Apr/092
RIP Geocities
Geocities, long forgotten by most of us, is finally shutting down. The Internet, those of us who've been around that long, is sad. It's like the college dorm of the Internet; we all remember our tiny rooms in there and how we thought we knew how to decorate with our tapestries and Christmas lights. It was so important to us at the time. Until you moved into a real apartment where you could smoke without putting a towel down on the door.But still: you feel a tiny flicker of sadness for its demolion and all the good times you had in there.
When I think about, Geocities was actually not my first rental property on the Internet. I'm pretty sure my first web site was the free hosting our ISP (remember actually using that stuff?) gave us. Back then, they were called "homepages." There was a hideous little template where you filled out your name, some text, and added photos that were ganked from other websites (which haha, we still do). Geocities was a step up and getting into the neighborhood of your choice was a really big deal. I remember getting a coveted spot in the Soho Studios, Number 2058. There were discussions about moving from one Geocities neighborhood to another, to one who's address more was more reflective of the unique web person you were. I never moved. SoHo Studios was where I wanted to be. I held on to it, using it as storage while I moved from URL to URL.
It was not an easy task to move a website in those days, even the simple tiny ones we had that were all HTML. You had to go in and change all of your links and put up a clever re-direct page so your 5 obsessive readers could follow you. And we moved a lot. Geocities at first totally free and with a simple banner ad, started to put pop up ads and become a lot more intrustive. There was a big exodus to Xoom, another free host, without ads. And then, a year later, I remember moving from them, too. This continued forever and ever.
What this ending of Geocities does make me realize is, for all our scary talk of how we need to watch what our slutty, drunken selves put online because oh no someone who may pay us to do something might see it, is how not permanent so much of the web truly is. This is why I think talking about the Internet's history is so important. So much of what happened is gone now. We have to discuss it, there's so little evidence of it but our memories and a few pages with dead links.
*The last crawl of my Geocities page, in 2003!
Apr/090
One of these things is not like the other
This kind of article, about how one thing is "over" is so aggravating to me, especially because the writer doesn't appear to be too well versed in the Tumblr community (which for better or worse, I am.) People will not leave Twitter for Tumblr. And if they do, they are looking for something Twitter does not necesarily exist for. Both of the services are different and cater to different people and different needs.
Tumblr is good at the following:
1) Easy posting of videos & photos
2) Easy posting of things you like, which unfortunately has created a community of people who have entire blogs which consist solely of other peoples content and things other people found. Some people love this, others (like me) are more "purist" in their philosophy and prefer to post stuff I wrote or stuff I found. However, the community of Tumblr is found in the "reblog" and if you don't re-blog or "like", you won't get very far in terms of meeting people.
3) Its extremely easy to use. People often ask me for advice on what blog platform to use since I've used them all, I always tell them Tumblr because if you can't click on a giant icon that'll give you the kind of post you want, then .. re-consider your strategy.
Okay, now that we have that covered, let's uncover the real reason there's a Twitter backlash against the nerds: it's not cool anymore. A Kardashian sister mentioned Twittering on the Bravo A-list awards. "PtwittyTV" is a real thing. It's not our secret little clubhouse anymore. The claims that it's jumped the shark because it's been unreliable is ludicrous; it's never been reliable, ever. But now that it's somewhat mainstream, it's starting to lose it's luster.
Tumblr, despite what anyone says, is not a "micro-blog." If I were to compare it to any other service, I would say it is a much sleeker version of Livejournal.
Twitter, with its 140 characters, and the asking of a very simple question, "what are you doing?" is a different beast altogether. One could replace the other, in terms of how people ar quick to all move on to the next new thing, but it'll be used in a very different way.
Despite my last post, where I talked trash about "experts", I love Twitter and I love the potential it has and the various uses: tiny diary, news feed, teller of jokes, or just learning the mundane (or not so mundane) things my friends are doing during the day. Its character limit is what makes it so unique.
