… but I had no idea it’d be this light.
Been crazy busy with projects to the point I didn’t even blog about the NFL playoffs so far. No guarantees, but I expect to get back into this saddle a bit more regularly. I’ve missed a ton of cool nanotech and invisibility cloaking stuff, not to mention business news and two major events in North Africa.
I’m back (at least partways.)
Many thanks and congratulations to Andrew Sullivan for reaching ten years blogging at his Daily Dish. It’s simply one of the best, and most honest, political (and, of course, more) blogs out there. He wears his heart on his sleeve most of the time and every once in a while can make a fairly harsh snap judgement on any number of topics, but one thing Sullivan has always done is remain intellectually curious and open. As he himself has put it more than once, you can watch him change his mindset on topics in real-time over weeks and months of blog posts. The Daily Dish has long been a daily read for me, and I doubt that changes anytime soon.
I’m pleased to announce this blog is now part of The Printed Blog Bloggers Network. This means some of my posts will be available in the new weekly print subscription magazine. Hit the link up there to subscribe and actually get to hold some of the best of the blogosphere in your hands.
Be sure to follow The Printed Blog at Twitter here twitter.com/theprintedblog, and like The Printed Blog at Facebook here facebook.com/theprintedblog.
I’m doing some posting at Environmental Graffiti on solar and other alternative energy sources. You can check out my first effort here. That post was built from one appearing here a couple of days ago.
This University of Missouri study shows citizen journalism (read: bloggers, et.al.) is not filling the void created by the collapse of traditional media. In an ideal world the two complement each other to provide a more rich picture of what’s going on in the world. The reality is traditional media has done an absolutely terrible job of transitioning to the digital world and reacting to web 2.0 technologies, and now it’s being hammered by an incredibly weak economy. The end result? We all lose out in the long run. Maybe some new paradigm for professional journalism grows out of the media mess of the last ten years or so.
The release:
Citizen Journalism v. Legacy News: The Battle for News Supremacy
MU researchers say citizen journalism does not match void left by legacy news organizations
July 08, 2010
COLUMBIA, Mo. — A team of researchers from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and two other schools say that even the top 60 citizen websites and bloggers are not filling the information shortfall that has resulted from cutbacks in traditional media.
“While many of the blogs and citizen journalism sites have done very interesting and positive things, they are not even close to providing the level of coverage that even financially stressed news organizations do today,” said Margaret Duffy, associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. “Not only do these blogs and websites lack the staff to adequately cover stories, but most citizen journalism managers do not have the financial resources and business experience to make their websites viable over time.”
Duffy collaborated with Esther Thorson, associate dean for graduate studies at the MU School of Journalism, and Mi Jangh, doctoral candidate at MU, along with others at Michigan State and North Carolina. The Pew and Knight foundations underwrote the research.
The researchers identified a number of factors including how much linking each website included, how much public participation they allowed or invited, how frequently news and content were updated, and whether the citizen websites provided contact information for the public.
Duffy says it is important to understand how citizen journalism and legacy news organizations co-exist. She believes it is critical that democracy have an effective journalistic presence. With many newspapers and broadcast news outlets struggling financially, she is concerned about the future of journalism.
“A strong democracy depends on vibrant, robust news coverage with informed citizens and voting public,” Duffy said. “If news media have to cut back and are unable to provide the same level of coverage for their communities that they did in the past, citizen journalism may need to step in. That is why it is important to examine what these websites need to do to improve and survive. “
Elements of the study were published in the Newspaper Research Journal as well as presented at the International Communication Association conference June 24 in Singapore.
–30–
I feel for that other David Kirkpatrick. He’s caught in the circular fire of a dying publishing industry. The thrashings of that particular dinosaur aren’t as public or violent as those of the music and entertainment industries, but they certainly aren’t any less dumb.
Read this entire piece for a taste of the soon-to-be-history file.
From the second link:
I carefully wrote the post, taking time to properly format the text from the excerpts (which is a real pain), linking to both the Kindle and hardcover pre-sale versions of the book in the first paragraph, and linking to Fortune twice in the second paragraph. I added a bolded statement“In the meantime, Fortune has access to two excerpts from the book, and this stuff is solid gold.”
