Blog

So, Michael Schrage has written his last column for MIT’s Technology Review. Wonder what the politics behind that decision were, given the new editor, Jason Pontin, formerly of Red Herring? Anyway, he goes out on a high note, I think, with Innovation Diffusion.

Simply put: innovation isn’t what innovators do; it’s what customers, clients, and people adopt. Innovation isn’t about crafting brilliant ideas that change minds; it’s about the distribution of usable artifacts that change behavior. Innovators — their optimistic arrogance notwithstanding — don’t change the world; the users of their innovations do.

Or, as I like to say: “It’s the people, stupid.” (Don’t mix those words up!)

On Sunday, I earned my long-sleeved Gary Larsen T-shirt by running the annual Run to the Far Side road race in Golden Gate Park. Brisk, even chilly, for San Francisco, but no rain and the course runs three blocks from home, so the family came out to yell at/for me as I went by. This year, though, I ducked the 10K in favor of the 5K. My body thanks me for it, even if it’s an admission of my lack of training, otherwise known as reality. 19:33 for the 5K, and home for waffles before 10am, so I can’t complain too much. The scary part was having a dream recently where I was excited about buying an ergometer and training on it regularly. Clearly, I’ve been away from rowing a bit too long if erging is invading my dreams.

One of the oddities for me in thinking about blogs is that there is rarely a sense of someone staying “on topic” in the sense of traditional publications. If you read the Wall Street Journal, you know what you’re going to get, and where you’re going to get it, often to the column on the page. If you read CNET News.com, ditto… although the web removes some of those navigation cues.

With blogs, you’re reading about individuals, and most of us have — and share — varied interests. Some folks even blog about those different interests in the same place, with or without categorization. That diversity — all in the same blog — is part of the appeal for me, but it sure makes it hard to categorize different voices into coherent groupings.

Is Tim Bray an engineer/entrepreneur/photographer/father/Sun employee/Canadian? Yes. Is Matt Mullenweg a musician/coder/photographer/one-time Texan, current Californian/open-source leader/CNET employee? Yes. Am I a father/husband/brother/reader/runner/map dilettante/CNET News.com employee/product manager/San Francisco resident? Yes. Is it useful to apply these labels? Not really. But how do you describe why you would read, for instance, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog?

I read all of the above, among many others. [One more item for the blog to-do list: a real blogroll, just because.] To the early adopters, among which I count myself, the names above often mean something, whether you know them as a person or not. Some of the labels stick. But the reason this still works is that the early adopters in the blogging world are still a small group, David Sifry’s numbers be damned. That’s why I use the “echochamber” label for this group, even though I’m one of those listening and, at times, contributing. It’s a lousy label, but I use it to remind myself that this evolution is still in the early stages, so I have to temper my excitement with patience. Just building it is not enough to get them to come.

Which reminds me… my original point was how hard it is to categorize blogs in any useful way. It’s actually harder than labelling someone in person because you meet people in the real world in certain contexts, and it’s only later that your knowledge of who a person is expands to frames of reference beyond the original context. When you read a blog, you often get multiple insights about a person’s interests in one quick scan/read. Granted, that’s only what they choose to share, but even that is often irreducible. And that’s great.

Next time I’ll stay on topic. Whatever that topic might be!

My Netflix queue is a jumble, and so I had a hard time remembering why I wanted to add The Sweet Smell of Success to my viewing list. Still, after a few weeks on the shelf, we watched it last weekend. I knew it was a “classic,” but black and white?!

Anyway, the theme that I found relevant to my skewed worldview was the power of the gossip columnist, J.J. Hunsecker. The pen wields incredible clout in this 1957 film. Competing gossip columnists lift up or (more often) destroy careers, businesses, and lives.

Most of Sweet Smell follows scheming between the columnist Hunsecker and the press agent, Sidney Falco. The career of Falco depends on his access to Hunsecker, and the columnist makes him pay dearly for a few scattered words in favor of Falco’s clients. Still, in the circulation wars that are endemic to a city of multiple newspapers (remember this is NYC in the 1950s), the columnist needs his parasitic remora for an edge up on the competition. We witness Falco working three different gossip columnists in this film, playing one against the other. Hard to imagine in this day and age, where newspapers usually have a monopoly in daliy print delivery in most American cities but that monopoly means less and less every day with a declining audience.

Will blogs like Wonkette or other gossip columns attain that influence? Will the rise of blogs restart the competition for audience in the world of gossip, opinion, and innuendo (read: columnists)? Or has cable television and talk radio already stolen that place in the media ecosystem and newspapers and bloggers alike are just sniffing at the crumbs either way?

My take is that the media reads blogs more than anybody else, so the echochamber reaches across the ecosystem already. And I still don’t believe local/regional newspapers have a long-term future.

