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Kevin - Feb 3, 2009

Great Post. I am still in two minds. Defining anonymous is the problem, I know you and the others - it’s not about that really, it’s those people that simply spread hate and use names that are never seen again. Maybe we should all have Open ID anon identities too!

Of course, if you’re being harrased that’s something different, at least by requiring an e-mail address you reduce the chances, and if you use disqus you can probably block them more easily.

I love anonymous commenting because it’s from the heart that people speak rather than from their pedestal. By this I meran that when you make an anonymous comment you don’t need to know anything. You can say what you feel and you’re genuine. Of course that feeling might last ten seconds and you regret it.The point is that you can speak as part of the uninformed mass, you can afford to be wrong and your sentiments reality the feelings of the crowd. The crowd is important. Understand the crowd and you understand how to please them. You see worries of anonmity, worries of stalking, feelings that the whole community you need is within three miles of where you live. Those comments have value. To be attacked both as an individual or a community doesn’t matter. That’s where dialogue and conversation come into play. That’s when we get to see each other’s points of views and it may result in friendships, or the disagreement doesn’t continue. We are the privileged with our blogs and our advanced mobile phones. For marketers and opinion hunters though it’s great. I read this post and I find myself disagreeing that anonimity is a bad thing. Everyone that comments on this blog lacks anonmity, at least for me because I know them on twitter or other websites. I lack anonimity too. I use a nickname online but within a minute of searching you’ll find who I am. The effect of that is quite concrete. Whenever I post on a blog, a newspaper or anywhere online I have a personality I want to show. I have a reputation I have to attempt not to damage too seriously. That’s because we all have our own egos to feed. I don’t mean that in the self loving sense that those dissenting voices use against the event and against twitter. I mean that I want to be taken seriously. I want to be valued. As a result if I flame someone who is part of twitter there is fallout I would immediately suffer from. I’ve seen it happen to others in forums, on twitter and in a number of places.

Ed Richardson - Feb 2, 2009

You raise some very valid points here Richard and on the whole I agree with you.

I’ve recently gone through a Twitter cleansing process, dropping off a whole gang of folk, who although are well know in the Twitter stakes, were not adding any real value to my stream.

I am now hitting a much higher percentage of folk whom I’ve conversed with and therefore, most likely, shared some common ground.

In this article there are recommendations about who you should follow on twitter and I must admit I followed almost every one of them. I have unfollowed everyone of them except one. Chris Brogan. He’s the person whom I feel is most likely to answer a tweet directed at him. If you’re following someone for their ideas don’t follow them on twitter if they’re not going to converse with you. It’s a waste of time and you’re missing the gems from the smaller time twitter users. Twitter is not about reaching a mass audience, it’s about reaching a focus group. Twitter’s strenght is the way in which a cluster of people can discuss an idea and bring it to fruition. I’ve seen how tuttle went from being the Social media cafe to being called Tuttle. I watched as people talked online and wanted to meet and collaborate. Thanks to Lloyd Davis and others that idea became a reality. As a result of this idea whenever I would drop by the Tuttle Mornings (every single Friday I was in London) I would watch as people spoke about their ideas and projects and how they wanted to keep in touch. Twitter gave them the initial contact before the meeting, as well as the follow up once they had met in person. It created a great network of people for getting things done. If you think twitter is about following a thousand people you’re an idiot. If you think it’s about being followed by a thousand people you’re an idiot. That’s not what it’s there for. It’s there for real time conversations across a number of platforms. It’s there so that when I’m waiting for a train I check what people are doing, for when I travel to meet with friends in other cities and more. If you’re not on twitter to converse you’re wasting my time, that’s why I’ve unfollowed over a hundred people rcently. If you’ve got something interesting to say people will mention you in their conversations, I will find your blog and I will subscribe to it. That’s the best place for ideas, they’re presented, shared and debated, all activities that take a lot more than a hundred and fourty characters, and threading for that is essential. Now stop following those who talk, and start interacting with those that listen.

elisa - Feb 2, 2009

Thanks for your kind words!
Elisa – @feedly

I really do like feedly, I was using it to check blog posts at the time when you were commenting. Works well for me.

Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that’s concrete. If it’s got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That’s the perfect website to invest in. Of course I’m speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it’s gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it’s gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals. It’s passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we’ve found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren’t bad if you’re only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however. That’s where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that’s interesting but aside from what’s written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don’t need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It’s already there. That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That’s where people will be moving next. That’s where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We’ve got a high end solution for our content needs. Of course we’re individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that’s where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues. Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.

Any french speaker knows this frustration. You see that a new service is available to Switzerland, drop by the site and everything is in German. Google latitude is in German and hundreds of other sites too. The most recent site to suffer from this curse is Nokia music, recently made available in Switzerland. It would seem that those in charge of marketing in Switzerland believe that people in Switzerland only speak German. French speakers exist too, and so do the Italian speakers. As web content creators maybe it’s time for you to offer us the services in French so that we may use them. Will companies providing services in Switzerland ever realise we’re not all German speakers? That remains to be seen. Nokia music, you’ve lost my interest.

I’m active on the web, spending thousands of hours a year connected to the web. As a result I have to log into a lot of sites often. I don’t like logging in though. That’s why I would love for big name publishers like the WSJ, NYTimes and others to sign an aggrement with Facebook so that I may log into their service without having to remember my account details. It would actually serve them better. Facebook knows who my friends are, where I studied, what stories I recommend and in some cases why. It’s also a reflection of the times that are coming. I went on a blog commenting spree last week and almost all blogs ask for three things, name, e-mail and website url. When I have to input the data I think twice about leaving a comment, and may recommend the story and write a comment in friendfeed instead. Too bad the publisher loses that bit of interactivity. For those publishers that want me to subscribe to your website you can forget it. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to a website I visit less than once a month. It’s just too much effort and too much additional information to remember. What I love are blogs that use Disqus. That’s because when I leave a comment I can find them all in one place at the end of the day. If someone answers my comment then I can see what they wrote. It means it’s an automated attention solution. Anything where I can spend time looking at new content is appreciated. It’s especially true now that web forums have become extro verted rather than introverted. You’ve probably noticed it too. How many forums are you still part of? In my case none. I prefer the friendfeed and feedly method of doing things, where I actively seek information and get it sent to a central point from which other people converge to comment, and head back out once they’re done. I love the web in it’s current form as a result.

For Valentine’s day I reached my 50,000th tweet which I dedicated to @orchideane through twitterfone, as asked by @toppgold. I really want to lay in to twitter for having database maintenance. really I do, but I won’t. I’ll concentrate on other things. There; contemporary joke: What’s the difference between twitter and the Stock market? None they’re both down.

Recently I started using feedly which is a great tool for managing rss feeds and content into an easy to view form. Connecting with google reader, friendfeed and a number of other surfaces it provides you with three principle displays for viewing the content you have selected to have aggregated. The first display shows your content by theme. In my case these themes are social media, video, technology, explore, and of course my own content output, to some degree. From this display I can quickly see a number of topics. The second display is named digest. It displays three of the top unread stories with the title and a quick description of the articles in each category. You can cycle through these articles using the ever popular J and K keys, j for going back, K for going forwards. A counter tells you how many items are left for each category. The list view gives you a quick headline for every blog post. It’s a quick way to go through your rss feeds. The articles expand to their full length once they have been selected. [caption id=“attachment_1010” align=“aligncenter” width=“307” caption=“Conversation tracking according to article”][/caption] Above is what I think is the most interesting feature of all. It’s a demonstration of how feedly is integrated into your every day browsing. Anytime you go to a blog you’re made aware of the conversation that is taking place and how active it is. You may also share that content to a number of platforms, from google reader to friendfeed, twitter and more to add. You can add a note to explain why you think that blog post is relevant to your readers. Of course the reason I love this application, requiring firefox, so much is that it allows for the entire world wide web to be something your share with those who are interested in where your attention is being drawn. It syncs with google reader, integrates with friendeed and just provides a great all round user experience. I strongly recommend using it.