Another sighting has been made of the Real-Time Convergence Train. MessageCast, a company that touts itself as “pioneering ways to dramatically improve electronic messaging and broadcast communication while eliminating SPAM”, is preparing to released their line of “Update-based” software.

These new products will provide a bridge between online content (most specifically blogging) and real-time media (IM, SMS). As a recent News.com article notes:

This week, Internet marketing services developer MessageCast said it plans to release a test version of an e-mail alert tool aimed at bloggers that taps into Microsoft’s MSN Messenger network. The service immediately notifies readers of new postings via instant messenger, e-mail or, on mobile phones, SMS.

“We’re giving people an easy on-ramp to the real-time network,” said MessageCast CEO Royal Farros. He added that the company is still negotiating with Yahoo and America Online to tap into their systems. “This offers a more effective way to reach readers than e-mail.”

Source: News.com, “”

For now, it seems that only MSN users will be able to receive these notifications. However, there are some interesting implications/possibilities. One use that seems to spring to mind is an IM-based RSS aggregator/messenger. The notion of sending IM commands to the RSS agent. Ideally, this would be a method for tracking comments on a blog. Currently, there are too few applications that provide comment subscriptions, complicating the matter of following ensuing dialogue. Additionally, responses to the alerts could be coaxed to directly publish responses, much the way IM-Blog gateways work currently.

IM is, in many ways, is more convenient that say E-mail or an RSS Aggregator to configure, not to mention leaps and bounds ahead of most web-based applications. It is this always-on, always-present simplicity that will drive development and convergence in this direction.

One of the side projects I have been working on here is to loosely categorize the blogosphere to get a deeper understanding of how blogs are used and the goals they accomplish.

A few months ago I first examined the different blog entry archetypes, templates that typify the forms used by bloggers as they create their content. Over the next couple of weeks, I will begin to look briefly at the next level up in the blogging hierarchy, the blog itself.

A Blog Archetype is, in short, describes the composition of a blog as a whole. Two primary characteristics can be used when determining a blog’s archetype:

• Editorial Goal - Although not always obvious, clearly there are goals, some unspoken, that motivate the blogger to commit to the development and upkeep of a blog.

• Entry Composition - Editorial goals are brought to life via the blog entries themselves. The authors selection from one of the many Blog Entry Archetypes provides a framework for the narrative.

The Blog Archetypes fall, roughly, into three distinct categories, business, personal, and social. Naturally there is overlap between these different uses and hopefully some of the motivations will be made clear as they are discussed.

A roadmap for the archetypes should be available in the next few days.

Garret French summarized the blogging world as described by Rick Bruner (via pc4media) As the article describes, there are 4 types, what I have coined the Blog Archetypes., that are the most successful:

1. Thought Leadership Blog. The though leadership blog allows the blogger to distinguish himself or herself as being a well-informed industry professional. One good example is Alan Meckler’s Weblog.

2. Customer Relations Blog. The customer relations blog engages with customers. For example, Macromedia’s weblog offers product updates from Macromedia product managers.

3. Peer Marketing Blog. Peer marketing blogs are typically ways for marketers to get the word out about their products. Everybody’s favorite doll Barbie is an example of a peer marketing blog.

4. Media Relations Blog. The media relations blog is a great way to augment a press section. Geared towards the journalist audience, media relations blogs contain press releases while still maintaining a personalized feel.

Source: webpronews.com, “Blogs Mean Better Listings On Google”

The role of gender in any cultural movement always raises important issues regarding how we interpret and dissect information, power, and the connections between. Over the past few weeks I have been keeping track of a few different pointers that start to look at different angles of this subject.

(more…)

You know things are rumbling when the edge technologies get folded inward and migrate towards the core. Yet another sign of the growing presence of RSS and those “little orange icons” has been release, this time by The New York Times.

In a recent article, they extol the virtues:

Called R.S.S. (the initials are variously said to stand for Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication and more obscure formulations), this increasingly popular online tool turns a morass of disparate information sources into an automatically generated and neatly organized index of the latest articles and postings.

[…]

R.S.S. may become an invaluable Web tool, but at the moment there are still a few kinks to work out. To add R.S.S. channels, for example, you have to look at Web sites for orange buttons labeled R.S.S. or XML. After you click on the button, you usually have to cut and paste the address of the feed into the reader software. Some reader programs can grab some feeds automatically, but it’s hit or miss. Furthermore, finding new R.S.S. sources takes time.

The best approach is to visit special sites that list R.S.S. syndicators. The largest ones include Synidic8.com (www.syndic8.com), which has an extensive listing of R.S.S. blogs; Newsisfree (www.newsisfree.com), which also creates its own R.S.S. feeds from various sites; and Moreover (www .moreover.com), an R.S.S. company that has created scores of business-oriented channels.

As more sites adopt R.S.S., there is the potential for a new kind of information overload. Subscribe to enough R.S.S. feeds and you’ll quickly find yourself consuming hours reading all the headlines and summaries. On the other hand, a tool is only as good as its owner’s judgment. So if you can control yourself, you may find that R.S.S. is the best tool yet for taming the Web.

