Flavors of the month
Posted on May 18, 2008
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
I’ve been reading all the noise about Google Friend Connect and Facebook from an amused distance.
Google Friend Connect is very similar to something like Yahoo’s MyBlogLog where website publishers (someone like me) can build an instant community around their blog, right on their blog. Widgetized social networks, if you will.
I get that Google isn’t actually retaining any Facebook data so that whole thing around Facebook blocking access is kind of silly. Let’s say that “Jill’s Curly Hair Blog” has Friend Connect on it, and my Facebook friend Mary joins that network. It will only impact me as Mary’s friend if I join the site too. Then I’ll be able to say, “Oh! Hey, my friend Mary is here.” Otherwise, the fact that Mary and I are Facebook friends remains between Mary and me. If my Facebook friend Pete joins “Bob’s Muscle Cars Rule” blog, my life (and my data) won’t change, other than my seeing that fact in a news stream on Facebook or on Pete’s profile.
I never joined MyBlogLog because I can’t see the practical utility of it. Either for my site or as a participant on someone else’s. If there is a thread that interests me and I want to be a part of that conversation, I do so by either leaving a comment or blogging about it knowing that the pingback will leave a trail. But ongoing “membership” on someone’s personal blog? Not so much. Especially if it depends on the sites/communities I care about also belonging to MyBlogLog or Friend Connect.
That’s why I like FriendFeed, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader shared feeds, etc. If someone likes what I have to say, they’ll build community around it by sharing it to places that people go to see what people they care about are sharing. They don’t necessarily need to make a commitment to my site and turn over their avatar to appear in a little window for my site to be part of the global conversation.
Sure, the larger more well-known sites have hundreds of members, but when I click around MyBlogLog it doesn’t take long to see that the vast majority of sites have so few members it looks a little pitiful.
I would much rather see the ability to search Facebook friends to see common friends on Twitter or FriendFeed, than to see on a blog I’m visiting which of my friends also reads the same blog. The web is fractured enough. We need more aggregation and filtering, and less mini communities that will only make the small blog publisher feel more out of the loop when their numbers don’t stack up.
I guess I’m just waiting for all this to solve a unique problem, rather than just exist to compete for attention within the tech blogging echo chamber. I want to see Google pay more attention to making their own Gmail contact data more usable for their users than worrying about connecting users to Facebook data.
I’m also hoping that video comments on blogs die a quick and painful death.
I love well-produced online video as much as anyone else. The best talking head videos are that way because people work hard to make sure the sound and lighting are good, and they know what they’re going to say before they open their mouths.
When I’m scanning a comment thread, I have absolutely no desire to see what someone has to say on the subject sitting there in their pajamas, mumbling into their webcam in a dimly lit room with some sort of strange feedback buzz over it all. I don’t need to hear them fumble for words…um, I think…you know…um, like…
If I’m reading a blog and my family is nearby, I’m not going to click on a video comment that may or may not have language on it that I don’t want my children to hear. I may be in a public place. I may already have headphones on because I’m listening to something else and I’m not going to stop iTunes just to hang on their every word waiting for them to say something profound. Sorry.
C3 has a new website!
Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Design | Leave a Comment
Considering that I’ve been waiting over a year to be able to post that headline, you think I wouldn’t have waited nearly a week to write this blog.
A bit of an improvement over the old one:
The new site was well over a year in the making. Not because it’s all that complex, but it’s been difficult to focus a very small organization on all the moving parts that had to go into a ground-up rethinking of a website on a small budget.
Some details…
FriendFeed
Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Misc. | 2 Comments
I don’t know about you, but I think I’m over Facebook. It’s too noisy. The time I used to give to Facebook, I now find myself giving to FriendFeed.
What I like is finding people who say/do interesting things online around topics, ideas and interests we have in common and easily following all the ways they express those topics, ideas and interests.
It’s called “FriendFeed” but friendship has little to do with it. Maybe the folks I follow will be “friends” one day based on those common topics, ideas and interests. I hope so. Some already are. But that’s not where it starts. FriendFeed should follow Twitter’s lead and change “friends” to “following” which is a more accurate term. Considering the name of the service, probably won’t happen.
FriendFeed is similar to Plaxo Pulse and at least 10 other services where you input all the places you are and follow others where they’re at (a kind of lifestreaming). As I posted earlier this morning, one can no longer assume that the blog is the center of someone’s online universe. It certainly isn’t mine. It’s just another avenue I use to express myself publicly (read: carefully).
