The Wisdom 2.0 conference was an energizing event (see my synopses here and here). Not only did it remind me that I had allowed the digital world to hijack my deeper connections with the real world, but it allowed me to meet and reconnect with many inspiring and amazing people (@CDEgger, @alizasherman, @kanter, @sh0wn and @SorenG to name a few). It revealed a hunger for something deeper than bits and bytes in the world, while recognizing that our digital attachments enrich us, and present us with previously unimagined opportunities.

Coming out of the conference, and watching the flood of intense, positive reactions in the Twitter stream devoted to the conference, it seemed to me that it might be good to establish a more permanent venue for ongoing conversation and resources.

But where?

A few platforms exist for community, but each has its strengths and weaknesses. At first, it seemed like an easy choice, but as I explored the different options, things became more complicated. What kind of features and functionality did the platforms provide? Could I pull data from other external sources? Would the barrier to entry be low enough for people to engage?

The way forward? A survey…

After seeing the plethora of options available, I realized that I don’t want to make a decision that could negatively impact the growth of such a positive community. It makes sense to learn a bit more about what people would want, and what service would best match that community need, before putting something in place. And so, I’ve created a simple survey to see what people think and want. Please let me know. I will collect and colate all feedback, consult with Soren Gordhamer (creator of Wisdom 2.0), and find the path with heart that allows us to move forward with creating a vibrant community.

Appendix: The reasoning that brought me here…

Account creation: The highest barrier to entry
People are already overloaded with accounts on different social networks, services and platforms. Why sign up for yet another social network? It seemed like it would be great to find a social networking platform that supported something like federated identity (e.g., OpenID) or at least delegated API access (e.g., Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth). In my first pass, I couldn’t find any robust community platforms that supported this kind of authentication.

Twitter feeds
Twitter seemed to be at least one primary stream for conversation related to Wisdom 2.0. Any platform should have the ability to insert widgets with a Twitter stream with the appropriate hashtag(s) (e.g., #wisdom2conf).

Longevity
If we’re going to bet on a platform, how stable does it look? Will it support community for the long term, or is it likely to flame out in the near future?

Cost
Sadly, but not unexpectedly, the premiere community platform (Ning) just changed its business model from Freemium (i.e., free baseline service with paid extensions) to pure subscription (pay for everything, with tiers). Other platforms like Wiser Earth don’t charge, but their functionality seems more restricted.

Trust is critical for companies (and some individuals) trying to engage in social media, but it’s only part of the equation when it comes to messages in social media related to products or services.

This morning, I came across a Twitter message from a social media author whom I both follow and respect. He was sending out a message about his new book (which I already own), encouraging people who were out and about to go to their local bookstore. I’ve seen a few other authors send out similar messages about their latest books. Writing a book is hard work, and the people I’m referring to do great stuff, so I totally understand their desire to promote their efforts. They also have a product (their ideas) worth paying for.

At the same time, my gut reaction to these (repeated) messages has been mixed, because it feels like advertising unintentionally masquerading as a more personal attempt at connection. It also feels like the way these authors encourage brands to engage, rather than push messages, is somewhat at odds with their own practices. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, which makes me examine my reactions to their book promotions.

As I thought about it, a few questions seemed relevant to me when looking at how a message about a good or product can be received:

• What’s the difference between simple sharing, self-promotion, and push advertising?
• Does it matter whether the messages come from individuals (“personal brands”) or faceless corporate brands?
• Is the cost of the good being promoted relevant?

In all of the following discussion, I’ll use the term message to mean “product-oriented message” (as opposed to something that’s purely conversational or informational). I’ll also assume that engagement and trust are somewhat synonymous (i.e., let’s assume that the engagement is the kind that fosters trust).

Sharing, self-promotion and advertising

Intent, content and delivery style will all impact how a message is perceived along this spectrum:

• Intent relates to whether the message is shared for personal or external benefit. The less someone benefits from the message they deliver, the more it seems like sharing. Advertising presents a more nuanced challenge, because it’s often perceived as unwanted “push” messaging that’s more about selling product as opposed to providing real value.
• Content is the actual substance of the message (independent of how it’s rendered or delivered). Language matters, and two different approaches for the same underlying message can be received completely differently (e.g., “Buy my book! It rocks!” vs. “After 6 months, our book is finally done…We think you’ll find some ideas to help your business thrive. Thanks for any feedback!”)
• Delivery style is how the message appears (i.e., its visual style and the medium in which it appears). The same message delivered in Twitter (text only) might be received differently than a print or online ad with typographic treatment, images and color. While style definitely matters, it’s not enough to trump substance and intent.

