech blogging failing is that comment systems are pretty poor these days. I don’t think that is a tech blogging problem as much as it is a general blogging problem. I’ve had to sign in and enter a CAPCHA just to leave a comment on a blog that is going to moderate the comment before it appears. Talk about a pain. I have to be really motivated to leave a comment at some blogs. Often I just don’t bother. Other times I decide that if I am going to work that hard I might as well write a complete blog post and link to the original blog. That is probably not completely bad but really how often does one have time for that “solution.”

Of course the reason for those barriers is bad behavior. Spam comments are a regular problem for most bloggers. As painful as it is to leave comments here (sorry abut that) I still get a lot of spam comments. It is a pain to delete them but I do because I worry about the consequences of not doing so. It would be a lot worse if it were easier to leave comments.

The other problem with comments is people who only leave negative comments. Oh I don’t mean people who disagree with the blogger. I mean the people who are just plain disagreeable. Flames, profanity, name calling, and all sorts of things that add nothing to the conversation. Its hard to blame bloggers who get fed up enough to turn off comments completely. Comments could be the best part about blogging but all too often they are the worst part. Its a sad state of affairs.

Growing Pains in the Tech Blogosphere

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:01:59 GMT

Every so often Robert Scoble gets a bit melancholy and writes a long, some what rambling post. Frankly these are the posts I wait for because these are some of the most interesting insightful posts he writes. Today he wrote about how he believes that tech blogging has failed their readership. When Robert started blogging it was all about sharing the latest cool things in technology. I think that for Robert that is still the big thing but for a lot of others there is more (or perhaps less depending on your point of few) to it.

Somewhere along the line people realized that besides fun there was some amount of fame and fortune. Well perhaps the fortune is relative but at least there was/is money to be made in tech blogging. For a blogger to get the fame and fortune (or at least make some money and get tech attention) one needs a lot of readers, access to the best events (product announcements, conferences, tech parties) and a constantly growing amount of attention. One needs to scoop other tech bloggers which sometimes means blogging about things that are not completely vetted for reliability. It means getting the attention of the main stream media which means getting into the business of tech as well as the products.

A slight diversion for a minute. One would think that for a blogger only online attention means anything – links, comments, traffic from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. At one time that was true but in recent years, as the media discovered blogs and blogging, it seems to have become more and more important to have some main stream media attention to build up credibility and to attract readers who are not themselves serious blog readers/writers. It’s easier for a blogger to get that CxO interview or industry party invitation if they have been quoted in Fortune or Newsweek or the New York Times. Showing off all the new tech toys may get one in the news but being known for knowledgeable about the latest inside news about the business side of tech seems to be a more reliable way to get MSM attention.

So today we have a lot more people who are as excited about the Fame, fortune, and yes still the fun of tech blogging who are all competing for attention. If they lose their audience they loss it all. If they gain audience they gain in all areas. The stress on some of these people must be intense. That no doubt leads to some of the problems Robert talks about.

I see all this as growing pains. In time it may settle out. The people who really care about the business side will focus more and more on business and the people who just care about the tech will focus on the tech. Chances are good that some of the blogosphere will become part of the main stream media. OH I don’t mean they will move into print, radio or TV as much as I mean that the MSM will move into the Internet and impose some rigor in reporting on bloggers. Access to larger tech companies may start to require some additional credibility and partnership between bloggers and MSM with the rigor that means. Also as blogging becomes more of a real business some sort of corporate structure to support a blogger is necessary so the blogger can focus on the work and not where the money is coming from. The partnership between FastCompany and Scoble may be a model for that. Robert doesn’t need the credibility as much as he probably needs a good corporate structure to support him. In fact Robert helps FastCompany in the Internet where it is not as well known as the big media names. Win win there. Different relationships will have different balances though.

The other thing that is going to settle down is this hopping from one “shiny object” to another. One of the frustrating things for me lately has been Robert blogging less and using other tools. I don’t want to follow him from one shiny object to another. My life is too busy to do that. I like blogs and read a lot of them. I have a Facebook page and while I enjoy it I don’t have time to be there every day so I only use it occasionally. I like Twitter but I keep my use there light. I Twitter a couple of times a day and I follow a reasonable number of people. But I’m not moving to FriendFeed. My social computing time is full and since I am not going to drop something right now I am not going to add something right now. Could that change? Sure. it took me over a year to decide to try Twitter and when I did the time in Facebook dropped.

But what is going to happen is that some people will focus on Twitter, others on Facebook, still others on other “shiny objects.” Those people who want to stay with those objects will get supported by people with a more narrow focus. Lots of us will still follow the Scoble’s of the world to find out about the next shiny object but we’ll not automatically follow them around. We need people with short attention spans to be the early adopters, tell us about new things, and in a sense create the culture around the new things so we feel at home when we move there (if in fact we ever do). The early adopters will have to be patient with use when we don’t see the same value or get as excited as they do though. Sometimes we late adopters may completely skip whole fads. Hopefully that will not hurt too many feelings. :-)

The only way tech blogging will really fail the rest of us though is if the A-list bloggers stop looking through the long tail for shiny items. A Guy Kawasaki can launch something like alltop.com and it will get picked up by the A-list right away. But an Aaron White and friends who launch something like http://icantdeci.de/ (which is fun even if not “important”) and its not as likely to get picked up. There are probably a lot of serious and important things getting announced all the time that are getting the same lack of attention. The long tail is getting really long and it is harder to keep up all the time. Not sure how to fix that problem.

