Marshall's blog and shared items

Great Designers vs Data Specialists: Which is Harder to Hire?

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:38 GMT

Data geek Soren Macbeth (now at Yieldbot) and I met over tea several months ago and he said something to me that I have thought of many times since. He said that though data science is getting all the hype, great designers might be even harder to hire. I was just thinking about that again this morning and thought I'd ask on the Twitter. Below you'll find the interesting conversation that emerged in response. I'd love to know what your thoughts on this are.

Of course the best of both worlds are those magical people who are strong in both. People like Nathan Yau, Andrew Vande Moere, Benjamin Wiederkehr, Ben Fry, Jer Thorp and Martin Wattenberg. Then there's emergent voices online like Cole Nussbaumer, Enrico Bertini and Bryan Connor. See also the new podcast Data Stories. I don't know all of these people personally, I just discovered them as part of the output of our startup Plexus Engine. Speaking of Plexus, if you're into data and design – and if you'd like to live in beautiful Portland, Oregon – you should send me an email so we can talk. If you don't want to move but are interested in rocking the future of the internet with us, you should still get in touch. We're building something incredible and we're looking for people who want to build it with us.

Things I wish were easier to do with RSS

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:28 GMT

I'm having a rough day with RSS feeds today, but there's SO much potential there still. We should all give thanks every day to Dave Winer and the other geeks who helped build RSS into what it is today. I just wish I could do more with it. I met with one of the biggest tech companies in the world last week and they too said they live on RSS feeds and love them. These are the things that I'm crying about today and have found myself upset about again and again.

Programatically look at a list of hundreds of webpage URLs and determine what their RSS feed URLs are. All the methods we've tried break or miss feeds.
Send a feed to a feed publishing service like Feedburner and have it cache non-live items in the feed it publishes.
Build spaghetti-ball messes of ornate processes with lots of RSS feeds without the apps using them timing out.

Anybody know good, scalable solutions to any of these problems?

Let’s Talk Tech on Facebook

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:11 GMT

After years of resistance, I have decided to take the time to create a Facebook Page. It's here. If you are interested in all things about the future of the Internet, and you use Facebook, I hope you'll join me for conversation there.

I've had a lot of issues with Facebook over the years, I wrote a big critique of the company's data sharing partnerships last week, but I also have a lot of admiration for Facebook. I can't go into great detail about that now because I've got a lot of work to do, but I hope you'll join me there if that's what you're into.

The Next Era of Tech Blogging: 3 Things That Could Make it Better

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:13 GMT

Leading tech and marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a blog post today that has inspired some interesting conversation; he argues that with the recent departure of a number of the key big names in tech blogging from their posts, the Golden Age of Tech Blogging has passed and it's a new era. He cites my leaving RWW among others, though I haven't entirely left. (I'm just focused on building killer research mega-tool PlexusEngine.)

Many people believe that no such change is happening, either. There's a continuum of constant change, but tech blogging has never really been about just TechCrunch, Mushable and ReadWriteWeb. There are many other important tech blogs, always have been and always will be. ReadWriteWeb 2.0 is going to rock, too, by the way.

Either way, things are certainly changing. There are opportunities for new blogs and bloggers to rise into leadership positions. I thought I'd take a few minutes and offer three bits of advice about things I think could help make the new era of tech blogging even better than the last one. I just think these things would be nice.

Outbound Links

It's sad that so few tech blog posts add the kind of value that can be added by including links to high quality off-site resources. It's ok to send readers away, they'll appreciate the pointers and they'll come back. Some of the biggest sites on the web just aggregate links to other sites – why not combine that form of value with original content on blogs? Not only are the links valuable for readers, the research required to assemble those links is a big value add as well. Compiling research and links to other sites is a fine art. I know everybody wants to see more of this. Who on earth would believe that a single blog post's author knows everything a reader wants to know about a topic?

This isn't just a matter of principle, either. Outbound links can be good for search engine traction, though that's not 100% clear and it's not clear how much weight they carry relative to inbound links. As Google's Maile Ohye said several years ago, “Thoughtful outbound links also help your credibility because it shows that you've done your research and have expertise in the subject manner. You visitors may therefore want to come back for more analysis on future topics.”

Research, Including on Company Founders

One of the things I learned from Michael Arrington when at TechCrunch is that it's always important to look at the backgrounds of founders of companies you're writing about. Almost no one does that anymore though, I too often forget myself, but it's so often a missing part of the whole story!

As VC Roger Ehrenberg once wrote, “There can be tremendous inefficiencies as founders ascend the learning curve, especially in areas that are not necessarily related to or interesting given the founders' backgrounds.” Conversely, a founder's background experience indicates the ways in which they are most likely to be particularly efficient.

The time and pageview pressure these days leads to short blog posts based on little more than the first impression of the blogger was left with after looking at a website themselves. It's like the what, the why and the when of a news story gets adressed but the who gets too little attention.

Platform Implications

One of the things I have learned from Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is that news is always more interesting when you adress the long-term platform implications of anything. When might a certain app, trend or news development make possible in the future? That's one of the most exciting parts of the story.

A contrary perspective is that, as investor Rob Go has written, the word Platform could be “the most meaningless and overused phrase that entrepreneurs and investors try to use to make companies seem more important than they are.” Maybe, but from a journalistic and analytical perspective, thinking about companies as parts of trends, which will hopefully lead to future opportunities, seems like something that can never be a bad idea.