Message source

Who’s delivering the message? Is it a faceless corporate brand? A stay-at-home Mom with three kids? An independent consultant whom I’ve met before? A friend who likes something and wants to recommend it to me? It’s not so much the source that matters. What matters is whether or not they are engaged with you and trusted, and the degree to which they stand to benefit from telling you something.

For example, if a good friend recommends a book to you, does it matter that they get a kickback from the author for every book they sell? What if an independent reviewer (whom you don’t know and who stands to gain nothing) gives you the same message? In this context, trust and benefit are highly correlated, because the more someone stands to benefit from something, the less we tend to trust that their message comes from the goodness of their hearts for our benefit.

Cost of good being promoted

In most cases, I’d venture this is secondary to the benefit received by the person promoting the good. If the source isn’t trusted, then any cost more than “free” is going to be met with skepticism. Conversely, if a source is highly trusted and engaged, then as long as the receiver of a message feels like the benefit outweighs the cost, the message will be more well-received. Of course, as cost becomes prohibitive, this whole calculus breaks down and cost becomes the deciding factor.

Engagement vs. Benefit: A model for messaging

Based on everything put forward above, I’m going to propose a two-dimensional model for how product messages are received.

Stive for both engagement and mutual benefits in your social media messaging

In a nutshell, the less engaged and less trusted the source, the more we care about the degree to which they benefit from the message they’re putting forward. The more engaged and trusted the messenger, the more people will look at how they benefit relative to the messenger, assuming good will if it seems to be of mutual benefit. In other words, we will tend to assume the source is more virtuous if they are more engaged and trusted, even if the message (and benefits) are exactly the same to us.

Let’s go back to what started this whole thing: a social media author suggests that you stop by the bookstore for their latest offering. Clearly, this falls into the mixed feelings zone for messaging. They stand to benefit significantly (i.e., if I buy their book), whereas my return on the expenditure depends on the content of the book. I’m engaged with them to the extent that I follow them on Twitter and know people who know them, but they aren’t my friends, and I’ve never really talked with them. And so I wind up feeling confused, unsure which way the benefit scale tips (i.e., book sale vs. book value to me) relative to my trust in their message.

Balance the forces of trust and benefit

Whether you’re a brand or an individual, when it comes to social media, it’s important to consider your level of engagement with your audience, and how much you stand to benefit from the (product) messages you deliver relative to your audience. If you’re not engaged (and maybe even if you are), you better be sharing more than you stand to benefit. Conversely, if you’re engaged with your audiences, but you benefit most from your messages, consider how that might come across and affect perceptions over time.

Balance the forces of trust and mutual benefit and everyone wins.

NOTE: Don’t mistake the title of this post or its content as a criticism of Brogan and Smith’s Trust Agents, a seminal work in the expanding field of social media. Read their stuff, it’s great.

When it comes to labels, social media is a forest with lots of trees

The term “social media” continues to rise in usage and popularity, but what do people mean when they say it? Is it misleading? And who needs a label, anyway?

Both Aliza Sherman and Olivier Blanchard have taken on this topic recently, each with similar conclusions (i.e., “social media” is not the best term, it’s hard to come up with a better one, but we should probably try). They suggest “social web” and “social communications” as possible alternatives, each of which has its appeal. At the same time, neither term seems to get its arms all the way around the paradigm shift that’s taking place.

It all started with Web2.0, when people tried to stick a label on this really big thing that was happening that no one quite understood. The term was coined for the O’Reilly media conference in 2004, and sparked quite a debate. People argued about what “it” meant, as if you could point at something and say whether or not it was “Web2.0.” It was a vague umbrella term used to cover a wide array of related concepts, but in the end, it stuck.

