Northern Voice 2006 Day 2
Starting With Fire: Why Stories are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales
Presenter: Julie Leung
Moving presentation on the power of storytelling and its importance to blogging.
Sifry on the Blogosphere
Presenters: Dave Sifry from Technorati and Tim Bray
Why did I build Technorati? I wanted to know what are people saying about ME. It’s a social thing. We tell stories, interact with each other. Even someone who disagrees with me probably has a lot in common with me. Searching the web uses the language of libraries, we talk about pages, indexes, directories.
Search engines don’t understand the concept of time. Google news and Yahoo news are the periodicals section of the library. Library is enormously powerful metaphor
Documents are created by people at certain times. So build something that goes beyond keywords and hyperlinks as votes of attention. Page rank still uses library concept.
Blogs can be thought about in a new way. They are the remnants of a person’s attention stream over time. When you write you are spending the most important thing that you have – your time. So you can understand who a blogger is. So rather than look at pages look at people. Who is linking to whom. I built it because I wanted to know who was talking about me. And many other people and companies wanted to know who was talking about them.
Look at the Web as a living thing. Doc Searls calls it the World Live Web.
What are the blogging stats today?
• Technorati is tracking 27 million blogs
• 75,000 new blogs created every day
• How many people are still actively blogging after three months: just over 50%
• 11% blog once a week or more
• Just under a million blog at least once a day
• About 50,000 posts/hour
• The news cycle cannot be measured in hours any more
• How do I make sense out of all of this?
• Blogging is incredibly many to many.
• Top bloggers become one to many, turn off comments etc. or else they are overwhelmed.
• There are about 115,000 blogs in the magic middle: they have between 30 to 1,000 people linking to them. Authorities in niche areas.
• Such bloggers become local authorities yet remain very two-way because the traffic is manageable enough to carry on a conversation.
What if we look at two important things. Do you really write about what you say you write about. And do others who write about what you write about link to you? Open this up to the world. People started tagging themselves. 870,000 have tagged themselves. Over 2,500 interesting tags on which bloggers are writing.
Tagging is a sloppy thing. Clay Shirky writes about this. As long as you make it really easy to tag and make people accountable, an emergent system starts to occur. Greater than the sum of its parts. As long as there are people who can tag in multiple languages, relationships start to form. The system itself become more intelligent.
Bray: what are you worried about, what could go wrong?
Sifry: This can’t go on if you extrapolate the rate of growth. It has to top out at some point. We are still very much at the beginning of all this. Spam is a problem. Comment, trackback spam. Splogs. Cory Doctorow: all healthy ecosystems have parasites. The cool thing about blogging is that it always resolves back to a web page somewhere, and that leads to some accountability. What I write becomes part of my permanent record. I can temper what I know about you by all the things you’ve said over time.
Concept of network neutrality. Potentially most dangerous threat to the ‘Net. Collapsing of number of backbone providers. Now these companies are saying we deserve to be able to do preferential pricing. You’re going off our network so we’re going to charge you 6 cents a minute. If you want to do video streaming, you’ll have to pay extra. Preferred providers. This is enormously bad for innovation. Protects the winners. These guys are going in front of Congress and saying of course this is the way we have to go. Only we can prevent this. They won’t hit consumers, they’ll go to companies behind the scenes. But that will hurt the small guys in the garage startups.
Bray: I have no idea who’s reading my stuff through RSS feeds.
Sifry: RSS is not really push. Your RSS feeder is constantly downloading stuff, but are you reading it? Feedburner uses graphics to ping back to show that someone actually read something. But still don’t really know. The way Bloglines understands things are read is different from NewsGator understands things are read. People are waking up to this issue. Hope to start resolving these issues cross-company soon.
Crowd question: What about federated blogging?
Sifry: Poor pay. Some coops are developing to split income more equitably. Natural outcome of shift in publishing economics. But a lot of people don’t have the skills to do marketing, advertising etc. Guild system developing. Can you write with quality? Can you make enough money? Right now people are spending 70 of leisure time online, but only 4% of advertising is online. This should start to equalize, so there are enormous opportunities here.
Snow White and the Seven Competencies of Online Interaction
Presenter: Nancy White
See her slides at link above -- a lot of great stuff I have no space for here.
What are competencies we need to interact online?
