A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead.

A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it in the future.  Then again, as Paul Banas noted, “If I were to survey US consumers right after World War II on whether they think they would use a television, and for those who don’t, do they think they would in the future, I’d probably get roughly the same data back as Forrester got on RSS.” Indeed, recall Ken Olsen’s classic 1977 statement that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

The more recent evolution of the debate is not so much about widespread adoption but that power users find RSS inefficient, preferring instead Twitter or various aggregators like Memeorandum or Techmeme.  Steve Gillmor proclaimed in May that “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.

But, as Dave Winer retorted, it’s rather silly to proclaim the death of RSS while instead using technologies that rely on RSS!

Sam Diaz revived the argument this week saying “Once a big advocate for Google Reader, I have to admit that I haven’t logged in in weeks, maybe months.”

I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my browser tabs so I can keep a pulse on what others in my industry are talking about. And then there are Twitter and Facebook. I actually pick up a lot of interesting reading material from people I’m following on Twitter and some friends on Facebook, with some of it becoming fodder for blog posts here.

The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago.

Although, again, YahooNews, GoogleNews, and Techmeme all merely aggregate information pushed through RSS.  Proclaiming RSS dead because you’re using it downstream is rather like proclaiming television dead because you never watch it anymore — you just TiVo everything.

Further, as Patricio Robles observes, “RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook, but who says it has to be? Twitter and Facebook are great for content discovery; RSS is one of a number of tools that can be used for content aggregation. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges.”

Steve Rubel takes that to the next level: “Think RSS is dead? Think it’s too slow for the age of streams? Perhaps that’s true for news. But have you ever considered using Google Reader as a private database? In this screencast I will show you how I do just that.”

Which is pretty much how I’m using Google Reader these days.  There’s a ton of information out there and trying to tab through and skim every post on every blog and newspaper that I want to follow simply takes too much time and energy.   So I rely in various aggregators, aggregate my own content feeds via the Firefox Feedly plugin, keep an eye on Twitter, and use Google Reader as a research tool for fleshing out posts once I’ve come up with ideas.

Steve Rubel offers “Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You.” Between email, blog feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and various other applications out there, we’ve all got too much information to contend with. Those of us in the information business are even more overwhelmed because we both need to follow more things and figure out how to aggregate it usefully.

The first and last tips — relying on one or two aggregators and reading saved materials on your portable devices while stuck waiting — are things I try to do now, although not all that successfully or consistently. The second, though, is really intriguing:

Don’t Subscribe and Read, Archive, Search and Skim

In the personal productivity world,  some eschew sorting documents and emails in folders in favor of just throwing them into an archive where they can be easily searched later. The same approach works well for managing your stream.

Use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to lots of content, including say all your friends on Twitter. However, view it as a personal, searchable database rather than another collection bucket you have to read and clear.

I do in fact use Google Reader to search for posts of bloggers I trust when I’m doing a roundup-style post.  And I frequently “mark all as read” to avoid a sense that I have hundreds more posts that I must get through.

At the same time, though, skimming blog posts and reading clicked links is one of the major ways in which I get ideas for posts.   I noted that in Steve’s comments and he responded, “I divide my feeds up. Some I read for that same purpose, others I archive and search.”

I’ve done that with Twitter, creating a group in TweetDeck for the people whose tweets I really want to read to distinguish those whom I merely follow out of courtesy.  I’ve divided most of my blog feeds in Google Reader into folders (Must Read, Europe, Security, Business, Sports, Blogging and Tech, etc.) but haven’t actually gotten into the habit of using them vice just starting with the most recent and skimming down until I get bored.

Image via Zee on TheNextWeb.com

The juxtaposition of two headlines this morning at memeorandum was rather amusing:

As it turns out, Michael Shear’s “An Early Military Victory for Obama” and Shailagh Murray’s “Obama’s Chief of Staff Grants Access, Gets Results” are unrelated stories combined through the vagaries of automated selection algorithms.  Indeed, the inside headline on the latter is actually “Give-and-Take With Emanuel Advances President’s Agenda – Lawmakers Respond to Improved Access to White House” (the other is the page title that will be found by search engines and aggregators).

