Do Nothing

I’ve been posting to this blog daily for some time now. I am doing it to keep a rhythm, but sometimes it’s rough finding material.

Yesterday I saw a perfect item for days when the Muse isn’t striking. It’s from Seth Godin:

I had, as I do every year, [an April Fool's] post written and queued up. (It was about JD Salinger and the Dalai Lama as twitter users.) It was good, not great.

So I posted nothing.

I couldn’t exceed my (or your) expectations, so I posted nothing.

Taking Private Conversations Public

Last week, Lisa Hickey wrote a piece in which she mused on some of the societal effects of social media. She makes a number of good points, but one in particular stood out for me — the relationship between online and in-person conversations when it comes to trust.

Think about all the times you’ve had a conversation with someone, who later asks you, “you’re not going to post this on Facebook, are you?” They’re anxious that something they see as private and personal (a face-to-face conversation with you) will become public. That’s a fair concern, and sensitive people who are devotees of social media need to be mindful of it.

However, I see a divide between the assumptions of people who are users of social media and those who are not. They are in conflict — most social media types assume that conversations are open for sharing unless they are specifically asked not to. But most people who do not use social media see it the opposite way.

As I have been experimenting with video lately, I started a thread on the issue at the video-conversation site Seesmic. Here it is (though I had to shift the video to YouTube for technical reasons):

The full Seesmic conversation thread can be found here, if you would like to see responses and join in.

What do you think? Where do you draw the line? Where do you think society at large will draw it?

Tweets Squeezing Out Rants

Brian Solis of TechCrunch wrote an important review of an interesting trend in today’s social media world.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

With the popularity and pervasiveness of microblogging (a.k.a. micromedia) and activity streams and timelines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing for your attention and building a community around the statusphere – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

This new genre of rapid-fire interaction is further distributing the proverbial conversation and is evolving online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities.

In most cases attention for commenters at the source post are competing against the commenters within other communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

Result: The “traditional” venue of blogs-and-comments has been disrupted and faces challenges. Just as deadtree news laments its disappearing readership (and hence business model) — blogs face the very same disruptive situation.

This is an interesting conundrum for content-creators. On the one hand, you want to get your stuff out there is widely as possible. So you write a blog post, Tweet it, status it, and import it as a note in Facebook. Oh, and of course you syndicate it. So far, so good. But, that gives multiple access points to your readers, which means that any discussion sparked by your ideas is going to be diffused. For some people, this is not a problem — they generate long comment tails. For others, this is indeed a problem. If, for example, a “hot” post of mine generates, say, five responses, when you spread them across all of my platforms no one is talking to one another.

So that’s one problem.

Another problem, for those who are trying to monetize their work, is how to do this? How, for instance, do you monetize someone “retweeting” your work?

I don’t have answers, just the questions. And I am very certain these are not the only ones. 

Finally, the irony is not lost on me that one way of looking at this is that the immediate (twittering, statusing) is once again pushing out the slower (in this case blogs) — and this is exactly what blogging did to print and other one-way media.

Looking For Mr. GoodBlog

My friend Adam Pagnucco, who writes a blog on Maryland Politics called, natch, Maryland Politics Watch, had a fascinating post just the other day.

Actually, it wasn’t by him — it was by his wife, Holly Olson. In it, she chronicles the history of her husband’s involvement with MPW and blogging, and announces there are going to be a few changes. Seems the two have a bun in the oven, and Adam’s been asked to scale back a few of his bloggiest traits.

Holly ends the post with this: “[T]his would be a great time for all of you wanna-be bloggers to step up to the plate and start providing guest posts. There are plenty of insightful, witty, and thoughtful readers out there who could offer a post or two a month. So let’s keep MPW alive and active — but let’s do so as a community endeavor. After all, I know that you all will continue to need your political fix — baby or no baby.”

This struck me because in mid-2007 I started a blog about my town called Rockville Central. It’s a sort of civic experiment, trying to open up new spaces for people to communicate on local public issues. It’s been successful (at least along most of the the measurements I care about) but it has fallen short in one aspect: not as many other people have followed suit as I suspected might. There was one other Rockville-based online information source called Rockville Living when I started (a very good site by the way). There are other info sources for the county, and some arts-related things, but not many new sites have cropped up that are just centered on the city.

