SummerMash Austin. It was fun.

Hey. It's been heck trying to get a ride to the airport, the SuperShuttle left me high and dry, so I'm paying the "you got jacked" rate of $41 to get back to the airport in a rush to catch my flight instead (was $13 to get from the airport!).

At any rate, I had a blast last night, was mightily impressed by the massive size of the crowd at the event (the photo above is from the afterparty).

If I can scam some WiFi on the way back at the airport, I'll update you some more.

/rizzn

Update: Here's a video from my hotel room in Austin, wrapping up the experience as I prepare to leave.

Out of Pocket Today

As you read this, I'm probably on a plane to Austin for the SummerMash stop there.

I'll be in town till about 3PM Thursday. Want to meet up? Leave a comment.

Obligatory Post Bragging About Stats

You know, there's nothing we bloggers like to do but brag about stats. I had intended to follow up the last couple day's posts - I'm still noodling those ideas, it's late, and I might just shoot a video. In the mean time, I think I'm just going to post some statistics on how my blog has grown in traffic since I reset back in April.

If you recall, I talked about my six or seven readers back in June, which might have been a bit of an understatement. When I refreshed my blog in April after six months of nothing but an error page, I told about six or so people about it, and I assumed that it hadn't grown much since then.


I took a peek at my stats today (see image above), and since April, traffic to my blog has been roughly doubling every month, so by my calculations, I should have around 56 readers now. Watch your ass, Elise's Recipes! I'm gunning for you!

Also, thanks for reading and participating! I love to see that I have a burgeoning little community going here!

Closer To Epiphany

I want to express appreciation to all the commenters (here and on FriendFeed) on my last piece, as well as Darren Rowse, Duncan Riley, Steven Hodson, and Alexander M. Zoltai for bringing attention to my emerging thoughts.

I'm a bit closer to some thoughts and revelations on this.

I wanted to highlight one thing in particular that bubbled up in the comments for me that I'll either end up talking about later here or at Mashable today from Chris Baskind:

> Exclusively text content cannot be monetized indefinitely under the current prevailing business models

This is pretty close to a eureka moment all by itself.

I responded with something akin to "this topic is pretty taboo," which is true. It's the type of thing I'd love to explore in front of the much wider audience over at Mashable, but given that it's a pro-blog, and it might be viewed as some as decreasing confidence in the type of advertisements we sell at Mashable, it might be seen by the higher-ups as something I shouldn't be doing.

It's definitely something you're not going to see explored in great depth by most of the A-Listers, and it's really not something that folks who haven't worked at a blog Mashable's size can speak on with experience.

Hopefully I'll find a way to tactfully break this barrier, because it's something that needs attention.

I'm at the Edge of a Eureka Moment

Caught wind of another meme today. Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb weighed in on a topic started by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger. Darren had basically mused on a bit about how the blogosphere might be losing its relational focus, which is a fancy way of saying that we don't get along as much as we used to.

I briefly touched on this a few posts ago:

Darren Rowse says that the blogosphere just doesn't get along with each other anymore. He obviously hasn't read a political blog in a while. It's mostly just for-profit tech bloggers that hate each other, and only a couple of them participate in that foolishness. I'm good (online) friends with employees at Mashable competitors ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Blog Herald and one former TechCrunch writer.

Richard hits the nail on the head today, though, when he says:

I don't think there's reason for alarm though. The fact is, pro blogs are full fledged - albeit niche - media businesses and they need to be run as such. As Sarah Perez mentioned in her personal blog recently, that is damn hard work. If you're in the pro blog business, you have to care about page views, advertising, business development and strategy, and yes - the "competition". What it boils down to is that new media is becoming more like old media - e.g. pro blogs run adverts and pay their writers.

Sounds a bit harsh when he says "new media is becoming more like old media," but it's absolutely true in a lot of ways. You can see it in the way that a lot of folks are resistant to changes in the conversation. Duncan Riley is calling this Blogging 2.0, I think.

I've had a lot of ideas swirling around in my head about the direction new media is going, and that's part of the reason you haven't seen any real huge, monumental editorials from me lately here or at Mashable. I'm on the cusp of a few epiphanies, and I really haven't found the words to express it all just yet.

