"The tide is rising...and we've got a sinking crime scene..."

Something most people don't know about me is that I absolutely adore cheezy TV--and David Caruso's one-liners at the opening of every CSI: Miami episode are some of the greatest cheezeball groaners to hit TV. Perhaps that's what makes it "most watchable." For your enjoyment: a collection of Caruso one-liners (be prepared also for an overdose of Roger Daltrey screams)

In case you are wondering.....

I thought I'd post a pic, since most of the ones of me on Flickr don't quite do me justice...

this was taken over the weekend by my friend Marvin, who came up to my neck of the woods for visit because nobody else wanted to go see Speed Racer...I'm a little more weighty than I'd like to be, but that's why I started walking and doing a bit of weight training again. That's what that sneaker expense was over the weekend...

Oh, and if you could see the rest of that room, you'd take it for a used record and book store. Yes, I have *that* much in old records and books. What can I say? I like to read....

Something's Rotten in the State of Technorati....

Update 6/14/08: According to Silicon Valley Insider's Dan Frommer, Technorati has raise $7.5M
and has, once again, crashed. Joseph Weisenthal in PaidContent.org wonders why anybody would ante up that much for a company that's demonstrated "an inability to effectively evolve the product." Have to agree with Joe--they must already have "some chips in the pot" over there--but as I mention below, the cachet of Techonrati is going down among some of us who, while not the huge A-listers, are the folks for whom Technorati has been very important over the years for both personal and career-building reasons. I am not sanguine on this cash influx being able to help Technorati to help us much. The purpose of Technorati seems to have changed...end

A few months back, my friend Marianne Richmond noticed that Technorati was broken when her blog lost a ton of links over a few days.

She never got them back.

Recently, my friend Ronni Bennett had a birthday. She wanted to find all the folks who linked to her and sent her birthday wishes. Naturally, she went to Technorati--and didn't find as many as she'd hoped.

I suggested doing a Google Blog search. She did, and it helped, a little. But the results weren't as clean as the ones Technorati used to generate...and between both of them she still missed a number of links...

And then another friend, Chris Brogan, also noticed that things weren't right in the state of Technorati. Chris mentions that Technorati used to be a great place to go to explain tagging, as well as to find out who's talking about you.

Not so much these days...

This was around the same time that I noticed my blog had lost more than half of its links. I dipped from a high of about 146 links to a mere 62 over something like a two-day period--something similar to what happened to Marianne. I couldn't believe what was happening. Since then, I have steadily lost more links. It's not, though, that people haven't been linking to me. On the contrary. When I post regularly, I'm still getting linked. Technorati, though, doesn't seem to be finding lots of those links. When it does, it also drops them in a day or two after finding them--nothing's accumulating. Except for splog links. Those are always, ubiquitously there....

Actually, I do better finding who's linked to me by doing a Google search on my URL. Although none of this is accumulated into any sort of rank, and lots of blog links are missed there as well...

So, in thinking about this, it seems there's been a real shift away from what bloggers used for years to keep up with each other--namely, Technorati--and more of a kind of "underground" movement that's more about who's reading you or tweeting about you than linking to you. Many blogs are now sporting little chicklets to tell you how many folks have subscribed to their Feedburner feeds. That's great if you use Feedburner--but what if you don't? There may be some tool that will tell you how many different subscribers there are that use the various kinds of feed readers out there, but I'm not aware of that tool. So, I may have 36 subscribers in Bloglines, but who knows who's reading in a Google reader or other kind of reader...

It's now more of a lurker's world...where a blog may have more readers than folks who link. Or Tweet--although Twitter, while not good for overall rank, is great for traffic boosts (thanks Chris, Valeria and a couple of other folks....

Bottom line is, the whole thing makes me pretty sad. I used to enjoy being able to check to see who's linked to me. Now, the only way I can tell is by going into my Sitemeter and checking the referrals. On some level that's great--it makes me click though to see if I'm on a blogroll or if I'm in a post. But I'm not thrilled about it. There's a strong sense of having lost touch with the larger community of bloggers that I might find again only via social networking of some kind.

