Being Genuine Is the Best Disclosure Of Them All

Even with the purest of intentions, people have bias, which can rise from an infinite number of sources, be they financial, personal, emotional, career-oriented, or any other. The topic of bias and disclosure flares up often in the increasingly complicated world of blogging and journalism, and as many of us both participate and cover the world in which we work, new rules are being adapted, usually with some push back by those for whom the existing set of rules worked well. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tried to step in and provide guidelines for bloggers with conflicts, asking those who received compensation for their efforts to disclose it. But even if you assume they intend to eliminate bias, they're not even close to answering for all potential bias cases. Not even my gimmicky and fun set of disclosure icons, put together at the end of 2009, can correctly anticipate every situation.

With this weekend's flareup over TechCrunch founder (and AOL employee) Mike Arrington's CrunchFund making headlines again, more lines are being drawn in the sand about what is appropriate for a man of Mike's position to do. His employees have explained they operate independently of his activities. His employer says the rules are different for his organization. His critics have called him names and penned him as having crossed the line. But this topic isn't a new one. It's just got an intriguing name behind it, someone that many of us watch, who draws attention good and bad, depending on your view, thanks to his being visible and arguably, on top, in his field.

More than three years ago (In August 2008), I wrote that "If you look hard enough, conflicts of interest are everywhere." The first topic I brought up back then was if bloggers should cover companies they invest in, and at the time, I said "Investors in a company usually know it very well, especially if it's an early-stage situation, where they will know it better than the general public. It's no secret they'll likely be more positive on the company, but if they're fair and disclose the relationship, you may learn a great deal." In this post, I also said "disclosure is needed" if bloggers joined boards, took day-job positions with a company, or participated in starting or buying a company. It's always good, at least for me, to have the body of work to point to when issues like this come up, as they do regularly. At the end of 2008, again discussing bias, I said, regarding my own preferences, "Even though I like these products, these people, and their ideas, the idea is to continue to be trusted. What liking a product doesn't do is force me to make up things that they don't do, or gloss over clear issues."

It's not my place, as a mere tech blogger and Silicon Valley marketeer, to assess the appropriateness of Mike's new fund. I am not involved, had zero knowledge of it in advance, and don't believe I am impacted by its existence. The story is interesting, and that's it. But the tumult over the discussion is really all about detecting bias and trying to divine one's intent out of their writing - to see if their words can be less trusted due to their outside interests. And that's the crux. Being genuine, transparent and truthful, despite any perceived bias, will always win. Being honest and direct and overdisclosing to the point of amusement, is always better than having to disclose after the fact.

Maybe I should disclose to you that despite never having worked for Mike (we're still talking about Mike Arrington), and having minimal contact over the years, I have never had a bad experience with him. Every experience has been good, be it in person face to face, be it in conversations on the phone, by email, or even Twitter DMs and Facebook messages. The last time I saw Mike was at a swanky Los Altos gathering where we talked briefly. He shook my hand (not something he likes to do) and said it was good to see me. We even talked a bit about Seattle and how he's writing less at TechCrunch. Mike previously invited me to TechCrunch headquarters in Palo Alto (when they were located there) and even gave me the scoop (by a few days) that he had hired MG Siegler away from VentureBeat. You might even try really hard and say that I am biased in favor of TechCrunch because I've previously worked for a company that was covered by the site (when I was working at my6sense), that TechCrunch covered my joining Google, and maybe it's in my best interests to be nice to Mike and the TechCrunch family if I ever want products I am associated with in the future to be viewed nicely. But this points out how hard it is to really determine what's in the author's head. You can't tell me why it is that I wrote something when I did, and you can't know what prompted me to do it.

Enough about Mike. He's a great firestarter for topics though, right?

At the end of last week, there was a quick story on Mashable that listed a few tips on how you could score your next job using social media. It's a pretty typical story for the site - a list style post that has a small number of things you can do to improve your life using the Internet. In the post, the author referenced my joining Google by saying, "take a tip from Louis Gray, whose demonstrated love and dedication for Google+ got him hired as a product evangelist."

With all due respect to the author, whom I don't know, his fast summary was balderdash. I didn't ever say in my post that my love and dedication for Google+ was the reason I was offered a job with Google and he didn't ask. It should be noted I underwent the same hiring process as any other candidate looking to join Google. The same 10+ interviews you have read about, and the interview process started months ago - before Google+ existed. The way I found out Google+ launched was by way of a tweet from Matt Cutts. I didn't get any early look at the product, and didn't get tipped as to when it was launching. The process for my being hired into the social team at the company was well under way before Google+ launched, and I would like to think that reasons I was hired were more tied to my body of work and job history than any excitement about the project itself. (I also haven't cleared this post with Google PR or anyone at Google, and don't plan on making that a habit)

That leads to another level of bias to discuss. After Google approached me late this Spring about possibly joining the company, I was cautious in terms of what I would say about their products or planning. I was cautious not in the perspective of making sure not to say anything that would talk them out of hiring, but in fact, the reverse. I made sure to be just as fair as I always have been, calling out issues that made sense, and praising where it made sense, so that if I were hired or not hired, readers of the blogs would not see any change in my approach. For example, in the months after our discussions began, I said it would take several days to move my music library to Google music and continued to praise Spotify. I even said in mid-July, after more than a half dozen interviews, that I thought Google+ should leverage smart algorithms to personalize the content. I also railed against people pointing their own domains to Google+ instead of their own content, saying "I am hesitant to endorse forwarding your identity to a third party domain you do not control."

But where could I have disclosed "I am currently in the interviewing process at Google"? I couldn't, of course.

