Nick Bradbury

BloggerCon IV

Most of the time when I attend a conference, I benefit more from the schmoozing/partying than I do from the actual panels. Truth be told, I usually skip the majority of the sessions, hoping to save my energy for the after-hours socializing.

So the biggest compliment I can give to BloggerCon IV is that I spent the entire day sitting in a chair listening to (and participating in) the conference itself. I know that some people sneer at the unconference idea, but my experience has been that it works - involving the "audience" in the conversation results in a far more interesting and unpredictable event.

My favorite discussion today was "The Emotional Life of Weblogs" (MP3) moderated by the brilliant Lisa Williams. Listening to fellow bloggers talk about how blogging connected them with other people reminded me why I'm in this business - to build tools to help improve peoples' lives rather than complicate them.

I also enjoyed the "Users in Charge" discussion moderated by Chris Pirillo, but I have to admit that I had to struggle not to blurt out my opinions as a developer (it's a user conference, so the users do the speaking). Why did I want to speak up? Because many of the people talking were techies, which is a big part of the problem. Less technical users believe they don't have the technical expertise to join the conversation, so developers end up tailoring their tools to meet the needs of power users since they're the ones that speak up. We need to create an environment where non-geeks don't feel intimidated, and power users need to help rather than hinder this goal.

What I'd like to see at a future BloggerCon (or Gnomedex) is an open, respectful discussion between users and developers. Even though public speaking terrifies me, I'd still be willing to moderate a session between users and developers if it would make the discussion less adversarial. So much of our society's future depends on technology that we absolutely must open the communication lines between those building the tools and those using them.

Scoble Leaving Microsoft

Robert, good luck on your new (ad)venture. Your work at Microsoft has had a huge, positive impact on their image (and on blogging in general).

Now, once Robert moves on, what single source are we supposed to read when we want to find out about new stuff that Microsoft is doing, without all the marketing?

NewsGator NewsCast

Wow - we've been so busy that I didn't even notice NewsGator's NewsCast had been announced. This service enables bloggers to permit their content to be re-syndicated by our Private Label Platform.

What's interesting to me about this is that NewsCast is opt-in - we're not going to re-syndicate your work without your permission. I think this is important, since I've seen similar services which re-syndicate feeds without the author's approval. If you're a blogger and you'd like to take advantage of this service, you can find out more about it here.

Related to this, it's also interesting to see feed syndication continue to break out of the aggregator. More and more sites are displaying posts from bloggers next to articles written by professional journalists, which is quite a change from the world of print syndication. You can include me among those who see this as a good thing. IMO, more bloggers should figure out how they can exist side-by-side with the "mainstream media" instead of thinking they can replace it.

My Blog is Boring

My nephew Tommy says that my blog has become boring lately. He's right, of course - my posts have become less frequent and less interesting over the past few months, but that's normal for me. When I'm working on a new version of my software, I focus almost exclusively on coding and let my blog stagnate. So I figure my blog should pick up now that FeedDemon 2.0 is out.

Of course, the surest sign that your blog is boring is when you write about blogging, so perhaps there's no hope after all.

Sticking up for my friends

I normally try to avoid getting into public battles, but today I need to make an exception. Yesterday Rogers Cadenhead blogged about a letter sent to him by Dave Winer's attorney, which caused a bit of an uproar in RSS circles. I honestly have no idea who is right or wrong in this case, and I've never had a reason to distrust Rogers, so I'm not going to take sides in this issue. But I was truly bothered by the number of comments made before Dave had given his side of the story. How can anyone possibly take sides when only one side has made their case? The mob mentality shown here, in a word, sucks, and shows why the blog world is no better than mainstream media when it comes to fact-checking.

Also, Steve Gillmor has recently made a couple of rambling posts that suggest he's not exactly happy with the goings-on in the world of attention. For the record, Steve, you're the person who introduced me (and certainly countless others) to the idea of attention, and I'll always give you credit for your pioneering role, no matter how cranky you get.

