Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Blogging Your Passions (or, How I Got Into Google)

Robert Scoble, a famous tech personality in Silicon Valley, is hiring an assistant.  In a post expressing his frustrations with the résumés he’s received so far, he lets the candidates know the best way to stand out: blog.  Sure Scoble’s hiring for a “tech” position, but I am confident that blogging is going to play an increasingly prominent role as a qualification for all sorts of opportunities.  Unfortunately, this aspect of the Web’s impact is not getting as prominent a place as the warnings against expsoing too much about yourself on Facebook.  This tone damages the conversation, overemphasizing the paranoia and neglecting (if not rejecting) the positive possibilities.  I want to change that tone, and that’s what this post is all about.

Scare Tactics

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of commotion about how companies, and even universities nowadays, are investigating the digital “breadcrumbs” left across the Internet by candidates for employment/admission.  Whether doing a simple Google search to see what appears in the top few results, or using dedicated tools to “check between the sofa cushions”, if you will: those whom we seek to impress are taking more and more seriously our online behavior.  (On an interesting side note, Spokeo — which I covered in one of my first posts on this blog — has begun advertising itself as a tool for HR professionals to do “deep social search” on job candidates).

I’ll never forget the story my friend Henry told me of his first day at the White House as an intern last year.  As they walked into one of their orientations, there was a projector and screen set up showing slideshow.  The images being projected were drawn from the public albums of the new interns’ Facebook profiles; you can imagine that a good number of those pictures were, well… not flattering.  When the nervous interns were settled uncomfortably in their seats, they had a nice little talking-to about how they were the face of the White House, how all these images could be accessed and republished by anyone, etc.  Luckily for Henry, he had previously (and famously) sanitized his profile to include only the following message: “I’d rather talk to you in person.”

“Be careful what you leave behind,” the experts and mainstream media tell us.  This is certainly fair advice.  What they fail to point out are the many positive ways in which we can embrace the idea of the “perpetual digital dossier”, and harness it to really take ourselves places.

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Making Twitter Work for the Masses

Back in February, I attempted to demystify Twitter for the non-tech oriented.  The service was (and still is) trying to find its place in the crowded marketplace of tech innovations.  It’s been plagued by serious downtime, and has even had to cut back on some of its features in order to provide more stability.  While it continues to slowly gain recognition outside the narrow audience of technophiles, it still suffers from a big problem: you can’t explain it to your grandmother in just a few sentences.

The easiest way I know how to explain Twitter is as a “microblogging system” or “a tricked out Facebook status update”.  In my blog post I called it a combination of text messaging, Facebook status, blogging, and instant messaging.  Little to none of that would make sense to someone who doesn’t own a computer.  Of course, it’s not like those people are the audience for Twitter.  But if you can’t quickly and easily explain your product to audiences that aren’t already embedded in these developments, how can you become relevant or attractive to them?

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Web Celebrations: The Return of Full RSS Feeds

Last week I griped about Mental Floss (one of my very favorite blogs) truncating their RSS feed.  At the time I wrote:

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

Maybe I’m an atypical feed reader, but I suspect not.  The truth is, a partial feed decreases the likelihood that I’ll read something by approximately 100%.  [...] When content providers refuse to provide a full feed, they disrupt [my] information flow.  As a result, I read less of their material.  In other words, don’t be surprised if fewer Mental Floss items end up in my Monday Links or anywhere else on this site.  I still receive the (partial) feed, but I’m. Not. Reading. It.

Harsh I know, but hey: that’s why I have a blog.  Well folks, it brings me great joy to share this *breaking* news:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Birmingham, ALA. Today, at 4:15pm EST, the editorial board of mental_floss magazine kept their promise to  readers and turned their blog’s RSS feed back to full blast. The feed had been temporarily disabled due to hacking issues. The gushing stream of full RSS stories hitting inboxes around the nation was quickly followed by cheers heard across America, and the popping of champagne corks distribution of celebratory juice boxes around the magazine’s headquarters.
“This is a great day for mental_floss and this is a great day for our readers!” exclaimed a triumphant Will Pearson, President of the company. “But mostly this is a great day for mental_floss.” The comment was nearly drowned out by the thunderous sounds of high-fiving and back patting taking place.

Well done, Floss Nation.  In honor of their editors seeing the light, I hereby shamelessly plug the geektacular shirts available in the Mental Floss store.

It’s a web celebration (a webebration?).  Ball’s in your court now, Freakonomics.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user ~Twon~.

Web Frustration: Partial RSS Feeds

I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments).  But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.

Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary.  A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:

Sticking Together, Up to a Point

The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.

It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page.  But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.

When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed.  In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):

Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

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Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com

Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!

My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!