Robert Seidman

Testing Sprout Widget Builder

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:39:00 +0000

Just a test, please ignore. Special thanks to Duncan Riley for his video walk through on using Sprout's widget creation tools.. It made the process so simple I didn't even need to read *any* instructions.

USA Network's Burn Notice

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:57:00 +0000

This is just really here to test Hulu embeds, please ignore if you don't feel like watching. : )

What Would Jesus Buy?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 17:06:00 +0000

I've been a slacker for a variety of reasons on talking about SnagFilms (I was hoping to get a different web site up before getting around to that). SnagFilms is another one of Ted Leonsis' endeavors and I have too much man love for Ted to not talk it up if it was any good.

It is any good.

SnagFilms is Internet distribution for documentary films. And they have a wide variety of films to choose from, from more well-known productions like SuperSize Me, to gems like What Would Jesus Buy? that I'd never heard of, but couldn't stop watching.

Some Thoughts on Blogger Burnout

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:37:00 +0000

Ah summer doldrums. Seeing how Mark Dykeman is apparently sending out an SOS, and Corvida isn’t exactly burned out, but just can’t find anything she feels like writing about (and oh man, I know that feeling) I thought I’d chime in with a little bit of perspective from the vantage point of someone who definitely has been through this and burned out.

I wrote and published on the Internet (e-mail and web) at times fairly prolifically from 1994-2000. Then I burned out. How bad did I burn out? Well, in some ways so badly that I let simple things slip (which is one reason why I can’t easily point you to the 1994-2000 archive). But it’s not exactly a cautionary tale of woe.

If you get completely engulfed by the flame, you run the high risk of burning up and burning out. By 2000 I’d hit that point and I shifted my focus heavily away from technology. When the new ballpark in San Francisco opened in 2000, I got seasons tickets and between the 2000 and 2001 seasons I attended over 100 games. Sure, they were all steroided up, but at the time I could relate to it well. I was on mega-doses of prednisone myself because I’d stressed myself out so much I had a program with chronic hives. The prednisone worked, but in some ways the fix was worse than the problem, but I won’t bore you with those details.

All the baseball games on the other hand were a whole lot of fun. Hate Barry Bonds all you want, but seeing a lot of those home runs get dumped in the San Francisco Bay and a lot of them in person was a great deal of fun!

The opportunity to do that came from letting the flame engulf me. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have probably gotten the hives, but I also wouldn’t be living in San Francisco, seen all those baseball games and had the luxury of not really needing a job for six years.

I don’t regret the outcomes or blame the burnout on being engulfed by the flame, but, I’d be lying if I said that achieving balance via extremes was a good way to go, or necessarily good for the soul. As a preference I’d have rather been writing a little bit for the last 14 years straight rather than writing a lot for six and then taking seven years off from it.

I definitely burned out, but not everyone does. There are plenty of people who were at it in 1995 who are still at it and never burned out or faded away.

One of the reasons I burned out is because I lost my passion for it. This happened because when it was new and you could write about what would likely happen and there were truly new and unique products and services springing up it was exciting. As things matured and played out more or less as expected, it wasn’t as much fun to write the same thing over and over again. So much of what was happening was “me too”. The Netscape browser was a big deal, but by about the 40th company that was spending money in hopes of being an Internet portal, it wasn’t all that interesting. Nor was it particularly interesting to write about how Yahoo had huge scale, but if not for the interest on the cash it had, it wouldn’t really be making any money over and over again.

Ironically one thing that has changed in the last 8 years is that Yahoo definitely figured out how to monetize its scale. It’s biggest crime is that it’s not Google, didn’t improve search as well as Google and didn’t invent the ad market for search. Sure, it’s a big missed opportunity, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the stuff to write that over and over again like my pal Kara Swisher.

Kara’s been at all of this a long, long time. She was writing in 1995, and God willing, she’ll be writing in 2045. I think the reason is this, Kara loves both the writing and the story itself. I loved the technology and a lot of the story was interesting to me, but interesting on a level where I’d want to buy one of Kara’s books and read her version of it (she’s a great writer, and a great storyteller).

Her partner in crime at AllThingsD, Walt Mossberg is another one who never lost his passion. He’s been writing forever, and about technology for eons now. He went through heart bypass surgery (maybe over 10 years ago now) and came back stronger than ever. Why does he stick with it? Well, the fundamental premise of his Personal Technology columns in the Wall Street Journal when he began them (I think in 1991) was “Personal computers are too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.” I think as much as anything what’s fueled Walt all these years was the desire to improve things on that score and help people (consumers of personal computers and other technological gadgetry out).

I think for Walt and Kara, what they’re really passionate about and what they do are very well aligned. You might not see them as bloggers, but they’ve been sharing their voices for years and years without burning out, and whatever the medium, that’s impressive. I think one big reason I burned out is because my passion and what I was doing were not as completely aligned. That’s all on me.

Why Don't Very Well Thought Out Posts Usually Generate Much Traffic?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:58:00 +0000

For some of us, to our great lament, many of the smartest people aren’t blogging. There are a lot of good reasons for that, too. I’m not saying that all bloggers are idiots or that there are no smart bloggers. The problem, I believe, as many have pointed out is that in the quest for chasing traffic the insightful and thought provoking pieces do not get as much traffic as something that is specifically designed to get your attention.

As a result of this it seems we miss out on a lot of thoughtful blogging. My biggest complaint with many blogs and bloggers is the lack of looking at the big picture. It’s easier to take a stance on Apple re-upping with AT&T on the iPhone through 2010 or even one on Apple’s hobby, Apple TV. But what is missing in almost any blog post about these topics is the big picture view.

For a big company like Apple, it’s juggling many balls in the air at the same time. While it has to prioritize somewhat which balls it wants to make sure don’t come crashing to the ground, it has to keep its eye on all the balls and try to keep them all in the air…at the same time.

It seems like quite often, bloggers will only zoom in and focus on only one ball at a time. It makes sense to me on one level. It’s not only easier for the writer to do this, it’s easier for the reader too. So we wind up with a lot of prose that isn’t very well thought out, or prose that’s only thought out in one particular dimension.

I’d like to believe though, that there is value in very well thought out posts, even if they have walls of text. I agree in the short-term that isn’t going to produce a huge amount of traffic, but I’d like to think that if someone had the stamina, and motivation to stick with it for a good little while that it would produce results.

I don’t have that kind of stamina or motivation myself, so I’m part of the problem instead of being part of the solution, which kind of sucks. I console myself that even if I had the stamina and motivation I’m probably not smart or insightful enough to make a run at it anyway.

Then again, I may just be completely freaked out because this weekend, I read not just one, but two posts by Steve Gillmor which I not only understood, but also agreed with.

Steve Jobs or CNET’s Don Reisinger: Who Ya Got?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:10:00 +0000

I’ve got Steve Jobs. Even if he’s got health problems and isn’t 100%. Even if he has serious health problems and isn’t even 75% I have Jobs. Mr. Reisinger does a nice job of working Apple haters into a lather, but his article on why Apple is wrong for extending its exclusive deal with AT&T misses several key points.

The iPhone as a very cool (but admittedly, still limited for some usages) device with a great browser and operating system would not exist as we know it had it not originally done an exclusive deal.
Working with Telcos is a pain in the ass
Most of you have never heard of the honchos at the telcos, but they have every bit as much hubris as Mr. Jobs
When you try to satisfy alllll the telephone companies out of the gate, what do you get? You get the craptastic Microsoft mobile platform. I’m not saying that the reason that the Microsoft platform stinks is exclusively for this reason, but I am saying that if Microsoft had said, “look, we need an OS that’s around 1GB to do our thing, take it or leave it” the telcos overwhelmingly would’ve told Microsoft to pound sound.
As already mentioned, the telco moguls have much hubris. They believe their iPhone clones will do just fine and so they’re not ready to admit that iPhone will dominate the smartphone market even with AT&T as its only carrier. A year and a half more where they’re not getting any traction with their half-assed iPhone knock-offs will humble them at least a little and give Apple better leverage in their negotiations with the various telcos.

