This is a test.

So much of our attention on the real-time web focuses on consumption — the notion that we want more information, faster. This was indeed the focus of our discussions at GigaOm’s “What Comes Next” session earlier this week (see my notes).

But then we all complain about information overload and continuous partial attention. At the very same Bunker session, alpha geeks complained of the Facebook and Twitter overload problem.

I’ve become convinced the real reason people love the real-time web isn’t for the glut of information it produces, but instead because it makes publishing more fun and enjoyable.

It’s all about the near-instant gratification from an “@” reply, or retweet, or a “like” on Facebook. Publishers (and by publishers I mean people who blog, Tweet, foursquare, etc) love this.

Blogging provided some of this in much earlier days, when it was a means of expression for a much smaller, insular, alpha-geek community  — but with a much higher degree of latency. You might write a blog post and  get a comment, or trackback, several hours (or days) later. But this kind of gratification fades over time — in part because so much of what we publish is so perishable — so services like Facebook and Twitter which provide more immediate feedback loops have come to dominate.

The response rate doesn’t have to be high, or targeted, with real-time. It has to be timely. Three or four immediate replies or retweets are ample reward — one can feel heard, listened to, a part of something bigger.

The fact that it’s all about the publishing, and not the consumption, is readily apparent to anyone who digs deeper into Twitter stats. Look at the average click-through rate of a link passed through Twitter by an A-list Twitterer, and you’ll be shocked how low it is. Folks with a million followers are lucky to get a couple of hundred, maybe a couple thousand, people clicking on a link.

All of which is to say: if I were an investor, I’d stay away from companies focused on creating the best possible way to consume “real-time” information. The truth is, other than stockbrokers and traders and people in the news business, most of us don’t really have a need for that. But, there is probably lots of money to be made still from services that use real-time feedback loops to get people to participate, publish, and contribute to a service or platform.

This morning I was at my pal Om’s What Comes Next for the Web — Om pulled together 40-50 people in San Francisco to talk about the combination of persistent, ever-present broadband networks and more powerful mobile devices that connect to those networks, and how we all make sense of the data explosion those two things have unleashed.

I sat in the back of the class and kept mum — I instinctively reprise my lame college and grad school behavior in those settings. … That said, I had a number of thoughts and reactions during the session, and thought I’d jot two of them down here to keep the conversation and thinking going:

Emotional and Qualitative Metadata

Marc Davis led a discussion about context — creating more standardized ways to put “who, what, where, when” metadata around media objects and other data that we create. There was much discussion of the use of geo-data in particular.

Thinking about this in the context of Vodpod (yes, I’m narrow-minded that way), I realized that this kind of “factual” metadata is often less important to us than “emotional” or “qualitative” metadata (some folks brought up emotional metadata in subsequent discussions, but the discussion on this was all too brief).

With video, the single most important piece of metadata is: is it any good? By “Good” I mean is it funny, or informational, or relevant, or beautiful.  And of course the answer to that for any given video is highly contextual (who is asking? who is answering?). We’re thinking about this a lot at Vodpod — and of course the fact we’re a community of video curators helps us — but creating interoperable ways to share this kind of qualitative metadata is a good subject for a follow-on discussion.

Serendipity Engines: Radio as a Guide?

Kevin Marks led a discussion about serendipity, and if there are ways for us to engineer and design for serendipity using all this new data. I kept turning my thoughts to the obvious and trite — but very best — example of serendipity by design on the web that I’ve seen so far — the radio offerings from Last.fm and Pandora. As I’ve written before, I’ve long been a big last.fm fan, and the appeal for me of that service is the radio feature — I invariably discover great new music through it every time I use it.

There have got to be some lessons learned from both of those services (one is top-down, one is bottom-up in how it determines which music to “recommend) that we can use.

And it also occurred to me that radio in general is an excellent format for serendipitous discovery, and that perhaps part of Twitter’s appeal for many of us is that it is a bit like radio for short-messages. Indeed, it was explicitly designed that way.

Maybe the radio analogy — in an extremely loose way, more psychological and state-of-mind than literal  — is a good one for those who seek to architect a bit of serendipity. It seems to me that when we’re explicitly receiving things — via the radio, or a Twitter stream — we’re more open to those moments of serendipity.

I’ve combined my WordPress and Typepad blogs, and am hosting both on WordPress.com now (thanks to the nifty export-import capabilities of both platform) at the mhallville.com address.

Historically, I’ve maintained two distinct blogs. The first was on Typepad, and eventually became an outlet for mostly political posts. I started my WordPress blog in late 2005, and have written mostly about technology and bikes there. Because the election is over, and I’m writing less about politics, it was becoming a pain to maintain two blogs. And given politics is no less important to me than technology, why keep the two separate.

I’ve also changed the look and feel, and am using WordPress’s relatively new P2 theme. The goals are to make the blog a little more conversational and to put up shorter posts,  more frequently, and I think the P2 format and layout encourages and rewards both of those things.

TechCrunch offers a guest post today by Vivek Wadhwa titled Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China.

It caught my eye.

Wadhwa suggests that many younger Chinese and Indians who have come to the United States to work in the technology business are returning to their native countries, and provocatively concludes:

It is very possible that some of the smart Indians who sat in the room with me holding their hand up on Columbus Day will start the next Google or Apple. Many of them will build companies which employ thousands. But the jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley. (emphasis mine)

Really?

