Proposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the Web

As comments on the Web become fragmented, conversations that occur on downstream aggregation sites often are taking place in a silo, disjointed from parallel discussions on the originating Web site. Over the last two years, many people have found this evolution controversial, hoping to unify the conversations in a central location - and some services, including JS-Kit's Echo and Disqus, have taken the first step by pulling external discussions to the source. But a brand new proposal, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, called the Salmon Protocol, is looking to take advantage of Pubsubhubbub to unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream. And yes... the name of Salmon comes because those fish manage to swim upstream, just like the comments.


An Initial Presentation on the Salmon Protocol
As discussed in Friday's panel at Blog World Expo on technology and the real-time Web, Pubsubhubbub essentially works as a middle-man conduit, taking information from a data's source passing along changed data to downstream destination sites. The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites.

In conjunction with Pubsubhubbub, the Salmon Protocol leverages the newest iteration of webfinger, enabling publishers to receive comments and verify subscribers - as a form of true identity recognition, similar to how both Disqus and JS-Kit have you register for individual accounts with either service. An additional side benefit to leveraging Webfinger would be to dramatically reduce the potential for spam, assuming each individual has a unique ID.

The debate over fractured conversations has risen and fallen over the last two years. In September, I essentially said I was done listening to people complain about the issue after hearing complaints regarding Google SideWiki - as I believe people will want to have conversations where they are comfortable, and that they shouldn't be forced to come back to a single source. This is a point I have been hammering since the first major flareup back in April of 2008. (See: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

Many people believe that transporting comments from one site to another and making the conversations one could cause confusion, or even make potential commenters uncomfortable. With this in mind, John has suggested that users "be made aware of the publishing scope of the comments they leave," adding "For some aggregators, this may be implied (all data is public), for others a warning or a checkbox may be necessary." (See: Salmon Protocol (Draft) Protocol Summary)


A Test Comment from the Aggregator Via Salmon

The Resulting Comment Back On the Blog Via Salmon
There is a test playground for the Salmon Protocol, and I can verify that it already works. If you want to test it, one option is to take a testbed Blogger account and point the Salmon Protocol your way. It occurs automatically, and comments that happen on the downstream aggregator will make it back to the blog immediately, thanks to Pubsubhubbub. Now, the quest becomes to turn this brand-new protocol into a new standard - one that could pose a serious challenge to services like JS-Kit Echo and Disqus, even including threaded replies. If done well, the long debate over unified conversations could soon be over.

Learn more at: http://www.salmon-protocol.org/.

Disqus Launches Version 3 Of Comments, Adds Profiles

The world of comments on blogs has changed quite a lot just in the past few years. Once the central discussion point for all activity around posts, comments have become distributed, floating to a myriad of social networks and RSS feed readers, while still others are simply retweeting the items they like. The changes were enough to see one comment provider, JS-Kit, say that comments were "dead". Meanwhile, amidst the noise, Disqus has rolled out version 3 of its product today, providing a new, smoother look and feel, and most-importantly for today's Web, real-time updating and greatly improved "reactions" that pull in activity from around the Internet.


Disqus Has Now Split Into Two With Profiles and Comments
In parallel with the company's revamp of its comments engine, Disqus has also added a separate product, called your Profile, which lets users add or delete comments, without impacting the original site, and also presents yet another place to add your third party services, so you can tie all your activities on a post through your profile. Other benefits include a personal URL, such as http://www.disqus.com/louismg for me.


My New Disqus Profile


The New Look of Disqus Comments
Disqus's improvements are coming none too soon. With a great deal of comments taking place elsewhere, as I mentioned with my recent post on Google Reader, and have seen with various sites trying out JS-Kit's Echo platform, the world of comments on the blog has to adapt. I just wonder how the real-time aspect of comments can keep people on the site instead of venturing somewhere else, where they may have established a community. I am looking forward to seeing Disqus 3 play a more connected role to the social ecosystem.

New FeedFlare Displays FriendFeed Likes and Comment Counts

Bloggers who are tied into social media sites have long used FeedBurner's FeedFlare functionality to help promote their blog posts, from pushing visitors to Digg or Stumble posts, add them to Delicious, or e-mail them to friends. But increasingly, information from external social networks is being fed back to the blog itself - from the number of retweets a post may have received to the number of Google Reader users who shared the item, for example. A new custom feedflare, designed by Kevin Fox, the lead designer of FriendFeed, and the artist behind popular sites such as GMail and Google Reader, is now available to display the likes and comments your post might have gotten on FriendFeed. It's already running on this site, and can be seen on his RSS feed as well.


FriendFeed Activity Displayed on My Site
The FeedFlare can be displayed on your site, on your RSS feed, or both - and clicking on the comments and likes statistics takes you to where your blog post is shared on FriendFeed, bridging visitors of your site to the conversation there.

Setting up the FeedFlare for FriendFeed likes and comments is not a one-click process, so if you are interested, here's how you do it:

1. Download this compressed .zip file. It contains the three documents you need, and an "About" file. Unzip the file and you will see a folder titled "friendfeedflare".
2. Open the file "flare.php". Next to where it says USERNAME, replace "notlouisgray" with your FriendFeed user name.
3. Open the file "friendflare.xml" and replace the pathname of "http://www.yourdomain.com/directory/flare.php" with where you will host the flare.php file. For example, I host mine at http://www.louisgray.com/feed/flare.php.
4. Upload the files "flare.php", "friendflare.xml" and "friendfeed.php" to a directory on your site which matches the path you provided in step 3.
5. Log in to your FeedBurner account, and go to the "FeedFlare" section in the "Optimize" tab.
6. At the bottom of the page, where you have the option to add a "Personal FeedFlare", paste in the URL of your XML file. (e.g. http://www.louisgray.com/feed/friendflare.xml)
7. Hit "Add New Flare" and then "Save".

