It's Rishi

I was composing an e-mail reply to someone (the person reading this will know who he is) and what I intended to be a short e-mail on the topic of conversation in the blogosphere ended up sprouting into this long rambling. I realized that I wanted to throw it on my blog for viewing by anyone who might find it interesting:

On any given Monday morning, thousands of people gather around water coolers at offices around the country to chat about the “Desperate Housewives” episode that aired the night before. On a daily basis, radio shows around the country host discussions covering the same events in news and politics. In these examples, because of physical limitations, the number of people that can engage in any one of these conversations is limited. That’s why many people flock to the Internet to discuss these same topics with a broader scope of people. Ultimately, the “perfect” conversation is when everyone interested in a topic, can engage in a single, dynamic conversation. It is often the case, however, that in the blogosphere, at any given moment in time, many blogs will be covering the exact same topic. The result is that there are many, duplicate conversations going on – just like what happens in the offline-world, as I described above.

A new service that made some commotion over the weekend, coComment, helps to facilitate conversation on a single blog. Also, services like Memeorandum help connect blog posts by finding memes thru back-links and track-backs. While services like these help to connect opinions, the problem is far from solved. Person a who comments on blog A may be stimulated by a comment from person b on blog B, but the two people are likely to never read each other’s thoughts.

As we all know, blogs compete for attention. More specifically, each conversation is competing for attention from other conversations about the same item. Every blogger would rather have a comment posted on his blog, and see his own comment thread grow, rather than that happen on another blog.

The blogosphere isn’t the only form of discussion on the Web. Far from it actually. There are many other discussion environments, most which are centralized. The best example of centralization are message boards (and if you think message boards are on the decline, do yourself a favor and check out some stats at Big Boards) where the entire conversation (both people and content) is centralized.

Message board culture is very different from blogosphere culture. People who visit and post in message boards do so because they like to be part of a community and for the entertainment value that is had by engaging in intelligent conversation about things of interest to that person. The blogosphere, which is sort of the opposite of message boards in the sense that people and content are decentralized, has a somewhat different culture. For many bloggers, their online identity is their blog (and the content that they publish on it). Most bloggers blog for the purpose of promotion of their identity – whether it’s their social identity or professional identity. The key advantage of a blog, in terms of building an indentity, is the very fact that all the content a blogger writes is explicitly connected to his blog, and thus his identity. This is not to say that bloggers don’t care about intelligent conversation, it’s just that bloggers have this additional motive of building identity.

By building our identity, we can increase the attention that we garner from our peers, and thus increase our value amongst our peers. This is true in both the message board case and the blogosphere case, except that in the former, the community of peers is small and isolated so building identity in this case has, in a sense, limited and finite value.

So the big question is, does blogger greed inhibit the unifying of conversation? Are bloggers so hung up on building attention that they’d rather own their conversations instead of joining their conversations together for the benefit to those involved in the conversation?

Anyways, I’m not sure I brought my points together as well as I wanted but it’s 5AM and I need to sleep. But I’m really hoping you read this post and tell me your thoughts.

My buddy Rob is a cooking machine. He wanted to start a video blog on cooking. Since I haven’t messed around with producing digital video in a long, long time, I decided it would be fun to help him out. The result was Yummy in my Tummy, Episode 1. The theme of this first episode is easy-to-prepare, great tasting Super Bowl food. We had some awesome plans for the show but due to significant time and resource constraints…well…click the link below and watch for yourself. Here’s some things I learned:

1. Image stablization technology in today’s digicams is awesome but still it’s not a tripod substitute. Much respect to professional cameramen who can hand-hold a camera with little to no shaking. I was the cameraman for this video and even while I thought my hand was fairly steady, it was not. The scenes we did with a tripod yielded far superior results.
2. Setting up the lighting for a scene is very difficult. Having taken photography courses in the past, I thought I knew a thing or two about studio lighting. However, setting up the lighting in Rob’s kitchen so that it was bright but diffuse and without shadows proved to be an impossible task for us. In some shots it looks like a flashlight is being pointed at the subject and in others it’s either too dim or too bright. Sigh..
3. Digital Video for the PC has come a long way. I remember taking a course several years ago on multimedia production. Back then, just the first step of getting the raw video transferred to the computer and digitized was a non-trivial task. For even the most basic editing tasks, you had to fiddle around with Adobe Premiere and have a top-of-the-line workstation to get the job done. And even then, rendering the video involved clicking “Start” and a long nap. This time around, we did the entire job with a 12″ Apple iBook using the bundled iMovie. I brought my much more powerful Windows laptop on which I installed a copy of Adobe Premiere, but we did not use it. Admittedly, if we had more time, we would have done some fancier editing and effects with Premiere. But still. We filmed the video with the camera. Plugged it in to the iBook via FireWire and fired up iMovie. It could not have been easier and I was amazed at how smooth iMovie ran on the iBook’s anemic 4200rpm harddrive.
4. Video Blogging/Sharing will be big. Podcasts are great, but video is really where it’s at. Furthermore, a nice digital camcorder costs less than $500 these days and, in fact, many of the latest digicams can record 640×480 30fps. Heck, I think I even saw a Sony HD camcorder on sale for around $1500 at Fry’s a few weeks back.
5. Broadband upload speeds suck. The typical DSL connection is 1500kbps downstream, 128kbps upstream. To upload a 100MB video at 128kbps, you’re looking at around 2 hours. For most people, upstream speed isn’t something they care about but in order for the sharing of multimedia content to be an everyday activity, we’re gonna need way faster upstream.

