Philip Greenspun suggests small organizations use a blog for their website (ironically, not blogged):

The Small Business Web circa 1994

In 1994, a small organization that wanted a Web site would hire a “Web designer” skilled in the exotic art of “HTML programming” to produce a static Web site, i.e., a cluster of linked pages with a distinctive design and color scheme, giving information about the company or non-profit org. None of the pages would have a date on them because, by definition, nothing on the Web could be more than four years old.

The Small Business Web circa 2009

Managers of new small enterprises or established non-profit organizations sometimes ask me “Whom should I hire to build my Web site?”

I ask them what they want the site to do. The answer is to promote their business and distribute some basic information to customers. What they want is a static 1994-style graphic designer-produced Web site.

I explain that publishing on the Web is like producing a word processor document or writing an email. Would they hire a designer to write their documents and emails? No? Then why would they hire a designer to build their Web site?

he goes on…

Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.

Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?

Aaron Brazell at WordCamp is talking about search and finability “not SEO.” Riffing on Ambient Findability, he asks:

• Can people find your blog?
• Can people find their way around your blog?
• Can people find your content and services despite your blog?

Remember:

• Your blog serves as a nexus for information about you.
• You serve as the nexus for trust and relevance.

Going Further? Make your social content outside your blog searchable, findable via your blog. Brazell conveniently recommends using Lijit, which does just that.

In an interview on NPR, The Diana Chronicles author Tina Brown says “Diana had represented feeling, and the end of the stiff upper lip,” but the Princess comes off sounding a bit like a harbinger of the Cluetrain. Yes it’s all about the Royals, the glamor, and her dramatic death ten years ago, but take note of this exchange:

Renee Montagne: “The Royal Family is probably stronger than it was when she died.”

Tina Brown: “Yes, it’s true, but the Royal Family have also learned a lot from Diana.”

We saw that with [with the Queen's response to] the seven bombings in London. The Queen in the past would not have gone to visit the victims until her [schedule allowed], instead she flew straight to the scene, went into the hospital and visited immediately the victims. And she made a speech, an impromptu speech from the canteen of the hospital, which was absolutely unheard of for the Queen. These things had always been very scripted affairs and this one wasn’t. She spoke like a human being, from the heart.

Brown says a Palace official told her “This was something, really, we learned from Diana.”

And when Brown met with Diana in 1997, just months before her death:

she said to me, “I wish I could make them understand that they need to reach out more. They have to show that they are feeling people and they care,” but she said, “but I can’t get through to them. They need a different kind of advice.” And it’s very sad that within two months she herself was dead, and they saw she was right, really. And they’d never admit it in public, but they do admit it in private.“ (emphasis added)

Seven years after Cluetrain, Much of this will sound familiar now. Indeed, Brown’s story of Diana’s fight to make the Royal Family human is echoed in many of the Cluetrain theses:

• 25: Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
• 34: To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
• 35: But first, they must belong to a community.

Whatever the causality, the lesson here is clear: ”The Royal Family is probably stronger…“ ”Yes, it’s true, but the Royal Family have also learned a lot.“

Princess Diana, cluetrain, royal family, Princess Di, Diana, Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles, Princess of Wales, blog voice, communication, blogs, blogging

Another great comic from XKCD:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life on the internet. Let’s walk around the world.”

“Sounds good.”

[panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure]

“And yet all I can think of is ‘this will make for a great Livejournal entry.’”

blog, blogging, blogs, information behavior, internet, journaling, life, livejournal

Our CIO is asking whether or not Plymouth should get involved with blogs. Not to be overly academic, but I think we should define our terms.

Despite all the talk, “blogs” are a content agnostic technology being used to support all manner of online activities.

What you’re really asking is instead: what kind of content do we want to put online, and who do we want to let do it?

In thinking about that question, I’m immediately reminded of John Lovas, who’s blog at De Anza Community College I discovered via some web searching some time ago. His post on street texts, for example, is a contribution to the community of knowledge on that subject. Most interesting, perhaps, is how he addressed controversy within his professional community. Though he succumbed to cancer in June 2005, his blog still stands as an outstanding example of the quality of De Anza’s faculty.