The FeedFlare Displayed In FeedBurner
At this point, the likes and comment counts on your items will be displayed on your blog or RSS feed. They will continue to accrue until you have 30 newer items in your blog feed.

A year or so ago, the blogosphere lit up around how social sites were stealing the conversation away from blogs, and operating in silos. With tools like this, and Disqus and BackType's integration of FriendFeed comments, the disparate conversations are becoming ever more unified.

If you like this FeedFlare, be sure to check out Kevin Fox's FriendFeed here, or his personal blog at fury.com. And if you get it up and running, it'd be great to see it on your site, so post your blog URL in the comments.

How To Cleanly Separate Personal and Work Social Media Personalities

As social networking and social media sites increasingly become as much about companies and brands as they are about people, you are seeing names like Zappos and JetBlue tweeting alongside you, and Comcast answering complaints. Companies might be making comments on FriendFeed and asking you to join their fan page on Facebook. Many of you, possibly tasked with maintaining the social media presence for your company, might be maintaining multiple accounts on practically every network, and trying to keep your personalities in check, lest you make the mistake of getting the two mixed up. For the last four months, I've been doing the same thing. Here's how.

Put Your Work Life In One Browser, and You In Another

Everybody has multiple browsers these days. Whether you prefer Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or something else, you probably have a second one which you use less. Rather than ask you to login and log out over and over, set up one of your browsers with bookmarks to all your work activity and the social media sites with that account, and keep your preferred browser all yours.

For my work account, I use Firefox, and for me, I use Safari.

When I open Firefox, the browser opens five distinct tabs:

• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Twitter Search
• Twitter
• FriendFeed

The GMail account tracks new subscribers and DMs. Google Reader populates the link blog. Twitter search watches what is being said online, and Twitter and FriendFeed let the company participate.

Running the browsers in parallel lets me do the work I need to in both, without suffering from multiple personality disorder.

Make A Second Login, Preferences for TweetDeck

TweetDeck, in my opinion, is still the best way to track groups and saved searches in Twitter. I set up TweetDeck so if I am logged in as me, the application has the standard black look and feel. But when I am logged in with the company ID, TweetDeck is in the company colors of blue and orange. Yes, the combination is somewhat garish, but it serves as a reminder to me that I'm logged in for work, so I won't screw up.


Logged Into TweetDeck as the Company

Logged Into TweetDeck as Me
Beyond the colors, you should leverage TweetDeck's saved search functionality to track your company and product mentions, as well as that of competitors.

Create a Second Disqus Account for Commenting

When commenting on blogs around the Web, as yourself, or for the company, it makes sense to use best practices and identify who you are. But you don't necessarily want to track your work comments to your personal ID. I recommend getting a second Disqus account that ties back to your work e-mail address, and have that registered in the "work" browser. When I make comments on sites as work, it says my first and last name, and then, in parentheses, the company name.

Always Work Methodically When Acting on Behalf of the Company

Tweeting or commenting or blogging or bookmarking as a brand is more risky than when you do it on your own. As with all things on the Web, you should consider how they could be interpreted downstream. But when you are doing something on behalf of a corporate entity that represents products, people, history and finance, you should take an extra breath before acting, and pay extra attention to every word, character or nuance.

Be Replaceable

If you do your job well, it should be easy for you to pass off the reins of the social media strategy at your company to somebody else with very little impact. If you make the company's social media presence all about you, it will follow you where you go next, and could negatively damage the company you are leaving, and distract from the company where you are going. See that you can work on behalf of the company without it being all about you. Try to offer personality without it necessarily being your distinct personality.

You'll note I don't often talk about work here on the blog. It was a conscious decision I made when starting the site at the beginning of 2006. It's not a secret where I work (check my LinkedIn profile) but it's not about where I work. It's all part of keeping things separate. Are you running the social media activity for your company, or looking to get started? I would be interested in the tips you may have as well.

Outbrain Gets Five Stars (And $12 Million) in Round B

While venture capital is said to be very expensive these days, hard to obtain, and with questionable potential returns given a closed market for public offerings and multiples for mergers and acquisitions, companies on the periphery of blogging appear to still be hot. We saw Auttomatic acquire Intense Debate late last year. You also remember strong funding rounds for my personal favorites, Lijit and Disqus, who are adding strong search and commenting functionality to sites like mine. Now, you can add Outbrain to the list, following this morning's announcement the company scored a $12 million round to expand its blog rating and recommendation platform.

Now, before you cry foul and ask where the money is in such a little widget, as is tempting, you can read between the lines in today's release to see that Outbrain has bigger plans - ones they no doubt shared with their VC partners, and not necessarily with me.

Outbrain is talking less about a widget, and more about finding great content across the Web. As one VC partner said, "Finding great content is getting both more difficult and more important... Outbrain's personalized recommended links offer great value to readers by combining their collective wisdom..."

If you think about it, Lijit and Outbrain are solving similar issues, from different angles. Lijit scours your personal blog and your social network of approved sites to find content you are searching for. Outbrain analyzes your individual posts, your previous blog entries and other blogs in their network to provide recommendations of what to read next. Both are useful, and both are getting traction. And it's good to see that good ideas are going to be rewarded, even when times are more difficult.

Our Doings: You Upload The Moment, They Organize It By Date

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Our Doings is a simple and unique photo sharing service. While it may not have the lengthy feature set and large community of a Flickr or Picasa, that's okay, as it's primarily a much smaller operation, and the feature set built into the service leaves it standing in a league of its own, in my opinion.

Getting started with Our Doings takes less then five minutes. Once you register for an account, you have the option of creating a custom URL for your photos, such as the one I created for testing purposes, or you can let the system automatically generate one for you. Both URLs can be viewed by the public. The key difference is the indexing option, which you can select on or off. If you select "no indexing", search engines are advised not to index your URL.