Still, the pairing is apt.  President Obama did what any president would have done: authorized the Navy to use deadly force (i.e., kill people) if they deemed Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips to be in mortal danger.  They did and they did.  (To paraphrase Maverick, “I had the shot.  There was danger, so I took it.”)

So, what’s the headline?  “When You Mess With the Best, You Die Like the Rest”?   No, it’s “An Early Military VIctory for Obama.”

[T]he result — a dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces — left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.

His strategic acumen was demonstrated thusly:

[A]fter a National Security Council telephone update, Obama granted U.S. forces what aides called “the authority to use appropriate force to save the life of the captain.” On Saturday at 9:20 a.m., Obama went further, giving authority to an “additional set of U.S. forces to engage in potential emergency actions.”

A top military official, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of the Fifth Fleet, explained that Obama issued a standing order that the military was to act if the captain’s life was in immediate danger. “Our authorities came directly from the president,” he said. “And the number one authority for incidents if we were going to respond was if the captain’s life was in immediate danger. And that is the situation in which our sailors acted.”

Obama to Navy:  “Do your job.”

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

Granted, reading the comment thread on Dave Schuler’s post about the freeing of Phillips, there are people who harbored this doubt.  But has there been a president in American history who hesitated to authorize force in a situation like this?   Jimmy Carter authorized the ill-fated Desert One rescue of the Iranian hostages.  Bill Clinton ordered the Somali warlord-hunting mission that led to the infamous Black Hawk Down incident.   Both caught flak for the failure of those missions.   But of course Obama was going to authorize action — at the discretion of the professionals on the scene — to save the life fo the captain.  To have done otherwise would have been morally unconscionable and politically suicidal.  I can’t imagine it ever crossed his mind to say No.

UPDATE:  Brendan Nyhan obseves,

I’m sure the Obama White House did not require much persuasion to leak word of the President’s role in approving the successful anti-pirate operation off the coast of Somalia, but I’m going to guess they won’t be so quick to take credit the first time some military operation goes bad. As the administration will soon learn, the president is largely a prisoner of circumstance when it comes to external events like this. The flip side of taking credit for good news is that you’re more likely to be held responsible for bad news.

Quite right.  Then again, he’d likely be held responsible, anyway.

UPDATE 2: Nate Hale, writing in the Washington Examiner, shares my initial take:

To be fair, President Obama made the right call, giving his commanders the authority to act swiftly–and decisively–to end the hostage standoff, when the opportunity presented itself.  But the successful rescue of Captain Phillips was hardly a triumph of executive decision-making from the White House situation room.  Instead, the real credit should go to the field-grade officer who accurately assessed the situation and gave the order to fire–and to the SEALs who took out their targets with customary efficiency.

UPDATE 3: Andrew Exum’s feeling vindicated.

Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere.

He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (”How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system.  While pretty much every blogger who wrote about this idea at the time scoffed at it, Craig observes, “That seems like a pipe dream today, but who knows about tomorrow? Television was once free, but now the average American spends hundreds of dollars each year for his cable or satellite subscription.”  That’s a good point, actually.

But what pay television offered that the free version didn’t was variety.  In the old days, most of us had the three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), plus PBS and a couple of local independents to choose from.  Adding just ESPN and CNN was a huge advance and the availability of movie channels like HBO and Showtime was just remarkable.   I’m not sure what the online news equivalent of this would be.

The second suggestion, via Mark Potts (”Editors as Curators: What’s Taking So Long?) is that editors could repackage their skills and rethink online newspapers as smart aggregators.

[N]ewspaper and TV sites still generally are trapped in their walled gardens, putting together their daily reports only from the sources they pay for: their own reporters, maybe some wire and syndicated copy and photos, and that’s about it.

On the Web, you’re not limited only to the content you own. You can create a rich, deep package for your readers on any subject by linking to outside sources—background, context, documents, data, video, discussions, blogs, user-generated content, etc. Even, shudder, good stuff from competitors. But with very few exceptions, this is done only tentatively, if at all, at the vast majority of news sites.

Craig calls this “a really smart idea/model” and wonders, “Can the culture of the newsroom support it? Or does a version of the Not Invented (Created) Here syndrome work against it?”

