Having read the extracts published, his main issue seems to be that much user generated content (UGC) is poor quality, and that the ease with which it can now be published and reach an audience because of facilitating technology is therefore a bad thing, because poor quality content pushes out the considered, well informed contributions to the media.

So what defence does the accused enter? I thought this would be a good opportunity to actually examine why the new media phenomenon is a good thing, and while I’m at it rebut his argument which, in my opinion, fails miserably. Much of this post is an adaption of what turned out to be a rather long comment I left on the Newsnight blog.

His central premise seems to be based around the abundance of poor UGC. However, he has overlooked the fact that bad UGC tends not to reach an audience. A poor quality, ignorant rant on MySpace will not reach any audience significant enough for it to do any damage. Since most people producing UGC tend to want an audience, there is actually an incentive against creating ill-informed, poor quality content because anyone with two brain cells to rub together will be able to work out that it will have a negligible reach. Those without the aforementioned brain cells will continue to produce bad content, but hardly anyone will read/watch/listen to it. And no-one forces him to watch those ‘poor fools’ on YouTube.

Contrary to his belief, there is no threat posed by bad UGC to good quality content, and the incumbent providers of much of it. The risk to the ‘old media’ is that they fail to maximise their routes to content and thus as people become less likely to buy a newspaper, their reach decreases. So long as an old media entity produces content and makes it accessible in as many ways as possible, they will continue to be a powerful voice in our society.

The new media revolution has, in fact, increased good quality content in real terms. A long tail has been created, much of which is of real value. The technology sector perhaps has the most developed media ecosystem (simply because it was the first to adopt the new technologies, and has therefore had the longest to mature), and is a good example of this. There is a clear distinction (I hope) between GizBuzz, a member of that long tail, and an ill informed rant on MySpace.

The democratisation of media has brought profound benefits. The work of the charity MySociety (behind sites such as TheyWorkForYou and the Downing Street Petitions website) is an excellent example of what the internet can do to promote good governance and make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. More people can become involved in the running of their country thanks to better communication. More people can feel enfranchised, a powerful weapon in fighting dangerous political apathy. To dismiss all of this based on the increased availability of drivel, which does no harm and he is not forced to watch, is ignorant and unhelpful.

The redesign itself is very nice; it’s more minimalist than any recent effort, and gives big emphasis to discovery of content, with a frankly enormous tag cloud and a selection of three videos, blogs and music albums which are deemed to be of the moment. Visually it maintains the obligatory rounded corners, so it must be a success.  The interface throughout is tidier and more effective than previously.

An interesting change (in that I don’t remember it last time I used Technorati) is in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are manfully attempting to do something fairly similar to Google’s recently announced Universal Search, in which a single search will result in the most relevant content, whatever the form. On Google this can include anything from text to images, maps to books. On Technorati this would include video content, podcasts and blog posts, for example.

Technorati is, however, less successful than Google. Their attempt revolves around a ‘featured’ tab on the search, which is far less clever than Google, because all they do is search various mediums and then plonk it in a relevant box. Video results are shown in the video box, blogs in the blog box. You get the idea. This easier to do because it doesn’t require ranking algorithm, and all it really amounts to is a metasearch of the different content-type searches. Whilst a nice UI touch, it isn’t really much more than that. They continue to push using Technorati tags; if you want to show up on that ‘featured’ page, my initial look would suggest that you must use them.

So what’s that change in emphasis that I mentioned then? CEO Dave Sifry alludes to it in his post on the Technorati blog:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web – blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.

I think what he’s talking about (the emergence of many different forms of new media) only really scratches the surface of what Technorati is becoming, or could become. I’ve talked before about the problems of content discoverability in the long tail (explanation of what that means), and Technorati is well placed to provide a completely different solution to the problem from what’s being done by the current leaders in the area (Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon).

Through some sophisticated, well developed algorithms, it should be possible to leverage the vast number of blogs which they search to come up with personalised recommendations for a person based on their OPML file and/or web history, by analysing past reading patterns and then ranking possible content recommendations by similarity and discussion on other blogs. At the moment all they do is come up with the one-size-fits-all suggestions that you see on the homepage, which is possibly useful but of fairly limited value.

All in all, an update that goes in the right direction but isn’t massively exciting. The UI is now impressive, and they appear to have recognised their importance in facilitating the discovery of content. They’re not doing such a great job in that, or the universal search idea, at the moment but that will come. They face the ever-present challenge of Google Blogsearch, but seem to be growing well and crucially they are out-innovating Google in the space at the moment.

Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

We are producing so much information in so many different places that it makes sense to try and pull that all together into one place. Jeremy Keith did that himself, and you can see the results here. That used a PHP script, and is fairly basic. However, a number of different services have cropped up which emulate the basic functionality, and they have all have evolved Jeremy’s concept in a slightly different way.

Jaiku is an interesting, slightly Twitter-like, product which is much more comprehensive and allows you to pull in your own feeds. iStalkr doesn’t have the mobile emphasis of Jaiku, and is more true to the original concept with a few nice extra features – in fact Jeremy Keith is a user of the service.

The one I really like, though, is Tumblr. Tumblr was originally conceived as an easy way to create Tumblelogs,  which are described by Wikipedia as preferring “short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” The whole point with Tumblelogs is that they are supposed to be a joy to update, with no work required, posting interesting things as and when. Tumblr realised that a great way to take that further would be to allow you to import your own feeds and republish that, lifestream style.

The result is a great service, for a number of reasons. It is a study in usability;  signup is incredibly quick, and the backend dashboard is brilliant, ensuring that anyone will feel confident using it. Crucially, the whole concept is instantly understandable, in a way that perhaps iStalkr and to a lesser extent Jaiku won’t be to those not well versed in the concepts involved. At the same time, there are a number of brilliant features on Tumblr, including custom themes and domains, as well as a friends system, adding the possibility of getting a network effect going.

I’ve been really enjoying my Tumblr blog. I’m not sure that anyone’s reading it, but in a strange way it is extremely satisfying to see everything you produce online collected in one place. I guess we’ll see this gaining popularity in the tech world, and probably even breaking out of that – you don’t need to know what RSS is to use Tumblr, which makes barriers to entry low. Give it two years, and Tumblr could be big.

Leo Laporte, podcasting celebrity and chief of the TWiT podcast network, has announced on his blog that he is leaving Twitter and moving to rival service Jaiku.

We’ve talked about Twitter previously on GizBuzz, but it’s basically a ‘nano-blogging’ service where you answer the question “what are you doing?”. It’s very addictive and there are many tech personalites, and normal people alike, using the service.

Laporte cites one main reason for leaving Twitter, the fact that the name is too similar to his podcast network TWiT. Laporte was an early adopter of Twitter, and mentioning it in his podcast was one of the reasons it was able to gain so much popularity.

But I’m leaving it [Twitter].

The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing. And it hasn’t helped the confusion that I’ve been such a fan of Twitter. I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship. But we don’t. And the proliferation of programs like Twitbox and sites like Twit This are not helping things much. So let me repeat…

Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT.

And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku. After a cursory glance at all three Jaiku seems to have the best mix of features for me (I’m too old to be groovy, or hooking up) so I’m moving to Jaiku. My handle is ChiefTWiT. Hope to see some of you there.

Fellow GizBuzz and YouMakeMedia blogger Chris Van Patten speculates that there could be a potential legal battle between Leo and the TWiTs and Odeo (the parent company of Twitter). It’s certainly a possibility, but I do hope that Leo and friends are seeking a non-legal resolution to the problem.

Twitter is certainly making a buzz in the tech community and this move does raise its profile yet further, just unfortunately does so in a bad context.

While I’m on the subject of Twitter, I just want to let everyone know that I’m busy hacking away at a solution so that you can get the latest Oratos posts (from here, FOSSwire and YouMakeMedia) delivered directly to your Twitter account.

It’s not done yet, and it’s currently a bit unstable and temperamental (and we’ve been having some issues with it posting old stories over and over again), but if you want to brave the beta, you can follow us at http://twitter.com/oratos.

As promised yesterday, I want to take a look at Twitter, a fairly new web application from Evan William’s Obvious company (who also developed podcasting directory Odeo).

The essential concept of Twitter has been called ‘nano blogging’; it allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates on how your friends answered that question via the web interface, instant messenger (IM) or your phone. It acts as a constant status message, and unashamedly advocates the ‘what I had for breakfast this morning’ style of blogging, which is so vehemently shunned by the tech blogosphere normally.

When Twitter first emerged some months ago, I dismissed it out of hand as a stupid idea which would never get traction. I doubted that anyone would choose to use an inferior blog interface to publish updates of incredibly restricted length, making use of a basic friends system, when depending on their needs they already had the choice of anything from their own installation of WordPress, to Vox, to Facebook and MySpace.

