BryanSays.com » Internet

7 Ways a Blogger Can Add Value to News Conversation

bryan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:05:44 +0000

First of all these are not my ideas but I wanted to share them with my readers as well. These tips are courtesy of Marshall Kirkpatrick, technology journalist for Read Write Web. I frequently listen to his “audio thoughts” podcast or cinchcast. I highly recommend following him on twitter and cinchcast. You will get an insightful look on his thought processes In his most recent recording, Marshall discussions the seven ways a news blogger can add value to a news conversation.

1. You can be First

If you are first to comment or write about a breaking topic or news event, you are sure to get lots of traffic assuming its a topic people are interested in reading.

2. You can be Funny

Oh yes! Funny is the Number 1 thing women look for a man and there are more women on the planet then men. So there you go

3. Synthesize / Summarize / Clarify

Do so in a way that the conversation can be really used. This is key, especially for topics that are not easily digestible to the average reader. If you can take a complex topic and summarize it into layman’s terms, other news sources will go to you or at least copy you. Especially if you are First and Funny.

4. Curate other high quality perspectives

Curation seems to be all of the buzz today. Many of us out there don’t want to scour the net to find every single source over a single topic so we go to certain blogs that do all of the grunt work to find the best sources and put them all together.

5. Add new details

Add new details to an existing conversation.

6. Add a new perspective to the story

Find a new angle to a story that all the other stories out may have overlooked.

7. Writing in a more compelling way

Mechanically you put the writing together in a more compelling way than anybody else.

I’m sure Marshall was “thinking out loud” with he recorded this for an upcoming blog post so expect a more detailed writeup from him on Read Write Web. At the end of his recording he asked the audience for more tips, so if you have more tips for him, be sure to send him a reply on twitter.

Below is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s cinch

Woot! gets Acquired by Amazon and Celebrates

bryan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:45:40 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve heard the news of Woot being acquired by Amazon. Well woot didn’t waste any time celebrating. Here is a video woot made to commemorate the occasion in true woot fashion!

I love the “no more rolling into work with our pajamas on” line.

Congrats Woot! Keep bringing us the funny and deals.

No related posts.

My Digg Version 4 Impressions

bryan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:02:17 +0000

How did I get my hands on an invite to try out Digg‘s latest update to their site? I was one of the lucky ones listening to This Week in Tech‘s live show with Leo Laporte. He was interviewing Digg founder and CEO, Kevin Rose as he made the announcement that all of the TWIT listeners could have first time access to the Digg Version 4 beta site! This was a small time window too. The invites were only for one hour on the show.

I was as gitty as a little school boy when I got the news. As Kevin Rose points out during the show, “there hasn’t been any changes to digg in the last two years.” This is a major facelift and retooling of the site. Kevin says this will fix a lot of the major problems people have been complaining about in the past. One of the issues that has plagued many users as Leo brought up during the show, digg has never just shown the stories from the people you care about or as Leo puts it:

I want a twitter style situation. Where I get to choose who I care about and they can curate my news for me.

Keep reading for screen shots and more information about the new features in digg version 4.

Before I get to my experience with the new Digg 4, here is a video Kevin Rose released a month ago showing a preview of Digg version 4:

Now Kevin Rose did mention that this was a rough alpha for version 4 so these screens could change dramatically for the final release. He also mentioned that invites will be released to the rest of of the digg community in the coming days. If you want to get in line, go to http://new.digg.com and request an invite. Next is a run-down stepping through the new setup process in Version 4.

Step 1: Suggested Profiles

This is eerily similar to Twitter’s Suggested User List. These are suggested profiles for you to follow based on all of the topics digg covers, or you can choose profiles on a per topic basis. One difference I noticed which I will point on again later on, the topics are only the major ones. You no longer have the sub topics under each major one. This is a step in the right direction. Less is usually better in my opinion.

Step 2: Find Friends

The next step of the new digg version 4 allows you to connect with your existing social networks and bring in your friends who are also on digg. Below are the screens that show your list of followers and those you are following. Once again, very similar to twitter in look and feel.

Digg Version 4 Followers Screen

Digg Version 4 Following Screen

These friends along with the suggested profiles you selected in the previous step will make up the content seen in the new “My News” section of digg.

My News

This is the brand new section of digg that will show you all of the diggs and user submitted stories by your “friends, tastemakers, and sources that your following all presented in one unified feed,” as Kevin Rose pointed out in the preview video above. If you think about it, its basically facebook’s “news feed” for digg. From here you can see the top stories that are dugg by all of the people you are following. You can also submit a digg link from this section. The process of submitting diggs is a lot simpler than before.

New Digg Submission Process

Submitting a new digg can be done in a few short clicks.