Similarly, in the past, I could not disclose if a company I was working with was seeking a venture capital round, an acquisition, a partnership or any number of things where the guarantee of non-disclosure, by agreement, trumped the request for disclosure here. What's more important than seeing if you need every single potential source of bias listed out on the page, as I often do, is if the author has established a record of being truthful, genuine and open to their biases. My posts here and elsewhere are biased, and the number of potential biases that impacts my choices of what I use and what I write about is legion.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was really on to something when one of the hallmark statuses available to Facebookers was that of "It's complicated." Life is complicated. It becomes more complicated based on who you know, what you do, who you interact with, what value they provide you, what they say to you and all who impact you and so on. I am confident that even though I am working hard to impact a great project at a visible company, my body of work stands for itself and I stand for something. Bias is complicated and the best way to classify bias is if you can find a direct link to an action that delivers another action which would not have happened without the first. You can try all day to divine the intent of the source, but you can't read their mind. Them being genuine first and always clears it all up.

Techmeme Leaderboard Features Google+ Users

The content being created and shared on Google+ is quite good. So much so that many posts that have originated here have been featured as leading articles on Techmeme, the much-watched technology news curator led by +Gabe Rivera. While Gabe and team have had Twitter activity play a role in the site as well, no other social network (Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, etc.) has previously gotten this level of visibility.

Google Plussers +Paul Allen and +Danny Sullivan have seen their content shared on Techmeme frequently enough that both are listed on the Techmeme leaderboard, which tracks the most frequently carried sources on the site over the last 30 days.

You can see all Google+ stories that have entered Techmeme here:
http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=sourceurl%3A%22plus.google.com%22&wm=false

I would not be surprised to see +Vic Gundotra and +Bradley Horowitz be listed at other times on this list in the future.

/via My Google+ Profile.

Don't Fear Being Fireballed or Slashdotted if on Blogger

It can be difficult to plan for an unanticipated spike in Web traffic. One of the most amusing parts of reading Macolyte John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog is the near certainty that at least once per day, one of the poor saps he links to goes down due to the resulting crush of curious onlookers. It happens so frequently that it's practically second nature to see him update a post saying the link has been "Fireballed", opting instead to point to Google's cache of the original. This phenomenon, of course, is not a Gruber exclusive. For years, otherwise innocent bloggers have been Slashdotted, TechCrunched or even Scobleized, seeing their sites crack under pressure. But from what I can tell, if you're hosted on Blogger, this isn't an issue at all. The company was just recognized for perfect uptime during a survey by Royal Pingdom, and I've seen my own site spike in traffic following controversial posts with no ill effects.

Blogger was not always known for a stellar uptime record. In late 2006, the service practically had to write "a novel" about continued outages. In fall of 2007, I railed against Google for ignoring users during another major outage. But services mature and times change.

Royal Pingdom's Downtime Report. Blogger Scores a Zero.

With the backdrop of Tumblr's highly-publicized downtime of more than a day earlier this month, Royal Pingdom also spotted occasional outages at WordPress, TypePad and Posterous, each of whom looked great compared to Tumblr's unfortunate blip, but not as spotless as the often overlooked Blogger.

Getting Slashdot, Scoble and Spiegel Bumps Simultaneously

While escaping system-wide downtime is a major win in itself, that doesn't speak to the services' ability to scale under pressure. Gruber recommends the WP Super Cache Plugin for WordPress, letting users serve more than a page a second, as it's self-hosted WordPress blogs that often get crushed with one of his links. But I've been linked from Daring Fireball a few times and lived to tell the tale. Same for Slashdot, Techmeme, Hacker News and the Huffington Post, all of which are capable of sending solid and sustained traffic on good days.

Techmeme, Hacker News and Scoble Don't Bring Down Blog

Similar to how Google is well known for its Web site never going down, I have to assume Blogger has mastered Google's distributed architecture, and makes no single blog, or its hotspotting, an instrument for failure. This blog didn't slow or go down when tens of thousands of visitors dropped by this July to tell me I was an idiot for switching from iPhone to Android. It also didn't go down when I questioned the usefulness of Google Wave last year, or when the Huffington Post liked my recap of David Kirkpatrick's Facebook Effect.

Not Even Daring Fireball Could Take the Blog Down

Even the largest services have occasional downtime. Facebook was down last week, intentionally, due to a code push ahead of schedule. Twitter has had its share of bumps, though the site has gotten much better in the last year, and even Facebook subsidiary FriendFeed went down this weekend. But Blogger users are sitting pretty knowing their blogs are going to be up and responsive, even under pressure.

OneTrueFan Adds Personalized Hot News From Your Friends

OneTrueFan is looking to be more than a badge-creating Web surfer tracking toolbar gimmick. The site, already extremely compelling to me due to the ability to discover new networks and stories from my social connections on Twitter, is adding an intriguing feature today that essentially brings each user their own Hacker News-like top stories summary, pulling from shared pages by one's friends in the network. The concept, a social newspaper, is one used by other sites including Paper.li, but in this case, taps into the power of the toolbar which follows registered users around the Web, and surfaces the most shared stuff in an effort to be sure you don't miss a thing.

Quietly launched at the end of last week and being publicly unveiled today, OneTrueFan has added a "Your Hot News" tab to every user's profile, showing items that are popping throughout your network of connections. Interestingly, not only do the items display the avatars of the people who distributed the shares in their network, but it gives each avatar a weight, as evidenced by size, to show how much downstream impact the sharer had. The bigger, the better.

The Hot News Story On My OneTrueFan Page

OneTrueFan gives site users 'points' for sharing items to Twitter and Facebook, and tracks the number of clickthroughs to their URL shortner, otf.me. One recent share I made of Micah Baldwin's "It All Changes When the Founder Drives a Porsche" article gained more than 1,000 clickthroughs, passing the points to me and making me the OneTrueFan of Micah's blog - which I was already, but now is confirmed by irrefutable science. This clickthrough data contributes to the Hot News section, but in the event other URL shorteners are used, ones Twitter reach comes into play.