Uploading is made easy. Give it everything you can throw at it!


The service gives you a multitude of ways to send photos into the system.

• e-mail to publish
  
• Web Publishing Wizard lets you upload straight from Windows XP or Vista
• Picasa photo albums button
• Web form to upload individual photos
• Ability to upload a zip archive of up to 100MB

Why do I like this service so much? Automatic organization of your photos by date!

While the service has plenty of nook and crannies, this is by far the best feature yet. There is not one service out there that I could find that automatically organizes and sorts your photos by date. This is not a feature currently offered by any of the other major photo sharing services currently on the market.


For someone like me, who is not meticulous with organizing my photos, this feature is a godsend. I have dozens of folders on my desktop with random images taken at any given time. The images from a specific occasion in time, such as a birthday party or wedding are easy to organize. It's simply a matter of creating a photo album titled "someones wedding" and dumping all the correlating images into that album. The other hundreds of photos are taken on random occasions, random days and so forth. Most recently, with the birth of my daughter, my wife or I will grab the camera at any given time to capture that perfect Kodak moment of our daughter doing something that warrants a digital snap. It's these Kodak moments that I specifically would like to know the day that it had happened and reflected on the photo album. Now with this service, I can begin to upload the hundreds of images that I have stored on my desktop, and have them chronologically organized by the date that they were taken. This core feature will keep me using the service hands down.

It gets better. Site integration with your favorite Web 2.0 services:


Ourdoings.com offers integration with a lot of the popular Web 2.0 services, such as Disqus. Oh, and did you see FriendFeed is on that list too? They implemented SUP, which means if you configure it for FriendFeed, your images will appear on the site in real time. I configured mine to import my images into FriendFeed, you can see my feed here. It took no longer than 15 seconds for the images to import onto my feed. Without the implementation of SUP, you would be waiting anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour for photos from other photo sharing services to import into FriendFeed. You could always uses the manual refresh link, but that defeats the whole purpose.

You also get a Media RSS URL for all of your photo albums:

Media RSS is a special type of RSS feed that contains rich media assets like video, audio and imagery. Many media sharing and news sites publish content using Media RSS. This is an added bonus, and one feature I'm sure the bigger competitors in the space do not currently offer. Do you have a wireless photo frame? Without getting too technical, it solves the nagging problem of photo orientation.This explains it in more depth. This is something I will use for my wireless photo frame that I have been eyeing for purchase for some time now.

In closing:
I'm thoroughly impressed with this service. It's the simplicity of it, along with the automatic organization of my photos by date, that has sold me. I don't need all the fancy bells and whistles that some of the other bigger name services offer. I have a Picasa account that suits me just fine as a backup. Will this be a replacement for Picasa? It's strongly looking like it. I have not made the switch yet, as I only have tested the service out for less than an hour or so. I would like to see some photo editing features such as cropping and red eye reduction added, but in the meantime this service is something worth looking into.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Disqus2FF Mashes Up Fractured Conversations

Who really owned the comments... the original poster or the aggregation site that "stole them away" was one of the biggest small-time blog wars on the Web in 2008. Whether bloggers were complaining about seeing comments and conversation moved from their blog and instead taking place on FriendFeed, Socialmedian or Shyftr, or debating whether they could trust comments in the cloud, it became clear that the only consensus was that there would be no consensus. You either embraced the new tools, or you yelled loudly against them. Today, an interesting tool via Disqus has let bloggers effectively synchronize comments between their blogs and the popular FriendFeed service, meaning people can comment in either place, and see it end up as part of the conversation - wherever it is.

And guess what? We've already implemented it on this blog for louisgray.com.


Set up your API key on both services...

As the Disqus blog points out, an enterprising Disqus community member, Carter Rabasa, put together a quick application on Google's App Engine, called FF2Disqus. By entering your API key for both Disqus and FriendFeed, assuming you use both services, the tool will check your blog posts on FriendFeed and pull in FriendFeed comments to your site, or send Disqus comments to FriendFeed.


The result spits out the copied over comments...
There's no installation process, no scripting and no code. Just run it once and you're good to go.

You can choose to make the connection unidirectional, from either FriendFeed to your blog, or the other way, or to have full synchronization. I enabled it to copy over FriendFeed comments to my site, effectively replacing the Yahoo! Pipes solution I'd asked Pat Hawks to create last June.

The result is pretty straight forward. If there is a comment on FriendFeed, it is displayed by Disqus on my site, in the order it was posted, and the author's ID links to their FriendFeed user profile. Now, what the solution doesn't do is crawl FriendFeed and find all comments on all reshares or tweets of your blog. It just gets the one main entry, which I think is good enough. It also is bound to have some disjointed entries as conversations are smashed together, but it should be a good experiment to see how the two could merge.

If you're a FriendFeed user and a Disqus-enabled blogger, you should really check out FF2Disqus at https://ff2disqus.appspot.com/.

Kakuteru - Roll Your Own FriendFeed On Your Own Site

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.

The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.

Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!

Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.

Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.

Okay, so what's so special about this?

• The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customization
• Semantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.com
• Related articles & tweets are shown for each entry.
• Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.

Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.

Oh, and did I mention it's open source?

Out of the box:


It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.



Extra integration:

Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.


Activity stats:

One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?

Final verdict:

I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.

Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

10 Things I Wish I Would Do Better On the Web Come 2009

To most readers here, it's no secret I'm fairly active online. I try to keep up with the news by absorbing a strong amount of feeds in Google Reader, and then share the best of those with you on my shared links blog. I try to keep the blog consistently published with good insight, both from me and the rapidly-expanding team of contributors. I attempt to be visible and participate in a small array of social networks, from Facebook to Twitter to Friendfeed, Socialmedian and Strands. I try to answer e-mail as it comes in, and monitor or reply to comments. But I know I'm not doing a perfect job. If I only had more hours in the day, and made this my priority, here are some of the things I wish I would do better on the Web, and things I'll be paying more attention to as the calendar flips from 2008 to 2009:

1) Make More Comments on Original Blog Posts

Every day I come in contact with hundreds and hundreds of new stories. The vast majority of them I read in my RSS reader. I click through a small percentage, share a different percentage and e-mail others. I am also encountering many other new stories via FriendFeed and other social aggregators, exposing me to new ideas and news.

But while I already know I am not reading enough stories at their source, I'm certainly not participating and commenting enough. I need to make more time to do this in 2009.

2) Respond to More Comments on louisgray.com

Some days I do this well, and other days, not really well at all. A while ago, I talked about whether comments on blog posts were conversation, or just replies, and I find too often I lean toward the latter. Disqus makes it super-easy to blast through comments and respond via e-mail, so I should do a better job of being engaged with the best audience on the Web in 2009.

3) Be More Interactive On Twitter

There's no one right way to use Twitter, as we mentioned earlier today, but I'm pretty sure the way I use it isn't perfect. I signed up to Twitter in early 2008 after being, for me anyway, a longtime holdout. It's likely that more than half of my Twitter posts are simply announcing new blog posts here, and I could do a better job of listening and engaging than simply broadcasting in 2009.

4) Spend Less Time on a Few Sites, and More Time on Many Sites

Being visible and active on social networks that have similar capabilities, like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Strands, is hard. It's no secret that there is a tendency to pick one or two places to build up a community and leave the others dry, and in 2008, I overweighted FriendFeed for sure. It makes sense that maybe I should dial back a bit on FriendFeed and spend more time in far-flung places in 2009.

5) Have More Time for In-Depth Reviews

At the beginning of the year, I feel I did a fairly good job of having the time to invest in fully reviewing new sites and services, to explain their every feature. From Toluu to ReadBurner to Feedly and Assetbar, it was not uncommon to show you every nook and cranny of a new site, so you could join it as an expert. But in the second half of the year, especially after the arrival of Matthew and Sarah, this time comparatively evaporated, making my reviews less detailed. I still try to do a good overview of new sites and iPhone applications, for example, but it'd be good to feel sharp about these reviews again in 2009.

6) Follow Up On Sites and Services After Their Launch

I want to avoid being a "hit and run" blogger, as I put it the other day, announcing something and then only covering them again if they had something major. Doing that, I feel, makes you a tertiary part of the story, and certainly not an embedded expert. I'd like to look back on the many different services that have either debuted here or been covered, and see how they have progressed in 2009.

7) Attend More Industry Conferences and Panels

Given blogging and the social media space is not my full-time job, I can't exactly say attending all the different events in the space is something that makes sense for my career or pocketbook. But I did get to attend Web 2.0 Expo in the Spring, and BlogWorld Expo in the fall, and enjoyed meeting many of the people with whom I'd only engaged online. I would like to make more time to see the industry mingle and participate in 2009.

8) Participate More Visiblity on Conferences and Panels

I've been lucky to learn that a panel I'll be participating in was accepted for the South By Southwest conference (SXSW) this upcoming Spring. This follows the panel I participated in with Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski, and a pair of panels and BlogWorld Expo this fall. As the blog has gained visibility, opportunities are making themselves available, and I would like to be less of a wallflower and more active in 2009.

9) Be More Active on Podcasts, Videoconferencing

Having blogged on the site for three full years now, showing I can put a blog post together and cover a story, or participate in social media is not a surprise. I also had the opportunity to participate in the Elite Tech News podcast earlier this year when it was more regular, and the ReadBurner podcast through the year. I think it would be fun to get the opportunity to showcase new entrepreneurs, bloggers and services using audio and video in 2009.

10) Highlight More Bloggers and Entrepreneurs

In 2008, one of the major focuses I had was to bring to light new bloggers that had previously toiled in obscurity. By launching the series of five new blogs each month, by bringing on a stable of talented writers and keeping a focus on startups and the people behind those services, we played a role in making people more known by the end of the year than the beginning. I don't want to lose momentum on this, and keep bringing new people to the fore in 2009.

These ten items are on my list because I believe, in combination, they will help my understanding of technology, the industry, and the people better. It will help me have a more rounded tech experience without being too focused on niche topics and insulated. 2008 saw some strides in many of these areas, but I know I need to step up my game in 2009, and I look forward to the challenge.

Disqus Gets Serious About Growing Comment Spam Problem

In the months I've had Disqus installed as the comments engine to my blog, I've been lucky enough to see some great engagement with readers of the site. The centralization and tracking of my comments around the Web, in addition to managing my comments in one place, and via e-mail have been a big help also, as has the service's extensibility and tracking via sites like BackType and FriendFeed. But one of the downsides of Disqus' popularity is that it has grown a bigger target for comment spammers aiming to shill for their prescription drug of choice, and all too frequently offering up ridiculous items, like gold for the game World of Warcraft. But as of tonight, Disqus has rolled out some new spam moderation functions that let you help fight the spam battle and, hopefully, reduce the amount of spam going forward.

In July, I suffered my first Disqus comment spam attack. Though it remains the largest flare-up to date, hundreds of spam messages have flowed into my mail box through the blog. Every morning, and at various points during the day, I'm faced with the routine of hitting reply to each e-mail and saying "Delete", to get the offensive gunk off my blog. I'd rather do that than leave the automated barnacles hanging on my posts, but the situation hasn't been getting better of late.


My Archive of Removed Messages Is Expanding
In addition to the 40 real comments I got on the blog today, I also got about 10 fakes - with about three or so a day in recent weeks. The topics themselves don't vary, but the names do.