I would love it if the iPhone was available via any service – especially Verizon because here in San Francisco, Verizon is the much better phone company (at least in terms of quality/reliability of voice calls). But I still understand why Apple is going about it as it is and it makes perfect sense to me. Steve Jobs and Apple aren’t idiots.

There may be much to not like about Jobs personally or Apple’s approach to business. But at the end of the day, it produces great products. Often, the best products.

Social Media: It’s Not Just For Early Adopters

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:44:00 +0000

I know the label “social media” means many things to many people. I still like Fred Wilson’s definition of it the best, but I’m not here today writing about the way the label is used.

I see a lot of people who are focused on “social media” do and say a lot of things (some of which I think are completely insane!) with regards to social media. There are a wide range of services in the sphere from FriendFeed and Twitter to Facebook and blogging. With a whole lot of Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Delicious in between.

There’s another label that means different things to different people: mainstream. Relative to the products and services referenced above, only Facebook can make a case for the mainstream. I believe MySpace and Facebook are already completely mainstream for people under 25 or so. But relative to the number of people who use a web browser, both still have tremendous room for growth. But both did scale big and scaled big in a hurry. Twitter? Decidedly not mainstream by comparison.

Digg? No way it is mainstream! Big numbers, and a real business, for sure. But still not mainstream. And I’m not saying that based on the fact I’d never use Digg and think it’s a dopey way to get news. I don’t use MySpace, but think it’s pretty mainstream. My view of Digg is based on the numbers.

I’m pretty sure if I was a tech or social media blogger or attempting to be, I’d probably wind up chasing Stumble, Digg and even TechMeme traffic. The blog I work on, TVbytheNumbers, isn’t in that space so we’ve never worried about chasing traffic that way much. The whole reason I’m doing that blog with Bill Gorman is pretty simple. In April and May 2007 for reasons I won’t get into, I was trying to chase down some TV ratings data.

Sometime around then at one of my regular lunches with my friend Bill Gorman as a complete aside I tossed out: “I can’t believe there is actually a hole in the blogsphere that hasn’t been filled yet. TV ratings!”

Bill says to me something like, “Oh come ON, you’re insane – there has to be something like Box Office Mojo for TV!” I told him there wasn’t, he went home and did some Googling and a website was born.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of TV ratings data out there – it’s just scattered all over the place. Our goal was to get as much of it as possible in the same place. We figured this was a niche, but we figured that it’s probably easier to get traffic for a niche that hadn’t quite been filled than for a big topic (say tech) that has tons and tons and tons of competition. We’ve been up about 10.5 months now and that’s pretty much been validated. There is demand for the info, and even if it’s a niche, if it’s an unfilled niche to some degree it becomes a "if you build it they will come" deal.

I bring any of that up only because it’s the primary reason we don’t spend any time chasing traffic via social news services. We figure it’s better to spend that time putting content up on the site and hoping people wind up finding it in Google. That’s largely come to pass.

But the point I really wanted to make in this is that one form of social media happens all around us. And people get involved whether they’re sixteen or sixty. People with like interests quite naturally find each other on the web. Below are the top 10 traffic referrals to our site since we launched (9/18/07) through yesterday (7/30/08):

The first three items on the list make complete sense to me. If you’re anything like me, you’d never heard of number four before. JokersUpdate is a website/forum dedicated to fans of the show Big Brother. About half of the visits (around 5,000) listed above came over a day and a half period. Due to the writer’s strike CBS ran Big Brother, typically summer fare during the winter and spring. When it first launched I wrote something about how CBS should consider pulling it. Though to be honest as the strike impact continued, I changed my tune. But that’s another story.

The bigger story for us is that even though it wasn’t particularly good traffic (it’s actually still a bit better than what we get from Digg and Stumble) something we didn’t even know existed became our fourth largest referrer. Wikipedia was not a big surprise. We’d hoped that it would happen that people editing the articles about TV shows would link to our ratings data sometimes.

Moonlightline.com and the CBS discussion board for Jericho, like Jokersupdate.com, that’s just like-minded people coming together over something they enjoy. In the case of Jericho, once they actually rallied CBS to bring the show back. Moonlight was on the ratings bubble and unfortunately for its fans – like Jericho, the bubble ultimately burst.

The hard core fans of those shows have worked hard to try to bring the shows back. And whatever you may think about where their passions lie, they’ve done some good works too. In the case of Jericho, for instance, they did some charitable deeds for our young men and women in Iraq. In the case of Moonlight (a show where the central character was a vampire) they’ve fittingly done blood drives.

Since the label “social media” gets applied to so many things, can’t we also apply it to people coming together for a cause? And it doesn’t have to just be a cause like saving a show (and even doing some good deeds in the process). The cause can simply be to have some fun. Our tenth highest TV referrer was from TVBigshot.com. TVBigShot was a fantasy league style game for wannabe television moguls run by Television Without Pity which is run by Bravo/NBC Universal.

I’d argue with the way some of the digerati try to apply the label “social media” that things like fantasy league baseball, football, etc. are all forms of social media. Sure, they’re not new and shiny and I don’t have much of an issue with the digerati and social mediati not focusing on anything that’s mainstream. I’m just bringing up that there’s a whole boatload of really cool social media happening all around us. All the time. And it’s going to keep happening in the mainstream whether any of the digerati care or not.

It’s not just for early adopters.

Five Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Blog About Blogging (Not!)

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:38:00 +0000

The recent wave of popularity of making sure you write blog posts about something where you can put a number in your headline is starting to grate on me as much as “What do you think?” closings aimed at generating comments. From “Eight Ways to Tie Your Shoes Left-Handed” to “Six Things to Consider Before You Recycle” sticking a number in the headline is all the rage.

I don’t really have five reasons why you shouldn’t blog about blogging. I don’t even have fourteen reasons why you shouldn’t include a number in your headline. Obviously people are using it because it works in terms of getting people to click. But then again, so does “Miley Cyrcus Naked”. Just because something works doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea.

If it’s your passion to create “list” style posts that are helpful for people,the whole “5 Ways To Headline Your Blog Posts” approach seems just fine. But if it isn’t, it sure seems like deliberately coming up with content where you can use a number in your headlines will get old to both you, and your readers very quickly.

Talent + Passion = Success

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:10:00 +0000

I saw this picture the other day. It was a web site’s pick for best fan costume at the recent Comic Con in San Diego. Now you can think this fanboy crazy, but that’s not really what struck me. What it got me thinking about was both how much talent and how much passion went into producing such a result. Many people have the talent for such a thing, even more still could envision such a thing. But most lack the passion to actually turn it from concept or thought into reality.

For the lucky relative few, the equation: Talent + Passion = Success is just simple basic math. It’s every bit as easy as it appears it would be. For most of us however, it winds up being more complex math. Some of us are very talented at things we have no passion about and passionate about things we have no talent for. All the shades in-between can turn it into Vector Differential Calculus for some of us.

For most of us, the laws of physics really do play a role. We get on a certain trajectory in our lives, and the law of inertia comes into play. We mostly, it seems, don’t spend a lot of time winding up thinking about Talent + Passion = Success.

Things happen in our lives and we come at it from a variety of ways, but don’t often get down to thinking about this basic math. I think that’s probably a real shame because in the end, when it comes to success that equation usually plays the pivotal role.

The other day, I watched The Last Lecture by Carnegie Mellon Professor, Randy Pausch who recently passed away. Pausch’s lecture, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams is worth spending the hour and sixteen minutes or so with. It was quite powerful. It left me feeling many things, including, quite honestly, ashamed of myself. One of the concepts he talked about was the brick walls that get thrown in front of us in our lives. He suggests that they’re not designed to keep *you* out, but designed to keep out all the people who don’t want it badly enough.