Another Top Story Shared By Many Folks In My OneTrueFan Stream

In the days I've tracked my Hot News on OneTrueFan, I've found it to accurately find top stories of the day that are frequently shared. It's not personalized based on my interests, but does a solid job of becoming a more personal Techmeme or Hacker News. Of course, seeing just who shared an article gives me more data to choose whether I want to engage in the item as well.

Like Blippy, I believe OneTrueFan's full potential has yet to be discovered. If I look at what the team is developing, essentially it is a horizontal social network that you can take from site to site with you around the Web, without requiring a centralized login. In fact, you just log in with your Twitter account. I believe in the model of sharing and discovery, and Hot News will make OneTrueFan (or OTF) an even bigger player as a destination site. If you're not on OneTrueFan already, you haven't been listening to me and should go register now.

KickPost Predicts Popular Posts for Top Tech News

As technology news sites have proliferated in the last few years, so too have technology news aggregators looking to find the best of the Web and surface it quickly - either through social voting mechanisms, insightful editorial picks, or complicated algorithms. In addition to the Diggs and Slashdots of the world, one finds Hacker News and Techmeme as the gold standards offering the front page of today's tech news. Now, there is a new site that has entered the fray - though minimalist for now - armed with what the founder calls a predictive algorithm which just might find top stories faster than anybody else.

The site is called KickPost (http://www.kickpost.com) and it comes from the hand of Caleb Elston @calebelston, the vice president of products at Justin.TV, who is also known to frequent blog readers here as the man behind Toluu, the RSS discovery site, and the gift recommendation site, Kallow.

One Item from KickPost Shows The Time of Post, Source and an Excerpt

In a discussion on Hacker News about the launch of KickPost, Elston describes the site as a "new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in realtime." He adds, "We are about 20min faster at predicting hot stories than Techmeme."

Another Top Story on KickPost

The site displays the headlines of predicted top stories, as well as a short excerpt, the author's name and the post source - with the headline linking to the original story and the source to the blog's main page. Stories are ordered chronologically, with the most recent at the top, and older ones below, with a time stamp showing how recently the posts entered KickPost's index, and the page automatically refreshes when new stories enter the index.

From a quick perusal of the site, it's clear that top tech stories are making it into the index - and they are being found fast. But the site sources are very common to so-called A-List blogs that dominate many other sites, including VentureBeat, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and Lifehacker. Where more editorially-driven sites, including Techmeme, have an advantage is through manual discovery - something a purely algorithm-driven site like KickPost can't catch. The one-off top stories from new sources will have a tough time making the index, from what I can tell, even after scrolling back 2 days into past KickPost content.

Given Caleb's history for parsing RSS feeds and finding how your own likes intersect with those from the community, I would anticipate where KickPost would really gain value over the competition is through personalization and building the top stories in near real-time based on individual's preferences, not just through beating Techmeme and others by a handful of minutes with headlines from top blogs. But it's a site we'll be watching.

Find KickPost at http://www.kickpost.com/ and on Twitter at @kickpost.

EdgeTheory: The Battle for Real-Time Reporting, Curation

The issue of real-time news reporting and curation is becoming increasingly visible and important as news breaks on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties. Tonight, Chris Saad and I talked about how the mainstream media can adapt to involve content curation in addition to their content creation, and how it still makes sense to have some investigative reporting in addition to real-time reactions.

The discussion weaved from curation tools like Cascaad and my6sense to the recent news of Teens In Tech Networks CEO Daniel Brusilovsky leaving TechCrunch, and how the news was interpreted.

Original Post Here: ET Conversations

Listen in below:


Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. In addition, I am an advisor to Teens In Tech Networks.

Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives

If you are the subject of the news, people will judge your actions and how you react to being in the spotlight. If you are the distributor of the news, how you message that news, and how accurately you report that news, will also be dissected. On the Web, especially in our sliver of Silicon Valley, where real time is becoming the standard, analysis of said news is itself happening in real time. From many corners, often from the more technically-oriented folks on the Web, I am seeing discussion around the tech news industry's alleged failings, inaccuracies, and usefulness (or lack thereof). While some of the feedback no doubt has merit, it too comes in simplified form, without offering potential solutions, taking into account how the creators and publishers of this tech news blogosphere are incentivized and rewarded.

On Sunday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, as he often does, started a discussion around what he termed "fast food content", saying that "hand crafted content is dead", summarizing a piece that lamented sites which steal content without attribution, and more darkly, sites that employ people to rewrite others' content, without adding anything new or doing "real reporting", the kind one learns in journalism class, or is required to do when working for a "dead tree" newspaper or magazine.

Given Mike's focus, running one of the more widely read tech news sites on the Web, his concerns lie around those who borrow much of his and his writers' content and publish it as their own. But I have also given a lot of thought, especially of late, to the vast number of tech news sites and blogs that are out there covering the same stories, and are jostling amongst each other to beat their competition by a few minutes - opting not to win on quality, but instead, on time. In this case, it's often not another tech blog's news that is being borrowed, but official announcements from companies.

One of the easiest things for tech blogs to do is repeat updates from the official blogs of interesting companies, add a few internal links to previous coverage they have done on that topic, add a paragraph or two of analysis, and hit the post button. I've no doubt done it myself over the last few years, even with this self-awareness, but you can see the process unfold practically every day. Watch for phrases like "According to a post on the official Twitter blog..." or "In an update on Google's blog this morning"... as many of the better-known sites all post their own interpretations of the news that came from the top.

