Online Media Cultist

I love Techememe. It does a pretty remarkable job of collecting the top and hottest stories going on in tech, Internet, online media, and all the business, cultural, and social issues surrounding those worlds. It uses an algorithm based on links and “influence” to find top stories and lays out those stories and the surrounding conversations in story clusters, which changes in nearly real time throughout the day.

Because of Techmeme’s popularity, it itself is often a source of news. Who is trying to game it, who is too popular, not popular enough, who is writing “bitchmemes” to get some 15 minutes of Techmeme celebrity, and so on.

Just over the weekend, TechCrunch did a study of who the top individual writers have been on Techmeme this year. Michael Arrington, Erick Schonfeld, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch dominate, taking three of the top five slots alone. Mathew Ingram, who nailed the #9 slot himself, points out that Arrington alone towers above the rest of the field, averaging some two Techmeme headlines per day.

Not surprisingly, the reactions have been swift. Dave Winer, in a post that will no doubt provoke many in the blogosphere, writes a withering rebuke of Techememe, basically accusing founder and owner Gabe Rivera of catering to his friends. Further, he takes the opportunity to blast Rivera for not being more transparent in how Techmeme works and calls out “most” of those who nab Techmeme headlines for not knowing “the first thing about technology” because they are not software programmers.

My only thought about TechCrunch’s dominance of Techmeme is that it’s reflective of its overall popularity in the tech blogosphere. It breaks stories, it’s highly popular, and gets linked to widely by influential sites, so it make perfect sense that it will rank high on Techmeme as well. If that popularity may cause momentum of its own accord, that’s the same with any other form of popular publication or broadcast. Over time, if the quality and value isn’t there, that would surely cause less people to frequent, link to, and write about the site, which would cause the opposite effect.

Another self-described expert is trying to sell a book by attacking the blogosphere, blathering about how a “pajama army” of “exuberant monkeys” is creating “an endless forest of digital mediocrity.”

Now there’re some images for you, eh? Puts you in the mind of a demented Peter Pan 2.0 or some such.

The author, Andrew Keen, is the founder of Audiocafe… which doesn’t exist anymore, sadly. This might explain his obsession with “digital thieves.”

There are lots of ways to fairly criticize and reasonably discuss the excesses and problems going on in the blogosphere and social media as a whole. Unfortunately, it does require some expertise in the area and a smidge of critical thinking.

Keen told Reuters that the book “is designed as a grenade… It is not designed to be particularly fair or balanced.”

Right.

The days when old guard traditional/print media journalists could get away with (fearing and therefore) ridiculing the vast wilds of the new media are mercifully near their end.

Therefore, it’s almost stunningly baffling that David Bullard, a columnist for South Africa’s Sunday Times, could so fundamentally misunderstand what’s going on in the blogosphere today. In a hateful, condescending piece called “Name and shame offensive bloggers,” Bullard equates bloggers as “the air guitars of journalism,” written by those “who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism.” Bullard fails to realize, of course, that many blogs are written by professional journalists and are published in online versions of mainstream media.

The biggest misconception comes when Bullard relates that all blogs focus upon the “tedious minutiae” of daily lives and muses that the growth of the blogosphere can be explained by “modern narcissism.”

While surely some blogs do fixate upon narcissistic minutiae, this ignores the teeming raft of writer/bloggers that inject serious news, personal takes, opinions, reviews, and interviews into the broader online conversation. It ignores the fact that the blogosphere is increasingly the place where people turn for news, particularly in terms of breaking news events and stories that involve technology and the online world.

The column turns nearly xenophobic at its end, referencing “some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t get a girl to sleep with him.”

Vinny Lingham smartly notes that, “This is exactly the mentality that is leading to the decline of offline print as a source of information, because the people entrenched in the offline world are so resistant to change, they cannot keep up with the times.”

Bloggers Blog: “Using miscellaneous personal blogs as a comparison tool between blogs and journalism really isn’t fair to blogs.”

