The reaction was almost instantaneous and condemning of any of the bloggers who took part in the promotion. It didn’t matter if the blogger planned on returning the laptop afterwards or not as this was never an implied requirement of the deal. The fact was; and to a very large degree still is, that unless you were of the Walt Mossberg stature accepting any kind of product for review automatically tainted you as an untrustworthy bloggers. It’s funny though how this self-righteous attitude only seems to affect those of us in the tech sector of the blogosphere.

At least this sure seems to be the impression one could infer after reading a post this morning by Jeremiah Owyang who talked [nw] about the ongoing BlogHer conference that is happening right now. In his post he showed the same picture you see above to show what good stuff was showered on the attendees of a pre BlogHer party. One of the things that I learned from his post and reading the excellent comments that followed was that it is nothing new for the mommy bloggers to be receiving new products for them to review. For them this is a common occurrence because right now this sector of blogging is one of the hottest areas and companies and their marketers are working hard to get these mommy blogger’s attention.

The interesting thing is though that nowhere at all does one find the same condemnation of mommy bloggers accepting items to review that we do in the tech sector. As Kate Olson said in the comments on Jeremiah’s post

When we do reviews on our site, it’s with the understanding that the company has sent us something to review. We don’t get paid to write our reviews, but for a brand to approach US and request essentially free advertising, a sample of the product is mandatory, otherwise we’d simply be an ad blog. We only do reviews once per week as to not dilute our main content, but I think these posts are really beneficial to our readers as we a) don’t publish negative reviews - if we don’t like a product, we don’t write a review - so the moms are getting great tips on good products and b) we almost always do a giveaway with the review. This brings in more readers to our site benefiting us AND the company. Again, this is much the same as magazines do.

Granted there are a few bloggers of note who say that as long as you have a disclaimer and of course return the item then everything is cool. The general consensus though from what I have read whenever this comes up is for the most cases exactly the opposite. It is like unless you are some big name blogger like Walt Mossberg or the crew at Engadget or of the similar rank then doing product reviews is a dirty thing and should never be attempted by the average blogger or the consequences will be dire indeed.

So why is it okay for the mommy bloggers or the name brand tech bloggers to have all the fun but not the rest of us?

Doesn’t this really smack of hypocrisy of the highest kind?

Conversation Tags: products, reviews, ethics

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and all the easy to publish methods that allowed for mass communication newsletters from the movers and shakers of the Internet began a slow decline in popularity. One of the early adopters of blogging of course was Jason Calacanis who says that blogging is dead and has returned to the email newsletter format for his more intimate conversation that he feels has gone MIA in our Web 2.0 world.

Now many of us on the [nw] web have [nw] called bullshit [nw] on this announcement that Calacanis has retired from blogging [nw] and plans on limiting his conversation to a selective list of 500 750 1,000 1,100 newsletter subscribers. However as we were informed by Robert Scoble on FriendFeed he has received the first of Jason’s newsletters which he then posted on his posterous blog [nw] and I am sure it is getting a lot of traffic at this point.

Personally I think Jason is full of shit on this retirement thing but I thought I would take a look at this new and intimate newsletter and see what it had to say and guess what – it’s just a continuation of his last blog post along with some back patting on how a head of the curve he is by doing this. I also thought it would be interesting to take some of the things he said in this news letter and see how high the bullshit meter goes.

He starts out the newsletter with a couple of paragraphs of discounting the idea that this was all a joke and then gets to the gist of the inaugural newsletter with this

Is blogging dead?
————————-
Yes, it is. Officially.

Okay folks it’s official we can all hang up out blogs as a waste of time and go onto other things because Jason says so. Wow that’s a hellva responsibility to take on there Jason – being the arbiter of a whole medium’s validity.

He then follows that up with

Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts
than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging
Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to
win at blogging: "show up every day." In 2003 and 2004 that was the
case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your
message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from
whatever you’ve said.