Blogs are developing faster than any other tool. When we go online we lose f-t-f cues. We are global. We may no longer have a shared cultural context. Bridging language, belief systems. A world of small annoyances. In f-t-f life our presence as a human being is still there. We need to bring that into online interactions. Bring heart and soul and spirit into online life.
Sometimes we go online and choke and die. We move too fast online. I wrote it so you must have understood it. The new medium goes laterally rather than top down. This freaks out organizations. Networks can totally disrupt organizations. Open source learning.
Competencies are emerging: Scan, See patterns, Write, Image-inate, Vocalize, Intuit
When do you stop scanning and go deep? If you can’t write you’re screwed. Think about multiple modalities that help people have an experience.
Approach online life with an open hand and let people take your stuff.
We glorify expertise, but by being unknowing we learn so much.
Online you don’t have to participate. How do you create an invitation that people will respond to? Online we are in a fundamentally open space.
I have to speak from a space from which people can hear me. I cannot always speak from my default culture. Go live in the world. Learn other languages.
Shouting that I’m right and that my issue is right, is not working.
A lot of us come from a single domain. Engineer, Economist, Artist… We have to be able to switch our inner context.
Outsiderness is a gift. We’re all outsiders, and if we embrace this we can use it in a positive way. The magic of the periphery.
The most importance competency is self-awareness
We all bring both bright and dark things to the world. Self-aware vs self-absorbed.
See: openspaceworld.org
The Changing Face of Journalism
Presenters: Mark Schneider, UBC School of Journalism;
Robert Ouimet, At Large Media;
Michael Tippett, NowPublic.
The news is dead long live the news
Tippett:
Tectonic shifts in the marketplace
Fundamental economic shifts in how news is produced and consumed
Audience is now becoming a supplier
News orgs have to change relations with readers
Readers can make their own news.
Does it make sense to have readers contribute news. Why are people participating? Hyper-local, know their neighborhoods. We have numerical superiority.
Shift from network to cable news. Same thing is happening with people. If you happen to be “there” and have a camera, you can report the news.
Shift is happening faster than big media expected. Tsunami, Katrina. Latent army of citizen journalists everywhere waiting for something to happen.
Ownership of news has passed into the hands of the public.
Ouimet:
Internet driving big companies crazy. Look for landmark moments in the way in which people consume content. I’ve never been in a room with so many people using so many computers taking notes, and I used to be a professional journalist.
Profound changes in which content is consumed. In old days big media owned all the parts. People are gathering and transmitting stuff like crazy in this room.
Media fragmentation. Pie is becoming increasingly fragmented. Big media have smaller and smaller market shares.
Schneider:
The news is really sick. It makes us sick. There is a toxic quality to what we are consuming. Noxious vapour. Crazy human instinct to want to be frightened.
News should help responsible citizens be citizens. There is a huge appetite for change.
So what can be done? How can we rehabilitate news? Blogging and journalism best practices. There are still valuable skills that journalists have. If you make mistakes, you’re instantly under the spotlight. Have to have an open mind. Can’t go in with mind made up. That does not produce quality journalism. Practice of corroborating evidence, sources. Journalists have an incredible urge to get the story, even putting themselves in danger. Yet journalism is tired. It needs waking up and perhaps you are the ones to do it.
Very rare to hear of journalist on the take, still a miraculously clean profession. Almost a dichotomy with stats on public distrust of the mainstream press.
Things we can do together:
• Create news wikis and other ways to collaborate
• Insist on more transparent media
• Support news certification (see definition below)
• Share skills and support one another
News certification: what went into the story, and what was left out. What couldn’t we answer, and invite public to fill those holes. We’re at a very primitive stage in this yet.
News ml: news markup language. Helps the good stuff rise to the top.
We’ve always been attracted to intelligence and creativity. We feel deeply compelled to tell our truths. Create tools to find the brilliant in blogs.
Audience comment: when you tailor newsfeeds you can totally miss what others are talking about.
Ouimet: We have this notion about this open mass media but it’s crap. You never know what was NOT printed. Editorial focus is about rejecting.
I want to be surprised I want to be challenged. People are smarter than we give them credit for.
Mainstream media can be brilliant because it has the resources to actually throw in a trained, skilled observer…. To ask questions that the neighbors never even thought to ask.