This, in my opinion, is the very definition of the "fast food news" Mike is talking about, and time spent both producing it and consuming it could be put to better use - as in these cases, links could serve just as well as full articles.

I am by no means an ombudsman for tech media and the tech news consumer. I am but one person who takes in a lot of content, and produces a little on my own. But I see a few other areas where the tech news engine is falling short for news consumers, news makers and the news authors themselves.

I believe "fast food news" also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the 10th site to report that Twitter got hacked last night didn't really add a lot of value to readers.

In fact, when Twitter did get hacked Thursday night, Mike (again) had a solid post that added information, and, as he gained more knowledge of the incident, he updated the same post multiple times throughout the night. Because he was the first to the scene, with real data, his post had meat, while many, many others that followed were just echoes of the obvious.

So why is this happening? There are a few reasons:

First, the advertising model that forces many sites to drive page views and social interactions, through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter retweets, is turning many tech news sites into post mills, staffed largely by inexpensive writers and freelancers. Instead of deep analysis posts that require interviews, backgrounds, and research, these sites are instead home to excerpts from YouTube, polls, user surveys, and whatever happens to be trending on Twitter that day. Quality is exchanged for quantity.

Second, many of these sites operate under the guise that they are the only site their readers see. Just because one major tech site covered a story 30 minutes before doesn't mean they should assume their readers already know. That is why if you do subscribe to many technology blogs, as I do, you can expect the vast majority of them to report the same story around the same time - instead of choosing a specific focus that can set them apart from the competition.

Third, thanks to competition and personal interactions, not every site likes the others. Years of infighting and annoyances, thanks to individual posts, personalities, or business priorities means that some sites really dislike each other. They won't link to one another. They will ban the competition from their user conferences, and when they aren't taking potshots, they will act like the other doesn't exist. Thus, if the competition "breaks" a story, the other will post it anyway, or try to find a wrinkle that makes their own version of events "improved" or invalidating the other.

Fourth, the rise of aggregation sites makes piling on to the news something that is rewarded. If all competitive blogs have covered a major story, many others will follow suit, be it to get into "discussion" on Techmeme, to see TrackBacks on the originating posts, or to come up when the popular terms are searched for on Twitter, Google and other engines.

In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

That's why you see people like Alex Payne (of Twitter) complain, saying "Rarely does technology journalism produce informed, correct, relevant, and readable content. This is a sorry and damaging state of affairs." in his rant from March (Towards Better Technology Journalism), and why Marco Ament, the lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper creator, this week, wrote: "Over the last few years, I have unsubscribed from nearly every tech-news feed. I have never regretted the decision afterward, and I haven’t missed anything important. Tech news needs help. Badly. It’s truly terrible."

Keep in mind that it's not unexpected for the more technical among us to dislike the way their works are interpreted. Engineering distrusting marketing is practically a requirement and a religion. But we know they are somewhat right. As much as we can complain about the public relations industry as a whole, many flaks often find that their offers for reporters to speak with the CEO or an official representative of the company go without interest, either due to time issues or a lacking skill set. It's always a lot easier just to ask for the press release ahead of time, and an embargo date.

In an ideal world, those who are acting as our news filters would take the extra time necessary to ferret out news before its time, would ask those making the news the questions they didn't want to answer, would understand competitive landscapes, and wouldn't worry about getting a post up in a few minutes to hit a quantity threshold, without it first passing a quality threshold.

Lest we think Alex and Marco are the lone cries for help, you can see other comments this week from The Angry Drunk, and from Google's DeWitt Clinton, who posted to Twitter, "Don't worry. Save some time. Your story doesn't need a shred of truth to it. It will be retweeted just the same." in response not to a tech blog story, but a mainstream media piece that had missed the mark. (He later, in contrast, praised Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for solid reporting)

Content producers need to make choices in terms of what it is they cover, and where their field of expertise lies. If not breaking the news, or having access to the technology elite, there are many other ways to make your voice heard, through analysis and personal use cases, as well as the option to find new stories. Content consumers too have the choice as to where they get their news. I would hope that those people who are being spoon fed repeats of others' original reporting, or are waiting, jaws agape, for recaps of company blog posts, recognize what it is they are really missing.

Given the low cost structure needed to create content, it doesn't look like there is going to be a painful consolidation any time soon. In the meantime, the system is set up to reward those who publish quickly and pile on - for extra effort doesn't bring home the page views. There are going to be pockets of the Web that harbor original ideas, a focus on quality and data, and there are going to be other places where copying, scraping, and shortcuts are going to rule the day. I know what I hope to be. The question is, can we do our part, as publishers and consumers, to somehow reward those that do things right?

Are You Writing Your Headlines for Google or for Twitter?

While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver. Now, instead of using the catchy headlines we once saw in print, or keyword-laden headlines that make Google giddy, we're now seeing headlines truncated to less than 140 characters, or even as low as 125 characters as the standard, assuming a short URL follows.

For me, practically the only driver for the length of a headline is whether it easily fits in one deck for somebody using standard fonts in a browser. I don't tend to think about SEO benefits down the road and don't consider if the headline will "play well" on Twitter or other social networks, but do recognize that a good headline can be "make or break" for those seeing the story downstream, be it through RSS, or on aggregation sites, from FriendFeed to Techmeme or even Digg. (See my post from last year on this topic)

Given that practically every blog is publishing to Twitter in parallel with their RSS feed, the drive to keep headlines short is very real. In my short visit to TechCrunch headquarters on Friday, their tech team said they are very much making sure the headlines play well with Twitter. Their Twitter account now not only shows a headline and a bit.ly URL (for stat tracking) but also the author's Twitter handle, similar to how I've called out posts from other writers on this site with their own IDs.

