02 February 2003

Paper on Weblogs: Section 3: Gizmodo and blogging-for-profit Sticking to my promise, today is the time for the third section of my paper on blogs. Gizmodo and blogging-for-profit   Somewhere in the fascinating world of weblogs, a flaming conversation has begun: is blogging-for-profit viable and where does its potential lie? A new weblog about tech gadgets called Gizmodo appeared on the blog-for-profit horizon in August 2002 and its founder, Nick Denton claims that revenue will flow in from affiliate referrals to Amazon's electronics store in much the same way that Andrew Sullivan is making money from affiliate referrals to Amazon’s virtual bookstore.   At his personal weblog, Nick Denton explains the rationale behind this new venture:   I have no idea how much Gizmodo can bring in revenues. All I know is that weblogs are a compelling form, gadget addicts are all online, and Amazon.com's API makes it easy to connect product with content. Most importantly, this is a low-risk commercial experiment. Most media companies suffer from overblown editorial, an ad sales force with padded expense accounts, and overly complex publishing systems with a team of primadonna sysadmins to maintain it. By contrast, Gizmodo will be a couple of hours a day of Pete's link- picking skills, some automatically generated Amazon.com links, and $150-worth of Movable Type. Media has never before been this lean (http://www.nickdenton.org/archives/2002_08.html).     It’ not surprising to see why statements and ventures such as the above trigger a plethora of reactions by bloggers and non-bloggers alike. At the first place, it sparks the good old discussion about blogging for money. This discussion usually revolves around two main tenets: first, some believe that only professional bloggers are well suited to do the job (and be paid for doing it) and thus, companies willing to pursue a ‘blog strategy’ should put one professional blogger into their payroll and assign him to cover all aspects relevant to their business as a full-time job. This is the professional blogger business model that Meg Hourihan (2002) suggests.   READ MORE 4:57:45 PMSay it loud  []

Collaborative Filtering and Ross's Book Problem   Ross Mayfield has a 'book problem'. Honestly, I don't really think he has one. But as good fella I am, I'm always willing to give him a hand.   Ross says: "I can always search with Google to find a book, but the results are out of context and impersonal" and “ can turn to AllConsuming.net to find a book, in context, but with impersonal results”.   I doubt all the reviews that turn up on Google are impersonal. Some of them may be of the usual PR type but many are deeply personal. The only problem I see is how to decide with which reviewers you choose to associate with. But again, this is not a real problem. When searching on the Web or at weblogs, we do not search to find an exact mirror of ourselves. Perhaps, there is not one. What is certain is that someone's tastes will be a close match to ours and most importantly; it's a learning process. “No matter how unsystematic and uncertified this knowledge is (these reviews are), because they come wrapped in a human voice, the knowledge they communicate is richer and, in some ways, more reliable: the lively plurality of voices sometimes can and should outweigh the stentorian voice of experts” [slightly rephrasing David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined].    However, we got out of the topic. In my essay I was referring to weblogs and in specific how blogs enable us to find books we like and consequently elaborating on the process by which collaborative filtering boosts the sales of such products by increasing consumer demand. This is not questionable: reading books, listening to music, associating ourselves with trends or a political party and choosing which clothes to buy are all in a sense social activities. We wouldn’t like listening to a band if we were the only two people on the world that had a thing for that band. Who would like going to a football stadium and cheer his team all alone in the absence of any other people being there? All I’m saying is that blogging is essentially a social activity and commerce/ shopping is a social activity too, although some companies seem to have forgotten what real social interactions are like.   The question is how Amazon (and in extension, similar personalisation systems/technologies such as TiVo) can improve its recommendations in order to find us a book we’ll enjoy. The answer again is simple: either by training the system (yes this books is of my taste/ no I would never wanna read this book) or by reading between the lines to find the unique, real, human voice that represents the opinion of a fellow human being instead of an automated storytelling piece of software. I believe the latter can help explain why Andrew Sullivan’s Book Club is successful.   But Ross is not done. He says: “since I am engaged in blogging and not just reading, the people I am getting to know with these communication tools are presenting me book reviews in context. Like Adina's Book Blog. What's worse, so many of the bloggers I meet are authors themselves so Im compelled to read their books”.   Honestly, I fail to see where the problem is. In the first case, exactly because you blog, as you say, you get the benefit of true and unique book reviews in context. So everything is fine now. You get the best of both worlds: book reviews by people you are interested in what they have to say (otherwise you wouldn’t bother reading their blogs) and at the same time, you get more knowledgeable because of having joined the blog parade. Then you claim that you’re compelled to read books that other bloggers ‘ve written and you hate this. I know the solution: stop reading their books. I’m sure they will not shoot you for doing so.   At the end of the day, we both agree that “The most powerful forms of collaborative filtering are the ones with the strongest ties, like Sullivan's Book Club or the groups that emerge naturally or exist and are served by blogging as a collaboration tool”.   And yes, we’d better teach children that sticking books into their mouth is neither educational nor nutritional. Reading books is more fun anyway. 4:45:19 PMSay it loud  []