It's a restless feeling, and it makes it difficult to sleep at night. It reminds me of the days when I'd be constantly working on a new start-up idea or thinking of ways to tweak the code on the startup project I was working on at the time, eventually sleeping from sheer exhaustion rather than anything else. It's a bit exciting.

We are in a hugely different era now than we were ever in when it comes to New Media. I keep thinking back to Frederic's post from a while ago talking about how unlikely it is for any new solo voices to rise to prominence in the manner the A-List has done now (side note: I just did a search on his blog, and that topic comes up a lot more than I remember!).

I'm starting to see some angles and opportunities and some breakthroughs in the blogosphere now, though, that were frankly impossible when I first started this. I don't want to make this the focus of my post, but a brief run-down of my experience strictly with blogging might be in order so I can offer the benefit of what I've seen changing over the last decade or so.

A Brief History of My Blogging
When I first got onto the Web (not the Internet - the Web didn't exist on my first forays to the web), I soon got around to setting up a site for my journalistic efforts, and one as a personal outlet. Obviously blogging wasn't a real thing back then (this was during highschool, so sometime pre-1997), but I had teenage angst like any other kid in the 90s, so I set up a series of Tripod.com web pages, and would do about one or two pages a week that contained horrible poetry, experiences, jokes and of course animated .gifs.

This was a very insulated experience, and only about 130 or so folks ever hit the site in the four years it remained on the web (during one of Tripod's acquisitions, it ended up disappearing completely).

After I graduated, I happened upon a site called Diaryland. I met a slew of really cool folks there, some of which I keep in touch with to this day (Hi, Kelly!) This is the first time the web was social for me. I would post random thoughts, experiences and stories during downtime at work as a software analyst, and folks would randomly happen across it. Relationships, networks, and blogrolls were forged.

Due to a really complicated series of events, I wound up no longer posting there at my Diaryland page, and merging my personal and professional blogs back over at Rizzn.com some time around 2002 or 2003. This is when the Web lost a lot of its social aspects for me. Despite the fact that I adhered to the liberal crosslinking and commenting behaviors I have today, I generally had the same thirty or forty readers from 2003 to around 2005 or so.

In December of 2004, I launched rizzn.net, which later became BlipMedia. Both sites have since become somebody's ad farms, but in their hey-day they were hubs and free hosting sites I created for a new phenomenon called podcasting. In joining this larger social media movement in a leadership role, I was able to enlarge my profile quite a bit, but there still was a huge lack of community in the blogosphere. My podcasts had listenerships in the tens of thousands per month. My blog, save for the occasional MSM traffic spike, had virtually no major increase in regular readership, commenting or community.

It's an odd feeling, really, when you're blogging for years on end consistently and only getting minimal feedback. This trend of blogging to the wind continued on into 2006, when people started to catch on to this whole social media thing. MySpace, Craigslist, and my podcasts ironically, were what propelled me into the limelight until I was noticed by Pete and Adam over at Mashable.

If you've read this far, you probably know the rest of the story.

Back to my original point...
What changed? The fact that money was involved. Blogging has now entered the public consciousness. Watershed events like Rathergate and Howard Dean's candidacy lent us political credibility. Sites like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable all gaining prominence, advertising dollars and audiences gave us motivation. Networking tools like Facebook, MySpace and Plaxo put us in continual touch with one another. New Media communications tools and technologies like YouTube, embedded flash, audio and video podcasting blasted open the doors on how we can express ourselves.

These days, we're generations ahead in how we commune with one another, and the big dogs of the blogosphere are on the cusp of all being institutions, instead of communities (odd how time accelerates so quickly on the Internet, eh?).

I've seen bloggers rise from literally zero readers to near A-List prominence over the course of a few months in this new hyper-socially connected realm we're in now. It no longer takes a decade to become a household blogging name.

There's a new revolution afoot, and no one has quite pegged it yet. We've come pretty far, but we're all working in a realm where we're simply translating the Old Media one to one into the New Media. It's grown up, and we know it makes money, but we haven't transformed it yet. We haven't made it our own.

