The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.
- Robert Metcalfe
The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.
- Robert Metcalfe
As many know, I wrote a blog for several years at Corante called Get Real, which is, sadly, still live there. I say 'sadly' because the blog looks like an abandoned building now: the last bunch comments are porn spam which Corante is apparently uninterested in deleting, although they keep the blog live for the trickle of traffic (I guess) that it brings in. Note that my requests for them to either take down the blog or clean up the spam have led to no response and no action by the publisher, Hylton Jolliffe.
I recently followed a link to one of the active blogs at Corante, Strange Attractor, written by my friends Suw Charman-Anderson and Kevin Anderson; this was the first time in a long while I had clicked on the pulldown found on all Corante pages showing a list of the other blogs: Corante seems to be down to 10 active blogs, including Strange Attractor and Many2Many.
Anyway, turns out that Corante's overall readership is falling, here plotted against /Message:
The last post at the Corante company was a note on the tragic death of Russell Shaw, dated 16 March.
Many2Many was once a hotbed of leading thought on social software, but the last post is a 28 February announcement by Clay Shirky about his book. danah boyd's last post there is 13 November 2007, David Weinberger's 25 July 2007, and Ross Mayfield, 10 March 2007. The blog is now ranked 49,486 on Technorati, while I know it was in the top 1000 blogs only a few years ago, and once upon a time Get Real was ranked about 1200 at Technorati.
Corante as a whole -- the aggregation of the dormant and live blogs -- has a Technorati rank of 1,322 (as a baseline, /Message along is now ranked 4,024). While there has been a lot of movement in the blogosphere, as mainstream media have moved in, it still is sad to see a promising media company turn into a slag heap.
Every once and a while I dust off my master's degree in computer science, and pontificate about the deeper implications of the social architecture we are composing on the web. A lot of our efforts have run into problems because the componentry people are trying to use is inadequate for scale.
Back in March, when Twitter was bracing for the SXSW torrent, I wrote
[from Twitter Braces For SXSW]What we would all love to hear is that they have ramped up the load-balancing and a reliable integration with a service like Amazon S3, that in principle dynamically scales with demand, so that we can do whatever we like, and the Twitter backbone will work. They threw out the Joyent solution a few months ago, professing love for the company but I guess not for the solution, and went to Verio, I think. Hasn't apparently gotten more stable, though, to my casual eye.
I really don't understand why the nice folks at Jabber, Inc, who parade their performance numbers up and down the street aren't in the mix at Twitter? Shout out to Joe Hildebrand: give these guys some help, please? Or is this going to be a mess until Google or Amazon or eBay or Microsoft buys Twitter?
The open source protocol XMPP is what Jabber is based on, and there is increasing interest across the web in seeing XMPP become a common component whenever messaging is involved.
A recent presentation at the Open Source Conference (OSCON) this week digs into the use of XMPP as a replacement for REST based web services:
[from OSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub - O'Reilly Radar by Robert Kaye][...]
For example, Kellan [Elliot-McCrea of Flickr, co-presenter with Evan Rabble, now of ENTP] talked about FriendFeed, a site that lets their users know when their friends share new items. In this example, Kellan pointed out that FriendFeed polls Flickr 2.9 million times in order to check on updates for 45 thousand users. And of those 45 thousand users, only 6.7 thousand are logged in at any one time. This of course, its a poor way of checking for changed content. Kellan says: "Polling sucks!"
It's clear that REST web-services provide the heavy lifting for many Web 2.0 sites, but its also clear that REST and its inherent polling mechanism isn't the best way of building a user notification system. With social networking sites not about to fade away, we're going to see an increasing need for capable message passing sites. And since Jabber is a well established and supported system, it only makes sense to piggyback on this great technology.
- Robert KayeTo solve this problem its key to leave standard REST web services behind and find a way to use message passing, which is a direct communication way of notifying users of changed content. The open and mature infrastructure that Rabble and Kellan found to use for this service is Jabber. Jabber has 10 years of experience of passing messages around the internet and has been embraced by many companies including Google.
XMPP, Jabber's protocol, works well for message passing and does not have many of the problems/limitations of HTTP:
1. XMPP works over persistent connections
2. It it stateful (SSL becomes cheap)
3. Designed as an event stream protocol
4. Natively federated and asynchronous
5. Identity, security and presence are built in.
6. Jabber servers are built and deployed to do this stuff.Given this, Kellan and Rabble decided to piggy-back a notification system on Jabber by sending XML fragments using a PubSub paradigm. In this context, PubSub is a simple method for passing XMPP pubsub stanzas via Jabber. PubSub is nothing more than a convention for how to send XML via Jabber, including a method for embedding ATOM fragments in the XML.
Rabble presented using XMPP for FireEagle, Yahoo!'s new personal geolocation service that allows users to provide their current location to other users. For a few users and a few updates you can paginate the data stream into RSS/atom feeds. But once you have more than a few users and frequent updates a paginated stream cannot keep up. What if a user publishes more updates than can an RSS feed can capture? Updates get lost -- and for applications using FireEagle missing an update presents a critical flaw. Using a system like XMPP, FireEagle can rely on Jabber to deliver all the updates -- exactly what Jabber was meant to do.
Kellan also applied XMPP/PubSub to Flickr and how a Flickr update "Firehose" might work. If Flickr sends a ~2k an atom enriched packet for each new public picture posted at a rate of 60 updates a second, it would take roughly a megabit of traffic. Even a normal DSL line can handle one mbit of traffic, so the network effects are manageable on this level, compared to the polling system that FriendFeed uses. (Kellan also points out that FriendFeed is not doing anything wrong at all -- the current web service centric model is simply insufficient for this type of service.)
To deploy your own message passing service based on XMPP/PubSub, you'll need to follow these 4 easy steps:
1. Get a Jabber client library. There are many available for all the popular languages.
2. Set up a Jabber server -- again there are many available to choose from. Turn off the features you won't be needing. (e.g. creating new accounts)
3. Build a component (according to Jabber XEP-0114)
4. Integrate the message passing system in your own site.Pretty simple, overall! The beauty of this approach comes from the fact that all off-the-shelf components were used to build this new notification system. No new magic technology is being created to enable this system, which is a personal metric of mine for determining the likelihood that a new system will succeed.