Paste your URL in the “submit a link” bar.
Digg grabs the images, title, and description from the site. You can choose to leave it as is or edit the content.
Choose a topic.
Click Digg It button to submit.

Top News

New Version 4 News Page

The current look of the News Page

Top News is the default view you are used to seeing on the current digg.com site with some adjustments. The topics in the current site used to run horizontally across the top of the page with the main topics and further sub topics broken down underneath. Now the topics are listed to the left of the page and vertical. You no longer have the subtopics. All you have now are the ten main topics. I live this simplified look and feel. It give it a less cluttered look, simple and to the point.

Import Feeds

Another leap forward in this new digg version is the ability to import your own RSS feeds from your blogs or websites. Digg verifies you are the owner of the site in a similar fashion to Google analytics. Once you add your feed, digg will give you a verification key that you have to embed in your latest post. The key can be in the title, body, or hidden in an HTML comment. I was able to perform this without a hitch but I feel not every user will know how to do this. I smell plugins being released very soon just for this feature.

Once your feed has been verified, every new post will automatically be added to digg! Now this is something that has been long overdue. No more submitting your post to digg and have another more popular user promoting your story to the front page and they get the credit.

Vanity URL

Another feature taken from the likes of twitter and facebook are vanity URLs. Your personal page will be http://digg.com/[username]. Since this is still in beta it points to http://new.digg.com/[username]. This page will of course show all of the stories you have dugg, links submitted, comments, imported feeds,and following/followers.

Final Thoughts

From the short time I spent on the new site before writing this article, it’s evident that a lot of work has been made to fine tune the experience on digg. The interface is much cleaner and simplified where needed. I have been a casual user of digg in the past where I would digg on stories occasionally but I was far from active. I tried adding my stories to digg only to see them get one or two diggs but never really getting much traction and the fact that it was a manual process to add stories, kept me from using the service. Having the Import Feeds feature in the new version is definitely a plus for me and I will be sure to keep active to see where this goes.

I like the added feature of following friends and other like-minded curators. I’m anxious to see what kind of new dynamic this will create for the digg experience. I like the direction Kevin Rose and team are taking us and I can’t wait to see the final product.

Digital Spring Cleaning

bryan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:26:58 +0000

Using the tips in the these articles on lifehacker, I’ll be spending the weekend going through various facets of my digital life clearing out what I don’t need. From Email, Contacts, Social Networks, Google Reader, and even my desk itself.

New Hosting, Look, and Direction

Fun with Chat Roulette

bryan — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:00:43 +0000

DISCLAIMER: Chat Roulette is an adult site. I wouldn’t venture to this site unless you are the adventurous and ready to be shocked. You might be offended by the pics in this post. You’ve been warned.

So me being the adventurous type, I decided to mess with the people using Chat Roulette. I won’t go into a huge description on what Chat Roulette is, google can tell you. My plan was to have fun with Chat Roulette by displaying some disturbing images instead of my face and see peoples’ reactions. Most people that are going here are looking for, naked chicks, penises, or trolling for attention. I wanted to see their reaction to something besides “the norm.” Needless to say I captured some amusing moments. Keep reading to see all the pics.

Most of the reactions were pretty emotionless like Castro and bug eyes here. They must have a one track mind. “Must see American girl’s boobies!” They usually click Next right away also.

I also got people who were genuinely disgusted with what they were seeing. That just seemed bizarre to me when there was far worse stuff to be seen at chat roulette but I digress.

You get the freaks who like to dress up for the camera and viewers watching, either to disguise their identity or just for plain shock value. The guy in the last picture was the most bizarre. He looked like he had blood on his face. I don’t know if it was real or fake.

You finally got those who were genuinely scared or frightened. I had a couple of girls who screamed then clicked next in lightening speed, so fast I couldn’t snap a screenshot. This is supposed to be an adult chat but I did see some kids on here and that bothered me.

The first picture below, the girl is telling her boyfriend to “hurry up and click next I don’t like it” while covering her eyes. The next picture is a girl who was on her bong when I showed the scary picture and she screamed “Dude don’t do that shit when I’m taking a bong hit! That’s not cool.”

I also got alot of people giving me the middle finger and telling me it wasn’t cool. Some people thought it was pretty funny. Others didn’t get it or clicked next right away in search of a naked body to look at or whack off to. There was entirely too much graphic nudity showing up. You can report abusive people and they are kicked from the room but only for 10 minutes. An internet savvy user can get around this by changing his/her IP address so its not much of a deterrent.

I get the draw of the service, you gamble by clicking the Next button cause you never know who or what is going to be on the other end. Nine out of ten times, you won’t be excited with who shows up next. If you want better entertainment, stick to the other social media like twitter, facebook, youtube, etc.