At the University of San Diego, Lawrence B. Solum’s Copyfutures blog illustrates how valuable the (default) open nature of blogs are to the class exploration. In Copyfutures (active from 2004 to 2005), Solum’s students posted their work and thinking on matters of copyright and got quick feedback from the intellectual property community. Open source education it wasn’t, but current and topical (on a subject that demanded such) it was.

Harvard’s Berkman Center hosts blogs for all Harvard students, faculty and staff (“anyone with a harvard.edu, radcliffe.edu, or hbs.edu email address [can] host a blog with us”). The list is longer than I wish to count, but they’re clearly active, and the aggregation of selected blogs at the Berkman Center’s website reveals a number of thoughtful, no doubt influential, bloggers. Best of all, their terms of use and legal FAQ are offer great templates for any other university considering such services.

Terms of service, of course, mean nothing when what we’re really afraid of is bad publicity. Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler, who blogged about her Capitol Hill trysts, and former Delta flight attendant Ellen Somonetti, who posted photos on her blog, are among a small handful of bloggers who’ve lost their jobs when they crossed one line or another. Bad publicity, of course, can come from non-employee bloggers as well. Kryptonite is still living down blog posts that explained how to open their locks with a Bic pen.

Branding consultant James Torio explains: “Blogs are effective for disseminating information because they have similar characteristics to word of mouth.” But also counters that, for those who understand it, the blogosphere responds to correction and facts in ways word of mouth never did. As an example, he offers Microsoft’s deft handling of the MSN Spaces censorship controversy.

Microsoft felt the backlash from the blogosphere, and to their credit they did not issue press releases or create new advertisements for damage control, rather a blogger [joined] the conversation; he worked with Microsoft’s customers and listened to what they had to say.

Both the Microsoft and Kryptonite cases offer examples of how the internet is changing the public relations demands on any enterprise. Blogs are just one of the tools consumers now use to communicate their satisfaction, delight, frustration, or pain in their dealings with others. Amazon.com allows readers to comment on books, Epinions.com and a raft of other rating sites do the same for every other product, and for better or worse, Wikipedia reports everything the crowd knows on any subject (including Kryptonite locks and the controversy).

It’s worth noting that in none of these cases of fired employees or public relations snafus were the blogs hosted by the companies at the center of the issue. The fact is, if somebody says something embarrassing about you, it doesn’t matter where it’s hosted. What matters is how deftly you handle it.

academia, academic blogs, blogging, class blogs, examples, faculty blogs, fear, plymouth state university, policy, psu, student blogs, blogs

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:

Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11

you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.

Ignore the bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Ignore the personal criticism. Instead, think about enormous shift of worldviews that allows a reader to make that comment about a popular story on a top-ranked website. Yes, the internet really is conversational — even if some people may be bad conversationalists.

Now imagine instead that the comment was on a related post at a library’s reference blog. Kindly worded or not, that’s a reference question. It’s an opportunity to serve a patron who obviously isn’t being served by traditional library services, and it’s a huge argument for libraries to make sure they’re blogging this stuff and fully participating in the Google Economy. Afterall, the person who made that comment certainly didn’t search the library.

Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today.

library, libraries, web 2.0, social web, social internet, blogs are conversations, blog, blogs, comments, blog comment, blog comments, teens, internet generation, reference blog, millennials, future libraries

A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps.

We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the Forbes story, the blogosphere is filled with teaming hordes intent on ruining established companies and destroying the economy (okay, I exaggerate).

But the Forbes story was found empty after Kurt Opsahl pointed out the criticisms leveled against blogs applied pretty equally to printing presses (or, just about any other media, probably). And most anybody watching political reporting on the cable channels will find examples of bloggers whose careers were made by that trail of work and opinion.

So I countered my doubtful friends fear with this: your successor will be a blogger, and when you re-enter the market, you’ll be competing against bloggers who will be able to point to a history of work and writing as evidence of their fitness for the job. As employers continue to lose faith in the claims made on resumes or by references, those blog posts will grow in value.

He started blogging the next day.

blog, blogs, blogging, bloggers, risks of blogging, risk, changing modes of communication, professional advancement, advancement

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.

On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.

Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter. I mean Seigenthaler is the founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, after all.

