There’s been a lot of good debate around the use of Twitter at a time of crisis with the terrorist attacks in #Mumbai.  I think its probably going to be one of those perennial topics any time there’s a crisis until Twitter becomes as mainstream as blogs, although I knew something crossed the threshold when I noticed CNN regularly including Twitter chat streams in its 2008 election coverage.

Say what you like about CNN, but when a major cable news network starts using a single service as the “real-time” voice of opinion, I think its really says something about not merely “just-in-time” reporting, but opinion and news as it happens — rightly or wrongly.

So, if Twitter has finally hit it big time, it behooves me to ask the question “who will be the next Twitter?”  I think there are a number of contenders, but for the purposes of just-in-time video streaming from your phone, I think there’s no one else in the space except for Qik.

Check out this video on Qik of Mumbai trying to recover from the terrorist attacks one day later:

I may be wrong, but Seesmic, Phreadz, 12Seconds, Justin.tv are all great alternatives if you happen to be near a webcam.  Qik is the only application that runs on your mobile phone to not just record video — but stream it via 3G connection, so there’s a live recording AND watching component on Qik.com.  

For my money, Qik’s the next contender to the Twitter crown, and is the next obvious step in bringing real-time communication in the form of real-time streaming video, to the masses.  And it doesn’t even need to be during times of crisis, although I suspect that its probably where it will earn its spurs.  For young parents (such as myself), using Qik is so deliriously awesome it is hard to describe how “insanely” great it is to capture moments, and then be able to share them online pretty much instantly.

Check out this in-the-moment video when I just realized that my son had drawn his first “smiley” face.  He’s two and two months, so being able to draw a circle, a line and three dots in a co-ordinated manner was pretty awesome:

While I am very glad the boffins behind Qik are expanding beyond the iPhone to other wireless phones that support 3G, its obvious that a big stumbling block with uptake of the service is the necessary wireless plans that accompany it.  You need a 3G plan.  You also need a phone.  And even though the iPhone (for example) has had great penetration in the US and Canada, it hasn’t all over the world (India particularly) for a variety of reasons, you also need to jailbreak it, which is not for the faint of heart.  That video above from Qik live from Mumbai is the only video I can find on Qik so far, for example

With pimping by Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte, its obvious that its got its fans amongst the early adopter elite (and lesser fans, such as myself).  The interesting thing to watch is how its going to cross the proverbial chasm.  It may come in time, as prices and penetration both change in Qik’s favor.  As a fan myself, I do hope that it survives the recession long enough for Qik to take advantage of both factors, and perhaps one day, to hit CNN as well. :)

post script: Kyte.tv mobile producer also looks pretty rockin, and supports a ton of Nokia brands.  But not the iPhone so far.

Interesting article from the BBC today on the changing attitudes of a clinic in Europe which treats “gaming addictions”.  The gist of things is that they’re changing the model with which they’re helping their clients, as they no longer view the majority of gamers who come to them as “addicts”; in fact, they claim that 10% of their clients truly have addiction-like problems.  The rest seem to be socially and / or emotionally “disabled”, for a lack of a better term, and find interacting in online gaming communities to be the main driver of their high usage.

Out of sheer geeky (and yes, personal) interest, and not merely wanting to parrot the “they’re not addicted they just need to get a life” post, I decided to do the most cursory of checks to see what the latest in literature said about gaming and addictive behaviours (noting that it was a pity Mr. Bakker hasn’t opted — to my knowledge — to write up a case study on his observations)

I did find one fairly recently published article in the peer-reviewed journal of Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, published on November 4, 2008 called “Problematic Usage Among Highly-Engaged Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games“, by CHRISTOPHER S. PETERS, M.A. and L. ALVIN MALESKY, Jr., Ph.D.  While their efforts were targeted at individuals playing MMO’s, there were a number of interesting observations in this observational study of around 200 gamers who were playing World of Warcraft, who played on average 30 hours per week.

[emphasis mine; some paragraphs were broken up for readability]

These results suggest that the greater amount of time individuals spend playing World of Warcraft, the more likely they are to experience problems in their lives. The relationship is only moderate; therefore, it is reasonable to suggest that not everyone who spends a great deal of time playing experiences numerous or severe problems in their lives. 

This mimics common sense (for most gamers) I imagine, as there are highly functional gamers, and not all of them have problematic gaming behaviours — for example, gaming to the point of causing screw ups with their personal, financial, or family situations.

