AMY GAHRAN: The Right Conversation

links for 2007-09-11

• Online Advertising in The Long Tail | WebProNews
  "If we look at the middle of the tail, I can tell you that there are A LOT of companies and entrepreneurs making great livings off of advertising. Some are sites that work primarily with ad networks and use tools like RMX Direct."
  (tags: advertising ad+networks business publishing news+biz journalism)

Folding this blog back into Contentious.com

For a couple of years now I've had this blog, The Right Conversation, devoted to the emerging and fast-moving field of conversational media. It was a spin-off from my main blog, Contentious.

However, it's proven to me more work than I can handle to keep up both blogs. So I've decided to fold this blog back into Contentious.

I'll be leaving this site up for the time being, as I migrate the content here over to Contentious so it's all in one place (and findable by a single site search engine). But eventually I will redirect this domain to the conversational media category on Contentious.

Thanks for reading The Right Conversation. If you want to continue reading about conversational media as well as other news and musing from Amy Gahran about how we communicate in the online age, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed or e-mail alerts at Contentious.

links for 2007-08-01

• projo.com | Subterranean Homepage News
  Facebook backlash: "Facebook is a walled garden, not indexed by search engines. Shelley Powers is not bothered by imposters, but by The Ugly Face of Facebook -- the "bias and bigotry in Facebook against older people."
  (tags: social+media problems)
• The state of Internet TV: more like an unincorporated territory at TV MAMA
  Amy Gahran, journalist and blogger: “I subscribe to several video blogs, and yes I watch them on my computer. No, I don’t feel any desire to watch them on TV, but I’m not a TV person anyway.”"
  (tags: mycoverage tv video)

links for 2007-07-31

• Co.mments - Will it Fly this Time? (Lumpy's Corner)
  "I have been using the new co.mment service for about a day now. Here is what I have noticed..."
  (tags: comments comment-tracking trends blogs)
• A Comment About Comments ~ Windows Fanatics
  "Blog comments are… just about dead. I’m not saying that they don’t happen, but inline community commentary isn’t as strong as it used to be. There are certainly breakaway posts, but even when bloggers beg for insight, it doesn’t come easily."
  (tags: blogs comments trends)
• Learning The Lessons of Nixon » Managing Comments on Your Blog
  "the issue of having a comment policy has come up. I did a bunch of research on this topic, so here’s a summary: After reviewing a ton of blog policies, I discovered three basic types of comment policy: Free speech zone. , discourse zone, living room zo
  (tags: blogs comments conversational+media civility conversation)

links for 2007-07-29

• Welcome to Maplecroft Maps
  global map of digital inclusion
  (tags: world)

links for 2007-07-28

• BlogHers Act: Live from Chicago! | BlogHer
  At the conference look for a bunch a cool things related to BlogHers Act: the big reveal of the BlogHers Act Global Initiative, the working sessions on BlogHers Act, the BlogHers Act election project and BlogHers Act Canada!
  (tags: blogs blogher events global activism citizen+journalism tidbits+fodder)
• Food Blog S'cool
  blogs community
• Google Custom Search Engine - Site search and more
  Have a website or collection of sites you'd like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.
  (tags: tools search)

links for 2007-07-26

• 'You have nice eyes': Artist's machine flatters passers-by : Nation and World : Boulder Daily Camera
  A whole new take on conversational media: "WASHINGTON — People walking by a bright red-and-white striped box on a busy street in the nation’s capital may be surprised to hear a reassuring voice say, “You have nice eyes.”
  (tags: conversational+media art psychology human+nature fun)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)
  "Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other. In truth, that was, long ago, the job newspapers saw for themselves."
  (tags: news business local media people newspapers history roles community tidbits+fodder)

links for 2007-07-22

• Susan Mernit's Blog: Fads of the moment: 10 things we can learn from Facebook
  "We want to be local, not global. Local is a state of mind."
  (tags: social+networks social+media local)
• Steve Outing » Why newspapers should give it away free
  "Reading habits — especially among younger people but certainly not limited to them — lead away from print. Papers must present their product (news coverage) online and to mobile devices — and of course make money from that."
  (tags: newspapers media+evolution tidbits+fodder business)
• Open Source » Blog Archive » We Interrupt This Program…
  "We learned late last week that a brand-name media company that had asked to partner with us had changed its mind. So for now, the best hope on the near horizon of relaunching the program and refinancing it has gone aglimmering."
  (tags: problems radio blogs money conversational+media community tidbits+fodder)
• “Hackers Can Now Deliver Viruses via Web Ads” Wall Street Journal Headline Exaggerates the Danger - The Internet Patrol
  "For the most part, the only way that clicking on a link in an ad could cause something to be downloaded to your computer would be if the source code for the ad was provided by some 3rd party, not one of the trusted online advertising vendors."
  (tags: advertising media business credibility problems journalism tidbits+fodder)

links for 2007-07-11

• Blogger media - a new branch of journalism?
  "According to Amy Gahran, a Boulder-based blogging guru, "Anyone can commit an act of journalism." In a recent blog, she characterized journalism as "a collection of practices that can be done by anyone - not just a select few anointed by certain types of
  (tags: mycoverage blogs journalism)

links for 2007-07-10

• Digg, Fark bring traffic - but is it good? - Lost Remote TV Blog
  "Viral attention drives up unique user and pageview counts - but its a little bit like a quick high. The folks surfing in from Digg aren’t likely interested in local advertisers - and actually drag down our pageview to unique user count - since they are
  (tags: advertising statistics social+media problems tidbits+fodder)
• Give Them 90 Minutes and They’ll Make You a Better… « Hidden Speaker Treasures of the Internet
  "When Amy Gahran speaks, I listen. Recently she wrote: “One task that’s been bouncing around on my to-do list for more than a year, I’m ashamed to admit, is to make better use of the online professional networking service Linked In.”
  (tags: mycoverage networking career social+media web2.0)
• Splashpress Media Launches Community Blogs : The Blog Herald
  "We also adopted the Blog Herald’s design concept of having featured articles, but we also organized these into sections. This way, the contributors and the editors would be able to showcase select articles as sticky posts accessible from the front page
  (tags: blogs networking community)
• David Card - "Live" Earth?
  The main three-hour American TV broadcast on NBC averaged a meager 2.7 million viewers, ranking as the least-watched U.S. program on Saturday night and falling below NBC's summer prime-time Saturday average, Nielsen Media Research reported on Monday.
  (tags: media problems advocacy events)
• VentureBeat » Quantcast becomes latest widget traffic tracker
  A number of companies now offer widget traffic measurement tools, with Quantcast being the latest. Here’s a summary of some of the main players in this nascent but increasingly important field:
  (tags: tidbits+fodder widgets statistics)
• SEO & Link Building Via Blog Comments
  "If you take the time to comment on at least 3 blogs per day, with a back link back to your website, the end result will be an extra 100 incoming links per month, or 1,200 links per year - with little effort on your own part."
  (tags: blogs comments traffic conversational+media credibility PR+marketing)