Well Jason you may have been concerned with SEO and digg points or felt you needed to hire a bunch of experts in the social media field (the field you yourself felt you were knowledgeable so many times) but to suggest that this is something that all bloggers concern themselves with is just assuming too damn much. I have been doing this for some time and I couldn’t give a damn about SEO or whether I’ve been on digg or whether I have the most followers on Twitter. There are a lot of bloggers out there who I am sure feel exactly the same way and for you to paint all bloggers with this paintbrush is in a way rather insulting.

Of course there is the obligatory swipe at Nick Denton and his Enquirer style of blogging across all his properties. Here’s a hint Jason – not all bloggers are cut from the same cloth. Nor do we all hop on the link bait train as he likes to suggest we do

Excelling in blogging today is about link-baiting, the act of writing
something inflammatory in order to get a link. Many folks say I’m
responsible for link-baiting–these people are absolute idiots. I’ve
never tried to get any of these insecure, lonely freaks to link to
something I’ve said.

Just look at any of the really excellent bloggers out there like Alexander van Elsas, Sprague D and right through to the old timers like Mathew Ingram shows just how wrong Jason is and the fact is the accusations of him link baiting have a lot more validity than him accusing other bloggers doing it.

He then raises the specter of how mean the blogosphere has become by trotting out the whole Xeni and Boing Boing episode which I note like most of the newsletter he does very linking to prove his point(s). Get a grip Jason – nastiness isn’t something that is specific to the blogosphere. People can and very often are very nasty – it doesn’t matter if they are being such on the Internet or even in real life – we will always have nasty people who like nothing better than to belittle and berate those who they don’t like.

In the section where he tries to explain why the switch to email and his rebuttal against the meanness of the blogosphere Jason writes

Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls
under them? Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it
under the belief that "open is better!" Open is not better. Running a
blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall,
and then seconds after their performance you run to the back Alley and
grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask
them what they think of the performance they overheard in the Alley.
They then take a piss on the stage and say "F-you" to the people who
just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness
for you… my how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged
on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.

Sorry Jason just like in my home I will not allow bad behavior the same applies to my blog and that is where being an administrator or caretaker of your home of thoughts comes in. It is our responsibility to stand up and eject those who would come on our blogs and spread hateful things. If you feel that someone has written something mean and nasty then fucking well delete it - don’t go whining about how nasty people are. Just because a person can’t be bothered to become involved in their blog beyond firing off a post then it is their own faults for this type of thing to happen and continue. If I was the stage manager in your example I would have booted the drunk off and seriously consider doing the same to the person who brought the drunk in. Don’t pass the blame for your own inability to manage your blog on others.

The fact is that in my opinion Jason really found himself not the center of attention that he once might have been when there weren’t so many really good and intelligent bloggers out there. That is of course the advantage of being an early adopter – the level of competition – getting those eyeballs – is a lot less but there are better alternatives out there now compared to the nonsense that could be found on Jason’s blog lately. Now though the quality level of the blogosphere is rising regardless of things like Valleywag or blogs like it and Jason was finding himself being sidelined which wouldn’t sit well for a man with the ego of Jason Calacanis.

So he decides to paint everyone in the blogosphere with the same paintbrush and calling us all losers and useless in the process. Well all I can say is that no newsletter is going to make him anymore relevant. The fact is that in the end he will end up losing real feedback because he has decided to shut out any and all dissenting voices. In exchange he is filling his world with nothing less than a bunch of people who agree with him and nobody learns anything of value when they do this.

Instead of trying to work towards making something better Jason retreated to a world where he is once again the king.

Enjoy your personal echo chamber Jason because the rest of us have moved on.

Conversation Tags: Jason Calacanis, blogging, newsletters

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.

Now as much fun as this whole thing is as it takes up space on Techmeme and pageview counters go nuts the fact is that the tech blogosphere had absolutely nothing to do with this takedown of Loren. In fact this whole bullshit hoop-a-la had long been put to sleep many months ago with everybody having picked their sides and gone on with other things. Then recently Loren had the pleasure of rubbing everyone’s face in it when c|net announced they were doing a deal with him. That of course was blown out of the water because of the schoolyard behavior that resulted from from his blow up with Shel Israel.