It all sounds the same as the Attack of the Blogs story in November issue of Forbes Magazine. That story began ominously:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But Forbes and Seigenthaler both conveniently ignore the fact that lies, libel and invective are common in other, older media. And Seigenthaler should know well the limitations of editorial authority over the millions of words published by hundreds of writers in a newspaper every day. Mistakes are made, and yes, counterfactual material is often slipped in. (Sadly, it’s also worth noting that real lynch mobs of the post-reconstruction South often enjoyed the support of their local newspapers.)

And unlike those old media, corrections are easy and quick, and in context with the original information. Take a look at how the Wikipedia entry addresses Seigenthaler’s complaints as an example.

Yes, the decision structure around these social applications is different from old media, but that doesn’t make it any more wrong or bad or dangerous. It is, perhaps, a comment on the obscurity of Seigenthaler’s biography that it went uncorrected for four months, but it’s also a comment on how responsive the system is that accommodated Seig’s corrections so quickly. Now, imagine how much Seigenthaler could contribute to Wikipedia. Imagine how much richer our online community could be with his participation?

And that’s what Seigenthaler and the Forbes article miss: the blogosphere and Wikipedia are built by those show up to the game. People and companies who ignore it do so at the peril, but there are many examples of success for those who participate.

wikipedia, wiki, social, social software, community, communities, moderation, editor, editorial control, Seigenthaler , John Seigenthaler, usa today, editorial, opinion, slander, libel, blog, blogs, bloggers, forbes, fear, findability, google economy

Online reaction to the Forbes cover story Attack of the Blogs has been quick and strong, and given the doom and gloom language, it’s not surprising:

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

Can it be true? Are legitimate businesses being squeezed by a few angry bloggers on a mission of hurt?

Kurt Opsahl put some of this in perspective in a spot-on parody (found via Copyfight):

Printing presses are the prized platform of a public lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Ben Franklin and John Hancock.

Take the tea tax. Revenue was coming, providing much needed funding to help with his Majesty’s benevolent aims in the colonies.

Then the pamphleteers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched a broadsheet long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles with his printing press calling your King “deceitful,”“unethical,”“incredibly stupid” and “a pathological liar” who had misled the colonists. The author claimed to be “Silence Dogood,” a middle-aged widow who started a one-woman “watchdog” pamphlet, to expose alleged regal excess.

Face it: blogs are disruptive technologies. Television and radio have been largely one-way, asymmetric mediums that benefit those of means — the same established business interests that Forbes serves. Does that put some perspective on it?

tags: attack of the bloggers, blogger, bloggers, blogs, business interests, disruptive technologies, forbes, legitimate businesses, lynch mob, online diaries, pathological liars, personal attacks, political extremism, printing press, printing presses

Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging

blogs, blogging, presentation

Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]]

More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video.

Introduction

Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people credit bloggers for swaying news coverage of Senator Trent Lott’s comments at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration in December 2002. Blog reaction was strong, and critical of both Lott’s comments and the limited coverage they received at first.

Media attention to blogs has grown since, with political blogs like the top rated Instapundit and Daily Kos among the most visible. A November 2004 episode of The West Wing featured blogs in the plot, and blog coverage has now become so common in cable news that The Daily Show did a piece on it.

Most everybody understands that “blog” is a truncated contraction of “web log,” but there’s little consensus on what a blog is. What is or is not a blog can’t be strictly defined by style, form, content, structure, or even the technology employed.

Types of Blogs

Political blogs get a lot of attention, but preliminary results of an MIT Media Lab sturvey of bloggers found that 73.62% (28,141) of respondents said that half or more of their posts were “personal.”

The Washingtonienne may be the most (in)famous of personal blogs, but LiveJournal, the blog hosting provider most identified with personal blogs, claims over 8 million user-bloggers (2.5 million “active in some way”). LiveJournal’s media relations page quotes a story that connects LiveJournaling with emo rock, saying:

The impulse to LiveJournal is the same as to go to the show and sing your heart out in front of strangers.

