Trial By Fire

Blogging May Need an Ethics Renaissance

I wasn't exactly sure, but when today's Memeorandum news was dominated by Scoble's April Fools joke (and about a hundred hangers-on) it became painfully obvious that trackbacks and comments have become nothing more than linkbaiting, and despite claims of the opposite, far too many people at the top care far, far too much about their traffic.

Reading most of the active blogs is really becoming boring.  There is so much rehashed news, unresearched opinion, and ad hominem debate that surely this is not a good use of time.  Comments and trackbacks are sure to be just as boring, and mind-numbingly chaotic.  I hear the same sentiment from lots of people.

I am certain that people like Scoble, Dave Winer, and Doc Searls all started blogging for the right reasons.  I am certain their desire to provide insight and "conversation" is real.  But, they need to go back to their roots.  The conversation is sounding like a drunken bevy of aristocrats at an opera premier.  Meme-trackers have in some ways made it worse.  I was just sickened to see the feeding frenzy that April fools initiated.  It brings out the worst in people to "know how to seed the meme".

I humbly recommend the following to all of you dedicated and visionary A-listers out there:

1. Don't say anything if it's been said before.  Say it once, and say it from your heart.  If you heart is silent, don't post.  Or, post a cameo from your personal life.  If you have to keep the meme throbbing, add some spice.
2. Link to people and new valuable information from outside of the circle, not to one another.  Bouncing between a-listers is tiring.  You need to take people outside the a-list into reality.  That's your job being at the top guys: digging it up, presenting it to us.  Enlightening us.  If you don't like that job, then stop blogging.
3. Discourage meme-tracker mentality.  If something is getting out of hand, change the subject.  If the top bloggers change the subject, the crowd follows.  Diffuse the bullshit.
4. Take the next step in blogging journalism: present conclusions!  One nice thing about the a-list group is that they're capable of coordinated effort.  Show us how it's done!  Figure out how, in this chaotic space, to bring some sense to it.  Maybe a few of you should put your egos in cold storage and work together, share a blog space.  Figure it out!  I'd love to have the combined knowledge of the group, but am not going to read 20 dissenting opinions and rants and raves to get it.  I don't have enough headache medicine.

The last one is really important.  Self-managed blogging has reached it's limit, and meme-trackers, though a good idea, are actually making it worse.  It may take some good old-fashioned teamwork, or maybe some new technologies.  I want to hear what you say, but I want every word to count.

I want you guys to become the "Strunk and White" of the blogging world.  Omit needless posts and comments.  Instead, you're heading off into the stratosphere  making more and more noise.  Time to sit down, pull out that great bottle of wine you've been saving, and reflect.

I'm not going to trackback or link to anything with this post as a form of silent protest. 

So there!

Immediacy, Truth, and Loyalty

Blogging works.   But often I'm not sure even top bloggers know why, and convincing skeptics is often difficult without facts to back up claims of blogging success.  There are, however, three very tangible reasons why blogging is so effective: immediacy, truth, and loyalty.  These are three elusive properties of sites which have been pursued by all good website designers for the past decade.

Immediacy.  Blogs, more than any other online medium, make it obvious that content is either current, or not.  If you go to a blog, and quickly scan the posting dates and headlines, you know almost immediately whether or not the author is dedicated to frequent communication.  In conventional websites, this is very hard to do unless you are CNN and immediacy is part of your core business.  Many sites try techniques such as displaying the date of the last update, but we know many of those are ficticious, and only visitors who are already loyal can really tell the difference from day to day.  Even if you go to a site frequently, creating the feeling of "constant change" is hard to do, and it's just as bad to overdo it (which looks like hype) as underdo it (stagnation).  Blogs make it simple, and it works better than any other "web site genre" I've seen.

