Category: Blogging

Nerd Humor

~ rbonini

If you don’t read the Official Playstation.Blog from Sony, you really should be. Its really good and is a daily staple of my blog diet, along with the Gamerscore Blog from Microsoft. I don’t have either console ( 360 or PS3) , but I really enjoy reading the posts.

Take this recent post from Jason Coker, Associate Producer of the PlayStation Network title PAIN for PS3:

What I CAN tell you is that it has been a blast to work on. It hasn’t been easy, but it sure has been hilarious. Here are just a couple of the gems I’ve heard (or said):

* “Coker, can you write up a description of a little person hip-hop pirate right quick?” (Yeah, I had the same reaction. You’ll see.)

* “Ummmm….who did the voice-over for that? That’s nasty.”

* “Hey man, if I get you a big glass of water, can you step into the recording booth and belch for about half an hour?”

* “Check the Leaderboards, Son. Spank. The. Monkey.”

* “Dude, I just really don’t think the farts are loud enough.”

* “Did you just grab that Granny by her head? Do it again! Do it again!”

* “That’s him right there. We call him the Ooch Master. He can’t be touched.” (You know who you are at Idol Minds, and I’m coming for you. The student has become the Master, baby!)

* “OH, *&%*!! THAT *^&%*#@ DONUT!!!!!!”

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A Word about Link Blogs

~ rbonini

Scoble, in his latest post, reflects on what a resource his link blog has become as a database of all things technological.

It has almost no noise, just much of the best blogging that’s been done over the past year in the technology field. But, whenever I think about moving feeds to a new reader I start thinking of that database and start thinking about the value it has to me as a way to search back on what caught my eye over the past year.

 

Then it struck me that since I’ve subscribed to said link blog over the past year, and since I use Google Reader, I can access that same database as well. The addition of search by the Reader team just makes it better. It has some invaluable stuff in it. I share stuff in it more than in all my other feeds. I find plenty of bloggable materiel in there as well.

Which brings me to the question: What is a link blog?

I know, it sounds idiotic, like something web 1.0 guys would ask.  But think of it. Do you a use a link blog to share posts with others? Do you use a link blog as reference for yourself, to point to things that catch your eye? Do you use it a reference, but don’t mind if others share it?

The way we see the utility of a link blog determines what we will use a link blog for, which in turn determines the quality of our link blogs.

On the one hand if we take it seriously and only add stuff that is truly worthy of being shared, not just stuff loosely related to what we blog about. In other words:Are you in the business of simply observing the world go by, or is the welfare of your blog and link blog taken seriously? Do we/you intend for our/your link blog to be a resource – personal or public?

On the other hand, Scoble can be easy on his link blog – he’s posted cat photo’s there more than once. Do we fill it with stuff that’s not really useful ( and I am definitely a cat person)? Do we linkblog just for the sake of it.

Lets take a look at the old school link blogers I have in my reading list.

Larkware News: They put their links in blog posts. They’re up to 1227 posts today. lets see what yesterdays post post looks like:

Software

Information

Community

 

Simple. Clean and neat. The three categories are particularly useful allowing you to skip right to the meat of the post. The RSS Feed is here.

Christopher Steen. Same deal. His latest Link Listing:

  • LINQ to SQL (Part 9 – Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the control) [Via: ScottGu ]
  • Obscure ASP.NET Problem – AJAX Control Toolkit, CollapsiblePanelExtender, Image controls pages loading more than once…….

    • RSS feed here.

    Kent Newsome posts “Evening Reading”. its not so much a link listing as a running commentary of the stuff he’s read. An excerpt from his latest:

    Larry Borsato talks about a recent focus group in which college students said MySpace is over, Facebook might not last much longer, and their best source for information is word of mouth.  Paul Stamatiou is one college guy who has chilled on Facebook.  Thank goodness there’s all those grown-up bloggers to keep the hype going.

    He posts this in the middle of his other stuff in stead of a completely separate feed. I tend to give it is quick scan and see if there is anything interesting, or else ignore it completely.

