Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has an interesting post here about the rise of fast food content.
But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn't a copyright issue - the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it's far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it - if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.
But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.
So what really scares me? It's the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.
Michael Arrington is absolutely right that this is on the rise. There are new companies emerging that are hiring lots and lots of writers very cheaply to produce tons and tons of content. It probably isn't a coincidence that these companies have emerged during a recession when many people are looking for a way to increase their income.
The search engines will certainly point people toward some of this content. Not all of the content these companies create will be bad but some of it is bound to be. This shouldn't mean the end of original hand crafted content but these mass content producers will certainly increase the competition that content creators face. There are ways around it. Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can point readers to the higher quality posts and articles. If bloggers will link to each other more like they did in the early days of blogging that it will help too. This should, in theory, help weight the better written content above the subpar content.
We have microblogging, so why not microvideoblogging. That's the idea behind Robo.to, a website that lets you publish micro videos - or visual status updates - that are no longer than 4 seconds in length. The videos can be distributed on Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.
Bits reports that the idea is also meant to serve as a digital calling card for users.
The idea behind the platform is simple: In addition to the microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual's identity on the Web. That's what helps separate the service from other microvideo services like 12seconds.
Bits says Robo.to already has 100,000 plus users, thanks in part to Justin Timberlake regularly posting the tiny videos on his Twitter account, @jtimberlake.
Music Blogging Network Called MOG Gets More Funding
Venture Beat reports that a music blog network or social network named MOG has raised $5 million. Venture Beat says the site has 8 million uniques and has signed up large advertisers including Nike, Procter & Gamble and LG. The targeted niche content and demographics must be appealing to advertisers.
MOG has an advertising network called MOG Music Network (MMN). The faq here explains how bloggers can sign-up and how they get paid.
Google Operating System reports that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will let users search tweets and updates from other microblogging sites.
Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.
On the plus side, a microblog search engine can return the latest information about an event or topic. On the negative side, there is the potential for the microblog services to become filled with spam and repetitive entries. The more popular they get the more likely that is. Filters can help with these problems and Google's microblogging search engine will likely implement multiple filters.
Bloggers Abandon Blogs For Several Different Reasons
The New York Times has a story about abandoned blogs. The article cites a 2008 Technorati study that found that about 95% of people who start blogs end up abandoning them.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Blog abandonment is not a new issue. There have always been people who have started blogs and then stopped blogging. Some quit because the issue or event that motivated them to blog faded away. Some quit blogging because of time constraints with work, family or health. Others quit when they found out blogging wasn't the quick path to riches they thought it was - this reason is probably less of an issue today. Some people have also left their blogs without updates for months because they found it easier to use Twitter or another microblogging service.
The Times says some bloggers quit blogging even though they managed to create a popular blog. They found the lack of privacy disconcerting.
"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
As you might suspect, the Times story also says that many bloggers quit because it is difficult to attract blog readers.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"
Building a readership can be a struggle and not being able to build one is the reason many bloggers evenutally quit. At the same time there are bloggers content to continue writing even for very small audiences. Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, told the Times a joke about blog readership. He said, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."
Demand For Lazy Blogging Job on Australian Island Crashes Website
A lazy blogging job being offered by an Australian island in Queensland will let you snorkel, stroll on the beach and soak up the sun's rays. You also have to blog once a week and make video updates and post pictures. They are looking for someone with good communication skills.
There's so much to see and do, so you'll have plenty to write about in your weekly blog. And with so much life above and below the water, you're sure to capture some entertaining moments for your video diary and photo gallery. To keep you busy, Tourism Queensland will organise a schedule of travel and events on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. Your schedule could include sampling a new luxury spa treatment at qualia on Hamilton Island, trying out new snorkelling gear on Heron Island, or bushwalking on Hinchinbrook Island.
Interest in the job offer has crashed the website which is at islandreefjob.com. It's not a surprise a job offer like that is getting a lot of interest in a global recession.
Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart and will be shut down on December 15th. Here is the email that went to Pownce members.
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.
Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce
Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,
The Pownce Crew
The Pownce page on sixapart.com talks about the Pownce team now working for Six Apart and tries to interest Pownce users in Six Apart's Vox blogging service.
Pownce was a microblogging and file-sharing service started by Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka that at one time was thought to have a shot at being popular before Twitter pulled away from the pack with the bulk of the microblogging traffic. Plenty of other Twitter rivals and alternatives still exist including identi.ca, Plurk, Jaiku, Kwippy and Rejaw.
Twitter is growing faster than the other social networks.
What if Wikipedia was a college professor? - funny video from College Humor.
How to skip the introduction of a YouTube video. More on this here.
The blogger blamed for leaking nine new Guns N' Roses songs pleads not guilty.
Is Mahalo an enormous blog? The Inquisitr says that Mahalo is now a "gigantic blog targeting news that drives traffic in any vertical."
LAist reports that the L.A. Times' new blog called Culture Monster is eerily similar to the name of an indepent blog called C-Monster. See also the "Dear L.A. Times" post here.