I was obviously proved wrong. What I failed to take into account were two factors. Firstly, the ease at which one can recieve updates. If I chose to, I could have Twitter updates follow me everywhere I go, and every time one of my friends posts an update, I have a reminder to use the service. So all I need is one friend on Twitter who is posting regularly, and I have an incentive to respond, either directly to their ‘tweet’ or by posting one of my own. I do not have to remember to visit the Twitter site every so often to check for updates – they come to me. It is surprisingly addictive.

Secondly, Twitter fills an important niche for many of the tech bloggers among whom it is so popular. Take Robert Scoble. He is a ‘web celeb’, whose blog is essential reading for many wanting to understand new media and Web 2.0. He posts many times a day, usually with his thoughts on a particular trend, person, blog or product, often with personal anecdotes to support his arguments. Through these glimpses into Scoble’s life, people have come to be very interested in what he is up to, but his blog does not exist to tell his readers what he had for breakfast this morning. That’s a good thing, because most of his blog readers really couldn’t care less, but there are many who could care, and for them Twitter provides this. In return, Scoble gets the ego trip of having 100s (about 700 at time of writing) of followers who do care what he had for breakfast. He must be doing something right!

Expect Twitter to carry on growing. Twitter will never reach beyond the tech crowd. I tried to explain what it was and why it was addictive to a non-techy friend only yesterday, to be met only by scorn. However, the ‘early adopter’ market will continue to grow, and so Twitter stands every chance of remaining healthy (at least in terms of user numbers) in the coming years.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why – with IMified you can currently post to WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 – open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

The Macworld San Francisco 2007 Expo is drawing close. The bit of it everyone is waiting for – Steve Jobs’ Keynote – is on Tuesday 9th January at 9 am (or 5 pm in London – find for your timezone). The rumours are running wild as to just what will be announced. But a few things seem quite definite. It is expected that more details will be provided about the upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard release and more on Apple’s “iTV” device that pulls music, photos and movies from your PC or Mac and puts them on your TV. Also quite firm predictions are the release of iLife 07, and an upgrade to the iWork software package (including a Spreadsheets program). Maybe there will be the true video iPod, and maybe there will be an iPhone. But probably in all honesty not.

So where can you find out exactly what is going on? Well all the Apple rumour sites are offering full coverage of the event. Here is just a pick of three ways to get the news.

World of Apple Live hope to offer a full audio stream live from the keynote. If this works and is not overloaded, then it will almost certainly be the best way to hear what happens.

MacRumors are offering two different ways to get the updates. Either you can watch their live site where there will be a constantly updated text commentary of events, or you can just bookmark this one post which will be updated with a link to the QuickTime video of the event which Apple post a few hours after the keynote has finished. The latter page promises not to have any spoilers on it – so you can watch the presentation (albeit a few hours late) still unaware of what has been announced.

Gizbuzz is not doing live commentary – however there will be summary posts of all the announcements as well as more in depth analysis about what they mean for the future. So watch out this Tuesday – whatever happens there will be plenty of news.

Update: Gizbuzz is building a series of posts on the announcement, and has also just recorded a podcast with some more in depth discussion. You can see all of these posts in our Apple category.

When feed analytics service FeedBurner acquired web stats service Blogbeat a few months ago, they announced that they would be integrating the two products. So, someone signed up to Feedburner is now able to see from one account how many people are subscribed to their feed and how many are visiting their website. So, the site statistics available (according to the Feedburner Blog) are:

• Visitor summary, detail and trends
• Page summary, detail and trends
• Referral and Search trends
• Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
• Outbound click breakdown
• Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
• Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
• Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
• Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
• Detailed historical traffic by page and by date

That’s a very comprehensive list. It doesn’t, however, offer anything which the free Google Analytics service won’t tell you. The unique selling point of the stats must therefore be usability, as Google Analytics has far more features than a blogger needs, and not all information on the above list is easy to find within Google’s product. For example, to see exact referral addresses rather than just referring domains in Analytics, you have to click on

• Marketing Optimization ->
• Visitor Segment Performance ->
• Referring Source ->
• ->
• Cross Segment Performance ->
• Content

That is far to many steps, with far to much jargon for any but the most determined blogger to successfully find detailed stats. There is then, a gap in the market for an easy to use stats tool for bloggers (especially after the likely demise of Performancing Metrics).

At the moment I’m waiting for the stats to populate on Gizbuzz’s Feedburner Dashboard. My intention is to run both stats systems in parallel. On a day to day basis I will use Feedburner (barring any usability or accuracy problems), but I will dig into GAnalytics for more detailed analysis not available from Feedburner. It will certainly be useful to have all stats in one place, nicely displayed (see the screenshots provided by Feedburner after the jump).

