Sky’s Blog

At this rate, pretty soon it’s going to be a regular ghost town in blog-ville. During Traveling Geeks/Paris in December I was faced with a challenge, which is that even some of the primo bloggers are deserting the blogosphere for other territory^[1]. Like many of them are almost exclusively twittering now, and their blogs are falling into disrepair. And normal folk are inhabiting Facebook rather than suffer the trouble of writing a long blog post even once in a while. Have you noticed this? Are you spending your time keeping up with tweets rather than reading blogs?

Here’s what I experienced with respect to the Traveling Geeks crew.

[1] My advice to clients is “Go where your clients and prospects are.” So if you’re a tech writer, and all your clients are spending their time on Facebook, you must be on Facebook. And if they’re tweeting about you, you’d better be on Twitter.

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Automattic released their Wordpress app for the iPhone this week. Since I’m fairly mobile, I wanted to try it out.

For offline blogging from a laptop computer, I already use Ecto, which gives me substantial freedom in that I can create new posts even when not connected to the net. Having the ability to write on the iPhone whether online or off might be fun.

My first impression is that this tool will work fine as long as you don’t want to include any fotmatting, because it’s really a pain, on the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard to get to the < and > characters – it requires several taps for each. So it’s probably only viable for text with a photo or two interspersed. For many people that’ll be OK, but it’ll be somewhat limiting for me.

I am, however, finding that a one-finger typing method while allowing the phone to correct the typos really is quite excellent! And the “fatter” I make each tap on the screen, the more accurate the algorithm seems to be.

I’ve had the app just quit out from under me several times, but I haven’t lost any data, so it’s inconvenient but not fatal. And I know it will get better with the next version.

This app looks like a keeper.

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Rob Paterson writes (today on the FASTForward blog) about The Power of the Personal – Voice? He visualizes this with an Alexa Internet chart/data showing how quickly the recent web sites that allow individuals to broadcast their personal voice have risen.

Most particularly, the data show that Wikipedia rose from zero to “Daily Traffic Rank” of about “10″ in about four years, and YouTube rose to “10″ in about a year and a half. (Making them among the top sites on the web.)

You’d have to attribute this to the fact that these sites are created by, or at least “formed” in some way by, their users. That belies the suspicion that people are couch potatoes and won’t lift a finger to create their own media entertainment, other than to channel-surf. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of channel-surfing going on at YouTube, but there’s also lots of participation, even if 90% of it is deadheaded talking-head responses. And Wikipedia is certainly a creation of its readers (even though there’s a core group that does a huge percentage of the heavy lifting).

So, I want to know if this phenomenon only gives “voice” to those with broad Internet connections, or whether it can be used by those with only occasional access to the net. Can conversation take place offline and then be put online in the form of blog postings, or wikipedia entries or online video? (continue reading…)

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I don’t know how I ran across this thing that Robert Scoble is now doing – but here he is interviewing people at Davos using a cellphone camera (actually two at the same time) – and questions coming in in real-time. I’ll just point you at his interview of danah boyd on QIK.COM (more about her later because she’s important to what I do in real life). Check danah at her blog “Apophenia :: making connections where none existed before.”

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