twopointouch

Dead 2.0 is a funny tech blog. The author posts anonymously under the name ‘Skeptic’, and enjoys deflating the hype around Web 2.0 startups with posts like ‘Funding the Web 2.0 gravy train‘ and ‘Secret to why you should invest in Dogster revealed…‘. One of his main targets has been Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch, the most prominent news source about these startups.

Now Nik Cubrilovic has discovered Skeptic’s identity, and so has Arrington. Apparently, he’s a VP at a prominent tech company that’s raised some serious funding.

Arrington’s understandably not happy about the Dead 2.0 ‘attack blog’, as he calls it. He writes, regarding the consequences of Skeptic’s possible unveiling:

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In breaking news err… yesterday, NewAssignment.net has received a $100,000 grant from Reuters to hire an editor. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen explains the project’s agenda:

The idea is to draw “smart crowds”—groups of people configured to share intelligence—into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadlines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the “pro-am” part.

Rosen has already thought through and answered a lot of the immediate objections that might spring to mind (interest groups manipulating stories, sponsors balking at ‘inconvenient truths’ & local stories, volunteers will be nutjobs with an agenda).

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The new reality? I was in a brief email exchange yesterday with the managing editor of NowPublic, Mark Schneider. NowPublic publishes blog posts in a new-sy manner, similarly to Newsvine and Tailrank. It’s citizen journalism in a very naked manner. He reminded me about the idea of ‘truthiness’.

Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the phrase in a skit about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (video here):

And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Later, moving from the mainstream to social media, he expanded the theme onto the susceptibility of Wikipedia to vandalism. (*sigh* the video is here). Out of character, Colbert told the Onion AV Club, “Truthiness is tearing our country apart … Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country.”

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The Register, ZD Net and PC Pro have all discovered a month-old transcript of an podcast featuring Tim Berners Lee made by IBM and published stories about it within a day of each other. Read/Write web published on the story over a week ago on August 22nd. Is this what they call ’social news’?

Anyway, they’re delighted that Sir Tim layed into Web 2.0 about it not being the computing revolution that it’s cracked up to be:

I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

The expression ‘Web 2.0′ was unfortunate. It makes a promise that it’s unlikely to deliver on - a web that’s twice as good, or fixed. If the other Tim, O’Reilly, had stuck to the expression ‘Infoware’, people wouldn’t get nearly so upset about the subject. He told me: “I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing [as Web 2.0], at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

If Web 2.0 has jumped the shark, then it’s because people find the expression either embarrassing or inviting of mockery. There have been a bunch of startups with fancy interfaces and questionable business models: that doesn’t make for a computing revolution. However, the things that these companies are heralding, what it really stands for - social software, online collaboration, social media, many-to-many communications - aren’t going to go away. As they become mainstream, their importance will start to have the sort of effects that might one day earn a 2.0 label.

And it looks like that’s happening. Check out Google’s new category addition on its news site (pictured).

My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery by commenting that the order was actually chronological according the time stories were promoted to the top. I also commented on the importance of rate and topic, which may have been less useless.

Yesterday, Fred Stutzman posted something to revive my interest. He was talking about the moaning and groaning about the power of top users and the voting blocs around them. Essentially, he says the reason for this is because we need some way to sort through the thousands of stories submitted to digg. Users can’t read them all, a lot of them are spam anyway, and so we develop coping mechanisms.

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Judging from the comments and trackbacks on this site, a fair proportion of blog readers have a blog themselves. But how many of you regard that blog as your day job? There’s an interesting article about your chances of making money from blogging in the new Business 2.0, with a bold promise in the subheading: “here’s how to turn your passion into an online empire”.

The article goes on to focus on how TechCrunch, BoingBoing and Fark are earning a substantial amount of money, together with blogging networks like Weblogs and Gawker. These are, the article says:

Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers - not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy.

(you may recognise what looks a lot like a snarky reference to the recent story about Kevin Rose being worth $60mn in 2.0’s rival publication, BusinessWeek)

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From a study by Telecom Express, a company that provides competitions, polls and other interactive services to newspapers, magazines and broadcast:

The most trusted source of information was television, scoring 66 per cent, just as highly as family and friends.
Radio was listed the fifth most trustworthy source of information, below national newspapers, but above websites. [...]
The most marked contrast was between the credibility of established media brands, compared with websites (36 per cent) and blogs (24 per cent).

Complete nonsense. Of course you can trust blogs.

I’m actually quite encouraged by these results. It’s pleasing that 24% of Britons know what a blog is. It would be interesting, though, to see these results on a historical scale. Do more people trust the internet than a year ago, for example? It’s also good to see that there is a fair bit of critical thinking going on: maybe “One Third of Brits don’t Trust TV” would have been a better headline.

via E-Consultancy

The verdict is in. Now its opening weekend is over, it’s time to count the votes on Snakes on a Plane.

This is what the public thought, comparing the takings from it’s opening weekend in the US to those of other summer blockbusters:

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - $135.6M
Cars - $60.1M
Superman Returns - $52.5M
Talladega Nights - $47M
Step Up - $20.7M
World Trade Center - $18.7M
Snakes on a Plane - $15.8M

OK. and err… here’s what the blogosphere was saying about the film prior to last weekend: “the event of the millenium”, “viral marketing management genius”, “It kind of points to the power of the Internet and in some way the evolution of the Internet”, “the folks promoting the upcoming movie Snakes of a Plane have managed to turn a somewhat silly sounding B-List movie into what will undoubtedly be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters”.

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What did I expect when I called Robert Scoble, perhaps the best-known blogger to have become famous for blogging? I wasn’t sure. Maybe someone very Californian. In the bad way.

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150-200 blogs out there.

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A-list bloggers are spurning the traditional media interview, says Steve Rubel. Instead of the normal procedure (reporter asks the questions, you answer them and then the reporter goes and writes it all up), the move is towards written responses. Apparently, Mark Cuban will only do email. Dave Winer answers interview questions on his blog. Rubel thinks this is fine and ought to be driven forward into new interview formats.

It’s fairly predictable of me, but I don’t think it’s fine at all. Here are four reasons why it’s bad:

(a) This is likely to lead to weaker published interviews. A one-hour interview can potentially contain over 20,000 words. Which interviewee is going to take the trouble to write that down? What a conscientous journalist does is take those 20,000 words and produces 3000 words that are cogent, interesting and helpful to the reader.

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