Maybe all of this is just a way to say “I think tech blogging should be more like the way I like to do tech blogging. But these three ideas sure would help make the next era of tech blogging even better, I think. Maybe no more listicles, too. (Blog posts with numbered lists! Ha!)

For what it's worth, I should mention that all the outbound links in this post were added lickety-split with the help of Plexus Engine. Sign up now for beta notification – it's coming along really well!

What I Learned from a Night Editing Wikipedia

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:49 GMT

This Friday evening I stayed in, not feeling well, and spent my night doing more editing of Wikipedia than I've ever done before. After reading Danny Sullivan's frustrated blog post about his recent experience being shot down on Wikipedia, I thought it would be good to share a different experience. I think Wikipedia is super important and I love it, but editing it is not easy to do. Not because of the technical requirements, those are pretty simple, but because of the way the community there can articulate its expectations.

I went with friends on Friday afternoon to the Fubonn Shopping Center, a large Asian mall with a big grocery store. Riding in the car through town to the mall, my precious Geoloqi iPhone app with the Wikipedia layer turned on was sending me push notifications as we passed places with Wikipedia entries. I love this app more than almost anything on earth – yesterday we passed by three heliports, for example, something the 6 year-old and I that were traveling together never would have known otherwise. When we went to a pay-per-use children's play facility with coffee for grown-ups, I sat and read all about the Willamette Stone, a marker located just down the road that served as the center reference point for the Federal land grant of 1850. That program was the first time women were allowed to own property in the US: they could own half of the hundreds of acres granted to each white married couple or “half-blooded Indian.” I love knowing the good and bad history around the places I find myself.

But Friday afternoon I was at the Fubonn Mall and was surprised to find out that there was no Wikipedia entry for the place! It calls itself the largest Asian mall in Oregon and that certainly seems of encyclopedic significance to me.

Unfortunately, I did not stop and snap a picture of the mall's giant round front window when I thought about it. I would come to regret that later.

That night I sat in my living room and decided I would create a Wikipedia entry for Fubonn.

It was a lot of fun. I logged in to an account I created years ago but hadn't used much and I created the new entry. I looked at entries for other businesses and malls around town, clicked the edit button, copied the Wiki code for all the formatting, pasted it into my entry and then changed it to refer to Fubonn. I Googled around, especially in the Google News Archives, and found information to include in the entry. It really enjoyed it. Here it is, a living breathing Wikipedia page about Fubonn.

I saw that other posts had photos of businesses included photos and I wanted to include one of the big front window of Fubonn. There weren't any I could find in the Creative Commons section of Flickr so I grabbed one from the Fubonn website. Wikipedia seemed to indicate that if a photo was used in an advertisement and I couldn't reasonably get a photo in another way, then I could use that photo in an entry. Turns out I misread that. My photo got deleted and a long paragraph of confusing explanation was sent my way. The short version: I need to go back to the mall and take my own photo of the front door. Silly, if you ask me – but that's the rules.

One long-time editor visited my entry, fixed some links, removed a “see also” link to the Fubonn Foursquare page (turns out you're only allowed to link to other Wikipedia pages in the See Also section – not sure where I could link to what I consider a valuable additional resource off-site) and then placed my entry into the WikiOregon project. That project is dedicated to building out pages about Oregon. The editor classified my entry as of “start” quality (not a stub) and of “low” importance to the project.

I took issue with the low importance designation, especially when I saw some of the other entries that had been classified as of “mid” importance, and so I edited my entry's Talk page and classified it as of Mid importance to WikiOregon. I am not sure why the page about the 1916 Oregon Ducks football team, which finished in 2nd place, would be more important than the largest Asian mall in the state and the cornerstone of the alleged move of Chinatown from downtown to South East Portland.

There were some parts of the experience that I found confusing and disappointing, but when I woke up in the morning I felt silly for having complained about that the night before on Twitter and Google Plus. This was my first major contribution to the giant sprawling, pseudo-democratic experiment that is Wikipedia. Why am I entitled to just jump in and be praised for everything I do?

New Zealand technologist Nat Torkington said of Sullivan's experience, “having built a valuable resource, vain nano-Napoleons hide behind hostile UIs.” For what it's worth, my experience did make me bristle – but I wouldn't describe what I experienced that way.

The new article rating system says that 9 anonymous people have already rated my article to be of high quality and completeness, that's cool. And the article history page shows that 4 other people have now made edits to the page. The end result is pretty good so far, I think. I wish my photo was still there, but I think I'm going to try to go back to that mall and take one of my own.

Once I got over the sting of confusing reprimands, my imagination started whirring. I imagined taking my 9 year-old niece back to Fubonn with my friend who's a professional food photographer. I imagined setting up an interview with the mall's owner and taking a bunch of high-quality photos to put into the public domain. Wouldn't that be a great experience for a 9 year old to get to take part in? To collaborate in creating a part of the public record like that?

I think I would like to do something like that with my niece, but I want to think of the best place to do it for. Maybe we could find one place near her home that has an entry we could expand on with some Google searches, then maybe another place that doesn't have an entry. We could take some photos, take a trip to the library to do some research, and create one ourselves.