I’d argue, though, that bloggers are pretty much doing this already and for free.  It’s Glenn Reynolds‘ bread and butter, of course, but even bloggers that aren’t primarily linkers tend to serve as aggregators.  Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and other general interest bloggers provide links to dozens of stories of interest to their readers a day and niche blogs like Small Wars Journal are, in additional to a source of original commentary and analysis, smart aggregators of the most important articles and discussions on their topics taking place elsewhere.

So, yes, this is a good model for attracting eyeballs on the Web.   But, since thousands of people are doing it for free — and hundreds are doing it well — I’m not sure how that translates into an effective business model for saving newspapers.

Photo by Flickr user Annie Mole under Creative Commons license.

Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame.

In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What’s happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:

• Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
• Blogging, at least in the “bleeding edge” technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there’s certainly some circumstanstial evidence – just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 – there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
• Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.

They offer a bit of data to support their thesis but admit that it’s rough.

Based on my own observations — and I’m only casually involved with Twitter, Facebook, and other non-blog social media outlets — the first of these bullets strikes me as more plausible than the others.

The professionalization of blogging and the rise of automatic aggregators has shaken out the pocket-Glenn Reynolds types, leaving essayists and discussion leaders in the ascendency.  Most of the “serious” blogs now create quasi-unique content and/or (as this post is attempting to do) bring attention to content from outside their niche into a wider discussion.

The hundreds of blogs that once existed mostly as true web logs — i.e., mostly just pointing to content elsewhere that the proprietor finds interesting — have mostly withered away. There’s just not a market for them (perhaps because the professional bloggers are cranking out too much content and people don’t have time to read anything else.)  It’s quite plausible that those folks have moved in to Twitter.

The second part of that first bullet is right, too.  The linking culture that still persists on political blogs is much less common in other niches.  Although I’m no longer actively posting, I own celebrity and sports blogs and there’s virtually no tradition of source acknowledgment in those sub-spheres.  Celebrity blogs in particular generally pass off cut-and-paste content from elsewhere as their own.

Photo by Flickr user HGruber, used under Creative Commons license.

Michael Scherer had an epiphany yesterday searching for a transcript of Dick Cheney’s CNN interview and stumbling on nine different stories in Politico about it.

What struck me about all this was not just that Politico had created a hassle for me, the reader. It was that they were doing news online smarter than the rest of the old-school organs of print journalism–from the New York Times to TIME magazine–and that Politico’s insights about how the web works could have ill effects for the future of my profession, political journalism.

Here’s why: The Internet has changed the incentives for news producers. Once upon a time, the incentive of a print reporter at a major news organization was to create a comprehensive, incisive account of an event like Cheney’s provocative interview on CNN. (Open the New York Times or the Washington Post tomorrow, and you will still be able to read  versions of this story.) That account would then be packaged into a container (a newspaper, a magazine, a 30-minute network news broadcast) and sold to the consumer. In the Internet-age, by contrast, what matters is not the container, but the news nugget, the blurb, the linkable atom of information. That nugget is not packaged (since the newspapers, magazine, broadcast television structure do not really apply online), but rather sent out into the ether, seeking out links, search engine ranking and as many hits as possible. A click is a click, after all, whether it’s to a paragraph-length blog post or a 2,000 word magazine piece. News, in other words, is increasingly no longer consumed in the context of a full article, or even a full accounting of an event, but rather as Twitter-sized feeds, of the sort provided by the Huffington Post, The Page, and The Drudge Report. Each quote gets its own headline. Context and analysis are minimized for space. The reader, choosing her own adventure as she clicks, creates her own narrative of the world, one that is largely dependent on the aggregators she employs.

Much more at the link, which ironically undercuts his larger point — as he himself acknowledges:

But I do wonder where it all leads. I wonder how long it takes before people view a 600-word web story as too long? What about a web story that is longer than 140 characters? What about this very blog post, which is now more than 1,000 words, two or three times the length of a proper blog post? I am sure most of you have stopped reading.

Look, I’m in sympathy with the desire for context and a larger understanding of the issues.  At the same time, however, we want what we want.  Faced with a choice of sitting through sixty minutes of drivel, reading a 5000 word transcript, or reading as many short articles discussing nine aspects of the interview as I’m interested in, I’ll take the latter every time.  Package them smartly and I’ll be interested in more of the articles.

