Disruptive Dialogue Podcast #3 - 03/20/2007

The third episode of the Disruptive Dialogue podcast is now available.  This one was recorded in Bow, NH and is 27:38.  You can download this podcast as an MP3 or subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you never miss an episode.

Topics:

• 00:34 - Opening & Introduction
• 04:40 - OnePipe by Marjolein Hoekstra
• 06:47 - John Kerry, Bloggers, and FOIA
• 09:10 - Jonathan Bernstein, I-Reporters, and Keeping the Wolves at Bay
• 12:27 - Interview with Ian Muir about South by Southwest & AOL
• 16:33 - Memetrackers
• 24:03 - Listener comment from Sara Adams on podcast quality
• 25:29 - Wrap-up & preview of next episode

Show Notes:

• OnePipe
• Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Jonathan Bernstein
• UserPlane by AOL
• John Kerry press release on FOIA
• The Big Memetracker Roundup by Stan Schroeder at the Frantic Industries blog
• Ian Muir's blog
• Memetrackers mentioned: Blogniscient, Buzzfeed, Chuquet, Daily Rotation, Feedable, Megite, Tailrank, Techmeme
• PRobecast by Topaz Partners
• South by Southwest

To Comment:

• Leave your comments here
• Call the Disruptive Dialogue comment line: (206) 424-4733
• Email me your comments in MP3 format (no more than 2 minutes and 5 MB, please)

Transcript:

Chip: Hello and welcome to the third episode of Disruptive Dialogue. If this is your first time visiting, you will find that we have a number of different topics to talk about each week. We include news commentary and analysis. This week we have got some interesting stuff.

I have an interview that I did with Ian Muir, who is one of my colleagues. He attended the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas last week, a conference that is devoted to technology as well as multimedia. He brought back some insightful observations about the future direction of AOL and particularly how they've decided to interact with people at this conference. So you will want to tune into that interview that comes up about midway through this podcast.

Of course, I have got a number of news items this week, including information about a tool that may be useful to you, as well as some efforts to change US government policy as it relates to bloggers. And a bit on crisis communications on the Internet as well. And I'll have a more detailed segment later in the show about meme trackers.

These are websites that track popular blog conversations and if you are not familiar with it you would want to tune into that portion of the podcast to learn a little bit more about what's out there. If you are familiar with meme trackers I bet there may be a couple of sites in this review that I am going to go through that you probably haven't heard of before, so definitely a worthwhile listen.

And then of course we also have listener comments and I encourage all of you to contribute to that in the future. If you are so inclined, I look forward to receiving emails or MP3 files or you can call the listener comment line and the number for that will be coming up shortly. The comments really are an important part of this show because after all, the show is called "Disruptive Dialogue" and it is not a dialogue if I am simply talking at you.

So be sure to provide your contributions so that we can turn it into an ongoing conversation in future episodes. And speaking of that -- if this is the second time or perhaps even the third time that you've tuned into this podcast, you certainly are a brave soul, as I said last week. I appreciate you sticking with it. I think that you hopefully will find that each and every week this podcast improves.

One of the things that I've tried to do each week is to improve the production quality of the podcast. I have been experimenting with different software and different hardware, and I already have some things lined up for the next episode of Disruptive Dialogue that will hopefully improve those even more.

You'll find that the quality of interviews that I do going forward will be even better than the one that I did with Ian today. I think the quality of the hardware really does make a difference at least in everything that I have done from a testing perspective.

One of the things I like to do for fun is to cook and I have found that over the years as I have improved the pots, pans, utensils and other gadgets, my cooking has improved. Well OK, maybe my cooking hasn't improved but when you use the right tools for the right job, you tend to get better results.

So, we will move onto the actual content of this podcast momentarily and then I will be back at the end of the show to wrap things up and tell you what to expect in upcoming episodes of Disruptive Dialogue.

