TechMeme Teasers

Blogger’s Fate

Have great idea to write about
Draft blog post, get interrupted by yet-another-great idea
While trying to pick which of your half-dozen half-baked posts to finish, read TechMeme and feel compelled to jump in a conversation
Respond to a few posts, and another day is gone without publishing your long-term baby
Now you have a dozen or so unfinished posts and even more ideas – some start to feel old, you may end up nuking them
Back to #1

It’s happening to me again and again today. So here are the TechMeme ~~bits~~ Bitchmemes.

FriendFeed or Blog, IM or Email

Top blogger and Social Media personality Robert Scoble is wondering if he harmed his blog by focusing too much on Twitter and FriendFeed. Mike Arrington @ TechCrunch crunches (pun intended) the numbers:

That’s 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate.

He concludes Robert is addicted and needs to be saved. Let me just add, I also use Twitter (moderately) and have a profile on FriendFeed, but don’t actively participate, only pay attention to it when I receive comments from others. I don’t have enough time and need to prioritize. I focus on where I find quality, and I agree with Mike (talking about FriendFeed and Twitter messages):

All that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time.

Yessss! You may become popular but not a thought leader on Twitter – there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters. So, unlike my friend Jevon, I am not worried about the future of blogging.

But before anyone declares this a narrow problem of the Social Media Elite, let’s just state it’s the same issue as the good old IM vs. email debate. Rapid-fire one-liners are helpful, but in business we often need to build-up a logical structure, sequence, or simply have a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication.

Long-form (email, blog) is here to stay.

Technorati Still Alive?

I’ve long buried (at least mentally) this former blogging pioneer, whose most known feature is the Technorati Monster – the equivalent of the Twitter Fail Whale. I paid my due respect repeatedly:

Technorati is clearly an IP company ( a damned good at that) that cannot cope with the infrastructure requirements of the growing Blogosphere. Isn’t there a White Knight out there that would acquire them and save us all from this slow suffocation?

I did not want to believe my eyes seeing that Simon Owens asks on Mediashift: Can Technorati Beat Google at Blog Search? Not that it’s a bad question – but it was relevant in 2005, not today.

In terms of features, my preference would be Technorati, not Google, but the real comparison is not between features. It’s between a system that always works, and one that perhaps works – or not. Yet I admit I am drawn back to T’rati for one single feature: the Technorati Authority. Not that I care about it as an absolute number – I use it to filter out noise.

Authority is an indicator of the number of inbound links from unique sources. Most blogs with an authority of 0, 1, 3, 5 are spam-blogs, created by bots, so keeping my search settings at authority level “some” (typically double-digit levels) will likely eliminate all spam leaving only real blogs written and linked to by real people.

The day Google implements such filtering for Blog Search is the day when Technorati becomes irrelevant.

Update (12/27): Wow, the “authority debate” got reborn today – this time “twitterized”: