Kellblog

Ever since I changed my sharing pattern to use bit.ly more, I’ve been using blogger less. This was put to me rather poignantly the other day when a prospective customer said: “why did you stop blogging because, well, back in the day, you used to have the best blog in the industry.”

Best blog? I blush.
Used to? Whoa.

It was a nice compliment, but it was also a wake-up call. Had my new found love of bit.ly destroyed me as a blogger? In fact, I hadn’t “stopped” blogging. I did 9 posts/month during 3Q09, but that was only half the 18 posts/month I did in 3Q08.

This got me thinking about why, which in turn lead me to start thinking about the major types of posts that I (and others) write:

1. Essays, which are often argumentative and sometimes rants. A blog composed of them is like an ongoing op-ed column. Each post typically cites multiple posts/articles on the topic and synthesizes an argument. These are hard to write.

2. Announcements, which announce upcoming speeches, marketing events, user conferences, et cetera. These are pretty straightforward, largely factual, and not hard to write.

3. Highlights. These typically highlight a single cool post/article, often with one excerpt and a pithy quote. Reality Check by Peter O’Kelly is largely composed of this type of post. These blogs deliver value in two ways: commentary and pre-filtering (i.e., highlighting the best-of’s in a mountain of content read by the author). I believe that the value usually comes 80% from pre-filtering and 20% from commentary.

4. Highlights posing as essays. Some posts are basically type 3, but pretend to be type 1 by dressing things up a bit, adding more wrapper commentary and taking multiple excerpts. But when you boil them down, they not argumentative essays. They’re just long, cool article highlights.

Type 3 posts are the most interesting — and most relevant to my blog post frequency drop — because there are effectively 3 ways to create them:

• Via a blog such as Reality Check.

• Via a tweetstream (an RSS feed of tweets) that include bit.ly-like shortened URLs with necessarily pithy commentary due to the short character limit.

• Via a shared items feed, such as the very good feed from Jill O’Neil at NFAIS. While these lack the ability to comment, they do include as much of the underlying posts as the feeds allow. Bizarrely, while I should prefer this method given my frequent off-line consumption, I find it rather old fashioned and shy away in favor of more hip services like Twitter and bit.ly. (Who says there’s no fashion in tech?)

What’s led me to cut my post frequency in half is that I’ve infinitely increased my tweet frequency: from 0 tweets/day to ~10 tweets/day – i.e., ~300/month. In effect, I do way more type 3 “posts” than before; I just don’t do them on blogger and thus dress what could have been tweets as posts. So, in a “what have you done for the community lately” sense, I’d say that I’m sharing radically more, but I’m indeed analyzing less.

Since I know that many folks enjoy the blog precisely because of the essays, I will make an effort to increase the number of analytical, argumentative, and controversial posts going forward. But if you want to see my full information stream you’ll need to follow both my blog RSS feed and my tweetstream (via Twitter directly or via an RSS feed of my tweets).

Since I’ve got time to burn here over Greenland on my way back from Europe, and since I’m analyzing my web 2.0 participation, I’ll share some other fun observations.

On FriendFeed and Social Networking Worlds
I’m changing my usage of FriendFeed as part of strategy to build a bit of a wall between my personal friends (Facebook) and my work friends and colleagues (LinkedIn). Going forward, I believe that most people will do the same thing, ending up with N social networks and “hard walls” between them. I believe that few people will trust a friendship-type field to protect what’s truly personal from what’s work. They’d rather just play it safe and use totally different social networks. As a concrete example, a friend status’ed something akin to this the other day on Facebook:

Jane is reminding herself that when projects are spinning out of control and that things at work are a mess that she needs to focus herself on what she realistically can and cannot control.

While many people, including me, “liked” the status, I can assure you that Jane does not want her boss reading this and would never make this her LinkedIn “what are you working on” status.

So FriendFeed, in my estimation, has two problems. First, it doesn’t work well with Facebook — it pollutes your feed with excessive updates which Facebook then over-corrects by downgrading FriendFeed updates to rarely seen second-class citizens. In reality, my Facebook friends don’t want to see my business-oriented Twitter tweets, and I don’t think my blog readers want to read my restaurant reviews. (To prove me wrong, go here.) Second, FriendFeed tears down exactly the wall I’m trying to build. So my strategy going forward to is build two social computing worlds: (1) a personal world centered on Facebook, which will use FriendFeed to link-in sites like Yelp and (2) a business world centered on LinkedIn, my blog, and Twitter.

On User-Generated Content
The problems with user-generated content (UGC) sites are clearer than ever. Yelp was recently in a mini-scandal where businesses could supposedly pay to determine which reviews came up first. I personally have more trouble using Yelp to pick restaurants because it’s starting to suffer from the TripAdvisor problem where businesses spam-up the site with positive reviews and everyone who’s had a bad experience punishes the hotel with a scathing one. The result: 100 people say it’s the best hotel in the world and 100 people say it’s the worst, leaving me nowhere but confused.

Yelp Evolution: Dating?
You heard it here first, but I think Yelp might well end up a better dating website than Match or the other deliberately dating-oriented sites. I think many people will prefer the old-fashioned serendipity of meeting on Yelp and Yelp is already oriented towards social events which further the cause. (“Oh you love Chanterelle, I do too!”) My spider sense is telling me that Yelp is figuring this out and running with it in a quiet way.

Yelp continues to fascinate me as a site for many reasons: food is indeed a basic compatibility between people, I have friends who been invited to fellow Yelper’s houses based on getting to know each through reviews and comments, and I’ve even had friends invited to restaurants to sample new dishes for the menu based on the quality of the reviews. Yelp will evolve; into what I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it’s more social and less restaurant.

On Twitter: How URL Shortening Changed Everything
Twitter’s evolution is also fascinating. Remember, when Twitter was launched as a micro-blogging, it didn’t have URL shortening. Since most URLs are so long and since Tweets are so short, few people used it for post/article highlighting. It was primarily personal status updates: “I’m in Saint Louis having a beer.”

I think Twitter’s original vision involved a lot of mobile phone use and a lot of personal updates as a result. With the advent of one feature — URL shortening — first with TinyURL and later with bit.ly, information sharing is now a key use of Twitter. I read about a recent report that said 80% of tweets are personal status updates (so-called “meformers”) but information sharing tweets were 20% and growing fast.

Also, remember that Twitter is for “old people.” It’s one of the few super-hyped sites that isn’t used by the teen/twenties generation. Never forget that. If you think you’re in touch with the next generation because you use Twitter, you’re not. Kids use Facebook or MySpace and – as a great example of network effects – entire schools tend to go one way or the other in a binary fashion. My kids have never used Twitter. It’s all about Facebook and text messaging.