“Social media” as a term suffers from the same problem. It’s an umbrella used to cover a huge array of practices, technologies and philosophies about digital content and engagement (as Aliza Sherman illustrates). It reflects another paradigm shift, in the same way “Web2.0″ did.

Out of curiosity, I did a search on Google Trends to see how search behavior related to some of these umbrella terms has evolved since 2004.

Even though this is an imprecise way to get at what people are saying and talking about (since it only reflects search volume), I think it still shows a few interesting things:

• Social media usage is rising exponentially, and has matched use of social networking as a term
• Social networking usage continues to rise, but not as quickly as social media
• Web 2.0 (two variants) are used a bit more frequently, but their use has declined dramatically since 2007

Labels are for forests, not trees

People in the business of understanding, explaining and advancing paradigm shifts like “Web2.0″ and “social media” are passionate about what terms are used. Terminology matters to practitioners, and they use and evolve it for a few reasons:

• To provide a reference point for discussions and debates
• To improve understanding of the paradigm shifts that are occurring
• To self-identify with others in their profession

For people who aren’t practitioners, it’s a different story. When it comes to labels like “Web2.0″ and “Social media,” most people don’t care about the nuanced distinctions being made. In addition, I would argue that getting the label “just right” won’t help describe these paradigm shifts to non-practitioners. After all, many people don’t even know what a Web browser is (let alone the Internet).

Paradigm shifts and the labels stuck on them are about taking a look at the forest, and they’re just not that relevant to daily life. Most people only care about the trees of connecting with friends or watching cool videos on YouTube or sharing a picture of their kids. Labels are for practitioners and people trying to make sense of what’s happening.

Paradigm shifts are label proof

No one ever agreed on the meaning of the term Web 2.0, and it ultimately didn’t matter. I don’t think anyone will agree on the meaning of the term social media, either. Three years from now, its usage will probably die down, following in the footsteps of “Web 2.0.”

As much as we want to stick labels on these big paradigm shifts, they resist them. They reflect deep societal change and technological disruption, and no simple label is ever going to capture the richness of that change and its impact on humanity. It’s a fool’s errand to keep searching for the right term, but it’s probably a worthwhile one, because the debate itself is what matters.

There’s a perverse fascination in watching the public humiliation of people we think deserve it, a satisfying schadenfreude that runs deep into our reptilian brains. And it’s something we like to share with others, the pleasure magnified with increased participation. After all, what’s better than one pie in the face of a jerk? Why, two, of course.

This all came to mind recently as I watched people repeatedly retweeting a blog post titled “Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.” The author (David Thorne) is purportedly sharing an email thread between himself and a technology entrepreneur named Simon Edhouse. In said exchange, Mr. Thorne appears to be the wronged creative, and Mr. Edhouse the egomaniacal business hack bent on extracting value with no intention of compensation. Thorne rakes him over the coals in an intensely creative way. His post is brilliant, scathing, very funny, and has a ring of truth in the way business people take advantage of creative talent. Through another lens, though, his post could also be seen as mean-spirited and sadistic.

When a few people on Twitter got a hold of this post, it spread like wildfire. As of this writing, the URL passed around has been clicked nearly 83,000 times (view up-to-date statistics). Twitter is a potent accelerant for this kind of fire because sharing links is so easy. Not only does the fire light easily, but it can have some staying power as links pass through different social graphs. In this case, everybody got in on the act, pie-throwers and kind people alike, maybe because it was funny and seemed justified.

I read the article, and had quite a laugh, but then it made me a bit uncomfortable. I felt kind of dirty. And then sad. Even if the story is true and Mr. Edhouse is a monumental jerk, does that justify the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve now had a chance to laugh at his expense?

Digital media will always spawn mobs, some good, some bad. This is nothing new and others have written about it (see Scoble’s piece on mob mentality for an example). On the positive side, I love seeing how Twitter and other social media can be used for good (e.g., ONE Drop, Movember, Tweetsgiving). On the negative side, social media tools can be perverted like other communication platforms. They can be used to support mis- and disinformation, corrupt and hateful thinking, bigotry, or just stupid behavior. I’d argue that this kind of stuff generates enough reactions, though, that people attempt to fight it, or at least engage in dialogue about it.

