Musings & Meanderings

Beginning 2 weeks ago, I voiced a personal opinion in 3 posts on comment tracking which engendered a ‘conversation’ with Jitendra of SezWho. Did that give someone who needs a life something to do? Perhaps SezWho has done me an unintentional favor by ‘noticing’.

Since that conversation, an anonymous poster has left 10 spam comments on 10 different Read/Write Web posts under the name Vera (which is the name I now post comments under). Each one is the same link to some sort of playboy site. If you happen to see one, don’t click!

Vera might not be an uncommon name, but I only noticed this because I’ve never seen any other commenter using it wherever I read. Those RWW comments also end in, “Best, Vera”, which is how I occasionally sign certain correspondence. This blog was set up late last August. That’s less than a year, and since I skim about a hundred posts a day, really read about 10, leave comments only a few times per week, and was away for 6 months, there shouldn’t be more than a few hundred comment links to here, max.

Kudos to whoever patrols comments at RWW, spam disappears really fast. The only reason I’ve seen a few of them is because I occasionally scan from my 50+ favorites in Technorati for a different, ‘hot off the press’, feel, so will click into things soon after they’re posted.

Here’s a thought for anyone in the new ‘tracking comments’ segment of the marketplace. Delete public profiles of regular spammers, but also how about pooling more of whatever info there is into a record? Nothing official or public that could get, uh, spammed. More like a word of mouth ‘look out for each other’ thing. I know that malicious people will always keep appearing like an endless army, but I’d hate to think that we’re too busy differentiating ourselves, and sometimes picking on one another, to act together when appropriate.

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added August 15, 2007:
It isn’t just on Read/Write Web. I’ve now come across the same spam on other blogs I read. Sometimes it is signed, Best Regards, Vera.

Valeria Maltoni posts about an issue that should be important to every one of us, yet is barely on most bloggers’ radar.

To define protection of free speech specifically when it is performed in a professional/paid capacity is an activity that lawmakers have been involved in for a long time. The difficulties that arise in applying those definitions to blogging, which is a form of publishing, highlight both the unprecedented power of free speech we enjoy here, and the responsibility that this entails.

As Ignacio points out, commenting on Valeria’s post,
To assume that someone should “earn income” from a blog in order to qualify for free-speech protection doesn’t seem consistent with the general idea that editorial is separate from any advertising influence.

To those of us whose weblog content is of the personal experience and opinion variety, this may not appear to be immediately relevant, but how many of us could define the circumstances in which it would become so?…and how does this bode for true citizen journalism?

The blogosphere was once composed of spontaneous and informal blogging communities. I do not refer to formal congregations of bloggers who all work in pr or who all write code, but to more loosely knit, dynamic, and ever evolving groups of bloggers sharing complementary viewpoints.

This phenomenon was a primary basis for my own decision to blog, despite the fact that I approached this weblog from the beginning as a sort of personal writing experiment. It wasn’t a requirement that I aim at center stage or high traffic, merely that I felt ‘at home’ setting up my personal space here in which to experiment with thoughts and ideas out loud.

Even one short year ago, I still found blogrolls a delightful resource. It was my primary way of discovering new favorite bloggers. Blog search was, and still is pretty hit or miss.

Many great bloggers don’t have a blogroll anymore, which disappoints me. If someone whose posts I think highly enough of to read regularly makes a recommendation, I’m going to check it out. I’m also going to view it as a generous gift, as long as it truly is a personal recommendation.

Your blogroll also tells me about you. For example, if you get into political issues occasionally, and you have a political blogroll segment which includes both left and right wing bloggers, I’m more likely to see you as an independent thinker. If you have categories of links to topics other than the ones you blog on, revealing other interests, this can sometimes give me insight into your perspective on things. If your blog has good content, but you’re not a natural writer or communicator, and do link to bloggers who write well, I might read your writing more carefully. Being glib or entertaining doesn’t always go hand in hand with depth and substance.

Returning a month ago to my couple of hours per day in the blog world, after a long absence for medical reasons, I have been seeing less really good blogrolls than ever before. There are more highly read bloggers without rolls at all (sometimes without comments or even trackbacks). There are dozens more blogrolling widgets, from almost every social network it seems, but far fewer personal recommendations. This strikes me as an ongoing state of disconnection.

While better bloggers are recommending each other less, newbie bloggers who are looking for traffic and ratings for the purpose of selling advertising, are linking indiscriminately. If the only recommendation you’re giving by linking to someone is that they linked to you, then the only reason your readers are going to have to click on those links is if they also are looking for people who will link to them.

The result is more random traffic and less great destinations along the way. I’ve read posts by veteran bloggers who decry the deteriorating state of the blogosphere, and think every time, please make more recommendations for what you view as the best stuff around or enjoy the most. Surely you can do this or why would you still be here? We all have an ability to raise the bar and the more of us actively do so, the more we’ll all benefit.

