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ᔥ Boing Boing

The Managing Editor of Boing Boing, Rob Beschizza, explains what blogging is to him and how to blog.

There are some good parts, great parts and gay parts of his post. But since Boing Boing is one of the worlds best blogs it pays to listen to what Rob has to say.

His comments about critics are interesting:

IGNORE MOST CRITICS

Even if you have thriving, dedicated, civil, reasonable, no-nonsense commenters, they’ll still be a tiny fraction of your readership. It’s true that they’re an important constituency; they build upon your work and buy your t-shirts. But losing sight of the 99.95 percent of readers who never talk to you is a bad idea–a bad idea that grows with your readership.

How do you serve people who aren’t in the habit of giving feedback? The answer’s simple:don’t stop doing whatever it is that brought them to you.

A habitual mistake of successful bloggers is to react to criticism from commenters and peers. First, we write about something in a certain way that builds an audience. Then the audience reaches a threshold at which criticism loudly presents itself. Then we make the critical mistake of thinking the critic represents the audience.

It’s hard to figure out how to respect a largely invisible readership, but the first step is respecting whatever you did to earn it.

and my personal favourite related to critics, but ones who are tits at blogging themselves:

IGNORE WHAT UNSUCCESSFUL BLOGGERS SAY ABOUT BLOGGING

Harsh, but true! Ignore bloggers, SEO experts, marketing gurus and other people who have figured out a traffic trick or two, but who have never built a large audience of daily readers.

A lot of people have a fixed idea of what a blog is: it’s something like Boing Boing, Gawker, or TechCrunch as they were years ago. A smattering of news, thoughts, links, opinions, random stuff. But you need to run where the ball is headed, not where it was in 2005.

At Boing Boing, we now pay experienced freelancers for original features on extremely obscure subjects. Long before becoming part of AOL, TechCrunch had a full-time staff of reporters who knew what was going on in Silicon Valley before anyone else. Gawker now occupies two floors in Manhattan, and has video monitors informing dozens of writers how their stories are performing.

Instead of trying to repeat others’ success, find something that no-one else is doing right. Find something close to your heart that no-one else is as interested in as you are.

Finally, stay away from cynics who see success in writing as a closed circle. I didn’t do a day of blogging before I got hired by Wired a few years ago; I posted comments on other people’s posts, on forums. Within a couple of years, I was an editor at Boing Boing.

So, people whining about the inaccessibility of the so-called blogging A-list can safely be ignored. They always were full of shit and they always were a bore. Be good at what you do, make friends with people who know a thing or two, and always be posting.

Open Parachute has the latest blog rankings for March.

Thank you to all my readers and commenters for supporting New Zealand’s number one blog and helping to continue to grow the traffic and readership.

I’m pleased to note that Martyn Bradbury’s little read blog gets about the same number of readers in a month as I get on a good day.

Mashable put up this video on their site suggesting that Conan O’Brien had bought out Mashable:

ᔥ Andrew Sullivan

Once again I am receiving emails from loyal readers who are sick of rubbish comments from trolls.

Andrew Sullivan, who doesn’t have comments, comments:

Dan O’Connor blasts what blog comment sections have become:

It is time, I think, for us to accept that disabling or deleting idiot comments is no more anti-democratic or elitist than refusing to engage with a person harrassing you on the street. Just because everyone is allowed to have their say, it does not follow that the bilge they say is worth listening to. I love the internet. I love social media. And the only way we will save them from themselves is by accepting that, more often than not, comments are rubbish.

Gawker is implementing a new comment system to deal with the problem. Recent Dish on a wildly successful comment section here. We’re sticking with posting the best and most informative of your emails. For the Dish, reader input plays a key role in airing debates and discovering facts from readers with deep knowledge of the subjects at hand. There is a way, in other words, to create a web space where readers add and don’t detract from the experience.

It’s called editing.

My own preference is to have a free reign with comments, but smack down outrageously racist, misogynistic or hateful comments. I have a firm belief that my “army’ will deal with any silliness. I don’t want a heavily moderated and sanitised comments section like Red Alert. I enjoy comments from Kosh now he is well trained, less so from Phil who seems untrainable and still posts tl;dr comments.

Personal unfounded attacks on me are dealt with swiftly and permanently with no recourse.

However I think that Dan O’Connor as quoted above does have a valid point.

Is it time for me to start doing this too, or do I need some volunteer moderators to deal with the more foolish of trolls?

