Archive for the ‘Blogs/Sites’ Category
The state of the SA blogosphere May 5th, 2008
I just read a post Arthur Goldstuck published to Tech Leader (Mail & Guardian’s latest group blog and companion to the very successful Thought Leader blog) about how the SA blogosphere is beginning to mature.
The numbers are pretty revealing. In December 2006 there were roughly 4 941 South African blogs. A year later there were 26 179 although of those, only 3 789 blogs were active. These numbers are pretty insignificant in the context of the global blogosphere (Technorati is presently tracking around 112.8 million blogs) but the growth rate is still pretty impressive. The explanation of what active blogs are compared to the total number of blogs is worth repeating:
The total number of blogs represents the extent to which blogging captured the imagination of aspirant bloggers. Active blogs, on the other hand, are a barometer of the commitment of bloggers. This indicates that, despite many blogs being deleted and many bloggers going back to their day jobs, commitment to blogging is still growing at a rapid pace.
Of course the number of active blogs is not terribly impressive if no-one is reading them. This is not the case in South Africa. According to Goldstuck, the average monthly page views for 2007 was around 5 226 million page views a month. In January 2008 alone, there were roughly double this number of page views - 10 448 million page views. That is a lot of people reading blogs and proof that blogs are not just a fad. I would like to know how significant these numbers are in the context of Internet usage in South Africa generally. That could be pretty interesting. Arthur?
Technorati Tags:
blog, south africa, blogosphere, statistics, arthur goldstuck, tech leader
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Our blogs | Comments (0)
On a personal note … March 31st, 2008
After much gnashing of teeth, various installs and domains, my personal blog has a new home.
I managed to register a couple domains I have been after for a little while now and have (once again) moved my blog. Please change your bookmarks for my personal blog to:
pauljacobson.org
The feed has already been re-routed so you don’t need to make any changes if you have subscribed to the following feed:
feeds.feedburner.com/pauljacobson
I am not going to comment on my compulsion to keep shifting things around - it has become one of those things you just shake your head about. Anyway, I prefer this domain anyway. It creates a nice clean split between my work and personal sites.
Technorati Tags:
paul jacobson, pauljacobson.org, changing bookmarks
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Our blogs | Comments (0)
TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur miss the point with FriendFeed March 30th, 2008
I noticed John McCrea’s post about this meme known as the “centralised / centralized me (depending on your language preference)” meme which has started to do the rounds on the some of the more popular blogs, like TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur’s blog.
Much of the focus is on FriendFeed and given that FriendFeed seems to be the new Twitter these days, this is hardly surprising but as I pointed out a little while ago, this idea of you as the focal point and origin of your many content streams is hardly new.
Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur really seem to be missing the point here with FriendFeed. Arrington has the following concern:
But there’s something just a little weird about FriendFeed, some people are starting to mumble. It’s an aggregated “me” but it sits in a centralized site (in fact, centralization is kind of the point). FriendFeed is a (and hopes to become “the”) Centralized Me. It’s a data silo. True, it’s a friendly data silo, with APIs and RSS feeds to move some of the data around, but it’s ultimately housed on their servers, and always will be.
Le Meur pitches in with this concern:
The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it’s not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody (except the software and host, TypePad of course, needless to say).
The value in FriendFeed is not as a centralised “data silo” but as one of many possible channels for content. Sure once you run all of your content feeds into FriendFeed then those content streams are centralised on one server but FriendFeed is merely one of the latest such aggregators to have surfaced. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, don’t forget about Jaiku, Tumblr, Plaxo Pulse and even the dubious Facebook (not to mention an even more recent entrant, Social Thing!). Each of these services can perform a similar function: aggregating and streaming your multiple streams of content, whether they be blog posts, images, videos or interesting feed items. If you make use of a few of these services as distinct channels of your content then the focal point shifts from these services back to you as the originator of the content.
FriendFeed becomes one channel out of many, each of which aggregates the content you posted to the source service (for example, Flickr, Vimeo and your blog). Your content is not centralised on FriendFeed, FriendFeed is one distribution channel for that content. The idea of a data silo just doesn’t fit with this model. Sure you don’t exactly own your FriendFeed page the way you own/control a page you set up on your own server or a hosted service but how important is that model of ownership when you remain the owner of your content and can distribute it on any similar lifestreaming service?
The “centralised me” is exactly that. I am the focal point, the centre of my lifestreaming experience on the Web. FriendFeed is just one of half a dozen vehicles I could use at any time and perhaps even use at the same time.
