Author: Jason

Net Ranking By Time Spent

Nielsen is changing it’s webranking system from counting page views to length of visit:

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Interesting and probably more accurate, at least for already heavily visited sites. If you only have ten views but each of those are for an average of ten minutes, that doesn’t really make you better than the guy with 5000 views for around five minutes each.

It’s interesting to see as the two measurements would benefit sites differently. Number of visits are greater for sites that tend to update more often while length of visits would benifit sites with longer content that tend to not update as frequently. (UPDATE: Valleywag’s thoughts off a Computerworld article.)

But let’s take this handy measurement and see how Virginia blogs measure up. Taking the top ten posted by NLS back in April:

1. Not Larry Sabato—- 2,447 Visitors Per Day
2. Raising Kaine———-1,883 Visitors Per Day
3. BVBL————————-635 Visitors Per Day
4. Bearing Drift————–432 Visitors Per Day
5. Virginia Progressive—-330 Visitors Per Day
6. Bacon’s Rebellion———328 Visitors Per Day
7. 750 Volts——————–93 Visitors Per Day
8. The Ward View————85 Visitors Per Day
9. SLANTBlog——————67 Visitors Per Day
10. BYP—————————-42 Visitors Per Day

Length of visits (as of today):

1. BVBL ———————— 4:50 min/visit
2. Raising Kaine ————— 4:12 min/visit
3. Not Larry Sabato ———— 4:07 min/visit
4. The Ward View ————— 3:31 min/visit
5. Bacon’s Rebellion ———– 3:07 min/visit
6. Bearing Drift ————— 2:59 min/visit
7. Virginia Progressive ——– 1:16 min/visit
8. 750 Volts ——————- 1:15 min/visit
9. J’s Notes ——————- 0:41 min/visit
10. BYP ———————— 0:39 min/visit

I can’t find SLANTBlog’s SiteMeter link. You lose, Terry, so instead I listed myself. I average 61 unique visitors a day, so that should mean something!

NLS and BVBL swapped spots. The Ward View had the biggest jump of four spaces, from 8 to 4. Short of listing every single blog in the VAblogosphere, the whole thing still holds pretty even.

Sacramento Bee: Real People Commenting Only

The Bivings Report is, er, reporting that the Sacramento Bee is requiring commenters on its website to start using their real names:

At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms. However, to a few people’s surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of “provocateur” as they slung vitriol of all types at those who disagreed with them. Some site participants stopped participating out of annoyance and disgust.

To counter the provocateurs, the Bee will soon require all commenters to user their real name on the site. While, as ombudsman Aramando Acuna notes, this will likely lead to fewer comments, many readers support stripping anonymity away from commenters. Further, the paper hopes that this policy will lessen the need for it to monitor and approve or reject every comment before it is publicly posted.

Fewer commenters is not necessarily a bad thing. Quality over quantity.

It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the Bee goes about confirming these identites but I can’t fault them for setting up the restrictions. Blogs and commenting on blogs is little different than writing a letter to the editor, something very few (if any) papers take and publish anonymously.

Shirky On Data

Relating to my last post, Clay Shirky follows up yesterday’s essay with one that concludes as such:

As Scott Bradner put it, the Internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. The upshot is that the internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom.

What Andrew Keen seems to be trying to argue through “The Cult Of The Amateur” is that the data is not the problem but that there is no one filtering it. There are no editors or publishers to ensure quality or even accuracy. And it is dangerous to assume the general public can judge this themselves. If all you get is unfiltered, flawed data, at what point can you craft a solid, well rounded, well founded opinion or even begin to get the actual truth or definition of something?

Data is subjective and selective. The audience needs to have a source of solid, certifiable information that presents something as close to the truth as possible or it will never learn.

Data is not bad. It is the lack of a filter that is dangerous.

Currently Reading: The Cult Of The Amateur

Andrew Keen discusses the dangers Web 2.0 and mob rule. While I’m only a little ways into the book, so far his talk so far on blogging and Wikipedia and what it can do at its worst is very interesting. I don’t agree with some of his statements in the introduction on matters such as declining music sales related to piracy but I’ll give the rest of the book to flesh that out.

Excerpt available here. Choice cut:

Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.

…

I’ve spent the last two years observing the Web 2.0 revolution, and I’m dismayed by what I’ve seen.

I’ve seen the infinite monkeys, of course, typing away. And I’ve seen many other strange sights as well, including a video of marching penguins selling a lie, a supposedly infinite Long Tail, and dogs chatting to each other online. But what I’ve been watching is more like Hitchcock’s The Birds than Doctor Doolittle: a horror movie about the consequences of the digital revolution.

Because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent. As I noted earlier, it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.

I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people—more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.

Read the NYTimes review here.

Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.

Visit Andrew Keen’s site here.

The Ethical Blogging “Buzz”

F.T. Rea at SLANTBlog makes a good point about the use of the word “ethical” in the blogosphere these days:

[T]he way the terms “ethical blogger” and “blogging ethics” are being used by bloggers to attack other bloggers they simply don’t like is not only getting quite tiresome, it is stretching the meaning out of the words.

Moreover, from what I’ve seen, the bloggers who are using this buzzword approach in their posts the most are the very ones who must know that any serious discussion of obnoxious behavior in the blogosphere — mostly meaning deliberate dishonesty and incivility — will shine a bad light on them.

Without speculating on who Terry’s talking about (though it’s probably the same people I’m thinking about), I must say I agree with him. The term “ethical blogging” is something people like to toss around but provide absolutely no meat to.

The more and more this goes on, the more people hop on the “ethics” bandwagon merely to use it as a weapon against people who have wronged them, the more I really start to feel that perhaps a code would be worthwhile, some written guidelines that show that people are willing to take themselves and their blogging seriously. Something that broadly defines what ethics in blogging truly is. Something that just says “I pledge to be good and others will be good to me”.

But there’s more to ethical blogging than trying to create a code and folks signing onto said code and interpreting it as they’d like.

I think readers know ethical blogging when they see it. I know when a blog hits me the wrong way, I know when one hits me the right way. There is a tone, there is a content, there is something about a site that speaks volumes without my really being able to put my finger on what exactly it is. You can pick up on these things and I think most readers do.

So if you’re going to talk ethics, be serious about it, because you’re not going to like what comes of the conversation if you aren’t.

Web 2.0: The Sleep Of Reason

Part I

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

…

Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do. The second kind of learning comes from either personal contact with living people—teachers, gurus, etc.—or through interaction with the human record, that vast assemblage of texts, images, and symbolic representations that have come to us from the past and is being added to in the present. It is this latter way of learning that is under threat in the realm of digital resources.

Part II

The flight from expertise is accompanied by the opposite of expertise—the phenomenon that Andrew Keen has called, in his new book of the same name, “the cult of the amateur.” This cult, says Keen, “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone—even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us—can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves.” He is referring to the impulse behind Web 2.0, but his words have a wider resonance—a world in which everyone is an expert in a world devoid of expertise.

Interesting reading. I hope to have more thoughts once I have time to digest this.

Icky Thump

I’ve dug White Stripes since they broke big with “Fell In Love With A Girl” back in the day. Icky Thump is their third album since White Blood Cells and, while fun, it and the two before it (Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan) just aren’t nearly as good as their first three. Still a great album, to be sure, but there’s something about the first three albums that just has a lasting impact that the last few seem to miss. Perhaps it’ll grow on me the more I listen (Get Behind Me Satan failed to impress me until I listened to it for a while), but if you’re not sure about the White Stripes, listen to their first few albums first, get to be a fan, then grab this one.

Choice Tracks: “Icky Thump”, “Rag And Bones”, “300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues”