So, as you may have heard, the “other” blog I blog at quite regularly has been sold. Heck — I interviewed Matt Craven a few days ago about the issue. The other bloggers and I have been quietly discussing things amongst ourselves, and I think for many of us, it may be a time of reflection of where we’re all going to turn next.

Should we stay at The Blog Herald, which many of us identified as indistinguishable from the man who hired us, Matt Craven — or move on to different things? Our own blogs and bloggy aspirations? (wow — I was punning without knowing it) Take up a position with another news blog and continue our efforts there?

I’ve refrained from commenting publicly over the past few days, although we were privy to the knowledge that the BH had been sold quite a few days before it was publicly announced … mostly out of professional courtesy and simply curiosity. But, my itchy bloggy fingers (there, I go, punning again) can’t seem to stay away from the keyboard, so here are few thoughts:

• The new owners are bloggy-network.com, (not bloggynetwork.com), and they decided that they wanted to keep things their ownership a secret — even from its own bloggers
• I found out a few hours before a public post was sent out to the Blog Herald that it was, in fact, the bloggy-network.com that is my new employer.
• Unfortunately, trying to find out who is behind bloggy-network.com is quite difficult, as there is no “about” page — its “under construction”
• In fact, I only found out, through the comments section of that “announcement post”, that (one) of the owners is a guy named Mark — I didn’t have a last name until I started asking a few questions, and it turns out his name is Mark Saunders (I think).
• For reasons that are still unclear to me, Mark has elected to not speak to his bloggers in person, or make introductions in person, but rather, initiate, and presumably continue, communications through some management personnel, Abe Olandres and J. Angelo Racoma.
• While most (or all) of the bloggers have been emailed personally by the management, we’ve been told more details will be forthcoming in the next few days — or possibly after the weekend.
• Its possible that the reason why bloggy-network wanted to keep its ownership secret is because there is another blog network named bloggynetwork, and they wanted to avoid controversy at this time, particularly over the name, and particularly because the Blog Herald is an old, established blog property.
• In other conversations, it seems like Mark, and by extension, bloggy-network, has some interesting and serious plans in the works; I won’t divulge the details here mostly because I know a whisper of a twinge of a rumour of things.

At the end of the day, I would probably like to carry on with The Blog Herald for a bunch of reasons: I like to meet new people, blogging at an established Blog property is still an exciting idea, and … well, inertia is a tough thing to fight.

On the other hand, what is really bothering me is how the bloggers at The Blog Herald were treated in this transfer of power from Problogging to Bloggy-Network. Namely, that we were kept in the dark. And moreover, that, we continue to be kept an armslength away from the owner(s) of The Blog Herald.

(more…)

Not to be outdone by the recent spate of crowdsourcing initiatives kicked off by Gannett and later followed by the BBC, who just a month ago announced a similar crowdsourcing initiative where they would pay an undisclosed sum to amateur video and photo ‘journalists’, Yahoo and Reuters are jumping into the fray with both fists first. The NYT reports on a new initiative that will be launched tomorrow, where, just like the BBC announcement, amateur photographers and videographers will be able to submit material for possible publication and syndication.

And, just like the BBC, there are vague promises of compensation if your piece does get chosen. The blogosphere has jumped on this piece of news, with Om Malik mentioning that its about time, given how prevalent digital cameras (and cameras on a phone) are; Thomas Hawk weighs in on behalf of potential photojournalists (let’s be above board with how much you’re going to pay them); Natali Del Conte opines on whether or not its a grab for Yahoo to get some free reporting done.

While the details of the process remain unknown, I think the specifics behind the compensation will probably be ironed out soon enough; that’s not really the issue.

If 2006 is known for the year that blogging, social networks, and social bookmarking got big — and readily game-able exploitable entities — it will also be known as the year that traditional news media took its first baby steps towards utilizing user generated content in earnest. And, as such, be the beginning loops in the death spiral for many professional journalists and photographers.

Its almost like the disintermediation of professional reporters — in all its forms — and when the price is so right (costing nothing to retain, and only paying for product), its hard to fathom why mainstream media outlets will turn away from this move. I think 2007 will only see a continual evolution of this aspect of The News.

I think one entity that has been lost in all of this is Getty, one of the leaders in stock photography, which has made great strides already in the user-generated content. (more…)

Earlier in the year, Gannett, parent company of such news properties about the USA Today, announced that it would take the bold steps toward restructuring the way they delivered the news. I blogged about it over here — but one of the biggest moves was to formalize an initiative to bring in the fold of user generated content, also known as crowdsourcing. The BBC has made strides to do the same sort of thing, but with a report by the Washington Post, it seems like Gannett is jumping with both feet in the water.

The article describes in detail how one local newspaper is in the process of transforming their journalists into “mobile journalists”, also known as “Mojo’s” — and are flattening their management and editorial process, where these “mojo’s” post directly to the newspaper website. While the Mojos will be a combination of full and part time staff, the newspaper will also be enrolling in non paid citizens to help encover the news as well; the article has no details on this, unfortunately, but does list a piece of news that predates Gannett’s dramatic change in its news policy.