This is the backdrop to the malformed ideas I have keeping me up at night, here are some sentence fragments and bullet points that I hope will lead to the Next Big Thing.

• The art of blogging - for profit and for journalistic, editorial or news purposes - needs and upgrade. We have three primary formats with which to express ourselves. Text, audio and video. The way it currently seems to be done is that text is the main dish while audio and video are the salt and pepper. These are ingredients that can stand on their own, and should take a more central role.
• Exclusively text content cannot be monetized indefinitely under the current prevailing business models. It is far too open to being stolen and repurposed, and the 'conversation' is migrating away from blogs to places where it is both just as public and easier to accomplish (Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace). This puts the revenue out of the hands of the many and back to the hands of the few.
  
• FriendFeed and Facebook both have a pretty good handle on how to mix the three formats seamlessly and naturally.
• Engagement is more important than pageviews, both for advertisers and for content producers. We need better ways to measure and monetize both if we want to continue making money in this business.
• Video today is what blogging was two years ago - a few people you are watching now are over the next nine months or so going to end up being the leaders in the space.

I have some more specific thoughts that are much closer to business plans than anything else, and as such I don't necessarily want to pollute the thought stream with them. These were my starting points for where I am right now, and I want to see what you guys do with them, and if this leads to any eureka! moments for you guys as well.

A New Tech Politics Voice

It's been a minute since I've done a daily podcast on politics and technology; actually coming up on a year since the last "RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech." The show ran for almost a year itself, and Art and I had some fun with it until Mashable's job requirements grew to consume all available waking hours for me.

Some sites, CNet, Wired, SlashDot and Ars Technica, have a history of once in a while putting up some interesting pieces about policy in DC having to do with technology or media, but they come at it from a slightly different cultural focus than the rest of us in the blogosphere. Aaron Brazell just pinged me to let me know that it's official, and Andrew Feinberg is coming on board at Brazell's Technosailor to work on a new column entitled Suitcase.

What's going to make it relevant to us is not only the fact that Andrew and Aaron are both active members of the Web 2.0 and social media community, but residents of DC. Feinberg has a particularly good track record of knowing the right people and making the right introductions.

A lot of us will be watching Technosailor's Suitcase coverage closely to get a better idea of what those DC politicians are saying and trying to push through when they think we aren't paying attention.

Most Amazing Contest Ever

Contests by corporations. I get an amazing number of these notifications by email from PR folks on a weekly basis. I'm curious though, since I don't see a great deal of these ever hit the major blogs (or minor ones, for that matter)...

... is there any interest in hearing about these things? They're usually highly niche to social media, design or programming, and the prizes aren't generally particularly lucrative - akin to a week or two's pay, usually.

I can't imagine them having a lot of turnout or exposure, though, so they might be particularly easy to win just by the fact that not many folks enter.

Thoughts?

This Might Explain a Few Things...

I've been wondering why the local economy in Tyler, TX is better by far than the rest of the country. Perhaps I've stumbled on the answer... there's a local patent troll company here. From the Dallas Morning News Tech Blog:

...a Lufkin judge plans to ban Nintendo Wii and Gamecube controllers today, after the company lost a $21 million patent lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Ron Clark ruled in favor of Tyler-based Anascape Ltd., which claims ownership of technology used in the Wii Classic Controller, the Gamecube Controller and the wireless WaveBird controller.

The standard Wii remote and the Wii nunchuk are not affected.

Nintendo may escape the ban by posting a bond or putting royalties in escrow. A Nintendo spokesman says the company plans to make a federal appeal, and retains the right to sell the Wii Classic Controller pending the appeal.

Anascape isn't listed in the local Yellow Pages. I'll do some digging with the local tech scene to see if anyone knows them, but I'm guessing not.

$21 million infused into the local economy. Neat. Sorry Nintendo.

If Tech Blogging Fails So Hard, Why Can I Buy Groceries?