I think there should be more and I have hoped that folks would emerge with their own blogs, looking at various aspects of what’s going on. But it hasn’t happened to the extent I’d like to see. At least not yet.

Now, to be fair, I have not been explicit about that hope the way Holly is in her post. I will be watching to see how other individuals respond to her call. So far, though, I have seen a small uptick in “outside contributions,” but it doesn’t look like Adam is working any less hard.

Maybe, over at my end, it’s time to start suggesting the idea to certain people directly!

Living In Public

My friend Thomas Kriese pointed me to a piece by a NY-based VC named Fred Wilson. It’s about “living publicly.” There are a lot of ways you might take that term — in this case it describes the state that it seems many of my friends experience these days. With all the blogging, Twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed, and whatnot, it seems like we are living on display, out there in public for all to see.

Fred bases his post on an email message from Jason Calacanis that outlines a number of the negative consequences that one faces when one is a blogger. One such observation: “At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis.”

That seems a pretty steep price to pay, just because one writes a blog. But I can tell you, the negative feedback inherent in living in public is real. While you may take great care over each specific blog post, the sad truth is that most people who are moved to comment do so becuase they disagree with you, and they only rarely take as much care with their comments as you did in the first place. The result, for many bloggers, is a constant, low-grade irritation. Any given post will generate resentful comments or emails. It adds up and eventually you just become inured.

Still, it’s disconcerting. “But, this is what you asked for,” some might say. After all, aren’t you seeking fame? The thing is . . . no. Most bloggers I know actually want to connect, to hold a meaningful dialogue, or have a forum within which to flesh out their thoughts. (That’s typically what I am after in my various online fora.) They aren’t seeking celebrity. So it seems an unfair thing to say that they somehow “deserve” negative attention for having the courage to speak up.

Nevertheless, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, at least in my view. I feel a greater sense of connection, encounter a greater diversity of ideas, and connect with a wider range of people than I would otherwise, all through online social media.

Fred Wilson has been living publicly in this way for some years, and his post ends with a series of useful rules for doing so and keeping a smile:

1) Keep your family out of it until they want to be in it
2) Be nice.
3) Demand that others are nice back.
4) Encourage the community to police the comments. Early on Jackson was my “bouncer” and now Kid Mercury has assumed that role.
5) Take the nasty comments lightly and use humor to defuse them.
6) Do not delete comments unless they are hateful to others, porn, or spam.
7) Ignore the trolls even though it kills you
8) Be careful with photos. They greatest lesson I got was when I posted a photo of me on vacation looking smug. Bad move that I learned a lot from.
9) Give more than you take.
10) Enjoy yourself. Talking, discussing, and debating is fun. Keep it that way.

Great advice.

Revise Your Goals

Beth Kanter had a great post a while back that rounds up a number of bits and pieces of advice for nonprofits interested in using social media.

My favorite graf:

The economic crisis has changed the external environment. So, it is important to think about that as part of considering how you need to revise your goals. The tools are changing, so if you’ve settled into one way of using a particular social media tool or set of tools, don’t set yourself on automatic pilot. Are you using the social media tools most efficiently and effectively given the environment, the changes in the tools, and your goals?

What a thought . . . fine tune strategy as you go.

How often do we really do that?

My Posts Are Too Long

My posts have been getting longer and longer.

Must. Stop.

Why? Because people want things in bites! Half the time, my ideas are only worth a bite anyway. More to the point, blogging traffics in speed, snark, and brevity. I can do two out of three (I’m not into snark).

So I need to get shorter. I thought, as I started this, that the amount of time I was allowing myself to do each post would push me to write briefly. But I am finding what (I believe) E.B. White said, which is that it is easier to write long than short. If he didn’t say that, then it was someone as cool as him.

I am going to have to try to focus in a little more.

And keep it brief.

A Dozen Years Of Blogging

The other day I got to looking back at all the online activity in my past, and saw how entwined my day-to-day life has been with the Web since way back.

First off, I recall I started a blog in 1996, a year before the word was invented.