It's clear that REST web-services provide the heavy lifting for many Web 2.0 sites, but its also clear that REST and its inherent polling mechanism isn't the best way of building a user notification system. With social networking sites not about to fade away, we're going to see an increasing need for capable message passing sites. And since Jabber is a well established and supported system, it only makes sense to piggyback on this great technology.
I predict that this blueprint will be applied generally.
New services like Gnip might provide the equivalent of this model as a service layer in social apps, but whether tool developers opt to use a scalable service like Gnip or roll their own with XMPP and the Rabble/Kellen model above remains to be seen.
I recently wrote a piece (see David Appell Is Andrew Keen Jr) countering some of the observations made by David Appell in a post about the blogosphere at his Quarksoup blog. Basically, he was making Andrew Keenish noises about the bilge being churned out by amateurs. I made the assertion that he probably doesn't participate in the web like a denizen of the edge does, to which he has replied:
[from David Appell's comment at David Appell Is Andrew Keen Jr] Actually I do use RSS readers and instant messaging. (I even have a cell phone.) I haven't found Facebook to be very useful though, nor Twitter. (Twitter is pretty much the exact opposite of how I want to spend my day.)[emphasis mine]
Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
- Kenneth Boulding
Looks like Google has released walking directions in beta for Google Maps:
This is a godsend for pedestrians, since driving directions can be wildly off.
I wrote earlier in the year about Nokia's Maps 2.0, available on s60 phones, like my n82, which has a similar support for walking:
So, I need Google Maps on my mobile, integrated with GPS, obviously, if it is going to compete with Nokia.
[Update: Because of Jamais' comment below, where he points out that Google Maps already runs on his n82 integrated with the GPS there, I reinstalled Google Maps on my n82: no walking option yet!
In the following image you can see the convoluted path they propose for me to walk home, because the app thinks I am a car.
][via Search Engine Land]
The Hamburg-based social tool company, six groups, announced today on their blog that I have joined their advisory board.
I first encountered six group's technology at the Next08 conference a few months ago in Hamburg, and subsequently got involved in technical discussions with Bahne Carstensen, the CEO, and his team. I will be working with them on business and technology direction, especially with regard to the application of their Livecommunity technology to conferences and other events.
Although it is a bit gloomy (maybe the overcast of the past week in the Bay Area has dampened Robert's sunny nature), I have to agree with some -- definitely not all -- of the complaints that Scoble has leveled at blogs. In particular:
[from Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you]More ways we’ve failed you?
Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.
What does this mean? Only the most motivated will leave comments.
/Message has always been about the deep structure of social tools: not at a software or hardware architectural level, but at the human cognition and the societal level. /Message will remain focused on that.
Robert is all gaga over Friendfeed, which I think has a lot of interesting features, but his initial statement is correct, although wrongly directed. It is not us, we the bloggers, who have piss poor commenting systems: it's the blogging platforms. [I will be giving a talk in Berlin in a few months, at the Web 2.0 Expo, called "Better Media Plumbing For The Social Web", a deep dive into the architecture of discourse on the web, and it's most egregious problems.]
The weaknesses of blog comments systems are exacerbated by the migration of commentary from blogs to the faster paced flow apps, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Feedly, Facebook, etc. (a topic I have discussed extensively, here, here, and here). The result is a fragmented and jumbled world where we basically never can see the whole body of conversation going on about some post.
Note that trackbacks seem to be dying (just like voicemail?) because a solution that is partial and unreliable is worse than nothing.
But Robert enumerates other reasons why blogging has failed that are, really, personal misgivings about his own situation as a blogger or the outcome of blogging's maturation. As blogging has destabilized conventional media, those media have begun to adopt the trappings -- and to some extent the real DNA -- of writing from the edge. So we can put to one side the concern that blogging has become too mainstream. Likewise, if Scoble wants to get back to being helpful and focused on what he really personally likes, great.
Robert has done me a service by teeing up this reflective reexamination of his personal motivations for blogging. In my case, I can't imagine a life without writing. I write 'man of letters' as my occupation on government forms these days.
/Message is going through changes as I rejigger the orientation of my work life. I am getting more involved in the media side of things, after a long hiatus. I was president of Corante, a blogging pioneer, and left the company in late 2005, but now I intend to push ahead with The /Messengers in that direction.
/Message has always been about the deep structure of social tools: not at a software or hardware architectural level, but at the human cognition and the societal level. /Message will remain focused on that.
As a result, I have managed to mostly dodge the PR folks that Robert gripes about, since /Message is not a 'breaking news' blog, but a hair more contemplative, more interested in the emerging web culture than what start-up has raised a million bucks. I am only half kidding when I use the category 'Webthropology' here.
So, while I don't join Robert's implicit mea culpa, I am happy to rededicate myself to being helpful and writing about things that I think genuinely matter, not just Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities.
Recent findings by the US Patent and Trademark Office may invalidate many existing software patents, including Google's Page Rank:
[from The Death of Google's Patents by John F Duffy]The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.
In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in section 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.” Perhaps, the agency has conceded, some “new, unforeseen technology” might warrant an “exception” to this formalistic test, but in the agency’s view, no such technology has yet emerged so there is no reason currently to use a more inclusive standard.
I will spare you the legaleses, but it looks like the PTO might move forward with new interpretations of patent law that would hit Google and thousands of other software companies.
[pointer @nitin]
In case anyone missed the big social media news yesterday, Social Media Group is acquiring Livingston Communications. Tongue firmly in cheek, Geoff Livingston reports on the top 10 reasons why he "sold out".
SMG develops social media strategies for large enterprises -- including Ford Motors -- and the social PR capabilities of Livingston will complement that well.
Consumers are starting to wrench control from official public transit authorities when it comes to information about the services: when the transit authority just can't get their act together, others will find ways to mashup and present the necessary data.
A recent example of this is MyTTC, which provides information about public transit in Toronto far beyond the dreck that the official Toronto Transit Commission site provides. From the MyTTC home page:
MyTTC was born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data. The amount and quality of the data currently available from the TTC is somewhat lacking, with fewer than twenty percent of the stops and stop-times available. We hope, with your help, to change that for the better.
We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!