Personaly, I want my Tumblr dashboard to remain pretty photos, quotes pulled from blogs, hot jams, memes, and occasional long rants. The day someone tries to quote me a listsicle on their social media expertise and 1 million reasons on why X is better than Y, I'll pour a little bit of my bacon martini out on the floor and weep at the death of yet another great community ruined by salespeople.
[Via Tippingpoint Labs.]
Apr/091
I Totally Care What You Had For Lunch
The world that I inhabit is not the type that worships the Internet "A-list." or the self appointed group of Twitter addicts that never misses a conference, "Tweetup" or never fails to make posts like "Why Everything You're Doing Is Wrong" or "Using Friendfeed Will Convince Your Girlfriend To Have Anal Sex With You."
Sure, we're sort of early adopters, glued to our iphones, checking in on loopt or foursquare or whatever new system comes around until we tire of it, we use Tumblr and we make references to "thought leaders" in an insidery way. We don't worship people like Guy Kawasaki or Gary Vee or Scoble or re-tweet everything Mashable posts. Which is why I was shocked to see people actually paying attention to those people when I went to SXSW. This is a very different Internet from my Internet (which I admit is mostly sponsored by Nick Denton; the "cool side" of the Internet as once brilliantly mentioned by a friend of mine). But anyway, the following post I read today on Kawasaki's keynote at a search engine conference last week confirmed my decision to largely ignore the "experts" and leaders of thought.
Here's my favorite quote:
According to Kawasaki: either you're a money-grubbing, social-media-abusing pusher of some product, service, or yourself to the waiting Twitter masses, or you're a frivolous nobody posting about your cat, or the new hairbrush you bought, or the fact that you brushed your cat with the new hairbrush. So those are the only two options? Building a genuine professional rapport or exploring mutual interests with a small to medium-sized circle of people? That has no place in Kawasaki's dichotomous world. People who aren't on the A-List are really just nobodies who should be spammed by A-Listers; that's Kawasaki's mental atlas. Funny that's how it is, because Kawasaki wastes a lot of breath trying to say that he feels just the opposite. He protests too much, a lot.
I think there is a lot of time and energy wasted on the Internet on things like analyzing how many followers you have, your "retweetability index" and a bunch of other nonsense. Who cares? How to get people to follow your corporate Twitter account? Don't be annoying. How to get people to read your professional blog? Be a good writer and update a lot. And if not, hire someone who knows how to write and do it for you. The whole Internet industry is far more complicated than it ever has to be. This stuff is not rocket science, unless of course, you're paying me, in which case it is.
But seriously, even when I've worked with people on their web projects, I've always told them that less is more. The appeal of social networking and how it can work in business is that there are people around you. So be real, like J. Lo. Don't write for search engines (but do write your titles for them), don't be the douche with 30,000 Twitter followers he can't possibly be invested in and who aren't invested in you.
And all these fake metrics are distracting from the only metric that matters (I learned everything I know about business from hip hop): how much cash you making? I have a small group of followers on my b5media blog on Bravo programming. I engage with them regularly, in addition to feeding my blog feed to it. I've increased my blog traffic significantly thanks to this and have sucessfuly monetized that blog. Do I care about analyzing my followers? No. My method is very simple: I update a lot, I follow leads on gossip people care about, I stay out of comments and I am nice to my PR people. So I get more pageviews and get pizzaid (still a pithy sum but money is money). What I'm doing is working and I'm building a tiny reality tv empire. But I realize that will take time. I'm not going to add 50,000 people on Twitter who had the word "Bravo" in one of their posts. That'll just make me look clueless. And that's the worst of all on the Internet -- just ask Amazon, who is probably having the worst Easter ever.
What I do wish Internet blowhards would realize is that not everyone wants to monetize on the Internet and they don't care about building a "brand." One of the most amazing things about writing a blog about reality television is how my Google Alerts point me to women who keep these meticulous personal blogs about their lives and who totally don't care about SEO or networking. And that's totally okay. There's room for them, too. I love the personal blog and prefer it (it's why I read Tumblr, where the personal blog is alive and well ). There's room to write about your cat on the Internet, still. After all, I love cats.