I’ve been following a meme this week regarding the fragmentation of conversations in the blogosphere. I’ve collected some of these posts at del.icio.us.

There appears to be a bit of backlash against conversations moving away from commenting ecosystems within a blogger’s community (his or her blog) and onto systems like twitter, FriendFeed, and other sites.

Blogs use technologies like pings and trackbacks to let other blogs links to one another, unifying the conversations that happen around a given topic of discussion. But Paul Buchheit, of FriendFeed, writes in his blog:

Although comments are one of our most popular features, they are also our most controversial feature. If you believe that there should only be a single, unified discussion, then the extra fragmentation caused by FriendFeed will seem like a step in the wrong direction. In fact, not only is there a separate discussion on FriendFeed, there may be hundreds of separate discussions within FriendFeed on the very same topic or link (because different people are sharing the link, and different people have different friend groups).

Maybe it’s because I work at a newspaper company and watch journalists miss conversations about their content on a daily basis, but this doesn’t seem revolutionary to me. People have always had conversations about content separate from the content itself. Thankfully I’m not the only one not amazed by this idea. Terry Heaton:

It is ironic, to say the least, that the blogosphere — the place where stories were lifted from the mainstream press for “discussion” — is now faced with the same issue that mainstreamers have been fighting for years.

Conversations happen everywhere. My friends and I talk about all sorts of things, as do yours I assume. We talk about LOST, random YouTube videos, books and blog posts and we have no intention on communicating with the originator.

I describe the difference between old media and new media to classes using the following two slides.

With old media, families would sit around reading the paper, watching Cronkite and Jack Benny, listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats. The media would be broadcast to them and these audiences would process this information. Being social creatures, we’d sit around the dinner table and talk to those in our physical vicinity, but we’d have no idea what our neighbors were talking about. Barriers like distance from our neighbors kept us from communicating with each other on a larger scales without mass media tools like printing presses and broadcast towers. People in the left house had no idea what was going on in the right house.

But technology breaks down those barrier. Loud cell phone talkers can broadcast their one-on-one conversations over the phone to everyone around them. People who post on their blogs can talk directly to individuals, but also in front of the crowd.

But now we’re seeing new barriers. Instead of distance, we’re running into “too many places to converse.” It’s harder to keep up with conversations you’re following because they’re happening in nooks and crannies you wouldn’t think to look. Too few opportunities has turned into too many to keep track.

Everybody wants different types of spaghetti. As content fragments, so too should the conversations. Some people like chunky spaghetti and some of those chunky spaghetti lovers also like spicy spaghetti. If you write on your chunky spaghetti blog about a type of spicy spaghetti (that happens to be chunky), of course people will take that single post of yours and incorporate it into spicy spaghetti communities that you may not necessarily monitor.

This is how pollination works. It’s the definition of word of mouth marketing. You want people to take something from your community and jam it into their communities. You want this to happen again and again, constantly bouncing a brand or idea from community to community virally and organically. Fragmentation is good in this regard. However it requires giving up control.

This idea that conversations have to happen in your ecosystem or you will lose page views is silly. You should experience an increase in page views from users unaware of your brand, idea or content in the first place. You’ve made new connections to new markets. Tap it! Don’t bitch about it!

ReadWriteWeb offers some essential tools to help content producers keep up with conversations happening outside their ecosystems.

Use them to follow conversations and to discover new niche communities you may wish to join.

The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

There’s some great discussion at editor on the verge regarding the full vs. partial feed debate.

Obviously, as a user, I’m on the side of full text feeds. But I think the business argument against full text feeds is exactly the same as those early arguments about putting print content on the Web. That argument, clearly, has been wrong.

Partial feed myths like “feeds take away page views” or “the market isn’t prepared to advertise via RSS” are stupid.

Feeds take away page views when you offer no extra value on your site. I’d argue that they can increase page views if you do it right, turn your best readers into your marketing department. Give them the tools.

Secondly, the market isn’t prepared to advertise via RSS because you’re selling based on page views and impressions rather than reach (or better yet, click-throughs). You, the advertisers, have not yet educated the market on the value of RSS. Instead you’re perpetuating these fears and myths of RSS while blogs and other sites come in and cut you at the heels for advertisers in this marketplace.