This effort came out of TransitCamp, an unconference about public transit first held in Toronto, where two guys put their heads together and came up with an idea for a better way to access transit information, then took on the project of actually doing it in their spare time. This was not an undertaking for the faint of heart: the TTC is North America's 3rd most used transit system (after NYC and Mexico City), carrying 1.5 million passengers a day on 150 surface routes and 3 subway lines. Route information and timetables are not available in standard formats, and some is not available electronically at all.
Arguably, the TTC should be providing this information on their own site: there are many examples of great public transit sites that have route mapping and lots of other information; we just don't have one of them in Toronto. And you can be sure that no official transit site would make a time lapse video, complete with music, of vehicle departures:
TTC Weekday Service (small) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.
My buddy BadgerGravling pointed me at this from Chris Hambly (note, no search engines were employed in the creating of this linkage… which is kind of Chris' point.)
From Chris’s blog:
"F*ck Google! Ask Me!.. is this the mentality that Social Media is promoting?"
And of course, it is. Which is why Google is getting all social with its approach to search. Because Subjectivity is the new Objectivity.
Old school journalists really struggle with this. They forget to ask: whose objectivity was it anyway?
No one gets to own objectivity. It’s a very subjective thing...
There are very few truths that remain true no matter who looks upon them or from where or when (of Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic kind).
Our versions of what was ‘objectively’ true were always a social construct. We’re just having the blinkers lifted now.
Eric is working on getting people's juices flowing for Defrag, and has been blogging some teasers:
[from Anything but ho-hum]“Is the flow just too much? Lifestreaming at the edge”: Anyone who knows me knows that I’m impressed by Stowe Boyd’s brain. One of the big pushes around information overload is always how to “limit” things. Declaring “email bankruptcy” is a pretty common happening for folks that come back from vacation (or travel) to find 1000s of email messages, feeds, bits of news and tweets that haven’t been read. Hell, I’ve done it.
What fascinates me about Stowe’s thoughts are his immediate reactions against this surrender. He would rather take us the other way - claiming that perhaps our metaphors of work and living inside of this “flow” aren’t quite caught up to where the technology is trying to lead us. Could it be that we’re all just horribly behind the curve (or flow)? I’m not sure, but I know that Stowe will make us think, and I’m betting that he’ll start to open our eyes to how it is that re-imagining our metaphors around interaction can help to reshape the technologies and tools we’re dealing with.
On the Defrag website you will find my picture and the title of my planned talk, "Flow: The Still Point Of The Turning World?", which he somehow mangled into "Lifestreaming at the Edge" (which is not too bad, really).
I am going to dig into the first order cognitive impacts of working with modern flow applications -- both good and bad reports from various researchers -- and extrapolate a bit on cultural, media, and business implications.
Among other thoughts, I am dithering around with 'flow advertising' -- what if advertisers emulate the social 'touches' and short commentary that create most of the conversation in flow apps, like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Feedly? If an advertiser responds in a natural way to my Tweets, is it spam? For example, I post 'Listening to Gillian Welch "Look At Miss Ohio"', and a entertainment service responds 'Gillian Welch in San Francisco, 9 Sept. Tickets http://bit.ly/yZQF7'. That's not spam, bro: that's good conversational marketing. Likewise, I post I am heading out for lunch, and a few hours earlier I had posted my location ('I'm at 156 S Park St, San Francisco, CA, 94107, US (156 S Park St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA) - http://bkite.com/010u4'). If I get a message from a nearby restaurant offering me today's special, I would be happy.
(And people wonder about the Twitter business model. Ha!)
A week or so back I shared some of the thinking behind a launch I've been helping out a little.
Now the guys at ditto.net have come up with a way for you to join in the fun.
It's a vote on the 'Rock Stars of Web2.0'.
Come click your participation (see if you can't get Stowe up the list!)
And if some people are missing... well, you can't say you didn't get a chance to nominate!
I also blog at fasterfuture
I finally am getting around to looking at various new features implemented in the Dopplr social travel application. Various new ways to communicate with the app, and the world.
Profiles
I have always believed that creating and sharing a profile is core to social tools ("Social = Me First"). Dopplr has always had a 'within the service' profile, which can be shared with other users, but they have now implemented a public profile that is accessible globally. As an existing user, I had to toggle the public profile on, and select various options:
The resulting profile has a sort of crazy quilt feel, since the various elements are of different dimensions, and no formatting options are provided:
My profile can be found here: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/stoweboyd.
I tried the email integration in its most challenging: I forwarded an email from Jetblue for a trip from Washington Dulles to Oakland, hoping that it would get associated with travel to San Francisco, and it barfed. Dopplr interpreted the email as a trip to London, and back to DC. And it was a one way from Dulles to Oakland.
Needless to say, I was happy that Dopplr has implemented integration of Email and Twitter message as draft trips. In this case, I just deleted it.
What I was hoping for is actually extracting the travel logistics information from the email: flight numbers, airline name, times, etc.
I tried using TripIt for that service for severla months, but it's like voice recognition: it has to be flawless, or else it is amazingly annoying. Like the time I showed up at an airport, pulled up my calendar on my phone (sync'd from TripIt) and discovered that I didn't have the airline name or flight number. So, I had to pull out my Mac, go back to the source email (from Expedia), and click through on the link to get to the itinerary. Yes, I know that Expedia doesn't provide the needed information in the email, but if I am going to have to manually check every hypothetically automatic import for correctness, I would rather simply enter the info myself, which is probably faster than doing the check and making corrections. So I dropped TripIt.
But now, I would at least appreciate it if I could attach emails -- even uninterpreted -- to my trips so I can have a folio of travel-related information in one place.
A try of the simpler sort of email integration -- just sending a message to a dedicated address generated for my account -- worked as advertised:
This uncovered one problem: Dopplr seems to assume I am traveling from my 'home city' to the location I select in the email. Perhaps there is a way to deal with is in the 'language' in the email, like
traveling to New York City from Paris 7-12 October
but I don't know if that will work.
I never managed to receive email sent to 'trips@dopplr.com' which I understood would work.
Twitter Integration
Twitter integration worked as stated, although suffering from the same 'home city' bias mentioned in the email integration:
A copy of the tweet is achived in the trip record.