As Twitter's impact on immediate traffic expands, it should be interesting to see how many blogs change their approach to headlines, and to see if they are in any way reducing longer-term traffic benefits from SEO for instant returns.

Tweetmeme Adds Leaderboard, Tag Clouds to Tweet Links Tracker

As Twitter grows in use, so grows its influence, and the total number of times the most popular items are shared and retweeted from user to user. As with Techmeme, Digg, RSSmeme and other sites that try to find the most interesting shares of the day based on user votes, Tweetmeme crawls the vast Twitter network and watches for frequently popular shared links, images and blogs. (See our initial coverage in July.)

Today,Tweetmeme expanded its offering with a pair of new features aimed at making the site more sticky. The first is a tag cloud, which analyzes the shared content, finding other words that Twitter users have included in their tweets, and displaying them below the items in their "popular links" page. The second is a leaderboard, which highlights those Twitter accounts which have most frequently been the first to share the most popular links.


In terms of determining influence and popularity, you've always seen a push/pull between enabling a gatekeeper with the power to move items up and down, and letting the crowd decide. Tweetmeme believes solely in the crowd - even featuring the total number of times the item was shared. Today's top shares are in the 400 to 600 range through all of Twitter.


Accounts on the leaderboard aren't much of a surprise - including RSS feeds for TechCrunch, Digg, popurls and ReadWriteWeb, for example. Additionally, the cloud below each item is tempting to click, but not functional. In theory, it'd be good to click on an item in the tag cloud and see other shared links that have the same tags. Maybe that's coming, but it's not yet here.

You can catch up on the most popular items, as determined by Twitter, at http://tweetmeme.com/.

10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog

I've been sharing articles I've read in Google Reader for the better part of two years. I don't know exactly when I started, but I'm fairly sure I'm nowhere near finished. And while I admittedly started sharing to a link blog without having a clear goal in mind, I'm finding that this massive shared items repository is becoming an incredibly versatile information hub that benefits me, the authors of articles I've shared, and the consumers, be they friends in Google Reader, or in many other locations.

I believe that while Google Reader has grown in visibility, arguably becoming the most popular RSS reader on the Web, the utility of shared link blogs is less known. Here are ten ways you can maximize your Google Reader link blog - most of which I'm doing, and probably didn't anticipate when I first started sharing items into the ether.

1. Act as a trusted information filter.

Regardless of how fast a reader you are, there is no possible way you can read every single news source and blog on the Web. Neither can anybody you know. And regardless of how closely your feed match percentage is on Toluu, there are feeds you read that your friends don't. By sharing the best items of what you read every day from Google Reader, you are hand-selecting the best of the Web and "endorsing" those items to your link blog subscribers.

Do so with some regularity, and you might be surprised as to how people come to rely on your manual intervention and news discovery. I first became cognizant of this in February when "SeekGround" reported "I discovered that I had shared more of louisgray's shared items than anyone else's in the last 30 days". In May, Duff's Device similarly wrote: "I saw another article that I received from Louis Gray'sGoogle Reader Shared Items again. Thanks for keeping on top of the world for me Louis. :-)"

As of tonight, ReadBurner reports I have nearly 8,500 articles shared on my Google Reader link blog. While there are others who have shared more total items, I know that I have shared those items I believe are most interesting to me, and others I believe are following along.

2. Share your items with Google Friends.

Though Google hasn't nailed the "what is a friend" issue, you can add friends through GMail and Google Talk. If they are also Google Reader users, and share items, you can opt in to seeing their Google Reader shares, and they can see yours. If they subscribe to your shared items, your shares are mixed in with all the other feeds on their list. Of course, if you don't want to see their lists, click "Hide" next to their name, or "Show" to bring them back.



3. Embed your Google Reader link blog to your own blog or Web site.

When I first started sharing to my link blog, I had this odd feeling I was sharing posts and nobody knew about it. After all, the link blog URL isn't the most intuitive on the planet. But you can embed a widget on your blog to display a subset of your recently shared items, and visitors to your blog can click out to items you've shared.

4. Add your Google Reader link blog to your Google profile

Your Google profile is a fairly blank slate, for you to add or delete as you please. While it's very common for people to add links to their Twitter page, their blog or their LinkedIn profile, I'd suggest it's just as important to add your link blog to the page. Mine is here.

5. Share items to Facebook, FriendFeed or Socialmedian.

2008 was the year of personal news aggregators, which took updates on your services from around the Web and put them all in one place. While this trends was best exemplified by FriendFeed, Facebook also offers the option to feature your Google Reader shared items, and Socialmedian will pull them in as news, going so far as to check the shares by topic to place them in the right categories.

You can see my Google Reader shares on FriendFeed here. And to avoid duplication of items, if I share items from louisgray.com, I manually delete them from FriendFeed. Takes seconds, and reduces the noise. (My Socialmedian page is here...)

6. Add your share count to ReadBurner, RSSmeme or Feedheads.

Feedheads, the pioneer in tabulating popular Google Reader share counts, was joined by ReadBurner and later RSSmeme, in early 2008. As some people are turning to ReadBurner and RSSmeme as a democratically sorted Digg or Techmeme, sharing items you like will add your vote to the list.

Be sure to add your feed to ReadBurner here.

7. Replace your bookmarks with Google Reader shared items.

At the end of the year, I said that RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks. As I thought about it more, it's my Google Reader Link blog that is essentially my rolling bookmark list, highlighting those items which are the best, and which I will want to return to. While Delicious is also a good Web-based bookmarking system, the link blog is a good way to find recent items of interest.