Technorati Tags:
lifestream, lifestreaming, centralized me, arrington, le meur, missing the point
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming | Comments (2)
Commenting for microblogs March 21st, 2008
One of the issues with some microblogging services is that you can’t really comment meaningfully on posts. Meaningful comments, to me, are comments which are linked to the source post and which can be viewed with the source post (so the ‘@’ convention in Twitter isn’t a meaningful commenting method as far as I am concerned - it is just too easy to miss out on responses and too time consuming to try draw them all together into a coherent comment thread).
A pretty good example of this is Tumblr which doesn’t allow for comments at all. That being said people are increasingly running their microblogging feeds into lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed which do have commenting functionality for incoming feed items. What seems to be missing is some way to link to a series of comments on a source post in, say, Tumblr which can be found in, say, FriendFeed. It seems to me that we need some sort of add-on (like the “Share This” plugin in WordPress) that can either be added to microblog templates or overlaid in a similar way CoComment can be applied to commenting forms on blogs.
Using this sort of add-on, people can read a post, click on an icon of some kind (or activate a bookmarklet) and link to the lifestreaming service of their choice to leave a comment which can then be made visible to the next person who visits the post. Perhaps this could be a sort of CoComment meets StumbleUpon type service?
Heck, this could even be applied to service that have commenting options available. The point is to make those commenting features of lifestreaming services more useful and to focus more attention on a lifestream than on the source content.
Technorati Tags:
lifestream, lifestreaming, comments, commenting, tumblr
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Infrastructure, Lifestreaming, Tools | Comments (0)
Thoughts on FriendFeed and lifestreaming March 15th, 2008
ReadWriteWeb has a post comparing FriendFeed to a competitor still in private beta, SocialThing! (I don’t think it is really a comparison post because there is very little information about SocialThing!). I signed up for FriendFeed a week or two ago and it is a great lifestreaming service and does a couple things that appeal to me. For one thing there is a commenting feature which makes it possible to comment more meaningfully on items that may not have commenting features built in natively (a good example is Tumblr which lacks a commenting feature or even services like del.icio.us which are perhaps less about discussion and more about one way sharing). One benefit of something like FriendFeed which I think I have started taking for granted is the following:
FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends’ content even if you don’t have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they’ve elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they’re a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It’s in this feature that its real power lies.
With all the excitement about FriendFeed and the lifestreaming’s sudden uptake, it is important to bear in mind that lifestreaming has been around for at least a year or so in the form of services like Jaiku and, more recently, Plaxo Pulse (there are ongoing upgrades and improvements to Pulse so be sure to check back there often if you use the service and consider signing up if you don’t already).
I’ve been talking about lifestreaming for a while now and there seems to be a looming tension between content centralised on a single site (whether that be a blog, wiki or personalised/niche social network) and content that is distributed across a number of lifestreaming services. I have had most of my content streaming into Jaiku, Pulse and FriendFeed for a while now and I am curious to see whether the distributed model gains traction and I will start receiving comments on my comment in those lifestreaming services rather than on the source services? Certainly with content sources like my tumblelog, that is pretty much the only way to comment on posts (at least until Tumblr adds commenting).
If this shift does happen then we will probably see new advertising models emerge with the drop in page views and attention paid to the source sites generally. I am not sure how you would monetise a lifestream being run through a 3rd party service. Perhaps a revenue share option?
Another issue which I want to explore further is content licensing on lifestreaming services. There doesn’t seem to be much attention given to this at the moment but it is an important issue for people who, like me, license their content under something like a Creative Commons license. The services’ own terms regarding how content is to be licensed on their site will be important because they may seek to override a user’s own content licensing preferences. In fact, this will be an issue regardless of whether users retain all rights under copyright or they license their content under specific licenses. Either way, I’d like to see these services facilitate these licensing options.
I see lifestreaming becoming more prominent as services like FriendFeed become more popular and as that happens, it will be pretty interesting to see how advertising models shift and how people manage their content in this context.
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, jaiku, lifestream, pulse, lifestreaming, socialthing, readwriteweb, advertising models, page views
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, Sharing | Comments (2)
Springleap is sprung … March 13th, 2008
Eric Edelstein asked me to take a look at an exciting new project he is involved in called springleap. I’m a little new to springleap so I got in touch with Eric and his partner, Eran Eyal, to chat about springleap on Skype. Here is the transcript of our chat:
And now for the interview. You will note that it has been edited down a little but just to remove some fluff (largely my own). The interview is pretty long so I have shifted some of the conversation to an extended section (apologies).
