Category: Social Media

Categories
Social Media

Change starts at home

There was a conference in the UK called Our Social World that ran last week. According to the front page:

Theme:

Demonstrating to you the benefits of the new internet technologies and the benefits of opening up communications with your customers and fellow workers without email!

Who should attend:

You if you are involved in running a business, charity or education and you are interested in improving communication within your organisation and with your customers.

So it’s all about communication, and the power of the blog. How forward thinking of them. However, looking at the the list of speakers, I found no new faces, exactly one women, a great deal of whiteness, and virtually no diversity. Oh, and a woman presented the speakers. Ooo.

Demonstrate what benefits of the new internet technologies? That they’re perfect for maintaining the status quo?

After the last few weeks — last few centuries, really–we should be more acutely aware of what happens when people are grouped, and excluded by, factors such as race and economic class. Diversity isn’t just a ‘thing that people have to do’ so that people like me won’t bitch.

Doesn’t matter if those who presented are nice people, liked by a lot of folks–those that attended and presented should be asking what went wrong, and what can be done to make it better. Especially since they’re promoting this so-called ‘brave new world’.

Categories
Social Media Weblogging

I own Stuff

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Technorati has a new beta feature: blogs with authority on topics. I, of course, checked out my site on certain topics to see if I am an ‘authority’.

I am the second highest authority on photography after Tim Bray ahead of Heather Champ. A big surprise there.

I am eleven in technology, after Doc and Meg and Scoble but before Dave Sifry, himself. There’s something rather poetic about that one.

I am second in Writing after Neil Gaiman. Who is Neil Gaiman, I think to myself. Exploring, I find a post talking about the Satanic Tomato. Of course.

I also own feminist but there’s only two of us. And I own women though there are more women. Just so there’s no confusion about my position, I also own goddess. And I’m fifteenth in Politics, but third on Bush. Oh my, I could have fun with this.

But none of this matters, because I own Stuff. When you own Stuff, then you know you’ve arrived. Oh, and it helps when you know how to work with metadata.

Ooops! Hold the presses! As of this afternoon, I am 12th in Technology and Dave Sifry is now one place ahead of me. Got to keep up in this metadata crazy world.

Categories
Social Media

A question of ethics

The discussion about sponsored links on a site has been fairly good at Phil Ringnalda’s, except for a couple of threads.

It’s late and I don’t have time tonight to link to any sites–maybe tomorrow–but there are folks who are not offended, and others who are. Rafe at r3c.org wrote:

I guess my position is that publishing those links on your site isn’t the most unethical way to earn a buck, but it is unethical. Publishing these links makes the Web a little bit worse for everybody. I guess a person could rationalize it by saying that the things that make a site a worthwhile spot to put those links in the first place adds value to the Web, and so it’s justifiable to post those links and offset some of the value being added to the Web in exchange for profit, but I still don’t like it.

Webster’s defines ethics as:

The discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.

and

A set of moral principles or values.

Well, at least I wasn’t accused of doing evil.

Categories
Social Media

Update on the issue of links

Well, after my experiment of providing full feeds, I have found that Ice Rocket, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and Feedster are all picking up my links. Technorati has picked them haphazardly, and I’m not sure what BlogPulse looks for. Ditto with Clusty.

I had a couple of nice comments from folks at Feedster, and also a note from Blake Rhodes at IceRocket. I do hope that if these services look at one thing, it’s the importance of letting people know how to make sure they’re included in aggregation counts (as well as how to have their links picked up). A list is only as good as the data that feeds it. It would also be nice if they provide access to the data for our own interpretation. Even summary data would be helpful.

Personally, if I can get dynamic link counts from these services, I may try a run myself at randomly collecting static link counts, and try out my ‘popularity to influence’ ratio, just for grins and giggles.

Most importantly, I’ve heard from some of you about how happy you are that I’m providing full feeds. I hope that folks still continue to visit the site; otherwise, I won’t know who is reading any particular post. I especially hope that folks leave comments now and again. But I want my writing to be read, and if full feeds helps, then I’m for it. The full feeds stay.

Additionally, if you’re interested in knowing when I add photos to Flickr, you can access my photo syndication feed here. There’s also a RSS 2.0 syndication feed, and I’m assuming the Flickr folks are updating the Atom feed to the newly released 1.0 specification.

Well, that is until I release Eve 1.0. Then I’ll be using Eve 1.0 all the way.

update

Koan Brenner has been having an interesting time with Technorati and how links are accessed and valued. I think the introduction of tags into the discussion has clouded the issue, because as far as I know, tags have nothing to do with how links are accessed, stored, valued, or used in any ranking algorithm.

If they are used, then yes, Technorati has some flaws in its reasoning.

Bluntly, to folks who run these services: time to come out and tell us how outbound links are accessed and stored, and what factors could prevent them from being recorded. More, it’s time to think about full disclosure on ranking schemes. Dropping hints and tidbits in this post or another is just going to create that much more animosity.

If you are degrading links based on time, or other factors influenced by the tech people use, it’s critical that this information be disseminated. You’re basically penalizing people for not using technology in a way that you assume it should be used, and that’s a sucky way of determining ‘popularity’, ‘influence’, and, especially, ‘authority’.

As for disclosure of techniques and spamming — I’m not sure this is the same issue with weblog-related lists as it is with Google. It’s an issue, I’m just not sure it’s the same issue. This one could definitely use some more discussion.

Categories
Social Media

Bang bang bang

From the department of you’ve got to be kidding I give you RSS 3.0:

Welcome to the RSS Version 3 Homepage. This site strives to create expanded and complete standards for syndication of online content – more specifically, it aims to recompose the RSS Version 2.0 standard due to underdocumentation and lack of concern towards modern necessities. Our goals are to provide at least one complete standard for common use under the Attribution/Share Alike Common License.

Brought to you by Slashdot–the organization that has conclusively proven that there is no tire so old or bald that it can’t be ridden on one more time.

Best response, from post at Danny’s given by David:

*bang* *bang* *bang* (head against desk)

A close second in Slashdot:

Basically, it’s all a bunch of pointless dick-waving.