Well tech bloggers are doing their thing. Are they failing the rest of us? I think that is a little harsh. There is a phase that things are going though. It will all be fine in time as long as they all remember to blog about things that are fun and interesting and not worry too much about being relevant. :-)

Struggling with blogging

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:59:30 GMT

I guess the posting rate here is slow enough that it may actually look like I am blogging more lately but the opposite is true. This is only one of several places I blog and at my main blog I am really struggling. Usually I post 22 to 24 posts a month there but I am on a rate for fewer than 20 this month. Also I usually have posts ready days in advance but lately I’ve missed days and not had anything until later in the day if at all. A third blog where I post for a very small group I haven’t posted in almost two weeks compared to usually several a week. So what is going on?

Part of it is travel. I’ve been away on vacation and a long trip to Texas in the last several weeks. It looks like I’ll be in Phoenix AZ for Synergy 2008 next week for a couple of days. I’ll have a day home before I head out to Redmond for the Research Faculty summit after that. I have a family wedding to go to in August as well. A few months ago I thought the summer would be slow and then it started to fill up. So a lot of energy is going into preparing talks, getting ready for meetings and just plain travel time. I lose pretty much a while day on a coast to coast trip – each way. Lots of that travel is not conducive to work because I am burned out. So I sleep or read for fun. And then there is catching up with email and other tasks that build up while I am away. I’m not complaining BTW – I love the travel. But it can make blogging more difficult.

Part of it is that things are slow in the tech field. This is especially true in education technology. People try to announce things in the fall so that schools and teachers can start thinking about it while they are thinking about course changes for the following school year. I didn’t see many new things at NECC for example. Maybe they were their but not for computer science. Without external things to blog about it gets harder to fill up the posting schedule.

But I wonder if I am getting blogger burn out as well. I still get excited about some things and rush off to blog them. But it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. I also have to force the excitement sometimes. “oh no I have nothing to blog about. Think think think” Really though that doesn’t do anyone any good.

I need to make sure that I do things right. Earlier I came up with a blog post idea. As I thought about it I realized that it would take more work to do right then I have tonight. Trying to have it ready for morning would result in a fairly worthless post that was little more than noise for the sake of filling the schedule. I decided to put the idea aside until I had time to do it right. Ultimately it is, or should be, about quality rather than quantity. If I need a break for a bit to bring the quality back up that is what I will do. I’m going to try to stress less the next few weeks. If I don’t get a lot of posts in July so be it. I need to concentrate on doing other things well.

For now, I have to go proof read a document my wife brought home. It’s on paper believe it or not. :-)

Blogging Is Not Dead – It never was alive

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:25:07 GMT

I’ve been reading all sorts of “blogging is dead” or “blogging is not dead” sort of posts lately. I’m not going to link to them because they all miss the point. Blogging was never part of the main stream to begin with. OH for sure it is at the center of some people’s lives but main stream? Not hardly.

Most people I know have heard of blogging but very few of them actually read blogs and fewer still write them. And even those who do blog (what ever that means to them) few of them do it often.

Take my wife for example (but don’t take her away - I need her). She is a very tech savvy person. She is one of the real “go to” people in her school district for technology issues. She is helping other teachers integrate technology into the curriculum across the board. She understands a lot more technology than the average teacher or member of the public for that matter. Heck, the woman was an outstanding machine language programmer in the early years of our marriage. But she doesn’t blog. She doesn’t read blogs, she doesn’t write blogs and she keeps telling me that she doesn’t understand why people blog at all. She’s a very smart woman but blogging just doesn’t fit her world view. She’s not alone in that! And she’s not wrong. If she is missing anything she is probably making up for it in ways that may not make as much sense to me.

I work for a serious technical computer software company filled with lots of people much smarter than I am. There are literally thousands of employees who blog. There are tens of thousands of employees who do not blog though. For many of them the only time they read blogs at all is likely to be when someone sends them a link and a request to read something or when a search engine search returns a blog.

Most of the people in my family and in my non-geek circle of friends (I have lots of non-geek friends – really I do) don’t know any more about blogging then they read in the newspapers. Blogging is not now and never has been a part of their lives. That doesn’t mean they are not on the Internet though.

Lots of people get tunnel vision especially with the Internet. It’s like the story of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and describing it as if they part they were touching was the whole of it. The world wide web is just part of the Internet. Email is part. Blogging is part. Twitter is part. Facebook is part. AOL is part. Search engines are part. Instant message is part. Blogs are a part. YouTube and Flickr are parts. The balance between parts of what make up the Internet that each individual takes advantage of varies greatly. For individuals that balance may change over time. Email may go up and IM may go down. Newsgroup usage may go up or down. It may fade out completely or increase to take up ones whole day. But just because the balance changes for one person or even one group of people doesn’t mean that part of the Internet dies.