With an emphasis towards publishing directly to the web, a mandate towards posting high posting frequency, with an aim towards local freshness, and an almost non-existent editorial pressure, coupled with online messageboards and a Craigslist style classifieds … well, I’m in agreement with the Silicon Alley Reporter on this one.

Its almost like they’re aiming to create a local news blog.

Is that what Gannett’s trying to achieve? They’re not saying it in as many words, and you can dress it up how you like, but it sure seems that way. And is it such a bad thing?

With blogging software anyone can easily start publishing frequent “news” easily, and distribute access to potential ‘journalists’ in seconds. Most open source software allows you to drop in plugins that can allow reasonable (and free) out-of-the box functionality. The only thing that’s missing is the funds to pay would be reports to be on the scene and essentially “live-blog” live events.

“Hyperlocal news”? Why not just call a spade a spade, and just say Gannett is moving towards blogging?

Although Matt Craven had mentioned that ProBlogging would be holding on to the BlogHerald not a week ago on this very blog, it looks like its no longer the case as the BlogHerald, one of the oldest blogging properties on the net, has now been sold off to a new owner.

Which is curious, because on this blog, Matt mentioned: “The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.” So what happened? Why the about-face? I sat down for a quick chat about what had changed — if anything — the challenges that Matt was running into as a manager of a Blog Network, and if ProBlogging doesn’t own the BlogHerald, how will they keep their own mandate to cover the blogosphere?

Tony Hung: So right here on this very blog you said “The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.” … what changed?
Matt Craven: Pretty simple - we decided to exit that portion of our business. In the process of divesting ourselves of our blog network, we found a number of parties interested in our sites - Blog Herald, Blog Network Watch, BloggerJobs, and others. The more we thought about it - the more it made sense to move out of this arena and fully focus on where we wanted to go…

TH: Which is consulting, right?
MC: Consulting has always been our core business - though one that’s not really seen with all of the Blog Network stuff that we had going on. But we do plan on expanding our blog consulting through problogging.com - but more importantly - we’ll be expanding the services that we offer for bloggers over at Problogging - including our talent management marketplace and some other goodies that will come out over the next few months. We’ll also be doing some ebook creation as a part of our efforts to tell our story - there’s some valuable lessons that we’ve learned that we hope to share with others - and make their journey a little less painful

TH: What was the greatest single thing about running a blog network that made you want to get out it?
MC: This was really about where we wanted to go as a company. Our options were looking like this.
1) hire more staff to handle the overhead associated with the blog network
2) divest the network
3) cutback on consulting and other work
4) find some other, more creative, solution
Running the network meant maintaining multiple sites - keeping adcodes up to date across all of those sites, maintaining a stable of bloggers, calculating pay, paying bloggers, and so on and so on. It simply wasn’t what we wanted to do anymore.

TH: True or False: Up until a few days ago, its almost like BlogMedia was, in a sense, a victim of its own success.
MC: Well, no - but I do think that we were taking a look at where our business was at and what we thought we could maintain without undergoing some changes that we didn’t want to make (i.e. hire more people - or cut back on other businesses that we considered closer to our “core”)

TH: You mentioned in the last interview, that the BlogHerald was a key part of your coverage of the blogosphere. Is blogging journalism — “covering” the blogosphere — now part of your “core” business? (more…)

So it looks like Yahoo has been taken out to proverbial the woodshed over some changes over its new TV subdomain (TV.yahoo.com) at its official blog.  Users have come out vociferously against some Ajax-ified, and flash-ied up site, and Yahoo has allowed all of the comments, good and bad, on its site.  And I say, “good on Yahoo!”.

I’ve blogged about it before, and I think its worthwhile repeating again.  Without a comments section, all a blog is a one-way form of communication, much like the main stream media.  You get to stand up on your soapbox and tell people what you think.  Its not a dialogue — which is really what blogging is really all about.  And even if people blog about it on their own blog, without comments there are no potential for trackbacks, so that people can’t follow blogging “conversations” either.  I would go so far as to say a “real” definition of a blog must include a comments section.
Corporate types will always be concerned about negative comments, which is a valid concern; however, if you’ve got a product or service that’s worth blogging about, your fans should be coming out to support you — which they have, in Yahoo!’s case.  Also, by allowing full comments, and better yet, responding to some of them, you gain a valuable sense of integrity and, as loathe as I am to type these words, “street cred” — that you just can’t buy.

Negative comments are the price you’ve got to pay for having a Real Blog, and companies that have them deserve to be recognized.  It shows that they believe in their own business, and they respect their customers enough to allow them to have a public opinion on their business.

UPDATE 1155h: CNet has a great article on how Digg specifically is being gamed; its a topic that has received quite a bit of coverage over the past few months. Elinor Mills covers a few specific examples outside of User/Submitter and SpiketheVote, including this tidbit: “[Unnamed] Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS.” — illustrating that the most notorious companies for gaming Digg are probably the ones you have probably never heard about, promoting stories you probably don’t even suspect.

