1. Two Twitter case studies (that have nothing to do with Iran)

If I only had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a person can do with Twitter…

Well, here are two good examples:

Tim O'Reilly spoke recently about how he uses Twitter as a publisher to build a community. Not to amplify his own status, but to support things and people that he wants to see more of in the world. "Create more value than you capture", he says. It's the same philosophy that made his media company successful and it continues to work for him on Twitter.

Not to be outdone, Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls used Twitter to make $19,000 in 10 hours using auctions and by organizing impromptu donation-funded gigs.

2. Design Tips for Crowdsourcing Applications

There's a nice piece from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab about how the UK's Guardian newspaper used crowdsourcing to quickly catch up to a rival newspaper's scoop, creating a website where readers helped filter through thousands of pages of government expense reports in a matter of hours.

A few quick UI tips I gathered from the article:

1. Keep the choices limited. The Guardian didn't ask people to write a report or notes for the pages, just click one of four buttons to rate it. This made it accessible to more people and helped them move through many pages quickly.
2. Make it a video game. Graphing progress and posting it on leaderboards helped motivate readers with a sense of accomplishment and competition. (similar to my.barackobama.com)
3. Pretty bird. Analytics showed people looked through more pages when they were accompanied by a picture of the person in the report. In their words, it turned a boring .pdf into a detective story.

3. FTC to Patrol Blog Swag

Aside from the occasional lawsuit, product reviews on blogs are unregulated. The Federal Trade Commission plans to change that soon.

It seems many companies gift bloggers with money or free product for a review and many writers do not disclose this in their articles. Although the companies don't tell the bloggers what to write, it's certainly a conflict of interest. So marketers and bloggers beware: if you don't follow ethical practices, the FTC may come knocking.

4. How do you design a package for a product that (technically) doesn't exist?

The Book Design Review asks an interesting question: who makes those fake book covers for books that aren't released yet?

Danger Mouse had a similar problem with his new album Dark Night of the Soul, when his record label refused to release it due to contract disputes. Unable to legally sell his music, instead he sold an "album" containing a custom-printed blank CD-R , encouraging his fans to download a leaked copy and burn it themselves.

It's an interesting design type to consider in this age of digital downloads. Without a physical package, what does the "cover" or "box" look like for a bunch of bits? Maybe that's an emerging design specialization....

If you haven't read Jared Spool's superb analysis of how Amazon made $2,700,000,000 in new revenue just by asking, "Was this review helpful to you?" you really should. In fact, if you are in any way part of the business of user interface design, his blog, Brainsparks, is quite regularly an amazing resource.

I myself am in the user interface business from time to time, and regularly enjoy his posts, although I rarely find occasion to blog about them. I tend concern myself in my writing with a slightly different aspect of user experience.

When I read the post in question, I wondered -- as I sometimes do -- whether or not I could add anything to it on BlogLESS. As often enough happens, I decided that my commentary would be superfluous. But then I started thinking about a little throw-away parenthetical in Spool's article, and had a (*erm*) brain spark. Here's what Jared says about the problems of chronologically ordering reviews at Amazon:

For small numbers, chronology works just fine. However, it quickly becomes unmanageable. (For example, anyone who discovers an established blog may feel they've come in at the middle of a conversation, since only the most recent topics are presented first. It seems as if the writer assumed the readers had read everything from the beginning.)

Detail of Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

I thought to myself: that's a really good point. I do think that bloggers need to come up with persistent ways to summarize the key arguments or threads made so far on their blogs. I imagine that this would really help anyone potentially interested in reading BlogLESS, and I know it would really help me as a potential reader of other blogs of substantive content.

Any thoughts on a sensible way to do this from any of our UI friends will be appreciated.

Imagine that a small startup exists, and that they provide off-site customer service infrastructure for companies that make software, web apps, etc. Pretty good idea, right? Many companies don't provide this service, or don't provide it well.

Now imagine that they create pages on their site for thousands of companies without their consent. They use the companies' logos, look and feel, etc. to make their page look like an sanctioned location to get official support for these products. The only indication on the page that you're not at an official support site is a badge that tells users that the company in question is "not yet committed to an open conversation." They also sell ads to competitors' websites on your page, unless you buy a plan for $100 a month. Pretty bad ideas, right? In fact, they sound downright malicious, and if they're not, they're horribly negligent design decisions.

Now imagine you're an a-list blogger, that your company provides great (famous) customer service and support, and that you find out about your page on this off-site help resource. You're obviously pretty upset. You write a blog post lambasting the company for their obviously shady practices, which ends up effecting change in the product. (Many of you will be aware by this point that this is a true story - it happened at the end of March.) Pretty good idea, right? I'm not so sure.

Titian, David and Goliath, 1540s

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Last week, the Financial Times reported that the FTC planned to adopt legislation which would regulate some forms of social or word of mouth marketing. Specifically, the new laws would "hold companies liable for untruthful statements made by bloggers and users of social networking sites who receive samples of their products".