    RSS feed here.

    Sam Gentile often posts his “New and Notable”. He’s up to number 180.

    SOA/ESB

    WF

    The great thing here is that they’re grouped by subject matter. You can skip right to what you’re interested in. RSS feed here.

    After that review, I still much prefer Google Reader’s Shared items. All they need next is a taging for your shared items. ( I think someone’s already suggested that somewhere in Scoble’s link blog 🙂 ).

    But one thing is sure – link blogs are invaluable tools to finding information because  the information has already been used and promoted as useful.

    There ain’t nothing like an oft used piece of information.

    So. My link blog has a new lease on life. (RSS feed here)

    PS Scoble says TechCrunch aren’t happy about linkblogs. I think this a first for a content producer to complain about link blogs.

    On Blogging

    ~ rbonini

    Hugh Macleod, in his imitable way, has a list about why we now blog less:

    Here is Reason one:

    1. We got busy. For many of us, blogging created opportunities for us in the offline world, just like the early blog evangelists predicted. And as we found out the hard way, it’s actually quite hard to do stuff and blog about it at the same time. As my father, a very smart and observant man once quipped, “A lot of these bloggers seem to have a lot of time on their hands”. That may have been true in 2002, back when the recession was still on. It’s certainly less true with a lot of people I know.

    Check the other reasons out.

    [via Shel Isreal]

    How True

    ~ rbonini

    I’ve just read this post from Jeff Atwood:

    I believe there’s a healthy balance all programmers need to establish, somewhere between…

    1. Locking yourself away in a private office and having an intimate dialog with a compiler about your program.
    2. Getting out in public and having an open dialog with other human beings about your program.

    If you didn’t catch the humor there, it had to do with the “intimate dialog with a compiler” bit 🙂 .

    Funny things are often true. Hold that thought.

    So this bit had me chuckling:

    Most programmers are introverts, so they don’t usually need any encouragement to run off and spend time alone with their computer. They do it naturally. Left to their own devices, that’s all they’d ever do. I don’t blame them; computers are a lot more rational than people. That’s what attracts most of us to the field. But it is possible to go too far in the other direction, too. It’s much rarer, because it bucks the natural introversion of most software developers, but it does happen. Take me, for example. Sometimes I worry that I spend more time talking about programming than actually programming.

     

    Natural introvert. Hmmm. Remarkable timing on Jeff’s part. I was telling myself  just the other day how much more comfortable it is to talk to a C++ compiler….

    Jeff spends the rest of his post urging the rest of us to stop talking about implementing features and implement them. I’m as guilty of this as the next programmer/developer, so I’d better get a move on.

    Open Source at Microsoft

    ~ rbonini

    A contradiction in Terms? Well, no. But I can’t blame you for thinking it.

    Port25, Microsoft’s open source blog, is worth subscribing to because of posts like this:

    Today, Microsoft has published 175 projects on CodePlex, we have written a pair of open licenses that are under a page in length and over the 500-project mark in adoption as others in the community have decided to use them

    As Microsoft’s engagement with open source grows, we have to move from being trailblazers to being road-builders. When you’re blazing a trail, organization, bureaucracy, and majority rule are a burden. In the beginning, a passionate group of people with strongly held beliefs and the will to persevere in the face of doubts and doubters is what it’s all about.

    Never thought I’d see the day when this was corporate strategy at Microsoft.

    In my view this about-face has come about because of a change in the environment that Microsoft operates in.

    Think of it. Sun completely open sourced Solaris. The rise of the blog,  the wiki and the Twitter (perhaps not in that order, but humor me) has lead to an increasingly networked community where people’s calls for change can gain plenty of traction. And if Microsoft wasn’t going to do something about them, others would – and did. Think of Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office – or even Linux.

    Secondly, Microsoft had a huge pool of untapped resources in the form of techies who had a great deal of experience in Microsoft products and blogged about it. I mean what better to find out what gripes (or ideas, for that matter) people had than by reading their blogs. And Microsoft could always hire the best ones.