But people see the world through filters. If an individual and all of their friends move from Twitter to FriendFeed then in their eyes Twitter dies. At the same time many other people might be discovering Twitter and its total usage might go up. (Or not who knows? This is an example.) Facebook has not killed MySpace and yet if you ask some avid Facebook users they might wonder out loud if MySpace even exists while other people will explain that they are on MySpace because they don’t know anyone on Facebook. People define the world based on the people they know. It’s like the people who were surprised that Bush won because they didn’t personally know anyone who would vote for them.

I’m not going to try to predict the future on blogging except to say that it will change. Should be a safe prediction. :-) I’m also not going to change what I do based on the predictions or laments of others. Blogging works for me so I’m going to keep doing it. If that means I get left behind while to “cool kids” move on to the next shiny object so be it. One day maybe something else will work better for me and I’ll move on as well. But that will not mean blogging is dead.

On Disconnecting

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:12:58 GMT

I suppose that if I were really committed to disconnecting from the Internet I would leave my laptop at home. But of course I seldom do and this vacation is not the exception. The first few years I cam to this camp in the middle of the Adirondack mountains they didn’t have any real Internet connection. There was dial up but it was a toll call and complicated to set up. To say nothing of slow. Still I tended to use it several times during the week. Several years ago they got a broadband connection but one had to do to a specific room that was a walk in a direction I didn’t often go. Still it was near the bookstore where my wife went so I would tag along. But still most years I didn’t use it much.

This year there is wi-fi very close to the cabin where I am staying. I have to walk but not far. It’s very tempting. But mostly I have avoided it. Sunday I used it because I thought I had forgotten to submit an end of fiscal year report. Tuesday I used it, well, I guess because I could and I was bored. But in doing so I learned some things. One is that most of the email that comes to me is easily ignored. I use filters and large amounts of my email come from a number of distribution lists that are automatically sent to specific folders. I can, and in fact did, delete those messages without reading them. In two easy moves I went from 250 unread messages to 27.

Secondly I learned that most of the messages I do have to read don’t actually require me to do anything. I should know the information in them and reading them is a good idea. But in the short term nothing is added to my task list. Thirdly those things that require action can often wait. I drag them to my task bar and set them to remind me to handle them on Monday.

Another major lesson I have learned this week is that email is only a small part of the distraction the Internet causes me. There is Twitter – which apparently goes on as well without me as it did before I started using it. And there are blogs. As I write this, with four days before I expect the pay blogs any attention and 4 days since I paid them any attention, there are some 450 unread blog posts in RSS Bandit. I think it will get worse before it gets better. I will probably only read a small fraction of them too!

And in spite of missing all those blog posts, deleting unread all that email, ignoring all those Twits to say nothing of not paying attention to Facebook, or MSNBC, or any of the several online forums I normally read on a regular basis life is going on. I’m spending time with family, I’m getting a daily paddle around the lake in my kayak, I’ve finished one book (one of those old fashioned paper ones) and well through a second. I’ll almost surely finish all three that I brought with me. And there is fresh air, sunlight, fires in the fire pit, and lots of conversation. I could live a life without the Internet I think. In fact I am starting to wonder if it might be a better life. Though to be honest I am not ready to give up computers completely. There is no way I am going back to writing by hand or even using a typewriter.

I started writing this several days ago but didn’t finish it or post it at that time. I was writing while offline. Since then I confess to a couple of short Internet connections but nothing like my usual activity. I have close to a thousand unread blog posts. I have deleted many more email messages but have several more queued up on my todo list. I made a couple of work related phone calls on the drive home from the mountains – cell phones keep us too connected sometimes.

I did finish a second book and started a third while I was away. I got in some extra reading as well. I realized that I missed other reading – novels, longer magazine pieces, stuff like that. The Internet seems all too often to break things into bite sized (byte sized?) pieces. Sure you can find long pieces but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I think that writing longer pieces, something that is on my todo list as well, may require me to stay off the Internet for a time. The Internet is an almost irresistible magnet to what ever ADD I may have. It sucks me away from longer projects with its “hey this will just take a minute to read/write/do.” My mind wanders or I just decide I “need” some piece of information right now and the next thing I know I’ve lost hours of time. I should probably accept the blame for it but I am human.

I think this once a year trip where the Internet is hard to reach is a good thing. How to make it happen more and to take more advantage of it will be a chore though as the Internet seems to follow me to more and more places all the time. So do you feel the need or even see a value in unplugging? Do you do it? How’s that working for you?

Little Ideas May Be Larger Than They Appear

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:06:01 GMT

Alltop, which I have talked about before, has gotten me thinking about how much of the future of web applications may just be small ideas that are unique and well done and attract a lot of repeat visitors. I think people spend too much time linking about big ideas – things that are massive and complex and solve some sort of big problem that people immediately realize they have. And yet small ideas that solve problems that may not even exist in reality but that spark the imagination may prove to be more popular in the long run. And if they are simple and inexpensive to operate the monitizition required to recoup investment may be much less.

So here a look at a couple of “small ideas” in hopes that there are more out there I am missing.

