Online Media Cultist

Back in September, I excitedly announced that Online Media Cultist had hit the 100 RSS subscriber mark and mused that “we may not see triple digits again anytime soon, but for the moment I’ll take a moment to celebrate… and to thank everyone who has thought enough of this site to sign up and have it delivered to you in whatever form you like.”

Right around that time, I hit a particularly insane period of work that lasted well into the new year. Over the last six weeks or so I’ve had a little more time to pour into OMC, and the response has been gratifying and humbling and terrific.

So even if we’re at the 200 mark for just one day, it’s a pretty great day.

Thank you to all who have signed up and commented or simply have taken a minute to have a peek at what’s going on round these parts.

Most recently, I’ve installed Disqus to run comments and added a widget over on the far right column to track my Twitter posts. If you have any thoughts at all about what you’d like to see here, what you’d like to see covered, to see less of (uncovered?), or general feelings about the wide world of the interwebs, please let me know anytime.

And in the meantime, I’ll get back to the online media cultery.

Lots of fun stats to pick through from a recent Universal McCann report on social media (found via ReadWriteWeb).

Some quick takes:

83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007

The maturation of social media tools based around video has just begun. This is going to be an area of experimentation, funding, and entrepreneurship for years to come. Video advertising and video metrics is in its earliest stages as well.

78% read blogs, up from 66%

A remarkable figure, particularly in the face of those who dismiss the blogosphere. It’s here to stay kids.

RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%

Many inside the web-obsessed folk take RSS for granted these days, but we see that it’s really starting to tip over into mainstream consumption for the first time. That’s great news for innovative plays like Readburner, which harnesses RSS feed reading and story sharing and creates community features around it.

China is the world’s largest blogging market with 42m bloggers versus 26m in the US

Social media is worldwide and growing. It will be fascinating to see if and how social media and blogging adoption in China will affect government policies and reaction.

Overall, it’s easy to conclude that the social media monster is growing with no signs of slowing anytime soon.

I’ve written a few stories about Shyftr over the last week. In short, Shyftr pulls full text RSS feeds published by websites and creates community around them on its own website. Although they’ve changed how the site works (in part due to an innocent question I asked on Twitter over the weekend, which set off quite a little debate throughout the blogospheric realm) the fundamental problem remains: you can read full text stories on Shyftr and comment on those stories on Shyftr without ever visiting the original publishing source. Some people disagree with this position, but in my view that fundamentally interferes with a publisher’s ability to interact with readers and the ability to create community around the original publishing source.

Last night, I discovered ReadBurner, a site which I believe does things in exactly the right way. ReadBurner takes stories that are being shared on Google Reader and provides a space for comments and voting to be made on them. The critical difference here is that they show an excerpt only and not the full text of the article. This in my view means that ReadBurner provides a valuable and unique service in the marketplace – content aggregation and social networking features focused on RSS-based social bookmarking – while promoting publisher source content. As LifeHacker notes, it’s a sort of neat conglomeration of del.icio.us and Digg.

I contacted Drew Olanoff, co-owner of ReadBurner, and asked him if he would like to comment on what his site is doing in comparison to Shyftr. I found his response to be very interesting:

While we won’t really speak to what Shyftr is trying to do, as we’re focusing on our own strategy… I can say that ReadBurner’s goal is to not steal the conversation, but to get it started. We want to be able to send new visitors to blogs who might not have ever visited in the first place. On ReadBurner, they’ll see a steady stream of fresh stories shared from their peers and will be able to interact and re-share if they wish.

I think getting the conversation started as opposed to stealing it gets down the heart of the issue precisely.

ReadBurner also distinguishes itself in a few other ways. Its design and user interface is clean, intuitive, and blessedly straight-forward. (It’s always essential for me to have the why am I here? question answered within a few seconds of arriving at any webpage.)

And here’s another thing: ReadBurner provides two prominent links back to the original content source for each article entry: the article title itself as well a “read more” link below the excerpt. The “shares” link and comments link take you to a ReadBurner drilldown page where you can comment on the story. Again, I think this is the right approach to take. This compares very favorably to what Shyftr does, where you’re almost always forced to be at least one click away from finding a page where you can click back to the original content source.

ReadBurner was founded by Alexander Marktl and was acquired by Olanoff and Adam Ostrow last month. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one for sure.

I expressed some pretty strong concerns about Shyftr over the weekend, a site that (until Sunday, at least!) creates community around full text RSS feeds.