There's this meme going around that tech blogging fails hard. I'm not sure who to blame for this one... obviously Scoble's a likely candidate, but I think my compadre Steven Hodson in his inimitable cranky style may have got the ball rolling on this. Perhaps it's just this damned summer heat. In terms of the news cycles, if the year were a fortnight, Christmastime and Summertime would be the weekends.

Rat Pack veterans know what the weekend means - bitchmemes.

I'm going to round up this whole meme here and sprinkle it with some commentary. I had intended to make this a full-on editorial, but for a few reasons it didn't pass our editorial muster at Mashable (for reasons I understand and agree with). Consequently it's relegated to the black hole of obscurity which is rizzn.com.

• Is Tech Blogging Getting Boring? It's his party, and he'll crank if he wants to. Steven's birthday was over the weekend, and he was feeling like complaining about how blogging on tech was getting a little dull and repetitive. He said it was more or less a passing impression (if memory serves) on Sunday's ETN.
• Blogging Has Lost Its Relational Focus. Darren Rowse says that the blogosphere just doesn't get along with each other anymore. He obviously hasn't read a political blog in a while. It's mostly just for-profit tech bloggers that hate each other, and only a couple of them participate in that foolishness. I'm good (online) friends with employees at Mashable competitors ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Blog Herald and one former TechCrunch writer.
  
• Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you. Of course you can count on Robert for an "is dead" post. Not long ago it was blog comments. Now it's blogging. Here's why it fails, according to Robert: bad factchecking, we're PR mouthpieces, we're like Old Media, our commenters are jerks, and we have no follow-up. His solution is to delete everything in his feed reader. Valleywag has it in 100 words.
  
• What Do You Want Out Of Social Media? A fellow I don't read yet, but see him occasionally show up in comment threads on FriendFeed is Steve Olson. He bounces off Robert's thoughts, saying they resonate with him. Needless to say I disagree with both of them. More on that later.
  
• What Will We Do When Growth is No Longer the "In" Thing Anymore? Charles Hudson riffs on this meme and thinks that we're at the end of the tech boom. You'd be right if you guessed that he's being influenced by habitual economic naysayer Hank Williams. Charles is the first one that I saw that took this to a direction related to business models. He's right that everything in the world can't be ad supported. He's wrong that we're anywhere near a penetration point.
  
• Techmeme and TechCrunch's Detractors Prove It's Hard to be On Top. This post by Louis Gray arrived concurrent to the other meme, but likely was subconsciously inspired by the same circumstances. Louis engaged Steven on this meme during ETN, and of course regularly hangs out and reads all these folks on FriendFeed and in GReader. It isn't directly related to the meme, but it suggests there's a rift growing between the community of folks who read "A-List" blogs and those who write them. I see his point, and don't completely disagree (in economics, it would be called 'class conflict').
• Is social media becoming a vast wasteland? No, but Shel Israel thinks it is. According to Shel, there should be no one with a louder voice than anyone else, because the resulting swollen egos are and potty-mouthed commentarians are a perversion of Dave Winer and Doc Searls' dream for social media.
• Maybe Blogging is Just a Loss-Leader. I almost forgot to add Sarah Lacy's screed to this list (this was the height of the fervor that made me want to write this post). She riff's on Robert Scoble's idea and proposes the idea of freemium as a way for bloggers to have an alternative to advertisements as an income - only she does it in such a way as to make it sound like she came up with the idea. "You know, I have this heavy box to get from point 'A' to point 'B'. I sure wish I had a round thing to put under this box to make it easier to transport." Replace "heavy box" with blog monetization and "round thing" with the concept of freemium, and you've got her post.
  

There were other related posts I didn't go into because it's five AM as I'm writing this, and I think you get the point they're all trying to make.

I would say I hate to rock the boat here, but I think we all know that isn't true. The fact is, though, that things have been this way for quite a while. Remember this old classic lyric: [insert Alexa-ranked blog name here] doesn't do a good job covering stories and they just regurgitate press releases? Unfortunately here I think Robert is trying to act like Spartacus and lead some sort of "[insert alphabet letter here]-List" uprising.