Then while everyone was drawing lines in the sand as c|net bowed to pressure put the deal “on hiatus” word came that Verizon was truly getting this whole social media thing by inking a distribution deal with Feldman and his company 1938Media. Within days of the announcement though all hell broke loose when KNBC posted to their website [nw] the news that civil rights groups where protesting the deal. What apparently had raised the ire of these politically savvy groups was a year old video of Loren’s that while in my opinion was denigrating of blacks it was still within his right to make and distribute.

While the tech blogosphere and the whole social media arena had basically left this in the past and had moved on to newer and shinier toys this video lurked in the dark like a bad dream. I have no idea who it was that sent the video to the mainstream news stations like KNBC but within a very short period of time Verizon found itself the brunt of racial and religious hostilities. The outrage hadn’t come from the place that gave Loren his birth of questionable commentary but rather it came from the real world social networks.

Regardless of the content; because after all he could have done the same type of thing with Jewish, Mexican or just plain pick your favorite religion or nationality, Loren suddenly found himself in the radar of groups that are well practiced in the art of corporate intimidation. They have been doing this for a very long time and have roots that go far beyond anything the high minded Internet social media groups could even dream of mustering. As much as social media on the Internet might like to think of itself as a force to be reckoned with they are living in a dream world when it comes to serious influencing in the real world.

It doesn’t matter one iota to a corporation like Verizon whether or not people like Ethan Kaplan point out the hypocrisy [nw] of the very people moaning about the loss of someone like George Carlin and the need to push boundaries but who in turn get pissy over Loren’s bluntness about the fallacies within social media. Nor do they care when folks like Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins quite rightly point out that if you don’t like it don’t watch it. What Verizon does care about however are the millions up millions of people who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about puffed up internet personalities but do spend money hand over fist for the company’s products.

With corporations like Verizon; for whom the Internet and social media mavens are only a miniscule portion of their overall business, the pressure that can be brought to bear by political and community activists is their real motivators for change. When it comes to affecting real change this only goes to prove that feet on the street are still more powerful that delusions of grandeur tapping on keyboards.

Welcome to the real world.

Conversation Tags: social media, Verizon, Loren Feldman

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.

Now APIs are not anything new either. They have been around for as long as Windows; or any other operating system for that matter, has been letting developers create applications to run on that platform. The problem with APIs though is that they are generally proprietary in nature and as a results only allow interaction with the host platform. Unlike the universal protocols like FTP, Email, NNTP, Gopher, IRC or Ping which were developed to open up communications between different systems regardless of where they were.

With the arrival of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of APIs it was thought that this new openness would increase our inter-communication abilities between these new forms of communicating across the web. What they have in fact done is create nothing more than new silos for us to all sit inside of. Sure we have things like FriendFeed which strives to use those foreign APIs to bring everything under one roof but once there that is were we remain.

Sure we say these APIs are all open and available to all but the recent downtime of Twitter and its follow up actions to limit access to that API or to actually take down parts of its service only goes to show that these APIs aren’t as open as we would like to think. Web 2.0 and Social Media has built itself as the new style of open communication and brags how it is set to replace things like Email and IRC. The problem is that as long as any company bills itself as the provider of a new and better form of communication and lay claim to ownership of those connectors (API) to that method of communication we will find ourselves locked within that system.

Shey Smith inadvertently pointed out this problem today [nw] in a post where he suggested how the three main third party commenting platform; Disqus, IntenseDebate, sezWho, could work together to create a common platform that then could be accessed by all – including themselves. As good as this would and something I have wondered about myself it will never happen because contrary to popular belief Web 2.0 and Social Media isn’t about opening up lines of communications that is equal to for all and accessible by everyone.

When Web 1.0 was king and everything was new there was a feeling among the developers of exploration and real openness. All the protocols we use without any thought; and upon which Web 2.0 and Social Media is built on, were created by people who didn’t want anything for their work. There were no VC backed start-ups behind things like HTTP or TCP/IP. Nor were there any global corporations investing billions in things like FTP or IRC. Everything we use on a daily basis came from people doing what they did for the real and pure love of it.