There are pretty strong opinions on both sides of the debate. One of the best counter-arguments to my stance came from Scott Karp, who believes strongly in “information disintermediation” (a let your comments go free and they will return to you kind of philosophy), and serving the user’s needs over the content publisher’s. However, Scott couches this argument in the belief that disintermediation works – comments on a story appearing on the likes of Digg, Friendfeed, and Shyftr – only if you can read those very comments collected in one place, back on the original site where the story was published.

I’d be happy to buy into this but unfortunately we’re not quite there yet. Therefore, I’d counter- (counter-?) argue that what Shyftr does is a disservice to both the content publisher and to users, who are still forced to follow the conversation through a byzantine network of aggregators and aggregators of aggregators.

Now, while we’re digesting this lets remember that Shyftr did just change the way its platform works… in part. Shyftr announced the following on Sunday: “We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease.”

It took me some time to wrangle with what this change meant, and I’m still chewing my brain on it. But while I admire that Shyftr is trying to better respect the rights of publishers, I still feel that this is a little bit of a smoke-and-mirrors move.

In essence, it’s saying: you can still read the full text here (without having gotten permission from the publisher to republish the full text RSS feed on the Internet) and, what’s more, if you want to comment, follow us behind Door Number Two where you can comment away on a page where we don’t provide the full text of the story.

Beyond being an awkward user experience, I don’t see how this fundamentally changes my original arguments.

Louis Gray continues to defend Shyftr gamely, writing:

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I’ve grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I have to say that for where we are right now, Shyftr needs to stop publishing full text feeds. Doing that will place it back within a range where publisher rights are protected and user needs are being met.

A few days ago, I noticed that a story I wrote musing about whether Twitter had become the new RSS reader had been linked to from a site called Shyftr. Clicking over to Shyftr, I noticed that the full text of my article was included on the site. My first reaction was that this was a “splog” site, or a site designed to “steal” the content of my site and then trick people who stumble across it via Google search into clicking its ads. (Yes, apparently there’s good money in this if you can pump out thousands of such sites before you get shut down.)

But Shyftr’s not a splog site; it’s something else. It does “pull” full text RSS feeds onto its site, but with the benevolent intention (I’ve come to understand) of creating a community around it. There were a bunch of lively and positive comments around my Twitter/RSS story, for instance.

Louis Gray is a fan and supporter of Shyftr, writing that it’s a “a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.” In Louis’ opinion, enabling community around full text RSS feeds is where “things are going” and what readers want. That may be true, but in all respect to Louis and the people behind Shyftr, it doesn’t necessarily make it right.

Louis is further involved in this story as I threw out a question on Twitter last night to the effect of “what’s up with this wacky Shyftr thing?” which initiated a rather fascinating and far reaching conversation that took place on Twitter, Friendfeed, and later across a number of blogs, including Tony Hung, Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, and even Robert Scoble.

I think my original question which set up the argument and discussion still holds: Shyftr pulls full text from your RSS feed and creates community around it. Doing that without the publisher’s notification or participation doesn’t seem right to me, but I’m willing to listen to counter-arguments.

Communities built around pulling RSS feed are different than social news sites like Digg, different than meme trackers like Techmeme, different than social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and different than specialized search engines like Google News.

Taking full text from publishers without permission (or even any communication or acknowledgement) and building a platform and community around it hurts publishers in several ways, even if that was not the intent.

* Publishers lose control over their audience – Yes, I understand in our new distributed age this is going to happen in part. But think about it: when a story is posted to Digg, submitted to del.icio.us, and so on, the idea is always to have a link and description text “tease” people back to the original story. It’s all promotion for the original story and the source website in essence. What Shyftr does is wrong as it removes any need at all to go anywhere except for Shyftr

* Publishers have no opportunity to engage the audience – If a publisher doesn’t know people are commenting on his/her work, it’s a huge disservice to both the writer and to readers. Most bloggers write with the intent to answer questions from commenters, moderate follow-up discussions, and pull future ideas for stories out of the comments. The way that Shyftr is set up does not allow this to happen.

* The difference between Shyftr and full text blog RSS feeds – But wait, you plead. Publishers already “give away” their content via full text RSS feeds. Doesn’t that break your core argument? Not really, I’d answer (throwing in a solicitous sir a la Paul Giamatti playing John Adams) because an RSS feed still has elements of control. Publishers can advertise on their RSS feed for one, readers can click back to the original story to comment, and importantly publishers can track RSS feed subscribers and count those numbers against their overall “reach” in the blogosphere and on the Internet.

Tony Hung seems to agree, writing: “I think there is a moral and ethical obligation to obtain content from the content owners about reproducing feeds in their entirety.” And Mathew Ingram sums up the big picture well as he so often does: “I think RSS gives people the right to read your content — but not to build a business around it.”