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that FeedBurner will be acquired itself during 2007 – it has a product which is indispensable to bloggers, and with new people deciding to blog every week, its target market continues to boom. The question is who; Google already has Measuremap (a stats service similar to the Site seciton of Feedburner’s offering, but which is yet to be released), although no RSS metrics tool. However, I think it would make sense for them to buy Feedburner and integrate it with Blogger. That, along with the release of the new version of Blogger and now the ability to use your own domain name without paying for hosting, could make Google’s struggling product a market leader in the hosted blog sector.

Screenshots after the jump

I have had access to Vox, Six Apart‘s new blogging tool for a little while now, and have been slowly gathering my thoughts on it. At the moment it is invite only, but it is fully launching on the 26th October. For those of you who haven’t yet heard of Vox, it is a blogging tool with very robust social networking features built around it, including ‘friends’, picture sharing and post permissions. The target audience is clearly the mass market; those who don’t know much about technology or care about it.

The screenshot on the right shows the posting interface. It is a good example of the excellent UI design seen throughout Vox; both highly usable and aesthetically pleasing. AJAX is used in just the right amounts, creating a user experience which will appeal to the target market. The ‘insert’ options across the top offer the option to add photos, audio, video, books (a picture of the cover and a link to the book on Amazon) and ‘collections’, which are essentially albums of related content from all the other types. For example you might have a holiday collection which included the travel books you have read and your photos you have taken.

There are many appealing templates, like the one I chose for my Vox blog (opposite), which are easy to customise in terms of layout and colour scheme, and they automatically display the latest pictures and other content uploaded. There is an ad on the blog, above the start of any content. I did not find it intrusive, and it is certainly less irritating than those found on Myspace.

Vox is a new approach to blogging and social networking, and I think it could potentially bring the two phenomena to a whole new audience. I can see myself using Vox as a largely private blog, with only friends and family able to view the vast majority of posts, taking advantage of the permissions features and photo uploading.

I would expect Vox to transcend the traditional boundaries between demographics; twenty-somethings communicating with their parents about plans for Christmas with some posts and about last Saturday night with their friends in other posts. Meanwhile the mother could be discussing flower arrangement with her friends in some posts. Obviously I’m being stereotypical, but you get the idea. By making blogging central to what is essentially a social networking product, and using a tasteful, highly usable design, Six Apart have made Vox interesting as a way to keep in touch, rather than meet new people as with Myspace, Bebo etc. This is likely to appeal to far more people as a concept. Coupled with attempts to create a great community through This is Good posts promoted across the service, and suggested questions to answer in blog posts, I can see Vox creating a real buzz.

The bad points: I do not have unreserved praise for Vox. I would like to see compatibility with one of the many blog APIs around (such as XML-RPC). As far as I am aware this is not available yet. I would also like to be able to insert HTML in my posts. Myspace has shown that people are increasingly aware of HTML, and whilst it is unlikely to appeal to the mother in my example, it may well appeal to the twenty-something, even if it is just to include, for example, an odeo widget of a podcast they liked. It is also important to appeal to the early adopter crowd, who will then start bringing users into the service.

In conclusion, though, expect Vox to do very well across the board, from ‘silver surfers’ to ten year olds.

Just a small update, Anil Dash of Vox has commented below, noting that HTML in posts and blog APIs are supported. Registration is also now open to the public!

The script operates transparently by parsing the (X)HTML of the blog, and adding onclick event handlers to all links that point to internal blog pages. When a user clicks on a link AjaxWp traps the event and, instead of letting the browser navigate to the target page, requests the target page with AJAX.

The requested page is then parsed by the AjaxWp engine, filtering out redundant markup (like the header and footer), and inserted in the designated area of the blog.

Basically, when you click on an internal link on a blog with AjaxWP installed, rather than your browser fetching the new page, the ajax script requests it and it is shown to you without you changing pages. It certainly looks really slick, and probably speeds things up since only the new content is fetched rather than the static areas on a blog.

There are, however, a couple of disadvantages which have stopped me installing it on Gizbuzz. Firstly, it makes all the URLs ugly, and whilst they will work if you send them to other people, I think they would put people of linking and sharing the link with their friends. The other disadvantage is possibly peculiar to Gizbuzz, but the sidebar on the main page of Gizbuzz is different from that on a post page. AjaxWP would not allow for that difference.

Despite my misgivings, if you can’t wait to jump on the Ajax bandwagon, AjaxWP looks like a simple and pretty way to go.