Alltop is a site that aggregated lots and lots of blogs. The blogs are grouped into an increasing number of categories. Once the initial work was done, apparently in fairly short order, the hard part is picking the right blogs to aggregate and putting them in the right categories. Since the popups that give people a preview do not include the whole post people have an incentive to visit the actual blog for more. People save time looking for interesting posts and people who write interesting posts get more traffic. Win win all around.

icantdeci.de – this one is new, its very simple in every way and its a lot more fun than serious. Full disclosure, Aaron White who was my student for a while once upon a time is one of the people behind this one. In this site, subtitled “a techno-crutch for the chronically indecisive”, people can ask short binary questions and after answering a few of them from other people see what others have selected from their options. So you can enter “Chinese food or Thai food” and in a few seconds get a result from some number of random people. Or you can just blow some time by answering a bunch of random questions and seeing what other people are answering. It’s not at all possible to take the results serious (well not for me anyway) but it can be a fun way to procrastinate for a few minutes and be mildly amused.

I think that instant messaging was also a small idea – just send messages to someone you know. Twitter and clones are a small outgrowth of instant messaging. Facebook started out as a fairly small idea and grew into something huge. But really so did search engines. Of course over time building a search engine became a lot more complicated than writing a web crawler (which often gets assigned as a school project in universities) and indexing the results. We keep looking for higher quality search results.

Will some of these other small ideas grow and evolve into big things? It’s too early to tell. But over all I suspect that the next really big thing on the Internet will start off as a small idea by a couple of crazy people. Sane people only come up with boring ideas.

Online Discussion of Public Issues

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:28:02 GMT

In the school district where I live there are a number of blogs and online forums that discuss local politics and related issues. One of the key topics is the schools themselves. Recently the local newspaper brought up the issue of concerns around the schools with a nod to these forums and blogs. (No links though. I wonder why.)

In the article, one member of the Timberlane school board (Stephen Brown from Sandown) charged that the online forums and blogs were not the most appropriate place for this discussion.

There's a time at every meeting for parents and taxpayers to make comments about the district, but that time is rarely used. Brown said it's a much more appropriate forum than posting on blogs.
"We listen, we discuss and reply to those comments," Brown said. "We are constantly striving to make the school district better."

If I didn’t know better I’d think that Mr. Brown was a naive idealist who had little idea of how the school board meetings worked. But of course he’s been around a while and knows exactly how the meetings work. So honestly I am suspicious of his suggestion and of his apparent attempt to move discussion from a wide open and very transparent location to the relative isolation (in time if not access) of a school board meeting. School board meetings are held only a couple of times a month (often less in the summer) and are time limited. Not everyone can make it to a meeting and not everyone can be accommodated on the agenda. Oh and by the way the school board has complete control over who gets on the agenda and how long they can talk.School board meetings are not a good time/place for real conversations with the public. Why? Well first off because time for the public to speak at such meetings is particularly limited. Secondly these meetings are not good for back and forth discussions. Generally boards allow a statement, let the board members ask a couple of questions, and the meeting moves on. There are just too many people involved, too little time, and the chair has much too much authority and responsibility to limit discussion with the public. Thirdly it would defeat the purposes of having a representative elected board. Board meetings should be about getting things down and board members should be doing their homework and talking to the people they represent outside of the meeting time.

It is of course quite appropriate for people to bring issues to school board members outside of meetings. They can do it in person, by phone, by letter and by email (though I have read at least on complaint about a constituent using email to a member of this school board). Why not through other, more public means though? Letters to the editor have long been popular. Today the Internet is a great platform for getting ones thoughts out. It seems to me that online forums may be the single most appropriate venue for discussion of public issues. It is very public. Access is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And everyone can participate.

The school forum for the Timberlane Regional School district that I participate in has had close to 40 topics under discussion in the last month and a half. How many of them do you think the school board would have had time to discuss in open session with active participation from people who are not members of the board in that time? Somehow I think not much.

Lots of public officials are unwilling (some would say unable) to participate in online forums. There are rules around disclosure of some things such as personal and disciplinary matters of course. But rarely are people asking about things that cannot be discussed in a public meeting. I wonder how many people are just afraid of letting their feelings and opinions known. Oh sure meetings are public but not as many people can get to them. Watching on TV takes a lot of time as well and minutes of meetings often leave out quite a bit that may not be directly related to discussion under vote. So posting to online forums makes people, not just officials BTW, somewhat vulnerable to people correctly understanding where they stand on issues. I’d argue that is good for honest, transparent government. But you know lawyers tend to like as much to be secret and “non discoverable” as possible. And elected officials are easily infected with that attitude.

I really hope that political discussions at all levels, but especially at the local levels, continues to move to the Internet. Let’s bring as much of the discussion into the open as we can.

Online Activities Have Offline Consequences

Wed, 28 May 2008 17:58:20 GMT

Teens and young adults lead compartmentalized lives. They have family, friends from school, friends from the neighborhood, friends from scouts/sports and friends from online. There is almost always some overlap of course but clearly not as much as when I was a kid. I traveled to school from 7th grade through high school so neighborhood friends and school friends were completely different. But there was no online then and friends from my outside activities were a pretty close overlap with my neighborhood. But I didn’t expect (nor really did I want) my school friends and neighborhood friends to know all the same things about me.