The thing I find different about the Edhouse roast is that no one even seemed to notice the mob, and it’s these invisible mobs that trouble me the most. They seem to fly under the radar, because it’s all just really poking fun, isn’t it? Maybe so, but it just shows how mediated experiences can inure us to what it’s like to physically participate in someone else’s humiliation. We seem to do it without a second thought, and tools like Twitter make it a bit too easy. Ultimately, as fun as it can be and however justified it is, I think joining these invisible mobs can be just as bad as joining the ones with fires and pitchforks.

While this digitally inspired crossover is pretty cool, it’s also becoming commonplace (and probably yawn-inspiring for people who spend lots of time with online social networks). What struck me about our lunch was just how important it is to keep things real when possible. Sure, mediated experiences offer a lot, and enable things and connections previously unheard of, but they don’t give us everything. At the end of the day, we are physical, and interacting with people face-to-face offers things no stream of bits and bytes will ever replicate.

So every once in awhile, do what you can to step out from behind the warm glow of your monitor or laptop. Pull things into the dirt world and go out for a Bento box with someone interesting. You’ll be happy you did.

Follow the yellow brick road...

Many companies are trying to figure out how to use social media effectively, and hordes of social media thinkers are eager to help (from those worth your time to the snake-oil salesmen). A quick Google search for social media success yields more than 500,000 hits as of this writing, with the top results mostly of the “Five easy steps” variety.

While simple recipes can offer some good advice, as many of these do, they can do a disservice to businesses by creating the illusion that (a) it’s simple to succeed with social media, and (b) there’s a one-size-fits-all solution.

Dorothy’s quest in Oz provides a pretty decent analogy. The recipe was simple for her: follow the yellow-brick road to The Emerald City. Seems easy enough, right? Until you realize there are haunted forests on the road. And monkeys. Don’t forget the flying monkeys.

The social media yellow-brick road

There are plenty of potholes in the social media road, lots of skidmarks, and a few smoldering wrecks. Many have already offered thoughtful examples of why companies have a hard time getting down this road:

• They don’t even want to be on it (i.e., social media isn’t seen as relevant)
• They get social media on some level, but fear stops them from engaging or they’re in one of the early stages of social media grief
• They engage but fail, either through basic misunderstandings and company culture misfit, miscellaneous mistakes, or by committing overt social media blunders that lead to firestorms of criticism, apologies and backpedaling

Beyond all of these failings and flaws, I’ve seen a few more twists in the road that can lead companies astray (or keep them off it completely):

1. Limited resources keep focus away from social media
Given limited resources and budgets, companies tend to focus on their burning problems, rather than on the strategic things they can do to be more successful. Social media is often not perceived as being urgent (and in some cases, it may not be).

2. Cost and organizational implications limit efforts
Getting an empowered company evangelist onto Twitter is one thing. Migrating an old company web site onto a CMS that supports user-generated content and comments can run from difficult to impossible. Sometimes companies feel like they have to do it all, or become paralyzed with indecision, and so they do nothing (or very little).

3. The landscape changes faster than companies can
Companies are willing to put effort into it, but they don’t want to waste time and effort on things they worry might disappear in six months. As a result, many large companies are waiting to see what happens (or waiting for others to fail first).

Create your own Emerald City

If you add up all of these lists of failings and challenges and things companies must do to succeed, suddenly the simple recipe has become more like one from the French Laundry cookbook. Social media success isn’t an easily-defined place like The Emerald City, and there’s no single, easy road to get there (no shortcuts and no overnight successes, either).

Dorothy succeeded in her quest through determination and friendship, making mistakes along the way, and staying true to who she was. Companies should do the same: give up on magic formulas. Just be engaged and follow some yellow-brick road, and enjoy all its potholes, prizes, and flying monkeys.

If you’ve got experiences to share from your trip down the social media road, I’d love to hear them.

Dusty entries prior to September 2009 are from the technology category of that older (somewhat defunct) blog. Rereading them is like looking at old High School photos: a combination of nostalgia tinged with embarrassment. Some are quaint anachronisms. Some are snarky (and not in a good way). Some are just not that well-written. Most are too long. But, there you go. It’s all part of the journey, and I wanted them here for completeness.

