msm vs blogs

I know there's supposed to be this revolution going on - main stream media (MSM) being replaced by many long tail, niche blogs but my Bloglines RSS feeds suggest otherwise. I'm going the other way. I'm guessing 80% of my feeds are now MSM versus something like 50% a year ago.

I sense there are a few issues that have driven this.

1. MSM sites generally stay on topic. Bloggers are whimsical. At some point they stray onto a topic that either I don't care about or they don't have any credentials that let me know they are worth reading. Pretty much everything I've read on the Yahoo-Microsoft failed merger has been painfully wrong. Most of it written by people who have never been involved in a merger. Unsubscribe.

2. Blogs are generally snarky by nature. You have a bad day or you have a beef with something or a bad hangover and it usually shows up on the blog. MSM institutions have editors that tell you to go home. I can only take so much snarkiness because it generally means 'unobjective'. Unsubscribe.

3. Bloggers are probably more narcissistic than journalists on average. They have, in effect, their own newspaper. This can lead to bloated egos or, worse, attention whoring. With financial blogs in particular you can see this evolution over time. Let's say someone is bearish on the economy. The readers who naturally congregate are bearish too. Then the author starts posting more bearish commentary to the exclusion of anything positive because that's what the readers want to hear. The readers cheer from the comments section. Then the author starts to bash and belittle individuals or companies who they see as being the cause of this weak economy. The readers turn into a mob. At the end the blog just keeps moving farther and farther away from any objectivity. Unsubscribe.

4. Finally, while the subscription numbers for newspapers and TV are pretty bad, the halflife for a blog seems to be 1 year. 50% of bloggers just can't keep it up for that long. I'm certainly slowing down. In the MSM you fire that guy and hire someone new. Blogs just end up being frozen in time except for the occasional comment asking if they are still alive. Unsubscribe.

I'm not sure if this is just me or a global event. I probably don't know what I'm talking about or perhaps I'm just in a bad mood. You might consider unsubscribing.

blog mia

My daughter's blog is MIA. I guess this brings new meaning to losing your childhood. I upgraded a bunch of blogs to the new blogger beta yesterday and it vanished. Gone. Is there a blog heaven somewhere? Is there any way to contact the people who put missing children on milk cartons? I'm split between crying and laughing.

All hope is not lost. A lot of other people seem to be losing their blogs too. And if I log in with old credentials the data is still there. It is just that the blog itself is gone.

blogger down

It's hard to complain about a service you don't pay for. But I don't understand the frequency of problems Blogger has. The rest of their services always seem so well run. And besides the uptime the service is very friendly and customizable. But my family uses one blog as a communications tool while either I or my wife is out of town. It can be exasperating when the service isn't available. As of late things have been terrible.

9/20/06 – Blogger down for maintenance
9/28/06 – Blogger slow
10/1/06 – Blogger beta down
10/12/06 – Blogger down
10/16/06 – Photo uploading problems
10/18/06 – Blogger slow
10/20/06 – Blogger slow
10/21/06 – Blogger down

the new & improved blogger

Having used the new Blogger beta now for a couple of weeks I have to say it is a huge improvement.

Fast
First and foremost it is a speedy little devil now. I get the feeling they completely rewrote everything. I hope it's not just a greater allocation of server resources and it bogs down when it comes out of beta. But I get the feeling that isn't the case. Posting is quick. There are no republishing or reindexing maneuvers needed. Just plain fast. Lovely.

Improved Design UI
Thankfully they've made the ability to add and change design elements a lot simpler. I was okay with getting into the code but I'd rather not. There aren't a ton of new elements to add but they now have a simple infrastructure to add features. Very cool.

Categories
I don't know why these are important. Does anyone use them? Regardless I wanted them. Nice shiny categories. Crack for the anal retentive freak in me.

[update] Spell Check
I forgot to mention that the spell check implementation is pure genius. Get the MS Word guys to photocopy this pronto.

There are of course some bugs and it doesn't work with Picasa to upload photos right now. But overall I'm very happy.

finally some upgrade action

I caught the news about Blogger upgrading some items in their service a couple of weeks ago. And only today did I notice that I was invited to the beta. I signed up. Probably a bad idea. Betas and I don't get along very well. So this is really a warning. I will be spending the next week or so screwing around with beta features and completely shafting this blog into oblivion. You as readers and subscribers will likely pay some price too. You have been warned.

blogger sucks

There. I said it. What used to be a great simple tool for getting content onto a site has suddenly become a HUGE time sink for me. Sitting here watching the progress meter swing around is just rage inducing. The worst culprit is the picture upload. The old way of doing it was with Hello. Very awkward but it worked. The performance on that upload has for some reason gone down the tubes. They then actually linked some code up to the 'add image' to make that very easy. But a good 50% of the time I find it not working. I then go back to my Hello and use that. Right now nothing is working. I was all set to blog about this iPod video being cut outside my apartment and now I'm going to finish this and go kick small stuffed animals. Viciously.

This is pretty simple common sense. Introducing a feature that doesn't work is WORSE than not introducing it at all. I guess that is why the only other investment Blogger has made is to make it easy to add AdSense. What is the point of trying to get your bloggers to generate revenues for you if you have a bunch of unhappy bloggers? I'm finally going to sit down and research my alternatives. I don't know how much more I can take of this.

life of the party

Had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine. He had just started up his own blog. I asked him how it was going. He said not well. I asked why not. His problem was that he thought he sounded quite boring and whiney. I agreed. I remember feeling the same way when I started up. I found it was easy to avoid that if you just wrote for yourself and didn't try to impress anyone.

I asked him if he would continue. And he said something interesting. He would. He said that over the course of writing the blog he found that he was able to articulate interesting thoughts more easily. I agreed. Writing does have a way of making sure you know what you're talking about and can state your point well.

rolling in it

Woohoo. I'm rich. Can't wait for my first AdSense paycheck to roll in. Somehow I doubt this will amount to much. My readership is not exactly on par with the NY Times. I did it more to see how Google's business model works and how their systems interpret my blogs into ads. Just peeking now I see Brooks Brother's gets the top spot and other menswear stores or related stores are coming in next. What's odd is that I also talked about Banana Republic and Kenneth Cole but there are no ads. Do BR & KC not place web ads or is Google so smart as to figure out that I wrote negatively about them? Scary.

Anyway feel free to click on the links. I'm saving up for a box of Chicklets at year's end.

what the hell

I'm reminded of a quote and old friend associated with his high school year book picture upon completion of that particularly cantankerous part of his life - "Quotes are statements made by people who think they have something to say in life that is worth remembering. I hope you forget this statement as quickly as you'll forget me." My friend was not a popular guy in school.

However (can you start a new paragraph with 'however'?), the gist of his 'statement' resonated with me and it resurfaced as I got the idea in my head to start a blog. What an awfully pretentious thing a blog is. One doesn't put forth this kind of effort without some pretentious qualities. And therefore I must admit I must have a pretentious bone in my body. It's no fun realizing you are a hypocrite either.

Hey where's the spell check on this thing?