I’ve been using CoComment lately to track my blogosphere conversations.
The service is great – I always used to find myself wondering what blog writers would think of my comments, and if they would respond. And of course, I would never remember where I had left my digital breadcrumbs, and so was destined for disappointment.
But now all my conversations are tracked via the Firefox err Flockextension … and I can simple check my conversations in one consolidated, simple view.
There is one problem, however, and one addition I’d like to see.
One problem
The problem occurred when I had CoComment installed both on my own blog (running Wordpress) and in my browser. The result: the comment would get submitted to CoComment, but not to my site … meaning that I could not comment on posts on my own blog. I had to disable the Wordpress plugin so that comments would submit and be saved.
One feature request
A very cool feature would be the ability to allow your conversations to be publicly visible. Currently, if you have an account, your conversations look like this:
It’d be a very nice feature to make that publicly available at some simple URL determined by your username … something like cocomment.com/conversations/johnkoetsier
Then people would be able to see sites that you’re visiting and sites that you care enough about to actually comment on … which I think would be a very interesting indicator to know about someone, and would help people find blogs relevant to their interests.
You are a woman with a young child in the jungles of Ecuador. It’s 1956 or so. Your husband and four of his fellow missionaries have just been murdered by a vicious tribe known for murdering others at the slightest provocation.
Do you flee – go home? Do you run to the city? Or do you take your child and go live with the tribe that murdered your husband?
The widows and their children elected to go live with the tribe that killed their husbands. Slowly, through their work, and through the work of one of the tribeswomen who had lived with them outside the tribe for some years, the Woadani tribe accepted the Christian ethic of love, and the Lord of that ethic, and the murder rate dropped 90% over a few years.
This is an amazing story, and I really recommend the movie – and the book.
[tags] end of the spear, christian, woadani, movie, john koetsier [/tags]
In complete and slavish (but very flattering) imitation of Liz Straus’ SOB program, I am (somewhat) proudly announcing the SLOB top blogs awards: for startlingly loquacious & outstanding bloggers.
(Cue assorting clapping, cheering, plus a couple of boos from the peanut gallery.)
See the newly inaugurated SLOB hall of fame right here. (This being the first week of its existence, there are only 9 members. But I think you’ll agree they’re all very, very worthy members.)
9 Weekly SLOBs
In any case, every week from now until I get bored or completely fascinated by some shiny piece of scrap metal, I will pick 9 SLOBs … 9 startlingly loquacious & outstanding bloggers … and throw them on the SLOB page, errr, vote them into the SLOB hall of fame. That bestows upon these happy souls the much-coveted privilege of displaying the august and revered SLOB logo.
Becoming a SLOB
Do you want to be a SLOB? (But of course you do.) Simply email me and suck up (or down, as the case may be). I am bribable. Money is verboten, unless it’s really lots and lots and in small bills and untraceable. Links are best.
Here’s to SLOBs! May they live long and propser – I mean prosper.
hic.
[tags] SLOB, SOB, bloggers, outstanding, HOF, hall of fame, silly, amazing, highly coveted, glorious, beautiful, bribable, yummy, john koetsier [/tags]
Great site, by the way. I noticed, as I crawled around her sites, that her purpose in blogging and in creating the SOB award is to be like her father … who was a focus for the social life of their community. She says it much better. Very cool – and very worthy of a read!
[tags] liz strauss, sob, blogging, links, john koetsier [/tags]
As I evolve professionally, this blog is evolving as well. And one of the things I’ll be talking more about is marketing in the social media we now live and communicate in.
I believe marketing isn’t going to be something you do as much as you are, and allow, and foster, and enhance. One thing that’s going to be critical is to establish yourself or your company as a thought leader.
Viewing your blog’s links and ranking on Technorati is often a bewildering experience. I was reminded of this when I read this post, claiming that Technorati is broken, on WeBreakDigg.
