Thinking about the relationship between
- sites or services that don’t generate easily digested text content and
- strategies their proprietors use to squeeze a weblog or similar attention stream out of whatever does get generated.
Sometimes [1] is because there’s not enough text — maybe a video site — and sometimes it’s because there’s too much text — like a wiki. Any wiki weirdo can glaze over at RecentChanges, but it’s data, not narrative.
Ideally, there’s a weblog or proto-weblog that serves as a single, high-level summary of what’s going on: if you’re going to watch just one thing, that’s the thing; or if you’re trying to understand the service and take the community’s pulse, it’s what you load up and skim over.
So here’s what I got, relevant examples culled from my personal web haunts.
If there are any bird’s-eye blogs you think are particularly effective or ineffective I’d enjoy hearing about them.
AboutUs
AboutUs has a daily stream of featured wiki pages on its front page, and a separate log of conversation and cool stuff called the DailyBuzz. There’s a separate AboutUsWeblog.org, which is a Wordpress blog that republishes some of the featured pages — but not all of them, or at least not on a regular schedule — along with random clippings from the DailyBuzz and the occasional free-form blog post. Blog posts are typically written in the hasty, careless tone that pervades the AboutUs house organs — if you listen, you can hear the copywriting sausage grinder whining away.
CommunityWiki
The CommunityWiki used to have a cool front-page faux weblog as described here, but apparently it didn’t get exported to the future.
Hiveminder
Two prongs for Hiveminder: a Best Practical weblog which has announcements about all of the company’s products and some human interest stuff, and Hiveminder News for product-specific notices. Both blogs are written in a fun and sometimes digressive “friendly programmer” voice. The Hiveminder News is baked into the product, and the updates are usually nice and terse, with the occasional longer introduction for a new feature. Awesome!
Plazes
The Plazes crew keeps blog.plazes.com, which is the usual jumble of product announcements plus publicity and corporate updates. The thing I appreciate about the Plazes blog is that is showcases the mashups, integrations, and art projects people have done using the Plazes API and feeds. These community_indicators are signs of life for the service, but they also do a better job of demonstrating what Plazes is all about than the Plazes site itself can. For a service which you need to have an active network and client software in order to really enjoy, seeing some of these projects gives a hint of what the experience might be like.
Revver
Revver (aka Commie Youtube) has a very active blog that streams a mix of service status crap and surfaced videos. Seems like a few missed information interior decoration opportunities, though: the blog is buried in footer navigation on the main Revver site, its branding is way off — the header is a video thumbnail montage which fundamentally looks like crap, and you have to work your way beneath the fold in order to find the new Transformers-esque Revver logo (which appears only in the little tiny video rolls in the sidebar).
Matt | 10-Jun-07 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
I’ve been trying to think of ways to link ArborWiki and ArborUpdate closer together, because it feels like CommunityNews + CommunityRepository would mesh well. Maybe there’s some interest — I’ll ask at the next work session.
Brian | 10-Jun-07 at 1:43 pm | Permalink
I think the trick is coming up with the editorial calendar and related content pipeline to make sure that quality blog materials fall out of whatever else is going on. (Albeit with whatever amount of priming.)
Or: the weblog is a machine.
After this post, I had a nice conversation with somebody from one of the projects I wrote about; seems like this is definitely the challenge for them. Fortunately, they’re sitting on enough (not a huge amount, but enough) excellent content to make some pretty nicely leveraged improvements.
The challenge for any Arbor Update / Arborwiki / (Yspi)wiki / DowntownYpsi / Ron Suarez ghostwiki wikiwikicobweb city council stuff / Critical Moment / etc. integrations is that I don’t see that much overlap in the readerships, at this point. None of them are exactly thriving, either (with the notable exception of Critical Moment + Critical Bloggers).
An opportunity I definitely see is for somebody to write focused “pulse of the blogosphere” commentary drawing from all of the above. Here’s what’s happening this week, and here’s what a sort of diffuse yet geographically linked set of people are saying about it. As a random example, Ed Vielmetti has been surfacing a lot of great stuff about dueling realtors (worse than dueling banjos) in the Pfizer Pfired aftermath.
Somebody who has the attention stream to slog through all this stuff and do some high-level linking and thinking could produce a really great digest.
But, I’m not that somebody — at least not this year.
Edward Vielmetti | 27-Jul-07 at 11:31 pm | Permalink
In Ann Arbor, at least, the Ann Arbor Observer print publication has a “pulse of the town” feel to it. (Alas, the pulse is from the perspective of someone who has been there since 1968, so it’s not the same pulse that I’m following).
The huge email list that I wish someone culled a weekly digest from is arborparents - that group generates so much traffic that’s relevant that you could create news from it. (and indeed I know it’s one of the attention streams that feeds into the Observer).