I think that would be an incredibly empowering experience for a young person old enough to appreciate it. It was even for me, and I write on the web daily, to accolades from around the world.

There's something magical about filling out a public resource about a place in the real world. The Geoloqi Wikipedia layer, as well as looking at Wikipedia entries through Google Earth, have created an expectation in my mind that every single place I go should have a Wikipedia entry available about it. I would really like that to be the case.

If Wikipedia can figure out how to welcome more and more new editors onto the site, and I don't think coddling us is necessary, perhaps that will become reality in the future. It's an incredibly complicated community management situation though. Danny Sullivan's experience having his entry about an important woman in technology get deleted is super frustrating and an example of how things can go wrong.

But there's a whole lot about that's right about Wikipedia, too. The difference between many Wikipedia entries and old encyclopedia entries on the same topics is so substantial that it deserves to be sung about from mountain tops. (The world before Wikipedia – an honestly horrible vision)

I thought I'd write up these thoughts in hopes it could help some other people jump into the messy world of Wikipedia, too. The world will be a better place for it.

Related: Why I Love the Internet So Much (about editing OpenStreetMap)

After Four Years as ReadWriteWeb’s Lead Writer, Here’s My Next Adventure

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:59 GMT

It’s with both excitement and sadness that today I announce I am stepping back from my full time position at ReadWriteWeb to build a product and a company. I’ll be continuing to post at RWW regularly, but I’ve got some big new things up my sleeve as well.

After years of writing about startup companies, I’m now building one myself. Specifically, I’m building a company that’s developing a technology based on some of my favorite consulting projects I’ve done for clients over the years: an app and data platform that discovers emerging topical information. It’s a learning-curve busting, “first mover's advantage” as a service, technology for information workers who want to win. It's about helping users “skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been.”

It’s called Plexus Engine, it’s in private beta and you can sign up to be notified when it launches at PlexusEngine.com. A Plexus is a place where nerves branch and rejoin in the body and the Plexus Engine analyzes points of intersection online to detect emerging signals.

What’s it do, specifically? It’s not ready to be talked about much, but I will tell you this:

I’ve built my career as one of the web’s leading technology journalists by making strategic use of lightweight tools for processing data to gain first mover’s advantage.

I’ve also consulted for companies large and small on how to build and use new media technologies, launch products and identify potential hires and industry experts, using tools as well. That’s where Plexus Engine was born.

Now I’m building a technology for everyone to use in order to save time and derive value from the huge sea of data being published online.

Josh Dilworth, founder of Austin’s Jones-Dilworth, who’s done PR for SXSW, Siri, Wolfram Alpha and many more, says – “For years Marshall has had a leg up and now we know why. We are already using Plexus at Jones-Dilworth and it makes us look smarter every day. It's instant domain knowledge — ideal for getting up to speed in new categories.”

Richard Snee, VP of Marketing at data warehousing company EMC Greenplum, with whom I was consulting when Plexus Engine was born, puts it this way: “For many B2B marketing professionals effective use of social media can be mysterious and frustrating. The work we did with Marshall helped create a blueprint for success in our social media efforts at EMC Greenplum.”

Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey in Oakland, CA says of Plexus: “Mining the info that this technology does, quickly and easily, is money.”

Plexus Engine is going to be especially valuable for people working in marketing and PR, but I think anyone who does business on the web is going to want to use it.

Ok, that's the end of the short version of the story. You should go to PlexusEngine.com and sign up for beta access. I’ll let you know as soon as more information is available. You can follow @plexusengine on Twitter for updates on the company and you can follow me at @marshallk

***********************

Now, who wants to hear some cool stories about the Internet?

I’ve been learning about how to do this kind of stuff for as long as I’ve been working online. The methods I’ve explored have been complicated, experimental and challenging but now I’m going to productize the lessons I’ve learned in a way that anyone can use them.

Back when I started blogging AOL’s Weblogs Inc. I signed up to get RSS feeds from the key tech companies via SMS alerts. (Using Sameer Patel’s old startup Zaptxt.) No one else was doing that at the time and it helped me report on news before all the other tech blogs. That landed me a job as the first hired writer at TechCrunch.

When I was at TechCrunch, I used a variety of other tools to segment my inbound streams of information and broaden the range of information I could consume. (See Open Sourcing My TechCrunch Work Flow)

At ReadWriteWeb, I’ve used a wide variety of tools to mine signal from a whole lot of noise around the web. Here are a few examples of tips and tricks I’ve employed there so far that I’ve already written about before:

Delicious Data Mining

When social bookmarking service Delicious was being “sunsetted” by Yahoo, I wrote about a system we set up for mining it for streams of valuable signals.

Here’s how it worked: we went through the ReadWriteWeb archives and grabbed URLs of companies and products we’d written about before. Then we took those URLs over to Delicious and we looked up their bookmarking history. We scrolled back to the first 20 user names of people who bookmarked those links, then we copied and pasted them into a spreadsheet. Then we repeated that process 300 times or so. Finally, we sorted the spreadsheet alphabetically and found 15 people who on 5 or more occasions had bookmarked something we had later found of sufficient interest to write about. They had a proven history of finding things early – so we subscribed to an RSS feed of everything those people bookmarked in the future. That worked really well for a long time.

