While I was out in Portland last week, I had a chance to re-connect with Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang. I had previously met them both on past trips out to the Bay Area. Brian is a nomad-in-training, much like myself (still aspiring to the true zen my cohort Stowe has achieved).

Brian had some interesting news about his future - which he revealed only after peeling away at the layers that are SocialRoots. Jeremiah has a wonderful mission as well and it was good to hear again.

The ironic thing - I actually missed working around the mic from the Beercasting days. Sometimes I wish I had the time to podcast more often. Usually, though, that’s followed by sweeping pains as I reconsider everything else I haven’t quite yet finished.

More over at the guy’s blogs: Brian, Jeremiah.

This weekend at BloggerCon, there was lots of interesting discussion. I ended the first day Dave Winer asked us what we’re all doing to change the world. When I had my chance at the mic, I noted that I’m very mindful of the leverage that other companies are creating around the things WE create. Doc dug a little deeper on my point which I quickly whipped out the “user-generated content” banner. My thought, as I’ve noted before, is that we are not users, we’re Active Publishers - reacting to an new environment of swift media.

My main point, however, is that when someone asks us to create something for them and doesn’t pay us, or worst, patronizes us with tokens of their sincerity, that we’re being put in the vice grip and leveraged into larger markets and networks that we can’t easily see from our seats in the nosebleed section.

Today, ShopWiki made a very interesting gesture towards our community:

ShopWiki, an incredibly innovative online shopping community, will announce today another step to expand their service’s offerings. The company will pay users $50 per video for the first 500 submitted product review videos selected for inclusion on the site - that’s $25k total. This site is nuts already and paying people to add video reviews is going to take it over the top in terms of usefulness. Or maybe it’s just really cool. I’m not Mr. Online-shopping by a long shot and even I think ShopWiki is loads of fun to use.

TechCrunch

One interesting counter to my argument was offered by Mary Hodder of Dabble towards the end of the day. She seemed to take a position that I made too sweeping a generalization with regards to those using that term. Her point being that she views herself as a User - referencing her prior role in usability. I went to her afterwards to clear the air a bit - and that conversation is important.

First, I noted that I have no problem with any company that recognizes the value in what they’re asking for and creates a pathway for rewarding the participants. There’s not as many as there should be yet, but there’s quite a bit of activity in this arena and more en route. We’ll never have equal footing if we don’t continue to assert our value.

Second, I still reject the term User-Generated except in the context that I am explicitly requested to create it - at which point I am a user of a system designed to collect something from me. On the other hand, while I surely am -using- Wordpress to make this blog, I am certainly not a user of SocialTwister - I am the publisher, editor, and janitor. Mary’s vantage point that, as a usability person, everyone’s a user simply isn’t sufficient for the range of participating and interaction we have in the world today.

Nothing like winding down a whirlwind trip to San Francisco with a blinking exclamation point, huh?

[full disclosure: I am the CEO of a startup dedicated to getting us all paid for our creativity and ability or to go broke trying]

technorati tags:socialroots, bloggerconiv, mary+hodder, napsterization, dabble, monetization, socialmedia, blogging, videoblogging, podcasting, activepublishing, crowdsourcing

The BloggerCon IV schedule has been announced. There are some interesting topics listed, but one caught my eye: How to Make Money led by John Palfrey. He’s written his introductory post which is worth a read. In it he states:

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

…

I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?�

Source: John Palfrey, “The ‘How to Make Money” Session at Bloggercon”

Naturally, I’m planning to attend this session. If anyone’s tried to figure out how to make money from blogging it’s certainly me - I’m building an entire company that helps bloggers make money.

At the same time, though, I’m somewhat conflicted. I seem to recall some time ago, at a previous BloggerCon, that Dave Winer openly told someone (Chris Nolan I believe), that she didn’t want to make money from her blog, she wanted to make it from the various things that come from having a blog (consulting, gigs, jobs - hey, aren’t those all the same?).  But I could be wrong.

It also strikes me as odd that, considering there are people trying to develop solutions in this arena (many more than just me)  that their knowledge and a dialogue with those audiences might be extremely relevent.  Aren’t the folks that go to BloggerCon largely the people at the top of the game (present company excluded) or otherwise already monetizing in some way?

Just a bit confusing - but I’m glad to see it regardless.

Quick ping to everyone reading for some help with a MT installation.  I need to put together a quick form that will let us utilize the MT API on the server side.  I don’t imagine this to be very difficult if you’ve worked with MT previously.

Add your resume to the comments or send it directly to greg AT socialroots DOT com.  This position needs to be filled immediately.

My good friend Stowe has ventured out on his own and started up a solo blog of his own, /Message. As many readers of this site know, Stowe also writes on GetReal. As he puts it:

The frank reality is that I was getting that cobwebby feeling, the one I seem to get every 18 months or so, when what once was fresh and exciting starts to seem old and stale. Meanwhile, I was interested in the increasing stream of new startups coming my way, and alternate writing opportunities. My head was elsewhere, so stepping aside seemed like the right thing to do all around.

I also I wanted to experiment with other approaches to blogging — not manifested yet, here at /Message, but changes will be coming in that regard.

At any rate, that is why /Message is here, and what I am up to. Stay tuned!

/Message, “”

Well, I guess I haven’t been paying much attention to this end of the blogging business, but it seems there’s a growing trend of Blog to Flip going on. The premise is simple: start a blog, generate some content (and maybe revenue), then sell it off to the highest bidder. Hmm. I don’t know.