[music]

In the news for Tuesday, March 20, 2007. Got a number of short news items for you today, beginning in the Netherlands with Majorlein Hoekstra who is a blogger and tech writer who is particularly interested in news alerts. She has been very helpful to us at CustomScoop over the past year or so in providing feedback on our products and last week she released something called OnePipe, which she describes as single button generic feed filtering.

As she says, "As far as I know OnePipe is the first solution to offer generic on the fly feed filtering based on URL parameterization." OK that sounds a little technical for this audience so let me boil it down again using her own words in her blog post which is at cleverclogs.org and don't worry all of this will be in the show notes."

She says, "A typical use case lets assume I am visiting the feed burner blog called Burning Questions. For the moment I am really only interested in blog posts about their headline animator service. In fact I would like to generate a feed based on just on that custom keyword, headline animator. With the OnePipe bookmarker in place, I can click the OnePipe button on my browser bookmarks toolbar, type in my topic and I am all set."

Some readers have chimed in on the comments on her blog and one suggested that, for example -- in fact this was Lee Hopkins, who is a frequent contributor and correspondent to For Immediate Release, one of the leading communications oriented podcasts online. He suggests that OnePipe could be used to track Second Life posts on Neville Hopson's blog, and of course Lee is very deep into Second Life. As I understand it he is actually working on a PhD in Second Life. And so he would definitely be interested in that sort of thing. So obviously you can see OnePipe provides some nice options for collecting information about really focused topics on particular blogs particularly bloggers who may only occasionally write about a particulur topic or issue.

The next news item is John Kerry, the Senator from Massachussetts and former presidential candidate. In a speech to the New England Newspaper Association last week. he announced support for legislation which would strengthen FOIA, which is the acronym for the Freedom of Information Act. It's a law for those of you who are not familiar that allows the public access to government documents and typically unless you are a member of the media or fall into certain other exceptions, you have to pay for the photocopies and the time spent by the government workers to prepare this information for you, in order to offset their costs.

So John Kerry's press release says that this legislation is particularly targeted to help bloggers. In fact it says, "The legislation would help bloggers because it would prevent agencies from denying them a waiver on fees just because they are independent or are not affiliated with any particular news organization. In the past need to pay fees for FOIA requests discouraged many bloggers or independent journalists from pursing FOIA requests."

So this is some interesting legislation that would put bloggers on par with the mainstream media at least as it comes to requesting government documents. Now whether or not this is significant, it is really hard to say. One of the problems with FOIA typically is that no matter what the administration has been Republican or Democrat, very few resources have been devoted to fulfilling these requests. And in fact, it is not uncommon for requests to take years to fulfill unless there are additional resources devoted to it. The fact that bloggers can make requests may actually make things worse before it makes them better, because it will potentially flood the system with additional requests.

I know in the past I have submitted FOIA requests and I have literally have continued receiving results form those queries as much as two or three years after the fact as the backlog is dealt with or new documents are found but nevertheless, some interesting legislation and something to keep an eye on.

And the third and final short news item that we have today comes from Jonathan Bernstein. For those of you that don't know Jonathan, he is an acknowledged expert in crisis communications and has his own e-zine and other publications that he uses to spread the word about effective crisis communications. He's taken a particular interest in online crisis communications.

He recently released an updated copy of an e-book called, "Keeping The Wolves At Bay," and it's available through a link that I'll include in the show notes. But Jonathan was kind enough to share a copy of that e-book with me. In going through it, there's a very interesting section on what he calls the I-Reporter, and let me just read to you a little bit from this section of the report because I think that listeners here may well be interested in this.

Jonathan writes, "The internet has become the largest media outlet in our known universe. Interactive print, audio and video communications are all available, with the line between "amateur" and "professional", "traditional" and "untraditional" media blurred almost beyond ken. This massive medium has spawned what I am calling "The I-Reporter."

And he goes on to talk about how anyone can be an I-Reporter and it's not really a thing that's easy to judge based on how much traffic a site gets or anything like that, so he lays out some criteria and he talks about do's and don'ts when dealing with this new universe. But he sums it up this way, and I think this is a very intelligent way of looking at things.