2008-03-13
Paul Jacobson:
17:05:41
Ok, baby with mom, let’s chat about Springleap
17:05:53
fantastic
17:06:01
what would you like to know Paul?
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:35
Everything
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:44
what is Springleap, where did the idea come from?
17:07:22
Well - Springleap is an empowerment initiative for South Africa
Paul Jacobson:
17:07:57
ok, sounds broad …
17:08:26
ranging from the cotton manufacturing trade, through the garment manufacturing industry to the retailers and all the amazing talented artists who deserve a platform for exposure
Paul Jacobson:
17:09:08
so basically bringing clothing and local artists together?
17:09:31
Eric and I opened the doors to eSquared Fashion 2 years ago and our business model was to scour the world for amazing artists producing original desings on 100% cotton
17:09:41
specifically with an emphasis on Asia.
Paul Jacobson:
17:10:09
Yeah, Eric mentioned it to me when I met him last year
17:10:19
TO answer your question Paul - yes : in a way that has never been done before.
17:10:26
Basically..
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Design, People, Sharing | Comments (2)
Blueworld revamp March 6th, 2008
I never thought I would see myself writing this (or even saying this) but I felt like an old fart wandering around Blueworld the last day or so. Charl asked me to take a look around after an update so I created an account (easy enough) and started poking around.
The first thing that strikes me is that Blueworld is a bit of a mashup of MySpace, Facebook and JHBLive (there is even an hint of Orkut). It is a social networking site that allows you to create a personal profile, check out events and just generally what your friends have been up to. Profiles have the usual categories of information about your likes, your specifications and your current mood. I battled a bit uploading a photo to my profile and eventually gave up on that, moving on to other things.
Blueworld gives users the option of uploading photos and videos and publishing blog posts on the site. Much of the content comes with Muti-style voting so you can either vote “Love it” or “Hate it” and presumably affect that piece of content’s ranking on the page concerned.
Tags are a useful way to just mooch around and find stuff and if you do find something you want to share you have the option of sharing with the usual sites (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us etc). Blueworld also has its own internal bookmarking function. The groups are very similar to Facebook groups.
A really nice feature is the ability to drag and drop elements on your profile page around so you can make your photos, videos or some other aspect of your profile more prominent.
Although Blueworld has members who are a bit older, the site seems better suited to people in their late teens and early 20s. I am certainly not the best demographic for the site (getting older and I can’t handle so much excitement 
). If I were 10 years younger I could see myself spending a fair amount of time on the site although there would be a tension between Blueworld and Facebook for me. It would be interesting to know how many Blueworld users also use Facebook and which of the two services are used more. Blueworld has an advantage in that it is local and more relevant to what people are presumably doing here. Facebook is great as a connector but lacks that local feel.
There isn’t anything unique to Blueworld in terms of functionality and features but what makes this site work are its local flavour and the collection of tools and features like content sharing, bookmarking, social options and more. In a way it is similar in concept to the Zoopy site (albeit with far more functionality). Although their focuses are different, both sites are seeking to appeal to a local audience who want a South African site for their social interaction. You can do pretty much what you want to do on Blueworld and with a mobile element (which I haven’t really explored all that much but seems to be an sms service), Blueworld is a really funky site. I think there should be a mobile site of some sort (unless I missed it) given that the people likely to be using Blueworld spend most of their lives on their mobile phones. That is a feature that could take the site far beyond the Web site itself and out there into the general population.
Technorati Tags:
blueworld, review, south africa, social networking, social media
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Fun, Web 2.0 | Comments (3)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
Technorati Tags:
blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)
Ok, back … again (aka How we migrated from Drupal to WordPress) January 25th, 2008
Ok, we are back in business and thanks to the very talented and helpful Andrew Glanville, we are now running on WordPress. Andrew very kindly contacted me after my tweet yesterday lamenting my recent crippling of our Drupal blog.
Andrew promptly took our database and waved his magic wand over it. He told me that behind the scenes he had to put together “some horrible once-off spaghetti code to handle the migration cleanly” (I am sure that is a technical thing) when he discovered that WordPress has a different database structure to the structure used in other posts describing how to migrate from Drupal to WordPress. The end result is the pretty clean structure you see before you (if you are on the site).
Please visit his blog and throw lots of money his way.
I want to thank Andrew a lot for stepping in and helping out here. I have been looking for a way to migrate and he did it for me. I promise not to dick around with my database for at least 6 months!! Really!
I am just rebuilding the sidebar of the blog so you’ll see a couple changes in the next few days.
Technorati Tags:
blog, chilibean, wordpress, andrew glanville
Posted in Blogs/Sites, People | Comments (4)