The 2.D’oh! Roundup: Crowdsourcing images, 2.0 Names

The Print ‘n’ Read ™ Feature

I try regularly to point out stories that are so worthwhile that they may actually be worth printing out and reading on paper. This week’s nominee: Cheap Photo Sites Pit Pros Vs. Amateurs, which appeared in Business Week. [A shout-out to Wired Crowdsourcing blogger Jeff Howe for the pointer to the article.]

It’s another story in which longtime-fat-and-happy creative professionals whine about losing business to amateurs. My message to those dislocated by new social and digital technologies: If your work doesn’t have more value than the work of amateurs, why on earth should someone pay premium rates for it? Quit yer belly-achin’ and find ways to create value in the new economy.

For extended responses to this question, print out the article’s comments too.

Too Cute.0

Jim Bacon sent along this link to a Big Media Man animation that has some sport with the juvenile, too-cute-by-.5 names of web 2.0 companies.

For another take on this unfortunate phenomenon, see the seminal written-for-print article on the topic ["How do you tell a web name from a typo?"] by Paul Farhi [interest revealed: Farhi's a former colleague at The Washington Post].

I previously wrote a post about the wiggy Dot-o-mater, a site that saves you the trouble and automatically generates foolish 2.0 names.

And finally, our regular spotting of The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™

Salon Blogger “Tipping” System”

N.B.: This entry was posted via Verizon Mobile Broadband service while riding on the Ohio Turnpike. Other than the 56k-baud-era download speeds, it’s working great. Don’t worry: I’m not driving.

Coinage: Rohit Bhargava and “Egocommunication”

Web 2.0racle Rohit Bhargava, author of the Influential Marketing blog and SVP at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, has visited upon us a brilliant coinage: egocommunication.

Here’s how he describes it:

Egommunication is a form of communication where you can share a message or piece of content with someone based on their own consistent habit of checking mentions of themselves and their content online … in other words, relying on their ego as a channel for your message to get through. It is a tacit form of communication. In effect, you take advantage of the fact that just about everyone in social media is self-googling on a frequent basis.

So I can communicate with anyone who is socially aware enough to Google their name often [or, more likely, have a Google Alert set in their own name] simply by mentioning them.

This is the phenomenon I wrote about not long ago in an entry describing how Dave Garr, founder of a site called Usertesting.com, discovered a negative comment I’d made about his site on Twitter. I had no name to describe the phenomenon I was then writing about [or doing]. I did a shout-out to Garr in the post and, sure enough, he saw it and sent a greeting back in a comment.

Fascinating stuff.

So: Hi again, Dave! Hi again, Rohit!

Rohit was moderator of a panel I was on at the recent Digital Media Conference, hosted by Ned Sherman of Potomac TechWire.  [Hi Ned! Look forward to working together again!]

And Rohit will also speak at a coming conference–a huge one called InterAct08, at which an array of digital high-flyers [Google's Marissa Mayer, 2.0 bodhisattva Ted Leonsis, among others] will appear in D.C. The CEO of InterAct08 is Stephen Mealy, whose InterAct08 blog describes the event in greater detail.

[Hi Stephen! Thanks for the note. I'll be in touch soon.]

The Feds and Social Media: EPA Goes Blogging

From the Who Knew? files: The Environmental Protection Agency has been hammering away at a group blog since April.

Don’t worry, it’s not the Bush hacks extolling the virtues of offshore drilling. Greenversations is written by a group of civil servants at the agency who explore greenish issues in a personal way. As they go, they often mention EPA services that can help you, the citizens of America, live a greener life.

Here’s Lina Younes, head of the agency’s multilingual communications office, on how the agency helped her fix her leaky toilet, in a manner of speaking.

I learned about the WaterSense program through EPA and found out that the new toilets with the high-efficiency WaterSense label were finally available in the Maryland area where we live. We studied various options. We considered the dual flush toilets that we’ve seen in Europe and more recently in EPA’s Potomac Yard green building, but we finally opted for single flush toilets that use 1.28 gallons per flush and we couldn’t be happier. They do the job and we’ve put a stop to those leaky toilets, finally.

The entries appear to be vetted by EPA staff. But I came across some useful stuff. In this entry about what to do with an old cell phone, I came a fairly cool federal publication on The Lifecycle of a Cellphone. It’s made for kids, but I learned a lot about the resource intensive manufacturing process of phones, and where the motes of deadly toxin are embedded.

The whole point of Greenversations is to “open up the agency to the public,” to digress into 2.0 communications vernacular, and “put a human face on the agency.” It appears to accomplish this. Yes, but will anyone read it? Hard to imagine someone engaged enough with environmental issues to read blogs would be attracted to this 2.0 public service announcement outlet, however well done.

Comments are moderated, as you might expect. But Greenversations has at least some tolerance for agitprop. A response to an EPA science writer’s introduction of a new regular blog item on environmental science:

Steve Holmer says:

July 23rd, 2008 at 12:05 pm

Rather ironic, but it is encouraging that EPA staff have not given up on science. However, reading today’s Washington Post about how Director Johnson repeatedly lied to Congress about the decision concerning the CA waiver doesn’t leave one feeling like EPA has yet turned the corner.

Looking forward to better times ahead,

Ah, yes, but now about the government has a database of people who have made comments critical of high-level federal officials! Is Mssr. Holmer safe from government harrassment, even under the provisions of the Patriot Act?

From the Frequent Questions page:

Why do you ask for my name and email address when I leave a comment? How do you protect my privacy?