Oh, well... things move fast out here in the blogosphere...

Jeff Howe wants to source the crowd....

Jeff Howe's in a bit of trouble. He needs a crowd--or at least a good-sized group of commenters--to, for the most part, help him put his money where his mouth is....

Here's the deal: the guy who's work formed the basis for what we did at Assignment Zero has been working on a definitive book on crowdsourcing (appropriate--he *did* coin the term.) He's been posting the chapters at Crowdsourcing and hoping they'd attract a crowd...

But things have been a bit slow. The comments are small and very good, but there's little disagreement (that old "echo chamber" thing that happens when people really like what you're doing.) Consequently, I got an email from Jeff last week about the "problem" (he posted about the conundrum as well.) Now, in the general scheme of things, this isn't much of a problem. Comments are almost always slow to come into a blog unless you're really high volume and/or are really hitting a nerve with people. Not to mention that, in some circles, much of the commenting (including a good amount of linking) has moved over to what could be called the Twittersphere....

Which makes it just a bit tougher for someone to get comments on their work via blogging alone....

Then there's the time-crunch thing. Perhaps folks that would be most interested in Jeff's content are in a time-crunch and don't quite have the leisure time to comment...

But I digress...

I haven't had a chance to read Jeff's work just yet--but I'm interested in it. I've got a little more time these days, so I'm going to jump in and see what it is that I can either poke Jeff about, or simply say "did you think about?" So, if you have a bit of time, go over to Jeff's Crowdsourcing blog, poke around a bit, and let him know what you think, too. Who knows--you might even make it into the book....

Why I hate the suburbs (or at least harbor a strong dislike)

I grew up in a typical New Jersey suburb, with highways on each side, and no real sense of "town." Sure, we had a small strip mall within walking distance, where there was a grocery store, a drug store, a 5 & 10, a beauty shop, a deli, and a pizza parlor. Some other shops sprung up around the highway, but when the main drag is called Route 27, and the speed limit is 40 (at least), this hardly constitutes a Main Street.

My "home town" of Edison, New Jeresy
is an ironic town. It surrounds Metuchen, New Jersey--an older, established town that once had a thriving Main Street, complete with a movie theater and department store. Edison's "Main Street" on the North End of town was and is the Menlo Park Mall. It once housed a Montgomery Ward, Walgreens Drugstore, Woolworth's (both with lunch counters), and Bambergers. It mimicked Main Street: technically everything a post WWII middle-class family could want. Now, it is rather nice upscale mall...

My how times have changed this suburb! The world of Edison Township was supposed to be the WWII vet's dreamland, where he and his new, young family could have their own plot of land outside of the evil cities (that became more "evil" with the riots of the '60's and the porn theaters of the '70's.) It never really was. In some ways, it was for my parents, who both grew up on farms. The suburbs afforded them a small plot of land for a rather large vegetable garden and the same sort social isolation that was always possible out the the "country."

I sometimes joke about the rich life of the Edison suburb, where you can roll out of bed and find a strip mall with Chinese food, Italian food, Indian food, and a bagel shop that will give you lox with a schmear of cream cheese if you ask for it. Yet that sense of multiculturalism through side-by-side shared cuisine belies the simple fact that the suburbs are still awful, isolating places, where there's no immediate sense of cohesive community. The architecture is flat and ever changing. Sometimes I can see the remnants of the architecture I grew up with--that strange amalgam of 50's and 60's pop culture that I see when I look at books on advertising from that era. That kind of architecture though, wasn't meant to last--much of it, like the mall, has been gutted and replaced with what should serve a late 20th century community's perception of itself. Hence, the upscale-ness of the Menlo Park Mall....