Posterous wants to be like Tumblr with Post.ly

bryan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:06:19 +0000

Posterous has done a relaunch of their URL Shortening site Post.ly. This site was used previously to shorten URLs from your posterous blog before sending to Twitter. Going to http://post.ly did not have this slick interface in the past. Now you can interact with the site directly as a quick and easy way to post to Posterous and Twitter.

This new simplified site’s look is a complete 180 from the normal posterous site seen below:

This may be an answer to the simple look and feel of Tumblr, posterous’s direct competitor. Is this article written by Peg on Tech, one of the reasons for Tumblr’s popularity is the landing page is much less cluttered. Here is a quote from the article about Tumblr’s landing page:

Sign up is dead simple. Can you imagine the conversion rates they get out of that page? Moreover, they have one of the best taglines of any service: the easiest way to blog. What else is there to explain? They don’t brag about features like “like”, “reblog” or (ugh) “tumblarity.” Tumblr is the easiest way to blog. Anyone, your mother included, can understand that.

Posterous with their new Post.ly page is trying to bring that simplicity to them as well. Techcrunch has an article on the announcement. I personally have a tumblr and posterous account. I seem to use posterous more because I like their feature set. I will definitely give this a try and see if I like it better than using their main site.

Sites I Like: Gawker.TV

bryan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:00:37 +0000

Gawker.TV is where I got to get my daily Tube news, gossip, and stories. The site has a great mixture of internet meme, TV Gossip, Show commentary, clips, links and more. They have a great section of their site called “What were Watching Tonight” where the reporters tell you their best picks or assignments are for the night.

This week I’ve been fixated on the Late Night Wars between Jay and Conan, where the fate of The Tonight Show is being decided. All the late night shows have something to say or make fun of the controversy and I don’t have the time or inclination to watch all those late night shows in one sitting. Gawker’s staff watches all the shows and records the best clips and saves them on their site. You get David Letterman’s crazy rants about Jay and Jimmy Kimmel’s clips where he dressed like Jay for an entire show.

So what is your favorite site for TV News and Gossip? Let me know in the comments.

First Guest Podcast

bryan — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:51:09 +0000

Did my first guest podcast, well actually my first podcast of any kind. The podcast was the Average Joe Show, hosted by Corey Charette and Ward Miller. It was a pretty entertaining show. In this episode we discussed the following news stories: sickness from BBQs, toy gun store robbery, long hair suspension, Army mom refuses to go, McGwire used steroids, Spider-Man 4 is a no go, and a sex robot. Ya we covered a varied array of topics. Give it a listen here.

Thanks again Corey and Ward for the opportunity and I hope to be on more shows in the future.

Sites I Like:Reflection of Me

bryan — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:00:46 +0000

ReflectionOf.Me “of you and of everything that surrounds us…”

is rated as one of the Top100 Posterous blogs. This is a blog I go to frequently throughout the week. The site at first glance might appear to be artsy but take a closer look or you might miss some cool stuff. Like this collection of Avant Garde hairstyles. The site can be informative as well like this post showing which countries have the highest inflation rates. I love the off-the-wall finds on this site that start my day on a light note. Like this collection of food art or this funny webcam video.

Most of all I like Clementine’s collection / comparison posts such as:

The results are the same alcohol or yogo which do you prefer?

Steve Jobs Magazine Covers throughout the Ages

There are many other internet gems to find on this site from surreal artwork to clever adverting campaigns. This is definitely one site to check out daily.

Leo Laporte Documentary

bryan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:53:22 +0000

This documentary was featured on the Inside TWIT blog but I had to share it with my friends and readers as well. If you don’t know who Leo Laporte is, you can’t call yourself a Technology geek. No biggie, thats what wikipedia is for. Leo runs a very successful podcasting network known as TWIT (This week in Tech) but he prefers to call them netcasts. Leo says,

“I’ve never liked the word podcast. It causes confusion…people have told me that they can’t listen to my shows because they ‘don’t own an iPod’.”

Speaking of netcasts, that is his tagline on the bumpers to his shows “Netcasts you love, from people you trust.”

The documentary below is done by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick where they traveled to the “TWIT cottage” in Petuluma, CA. This is part of The Spark Series for eGuiders. They are exploring what makes Leo stand out in this new frontier of media. Leo Laporte has a huge following on the internet and he is doing this with a small staff and a modest budget compared to his TechTV days where it used to cost millions to do what he’s doing today. Leo also give his take on technology in general, Net Neutrality, and explains the joys of doing his show now versus what he did with traditional media. You will also get a small look behind the scenes of TWIT is run. I have always been a huge fan of Leo and the ex-TechTV personalities. A great little film about a tech culture icon.