And so, onwards, sideways, and hopefully upwards sometimes. Leave your thoughts on what I write, if you’re so inclined. I’d enjoy hearing them!

enter new ways to blog: microblogging (e.g., twitter), image blogging (flickr) and other lightweight blogging services (e.g., tumblr, posterous). there are other things that could be seen in this light (e.g., dopplr, YouTube), but i’ll only focus on the first two.

New ways to tell stories

blogs, microblogs, image blogs, presence blogs, video blogs – all of these things are tools for storytelling, but with different forms. a blog like this one is long-form (maybe too long-form), microblogs are (very) short form, and things like flickr are picture books, but with an amazing layer of other stuff attached. for the purposes of this entry, i’ll refer to all the stuff other than regular blogs as “second-generation blogs” (2G blogs or channels).

each of these 2G blog channels supports the core motivations for blogging (communication, many-to-many connection), but with a different kind of effort that’s easier to support more continuously. it’s also easier for others to engage with these channels, or to ignore them without worrying too much about missing something important.

microblogs like twitter are about as lightweight as it gets. anything and everything is fair game to include in these streams of personal information. any single message is, for the most part, meaningless and very easy to create and consume (or ignore). the aggregate of these messages gives one window into what people are doing with their lives. it’s not a rich connection, but it’s a connection, and face it: people only have so much time and energy for real rich connections.

flickr is interesting. people put a LOT of time and effort into flickr, and it’s an incredibly vibrant community. i was mistaken when i originally thought it’s just a photo-sharing site. it is that, but that’s secondary to it being a social network, with all of the associated drama, emotional energy, and fun. also, the nature of the effort to engage on flickr is different than with a narrative blog. the mental overhead is relatively small when it comes to taking a  picture and posting it with a small description or witty title. it’s not that it doesn’t require talent, or creative thinking, it’s just much different than the effort needed for narrative. this is also not to say that some people don’t put a lot of effort into creating narrative that goes with their pictures.

So what do we get out of all this?

like storytelling, the rewards are different depending on what is consumed. long-form blogs take more effort, which hopefully leads to richer rewards. microblogs require little to no effort, with lots of small rewards, all of which add up to a heightened sense of connection and community. and flickr? for me, flickr is more about emotional inspiration and fun, tied to connecting with people through the way they see the world, as opposed to the way they think about it. the rewards here are more complex than microblogging, but different from the long-form.

as much as all of these forms of storytelling are about connection, they are also very much about our ultimate vanity and self-interested virtue. people love to feel like they are important, like people are paying attention to what they think and say and do and see and feel, that others find them engaging, interesting, funny, sexy. in addition to communication and connection, blogging (in all the forms i’ve discussed) is about giving and getting attention, and all of these new channels make it easy to get and give: they’re free, they’re fun, and they’re easy to use.

And what the hell is my point, anyway?

i don’t think i’m saying anything new here. if i had the energy to dig, i’m sure i could find 100 blogger or social media pundits who’ve already made these points better than i can. if i had to distill it, though, i’m saying that i think the internet is enabling people to share and engage with new kinds of stories, each with their own social rewards.

i’m also just thinking out loud about why i engaged with those other channels to the exclusion of this blog. it probably just comes down to me being lazy, and being able to connect (and get more attention) in those other channels. i still relish the ability to come back here and tell longer stories; i just also wish i had the time and energy to do that more.

take AJAX as an example.

i’m not talking about the popular cleaning product that guarantees it will get your sink and tub pearly white with little to no elbow grease involved. no, i’m talking about the term coined by a notable person at a design firm in san francisco (name and link withheld to avoid unnecessary page rank bloat).

it was coined in an effort to describe a collection of technologies that have been around for a long time (in Internet years, at least). people have been using these technologies for a variety of things (google maps, for example; or even microsoft outlook web access), but they’ve done so without the comfort of a name to say what it was precisely that they were doing.

and so this design agency author made one up. it’s an acronym, although he avoided the dreaded TLA (three–letter acronym) that is the focus of so many consultant jokes. it’s also memorable. kinda catchy. almost sounds like marketing.

and that’s what it is. marketing.