One irony of the way the Internet is evolving is the move from text to audiovisual, thus undercutting its natural advantage.  Occasionally, it’s great to have a video — especially a short one — to illustrate something.  This is especially true with things like the recent flap over the Rush Limbaugh “I want Obama to fail” speech or the Jon Stewart vs. Larry Cramer confrontation.  For the most part, though, I’ve stopped watching long form television shows — including the Sunday talk shows — in favor of blog- and Politico-style discussions of said shows.   The vast majority of what happens on a 60 minute segment of these shows is either old news or simply uninteresting to me.  I’d far prefer to wait a couple of hours and just get the few minutes worth that I would have cared about and examine that in depth.

Tom Barnett’s latest book tour has him frustrated with much of the mainstream press, whose preference for cuteness and brevity makes discussion of complex ideas next to impossible.  He contrasts this with talk radio, where he can have a long back-and-forth.  He closes:

Long story short: after a day of many disappointing feedbacks from the MSM world, I feel a lot better after spending the time with someone willing to explore the complexity with me, even when he often disagrees with several of my tactical choices and strategic imperatives.

But that’s the debate we’re missing right now in the MSM. I have to admit: the older I get, the more I buy into the blogosphere’s notions that the MSM is deeply dysfunctional. As they drop from the print world and become glorified Huffington news aggregators, I’m not so sure anymore that I’ll miss them.

Presumably, he’s talking about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which announced over the weekend that they’re doing precisely that.

What’s currently happening on the P-I homepage fits with what I’m hearing: the online-only P-I, as it is currently being conceived over on Elliott Avenue, will be, in part, an aggregator.

As Josh in the comments says, this is “a big deal.” Another commenter offered a one-word summation of the transformation: “PI HuffPo.”

They’re right. It’s hard to overstate how big a change this represents. For a daily newspaper to abandon its belief that important local news should be conveyed first through its own trusted reporters, and its own trusted reporters only, is a tremendous shift. It fits with something else that’s been becoming more clear lately: Hearst wants to hold on to the P-I brand, and the online traffic that comes with it, but it is ready to jettison a lot of old notions about what makes a journalistic enterprise.

At some point, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.  Aggregating the news is a very useful service if done well.  It ain’t, however, journalism.

Steven Taylor’s PoliBlog turned six recently and, as he notes, OTB recently (on January 31st, to be precise) did so as well.

The blogging landscape has changed markedly in the intervening period, with many of the top blogs of early 2003 long gone and quite a few relative newcomers having taken over the top rungs.  Relatively few of those who started when Steven and I did are still at it.

Political blogging has gone from an almost entirely amateur niche enterprise into something much more similar to the mainstream press, a process that has been both good and bad.

There’s much more talent out there than there was back in the proverbial day.  A political science PhD with combat experience and a wonkish expertise in security studies during the run-up to the Iraq War was a novelty in the blogosphere and gave me a hook that allowed me to build an audience very quickly.  It would be much harder to break in today absent a pre-existing reputation or the backing of established bloggers.

Because there are so many voices now, though, and many of the best have been acquired by major media outlets and think tanks, there’s a certain Establishment feel to the blogosphere that didn’t exist years ago.   The rise of RSS readers and aggregators like Memeorandum mean that fewer of us are using our blogrolls or just keeping a log of interesting things we’re finding on the Web; instead, we’re much more apt to write about what everyone else is writing about.

Related:

• Fifth Blogiversary
• Fourth Blogiversary
• Three Year Blogiversary
• OTB: 2005 Year in Review
• OTB: 2004 Year in Review
• Two Year Blogiversary
• One Year Blogiversary

For what it’s worth, we’ve published 22,744 posts and 593,200 comments (not counting those from the first three months that have since disappeared into the ether) along the way .

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll.

Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.

[...]

Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

He expounds on this in great detail in an embedded video, using a nifty Australian accent to boot.

I’ve still got a blogroll using blogrolling.com but it’s AJAX’ed so you don’t see the links unless you click for them. But mine, like most still in existence, is a museum, preserving my blog reading habits circa 2005. There are numerous defunct blogs on the list and it really hasn’t been updated at all in two years. Nor do I use it myself, like I once did, as a source for posting materials.