A number of different factors, such as personality, could contribute to this correlation. With regard to the personality characteristics, two trait correlations are of particular interest: neuroticism and agreeableness.

Based on these results, it is logical to suggest that one reason some individuals spend more time playing the game is to avoid face-to-face social situations in which they may lack the proper skills to foster good relationships. Furthermore, if the individual were rejected in these situations, it would likely cause them distress due to their difficulty in dealing with stressful events.

However, because extraversion is only weakly negatively correlated, it is probable that the individuals desire at least some amount of social contact. Therefore, the individuals may seek social connections in a safer environment: the environment of MMORPG guilds. This is evident when players become better friends with their online guild mates than with their “real-life” friends.

I had to look up the “formal” definitions of neuroticism and agreeableness, not having a background in psychology (and I use formal in quotes, because I found these definitions in Wikipedia).  At any rate the data suggests that gamers who tended to have more problematic behaviours tended to have a negative correlation with being agreeable — that is to say, they were “compassionate and cooperative” — and a positive one with being neurotic, which apparently means “emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress.”

These traits correlated highly with gamers who were thought to have problems with gaming in their lives.  And it goes on to the same conclusion that Mr. Bakker suggests in the article: that the core issue with gamers is not with what, perhaps, is recognized as a the formal issue of “addiction”, but perhaps, the real way that some personality types cope.  They may find it easiest to interact in digital environments than “real” ones, and therefore they choose to spend their time in places where they feel the most comfortable.

Interesting conclusion to their article: 

One significant limitation of this research is the possible defensiveness of the participants. Defensiveness is a possibility with all research that includes the use of self-report in that participants may attempt to appear socially desirable. As a result, participants may have acknowledged fewer problems or negative attributes than they really have. There is also a more global defensiveness with regard to online gaming in general, as exhibited by one guild leader who declined to allow his guild to participate:

“I don’t want any of you _expletive_ researchers creating problems with things where here is nothing wrong. Gaming does not need any more restrictions than there already are.” Thus, based on this and similar statements, it appears there may be concern among some gamers that research in the area could result in restrictions being made to online games.

Wow.  Defensiveness in online gaming?  Man, I have never heard of that before in online gaming, forums, or comments anywhere! :D  Actually, it seems like being defensive is part of the same ball park as “emotionally reactive”, so perhaps it makes complete sense.  Interestingly the survey above excluded everyone under the age of 18 — I do wonder how much more neurotic the sample would have been if it did include teenagers? 

Louis Gray spent a lot of time crafting a satirical post on the alleged “exchange rate” between comments and other means of interacting with a post — launched in part due to Allen Stern’s public bemoaning of a lack of comments thereof, and who is not alone in voicing there support for comments-on-blogs.

There are a lot of dimensions to this issue.  I sympathize with Allen because not every blogger is doing this for the hobby and the egotistical pat on the back that traffic and comments bring (myself included) — some are trying to make a go out of it.

Traffic DOES matter when you’re trying to sell ads to support yourself or business.

But let’s rephrase the question another way — do a lack of comments mean that there’s a gap in reaching the maximum traffic potential?

As part of a larger discussion about the utility — or futility — of socially driven traffic, I’m not so sure.  I love Allen (in a brotherly blogging kind of way), but when your bottom liine is governed by pageviews and uniques, I would argue that the level of user engagement is but a secondary metric. It is neither a necessary, nor sufficient, factor for success if your primary goal is traffic.

That is to say, I am of the opinion that in some (most?) industries, the percentage of active commenters are likely small with respect to the actual traffic coming in; and as a corollary, a lack thereof probably does NOT represent a giant gap with respect to maximizing traffic.

Furthermore,  I think its possible that traffic that is commenting is probably the exact opposite of the kind of traffic bottom-line bloggers want — they actively visit your site, and as a function of familiarity with your blog, they probably develop ad-blindness the fastest.

Factor in the first-adopter-ishness of Allen’s blog, and you can probably double, triple, or square, if you like, the likelihood of ad-blindness (and therefore, lack of clickage, and therefore, a lower CTR all things being equal) on all display ads.

Call me a [whatever you like], but for folks who are interested in the bottom line, the best kind of traffic is probably search-related traffic where people have absolutely NO allegiance are morely likely to read, and then move on — and possibly click on an ad in trying to find what they’re looking for.

Some news today on the tragic suicide of a young man captured on Justin.tv — Justin.tv being a tad different than, say, YouTube, as its one of those video services which streams content live.  That is to say, he committed suicide on “live” internet-streaming video.