Actions speak louder than words, though, and this is social media. You don't lead by talking about leading, you lead by doing (the meritocracy takes care of the rest). All of this comes down to a long protracted bitchmeme, and while all the words were expertly written and generally very compelling, it's all ground we've covered a hundred times before in a hundred discussion cycles before.

Is the social media landscape changing dramatically right now? Of course. Are blogs a decent way to make money still, even with ads? Hell yes. Do those ad models need improvement and adjustments? Didn't I just say so yesterday?

Look, I worked for over a year as an independent journalist with podcasts and blogging. It was tough work and I was virtually unknown before Mashable, but I supported my family (there was then 3.5 of us) through a marriage and pregnancy while paying one employee. It's possible, and it's only getting easier with the advent of tools like Twitter and FriendFeed. The blogosphere is growing up and going mainstream. There are growing pains, and we can all stand some room to improve.

Let's just not get overzealous and declare blogging dead, ok?

Sheesh.

Update: Apparently what didn't pass editorial muster at Mashable made it at TechCrunch. Erick Schonfeld uses it as an opportunity to pimp the web tablet idea they're working on (Ironically, a great idea and something I have a good deal of experience with. Too bad they'd never let me help on such a project).

Update #2: Aaron Brazell has drank the kool-aid on a the blogosphere roll-up concept.

Video Bloggers have a Different Ethical Code

That's a slight exaggeration. Things are done a little differently with rich media. I'm not sure why it's acceptable for the audio or video podcast host to get paid for saying something, and it isn't acceptable to write it.

The fact is, though, is that we do this to confuse Allen Stern intentionally though.

Just kidding. It's always been done that way. More on the topic in my podcast today. Download the MP4 here. Subscribe to the feed here.

Terrorist Fist Jabs

Replace "New Yorker Magazine" with Loren Feldman, and you have my editorial from last night.

Reason #8,232.551 Politics and Technology are Inseparable

I got an anonymous email just now from an unhappy HTC subscriber from Israel.

"I can't contact HTC. It appears they've removed my country. I live in Israel, which is no longer listed on their support form.

Apparently Palestine still exists.

Check it out: http://www.htc.com/www/CS_Mail.aspx

Signed,

Not happy! :-(((("

I'm guessing it's an error of some kind, and likely not politically motivated. It's 3AM for me right now, so my friend at HTC I could call on this is asleep, but I imagine I'll hear from him tomorrow for confirmation.

While there may not be a grand Muslim conspiracy to exclude Israelis from getting tech support from HTC, it emphasizes how politics can always infiltrate everything. Hopefully they'll get it fixed before it becomes an international incident.

Nerdcore and the Care-O-Bot

Hey folks. A quick weekend episode for your enjoyment. I'll have the MP3 feed going soon, but for now you're still stuck with the video only feed.

In this episode, I talk a bit about Nas, Nerdcore, MC Frontalot, Robbie the Robot and the new Care-O-Bot.

Get your MP4 link here.

Why Go Negative?

Up until Steven Hodson joined up at Mashable, I think there was little contest with regard to who was the most controversial writer at the company (now, though he gives me a bit of a run for my money!). Although no one has explicitly asked the question, I'm pretty perceptive, and I'm sure a lot of the folks who know me and read the site often wonder why I take my articles the direction that I do (that direction being usually politically unpopular positions, and technically unorthodox statements).

There's a complex consortium of motivations behind it. I'm conflicted whether or not I want to pull back the curtain on this. On the one hand, I only have about six or seven readers - but as we learned from Loren this week is that things you say can have a way of coming back to bite you much later. Fortunately for me, none of this could be construed as racism, so I should be fairly safe.

In no particular order, my motivating factors:

• By and large, and particularly from the blogger perspective, readers are unengaged and lazy. If I write straight news pieces, by the numbers, about 1:10,000 readers will comment on a piece. If I add two paragraphs of analysis (read: opinion), I can increase that ratio to 1:1,000. If I use a controversial position, I can increase it to 1:100. It's so predictable, I can count on it.
  