In addition to the causes Duncan suggests, I think it’s mostly a function of the rise of aggregators.  Most of us read blogs through RSS feeds, memeorandum, and even social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  (The last, incidentally, is how I found this post, via a link shared by K Welch.)

[UPDATE: Eric Berlin suggests an explanation that I overlooked: "The rise of widgets and the greatly increased focus on jamming ads into every nook and cranny likely have had a role in squeezing out blogroll real estate." It's probably at least part of the reason I AJAX'ed mine -- so that I could put it back where readers would see it without sacrificing much sidebar space.]

Do any of you readers actually still use the blogroll?  Is it worth a blogger’s time to update their lists?

Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, “I’ve seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.” He offers three likely explanations:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.

2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.

3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

Indeed, I found his piece on Techmeme and had never heard of Gray before, despite his being a relatively big player in the tech-social media space.

Gray rank ordered his referrals from the last six months and, sure enough, search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion.  None delivered more than 500 visitors!

My experience in the politics niche is quite different.  Yes, without question, Google and other search engines provide a significant share of OTB’s traffic.  For June, Google brought in 118,236 visits; Yahoo 10,574; MSN 4764; Google Images 2522; Ask 2147; and Windows Live 1914.  Aggregators memeorandum and RealClearPolitics brought in 1722 and 3635, respectively. Social media sites brought in negligible traffic:  Fark 1891, Digg 153, and StumbleUpon 129.

Still, blog linkage accounts for significant traffic and can bring in nice surges. In June, links from InstaPundit brought in 7502 visits, Balloon Juice 3812, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish 2371, and Matthew Yglesias 1495.  And that’s only counting top-level referrals, as I’m not ambitious enough to add up referrals from individual URLs within those sites or www/non-www variants.   Certainly, though, plenty of them brought in more than 500 visits.  And that’s in a single month, not a six-month period.  Indeed, links from any of those sites and many more can bring in more than 500 visitors in a single hour.   The key variable there is the nature of the link.  One that (Like this post, I’m afraid. Sorry, Louis.) provides significant excerpts of a post and provides extensive original analysis tend to send much less traffic to linked sites than posts that provide only a teaser.

It may well be that the ethics of linking and the reader habit of clicking through is more engrained on the political blogs than other sectors of the blogosphere.  In the celebrity gossip space, where I’ve also got a presence (albeit mainly an ownership/management one) there is relatively little linking to other blogs and, indeed, outright theft of content without even a nod in the direction of attribution is the norm.

I suspect, too, that the reading habits of tech and politics bloggers are simply different.  The handful of the former I read, for example, seem to be much more engaged with Twitter and various other social media outlets than most of us in the political space.

Most of you have likely seen the EPIC 2014 video, created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson in November 2004, by now. For the rest of you:

As the Wikipedia entry explains, the eight minute movie “explores the effects that the convergence of popular News aggregators like Google News and Newsbot with other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, social networking and user participation may have on journalism and society at large in a hypothesized future. The film popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy and copyright issues raised in this scenario.” Some of it is, of course, more than a little far-fetched. The premise, though, is all too real. (There’s also a less-widely-circulated January 2005 update called EPIC 2015.)

I was reminded of that this morning by news that Google has filed a patent to analyze the psychological profiles of online gamers. David Adam and Bobbie Johnson report for The Guardian that, “The company thinks it can glean information about an individual’s preferences and personality type by tracking their online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers. Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says.”

The plans are detailed in a patent filed by Google in Europe and the US last month. It says people playing online role playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be particularly good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behaviour in real life. The patent says: “User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc).”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Google already uses keywords and other information to target ads on various Web pages and even email messages for users of its popular Gmail service. Their desire to improve their techniques and serve more tailored ads is understandable and unobjectionable. So long as the data is merely kept at the level of “the user onscreen now,” it seems harmless.