ever since i first heard the term, it was bugging me. it bothered me that they made up a new term for something that already existed. it bugged me that it wasn’t, strictly speaking, technically correct. it bugged me in general, but i couldn’t figure out just why. and then i realized why: because they stood to benefit financially from the creation of a new term, something that could become a meme in the internet world. something that everyone would pick up and say, "AJAX? oh yeah! that firm in ___ ___ invented it!"

bzzzzt. wrong. they didn’t invent it. they just knew how to market it and their ability to explain it — intelligently and in a ready–for–publication way. i don’t fault them for their insight regarding the patterns of usage of this particular technology combination. what i do fault them for is shameless self–promotion. one might say that they were just pointing something out for the benefit of the internet community, humanizing a technology to help it be better understood. i’ve been in this business long enough to know that’s about as likely as a beautiful snowflake in the molten pits of hell.

the other term that caused me to get all twitchy was folksonomy. this is a conflation of “folks” and “taxonomy,” meaning a classification system created by normal people (e.g., not librarians or those prone to organizing their socks by color, then texture, then projected lifetime). think of it as the dewey decimal system for crackers (a harsh and not–wholly–accurate analogy, but work with me here).

the idea is a very important one, but the term is just silly. just call it tagging and be done with it, ok? why was there a need to come up with a cutesy term?

***

if youre’ gonna come up with a new word for something, make sure your motives are pure. do it because there really needs to be a new word, in my opinion. otherwise, you just wind up looking like a linguistic poseur, and we all know how much everyone hates linguistic poseurs.

at least, that’s what one of my friends thought. like other content junkies who want maximum information with minimum distraction, he uses a syndicated content aggregator (like bloglines or feeddemon or netnewswire) to chow as many headlines as his brain can handle. (for a refresher, see my synopsis below: the wonderful world of blog syndication)

this is all fine and well, even good — possibly great. it’s a useful strategy for handling information overload, while steering clear of many of the landmines on the info superhighway (e.g., spam from mailing lists you never read, web sites full of advertising you don’t care about, etc.). the problem comes when the content oil stops coming down the syndicated pipeline, as it were.

let’s take my site as an example. suppose you subscribed to my site. you go to your aggregator every day to check the latest from the blogosphere (ack), and you notice after awhile that i’m just not writing any more. it’s been six months, and not a single post. hmm. interesting. looks like ryan stopped writing; i wonder why?

the problem with our brave new world of mediated experience is that we draw conclusions from unreliable digital proxies. if an RSS aggregator says i’m not writing, then to a lot of people, i’m not writing. maybe i moved to alaska and fell off the grid. who knows? a phone call or an email or a trip to my web site would clarify, but in a world where the sands of time are coated with teflon, it’s just too much effort.

and so, from a limited digital perspective, i ceased to exist.

cause of death? carelessness

in my case, my feed died due to sheer carelessness: in my headlong rush to redesign, and to clean up the architectural mess that was causing me to lose sleep, i altered the directory structure on my site. two things resulted: (1) a wonderful simplification in the way my blog files were organized (which no one but me cares about), and (2) a dead RSS feed. dead simply because the file containing my feed moved from one place to another.

sorry…[geek shudder]…my bad.

for reference, here are the proper URLs for the syndicated version(s) of this site (pick your XML format of choice):

• Atom 0.3
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0

if there’s any solution to the problem of moved and dead feeds, i couldn’t find it. at present, it looks like a pretty messy problem (see technobabble discussion below).

the emergent properties of technology–mediated experience

this might seem like a problem that will affect only the weeniest of the techno weenies. i don’t think it’s that simple. mediated experience is giving birth to unexpected things; it will affect more and more people as time passes.