Final observations:
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new blog, /Ground, dedicated to what I am calling localism:
[from Launching /Ground]I believe that we are entering a period of human history where much of the conventional wisdom about the world and out place in it will be dethroned. In this post-industrial, post-modern, post-coldwar, post-twentieth century time, we have to rescope and redesign the frameworks of our ways of living. The post-everything world will harness a return to timeless values -- like stewardship of the earth and the enduring, central role of human relationships -- as well as a necessary reinvention of the apparatus of living.
One of the most salient trends -- one that I think trumps others -- will be the rise of localism. As nation states increasingly falter, and lose relevance we will see people shifting their sense of belonging away from mass organizations and political constructs, like nationalism and global religions.
We can already see the seeds of a new localized social order in activities like local food, local economies, distribution and energy, and the artisanal production of local goods. In a time when the web and other communication tools allow us to move to the edge of the media network, and shift our allegiance to demassed media, the parallels in other economic spheres are striking. Just as media has been transformed by the freedoms underwritten by the web, web-based social tools will lead to equally radical and parallel changes in other parts of the economy, as people opt out of globalized systems driven by unsustainable principles of unchecked growth.
In the middle of a torrent of stories about paidContent.org's acquisition by the Guardian News, new investment in Silicon Alley Insider, and a changing cast at the TechMeme Leaderboard, Fred Wilson takes a deep breath:
[from A VC: Blogging's Dead, Long Live Blogging]This blog is me and I am this blog. It's mine and will always be mine. I understand why many of the individuals who made blogging what it is are either moving on or turning their blogs into businesses. That's the way it is. But I am fortunate that this blog is totally integrated into my business and provides great value to me and my partners. So it's sustainable from an emotional and economic perspective and I plan to keep showing up every day.
But then, Fred is *not* a media mogul: he's an investor who uses his blog as a bully pulpit about where he sees trends heading, and a place to talk about his other loves, music, food, and so on. He is like Guy Kawasaki or Marc Andreesen, public figures that took up blogging as an aspect of their public personas. I find Fred a good read, and his character shines through, but I bet that if he was *not* the well-known and highly regarded investor from Union Square Ventures his blog would not be as popular as it is. By which I mean no offense.
My point is actually a support of his comments earlier in the post, where he agrees with Ian Lamont's comments about the composition of the TechMeme Leaderboard changing. Specifically, individual voices are being pushed from the top 100 -- Doc Searls has fallen off, Scoble is down to #70, and Calacanis has committed blogicide. Notably, Fred is holding on in the 30s.
To some extent, I am swimming in the opposite direction from Fred. I am writing frequently -- "Showing up up everyday' as he puts it, which is perhaps an unconscious paraphrasing of Woody Allen's "80% of everything is showing up," or Hemingway's "Sharpen your pencil everyday" -- but I am transitioning /Message from a personal blog into the cornerstone of a media company. I have launched a second blog under the domain here (see Launching /Ground), and am planning other media activities, like a video show.
I intend to retain my own true voice, but I am going to follow the lead of Rafat Ali and Henry Blodget, and try to grow /Message and the other blogs into something larger.
A number of new takes on social search have popped up.
Looks like Google is experimenting with a crowdsourcing approach to socializing search results, based on some screenshots Adrian Pike sent to Techcrunch:
[Test feature shows social search may be on the way for Google | The Social - CNET News.com by Caroline McCarty]Google has put out some official words on the test: "This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes." Users can additionally suggest changes to search results, something that Google says may be shared with other users. The explanation added that users will probably only see this feature for a few weeks before it returns to the drawing board.
There's a Google FAQ for it too, explaining that the feature is called "Edit Search Results." And blogger Justin Hileman has posted a detailed account of his experiences with it.
Learning personal search preferences could not only help make results more relevant, but could also add to Google's vast library of personal data and preferences, potentially for ad-serving purposes. It could also be applied to other areas of search, like images, news, and video, which many critics argue are tougher to index by algorithm alone.
But this is interesting for another reason: the persistent rumors that Google might buy Digg and use its technology to breathe some new life into Google News, which hasn't been growing as quickly as some of the company's other products. If Pike's screenshots are any indicator, this may mean that Google has been working to build something similar in-house instead.
Hileman's observations are most interesting. He discovered that he could see other users' 'edits' of their search experience, as well as they seeing his apparently. Are comments next?
Early this week, Me.dium announced a social search alpha based on Yahoo BOSS. I spoke with David Mandell of Me.dium and learned that the company has been experiencing very fast growth, with 5M users getting served 20M URLs/day.
I tried fooling with the alpha and it yielded not the greatest results:
I don't even know how to evaluate the results. It took me some digging to find out the meanings of the various iconic information indicators associated with each result. I suggest you contrast this with a Google search.
Then, I started getting script errors:
I think I will have to revisit when in beta form.
Obviously, the Google experiment suggests a significant future for social search than the Me.dium alpha, but they are convergent trends.
It's not hard to blur your eyes and imagine a mashed up Google space, where my search experience is informed by my explicit manipulation of the results but also channeled by other Google managed information, like Google Reader, my Gmail, and other Google-managed social artifacts. This is very fertile ground indeed.
I had heard the rumors, and now it's confirmed: Twitter has acquired Summize. But I don't think that Summize search is the answer to Twitter business model question.
[from Twitter Buys Summize For About $15M: Gets Search - And Maybe A Business Model by Peter Kafka][...]
And, if you're feeling generous, Summize might well help Twitter solve its business model problem, too. Twitter users wouldn't stand for ads sold into their tweets, or on their Twitter pages themselves. But there are a couple of companies we can think of that have done well by selling ads on search pages.
If you start putting ads into Twitter's search results, there is no reason you could put ads wherever. I have ads in my Gmail and I accept it because the service if free.
Alternatively, if Twitter started to treat my Twitter stream as a combination of blog and RSS feed, why can't I put my own ads there? I have ads on my blog; so why not just institutionalize the ads, and share the revenue with the Twitterers?
Adage shares this in its 3min news: Advanced warning of the stepping up of the most pointless arms race in history.
Turning three sides of a 25 story building into a coordinated animation display, the world's largest digital sign is nearing completion in Times Square, New York. Commissioned by Walgreens, it wraps One Times Square...
Its 23 synchronized digital screens dwarf those of the nearby Thomson-Reuters sign which has only 11 such units.
The designers are determined to push the competitive advertising environment of Times Square to a whole new level.
Haven't they noticed, nobody is looking anymore?