If you’d like to experience both sides of the coin, here’s two parties writing about the sale from both the buyer’s and seller’s side:

• Buying Blogs: The Blog Buying Checklist
• Flipping blogs

Considering my post yesterday on the Third Voice, this is something worth mentioning. I don’t personally think I would recommend this route to all but the rarest of clients. In a lot of ways, the notion of buying a blog brings back memories from philosophy class about the mind and soul - can one exist without the other? Does one live once the body dies? As somone who’s blogged for some time now, I can’t imagine this site being of much use or value without me here anymore - certainly, I don’t think it would be the same thing.

Stowe raises an interesting discussion today regarding the new Technorati Kitcken, or as Michael Arrington refers to it, “where Technorati is putting it’s not-fully-baked beta products”.

Imagine the opportunity: Technorati has the world’s largest tagspace, and all of a sudden all those hot tags — that we have lovingly created for them — now become communities where people come to exchange views and learn. I predict that T’rati will start bringing more social tools into the mix: why not let people comment directly in the tagspace, for example?

Source: GetReal, “Technorati Explore: The Tagspace As The Future of Media”

It’s an intriguing question when you think about it - and really quite obvious. More than a year ago, I was working with the Pokkari crew, makers of blip.tv, and we approached this very same problem with the Relevanta aggregator. Relevanta was a great system that aggregated posts from a growing collection of blog entries, added in a reputation engine, and centralized a community around an area of focus. It was certainly “new” back then, but it seems like it’s starting to get that “new new” luster once again.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with tagging and its relationship to both navigation and community development. It’s still surprising just how much potential is not tapped and how many problems still need addressing in major way before we can leap to the next plateau. I’m still confident we’re nearing a new wave. I can hear the Yahoo!s already ;)

We’ve seen the explosion of blogging into all facets of life. It seems that nowadays we can expect our blog served cold and hot, depending on the engine of your choice. As this content continues to bloom, many are trying to better understand it. You see, we put everyting and anything into our blogs - from photos to reminders to articles and everything in between. Of course, this is all potentially a huge database of different types of information - if it only had structure.

That’s right, we aren’t very good at actually making our information consistent. Each island, what we call a blog, develops its own standard and method for publishing this data right now. Some groups have set out to scour the web for that data and make sense of it - a valiant effort to say the least, but some future efforts may largely undo the necessity.

What are those efforts? Well, there’s two primary camps right now. Microformats, advocated by Technorati, provide a XHTML-based approach to identifying meaningful data. Microformats rely on convention over configuration - a phrase I’m borrowing from my Rails bretheren. Microformats establish a standard convention for how to map and model your information and publicize that for all to use. Specialty tools, currently in the form of Javascript extensions, are able to automatically extract this information based on the pattern.

The other entrant in this movement, is Structured Blogging, from the fine folks at PubSub. Structured Blogging tends to work from the other end of the spectrum, advocating the extension of publishing tools to generate “better” content. Right now, Structured Blogging is taking the plug-in approach and working to create plug-ins for the leading blog tools that will assist the user in creating structured blog content.

Of course, I was talking about this more than a year ago. I ran a series of posts about Blog Entry Archetypes. I definitely can appreciate where both groups are coming from.

However, for me, these two camps are really different sides of the same coin. The end result of Structured Blogging is XML, so why not XHTML? If we go with XHTML, we end up with Microformats. Realistically, why wouldn’t we present the data using a microformat, when available?

The same goes true in the reverse. No one wants to remmber the standard. No one wants to really write XHTML if they can just fill out a form (well most sane people don’t). Tantek demostrated the conversion process for me at Gnomedex earlier this year - it was straightforward (especially for him). But why bother? There are tools that can assist me in the creation process and Structured Blogging seems to be advocating that route.

Stowe has alluded to potential business motivations tht might be driving the various approaches. I think he’s certainly onto something. But in the end, both parties say they’re open - and I believe them. In the end, they want data that’s parseable - what red-blooded geek doesn’t? Arguing over what’s more important, the hammer or the chisel - well, that seems pointless.

In the end we’re all just users and we want to be as lazy a s possible but still expect the world ;)

I’ve known Lee LeFever for about a year now in person. He’s truly a great guy to know and he’s also quite talented at this social stuff ;) Lee’s been planning a trip around the world for 2006 and he’s launched an interesting social experiment in the process.

The World Is Not Flat serves as not only a media center for their future trip but also a gathering spot for world travellers with lots of experiences to share with these two voyagers. Here’s a blip from the about page:

To get the most out of TwinF, notice that there are two basic things happening here:

• We’re blogging the trip. The front page of the site has “Our Dispatches” which are entries we write about the trip. We are the only authors of the dispatches and they are browsable via Global Map and Keywords.
• We’re asking members to share their experiences. We call these “Member Travel Experiences” and they are entries written by the members and organized by Country Pages. Our hope is that these first-hand experiences will help us (and others) have a better trip.

If you’ve got some great recommendations, I’d point you in their direction so you can share in the process. What’s that saying, oh yeah, Knowledge is Power - share it.

I’m currently sitting in the Northern Voice keynote being given by Tim Bray. He asked an interesting question of the crowd: “Why do you blog?”.

Since I had the QuitFiltering.com engine already setup, I’ve made a new list to check out.

Give it a try. It will be moved to whyblog.quitfiltering.com soon.