Wikipedia defines an emergent property as follows:

An emergent behaviour or emergent property is shown when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. A system made of several things can host properties which the things themselves do not have…[snip]…Emergent properties arise when a complex system reaches a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and represents a new level of the system’s evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities.

the internet and everything digital attached to it (e.g., browsers, blogging applications, and RSS aggregators to name just a few) can be viewed as a system of relatively simple (ahem) entities. unpredictable things are starting to happen as we combine and recombine all of the parts of this system, and as we use them in ways no one could have imagined. this is obvious. what i think is less obvious is that our human (social) experiences are becoming a part of this system, and they are being affected as a result.

as we rely more and more on technologies to mediate our experience, we subject ourselves to the vicissitudes of digital systems, and more importantly to what their agents tell us. quotidian changes (like moved files or dead servers) can have broad consequences (both visible and invisible). my RSS feed dies due to a moved file, a friend concludes i am no longer writing, and we lose touch for four months. how would our lives have been different if that hadn’t happened? maybe he would have read a particular entry in my blog that sparked a thought that led to an action that caused an event that changed the course of his life (even in the simplest way). this wasn’t possible, though, because his RSS aggregator led him to a wrong conclusion.

we suffer and benefit from our reliance on digital proxies. we suffer for their inaccuracies; we suffer because we can’t always interpret what they’re saying; we suffer for the laziness they engender. at the same time, they enable communication and interaction that wouldn’t otherwise be possible; we are richer because of them.

whether or not someone reads my blog is a small, immaterial thing. how many of these small things does it take, though, to have broader social consequences? after all, great events may shape the world, but not without the million small events that make them.

where do we go from here?

we create the proxies; this isn’t the matrix and there’s no malevolent AI running around trying to do us in through addiction to technology. we are the ones actively mediating our experience. maybe we do it because the benefits seem to outweigh the costs; maybe it’s just a matter of laziness. in either case, it seems we would be wise to really think about what we’re doing, because at some point, the costs will be too high, and there will be no going back.

…

the wonderful world of blog syndication

a synopsis of syndication
syndication is a method of providing content on a periodic basis to a set of interested readers (or other content providers, who subsequently redistribute). this is usually done with news, but it translates quite nicely to other things. the application of syndication to blogs is simple — anybody can "subscribe" to this blog and get quick access to all the latest headlines (and maybe more).

how syndication is done with blogs
any syndicated blog provides one or more feeds. each feed is really just a Web link to a text file that contains various information about the blog in question (latest headlines, excerpts, author, etc.). every time the blog gets updated, so does the feed. all you need is the address (URL) of the feed, and something that knows how to read the feed, and you’re in business, reading blog headlines and digesting the blogosphere like so much digital chicken.

really simple, right? that’s why the most popular data format for feeds is called RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things). a few different formats exist (each with benefits and drawbacks); by the way people argue about this stuff, you’d think they were talking about religion. developers regularly get pissy about RSS 0.93 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. snerd feebler’s really cool syndication format (SFRCSF). you can safely ignore this discussion for the most part (i do; i’m hoping the people smarter than me eventually sort it out and then share their wisdom quietly in the form of stuff that just works).

why bother? who cares?
syndication and feeds make it easy to cover a lot of ground on the web. if you subscribe to 100 feeds (from 100 Web sites), you can pretty easily scan the headlines from all of those sites in 10-15 minutes, depending on how much they publish (this doesn’t include any time you might spend reading complete articles you find along the way). so, getting lots of content is one benefit (although cable TV is a clear counterexample to the more–is–better way of thinking). the other nice thing about syndication is that (at this point) it contains no advertising; it also doesn’t require you to share your email address to get the syndicated content (it’s a pull technology, where you grab what you want, rather than a push technology, where content is pushed to you via email, for example).

technobabble about dead feeds

you’d think that this problem of dead feeds wouldn’t be a big deal. we’re smart; why not build a better RSS mousetrap so that when a feed disppears, the feed reader figures out if it just moved, or if it’s actually dead? good question. there seem to be at least two technical problems:

problem 1: RSS auto-discovery is hard
it’s not easy to automagically figure out what the feed is for any given Web domain. in some cases, like yahoo! news, there’s more than one feed, which makes it pretty much impossible without human intervention to say which feed disappeared. as a result, if a feed disappears, there’s just no simple, automated way to look around its parent domain to see if it moved or if it’s indeed dead as a digital doornail. (jeremy zawodny has a good summary of RSS auto-discovery issues ).

problem 2: if you move your feed, telling everyone is hard
with a Web site, it’s easy to put up the digital equivalent of a "We’ve moved!" sign. i wasn’t able to locate a universal method for doing this for an RSS feed (read this discussion on feed redirection to see just how nuts this whole thing gets).