They could paint the sky with their slogans and no one would notice. We've stopped looking at the stage. We're looking at each other.
I was alerted to an interesting presentation from the recent Public Democracy Forum (thanks @blogstar, I knew I should have gone) by Mark Pesce (@mpesce) on Hyperpolitics (see transcript here, and the video, here).
One nugget:
The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.
We are able to end run mass organizations -- in the presentation, Mark discusses the likelihood that the grass roots Obama organization may take its own direction post election -- and as a result, we become self-organized based on the core social wiring innate within us: a tribal future.
Jim Kukral is trying to thread together a few data points, and looking for a smooth curve, but I don't think he'll find one. Kukral thesis? Because Robert Scoble can walk along the Apple store line livestreaming on Qik while chatting up a dispirited and apparently unresponsive crowd of early adopters, and because Jason Calacanis has declared he is giving up blogging, then somehow the A-List is dead.
Let me take this apart.
Kukral goes off on a tangent:
[...]
Are you catching my drift? The thing we like to call “the a-list” is fading away. In fact, I think it might be already dead. Guys like Scoble and Winer and Calacanis and Arrington, and the rest, well, someone stole their mojo and they’re trying really hard to get it back by grasping at straws by trying to build the hugest Friendfeed list, for example.
But they’re not going to be able to get it back, even with a biggest list of subscribers. Their mojo has been stolen.
The a-list, if you ever believed there was such a thing (there was), is dying. No, let me clarify, it’s dead. It’s been eliminated. Not because those are bad people or they did anything wrong…
But because it’s just not needed anymore.
[...]
So why did the a-list die?
I’m sure you’ve got your own reasons. I don’t presume to have the right answers, but I have opinions. Here are some.
- The a-list died because of social networking tools. It used to be that connecting with thousands of people could only be done if you had massive reach like an a-lister. However, with tools like Friendfeed and Twitter, anyone can reach out and “friend” up with anyone, causing millions of new connections of regular people.
- The a-list died because the sharing of information became easier to do. In the past, the a-list was in charge of spreading the virus, but today is no longer needed, we can do it ourselves.
- The a-list died because we used to have to rely on them to innovate and guide us to the new things. But we don’t need that anymore. We’ve reached a point where we have the knowledge and the tools to try things ourselves.
- The a-list died because we’re tired of them and their incessant drama and posturing for attention. We all just decided enough was enough and called bullshit. It was bound to happen.
- The a-list died because guys like Loren Feldman exposed them and made them just regular. You may or may not like Loren or his shtick, but there’s no denying he was a big part of satirizing them and bringing them crashing down to the ground.
It’s over. The revolution happened overnight and we didn’t even know it. We’re all now in charge, together, as one big group collective.
The a-list is dead.
Yes, Jim, the social revolution is moving forward, and it is changing a lot of things. We have new tools that are changing the way we work, communicate, and even the way we think to a limited extent. The technology underlying blogging hasn't really kept up (in fact, I am working on a new presentation entitled Better Media Plumbing For The Social Web that I will be presenting in Berlin, at the Web 2.0 Expo there), and much of what has made blogging social -- comment-based conversation -- is moving from blogs and into social contexts where the flow is faster, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and Feedly.
But even as blogs have lost their preeminence, don't believe for a second that the power laws are going away, that human sociality will shift from the unequal distribution of popularity and authority. Even if we move into smaller, less massive social systems -- the tens or hundreds of thousands of Twitter users, for example, instead of the tens or hundreds of millions of blog readers -- the same distribution of popularity, authority, and influence will arise. It's an inevitable consequence of the wiring in our brains: the way that we perceive the world is based on the deep structure of our social mind.
The shift from Web 1.0 era social media to Web 2.0 social tools will not change human nature. It's like taking a high school's student body from their campus and putting them in a summer camp: the same social patterns emerge, just in a different cafeteria. We aren't changing the roots of our sociality, we are just rearranging the furniture.
Different folks may rise in our regard in new contexts, like @pistachio or @megfowler on Twitter, but it will happen with the same dynamics as in every other social space.
So, Jim, the A-List will never die, although new stars and new social contexts will arise.
Jay Rosen brought my attention to a post by David Appell, someone I don't think I ever read before. Basically Appell is arguing that 'amateur bloggers' aren't contributing to Western Civilization, and since they aren't 'experts' -- defined as someone who has spent a gazillion hours focused on the topic in question -- then what they are doing is a waste of everyone's time.
[from Quark Soup: Blogosphere]Over the last six months or so I have been getting very frustrated with the blogosphere, and I find myself reading less and less of it. There just isn't much meat out there. Amateur bloggers just seem to spread useless gossip.
This is the Andrew Keen Cult Of The Amateur argument rewarmed. Appell, like Keen, seems to miss the whole notion of open discourse -- it's a big cocktail party, not just shouting from the pulpit, guys -- and the argument has an outright elitist agenda: if you aren't an expert, you ain't shit, so shut up.
He goes on to savage "professional bloggers":
And what's especially bad, "professional bloggers" seem so intent on posting 20 times a day that all of their individual posts are basically useless, conveying nothing whatsoever.
He details his dismay regarding Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias (two other guys that I seldom read, either) suggesting that they suck because they a/ write too much, and b/ they write about things about which they have inadequate expertise, according to him.
Andrew Sullivan ripostes adroitly:
[from Do Blogs Suck?]I think Appell misunderstands the nature and appeal of blogging. It's a form of conversation, not a medium of absolute authority. He writes:
It takes weeks and months and years to understand situations, to write from anything like a position of expertise. You don't get it by quickly flying out to Aspen and back, or by reading an article from the Brookings Institute or from Harvard's 321 course on Environmental Philosophy. It takes blood, sweat, and tears, it takes going out and looking at rivers, pouring over government reports and spreadsheets, hiking to the tops of mountains for the big picture, calling 25 people a day -- precisely the thing the blogosphere does least of.You bet. Which is why this blog contains not just my musings but links to many other deeply reported stories, essays, specialist blogs, videos, and emails from expert readers, etc. Moreover, different blogs can do different things - and this one has evolved over the years from a purely personal diary of sorts to more of a broadcast hourly magazine. The point is that I don't expect or hope that any reader relies on the Dish alone. The Dish is a portal as well as well as a blog - to all the information and ideas percolating out there. And my role has evolved from purely an opiner to a web DJ of sorts, re-mixing and finding and editing the thoughts and images and facts of others.