8. Expand the visibility of lesser-known sources.

Sometimes, I get in a routine of reading my RSS feeds and then sharing, without thinking about how the shares are effecting the downstream author. But I've gotten e-mails saying the shares have generated attention beyond what I expected. Last month, one blogger wrote, "When you pop an article on (the linkblog), I'll get 60-70 hits and get pumped to the first page, that is pretty averge for the support you give me." Earlier this week I got a similar e-mail from a second author, who wrote an e-mail titled "Thanks yet again", adding "Your Google Reader share really lit up that discussion."

In a tech blogging world where there are so many different sources of news, and so many people writing about the exact same thing, you can make a difference by choosing lesser-known sources of news, and highlighting the best content, not just the loudest. I've tried to share items from those who have done original reporting or are thinking differently than the echo chamber, and it in turn can deliver greater visibility.

9. Use your linkblog as your "to comment" list.

As part of my online new year's resolution, I said I would be making more time to comment on other blogs through the year. But as you know, my full-time job doesn't work all too well with browsing the Web and making comments throughout the day. Instead, I've found I'll go back to my own Google Reader linkblog, and open the items in a new tab, and go through to add comments one by one, left to right, so I've given the authors feedback and participated.

10. Create your own leaderboard of news sources.

Google Reader tracks statistics on what your most-shared news sources are over the last 30 days, which can report on who you've found most interesting in the last month. Given each person's individual tastes, the results can be very different than more public leaderboards which tend to feature those who are most popular and have a deeper subscription base. While my own link blog does tend to feature popular sites like TechCrunch, Scobleizer and ReadWriteWeb, I can see that I've also shared a high number from lesser-known sites, including TechWag, Regular Geek, The Future Buzz, Andy DeSoto and Chuqui 3.0. And if you're stat-oriented like I am, you can check in and see how this changes over time. (See my blog leaderboard from last July)

So... are you sharing your Google Reader items? I am. You can find mine here. For the betterment of the community, it'd be great to see your shared item links in the comments.

---

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

---

Does Your Ethical Stance on Rumors Change in a Down Economy?

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

Tech blogging is just as competitive, if not more competitive, than mainstream news. Nearly every blogger salivates over the tiniest little rumor that could turn into the scoop that lands you the top spot on Techmeme or the front page of Slashdot or Digg. It's practically become acceptable to run with the unconfirmed rumor in order to make it out of the gate first.

Should that codicil to a blogger's code of ethics be removed in a down economy?

Two notable stories have "broken" so far this year that lack confirmation. The first, making its appearance on Gizmodo this past Monday, had Steve Jobs passing on the Macworld keynote because he's allegedly on his deathbed. The second, also breaking on Monday, had SD Times claiming Google would put Juniper out of business by coming out with a hush-hush router to end all routers.

Apple still had a new 17" MacBook Pro and some sexy software upgrades, but Juniper didn't fare so well, dropping steadily throughout the week with a huge dip this morning as the story about the stock falling and the alleged Google router hit the mainstream press.

Are either of these stories true? Looking at past history and the companies involved, I think it's pretty safe to say that Steve Jobs is sick. That's been apparent since the rumors of his imminent demise started swirling after his appearance last year. However, Steve Jobs is not stupid. I don't think he would let things get to the point where he's on his death bed before taking some steps to turn over control of the company, and speculating that he's got one foot on a banana peel over a grave is gossip, not news.

As for Google and Juniper, it's no big secret that Google wants things Google's way. Is Google going to go into the hardware business and compete against companies like Cisco? Never. It's simply not going to happen. If they weren't willing to do it for a consumer device like the rumored Gphone we were all salivating over the idea of years back, they certainly aren't going to do it on a scale like routers, where failure would be catastrophic. But they have Android, and they've shown a desire to apply their software acumen to existing hardware issues. Is it conceivable they are planning to (or already are) working with a hardware company, much as they did with HTC on Android? I might bet a few pretzel sticks on that.

Based on the evidence, however, Google isn't going to topple Juniper, and we aren't going to see Cupertino shrouded in black crepe any time in the near future. And in a climate where tech jobs are on the chopping block and companies are scampering to drive their stock back up to appease shareholders, going for the big dramatic story rather that looking at the facts is going to end up with all of us out of work. If the tech companies go under, so do the jobs writing about them.

Read more by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Shakespeare I Ain't.

Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.

Arrington? Le Meur? Scoble? Everybody's Right About "Authority".

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

This weekend's blog flareup on whether Twitter should track the "authority" of a user, based primarily on the number of followers, has a number of people up in arms. One side says it makes sense. After all, Technorati and Google have always tracked influence. Others say the following number can be easily manipulated, and has no weight. First of all, before we address the issues, why am I writing this on LouisGray.com and not my own blog, StayNAlive.com?  It largely comes down to numbers.  LouisGray.com has near 4,000 RSS subscribers, while my blog only has 500.  Aside from the fact that I enjoy the team of great writers I work with on this blog, I have a much louder, and because of that, more authoritative, voice here.  More people listen with a larger audience than those with a small audience.  And like it or not, all bloggers trying to compete play the numbers game - that's simple marketing.

Background

Recently Loic Le Meur wrote a post, suggesting that Twitter Search sort their results by most popular on Twitter.  So, for example, if Robert Scoble has more followers than Michael Arrington, Scoble's posts will appear higher than Arrington's in the search results.  Scoble responded with a blog post suggesting Lemeur was wrong, saying that the number of people you follow is more important than those who follow you.  Today, Arrington reignited the flames with another follow-on post, supporting Le Meur, effectively saying the controversy was much ado about little, that it wasn't a separation from the haves and have nots, but instead, a simple recommendation to add to Twitter search.

So we have two business men, trying to find more readers and users to build revenue for their businesses (Arrington runs a content business, TechCrunch.com, while Le Meur runs a Video publishing service, Seesmic).  At the same time we have a video blogger, Robert Scoble, trying to find new content, which in turn generates revenue for the business he works for by building unique content.  He's very good at that, but They're both right.