Young people expect people to respect their compartmentalization. They expect parents to ignore what they do with their friends or at school. To young people that isn’t family stuff and family stuff is different from peer stuff. They are often surprised when parents even ask about things that they see as separate. No where else is this more true then in online activities. Students often see online as completely divorced from their real lives. Online they pretend to be different people – older, sexier, more outgoing, more wild, and generally just different from who they are in real life. They expect it all to be safe and consequence free.

It seems to me that young people regard the Internet as a sort of “no adults allowed” club house. A place where they can do what ever they want without complications or consequences. It is all virtual. Even when their own feelings are hurt or they feel negatively effected by something that is said or done on the Internet they still expect there to be no consequences for their actions. I think it is a factor of their youth – perhaps the way their minds work.

The title of this post is a statement that Vicki Davis made during an online presentation today about her online student projects. She said that some student, usually very early in the project, does something very inappropriate. She handles this action quickly, decisively and with the full weight of her authority. She uses this teachable moment to make it very clear that online activities have offline consequences that can be quite serious. She makes it clear that adults are watching. This usually takes care of problems for the rest of the project as word gets around quickly.

To me this is great teaching. If we teach students nothing else about their life online we need to teach them that online activities have offline consequences. If they can learn it well in middle school (or before) I think they may make fewer and smaller missteps later on. This is a valuable life skill that students need to have. Sure there is a lot of other value in using Web 2.0 tools and connecting students from around the world as Vicki and her partners do. I am excited for the opportunities her students are getting. But none of it would be possible without hard work, constant vigilance and the willingness to help students learn from their mistakes rather than taking the easy way out and just trying to prevent mistakes.

The Butcher’s Blog

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:50:33 GMT

My wife returned home from one of her favorite butchers with a newsletter called “The Butcher’s Blog.” It was a nice full color, glossy, four page newsletter with some good information. But it was the title that got my attention. There was a web site listed for the company (this is a small chain of quality butchers) so of course I went there to look for the online blog.

Well there wasn’t one. That’s right – they call their hardcopy, print only newsletter “The Butcher’s Blog.” Now since “blog” is short for “web log” and that implies a web page I was surprised. Well not all that surprised. But after years of seeing online content using off line names (newsletters, journals, etc) this was the first case of an offline article borrowing an online sort of name.

I assume they have seen all the attention that blogs are getting in the media and decided that they might as well borrow some of that attention and look hip and with it. The web site is very slick with lots of information. It’s brochureware of course. No interactivity that I could see. I did see a sign up for a newsletter (via email) so I signed up. I haven’t seen what it looks like yet though. I looked for back issues online but could not find them.

I wonder who is advising them on their online presence. Somehow I suspect that the people who create the online presence and the people who suggested the title for the newsletter are different people.

The website is very well done even if the online ordering system is currently closed for maintenance. They are doing a lot of real life community involvement which is great. But they don’t quite seem to be ready for that online community/conversation that would make them a real “Web 2.0” operation. I don’t have a problem with that really. But calling their newsletter “The Butcher’s Blog” just seems a bit wannabe.

Still their meat is very good so we’ll go there. Though between you and I, I’d rather go to the closer, smaller, more comfortable (for me) and every bit as good J & B Butcher Shop. Their web site may not be as fancy but I love the service and the quality of the products. And ultimately, no matter what gets you in the store in the first place, those are the things that determine if you come back.

Who Are The Interesting People Following

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:12:17 GMT

One of the things I have been doing lately is checking out the lists of who the people I follow on Twitter follow. I am starting to see patterns which is of course to be expected.

There seems to be several kinds of people.

Famous People -Those who follow a few and are followed by many.
Followers -Those who follow many and are followed by few.
Regular People - Those who follow and are followed by a similar number of people (ratio of followers to following is usually around 1.2 and 0.8).

Well sure there are outliers like Scoble and Kawasaki who are both followed by and following insane numbers of people but that sort of makes them less interesting in terms of understanding the bigger Twitter picture. (Yeah they are interesting and I follow both of them but I want to look at something different here.)

The people who are followed by many but follow few themselves are “famous” if I can use the term somewhat loosely. By that I mean that they have a reputation in their online community that often far exceeds their local real life community. Their neighbors may not even know they have any fame at all but when they show up at a conference or similar event they attract a crowd. They get quoted as authorities in other blogs and in conversations. Reporters (main stream media ones) talk to them, call them up, and quote them. They tend to follow other famous people more than “regular people” or “followers.” That’s fine as far as it goes but I wonder about echo chamber problems and losing touch with regular people. But clearly these people are hubs of a sort and something that is interesting can quickly spread to many people. That makes them even more valuable which leads to more followers.

Followers are people I don’t quite understand. They follow many people but somehow never generate the interest to attract many followers of their own. So what is the point? Is it all about taking in lots of information? That seems a reasonable goal I guess. It’s just not for everyone though. Anyone have an explanation for that phenomenon?

Regular people do not have time to follow lots and lots of people. They follow their friends, colleagues, peers and yes, fairly often, some famous people. It seems to be partly about following the news (from the famous) but even more largely about sharing with peers. I think all of Twitter is largely about sharing with peers of course. But for the regular people I think there is more use of the reply and direct message to a larger set of people. Famous people reply to their followers but regular people carry on conversations with their friends in a less formal way.

