Categories
Random

On niche weblogging, Google and Adsense…

Matt Haughey writes about putting Google AdWords on PVRBlog:

Make no mistake, last month PVRblog made a lot of money from Adsense. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? Sounds like something you might have heard in 1998, no? Well it’s true today, and I hope a lot more people meet with the same success.

Haughey’s experience sounds very intriguing and his tips for running a successful Adsense-based semi-commercial venture may very well gesture in the right direction for niche commercial weblogging enterprises. I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea of getting money from weblogging, because I’ve always felt that there was a distinction between getting sponsorship for what one writes and getting advertising based upon what/who one is. Weblogs have seemed to be to be a space in which individuals could self-describe and – as such – putting advertising upon them has felt to me rather like being prepared to sell parts of one’s face or body for commercial advertising purposes.

Today at the iSociety event, Cameron articulated a useful and simple distinction between a publishing model of weblogs where a specific site is (to a greater or lesser extent) impersonal and subject-focused (which is – I think – the only part journalists seem to understand), and a social model where the site is no more or less than a representation of a person online and connects with other sites around itself as a proxy for a social connection to the person behind the keyboard. That we can understand weblog space as being a spectrum like that (with people like Mark Pilgrim occupying this weird Schroedinger-like superposition between concept and human) makes it much easier for me to conceive of a comfortable place for this kind of commercial weblogging venture.

Categories
Personal Publishing

On conversations with Cameron Marlow…

While BloggerCon has been ongoing in the States, I’ve spent most of the weekend attending mini events with the charming Cameron Marlow of Blogdex infamy. Cameron came over to the UK to talk at a conference at the Oxford Internet Institute and managed to squeeze in a few small gatherings before heading back to the States.

On Friday afternoon, I hosted a small event with Cameron at the BBC that Matt Jones had organised but was unfortunately unable to attend. Cameron talked about social networks, the similarities and differences between meme transmission and STD transmission across social networks (there are, intriguingly, many fewer types of STDs) and the relationship between link networks and the social networks that they sit upon. There were a fair number of UK-based BBC-based webloggers present (plus Cal who we sneaked in), but irritatingly none of them have talked about the event on their sites, so it’s been very difficult for me to gauge how useful or interesting they found it. The day was nicely capped by Cal, Cameron and I stuffing our faces at Pizza Hut, having a long discussion with a man at a neighbouring table about The Darkness (“Men what do rock, baby”) and then collapsing in front of Finding Nemo. I’m fairly sure I had an argument with someone important about Eastenders as well…

Yesterday – in a more dedicated weblogger-centric (and sporadically organised at the last-minute) dim sum session at the New World in Soho – we got Cameron together with some more bastions of the UK tech/weblogging scene, including Matt Webb, Cal Henderson, Phil Gyford, Paul Hammond and Neil McIntosh from Online Blog. After eating inhuman amounts of tiny tiny food and everyone tolerating another one of my long rants about Eastenders, we decamped to Apogee – a café off Leicester Square – for coffee, cake and constitutional cocktails.

Finally today, Cameron and I found ourselves on a lunchtime panel at the iSociety (written up by James Crabtree in considerable detail) on weblogs and the public sphere which I found very rewarding (although I’m not sure the same could be said of the people who were forced to listen to my ramblings). I think both Cameron and I were particularly interested in the various perceived inequalities and freedoms of webloggia (perhaps as an example of networked individualism), how those freedoms/inequalities might inter-relate with one another and what it meant to be an ethical builder of tools in that environment. I was also particularly delighted to see Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net again, who – while I might not agree with his politics – always has an interesting contribution to make to these debates.

I’m almost certain that I’ve managed to capture only the most limited sense of the events and the issues discussed at them. Should any of the parties concerned with to use this space as a forum for subsequent discussion, they should feel free…

Categories
Random

A Victorian responds to comment spam…

Today – after receiving a few more pseudo-comments from people whose home URLs contain the word “blowjob” – I also received the following:

If you don’t want certain types of homepages listed such as ones about sex then you need to turn off allowing homepage url’s to be listed with the comments. I don’t know what your problem is with sex sites, perhaps you are a victorian or a religious fanatic, beats me, but you do have the option to turn off homepage url listing with the comments.

The interesting thing about the person who decided to leave this message (which like so many was stuck on the end of my piece about the evils of weblog comment spammers) was that they don’t seem to be able to to understand the difference between someone engaging in a conversation and someone coming into your space and trying to sell you something. And they don’t seem able to understand that taking advantage of other people’s good-will to whore your own products and services is innappropriate – that it’s wrong.

The reason – obviously – that webloggers allow individuals to put links to their homepages in their comments is so that we can strengthen links and ties between the members of our heavily abstracted community. We do it so that if people find a comment interesting they can go and read more about the person who commented. The cynicism involved in using such things for pure Google-juice – just to try and scrabble people to your porno site for a few extra cents – is just disgusting. And it’s not because it’s pornography, it’s because it’s brazen, disrespectful and offensive.

