Andrew Sullivan on Blogging: Unreadable Online

I periodically make a Print ‘n’ Read recommendation–a piece of writing about the social web that’s so compelling it’s actually worth firing up the ol’ HP Inkjet and printing out to read later.

In this case it’s Andrew Sullivan’s Why I Blog.

It is, of course, utterly unreadable on the web. At 5,200 words, on the website of the Atlantic it requires clicking through four “pages,” each of which is five screens deep. Even if you have an Aeron chair with lumbar support you’re courting orthopedic danger attempting to read this thing online.

But [or I should say, therefore] it’s one of the most thinking, engaging and true pieces of writing about blogging I’ve come across.

Giving himself the opportunity to reflect and dig–which, Sullivan points out, blogging does not–in this long-form article he surfaces many insights that will resonate with anyone who has spent much time typing into a blog’s vacant white box.

For instance:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

But, alas, Sullivan & Co. push their luck. The printed magazine promises “More Online”–a video in which Sullivan and fellow Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder discuss the blogging life. Sounded like a bad idea to me–a video of two guys talking about blogging. Ack.

But, as a dutiful student of digital media, I went looking. I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Huh. So I typed in the url the magazine published in ink on its paper pages. I hit “enter.”

Here’s what I saw.

My Friends. . .I Apologize to You All

I’m killing time waiting for the final presidential “debate” [it's a joint televised appearance, not a debate, but let's save that for another day]. So I decided to goof around with yet another interactivedigitaldemocracydoodad.

I can’t be sure, but I think I just gave up all my friends in order to learn that I, like Barack Obama, am intellectual, aesthetic, and curious.

This is one of those pointless quizzes that demands you rate yourself on a handful of questions between two false extremes, tallies your claims and disgorges a simpleton analysis. Honey, I shrunk the Myers-Briggs.

But in my haste to do this, I clicked “Allow” on the following screen:

I know that even creating a profile on a social network is the first step to losing any pretense of control over my identity. But I think I just allowed this stupid application to suck in all my friends’ info and “other content” it requires to do its work. Maybe I’ve done this before. I really don’t know.

But the combination of the inanity of the application combined with what appears to be a full unconditional grant of my friends’ goodies is deeply annoying.

I have 180 friends–okay, “friends”–on Facebook. I think it’s too late to do anything about it.

To my friends, I apologize. Unfriend me if you will.

Luckily, from the information above, it looks like that’s unlikely to happen. My friends, I now know, are “understanding.”

Google Blog Search, Re-Booted but Good

Not long after I proclaim a cool new tool to search for blog content–Nielsen’s BlogPulse–Google comes along and turbocharges its blog search. It’s a big improvement in a space Google has not, so far, been dominant.

For those of us who continue to rail quixotically against Mountain View hegemony, the upgrade is not good news.

Here’s a search I did using BlogPulse for the Honda Fit, a bitchin’ hot, fuel-efficient, high-style economy car. [If that sounds like an uncharacteristic rave, I should reveal I just happened to have purchased one--revealing myself as either the last confident consumer in America or a damn fool.]

BlogPulse

BlogPulse’s output: 8,600 results, with the top one gibberish, the next one off-point, the next two non-English. Argh.

Google Blog Search

Brother Google’s output: 70,306 results, much better than BlogPulse’s. Note the top box. The first two listings are for an excellent Fit blog and a Fit forum. [While there's non-English stuff in that top box, it's in Japanese, which is at least logical and potentially useful.] And note how the individual results are more on-point–more relevant–than BlogPulse’s.

Once again, it appears Brother Google’s maddeningly dominating knack for the algorithm pays off.

To be fair, BlogPulse offers analytical tools well beyond the good Brother’s range.

As a product of Nielsen, the blog search function is just part of a suite of products designed to help people monitor all kinds of consumer-generated content on the social web. If you’re serious about monitoring the social web on behalf of your company or a particular topic or niche, BlogPulse is far more powerful.

For instance, check out this graphic that illustrates levels of blog activity about the Fit.

Still, if you’re a regular old web user looking for chatter about the Honda Fit. . .Google scores again.

I hate it when that happens.

A New View for Viewzi

My favorite “alternative” search engine, Viewzi, has debuted a new feature that merits another visit.

By my tastes, Viewzi is the best tool on the market to combine search and data visualization–two of the most important functionalities on the web. When you conduct a search using Viewzi, you can choose among 18 [!] different ways to view your search, from a visual “album gallery” of sites to the surprising, and surprisingly functional, Google Timeline view, shows results lined up in the order Brother Google first discovered them.

Viewzi tends to be more impressive as a technology platform, a sort of innovation farm for dataviz geeks.   But its new view, Power Grid, takes an important step toward usability, if not quite practicality. It lets you choose either to “see” or “read” results, and includes a handy bookmarking feature. Read more

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