James Howard Kunstler's talk at TED on the "Tragedy of Suburbia" nicely sums up the troubles with suburbia, how we have since the end of WWII created places that have created environments that force abandonment of civic life and civic engagement. These are they are places "not worth caring about" and I hate to say that, in many respects, he is right:



Someone asked me the other day if any of my life dreams had come true. To some degree, living in a small New England town is one of those dreams-come-true. For most of my life I yearned for a "town"--a place with a Main Street where I could walk to a grocery store if I needed something for dinner, and maybe even see and say hello to neighbors now and again. Places where there might be a church I could walk to and organizations I could be a part of that I didn't require a short drive. I live in that place now, over an art gallery, that's next to a bakery (how convenient!) and an ice cream parlor. This morning I was treated the the sirens and horn blasts of the vehicle parade for Big Rig Day, and soon the town will host the Junior Trout Fishing Derby at the pond behind my apartment. It's taken me a bit to get used to small townness--even though I'm extroverted, I've got that ingrained sense of suburban life, where you sit mostly in your house, have to drive everywhere, and don't really talk to anyone else if you don't want to. I sometimes wonder if the folks I encounter who I think may be unfriendly are also suburban refugees, who learned the lessons I did--or if it really *is* something about the locals, who already have their friends and aren't interested in making any more thankyouverymuch.

Or if it's just me--who has New Jersey suburban social skills that don't quite graft to Massachusetts country social skills.

Beyond the social, I find the way of life on my little street to be quite wonderful. I don't have to drive to get a watch battery replaced--there's a jeweler's nearby. I don't have to drive to a video store--there are two within walking distance, and one is staffed by a guy who knows a whole bunch about movies. There's a record store, great coffee shops, a number of places where you can get a good meal (although nothing in the way of "fine dining") and we recently got a dollar store (the 21st century equivalent of the 5 & 10.) There are often things to do "in town" or at least nearby Sure, I'm not within driving distance of the Big City, and I think my dating prospects are probably quite dismal--but then again, I don't really need to drive to the Big City to go see a good musical act, and there's a distinct possibility that a really nice middle-aged single guy *is* here, just not doing the online dating thing (which, whether it's eHarmony or Match.com is still a disconcerting and surreal experience. We cannot sum up our lives nor our True Selves in 200 words or less.)

In some ways, I miss life in New Jersey--I love the pace there, the ways in which I found more people who were into the stuff I love. But then again, the suburban life just isn't for me. I've looked too, at the urban life of cities like Boston and New York. To live in Boston I'd have to pay at close to three times what I pay for the place I live now. Lord knows what it would cost me for an apartment in New York that's perhaps only half the size. Not to mention that both Boston and New York might be more noisy than where I'm at now--which, even for "town" is fairly quiet.

Now, don't get me wrong about the Big City. I adore the Big City--esp. New York City! So much so that, on some days, it bothers me that I'm not close to New York. But if the choice is to live in the suburbs in order to get withing striking distance of a city like New York, I'm really not sure that I want to take that kind of trade-off. Besides, just because one lives within striking distance doesn't mean that one can fully enjoy the social milieu of the Big City. There is usually that
"drive home".....

So, for now, I'll stay where I'm at--living this small dream of small town life. Today I have to walk up to the grocery store and get some vegetables to go with tonight's roasted chicken dinner. I may even see a few folks I know, or at least have a nodding acquaintance with. I'll sit in the back, by the pond, reading for a bit and watching the birds. I'll think about hopping the train for a weekend in NYC, which I can afford. And if I choose not to do any of this, it won't be because I dread traversing the suburban sprawl or lack the gas to get there.


(thanks to George Johnson of Buffalo Rising for the link to the Kunstler talk....)

Size Matters! (in some instances...)

I almost died when I saw this auto advert from the 1950's on Flint Expatriates...



You know, I always wondered if there was more to all those guys with huge trucks than simply that some guys need them for off-road...esp. when so many guys keep them incredibly clean (for off-road vehicles, that is.)

Makes me wonder, too, what it says about guys who drive small cars...

Nowadays, could mean they have more money for dates than guys with big trucks!

Think about it....