The problem is that there’s nothing to prevent the massive amounts of data that Google is amassing from being aggregated and put to other uses. If Google has your name, address, Social Security number, bank account number, credit card numbers, and other critical information — and it likely does if you’re doing business with them as an ad seller, ad buyer, WiFi client, or with any business that Google may happen to buy in the future — plus all of your email, your calendar, your online chats, your phone conversations, every address you’ve used Google maps to find direction to, every search you’ve entered, every spreadsheet and word processing document you’ve worked on, and so on and so on, the potential for abuse is massive.

There’s an article on Slashdot this morning (found through my Google toolbar, naturally) entitled “Who Isn’t Afraid of Google?”

“Google, despite ‘doing no evil’, has managed to make itself a number of enemies recently. That’s the subject of an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which looks into the Davids looking to slay Goliath. In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. ‘Despite Google’s power, few say the company strikes as much fear in them as Microsoft did during the 1990s, when its near-monopoly on computer operating systems earned it the nickname “evil empire.” Google’s spotty track record with new products — few outside of search have much of a following — and intense competition with other Internet companies keeps it a step below. “With Google, there is still choice,” said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst for Guernsey Research, “so I’m not sure if the ‘evil empire’ epithet can be equally applied.” But he cautioned that the warning sign will come when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it. How well will Google deal with its customers’ problems then?’”

Those of us who live and do business mostly online are likely already there. Google is the 900 pound gorilla of search and they have the power to tip the scales of between success and failure for referral-based Internet businesses. Being “Condemned To Google Hell” can be catastrophic.

Certainly, blogs like this one can benefit enormously from traffic from Google and be harmed by changes in their algorithms. We were on GoogleNews for a few months and got an enormous traffic spike. They changed the way they valued blogs, taking away much of that traffic (after several articles made the front page in the first couple months, we became part of the “see more”) and ultimately we were dropped altogether. Having a higher PageRank drives more traffic yet its formulation is constantly changing and the subject of guesswork.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the power of Google (and other companies) to play favorites on an ideological basis, too. There have been a handful of high profile cases involving conservatives being dumped from various Google listings or from YouTube, which Google now owns.

Now, frankly, I think Larry Page and Sergey Brin are happy to simply serve you better ads and continue raking in a few billion dollars every year. My guess is that they’re more concerned with the bottom line than with politics and that the harm done at the individual level is incidental to purely technical business decisions. Still, the potential for abuse is staggering.

Furthermore, as we’ve seen so many times in recent years, massive compilations of data are subject to theft and otherwise being compromised. The number of government agencies and large corporations who have lost control of sensitive information is frightening. At this point, Google likely knows more about us than all Federal agencies combined.

Dave Schuler, who occasionally contributes here and at Dean’s World in addition to maintaining his own site, laments a trend he’s seeing among his favorite blogs:

Brilliant bloggers who posted once a day, maybe two or three times a week, are linking arms as associate bloggers on blogs with larger readerships. They’re still posting once a day, maybe two or three times a week. But because of the numbers of associate bloggers at the larger blogs those blogs are being updated ten, fifteen, or more times a day and the individual blogs of the associate bloggers are languishing. Posts are at the top of the page for a few hours, maybe minutes, and then scroll off, sometimes off the front page entirely.

I’m on both sides of the fence, since, as a blogger, I’ve been recruiting very good bloggers who update infrequently to OTB but, as a reader, I’ve quit reading a handful of old faves because they’ve chosen co-bloggers poorly.

Still, the trend is inevitable and largely good. Some great bloggers from my early days in the game fell off the map because the demands of everyday life kept them from posting with enough frequency to stay atop people’s “must read” lists. That tends to take a toll on readership which, in a vicious cycle, lowers the incentive to blog when time permits and further drives down readership.

That was bad enough in the old days, when most of us kept up with our favorite blogs via bookmarks and/or blogrolls. A couple years ago, though, readership started drifting towards aggregators like Memeorandum and RSS feeds. I was slow to catch on to RSS but now almost never look at my blogroll. And, if I happen not to look at the particular feed that has your updated-five-times-a-month blog the day you posted — or there’s a glitch in your feed or my reader or you got overwhelmed in a flurry of posts from other sites on the feed — I miss the post.