Okay, and now for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/?v=smRE6qHZv4I

I just read on Scobleizer that coComment is launching a service that tracks the comments that you make in the blogosphere. Using coComment, you can:

1) See a centralized view of all the conversations (conversation = blog post + comment thread) that you have commented in. It’s not clear if they handle the recursive nature of this. For example, Scoble posts, gets 10 comments, I trackback and add my 2 cents, I get 5 comments, …. This is all one conversation but spanning many blogs.

2) Put a little widget on your blog that shows your readers what comments you’ve been making on other blogs. This is really what gets me most excited. Every comment you make on another blog is a little piece of your identity that now belongs to someone else. By making these comments visible on your blog as well, your comments become tied to your identity. That’s why, often times, if i have something insightful to say on a topic, I would rather post about it on my own blog rather than comment on someone else’s post.

3) Get alerts when conversations you’re involved in get updated.

My take: Great idea. Questionable implementation. However, to be totally fair, I will reserve judgement until I get a chance to really sink my teeth into it.

I have discussed a similar idea with several friends over the past couple months and just about everyone has agreed that there is a need for this. The concept of centralizing the decentralized nature of the blogosphere has already manifested itself and this is yet another example. Sort of making a personalized Usenet reader out of the blogosphere.

However, the implementation that I have sketched out is simpler and would not involve third-party bookmarklets. I’m not going to go into details right now but if I do get time to hack it together you’ll see what I have visioned. If anyone is curious, shoot me an e-mail.

According to this article in Google Blogoscoped, BMW’s German site, BMW.de, got banned from Google’s search index because the webmasters of the site apparently tried to fool Google’s crawler, GoogleBot, into assigning it better relevancy than it deserves for several terms. In other words, their site detects if the visitor is GoogleBot (I’m assuming by just checking the User-Agent request header) and if it is returns a page packed with tons of keywords. If it’s a human visitor, then the normal homepage is returned.

The bottom line is, BMW.de tried to cheat, got caught, and now they pay the price: “A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all.”
You can bet that some BMW IT guys over in Deustcheland are looking for a new job. =)

I found this story interesting because it was the first time I’ve heard of a major, A-list site getting the boot from Google for using shady SEO techniques.

Food for thought: Google penalizing sites that try to game it’s system does help to ensure relevant search results for users. However, by Google removing BMW.de (and other legitimate, useful sites) from their search results, does the user really win? In this example, a Googler looking for BMW’s German site will be at a loss. Ideally, Google needs to use a penalty which hurts only the website, not the user.

I heard on TechCrunch that Attensa for Outlook came out of Beta. However it’s no longer free and thus is no longer my RSS reader. I really hate to sound like a stingy bastard and I certainly don’t mean any ill will towards Attensa, but I just can’t see myself spending money for an RSS reader when there are plenty of free readers available and since Microsoft has already announced that the next version of Outlook will have RSS reader functionality built-in.

It’s kind of a shame because except for a couple weird memory-hogging and stalling issues, I have generally enjoyed using Attensa for Outlook since December when I first discovered it. Luckily, Attensa does allow me to export my subscriptions to an OPML file. Now the question is, to which free RSS reader will I import this into. I think I’ll check out Attensa Online, their free web-based reader which just launched.

Anyone else using a RSS reader they think stands out from the rest?

It’s 2:15AM, one last check of Memeorandum before I hit the sack and what do I see? My last blog post, “How real-time is the blogosphere?” is on Memeorandum!

Admittedly, my post is clustered with the thread on Google’s earnings announcement and even though my post did back-link to the AP article at the head of the cluster, my post was pretty off-topic. Nonetheless, it’s my blog and I’ll cheer if I want to. Besides, who knows if this will ever happen again. =)

Gabe, I am not worthy.