Yes I know that famous people hold conversations with their friends, who are usually other famous people. These conversations are often part of the reason people follow them but conversations between regular people seem to be more personal.

I have been looking at a bunch of people lately and wondering who among the people they follow I should also follow. If a lot of the really interesting people are following someone should I also follow them? Or should I keep my traffic down and assume that somehow the interesting thing from those people will show up in the people I already follow? So far I am adding people very slowly. I’m sure I am missing a lot of interesting people but there is only so much time in the day. And I’m reading too many blogs so until I cut back there I don’t have a lot of time to follow many more on Twitter.

Why do we put up with online advertisements?

Fri, 23 May 2008 03:21:45 GMT

The other day my wife and I were watching a TV show that was recorder on our DVR. As you might expect we would fast forward through the commercials. My wife pointed out that we gained about 15 minutes per hour that way. She suggested we think about not watching TV “live” at all. There was a time when there were a lot fewer commercials (and fewer channels) but we didn’t pay anything for the shows we watched. Today we do pay for cable access. Where we live that is about the only way we could get quality of viewing or quantity of shows. You’d think though that the money we pay would be enough but apparently it is not. We put up with the advertising because we have little choice. Of course the DVR is starting to give us choice and we are starting to exercise it.

But what of the Internet? When I first started using the Internet (back in the early/mid 80s) advertising on the Internet was almost a capital offense (as defined as something that could cause you to lose access the the Internet). It was more or less acceptable to use a form of word of mouth in that one could talk about products where they were reinvent to the discussion. But pure advertising? That was a no no.

Just like the era of free (but advertising supported) broadcast only TV the early Internet was a little light on content compared to today. More and more Internet features from web based email, to search, to media of all sorts is paid for by advertising. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of the efficacy of online advertising (see this article I wrote in 1996 before Google and a lot of other things) but companies are spending lots of money on it. People keep saying online advertising is money well spent but I sure wonder about it. It seems like a lot of magic hand waving goes on about the numbers.

Of course people like things to be free and we as a society have gotten used to advertising paying for all sorts of things. When was the last time you were in a school gymnasium and saw a scoreboard that wasn’t paid for with advertising? It goes back a long way so we should not be surprised that it goes on via the Internet. In the early days of the Internet boom lots of companies tried to charge people for services but people were not buying. Well most people were not. I paid for a couple of early paid services. I even paid for Slate when there was a fee for the good stuff. It was worth it to me but apparently too many people want advertisers to pay for their news.

I also pay for a premium account with Hotmail/Windows Live services. That is why there are no advertisements on this blog BTW. I’m paying for your access. (You’re welcome :-)) Though in a sense one could say this blog is an advertisement for Alfred Thompson. And word of mouth for things (like the books on the book list) that I like. But again I think I am in a pretty small minority.

While I am pretty good at ignoring most online advertising including the occasionally pop up or pop under when I do notice it I find it annoying. It also reduces the space for content that I really want and the ability to make web sites more pleasant reading. I also feel like it takes away some of my control over the suppler of the content or service. It is not like I can say “hey I’m paying for this service so fix x, y and z.” I can say I will leave the service or use it less but that somehow doesn’t feel like as powerful a statement. I can’t say “add a feature and I’ll pay more” either. The control is much more in the hands of the advertisers. Oh sure the visitor numbers are important but aren’t companies likely to assume (usually correctly) that people who complain are not likely to click on their advertisements and add to their revenue stream anyway?

I’m fighting city hall as the saying goes on this I know. But given a choice I think I would prefer small reasonable fees for more of the Internet than more and more intrusive advertising. I wonder if I am part of a large enough demographic to pay for anything of value though. What do you think?

Gen Y and the Future of the Internet

Fri, 16 May 2008 22:43:00 GMT

My manager forwarded a link to an article called “Why Gen Y is going to change the web” today that makes very interesting reading. I think there is a lot of good insights and information in it. But – hey you knew there was a but coming – I think some things are over stated. And other things need not be as scary as they may appear.

First the overstated. Gen Y is not quite as fast to grab on to things as we often think they are. I talk to groups of high school students (and college students) regularly. Few of them seem to know about Twitter let alone use it. They know about blogs but they don’t seem to be writing them as often as many think. They are on Facebook and My Space though. Very short updates seem to be the common thing there. Think Twitter but not in Twitter. It all comes back to that short attention span that is not overstated in the article. Maybe they will blog as they get older. It could happen I guess. I actually hope it does.

The blog post says that “They're also wary of old folks, like their boss, trying to "friend" them in their social space, especially if they're tragically un-hip wannabes.” I think this is true however – as a change from saying but – they do welcome “old folks” who have earned their respect and who treat them right. “Old folk” like me do best when we wait for the Gen Yers to reach out to them. Most of my 182 (!!) Friends on Facebook are in Gen Y. Some of them I poked but all of them issued the friend invite. I may do a poke if I think it will be received as a simple “hi I’m on Facebook” and not as something pushy. Friend invitations from old people to young people or from manager to subordinate (unless there is a clear out of work friendship) are just too likely to appear pushy to me. But the key take away is that you have to earn some credibility. Blog, Twitter, learn to txt message, and make your own identity in the online world before you try to jump into the Gen Y world.