Truth.  Blogs encourage "transparency of authorship".  When you go to a blog, you expect to find an individual who is the author.  You expect to find details about them (if you're interested).  The blogosphere has trained you that a pseudonym or "corporate identity" is a warning sign.  The truth value of such blogs is instantly demoted.  This credibility is essential.  You need to see it in the posting style, the "about" page", and in the genuine interaction of those who comment and link to the site.  Truth and transparency are the new buzzwords of corporate communications and marketing, and blogs do it best.

Loyalty.  Take immediacy, add truth, and visitors have an instant inclination to loyalty.  That's always been true.  But blogs add the missing link: RSS subscriptions.  Web designers try desparately to capitalize on that inclination with mailing lists, forums, competitions, and other mechanisms.  But, RSS creates a direct channel between author and audience that is unrivaled.  Because blogs do this so well, their loyalty groups grow more quickly.  Without syndication, all a web designer has is word-of-mouth and Google.  But, RSS brings with it tagging, blogrolls, sites like Technorati.  All of these are technical multipliers of the word-of-mouth effect.

I'll bet when most people visit websites they find relevant to their purpose, their brain is instantly trying to assess how current the site is (immediacy), how truthful it is, and making a decision if they'll ever come back (loyalty).  With most sites, this is a hard decision.  So hard that many people just "click away".  With blogs, it's virtually an instant assessment, and an intuitive one.  That's why they work.

In a recent posting by Scoble (one of blogging's superstars), he realized he needed to learn to hone his rhetoric:

The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.

It's true.  It is difficult to convey things with anecdotal stories of success, as Robert did in a recent meeting with Amazon.  Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon) was unimpressed.  I can see why.  Werner is a real numbers guy, and I know Robert's style of enthusiasm is hard to swallow for certain types of people.  But, Robert is right, and his anecdotal stories are real representations of success.

I think the best premise for people like Werner is to argue that blogs are nothing other than extremely effective websites.  Skip the evangelism about "the conversation".  Though it might be interesting, and even real, it detracts from the firm message about why blogs are effective.  They're effective because, in their current form, they build an audience by using a rare combination of immediacy and truth, coupled with unprecedented ways to cement the loyalty of that audience.

Contrasts need be be drawn so people can see this more clearly:

1. How effective is your mailing list?  How clean is it?  How much control do subscribers have of what they get?  And, how often do you use it?  If you contrast most mailing lists with RSS, RSS will win hands down by just tallying the answers.  RSS wins.
2. How do you know what your visitor's think?  Surveys?  Market research?  Compare blog comments and the transparency of such communication with more conventional web mechanisms.  With the exception of a few enormously dedicated market research efforts, blog comments will win this game, especially for smaller organizations that need to be more agile.  Comments win.
3. Don't focus on things like "hits, visitors, and sessions" but rather effectiveness ratios.  Blogs may not have higher visitor counts than well-marketed websites.  But, you can bet that their ratio of "engaged visitors" to "casual visitors" is higher.  Finding numbers to support this may be hard.  Tools like Feedburner can help by redefining statistics in terms of "circulation" and slicing numbers differently.  Blogs will win most "effectiveness ratio" arguments by the numbers, if you can manage to collect them.

Some of this is hard.  I've done KPIs for sites many times, and slicing and dicing numbers to prove a point can sometimes be harrowing.  As a blogger, I know intuitively that what I'm saying is true.  But I also have had the same failures of rhetoric Robert describes and know that in the end, a more potent analysis is needed so that people can understand whether blogging will work for them.

A year and a half ago, I was skeptical myself.  But, if I've learned anything over that time, it's that blogs are not a new, amazing gadget which reinvents the web.  They simply do what we've always known we need to do online, and they do it very, very well.

 

Blogging: The New Social Club

The more I blog, the more I am reminded of one of the greatest and most ironic scenes in all of cinema, as Charles Foster Kane, his face in shadow in the publication rooms of the Examiner pens his "Declaration of Principles" for the front page of the morning edition.  As he is scrawling it, he emphazies that "no special interests will be allowed to interfere with the truth of that news".  I'm sure you believed it at the time, Charlie.

In the real world, The San Francisco Examiner began operating in 1865.  Just 7 years later, tired and bored of what the news world had become, five Examiner news reporters started a social club to promote a lively fellowship of jouralism and help "elevate journalism to that place in the popular estimation to which it is entitled".

That club is the "Bohemian Club" in San Francisco, the most exclusive and talked about men's club in the world.  Every Republican President since Herbert Hoover has belonged and the coveted roster of members reads like a Who's Who of Washtingon politics and West Coast elite.  To many socially-aware bloggers, clubs like this are the antithesis of what open media and politics should be about.

Ironically, at the Bohemian Club today, journalists are denied membership.

As one of the original founders of the blogging phenomenon, Doc Searls might as well have been one of those five Examiner reporters.  Today, in his post he says

To me this is a world where the only success that fully counts is in helping move good ideas along, in helping make this new world a bigger, better and more open place. And in helping others enjoy the privilege of participating in it.

At the same time, his post is full of melancholy reconsiderations.  It's a response to an excellent post by Seth Finkelstein called New Gatekeepers Are Still Gatekeepers in which Seth tells Doc in no uncertain terms that there is hierarchy, there is an A-list and a Z-list, and that the long-tail of online journalism does not spell democracy of media, but rather the same as media has always been, dominated by exclusivity.  I think Doc is feeling it too, even though he seems reluctant to admit it.

Seth is right.  Today's blogging world is a world of complex rhetoric, lightening-fast replies and discussion, and advanced search tools like Memeorandum that hone-in on exactly the kind of "converstaions" A-list bloggers have.  It's tough to keep up with the A-list crowd, and even tougher to engage in conversation.   There are myriads of new buzzwords: bloggers talk of "the edge", and of a new media economy based upon attention scarcity.  New economic thinkers like Umair Haque are creating a new lexicon of economics, media and technology, and a word coined only yesterday becomes mainstream discussion after 10 minutes of exposure to the "blogosphere".

Joining the Bohemian club involves an interrogation that one member said "would satisfy the KGB".  Thousands are on the waiting list eager to pay several thousand dollars to "get in".  For A-list bloggers, the price is the mastery of technology, terminology, rhetoric, and the discipline to dedicate hours of your day to reading, researching, and posting insightful new postings and replies.  To be on the A-list, people need to believe you matter, and the currency of the medium is intelligence and literacy.

I think bloggers should embrace this.  Rather than fearing that their idealistic vision of democratic media is crumbling, they should rejoice that a currency of intelligence and literacy is a breath of fresh air.  Scott Karp, whose posts I always enjoy, says it better than I can in his response posting There's Nothing Wrong With Gatekeepers.   Unlike many new media bloggers, Scott knows that the similarities between old and new media are just as important as the differences.

I'd rather start thinking of the A-list bloggers as Gate Openers.  Because in today's blogging world, that's just the way it works.  Scoble allows anybody to post comments.  So does Doc, Scott, Fred Wilson.  The A-list of truly good debaters and thinkers have the gate open wide, and anybody can truly join in.  I think the A-list needs to keep taking this responsibility seriously.  There is nothing wrong with a pecking order.  There is nothing wrong about having to prove that what is said is worthwhile, and to forcing people to practice their writing, their thinking, and self-analysis skills.  One thing we have far too much of on the net today is spurious, unresearched and unreliable information.  The A-list is raising the bar.

One thing though about human nature.  It hasn't changed.  And history does indeed repeat itself.  Don't think that new media is inherently impervious to corruption.  Quite the opposite, all the clichés are true.  Power does corrupt.  And the power of the A-list blogger is very, very real.

One of the most important tasks at hand is to scrutinize how this magical thing has happened, and figure out how to prevent the blogosphere of today from becoming the Bohemian Club of tomorrow.  Because unchecked, that's just what will happen, just like it did to Charlie Kane.

[tags: blogging]