Open Parachute has released the latest blog rankings for February:

I am going to post my favourite comment from the previous day each day…I haven’t yet determined what time it will be, but I will fix than down.

Feel free to drop me a line if you see a good comment. Also don;t forget to use the “Like” Feature in the comments system.

In the meantime here is one from yesterday that made me snort Mountain Dew out my nose. It is a shame it was made by an anonymous commenter.

A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log)[1] is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject.

Source: Wikipedia

Considering this is Whales “personal journal” on a “single themed subject” I am sure when he opens up blog topic requests like a fucking karaoke bar you will be the first person he contacts.

Mostly American blogs but some of the ones I read…does that mean I am an amalgamation of the thoughts.

Slackstory explores what your favourite blog says about you.

The other day Boing Boing published an article about the Police in Georgia (the country not the state) and their new iPad like devices. In the article they added the following comment:

“100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services.”

Boing Boing is clearly very widely read because the Georgian government responded. The letter is awesome and shows how you can turn a silly comment into a social media win. Labour should take note:

The article published on [Boing Boing on] January 12, 2012, about the initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia to introduce new portable field computers (so called “Police Pads”) ends with an anonymous quote declaring that “100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services.”

Stereotypes like this are easy to toss out—but are quite simply incorrect. This quote does not reflect the productivity, effectiveness, transparency, and reliability of the police force in Georgia today, but rather the bygone era of the 1990s, a reality that has drastically changed thanks to an ambitious and successful reform process.

The reform process in Georgia began immediately after the 2003 Rose Revolution. The new government inherited a completely corrupt and bloated law-enforcement system. The systemic corruption and the high level of crime throughout the country resulted in a very low level of public trust: fewer than 10% of Georgians had confidence in the police, according to 2003 polls. And the very low average policeman’s salary (approximately $68 per month) made the soliciting of bribes routine.

Georgia has since made the creation of an efficient and modern police force a national priority, undertaking a series of reforms that sought to rebuild the national police force literally from the ground up. The entire national police force was fired, and a new force hired, trained and deployed with the aim of meeting the highest international standards of professionalism.

These reforms are widely regarded as an unqualified success. Having reduced corruption and bribe taking to levels comparable to those in Europe, the police in Georgia have earned the trust and respect of the public they serve:

•According to Transparency International’s latest Global Corruption Barometer, in terms of public perception Georgia has the world’s 5th least-corrupt police force, placing it ahead of Germany or even the United States;

•According to the survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in November 2011, 87% of population have confidence in Police;

•According to a survey funded by the EU and conducted by GORBI Institute in 2011, Georgia has one of the lowest “victimization coefficients,” a measure that reflects public perceptions of crime and individual security.

On the subject of the so-called “Police Pads,” reforms have transformed what was once an antiquated backlog of paper files for car imports, registries, and customs. They have been replaced with new, cutting-edge technology capable of streamlining requests and filing paperwork in record time.

Georgia has much work to do in shaking off the vestiges of nearly a century of Soviet occupation, but the transformation of our police force into a modern and professional service is an achievement that Georgians are deeply proud of, and a symbol of our commitment to retake our rightful place in the European community.

January 16, 2012
Press Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

No one will be under any illusion now as tot he fact that Georgia is a vibrant, modern, improving economy climbing out of the wreck of Soviet domination.

It looks like Labour has seconded Trevor Mallard to advise Vladimir Putin with his forays into the online world. He is certainly having all the same luck as the Duck:

Within moments of Vladimir Putin launching his campaign website today, calls for him to resign and drop his bid for Russian Presidency were so large that officials had to limit public access andcontinued to live in denial blame hackers. If we were better at Russian (luckily many sitesare adept) or if the Putin campaign hadn’t limited public access, we’d be able to tell you more about the messages and less about the website’s majestic aesthetic. Radio Free Europe has more on the messages which flooded the site. They ranged from “Please leave politics,” to “I’m tired of you. I’ve already tolerated you for 12 years and it’s still the same” before the Putin campaign culled the comments. ”All this fuss with calls for resignation is a kind of computer game that children are playing at. It has nothing to do with constructive dialogue,” Putin’s spokesman said in a Reuters report. He also mentioned that most of the anti-Putin messages were a result of email spam (cue that Russian/.ru email spam joke). Of course Putin’s hacker attack excuse is just more proof of agovernment feigning denial or knowledge of massive anti-Putin sentiment in the country, which has been pretty hard for anyone to ignore.