But generally I think that post was spot on. Work is going to change to meet the way Gen Y lives. Managers are going to have to change their ideas of control, of motivation (money is not everything for Gen Y), and of communication. Advertising has got to change as well. How well will Internet advertisements work for a generation that has already learned to ignore them? Video is going to be more important. Word of mouth will work faster and with more impact. TV ads are going to be cool or be gone. If you can fast forward through an advertisement as you can with a DVR or online video who will watch boring? And are Gen Yers really going to click on black & white text advertisements on web pages? Really?

It’s going to be a whole new world.

Just Google Me

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:42:24 GMT

Actually I don’t mean use Google. I use “google” in the generic “look something up on a search engine” way that I think most people really mean it. Personally I use Live Search as my default search engine.

Anyway, this morning I was looking at a slide deck by Ted Demopoulos from his talk on how to sell blogging to a CEO and noticed his last/contact slide. Ted included his email and his web site, as you’d expect, and then added “or just Google me.” This got me thinking. Well thinking more, because lately a lot of my referral logs show people doing searches for my name. They are using Live Search, Yahoo Search, AOL Search and yes, for the most part, Google search. But regardless of which engine they are using they are finding me or more specifically my blogs. This wasn’t always the case. Blogging changed that and really raised my Internet visibility. If one can remember my name they can find me. That is helpful for me in my line of work!

The same is true for Ted BTW. Although I have to look up his last name before I can spell it correctly. I keep meaning to ask him if he has bought domains with close but wrong spellings of his last name. :-)

But what about other people? I have links to most of the people in my group at work and I see searches for their names finding my blogs. I assume that a lot of searchers also go directly to their blogs of course. And I suspect that some of the visits I get that come from their blogs are from people looking for me who found their blogs and links to me first. That’s how the web is supposed to work after all.

But where do searches for people who don’t have their own blog or personal web page go? I search for people all the time and many of them are not in any sort of control of their web presence. I look for teachers pretty often and as a general rule I only find them on their school web pages. Many times not even there. A couple of times the only reference I have found is in a copy of the school board minutes from when they were appointed to their job. You would be amazed at how hard it is to find teachers in many schools. That this is the case for computer technology or computer science teachers is even more surprising. Though in all fairness a lot of teachers don’t have a lot of time to create their own web presence.

Not being able to find business people is even more common and yet, in some ways, even more surprising. After all business people depend so much on a reputation and on people being able to find out about them. A search engine search is now becoming common practice for most people looking to hire or otherwise do business with people. People want to know that someone is an expert and these days people look to the Internet for that sort of information. Why don’t more people take charge of their Internet presence? Time? Knowledge? I guess it is all still new to most people.

I think of one’s Internet presence as a sort of enhanced online resume. The Internet is where people look to find out who you are, what you are and have been doing, and to get a look into what others think about you. If people can’t find online references to what they see on your resume what does that mean? Perhaps nothing but it is something I would expect to be asked about on an interview. The world is changing.

One last piece of advice, if you are searching for people (or anything really) use multiple search engines. This week my other blog was the number one hit for “Zune games beta” on Google which is crazy given that I’m just linking to other places related to that. Live Search had more useful links in my opinion. And compare searches on Live and Google for “Ted Demopoulos” sometime. Both useful but both a little different. One keys in more on his books (good books too) and the other on his web sites. BTW I recommend Ted if you are looking for a consultant on blogging for business – especially if you are looking for someone to talk TO people rather than AT them if you know what I mean.

How To Get Links To Your Blog

Tue, 06 May 2008 08:25:45 GMT

It is said that links are the currency of the Internet. Certainly they are important for bloggers. Links mean traffic – readers – discussion – credibility – and a feeling that one matters. Well to some degree or an other I guess. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the initial traffic from a link is only part of the story. Lots of blog traffic comes from search engines. Links are what make a web page or blog post show up highly in search results. So the more links a blog has the more likely it is to be found by people searching for something. The long term benefits of a link may be greater than the short term.

So how does one get links to their blog? The best way is to write brilliant, insightful commentary or wonderfully useful information. In other words great original content. People will read it and want to share it with their readers. This is not as easy as it seems though. Well not for me anyway.

You can also embed great pictures or videos – cute, funny, smart, educational – there are lots of options. People like pictures – its part of what makes http://icanhascheezburger.com the number 8 blog on Technorati’s Top 100 list. Embedding the images/video is best because that way people link to your post and not to the site of the original image (if it exists elsewhere).

Linking to other good content sometimes works. If your link is directly to an image or some file that is not a web page that’s best. If your link is to another web page people often just link to that page. Sometimes they link back to you as how they found out about it but not always. As a matter of being nice it is always good to link to the place one found out about good content as well as to the content itself. I try to do that though if it is one of those things that I see several places I might not. Anyway if you can link to a really useful resource (especially a free one) people will often link to your post.

Speaking of linking. Trackbacks and comments generally do not give one links that “count” for search engines or incoming links. Too many spam trackbacks means that many systems use the nofollow tag for those things. They do however let people know about you and you may get more traffic from them and that may lead to direct links. I am amazed at how many readers I get from people following back from a comment or a trackback. So don’t discount them completely.