What Lane Merrifield can teach newspapers and businesses about online communities

Today, I absolutely rejoiced when I read Phil Elliott's interview with Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield in gamesindustry.biz. Someone else gets that, when a company creates an online community (and I don't care if it's a virtual world or a message board,) moderation* is necessary to keep the inhabitants of that space safe from stupidity...by moderation, I mean some oversight of the dialogue going on. Doesn't mean every post has to be held, but it does mean the conversation should be humanly screened in some way...

When you keep a place safe through watching the conversation, you are laying the foundation for a civil environment. When you lay the foundation for a civil environment, you do not need to ask participants to disclose sensitive information about themselves.

Now, I can hear y'all bloatedly bluster: "but Merrifield is talking about the kid's virtual world (Club Penguin)! Of course *children* need to be protected online!"

Well, don't all of us need some protection when we enter an online community??? Think about it: If you've ever participated in an online community, you know that if you don't want to get flamed right out of the gate, you have to lurk. Some people never get past the lurking stage to participate, in part because it never feels totally safe. Perhaps they never feel totally safe because they may be asked to disclose more information about themselves than feels comfortable or right.

Oh, yes, I've heard the answers to this one: "Civility is all about disclosure! We have to do away with anonymity or else these users will just continue to behave like cretins!!" says Andrew Keen's echo...

Although, according to Merrifield, one of the ways in which they keep kids safe at Club Penguin is "we encourage kids to not reveal any sort of personal identifiable information. "

Gee, isn't that kind of like that old bugaboo ANONYMITY?? Oh my Lord! He's encouraging kids to be either pseudonymous or anonymous online so that they don't get hurt!

Isn't that what some of us were doing when we had screen names in those oldy-mouldy chat rooms and online communities at the dawn of the Internet? I believe so! Us super-early adopters knew there were risks, and wanted to keep ourselves safe while engaging in conversation. It's like not showing your driver's license to the guy you're chatting with at a bar...

Merrifield adds...."And we have huge filters and over 100 moderators to try and keep the world as safe as possible.

So, if you're going to have an online community where people will have their personal information kept safe, then you will need at least two things: (1) filters and (2)a sufficient number of moderators to make sure that community stays safe.

This seems like a total, logical no-brainer to me--and should be even more of a no-brainer when it comes to communities frequented by grown-ups. Let's face it: some folks might be grown in body, but that's no indication of the growth of their minds...let alone the old Id, the unbridled expression of which has been touted as "free speech" by people who just don't get that with such a big freedom can come equally big responsibility (I mean you Howard Stern, and all the other "shock jocks" out there. Yes, I blame shock jock-yness for the decline in civil public discourse. It started well before the Internet, and so were discussions about that decline...)

Back to online communities: I'd like to point y'all back to Clay Shirky's wonderful essay A Group is its own Worst Enemy" where he defines three persistent patterns in long-lived online communities. These patterns continue ad nauseum within online communities, whether they are hosted by newspapers or by corporations or other concerns. These are weird little quirks of human nature that even occur when we are totally non-anonymous in face to face environments (Shirky cites W.R. Bion's work in the mid 20th century...way before the Internet.)

When it comes to the human condition, online or off, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We behave in weird little ways in groups because we look to preserve the safety of that group (see Shirky.) Sure, a site may be able to get adults to disclose all the pertinent information that the Powers believe is necessary to create "civility." But the direction in which an online community de-volves can't necessarily be controlled by those Powers. People can be forced to surrender their full identities in order for them to participate in a community--but that might simply end up exposing them in ways they may be very uncomfortable and unsafe. By exposure, I do not mean just to malicious folks, but also exposure in search which is becoming more prevalent for information/social profiles we put online. (Google yourself and see what I mean...)

There is another aspect to Merrifield's interview that's of interest: the attitude about technology and community. Perhaps it is because he's working with children that he sees the "irresponsible nature of our industry" (towards children) and the "over-reliance on technology" as obstacles that had to be overcome in order to create a safe community.