There are a number of things about Technorati that I don’t understand:
Numbers weirdness
72 blogs link to your site, which is more than the 65 that linked to your site last week, but the top new links are the same old ones that you’ve seen for a month.
Link weirdness
A blog links to your site, according to Technorati, but when you go to that blog, there’s no link visible. You check, doublecheck, view source and search … and there’s no way that a link to your blog is on that site. (Example: this site supposedly links to my blog.
Missing link weirdness
Someone links to you, and you know know that they did, because they tell you that they did, and because you see their link, but somehow Technorati doesn’t – for 9 months. Then all of a sudden it does show up … listed in Technorati as being added “4 days ago.”
More numbers weirdness
When you check one day, there are 84 links to your site. The next day, it’s back down to 61. It doesn’t seem plausible that 20 or more all of sudden passed the 6-month expiry date.
Redirection weirdness
You move blogs, and redirect the old blog’s traffic to the new one – Technorati doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t apply the old links to the new blog, doesn’t remove the old blog from the listings.
Even more numbers weirdness
One day, you have 50 links. You see the first few of those links in the list. The next day, you come back, and there’s a different, new site that you’ve never seen before in the list of sites linking to you. But, amazingly, you still have only 50 links.
I’d love to hear an explanation. Anyone? The recent update didn’t seem to fix anything …
[ update August 30 ]
This is a test link to What’s Next Blog … see comments below for an explanation.
[ updated below; MySpace is having issues ]
[ updated again August 6th; MySpace has finally fixed them - see comment at end ]
[ updated yet again December 1, 2006; still buggy, but there's a solution. See Laura's comment way down at the bottom of the page ]
Apparently I am too stupid to join MySpace.
Huh. This is an odd one. I have my own blog on my own server with a Wordpress install that I’ve installed and a theme that I’ve customized. I’ve built two (very small) content management systems in PHP, including one that was essentially a blog in 1996 or so.
But I can’t join MySpace
I was about to throw in the towel, hold my nose, and do a quick land-grab … ensuring I had a digital toe-hold in the busiest and hottest social networking site around. But I’ve been saved from my own rashness by a broken login system.
I’m sure it usually works. In fact, I know it does because a few months ago, I created a profile on MySpace for a brand that I’m working on. (It’s still dark because we’re not quite ready to release it.) So it worked for me once – just not today.
Gotta love that error message in the patented MySpace StickAllTheWordsTogetherAndItWillBeCool style: LoginErrorMessage30.
Arrghhh ….
[ update July 29 ]
While trying to figure this out on a different machine, I logged into MySpace with another account (not a personal one) that I had created months ago. While doing so, I saw this page:
Either MySpace is having major issues, or the page is coded for a specific browser that is supposed to interpret something in the place of those strings. (“String” is programming language for a word or a phrase).
I use Flock mainly, a Firefox variant, but the same thing shows up in Safari and Firefox. If the same error shows up in all of those three browsers, it’s got to be a programming error. Which means that MySpace is doing something incredibly stupid … and not me.
Whew.
[tags] myspace, bugs, login, stupid, john koetsier [/tags]
Flock was behaving rather naughtily for me yesterday … when I dragged a browser window around it would snap to odd places on my screen.
After it happened a few times I thought I’d take a movie of it, and here it is.
I’m dragging it to the left, and when it moves to the right (or once right up to the top of the screen) it is moving “by itself.” It doesn’t happen every time, but most of the time.
Ghost in the machine, apparently …
Don’t let this scare you off Flock – it’s a great browser (as I blog about here) and this disappeared after a simple quit and restart of the application.
[tags] flock, browser, software, bugs, youtube, john koetsier [/tags]
The discussion about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail has been absolutely fascinating.
The book makes the claim that in markets where physical inventory is not an issue and transaction costs are minimal, goods that are not top-sellers can be a very significant portion of sales, when taken in aggregate. So, for instance, the bottom half of songs on iTunes in popularity will make up a significant portion of sales … sales that simply would not occur in a bricks-and-mortar industry where carrying costs and inventory are very, very real concerns.