Needlebasing Twitter

One day we caught wind of a local Salt Lake City newspaper that ran a story about a big new data center opening in town with a mystery anchor tenant. The paper believed that the tenant was Twitter, opening its first data center outside of San Francisco – as the company said it would, in a location undisclosed. We used the (now Google-acquired) web app called Needlebase to investigate.

We grabbed the URL of the Twitter List of the staff of Twitter Inc. and we trained Needlebase’s point-and-click screen scraping tool to recognize what a user name, Tweet text and location field (when there was one) looked like on the page of staff Tweets. Then I clicked a button and said “go!”

In just a few minutes, the most recent 1125 Tweets from staff were pulled into Needlebase and we said “show ‘em on a map!” Sure enough, one Twitter network engineer had posted a Tweet with a location attached to it right across the highway from the alleged mystery data center. He’d just left San Francisco, he had Tweeted, and arrived in Salt Lake City ready to get to work.

That Tweet was quickly deleted after we reported on it. Six months later, it was reported that the Salt Lake data center efforts were plagued with all kinds of problems and got called off at great expense. (Here’s a screencast about how to use Needlebase to scrape at least the old Twitter interface, things have changed but it’s an ok intro to Needlebase.)

ReadWriteWeb is where I learned to use Twitter as a journalist and it was only slight hyperbole when I wrote four years ago that Twitter was paying my rent. (It was through my use of Twitter on ReadWriteWeb, by the way, that Mashable learned to make use of Twitter, too.)

Backtyping Your Comments Around the Web

Backtype, a startup that got swallowed up by Twitter, used to offer the coolest feature: an RSS feed for comments posted to blog posts all around the web and signed with a particular URL in the URL field.

We took Robert Scoble’s Most Influential in Tech list of Twitter users, grabbed the home page URLs from all the Twitter bios on that list, then ran those URLs through Backtype and got an RSS feed for any comments posted by the people on the list. For some people we put their feeds in an RSS to Instant Messaging alert system, so whenever Chris Messina posted a comment on any blog around the web and signed it FactoryJoe.com, I’d get an IM within 5 minutes. We got to write several stories before anyone else that way.

Unfortunately, that service doesn’t exist anymore, but it was born from the same kind of thinking as the other examples above: what new fields of data online could I gain programmatic access to, subject to some analysis and then use for strategic advantage?

That’s part of the thinking behind Plexus Engine, too.

I’ve written about lots of other ways to use publicly available data and services to derive value from the web: How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Almost Any Topic, How to Use Blekko (or any Custom Search Engine) to Rock at Your Job, How to Use Mechanical Turk to Rock at Conference Blogging and even How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet.

If those kinds of things are exciting to you, I think you’re really going to enjoy Plexus Engine. It’s going to be some internet magic, with a ribbon on top.

I think it’s going to be a must-have technology for anyone who does business on the web. I’m looking forward to showing it to you, as soon as its ready.

Social Media is Not Ruining Journalism

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:31 GMT

I found myself responding to a Google+ thread this morning wherein a respected technology leader said “copying and pasting from social networking sites is not journalism.” Apparently he'd been seeing random Tweets referenced on TV and thought it was lazy, pointless and a sign that journalism is going down the tubes.

I'll leave his name out of it because I've totally copied and pasted things he's posted online before as the basis for acts of journalism myself!

I do take issue with the idea that the trend of bringing curated social media into other types of media is a bad idea. Here's why, from my comment on Google+. I edited it to make it more clear.

I respectfully disagree.

1. Had you seen those tweets yourself already? Discovery, curation and contextualization of publicly available information has long been an important part of journalism.

2. If it's random peoples' random tweets being shared, that doesn't sound like a value add, but there certainly is potential there for journalists to integrate multiple types of media to add value. Some Tweets are good to include, some Tweets are not. I find a lot of news on Twitter and sometimes include the tweets themselves in my reporting.

3. I would argue that journalism is expanding and you're seeing a lot more of new types of journalism: quick hits to catch busy people up on news, curation of reports elsewhere, etc. but there's still old-fashioned journalism being performed as well. I'm watching the Al Jazeera iPad app right now and it's great.

I'm also working on a big article about Walmart's mobile strategy. I've been working on it for a week. I'm using lots of online social media, bots, virtual assistants and hope to have 4 or 5 interviews included in my research. In the meantime, though, I'll probably write 10 other posts for which I didn't take the time to do interviews. All of that rolled up together = contemporary journalism. Go read some tweets, then go read some longform.org or such things.

I don't think it's as dismal as you think.

In fact – I think we're making a difficult transition into a new golden age of journalism. I hope so, at least.

That said, there is a feeling of pressure to work ever faster. From a previous comment in the same conversation.

It's hard to scale, but we honestly do try to interview people whenever we can. (I know I totally copied and pasted a comment from you awhile ago though too!) I do probably 5-7 interviews a week by phone or IM for 15 blog posts I write. I wish I could do more, but I have to rely on search and discussion with my own co-workers in most cases. I can't spend more than 90 minutes on most of those stories and sometimes that precludes being able to connect with someone to interview. Sad but true.

Given all that – online social media is where a lot of conversation is happening and it can be incredibly valuable to news research. Sometimes that's done well and sometimes that's done poorly.

Corporate Social Strategist List Now Doubled in Size

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:57 GMT

Back in January I did some fun hacking together of a Twitter list and some stats about corporate social strategists on Twitter, based on a great list of people in charge of social technology strategy at companies around the world compiled by Jeremiah Owyang.