A blog called ChinaSmack translates compelling China blog posts and articles into English. (via The Raw Feed)
Technorati's latest State of the Blogosphere said that blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month make $75K+ (mean annual revenue). A lot of bloggers think that sounds too high - see here,
here and here. (On an unrelated note this fish is also worth $75,000.) Ars Technica also has a write-up on the State of the Blogosphere. ReadWriteWeb offers a look at how much top-tier bloggers get paid here.
The Telegraphreports that a pot plant named Midori-san has joined the blogosphere. Midori-san's short entries include a self-photo and comments about the weather like, "It was cloudy today. It was a cold day."
Midori-san, which lives on the counter of a Japanese café, writes regular updates with the help of sensors attached to its leaves.
The detectors pick up electronic signals on the surface of the plant, which responds to light and human touch.
The data is then combined with weather and temperature information and translated into chatty blog posts using a computer algorithm.
"Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot... I had quite a bit of fun today," it wrote on October 16 from its cafe in Kamakura, near Tokyo.
A post on Pink Tentacle has a diagram of the plant interface system used so Midori-san can blog. There's also been a plant named pothos that has been twittering since February, 2008. The tweets from Pothos get more urgent when Pothos needs water.
Here's a video from the Telegraph about Midori-san.
Today is Blog Action Day. This year's message is about global poverty. Thousands of blogs are participating in spreading the message.
First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue.
By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue.
Out of this discussion naturally flow actions, advice, ideas, plans, and empowerment. In 2007 on the theme of the Environment, we saw bloggers running environmental experiments, detailing innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices and focusing audience's attentions on organizations and companies promoting green agendas. In 2008 we aim to again focus the blogging community's energies and passions, this time on the mammoth issue of global poverty.
You can see posts from of the 12,000+ sites participating here. There are also videos and podcasts. The official Twitter for Blog Action Day can be found here.
Evangelical Alliance Names The Ten Blogging Commandments
The Evangelical Alliance recently came up with the "Ten Blogging Commandments." The Evangelical Alliance says they are loosely based on the real Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. The Evangelical Alliance says these commandments are "intended to cause bloggers to consider the social impact of their blogging."
The commandments were released at Godblogs, a gathering held by the Evangelical Alliance. If you start breaking the 2nd commandment then your blogging has really gone to your head. Hat tip to J-Walk Blog who says he has already violated a few of the commandments.
You shall not put your blog before your integrity.
You shall not make an idol of your blog.
You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.
Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.
Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.
You shall not murder someone else's honour, reputation or feelings.
You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.
You shall not steal another person's content.
You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.
You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content.
National Society of Newspaper Columnists Consider Blogging Category in Contest
Editor & Publisherreports that the National Society of Newspaper Columnists is considering adding a blogging category its annual awards.
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists is thinking about adding a blogging category to its annual awards contest.
At its recent meeting, the NSNC board of directors passed a motion to ask the contest chair to present a proposal for such a category.
Current categories cover general-interest, humor, notes/items, and online writing. Award winners are announced during the NSNC's annual June conference.
You can also read about it here on columnists.com, the NSNC's website. It wouldn't be a surprise to see blogging categories add to lots more journalism awards given the number large number of journalists who are now blogging for magazines and newspapers.
Mashable reports that Twitter is growing like a weed. The Mashable post cites new figures from Nielsen Online that show Twitter has grew 422% from August, 2007 to August, 2008.
The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.
Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average - a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.
It helps when a CNN anchors is incorporating Twitter into his show. It also helps that everytime there is a major disaster somewhere in the world there are immediately stories about how Twitter was the first place to hear about it. Twitter has always been a great way to cover breaking news invents and share information. It's use by news organizations alone should continue to foster growth and let Twitter remain follower central despite spam and uptime issues.
Blog has become a mainstream word and it's a hot enough topic that advertisers are now using it in commercials. Here's a Twix commercial where a guy convinces a girl to come back to his apartment so they can do some blogging. "Oh Blogging," she says, "I love Blogging!"
Two More Microblogging Sites: Identi.ca and Kwippy
The number of microblogging worlds to visit continues to climb. You can add them to growing number existing microblogging tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Jaiku and Pownce. Twitter - the most popular of these types of tools - has been functioning better lately but this improvement has come at the expense of the Twitter API. The latest microblogging entries are Identi.ca and Kwippy.
Identi.ca is a recently launched microblogging service that has a similar feel to Twitter. It is unique in that it uses the Open Microblogging specification. Identi.ca recently added a response tab and they are planning many more features. You can read some other posts about Identi.ca here, here, here and here.
Kwippy is a microblogging service with a unique look that allows updating via GTalk and Yahoo messenger. Kwippy groups comments together in threads which makes them easier to follow than on Twitter. Kwippy also allows entries that are longer than 140 characters. Following is easy on Kwippy and can be done with a single click. You can read a few other posts about Kwippy here, here, here, here and here.
Both of these new microblogging sites can be updated through ping.fm. You can follow bloggersblog on identi.ca here and on Kwippy here.
Venture Beat 
Google Operating System 
A 
The Telegraph 
Today is 
Editor & Publisher 
Mashable 