He says, first of all, "All of the crises which I have helped clients to respond to in the past five years have had a web-centered or internet component, with the impact of the internet on crisis management strategies and tactics growing exponentially every year." He says, "But now just as it was pre-web, the purpose of crisis management is to preserve what has been gained through promotion to ideally prevent crises from happening, but when that isn't possible, to minimize damage."

He says, "In the 21st century, crisis managers need a new paradigm and an expanded skill set to help their organizations or clients achieve that critical goal."

Jonathan has done a really nice job in this publication to point out the do's and don'ts, not only of communicating in crisis communications online but through all media, and he's got some sections in there talking about how to do effective interviews and how to interact with the media appropriately, what sort of tactics and logistics you need to be aware of.

It's really just a tremendous resource. As someone who has done crisis communications in the past, I wish that it was a resource that I had had years ago when I was more involved in it. So I will include the link to this in the show notes and I encourage you to get a copy for yourself. And that will conclude the news items for this week, so we're on to our next segment.

[musical interlude]

Chip: I sat down recently with one of my colleagues here at CustomScoop, Ian Murer, who spent five days out at the South by Southwest conference in Austin,Texas learning about the latest and greatest in technology and multimedia. He came back with some interesting observations about AOL.

Now, AOL has typically been perceived by technologists and developers as the monolithic ISP that does things their way and doesn't really respect the developer community, but it seems like that might be changing. And so Ian had some views on this and said that they were pretty well received out there and I think it would be interesting to take a listen to what Ian has to say about the new AOL.

Ian: So, traditionally AOL has been known for ISP services and more mass market to general audiences to companies and now they're focusing more on developer audiences by using tools to take a lot of their brand name, a lot of the tools that they're known for like instant messenger and chat services, and working on building tools where you can embed those into pages and use those to build communities.

So they're focusing less on selling products directly to people and more on creating products that can be embedded into your own sites and your own communities. So now they're definitely approaching the developers to get people to start using their tools and start building interesting things with these so they can use that to go back and again promote to the mass audience that... you know, AOL's back just in a different fashion.

Chip: I also had a chance to talk to Ian about one of AOL's recent acquisitions, a company called Userplane which has some potential implications for the social media space and here's what Ian had to say about that.

Ian: They just acquired Userplane, and what Userplane has been focusing on is community-based sites. But rather than things like forums and blogs and the more traditional community media they are focusing on more real-time media, so embedding chat in applications, creating chat rooms and applications, doing video conferences all through web applications rather than using a separate desktop allocation.

So they're trying to bring some of the rich media and some of the audio elements that are merging in the technology and bringing that into communities where traditionally text-based tools such as forums and blogs used to be kind of the norm.

Chip: One of AOL's greatest strengths these days in the post-dialup era is that they still have a leadership role in instant messaging. In fact, AOL Instant Messaging or AIM for short, still has a market leading position here, and Ian has some perspective on what that might mean for the future of AOL and developers.

Ian: I think that the biggest thing that the instant messaging technology gives them is they have a user base of hundreds of thousands of users, so if they give developers the opportunity to build tools that leverage that existing user base, that's going to be a huge appeal to the developers because then they're not worrying about going out and finding users and getting people to sign up for a service, they can offer the feature that the tools that are built into their web site can leverage services you've already signed up for, accounts that you already have.

So I think that's going to be one way that AOL can leverage some of their existing technology and some of their existing user bases. Not only do they have a reputation of having a good IM client, but they also have this huge user base that developers can tap into by using their tools.

So that also makes it more appealing to businesses too. If a developer goes to a business owner and says, "Hey we can build our own application and convince people to sign up or we can use this embedded application that already has a good reputation and a hundred thousand users, " most business owners are going to go with the more reputable solution rather than building your own.

So all in all, a very interesting portrayal of AOL's role in communications and development going forward. What do you think? Does AOL have a chance to re-establish itself as a market leader? Will AOL really make a difference in how we communicate going forward? Go ahead and share your comments with me and we'll play them on the air next time.