Participate in interesting memes. My recent “book meme” post has resulted in three different people linking back to this blog. This one is tricky though. It requires an audience that is interested in the meme. I have a literate and fun loving audience here. They seem to like books and they are willing to participate in this meme. The audience for some blogs would see many memes as off topic, distracting and not useful. And if people do not want to participate there will not be any links. In fact in some blogs this may cost one regular readers. As with anything in writing knowing ones audience is important.

One way that seems to work wonders but that I don’t recommend is to really annoy an A-list blogger. This isn’t as easy to do as you might expect because they people have developed really thick skins so easily shrug off and ignore most insults. However if you do succeed in getting them annoyed to link to you and point out what an idiot you are you may get a lot of links. First off their fans will link to you so they can call you names, demand that you be fired and otherwise be very mean to you. That makes this strategy not for the faint of heart. Yes, the A-lister’s detractors may link to you as well and even say nice things. But honestly they probably think you are just pointing out the obvious and may not find that link worthy.

Now someone is going to say “how about positive links from A-list bloggers?” Sure that is always a good thing. But honestly that’s all about writing great content and I covered that already. Besides I am not convinced that a link from an A-list blogger carries much more weight in search engines than any other link. It may get you more initial attention and it may occasionally result in some of their readers also linking to you. But as a strategy “I’m going to get a lot of links by getting some A-list blogger to link to me” I think it is something of a lottery. Better to write for your core audience and just be happy if one of the links you pick up is from an A-lister. The big benefit from an A-list link is a few extra people dropping by with the chance that a subset of them will become regulars. The conversion factor from another more closely related blog that is not an A-list blog will often be a lot higher.

I was going to not say “link to other people as much as possible” because I thought that is sort of obvious. But maybe its not. Link to the sort of content that you appreciate. It helps out and encourages the people who create it. Plus it lets them know about you and maybe they will see content of yours that they will want to link to. Besides it is always right to treat others the way you would want to be treated.

What did I leave out? Any other recommendations for getting links?

Twitter: Follower to Following Ratio

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:11:40 GMT

I read in a blog recently about a technique for deciding to follow or not follow someone who follows one on Twitter and other sites. The short version is that if the person has more followers (or close to a 1 to 1 ratio) that they will be followed. I sort of use that myself. Though not quite. I will follow people I actually know even if the ratio is way off. As a general rule I don’t follow complete strangers unless I have a reason to believe they will actually write things I am interested in. When in doubt I use the follow to followers ratio as a guide.

Robert Scoble says that people define themselves by who they follow. I am sure he is right to some extent. One of the things about me is that I don’t have as much time as it would take to follow thousands of people. Nor do I think I could get real value from a Twitter feed that traveled to fast for me to keep up with. I’m limited in time and energy so I have to set some guidelines for myself.

Most of the people I follow are followed by more people then they themselves follow. What does that mean? Well I like to think that it means they are interesting and create original content. Usually when I decide to follow someone I also look at who they follow. It is nice to see that they follow some people I follow but it is probably more useful that they follow very different people. That helps to minimize “echo chamber” effects and means that people can be connectors.

A lot of the people I follow also follow a number of people who I follow. I think that is because there is a community of educators and people interested in education which is a good thing. There is also a tech circle in my follow/followers list. I think that being a member of several circles is a good thing. I don’t think that one has to follow everyone in the circle though. The really important and cool stuff will make the rounds. Being a part of several circles means that information can flow between circles. Again the good stuff will make the rounds. That’s my theory so far anyway.

Many of the people who follow lots of people are followed by relatively few people themselves. I don’t think that following lots of people automatically makes one an interesting person. It may make one more informed but I have found that does not always translate to interesting.

A number of famous people or important people (using various means of defining important) have a lot more followers than they follow themselves. usually that is not so surprising. Someone who is a CEO of a company generally doesn’t have time to follow a lot of people. They do often have interesting things to say though. Robert Scoble used to automatically follow anyone who followed him but recently stopped doing that. At over 22,000 people to follow I suspect he is already getting more Twits than he can follow.

Guy Kawasaki follows more people than follow him. That really surprised me. The man is famous and is a very interesting Twitter person. I do wonder how he keeps up with the traffic of following over 10,000 people though. He’s replied to Twits I have made to him so he obviously pays some attention to replies.

Anyway I think that most people have to make some sort of decision about who to follow based on their tolerance for traffic. The follow to follower ratio seems like it might be helpful for many of them. What do you think?

Book Meme

Sun, 04 May 2008 04:27:46 GMT

Thanks to Michele and Leigh Ann I found this list and had to fill it out. Honestly some of the books I was required to read I wouldn’t wish on people I didn’t even like. How “Catcher in the Rye” is regarded as more than trash is beyond me. Not so much because of the language as much as how depressing it is. I’ve long wondered how many students read that book and decide to kill themselves. (Yes I am serious.)

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.
Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones read solely as a curriculum requirement, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.
Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
*Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
*The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
*Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
*Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
*The Three Musketeers (I’ll read anything by Dumas)