The next day I saw the picture above and because it was already on my mind I started thinking about the talent plus passion equation and how great it would be if when the brick walls presented themselves, we stopped and thought about those walls and why they are there and what we want to do about them. I run into many people who when running into such walls feel victimized by them and don’t feel they personally play a role in getting around the wall, scaling the wall or knocking it down with a battering ram. But I like Pausch’s take on those walls.

I’ve been blessed to know many people, online and off whose talent and passion are aligned extremely well. So well, it all just seems natural for them. It seems so easy for them we sometimes don’t realize just how hard they are working at it. But they are working hard at it, it just doesn’t seem like work because they are following their passion.

Internet Video Star: Bwana McCall

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Justine, Veronica, and Leah D’Emilio are all very beautiful and talented Internet video stars. But let’s face it, all three of them probably aspire (some of them already successfully) to actually be on television. While they’ve put their talents to good use, I don’t see them utilizing the new technology in particularly new ways. This isn’t a slam on any of them, especially as many of the old ways have been proved over time to be very effective.

For a whole variety of reasons that I’d wind up naming Justine, Veronica and Leah, is no surprise. But my favorite Internet video person, at least in terms of using the new medium as, well, a new medium, is actually a man. Sorry, Lon Harris, I'm not looking at you, though I do enjoy your videos too.

My favorite on the net, at least tech-wise is someone you’ve probably never heard of. His name is Bwana McCall. A few people apparently pitched in to buy Bwana and his wife new 3G iPhones. I know, yet another frakking post mentioning the 3G iPhone. It probably won’t stop until I break down and buy something I absolutely don’t need to buy. Sorry.

Anyway, Apple should just give Bwana phones and free phone service and let the man make videos. Some of his screencasts/tutorials are wonderfully produced and extremely informative.

Other times, like this one where Bwana unboxes his new phone are just fun. Watch the video in that link and stay until the end for the “Muahahaha I got a new iPhone” evil laugh. Anytime someone is as talented as Bwana and loves the tech so, so much – you have to encourage it.

It should probably work out where Bwana winds up a superstar who is even more popular than Louis Gray and Scoble. They’ll all have nice gigs, but Bwana has a great presence in his videos and over the long haul, presence in videos on the Internet will be a very, very useful skill to have. Truth is, there are many aspects of what the kids are calling “social media” that can be easily faked. But good video presence is not one of them.

Many opportunities will open up for people with great video presence. While Apple is probably best off just giving Bwana gadgets, if they don’t figure that out some company that is developing applications for the iPhone will surely be able to put Bwana’s skills to excellent use, pay him a respectable wage, give him free phone service and be delighted with the proposition.

Louis Gray Ponders Ethics. Again.

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:33:00 +0000

Mr. Gray won a free 3G iPhone from the folks at SocialMedian and two things are clear:

1. Louis really, really, really wants the phone (me too, and I absolutely don't need one, but still, me too)
2. Louis is struggling a little with propriety and ethics, but not so much that he’s not taking the phone

Although I predict Louis will regret giving up his Blackberry (assuming he sends more than a couple of few word e-mails per day), I think he handled this situation appropriately. He thought about it, but still took the phone. I think it is important to think about it, but, in this case, I also think it is OK to take the phone.

It’s good for journalists to be pure. But bloggers aren’t journalists. I admire the ethics of Walt Mossberg and his purity comes in handy since he’s making purchasing recommendations, often on items costing more than several hundred dollars. But still, even Walt lets Kara Swisher trash Yahoo week in, week out (day in, day out) when Kara’s wife is an executive at Google. Kara refers to that in her disclosure every time she writes about Google or its competitors, so there's no issue as far as disclosure. If even Walt and the WSJ draw the distinction that blogging is not journalism that’s plenty good enough for me.

While Louis is a great critical thinker, he seemingly aspires to never be critical simply for the sake of being critical. This puts him into a very, very small slice of the blogsphere. It’s a nice piece of the pie to carve out. I trust Louis to be honest about what he thinks and therefore don’t worry about the ethics issues where he’s concerned.

Louis was pretty honest about disclosing the one fact that probably was most important (for me) when assessing how much Louis currently values SocialMedian. He expressed some guilt over not having used the service much. I’m not sure if this was guilt at not using the service much or guilt over not using the service much and STILL winning the phone. But either way, the thing he disclosed that I thought very important was this: he isn’t using the service regularly. That says quite a lot really.

One of the hardest things about “reporting” anything is that inevitably you meet people, you like them and it’s all of the sudden difficult to write something about someone you’ve met and liked that might not wind up sounding so good. I ran into this problem more than a few times. The one thing I learned was that in the long run, the good people will not hold a grudge with you speaking your honest opinion and when someone does hold a grudge against you for doing that, it says more about them than it does about you.

Louis disclosed all he needed to disclose. While I don’t think having the iPhone will impair Louis’ ability to accurately portray his feelings about SocialMedian, in the short-term I think winning the phone will make Louis want to use the service more. But in the longer run if the service isn’t providing enough value to invest his time in on a regular basis, having the phone won’t change any of that. Either way, we at least have enough information to decide for ourselves whether we want to trust Louis’ opinion on the service or not. I find absolutely nothing improper about this.

3G Launch A Pain, But No Crisis For Apple

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:44:00 +0000

Sometimes it pays off being a geek. Since I just couldn’t wait to update my first generation iPhone, I did so yesterday. This proved to be a benefit as apparently if I would have waited until today, due to all the trouble Apple is having apparently my iPhone would’ve been rendered a useless brick. Turns out the iTunes activation service got crushed and without being able to activate after the firmware update, no phone.

While this is unfortunate for everyone involved, it’s hardly a disaster as some would describe it. I was moved to evoke The Who lyric of “this is no social crisis, just another tricky day.” Sometime a year and a half from now when Apple has 50% of the smartphone market, it will be a "remember when?" story.

Version one iPhone owners who attempted to upgrade today surely have a right to be annoyed, but when the dust settles and the phones are reactivated they’re going to like the upgrade.

It’s not without glitches, and I didn’t find the App Store as sublime as some people. Sublime perhaps, but sublime within belief, not beyond it.

The Facebook application is so nicely done it makes me wish I cared about Facebook. There are glitches (not just with Facebook, but with the Apps and the 2.0 firmware in general, it seems) for instance deleting mail messages within Facebook often returned me to the iPhone’s home page for no reason.

But the coolest thing to me is that many of the applications work just fine over 2G (Edge network, in the US). Facebook is highly usable over 2G. And how well AOL Radio worked via 2G surprised me very much. I walked around for about an hour today listing to 92.3 K-Rock in Cleveland and never lost transmission or even had it buffer once. Over 2G!

And of course, all that stuff works over WiFi much better. If you’re a first gen phone owner if you have access to WiFi often, and you don’t need GPS I wouldn’t upgrade. Indeed between cell tower/WiFi hotspot triangulation, the existing applications can locate you to within about 1/8th of a block anyway.

Something that would’ve had me upgrading would’ve been the inclusion of support for Flash. Unfortunately, Apple is in some weird feud with Adobe, so it doesn’t support it. Apple (and Jobs) claim this is because Flash is too slow. But I don’t buy that. In any case, if I could stream my TV/DVR to my iPhone, it wouldn’t have gotten me to stand in line like a fanboy, but it definitely have gotten me to upgrade to 3G sometime soon. But it doesn’t, so I see no need to upgrade yet.

That said, I highly recommend upgrading to the 2.0 version of the firmware, at least once the dust settles and you can actually activate and use your phone.

One other note. The version of the firmware I got has my iTunes constantly wanting to make a very lengthy backup at sync. It's no trouble to just "x" out of it, but it's annoying.

Why Good Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is Nowhere Near Dead Yet: Mediabistro’s TVNewser.com

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:04:00 +0000

Ok, I know what you’re thinking, “Jesus, you’re on freaking BLOGGER, what could you possibly know about SEO?”