    And finally, the perception that Microsoft was opening up and actively engaging with the community has done wonders to its once-flagging reputation.

    So while Microsoft may not be on the road to open sourcing its flagship products (Windows, office, Visual and Expression Studio), it is opening up.

    The Echo Chamber

    ~ rbonini

    I read this post from Shel Holtz last night suggesting that the Blogosphere is akin to an echo chamber. At this point I’d like to congratulate Google for NOT including search with Google Reader since I had to go looking for this post manually from my long list of feeds, which wasn’t easy – but I digress.

    So, bearing in mind that I’m doing some echoing myself here:

    One of the dominant criticisms of the blogosphere is that bloggers just write about what other bloggers have written about; it’s nothing more than a huge echo chamber.

    I’ll give you an example of said effect. last week, Windows Home Server was released to manufacturing. I got virtually the same post from the WHS Team Blog, We got Served, Ms Home Server Blog and Ramblings of a Home Server Tester. And by the way, they all arrived in my feed reader at the same time.

    Shel argues that The Echo Chamber Effect is nonsense:

    I don’t buy the echo-chamber argument. Based on the 10% rule, which suggests that 10% of a blog’s (or Wikipedia’s or any other collaborative property’s) readers contribute to the content, that leaves 90% who are passive consumers of the content.

     

    And gives an example:

    read a blog called Brand to be Determined. Many of you—readers of this blog—probably don’t. So when I point you to a resource I learned about on Brand to be Determined, you’re getting information you probably wouldn’t have otherwise received.

    Take Facebook as an example.

    The tech blogoshpere has run amok with Facebook posts (A Google custom search of my 140 subscriptions gives me 1500 posts, a Google blog search gives me 437,000 posts).  Facebook has been analyzed from every conceivable angle, probably several times over.

    So if I now write a post echoing Scoble and a few others, do I add value to the conversation, or noise? 

    Declaration of Blogging Independence

    ~ rbonini

    Just read this hilarious post by Kent Newsome:

    We hold these truths to be self-evidently pie in the sky, that all bloggers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Computers and iPhones with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are lots and lots of Links, Thoughtful Comments and the pursuit of AdSense Dollars. – That to secure these rights, lots of Wailing and Moaning is inserted into Blogs, deriving their literary powers from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical video-blogged nerdathon, – That whenever any Ze Frank or Ze Frank equivalent becomes destructive of these ends by monopolizing all the viewers who would otherwise be watching videos of Star Trek impersonations, it is the Right of the Bloggers to use their webcams, lightsabers and YouTube to alter or to abolish it, and to achieve new levels of self humiliation, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their rapidly diminishing Technorati Ranking and Google Juice.

    Read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

    Update: Here is the real thing

    Scoble’s Phantom Links

    ~ rbonini

    You may or may not have read Scoble rant here about Techmeme not putting most linked stories on its front page.

    TechMeme (which started out as a blog news engine) has totally switched its focus away from blogs. I’m tracking the Plaxo news. I was among the first two sites out with news about Plaxo’s new 3.0 platform. I have the only videos. Posted two of them. I have one of the first real reviews. Google’s blog search shows I have the most inbound links. Om Malik, who posted a story about Plaxo two hours after I did, even linked to me.

    Yet the top article right now? One by the Register which doesn’t even have comments and doesn’t link out and doesn’t have screen captures (like other articles do) and doesn’t have video and doesn’t even have any real news.

    You can read Doc Searls respond to Scoble about this:

    And some don’t bother to play at all. Yours truly, for example. I don’t follow Techmeme, Digg, Memeorandum or TechCrunch any more than I once didn’t follow Daypop or Slashdot. Somewhere way back there I began following topics more than bloggers. Last couple of weeks or so, for example, I followed Supernova and VRM, together, because VRM was a subject of special interest to me that was discussed at Supernova. If in the course of looking into topics I run into one of the popularity-following (or -making) sites, I’ll go there. But I don’t start there.

