Hans Across The Interwebs

This week’s big story on the web is how bad the standards of reporting are on the web. It’s about the complainers hating on the blogosphere. My Take: Hey Winer and Evans, change your reading habits!

Dave Winer would go so far as to say that the end is near, because journalistic standards are going down the toilet, while blogospheric group behaviour is going rampant. Winer wishes it was 1997 again, when men were men and bloggers were smart and insightful. In an ironic twist of fate, his story is now #1 on tech aggregator Techmeme.

Mark Evans tries to give some sort of explanation for why many blogs are just so bad. The short of it: original content doesn’t drive traffic; original content takes too much time out of bloggers’ schedules.

Sure, there’s some flocking behaviour out there. The not-so-negative explanation could be: bloggers want to be part of the conversation; so you have to jump on the band wagon sometimes. I know that’s part of the reason for me. Evans also mentions this.

I was a professional journalist for years. I understand how important sources are. I like to have original content as much as the next guy. But for me, blogging is different from writing tech stories for CIO-magazine or InfoWorld (The Dutch versions, if you’re wondering). Sometimes a blog post is just a way to start a conversation. And to learn from it, or just to enjoy it. It’s like a discussion in a bar among friends about something we all find interesting.

Now, I do know some people who will ask me to quote my sources during a drunken discussion in bar (annoyingly…). And sometimes that’s appropriate for blog posts too. And you can even add them yourself. For many blogs, the comments are AS important as the original post. But that’s just me. Others have different goals with their blogs. A blog is not a blog is not a blog. And I don’t hear anyone complaining about the reporting standards on the Dogblog or my friend Kingrat’s Pie Night Announcements. Can’t we all just get along, and have fun in Blog-O-Land?

One thing is definitely true: sites like digg.com, techmeme.com, technorati.com and many more have made it increasingly easy to know exactly what’s going on. What the ‘buzz is’ so to speak. Sorry, I forgot, we call them ‘memes’ now.

Now let me get completely defensive here for a moment, if I may. If you think the web is a place just infested with bad writing, bad reporting and sheepish behaviour, well, you probably spend way too much time scouring these meme-sites for interesting stories to write about. It’s probably time to weed out your feed reader. Winer, are you listening? 1997 Isn’t coming back. It’s like my dad used to say about the television: ‘it has an off button you know’.

So tell me: are you sick and tired of the same old stories over and over again?

The big buzz on the web for the past week has been Yahoo’s Digg Killer, aptly named Buzz. This news site – launched on february 25th - caught everyone unawares by suddenly launching droves and droves of traffic all over the web, impressing even the most unimpressable of bloggers, Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington: “it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer.”, said Arrington.

Salon.com and the Huffinton Post, to name a few, reported significant traffic increases in the many hundreds of thousands.

No Revolution here?

But Yahoo Buzz is no social news revolution, and it’s not bringing the Digg concept to the masses as some would have us believe.

Don’t think you’ll be posting your next blog post (probably something like “10 things to think about during a boring subway ride while picking your nose”) on Yahoo’s Buzz anytime soon: it is invite only. The stories therefore necessarily only come from bigger, more mainstream sites. And that leaves nothing but a watered down, castrated version of Digg, a digg.

That’s not to say this thing isn’t big, but Yahoo was always getting lots of traffic. Once they decided to point more links outward, any model they chose was going to creat massive amounts of traffic. As does Buzz.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still wants to buy Yahoo; Yahoo still doesn’t want to get bought but is in talks with Microsoft anyway; and Yahoo is trying to bring up its price by stating they will grow 73 percent in revenues in the next three years. They failed to indicate why they’d be able to do in the next three years what they were unable to do in the past three years. Maybe it’ll be through Yahoo Buzz.

I do know one thing: I just can’t wait for Buzz to get really big, so someone to think of a next generation app to replace it: The Buzz Killer! (ahem)

So what do you think about this Buzz thing?

Google becomes Digg plus a bit more.

Google Experimental Search: “This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks”

via Chris on Twitter

Just so you know.

Free Wall Street Journal Stories Through Digg RSS [News]: “The Wall Street Journal added Digg buttons throughout its paid-subscription website yesterday, but any article that’s been dugg will be freely viewable.”

I’m sure there’ll be a website featuring only dugg wsj articles soon.

(Via Lifehacker.)