Advertising, like content, needs to be relevant to the readers. Don’t just give a sports page feed and attach ads from the local sporting goods store. Give people granular feeds and pump in ads from smaller, more relevant advertisers.

What do you think?

In the order these things should happen at your newspaper.com:

I’d like to see better headlines. Too many papers port their print heads to their Web sites. Worst idea ever. Your Web site isn’t the only context for your words. Think about how RSS readers, email alert receivers and Google searchers see your headlines.

I’d like to see more information you wouldn’t bother printing in the paper. Which roads are closed today, or this week? Most newsrooms get hundreds of news releases a day. Most are lame, but surely someone will find a quick brief on it interesting. I’d like to see more pictures. Lots more pictures.

I’d like to see more pay walls fall down. There sure was a lot of talk about this last year but not many sites actually followed up on it. Move it and lose it, folks.

I’d like to see better search. Keyword based search is fine if it works, but I really care about timeliness as much as relevancy.

I’d like to see granular linkage. Tagging would be really nice. Pro tip: Granular news begets granular advertising. Think smaller. Much smaller.

I’d like to see better use of RSS. Granular RSS would be really sweet. Full text and pictures with or without ads, doesn’t matter. Unless you are the Washington Post or the New York Times, I just won’t follow your sites (and probably will never go to your site again unless someone I trust links to it). I’m much further ahead on the tech curve than most people when it comes to RSS, but I’ve already made it a policy this year to drop most feeds with partial text. You must have pretty compelling content to keep me as a subscriber to partial text feeds.

I’d like to see sexier designs. You wouldn’t put every headline on A1, why do you do it on your sites?

I’d like to see better ad strategies. Banners are lame and unless you’re in a fairly large market you’ll have a tough time selling inventory once you drop the pay wall. Think about how you can target and integrate advertising with content. No, not Intellitext. Clicking a tag or a search narrows content, it should narrow advertising too. Get creative. Have lots of editorial Google maps? I bet there are businesses in those areas…

Registration should let me do more than comment on articles. Come up with some good ideas here for yourself.

This one will likely be controversial: Write more stories using fewer words. 10 inches average. I’m serious here. Stop writing so many 40-50 inch articles every day. Use site metrics and reader reactions to help you decide stories to follow up on or to write-through. Write 50 inches on a story over the course of 5 articles. And make sure to leave me the crumb trail if I’m interested in the topic.
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I know most of this stuff seems trivial when we’re talking about grander enterprise issues. I know the hot topics of late include blogs, video, mobile versions, Facebook apps and structured data. Sure those are cool BUT there still exist too many papers missing the fundamentals above.
Nothing else should even be a discussion at the table until these objectives have been met.

Besides starting this blog this year (and this one and this one and this one), I have to say despite all my screaming and yelling and general frustration, I’m pretty pleased with what’s been going on over the last 12 months.

Newspapers seem to be getting it. It’s slow going, for sure, but many newspapers now see the power of the Web. The greatest coups for online staffs have come from breaking news situations like the Virginia Tech shooting and the California fires. This is good. I’m not one for predictions, but I expect to see some really awesome stuff happening in 2008. I expect TV sites will finally start to come around to the Web and I expect many of them to fail miserably again. I expect to see more sites fully embrace simple technologies like RSS and I expect them to figure out how to monetize them. I expect to see a large blog network or two purchased by a traditional media powerhouse.

We’ve seen some truly great things happen in the world of community journalism, the smuggled Myanmar videos being the prime example. We’ve seen many newspapers hand local TV stations their asses with online video (and we can still do better). New York Times tore down their pay wall and they’ve only begun to see the benefits. Reporters and editors, although still somewhat begrudgingly have taken blogs under their wing.

Declining print readership and online advertising sales not making up the loss continue to concern publishers. Eventually those streams will cross. But only if we do things right this time. The fact remains that I can find breaking news faster on twitter and Wikipedia than the papers that supposedly serve the markets where these events occur. Omaha.com was a disaster to never be repeated. Pay walls unfortunately still block thousands, possibly millions of readers from content. Papers still fail to understand search engines. Papers have no idea whatsoever how to turn print-comparable profit on the Web. It’s still being sold like the print product. Site designs must improve. We can do better.

