Words’ End

I’m sitting here at the Hyperlinked Society conference in Philadelphia, blogging it alongside mindlace. I’ll probly post something from each of the six panels and conclusion that has something interesting in it. Apologies if writing is incoherent. :) Also, these next few posts are notes; reflections later.

This thing is getting audio- and video-recorded; I’ll post a link if (when?) they post it online.

First session, “Mainstream Linking.” Jay Rosen, moderator, has asked the panelists how links work in their world and what they mean.

Tony Gentile, VP of Healthline, a vertical search engine focused on health information. They participate in search engine marketing – they specifically go out to buy links from Google, Yahoo etc. So which links to buy, how to present them to the user, and what will the user see if they click on the ad link? Generally with linking there’s a feeling of reciprocity, he says, but one of the companies they had a contract with made back-linking a mandate. The link has transcended hypertext: they’ve developed an API that emulates a link structure. Also, they work to circulate people to the main areas of their site. In addition, esp. with health information, they have to be discerning as to whom they link to – and their whitelist (algorithmically and somewhat manually generated) contains about 170,000 companies.

Tom Hespos, President of Underscore Marketing, LLC, “a marketing guy” says the moderator. Hespos works with clients to get them “more linked in” – but he’s also a journalist and a blogger, and that gives him a perspective that other marketing people may not have. Points to the debut of Google as the turning point in link importance. Google brought relevance back to search; gave links an intrinsic value that they’d never had before. This might have done a bit of evil, in giving that value to links, despite Google’s motto (“do no evil”). Linking is a vote of confidence: page A linking to page B puts in a vote for page B. This is true in blogging world; businesses want links so that they can be found, vote-of-confidence has nothing to do with their attitude re: links, and that – Hespos says – should change, and quickly.

Eric Picard, Manager, Ad Product Planning, Microsoft. (Gasp! Not the Evil Empire!!1! Ohh, I’ll get over it.) Works on team called “MS Digital Advertising Solutions.” Focused on long-range planning and emergent media. He spends time trying to understand the economic model of hyperlinking – connecting people to information and people to businesses that might be relevant to that information. He started out as a multimedia designer and moved to things like VR, and then the web. He takes a broad view to the issues of hyperlinking. Thinks about the ways in which people “move through information.” Thinks about video game advertising, digital TV, areas into which people step for the first time in a commercial setting. Question is, how do we do this commercial setting (advertising) that is beneficial both to the consumer and to the advertiser – or at least doesn’t infuriate the consumer? MS, he says, should be thought of as an “ecosystem company” (?!); defends the “good job” MS is doing, supporting the “ecosystems” they work with (operating systems, for example, the MS search engine…)

Jay Rosen, “a student of multimedia,” reflects on above:

- Raymond Williams (sociologist) says in Culture and Society: “There are no masses; there are only ways of seing people as masses.” He meant that you can’t go into a northern England home and find a Mass Person. People are complicated. They don’t obey formulas. What does exist are ways of addressing people as masses. Today, all the past ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart, they no longer work so well. Now we have to specialize, and learn how to see people as a public, a community, knowledge producers in addition to being consumers. We’re good at connecting people UP – to companies, to central powers. Broadcasting is a good example of that. Today, a lot of the transformation and disruption in the media world is because the internet is good at connecting people laterally, not just vertically. The cost of like-minded people to find/meet each other has gone way, way down. If they’ve found each other, in many ways they don’t need the mass media. This radically changes the balance of power in the media world.

This became even more interesting when Rosen discovered blogs through a student who showed him Instapundit, just one link from which can instantly give an obscure blog ten thousand readers. Whoa. Rosen’s blog is PressThink, and it blew his mind that he could now write about media without having to run his writing through that same media. Holy freedom, Batman.

Q&A session I’ll leave for Ethan to describe in more detail.

It is pretty. I’ve little time to play with layouts and themes now, so the site might look different at any point. It’ll likely be up at any given time, though. :)

So much to write. At least there’s like a whole week and a half at home. Maybe I’ll get to it. Geez, busy summer.

Now that this very strange commentary debacle is over (and people seem to have gotten bored with attacking my love, too), I’m turning on comment moderation. Spammers have figured out how to both get through my comment-spam-posting blocks *and* prevent WordPress from sending me a ping that a comment has been made. So I have to keep a watchful eye myself, and frankly, it’s exhausting.

When we upgrade to WordPress 1.5, this might be easier. But first we have to find the time to do it.

I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.

Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?

(rhetorical question.)

With supremely patient help from Ethan, my blog is now WordPressed. Erm, sorry if that renewed all your RSS feed posts. But it’s worth it, oh yes it is.

While we were at it, I have redesigned the entire site; the main blog is now at the root, and there are some other changes. If you use a smart RSS aggregator, it’ll update the URL for the feed automatically (and there’s a permanent redirect in case it doesn’t). If you want to do it manually, and/or subscribe to the comments feed, look in the lower part of the left-hand column for links.

I’ve also started another blog, for matters geopolitical. It’s called Okno, and the first post contains more information on its raison d’être.

OK, I’ve been lame with blogging. We went on an apartment hunt, found one we fell in love with, and are now looking for a subletter for our current apartment. Of course, I still haven’t blogged the conference (but oh, I will one of these days when there’s a lot of time), but right now I’d like to address Mena’s post requesting information regarding how I use her software.

Here on Words’ End, I have a single blog (this one) with a single author. At present, that’s it; but I was planning to set up a collective blog for our next big research project at the Decameron Web, not only so that we might easily communicate with each other from different countries, but also to encourage dialogue by interested parties who aren’t directly involved.

I’m keeping my emotions out of the whole pricing-scheme thing until the educational pricing is publicized. Then, I’ll probably add another trackback to this post, which SixApart is graciously keeping online and trackback-able. Thanks, SixApart!!1!

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is a great resource. They do weekly updates, and they have a one-way announcement-only mailing list that I find very convenient.

Today, they pointed me to the eScholarship Repository at UC, which seems interesting, especially as we’re about to talk about e-journals at the upcoming conference.

Speaking of which, “Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” is this upcoming weekend, and is open to all. It’s officially bilingual in Italian and English, but English-language abstracts and outlines are being put up, and there’ll be simultaneous translation available during discussion sessions. Should be fun.

This little toy aggregates and displays the latest images that LiveJournal users have been posting. “They may be subject to copyright and may not be work safe,” reads the warning. LJ users seem to post images rather frequently – every time I reload the page, all of the new loads are completely different. Of course, LJ has what, over a million users? So the volume is not that surprising. Amusing, though.

While we’re at it, Ethan pointed me at Random Personal Picture Finder ™, which makes up a random string likely to be commonly used by digital cameras, and searches Google Images for it.

Every time I change the RSS template, LiveJournal reads them as new messages and thus reposts them to people’s friends lists and flooding.

Sorry about that. I’ll leave the template alone now.

Just downloaded NetNewsWire, which seems like a nice gadget for blog reading.

Oh, the tragedy! Fully half of the bloggers I want to read put only excerpts of their blogs into their RSS feeds. So I actually have to click on the link to the entry, if I want to read the whole entry.

I’d really rather not, in most cases. There are many people (including myself) who make the full entries, including images and/or comments (that last one I should really figure out), available through syndication. Is there a good reason not to do it?