Online Media Cultist

Huge congrats to Blogcritics!

It was announced today that Blogcritics – an online magazine-meets-blog community that I have a long and continuing relationship with – is being acquired by Technorati:

Today, we’ve announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org. If you’re a blogger, you might be familiar with them (and they’ve been part of the Technorati Media network since June). If you’re not, Blogcritics is an online community of thousands of bloggers, and an award winning site. They’re publishing everything from music reviews to articles on politics and technology – to a monthly audience of more than a million.

Why did we do it? It just made sense – as we’ve stated more times than you probably care to hear, our mission is to help bloggers and the people who read blogs. Blogcritics shares this mission, executed in their own unique way by providing a large stage for bloggers to express themselves while giving readers a great array of high quality blog content.

Blogcritics was founded by Eric Olsen way back in 2002. In the nearly as way back as 2004, I recall stumbling across Blogcritics and was immediately amazed and delighted to find a place where smart and talented people who were interested in a little bit of everything (or a lot about a few things) could write and read and comment and interact.

It was early grassroots social networking for the blogger and content-minded set, and I dove right in. So much so that after beginning as a writer and site member, I soon got involved as an editor and eventually began taking on as many other things as I could. I went to become the site’s executive producer and was proud to help oversee a lengthy period of expansion of growth.

Part of that expansion led to the founding of this site in early 2007. By last fall, work and other responsibilities sadly forced me to step away from my day-to-day role with the old BC, but I’ve remained a great fan and admirer, and OMC remains a part of the Blogcritics network of sites (which also includes the fun/snarky GlossLip, run by Eric’s wife, Dawn Olsen).

The thing that I always loved most about Blogcritics is that it provides a great value proposition for both writers and readers. For writers, it offers the opportunity to have your work edited for free – a service I still believe is unmatched on the Internet – and mentoring from a great and supportive blog community to boot. Additionally, I personally testify to the number of doors that have been opened by way of association with the site. For readers, BC provides a delightful array of content (TechCrunch reports that an astounding 73,000 articles have been published to date), magazine-style opinions and news and reviews across the pop culture and entertainment and current events/politics gamut.

So congrats again to Eric and Dawn and Phillip Winn and Lisa McKay and crew. And on top of that it will be very interesting indeed to see what Technorati – another old school blog-focused institution itself – will have in store with Blogcritics and other announced changes to come.

There are a handful of really good places to discover books and interact and share with other booklovers. Amazon is the titan of this space, of course, but there are other scrappy contenders that serve some cool functions, particularly on the social media side of things.

Shelfari has long been a standout in terms of its visual display. Giving the illusion of browsing actual book shelves and the ability to enjoy beautiful and interesting and unique book covers is a way to truly extend the experience of being a real world bookstore (without the annoyance and expense, I’d argue!). Borders.com switched to a similar interface as well, and its easy to see why. On top of cool visual browsing, Shelfari also offers a host of social features.

Well, it seems that Amazon acquiring Shelfari. I’m not sure what this will mean for the health of the online books business, but I am selfishly hoping that Amazon will eventually roll out a version of its Kindle product with a dazzling colorful visual browsing interface.

Speaking of no brainers, CNN.com is getting on board with other major online news outlets in providing embed code for video clips.

There’s almost no use in not providing this standard feature.

Attention video producers: If someone takes the time to grab your video and put it up on their blog, they are in effect promoting your brand and your content for you. Hanging onto it tightly makes sense from a traditional media perspective but doesn’t hold in a distributed web environment.

How do you make from this? You have no idea, right? Well, the good news is that pretty much no one else does either, so relax!

That is all. Thank you.

Technology is revolutionizing the ways in which content can be distributed and consumed. That’s a fancy-ish way of saying that more stuff can now be seen in more places than ever before. That turn has increased the desire for consumers to demand more of what they want when and where they want it. Therefore, the media companies and platforms that make good on delivering content that people highly desire are smart and will likely win out in the long run.

This stuff seems pretty obvious on the surface, but the reality is that many parts of the world are only just starting to align themselves under the new interwebs regime.

I’m reminded of this in reading a story in which ESPN and Major League Baseball have signed a deal to stream baseball games live during the season. With the number of sports nuts out there who would love to throw a game up on their monitor at work, this seems like it would be a no brainer. It seems silly to me that they will blackout games locally, but that plays more into the economics of sports than the web side of things, so I won’t get into it here.