Vincent Maher says that David Bullard owes South Africans an apology for “a dazzling display of arrogance” and then goes on to break down (and crush) the column line by line.

Bullard’s column is called “Out to Lunch.” Indeed.

Thanks to JD Lasica at Social Media for pointing out that Joseph Farah’s book, “Stop the Presses!” heralds Matt Drudge’s famous/infamous Drudge Report as the entity that inspired “the ‘blogosphere’ today.”

Certainly Drudge holds a certain place in the web ecosphere. I stop by Drudge every so often – it’s a fun place to get kind of a quick grab-bag collection of what’s going on in the world and on the Interwebs at any given moment. A major grain of salt has to be consumed each time of course to account for the rightward tilt of the story headlines and particularly its “exclusives.” It’s also a place where rumor mingles merrily and openly with truth.

Drudge rose to popularity during the Lewinsky scandal days of the Clinton administration. To claim that the “‘blogosphere’ today” was inspired by Drudge is downright silly. It’s not really a blog, for starters. And the blogospheric revolution would have undoubtedly gone down with or without Matt and company.

I take issue with a piece that Victor Keegan of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited wrote today, called To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it.

Keegan’s argument boils down to a few main points. Let’s take a look at them:

* Blogging is “very much a minority sport” because, according to the recent State of Technorati report, the blogosphere has doubled in size, from 35 million blogs to 70 million, in the last 320 days.

Keegan argues that because English-language blogs now number in the 24 million range, that is a sign that the blogosphere is waning in influence as compared to the proliferation of video uploading/sharing and social networking.

I find this assertion to be incorrect in several ways. The fact that non-English language blogs now make up the majority of the blogosphere is astounding, and means that there’s a galaxy of conversations and developments going on that we in the West are largely unaware of. I would think that this part of the web will only continue to grow and develop.

Also, doubling in size to 70 million blogs in less than a year is an enormous increase, particularly when considering that writing a blog with any regularity is hard. Just as most people who start a novel never finish, most blogs are abandoned in less than a year, and many don’t make it past a few posts. I would think that now that blogs have been around for a decade, people consider this difficulty before taking the plunge. I’d love to see numbers on current activity of blogs founded within the last few years as compared to an earlier period.

* Despite success “in politics and the arts,” blogging hasn’t “taken off” in a way people thought it would.

I don’t understand the rationale behind this assertion. In size and in quality, the blogosphere is big and bad and thriving. Blogging and online media are fundamentally rocking traditional media to its very core. Online mainstream media publications are implementing blogs into their offerings, professional journalists and CEOs and well known public figures are blogging as never before, bringing the public closer to the action and inviting them to partake in the conversation.

“Blogging” is now mainstream, and the blogosphere is maturing. That maturity is reflected in both the sheer growth in the number of blogs as well as the innumerable ways that blogs are shaping the Internet… and even in the ways that it is shaping such things as social networking and other “web 2.0″ applications.

The “new black” in blogging, for instance, is “micro blogging,” proven out by Twitter, the latest craze, and other services like JaikuL and Tumblr.

People are finding ways to communicate and share information, and blogs are an essential component in that.

The Media Age rightly points out that blogging “is absolutely a losing business proposition” because of the time required to do it, and to do it right. I would argue though that most do it not for money but for the passion of sharing information and ideas and engaging readers in conversation. And in fact those with the most passion for this have the best shot at cranking out a winning business proposition.

* “… the act of blogging is turning out to be more of a spectator sport than we originally thought.”

Hilarizor! The argument used to be that no one read blogs because all blog readers were too busy writing and hawking their own blogs. A growing non-writing reader base for blogs – any blogger will tell you this – is a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.

The blogosphere is maturing and continuing to expand at a strong if not astronomical rate. More important than sheer numbers though is that blogs continue to have a profound influence on the online media world and among other innovations is increasingly becoming integrated with more traditional media offerings.

Far being a minority sport, the blogosphere is big time big leagues.