  Controversy is a cattle prod that's useful for shocking the readers out of their reverie when they've had a long holiday weekend or a particularly boring news week.
• I'm a bit of a contrarian, with conservative and libertarian leanings. First and foremost, I'm a contrarian. As a youngster, I discovered I was different (read:nerdy), and would always be ostracized for it. Instead of being bothered by this, I embraced it. Nerdy became my hallmark, and when the crowd zigged, I zagged.
  
  When it comes to politics, particularly in the Web 2.0 crowd, this manifests itself as me talking up my conservative leanings and supporting the underdogs (which are generally Republicans). Perhaps I'll post some sort of political manifesto later, but germane to this topic, I think it takes a lot more intelligence and guts to act as an apologist for unpopular positions.
  
  As the blogosphere is a meritocracy, despite how much folks hate you during the debate, the rewards always come back to me in terms of increased attention.
• I like to think of myself as an anti-evangelist. Don't get me wrong, I love most of the theories and philosophies behind Web 2.0 and social media (which is why pundits like Drama 2.0 and Strumpette baffle me - they seem to hate all this stuff yet keep doing it). I couldn't live in this world without that love. Taking a contrarian angle to it all, though, allows me to pick apart the sometimes over-exhuberent evangelists and the often very naiive startups they represent.
  
  A nest built against the wind will always be stronger than one built during the calm. That's one of the great strengths of blogging as a journalism platform, too, incidentally - those same principals apply to whatever statements I make. If they're blatantly wrong are shakey, their mettle is tested by the commenters
• It gives me something else to write about. Sometimes when I write, I intentionally don't make the strongest case possible, so as to invite criticism. Sure, brevity plays a part. I learned this from watching pundits like John C. Dvorak, Chris Brogan and Steven Hodson. It gives you an opportunity to come back and engage in comments and sometimes follow up with another post, rebuting with your deal-sealers.
• I'm the whetstone that sharpens others' knives. Sometimes I pick a position that I don't necessarily agree with and defend it because I want the reverse position to come out on top. In almost all cases, I welcome disagreements, but in these cases I offer up a position that I know can be easily refuted, but I defend vigorously so that others won't always go for the easy answer.
  
  For example, when I did a lot of political blogging, I'd often speak out in defense of the folks who argued for gay marriage bans. Like racial issues, gay marriage is something that most enlightened folks think is an imperative right. The means they often use to argue for this are generally deeply flawed, logically. What's worse, most of the proponents for gay marriage bans use horribly flawed arguments - leading to a cacophony of ridiculous yelling.
  
  By inserting a bit of analysis and support for an unpopular opinion, I can cause folks to re-examine why they're for a certain position, and when it comes to enacting their policy on the topic, it is more likely that it won't enflame and enrage the other side yet still accomplish their goals.

I hope this is illuminating for those that happen across this - and to my naysayers shows that I'm a bit more than just a disagreeable jerk. Long ago I learned to love ideological conflict, but still don't want to put out the image that I'm completely inhuman. On a personal level, I am targeting this post towards those I work with in the blogosphere who wonder why I'm such a muck-raker, but on a more wide-spread level, this is a bit of a peek into how to use controversy as a tool, rather than something to shy away from.

Josh Catone Leaving ReadWriteWeb for SitePoint

As Richard MacManus announced a few days ago, Josh Catone is leaving ReadWriteWeb for greener pastures. It turns out those greener pastures are SitePoint, the well known online marketplace for many things, most notably Web 2.0 startups:

Time to announce where I’m going to be doing my blogging post-ReadWriteWeb. The answer? SitePoint.

SitePoint is a huge web development community, and I’ve been brought on board as Lead Blogger to push out a new focus on their blogs toward web tech news and analysis (the same sort of stuff I’ve been writing for the past year over at RWW). I’ve been a regular on SitePoint’s forums since 2003, and I was a moderator there for about 4 years. So in a way, this is a homecoming for me.

Theoretically I’ll be contributing to all the SP blogs, but really I’ll mostly live in the ‘News & Trends’ category. My goal is to really own the main page of the site in terms of timely, blogged, web tech news content.

I know I'll be reading the site more frequently, but it was already a place that resided within my concentric circles of online web browsing.