Jeremiah kept adding to his list, though, and I quickly fell behind in trying to find each new addition to his list on Twitter and adding them to my Twitter list. Last month I finally figured out a way to get myself caught up and a list that was 141 members strong is now up to 277!

Here's that list, if you haven't started following it already. And here are a bunch of metrics and insights into the first half of the list. (If you're interested in this kind of research about any other business sector, but better, you should contact me, by the way.)

Here's how I caught up on list updates, if you're interested. I copied all the names on Jeremiah's updated list into a Google Doc, then I copied all the names on my Twitter List into another Google Doc. Then I emailed my favorite virtual assistant service Fancyhands and asked them to send me a list of the people on Jeremiah's list but not on mine. They did that promptly. Then I sent the resulting list back into Fancyhands on another work request and asked for everyone's Twitter username on that list.

Then I turned the resulting list into a bunch of links to those Twitter profiles. Then I changed my Twitter password. Oooooh, scary! Then I gave my new Twitter password to my fabulous new friend Steve Malloy and he did me the favor of adding all the new people to the official list! Thank you so much, Steven, for helping all of us keep track of the Tweets of social strategy leaders around the world!

Why Klout is Really and Truly Valuable

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:28 GMT

Social media scoring system Klout did a big refresh tonight and it is clearly broken because it said I am less influential than it said I was before. But is it worthless? Is this a meaningless arbitrary number that deserves nothing but mockery? No.

Alexia Tsotsis posted a funny video and a harsh critique at TechCrunch tonight and she said, essentially: Klout is worth nothing, nobody cares.

I disagree.

I've certainly got critiques of Klout, but I think the service's value is important to recognize, too.

My comment, in response:

I use the Klout browser plug-in to help when I'm scanning down a large set of Twitter users in my browser as one of several methods to make sure I don't miss someone that was not known to me before but was known to and respected by the many more people on the web than myself. In other words: “We all have an inherent sense of who is influential” is a statement that only makes sense if you keep looking at the same people all the time or assume that you already know everyone influential.

I suppose I could get a good feel for how influential a person I do not know, from a place I've never been, is if I took 30 to 180 seconds to make that evaluation manually (who can't judge another person quickly these days?) but if you're looking at hundreds or thousands of people then Klout can be a useful tool.

For example, see below a Twitter search for the hashtag #occupysf, with the Klout browser plug-in turned on. Scanning down these four accounts Tweeting the term, the numbers tell me that the first and fourth accounts are less weighty than the second and third. If I stopped and looked closer you know what I'd see?

I'd see that the first is a Sarah Palin satire account that almost no one pays attention to and the fourth is a political rabble rouser with little traction on Twitter either. The second and the third are documentary film makers who have built audiences for themselves online. I stopped to find that out, but I didn't have to thanks to Klout. When I'm in a hurry and there are lots of twitter accounts to evaluate fast – I can scan down those numbers and see who's got a history on Twitter and online, and who doesn't. I don't know any of these people, but some of them have a greater demonstrated history of contributing content that's appreciated by their communities than other accounts have. Is that the be-all-end all metric? No. Is it a useful tool? Yes. Klout is great for quick judgements and fast sorting of a bulk of people online in lightweight circomstances.

All social networks assign scores to the accounts inside them, Klout just surfaces those as its central value proposition.

Sharing Secrets With Strangers in Startups

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 13:02 GMT

From the conclusion to an email I just sent an entrepreneur and incubator seeking coverage. Seems like a really cool startup and I'm not going to be mean about it this time – but I don't think I'm being unfair to say this isn't really how it works.

Startup emails me all the details about what they are doing and then says “oh by the way, this is embargoed until Monday.” Nice to meet you, too!

Fwiw, this is the 2nd [unnamed incubator] startup in the past few weeks who has written to us and just asserted an embargo we haven't agreed to. It would be great if this post and the post it links to was read by your people: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_will_respect_your_embargoes.php

In short: if I don't agree to an embargo before you give me info, then I presume you've reached out to others who haven't either. That means I have a. no verbal contract to wait until the asserted embargo time and b. no reason to believe that other media outlets will wait. That means it is in my interest to write now and be first.
That's how I understand it and I know I'm not alone.
best wishes,
Marshall Kirkpatrick
ReadWriteWeb

Google News Strikes Blow Against Cynicism, Will Drive Pageviews to Quality Content

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 11:32 GMT

In a Saturday morning blog post the Google News team just announced a new HTML tag they will be scanning for in the headers of news articles: standout. Publishers can call out their own content when they publish particularly good stuff or they can highlight someone else's content that inspired their own. You can call your own stuff “standout” up to 7 times in a week – any more and the tags will be ignored. But you can highlight other peoples' content as much as you want. Google seems to imply in its announcement, though it doesn't say it explicitly, that its algorithm will reward publishers who engage in the best practice of generously applauding great content on other sites with recognition.

People say that online news has grown cynical and pandering because that's the only way to thrive under the rule of the angry god of pageviews. But what if the big traffic drivers put a premium on generosity, if not machine-recognized authenticity? That kind of strategy could be carried to quite an extreme – the Google algorithms could give extra rank to content with a better Flesch–Kincaid readability test score, or lower rank to any site that ever mentioned anyone's name who'd appeared in headlines along with the phrase “sex tape.” That's probably a little too paternalistic – but the Standout tag seems like a simple and smart way to reward content that publishers appreciate.