Enter the group blog. Collectively, a handful of good writers who post a few times a week can create enough content to make readers keep coming back. That keeps the bloggers motivated and the readers happy. The key, though, is putting together a group that’s more-or-less coherent so that the blog still has a “voice.” Perhaps the best examples of this phenomenon are Crooked Timber (a collection of left-of-center academics), Volokh Conspiracy (law profs with a libertarian-right bent), Counterterrorism Blog (CT experts) and Winds of Change (an eclectic warblog). With the possible exceptions of Eugene Volokh and Marc “Armed Liberal” Danziger, none of their lead authors are sufficiently prolific to sustain a major blog.

Despite a bevy of co-authors, OTB is still mostly me. I’ve always been prolific because I write fast and had jobs that allowed me to multi-task. Still, having additional authors gives our readers more content and showcases several fine voices who might otherwise not be heard. And it gives me a little breathing room.

Steve Verdon contributes several posts a week, often in a few flurries. He’s all but shut down his own site and does all his blogging here nowadays. He brings some genuine expertise on economics and a passion about some other issues to the table.

Rodney Dill has taken over the caption contests for me. They’ve have died out a long time ago otherwise, because the effort of finding pictures and picking winners stopped being fun and started being a distraction for me well before I turned them over. The contests are more popular than ever and, as an added bonus to our readers, someone other than Rodney now has a chance to win.

Alex Knapp and Chris Lawrence contribute when they can and add valuable insights to the discussion. Alex is an attorney by training and tech guy by trade and Chris is a gypsy political scientist. Robert Prather is currently internet deprived but promises to rejoin the fold any time now. All three are more libertarian in their philosophy than I am (Steve is, too, for that matter) but they’re close enough politically and, more importantly, in conversational and analytical tone that I think the group thing works.

The Pros and Cons, as I see them:

PROS:

• For the bloggers: Less pressure to crank out posts, a larger audience, and a possibility of earning some beer money
• For the readers: More content and viewpoints in the same basic intellectual milieu

CONS:

• For the bloggers: Less control over the identity of the site, posts pushed off the page faster
• For the readers: Some of the authors might appeal less than others, Occasional confusion over who said what

The pros of a well-constructed group easily outweigh the cons, I think. And those cons are easily mitigated. In OTB’s case, at least, each of the contributors effectively has a blog-within-the-blog, since all the posts they’ve written are put in their own category.* These categories have their own RSS feeds, and everything. So, conceivably, you could subscribe just to what Steve Verdon or Chris Lawrence or whoever your favorite(s) is/are and ignore the rest.

*The exception, oddly, is me. Since I wrote nearly 10,000 posts when this was a solo blog, there was no need for me to create an Author category and I have not gone back and added that category for many of the pre-October 2004 posts.

While relying on RSS feeds and other aggregators is quite efficient, doing so comes at the price of missing interesting things that fall through the cracks. In example: Brett Marston, whose blog is updated much less often than it once was, recently stumbled upon a bunch of books owned by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, complete with handwritten marginalia, for sale cheap at a used bookstore. His last several blog posts detail some of what he found in them.

Photo courtesy Chalicechick.

Some of the more astute readers might have noticed that I’ve added some additional links to the left sidebar. I wanted to make the site navigation links more obvious to the reader, so put links to the About, Policies, and Contact pages (previously in the top navbar) over there. That consolidates the links to internal pages and features in a single location.

Replacing them in the top navbar are several new links: FRIENDLIES, OPPOSITION, SECURITY, and TRENDS. Taking a page from Taegan Goddard’s playbook, these are collections of RSS feed aggregations that I am working on.

The pages created so far are:

• Friendly Forces: These are some of the best written right-of-center blogs. Even if you disagree with their worldview, you’ll learn something from them without being insulted in the process.
• Loyal Opposition: A quick look at what the smart, reasonable voices on the left side of the blogosphere are saying. We usually don’t agree with these views but they’re well worth reading.
• Security and Foreign Policy: Some of the best writing on international security, military affairs, and foreign policy on the Web.
• Trends: A collection of raw data and analysis on U.S. elections, especially that related to public opinion polling.

I’m still adding feeds to each of these lists and will likely add another collection or two. The intent, though, is to keep each of the lists to no more than 8-10 high quality, thoughtful sites. Most of them have a viewpoint but they’re seldom going to insult the other side’s integrity or their reader’s intelligence.