Blogging for Business in Nashville

This afternoon I'll be part of a Blogging for Business panel here in Nashville, along with Rex Hammock, Brittney Gilbert and Ken Russell. If you're in the Nashville area, check out the details and come on by!

Strange Addiction

Rex Hammock suffers from Frappr addiction, and apparently it's contagious.

Kudos to TypePad

I'm really impressed with the way Six Apart is using their Everything TypePad blog to introduce customers not only to new features in TypePad, but also to the engineers responsible for creating these features.

AttentionTrust.org

Last week saw the launch of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit hatched by Seth Goldstein, Steve Gillmor and Hank Barry which is "dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners." I'm honored to be serving on the initial board of AttentionTrust.org, along with Dick Costolo and Clay Shirky.

I've written about attention before, but I realize it remains a nebulous concept to many folks. I think part of the problem is that those of us who write about attention tend to be talking to people who already understand the concept, so I'll write this on the assumption that you have no idea what I'm talking about.

In a nutshell, the idea is that your attention data - that is, data that describes what you're paying attention to - has value, and because it has value, when you give someone your attention you should expect to be given something in return. And just because you give someone your attention, it doesn't mean that they own it. You should expect to get it back.

I know that sounds a little weird - it took me a while to grok it, too. So I'll use an example that's familiar to many of us: Netflix ratings and recommendations. By telling Netflix how you rate a specific movie you're telling them what you're paying attention to, and in return they can recommend additional DVDs to you based on how other people rated the same movie. In return for giving them your attention data - which is of great value to them - they provide you features such as recommendations that they hope will be valuable to you. In my mind, this is a fair trade.

But what if Netflix collected this information without your knowledge, and rather than using it to give you added value they sold it to another service instead? I imagine that many people wouldn't like that idea - chances are, you'd want to be given the opportunity to decide who this information can be shared with. This is one of the goals of AttentionTrust.org: to leave you in charge of what's done with your attention data.

But what about this whole idea of mobility, as mentioned on the AttentionTrust.org site? What's the benefit of making this stuff mobile? Dave Winer provides a nice example: suppose you could share your Netflix attention data with a dating site such as Match.com, so you could find possible partners who like the same movies as you? For that sort of thing to be possible, you'd need to be able to get your attention data back from any service which collects it. (As an aside, this also means you could share your Netflix queue with any new DVD rental service that comes down the pike - so my guess is that smaller, up-and-coming sites will be more willing to share attention data than the more entrenched sites will.)

This is the stage we're at now with attention data, but my prediction is that attention will become far more important down the road. Right now we're witnessing the growth of services who provide aggregated attention data, and statistics suggested by this data will increasingly impact those of us - journalists and techies alike - who hope to survive in the online world. And the Utopian in me would love to see this grow into a means to find out what people are paying attention to (so we decide what the top stories are) but I fear that spam and the usual assortment of garbage that comes with popularity will give rise to "safe" outlets that still end up choosing the news for us. Regardless, though, now is a good time for something like AttentionTrust.org to plant a stake in the ground and let attention-based businesses know what's expected of them.

Related reading:

• http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/?p=132&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdblog
• http://majestic.typepad.com/seth/2005/07/attentiontrusto.html
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1648&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdblog
• http://gotads.blogspot.com/2005/07/what-is-attentiontrust.html
• http://www.edbatista.com/2005/07/attentiontrust.html

AO/Technorati Open Media 100

Wow - I'm flattered to be included in the AO/Technorati Open Media 100. All these years I thought I was just a geek working from home, when in fact it turns out that I'm a revolutionary :)

There has already been some chatter about who else should be listed, so I'd like to nominate a few folks who I believe should be included:

• Todd Cochrane
• Anil Dash
• Dare Obasanjo
• Mark Pilgrim
• Sam Ruby