I agree with Sullivan that the ins and outs of being a blog author has changed over time. I believe that blogging has changed the way I explore ideas, for example. While I still write big essays a few times a month and detailed product reviews on a regular basis, I also write more short snippets as things cross my transom. I don't believe that every post has to have a beginning, middle and end, and I don't have to tie things together in some conclusive package. It's a stream of consciousness, in a way, which matches the rise of social applications like RSS readers, instant messaging, and flow applications (like Twitter, Facebook, and so on).
I bet Appell doesn't use these tools much, and that a new mode of web based sociality is passing him by. He thinks blogging is just writing articles without a magazine paying him for it.
And I have long maintained that we are doing on the edge will be considered illegitimate, or crazy, or unintelligible to those stuck in the mainstream.
Some interesting survey results:
[via email from www.leadernetworks.com]Leader Networks has just completed an extensive “Networks for Counsel” survey of 650 attorneys and how they might best use social networking.
The survey has uncovered some interesting insights including:
- Almost 50% of attorneys are members of online social networks
- Over 40% of attorneys say they are confident that online professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years
- Less than 10% have confidence that the current professional networks and online communities they belong to can help them improve workplace efficiency and cost effectiveness
- More than 40% said they would like to join an online network built specifically for attorneys
Looks like a real business opportunity. I worked with a group two years ago who planned to build a social tool for lawyers, but I guess it was never funded.
As someone who follows Twitter-related news quite closely, I felt quite debilitated a few months ago when Twitter disabled Twitter Track, its keyword tracking service.
When the Twitter team announced Twitter Track in September 2007 as a 'tiny feature' on the official Twitter company blog, users immediately recognized its huge potential. They used it—complementary to the Twitter Replies tab—for ego-tracking, but also to follow updates about events, conferences, news headlines and any topic they wanted to stay informed about. Twitter Track was likely one of Twitter's most popular features ever since.
Unfortunately, Twitter Track still hasn't been restored. Even if Twitter eventually does reactivate the Jabber IM bot that used to provide access to Twitter Track, it's not at all certain that Twitter Track will be enabled along with it. See this screenshot from the June 13th edition of the Twitter Status Blog:
Apparently Twitter track needs serious work before it can be relaunched. That blog post sounded like it's going to take time. In the mean time I needed to look for alternatives. Like many, I started to rely heavily on Summize's Twitter Search on my daily quests for Twitter scoops, having as many as 20 tabs open at any one time.
Suddenly, earlier this week, a Summize query for 'twitter' and 'bot' produced a search result that caught my attention: someone by the name of Dustin Sallings, @dlsspy on Twitter, had made a Twitter Track replacement called TwitterSpy, leveraging the Summize API. This implies the possibility to build complex queries of keywords concatenated by boolean and other search operators.
My blood started pumping: the ultimate Twitter Tracking tool had become reality. TwitterSpy was combining the best of both worlds: the immediacy of instant messaging with the flexibility of Summize's advanced search syntax.
I quickly added twitterspy@jabber.org to my contact list on Gtalk and created a handful of queries, reporting from my @twtooltrack account while I was discovering more and more about TwitterSpy:
Yesterday, after having sufficiently experimented with TwitterSpy, I added another 30 queries. Where Twitter Track requires to enter each keyword with a separate 'track' command, TwitterSpy lets you combine multiple keywords into one logical query. Here's an actual query I use myself:
track Twitter tool OR application OR app OR apps OR
applications OR tools OR service OR services
The interesting part about TwitterSpy is that it's not just a replacement for Twitter Track: it's becoming a full-fledged instant messaging client for Twitter, with commands such as log in, post, search, follow and many more:
Scott Kingery, aka @techlifeweb, has an excellent tutorial on his blog TechLifeBlogged explaining how to start using TwitterSpy if you want to try it yourself: How to set up TwitterSpy in Google Talk.
There are a few potential hazards to TwitterSpy's success that have come up in a chat conversation I had earlier this week with Dustin, the TwitterSpy developer:
The TwitterSpy name: I suggest picking a different name, one that's not already in use as a web domain by someone else. TwitterSpy happens to be the name of a Google Maps + Twitter mash-up that was launched three months ago.
Summize API: TwitterSpy thrives as long as the Summize folks allow it to access the Twitter XMPP public timeline firehose through the Summize API. Now that Twitter themselves have increased the hourly rate limit to 100 requests, the Summize team may insist that TwitterSpy makes Twitter API calls instead of Summize API ones.
Volume: When this bot does catch on with a bigger audience, it's to be seen if the bot and its current host can hold up.
I am setting new directions in my work. Based on a wide variety of factors, ranging from the hugely personal issue of what makes me happy, the economics of what work is out there, and what work works, I am making some significant changes in my life trajectory.
I envision a loose collaborative of /Messengers involved in delivering high quality open analysis (and synthesis) here on /Message, but also being drawn into client engagements with me or perhaps independently of me. I am developing a distributed, virtual thinktank of leading thinkers, researchers, designers, and entrepreneurs whose involvement will range from fulltime (like me) to occasional on-demand engagements.
A Return To Media and Analysis
I have been involved in analysis since 1994, when I worked as a consulting partner to then BIS, which became Giga Group and was acquired a few years ago by Forrester. I worked in a similar way for several consulting firms in the mid and late 90s, including work at the Accenture Center For Strategic Change with Tom Davenport. Also, in 1994 I started writing a monthly newsletter for Cutter Consortium on topics like groupware, workflow, business process analysis, and knowledge management. With the advent of the web, analysis became a dicey business, with huge retrenchment across the industry. I became a blogger in 1999, and retired my own electronic newsletter (called Message, unsurprisingly) at the same time.
Blogging has changed everything for me. The sequence of my blogs has been herky-jerky. Started on a service called Convey.com with a blog named Message From Edge City. They went out of business, and I moved to Blogger with a blog called Timing. I was recruited to Corante and wrote a blog there called Get Real, which is where my first real influence in the market began. I left Corante (and my role there as President) at the end of 2005, and started /Message in January 2006.