Of course Arrington and Le Meur want more followers, and preference placed on followers - they benefit by doing so.  Their experience, as businessmen trying to generate revenue for their business, shows that more followers can both directly and indirectly translate into revenue for the businesses they own and run.  Arrington, after today's article, will generate even more readers of his blog because of the discussion going on about this on Twitter and FriendFeed.  That converts to more followers, which in turn sends them back to TechCrunch.com.

If I launch a new feature for SocialToo.com (Disclosure - I am CEO and co-founder of SocialToo.com, a service that, among many other features, enables you to auto-follow those that follow you on Twitter and other networks.), I have 4,000 followers I can now announce that to.  A year ago, when I was only at a few hundred, that announcement would not have made anywhere near an impact.  Now, with a sound business model, I have the potential to convert many more users to drive both traffic and revenue to the service.  The same goes with Arrington and TechCrunch, and Le Meur and Seesmic.  They're smart businessmen.  Notice Guy Kawasaki, another smart businessman said the same thing.

At the same time, it makes complete sense that Scoble places his value on the people he follows. Scoble's value is in the information he learns.  It's a sound strategy for a journalist, a PR professional, or a blogger.  After all, I met Scoble through following him on Twitter and FriendFeed (in person even!).  I also met Guy Kawasaki by following him on Twitter, as did I Chris Pirillo, and following the Tweets of the two of them was the premise behind me starting SocialToo.com.  There is value in that as well.  Scoble, and others can be experts, because of the people they follow - that is powerful.  It should also be noted that Scoble has a lot of followers because of this strategy.  This really is a "Chicken or the Egg" argument!

Social Networking is About the Experience for the Individual

The power of Social Networking is that it allows each individual to develop their own personalized experience on the web.  By the people they follow, they get the content they want.  By the people that follow them, they are given a voice outside of that personal world.  Scoble is right - you are defined by the people you follow.  I've talked about that here before - relationships define the individual.

However, a relationship is a two-way connection.  In the end it's those that follow you that can vouch for who you are, and what type of person they perceive you as.  If anyone were to steal my identity, I now have 4,000 people that can vouch it's the real me.  Of course there are ways around this, but it's still a form of identity, and will solidify even more as technology evolves.

I am a smarter person because of the people I follow - I've mentioned before that I separate those I pay attention to from those I follow.  That's how I follow smart people.  At the same time, I can ask any question now, and get multiple answers to that question from my 4,000+ followers.  I couldn't do that when I had only a few hundred.  I'm also smarter because of the people the follow me!  The people that follow me are very valuable, and make me a more authoritative source, just as the people I follow do.

I really don't think there is any right or wrong answer here.  I think Scoble, Arrington, and Lemeur are all right - it's important to follow smart people, yet at the same time your followers are just as important.  I don't think either one is any more valuable than the other on a general level - it varies on a person-to-person experience, and that is why you see them arguing over it.  That's the amazing thing behind Social Networking - there is no right or wrong answer because each individual can define their own!

In a perfect world, Twitter Search would provide multiple filters, some based on followers, some based on people you follow, some based on the number of people you converse with directly in your network of friends and followers.  The more personalized that search becomes, the more valuable it becomes to the individual.  "Authority" is determined by the individual.  Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Techfuga: If Techmeme and AllTop Had a Baby

Where do you get all the day's tech news? For many people, including me, it's Google Reader. For others, they look to Techmeme or other sites that aggregate the headlines from around the tech newswires and blogosphere. But as there are a seemingly infinite number of news sources and social news tools, from Digg to Reddit, Hacker News, ReadBurner and others, aggregation sites are getting a second look. A new site, launching this morning, called Techfuga, not only aggregates all the leading blogs, but also those social services as well - including FriendFeed. The result is a very busy site that has hundreds of links to the day's news, from a wide variety of sources.

Techfuga's mission, like many others before it is to provide "the ultimate top tech news from around the Web." On launch, the site has aggregated 40 different technology news aggregators. It then separates those aggregators into three types: "Human aggregated based on submission and voting/sharing", including Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Readburner and FriendFeed; "Solely based on algorithms", including Techmeme and Google News, and "Editorial human-aggregated", including TechCrunch and Ars Technica. As you might guess, the result is pretty busy. The data's there, but like with Guy Kawasaki's AllTop and PopURLs before it, you might spend as much time scrolling down to find the article you want to read as you eventually spend reading.



Like Alltop, Headlines from Across the Web Populate Techfuga.
Beyond the simple headlines, Techfuga groups related stories (as Techmeme does) and attempts to link to the discussion pages of items that are indexed. They also, like Techmeme, say they offer an algorithm that determines "Top Stories".


Techfuga Correctly Found Linkage Between Stories
After midnight on Tuesday, Techfuga correctly found that Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins' article "FriendFeed: Like Most Things, Good in Moderation [Scoble’s Intervention]" was related to a FriendFeed post by Robert Scoble, "Oh, oh, @techcrunch thinks I need a friendfeed intervention!". That in turn, led to related items at TechCrunch and Scoble's blog. So, in theory, the algorithm works. It's not the prettiest I've ever seen, but if you assume that Techfuga is the superset of data, incorporating Techmeme as one of its sources, it does have a ton of data to work with, and as many early versions of sites have shown, cleaning up the GUI can be easier than discovering the content initially.


You Can Search The Full Techfuga Archive for Keywords
Techfuga's value is also found in its search engine. Searching Techfuga also searches through its many different sources, so when I performed a vanity search to see if I ever came up, responses came through Propeller, BuzzTracker and ReadBurner, and did so quickly. Broader searches, even outside of tech, like one for "Baseball", showed similar diversity.