I find it sad that this sort of care couldn't be extended to adults as well, and that human moderation is still thrown aside in favor of automated filters (CP has filters as well, but they work in concert with human beings--not as an efficient replacement for human beings.)

"Oh, but if we have all these moderators, won't we be treating the adults like babies??"

No--and here's why: whether you're a kid or an adult, online is a weird place. You can be chatting or exchanging messages with someone who tells you he/she is in one place, when he/she might even be next door. You might interpret someone's message syntax (if you get this far) to be female, when, in fact, you're chatting with a male. Everything about a profile can be faked to look like the person is real (stock photos touched up to make them look real, unverifiable addresses and other things.) There are no guarantees that the info a person submits to a site is their correct personal information. Most of the time the only verification is an active email address.

Bottom line: moderation is key to civility and safety in online communities. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed, and it can be assisted by technology--but it can't be done by one guy for thousands of messages (as I understand it has been at the Hartford Courant...)

If an industry--newspaper or otherwise--is going to skimp on moderation because of cost, or hires moderators who are either very inexperienced or hostile to the mores of online communities (because they've read too much Andrew Keen and think "why can't these idiots give up this anonymity crap!") then perhaps the industry has no business building an online community in the first place.

One addendum: if a site is developed that insists on full disclosure, there should be mechanisms in place that shields certain information from others. However, this is no guarantee that the information entrusted to you won't get into search--unless there is some mechanism to block search. What may end up happening is that the community will consist of only certain kinds of individuals who are comfortable living out in the open online. That may be fine if meeting the goals of your community require disclosure, but remember that your participation levels will be limited to certain kinds of folks. If you gain a good level of participation, then great! You may, however, have to live with a small, yet beautiful, community. Still, don't think some folks aren't going to try to spoof you with pseudonyms. There are no guarantees...

For further reading: Getting Commenters to Play Nice from my friends at Poynter.org. My only criticism: what about when the newspaper's staff doesn't play nice??

Chris Brogan's great On Managing a Community gives a step-by-step strategy for good community management.

and Francois Gossieaux's Understanding the power of communities--even when you do not have a critical mass of users--no matter how small your community, there's still a whole lot you can learn from your participants!

What drives your blog traffic these days?

After a lively discussion with my friend Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By on how you just can't rely on Technorati to help you find links anymore (it's pretty much broken for that), I got to wondering if linking to other blogs was all that important anymore in the grander scheme of traffic....

Are links still the *thing* that drives traffic to our blogs the way they did a couple of years ago? I started to wonder more about this, as my traffic blossomed last week while my Technorati rank (and links) took a swan-dive. Over the past few weeks, I'd even noticed that my traffic has a habit of blossoming and staying steady--mostly due to where I'm at in Google. So I was quite intrigued by Darren Rowse's survey of his Problogger.com audience on where their traffic comes from:



Apparently, I'm not the only one who gets a sizable amount of her traffic from Google. Darren was interested to see how many bloggers report links from social networking sites. Being somewhat active in Facebook, and having seen some traffic boosts from Twitter links, as well as how people promote their blogs and blog posts of others, I can understand how social networking links can boost your readership (or at least click-throughs.)

What might this mean for bloggers when it comes to rank and authority? Well, for one thing, while Twitter is searchable, Twitter links do not add to "rank"--which used to be the one way of judging a blog's authority. If we added Twitter links, we'd also have to add Facebook links--which are much harder to aggregate. But if bloggers aren't keeping blogrolls (many aren't) and they aren't linking as widely as they used to, then the idea of blog links as a measure of authority kind of goes by the wayside...

It might be that social networking sites, plus links from other blogs, plus repeat readers, plus links from other sites, plus our Google traffic, is what will give us authority. It might mean that I have to be a bit more shamelessly self-promoting and post links to my new blog posts on Facebook, get a Twitter account and tell everyone about my blog posts (and the posts of others) and then hope that some other bloggers will link to me too...