    …

    Every one of these valuation engines has its own weighting system, of course. But many links from many bloggers does not true authority make, especially when the system is gamed in the manner that Kent nails rather well. We’ve gone from SEO (search engine optimization) to BVE (buzz volume elevation). The results are often useful, but they can also turn the blogosphere into high school.

    In his post he links to Kent Newsome’s hilarious post about this:

    Scoble says he has all the inbound links and ought to be the top story about whatever the top story is at the moment.  He’s said basically the same thing before.  Here’s the problem with that: Scoble could write a post about arm farting and 30 or 40 people would immediately link to it, hoping he might link back.  Scoble has more yes men than Michael Corleone and Michael Arrington combined.

    In other words, all those people linking wildly to Scoble aren’t doing so because they think he is the world’s greatest authority on arm farting.  They are simply holding out their hands eagerly and hoping Scoble will shake it (via a link) as he walks by.  Getting a link from Scoble is almost as good as getting arrested with Paris Hilton.  It’s not Scoble’s fault he’s the king of the blogosphere any more than it’s Paris Hilton’s fault she’s in jail.

     

    But none of this is a sound basis for deciding what is top news and what isn’t.  There needs to be more to it.  There needs to be a balance between popularity, authority, freshness and inclusion.  Most of the target audience for Techmeme already subscribe to Scoble’s blog.  They are at Techmeme looking to see what others are saying about various topics.  And let’s not kid ourselves, a ton of Techmeme readers are bloggers who want to be included in the conversation.  To remove the opportunity for inclusion would change Techmeme in a fundamental and adverse way

    Unfortunately no one has yet come up with a magic silver bullet or ( if I may mix my metaphors) the PageRank for blogs. Its a though problem to solve. Do you crawl the linking websites to see if they actually talking about Scoble’s expertise Arm Farting, or is it simply a link farm blog? Come to think of it, how do translate a blogs authority? Page views? Subscriber stats (Google will have no doubt added this in to their blog search)?

    Authority is more perception than anything else.  You can’t get an algorithm to perceive the difference between Bush’s authority and Scoble’s ( that is authority as in “do people listen”).

    Hey Robert, now that you’ve got  2 days on your hands, how about some arm farting lessons?

    Shel Isreal needs help

    ~ rbonini

    Shel’s engaged in a new project to, in his words:

    I have 60 days to produce three anecdotal research reports on The Americas; Asia Pacific and Europe-Mediterranean-West Asia and I need your help.

    A report on what?

    Here’s what I am doing.  I am trying to answer a single, overwhelming question: “What is going on in the world with regard to social media? I am looking for useful statistics, but those are often outdated before they are published as we learned with the book.

    And Shel needs our help on this project:

    I suggested to Mike that we conduct and report on this project, transparently, online on this site in the same way Robert and I wrote Naked Conversations. If the book had magic, had not come from the research or the actual writing.  It came from the collaboration we had shared with the blogosphere.  Bloggers gave us leads. They corrected the facts.  They let us know when we were making valid points and when we had gone over the top.

    I proposed that we do the SAP Global Social Media Research on this blog, in collaboration with the blogosphere, that we do it transparently and that what we find we share on this blog. This, as far as I know, would differentiate it from any market research and the process in itself would become an example of thought leadership.

    …

    I want your stories.  For those of you who started reading this blog after the book was published, I interviewed most of the people in a Q & A style and posted them on this site.  Then other people left comments.  Those interviews got incorporated into chapters.  Early versions of the chapters were then posted and we received more comments before finalizing the chapter.

    So, please start those cards and letters coming now.  If you have a story that reveals something about blogging, blogging trends in any country of the world please let me know.  SAP is more interested in business than consumer, but what people are doing is  valuable in that it shapes  all markets. You are encouraged to leave a comment here.  If you are shy you can email me at shelisrael1@gmail.com.

     

    I’m looking forward to seeing this unfold ( I missed this the first time around with Naked Conversations). I fully intend to participate.

    Well, what are you waiting for?