I’ve been obsessing over Twitter the last few weeks, and I left off yesterday’s piece with the question: has Twitter become the new RSS reader?

For me, Twitter has of late become a faster and easier and more accessible way to let the news “come to me.” Churning through endless RSS feeds – spools of new product announcements from the likes of TechCrunch and Mashable, for instance – can at times be a chore, leeching away the excitement of discovery that leads me (and you) to hit the interwebs in the first place seeking out new treasure chests in the first place.

As an experiment, I took note of some of the interesting stories that I found among the Twitter folk that I follow over a 12 hour or so period. Here it is:

* The $10 billion state bond for high-speed trains — good for Silicon Valley, good for California?
* Twitterholics Blog
* Wondering why I write less these days?
* Hell Hath Frozen Over
* 10 Signs that You’re Addicted to Twitter
* The Truth According to Wikipedia
* I’m evolving, constantly evolving.
* Iraq In Charts
* 5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter

This is a list of stories that I would not have found in my RSS reader, at least not in full. I enjoyed reading the stories on this list, perhaps partly because it had that sense of discovery about it. People on Twitter chose to share these stories with me and many others, and in that way I suppose it felt good to be part of that ongoing conversation.

Not surprisingly, several of the stories are Twitter-centric. That might be due to the fact that as I mentioned I’m in a Twitter-obsessed phase and obviously related to the fact that people on Twitter like nothing better than talking about Twitter!

What do y’all Twitter-obsessed masses think? How has your use of Twitter related to your time spent digging through your RSS reader?

A piece on Mapping the Web called Why I Stopped Reading TechCrunch and Mashable led me to consider my own take on the top tier, high volume blog publishers and how I’m moderating my own information-intake of late.

To put it more bluntly, I know I’m not alone in being terrified of my RSS reader at times. Oh man, I have 1,400 unread stories? Not an uncommon thought. TechCrunch and Mashable are great places to catch up on the newest product releases, start-up doings, and other inside the social media and tech beltway kinds of stories, but keeping up with them can be a nearly full-time endeavor.

I’ve been using my RSS reader more selectively of late, as a place to browse around when I have the time rather than looking at it as a mountain must be climbed everyday. My day-to-day strategy is to use Techmeme and Twitter as the places where I can quickly get caught up on what’s going on in the tech and webby world while still allowing my community to provide me with the latest news, insider gossip and tips, and all the other juicy stuff that gets an online media cultist up in the morning.

There used to be a saying that if you simply read all of the stories published to The New York Times front page everyday, you’d have a pretty solid understanding of what was going on in the world. I think that you could do worse than scanning all of the headlines on Techmeme a few times a day for understanding what’s going on in tech and online media.

Having that basic understanding, Twitter can then be a place to get the really good stuff, quickly and easily. The key is to set up your Twitter profile to follow those people who are going to deliver the good stuff, which can take some time but I have found to be rather fun.

In fact, my thinking in recent days has become somewhat radical. When I find a new blog that I really like – such as yesterday when Louis Gray wrote about Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren’t (I was kindly included on this list, thank you Louis!) – I considered if it would be more beneficial to me to follow the Twitter profiles of the bloggers Louis wrote about rather than add their RSS feeds.

Has Twitter become the new RSS reader?

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly battling information overload and time crunch crises. RSS is a simply amazing way to automatically pull stories and information to you without needing to go out and find it each day.

However, I realized recently that I felt a bit buried by the number of feeds that I had to dig through. I must admit that I had been swayed by tech-geek boasts of reading thousands of feeds everyday (how do people do this – are they speed blog readers?). Here I was, with a little over a hundred feeds, and I felt overwhelmed to keep my unread items under 1,000 or 2,000 posts.

I decided I needed to give myself an RSS intervention and trim things down a bit. Over the last week or so, I pruned down to around the 50 mark and now feel a lot happier about firing up Bloglines (I know that many people think that Google Reader is much better, and I may well switch over at some point), my RSS reader.

The key is to try to find the right mix that meets your needs. For me, I realized that I could still get a great take on breaking and interesting stories bubbling out of the mainstream media and the blogosphere by being strategic with RSS. For example, if you read TechCrunch and Mashable “cover to cover” you get a pretty darned good feel for what’s going on in web 2.0, new web products, start ups, and web communities. I then rely on some of my old time faves such as Mathew Ingram and Tony Hung for entertaining and original analysis of all things webby. I also enjoy doing “surgical strikes” into the bowels (so to speak!) of enormous online media sources to pull out information that I’m interested in. For example, BBC News has a great technology feed, and I find a lot of useful fodder for OMC stories from Reuter’s Internet News feed.