Update: Sarah Perez, to the best of my knowlege, isn't leaving RWW. And Josh should put his name on his blog somewhere.

What's Wrong With Video?

Sean and I had a great discussion about online video, and what really grinds our gears over it, on yesterday's Mashable Conversations.

Check it out. Discuss.

I Resent The Implication...

This is a generalized response to the folks all over the web who have been hinting around at my motivations for defending Loren Feldman over this stupid Verizon deal. Don't get your panties in a bunch - if you didn't actually imply I'm any of these things, then it isn't meant for you. The rest should know who they are.

I resent the implication that I'm a racist because I took the time to understand the point that Loren Feldman made with his TechNigga video.

I resent the implication that I can't understand race relations because I'm a white man.

I resent the implication that I'm an idiot for stating the facts of the situation without responding on emotion.

I resent the implication that I'm supposed to take knocks on the chin for my various cultures and subcultures in good humor, but I can't return the favor for certain other cultures.

I resent the implication that you're morally superior to me because I'm not repulsed by what was essentially a poorly crafted joke.

What really bothers me the most is that too often, citing facts and examining the case objectively when talking about certain subjects has the potential to make me part of the "untouchable caste." I realize that often I play the heel and devil's advocate in my political and technical commentary. That's probably the only thing that's saved me from wide-spread derision in my comments on Loren across the blogosphere the last 24 hours (the fact that everyone expects me to be contrarian).

I see a lot of folks making a lot of the same points - points that aren't racist at all and have a lot of validity to them - being branded as something they aren't simply for positing them in conversation.

I humbly submit that those who would willingly dehumanize someone in their mind for having the momentary lapse in judgement that caused them to defend Loren Feldman are just as much of a close-minded bigot as they accuse Loren of being.

AI, Semantics, and Other Cool Intelligent Sounding Stuff

I was recently a guest on Falken's Maze, a cool sounding name for an even cooler podcast about semantics and AI.

In case you only know me through my writings at Mashable and aren't a long-time friend of mine, you may not know that I'm a huge buff of AI, and have had a lot of experience programming and configuring various chatterbox systems (my particular favorite side of the AI field). I spent a lot of time in the mid 90s as well as after the tech bust in 2000 playing with, coding for, and engineering various chatterbox systems.

As I said on the show, as I'm getting acclimated to where AI is currently after having put it down for a few years, I'm surprised by several things. First of all, I was surprised that semantics and semantic web is actually, in part, about AI. It has a huge marketing problem. When you hear it described, you typically get the impression that it's all about tagging.

The semantic web folks, unless they want to stay stealth, need to push the AI side of things. Everyone loves Minority Report and I, Robot. Associate cool stuff like that with your brand, and you too will be cool. Simple as that.

The other thing that I'm impressed with is that "the cloud" hasn't yet been suitably applied to chatterbox AI. The major problem with chatterboxing is the fact that you need immense computing power and an immeasurable database of responses to really beat the Turing test effectively and consistently. We have that now.

I haven't seen evidence of this train of thought applied yet (and maybe that means I need to "get on that project"), but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Edgio Dead and Decaying

Edgio, the Internet classifieds system that was somehow considered Web 2.0, even though that concept is about as 1.0 as it gets, has been dead for a while. I'm not one of those folks that takes particular glee when I see a site die, no matter who's in charge.

Something I saw that warrants mentioning today, but not a particularly big writeup, is that not only is the site dead, but it's decaying. According to the last blog post on the company blog, "This blog will remain in existence as a historical record of edgeio."

That is apparently not destined to happen. I noticed this afternoon after seeing a number of "wordpress test posts" pop up in the company feed, which is still subscribed in my "corporate" classification of feeds in Google Reader. Curious to see what was happening over there, I clicked on a number of them, but they had all apparently been deleted by the time I saw them (which was relatively soon after they showed up in the feed).

To see what else I could find, I clicked over to the blog site itself. The front page is still there, showing the last few posts, but all links to archives or categories result in 404 errors.

Like I said, not particularly newsworthy, but interesting.