These are must-read sites that, regretably, I’m often not reading. Along with several other bloggers I’ve talked to, my reading habits have changed over the past year or so and I’m no longer reading other blogs nearly as much as I used to. With the advent of aggregators like Memorandum and RSS readers like Bloglines, I tend to parachute into other sites to read specific posts. I’m hoping to change that and also expose OTB’s readers to these sites by making them convenient.

Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a new study that has discovered six new trends in the mass media. The one attracting early attention is this:

The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame. Such concentration of personnel around a few stories, in turn, has aided the efforts of newsmakers to control what the public knows. One of the first things to happen is that the authorities quickly corral the growing throng of correspondents, crews and paparazzi into press areas away from the news. One of the reasons coverage of Katrina stood out to Americans in 2005 was officials were unable to do that, though some efforts, including one incident of holding journalists at gunpoint, were reported. For the most part, the public — and the government — were learning from journalists who were discovering things for themselves.

Another trend, what strikes me as being somewhat related, is this:

The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time. When it comes to news, what companies like Google and Yahoo are aggregating and selling is the work of others — the very same old media they are taking revenue away from. The more they succeed, the faster they erode the product they are selling, unless the economic model is radically changed.

There is no discussion of blogs, which presumably are finally no longer considered a “new trend,” but the combination of blogs and various aggregation services has helped spark the narrowing of topics, as it becomes easier to glom onto a handful of stories and then beat them to death with follow-ups, op-eds, analysis, and so forth.

NYT’s Katharine Seelye touches on the role of blogs as well:

On May 11, 2005, a date that was chosen randomly, Congress was debating the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, the actor Macaulay Culkin was testifying in Michael Jackson’s molestation trial and car bombs in Iraq killed 79 people. On that day, the study said, ” Google News offers access within two clicks to 14,000 stories, but really they are accounts of just 24 news events.”

The coverage offered by 57 media outlets was examined in depth in three cities (Houston, Milwaukee and Bend, Ore., which were randomly chosen from lists of cities of different size and geographical location) and showed certain shared characteristics depending on the medium. Print and the evening network news, for example, focused on the violence in Iraq, a false alarm in Washington involving a small plane that violated restricted air space, and protests in Afghanistan. Cable television and the morning news programs highlighted Mr. Jackson’s trial and a murder in Illinois; local television and radio produced a steady diet of weather, traffic and local crime.

The blogosphere, meanwhile, shrugged off most of the breaking news, focusing largely on broader, longer-term issues. Contrary to the charge that the blogosphere is purely parasitic,” the study said, bloggers raised new issues. But they did almost no original reporting: only 1 percent of the posts that day involved a blogger interviewing someone else and only 5 percent involved some other original work, such as examining documents.

Ironically, LAT’s James Rainey just repackages the executive summary of the study as “original reporting.”

The problem with Google News, aside from its recent decision to drop most blogs from its aggregator, is that it lacks the ability to differentiate stories, leading to hundreds of “sources” that are nothing more than repackaged AP and Reuters copy. At least the blogs typically add commentary.

Howie Kurtz notes that, while the number of outlets offering news coverage may have grown, the number of reporters has not: “Hundreds of cable and radio commentators, and millions of bloggers, can sound off about the news in real time. But the number of old-fashioned fact-gatherers is dwindling, and will almost certainly continue to shrink. In the Philadelphia area, for instance, the number of newspaper reporters has fallen from 500 to 220 in the last quarter-century. Most of the local television stations have cut back on traditional news coverage. Five AM radio stations used to cover news; now there are two.” He doesn’t mention, oddly enough, that his own paper, the Washington Post, has just announced yet another cut in its newsroom staff.

This is interesting, too:

“Everyone’s got fewer resources, and yet everyone feels compelled to cover the same basic stories,” says Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, whether it’s a White House event, plane crash or high-profile murder. “It’s a way of branding the event. They want Katie Couric or Wolf Blitzer or News4 Milwaukee there.”

Quite right. This is a truly bizarre trend. Several years ago, the local news stations in many markets started doing two early newscasts, one on each side of the nightly network news show. Yet, there was actually less local news than ever before, as they started covering–or, rather, pretending to cover–national news events. Plus, more and more sports, weather, and fluff.