In other words, some markets are moving away from being completely hit-based – only popular stuff makes money, relatively unpopular stuff disappears – towards being more craft-based – more sellers of more stuff, each in small quantity individually but in aggregate forming a large market.
The Wall Street Journal’ Lee Gomes has essentially attempted to quash the meme, saying that the Pareto Principal and the hit machine that modern consumer culture has built are both alive and well in new media.
It would be wonderful if the world as Mr. Anderson describes it were true: one where “healthy niche products” and even “outright misses” collectively could stand their ground with the culture’s increasingly soulless “hits.”
But while every singer-songwriter dreams from his bedroom of making a living off iTunes, few actually do, mostly because so many others have the very same idea. And to the extent that Apple is making money off iTunes, thanks go to Nelly Furtado and other hitmakers. Indeed, you can make the case that the Internet is amplifying the role of hits, even in relation to misses, not diminishing them.
In turn, Chris Anderson has written a rebuttal, which asserts that, unfortunately, Lee Gomes doesn’t know math.
I have no doubt that there are many parts of my analysis and data that could be improved. Unfortunately, Gomes, in his haste to find them, stumbles over statistics and more, and in the end simply makes a muddle of what might have been an interesting debate over the magnitude of the Long Tail effect.
But I think the best perspective on the whole affair is Robert Scoble’s. And, in fact, he’s pretty well positioned to have it … due to previously being in the really, really short (but fat) part of the tail at Microsoft, and now being at the very, very, very long end of the tail at Podtech.
Scoble does a great analysis and then synthesis on the debate and comes up with this: the long tail can be viewed as an enormous farm club for mainstream media.
(That’s obviously not ALL it is – I’m 100% certain that Robert would say that as well. It’s first and foremost a means of self-expression and communication for millions and millions of people.)
But the point he makes is valid: a talented podcaster can make it on radio – terrestrial or satellite. A talented videoblogger can make it on TV – cable, satellite, or terrestrial. The same goes for a talented blogger.
That’s not to say that MSM has figured everything out – far from it. And it’s not to say that radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines aren’t in big, big trouble unless they can find models that make sense in the networked, digital world.
But it is to say that talent will rise to the top, and that revenue will come to those who want it, and are good enough to warrant it.
Which is about the smartest thing I’ve heard on the long tail in a while.
[tags] robert scoble, long tail, chris anderson, WSJ, daniel gomes, MSM, media, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, radio, newspapers, magazines, Sirius, john koetsier [/tags]
This is a little off-topic for bizhack, but I thought it was insightful and important enough to post:
After reviewing extensive research from the Saratoga Institute, Leigh Branham determined that people leave their employers because the employer is not meeting one or more basic human needs. In his book The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, Branham identifies these four needs: the need for trust, the need to have hope, the need to feel a sense of worth, and the need to feel competent.
When employees don’t have the information and resources to do the job right, their sense of competence is compromised, they become discouraged, and ultimately they’re more likely to leave. Having the right tools—that is, the information and resources to do the job right, is fundamental to a sense of competence, which is, in turn, fundamental to retention and productivity.
I’m working on a social media (blogs, podcasts, and wikis) presentation for a business. While I’m still in the initial stages, here are some links, quotes, and perspectives that have been helpful so far.
Let me know if there’s something else I should be looking at as well …
The majority of companies surveyed (76 percent) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s)
75 percent of respondents reported that the initial goals of their blogs have been met
Three-fifths of corporations have guidelines in place which outline the company’s responsibility for posting and maintaining their blogs, yet nearly two-thirds do not review content prior to posting
42 percent of respondents said that specific blog posts have affected the company or a brand and in the vast majority of cases it has had a positive affect
companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists
Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies
Quotable quotes
Entrepreneur (on blogs) - they also can be used as a unique, informal way to establish a company or individual’s reputation or brand
- They improve branding by presenting a more authentic and distinctive voice for a business than canned PR or MarCom messaging.
