/Message

Housecleaning and Facelift

I have made peace with /message being hosted on Typepad. It is just impossible to imagine moving it. If anything, I may at some time start a new blog, but in the meantime, this is what I have arrived at:

• All the current blogging platforms lack the features I would like to have, unless I go down to the bare metal and build my own social foundation. And of course, if I did that, no one else would be using it, so the social aspect would fail. Unless I were to develop it as a plug-in, like JS-Kit or Disqus. And I don't want to have to invent everything in order to have a blog.
• I have pulled out the Disqus commenting system, because it didn't offer that much, and it was just an additional headache. I pulled it out of my Tumblr blogs a few weeks ago, but for somewhat unrelated reasons: it doesn't gibe with the Tumblr sharing model, really.
• I think of my blog increasingly as a tool to craft long-form posts, but which will be distributed and commented on elsewhere, such as Twitter. What i would like -- and wish that Typepad would give me -- is the ability to display tweets that refer to a post -- but I don't want to have to hack my templates to do it. So someone has to work with SixApart to make it a plugin.

To those folks whose comments were in Disqus for anything posted here since I started using that system, apologies. Your comments are still in Disqus, undeleted.

Giving Up On Moving To Tumblr

I had hoped to relo this blog and /Ground onto Tumblr, and I may someday. But there doesn't seem to be a path to get there yet, and the fact that Tumblr doesn't support an export capability is vaguely annoying. So I am going to take another hard look at what I can do in Typepad, and suck it up for the moment.

I Had To Laugh

Following my recent post about the transition from the inbox to the stream (see From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The Inbox), I got a comment from someone called 's' which actually made me laugh. Among other things, 's' suggests I lack sufficient experience to write about these topics:

/Message: From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The Inbox.

I think you need more experience with these mediums before purporting to find a supposition and writing about them in depth.

Priceless.

Taking Ads Off /Message

The other day I decided to drop advertising here at /Message.

First of all, it never amounted to very much money.

Second, it was ugly to see a server or a car being hawked on the upper right hand corner of /Message, so that I could get 16¢ if you clicked on it.

Third, its an old, old model.

I am hoping that someday I can move to a model like Techmeme, and allow a select group of companies to display sponsored posts here, but that would mean that someone (Gabe Rivera?) would have to create a blogvertising network around that model.

Top Posts Of 2008

Some posts that got some attention this year, in a somewhat ordered list:

• Battle Of The Twitterologists: Microsharing, Microsharing, Microblogging, Microstreaming
• Tools I Use
• Web 2.0 Is Not Dead
• Authority Is A Highly Charged Particle
• Social Network Subscription At Dopplr
• Hello Gmail Tasks, Bye Bye Remember The Milk -- Note: I went back to RTM a few weeks later...
• Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web
• Present.ly: An 'Enterprise Twitter' Worthy Of The Name
• Yahoo AOL Talks
• Twitter Is The New Bloomberg
• Jason Calacanis And Thomas Friedman On A Brand New Day
• Yammer Tops TechCrunch50
• Arrington on Scoble, FriendFeed, And The Web Of Flow
• Why I Am Obsessed With Tumblr, And Why That Matters
• Scoble Doesn't Like Twitter's Direct Messages
• Pukka: A Bookmarklet For Multiple Delicious Accounts
• JP Rangaswami on Continuous Partial Asymmetry
• MicroPR: A Way To Connect Journalists, Analysts, And Bloggers
• Planning My Talk For Defrag: Lifestreaming From The Edge
• Teenagers Are Not Being Driven Crazy By The Web
• Don't Cross The Streams: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light
• Happiness Is An Emergent Property Of Social Networks
• Scott Karp on Networked Newspapers
• Twitternomics: How Will Twitter Make Money, Not Whether Twitter Will Make Money
• Flows All Over: Friendfeed, Flickr, Slideshare, Co-Op, Backpack
• SocialU: It's All About You, If You're A Virtually Materialistic Narcissist
• The Great Comment Switch: Disqus
• The State Of The Twittersphere: Don't Look For A Bell Curve
• Mark Pesce Respins John Gilmore
• Twitter To Go It Alone, Leaves Facebook Deal On The Table
• Doodle: Solving A Little Problem Well
• Edmodo: Educational Microstreaming... And More?
• Gmail Appointment Reminder
• Porn Falls As Young Men Turn To Social Networks
• Office 2.0 Conference: That Which Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger
• More Evidence That Web Exposure Rewires Us
• Bethany Klein on Pop Music, Advertising, Labels, and Filters
• Get Satisfaction Announces Socialized Ad Policy
• Dopplr Launches Q&A, Appoints Marko Ahtisaari As CEO
• Email and Youth: Reading The Tea Leaves
• Bluenity: Air France Gets Social Travel All Wrong
• Working On The Streamflow: A Microstreaming Workflow
• Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution