Hello, I Must be Going: The End of This Blog

Both regular readers of this blog have been pestering me lately about what’s happened, why I haven’t written a new post since before they left for vacation.

It’s because it’s time to fork this blog.

For good.

Last week I started a job with the federal government. I’m now a webbist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, part of a communications team devoted to food safety. I’ll be helping  use the web, social media and digital technologies to do public service. [See site links below.]

Which is to say: 2.Oh. . .Really. As in for real. As in practicing what I’ve preached. In public. Of, by and for the public.

[!]

Which brings us to this blog, the one that so recklessly–indeed without pity, temperance, empathy or foresight!--poked a stick in the eye of those who dared to blunder around with social media technologies to actually accomplish things.

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Oh, it gets worse. The blog topics I’ve hurled tinfoil thunderbolts at create so many potential conflicts of interest the neck snaps:

The future of media, and the persistent misdeeds of legacy news companies? They cover food safety issues all the time. Tzzzztz!

Health 2.0, and the persistent misdeeds of those who seek to use digital technology to do. . .well, all kinds of stuff? Deeply involved with public health, federal agencies, private companies and political interests. Tzzzztz!

Web 2.0 technology generally, and the persistent misdeeds of those who are selling and evangelizing such technologies? My team will be using such technologies. We already are. Tzzzztz!

Government 2.0, and the federal agencies that. . .TZZZZT!

Politics 2.0, and . . . .TZZZZZZZTTTZZZ!!!!!!!!

I think you see what I’m up against. I’d rather stick a fork in this blog rather than a lobotomy needle in its brain. Or, far worse, compromise my ability to do the people’s work without fear or favor. I work for you now. You should demand I be independent and unentangled or tainted by even a perception of conflict of interest.

Oh, sure, I could reinvent myself as a private-citizen blogger.

Hey, maybe I’ll blog a moving personal memoir about a bright-eyed lad from Cleveland who came to Washington many years ago to pursue his destin–ZZZZZZZZZA, A-OOOH-GA! A-OOHH-GA!!!!!@#@#?! DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

No. Better to do the thinkable and retire from blogging.

[Brief pause to feign serious reflection.]

Yup, that’s my decision. Retire from blogging. And I’m stickin’ with it.

So: Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for commenting. And Retweeting. And saving to Delicious. Etc.

But mostly, thanks for reading.

I mean that.

Really.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Sites and tools my colleagues and I will have a hand in:

• Food Safety & Inspection Service agency site.
• Multi-agency consumer-oriented food safety site, foodsafety.gov, led by my friends at the Department at Health and Human Services. [Redesign/relaunch due soon.]
• Food Safety Working Group, reflecting the administration’s commitment to transparency and civic engagement in food supply safety.
• Multiple Twitter feeds, widgets, YouTube channels, etc.

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.

DNC Exposes a Gap in the New Media Ecosystem

As part of my utterly ineffectual campaign to embarrass the journalism establishment until it capitulates to my irresistible wisdom, I’m doing my best to boycott mainstream media coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

There are 15,000 journalists in Denver. There are 4,000 delegates.

At a time when news leaders face the urgent need to reinvent themselves around crushing economic changes, they’re squandering precious journalistic resources earnestly covering an event that’s part infomercial, part pep rally and part goofball Americana parade. All right now, let’s listen to State Sen. Rhubarb Buttwhistle’s intro to Gov. Louis Meander’s tribute to Adlai Stevenson! Tough questions, you say? Tell me, Mdme. Janie, is this convention hat really from 1956?

Yo, journalists: Is this what you went to school for? Isn’t there a meth lab in a house jointly owned by a city councilman and a corrupt contractor catching fire back home or something?

So anyway, I figure this is a great time to check out the emerging media. You know, those bold, independent voices unfettered by the groupthink of corporate media and resistant to the virus of party politics.

I went looking for a source that pulled together an eclectic mix of the best independent voices from non-mainstream, non-corporate media. Certainly some new media visionary was at this task right now, mining the indie datastream for precious nuggets, producing a truly fresh, truly independent, crisply edited feed representing news and opinions spanning the spectrum of politics, age, gender, lifestyle, social class and headwear preferences.

Um, no.

I found four varieties of DNC blog aggregation going on.

Big Brands (Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico) These mainstream outlets simply have their staff use blogging software to get their content on the screen faster. Also saves money on copy editors. Independent? Not so much.

Digital Algorithmic Aggregators (DayLife, Topix) These wrap a skin of a harried producer’s choices around an armature of machine-generated content, usually from mainstream sources. Curated? Not so much.

Lefty Blogs (Huffington Post) and Righty Blogs (RedState). Interesting for three or four clicks. Then, very quickly, thin and stifling.

I spent well over an hour searching for a dispassionate curator who undertook the task of presenting an eclectic mix of high-value content representing a range of views, avoiding both mainstream news and an ideological filter. I searched in vain.

I guess it makes sense. Big media brands are invested in promoting their own folks. Lefties and Righties want to ventilate only the viewpoints their benefactors embrace. The machine aggregators just want to assemble eyeballs at the lowest costs.

All of this exposes an interesting gap in the new media marketplace. Lots of great independent content is being created from and about the convention. Nobody I could locate is making an intellectually honest attempt to select the highest quality stuff and make it accessible in a single place with a single RSS feed. If it included multiple media–pix, Tweets, videos, etc.–so much the better.

I know there’s an audience for this. I know there are people capable of producing this.

And yet. . .there it isn’t.

The digital media marketplace being what it is, I wonder if this task isn’t best suited to a journalistic foundation or university program. [This isn't a grant proposal, honest.]

Of course, it’s entirely possible that there is a politically independent, journalistically sound effort to curate the best non-MSM content produced by a variety of sources coming out of the DNC in something like real time.

If so, I’d love to hear about it.

It would make my pitiful solo boycott of MSM DNC coverage so much more satisfying.

Five Lessons From a Year of Blogging

One year ago I launched this blog with a notion but no clue.

The notion was that I wanted to make sense of the baffling, bad but somehow occasionally powerful stuff that was emerging under the aegis “Web 2.0.” [It has lately been usefully redubbed "social media"]. I’d just left the employ of Steve Case’s $500 million scheme to reorganize the healthcare system, partly via 2.0 tactics. Before that I’d been an editor at The Washington Post, spending some of my time trying to help reorient the paper to the web.

So it was a good time to wrap my brain around this developing technology and figure out where it was headed, and where it might take me.

You can find a lot of lessons on other blogs about how to build traffic. You’ll find sociological treatises about what blogging means to democracy, commerce, media and the written word. This ain’t that.

Essentially what I’ve done here is whack the 2.oh. . .really? birthday pinata and pick up a few edible morsels that have fallen onto the floor. Following are five to chew on. They certainly don’t apply to all blogs, which have many different purposes, audiences and authors. So for what it’s worth, here they are.

A personal blog is as valuable to the writer as the reader. A near-daily obligation to write forces you to learn something new or create an insight about something you already know. Writing a blog lets you educate yourself in public.

Entry titles are as important as content. Titles should be dead-clear. Web users are brutally impatient prowlers, unforgiving of ambiguity and unlikely to hang around to figure things out. But provocative works too. Three of my more inane items scored big because their titles promised some mischief: Hillary Needs a Widget; Dilbert, You Ignorant Slut; and Dear Facebook: Bite Me.

Don’t expect your best content to be rewarded. Accept that blog audiences are so unpredictable and that some of your most valuable gems will stay buried. For instance, I remain convinced by my treatise Adsense? Nonsense! is a devastating comic romp that brilliantly lays bare the false premise upon which Google’s vast worldwide empire is founded. 34 people have read it. One of them left a comment as inscrutable as mental ward haiku. The alternative explanation for this lack of attenton is that the entry is full of crap. There’s a lot of that in blogging too.

Stand on the roof in a thunderstorm holding up a rake. You never know when lightning will strike, but you can improve your odds. When you write something really good, send it to other bloggers whose audience you’d like to reach. This will usually fail. But if you get a link from a big blog, bar the door. A link on Huffington Post drew over 10,000 readers to Al Gore vs. Drew Carey: Another Nail-Biter! A prominent link on Jim Romensko’s journalism news blog sent almost 1,500 angry journalists to Proposed: Death to Bylines. I’ve sent out dozens of notes to bloggers pimping other entries and gotten nada. You just never know.

Write short and use pictures. This one is straight from the “Duh” files. You should make regular exceptions, of course. But as a daily practice, short and visual serves readers well. Authors too. I wish I followed this one more.

Maybe next year.

Which Way to Voxford?

My good friend John Kelly, a tenured lumberjack journalist [my new term for those who chop down trees to publish words], has a hilarious piece in The Guardian. It’s about how people find his blog.

Kelly, a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post, has been whiling away the months as a visiting scholar at Oxford, studying citizen journalism or some such rot. His blog, Voxford, is full of sharp observations from the psychic border shared by the US and the UK. To read it during lunch is to risk spattering your screen with bits of tuna fish from laughing out loud.

Anyhow, his Guardian story is about the strange search queries that bring people to his blog. Since he’s so close to Fleet Street, his blog is full of references to the sort of goofy smut you find in the British tabs. Some of the searches that have brought people to Oxford include:

Penis grab off

How to grab a woman’s breast without getting caught

Why does my groin, face, beard and head itch?

Picture of tourist diarrheaing

I’m afraid my own U.S. based blog can’t compete with that. I do well with “scariest video on the web” and “hillary widget,” but that’s the best I have.

Of course, now that I’ve used the same words in my blog–I refer to penis, breast, groin, and diarrheaing, among others–I may get some of that traffic too.

Which I think answers the question raised by the only other marginally exotic search that led people to my blog: “web blogging is it really as good as eve…”?

The 2.D’oh! Round-Up: Crowdsourcing Dead Bloggers, etc.

Amazing, amusing and alarming observations from the world of Web 2.0

Miller Analogies Test Item of the Week

Twitter is to Blogging what Telegrams were to . . .

a.) FedEx

b.) Airmail

c.) e-mail

d.) Strip-o-Grams

If you’d read Ted Rheingold’s Web Journal (via TechMeme), you’d know the correct answer is b. At least according to Ted.

Let’s Crowdsource Dead Blogger No. 3!

Veteran newshacks know that in order for lifestyle journalists to legitimately proclaim a trend, they need to find at least three (3) examples of the thing in question.

Inexplicably, the New York Times slipped its blogging-yourself-to-death story into print with only two actual dead bodies at the keyboard. Oh, sure, they found a few people on the edge, and a had a bunch of expert commentary and all that. But still. [Truth told, we are beginning to suspect the Gray Lady broke a hip when she moved into that fancy new nursing home on 8th Avenue. She hasn't seemed her old self since.]

But remember what they say in Journalism 2.0: The story is a process, not a finished product. So let’s crowdsource that dead-blogger story to find that missing example. There must be another stiff in jammies out there. Drawing on the power of distributed network reporting, we’ll find it.

Just use the comment field below.

But please notify the authorities first.

And finally, from the Are You Sure This Isn’t from The Onion? Dept.

Via The Smoking Gun:

Perez Hilton Calls Blogger A Defamer: Gossip kingpin sues online rival over published sex claims