Believe it or not, this was my first full year as a full-time “web guy.” My background is in TV and before that, alternative print. If I can jump head-first into this, so can you. I hope publishers start to take the time to understand their “web guys.” Let’s make 2008 awesome.

Ryan Sholin posed an interesting question on twitter, and it will take me more than 140 characters to respond.

He says:

Hypothesis: Newspapers in blog form are more pleasant to read than blogs in newspaper form. Discuss.

It all goes back to the signal vs. noise issue. Newspapers write about a lot of stuff I don’t care about. At least I don’t care about anything more than just a general overview.

Scenario: Sometimes a court case will break in the morning and a paper (or a blog, for that matter) will write through the story several times through the day. This is a good thing to do, but if I’m subscribed to that papers feed, I really don’t want my feed reader cluttered with constant updates, when a single story will suffice. It’s just a personal preference. Noise is the number one reason I unsubscribe from blogs, too.

This is why it’s so important to explode categories of news. On a newspaper.com, I should be able to get granular news items. I don’t necessarily just want entertainment news, I want news relating to movies and TV. I don’t want local news, I want news about local crime or city hall. The sports section is a terribly boring section to me, but I love baseball, so I’d like to just follow baseball related stories. See where I’m going?

As for reading blogs in print form? I don’t know. I’d rather not. Unless it was a newspaper from boingboing or Silicon Alley Insider. Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to read kottke.org without the links?

I do have to say that blogs tend to have more readable designs than newspapers and most certainly better designs than newspaper Web sites.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flat-footed in Omaha

It’s simply unacceptable. The site still takes upwards of 2 minutes to load today. It looks like the site’s been hit by digg.com or slashdot, but I don’t believe that traffic would sustain like that for this long when nothing is loading. There is probably some other mess going on behind the scenes.

TV stations in omaha had live video online all day there and was on top of both stories, so I don’t buy the argument that there wasn’t enough staff to cover the shooting. That they couldn’t shift from Bush coverage tells me something is wrong with their entire process. KETV (which isn’t even the market leader) nailed the shooting coverage and I can guarantee you they didn’t need 20 people on either story. I’m betting it’s because they’re simply more equipped to handle breaking news environment.

The blog they’re talking about was a free blogger.com blog that had a handful of nothing on it. One post, a few comments. Nothing… Makes me think they had no blogging strategy to begin with. http://omahaworld-herald.blogspot.com/

There are two shining examples of recent that I can think of on how to cover a huge local story on the Web: The Strib had a several stories, a video, graphics and maps all up within 2 hours of the bridge collapse and the Virginia Tech shooting coverage with its twitter.com-like fast updates on the Roanoke homepage.

Bill Keller:

In other words, something is happening out there, and if we don’t understand it, it’s not just the newspaper business that is in peril.

And at this time of desperate need for reliable news reporting, the supply is dwindling.

That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of ‘too much Information’. You turn on your computer and there is a media tsunami: blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social sites like MySpace and file-sharing programs like YouTube. You can harvest it from around the world. You can customize it. You can have it delivered to your cell phone. You know where many thousands of younger readers go these days to follow breaking news stories? They go - or at least they are sent by search engines - to Wikipedia, an online, communal encyclopaedia written and edited by well, essentially written and edited by any passerby who wants to log on and contribute.

The Onion:

In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday. The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times. “Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs.

Matt Taibbi:

If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.

People say the darnedest things, don’t they?

Listen, this is journalism 101. Bill Keller is an idiot (somebody put that in a textbook). The Onion hit the nail on the head here. The blogosphere isn’t some unified voice as the-media-would-have-us-believe. It’s a bazillion voices talking about a bazillion things. Which is why there are tools like social networks, RSS and search to help cut the signal from the noise. Why is this journalism 101?

Because, the whole idea of the Fourth Estate (the other three being the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of American government) is that journalism acts as the check on the government. It acts as the voice of the people who give democratic government its power. That the barriers to create and consume media have lowered, taking power from the media, means that voice has been passed to the rightful owners of the Fourth Estate: the people.