In my world, that’s known as a big wet kiss. And at first both Fortune and Kirkpatrick were pleased. 22 minutes after the post was live, Kirkpatrick emailed to thank me. 48 minutes after the post was live, Fortune emailed to say:
Hi Michael, thank you so much for doing such a great post this morning.
But of course no good deed goes unpunished.
Just six minutes after emailing to tell me how great the post was, Fortune emailed again telling me that in fact they had only wanted me to post exerpts of the excerpts, not the whole excerpts:
Michael, I don’t know where there was a miscommunication, but I didn’t offer you to post the entire excerpt, just the first look and to pluck pieces from it. I need you to please take down the entire excerpts and just post pieces of it as we discussed. I gave you the excerpts to select from, but did not offer for you to post our content, I’m sorry if that was unclear. This is now an issue of copy write infringement and I really need your help in taking down the full excerpts and just posting pieces of it. Please contact me as soon as you can to let me know that this is happening.
Uh oh. “copy write infringement.” Sounds serious.
That was just before 6 am on May 6. I had been asleep for two hours. Fortune then called me three times between 6 am and 7:30 am. I woke up each time and thought “Who’s the jerk calling me in the middle of the night?” and went back to sleep without checking.
Another email at 6:03 am:
Michael, I really need your help on this. Again, I need the post to be fixed and you’re welcome to post a few hundred words from each of the excerpts, but I didn’t offer for you to post the entire excerpt. I gave those to you only to choose something to post. I’m sorry if that was a miscommunication, but I wouldn’t give you permission to post all of our content. Please take down the post and edit it to reflect only some quotes. Please let me know as soon as possible who I might reach to make that happen. I really need your help.
A fourth (or maybe fifth) call at 9:46 am finally got me up (after almost 6 hours of sleep, my average). This time it was Dan Roth, the managing editor of Fortune.com.
I returned the call and things got…heated. Roth said it was unreasonable for me to post the entire excerpts, despite the fact that they asked me to, and that it should have been obvious that we could only post excerpts of excerpts. He told me I needed to edit the posts. I declined on the grounds that I was pissed off I was being called so many times and that it would be a ridiculous amount of new work to pick out the right excerpts of excerpts.
He called me unethical. He then called me unprofessional. He demanded that I remove the post entirely. I declined. We hung up.
Is anyone there? Hello …
No April Fool joke with the blogging blackout this week. Just more outside projects than usual coupled with an electrical problem (now fixed) at the home office. Should be rolling as usual soon.
I’ve done a lot of blogging over the last two years on the convergence of cancer research/treatment and nanotechnology. Here’s a HubPages hub that serves as a clearinghouse of those posts to date.
Hit this link if you’d prefer to plow though all the posts here on this blog.
Update 3/13/10 — HubPages doesn’t allow multiple links back to one source, so it pulled my original hub and did not respond to a request to waive the otherwise sensible rule in this case as the hub was not a link-building page for this blog, but simply a method to get a lot of information covering a long time period in one place. Hit this link to find the text of the original hub in its entirety.
… and it seems to be for, and about, mature people in the age of texting and Twitter. Looks like blogging is too long-form for youthful expression and communication.
Wonder what that says about serious long-form journalism, novels and feature-length cinema? Maybe short-short fiction will become a hot commodity. That’s a format I’ve deeply explored.
From the first link:
A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.
“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things.”
Update: 12/1/13 — back again, as usual …
This is a repeat from last year’s black background post to emphasize the WordPress virtual snow. Like last year this will remain pinned to the top spot until the snow ends.
(Note to WordPress bloggers: hit this link for a guide on turning this feature on your blog.)
(Note 12/1/10 — repeated once again)
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
The year dating back to November 23, 2008, and with a $1K top prize to boot.
From the link:
The winners of the polictics prize will be announced on December 21, 2009. Here’s the schedule:
Today:
- The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of politics by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
- Each person can only nominate one blog post.
- Entries must be in English.
- The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
- The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after November 23, 2008.