It’s a fair question. But chalk that up to my being lazy in a lot of ways and not really caring if anyone besides a couple of people I know who RSS my site read this site. I write here for pleasure.

SEO is made to be this mysterious complicated thing that it really isn’t. It’s pretty simple to break down good (or “White Hat” ) and bad (“Black Hat”) SEO down into something easily understood:

Good SEO: the best content I have that’s relevant to a search will show up in the search engine

Bad SEO: no matter what you’re searching for, MY site will show up, even if it’s completely useless and irrelevant content

Is that an oversimplification? Sure. But not greatly so.

But here’s why good search engine optimization isn’t dead.

I follow TVNewser primarily for one reason, it discusses the ratings for TVNews and with Bill Gorman I run a site on TV Ratings. There is a secondary reason. The original TVNewser, Brian Stelter is now at the New York Times as both a reporter and a blogger. Brian runs the TV Decoder blog which is a great resource if you’re following the TV biz.

Sure, Brian is a lefty when it comes to politics, but he’s a good guy and a hard worker. OK so I believe anyone who is a lefty or righty when it comes to this stuff as an extremist and I scratch my head and wonder why the hell anyone would want to be an extremist, but I like plenty of these extremists just fine.

I do understand that from a societal perspective those are pretty much the only two options and pitting them against each other is good for ratings and web traffic. Most of us love a competition of extremes. I don’t because I view both extremes as exactly what they are: the same thing. But that view isn’t any fun, or any good at all for web traffic. Know what else isn’t any good for web traffic? Having your web content highly not optimized for the search engines!

TVNewser.com, a part is a part of the Mediabistro.com empire which was purchased by Jupitermedia last year, I believe, for around $12 million. Laurel Touby, the hostess with the mostess finally scored the big score. Good for her! But now, unless this is a short-term glitch, both Jupiter and MediaBistro should be embarrassed. Why?

Because every single story on the TVNewser site shows up with this headline / page title: mediabistro.com: TVNewser

That’s just awful from a search engine perspective. Branding is fine, but putting branding above ALL else is just frakkin dopey because the search engines give just about the highest weight possible to the headline.

So a post with the title: O’Reilly Factor to Air Video of Jesse Jackson Comments About Barack Obama shows up to the search engines titled as: mediabistro.com: TVNewser.

Bad. Bad. Bad. There's no problem including some branding after the headline, but to only show the branding is extremely problematic. It most likely (and in this case definitely) means your content won't show up in the search results when it should have.

Now ideally they might have wanted to go with something like “Jesse Jackson Smack Talks Obama on O’Reilly Factor” for the site, but the title of “O’Reilly Factor to Air Video of Jesse Jackson Comments About Barack Obama” is actually very good for the search engines.

With this crazy thing called the interwebs you know, you can actually do both. Have it show up as “Jesse Jackson Smack Talks” on the site while showing up as “O’Reilly Factor to Air Video of Jesse Jackson Comments…” for Google, Yahoo, etc.

But that’s not happening, and on a guess, TVNewser isn’t getting anywhere near the search engine traffic it should and could. And in this case if someone should search: O’Reilly to air Jesse Jackson Comments it would be nice if the TVNewser content would, you know, show up. But it doesn’t. Not because SEO is bad, but because TV Newser is bad at SEO.

All SEO really should mean (in the good sense) is making sure your relevant content shows up in the search engines. That's a good idea for everyone, even Google.

Disclaimer for Blogger lovers and bloggers alike: you can do perfectly fine SEO from Blogger! But that doesn't meant I've done that here :-)

Disclaimer 2: I'm not in any way suggesting that this was the case when Brian Stelter was running TVNewser. I'm not even suggesting it was the case with TVNewser last week. I have no idea other than it is the case right now.

“I wrote the same (thing), but in different words”

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:24:00 +0000

My pal Ted Leonsis shared the link to this video on his blog. I’ve embedded it here. It’s an important message. It reminds me of those bloggers who are always struggling over how hard it is to make a buck via blogging. While one (often suggested) solution might be to get a job and not worry about making money via blogging, perhaps the approach of writing the same things you’ve been writing, but from a different angle will work out well for some.

Watch the video and decide for yourself. Note: the embed code does not seem to work in IE, though it is fine in Firefox, if you can't see the video below, you can get to it here.

Will FriendFeed Be "The Daily Me" Newspaper for the Next Gen?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:12:00 +0000

Back in 1993 when I was Louis Gray's age and he was going to the DMV for the first time to get his drivers' license I began a three year whirlwind of focusing on an online personalized news and information service. The Internet was not yet pervasive in 1993, but online connectivity via modems was becoming widely accessible. My whirlwind tour spanned two companies, initially a start-up joint venture between MCI and Equifax (FYI Online) and then IBM. Though I only was highly focused on personalized news and information for a few years, I have never stopped thinking about it.

The technology, at least software-wise (at either company, frankly) was not bad, even by today's standards. It worked to specifications and with a bit of work could be customized, with a high degree of reliability to send me only information that was relevant.

I left IBM in 1996 to pursue for a couple of years the fruits of being an early stage blogger (that is a tale for another day) and consider both companies products in the realm of "noble failure". I believe they failed primarily for two reasons :

Putting the honus on someone to fill out a profile that will yield all of the information they want and none of the information they don't want is an incredible challenge. If designed well enough to accomplish the task, very few people will want to put the time in up-front to fill out the profile.
Serendipity: there is none! This is a huge problem. Assuming that the technology works and that someone goes through the trouble of creating a good profile they will get exactly what they asked for and none of what they didn't ask for. But we love serendipity. Editors are – or at least were in the old days when I still regularly read newspapers very good at serendpity. They place things they think you might ought to see that you never knew you were interested in and do this in a way that catches the eye.

In 1995 (or maybe 1996) I got to join a group of IBMers on a tour of the MIT Media Lab which at the time was run by Nicholas Negroponte (though Walter Bender was already very influential). Negroponte is widely credited with the notion of "The Daily Me" and there was one project specifically working on this and several that were peripherally related. One of those projects was RINGO. RINGO was (or perhaps still is) a music recommendation engine.

Though music and news aren't related the notion of recommendations as a solution for the serendipity problem and potentially for the actual profiling did cross my mind. For now, it still remains largely potential.

FriendFeed does solve a lot of the serendipity issue. I wind up seeing a lot of stuff I never would have asked for that I truly enjoy seeing. Like this, this and this.

There are plenty of challenges with the automation still. On one hand, if there is any kind of reward system that can be schemed (Digg, for example) it will be schemed and often produce less than desirable results. FriendFeed is by no means perfect for this yet, but it's getting pretty close for me. But getting pretty close for me is not good enough. Unlike Hutch Carpenter, I actually *am* a geek (so is Hutch, but if his denial makes him feel better, fine by me!).

So for me, FriendFeed is becoming a prototype of "The Daily Me" and I'm quite pleased with the progress that has transpired since the mid 1990s. But most of the progress is still yet to come. My geekdom positions me for screwing around with things, figuring out how best to hide 50 versions of the same thing showing up in my feed. Geeky as I am, I have not completely mastered this yet. The percentage of the world's population that would screw around with the FriendFeed hide tools to the degree I have is negligible (I'd guess under 1% even in developed countries). 1% doesn't get you to anything that is the XYZ for the next generation.

FriendFeed needs a whole lot of work if it's to fulfill the vision of "The Daily Me". I know some of you will say, "But FriendFeed isn't trying to do that, it's an aggregation system for sharing lifestreams." To you people I would say only this: I hope you will expand your thinking a little bit and consider the notion of it.

While it's true that FriendFeed is an aggregation system for sharing lifestreams, that is a semantics game because OF COURSE "The Daily Me" would include pictures of what your friends did this weekend, what songs they're listening to and what movies they liked and what restuarants they ate at that they thought were great.