So my personal wish is that the blogging community, and the veteran bloggers especially, take a bit more time to offer more handpicked recommendations. I don’t want to see a list of the 750 blogs that those on the fast track skim in their reader for business reasons, just a random sampling of personal favorites and interests. In the gap between the A list and the flood of linkaholics are millions of bloggers finding their part of the ’sphere becoming increasingly disconnected, and yet they form a big segment of the primary readership and conversational base of the A-list, and fast-track, and veteran bloggers.

In answer to the capturing traffic question on yesterday’s post and comments, I have new traffic here from SezWho.com but not from Read/WriteWeb.

As to Jitendra’s comment that one’s profile information can be edited, I clicked on that link on my profile and discovered that I needed to create an account with SezWho first. Not wanting to do this, I am only going to guess at what I’d expect to find, which is the ability to enter profile information for the benefit of anyone viewing my comments. If I could actually see the profile of who rated me, and also delete personal conversation (as discussed in yesterday’s post), I could better understand the incentive to sign up.

SezWho’s News/About Us page has links to lots of recent blog posts and articles about the service. You can also search SezWho on Technorati for another list, which is possibly how Jitendra arrived here. It might also be an interesting current search for anyone comparing search engine results.
to balance the positive coverage posts linked to on SezWho’s page above…
Geoff Livingston, a new Twitterer, tweets, “Not a good idea.” after his first encounter.

My trial comment was rated just over 2 stars. 3 is a good comment and 4 is a great comment and you can use that rating criteria to view only the best comments according to SezWho.

Objectively, I can understand why my comment, from a consumer and also business perspective but with no tech content, was not of ‘use’ or interest to the average Read/WriteWeb reader. I doubt, though, that most people will actually read all the commentary on an interesting post/topic and connect it to the star rating to form their own opinion. The comment immediately prior to mine said only, “This is such an interesting take on such a simple thing.” and received a rating of 3.5 stars. The commenter’s profile indicates that they might have been a SezWho beta tester (or closer).

Commenters who have (I assume) signed up have their website or url posted on their profile. If SezWho is actually capturing every linked posters’ traffic, though, why wouldn’t they display those posters’ websites in the profile also?

The potential of abuse with anonymous rating is what bothers me. SezWho requires entering an email address to submit a rating, but you can enter anyone’s. Being rated on Digg is not particularly invasive for those of us bloggers who aren’t mavens or seeking major traffic, although I still believe it affects all of us. Blog comments, however, or what remains of them, are somehow more intimate, and still the best potential for conversation in the public part of the blogosphere.

Last week, in a post about reputation systems, Dinesh Tantri said, “Reputation needs to be portable across the enterprise information ecosystem - a SezWho kind of distributed system for the enterprise.”

Imo, reputation also needs to be portable/aggregatable by its owner, which is related to the topic I commented on yesterday in my try out of SezWho.

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update added July 31st, 4:30 pm et

Although Jitendra posted here, I did not receive any direct or further communication, however…
The hover link has been removed completely from my name at the top of my comment (although you can still see the SezWho url, inside javascript, on the footer bar in either IE7 or Firefox)
The hover link over my name at the foot of the post has been changed completely to read verabass.blogspot.com. These changes appear to have been applied across the board.

Dear Jitendra and SezWho,
I may be just a blip of traffic in your stats, but I’m still an actual human being using services that you guys develop and promote. Respectful behavior is appreciated by people like me. It wasn’t optics that I expressed concern about, and transparency is usually a better policy.
Vera

Last week I posted on the Conversation on Comments, and talked, among other things about the rating by strangers aspect of SezWho. Being rated doesn’t bother me personally, but it does not strike me as a way to promote more conversation, and having a ‘reputation’ number assigned by unseen parties who may or may not even be participating makes me uncomfortable.

There are already plenty of reasons that cause 90% of open forum and comment readers to lurk, whereas the participation numbers in closed forums are something like 80%. (I can’t find the exact numbers or source on this, but when/if I do, I’ll edit this post here to add it.)

Today I made my first Sezwho comment, on the Read/Write Web post about information silos, and discovered something else that I’m not too happy about, which is that the poster’s name link to a url is no longer direct. It either goes through SezWho, or gets logged by them. I’m wondering how that improves comment conversation.

Aren’t there enough people tracking us already? Capturing commenters’ identities as part of aggregating their comments makes sense to me. More than that I’m not happy about. I realize that coComments, which I’m trying out, has similar aspects. The difference, to me, is that I make the choice to use coComment or not. I’m also musing on whether we’ll see any shift in the makeup of regular commenters with SezWho in favor of those who find this form of incentive appealing.

The primary feature of SezWho, which is a profile showing other comments made by the same poster, is attractive at first. I got to thinking, though, that if I make a comment of support to a friend on a more personal topic, it doesn’t always belong among comments I make on business discussions. So the feature makes me think about holding back on one or the other. It would seem that the alternative is more anonymity, and you know how I feel about that.

To improve the conversation further, my subject comment was then quoted (with a link/attribution to me) on a closed forum blog that it appears I’d have to register for to read. Maybe I’ll get an invitation.