Disqus Asks for Us to Help Them Fight Spam
Now, according to the Disqus blog, I can reply back to assumed spam with the simple one word command of "Spam", adding to the service's knowledge and helping them form a blacklist. You can also go into the admin section of your Disqus site and block the comments as spam there.

The war between Web services, e-mail, comments and spammers will never be over, I am afraid, but at this point, the move is yours, spammers. Disqus isn't taking this fight lying down. The service also promises some new features coming soon, including a new interface and internationalization.

My Kids' Early Lives Are Already Entwined In Social Media

So far, I've held off on doing the silly thing, signing up my 4-month old twins, Matthew and Sarah, with user names to popular Web services, even though others thought I would. I haven't purchased them domain names, dedicated servers, or purchased them their own digital devices - yet.

This is because I expect by the time they're ready to use them that many of the brands will have changed, and because to have yet another login (or two) would be too tempting, and I'd find myself tweeting as an infant, and that would be completely silly. Also, who knows what kind of user names these kids will want once they've realized they have a choice? Surely not the fuddy-duddy version I'm bound to select.

In March, I said loudly, Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag. And while they're still small, and haven't grown into everything, they're doing their best. (Not that they wouldn't mind more logo clothes - e-mail me if you're interested.)

But, consider the following, all of which are true:

• FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and his wife knew we were pregnant before my family did.
• I posted the announcement that we were pregnant to the blog, before telling many family members.
• Travis Parsons of Browzmi was the first person I told that we were going into labor, and I told him via Facebook.
• The labor process was posted to both Twitter and FriendFeed overnight and into the day.
• When Matthew and Sarah were born, I was wearing a Disqus shirt.
• Matthew wore a newborn Google onesie when only two days old.
• Matthew was hired, and subsequently, fired, by Allen Stern at CenterNetworks.
• Matthew has been featured in his Strands onesie on the Strands blog.
• A YouTube video screenshot featuring Sarah was posted to CNET last Friday.
• Both kids have been over-exposed on FriendFeed, having their pictures posted frequently.

All this has happened before the pair have learned to crawl, talk, read, or walk. But they're growing up in front of laptop screens, they've been pictured with the iPhone, and have attended Silicon Valley gatherings. Sarah met Loic Lemeur of Seesmic, and both met Drew Olanoff of Strands and MG Siegler of VentureBeat.


Matthew Goes LOLCat for Strands
Whether they realize it or not, as social media becomes more intertwined with every aspect of our lives, they too have become intertwined with social media.


Sarah Gets Chatty Last Thursday On YouTube
Today, Matthew and Sarah turn four months old, so they are effectively 1/3 years old. While I've gone light in terms of dousing the blog with their pictures, you can stay updated in a few places:

Internal FriendFeed postings on my feed:
http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=internal

Our SmugMug page (needs updating):
http://louisgray.smugmug.com/

Our YouTube page:
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=asypta

Five Creatively Obnoxious Things to Do With Social Media

We're all too familiar with trolls or people who spout nonsense to get a rise out of you. The art of trolling is one much-perfected by few, and typically, despised by all. But there are less "in your face" ways to have someone scratching their head, trying to figure you out. Some are undoubtedly amusing, and I've been tempted to do them myself, if I didn't unfortunately have an inner moral conscious crying out for me to stop. This list is by no means inclusive, but none would be all that difficult to pull off, if you're in an incendiary mood.

1. Respond to very old e-mail as if there were no issues.

We've heard many people espouse the idea of "in box zero", but for most of us, it's not realistic. I've got e-mails I never answered in my in box going back a good part of two years. Sometimes, I think it'd be fun to start at the top, and respond to the old e-mail, without apologizing for my lateness, and continue the conversation from where it left off. Imagine the hilarity!

2. Pick somebody random on Twitter who is fairly active. Follow them, and then block them immediately.

Most Twitter users will give a new "follow" at least a cursory glance, and many will reciprocally follow. They'll likely be scratching their heads when it turns out you've blocked them and it's impossible for them to follow you back.

3. Use Twitter or FriendFeed to shout out someone's name with no context.

I've seen this happen a few times, when people accidentally post a name instead of searching for it. (For example: here) If you saw somebody post your name to Twitter without any reason or follow-up, wouldn't it drive you a little nuts trying to figure out what they were thinking?

4. Put somebody on a custom FriendFeed list that contains profanity or an odd name.

Earlier this month, resident crank and good friend Steven Hodson of WinExtra noticed somebody had added his data to a custom feed called "curmudgeons". As you can set up any names you wish, and there are no known filters, you can let your imagination run wild with just what you can name the lists. Then put people you know obsess over their stats and click through like mad.

So far, I haven't thusly been abused. Some of the referrals I've seen have me in "gurus", "noisy", "personal", "thetechnologylife", "professional", "sm-bloggers", and "pay-attention". So far, so good, but there's no doubt this could change. I'm just trying to stay off Mark Hopkins' "irksome" list, myself. (See also: Hutch Carpenter: How to Mess with Bloggers’ Heads Using FriendFeed Lists)

5. Set up a custom e-mail account for Disqus with an auto-responder.

If you have a Disqus account, leave a comment on a blog, and get a reply, you should receive an e-mail notification saying the conversation has continued. If you create a new e-mail account just for this, say from OtherInBox, you could set up your e-mail to reply to all new messages, saying you're out of the office, or something akin to "I receive a lot of e-mail and will answer yours in the order it was received".

This response will itself be placed in the comment thread of said blog, and be the owner's responsibility to delete, or could even lead to them responding to your out of office and have it continue. Heck, if you make the auto-responder creative enough, they may think you actually typed it yourself!

These are of course just scratching the surface. What other annoyances have you seen, or done yourself, that can be pulled off without being too destructive in nature? Have you done any of the above, and will you start now?

