Category: Blogging

Metcalfe’s Blog

We’ve talked in the past about Metcalfe’s Law, the idea that in a network, every new member of the network not only derives value from the network, but makes the network as a whole more valuable; the classic example cited is the fax machine. Every fax machine sold increases the value of existing fax machines.

Blogging is one of those Metcalfe applications. Consider this: you’ve got a blog with a decent theme, and on that blog, chances are you have a blogroll or list of friends, sites, and links. (and if you don’t, you might want to consider it) On here, the blogroll is on the right-most navigation bar. The navigation of your blog probably also contains links to other things you care about, such as causes, friends, and even your own stuff on other sites.

Here’s the neat part. Every time I write a blog post, WordPress creates a new page, with a new URL. On that new page, there are a whole pile of links to other pages on this site and on the blog roll. Every blog post makes preceding blog posts more valuable, and as a bonus, every blog post creates an entirely new page with outbound links to everyone in my blogroll. They all benefit every time I blog. I benefit every time I blog. Blogging is self-reinforcing, and that is one of the features that makes it such a powerful tool.

Google Reader, Your Newspaper, and Chris Brogan

The first impression I have of Chris Brogan is from a presentation at BarCamp Boston. Actually, the first impression was watching him try to record a presentation by holding an iRiver 1 inch from a speaker cabinet, but beyond that, he did a great presentation on building content networks. One of the takeaway moments of that presentation was when he took a copy of the Boston Globe he’d stolen from his neighbor’s driveway and tore it up in front of the crowd into individual articles. He handed out an article to each person and said, “This is blogging.”

Each person’s blog is, in this model, a newspaper column. People don’t pay to read individual newspaper columnists, in his presentation, people pay for the newspaper, and the ads in the Boston Globe are no different than AdWords or banner ads, really.

What Google Reader does with its shared items and shared items of friends is no less than let you publish your own newspaper. You incorporate the authors you read and like into your own reading, which is your field reporting staff, and then hand-pick all the best stuff out for your friends and the world. That’s the distilled newspaper, YOUR newspaper, the newspaper that you’d gladly pay for if someone actually published it for you. It’s your news.

Your Google Reader Shared Items is every bit a part of your personal brand and worldview as any other form of media you publish. Some people might call it reblogging or lazy man’s blogging, but the reality is that it’s as much work to edit a newspaper as it is to write for one, and Google Reader Shared Items is a newspaper with you as the editor. What you choose to share reflects on your personal brand and what you think is important in the world. Want to check out a new employee? See what’s in their Shared Items. Want to see what’s on your boss’ mind? You know which newsstand to hit.

What’s in the headlines of Your Daily News?

photo courtesy of Mr. Brogan’s Flickr feed. 

I wish you a very happy new year 2008.

2008 is going to be an interesting year. Economically, it’s going to be a rough ride. You know this, and so does everyone else.

Oddly enough, this is kind of comforting. I wish for peace, health, happiness, and prosperity for all my friend, but a dose of economic sourness for the world as a whole is a needed thing to restore balance after the past few years of excess. I also firmly and wholly believe in my friends and their abilities to the extent that in rough times, their abilities and capabilities will shine through.

When it’s noon, everything looks bright.

When it’s midnight, you will see who really shines on their own.

I believe in you, my friends. Let’s shine!

What matters most in social media is the exercise of vital powers. Chris Wilson from Answers for Freelancers twittered and blogged his family’s search for 16 year old Manessa Donovan, his sister-in-law, in the hopes that his social media network could aid his family in their search for Manessa.

I did a few small things here and there on MySpace to aid in the search, but what I thought was most interesting was the contrast between the “Dig a Tech Girl/Guy” debate yesterday and finding a lost person today.

How many people who ardently twittered about the hot guy/hot gal of social media equally ardently twittered to help make a real impact in the life of someone in our new media community? How many people brought the discussion of ways and ideas to help Chris Wilson out in the forefront of conversation?

Which mattered more – who’s a hottie, or who’s in need of help?

To those of you who embraced Chris Wilson’s plea for help as a cause worth promoting, thank you from a fellow new media professional who also cares, and from someone who believes that the power we wield in new media MUST be used to make a difference. Your support, great or small, ALWAYS makes a difference.

If you want to continue helping, Chris Wilson has a blog with updates at SaveManessa.wordpress.com. I’ve got a MySpace page at MySpace.com/savemanessa – please contribute what assistance you can, be it awareness or feet on the ground.

To those of you who embraced the hot guy/hot girl contest promotion but not the help-a-friend-in-need…

More of what you want, Julien Smith and the Attention Economy

This afternoon, there was a healthy discussion on Twitter about the perception of women in technology and whether lowest-common-denominator entertainment, be it Dig a Tech Girl or Clash of the Choirs, demeaned women by focusing on physical attributes as the key measurement of their worth. This is not a debate for this blog post, and plenty of others can argue the merits far better than me.

What this is a blog post about is a reflection of something Julien Smith said at our PodCamp Boston 2 session: we live in the age of the attention economy. With so many channels of media, with so many things competing for the same 24 hours, anything you want to promote has to be marketed for the attention economy.

Whether a woman’s appearance is a factor at all in her worth is not the heart of the debate. The true heart is the attention economy, and the reality is that appearances garner attention very quickly, if fleetingly. That’s human nature, the way we’re wired and the way societies build on top of those fundamentals. If you want to capture attention, market with any strong emotion. It just so happens that physical attractiveness is the easiest, lowest cost, and lowest mental processing load factor on which you can compete for attention.

If there can be a solution to the issue of using attractiveness and surface traits for marketing purposes, it has to be that the stakeholders who want to foment change MUST deliver competing content that is more compelling, more powerful, more engaging, more attention-grabbing and attention-holding than lowest common denominator content. If you want lofty social values to eclipse boobies, then you’d better package and market those values in a way that makes them highly desirable content to consume.

I had this discussion recently with a teacher of mine, discussing how to combat negative comments and slander on the internet. My final point was that if you don’t like some of the content online, you can either struggle in vain to have it removed or changed, or you can flood the internet with the content that YOU want to have distributed, making it more compelling than the garbage, and let the garbage just wither from lack of attention.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If you want to displace lowest common denominator entertainment, have something ready to take its place. The beauty of new media is that to get more of what YOU want, all you have to do is create it.