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The commercialization of social networks and blogging has begun in earnest -- and I don’t mean bloggers trying to earn adsense dollars and social networks charging a fee for their members. No, what I mean is that since the socialization of the interwebs has gotten hot in terms of mainstream press, and is quite frankly, fueling the next bubble (yes, we’re in it right now), enterprising companies have gotten into the business of actively corrupting that socialization for a fee.I’ve blogged about it before, but as far as I’m concerned the blogosphere has already turned this page with ReviewMe and PayPerPost. Yes, its awfully sanctimonious, because of course bloggers are entitled to earn a living. But, I think we can all agree that any time you take money in exchange for potentially changing the tone, quality, or content of your posts is the definition of corruption; its a strong word, but if it makes you feel better, you can, in your own mind, use the word “taint”. Or maybe “advertorializing”. I suppose it was an inevitability. People need money and like money. Offer them money for something they’re already doing, and a high percentage of people will take your money, because, after all, you’re not telling them to rob a bank or anything. And to be fair, to those individuals who need to pay the bills, they’re probably flipping the bird at me right now, which, of course, is their right.But this post isn’t about how great PayPerPost (and their ilk is), but rather, how new business systems are corrupting current social “networks”, in all its forms.

If you want any proof for how popular and well accepted PayPerPost is, just sign up for Google Alerts under “payperpost”. After a while you will see that every day all of the alerts for “Payperpost” are about how great it is and how people are using it to make a little cash. The blogosphere, by and large, isn’t outraged by it, but are embracing it as another means to monetize their blog. (I wonder if I’ve just taken an elitest “liberal” stance on the issue?)

Forget about blogging for a minute. How about social networks, proper?

Or even social bookmarking?

Well, it seems like in every circumstsance where a venture has gotten popular there are commercial interests who are waiting to exploit it (and “corrupt it” — see? I am an equal opportunist when it comes to being pompous). For social bookmarking sites that use the “wisdom of crowds” to democratically push the most popular news to the top? … you have SpikeTheVote, which is currently on the block, and of questionable use. Its a system which allows individuals to submit stories that will allow them to voted on by a group of individuals, provided you also join that group. There’s at least one other system that allows you to game this system, called User/Submitter which allows you to pay for Diggs.

Of course, both of their uses are questionable simply because of the amount of attention they’ve gotten, and the fact that anyone can join in — including the faithful for social bookmarking sites, who can report on which stories are currently being “spiked”.

For social networks, we have businesses like FakeMyProfile, which was recently “profiled” on Wired’s on MonkeyBites, where for only 0.99c per month, they’ll add a profile of a hot young male or female to your profile as a “friend” and send you two messages a month. What’s quaint of course, is that all the descriptions of your new “friends” makes it sound like there are actual models behind those pictures. And of course, the young ladies appearing in late night commercials are the very same ones staffing the sparkling conversation behind those 1-900 televsion ads late at night. And of course they’re ladies. ;)

And let’s not forget the great astroturfing flogs that Edelman was behind earlier this year on behalf of Wal-Mart.

Clearly money is the motivating factor behind all of these systems and businesses, that exist, to greater or lesser degrees of success, in manipulating and corrupting existing social “networks” in the widest sense of the word.

What I hope, is that as the socialization of the Internet gets mainstream press, there will be enough journalistic know-how to pick up on these nuances (that really aren’t that subtle), to warn people to take it all with a grain of salt. Sure, there are stalkers, pedophiles, and murderers on MySpace. That all gets air time.

But for the innocent surfer, they might not know that the people you’re interacting with on MySpace might be fake. Or their friends might be fake. Or that the post you just read on your favourite blog was only up because it was paid for by a company. Or that story that you were just forwarded, only got a certain amount of notice because someone knew how to work a voting system. Or trying to purchase a mortgage or insurance online will only send you in endless splog-orrific circles without learning anything.

Yes, I think most individuals who are savvy enough to push the “on” button on their computer is particularly cautious about phishing scams and meeting perverts online, but with the corruption of the socialization of the Internet, I suspect a more nuanced, and careful tone needs to be adopted in terms of New Media literacy. Users of social media, and as it grows more prevalent, really, anyone who uses the Internet, needs to ask some fairly important questions on a fairly routine basis.

• Who am I really interacting with?
• Who is really behind this story?
• Who benefits from the promotion of this story?
• And above all — who has really earned my trust?

The fact that you’re reading this blog probably means you’re well versed in the “new” New Media literacy. But as the Internet continues to evolve, and seems to do so at a quicker and quicker pace, we can only hope that everyone else is trying to keep up. There are still gold in there thar hills, but the amount of savvy you’ll need to find it, unfortunately, continues to grow.

James Kim, one of the Senior CNet editors has gone missing — he was supposed to have returned earlier in the week from a Thanksgiving trip in Seattle, back to his home in San Francisco. When he didn’t show up for work on tuesday, friends and family got concerned. The technosphere is rallying behind one of their own right now, with plenty of news sites and blogs picking up the story. Here’s hoping that the Kim family was merely delayed with the storms hitting the northwest, and returns safe and sound.