- You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
- Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
- Nominations are limited to the first 100 entries.
- You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!
December 2, 2009
- The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
- The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.
December 9, 2009
- Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).
December 21, 2009
- The winners are announced.
Today has been something of blog stat anomaly because this post is getting some traffic. The reason it’s unusual is the linked post is an article I wrote years ago that went unpublished (I got a kill fee from the publication that contracted the piece) until I posted it this past January. The post is on Dallas’ “Frog Town,” a red light district in early 20th century Dallas given an official imprimatur of sanction by the city council in 1910.
Why today is an anomaly? With no other way to determine when the weekend arrives, I could check my blog stats and see that post getting plenty of hits. And judging by the search terms used to find the post it’s mostly people — I’m guessing men — searching for prostitutes in Dallas. Of course some legitimate historical searches figure into the mix as well. Here’s just a sample from the last week or so: “prostitution in dallas,” “red light district in dallas,” “prostitution boundaries 1910 dallas city,” and the most searched-for related term this year, “dallas prostitutes.”
From the link:
A 1910 city ordinance adopted by Dallas city commissioners designated new boundaries for the prostitutes in an area just north of the Old Red Courthouse. Three of the commissioners wrote a report rationalizing the ordinance and in “Big D” Payne quotes the report, “We find that under the existing conditions bawdy houses and bawds are promiscuously scattered throughout the City, greatly menacing the decent neighborhoods and offending decent and respectable communities and parts of the City … We feel that the measure hereby suggested by us will entirely eliminate such objectionable characters from the decent neighborhoods of the City.”
Payne writes about the location, “This was immediately east of Lamar Street, from Cochran Avenue on the south to the MK&T railroad tracks on the north, and bounded on the east by a small stream known as Dallas Branch.” Payne points out three areas of particular interest in the district, “The 2100 block of Wesley Avenue, the 1000 through 1300 blocks of Broom (recently changed from Audrey), and the 2100-2300 blocks of Griffin Street.” The designated area was known as “Frogtown,” likely because of the calls of frogs that came up the stream from the Trinity River. Once the area became a designated red light district it was also referred to as “the reservation.”
Frogtown’s location relative to the downtown Dallas of today is an area straddling Woodall Rogers Freeway, beginning just east of the West End historic district and running north toward the home of the Mavericks and Stars, the American Airlines Center. One feature of early 1900s Dallas faded away and was resurrected in 1989, the McKinney Avenue Trolley. Payne points out that streetcars would pass by Frogtown and passengers would rubberneck to look down the streets of the reservation with curiosity.
Frogtown, Dallas' red light district in 1013
And it takes nine slots to get to the first elected official — Jim DeMint. Sarah Palin clocks in at number two behind Rush Limbaugh.
There really is no mystery why the GOP is becoming so marginalized. Angry volume and right wing media exposure do not mean legislative or electoral success.
To illustrate the marginalization consider this:
In 1987 comedian David Brenner bombed in syndication with about 2.5 million viewers at midnight — which is roughly what Fox, the leading network for political talk shows, averages in prime time.
(Hat tip: NewMajority)
Selected press releases from both BusinessWire and PR Newswire are delivered to my inbox on a daily basis (as regular readers probably know and might lament) and today something new from PR Newswire came in this afternoon — the “Bog Briefs Lead.”
I’ll let the release do it’s own horn-tooting, but I have to wonder what’s the utility of seven leads to blog posts without links to the posts themselves? Maybe this release went out incomplete by mistake.
At any rate, here’s the release:
Blog Briefs Lead
The following Blog Briefs roster is a weekly roundup of posts from selected blogs. Blog Briefs are archived and available on the PR Newswire Web site, http://www.prnewswire.com/.
The following are the Blog Briefs for the week ending July 31:Blog Briefs
1. Queercents: Penny-Pinching Pregnancy – Saying No to Expensive Tests
2. Waylon Lewis of elephantjournal.com: Urban Outfitters Sells Fixies; and
Frat Houses Go Solar
3. Sunday Morning Soliloquy: Blogher ’09 Through the Eyes of an Un-Mommy
Blogger
4. synthesis – We Must Spend Less on Education – Necessity and Invention
5. BANDIT Lets the Air out of Formula 1’s Tyres
6. FoodieMama.com on Alternatives to French Fries7. Credit Union Uses ‘Lottery Effect’ to Encourage Customers to Save Money
/PRNewswire — July 31/
Source: PR Newswire
Web Site: http://www.prnewswire.com/
Who knew.
