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.

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.

At 4:02PM (Eastern), Google posts their Q4 earning results on the Business Wire. The big, big news (definitely the biggest news out of the valley for today) is that their numbers fell short of consensus estimates. At 5:11PM Reuters posts their summary of this news item and at 5:29PM, AP does the same. At around 5:30PM, this news cluster lands on Google News under the Business section. At 5:45PM, a CNN (via CNNMoney) writer has published an article covering this news.

It’s 6PM (Eastern), a full 2 hours since this news landed, and no sign of it on Memeorandum. This exhibits a limitation of pure algorithm-based aggregators is that in their attempt to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio, they have a hard time grabbing big stories that are just breaking. However, I know several people that consider Memeorandum to be the best source for real-time Tech-business news. Clearly in this case, it is not.

What’s somewhat amusing about this is that the first news organization to post a follow-up to Google’s own announcement was not even US-based. It was The Financial Times, a London-based publication.

UPDATE: At around 6:15PM (Eastern), the news hits Memeorandum. The head story is the AP article and it has a couple posts from the blogosphere connected to it. I’m guessing what happens is that since there’s tons of news items posted by AP every day, there’s no way to isolate immediately which few are actually big news. Big news publications, in this case like CNN or TheStreet.com, publish fresh copy on the news and do not generally back-link. So, unless you are clustering news by relevance, you’re not going to be able to figure out what’s big until bloggers, for which back-linking is common practice, start posting about it.
Also, one could certainly argue that for 99.9% of people, a 2 hour delay is totally justifiable especially if it means keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio. I know for myself, this would usually be my preference as well.

There’s tons of inspiring quotations you and I hear on a regular basis. When I hear one, I’m usually like “oh wow! that’s so true!” but after passing it on to a couple friends, I forget it in a day or two. Well, one such quotation I heard recently I can’t seem to get out of my head:

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford

When I first heard this a few days ago, as usual I was like “oh wow! that’s so true!”. What one can achieve is all a matter of one’s attitude and commitment, right? Well, a few hours later, I started thinking more about this though and I realized that actually I don’t agree with it.

I reflected back on several situations that took place over the past few months in my life and I strongly feel as if the opposite is true: If you think you can you probably can’t. If you think you can’t, you probably can.

This may sound bizarre but think about it for a second. When a person is bullish on something, they tend to focus only on reasons which support their conclusion that it is possible, neglect the realities involved, and thus become overly optimistic. When a person is bearish on something, they tend to grasp at any excuses they can find which support the conclusion that it’s not possible and thus become overly pessimistic.

Anyways, I realize I’m totally overanalyzing Henry Ford’s quotation and I realize that it’s meant simply to be inspirational, but for some reason this quotation has been (uncharacteristically) stuck in my head for several days now. Which do you agree with, Henry Ford’s version or my contrarian version?

Over the weekend I had dinner in the city with several friends. During our delicious meal, I was chatting with one of the friends about my recent blog post on Structured Blogging when something occurred to me. At the table was ten young 20-something successful professionals yet I was the only one there that had a blog. On the drive home, I realized that because I spend my days obsessing over the latest tech news/developments, my world is probably very skewed. In fact, a couple weeks ago at a poker game with some friends, I had a side conversation with a friend about Y!’s acquisiton of del.icio.us and nobody else in the room had heard of the news much less had even heard of a website called del.icio.us. When I get emails from friends sharing their recent photos, those emails are coming from old names like ImageStation and SnapFish not Flickr. Today, I had to spell out M-e-e-b-o several times to a friend who was looking for an IM solution to get around his company’s firewall. I could go on and on with examples…but you get my point.

Many of the techie bloggers in the blogosphere have a grossly skewed view of the world. We get so used to this community of early-adopters that focus is lost on the other 99% of the population. However, for a consumer application/service to achieve real success, it is crucial, of course, to capture the mainstream user which represents the overwhelming majority of the market. And, because “Web 2.0″ (I put that in quotes for a reason..heh) apps tend to be community-focused, attracting a wide audience of users is seemingly more important than ever.

One example of this skewed view is the recent talk about decentralized content and the power of self-publishing. The concept of Structured Blogging is built on this principle. As I mentioned in my post on the topic, if I’m going to write a movie review, I want to post it on my blog so I own it and it remains a part of my online identity. Similarly, posts like this predict the end of centralized sites (the author calls them “Walled Gardens”) like Craigslist and eBay because users will inevitably prefer to self-publish their classifieds ads on their own blogs.

The problem with these discussions is the reality that the number of Internet users who blog regularly is tiny. It’s hard to say exactly how many blogs there really are since I don’t trust most of the statistics on # of blogs because lots of people have blogs (sometimes several) but few actually post to it. According to this survey, only 7% of American adults read blogs regularly. If this is true, then Americans who actively publish via blogs has got to be no more than a couple %. Yet all this talk of self-publishing requires one fundamental thing: a place for the self to freely publish on the Web which for most people means having a blog. (Note: I say “freely” publish to exclude sites like MySpace which do limit the format of content that can be published by the user). And just a very small fraction of Americans blog.