The loss of a young life is always regrettable.  I think the real bit of news is merely that it may have been the first time it was captured in this way.  As new media evolves, and as a newer generation of users become comfortable with capturing every facet of their life permanently (as debatable as that is), suicide captured in the medium of the day is inevitable.

As is the birth of life (cue: Robert Scoble Some other dude twittering the birth of his child).  And the suffering of people in life.

The “new” web is more than the spectacle of the crushingly banal or the bruisingly idiotic, and like it or lump it, it will probably catalogue the depth and breadth of the human experience in a way that’s never been done before.

And yes.  That probably means sometime, incredibly and regrettably, someone will probably be murdered in a live-streamed broadcast as well.

And yes.  It probably also means one day it will be so banal it won’t be reported as a television worthy (or blog-worthy) event either.

Text-Link-Ads (disclosure: they had advertising on this blog for a loooong time — what’s up Patrick!) has recently unveiled one of its newest products: InLinks.com.  This service aims to match bloggers with advertisers in the paid-link arena, and makes no bones about it.  This is a marketplace which allows bloggers to sell their pagerank, as what makes this venture different — and stealthy, I might add — is that InLinks aims to be the silent broker between advertisers and bloggers.

What do I mean?

Advertisers pick the inline, or anchor, text they want to be the link through a search bar.  Inlinks combs through its database of content to find blog posts with that particular inline text, and serves up a listing of such posts, that are sorted according to Alexa score, PageRank, and Date of post.  Once the advertiser selects the blog post, some magic happens, and the link is rented.  The starting rate for many links are about $10/month.  

On the blogger’s side of the equation, the a static link is created on a given page to the advertiser’s designated landing page / URL with no “nofollow” attribute — pasing along the linkjuice accordingly.

The trick? Unlike other marketplaces, such as ReviewMe.com, you never get to see *who* those bloggers ar.  And also unlike Payperpost, no one is asking you to write about, or review any particular thing.  And obviously its not advertised *as* a paid link (under a helpful heading such as “advertisers”).

Translation: the hope is that Google will never find these paid links, as they are truly in the dark and under the table.  

Why? Only because Google frowns upon paid links, and has even encouraged people to report sites which are thought to have engaged in the practice.  

I won’t delve into the larger issue of whether its ethical or not, as I know arguments on both sides of the equation — that larger companies do it en masse, creating a difficult situation for smaller companies, but will never get penalized; that it pollutes the index with meaningless drivel; that Google is responsible for creating a link economy and so on and so on.

From a bloggers point of view, however, its just one more means to try and monetize their blog through a convenient marketplace that’s set up for you.  If you don’t care about such things as pagerank, or how Google thinks of your site, or perhaps those of your peers (if they care about such things) then its probably worth a go.  But then again, you’ve probably agreed to (or were sorely tempted to) rent out links private to people who approach you about adding blocks of text to some of your older and more popular posts, right? 

And lastly on the issue of hiding paid links from Google, I do vaguely remember Google being able to algorithmically piece together who is selling links from their “snitch” reports in a pretty easy way.  

As always, caveat emptor on all sides.

You may have heard that Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyon was forced to yank a couple of posts — and that he’s threatened (or may have actually) left his blogging post over the fact.  Although Valleywag does a nice timeline and decries the loss of another “real” voice in the tech blogosphere (note to Valleywag: there’s no shortage of them, you just need to know where to look), I suspect it was just a matter of time before the “real” Dan Lyons either a) threatened to leave, or b) got his crusty ass bum ass tossed to the curb.

Why?

Only because when you’re blogging for a corporate entity — like Newsweek, or Forbes — where reputation and relationships matter … specifically, those that aren’t your own, but those of your bosses and the company at large … you’re never going to have carte blanche to say whatever you like.  Even if the vaunted blogosphere is behind you all the way (decrying the sacred violation of Transparency).

Even if there are unsaid rules, there were probably written rules when it comes to professional blogging, in fancier terms, also called a “contract” that Mr. Lyons had to sign.  I doubt it will ever really come to light, but its also possible that the tenor, voice, and content of those posts also violated terms in the “problogger” contract Mr. Lyons had to sign.

When you’re blogging for someone else there are always going to be rules, even if your boss claims there aren’t, by virtue of the fact you’re going to be answering to someone bigger than yourself.  

If the “real” Dan Lyons wants to blog “for real”, he’s got only one solution, and that’s to do what “real” bloggers have always done (besides not hiding behind a pseudonym, that is):

Blog on their own and answer to no one.