Wadhwa essentially implies: if smart Indians and Chinese leave, well, there won’t be many smart people left here in the Bay Area. “The jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley.“

I don’t pretend to possess a definitive history or deep understanding of Silicon Valley. But it seems to me that the genius of the place is that it attracts interesting, smart, able people from all over the world and all over America, and from many diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Not just from one or two countries.

To the folks going home to Shanghai and Pune and Bangalore, best of luck. Yes, our economy is a mess, but I suspect some smart kid from Romania, London, Mexico, Brazil, Cleveland, Alabama, or Vietnam will arrive to take your place. And Silicon Valley will go on.

A month or two ago, our local newspaper (the SF Chronicle) arrived sheathed in a special cover, with a surprisingly interesting illustrated history of the paper. You can get a sense of that history here.

The story of the paper’s creation was so outlandish and improbable that it got me interested in a broader history of newspapers, particularly as significant businesses (the media empires created at the turn of the 19th century by Pulitzer, Scripps, Hearst among others). You could see, in the founding and evolution of the Chronicle, something not too dissimilar to what we’re witnessing now, with another great media revolution and birthing of new media outlets like Talking Points Memo, Politico, TechCrunch, GigaOm and more.

So I have before me a couple of books about the history of the newspaper business (there were shockingly few about this subject). I’ve just begun to sink my teeth into E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers by Gerald Baldasty. For those of us who are new media entrepreneurs, there is stuff to be learned. I’ll try to share the most relevant bits in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

Fred Wilson, a VC and blogger and investor in Twitter, talks about the power of Twitter to drive traffic.

He says that among their portfolio companies, traffic from Twitter and Facebook is now about 20% the amount of traffic driven by Google; that it is growing about 3-40% per month; and that if that growth rate continues, Facebook and Twitter will drive more traffic to their portfolio companies (excluding Twitter, obviously) than Google within a year or two.

As I wrote two months ago, I get that the potential for traffic growth is very attractive. The question for me remains is there some fundamental benefit that will allow this to happen, or are we just seeing a bubble inflate right now:

So why the hype? Traffic. People — bloggers especially, those in Silicon Valley or the tech industry even more particularly — have realized that Twittering can send traffic.  This is why Jason Calacanis offered $250,000 for one of the 20 recommended user slots on Twitter.  It’s why so many top twitterers include links in their tweets, usually to their own properties. And why so many in the SEO/SEM business have flocked to use Twitter.

So it’s all good, right? Twitter is the new Google, a new fountain of traffic for web properties? That depends on how you look at it, and whether you think Twitter provides some essential, fundamental value. If you question whether it provides much value other than the potential to drive you traffic, the Florida real estate cum ponzi scheme analogy goes like this: people are flocking to Twitter mostly because they believe it has the potential to drive traffic, and as long as people flock in that perception is fulfilled.

The problems start occuring when the growth slows down, or stops.

And this movie, we’ve seen it before. Digg and Facebook got the same (ok, not quite the same) levels of hype in their days of ascendancy, for the same reasons. People thought they could be tamed, harnessed, used as traffic hoses. As growth (or the perception of growth) in traffic from those services decreased, so to did the hype attendant on them decrease, at least among the digerati. But unlike Twitter, one could argue Facebook, and to a lesser extent Digg, provided some more meaningful, underlying value to their end users.

I still think that the jury is out.

One of the interesting things about being totally off the grid these past three days is that I was oblivious to what was happening in Iran. I would probably have followed the news obsessively if I had been in town, and connected.

Today, I made up for that a bit and out of purely personal interest put together a quick collection of videos from around the web covering the protests. The Channel 4 UK coverage is particularly worthy. I’ll try to update my particular collection over the coming days.

But short of that, you’ll find the videos being collected by the larger Vodpod community are really comprehensive and good and interesting. I’ve listed some other resources here on the Vodpod blog if you’re interested.  A great example of crowdsourcing at work, where people collecting individually and independently, driven by their owns needs and desires, produce a worthy and timely news product.

I think Compete’s numbers are horses*#@. I usually prefer to look at Quantcast to compare sites when both are “quantified.”

But I thought this was interesting for the trendline. One site is written about extensively by the trade blogs, the other not at all. I’ll leave you guess which is which.

I like Fred Wilson’s blog. Read it regularly. Also follow him on Twitter.

On Friday, Fred posted an interview with Robert Scoble where he asked for a “del.icio.us for video.”  Real-time maven that I am, I would have seen Fred’s note, it would have caught my attention, and I would have tweeted him right away. For I know of such a service!

But, very happily for me, I was very off the grid for three days here:

Now I’m back, refreshed, and should update the record. Del.icio.us for video? Already done.  Called Vodpod. Been around for over 2 years. And indeed already pretty popular! You can see my video bookmarks on the right. Heck, you can even watch them there!

Vodpod:

• Provides a handy browser bookmarklet (or extension if you prefer) so you can bookmark a video from any site that offers Flash video + an embed code (9500+ sites and counting)
• Makes it easy to share the videos you bookmark in an infinite number of ways through our widgets, RSS feeds, API, hosted video sites, applications for Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed, and more
• Normalizes the video playback across thousands of different Flash player types, with consistent sizing and handling of auto-play (as best we can, anyway)
• Makes lovely thumbnails for the videos you collect
• Provides handy Flickr-like organizer, so you can order your collection as it grows

And more. The team gets an A for building an awesome service; I get a more critical mark when it comes to evangelizing the product among the technorati.

So @Fred — check it out! It’ll even work on your Boxee:-)