Here Comes the Blog Flood

By | November 22, 2011
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The power of the history of the Internet? So much feels disposable about the Internet, and blogs haven’t helped. Postings more than a few days old feel like ancient history, and yet at the same time they sit there, a snapshot of a point of view the author can barely remember ever having. Comments added by anyone stumbling along more than a few hours or days later look like stragglers, people who turned up on the wrong day for a party and could do little more than leave their calling card.

But here was a site that struck me differently. It’s just a collection of comments on Peter Gabriel’s ‘Here Comes The Flood’ (one of his best numbers). It’s not a blog, or a web page past its expiry date, although it should be the latter: It was set up in 1994 by a German programmer called Brigitte Jellinek. The last comment attached to the page on Flood is less than a month ago. The first was in February 1996. Amazing, really; more than a decade of simple, sometimes moving thoughts on one timeless song. As Ms Jellinek herself observes on the homepage:

In December 1994 I set up this page to give people on the Web the chance to share what P[eter] G[abriel’]s songs mean to them. I didn’t expect much – from my previous experience with guestbooks I was prepared for idle chit chat and childish remarks. Well, you all proved me wrong. Every time I read some of the comments I am amazed about the quality of the contributions.

There can’t be that many sites from 1994 still so active, so alive (and someone taking such effort to preserve one). Credit to Ms. Jellinek.

Perhaps some blogs have this timelessness too, but the reverse chronological nature of blogs, their emphasis on a log, a journal, and time, perhaps work against this. Posts are time sensitive, more transient, and stumblers on an old post are likely to see their voices lost in the relentless forward march. That’s what makes the Flood page so remarkable — about a song that was originally performed in 1977, if I’m not mistaken — in that the comments may span more than a decade, and yet all share the same address, the same timelessness. A lesson, perhaps, for the design and future of blogs.

Netscape Diggs In and Elbows Out the Competition

By | November 22, 2011
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AOL/Netscape has launched a beta of its new homepage that looks uncannily like Digg, a hugely popular site for techies to publish stuff and have their stories sorted by popularity. Actually it not only looks like Digg, two of the top three stories are Digg’s. AOL’s been smart tho: visit the source page and you can only do so within a big black sidebar that keeps you wedged inside the Netscape site. (You can’t resize it, but you can turn it off, but obviously by default. Meaning it will open with every external link you click on. Oh, and it’s really slow to load.)

Perhaps by coincidence, or by the efforts of a few Diggers, those two Digg stories are less than complimentary about AOL: The first, AOL Copies Digg (“Check out what this is based on”) and the second  Trying to cancel AOL (“Here’s a recording I did of a conversation between myself and AOL while trying to cancel an account I no longer needed. It was old, and I hadn’t used it in a REALLY long time, I just never got around to cancelling it. Enjoy!”)

A piece by Reuters says that this new site has “editors, which Netscape calls anchors,” who “can choose to highlight what they consider important stories.” This might be the top portion of the page, but I assume the anchors are not highlighting the two stories mentioned above. Or maybe they are, in some wild new form of self-flagellating transparency?

I won’t get into the journalistic implications of all this here. But there’s a telling comment by Netscape.com’s new general manager, dot-com news entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, to the Reuters reporter: “We don’t have to do a level of journalism that you guys do,” he said, referring to traditional news organizations. “You guys take it 90 yards, we take it the next 10.”

The reporter didn’t pick up on this. But when sites like this basically suck content from other sites, from NYT to Digg to Reuters, to form the basis of their homepage, and then link to that content within a sidebar that squeezes the original website partly out of view and off the screen plaster, that 10 yards looks mighty cheap for the yardage you get. Whose content is it now? Who’s making money off whom? And who is the smartest person in the room?

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Boingling Along

By | November 22, 2011
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Another social annotation tool, this time called Boingle, put together by Greg Martin, who writes:

Boingle is a stripped down social annotation system that lets you annotate within web pages with the result being a simple markup (“Boingles (2)”) that looks as though it belongs in the page, much as a link titled “Comments (4)” looks normal within a blog. It is very understated in nature, and lets the annotation content itself be the star.

Social annotation, in case you’ve not done it, is a method to leave comments (annotations) on web pages so others can see them when they visit. It’s mildly popular, though of course only starts working when a critical mass develops of people using the same tool.

Boingle is a toolbar for Firefox and IE, allowing you to add comments (Boingles) by selecting portions of a webpage and then typing in comments (no need for an account; just enter your name, or anyone else’s).

I agree Boingle is understated, which is good, but not being able to see what the comments are on the actual web-page reduces its effectiveness, I suspect. Clicking on the ‘Boingles (2)’ link will open another browser window, which surfers may feel is one browser window more than they need. The other problem, I suspect is that perhaps the ‘Boingles’ links are too understated, sometimes not really being visible to anyone who isn’t looking hard for them.

I think I’d rather see the Boingles appear either as a pop-up or in the browser sidebar. But there might be sound reasons why that may not work.Anyway, great to see people exploring this avenue again.

List of all the social annotation tools I can find here. Please let me know of more I’ve missed.

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A Chip off the Old Flock

By | November 22, 2011
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Flock, which I wrote about a few months back, is now in public beta (meaning ordinary folks can use it without too much weeping). TechCrunch carries an interview with the folks behind it.

What’s so good about it? Well, it’s all about trying to build Web 2.0 into the browser, so the browser isn’t so much a browser as a tool to upload photos, blog, read RSS, that kind of thing. You can drag a photo and publish it, view photos across the top of the browser, search faster (the search box includes results that update as you type the word.)

I’m most interested in the blogging tool. And while it’s better, it sure ain’t perfect. I’d like to see a proper editor with all the features of an editor, including shortcuts (Control + k for inserting link seems to be a pretty well-defined standard, for example.) That said, it seems a tad more stable than BlogJet, for which one would have to pay money.

How does these guys make money? Mainly through selling the spots in the search box at the top right corner, I believe. Yahoo! seems to rule the roost at the moment, and it doesn’t seem possible to change that as the default without opening a separate preferences window, unless I’m missing something. I assume that extra step is deliberate, something most folks wouldn’t bother to do.

Anyway, another browser can’t be bad news. I’m not going to dump Firefox for now, but I think I’ll keep Flock a-flickering too for now.

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Blogged with Flock

Content Killer

By | November 22, 2011
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Good piece by Publishing 2.0 » (Google Is Killing the Economics of Content) on how Google’s AdSense is killing the internet by driving the creation of sites that exist solely to squeeze money from AdSense. Here’s how it works in brief, based on Robert Weisman’s piece in The Boston Globe :

A company amasses hundreds of thousands of Internet domain names — and not just silly names, but ones like photography.com, bookstore.com, or jobfinder.com — and then puts a few links on it that look like content but aren’t (new term: “content-light”) . Users go there by typing in the name (rather than searching on Google, as many users apparently do; another new term: “direct navigation”) and then click on AdSense links on the site. As Scott Karp puts it:

The sites were talking about here are NOT about content and they are NOT about serving web users in any meaningful way — they exist for one purpose — pay-per-click ad revenue. …

Why bother with the expense of creating content? Google certainly doesn’t care. And the advertisers dumping billions of dollars into AdWords and similar ad networks don’t seem to care where their ads appear. It’s all about the click.

Companies involved: NameMedia, Marchex. According to alarm:clock, which monitors new tech ventures, NameMedia has acquired a leading domain reseller, BuyDomains, GoldKey, and dozens of smaller domain collections over the last year to create a portfolio of more than million domain names. It was formerly called YesDirect, and claims to have more than 25 million visitors a month.