[musical interlude]

Chip: The big meme tracker round-up. Over the weekend I was going through my feed reader and I came across a post by Stan Schroder of the Frantic Industries blog, and he has a great round-up of eight different news aggregators or meme trackers.

And for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, let me quote from his blog post to describe exactly what a meme tracker is. He says, "It's a web site that gathers news from many sources, usually through RSS feeds, and sorts it according to time of publishing relevance, importance, number of inbound links or other factors."

The important part here is there is very little or no interference by living editors, news items are chosen and sorted by an algorithm automatically. The ones that you've probably heard of the most in this category, Techmeme, is certainly the leading one of these if you are interested in the technology space, and most of you have probably heard of that, but there are a number of others, and I wanted to take a moment just to quote from Stan's report to go through some of these because I think it's useful to understand how meme trackers and what the differences are between them.

The way he describes things, and I would tend to agree, Techmeme and Tailrank and Megite are the three that really lead the pack, but there are a few others that he reviewed, so let me start with those and I will get to the industry leaders. The first one that he talks about is Blogniscient, and this is what he says about Blogniscient.

He says, "It seems to be indexing way too few blogs, for example, in the sci-tech category, 80% of the stories come from Engadget and HDB." He also says that the stories are old and that when he looked at it in one of the sections, most of the stories were seven days old.

And of course meme trackers really are designed to track current conversation, so that's obviously something that makes it difficult to use that site. He also talks about a site called BuzzFeed which is different because, as he says, "unlike others, it adds its own editorial commentary as the actual items often aren't revolving around a specific story or an article, instead they are identified by a common buzz, a trend that is recently popular written and talked about, " and topics covered include movies, music, fashion, ideas and technology.

So BuzzFeed, definitely different than a typical meme tracker and more topical in nature. But I think that's interesting and worth checking out.

There's another site and I... I'm certain that I'm going to mispronounce it but I would pronounce it "Chuck It", it's CH-U-Q-U-E-T. And Stan isn't real wild about the design of this site. He says, "while it's not bad at actually delivering the news, all be it at times a bit slow, what Chuquet fails to really stand out as far as options and features go, and the lackluster design doesn't help. A bit more effort and a redesign and it could be rubbing shoulders with the best services in the round-up."

He also talks about a site called Daily Rotation, and again this is different from the other sites. Here's how he describes it: "Daily Rotation offers the option to show a number up to 50 of top headlines which are chosen from a number of different feeds based on what users are clicking on the most. So while Daily Rotation is not a full-featured meme tracker, if such a thing exists, but it gives the users a way to quickly scan the important news, which is obviously of value to many readers."

He also talks about Feedable, and he says, "This one is a little bit different because the stories aren't clustered as they are in most meme trackers. Feedable simply finds the interesting items and sorts them by freshness and relevance, " He says, "While this works well enough, clustering similar stories is a very important feature for a meme tracker and Feedable is sorely lacking here." So Feedable, if you're listening, if you group them together you may end up with a better review next time.

And that brings us to the big three. And let me talk first about Megite and what Stan had to say about that. He talks about Megite and he says, "It picks up news quickly and intelligently and it puts the original sources on top and comments and opinions below, " He says, "Occasional glitches are present, " but whenever he has found them he has talked to the site's founder, Matthew Chen, and things get resolved very quickly.

He also mentions that Tailrank is a site that is very similar to Megite and it's the one that he seems to favor the most out of the crop, and this is why. He says, "Overall Tailrank is the cream of the crop, it's smooth design, solid number of additional features and tools and timely deliverance of news will make it a favorite choice for many."

And finally Techmeme, which I mentioned at the top is the industry standard, but it's focused primarily on technology, and I think Stan was looking for a broader depth in what he was describing in his search. He does say, "Even the best of the sites described in the article, they are not without problems. Their biggest issue lies in their very core, " and what Stan talks about here is that there is a biased towards sites that are frequently featured.