I love Howard Fineman. He’s one of the best political writers in the business. He’s great on Hardball, and his coverage and analysis of elections and the pure sport of politics is second-to-none.

But still, it’s hilarious when non-tech savvy journalists wade into those electronic weeds.

The Internet is now a part of politics as it never has before. As Fineman rightly notes, it was Howard Dean’s (and Joe Trippi’s) success in raising money and building grassroots community online in 2003 that ushered political campaigns into a new era. Politics and politicians have always followed the money, and therefore 2008 presidential hopefuls are online and actively seeking advantage, dollars, and voters. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama broke away from the long tradition of officially announcing a presidential campaign in a hometown dripping from its very pores in Americana, for example, and instead announced via online video.

Politicians are now seeking ways to integrate technology into their relationship with constituents as well. Obama has made at least one appearance on popular left-leaning political blog Daily Kos during the run-up to the pivotal 2006 midterm elections, and ‘08 presidential aspirant John Edwards delivers regular posts on Twitter, the newest rage of the tech-bloggy set. (Edwards staff has thanked his “followers” on Twitter for all of their words of support over the recent announcement that Elizabeth Edward’s breast cancer has returned.)

Journalists are trying to keep up. It’s chuckle-worthy every time that Hardball’s Chris Matthews (another favorite of mine) announces that features and video clips can be found online. He has a look of smirking wonder that seems to say, “There’s this thing called the Internet and people actually do stuff there, can you believe it?”

This week, in the midst of an interesting-as-usual piece called “Out of Control,” which looks at how technology and the media now leave political candidates with less control over the message of campaigns than ever before, Fineman let this beauty slip: “Last time I checked, MySpace, by far the leading social networking blogosphere, had more than 60 million registered members.”

The leading social networking blogosphere. If only he had just scaled it back half a notch and left it at “leading social networking website.” Or platform, tool, place, locale, or e-shack of misbegotten ill designed schlock. But blogosphere has a pretty clear if broad connotation, representing that vast array of millions of blogs, most of which are separate online entities from one another.

MySpace certainly has millions of profiles, all of which have a blog feature. So I suppose it would be okay to call MySpace a blogosphere unto itself, though I would wager that’s going a bit too far. And it would be definitely be inaccurate to compare that “blogosphere” with the blogosphere.

So MySpace is not a social networking blogosphere. It’s a huge and monstrous social networking site. The blogosphere is its own universe (thus the ’sphere!) and many who occupy it are more than happy to not be associated with MySpace.

Howard, we love you, but you gaffed a little on this one!

Mashable and news tracker site Megite have partnered to launch Mashtracker, a “memetracker” that focuses on blog conversations stemming from stories published by Mashable.

This is an interesting development on a few fronts. Gabe Rivera’s suite of memetracker sites – anchored by politics-centric Memeorandum and tech-centric Techmeme – does an excellent job of selecting hot stories (based on an algorithm that uses factors such as links and “influence”) and then surrounds them with related stories and blog articles in story clusters. These clusters change and evolve and move up and down the page fluidly, so it’s easy to see which stories are hot and being talked and buzzed about across the Internet.

Included stories cover a wide range of subject areas and are selected from both mainstream media publications as well as the blogosphere. The new Mashtracker narrows the focus by just tracking social news stories published by Mashable, and the related conversations that spring up around them within the blogosphere. Mashable has a unique opportunity here to be successful, I’ll wager, because it already is a trusted source for social news. (No one does a better job of keeping up with the current blizzard of social networking start-ups, for example.)

And the particular focus on blogs is another step forward in terms of the blogosphere’s credibility. In essence, this is another way in which the blogosphere is declaring that it is in many ways a better source of Internet news, reviews, and opinions than traditional media.

While Mashable’s layout is similar to Techmeme’s, the design is a bit more clunky. That said, I do like that company logos are used to anchor the lead stories. I imagine they’ll clean things up and streamline as the new site matures.