Though LJ blogs are derided by many as “mundane, banal or even primitive, inhabited mainly by teenagers producing thoughtless and valueless babble,” the service has also attracted serious study, including in peer production of popular culture and a mood study by Gilad Mishne of the University of Amsterdam. Danah Boyd, study of linking patterns noted that personal bloggers are among the least likely link to other sites in their postings and that there is an assumed familiarity between the blogger and reader.

Starfishncoffee is one LiveJournal blogger, but I would also describe the anonymous Feel-good Librarian as a personal blogger.

Other types of blogs:

Promotion — think “online book tour”

• Freakonomics Blog
• Findability

Niche News

• The Shifted Librarian
• Wi-Fi Networking News
• Copyfight

Blogmedia — for profit blogs with editors and staff writers

• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Boing Boing

Numbers

Technorati, an online service near the center of the “blogosphere,” claims to track 20 million blogs and 1.6 billion links. Though Technorati is not a blog, it offers services like blog searching, link tracking, and “tag” indexing. They also, of course, rank blogs based on the number of their incoming links.

Alexa, recognized as the Neilson ratings for websites, allows users to graph site traffic and compare it against other sites. This graph for BoingBoing, the site Technorati lists as their #1 blog, shows they’re ranked #4,195 of all sites in the world. That ranking compares favorably with The Chicago Sun-Times #1,233 position.

According to the Jan 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report on blogs and blogging, of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet…

• 27% (32 million) read blogs
• 12% of have posted comments or other material on blogs
• 7% (8 million) say they have created a blog or web-based diary

James Torio’s MA Thesis in Advertising Design discusses the commercial and marketing aspects of blogs:

Blogs are effective for disseminating information because they have similar characteristics to word of mouth. People tend to listen to the recommendations of friends and trusted resources and many Bloggers are viewed this way by readers.

Torio suggests that companies ignore bloggers at their peril, and offers as examples accusations of censorship by Microsoft (handled successfully by acknowledgment, p.74) and the issue of Kryptonite locks that could be hacked with a Bic pen (completely ignored, p.77).

Blogs Are Conversations

Indeed, that personal and conversational nature of blogs seems to be hugely important in their success. Chris Bowers, in an informal study that looked at popularity of political blogs over time and their community-building features, like the ability to comment or contribute, found that such features are vital to growing readership.

Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, points to Ann Arbor District Library as a an example of an organization that makes good use of a blog in their relations with their patrons:

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Risks

The notion that blogging is a risky career move is remains persistent. A rather negative story in The Journal of Higher Education noted (discussion):

A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

Wikipedia, in fact, lists a few relatively well-known cases of bloggers fired for their blog postings, including former employees of Delta Airlines (for pictures) and Friendster (for discussing technology decisions).

Though causality can only be inferred, a 2004 MIT Media Lab Blog Survey found:

[T]he frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; [...] generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.

Legal

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers and guide toblogging anonymously are worth a look. Also of relevance is a recent Delaware Supreme Court ruling that establishes precedent that readers are expected to use context to aid their evaluation of meaning.

Cold Water

• Dvorak vs. Blogs
• Why your Movable Type blog must die

The Google Economy

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen describes blogs as “a Web-native content genre,” continuing:

[W]eblogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) that serves as a positive feedback loop: Whatever good postings exist are promoted through links from other sites. More reader/writers see this good stuff, and the very best then get linked to even more. As a result, link frequency follows a Zipf distribution, with disproportionally more links to the best postings.

Google was quick to understand the value bloggers offered in identifying new resources to index, and what resources to index more often, a fact that lead to their purchase of Blogger, recognized as the first blog service, in early 2003.

As it turns out, hyperlinks are among a blog’s most valuable products. Because the web makes it easy to do large-scale citation analysis, and because every popular search engine now uses the technique as a significant component of their search ranking, the large number of bloggers hold great power over what we can or can’t find in those search engines.

The Google Economy is a recognition of the role linking and link-ability have on the propagation or success of an idea, product, or service. More discussion of this can be found in Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, subtitled “what we find changes who we become.”