Here comes the science:
Online ethics and the bloggers’ code revealed
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (June 25, 2009) – Whatever their reason for posting their thoughts online, bloggers have a shared ethical code, according to a recent study published in the journal New Media Society, published by SAGE. Key issues in the blogosphere are telling the truth, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution, although the extent to which bloggers follow their own ethical ideals can depend on the context and intended audience.
Creating weblogs (blogs) is often viewed as a form of citizen journalism, open to anyone with Internet access. As it grows in prevalence and influence, communication scholars, news media, governments and bloggers themselves have raised questions about blogging’s ethical implications. Some academics propose that bloggers should follow an ethics code, based on standards journalists follow. But few researchers have examined ethical standards bloggers themselves aspire to, and whether they adhere to their own ethical standards.
Blog tracking site Technorati (www.technorati.com) tracked some 113 million blogs in early 2008, although not all blogs are active or updated frequently. A blog can be a personal journal for family and friends. But many bloggers aspire to reach a wider audience and create non-personal blogs, which cover everything else from commerce or politics to entertainment and technology.
Andy Koh, Alvin Lim and Ng Ee Soon of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore used a web survey of 1224 international bloggers with active, text-based blogs to find out more about bloggers, their ethical ideals and how they put these into practice. Of those surveyed, more than half were male (51%), most were under 30 (65%). Most were well educated, and the majority were from the USA (65%), with no other country accounting for more than eight percent of the participants.
Sharing thoughts and feelings or creating an online diary is the main drive for personal bloggers, who are mainly students (39%) and information technology industry workers (9%). These bloggers often feel they know their readers very well (62%) with many blogging for those they know personally (39%).
Non-personal bloggers are more likely to be male, older, married and better educated. Students (18%) and information technology workers (12%) still make up the largest proportions of this group. The non-personal bloggers’ main reasons for blogging are to make commentary (36%) or provide information (21%). Among their diverse blog topics, government and politics (28%) and news (10%) are most common. Their primary intended audiences tend to be people that they do not know personally (48%), or no particular intended audience (38%). Despite this, almost half still feel they know their readers well.
The researchers identified four underlying ethical principles important to bloggers: truth telling, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution. Truth telling involves honesty, fairness and completeness in reporting. Accountability involves being answerable to the public, bearing the consequences of one’s actions and revealing conflicts of interest, and minimizing harm underlies issues involving privacy, confidentiality, reputational harm, consideration of others’ feelings, and respecting diversity and underprivileged groups. Attribution covers issues such as avoiding plagiarism, honouring intellectual property rights and giving sources proper credit.
The researchers found that personal bloggers valued attribution most, followed by minimizing harm, truth telling and accountability respectively. Non-personal bloggers valued both attribution and truth-telling most, followed by minimizing harm, then accountability. For both groups, attribution was most valued, and accountability least valued. But between these two groups, truth telling was most valued among non-personal bloggers, whereas personal bloggers valued minimizing harm more than non-personal bloggers did.
“This first large-scale survey of blogging ethics revealed no shocking lack of ethics in these areas,” says Koh. But he adds: “Ethics codes may be little more than a set of ideals, unless they have ‘teeth’ in the form of sanctions”.
Attribution was paramount for both groups (non-personal bloggers valued truth-telling as much as attribution). Attribution is vitally important among bloggers for building community. But did they put this into practice? Where the non-personal bloggers were concerned, attribution was practised as frequently as truth-telling and minimizing harm. But despite the importance they placed on attribution, personal bloggers were actually better at minimising harm than at attribution.
Credibility counts. The authors suggest that non-personal bloggers practise truth telling, attribution and minimizing harm with similar frequency because they want their content taken seriously. As in journalism, offering readers sources and providing links makes for more convincing blogging than just telling the ‘truth’ alone.
