A Networked World

What's In a Blog Headline? GNU

Both Terry Heaton and Paul Chaney have been asking the $64,000 question. Paul asks if we have two hands, can we clap?

Can titles be both keyword-oriented AND clever at the same time?

Answer: Wrong question.

Of course it can't hurt to have your keywords from your story reflected in the headline, it helps keep Google from having a snit, and clever is fine if you can do it, but both of them treat the post as an entity in its own right, something separate from anything else on the net, and that is absolutely the last thing I want.

The Reverse Shoeshineboy Effect

Got a biggish serve from Jeff de Cagna about my Podcasting - Meteor Passing in the Night piece. Its interesting that I can disagree completely about this with someone whose views on Best Practice I think are totally spot on. But of that later, this is about Podcasting and right now I go with Mark Cuban, Podcasting is a tool that is marginally useful for distributing some material, especially repurposed audio, but that it ain't, and wont become, a business any more than buying airline seats is a business.

When there are predictions of massive growth, a new wave, all that stuff from the mavens of Internet investment, its like the shoeshine boy giving stock tips, time to get skeptical. When you look at the early days of the net, email, IM, blogs, the common factor is that the big names dumped on the technology because, frankly, it wasn't glamourous enough.

The "future" was all about web TV, the Internet "audience", "capturing" the network yadda yadda. But podcasting has the necessary zing, its about one way traffic, not being argued with, debated, interactivity, its the sage on the stage and the media does that in spades, and the financial industry loves the control, it offers the kind of certainty that investors will bank on.

All wrong, and even the Scobelizer gets the wrong end of this stick, he asks, "I'm confused, we're supposed to be making money doing this?" Actually no, Mark is hoeing into those who think that Podcasting IS a business and his answer is, it ain't. Oh, and a few corrections to Jeff's piece.

Five 9's For Chris Anderson at Wired

Did I mention The Book? Its focus is blogging in business and I'm up to here in research right now. I've decided I'll post some site reviews and let you have a tear at them as well. But the first is one that does the heart good. Here's the entry so far:

The real test of any corporate blog comes when the company is under fire and here Chris shows how to do everything right. Listen to this.

On Friday, the SF Chronicle's consumer-rights columnist ran a piece about complaints from Wired subscribers that they were getting threatening letters from a collection agency when they let their subscription lapse.

He then goes on to explain how it happened, including the admission that it was Wired's pown fault, and acknowledges the role of another paper in the process

Doc Searls On Boeing Blog

I started monitoring the Boeing Blog the other day because The Book is going to be about business blogging and I wanted to keep an eye on some examples. Looks like Doc Searls is doing the same. He says:

Flight takes blogging I dig the bloglike Boeing Test Journal. Yes, it's PR; but the posts are written by actual workers inside the company, rather than PR people (although they may have to pass by PR, among other functions).

Still, leaves traditional PR in the dust... and about 40,000 feet below.

Throwing Caution to the Winds

I've decided to write a blogging handbook.

I must be nuts. But if you have any ideas that absolutely must, or must not be included; feel free to blaze away.

AI and the Tao of BPR

The things you can fix in an organisational process are not the things that are broken
Because
The process you can see is not the process that is happening

I watched a fascinating Equinox programme on Odyssey Channel last night, it was from 2001 and called Battle of the Robots – The Hunt for AI which follows three teams in their attempt to get real machines to behave like ones in the movies. Apart from being an object lesson in the impossibility of defining AI, let alone achieving it, the programme was a beautiful example of how completely normal human processes can sabotage and eventually destroy the very things they think they are trying to achieve. It also intersected with a conversation I had with a potential client a couple of days ago, which then lead me straight to the Tao.

Why Does Something I Approve Make Me So Nervous

I think the time will come when this is how every book will be published. Classics return with a click of the mouse

It will be one small step further for Australian literature - and a giant step into the future for books.

On Monday night 25 out-of-print Australian literary classics will become available to readers through the click of a mouse.

The titles, most of them novels, are part of an initiative by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), the Sydney University Press (SUP) and the Australian Literature Gateway organisation (AustLit) to provide print-on-demand books through the internet.

It will completely change the publishing model and drastically reduce the material flows, not to mention the wastage of printing each year millions of books that nobody wants.

One Click and Its GONE

Someone at Jamie Oliver's publisher has just made a career changing move. A Friend of mine, who was the second or third or tenth person in the chain just sent me an electronic copy of his new recipe book, "The Naked Chef2". Nice thought you might say, except that someone at the BBC has mistakenly sent an email of the entire contents of Jamie Oliver's new book. Now this person has either made an enormous botch of something, like meaning to send the file next to this one, or maybe sending it to the email list next to the one they used, or maybe they really hate Jamie Oliver or his cooking or their boss. But I'd hate to guess how many sales it has cost. And NO, you can't get a copy from me, though I notice that a publisher was among those forwarding the errant email, tsk.

Update: Its weirder than we thought and I love it