Providing your name or email address is optional. We ask for your name so that it is easier to carry on a conversation, so we will publish it along with your comment. We ask for your email address so that we may contact you if necessary. We will not publish your email address.

To protect yourself, please don’t include information that identifies you in the body of your comment, such as email addresses or phone numbers. We don’t edit comments, so we won’t be able to publish comments containing such information.

Huh. I wonder of Mssr. Holmer included his real e-mail address. And if he did, whether he got a response “thanking” him for his “valuable comment.”

If any of this interests you, you can always follow Greenversations on Twitter.

But you knew that.

The 2.D’oh! Roundup

A survey of recent insights, insults and intransigence from the world of social media:

Coolest tool of the week

Put your URL into Wordle, choose a few options, and create a wordcloud of your site. Here’s mine: [please click here if the image below doesn't display.]

A wordcloud, I should point out, is very different from a tag cloud. This tool just picks up words within a site’s text and visualizes the frequency of their use. Tag clouds [see mine in column at right] show how often you write on certain topics.

From this wordcloud I learn that I yammer frequently about the “news” and use “occasionally” a lot, that I’m “pleased” more than I thought, and that I refer to “bad” “lie[s]” pretty often.

It also exposes some of my annoying tics: the rarely used [by others] “electroland,” “wayleft” to describe people far on the progressive side of things politically, the shamefully retro-poseur “jones” and my tendency to refer to people as “folks.”

You can change all sorts of settings, including the number of words [200, above] and typeface ["sexsmith," just. . .because.]

Rock star blog comments

This week I celebrate a milestone in my blogging history. No, not my blog’s birthday again. This week I got my first rock star comment on my blog.

By this I do not mean some bigshot in the world of 2.0 like Mark Zuckerberg, or some brilliant loudmouth like Mark Cuban, or a sage web vet like Guy Kawasaki.

I refer to a rock star without quotation marks. As in a famous rock musician.

I refer specifically to this comment on my About page by Paul Westerberg, front man of the post-punk indie band The Replacements and now a solo musician in Minneapolis. And, apparently, a reader of blogs. Including this one. Go figure.

In his comment, he catches a typo.

And invites me to download 49 new minutes of music for a mere 49 cents.

Here I return the favor by sharing the URL, which pending cooperation of the tech gods should be working by Monday.

Let’s all show Paul some support with .49 donations as a way to thank him for participating in the blogosphere with a proofreadr’s eye!

[Not] Alltop News

Every trend contains the seeds of its own countertrend.

And so I call your attention to Alltop, a site consisting of newslinks not upchucked by some algorithm, but [it is said] via user-assisted hand-picking based at least significantly on the founders’ tastes.

The founders [one of whom is the legendary Internet "rock star" Guy Kawasaki] refer to the site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet and “aggregation without aggravation.” Say they in a FAQ:

Q. How do you decide which sites and blogs are in a topic?

A. We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

Well, great idea, except that the product is pretty spotty. I found the links maddeningly redundant, often second-rate and a bit.  . .aggravating.

Arbitrarily picking an utterly non-tech topic, I checked out the golf page and found at least half a dozen links each to overexposed kid golfer Michelle Wei’s recent tournament disqualification, and at least as many for overexposed superannuated Australian Greg Norman’s improbable lead going into the final round of the British Open.

Under “Twitterati,” presumably the cool Twitter feeds you ought to know about? Nearly 100 to choose from, many of them way-inside the world of Twits.

My assessment: Alltop is essentially a lot of people’s different RSS feeds pulled together in a tough-to-wade-through mess. Aggregation with aggravation.

Remind me: The value is. . .?

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.

Platform A, Election Spending and Old-Media-Think

At last week’s Digital Media Conference held outside Washington, D.C., the lunchtime speaker was Lynda Clarizio, President of AOL’s Platform A. Platform A is a huge advertising network, a group of smaller ad networks lashed together under a single brand name. It’s AOL’s attempt to play big in the online ad game.

Clarizio’s a great speaker, able to command attention even amid the din and eventual post-prandial slump of a conference lunch.

But one thing she said led me to believe part of her operation, for all its new-media-world-killing ambition, is still grounded in the thinking of old media.

Since I wasn’t taking notes, I can’t quote her figures or words specifically. But she said she was disappointed with the recent performance of paid political advertising online. She hoped sales to political campaigns would boost online ad revenues this year.

The trouble with that thought is this:

Political campaigns–particularly Barack Obama’s, but many others as well–have learned to master social media to get their message out. Why buy online ads when a staff of two social media masterminds, a brilliant geek in a Red Sox cap and a battalion of interns can spread a powerful political message immediately, virally and essentially without cost? And far beyond the reach of any ad buy?

Political campaigns have become some of the most adept, persistent innovators in social media, and they have had a powerful effect already in motivating volunteers, generating donations and circulating millions of messages via video, pictures, widgets, blogs, Tweets, podcasts, purloined documents and endless screeds. Much of this is being done by people with no formal affiliation with the campaign–which is, of course, the way social media is supposed to work. [For details on the web 2.0 arms race [[Obama's campaign so far is kicking McCain's staff's slow-moving butt]], I invite you to attend the daily master class on such matters at the website of TechPresident.]

Paid online advertising–no matter how well targeted, contextualized and behaviorally-aware–is a garden hose.

Social media is a tidal wave.

Why bother paying for the former when all you need to do is ride the latter?

Next Page »