More on the Blogosphere’s Diluted Conversation

Yesterday, I wrote an article on Read Write Web entitled "The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere" about all the various ways the new lifestreaming and aggregating services have moved the conversation off of blogs and onto FriendFeeds and Twitter and the like. (Follow the conversation here on Techmeme. The post was inspired by Jason Kaneshiro’s post on The Blog Herald.) I’m really interested in the conversation that has developed around this topic. Larry Dignan on ZDNet asked "Do You Have to Be in Every Conversation?" But it’s Allen Stern who notes that the bigger issue is that readers of his articles miss the discussion. He then points out that there’s a business idea here, saying:

"What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose."

However, Mark Krynsky, thinks that 

"People are losing interest in commenting on blog posts. This dialog is usually limited to the vacuum that is just the author and other commenters. Twitter and FriendFeed offers us the intimacy of  sharing ourselves and our data with our immediate circle of friends."

If FriendFeed and the like are inspiring conversations because they are more intimate conversations between friends (which very well may be the case) then blogs, formerly the locale of these conversations, have failed.

What killed the blogs, then? I think it was spam. Well, not the spam itself, but the tools blogs used to fight it: the comment forms you had to fill out providing an email address, the CAPTCHAs, the authentication methods, the comment moderation, etc. - that’s what did the blogs in. The immediacy of the conversation was killed.

This is where FriendFeed came in and solved the problem. One click and you’ve commented. Simple, basic, easy, immediate. Plus you could comment on everything, not just links, but tweets, songs, anything. And the ingenious "Like" feature is the perfect digg-like tool that lets you opine without writing a word. Blogs, meanwhile, suffer with no comments. New readers do lose out because they’ll never know what other people really thought of the topic…and yes, Vlad, that matters.

I hope some developers see the eagerness people have for a tool that centralizes our conversations, be them on Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, RSSMeme, etc. and lets us follow them and mash ‘em up and stick them back into our blogs. Don’t just give us our lifestream, let us USE IT.

And listen up: I want an all-in-one tool. This is where a service like cocomment could stage their comeback (is anyone still using this, I wonder?). Their site claims they will track all your conversations, but I want to track "conversations," not just "my conversations." If I write professionally for RWW and it gets dugg and commented on in the digg comments, I may or may not be joining that discussion, but I sure as heck am interested in following that conversation. Where’s the tool that does that?

And FriendFeed, start creating some solutions here. I mean, look how excited people were to discover a way to filter your FriendFeed services via Greasemonkey, something I just discovered on Corvida’s site.  What kills me about this is that the creator of the script comments on her post that

"The script isn’t doing anything that smart… all I’m doing is using features on friendfeed that are kinda hidden."

Wait - What? Features? Where? I don’t see these features anywhere. I hope the FriendFeed dev team is listening because that should be built into the product. A Wordpress plugin that integrated the FriendFeed conversation around your blog post with your Wordpress blog would be nice too.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

In case you haven’t had time to keep up with Read Write Web, here are some of the recent articles I’ve written over there, which you might enjoy. Short summaries with direct links to the articles are provided below:

Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload: These days, it seems everyone has an opinion about how to deal with information overload, especially when it comes to email management. There are numerous methodologies, best practices, tips, and tutorials available, but are any of them really effective? We’ll explore that question as we delve into the top five email management methodologies. Keep Reading…

The Internet Will End in 30 Years!: Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number…Keep Reading…

Social Networks Will Be Tomorrow’s iTunes: We all know by now that social networks aren’t a passing fad. They’re no longer used solely by early adopters, young adults, or tech enthusiasts - social networks are now mainstream. However, a recent UK study conducted by media research company, Entertainment Media Research, reports some figures that point toward the fact that social networks could do even more. In fact, social networks have the potential to be the content distribution platforms of tomorrow. See you later iTunes, I’m gonna sync with MySpace now…Keep Reading…

The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere: We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to. The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up? Keep Reading…

The Best Tools for Visualization: Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best…Keep Reading…