/Message has really taken off this year, with growth of unique visitors increasing over 2000%. I intend to experiment with adding more contributors and partners in The /Messengers, and returning to more in-depth review of social technologies. I will continue in the open inquiry approach that I have used for the past nine years: all of the analysis and synthesis from The /Messengers will be presented in an open fashion, available to all.
On the media side, I will be launching a video show in the next few weeks, called /Aviso, which will feature my take on recent tech doings, interviews, and a short sermonette on some trend of interest. We are involved in a redesign of /Message (thanks to Matt Balara), which will likewise be rolling out in the next month. I also will be launching a new blog in the next week, more to follow on that front.
I am fashioning a new suite of services, derived from the advisory work I have been involved in recently, but moving it more clearly into the analysis/synthesis sector, and away from design and 'advisory capital' activities. I have posted some details about this (see About Stowe Boyd And The Messengers). In brief, I am responding to what I perceive are the needs of the sorts of companies that I have been encountering in the expanding social revolution: startups, established vendors, investors, and enterprises trying to apply social tools.
The Limits Of Advisory Capital: A Cautionary Tale
A few years ago, I set off on a new direction that seemed very promising. I had just left Corante, where I had grappled with the growth issues of a small media company for several years. I thought that it would be more rewarding to remain a soloist, but to invest my time into a small number of startups as a strategic advisor. In the past two years, I have had some very positive experiences -- like Workstreamer, Travelpod, GlobalLogic, and Going Far, and some others in the works right now that have not been announced -- but in general, the results have not been anything like I had hoped. While I have made a good income, the reality is that most of the engagements have fallen apart, many products have been sidelined, or companies have made significant management transitions leading to a mismatch in expectations. And bringing stock into the picture -- a key element of advisory capital -- has made things more difficult, not less.
However, what I have learned from the most successful experiences I have had in this advisory capital experiment is that the early stage analysis and strategic direction feedback has been a real boon to my clients. The longer term strategic involvement -- a significant involvement in design, go-to-market execution, or other operations -- hasn't worked nearly as well. My feeling is that the mismatch between the fevered pace of software companies and the necessary limitations of part time involvement may be too great to be bridged.
So I am shuttering my 'advisory capital' experiment, at least until I can afford to invest my time directly for stock without the need for any consulting fees. I am going to continue on with a few cherry-picked projects but aside from those where I am a true co-founder (like Workstreamer), I won't be taking any news ones on.
This doesn't mean that I won't be working as a member of companies' advisory boards: on the contrary. But the notion of basing my business life around 'advisory capital' is passing.
New Directions, Old DNA
I have said many times that I am more of a synthesyst than an analyst: I look for big trends, tectonic issues, and reason backwards to the specifics of any issue. I coined the term 'social tools' in 1999 as a result of bumping into the leading edge of the social revolution, and recast my professional life around that. I have been at the forefront of a number of other trends in recent years, like the rise of flow applications and the impact of microblogging. My metaphor for the denizens of the online world, Edglings, has become a commonplace in the discourse about web anthropology.
This new direction is the expression of my core DNA, not some random departure.
I am accepting the fact that I will need to recruit other /Messengers, initially as contributors to the freeform and open inquiry here at /Message, but also as a collective analysis service.
At the moment I am the sole full time, /Messenger. But I don't expect to be a solo act for long.
I envision a loose collaborative of /Messengers involved in delivering high quality open analysis (and synthesis) here on /Message, but also being drawn into client engagements with me or perhaps independently of me. I am developing a distributed, virtual thinktank of leading thinkers, researchers, designers, and entrepreneurs whose involvement will range from fulltime (like me) to occasional on-demand engagements.
I have updated the About Stowe Boyd And The /Messengers post to reflect this refocusing on analysis/synthesis work.
Please contact me if you have any questions: stowe DOT boyd AT gmail DOT com.
[updated 12 July 2008]
The /Messengers is not a band, although it sounds like one. It's just is the name I dreamed up for my consulting business back in 2007, which had been called many, many things over the 13+ years since I started out as an soloist. There was Work Media, Running Light, and A Working Model.
I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it, I hope) at /Message, hence the /Messengers. I am obsessed with social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. I coined the term "social tools" in 1999, the same year I started blogging, and I haven't looked back since. Writing and working with clients takes most of my time, but I also speak at various events, such as Reboot, Lift, Shift, Mesh, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Under The Radar, Next08, and Web 2.0 Expo, to name only a few.
Over the years my blogging has moved around. I started with a service called Convey.com with my first blog, Message from Edge City. The company shut down one fine day, and I lost my content. Ouch. I started a new blog called Timing on Blogger, and consolidated that into Get Real, a Corante blog that I wrote for a few years. I parted company with Corante, where I had served as president for two years, and left Get Real behind. I started /Message in January of 2006, and it has drawn a following of web industry insiders and social technology savants. I serve on numerous advisory boards.
The /Messengers is an analysis/synthesis service focused on the social revolution on the web. We work with startups trying to attack the social tools marketplace, more established software companies, service organizations, and investors trying to make sense of the rapid changes on the social web, and enterprises grappling with the challenges of applying social tools to their operations.
We have three tiers of service offerings geared to these three classes of clients, all of which are based on an annual subscription. The minimum annual subscription is $5000, for startups. Other companies' subscriptions are based on a number of factors.
In all cases, we begin with an initial working session, which entails a deep dive through the company's plans and situation, and which yields a detailed assessment and action plan. Depending on the company's situation and the specifics of the action plan, we determine a planned level of expected services, such as reviewing marketing materials, conference speaking engagements, quarterly sales meeting support, advisory board participation, and so on.
We have worked with many established companies in the past decade, including Microsoft, AOL, Businessweek, CIO.com, GlobalLogic, Travelpod, and dozens of startups, far too many to enumerate.
My email address is stowe DOT boyd AT gmail DOT com, if you'd like to contact me.
I am all for word of mouth marketing. But, as I explained to Andy Sernovitz a week or so ago, word of mouth is only one part of an overall marketing program that would include traditional advertising, social media, and more.
Andy decided to experiment with more or less conventional blog advertising, via an affiliate relationship here at /Message.
Based on the response that this is causing (see Todd Tweedy on Affiliate Marketing At /Message), Andy has decided to withdraw from the experiment:
[via email from Andy]Stowe -
Thanks helping to get the word out about our event. As you know, you were our only test of a sponsored blog post (and you did a great job of disclosing it properly).