I’m trying to find a good strategy for resolving this situation, but in the meantime I’m just going to change the URLs to pages about the evils of spamming, if I don’t just delete them. I’ll try and collate some useful links as soon as I am able.

Categories
Random

Vote Alex!

I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but if you are in the United Kingdom and if you’re not going outside and getting drunk or having a big party of something, could you please ring 09011 212 210 and cast your trashmatic Fame Academy vote for the wonderful Alex. I wouldn’t normally ask, but this is really important… Sigh…

And thank God! She’s won! Bloody wonderful! That’s really cheered me up. Thanks everyone for being useful and voting for her! The ‘staff’ look pretty happy too, which is probably because they’ve been saved from Sneddon-like embarrassment. Good stuff. Good stuff.

Categories
Random

Advice for members of online communities…

Here’s three pieces of advice that apply as much to moderators and administrators of message boards as much as to the people who are unfortunate enough to have you as unduly elected presidents for life. The first piece of advice I have been reminded of again recently. It’s nice and simple and is profoundly important: Don’t post angry. The second piece of advice is about the content of your posts: Argue the issue, not the person. And the third and final piece of advice is about how you argue your point: The art of winning arguments is all about seeming to be the more reasonable party.

Categories
Random

Around the back of Broadcasting House…

Anyone who has passed by Broadcasting House in recent months will have noticed that it has been carefully gift-wrapped in white sheeting and scaffolding. Underneath the chrysalis it’s hard to guess what’s going on, but from the otherside – from inside the Portland Place part of the structure – you can see a lot more… This view is looking southwards toward Oxford Circus. Check out the little tiny diggers at the bottom of the picture. They’re on the third or fourth story! Neat, huh?

the_back_of_broadcasting_ho.jpg

Categories
Politics

On Gordon Brown's Speech…

The full text of Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour party conference is well worth a read whether or not you rate his aspirations or his ability to achieve them. I personally think it presents an interesting and honourable model for what the United Kingdom could aspire to be – a bridge between nations and a model of the balance between responsibility and practicality – although of course with all normal caveats gently acknowledged. The only thing I’m less than comfortable with is the way that he appears to have taken vague pot-shots at all our national neighbours and allegiances in the process. Otherwise – generally intriguing and rousing stuff…

“And where America is enterprising but not today seen as fair, the rest of Europe more socially cohesive but not today seen as enterprising, I believe that we in Britain can – even amidst the pressures and insecurities of globalisation – become the first country of this era to combine enterprise and economic strength with a strong public realm where public services are based not on vouchers or charges but are universal – and we eradicate child and pensioner poverty… And by standing up for these British ideas – and with our outward looking internationalism – Britain can be more than a bridge between Europe and America: our British values – what we say and do marrying enterprise and fairness, and about public services and the need to relieve poverty, can and should, in time, make Britain a model, a beacon for Europe, America and the rest of the world.”

Categories
Social Software

Modelling a space for group-activity…

In preparation for a piece of work we’re doing this afternoon, Mr Webb and I have been thinking around social software and its relationship to the other things we do in our lives. In other words – how often is it in real-life that we meet with people without a context, a circumstance or some kind of an activity to meet around – all good Shirky-esque stuff. As part of this thinking we’ve come up with what I think is quite a nice and useful way of conceptualising the relationships between our social activity per se and the things we do with people.

Imagine that you’re participating in a group activity – for simplicity let’s say it’s in your spare time. As far as we can tell, your activity will fit (roughly) into one of three kinds of group activity. The first one is where the media or activity form nothing but the background for social engagement – like having the radio on in the background at work, or going around to a village coffee morning. The second grouping is where the media or the activity is an inspiration or an ongoing pretext for social activity – like going to an political meeting or playing a game of football with friends. And finally there’s that grouping in which the media or activity takes up almost all the attention of the whole group – leaving (at least while it’s occurring) no room for overt social interaction. The cinema or the theatre are the perfect examples of that kind of activity.

Alongside this distinction (in which activity is either foreground, midground or background) there’s another one based around who you’re undertaking it with. Some activities you might choose to undertake with mostly complete strangers (perhaps joining an adult education class or going on a demonstration). Others are clearly activities that you undertake with just your friends.

If you put these two axes together, then you get a model of a space upon which you should be able to plot (in theory) pretty much any group activity you can think of. Here’s a visual representation:

Group activities can be plotted onto a 2-D grid.