Goodbye, Enterprise - Hello, Socialprise: Here’s another word to add to your lexicon: "Socialprise." It’s meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise."  It’s a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it’s currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. We covered some socialprise tools before, in discussing Worklight, Google Sites, and HiveLive, but here’s a new avenue for social tools in the workplace: Social CRM. A company called InsideView is bringing the social web to CRM, and they’re not the only one to do so…Keep Reading…

Steve Jobs Was Only Half-Right: People Do Read - Even Kids - They Just Do It Online: When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore." As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online…Keep Reading…

HiveLive Partners With Marketer, Responsys: It’s More Enterprise 2.0: HiveLive, a B2B social software platform provider, brings the social web to businesses by providing them with customizable tools like user profiles, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and RSS which they can skin, edit, and secure easily, and without any coding. The platform is based on a building block called a "Hive," whcihc can be configured to support a range of community activities, like concept brainstorms, product feedback, design reviews, voting centers, and much more…Keep Reading…

Mobile Web Use Growing Faster than Ever: Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. Computing is changing, too. Cloud computing will move applications and storage away from the desktop to remote servers. If anything, this drive to push data off the PC and onto the web has been in some part driven by the increasing mobility of internet users. Mobile access to the web is pushing internet adoption rates up while also providing more people the opportunity to work away from a stationary PC. So who is going mobile? Some new studies from PEW Internet & American Life Project and iPass shed some light on this topic…Keep Reading…

Goodbye, P2P! P4P is Coming: P2P, or peer-to-peer, is the protocol currently used by many file sharing networks for moving large files over the internet. Now, a new protocol, P4P - aka Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P - is being introduced by Verizon. P4P’s goal is to reduce backbone traffic and lower network operation costs. Will P4P bring us the bandwidth we’ve been waiting for? Keep Reading…

Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison: Today, Microsoft announced that the Office Live Workspace beta is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Some say that the service’s launch is a direct response to Google’s entry into the web office space with their Google Docs online service. If that’s so, then the question now is: did Microsoft just trump Google Docs? Or does Google Docs still rule online office suites? Keep Reading…

Grand Effect is a small tech blog network I recently started with the help of another founding member, David Peralty of eXtra For Every Publisher. Our focus is only tech news - whether it’s computer tips, web apps, software, blogging, or social media, you can find it here on Grand Effect. We’re not trying to be the next big blog network, we’re just a few guys and gals who blog about tech.

We’re kind of picky with our membership, so we have chosen to start small, but we’re going to stay small, too. This way, Grand Effect will always be a community, and not a conglomerate. Our readers will benefit as well, because they will know that they can always find great content on the Grand Effect network members’ sites.

So the big announcement tonight is that the Grand Effect network now has a new member. We would like to welcome SheGeeks (aka Corvida) to our network.

Corvida’s blog focuses primarily on social networking and social media, offering reviews, advice, and commentary -  and she doesn’t just blog about this stuff, either - she’s an active participant in the community, too. If you want to get clued in on the latest Twitter news or the hottest new web app, you are sure to find it on SheGeeks. I highly recommend this blog! If you want to try it out for yourself, you can subscribe here.

As far as Grand Effect goes, we’re still slowly building up the network and working on the back-end. Sometime later this summer we hope to have a complete network of blogs covering all aspects of technology.

If you’re interested in becoming a Grand Effect advertising partner, you can always reach us at our main address: advertising@grandeffect.com.

Brijit is an online community that offers up the world’s best long-form content by boiling it down to 100 word abstracts. You can then peruse the abstracts to determine what you what to read, listen to, or watch. The sources Brijit pulls from can be stories, like magazine articles, but they can also be radio or video shows, too. The summaries are sorted into 15 different subject areas like Politics, Entertainment, Science & Tech, Travel, Home, etc., each with their own RSS feed. Brijit’s list of sources is even larger, pulling in articles from popular print media like Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, The Economist, Marie Claire, GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, Details, BusinessWeek, and so many more. You can get involved at Brijit by writing abstracts for them. If yours is chosen, you earn $5 (or $8 for an audio/video source like a TV program. See, I was right - people do read, they are just doing it online. Awesomeness.