Accountability was valued and practised least by both groups of bloggers. Some reasons for this may be a belief that bloggers cannot be sued for blog content, or a perception that the social risk of a failed relationship with readers is fairly low compared to a failed face-to-face interaction.
The study also highlights how a personal blog on thoughts and feelings is necessarily more subjective, and so a belief in telling the truth ranks behind attribution and avoiding harm. When your primary audience is more likely to consist of people you know, minimizing harm may be a higher priority than telling the truth.
The present findings revealed no significant difference between personal and non-personal bloggers’ agreement on the need for a blogging ethics. But even a self-imposed bloggers’ ethics code may constrain the free expression championed in much of the blogosphere, or interfere with bloggers’ autonomy to make ethical decisions.
The exceptionally large, diverse and informally linked blogosphere may not be particularly suited to self-regulation. But in reality bloggers profess that they value the principles and adhere to the practices explored in this study. Less ethical bloggers can also expect payback: the blogosphere is more interactive than traditional media, allowing instant and often vigorous feedback to bloggers that violate readers’ standards. This ‘sanction’ on unethical behaviour may replace the need for a formal blogging ethics code.
###
Doing the right thing online: a survey of bloggers’ ethical beliefs and practices by Mark Cenite, Benjamin H. Detenber, Andy W.K. Koh, Alvin L.H. Lim and Ng Ee Soon is published online today in New Media Society, published by SAGE (2009; 11; 575).
The article will be free to access online for a limited period from http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/4/575
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com
Andrew Sullivan is doing an exhaustive (and exhausting even for me just to attempt to keep up with it all) job of live blogging the green wave in Iran and now today’s crackdown from the despotic ruling regime.
He’s continually adding tweets from inside Iran, embedding video and providing fresh images of the protests and state-issued violence against a democracy seeking population.
Hit the Daily Dish link in my blogroll for his latest posts, and this link goes to “Live-Blogging Day 8.”
From the link:
2.58 pm. good source: Hospital close to the scene in Tehran: 30-40 dead thus far as of 11pm and 200 injured. Police taking names of incoming injured.
Voice from Iran: Shame on a country in which foreign embassies are safer than hospitals 😦
Gunfire Is Hearing From Near Resalat SQ. (East Teharan)
2.47 pm. New footage of fighting in the streets. And another protester is shot.
2.31 pm. Canadians, call your foreign office. It’s confirmed Canadian Embassy rejects injured protesters
Australian Embassy reportedly accepting injured
My Friend Wounded At Haft Hooz SQ, No Clinic Is Open!
… this week. The continued bad to neutral economic news (don’t let the media pollyanna’s fool you) and the ongoing torture revelations have spent those subjects for me. At least for the remainder of this week.
I’m tapped out on the torture story for the time being. I’ve been charting it longer than most of the media and blogosphere. The grim reality is it is as bad as could be imagined.
It was ongoing and systemic, poorly-drawn legal documents were created in attempt to provide legal cover after the fact, and it’s becoming fairly clear Cheney used torture to create false leads in the connection (none we now know) between Iraq and al-Qaeda. We went into a drastically costly on many fronts war based purely on the lies of the sitting vice president and his cronies.
And according to those in the know who aren’t in CYA mode right now, the torture produced no real, usable intelligence. The shame that will forever blot the Bush 43 regime is it knowingly overturned a non-torture policy of the United States of America that pre-existed the very existence of the USA. General George Washington instituted the policy during the Revolutionary War.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney overturned a directive from our first president, repeatedly lied about the program’s existence, attempted to cover up the war crimes and now administration offcials and GOP party hacks desperately attempt to defend these shameful and criminal actions.
History will not be kind to the Bush 43 regime.
Here’s the entirety of a quick-hit post from Brad Feldat Technology Review on VC friends of his who’ve began blogging. I read VC blogs on occasion. They are interesting for a number of reasons, and they offer a lot of inside information for my privately-held clients looking for angel funds.
