Netizen

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

Image representing Fred Wilson as depicted in ...

I was just busy leaving tens of comments at this particular blog post by Fred Wilson, the VC also known as AVC, and it occurred to me that we treat blog comments as almost illegitimate. There is that near universal no follow command that pulls down comments left at most blogs. I appreciate the logic behind it. Spam commenters would skew the Google PageRank mechanism. Links in the comments sections should not carry the same weights as links in the body of articles and blog posts. But to say they should carry no weight

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

at all is ridiculous. By that logic, email should be banned. Those Nigerian dictators are reason enough. So far the way we have treated blog comments - with hostility - stems out of ignorance. If you don't fathom it, destroy it.

[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments

By that logic, Twitter is out and out ridiculous. (I Get Twitter) 140 characters? Come on.

There is blogging and there is microblogging. Twitter is microblogging, and has more than earned its rightful place. It has all the buzz. Blog posts are content. Blog post comments are microcontent. Microcontent has not been given its rightful place. And I think that has been a mistake. Good to see Disqus at work to remedy that. But it is not growing fast enough for me. There are too many blog posts that I come across that I want

Image via CrunchBase

to comment on but can't because I got there before Disqus did.

I would be curious to know how Disqus deals with the no follow nonsense.

It is Google that is slow. It has yet to deal with tweets. Google and/or Facebook have still to deal with Facebook updates. Google is nowhere close to even wanting to deal with comments at the bottom of blog posts. How social is that? Not at all.

Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

I Must Be Following A Lot Of People On Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

Or people I follow must tweet a lot. I was just on my Twitter main page hoping to click over to my Direct Messages, but right before I clicked on to Direct Messages, I caught eye of a tweet by a woman who said something along the lines of, I love football, men wearing funny clothes, falling over each other. The tweet I thought was funny, very funny actually. Call me a Third World guy enamored by soccer and soccer alone, but I never quite got the hang of football. But by then I had already clicked on to my Direct Messages. I clicked the back button. But that does not do the trick. You are

The striker (wearing the red shirt) is past th...

Image via Wikipedia

still on the same web address when you click on Direct Messages. So I had to click on Home. The tweet was gone, flushed downstream. I kept clicking on More, until I could not do it no more. I guess Twitter allows you to click on More only so many times. The lady and her tweet were gone, nowhere to be found. That is when I realized to follow 27,000 people is to follow a lot of people. A refresh in 10 seconds puts you on another planet.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen
NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12
Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

Pages

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

I Must Be Following A Lot Of People On Twitter