From what I’m always reading about, the number of bloggers is rapidly rising so maybe, down the road, models involving decentralized content may become more and more of a reality. But, it does seem that we are not nearly as close as many tech bloggers make it seem.

First of all, what is Structured Blogging? Right now, blog posts are physically just free-form text entries in plain english paragraphs. But logically speaking, a blog post might be a movie review, an editorial on a recent news bit, description of an upcoming event, etc. While plain old english prose is the optimal mode of comprehension for us humans, machines have a tough time figuring out what the heck you’re talking about unless the content of the entry is tagged or categorized in some way. Structured Blogging is all about incorporating microformats into blog posts in order to structure (aka. tag, but not tagging in the folksonomy sense but tagging in the tagged-data xml sense). Basically, let’s say I posted

“I saw Syriana last night and it was thrilling and though-provoking. Go see it this weekend.”

From these two sentences, you likely had no problem understanding that:
1) Syriana is a movie currently in theaters.
2) I saw Syriana and my review of it is: “thrilling and though-provoking”
3) I am recommending people to go see it.

For a machine to correctly recognize these exact two sentences as a review for a movie named Syriana is difficult. Furthermore, for the machine to find meaning in what I wrote is another problem in itself. Instead, if I published my post using the hReview microformat, a machine could easily recognize that my post is a review for an item – in this case this item is a movie named Syriana – and know what exactly my review is of the item – “thrilling and though-provoking”. Structured Blogging has partnered (it’s not clear how deep these partnerships really are) with all the major blogging tool companies to presumably integrate these formats into the popular blogging software so that the blogger need not know the exact syntax and tags of each format. Tagging your movie review post with the hReview format shouldn’t be more then a click of a few buttons.

Will bloggers use this? Let’s take a minute to understand the motivation of the blogger.

Currently bloggers publish their blogs as a medium for building and expressing their self identity on the Web. When you write something on your blog, it stays with you in one centralized place and becomes part of your e-identity. If I write a product review on Amazon, sure it will get read (in fact it would probably get way more readership than it would on my blog) but that’s not the point. I’m sort of giving away my content. The world doesn’t know who I am on Amazon. Right now, people’s online identities are so fragmented. Pieces of their online expression are happening on many different sites. They might publish some product reviews on Amazon, list some items for sale on Craiglist or eBay, write movie reviews on IMDB, regularly comment on news items on various blogs, chat on various message boards… the list goes on. Sure, all these forms of expression come from me, but because they are completely decentralized they do not form any sort of identity for me. Someone reading my Amazon review of a DVD I bought has no idea about the movie reviews that I’ve written on IMDB. Without a doubt, the ability to keep the content I create on the Web in one spot, published in the way I want is compelling. But blogging already offers this. Why do I need to adopt structured blogging?

The reason is so others can better find the content I produce. If someone is searching or reviews on Syriana, if I have properly tagged my review as such, then there’s a higher chance that a user will find my review. The reason is that the aggregators of the future, while sucking up my blog content, will be able to recognize and precisely record my post as a Syriana movie review. Without this tagging, the only way my content will be located is by search relevancy for the term ‘Syriana’. That’s pretty much hopeless. Besides, someone searching for ‘Syriana review’ won’t even be likely to be given my blog post because I didn’t even put the word ‘review’ anywhere in it. Okay, so if I use Structured Blogging, people will be able to better find my content. Sweet! Well it’s not really that perfect.

These aggregators of the future are going to want to aggregate the content they suck up. You can imagine a movie review aggregator that sucks up all the reviews in the blogosphere, and provides an uber MetaCritic. So users looking for reviews for Syriana will conveniently see “average 4 star rating based on 35 bloggers”. And then of course this aggregator will have advertising and sell movie tickets and essentially be making money off of my and others’ reviews. Is this aggregator compensating me? Nope. They’re just leeching my content and making a buck. The only thing the aggregator can possibly offer me is increased traffic if, in this case, the user wanted to actually read individual reviews of the movie. Is this a fair tradeoff? If I am posting something like a classified ad where it absolutely benefits me to increase its visibility, then there is real monetary value in it for me then the answer is yes. For other situations, the answer becomes tricky. Note: This discussion is very similar to the relationsihp between web publishers and web search engines.

Finally, this topic of structuring content was in the news recently thanks to our friends at Google. A few weeks back GoogleBase launched. Read my post about it. The concept with GoogleBase is very similar: Structure data so that it can be better aggregated. Right now, the only way to input into GoogleBase is directly via a web form (they have different forms for different data types) or via a feed. Either way its the content creator actively submitting it to Google. But, if structured blogging takes off, doesn’t it make a lot of sense for GoogleBase to suck up structured content from the blogosphere? Sure. If there’s structured content anywhere out on the Web, it makes tons of sense for Google to go fetch it. The problem is that right now there is little, if any.