I also post on Web Worker Daily. I share links through Google Reader and Del.icio.us. I post some photos on Flickr and SmugMug. And of course, I tweet. Interested in the same things I’m interested in? Subscribe to me on FriendFeed and you get it all.
FriendFeed is pretty simple. I like that the interface is low-key. It doesn’t trip over itself like Pulse does. It only sends me information I’ve asked for (which is once per day).
It’s not a popularity contest. I love that I can only see how many folks are subscribed to me, and I can’t see how many folks are subscribed to others. Yet I can see who they’re subscribed to. A nice way to discover new voices.
Bottom line is that I’m not that interested in Facebook groups, pokes, games, etc. which makes most of Facebook annoying these days.
I love the “hide” feature (underneath each entry). I prefer to read tweets in Twhirl. I’m starting to appreciate FriendFeed for the other streams. So I set FriendFeed to only show me tweets that have comments/activity in FriendFeed. Cuts down on a lot of the duplicate noise.
Currently, you can only auto-discover fellow FriendFeed users through your address book. I wish there was a way I could pour in the list of folks I already follow in Twitter.
The blog’s stream runs deeper than Twitter
Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Life, Misc. | 1 Comment
Like many, I’ve been more active on Twitter lately than my blog. It’s hard to explain why, for many of the same reasons Twitter is hard to explain in the first place. You either get it, or you don’t.
I was just reading a post from someone who begs folks to “Twitter Less, Blog More.” One of the reasons he gives:
Even if you don’t like to think in abstract terms, there are material reasons to opt to blog something instead of Twittering it. In the long run every backlink and every visitor count. Guess what, every time you Twitter instead of blogging something interesting you are risking to lose visitors and backlinks.
Guess what? That’s exactly the reason I’ll put something on Twitter instead of blogging it. And it’s part of the reason why I don’t publish my Twitter stream here. There are times, more often than not lately, where I just want to be part of the conversation without all the baggage.
I’m still a little blog-shy. Last year, some of this blog’s archives from 2006 were taken out of context, twisted and used against me in a legal case. That’s about as much as I’m going to say about that right now. Rest assured. I do plan to blog the details at some point when I feel it’s safe to do so. If for no other reason than to serve as a warning to other parents fighting for appropriate services for their children.
We often forget that the average person doesn’t see the difference between sites that report news in blog format and personal blogs that react to news in the moment. What I’m writing this minute is how I feel and how I see the world at 7:14 am on Sunday, April 27, 2008. That may change at 7:14 pm tonight, or it may change in a week or month from now. But because I’m blogging this, it will have more permanence than if I put these thoughts on Twitter in between my thoughts on 100 other topics that I may tweet about.
Here, I refuse to go back and edit/delete posts. If it’s clear I’m editing after-the-fact what I posted in the past, how can you trust that I believe what I’m saying right now? I haven’t even removed or edited the posts that were used against me. I’ll say I’ve changed my mind. I won’t change the past to catch up to the present. It’s a losing game.
Yes, I know that with my tweets on the public timeline everything I say there is for the world’s eyes and it can still come back and haunt me later. I’m careful in my tweets, especially as the legal matter referenced above is not resolved. But somehow, 140 characters caught in between completely irrelevant content clearly says “this was in the moment” in a way that a blog post never can.
WordPress 2.5
Posted on March 30, 2008
Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment
I was originally planning to wait before upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.5. I usually like to read what others have to say before diving in for myself. But then I was poking around the dashboard on my blog and I saw that the fabulous WordPress Automatic Update plug-in had been updated to version 1.0 to work with WP 2.5. That, and the fact that WP 2.5 supposedly allows you to insert code with the visual editor on. I backup my database every night, so I decided to hold my nose and jump in.
Using the WPAU plug-in, the upgrade took about 3 minutes from start to finish. No problem at all (that I can see).
There are some things I like right away. I like the tighter editing window. I like new dashboard which puts more emphasis on my stuff than WordPress.org self-selling. I like the change in language from “slug” (which no one understood) to “Permalink” which makes more sense. I like that superfluous settings are tucked away, while things like the post status and tags are front and center.
Hmmm…only thing that seems a little weird is the fact that it’s giving me Pacific time for draft saves, rather than Eastern/UTC -4 (time zone is set correctly in blog settings).
And yes, I only posted the above screen shot so I could play with the new integrated media upload tool. 