Of course it would. Someday, I think it will.

Twitter and FriendFeed: Both Will Thrive, Both Will Survive

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:30:00 +0000

This started out as an e-mail to Jason Calacanis in response to his blog post but it got so long that I said, "screw it, that's not an e-mail, it's a blog post."

Hey Jason,

it is good to see you on FriendFeed and I hope you find it a useful tool for your endeavors. I can’t help but think you will. I think for the first time during the 2000s I was in front of you on the curve with something (besides watching a boatload of video on my iPhone but I don’t really consider that an Internet thing).

A few things.

1. It’s not odd to me at all that you (or Loic, or Arrington or Scoble) would garner followers on FriendFeed more rapidly with FriendFeed than Twitter. You all had a group of built-in, click-happy, early-adopting followers already on Twitter. I’d guess the correlation between your followers on FriendFeed also following you on Twitter is nearly 100% (same for Loic, Scoble, etc). When Twitter was born there was no built-in group of click-happy, early-adopting subscribers to follow

2. Twitter and FriendFeed are NOT the same service. While you can do much of what you can on Twitter (promotionally) on FriendFeed they are not the same things. I view Twitter as primarily a communication service and information becomes a component as a result of the communication. FriendFeed is primarily an aggregation/information service where communication becomes a component around the information. It’s a very different model

3. Twitter still has huge opportunities (HUGE!). While I’m not a huge fan of Twitter and prefer FriendFeed this is based on a personal bias. Twitter is still better for simple broadcasting and simple direct messaging. I don’t believe FriendFeed has any objective to become primarily a communication service or offer direct messaging. In fact, I hope they do not get caught up in any of that.

4. SMS is huge. Twitter is perfect for SMS. Twitter hasn’t even remotely begun to capitalize on the opportunity it has as a communication service via SMS. I’m not sure it makes any sense whatsoever for FriendFeed to worry about SMS. At least for now, I really hope they are not thinking about it at all.

You, Scoble, Arrington etc quite are not the typical use cases for either Twitter or FriendFeed. You and Arrington primarily (seemingly, I could be wrong) see these tools as promotional for your products. While that *is* a use case for both services (and I have no qualms with that) I think promotion/broadcast are on a sliding scale.

I’m not sure what the continuum is – perhaps it’s from broadcast/promotion to information and communicating with people. While I think there is a promotion component for everyone (if you buy into “you are your brand” thinking) the weighted importance of broadcast/promotion will not likely be heavy for the mainstream user. Scoble may be in a league of his own at 100% on both ends of the spectrum! But on a sliding scale you and Arrington definitely are slid closer to broadcast/promotion than communicating with other people. Whatever the sliding scale is, there is a pretty wide range of use.

While I understand the Twitterati (I can’t believe by the way, that ‘Twitterati’ makes it through the MSFT spell check!) is very down on Twitter being down all the time, and I understand the reliance on FriendFeed during the downtime, it’s definitely not an either/or situation.

Will FriendFeed kill Twitter?

Did the web kill e-mail?

Rhetorical question. :-) While it’s certainly in the realm of possibility that Twitter will kill itself, at this juncture, reading the tea leaves that seems highly unlikely as the reason that people are bitching so passionately at times is because they love them some Twitter.

Jason Calacanis is to Michael Arrington as Ginger Makela is to...?

Finally, I hear a lot of ranting about FriendFeed just winding up being an echo chamber. There is more than a little truth to this because of the nature of things. There are a lot of early adopters and bloggers on FriendFeed right now who want to promote their stuff. Then this fact of life comes into play: if you digg, delicious, stumble or in some other way share MY stuff, I will be more likely to digg, delicious, stumble your stuff. Of the people I follow (~120) I can count on a good 20-30 of them digging, deliciousing and stumbling on the exact same things.

There are a couple of ways to handle this echo on FriendFeed. One is unfollowing some of the people who share the same stuff because essentially I can follow only Louis Gray and see it. I have unfollowed some people including Scoble because anything really important Robert has to say will still wind up on my radar via friend of friend. I can follow Louis Gray, J.Phil, Steven Hodson, Allen Stern, Hutch Carpenter, Corvida, Sarah Perez, etc., etc. and I do (though am playing around with following and unfollowing), but I can wind up seeing a lot the exact same thing by simply following Louis. Alternatively, I can hide all Digg, Stumble, Delicious, etc from certain people besides Louis and reduce the echo substantially.

The tools aren’t perfect yet, but they are not shabby either. I think the folks at FriendFeed are really putting a lot of thought into empowering one to have as much or as little echo as they wish to have. Do I want to see the same thing 50 times? No! But some people might like it and I have no desire for the service to be designed around ME so long as I can completely customize it to taste via preferences/settings, etc. Some people like to watch the same movie or TV show 20 times. I’m not one of those people, but that doesn’t make it wrong or bad for someone to do it if it suits them.

Armed with the proper tools via preference settings FriendFeed as it adds more users it will only get better. Is there echo? Sure, but there’s something else. Like Bob, Ginger Makela and Paul Bucheit. Yeah, I know Paul is a founder of FriendFeed, but he shares some really interesting stuff. He doesn’t overshare (or even share at all really) the tech early adopter echo chamber stuff. The stuff he does share is usually interesting to me.

Same for Bob. Same for Ginger Makela. They share things I find really interesting. People get all hung up on statistics (and I don’t want to sound all hypocritical as I’m a numbers junky myself) and things like the “FriendFeed Likes Compability Calculator” but for me that’s a cool notion that winds up pretty much being a big “meh”. Why?

I have my eyes and my brain to tell me whose stuff I like the most. I like Ginger, Bob and Paul. They ain’t echoing much (if at all) and what they share is really interesting to me. Interesting enough to me that rather than worrying about seeing their stuff I simply bookmarked their FriendFeed pages. Sometimes I want to know what Ginger and Paul are finding interesting and thinking on and sometimes I want to know what Bob is reading – his stuff ranges from deeply thought provoking to downright weird. Sometimes I like weird.

There are plenty of other people I'm following (at least 30 anyway) who aren't all hung up on the tech echo chamber. They like sports, culture, pop culture, etc. and they are fun/interesting to follow.

You can’t always really get a good vibe of what people are reading or thinking about via Twitter. But you know what you can’t do on FriendFeed? You can’t send Fred Wilson a message while he’s in France letting him know he screwed up the spelling of someone’s name in a post. I’m not a typo nazi, except when it comes to names. Especially when it’s the name of the guy who is single-handedly responsible for my having a TiVo since 1998 (almost 10 years now!). Fred’s response?

In less than 140 characters Fred summed up all the goodness of early adopters for me and made me remember why I was an early adopter to begin with. We get to touch the future. FriendFeed and Twitter may not be perfect, but they are a glimpse of the future. Sometime in 1992 after spending 12 hours on a Saturday getting the CD-ROM installed and figuring out how to get it to play audio CDs through the soundcard I was absolutely thrilled with the triumph of getting it to work. My girlfriend at the time thought I was a complete idiot telling me, “You’re so proud of yourself about wasting half your weekend and $250 to do something you could already do on your perfectly good CD player!”

I told her “Computers are the future of music, I can wait 10-20 years until it’s actually much better, or I can screw around with it right now. I choose right now.” I'm trying to think of FriendFeed and Twitter style services with the 10-20 year view. As with music in 1992, I want to touch that future now. Because of services like those, we can. Is it perfect? Hell no. Will all this stuff work better 10-20 years from now? Hell yes. But it's still very cool for many of us to glimpse that future now. In 1992 there was no iTunes. No iPods. Not even software for ripping an audio CD into digital format (and if there was, the hard drive sizes didn't make it feasible).

But you could begin to imagine it. I'm guessing Fred is imagining a world where more and more people will be able to "share something" when they want to. Even if they are on a subway three thousand miles away from home.

