Neomeme

GigaOM has recently launched Found+Read, a multiauthor blog about the startup process. I really like the fact that the blog, despite having been started by a very succesful blogger, leaves it up to the community to provide content. the blog goes out of its way to enourage participation by the community, soliciting ideas which are then voted on by the community. The ideas with the most votes are then selected by editors and turned into stories. Like a Digg for writers.

I think this blog has tremendous potential to effect change throughout the blogosphere. Right now, the A-list bloggers make the news. Anything an A-lister discusses is quickly picked up on and commented on by dozens of other blogs. Community blogs like this one, where anyone can participate even the playing field. It remains to be seen whether the community picks the best story ideas. But with a self-selecting crowd of entrepreneurs and technologists, using real names, there should be little trolling or stupidity.

I’m excited to read and contribute to Found+Read. I really think that a very cool community could grow up around it, producing content far superior to anything any one blogger could come up with.

I was going to write a lengthy post on Tim O’Reilly’s proposed code of conduct, but then I discovered Toondoo, which lets you drag around icons to create cartoons. And being a cartoonist is so much more fun than being a writer. So, for this post, a cartoon:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the private email servers used by some Republicans to subvert White House data storage rules. Well, a lot of buzz in the mainstream media- Wonkette was on it
weeks ago. Without delving into the politics of it all, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at gwb43.com , the domain registered by the Republican National Committee that Karl Rove allegedly uses for 95% of his email. And what strange things did I find… Read more »

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch invites us to abuse him. He’s dangling some Web2Expo passes in front of us hungry masses, but I can’t attend, what with school and all. I’m in this purely for the fun. Here we go:

Whenever Arrington writes how one service is better than another, established service and will overtake it he is dead wrong. I think somebody should write a Greasemonkey script just to add a big WRONG! to every time TechCrunch proclaims something better than anything else. Until somebody develops such groundbreaking technology and TechCrunch blogs about it as the harbinger of Web 3.0(It’s Web 3.0 because its advanced algorithms know when a TechCrunch prediction is wrong), we will have to resort to more low-tech methods. For now, I recommend adding a big mental NOT every time you see the word “better” on TechCrunch.

Case in point: Read more »

Wordpress.com had, in my opinion, one of the most clever(and also most painful) April fools pranks when they made everybody blog of the minute. Unfortunately, since then they’ve gone back to the same old “algorithm”, which simply ranks the 100 blogs getting the most traffic for that day and picks one out from the top. Of course, there are some excellent blogs that also get decent traffic and thus become “blog of the minute”, like the current champion, Strange Maps. I would have never discovered that excellent and unique blog had it not been for Wordpress.com’s featured blogs. But I am also certain that there are dozens more blogs just as good that I have never discovered because they are not blessed with the traffic they rightly deserve. Traffic rarely, if ever, equals quality. For every popular genius out there blogging, there must be 100 even more brilliant bloggers out there toiling away in anonymity (I am not one of them). Somehow, the Wordpress ecosystem, and the blogosphere as a whole has become incredibly skewed. In blogging, there is a very small middle class in terms of traffic, which I am fortunate to be a part of. Most are either very visible or, much more likely, very invisible, and some of those certainly don’t deserve that invisibility. I’ve got the math to prove it. Read more »