Web 2.0 and Social Media might like to espouse an open and transparent working of the web in the hyped up rhetoric of doing it for the people when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Facebook isn’t about openness, Twitter keeps the locks on their doors nice and tight and even the newest darling of the early adopters FriendFeed has their secrets. All these so-called harbingers of a new era of the web aren’t doing what they do out of any true goodness of their hearts. In the end it will always be about the making of money which there is nothing wrong with except that they aren’t being honest about their motivations.

As much as everyone likes to put down the whole Web 1.0 experience because of what happened as a result of the dot com crash they seem to forget that we wouldn’t be where we are if it wasn’t for the people who created the very protocols we depend on daily. Without those people we would still be in the world of dial up and bulletin board services and even that is questionable. Until Web 2.0 and all the Social Media companies can honestly say that they have contributed something to really progress us along this thing we call the Internet and the Web then what they are doing is nothing but selfish hype and just another get rich quick scheme for which we pay the price.

If there is really the desire to open the web then we need to take the lessons of our web torchbearers and really open up the web. We have gotten to where we are because of open protocols and the time for Web 2.0 to live up to its professed ethos is coming. It is time that we the users of the Web start looking for these so-called believers in transparency to step up to the plate. It is time to quit trying to lock us into so-called open APIs so they can make more money that most of us will ever see in our lives.

It is time that we the users stop accepting that we must use one or another method of communication just because some Web 2.0 or Social Media start-up on the hunt for big bucks says we have to. The time is coming when we should expect that any new form of communication should be on the basis of an open and accessible protocol available to all. Just as Email or NNTP was a common ground protocol so should any API of the new web that enables communication between people.

It is time for APIs to stop pretending to be open and actually become the future open protocols that the web was founded on. Protocols that came into being for nothing more than the love of giving something to the people.

Conversation Tags: protocols, API, Web 2.0, Social Media, Internet, technology

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.

For most of this evening I have been watching an amazing event. It is totally fascinating to watch a group of what should be intelligent and well educated folks suddenly become drooling masses of quivering jelly like substance. It was like they had been locked in a room without any way to regenerate their failing levels of social interaction. Then with a simple whisper the floodgates seem to open up and the emotions came rushing to the surface.

Why did this happen?

What was the momentous event that rocked their world to such a degree?

What was it that happened that rejuvenated their incredible power of prose?

It was something so incredibly simple that it will amaze you. It was the birth of the world’s very first open source Twitter clone that was lovingly named identi.ca by it’s proud parent.

You think I’m joking? I would never joke about something as incredibly important as this momentous event. After all this is Dave Winer’s wet dream come true and that alone should be enough to prompt another peyote induced post by Steve Gillmor - that is as soon as we can get him to come out of his corner.

Yes folks - it is true. We are now the proud owners of a brand new clone of the Fail Whale we love to hate … or is that hate to love … I never seem to get that straight. Anyway rather than continue this orgasmic hyperbole over this newest shiny toy I’ll just point you to those that are truly thrilled to their early adopter bones over this addition to our social media world. Okay so not all of this effusive expressions of amazement is as breathless as you might expect but you’ll get the idea …

Identi.ca Early Adopter Tips [nw] :: Sarah in Tampa
Twitter refugees find a new home (at least for this week): Identi.ca [nw] :: VentureBeat
Could Identi.ca be a Fail Whale Killer? [nw] :: Inquisitr
Identi.ca: The Force Is Strong With This One (But is no Jedi, Yet) [nw] :: Mashable
Identi.ca Apps & Why It Could Blow Twitter Away [nw] :: SheGeeks
Identi.ca: Twitter Alternative [nw] :: webomatica
Identi.ca proves me wrong, and I’m happy about it [nw] :: Duncan Riley

All this fuss over a half baked not yet ready for prime time web service - amazing .. just amazing.

Conversation Tags: Twitter, Identi.ca, social media

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.