On an entirely philosophical level

I’d argue that, especially lately, and especially the New York Times, that the mainstream media hasn’t acted as a voice of the people. It hasn’t acted as a check on government. It’s been by and large the voice of the government instead. That Tiabbi interview I link to above makes some brilliant points about why the media is disconnected from the public. Read it.

Which, honestly, so be it. Let the mainstream media be the mouthpiece for government. The media as it once was is not as relevant as before. They are simply an increasingly small part of the head to the long tail of conversations happening in the world. More people are talking about more things through blogs, social networks emails and, hell, face to face conversations than the media can cover based on its rigid standards of “excellence.”

The truly excellent writing is happening on the network, all you have to do is filter the noise. And know what you care about. Someone else cares about it too. They’re probably an expert. Or, at the very least, not boring.

On an entirely business level

Mainstream media moron Bill Keller (I’m sure he’s a smart guy, but this smart guy missed the damn point) opines in his speech about how the media is mishandling coverage in Iraq. There are only 50 western reporters in Iraq. When Saddam was captured, there were 1,000. Do you know why this is? The media has a really, really hard time making news relevant to their readers. I guarantee you they were all pretty much writing the same stories over and over, hardly one of them relevant to their market.

So dump the overseas reporter and use wire copy. It’s expensive to send a reporter to the Mideast. And it’s more expensive when said reporter joins the chorus (or boys club or whatever you want to call it) and writes the same thing everybody else is writing instead of writing something interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant. God, when put that way, the news media sound like “A-list” tech bloggers. Fuck.

Taibbi is right. Where are the news people who really know what they’re talking about? I’m sure those 50-some reporters in Iraq know what’s going on around them, but by the time it’s vetted by editors and wire monkeys who most likely don’t know what the hell is going on, we the readers are left with mindless, boring drivel, watered down and written for 12-year-olds. And even if a single great story somehow survives this process, there’s hardly ever context to what we’re reading. There’s no sense of history, of the characters and events leading up to the news item. And if there is it is trivial. “Today the stock market fell because a cow looked at a businessman in India.”

No, bring the reporters home and spend an eternity talking about Paris Hilton’s latest idiotic endeavor. It’s relevant to your readers, right? No, but at least it’s halfway interesting when faced with matter of fact city council reporting. It’s also cheap (literally and metaphorically)!

This is the cancer of the media. This is the bane of my existence. Why the hell did I ever think it would be any different? We should all just quit and go into advertising and marketing. At least there we’d be honest about being lazy scumbags.

If you think it’s all about long-form enterprise stories, you’re mistaken, too. Unless you can show your readers by the time they read the headline and look at the photo why this story is important to them, they’re off to the funnies page. Or calling to cancel their subscription. You’re wasting space.

Relevance matters. It matters more than any other news attribute.

You have two options that I can think of: Cast a wider net or throw spears. Use your space to write about more things with the hope that a few or more articles will matter to people or go out, pick valuable segments of your population and cater to their proclivities.

As much as I hate to say it, it worked for FOX News. It works for professional blog networks. It works for the book publishing industry. It works for magazines. That isn’t to say the people are turned off to the idea of balance and fairness. It’s just that we’ve turned those ideals in the newsroom into bland and boring. We try to be everything to everybody. It’s stupid.

On an entirely personal level

It can be better.

We can drop the pompous, holier-than-thou act. We could start thinking in terms of neighbors instead of readers and eyeballs. We could remove the laziness from newsrooms across the country. We could stop hiding behind upside-down pyramids and passive voice. We could stop worrying about beating the competition; Nobody is comparing notes (scoops are illusory ego boosters). We could start serving segments of readers better. We could demand that J-schools get their heads out of their asses and pass only the students that didn’t just get into this business because they hate math. Then we could make our content interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant.

To do that, we should diversify our media offerings. We should enable our audience to join the conversations. We should solicit the best voices of our communities. We should stop looking at blogs as a unified object out to destroy us. We should create and design tighter, better papers and Web sites. We should create tighter news packages. Dump the decisions by committee. Think outside your products and go where your readers are.

We should do more and talk less.