It's interesting that simply linking elsewhere isn't enough anymore. It will also be very interesting to see what kinds of content publishers think is their best, how often they do highlight the content of others with an outbound Standout tag, etc. That should all be available for independent analysis, too, as it's not just Google that can see these HTML tags. What kind of relationship do you expect various sites to have with Standout? GigaOm vs BusinessInsider? Mashable vs. TechCrunch? How will ReadWriteWeb use them? You'll just have to wait and see!

I think this is a great idea and I hope it helps flesh out a linked web of content that prioritizes serving the reader over short-term self-referential pageviews at all costs.

There's a lot more to be said about this but I'll defer to Ethan Klapper's write-up at Mediabistro for more. Heck, I'd tell the bots it's a standout article if my personal site here was indexed by Google News. As a one-person, low-key operation it won't be – so I'll have to just link the old fashioned way.

New Google Plus People Search is Not Very Good

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:29 GMT

Google Plus released a search function this week, months after the search giant's social network went live. The People search part at least is remarkably un-useful. I think there are huge opportunities in discovery of people but apparently Google thinks not so much, so far at least.

People search searches the About pages of peoples' Google Plus profiles as a full-text search. There doesn't appear to be any relevance ranking in the People Search results pages, either. So you get a lot of very random results.

Search for anthropologists and it does identify people who use the word anthropology in their About page, but they seem pretty random. Some of them are anthropologists, though. Search for people with the keyword baseball and the #1 result is an online marketer named Kevin Palmer who filled out the bragging rights section of his profile with the words “I got hit in the same spot on my leg in a high school baseball game.” I guess he means twice? I don't know. Odd choice for the #1 search result from the #1 search company in the world. Maybe it will get better with time. I see that he's following me on Plus though so maybe the results are different for everyone. Odd.

I hope it becomes awesome someday. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to find baseball playing anthropologists and pop a handful of them into a Circle?

Disclosure: I'm on the Google Plus suggested users list and thus have an economic interest in not criticizing the service.

Google Plus Just Gave Me Thousands of Dollars

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:08 GMT

Google's new social network Plus released a suggested users list today and I'm on it. Here is Alex Howard's post detailing all the people listed. We will all now get tens of thousands if not millions of new subscribers to our updates on the network. We will have all the more incentive to keep posting to Plus and to say nice things about it. Those of us who make money doing these sorts of things, as I do when people click my links and view the ads on ReadWriteWeb or consider my consulting services through this site, will probably see a windfall of thousands of dollars. At least. For some new media brands, if Google Plus gets as big as Twitter, it could mean millions of dollars.

Is this a case of the rich getting richer, of the new media ecosystem being concentrated into the arms of a small number of voices, contrary to the interests of consumers? If this was the only way to discover new people to follow, that would be bad. It isn't and it won't be though. Like all things, this arrangement is part meritocracy, part democracy, part privilege and some other parts other stuff. It's complex and there's more to discuss about it than I can here while I'm riding down the highway on an Amtrak bus and blogging on my phone.

Is this ethically wrong? I don't think so, but it is sticky that's for sure. Networks of self-published content are the hot currency of the era and the ecosystem around those networks includes some of us interesting enough, culturally safe enough and commercially viable enough that we make our living publishing on the web, through RSS, to subscribers on Twitter, Facebook and Plus. It's a beautiful thing, but the challenge will be to not get so cozy with the networks that we both cover and that deliver us this flow that we no longer serve our audiences (or whatever you people reading should be called) with an eye for critique of the network providers themselves.

I'm not on Twitter's suggested user list but my employer is. I'll rip into that company at a moment's notice, publish its secrets when I discover them and just generally maintain a respectful antagonism with them despite their role in the supply chain that turns my thought into bits into (delicious Oregon microbrewed) beer in my belly.

Hopefully Plus didn't just buy a bunch of unconditionally supportive new friends in the media. Clearly they don't hold a grudge about my scoop of the details about how the new network would work at SXSW, despite the red-faced shouting at me at the time. I've also been very critical of Plus regarding the Real Names policy.

There's room in my head though to be glad to have been picked for the pickup basketball team while also feeling like the captain of the team sometimes acts like a frat-boy a-hole. It's a complicated situation and no one is pure and good in it. It's the future: messy like the present and the past but hopefully a little more just and democratically empowering.

One thing's for sure: I'll be disclosing that I'm on the Plus suggested user list in every article I post about the network in the future. Because these days, a free pile of social network connections equal free discourse at scale, free access to answers to many of my questions and other resources that eventually translate to free money and power. And I intend to keep it free because I'm going to work hard to not pay the price of my integrity.

Let’s Test a New App Together & You Can Give Me Advice

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:53 GMT

Dear Friends, I would like to test out a new app called Qidiq, which will let me send you push notifications and emails when I have a question I'd like to survey you about. I'd like to ask people about tech news coverage questions. I can't imagine I'd send a push notification more than 3 or 4 times a week max – it should be fun. I hope you'll try it out with me; then I'll review the app on ReadWriteWeb.

Thanks for your help!