I had sports and distribution deals on my mind already this week after learning that New York sports broadcaster Chris “Mad Dog” Russo has signed a deal with Sirius Satellite Radio to bring a new act, now solo, to a national audience. Russo and Mike Francesa have just ended a nearly twenty year run on WFAN radio’s Mike and the Mad Dog show.

As a New York native who has lived in California for nearly ten years now, I often longed to be able to stream, download, or somehow access WFAN in order to get a little slice of hometown sports talk action. Unfortunately to my knowledge this has never been available aside from a few thrown together and occasionally updated clips on WFAN’s website.

Again, this seems like no brainer territory to me: you have a nation full of displaced sports fans who would love to be able to access local sports content. With terrestrial radio facing enormous competition both from satellite and the Internet, shouldn’t it be in their interest to squeeze every potential penny from their offerings?

Maybe this is part of the reason why WFAN couldn’t hang onto Russo. In any event, I’m looking forward to hearing the Mad Dog on Sirius – which I can catch both in my car on the way to work or online anytime!

It’s counterintuitive. Fewer people can accomplish more than more people. Simple ideas are more powerful than complex ones.

This is the basic argument of a great little piece called The power of small teams, by Avi Muchnick, and in terms of the web worlds, I very much agree.

Muchnick relates Jeff Bezos’ concept of the “two-pizza” team, which means that the most efficient and productive team is one that can be fed by a couple of large pizzas. Smaller teams are more effective because communication is more efficient. Of course, the trick is to have the right team, the right group of highly motivated, smart, and cooperative folk willing to buy into the vision of the project at hand.

Muchnick goes on to argue that the most efficient team is a one-person unit, where there’s no communication needed at all. That goes a little too far in my book. I’m reminded for some reason of the J.P. character in the hilariously goofy Grandma’s Boy, which features a genius game designer who has no capacity to deal with real life or the real world. In essence, the vast majority of us don’t have the ability to do it all on our own. While the barriers to entry to get a web product to market have never been lower, perhaps the two-pizza theory also works the other way: the most efficient team is one that would probably get through a couple of pies in one sitting.

The other side of the equation – keep it simple (stupid) – is more meaningful for people who don’t work in the Internet industry. The truth is that no one cares about feature rich websites (which can always run the risk of turning into overblown web monstrosities) if they don’t serve some vital or unmet purpose.

The end of the piece includes examples of simple-yet-powerful social media sites built by small teams. They include some of the hottest web 2.0 properties, such as Reddit, Delicious, and Flickr.

Take those three examples and it’s easy to see why simple is powerful:

• Reddit – Comment and vote on stories
• Delicious – Find and bookmark stories
• Flickr – Find, upload, and share images

All three are super easy to comprehend, and all three are super easy to use. They all also have a tremendous number of other features, nuances, and subtleties that make them unique, but in reality these things are peripheral and were developed on top of the core platforms over time.

The ability for small teams to pump out useful applications and services quickly fueled the web 2.0 boom. The next wave of innovation – in whatever form it takes – will be powered by the same foundation: good/simple ideas powered by good/small teams

Stumbled across some interesting data (via Lost Remote) running down the top 30 “Online Current Events & Global News Destinations for July 2008.”

MSNBC rolls in as the top destination, with Yahoo! News coming in at a close second. CNN, AOL, and the New York Times round out the top 5, with Google News sitting at the number ten spot.

I was particularly drawn to these numbers in light of the story I just published a little while ago sketching out the weirdness around Fox News Channel’s decision to expand its presence on Facebook. Fox News Digital Network falls in at #9 on the list, so perhaps it is attempting to get more aggressive, even if it means neglecting the social networking bigwig (MySpace) that’s owned by parent company News Corporation.

Weird news item #1: Fox News is expanding its presence on Facebook
Fox News Channel, which is part of the same company (News Corporation) as MySpace, is expanding its social networking presence on MySpace’s leading social networking competition, Facebook. The New York Times speculates that the reason may be due to MySpace’s “existing partnership with MSNBC.

Weird news item #2: Fox News SVP claims Facebook is bigger than MySpace
It’s one thing to branch out to a social network that might be more geared to your demographic. Joel Cheatwood, senior vice president for development at Fox News, rightly points out that Facebook’s audience tends to be “a little older and a little more sophisticated” as compared to MySpace.

And it’s another for the “real reason” to potentially be MySpace’s deal with MSNBC. But why would Cheatwood go on to say that “Facebook is ‘currently the leading social network’ worldwide”?

Even if it were true, wouldn’t that be the kind of claim that you wouldn’t want to make about a major competitor to one of News Corp’s highest profile properties?