Now the interesting stuff comes when you actually try and plot some of the spaces that we’ve created for online social activity. For the most part, activities that are undertaken primarily through a web-browser sit resolutely towards the bottom-middle of the graph. Only a few of the online interactions (notably e-mail and instant messaging) have any overt utility for groups of friends at all, and they only rarely attempt any kind of social activity that isn’t directed towards interest-group conversation…

Now one argument here might be that this stranger-space was relatively empty until the arrival of the internet. I’m guessing this is probably the case (and I’ll see tomorrow if anyone can think up a block of things that disprove me on that one). But the question now is – is that the end of the story? It seems relatively clear to me that with western countries gradually approaching a relative ubiquity of access (no matter what the device that access manifests itself upon) whole ranges of the graph will start to be practical spaces for experimentation – if they’re not already (which I basically think they are)… So maybe it’s in online analogues for these friend-focused activities that we should now be looking…

Categories
Science Technology

Enhanced reality: Noise in Space?

So it occurred to me (while watching some dumb sci-fi TV series set in space) that maybe spaceships that make noise in a vacuum isn’t such a dumb idea after all. I mean, obviously they wouldn’t (couldn’t) make any noise, but there would be all kinds of reasons why it would be in the best interest of neighbouring ships to simulate the sensation. After all, noise can convey all kinds of useful information – different guns make different noises, different engines make different noises, you can tell the location – perhaps even the speed – of an object by pure noise alone. If we were to assume that – in space – the computers and sensors on ships would most likely be taking in much more information than a human could easily assimilate through a visual interface, then it makes total sense that you’d try to deliver some of it through sound. In fact it seems astonishing that you wouldn’t!

In such an environment – detached from everything outside your pressurised container by metal and vaccuum – the only sense that you’d otherwise have much use for would be sight. Smell would be pretty much redundant, you couldn’t reach out and touch anything and taste (bluntly) wouldn’t be that useful. Even the limited amount of motion senses that we have would probably be quite dramatically interfered with by the unfamiliarity of space and either an absence of, or a highly localised and disorientating forms of, gravity. That being the case – making use of a sense that would otherwise have very limited input would seem to be eminently practical and useful. Overlaying this enhanced – information-delivering, but yet still artificial – reality over normal video footage would create an outer-space that was more obviously comprehensible to human beings. That simple layer of mediation would help transform the insanely complex and alien into the routinely prosaic (this being – after all – precisely the reason that TV series put the noise in). So From now on I’m going to pretend that’s what they’re doing when the Romulan ships let off a volley of patouieee-ing distruptor blasts. I’m going to pretend they have a special insight into the world of the future and the ambient interfaces that they might use. I’m going to remark to myself, “How clever they were to think of that!”

For more information on various kinds of enhanced reality, you might try out some of these links:

Categories
Random

Everything in moderation…

What follows is an enterprise that only the most anal and beard-stroking of smoking-jacketted social software enthusiasts could possibly enjoy. While I was writing it I could almost feel myself rocking backwards and forwards in my leatherette chair with quiet but insistent mirth while muttering to myself, “Quite so! Quite so!”. I’m indulging in that particular depth of humour that has analogues in all the trades and professions. I am gaining pleasure from the equivalent of jokes about double-entry book-keeping.

For some reason best known to myself, I’ve been digging around for quotes about ‘moderation’ (in the sense of being a moderate drinker). More particularly I’ve been looking for quotes that take on an entertaining or strangely pertinent double-meanings when you pretend that they’re actually about the moderation of online community spaces. Ho ho ho! Do you see what I did there? Two meanings, with one word! Oh the decadent ecstasy of language! I may die!

Anyway – I’ve found the whole enterprise highly entertaining, which is almost certainly an indication that I should be upstairs at my neighbour’s late-night party rather than down here quietly bitching about the noise they’re making while tapping frantically at my little laptop… But given that I’m not likely to be leaving my flat any time soon (or sleeping, for that matter) here are a few of my favourites:

“The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.” Aristotle

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Oscar Wilder

“To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity.” Blaise Pascal

“The heart is great which shows moderation in the midst of prosperity.” Seneca

“Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.” Charles Caleb Colton

“Exactness and neatness in moderation is a virtue, but carried to extremes narrows the mind.” Francois F⁄Nelon†

“If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.” Georg C. Lichtenberg†

“Only action gives life strength, only moderation gives it charm.” Jean Paul

“Out of moderation a pure happiness springs.” Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe†

“Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.” W. Somerset Maugham

“Wisdom hath her excesses, and no less need of moderation than folly.” Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

I could go on all day… But I won’t because if I did so, none of you would ever come back. I hope you’ve found it at least a little illuminating and enjoyable. God knows you could all do with a little culture every now and then… Anyway, I’ll end with my favourite quote of the lot – to be delivered with a rueful complicity smile and a bit of an eye-roll towards its author, Saint Augustine, who (clearly after looking after barbelith for more than a couple of hours – was heard to remark (with a sigh?):

“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”