Disqus' API Launch Extends Commenting Possibilities

At Blog World Expo last week, I said that those services which "played well with others" would do better in a collaborative, cooperative Web 2.0 landscape over those that instead held tight to their walled gardens (See tweet from @drewolanoff.) It is through the launch of an API and extensive developer activity that services like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter have grown, often at the expense of those that didn't. Tonight, the popular Web commenting service Disqus joined the fray, launching a full public API.

The API (outlined here) lets services and tools write custom comment import and export tools, or to develop unique plug-ins for their platform. (see the announcement and coverage by The Inquisitr.)

Disqus comments are already among the most portable, enabling syndication through RSS, and into lifestreaming applications of all sorts. But what I found most interesting was the note on custom plugins for customer platforms. What's to stop developers from making a custom Disqus-enabled engine that is secure, and for the enterprise, essentially the comments equivalent of Yammer (versus Twitter)? What I see happening is that many of the social tools we may be using for community and entertainment in our world are now on the verge of making it to the enterprise. With an open development platform, and possibly, the idea to customize the comments engine for services that have enterprise capabilities, this could be one way to break on through to the other side, so to speak.

This week's big commenting news was Automattic buying up Intense Debate, something many thought would make Disqus' world a whole lot harder. Tonight's announcement shows they aren't sitting still and playing the part of victim. I'm eager to see the new services and tools that get developed as a result of being Disqus-powered.

Seesmic to Release New Nokia Client, Sees New Video Every Minute

Yesterday evening, at a panel on lifestreaming put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur introduced the video conversation site as seeing significant growth and part of the real-time Web, utilizing video, for the first time, in an active way, rather than a passive way, as YouTube does. The result is a site that he says is used in more than 40 countries and sees a new video posted every minute, a number which has now reached more than half a million since May, from 30,000 different users. Also, he dropped hints to a new Seesmic client built for Nokia handsets that would enable full video conversations, including replies, to debut today.

I attended the session and took notes via laptop, so all quotes are "best effort."

Le Meur said Seesmic came to life due to a gap between today's text-based social software, including blogs and Facebook, and the more active nature of video. He said that while YouTube offers the ability to post comments and replies to videos, they don't happen all that often, and that through integration with tools like Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed, Seesmic can power the video conversation.

As he told attendees, half of the service's traffic happens on the Seesmic Web site, and another half occurs through desktop clients, like Thwirl, which he acquired earlier this year. Seesmic is now also installed on 7,000 blogs, including this one, and TechCrunch, enabling visitors to leave video comments on stories, and embed the entire video thread.

Le Meur, who raised $12 million for Seesmic, said the actual costs of the site are relatively small, in the tens of thousands per month. Costs are largely kept low due to users' videos, on average being less than a minute, he said. But plans for revenue include a mix of advertising and pro accounts, which would have greater capability and customization. He also spoke highly of co-branded operations, citing a 20th Century Fox promotion that received 1,600 view replies, and said a new feature, called groups, would debut in coming weeks.

"We were very lucky that we raised $12 million, and we are very cautious," Le Meur said. "We can hold for years."

The goal of growing Seesmic isn't to flip the company and make a quick buck, Le Meur said yesterday, joking about his record of selling four different companies after saying that was a "bad goal to have". Instead, he wants to help power anytime communication by video from anywhere, getting as close to real life as possible, while continuing to learn from the user community as to what features should come next.

"I would like to pursue my vision of a worldwide talk show, where people talk together, no matter where they are, all on video," Le Meur said. "We are building something real different. We wouldn't have done video comments at the beginning, and now we are learning by the community. We have a very active community and get thousands of feature requests."

Le Meur, who has one of the most active, most-followed Twitter accounts in the world, said he saw the real-time nature of the service as incredibly compelling, and that the "instant Web" was changing everything. His goal would be to leverage the power of sites like Twitter and FriendFeed to reach more users and groups of users who find communities online, even if the video quality, so far, isn't the best ever - something that has surprisingly been a boom for online dating sites.

"The good news is that you actually look worse (on Seesmic) than you really are," he said, adding that Seesmic would be branching out to make even more people look worse than they really are, through the release of an updated Nokia client today, which will let Nokia users have a full conversation, including video replies, using only their handsets.

BackType Goes Forward With Comment Tracker and Search

A little over two weeks ago, I reported on Disqus' platform updates, which brought new features, including the ability to show a "comment blog" that displays all your comments on the platform from around the Web. Today, a new service called BackType has opened up to go beyond Disqus, finding my comments (and yours) from many different commenting platforms and assigning them to a single stream. The service also lets you follow other BackType users, and search across the BackType community to find popular topics of discussion, no matter which blog, or which commenting engine, they take place on.


BackType Shows Comments from Those You Follow Around the Web
At times, reader comments can be just as thought provoking, if not more so, than the original author's blog post. Disqus made some noise this week with the introduction of the ability to "reblog" comments as individual posts, and last month, Fred Wilson of A VC openly wondered if there would come a time when comments were treated equally with posts on popular news aggregators, like Techmeme.


You Can Search BackType for Comments that Contain Keywords
With comments carrying so much weight, it's no wonder some bloggers are up in arms when they've seen their comments move to RSS feed readers or social media sites. But to date, no single service has given comments equal weight, until the arrival of BackType.


You Can Select People to Follow on BackType
When you register for BackType, you can add your blog, or your page on popular comment engines, like Disqus. You can also click on the "People" tab to see the most followed users of BackType, see their commenting frequency, and click through to see their activity. A few BackType users of note, at launch, include Andrew Weissman, Chris Brogan and the aforementioned Fred Wilson. On each person's page, you not only see their most recent comments, but you can also click on the blog icons on the right side of the page to see their comments on specific sites.

Like on Twitter, FriendFeed or other social sites, you can both follow BackType users, or be followed, and you can see the statistics on each user page. Given the site's new status, the most popular people barely break a dozen followers, but I can see how following someone's comment stream could be a lot more rich than their 140-character updates on Twitter.