Of course, there are times when I want to dive in deeper to find stories from new voices and perspectives, or to simply get a sense of what’s going on in the great galactic sea of the blogosphere and the wider Internets. Robert Scoble, as voracious an RSS reader as they come, offers a feed that displays shared items from his own Google Reader. Therefore, I always have a few hundred stories to peruse that have already been filtered by someone who has dug through thousands of feeds already!

Finally, you need to leave room for the fun stuff. TV Squad is my quick fix of television news and reviews, Valleywag is a fun burst of techie gossip, and I was finally – after about two full years of trying – able to successfully add Mike Lupica’s (just about the best sports writer in the country) New York Daily News column.

How do y’all deploy your RSS feeds?

Everyone knows that your phone is now a video camera, that your TV and computer are melding together, and that your dog is really more robot than mammal these days.

Okay, one of those might be not so much. But what does feel like science fiction made real is that you can now access Google Reader with your Nintendo Wii gaming platform. So in between tennis and Zelda sessions you can rest your Wii elbow and catch up on your RSS feeds.

On a serious note, it’s extraordinary that the computer may see serious competition in the near term as a platform for accessing the Internet. And meanwhile there seems to be a serious drive to produce remarkably cheap laptops, as low as $10 in fact if Indian manufacturers are successful.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to checking out my cereal box-based comic book reader.

Update: A kid talks about the wonders of the Wii browser.

I’ve written a lot about how much I dig “social networking site for bloggers” MyBlogLog, and speculated more recently that it may be losing its buzz.

The best part about MyBlogLog – far and away – is its widget, which allows you to see MyBlogLog members who have visited your site. You get to see their profile picture (or avatar, or whatever little colorful oddity they’ve chosen to represent themselves with) and their MBL username. Clicking on either takes you to their profile page on MBL, where you can read their bio, leave them a private or public message, and see what site or sites they author and visit them.

This core functionality is extraordinarily powerful. As a blogger it gives me tools to see what other bloggers who visit my site are up to, and contact them if I wish.

In terms of the MyBlogLog site itself, there are other features that are available, but I don’t personally find them all that useful. While I’ve praised MBL in the past for their stripped down and simple social networking model, I increasingly wish of late that I could do more with the on-site features that are available.

I’ll drop a caveat in here before I move on with my critique: there’s no doubt that MBL is still undergoing a major revamping because of its acquisition by Yahoo! (and in fact it was just announced that MBL co-founder Scott Rafer is moving on from the company). That said, here’s what I’d like to see happen:

* Friending: Right now, you can add friends, but there’s nothing to be done with them after you add them beyond having a stored collection of profiles. If I could organize them in ways that are of interest to me (sports bloggers, political bloggers, web 2.0 bloggers, that kind of thing) that would be more useful.

* Communities: This feature is about the most useless on MBL right now, but it has the potential to be great. You can add a website (which exist on MBL as a separate kind of “groups” profile) as a community, and again this simply exists as a way to see all the sites you’ve added as communities. You can post messages on the communities page, but that’s about it. Communities pages desperately need to be able to post a recent stories feed at the least, and then move on to adding features that empower its audience.

* RSS: The number one way to add value to MBL, in my view, is to add recent story feeds across the board, on both profile and community pages. Therefore every time I visit a new page on MBL, I can quickly get a sense of what the profile owner is interested in (which of course quickly tells you whether or not you want to invest more time in sticking around). Further, I’d love to be able to access the RSS feed right from the MBL page so that I can add sites that I’m interested in to my RSS reader.

* Direct communication: It’s nice that you can send people private messages, but it would be simply fantastic if MBL allowed you to create custom bulletin or newsletters. For example, there should be something like a “Get the latest news and information about Online Media Cultist, click here!” button on the OMC community page. Then, I could fire out news and notes about all OMC-related doings to the people on this list. Trust me, once people sign up for such a service, these “acquired customers” are extraordinarily valuable to bloggers.

* Add social bookmarking features: Bloggers who sign up for MBL are natural self-promoters. Along with recent story feeds, add the ability to submit and vote for stories on such places as Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Newsvine, or whatever people want.

* Metrics: MBL does provide stats on site traffic, but I don’t find it that useful. Site Meter works best for me because it tracks hourly, daily, and monthly traffic in real time. Perhaps if MBL provided much richer metrics features I would take interest, but this doesn’t seem to tie into the site’s core mission: allowing bloggers to self-promote and networking with one another.

I really do love MyBlogLog. I just wish there was more for me to do once I click over to the site from Online Media Cultist’s MBL widget.