Me? I'm imagining a world where people don't try to constantly pit products and services against each other even when doing so doesn't really make any sense.

It's easy if you try.

Openness and Transparency is Nice, But...

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:17:00 +0000

Steven Hodson wrote about what happens when cool trumps openness and transparency. He essentially lashes out at buzzword loving "Web 2.0" and "social media" crowd singing the praises of openness and transparency and then mostly using MacBooks, a product according to Mr. Hodson from "one of the most closed and anti-community companies around."

Captialism is about many things, but openness and transparency only play in when it will net more money! Should Apple be completely open and transparent about how many iPhones will be available for purchase on Friday July, 11? Not if such transparency would cause short-term hit to the stock price it shouldn't.

For the last few years what Apple has been in a lot of ways, is a company that sells the best MP3 player that just happened to sell computers and other stuff. For a lot of reasons, including Apple’s impressive retail strategy, that’s actually helped Apple greatly in terms of selling more computers to home users, and I expect that will continue for years to come.

I’ve been a hardcore Windows guy since the late 1980s, and initially stayed away from Apple due to price and because new software wasn’t usually developed for Apple computers nearly as soon as it was for Windows-based PCs. That’s starting to level out and I’m pretty sure my next desktop purchase will be an iMac.

Apple’s products are impressively designed and built and perhaps even more importantly, very impressively marketed. Overall, at least right now, the notion that Apple is only for the cool kids is not bad for Apple (or its shareholders) at all.

Openness and transparency may have their virtues, but if you have a crappy product or business model no amount of openness and transparency on the Internet will make a real difference. When you get right down to it, great product design and great marketing trump Web 2.0 and social media in spades. If you’re a start-up company or someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, I think “social media” to build your brand makes a ton of sense.

But if you’re Apple, already having spent a gazillion dollars on product design and marketing, openness and transparency aren't you're priority. While Web 2.0 has been all the rage on the nets, not participating on Twitter or FriendFeed hasn’t hurt Apple’s topline revenue, earnings or stock price at all. The stock has risen from $57.56 on June 16, 2006 to $180.81 on June 11, 2008.

Hey Apple, What Am I Supposed to Do With My Old iPhone?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:18:00 +0000

Ok. Let’s see: I paid:

$599 for an 8GB iPhone on June 29, 2007

I know, you think I’m a total dope. Don’t blame you, really, but I’m an early adopter and a gadget geek and having the phone for those few extra days before Apple cut the prices by $200 was OK with me. They did give back $100 as a credit. I’m OK with how all that transpired and I wanted the phone day one so I don’t feel ripped off.

On July 11, 2008 there will be a new iPhone, billed as “twice the speed, half the price”.

I don’t mind paying $199 for another phone. Or even $299 for a 16GB version. I’m that geeky and love the version one model that much. Twice the speed isn’t a ton faster, but it will likely get me using the network more than twice as much so I don’t mind that the data will cost $10 a month more and effectively eat up all the hardware savings over and then some after two years.

There are perils of being an early adopter and to anyone who’d say to me, “It’s your own damn fault, you should just wait a few years, the damn thing will be FREE!” I would completely agree with you if complaining about money was the issue. Some will complain fiercely on that score and I too would say to them, “It’s your own damn fault!”

But there’s a problem with the iPhone. If I could upgrade to a new phone and use the old one as an iPod touch that I could synch with iTunes and use as a normal iPod without jailbreaking it, or give it one of my friends with kids so they can use it as a portable video/music device instead of buying an iPod touch, I’d be fine with that.

But here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll get a new phone and then – my old phone is in a precarious state. It doesn’t work unless it’s activated and I can’t have two phone active with the same phone number without causing some complexity in my life. Essentially, unless Apple is going to do something special that allows me to use the phone, sans the phone as an iPod touch that I can sync with iTunes I’ll need to sell it.

Since the new frakking phone is $199 I don’t see getting more than $50-$75 or so for the old one, and it’s worth MORE to me than that as an iPod touch.

What do I think should happen? One of two things:

A.) Apple needs to give me some way to use the old phone as an iPod touch without hacking it or
B.) Apple needs to let me trade it in for $100 (which coupled with the $100 credit would essentially make the phone free, but from my perspective I will still have spent $499 for one phone). Again, it’s not about the money. If my current phone would work as something other than a pretty paperweight without hacking it, I’d be OK with that.

Sadly, my guess is it will be C.) none of the above and Apple will answer the question of "What am I supposed to do with my old iPhone?" like this: "not our problem."

I hope I have that wrong.

What’s it gonna be, Apple?

I Owe It All to Video Games

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:39:00 +0000

I was killing some time before heading over to the Apple Store and I read Fred Wilson’s blog post on how the world is changing and how video games are an integral part of teaching these days.

Amen. Reading his post almost made me cry, and that might just be sleep deprivation, the thought of getting a new iPhone or the thought that of course they won’t really be available *today* and even if they are that just probably means my generation 1.0 iPhone will turn into a pretty paperweight (hey, at least I’ll be able to use the $100 rebate to buy the new phone!).

But really it was this: every good thing that ever happened to me probably happened because of video games.

I didn’t have much disposable income when I was a teenager and young adult. But in 1980 I could figure out a way to scrape together the bucks for an Atari 2600 game console. I was hooked instantly. I couldn’t afford the TRS 80 or later the Atari 400 or Atari 800 or an early IBM PC, but I did wind up being able to scrape together the funds for a Commodore 64 and a tape drive peripheral and the game Frogger. I still remember my delight when the thing FINALLY loaded up and the Frogger theme music came on. Several months later I got my first modem and when I finally got it working the very first thing I did?

Connect to a BBS and download some games! My first online social networking was definitely around video games. The very first person I met off the computer in real life was a guy I wound up exchanging video games with. Illegal? Ok. Was I a young hoodlum? Probably. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t like I was taking money away from the computer hardware and software manufacturers. I was spending every spare dollar I had on computer hardware and software and this “fueling of my love” ultimately led to probably not just thousands of dollars spent on electronics and computer hardware and software but well, well over $100,000.

I have a PS3 and an XBOX 360 and while I’d like to chalk up the fact that I’ve turned neither on in over 9 months to being consumed with doing my fair share to build TVbytheNumbers, I may just be getting old.

My love of computer games though fueled a desire to learn how to do stuff. Ultimately I got an IBM PC-XT and parlayed my learning skills into teaching myself how to use Lotus 1-2-3. By 1986 or so that was a very useful skill to have and there wasn’t an abundance of people who had it.

My passion for video games led me online, which in the end, became my bigger passion. That led to a lot of good things for me personally.

So yes, as a matter of fact, I really am grateful for Space Invaders.

Free Product Development for FriendFeed

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:52:00 +0000

I’m going to head to the Apple Store (not a big Journey, I live 5 blocks or so from one) at 10am just in case, you know, the new iPhone goes on sale.

While I am certain there is absolutely no way the phone will go on sale during the keynote of the WWDC, it's only 5 blocks. Announcing it at the conference would cause pandemonium – and Apple would be OK with that, I’m sure. But it also might cause a mass exodus from the conference -- unless they’ve set up some kiosks on site.

But trying to convey information at a conference probably isn’t as effective if everyone is playing with their brand new shiny 3G iPhone. I’m going with Friday June 27th as the "available" date. But just in case....

In the meanwhile, more FriendFeed, the coolest thing after the iPhone. All right, in a battle between the DVR(s) and FriendFeed, I'd give up FriendFeed, but still...

Louis Gray is the most FriendFeedish blogger I know and I likely wouldn't be enamored with FriendFeed if not for Louis. This post from Louis I’m sure both greatly inspired the post I wrote yesterday and to play around with FriendFeed even more. While I was not intentionally trying to rip off Louis' "prior art", he was definitely way ahead of me on this.

I also recommend this post from Hutch Carpenter. Hutch asks some of the big questions that face FriendFeed, and contrary to what he says, I think he’s the bigger name in blogging (at least if it’s not about Nielsen ratings and Gossip Girl).