Raphael's The Three Graces (1501-5)

We've touched on this idea before when discussing WOMMA, when we agreed that it is unethical for marketers to hide their identity or to manipulate consumer's opinions through coercion (bribes, in this case).

The FTC has additional concerns. Since they are not officially advertisers, bloggers can make any claims about a product that they want. Without regulation, some of these claims might be harmful to the public (e.g. this product is safe for babies, cures cancer, etc.).

While the legislation does not shut down bloggers and their opinions, it attempts to draw a line between real and manufactured word of mouth. If a company tries to induce a statement from a blogger by giving them free product or other compensation, then that person is considered a marketer. Under the new laws, it's not just the companies that are on the hook: bloggers who receive compensation would be liable for any statements they make about products.

The problem is: how can you tell who is getting paid and who isn't? What if someone receives a legitimate free sample and decides to write about it? Are we questioning the intent of all samples, now? Enforcing the law could be very messy.

Regardless, I agree that the laws regarding advertising have to try to catch up to technology. Hopefully these new laws will have a chilling effect on the most overt attempts to manipulate word of mouth and companies will refocus their efforts on the best way to turn customers into cheerleaders: make great products.

I like Jay Rosen. He's teaches at the NYU School of Journalism and, more importantly to me, is the author of PressThink, which is a blog mainly about journalism, but which often focuses of educating traditional journalists about blogging.

Trust Fall by Lauren Nassef (August 27th, 2008)

His most recent blog post is titled If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue. (one of the reasons I like him are his witty, prolix, and often multi-sentential titles). It makes the following point nicely:

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, says a blog is not defined by the software or features in the format (like comments) but by a person talking: "one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think." Blogging, he says, is "writing without a safety net" and taking personal responsibility for the words.

To trust a blogger is to trust in a person, talking to you, who is working without the safety net of an institution.

This weekend, Nick and I are going to be thinking about trust, which will be our topic next week. We invite you to do the same.

Nick pointed me yesterday to this blog post, by Chris Lott. It is a sort of manifesto (although apparently not the first) for what seems to be an emerging movement: slow blogging.

Slow blogging, on the concept drawn by Lott and his influences, means spending more time on posts, taking care to not distribute our thoughts half-baked. From the Slow Blogging Manifesto: "Slow Blogging does not write thoughts onto the ethereal and eternal parchment before they provide an enduring worth in the shape of our ideas over time."

Image via dawdlr: Super-slow blogging.

I'd like to counter-propose that while this conception is motivated by the right kind of concern, it misses what's really good about blogging in the first place. I want to do this because I am deeply in agreement that blogging is an undersold platform for doing a serious kind of writing work.

The slow-blogging advocates are correct that the blog culture is often unthoughtful, and that a likely culprit for this is a supposed need to deliver an incessant stream of interesting content. The immediate and obvious (albeit unreflective) solution is to just "go lowest common denominator," and pound out aggregate blog posts until your fingers bleed. I agree with the slow-bloggers that this is non-optimal.

However, I find it overly reactionary that the correct response to this observation would be to write blog posts more like a magazine articles. The right solution here, I think, has to both take on board the legitimate criticisms of the slow bloggers and still allow itself to leverage the power of the blogging medium.

So I would suggest, as opposed to the proposed "magazine slow," something more like an interest-based (or "geological") model of blogging, where deep ideas are allowed to accrete over time from an ongoing public conversation in blog posts. The requirement for a "slow blog" would not be that each post is a criticism-worthy piece unto itself, but rather that each post contributes to an emergent argument. I would suggest that taking such a tack manages to handle both the depth and breadth concerns inherent to good blogging practice handily.^*

^* On an interesting side note, this is exactly what tag cloud navigation tracks. As themes emerge, they become more and more salient navigational elements.

Tongue firmly in cheek, I'd like call this kind of emergence-model slow-blogging slogging: Slogging means that by simply continuing to make small steps forward, you'll eventually get somewhere.

But of course, the key is taking the time to notice what themes are emerging from your posts. So, as you tune up last year's weather-stripping on your windows this weekend, why not spend some time pondering what your blog posts are already trying to tell you?

One particular point of pride for us here at DLB is the fact that we post on BlogLESS six days a week, and we simultaneously manage to keep it valid.

For the most part, once you've mentally committed to valid HTML, this kind of feat rarely causes a problem. However, for a very brief moment this fine Wednesday, I thought I'd share with you three fairly non-intuitive things that we've run into that caused us validation errors, and what you can do to prevent them.

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On my best days I find self-marketing unpleasant, and on the other six days a week I find it nearly impossible. I am regularly torn between my ethical imperative — that the whole practice is ugly and should be unnecessary (that content should be king) — and my ontological one — the stone fact that it is completely necessary (that relationships are king).

Needless to say, this leaves me at what feels like an impasse. Namely, either I invest a lot of time learning how to market myself that I could otherwise be putting into client and personal projects that are in my major field, or else, I can doom myself to permanent obscurity. Can't somebody please help?

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