It’s boring to read a blog about the difficulty of managing a blog, so I’ll keep it brief. Two of my 10 (?) readers noticed the brief outage, but I’m glad to say things are fully back online, as I republished the entire site. That act cleaned up some macro errors along the way, although I haven’t checked everything. If you come across anything randomly broken, let me know.

I have more “surgery” I want to do, but I’m finding that my Verio adventures continue. I’ll share the whole saga at some point, but I’m learning that my account switch has some other unintended consequences. So far, the blog works and email works; those are the necessities.

The DNS change is active, at least from here. Setting up WordPress is going to take a bit longer than anticipated, though, so first I’m going to see if I can publish via Radio to the new server. If this works, I’ll republish the entire site (or try to) and then keep working on WP.

Things may go off the air here in a bit… moving the DNS around. If things get weird, give me a try in 48 hours or so.

This afternoon, CNET News.com introduced public TrackBack and Pingback support. I’m thrilled the team got this feature live, and I look forward to seeing how readers and the larger web community respond. I don’t know of any other major non-blog site that has adopted these emerging standards. Of course, it’s hard to be first at anything… and even harder to prove it. We’re building on what others have done and applying it where it’s useful. That should be enough, right? So, I’m just satisfied that the feature is live and the thirteen readers and counting who pinged the TrackBack/Pingback introduction page were complimentary… although I can’t read the Japanese entry, so I’m hoping for the best.

Technically, TrackBack is a pain to grok. I spent lots of time talking it through with some really smart folks at work, and what seems simple (tell another site in a machine-readable way that you linked to them) requires more effort than I would have thought. Content management systems and blog publishing tools may be converging, but some of the assumptions of one world are not yet to be taken for granted in the other. I’m expecting that some of the abuse counter-measures which have spread through the blogging world will need to be adopted by CNET News.com. Note: there are some in place now, of course. There may be moments of concern. But you can’t really learn until you take the live plunge… and the water feels pretty good so far.

Irony is being unable to successfully send a ping from my own blog to the feature I helped launch. Radio just isn’t that clean on this stuff. Maybe this time it will work?

Jeff Veen turns off the Dock notification in NetNewsWire to preserve his sanity and his time. Yes, the red numbers go away. Dave Winer says those of us who treat RSS like email are “using it the wrong way.” Apparently, treating the red numbers (a proxy for RSS) as boxes to check off bothers Dave. I think the beauty of RSS is that you can do whatever the hell you want with the information. Dave can sit by the river while I can obsess about keeping up with flow. Different strokes for different folks.

The irony, I find, is that Dave and I agree elsewhere in his short paragraph, when he writes:

Your time is what’s valuable, there’s no value to the items you didn’t read. If it’s important it’ll pop up again.

Yeah… you can’t duck the bad news, and good news finds you eventually.

So, Foreign Policy has a long, scholarly piece on the growing influence of bloggers. The authors are Daniel W. Drezner, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a member of the group blog www.crookedtimber.org. I’ve never heard of them or their blogs, but I’m pretty much of a navel-gazer at the tech industry, so that’s my problem.

The argument, scattered across seven pages, boils down to one phrase from the first page:

Blogs are becoming more influential because they affect the content of international media coverage.

I have two reactions to that statement, neither of them congratulatory.

First, I’m amazed at how few voices it takes to tip a scale. Are we all so silent and passive that relatively few folks typing into the void can feed the non-stop beast that is professional media?

Second, I wonder if “international media coverage” is truly that lazy. I write that as someone who reads and enjoys dozens of blogs, as someone who has witnessed stories’ movement from blogs to more traditonal outlets, first elsewhere online and then even (gasp!) to print and television.

I find blogs fascinating for the glimpes offered of other people. I also appreciate the group filter on “international media coverage” that my collective reading provides. But I hope for more from “international media.” They have a professional responsibility (because they are paid to do it, if nothing else) to contribute to the global web of information and (occasionally) knowledge. Maybe my expectations are lower for bloggers, because I know it’s not a job (for all but a few), so I read for pleasure and insight, but not urgency. Connecting with other people does lead to influence, but it’s more on the “local” scale, where local can mean industry/interest as much as region.

One more clip:

When less renowned bloggers write posts with new information or a new slant, they will contact one or more of the large focal point blogs to publicize their posts. In this manner, poor blogs function as fire alarms for rich blogs, alerting them to new information and links. This self-perpetuating, symbiotic relationship allows interesting arguments and information to make their way to the top of the blogosphere.

Am I the dog (poor blog) in this relationship? Yes. 😉

Apparently, you can get a(n even) lengthier version of this argument in the authors’ paper for the American Political Science Association. That link, and more, can be found in the web version of the endnotes.