Regarding Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention

As a singer/songwriter in my little town of Zap, North Dakota, I applaud your actions to take on the vile and contemptuous University system in regards to theft of my music. I must personally thank you for this. You are a hero to me and people like me.

Some may call me a failure at contemporary Christian rap/soul/funk/big band music, but I have only one person to blame: The American Education System. It feeds off small composers of fine, easy listening tunes. The Ivory Tower actively encourages its students not to learn about the BIBLE, but to learn about evolution. Where has this gotten us? Thievery. I am only a failure because The American Education System has stolen my music and given copies to students freely! Don’t you see?

You do, I bet.

But, I must say that while your efforts to rob students of their education for stealing popular digital songs (Such as my classic: “Jesus has a six pack and he died for your sins, gangsta”) are most certainly noble, they do not exact enough punishment on students.

I suggest that instead of pulling only financial aid from students of universities that don’t actively seek out and destroy the lives of copyright infringers, you must also revoke all degrees “earned” at such universities.

It is the only way.

The more you know!

Zac Echola
Singer/Songwriter/Interpretive dancer

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Sooner or later I’m going to have to get back to writing about things I actually care about. But I actually did send this to the Congressman. You can read more about the above idiocy here.

I twittered tonight that I was going to watch a movie because the Internet was sucking, but then it (it being the Internet) distracted me again. I know right!

A while back I also twittered–god damn, I hate the Internet sometimes–anyway: I wrote a post on the Web site twitter.com:

I’ve stopped bothering to remember things. Not immediate little things like get milk. Wikipedia has everything I need to know now. It’s official.

Well it’s true, I believe. If someone asks me what I know about NAFTA (who wouldn’t ask me what I know about NAFTA?), I don’t even bother thinking about what I actually know about NAFTA. I just look it up on Wikipedia. NAFTA. Hell, the Wikipedia page for NAFTA is the first page to come up in a Google search for NAFTA. Take that USDA!

Shit, there’s an entire generation of students out there who rely entirely on Wikipedia as a starting point (and oftentimes ending point) for their C-grade papers. The ‘C’ stands for consensus, or decision by committee or most commonly, crap.

Back on topic: Wikipedia contains all knowledge. Or at least approaches containing all knowledge (kinda like .999 repeating approaches zero). So tonight I set off to prove it using completely arbitrary arguments and irrational thought processes.

Here are the rules, arbitrary and irrational as they may be:

• Start at Knowledge because that makes the most sense
• Follow the first link in the article
• Don’t include the disambiguation links, dummy
• Or the links to Wikipedia policies
• Or the links to pronunciations
• Just click the first legitimate link
• Repeat until you can’t go any further

Easy enough.

Knowledge starts out with a definition of knowledge from the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as it turns out, is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press.

Dictionaries, if you didn’t know (because you are stupid or of stupid-descent), are also known as a lexicons, as well as being books “of alphabetically listed words in a specific language, with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and other information.”

You get where this is going. Lexicon begets linguistics begets science begets knowledge.

Shit. Now what? I think we’ve run into a Wikipedia circle. Now, ‘Wikipedia circle’ doesn’t have an entry on Wikipedia, because ‘Wikipedia circle’ isn’t Knowledge according to Wikipedia (yet). I’d add the entry myself, but those snobs over at Wikipedia would delete the page instantly.

Ugh. Sometimes I hate the Internet.

Back on topic: Wikipedia contains all knowledge. Maybe I’m just starting at the wrong point. If Wikipedia contains all knowledge then Wikipedia itself is all knowledge.

So, let’s start at Wikipedia:

• Multilingualism
• Monolingual
• Greek
• Language
• Phenomenon
• Event
• Festival
• Religion
• Prayer
• Deity
• Preternatural
• Natural
• Phenomena

Again. Notice that it’s not a complete circle. Wikipedia takes us on a fun journey, then we get stuck in the phenomena Wikipedia circle phenomenon.

Phenomena are everywhere.

But to the keen eye, you’ll notice that this completely arbitrary system I came up with (not unlike tech bloggers using compete.com for stats comparisons) shows that the Wikipedia path is longer than the Knowledge path.

If I know anything–not that I’d need to know anything anymore. If I know anything, longer is always better.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it tonight.

Now, time for that movie.