If you like the idea of a comment blog, you'll really like BackType. If you like seeing what your friends and peers are doing around the Web, in full sentences and paragraphs, not just microupdates, then BackType makes sense as well. You can follow me at http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

Disqus Takes Commenting to the Next Level

Over the last few months, no blogging comments engine has received as much attention, or gained as much perceived blogger momentum as has Disqus. While alternatives exist, Disqus' clean interface, tracking capabilities and the team's aggressive approach to customer support have begun to make them the alternative to standard blogging comment engines from Blogger, Wordpress and TypePad. As I previously documented, moving to Disqus has greatly improved the interactivity between me and my readers over the last few months, and I remain extremely optimistic about the company's ability to gain market share.

As many other sites have now reported, Disqus rolled out version 2 of their software today, addressing some concerns held by holdouts who believed implementing the engine would hurt their SEO rankings, while also delivering strong platform integration with Wordpress, a new developer API, and a significant reorganization of Disqus.com to deliver immediate access to an individual's comments to track and manage.

On Sunday, prior to today's announcement, I spoke with the company's CEO, Daniel Ha, who said much of today's rollout was targeting those people concerned with their comment data being externally hosted on "the cloud". The service's new API enables full synchronization between Disqus and your local comments database (for Wordpress and Moveable Type only today), which has a side benefit of working well with search engines, such as Google.

Most interesting to me in today's announcement are the changes at Disqus.com. As I've discussed before, comments are often made, and as Disqus comments can flow to e-mail, to FriendFeed, or other lifestreaming services, context becomes crucial. Now, each registered Disqus user has a personal "comment blog", which can show previous comments, as well as replies, to provide context. For example, you can see mine here: http://disqus.com/people/louismg/

Disqus is now installed at more than 30,000 Web sites. When I asked Ha about the service's penetration in markets outside the typically insular tech blogging community, he said, "We have a very great presence in the tech blogger segment, but the most prolific discussions come on political and finance blogs. There is a lot of heavy usage back and forth."

Disqus, which held a party this most recent Saturday at their new office, employs three people full time, with an intern, who will be leaving the company at the end of the summer, much to Daniel's dismay.

The blog comments space is not one where Disqus has a monopoly yet, by any means. SezWho and Intense Debate have a good following, as does WordPress, of course, but today's developments raise the bar yet again for competition as Disqus becomes more entrenched as the standard.

Me-Too Software and Web Apps Often Find Their Own Niche

As the price to develop Web applications and communities has decreased, and investment in people is less-demanding, it's no surprise that we've seen a boom in sites with significant similarities - be they social networking, lifestreaming, status updaters, online file storage or virtual worlds. While the rule holds true in software as it does in Silicon Valley, that the vast majority of products may meet a less than optimal fate, the potential payout continues to draw development, with new brand names hitting our RSS feeds on a daily basis.

The seeming onslaught of new services had the omnipresent Chris Brogan asking frustratedly yesterday, "Who's writing all these me too software apps? Do they feel accomplished?" Brogan later gave the services Kwippy and Yokway as examples of two services that had recently come across his view, adding, "(I) just dont' see why we need yet another of something we have in spades. Where's the innovation?"

Sometimes, in this age of instant analysis, determining the differentiation and purpose of a new site can be hard, especially as the bloggers and technology reporters try and grasp the new site and place it in the context of existing applications that are more well-known. (See: Inquisitr: Yokway: Sort of FriendFeed Meets Del.icio.us for one example)

Whether it's in the name of differentiation or competition, it's rare that a developer or startup team will be aiming to make a carbon copy of an existing site. RSSmeme debuted, after ReadBurner, to show the most shared items in Google Reader, and progressed differently, offering a custom FeedFlare and featuring deeper index with more linkblogs than ReadBurner, while ReadBurner partnered with multiple RSS engines, including NewsGator and Netvibes. Facebook was like MySpace and Friendster before it, but initially just for the college set and later high school, before opening up, and later adding a development platform.

There is a long history of services and software that have striking similarities to one another. That a product exists doesn't mean that any potential competing product should walk away and cede the market, delivering a monopoly. As Disqus' CEO Daniel Ha told me back in June, the existence of competitors like SezWho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit help let him know he's in a worthwhile market to pursue, even if it's a rare blogger who has plans to implement multiple commenting engines. The existence of Digg didn't stop Mixx from debuting, and the existence of HotBot, Lycos and Excite didn't look like too much of a hurdle for Google to get going.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek, in the FriendFeed comment thread spawned by Brogan's question, said, "Until someone dominates the space you will see a lot of similar applications," while Clint Ecker wrote, "The market will bear out the niche products and the unsatisfactory ones will fade away and disappear until the community has selected the 'best' service."

But even the selection of a "best service" doesn't mean there won't be more developers trying to crack the market. Plurk and Identi.ca are two recent approaches to microblogging, taking on Twitter. And Cuil's entry into the search market came at a time when Google's enjoyed its largest market share ever. The likelihood of these challenger sites to replace the market behemoths is very small, both short term and longer term, but just about every site and service can develop a dedicated community who swears by it - arguably making the developers' efforts worthwhile. You recently saw this happen when the niche community sites of Ballhype and Showhype, arguably Digg clones, were acquired for $3 million.

From the outside looking in, developers don't see themselves as copycats. Instead, they likely see opportunity, finding weaknesses in a competitor's offering, or finding a new way to seemingly offer the best of both worlds. And just because they aren't enjoying a majority market share in a given metric by a certain time period doesn't mean their efforts were in vain. There's no hard and fast law saying you need to sign up for every lifestreaming service, every social network, every microblogging client and every RSS reader, but as more options and alternatives are out there, there will be a small group of people who prefers the new entrant, whether it be for its GUI, its compatibility with plug-ins, widgets or extensions, or implied productivity.