The Current Podcast Renaissance

Friday evening, my fellow Mashable writer Steven Hodson sat in on a sort of round-table podcast with Profy writer Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Inquisitr's (and occasional Mashable contributor) Duncan Riley, and Cyndy's husband (sorry, didn't catch his name!). It's apparently destined to become a weekly thing, and another instance of members of the alleged "rat pack" spidering out into all parts of the blogosphere.

I like to think this trend all began with the 'rat pack' podcast "Elite Tech News," the weekly foray into tech as decided by the L33t Reddit Filter. The podcast is unofficially part of the Mashable family of podcasts (but in no way owned by Mashable, and is not a Mashable property - in fact, we really don't even think of it as a property). The management never explicitly sanctioned it, but somehow I got away with throwing it online into the site's mix (I think I asked someone at some point, but no one can remember who okayed it - not even me).

Four members of the rat pack panel are in some way affiliated with the Mashable, and Sean P. Aune and Adam Ostrow have been past guest panelists (as have Allen Stern and Robert Scoble), hence the unofficial Mashable affiliation. Still, VentureBeat's MG Seigler, The Blog Herald's Jason Kaneshiro and ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois have all been members of the l33t tech squad since the beginning.

The idea for a podcast grew organically as the group came together, but as one of the people who suggested it (you knew it had to be me, right?), I can say that I was inspired by Leo Laporte's TWiT, and to a certain extent the Gillmor Gang.

Podcasts Are The New Social Club
Since Mashable has been running the posts, though, the Gillmor Gang was brought under the TechCrunch fold. ReadWriteWeb started their own panelist podcast (RWW Live). Profy seems to be playing host for Cyndy's show (Things You Can't Say About The Internet).

Even other non-media entity companies are starting up with it. Adam Ostrow and Drew Olanoff (incidentally, a blogger at Download Squad) do a weekly ReadBurner roundtable podcast. Past guests there have included Louis Gray, Duncan Riley, MG Seigler, Marshall Kirkpatrick. Starting to see a trend?

I like that we're collectively into podcasting again. I can't speak to everyone else's download numbers, but download trends to L33t Tech have been both interesting, unique, and flattering. We've got a huge number of downloaders that grows in a steady pattern. What's most interesting about it is that they all showed up instantly - the minute the feed was created, we had this mountain of downloads. We haven't had many spikes, and no dramatic drops, since inception.

The numbers tell me that we're looking at an insidery group of folks interested in the thoughts of those in the various places where news often breaks. I'm sure that all the other folks running these round-tables are seeing (or will see) similar numbers.

What is of most joy to me is that the core of the movers and shakers in the blogosphere are getting back into the spirit of podcasting (after an extended period of bashing it for having no future). Its usefulness and business potential is being rediscovered.

I have some more thoughts on that, and I'll probably get into them at some point in a video post, but at the moment, sleep is overtaking me. So you'll have to wait with baited breath for that.

/rizzn

PS: Sunday night is L33t Tech Night. Don't forget to tune in. Look for the link in your Twitter feed.

What I've Been Busy With

You may have noticed the lack of updates here. Several reasons for this. Chief amongst them is the fact that I've been increasingly busy with Mashable's new video podcast series, which is getting better and better by the episode (we're already worlds better than episode number two, which is the first episodes that I produced end to end).

In other news, I've been busy on projects away from Mashable, as well. I'm building up a queue of shows to release on my personal video podcast feed. I've got a couple screencasts and a few interesting discussion episodes, as well.

(By the way, if you're interested in spotting me some cash to run some ads in that show, I've already got a pretty impressive number of folks subscribed to the show, especially considering there haven't been any episodes released to the feed yet.)

At any rate, I'm pretty proud of the stuff I've been doing for Mashable. Check out the latest July 4 episode of Mashable Conversations, where Sean P. Aune and I discuss Twitter and Identi.ca



Aside from the work related things, I woke up early on Thursday to appear on an episode of Falken's Maze, a show about AI and the Semantic Web. You don't want to miss it, it was a lot of fun to do (my episode should be up on Monday).

/rizzn