BloggerCon II Weblog - Celebrating the art and science of weblogs, April 17 at Harvard Law School.

Permanent link to archive for 9/29/04. Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Election Day 2004 (and 2005, 2006....)

B-Con3 happens just four days after the November 2 election...and even if the Supreme Court is still trying to adjudicate the decisions of all those electronic voting machines, we will have plenty to discuss in terms of weblogs and politics.

This is the year that was: the campaigns of George W. Bush and John Kerry, the ghost of Howard Dean, the misadventures of Dan Rather, the clout of Daily Kos and Instapundit. Blogs rerouted the flow of political money and information, opened communication and redesigned organizations.

As for actually driving votes, we'll see what that first Tuesday in November shows us. What did blogs really accomplish, and what did we think they might do that they didn't?

There are important stories at other levels of politics, too. Blogs and related strategies are part of the political toolkit in elections from the Register of Deeds contest in my North Carolina county to the highest-profile state-wide races. Let's get specific, name names, count votes and volunteers and hits and comments and cash, figure out what it was that we just witnessed.

But as we sketch the landscape so recently traversed, we will also be looking at where local and national politicos might go next. That's the big story at all levels of the game.

This session won't just be about post-mortems -- we should develop a sense of how the next campaigns (which will have already started) will play out online.

In 2004 we saw version 1.0 of weblog politics. In coming campaigns, blogs and bloggers will be expected to deliver results.

We can help define some of the expectations, limitations, and possibilities for weblogs in future campaigns -- in your town next year, your congressional district and perhaps a Senate race in your state in 2006, and back on the national stage in the race for the White House 2008.

# Posted by Ed Cone on 9/29/04; 11:57:50 PM - --

Dealing with Information Overload (getting ready for 10,000 feeds)

A day is coming when I'll have 10,000 feeds instead of the 915 I'm currently reading (I'd guess that the average blog reader follows 50 to 100 feeds, based on anecdotal evidence of talking with other bloggers). Actually, the number of bloggers I read is much higher than 915 thanks to group blogs and services like Feedster, Pubsub, and Technorati.

I'm not the only one struggling with information overload. Larry Larsen, multimedia editor at the Poynter Institute for for Media Studies has written several times about his struggles to keep up with reading a lot of news:

1) Zero second news
2) 1,000 headlines in 460 days

Larry isn't alone. I've met lots of bloggers and journalists who are struggling to keep up with the larger and larger amount of great content that's being published every day to the Web (Technorati's Dave Sifry reports that they are seeing 15,000 new blogs per day. Even if only .01% of these are "great blogs" that means a huge increase in great content every day.)

BloggerCon is for people who are actually writing blogs, so I'm trying to get in the shoes of a "normal" blogger, if such a thing exists.

Most "normal" bloggers don't even use an RSS News Aggregator yet. Assuming that each blog has an average of five readers, that means there's 20 million people out there reading blogs. Are there 20 million people using RSS News Aggregators? Not even close.

So, those of us who are reading lots of RSS feeds are ahead of the curve. What are we learning? How are we becoming more efficient so we can keep up?

Someone asked me the other day "why don't you just build a few search queries and delete the rest of your feeds?" I thought about it, but I enjoy the random weird stuff that people blog about. Search queries will only bring back the equivilent of purified sugar. Sweet, yes, but not that nutritious.

It's why I keep my link blog. It helps me think about everyone of the approximately 3000 items that cross my Tablet PC's screen every evening. "Is this something my readers need to know or would like to know?" I ask myself.

Watching that many feeds I've found ways to become more efficient. But I'm not efficient enough, so I want to talk with other people who are news junkies about how they consume large amounts of content. I remember working the Associated Press wire machine in college. When OJ was found "not guilty" several hundred stories crossed my screen in just 30 minutes. How do you keep up with that kind of news flow and deliver something to your readers that's useful?

How do you keep your sanity?

What else would you like to discuss at a session about how to handle the information overload?

Oh, and we haven't even started thinking about the latest "podcasting" craze. It's impossible to listen to more than a few hours of audio or video every day (while you can read a LOT more text). This trend to audio blogging will make it far less likely that you'll consume content from a broad set of people.

So, to wrap it up, here's an outline:

1) Keeping up with feeds. State of the art in News Aggregators and more.
2) Services that'll help you find the best stuff. You know, Feedster, Pubsub, Technorati, etc.
3) Linkblogging discussion.
4) Keeping up with the audio and video blogs that are popping up faster than mushrooms in springtime.
5) What do we need for a future of 10,000 or more feeds per person?

If this doesn't sound interesting, let me know what you'd like to see discussed.

# Posted by Robert Scoble on 9/29/04; 11:47:44 AM - --