From the link:
My friends at Highway 12 Ventures have started a blog. The gang at Highway 12 is based in Boise, ID and has built a very interesting portfolio throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Plus they are great guys.
Fortunately they put Lijit on their blog for search so I didn’t have to badger them about into using it and it made it easy for me to add them to the brand spanking new Venture Capital Bloggers Network powered by Lijit.
Blogging, Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools can be a real boon for small business, but it’s important to have a solid plan and stay with the plan. Unless a small business owner has a lot of time to devote to social media, or has staff in place that can fill the role hiring a professional writer to ghost blog is not a bad idea.
The business owner can stay on top of the subject matter covered and frequency of blogging while the ghost blogger can focus on solid, SEO content posts and stay of abreast of the rapidly changing Web 2.0 world.
From the MainStreet.com link:
Blogs have blown up. So how does blogging fit into your marketing strategy?
First, the eye-popping statistics. There is a total Internet audience of 188.9 million worldwide for blogs, according to comScore, and eMarketer says half of all readers are in the U.S. By the end of 2009, there will be 28 million bloggers in America and 116 million readers, eMarketer projects.
Some demographics: Readers of blogs have household income of $75,000, meaning upper-middle class, according to Technorati. Half of all bloggers are on their second blog, and 59% have been posting for at least two years. In addition, two-thirds are male; half are 18 to 34 years old; 74% have college degrees; and 44% are parents.
One interesting stat that caught my eye: Fewer than 1% of readers have incomes in excess of $150,000, which tells me the following: Decision leaders aren’t typically reading blogs, and the very wealthy are not reading blogs
… this week. I’ve had (and still fighting) some late-winter killer flu. Been trying to get at least a couple of posts in each day.
I’ve been pretty tough on the GOP over the last couple of weeks and it’s disappointing. With Obama’s election and the Democratic clean-sweep of November I was looking forward to pushing back against the new establishment and challengeing areas where I didn’t like the direction they were taking the nation. And don’t get me wrong, there is plenty to touch on — right now some of the more insidious provisions stuck in the stimulus package come to mind.
The problem is the GOP is acting so stupidly and pathetically as a minority party, it’s impossible for me to stay off the topic. Right now for me the GOP is a festering wound with a scab I can’t help but pick at repeatedly. And I’ll have to admit there’s some morbid fascination watching a political party completely implode. I don’t wish this for the Republican Party, but I’m not kidding when I write it could be coming to an effective end as a national political force.
When you have party mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh wishing for insta-failure for Obama’s administration instead of hoping America gets back on economic track and becomes the great nation it has always been once again; when you have minority whip Eric Cantor reliving those glory years of Gingrichism instead of working within the current political climate to improve our nation; when you have has-been punchline Ken Starr making pronouncements about Obmama’s potential Supreme Court nominee fights; and when you have the far-right bloc of the party trying to oust the three Senators who voted for the stimulus package for being RINOs, you don’t have any hope for a ruling coalition.
Sphere’s content widget on mainstream media websites has driven traffic to this blog on many occasions when I’ve posted on breaking, or hot, news. Sometimes the post of mine is peripherally related to the article that drove the traffic, but not about the exact story. That makes sense now I see where Sphere is a big proponent of contextual analysis, rather than behavioral analysis, to sort content.
Here’s an interesting post on the debate between the sorting methods on Sphere’s blog.
From the link:
For the past year, we at Sphere have been waging a polite and respectful war on our cousins in the space, powering related content using behavioral analysis. We’ve believed and maintained that behavioral analysis (ie: forming relationships based on repeat user connections) cannot compare to contextual analysis of the content, mainly because readers don’t always group their reading so systematically by topic. I blogged about this last year and our opinions/learnings haven’t much changed. We think behavioral matching is a cool technology and extremely valuable in other applications – such as commerce. I love the feature on Amazon.com where it tells me that 64% of users bought the item I’m looking at, 24% bought another one and still, 14% bought a third. It makes my shopping experience more informed and leaves me feeling better about my purchases. Likewise, it’s helpful, when buying an iPhone, for instance, to know that most previous purchasers also bought the charger set and plastic case. Content, though, is a different story.
David Kirkpatrick 