Techfuga opens its doors this morning, so find it here: http://techfuga.com/.

Social Media Advertising: Crossing the Streams

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Can you hear it? That's the sound of social media companies scrambling, hustling, and scraping to find new revenue-generating models to beat back the hounds of this wacky economy.

Most recently, we're starting to see talk of experimenting with the insertion of advertisements into what users normally expect to be ad-free content streams. In movie metaphor terms, it's time to look to Ghostbusters for inspiration.

As we all know, Dr. Peter Venkman (played by the amazing Bill Murray) advised that the streams of the ghostbusting team's Proton Packs were not to be crossed… right up until the end of the movie, when they had run out of ideas in defeating the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was a classic "it's so crazy it just might work" movie moment.

Are some social media companies reaching a similar "crossing the streams" decision point? For instance, Techmeme, the well-known technology news aggregator, has actually employed the practice of inserting "sponsored posts" into its stream of algorithmically generated story and blog post clusters for some time.


Techmeme Interweaves Sponsors' Posts With News
With a clear label of "sponsored post" and a different colored background on what is essentially an "advertorial" ad unit, Techmeme is leading out a new form of online advertising that other social media companies might be looking to adapt.

A story on TechCrunch this week called Digg's Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product was illuminating in a number of ways.

Key takeaway:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.

So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them "bubble up" to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. That said, we can imagine that some of Digg's famously rowdy commenters would be incensed at the prospect of any advertising inserted into an area previously set aside for user generated story submissions.

How incensed is hard to say, but we can look at the reception that ad network Magpie received on Twitter to get an indication. To be fair, Magpie is an independent service - it has no formal affiliation with Twitter - that offers to sell "tweets" on Twitter user profiles. So its revenue model aims to cut microbloggers in on revenue, and not Twitter itself. The reaction thus far from the Twitter community has been pretty negative, and indeed signs are that Magpie is gaining very little traction.

That said, it's perhaps doubly interesting that Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams would mention inserting ads into Twitter streams as a potential revenue option during a recent interview. However, he noted that they are "looking into other options." Maybe it'll come down to a "don't cross the streams" decision?

It's worth considering if Internet audiences will be generally more accepting of seeing "sponsored posts" on Techmeme – or indeed inserted into the "blog stream" on well known tech blogs such as Mashable – versus user generated content-driven platforms like Digg and Twitter.

In any event, social media companies are going to be looking for new ways to keep the lights on and servers humming, and that will likely mean seeing more forays into previously ad free content zones.

What's your opinion on crossing the streams?

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close

It's a year-end tradition for many media, blogs and individuals, to predict what will happen over the next year. Some prefer to make their guesses fairly straight-forward in an effort to be right (Example: Apple will release new notebooks with a faster processor at MacWorld) and others will make their guesses seemingly outlandish, so that if they're right, they're seen as virtual psychics. Others, somewhere in between. At the conclusion of 2007, I made ten predictions that I thought would be fun, and as we're coming on the one year anniversary of that post, it's a good thing you didn't bet your home mortgage on my list. (What? You say there are other issues with your mortgage? Oh.)

See: 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

In the spirit of reducing my ego, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Wrong. I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it's largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner and took the position in August.)

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

Wrong. I thought Facebook would use its expensive stock and buy up some smaller companies. Digg continually sounded like it was shopping itself, but it never sold, and the company's CEO often denied talks were occuring with anyone. Also, given the stock market crash, Facebook is no doubt valued much lower these days, making a stock transaction less likely.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

Wrong. So Far. In September, TechCrunch and others reported that eBay planned to sell StumbleUpon, but no sale has taken place yet. At this point, also, with Yahoo! crumbling, they are less likely to take on the service.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Wrong. Twitter focused on growing and not crashing this year. Still just text.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Wrong. I hardly hear anything about Boot Camp these days, likely because VMWare Fusion and Parallels have become entrenched, and nobody cared about Apple's "restart" alternative. My comment that Apple would "slowly take over the market" in this space also looks quite dumb, as did the expectation that Windows applications could boot alongside Mac apps. The question is, why not?

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

Wrong. And it's too bad! Sure would change things a bit if somebody could figure out how to check a box and have graphical ads or text ads disappear.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Wrong and Right. AssetBar, in its attempt to replace Google Reader, failed fast. FriendFeed, however, did much better than I could have guessed at the time I wrote the post. Obviously, I played a small role in evangelizing FriendFeed through it coming out of beta in early 2008, but it got bigger than even I expected. My comment saying that "neither would be acquired by the end of 2008" did manage to be true.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Right. While there are some bloggers who prefer video and are using it, from Robert Scoble at FastCompany TV to Loic LeMeur at Seesmic, it hasn't become as second-nature as standard blogging or mciroblogging. And so far as I know, nobody is making money on this in a consistent way.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

Mostly Wrong. Netflix didn't blink against iTunes' charge. They instead branched out with their "watch instantly" feature and partnered up with TiVo and others. Blockbuster is still a disaster, and I certainly am not going to the box office thanks to so many alternatives. But iTunes video rentals cannot be said to have hit Netflix and others all that much.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

Wrong, So Far. Robert joined FastCompany at the beginning of the year, and is putting up some interesting content. That said, FastCompany has seen changes in focus and leadership, and I am curious to see how his show evolves in 2009. Scoble continues to be a mainstay on the social Web and at industry events of course, so even if 2009 sees him somewhere else, it won't be far from the limelight.

So wasn't that fun? Now you see you can largely ignore my predictions, or maybe, I should try harder to be right. Maybe, if I'm good, I can put a 2009 prediction list up by the end of the year...