As always, take it with barrels of salt, but Alexa pegs Facebook as the #5 ranked website on the Internet, with MySpace trailing at #7.

I spend a lot of time reading blogs. Part of the fun of that is sharing what I’ve learned and what I think via Google Reader shared items, FriendFeed, Twitter, and of course here at the old Online Media Cultist stomping grounds.

Living in Los Angeles and working as a web producer for 3jane IndieClick, I feel like I’m in a pretty interesting and lucky position. I help to manage the production of cutting edge websites and tech products. So I like to think that my experiences as a web producer and my blog consumption and general web cultery gives me a unique perspective on things.

And so I’m a little bit outside “the beltway” of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, though I lived there circa 1998-2003. In addition I don’t have the time/resources to get to many tech events and conferences and such (and I feel like my days are packed wall-to-wall anyway!). So while some of the upper tier bloggers in the tech/web space may have a vague-ish idea of who I am, I have no illusions that conference cocktail parties are replete with lengthy and fascinating discussions of the latest OMC installment.

This is all prelude to saying that something I read this evening by a Mr. Robert Scoble pissed me off a little bit. Scoble is of course one of the better known tech bloggers out there. Here’s the thing: I know that Scoble didn’t mean anything by what pissed me off. But I tend to think it’s a little bit telling nonetheless.

In the midst of a very lengthy discussion of the supposed concern over the future of PR (my take: as long as there’s something to promote and people around who want to self-promote by means of promoting, the PR industry’s going to be just fine, kids), Scoble issues the following declaration:

…it’s hard to remember the last industry event where Brian [Solis] wasn’t holding court and if you’re a tech blogger and you haven’t yet met Brian you probably haven’t been blogging for more than a week or two…

My first reaction, uttered out loud: really dude?

Now, technically I’m not really a tech blogger; I’m more in the webby/Internet space. But it’s really interesting to see that from Scoble’s perspective, if you’re not attending insider-y tech events, you don’t really “count” in the blogospheric sense. And I have no doubt that Solis is a fascinating fellow to be around, but doesn’t it seem a little old-boy’s-club-ish to declare that to not have been well met with the gent implies a lack of credibility in writing about tech and the web?

Perhaps I’m taking this seemingly offhanded statement too far, but it does give an anecdotal sense of how the much debated “A List” bloggers think of themselves and the wider blogospheric and Internet proletariat/masses/rabble.

Or maybe I’m just being sensitive?

I hear Alexa ranks thrown around with regularity, and I do it all the time myself. Everyone knows that its ranking system is far from perfect… and yet it still plays an important role in how websites are thought about, and even valued. There are a number of other third-party website traffic analytics tools that you can install or utilize – Site Meter, Compete, and Quantcast just to name three – and all will show different takes on a website’s relative popularity. So which one gives the right take?

The “beef” today between Andrew Baron and Jason Calacanis over whether or not Calacanis’ Mahalo has hit a traffic plateau proves more than anything that numbers remain very much in the eye of the beholder.

A wide ranging, intriguing, and at times heated discussion on this topic spread over Twitter, Techmeme, and FriendFeed today. While there were many sides to the story – including a number of brutal salvos between Calacanis and Baron that became quite personal – my overall take was that you could make the case either way.

That is, look at Alexa and Compete and it’s easy to conclude that Mahalo traffic has indeed peaked out, at least for the time being. However, bring in Quantcast and hear out Calacanis on non-US traffic growth and the normality of summer doldrums, and you can easily see things in a completely different light. Add to that the fact that we can’t look at Google Analytics or Mahalo’s raw server logs, and you really start to get into murky territory on knowing who is right, wrong, or simply dazed and confused (that’s me!).

I’ve certainly been a huge and vocal fan of the Amazon Kindle ever since I got my paws on one earlier this year.

While there was a good bit of early skepticism about Amazon’s nifty electronic book reader, projections are now being arced high and skyward. As in more than $1 billion in sales and 4% of the company’s revenue by 2010. “Amazon’s iPod” is now being tossed around, with early sales figures to back it up.

Like the iPod and iTunes combo, the Kindle is easy to use, easy to manage, easy/addictive in making purchases, and actually encourages more of an activity you already enjoy (listening to music / reading books and other stuff on the go). In fact, I’m about halfway through the first history book that I’ve managed to dig into in some number of years. It’s about the battle for Moscow during World War II – on my mind in part of course because of the terrible situation in Georgia.