Well needless to say the friendships didn’t last much longer than it took them to cash my entrance fee into this rarified dream world. Neither did I ever end up owning a mansion or a private jet and neither did I ever get to vacation in the playground of the rich and famous. I did though manage to piss off a lot of family and friends in the process of following these tried and true practices of wealth building.

Flash forward thirty some years to when the Age of the Internet is well underway and it has become the new playground of the nouveau tech rich crowd as they flit around the world from conference to conference and startup to startup. To a time when voices like Stowe Boyd, Chris Brogan and Marc Canter (when he is making sense) are preaching the gospel of freenomics and the power of TwitPitches to a new generation of wide-eyed and breathless neophytes of the social media generation.

A generation that eschews the need of business models and cradles itself in the warm bosom of the Angel investors. A generation who have been made to believe that making a pact with the devils of advertising in order to bring the illusion of software and computing freedom to the great unwashed masses is a fair trade. Once more we are being presented with a dream world by the privilege few who managed to grasp this new style multi-level marking of social behavior and in turn set themselves up as the sages of this social multi-level marketing bonanza of financial duplicity.

Where traditional multi-level marketing (MLM) folks were at least sideways honest about their leech like behavior once they deceived you with their getting together with friends meetings and took your signed in blood sample case check the social media mavens dangle the word free. It is this kind of tactic that almost guarantees that the ranks of social media multi-level marketing will swell incredibly fast with both those dreaming of a pajama job lifestyle and those wanting something for nothing.

After all isn’t that the ultimate goal of life - to be able to get something for nothing and so what if you have to put up with advertising. There’s the rub though. You aren’t getting something for nothing are you unless of course you’re smart enough to know what ad blockers are and how to install them. This minor segment of gullible mooks though are an acceptable loss for the ad networks all clamoring to get their hooks into this willing and forever growing group of mindless link clickers.

While these social media ad providers startups might like to blindly think they are doing good all they are really doing is lining the pockets of those smart enough to have figured out this new MLM scheme. It is a scheme where both the money people of these startups and the advertising networks have come together to create this perfect model of money generation called social media. Along the way they attract people who maybe out of good intentions become the voices for this new social media and because of their reputations provide a nice cover for what is really happening - a small group of people making a lot of money by convincing another group to talk their friends into trying out this new social media thing that is all the rage.

When you look at how MLM advances itself through its faux pyramid build up it always has charismatic people in the forefront who by their very strength of personality convince a number of folks to sign up with the understanding that they will make a lot of money. From there this group then spreads out and begins evangelizing (or advocating as that is the new hot buzzword for this) their money making scheme. As more and more people sign up for this impossible mission of a rich lifestyle with minimum effort those who started the whole movement sit back and watch the money roll in.

This is not really any different that what has happened with this whole social media shebang. A small ground of folks got together and using the word free as the entry price managed to convince another small group of folks about their <em>good</em> intentions which got them engaged in the process and out there evangelizing this whole new way of communicating. The masses as a result of this new freenomics have rushed headlong into this social media with some thinking that they to can be a part of this new road to riches and the rest falling head over heels for the free stuff being handed out like candy.

In the end you can say what you want about social media and freenomics but it all boils down to making money by providing the same type of top to bottom weaving of dreams of riches but this time there is no price of entry. Where MLM in the past have made their money from the initiation of fresh meat being brought into the game by previous suckers this new Social Media MLM has made it so everyone you know can be that sucker as long as you know their email address except this time the circle of real money makers is even smaller and the base of the pyramid is the size of the Internet.

Don’t fool yourself by the warm and fuzzy rhetoric of the freenomics and social media mavens - this is all about making money the easiest way possible and that means making you think you are a part of the process and can have the same access to the riches as them. Don’t think that this is about leveling any playing fields or making the world equal for all - this is all about making you do all the work like the MLM peons before you.

Conversation Tags: multi-level marketing, social media, social networking

Interested in sponsoring the WinExtra RSS feed then drop by our Sponsorship page and see what we can work out for you.