I think our test proved one thing quite quickly: disclosure is a complicated issue.As the guy who led the drafting efforts for disclosure best practices at WOMMA and other organizations, I've spent much of my career working with hundreds of companies on the best way to be systematically open and transparent.
With that said, it's probably best if we conclude the test and cancel the referral fee agreement. If you want to continue to share the discount code without a referral fee, that would be appreciated.
My learning:
1. Pure word of mouth without compensation is more effective, more credible, and less controversial.
2. Compensation for exposure isn't wrong -- it's called "advertising". The most important thing this that every reader is clearly able to know which is which, and both the blogger and the marketer insist on full disclosure.
3. Disclosure and transparency are vital issues that we need to continue to prioritize and keep working on.
Sorry you got dragged into this, but I'm always happy to have another chance to talk about the importance of disclosure.
Thanks,
Andy
So, following Andy's request, we are dropping the affiliate deal with him. I will be keeping up the discount for anyone who wants to get it though. I have the utmost regard for Andy and the professionalism he is showing.
In this process I have learned perhaps more than I wanted to about the feuds and contention within the word of mouth marketing community, but I guess that's to be expected in a new and somewhat controversial sector.
I discovered, sort of by accident, that /Message is in the top five analyst blogs as calculated by Technobabble.com:
And #2 analyst Twitterer:
Honestly, I am planning to devote more of my energies toward analysis, synthesis, and media activities starting this summer. I plan a post later today outlining the reasoning behind this shift in my work. More to follow.
A quip about the steep decline in ad revenue in magazines:
[from In Deepening Ad Decline, Sales Fall 8% at Magazines by RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA]“The joke here is, ‘Flat is the new up,’ ” said Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director at Condé Nast.
Rafat Ali and Co. have been acquired as part of the Guardian's move onto the web and into the US media markets. Congratulations, Rafat. I know how hard you and your partners have worked.
[from ContentNext 2.0: Life With The Guardian Media Group]We got scooped on the biggest story of our own company’s life. Such is our life. Almost six years after our company started with paidContent.org, we have been acquired by Guardian News & Media (GNM), the news media division of UK-headquartered Guardian Media Group (GMG). Guardian itself is owned by the Scott Trust.
GNM publishes UK national newspapers – the Guardian and the Observer – as well as the Guardian.co.uk and Media Guardian. We will be part of Guardian Professional group, which is the B2B media division for GNM, and runs targeted sites such the MediaGuardian, as well as online data businesses and conferences.
This starts the 2.0 phase of our company ContentNext Media: we will remain a stand-alone business under GNM. This also marks a major expansion of Guardian’s U.S. presence....it already runs the Guardian America website, focused on U.S. audiences. You can see all the formal details in the release below.
It will be interesting to watch the Guardian's moves. They seem more savvy about the web than the many US media groups in some ways, and the enormous plunge in ad revenues here in the US (as much as 8% so far this year and headed for at least 10%, according to today's New York Times) hasn't been as precipitous in the UK... at least not yet. That may give them an opportunity to scoop properties like paidContent.org, while the US competitors are in freefall and strategic disarray.
[Update: 11 July 2008 1:33pm ET -- The affiliate marketing experiment for Andy Sernovitz at /Message has been terminated: see Andy Sernovitz On The End Of An Experiment]
Received email from an old colleague who I haven't talked to in a long long time. He suggested that the 'sponsored post' that I wrote yesterday for Andy Sernovitz's upcoming Word Of Mouth Marketing was, er, bullshit, so I thought I would clarify things a bit.
/Message has had advertising for a long time, and I intend to continue in that direction. I have recently begun bringing on other authors to broaden and deeper our coverage of the social revolution. I hope to continue the sort of influence /Message has had and to continue the growth we have seen over the past year: over 2000% growth in unique visitors over last June.
For that increase in attention, /Message needs to be a commercial entity, if only to offset the time being dedicated by me, and the other contributors.
In the past several years, /Message has structured affiliate relationships with various conferences, just as we have an affiliate agreement with Amazon. In many of these relationships, we offer people discounted attendance, with a discount code, and the discount code is used to track the number of registrations attributable to /Message. We receive a fee for each registration, just as we receive money from advertisers on clickthroughs. This is basic web marketing.
So just to clarify: yes, we are in a financial relationship with these conference companies. However, we only select conferences that we believe are of genuine interest, and that would provide real value to attendees.
Also, as part of the full disclosure, let me clarify that in many cases, the conference companies extent free attendance to authors at /Message, and in many cases, particularly when I am speaking, I receive speaking fees and am reimbursed for travel. This is the normal and usual case, but I am clarifying just so everything is open and transparent.
Here's Todd's email:
[via email]Stowe,
Happy Thursday!
Spoiler Alert: I think the Sponsored Post is bullshit.
I haven't been reading your blog for some time but what is up with the hidden sponsored post thing today? Honestly, if you're going to make your "organic" content sponsored I think having a tag with sponsored post or some other label is needed if you are going to continue using :: sponsored post :: in a font size most people won't see.
In fact, is your special code actually a revenue share framework? Don't you think you should disclose that you are an affiliate and making revenue from an affiliate link? Auctioning off what brand or logo you wear is one thing but this post appears to be affiliate marketing. If it is, disclose it, please.
You've created great content with Corante, A Working Model and Message but your :: sponsored post :: format using an tiny font is bullshit.
Todd Tweedy
President & COO
BoldMouth Inc.
http://www.boldmouth.com
As a result of reflecting on Todd's email, I have made the ':: sponsored post ::' much more obvious, with a larger font and offset with two horizontal rules. I was simply reusing an existing CSS style without considering it too deeply. I agree with Todd that it should be much more obvious that a post is related to some financial relationship. I also added a 'sponsored post' tag, which I should have done if had been in my normal frame of mind (I have been at 50% all week with bronchitis). Basically, I wasn't try to hide anything, but I have taken steps to make it much more obvious that there is a financial relationship in place.
By the way, Todd's company, Boldmouth, is a word of mouth marketing consultancy, a competitor to Andy's, I guess. And as Todd says, he hasn't been reading /Message recently or commenting here, but this post got his attention, somehow.