My (free) product development for FriendFeed involves helping new users out.

I’ve seen the suggestion that FriendFeed add channels. To this I say, “bah!” Let those who want to play around with Greasemonkey make their own channel tabs, that’s all well and good. But, I think it would be really cool if they came up with some categories (social media, music, television, sports, politics, geek gadgets, video games, etc) and then figured out how to leverage the existing community of people already very good at sharing items about such topics into pre-canned subscriptions. Instead of making people find people to subscribe to in order make the service useful for them, help them along.

Allow them to subscribe to perhaps as many as (10? 20? I don’t think it could/should be too many) all at once with one click.

It’s difficult because although blogs are often one dimensional in their coverage area, people are rarely one dimensional and focus on only one thing. But I think FriendFeed could actually enlist some of its community to create accounts for such purposes and share things that are relevant to the topics. It’s a hack, but it’s an easy hack that could potentially produce great results for newcomers.

The best thing about FriendFeed is the people on it, and yet I don’t think FriendFeed itself has even remotely begun to crack the code of how to best leverage that community (I see that as good news, not bad).

This thread got me wondering about whether FriendFeed should try to enlist some celebrities to grow its user base. Right now I think the answer is no. With one exception – why not try to recruit Bill Gates as a FriendFeed enthusiast? The guy is coming into some free time. A lot of people would be interested in knowing what Bill G. is reading. Either way, at some point in the not-too-distant future it seems there will be opportunities for FriendFeed to leverage celebrities.

FriendFeed: Being informed, Sharing, and Participating

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:22:00 +0000

I got an e-mail from someone basically saying, “So, is FriendFeed going to be an AOL thing with you?”

Background

I wrote rather prolifically about AOL in the in the early-to-late 1990s. Why? Because I saw it as the path of bringing online services and the Internet to the mainstream. That’s one prediction that I got right. I also knew the web would kill it if AOL didn’t play its cards right but I figured that would take some time. Amazingly though it has been beaten down badly, AOL still has millions of paying subscribers.

By the time I used a graphic front-end web browser for HTTP in 1993 (Mosaic) I’d already been on one AOL service or another for over 7 years going back to the Q-Link days of the 1980s. Mosaic was the first thing I’d seen in a long while that WOWED me and just about everyone I knew who cared about the online world got an e-mail from me saying “WOW, you have to check this thing out!” I’m sure I e-mailed AOL’s own Steve Case.

And Then There Was FriendFeed

The thing is, I could fairly easily explain why I thought AOL was a big deal and why I thought the web browser was going to be a huge deal. FriendFeed is a little trickier. But I have to be honest, the iPhone and FriendFeed both are the first thing to WOW me like that, probably since I first saw the Web browser. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff since the first browsers came on the seen.

The main great thing about the web is access to content – and there’s tons of it from stock trading to sports to everything you could ever want to know about just about anything. Google and Wikipedia? Amazing. FREE awesome content management system via Wordpress.org (FREE!) un-frakking believable. FREE!

All my expectations with regard to the web had largely been fulfilled. It takes creative people innovating to get my mind thinking, "huh, perhaps I didn't expect enough and should expect more!"

Like AOL and the web browser, I can articulate easily in bullet points why the iPhone is cool as hell. I’ve had mine almost a year now and – it’s still cool as hell to me.

FriendFeed becomes a problem to articulate mostly because I never stopped to think about why I liked it. I think that's actually a good thing generally speaking. I wound up giving it a little thought.

Why I’m a FriendFeed Lover

I guess you could say it fulfills several fundamental needs and combines them very uniquely:

The need to be informed
The (very human) need to share
The (also very human) need to participate

I’ve seen services which do parts of that fairly well, but I’ve never seen anything interweave them as elegantly as FriendFeed does. FriendFeed is still in the very early stages and learning a lot. I don’t really know if it is anything that can take off with the mainstream anytime soon. But I like the promise of any service aimed at fulfilling three basic needs and think the FriendFeedsters are off to a great start.

Having spent several years in the 1990s working on profile-based news services that would produce the "Daily Me", I'm also very interested in the role FriendFeed may play there. But more on that another day.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for FriendFeed may be that when it comes to explaining it, it’s sort of like TiVo – you can explain to someone how cool it is, but that doesn’t tell the story nearly as well as just showing them.

Also, I fear some people will feel inundated by the information flow on FriendFeed. I don’t feel that way, but I also don’t feel any particular obligation to read everything. If I miss a day, I just jump back in with whatever is at the top of my page.

If I want to know what’s up with any particular person, I can just go to the friends list and click on them -- this is an area from a UI perspective FriendFeed can and no doubt certainly will improve.

Friendfeed has many other product challenges that revolve around information presentation, including the feeds themselves. Right now, for example you can feed just about anything in via RSS but it shows up more or less looking like it should be a blog post, even if it isn’t. That's a problem. But the product issues, in the scheme of things are very resolvable and ultimately the least of FriendFeed’s challenges. Though I imagine for now it keeps them awake at night anyway.

FriendFeed: Be Careful What You Ask For...

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Part of the problem with FriendFeed for me is that if you don’t care much about Twitter, FriendFeed or Plurk but are interested in following early adopters who like tech, you’re going to wind up inundated with notes about Twitter, FriendFeed and Plurk. Blah.

For me personally, talking about that stuff over and over again isn’t particularly entertaining, productive, educational or useful, but I understand it and don’t have much of a problem with it. It’s easy enough to hide stuff on FriendFeed. I need to find more people who are interested in sports, television, and technology, which is easy enough to do. But finding the people who are interested in that who aren't also into all the items about Twitter, FriendFeed and Plurk is a little trickier.

One of the great things about FriendFeed besides its developers being smart as hell is that they listen to feedback. In the process they added a “Show Best Of” feature which easily allows you to see the best of the day, week or month based on how many people “liked” the item or commented on it.

It sounded really, really good in theory and I was asking for it, too. It turns out that in practice I’m not sure I actually like it much.

From the ability to browse the information that way I do like it. But what winds up happening is that people are finding "best of" items so easily that they naturally are and adding more “likes” and comments to them which causes them to jump to the top of my regular FriendFeed stream (even outside of “show best of”). I don’t love this. But I’m sure they’ll add a way for me to hide all items two, three and four weeks old eventually.

Sometimes we have to be careful what we ask for. The new features work exactly like what I thought I wanted, but wound up having an effect on the overall service that I don't love.

The Most Important FriendFeed Feature I'd Like to See (Right Now)

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:59:00 +0000

What's the thing I'd love to see FriendFeed change and quickly? Direct messaging? Not so much. Better handling of duplication? Very much. But both of those are fairly common requests. One request that I haven’t seen much of, and I might have merely missed it while being drowned in duplication, is better filtering with the way FriendFeed handles RSS feeds.

If you throw in an RSS feed, FriendFeed treats it as one category and if you have multiple blogs or feeds you’ve added via RSS feeds it’s all treated as one feed. You can hide all of a person’s RSS feeds but you can’t merely hide an individual blog/RSS feed.

For this reason today I wound up removing the feed for TVbytheNumbers. Why? FriendFeed is right now an early adopter crowd. While I might post something on this blog that people subscribing to me on FriendFeed might find interesting, I imagine most FriendFeeders subscribing to my FriendFeed stream aren’t all that interested in Nielsen Ratings or the TVbytheNumbers content.

On Tuesdays we do a massive amount of Nielsen ratings posts. Unfortunately the easiest way for anyone to hide them requires hiding all blog posts, including this one, which they might actually have cared about a little.

So my number one request right now, given how FriendFeed works today would be better filtering selectivity around things that are directly added via RSS. I’d grant I probably should’ve known that feeding the TVbytheNumbers content stream into FriendFeed was dopey, but I didn’t really think about it at the time I set the account up. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

There are some people I follow who feed multiple things in via RSS and some of the separate feeds I’m not interested in following but some of them I am. Right now, it’s an all or nothing proposition in terms of RSS feeds. I can't filter them out by feed, and that’s not good.