Blog Technologies

• social software
• tags, tagging, and folksonomies
• trackbacks and pingbacks
• RSS and microformats
• moblog
• podcast
• vlog

Get Yourself a Blog

• Ask Ken
• WordPress
• TypePad
• Blogger

tags: plymouth state university, lamson library, tech tuesday, tech tuesdays, blog, blog study, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogs, content structure, libraries, library, livejournal, media, networked information, presentation notes, typepad, wordpress

Where are the MIT Weblog Survey Results? They were supposed to be out September first, but they’re still missing… All I can find is this older page from Fernanda Viegas.

survey, blogs, web usage

James Torio has been working on his masters in marketing and took a strong look at blogs for his thesis.

I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.

Via Blogging Pro

tags: blog study, blogging, blogging thesis, blogosphere, blogs, communication, james torio, media, media landscape, research, thesis

Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.

As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.”

In short, as Seltzer points out, the ruling hold readers responsible for seeing materials in the context they’re presented in:

The standard empowers a wide range of bloggers’ speech. Because readers can use context to help them differentiate opinions from statements of fact, bloggers are freer to publish their choice of opinionated gossip or citizen journalism. And thanks to courts like Cahill and Dendrite, they can do so using pseudonyms or their real names.

tags: blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, cahill, cahill v. doe, chatroom, citizen journalism, city councilman, context, delaware, delaware supreme court, first amendment, free speech, freedom of speech, liability, media, media landscape, online forum, proud citizen, pseudonyms, real names, wendy seltzer

I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber:

[I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

This is news on its own, but what Farrell was really reporting was that arXiv now supports trackbacks and pingbacks. These technologies play an important role in fostering and tracking online communication, and in the Google Economy. “[T]his strikes me as a Very Big Deal indeed for academic blogging” he says, and he’s right. It’s a big flashing sign that modes of communication are changing in academia, it’s a sign that there a bunch of physicists who get it. And with all that, one has to assume that standards of promotion and tenure will change too. Is a well received pre-pub in arXive as important as for a print publication? What role does the online response, the trackbacks, the paper’s position in the Google Economy play in such evaluations?

This seems to me to be the nucleus of something like the new approach to academic publishing that John Holbo [link added --Casey] has advocated, in which blogs and bloglike tools become an integrated part of academia, creating conversation around interesting recent papers, filtering the good ones from the not-so-good ones etc etc. I can see potential problems down the line (trackback spam, attempts to game the system etc) – but the promise that this holds for physicists (and for non-physicists when we get around to creating arxiv equivalents) seems to me to be nothing short of extraordinary.

tags: pingback, academic publishing, arxiv, blogging, blogs, disseminate, google economy, journal publication, modes of communication, trackback

The developers describe Flock as

[T]he world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.

Which is a good enough sales pitch to make me try the free demo, but it’s all still a private beta. Perhaps they’re trying to prove the point that nothing builds buzz better than unavailability. Osakasteve gushes:

A browser that is designed around social software like blogs and flickr

And Roland Tanglao overflowed:

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging – drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos. And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Extra: it’s based on Firefox and will fully love Mac, Win, and Linux. Interesting ideas…where’s my beta invite?

tags: blogging, blogs, drag and drop, firefox, flickr, flock, mac win linux, private beta, sales pitch, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, social browser, social browsing, social networking, social software, social web browser, web browser

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

tags: bias, biases, blog, bloggers, blogs, gender, gender differences, google, google economy, link, linking, rank, ranking, social life of information, technorati

David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun.

of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one [...] even allows comments…

[...]

Community moderated blogging platforms [...] have provided us with an excellent means of finding new voices, and these are the voices that are generating the accelerated growth in the liberal and progressive blogosphere when compared to the right-wing blogosphere.

Chris Bowers may have a point. He’s certainly got the numbers and I suggest taking a look at the links above to get the full weight of the story.

Though I’ve had my own frustrations with comments here, I keep them open because I believe that honest debate is the center of democracy. I keep them open despite my concerns about the tone of comments in stories like this, and despite the comments from conservative snipers in a number of my political stories. Republicans are working hard to stifle debate in our traditional news media and our universities, it’s no surprise they’re doing the same for new media too.

Technorati Tags: aristocratic, blog, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, chris bowers, comment, comments, community, conservative, daily kos, dailykos, david rothman, debate, democrat, differences, difference, honest debate, liberal, mydd, politics, progressive, republican, snipers, stifle, story