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Don’t Freak Out About Another $800 Million Investment In Twitter

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:29 GMT

Peter Delevett of the San Jose Mercury News did some research tonight and got specific numbers on Twitter's widely discussed mega-round of (even more) venture capital. Specifically, $800 million. Delevett says it's the biggest VC round ever and while I'm not one to say authoritatively that the Merc is wrong about something VC related (they are experts on the subject) it does seem like a bold assertion to make: “the biggest ever.” A WSJ report by Scott Austin last January offers 3 examples of larger investments, including Groupon, Clearwire and the poor risk-takers-gone-wrong at Western Intergrated Networks, who turned $900m of investment into $12m in sold assets a few years later.

There are probably other examples and as people are telling me on Twitter – it really depends on your definition of Venture Capital.

Why It's Smart

Regardless, I think that if anyone is going to break a record on funds raised, it's ok with me that it's Twitter. I don't have the time or knowledge to put together a whole post about this on ReadWriteWeb, so instead some notes here.

* Twitter has revolutionized business and public communication in a historically unprecedented way. Never before has it been so easy for anyone to publish quick updates about what they are doing and for that to be read and passed around at scale, in real-time. That's a really, really big deal.
* Businesses are scrambling to get to Twitter's advertising products faster than the company can deliver them.
* Twitter comes up with really smart ways to do what it does, like its latest ad product – letting brands pay to have their Tweets show up at the top of the page any time someone who already follows them visits Twitter.com. That's brilliant.
* This whole thing is just beginning. Twitter's just beginning, but “social media” is all the more just at its beginning. At least, if you were someone with a huge amount of money made from the old economy, and if you could afford to gamble it on what appears to be a new economy emerging, to make a very serious bet seems like a respectable strategy to me.

Half of that money, reportedly, is going to buy out the hippies that created Twitter, leaving them wealthy enough to go innovate some more, possibly kicking off a PayPal-like wave of new world-changing startups.

The rest of that money is going to go, apparently, towards making Twitter all the more solid, important and ready to be the AT&T to Facebook's Verizon and Google Plus's Sprint, or whatever. These could well be the communication platforms of the future though, so I don't think it's stupid at all to throw a whole lot of money into them. If you've got it. And Digital Sky Technologies, the giant Russian company that's put comparable sums into Facebook, Zynga and other companies has it. So why not?

This really isn't my area of expertise, though, venture capital. Maybe there's good reason to freak out – but I haven't heard it yet.

A good RSS to OPML file generator

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:39 GMT

My old favorite web service for turning a list of feeds into a bulk-importable OPML file has recently gone offline but today I found this one: http://reader.feedshow.com/goodies/opml/OPMLBuilder-create-opml-from-rss-list.php

Oh does that make me happy. I found a list of the top 25 business web app startups or some such thing today and of course I sent the link to Fancyhands, asking them to go grab the RSS feeds for each of those companies' blogs or press releases. They did so, like magic, then I plopped those puppies into the form on the page above. It's a simple function to perform, but it's a nice time saver. Now I'm ready to subscribe to them all and keep up to date with important developments in those companies. Thanks, Internet!

A First For Me: I Found News on Google Plus Today

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:54 GMT

I found my first news tip on Google Plus today, that Google had acquired Fridge. Dain Binder of Computer Sciences Corporation shared a link to the Fridge blog and that's how I found out it happened. I went into my Custom Search Engine of competitors and found that +Liz Gannes had written it up on All Things D an hour prior, and Mashable 15 minutes prior. (Later, I think I noticed that Biz Insider posted 2 hours prior). And then I wrote it up. Paused before publishing, gave it what I think is a much better title than originally planned (Google Plus is Eating Startups, instead of Google is Buying Up Startups to Bolster Plus Social Network) and there you have it.

I think I remember the first story I got thanks to Twitter; I believe it was a +James Governor tweet that Google had acquired +Jyri Engeström ‘s Jaiku. Twitter quickly became key in my work. And it still is today.

I also remember the first story I ever got to first thanks to Quora. Eighteen months ago I was organizing an event for RWW and decided to ask on that hot new social network, “when is Twitter's rumored first developer conference next Spring? I don't want to schedule a conflicting event.” +Ashton Kutcher answered the question! With the correct date! It was awesome, so I didn't schedule the event that day and in fact I wrote up the news: Twitter's first dev conference is, according to the site's then #1 most popular user, going to be on April 14th. And indeed it was.

I used to break a lot of news stories first using RSS to IM/SMS alert tools, and I still do sometimes – that's how I got my job as TechCrunch's first news writer. Strategic use of tools helped me get to news stories faster than Michael Arrington – so he called me and hired me. Now everybody uses those sorts of tools so you have to be extra crafty to figure out how to win with RSS.

I wasn't the first on this story on Plus and I bet some other people have broken stories on here already. (I roughly broke the story of the Circles feature at SXSW, but that was all shoe leather and beer, no web tool hacks on that one.)

I just thought I'd post a little note, marking today as a little milestone for me and thinking out loud about how I want to try to use this platform for work in the future. Thanks for being my Plusbuddies, everybody, hopefully we can figure it out together. If you'd like to connect on Google Plus, I am here.

Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:48 GMT

A number of prominent web personalities have announced that they are going to redirect their personal blogs to their Google Plus pages – because they get so much more interaction with readers when they post there. I can understand that, but I'll never do that with my blog. I have 3 times as many connections on Circles as I have RSS and email subscribers here (in 2 weeks, vs 5 or 6 years!) – but I'm not tempted in the slightest to give up what I have here. Perhaps it's just about trade-offs and I'm not willing to give up the control I have over the way my personal site communicates with visitors.

I've got important things in the sidebar of my blog, for example. I like having my contact info, bio, links to information about my consulting practice and my media citations sitting right next to every article, no matter what readers came here to read. I don't want to lose control over my own Information Architecture, no matter how under-developed it is, to Google's vision of “posts in one tab and about page in another.” I want to put those things where I want, in the order I want and make them look however I want.

I've got some of my most useful posts on this blog pinned in the sidebar as well. Several of them are 3 or 4 years old. In the Plus world, those would be washed so far down the stream!

I like being able to choose what commenting system I use on my blog. I really like using Disqus because I can click on any commenter's avatar and see what other Disqus-using blogs they comment on and how often. That's a great way to get a quick picture of someone's community of participation.

I like offering a search box, I use Lijit that searches my own personal blog archives and an extended network of sites I've identified (my tweets, my bookmarks, some of my favorite RSS subscriptions). I really doubt Google Plus will ever enable something like that.

Google Plus doesn't have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we'll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.

Rather than chasing people around from one platform to another, where they prefer to spend their time, I'm going to sit right here on a site I own and wait for the future to become interoperable with me!

WordPress plug-ins, the iPhone publishing app, the open source community, but more than anything my own control over how I present my self to the world – all those things are very important to me.

I do love Google Plus, though, and if you do too – here's my profile there that you can add to a Circle so we can be Plusbuddies.

Google Plus’s Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook, but to Force it to Open

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:16 GMT

I've been so focused on the user experience of Google's new social network Plus that I haven't thought very much about the big picture, I must admit. Listening tonight to an interview with Plus designer Joseph Smarr on the IEEE Podcast it became clear to me that for at least some of Plus's leadership the goal is not to win social networking outright, or to kill any competitors, but to disrupt the social networking economy with a big enough, good enough and popular enough service that the walled gardens (Facebook in particular) are forced to open up interoperability enough that their users can communicate with the significant enough number of people in their lives that use a different social network. Back in the bad old days, customers of one phone network couldn't call customers of other phone networks, then people couldn't email out-of-network. Today people can't be social across networks, but few people mind because everyone they care about is on Facebook. Plus is a big push to change that. Interoperability will be better for the open web and thus better for Google. It should also be better for consumer choice and satisfaction, in the long run. As long as Face-oogling or whatever doesn't become as frustrating in the future as dealing with phone companies is today. But they do have interoperability!

I don't know why I hadn't thought about it this way before. I hope the plan works. One more cool thing about Plus.

I'd post a link to my Plus profile here but I wrote this whole post on my phone, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house, in the dark. (Cutting sod that's grown over my walkway.) I'm not hard to find there though and am lots of fun to talk to, I promise.

How to Think Up Cool News Hacks

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:40 GMT

Last Spring I was weeding my yard and thinking “what new fields of data online could I gain programmatic access to, subject to some analysis and then use for strategic advantage?” Blog comments came to mind as an under-utilized set of data: structured, publicly available and created as a result of casual gestures online. BackType came to mind because that's what they did at the time, search for comments left by a particular person. I thought about a lot of different ways I could analyze or filter feeds of blog comments, cross referenced with other sets of information or delivered through various interfaces. Most of my ideas didn't come to anything.

That's when I thought “how about I take a list of high-priority individuals, track their comments around the web and use that as a way to sniff for news?” I used Robert Scoble's Twitter List of Most Influential People in Tech, but it could have been any list of people with home page URLs published in a public, predictable place. If I was a geotechnology beat specialist, I might have used (heck, maybe I still will) a list of geotech industry specialists.

Source of data, available programmatically, with a structured field with which some data can be filtered out from others based on some criteria, criteria data-set available from another source already. Put all of those circumstances together and you've got an opportunity.

That's what I did, as described in this post on BackType's acquisition today by Twitter. That feature is probably as good as dead, now.

I just thought I'd share that thought-process here. I think about things like this all the time, but especially when I set aside some time for my brain to think about it. You can too. Publicly available, structured data enables all kinds of strategic possibilities.

www.josschuurmans.com: "Rebooting the news" | Dave Winer's and Jay Rosen's podcasts

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:33 GMT

50 most influential Twitter users in India « Gautam’s Net

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:31 GMT

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:26 GMT

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out!

The significance of Google’s Android

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:31 GMT

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread.

Media Bullseye

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

Interesting new site for PR and marketing news regarding social media. Chris Brogan an early contributor.

The Identity Corner » The problem(s) with OpenID

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

A long collection of links to critiques of OpenID. Looks real good.

Massive Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Video Recap

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

Can't wait to spend some time with this one.

A hunger for books | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech where she brings up critiques of the web's cultural impacts, among other things. An important read.

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

Great write up of an interesting study on the perceptual impact of good search placement. This one's a keeper.

Thoughts on Seth Godin's keynote at SES [SearchEngineWatch]

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00 GMT

Seth Godin is probably someone I should read a lot more of. He's a marketer, but interesting.