Do You Want Traffic or Readers?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:31:00 +0000

Personally, as far as this blog goes the historical answer has been neither. :-) It started as an experiment and I don’t love the domain name on this site much (at least not for the type of things I mostly want to write about). I have seidman.org, but I need to go through some hoops of bureaucracy with Network Solutions and inertia is winning.

So while for this blog it’s neither, for TVbytheNumbers it’s probably both – we want traffic and readers. Ideally, we want traffic that has the highest chances of converting people to regularly reading our blog. It’s a niche though (television industry metrics, largely focused on the Nielsen ratings) so we’re not going to have millions of readers. But, the interest in the niche itself is bigger than I thought it would be.

Good Traffic or Bad Traffic?

There are easy metrics for this. Traffic that bounces immediately after arriving isn’t good traffic.

I bring any of this up because I took a glance at our blog stats for today shortly after noon and we’re on pace to have one of our biggest days of the week which is odd because Sunday is usually our worst day. I could tell that traffic was up and that it was largely bad just at a glance because the average time on site which is normally around three minutes was one minute.

The Culprit?

The traffic came from writing a brief post about the MMA (mixed martial arts) matchup featuring a Kimbo Slice. The ratings (which I still haven’t seen) are interesting to me and on-topic for our site because it’s the first time an MMA bout had been aired on broadcast network television. I largely put up the brief post before bed because I wanted to note that although we’d sooner or later see the overnight ratings, as they only go through 11pm and the broadcast, including all of the Slice/Thompson bout were on after 11pm, we’d not see the ratings until Tuesday. I also indicated it was fairly brutal and probably something better to watch in low definition than high defintion and did a very brief write-up on the last bout.

The Real Culprit: People Love Pictures

Because we’re a multi-author blog and do at least one and usually more daily post and are a multi-author blog, we were accepted into Google News. Normally it doesn’t drive a ton of traffic because people aren’t generally using Google News to find out about ratings. But the weekly ratings posts, posts about DVR viewing and any post at all mentioning Battlestar Galactica do get some traffic even via Google News. News both was and wasn’t the culprit for the traffic spike. It wasn’t in this sense: people were not actually arriving at our site via browsing and searching in Google news.

But, I’d posted a picture in the post and Google News made a thumbnail of that picture and what happens is that on organic Google searches, if there is “news”, it is displayed at the top of the organic search results. And while our article isn’t ever displayed itself, Google rotates the pictures and every so often the picture is the one from our post, and then bam – traffic spike. Below is an example of how it works in Google search – sometimes our site appeared where the picture that links to “Bleacher Report” is:

Mixed Feelings

87% of the traffic to that page bounced. I don’t love high bounce rates. On the other hand, it was a pretty high number (2000 visits by noon just for that page) so there were around 250 people who stuck around and poked around. As a preference I’d rather write something that makes people want to stick around. But you can write something that 20 people will see and like, and bookmark or subscribe to your site’s feed. Or you can write something that 2000 people will see, that only 250 will be interested in, and only 20 people will like enough to come back again. In the end it will drive some repeat traffic, but it also caused a lot of people to think, “Nope, that’s not what I want.”

The nature of things is that if you write about things like historical NBA Post Season Broadcast Ratings, some people will find it via searching just on “NBA finals” and that will produce high bounce rates as well (as high as 95%!). I don’t think there’s really any way around that until Google and the other search engines figure it out someday.

Until then, It’s probably best to not obsess over bounce rate, but I don’t want to deliberately create content that will mostly bounce just for the traffic either. But even the bad traffic will bring in a few good readers.

Social Media: What Do You Want To Share?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Seidman) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:39:00 +0000

My friend Fred Wilson “shared” part of an e-mail I’d sent to him asking what his vision for Social Media was in a post on his blog. I’d written him largely because some of what I see tossed around as “social media” winds up frustrating me in some ways and so I was pretty sure I was missing out on the big picture. I was. Fred’s vision is simple enough to get on a t-shirt:

“Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet. That's it in a nutshell,” Fred Wilson in an AVC blog post.

Fred goes on to say that many will think he’s crazy, but I don’t. In fact, I can get behind that fairly enthusiastically. There’s not even a single buzzword in that vision. It got me thinking about how I share and the notion that I’m going about it all wrong sometimes. There is good sharing and bad sharing.

Good Sharing

Sending Fred an e-mail and getting him to think is good sharing. Sharing thoughts, ideas or anything that people might find interesting (pictures, music, news stories, video clips, whatever) is a good thing to do. I like making people think, but haven’t always adapted that process to a style that’s productive and constructive. I think the best shining example of this that I’ve seen lately, and via FriendFeed of someone who is a really good sharer is Thomas Hawk. Thomas has a lot to share and does so in a style that works well.

There’s a quote that goes something like “Make people think they’re thinking and they’ll love you, make them really think and they’ll want to kill you.” Which leads me to:

Bad Sharing

Here’s an example of bad sharing, while I was definitely sharing my off the top of the head thinking, and it did inspire Louis Gray to think, it did not do so in a way that would probably inspire a lot of people to want to share with me. Louis thought about it so much that he wound up writing a whole post about it. While I’m happy to have inspired him to think, there are some potential downsides. Let’s say I was being considered for a job where Louis worked and they asked him for his opinion. His opinion might be, “He makes me think, but one of the things he makes me think is that I don’t want to work with him.”

Bad sharing. Bad branding. Bad.

It’s Good To Have Goals

Complacency can be a cruel bitch. The first time I ever connected to the online world, now over 25 years ago, I could see the possibilities. Computing power sucked. Bandwidth sucked (300bps!). The experience sucked with text/command line interfaces. But even through the crappy experience you could see the possibilities. Most of my expectations were met or exceeded. I’ve had good broadband for 5 years now. Computing power is much better. Things aren’t perfect but they work pretty well. I’d argue that I’m complacent for the best of all possible reasons: I’m pretty happy about how things have worked out.

Still, I don’t feel that my complacency is anything to be defended. The truth is computers still don’t work well enough, still aren’t easy enough to use, still aren’t cheap enough and broadband isn’t available or cheap enough either. Add that all up and you have a lot of obstacles to achieving Fred’s simple, but grand vision.

The progress over the last 25 years has been massive. But it’s no excuse for resting on laurels or being complacent. Fred has set goals around what he’d like to see happen. It’s a good thing to do and I need to spend some time thinking about how I’d like to see it evolve before I spend any more time critiquing how it is actually evolving.

It’s good to have goals in general as my friend Ted Leonsis has pointed out to me either directly or indirectly. One goal is to figure out what it is I want to share an how best to share it.

There Are Some Really Great People Out There

Social media may have a long way to go, but there are a lot of great people already “sharing” on the internet. My advice is to find them, enjoy them, and learn from them.

After largely “disconnecting” from the connected world from 2000-2007, I reengaged last year. Two of the people I’ve reestablished communications with are Fred and Ted.

I met Ted and Fred the same way I met Bill Gorman, a long-time friend and my partner in crime with TVbytheNumbers. I wrote a newsletter, they read it and would sometimes write to tell how wrong I was.

I’ve had the great fortune of learning from all three of them (and more). While I regularly lunch with Bill my communications with Ted and Fred have been almost exclusively online. And almost all of what I have learned from them I have learned as a result of their blogs.

Considering the lives they lead and just how busy they are, I find it both amazing and inspirational how they go about sharing their thinking. I know the online world is a huge passion for both, but they’ve made “sharing” a high priority and that is by design, not happenstance. There’s not a lick of complacency in either of them, and it makes me both very proud of them and very ashamed of myself at the same time.

One thing I’m sure of, I’m going to make it a high priority to share more and share better.