As an early adopter, I'll usually be checking out most of these services, and I welcome more. It's not about finding how much they're all the same, but determining the differences, and seeing what I can do that's new. I might, sometimes, never use a service again, if I don't find it to do what I had hoped. But often, when I check back in a few months later, I'll find a small community that's calling it home, or see the development didn't stop at day one, making it a richer experience. So, development community, keep it coming. Let's see those new apps, the new innovation, and the new services. It will never be enough.

To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question

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

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

Writing Once, Publishing Many Times, Makes Context Critical

Whether Web services leverage RSS, send e-mail confirmations or are indexed by keywords in specialized search engines, it's not too uncommon for any activity you make online to set off a series of actions. When taken out of context, something you said in one place won't make as much sense somewhere else. A sentence fragment or a response might be completely confusing to one audience or at a certain time. With this in mind, best practices would suggest writing in full sentences where possible, and offering context.

Two Examples:

Sending replies in Twitter

Often, I will be following "Person A" and they will be following "Person B", but I won't be. If Person A sends a note to Person B, Twitter may often catch that as a reply, and clicking through the "in reply to" link will give you Twitter's best guess as to what Person A was responding to. But this doesn't always work.

Here's how it often happens:

Tweet 1: Person B: "@persona, are you up for seeing Wall-E at the Metreon?"
Tweet 2: Person B: "AFK for 15 minutes, got to get dog food."
Tweet 3: Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go. See you at six."

To the Twitter user following Person A, clicking the "in reply to" would make it sound like the pair were off to consume some Kibbles 'N' Bits, as Twitter usually grabs the latest tweet from the person to whom the tweet was sent as the message.

What would have been better is if that 3rd Tweet had read:

Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go see Wall-E. The movie sounds great. I'll see you at six."

Now, if I'm following only half the conversation, I get the idea, even without having to click through, and I won't think you are a huge Alpo fan.

Also, Tweets are read in more places than just Twitter these days. If I had set up a Summize search for "Wall-E", I would have seen Person B's initial tweet, but not the second one, from Person A, unless they put Wall-E in the response. And if I were following Person A on FriendFeed, the tweet with details would make a lot more sense, when jumbled in the rest of their activity.

The idea of writing in full sentences or giving context is to understand the audience for your messages is larger than you realize, and you should write for the followers on the periphery.

Making comments using Disqus

When I make a comment in Disqus, at least five things can happen:

• A comment is added to the originating blog.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the blog owner saying a new comment has published.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the person I am replying to if I am in a thread.
  
• A copy of that Disqus comment is added to my personal Disqus page.
  
• The full copy of that comment goes to aggregators like FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing.

Because the Disqus comments can go in so many places, it is especially important to try and highlight the name of the person I am responding to, give context to the reply and to write in full sentences. This way, the comment, wherever it may be seen, can make sense. When I make a comment in Disqus, I am thinking about the fact it's not just publishing to the blog author and commenter, but to those people who have not yet been part of the conversation. This you can see from my Disqus stream on FriendFeed or my profile on Disqus.

For a good idea of how the world uses Disqus, check FriendFeed's public stream of Disqus comments:

Here's one that has no context:

Svartling:"No sorry. But you can look here: Link"

Here's one that works well:

Svetlana Gladkova: "Very true Shey, I have seen it pretty often that a post from Profy receives, say, 30 likes on FriendFeed and a dozen of comments, and our server stats only shows a dozen of people actually visiting the post to read it and leave a comment on FF (if that is the place they prefer to leave comments). It is annoying when I realize that people only use FF to create some presence for themselves by liking and commenting titles instead of actually consuming the content they pretend to like - I think it is even worse than fragmentation of comments that FF initiates."

As aggregators play an increasing role in how we gather information on the Web, it's now possible for our comments on Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Reader shared items, as well as those from other services, to become part of our lifestream. In addition to Twitter and Disqus, two of the major examples, we should know that every time we say "LOL! I totally agree!" when we could have said, "Wow, thanks for sending me to this YouTube video of Conan O'Brien's Friday monologue. You're right, John McCain is old!", you're losing the opportunity for readers who find you in a different place to be part of the conversation.

Much of the time, one-sided conversations without context are called noise. You can actually reduce noise through carefully crafting the signal around the noise. It takes a little bit extra work, but it's well worth it.

I Woke Up to My First Disqus Comment Spam Attack

In the two and a half years I've written on this blog, comment spam has been an occasional problem, but nothing alarming. When I was using Blogger comments with Haloscan, I could moderate and delete when needed. When I used Blogger's native comments, I had the occasional piece of spam, but it was unusual. Now that I'm using Disqus, it's still very rare. But this morning, when I checked my e-mail, and found 94 new messages, I knew something was wrong. I'm simply not that popular.

Sure enough, somebody had broken through.

In less than an hour's time, the poster had added more than 30 comments to Disqus, all on different blog posts, all very old -- a clear example of a blog comment spammer on autopilot.


My In Box this Morning (Click to Enlarge)
And like any good spam these days, its message made very little sense, with a note to "make money" and dozens of lines in Farsi (or Arabic, I'm not an expert).

The good news is that Disqus gives me a way to delete the garbage. Usually, the service will alert me that a comment is flagged as spam, giving me the option to e-mail my desire to "delete" or "approve" the note, but this gibberish made it through the filter entirely. So I had to go to my Disqus dashboard, and delete each entry one by one. There was no way to delete the whole group or delete all by a specific author, as far as I am aware.


I know Wordpress bloggers swear by Aksimet and other solutions. Some even eagerly trumpet the thousands of spam messages blocked. So far, I've never had the need. Are you seeing spam commenting pick up, and if you're using Disqus, how do you handle it?