Source: NYTimes.com, “Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information”

We’ve already seen that blogging can be quite the addictive drug, especially when authors get hooked on the fix. In the blogosphere, the “addicts” are rewarded with the fix is not used
How do you engage visitors to your blog?
http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/2004/05/how_do_you_enga.html

What’s Your Post/Comment Ratio Part II?
http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/2004/06/whats_your_post.html

It seems lately that there are more and more surveys going on about the blogging world, from the types of people that are reading them on through to the types of people that create them. The folks over at BlogAds have conducted their own survey now of blog readership and published the results.

This survey has a fairly large sample, almost 18K readers were polled. The greatest fault with this survey, unfortunately, is that it was completely self-selecting, and, as a result, very biased in terms of providing a generalized report on the types of people that read blogs. As the survey notes:

To be clear, the survey’s responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. On Monday morning, I e-mailed roughly 50 of them — some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads — suggesting they link to they survey. I explained that the survey would “boost both public appreciation of blogging AND your revenues.” Some of the bloggers I wrote to (and some I didn’t) linked to the survey; some of their readers clicked; some were offended by questions written mostly for Americans; some aspiring respondents were unable to complete Surveymonkey’s sometimes buggy forms. So wield a salt shaker as you munch on this data.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Despite this lack of randomness, I think the results are still valuable though not predictive. Here’s the summary of the findings:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I’d hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

• 50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
• 47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
• 50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

Blog readers are media-mavens: 21% subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15% to the Economist, 15% to Newsweek and 14% to the Atlantic Monthly.

Source: BlogAds.com, Survey Results

Fortunately, this is a sign of things to come. As any industry begins to entrench itself into our daily lives, there comes a need to understand, rationalize , and eventually commoditize the forces at work.

For many, blogging is a way to express themselves in a manner that they have never before been afforded - regardless of audience. For others, it is a route to fame and microfortunes. Whatever the direction, there is one undeniable truth - managing a successful, current blog is a great deal of work.

Depending on the blog’s particular mix of the blog entry archetypes, the amount of effort can be casual to outright arduous. As readers, it’s often easy for us to overlook the wayfinding, research, and dedication it may take to get information down on pixels.

Today I received an interesting comment on my previous post from someone I know to be a frequent reader of the site. One of the things that was creating a small annoyance was my cross posting of entries here and on GetReal. Surprisingly (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), the reader is actually subscribed to both sites so they were being pinged twice with the same information. I definitely can see this as annoying.

As I explained in the comments, though I don’t want to alienate any of my readers, I just don’t know how large the mix is to preclude posts to both. In addition, the material I am researching and writing is not only on topic for both sites, but it also takes a great deal of time to prepare and publish. For example, the analysis of Yahoo! Messenger required not only researching Yahoo!s claims about the new features, but also installing, testing, and summarizing the important (from my point of view) aspects. It probably took more than an hour once you account for writing up the HTML, spell and grammar checking, and publishing.

It’s never easy to please everyone. Although, I guess I should be grateful that there’s even someone on the other end paying attention. It has become commonplace for blogs to be equated to conversations, though sometimes these conversations are solely with ourselves.

Coincidentally, The New York Times is running a piece in Circuits titled ”
For Some, the Blogging Never Stops”. Here’s a choice snippet from that very piece:

The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.

“I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting,” he said. “Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible.”

For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur - all the while knowing, he added, “that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself.”

When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.

Source: NYT Online, “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops”

In the immortal words of Bob Harris (Lost in Translation), “Thank you. This is hard.” And that’s all I have to say about that *wink*.

I was quite pleased to find that Peter Caputa had initiated a new little experiment titled the “Weblog Invasion Tour (WIT) and selected SocialTwister.com as one of their first targets.

The premise of WIT is to highlight, as Peter describes, Under-known blogs across the web. As he describes:

Under-known is a word [I believe] I’ve invented to describe a weblog that is excellently crafted, but isn’t known too widely. All four of these webloggers write extremely well, have lots of orignal thoughts, like to try out new things, and analyze things in interesting ways.

Source: pc4media, “The Weblog Invasion Tour (WIT) Rolls On”

Of course, this is a reflection of life under the Power Law Curve — one where newcomers are often faced with the insurmountable task of ratcheting their way through the infinitely crowded landscape. This reminds me, in many ways, of Gordon Gould’s notion of micro fame which I commented on earlier this month. I’ll also mention that, as Joi Ito recently pointed out, that the role of authority may be waning in favor of influence.

I’m certainly honored to have been selected for the initial rounds, but kudos to Peter for devising an approach that socially hacks the Power Law.

I’m happy to announce that for the next few weeks or so I will be part of the GetReal team providing news, information, and other bits of data on the ever-increasing use of real-time and social technologies.

Special thanks go out to Stowe and Hylton for the opportunity.