Does this seem like a lot more work than it used to be to try to figure out what's going on with our blogs? Are we maybe adding more noise to the signal? And is this really giving us authority or just popularity?

Maybe, when it comes down to it, there's no real "authority" in blogs that aren't written by voices of authorities. Maybe we are only authorities--or experts--within our own social spheres, which we carefully cultivate out here in the variety of social networking applications that are out there.

And where does Google come into this? Is, perhaps, Google the channel by which we gain authority and significance on the web?

All I can say is the blogosphere is an ever-morphing, ever-changing place. And how we get traffic--and even authority--might just depend on what our intention is for our blog. Do we want to be linked and loved, or do we want authority from search. Can we do it all? Do we have the bandwidth (or the time of day) to do it all?

Then again, maybe it all depends on our personal priorities for our blogs....

Just my $.02...

Facebook "Friending" and Making Facebook Friends Real

How many of us remember the story of the Velveteen Rabbit? I never read the story when I was a kid, but someone gave me a copy some time ago, when I was going through a very hard time....

And a long time ago (or it seems that way) when I first started blogging, I wondered what it was with all these people who said they had made friends with other folks through their blogs....

It was then that I realized that some folks made casual acquaintances through their blogs, while other people made real and close friends through and with their blogs. Usually, the close friendships came from meeting other bloggers face-to-face.

That was the same thing that happened with groups of folks I knew from the NYT Film Forum. Our friendships were better once we met f2f as well....

Lately, I have received a number of "friend" requests on Facebook from people I don't know, but with whom I appear to have some common connections. Many of them I accept--in part because we have common friends, but also because these are interesting people who do not seem to pose any threat.

Although I do wonder about some of them, given how marketers are using Facebook as a "social marketing" tool. Individuals have businesses that they think I might be interested in hearing about, or they have books coming out and they think I might want to be part of their circle for promoting their books, or for any other reason that has nothing to do with knowing who I am as a person...

Basically, I am wondering if some of these people who are asking me to "friend" them are really interested in me in that capacity at some point--or am I only just someone for whom they believe should hear their "message" or get their book, or for some other reason that is connected mostly to marketing and less to knowing something about me...

Are some of us, then, just targets for "social" marketing on Facebook?

Now, I don't find social marketing all that annoying when someone invites me into a group, or even when an organization tries to "friend" me. In the case of organizations or products "friending" me, I know that this happens because, in Facebook, friend pages have better features than group pages, allow for more apps, and constitute another channel for people to find them.

But if someone's just asking to be my "friend" because they want to pitch me--well, I think of all those home-sales programs (you know the ones I'm talking about) where the reps always seem to want to be your friend, but only if you'll buy something from them. It's as if the friendship is conditional on the sale--which, outside of a retail establishment, this seems kind of strange. Retail gives that friend-sale thing something of a context: I see these people at "x" retailer because I like the product. We shoot the breeze because not only do I like the product, but they are people with whom I feel comfortable shooting the breeze. But if I am not in the retail atmosphere, and you're shooting the breeze with me because you want me to buy your product, and if I don't, then you turn away from me, I'm going to think you're a right phony....

So, here's an interesting little experiment: can I make someone who's a Facebook friend into a real friend? or at least someone who it might be nice to have a casual conversation with....and not because either of us wants something, or because it's some kind of professional thing...but just as two people...

Is this possible? or is it just another Internet illusion?

We'll see....

Update Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post on the ambient intimacy of Facebook and Twitter. I have to agree with Jeff that these two apps can help us keep in touch with people we don't see often, and even help us renew friendships with those that we might have lost for good if it weren't for them. But when someone out of the blue sends a "friend" request, can that new person become an actual friend? or is there another reason for the friending?

Friday Music -- Goldfrapp

Because a girl has to just let go sometimes.....




Thought I'd adopt a new feature to this blog--friday music, featuring something to just get my mind *off* of all that heavy thinking.

And to let you know what I'm thinking before the weekend sets in...