In 1996, during the Clinton-Dole presidential race, I started an online political column I called “Content.” It had aa cool logo. I used The Well, and updated the site manually. That site has disappeared into the ether, but each time I updated I also posted to the alt.politics.elections Usenet group and those posts still exist. Here are a few. The earliest one I could find:

THE HAND THAT (MIGHT) FEED
Term-limited Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento) has an irate letter to the editor in today’s Sacramento Bee. Isenberg says Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) promised a “good, clean” gambling regulation bill this year, but the result (SB1887) looked more like a special-interest wish-list than a regulating bill. Isenberg says the Assembly had to clean it up. One of the things the Assembly did was add a provision which would ban candidates from attorney general from taking campaign contributions from gambling interests. Makes sense, huh? But Lockyer is mulling a race for AG, and campaigns being as expensive as they are, it would take quite a politician to give up all that potential money. Evidently, Lockyer isn’t that politician: he let the Senate adjourn instead of allowing the bill to be heard.

And this was the latest one I could find, in June 1997:

HAVE YOUR CAKE BUT DON’T EAT IT, TOO
Back a ways (May 30, actually) the Assembly Appropriations Committee killed a popular idea by Republican Assemblyman Brooks Firestone. AB13 would have created a tax-exempt college savings program for parents, run by the state. Seems ol’ Brooks (yes, he is heir to the tire fortune) is pondering running for Lieutenant Governor, and such a popular piece of legislation with his name on it would be a nice feather in his cap come campaign time. So the Democratic leadership killed it. But then (long about June 9) the leadrship had a change of heart and realized they had killed a good idea–so they kindly resurrected “Scholarshare.” The only catch: Firestone doesn’t get to have his name on the bill–the new “author” will be the Assembly Higher Education Committee.

Later, in 1998, working at the Institute for Global Ethics, I had the idea of starting something we called Business Ethics Newsline. The first edition was in February that year. I wrote columns for Newsline on occasion. It’s still going strong.

I’d have to say my favorite Newsline item was called “Civic TQM:”

Imagine we were able to implement TQM in the civic life of the United States. Opinion makers would encourage people to focus on fixing problems early in the process, when it’s first possible to correct — and possibly preempt — them. Instead of telling citizens that their highest — and only — duty is to vote, what if we were to spend a similar amount of energy encouraging citizens to get involved before November? The intense get-out-the-vote efforts by so many nonprofit community groups could become get-out-the-letter-to-the-editor campaigns focused on Labor Day, when there is enough time to influence policy proposals. We could create a new social movement around quality citizenship.

While at IGE, I also had the idea to start a newsletter called Campaign Conduct This Week. It was a weekly (natch) roundup of political happenings that related to ethics in politics. I can’t find many traces of it, except for a December 1999 version that the San Juan County prosecutor’s office sent out to an email list (we used to send it out by email as well as post it).

Then, in 2003, after I had left my job and struck out on my own, I started my own blog under my own name. I called this one Public Comments, and it was just an occasional outlet for writing. I was even quite haughty about not calling it a “blog” — no, these were essays. Occasionally I’d get them published in The Christian Science Monitor but more often it was just an outlet for my thoughts.

Later, in 2007 I started a local blog called Rockville Central, which takes up a great deal of my blogging time. I wrote a recent article all about that here.

Around this time, I also started writing more and more frequently for Pajamas Media, a collection of bloggers (like Huffington Post).

So I guess it makes sense that I started this daily blog up recently. The last dozen years have been filled with various versions of blogs, and now perhaps doing one that is just my daily thoughts will be good for me.

But . . . what to write about?

Taxonomy of Bloggers

A simple taxonomy of the different blogs out there in the public sphere.

• Annotator and Pointer: InstaPundit, Atrios, Drudge
• Thoughtful Response: Mark Schmitt, Talking Points Memo, PowerLine, Captain’s Quarters
• Secret Expertise: Brad DeLong, Mystery Pollster
• Pot-Stirrer: Michelle Malkin, DailyKOS
• Omnivorous Essayist: Dynamist, Redeeming Hope, Think Again (Stanley Fish), Bitch Ph.D.
• Newsroom Bullpen: The Corner, TAPped, The Lede (NYT), The Note (ABC)
• Behind The Curtain: Raw Fisher, Political Muscle (Salladay on Calif. Politics)
• Fringe Conversation: MyDD, Redstate, Democrat Underground

Just my take.