Love widgets? Can’t get enough? Then check out this collection of widget web sites for finding and/or creating your own widgets for use on your site, blog, social network, or desktop. Did I leave any great ones off? Let me know in the comments!

Search/Directories

• Cleverhippo - widget search engine
• Flickerdna -  flickr widgets
• Goodwidgets - photo widgets for your blog
• SpringWidgets - huge selection of blog widgets
• Snippero - widgets for your web site
• Spinlets - free web site/blog widgets - 2 galleries - Music and General, which features widgets for Twitter, digg, flickr, YouTube, and more
• Widgetoko - blog that tracks daily widget awesomeness
• Widgetbox - widgets for your blog
• Widgipedia - desktop and blog widgets
• YouCams - video cam widgets for your blog
• Yourminis - widgets for your web site/blog or desktop

Build Your Own

• Clearspring - widget platform
• Mashupmania - Build your own mashup widget in a virtual environment without coding
• Showyourself - Show your community & social media memberships
• SproutBuilder - online widget builder

RSS Widgets

• Feedflash - A free online tool to create web widgets, feed readers and place them everywhere on the web.
• Feednames - feednames is an advanced, automatic namecloud widget. Using artificial intelligence techniques based on LingPipe technology, feednames extracts the most relevant words from each article in the feed, and automatically creates a "namecloud" out of them.
• Grazr - RSS widget
• Opod - OPML & RSS widget
• Optimal - OPML widget

Stats Widgets

• Myustats - page rank & more
• Neoworx - cool stats widgets - even one that looks like an iPod

Desktop Widgets

• Amnesty Hypercube - move web widgets to your desktop
• Widgipedia - desktop and blog widgets
• Yourminis - widgets for your web site/blog or desktop
• Yahoo Widgets
• Google Gadgets

  TumblWeed is an Adobe AIR/Flash app for bloggers who use the Tumblr blog platform. With TumblWeed, you don’t have to open an web browser and go online to blog - just use this desktop application. There isn’t a WYSIWYG blog editor, but you can drag and drop photos and audio files to upload them to your Tumblr blog. You can also view your posts on a mini-dashboard.  The app is in alpha, but looks pretty good. You can download it (and Flash and AIR if you don’t already have them) from here.

 SproutBuilder is a service that provides an easy way for anyone to build web content like widgets, banners, mashups, videos, music, photos, RSS feeds, calendars and even web sites. The SproutBuilder app is a WYSIWYG Flash/Flex-based editor where users can used included tools to create "sprouts," (not widgets!) of web content. In addition, the service allows for the addition of components from 3rd party services like Meebo, Ribbit, Yahoo Mpas, and PollDaddy. Even better, you can get started building without having to sign up first. SproutBuilder had been in private beta, but it’s live now, and totally fun.

Bambuser  is a new service that lets you broadcast live video from your mobile phone onto your website or blog. You can also use a web cam, but that’s not nearly as cool.

To get started with this new, alpha service, do the following:

1. Install the bambuser application on your phone. Download it here or point your mobile browser to http://m.bambuser.com.
2. Start the application and review the configuration options at Options » Settings.
3. Enter your username and password at Options » Settings » Credentials.
4. Start the broadcast by choosing Options » Connect.

The blogger over at bavatuesdays just discovered a little-known feature in Google Docs - a "publish to blog" option. To use this feature, open up your document, click on the "Publish" tab (on far right), and you’ll see an "publish to blog" option. The first time you use this feature, you’ll need to set up your blog info and details (like whether it’s WordPress or Blogger and URL, etc). After the initial configuration, you can just click "publish to blog" and you doc goes live on your blog!

A service called Awesome Highlighter lets you markup web sites by highlighting text on the pages. You can choose from four different highlighter colors: yellow, blue, green, or red. The highlighted pages can then be saved to your account or shared with friends using a TinyURL-like shortened URL. You can use the service by going to the website or by using the Firefox extension. Pages can be sent to your Twitter account, too.

Although this may not be something that’s useful for everyone, I can see its benefit for team collaboration or even in an educational setting, where students share web notes with each other, or teachers share marked up pages with their class.

(via downloadsquad)