The way that you typically show up on these meme trackers is to have your blog post linked to by many other bloggers. Unfortunately this becomes almost a circular loop, in that once you get featured, more people see you and so more people link to you, and once you actually show up on a site like Techmeme, there's often a swarm-like effect where other bloggers will link to you because they then get listed as part of the discussion.

So, he'd like to see something, and I agree, where there's a little bit more effort to be able to include good content from people who haven't necessarily received a lot of links in the past, or maybe even don't have a lot of links to their current post. It's just quality.

The problem of course with this is that it's hard to tell a computer to figure out what's a quality post, so then you're probably going back to the idea of using human editors, which is one of the things that meme trackers are touted for, that they don't use those and it is therefore unbiased in that respect.

But I think that there's a lot of room for growth in the meme tracking industry, I think that a lot of readers of these types of sites would like to see better algorithms, but it really does allow you to see what's going on in the blogosphere, what the hot conversations are. And from that perspective they do add a lot of value and they will continue to be around and I look forward to the innovation that they will all continue to contribute.

[background music]

Narrator: Now it's time for listeners' comments. You can join the discussion by calling the comment line at area code 206.424.4733 or you can email you comments as text or as an mp3 file to chipgriffin@gmail.com And now here's Chip with this week's feedback.

[background music]

Chip: It'll be a brief segment today because I got only one comment last week. It was from Sarah Adams who is the marketing director at CustomScoop and she writes, "The new intro, sound level and tone are much improved. Nice work!" Apparently at least one person thought that the changes I did to try to improve the production quality of Disruptive Dialogue worked out, and it'll be interesting to see going forward what the feedback from other listeners may be.

Of course I encourage you to submit your own comments using the various means that are described throughout this podcast, I particularly encourage mp3 contributions and I'm looking forward to hopefully receiving some comments from my new friends at Topaz Partners, a PR firm in Boston who have an interesting podcast of their own called "Probecast" and I will include a link to that in the show notes.

They issued a challenge to me to comment on their podcast this week which I did, so hopefully now they will return the favor and submit a comment to this show that I will use in the future. So keep those comments... not keep those... *start* those comments coming and we will look forward to having more discussion in a future episode.

[musical interlude]

Chip: Well that brings to the end the third episode of Disruptive Dialogue, I appreciate you sticking with the podcast for the entire length of the show today and I think you'll find that you probably learned a few things along the way.

I'd be interested to know what you think about Majorlein Hoekstra's OnePipe. I want to know what you think about John Kerry and his legislation to extend FOIA to bloggers, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about Jonathan Bernstein's e-book once you've had a chance to take a look at it.

Coming up in future shows I will have a little bit more of my interview with Ian Muir. He talked about things beyond AOL that occurred at South by Southwest and in particular he talked about the conference format and how it was so effective and I think you'll want to hear that, so stay tuned to the next episode of Disruptive Dialogue for that.

And finally if you have any thoughts on the meme trackers segment, I'd be very interested to know which site you find the most valuable, which ones you tune into every day to get your information about blogosphere conversations. So keep your comments coming because without your comments, it's not a dialogue, it's simply me talking to you and while that's interesting I think it's better if we're actually able to have an ongoing conversation. So I look forward to hearing from you and I look forward to the next episode of Disruptive Dialogue.

[background music]

Narrator: For show notes and more information about this podcast, please visit www.disruptivedialogue.com or visit Chip's blog at www.pardonthedisruption.com To share your feedback you can call the comment line at area code 206.424.4733 or you can email your comments as text or as an MP3 file to chipgriffin@gmail.com.

Comments

[Brian Helfrich]

The sound and production quality of this podcast is extremely crisp and clear. Sounds great.

Regarding FOIA, government is for the people 9at least I hope it is), a blogger is and should be just as influential in reporting as traditional media and should have the same access.

Hopefully the blogosphere will be a form of checks and balances for the FOIA system to make sure FOIA is actually documenting and archiving government documents correctly as they should be.

How amazing that more of the "general public" will be able to access documents better clarifying what our government is actually doing. I personally hope more information being accessible to the masses is a win-win situation for us all. Even though it may result is some government staffers doing extra leg work.