The Power Of Twitter

-I am using RSS less and less lately. Mostly due to FriendFeed, but also because of Twitter ...

-People worry about companies starting to use Twitter for marketing. If companies misuse Twitter, block or unfollow them. Problem solved. Remember, it's who you follow that defines you...

-Twitter is the public square. Lots of noise, little signal. Blogs are like a speech. Signal, but little noise ...

Remember the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? You personally may get a second chance to sway that first impress, but your blog doesn’t. If you don’t grab them within the first micro-seconds of a visit, they won’t subscribe and they won’t be back.

Digging through a lot of blogs recently to research an upcoming article, I found myself thinking “WTF” as I looked at the designs. I was constantly distracted from the content I was eager to read through and quote towards things that blinked, flashed, or listed irrelevant stuff. My eyes had to work overtime to stay focused on the information I was there to glean.

I often wonder what WordPress Theme and web designers think when they see how a blogger has treated their design in use. How quickly a nice clean Theme become a garbage dump for gadgets and gizmos. The sidebar is notorious as a great dumping ground for every widget, Plugin, and gadget around.

More importantly, I wonder how all this clutter impacts the visitor’s experience? Do visitors think WTF as I did when they see cluttered and clogged web designs?

A visitor stumbling upon your blog is honestly looking for only two things: an answer to their search and any excuse to dismiss your site for not having the answer to their search. If the blog’s design, structure, layout, and content doesn’t give them the correct answer, you’ve given them just cause to bounce away fast.

Could part of the confusion be that WTF experience of your blog’s clutter?

I mentioned Blog Archives as clutter recently, and I’d like to start a series that explores all the different types of clutter we have on our blogs and their WTF factor.

What do you think qualifies for WTF on blogs? What do you think is overkill and doesn’t belong? What do you think does belong in a blog’s design?

The past month has been a hotbed of indigenous social justice activity in Ottawa. The Algonquin community of Barriere Lake has organized and carried out several actions alongside local organizers and ally groups.

On June 26th, 2008 a dozen Algonquins and supporters occupied the office of MP Lawrence Cannon, Stephen Harper’s Quebec Lieutenant. Cannon is the also the Minister of Transportation and MP Responsible for the Pontiac Region in Quebec, in which Barriere Lake is located.

“We came here today to demand a meeting with the minister,” said Acting Chief Benjamin Nottoway in front of the MP’s office in Buckingham, QC. His demand of the minister was “to call for a leadership reselection in our community. We hope to get a response by today, or we will stay here as long as it takes.”

The aboriginal activists and allies unfortunately could not stay, as by five in the evening they were forced to leave the office. Six were arrested, detained, and released later in the night, greeted by a crowd of cheering supporters.

The chief’s promise to continue putting pressure on the minister was not in vain as on July 16th almost a hundred members of the reserve of 450 came to Ottawa for a three-day protest and camp-out.

We’re here to demand the minister live up to the promise that he made to us,” said former chief Jean-Morice Matchewan. “They never kept one promise that they made to us,” he continued.

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TechCrunch reports that AOL has been making big budget cuts across its blogs. We’re not talking small stuff here, serious cuts up to 25%, which will almost certainly effect the writers the most.

The cuts range up to 25% of each properties total budget, which falls mostly on personnel costs - bloggers are simply being told to take a couple of weeks off for now, and there may or may not be work for them later in August.

The tech blogs, with Engadget being the most prominent one, is not affected, the sources say.

While this should be treated as a rumor for now, it is something that will and should rattle the blogosphere.
Gawker has been in the spotlight for their recent pay cuts, and b5media head honcho Jeremy Wright paints a gloomy picture in a comment to the TechCrunch post:

We’re seeing this across the industry. Gawker’s pay is now down almost 75% this year. Time’s is down 50%. AOL’s overall pay to bloggers is down almost 50% (happened earlier this year). Pubmatic is down almost 80% on the year.

It’s good, because it’ll force companies to really refine their models. It’s bad, becuase neworks are now closing all over the place (2 this week and 1 last week alone).

Needless to say, b5media is probably not one of the two blog networks mentioned.

So is this the final proof that blog networks are dead? Of course not, sites come and go all the time, and blogs are no different. Today’s blogs are not so different from dynamic websites of the past, although a lot of people like to act like it. Still, it is a sober reminder that you need to make money to stay alive in the harsh online world, and that means adopting to the current situation, or perish. Epic words, but rest assured that’s how it feels for the ones watching their empire crumble.

Just testing you can guess what… Sure wish I had smaller thumbs!

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A group of folks, led by Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze, has filed a comment on the FCC’s proposal that it give away some public spectrum to be used for national Internet access, with the requirement that the provider censor it down to what’s safe for a five year old. Wendy and her friends produced what I think is an outstanding, thorough, and legally-based criticism of this plan. (I’m proud to be one of the many signatories.) [Tags: fcc censorship wendy_seltzer ]

I saw this as an isolated incident, until it happened again today to another friend of mine who's apparently separating from his wife. In fact, unlike the previous occasion, I found out from Facebook. It was a lousy way to find out that a couple may be on the road to divorce -- as it would have been a lousy way to find out any other piece of "serious" or "sensitive" information. But there it was in my Facebook friends news feed. I learned from a mutual friend that the dissemination of the news was unintentional.

And what about enterprises that use Facebook as a corporate intranet? Could it be that employees are also unaware of such automatic information distribution? As readers of The Enterprise Social Software Report know, it's difficult to separate professional from personal information on Facebook, which has also had a history of privacy and security breaches. Though you can now categorize friends and decide who gets to see what information, I admit, I find it crazy that in this day and age, people still think that things published on a social networking site will go unnoticed, or not be disseminated. Unless you specify otherwise, you should assume it will not only appear on your page but distributed to every close, personal Facebook friend you have. All 347.

If you mix work and play on Facebook, don't be naive. If you're going to sip wine while naked in a hot tub in California, don't write about it on your wall unless you're comfortable with everyone knowing, including your boss, your ex, your clients, and anyone else you may have thought it was a good idea to "friend."

In this blog, I once linked to a colleague's Facebook page, and then was contacted by his company's PR firm, insisting I switch the link to the person's profile on LinkedIn. I accommodated, but was also perplexed. What I'd said about the person was nothing but complimentary. It was clearly an issue of not wishing to mix work and personal information. But really, it's too late. We're already there, thanks to Facebook, thanks to the legions of social networking sites on the web. Social software doesn't let you control the dissemination of every piece of information about you out there -- yet. If you don't want people to know, just don't publish it. Anywhere.

I choked up merely reading a transcript of it on my cellphone on a bus.

[Tags: obama berlin ]

Must-see photo, shared by Dave Winer. Click on the largest size your bandwidth allows…