- “for many companies, blogs have become a business staple”
CNN
- “A blog is the perfect platform for someone who really is trying to establish themselves as a thought leader,” said Web analyst Rick Bruner.
- “The blog provides a very human side to the corporate face beyond press releases, or a Web page or a corporate brochure,” said Tom Murphy of CapeClear Software.
Inc.
- “Blogs are a way for you to tell your story over and over again, and do it in a personable way. If you are blogging and your competitor down the street is not, then it can be a competitive advantage,”
- they can be an excellent tool to build relationships and create brand equity as more Internet users see them as viable sources of information.
BusinessWeek
- Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.
- Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later
Also BusinessWeek
- Customers can be your best evangelists
- Viewers, listeners, and readers are smart— often smarter than your own employees—so let them improve your products and services.
And BusinessWeek again, this time on Nike
- A strong relationship is created when someone joins a Nike community or invites Nike into their community.” Which is the point of brand marketing, isn’t it?
- Last fall, Nike started feeding video clips that spotlight Nike-sponsored soccer players onto popular video sharing sites, including YouTube and Google. It created JogaTV, a virtual soccer TV station, where it releases a new video clip every few days and fans can upload their own clips.
eMarketer
– “A year ago eMarketer looked at the business of blogging and said that blogs were a one-to-few medium, and they were not practical for most businesses,” says James Belcher, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, The Business of Blogging: A Review. “But over the past year many things have changed, including our opinion.”
Web Ink Now (on something you can put on your blog: e-books)
E-books directly contribute to an organization’s positive reputation by showing thought leadership in the marketplace of ideas. This form of content brands a company, a consultant, or a non-profit as an expert and as a trusted resource to turn to again and again.
There’s more, but that’s all I have time for tonight …
(And yes, the presentation is all about trying to persuade this company that social media is a very, very good thing to invest in – right now. After all, marketing is about ideas, and there has never been a more powerful way to spread ideas than the internet, and the most powerful idea-spreading forces on the internet right now are social media.)
[tags] womma, TED, business, social media, blogging, podcasts, guy kawasaki, seth godin, tara hunt, Hugh Macleod, john koetsier [/tags]
Sometimes people who buy from you can communicate what you do far better than you can yourself.
Case in point:
Notice how it’s fairly hard, if not impossible, to understand what the company does if you just read the letters in black? And how easy it is when you just read the letters in white?
(And that’s probably a fake customer quote – so even starting to think like a client will help you communicate better.)
Somehow, we just get too close to the companies we work for, the products we build. And then when we try to talk about them, we say too much. We talk down. We use too many adjectives. Our verbs are hifalutin, like integrate and facilitate. And our in our fear to leave anything out, we make it way too complicated.
In case you didn’t realize it, having to work two jobs in order to pay the rent is now referred to as “portfolio diversification:”
Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,� he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.� Pay for essential workers like plumbers and cabdrivers will tend to go up, he said.
… from an article in the NY Times about the declining availability of affordable middle class homes in large US cities. Canadian cities are no different.
One more soundbite:
But middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed.
This time, they are being squeezed out by the rich as much, or more so, as by the poor — a casualty of high housing costs and the thinning out of the country’s once broad economic middle. The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington has dropped since 1970, according to a recent Brookings Institution report.
The percentage of higher-income neighborhoods in many places has gone up. In New York, the supply of apartments considered affordable to households with incomes like those earned by starting firefighters or police officers plunged by a whopping 205,000 in just three years, between 2002 and 2005.
Personally, I think we’re losing something if families can’t afford to live in cities any more. Am I the only one who feels that something is missing in neighborhoods without children? Can you really call it a community if it’s all 20-30-40-something married-to-their-career types?
[tags] city, children, housing, affordability, middle class, NY Times, john koetsier [/tags]
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
9 Weekly SLOBs
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
