Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Citizen media innovation Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor: The disruption has never been higher than Web 2.0, but the cost of experimentation has never been lower. The R&D of media will happen everywhere, not just media companies. They will do the bulk of tomorrow’s R&D.

A lot of us have been talking about disruption and the democratistion of media not in the sense of voting but in terms of participation, production and access. The media used to think that we make stuff and distribution. We have a read-write web. People are not just consumers but collaborators.

There is also competition in the business model. eBay and Craigslist compete with classifies. Advertising revenues for Google will soon top television. What is the creative part of this? Data. Podcasts. Pictures. Blog posts. World of Warcraft. Halu hotel. Videos from the tsunami.

Also, data is places, and he showed Placeblogger, a site that aggregates blog posts based on places.

The question is not who is a journalist but what is journalism, and he showed off a professor’s economics blog. He mentioned the mobile phone pictures of the 7 July 2005 bombing in London. NGO’s can do advocacy journalism on their own and amplify their own messages. NGO’s can build trust. Corporations can do newsmaking, not press releases.

Press releases typically sound like a Turing Machine mated with a lawyer, but blogs can sound like human beings and provide useful information for people who care.

Journalism itself is moving from lecture to conversation and that is a great thing. It’s crucial to include the people who before were the audience. The first rule of conversation is to listen, and it’s not something that we do apart from listening to our sources. We listen to our sources.

We love readers, plural, but we’re kind of freaked out about reader, singular, who may call us out.

They are building converged newsrooms and adding staff blogs. But it still is freaking out journalists because people are saying things that they can’t control.

Adrian Holovaty who recently left the Washington Post to create EveryBlock.com. He pioneered using databases for journalism. It’s helping to record history, something that journalists should do but many don’t do. Los Angeles Times got a hold of a property database with foreclosures or possible foreclosures in California. People can simply add their zip code and find out foreclosures in their area.

Dan also showed a mashup of homes sold, plotted on a map, showing homes that sold for less than local governments thought they were worth. It was posted not by a journalist but created by a real estate agent who thought it was important. Why don’t media people do this?

I call this journalism just not done by someone who calls themselves a journalist. He showed a map of bombings in Iraq using a site called Platial. His students at Berkeley created this. No newspaper that Dan knows of has done this.

In Bakersfield, they created a pothole map. People could put a pin on the map showing potholes. They could add pictures. They could list potholes that have been fixed.

He also showed video mashups, an important new form of video commentary. Young people know to mix-up culture, but not journalists.

Journalists have changed from oracles to guides. No news organisations can cover everything. They should point to other stuff that they don’t do. AftenBlat in Sweden has a blog portal. If you send people away for good stuff, they will come back for more.

It’s a good start, but the next level is to get people deeper into the process beyond comments. That includes something like a Fort Meyers Florida newspaper did. They saw a rise in water utility rates. The readers responded to a terrific amount of information. The readers helped them investigate the story.

The BBC was early in asking for pictures from the audience. It is now routine. We should be careful about asking people to take risks.

He gives a few examples iconic photos from stories including the London bombings, the Thai coup and bombings in Jakarta. He said that authenticity is important, possibly more than traditional measures of quality.

He also points to SourceForge, a place for Open Source projects. The top projects get thousands of downloads. He takes a look at the long tail of downloads on the site. Most of the downloads are so low that they are approaching zero.

Clay Shirky says the cost of trying things is approaching zero. “There are few institutional barriers between thought and action.” That most of the projects fail is not a bug. It’s so cheap to fail, but the important thing is to learn. That is one of the hidden strengths of Silicon Valley.

He highlighted Dopplr, a project that he is involved in. It allows you to know about

People can focus on niche subjects or go hyperlocal. Newspaper project can lead to software development – see the Bakotopia project. This wasn’t done by a big media company but by a small, family-owned newspaper.

Trust and reliability need a lot of work. Too much data. We can move from the Daily me to the Daily Us, and he showed off Newsvine.

To approach distributed R&D, be open, don’t reinvent wheels, collaborate and take risks. Companies must give their employees the ability to fail creatively. That is why a lot of people strike out on their own to do it.

Martin Stabe of the Press Gazette’s Fleet Street 2.0 has uploaded the audio of the full talk (with a little help from his friends ; )

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06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Does social media have legs?

  • Walid al Saqqaf, COO TrustedPlaces.com
  • Philip Wilkinson, founder crowdstorm.com
  • Euan Semple, independent consultant
  • Justin Davies, founder Buddyping
  • Paul Carr, FridayCities
  • Jemima Gibbons, co-founder and MD, I Know How
  • Mike Butcher, moderator

Walid: We received a half a million pounds. TrustedPlaces is an ever growing website. We’re going to use it to improve the product and improve the recommendation and personalisation engine.

Mike: One of the biggest criticisms of Web 2.0 companies is that they launch features not companies. Are you a feature or a company?

Walid: We’re a company. We’re here to improve people’s lifestyles. How many people go to the same restaurants and bars? Exactly.

Mike: How do you differ from TrustedPlaces?

Paul: Exciting place, local information and personalisation. Our idea is to ask a question about any place, not just restaurants and bars. I think there is room to achieve the same goal in different ways.

Local social networks are a big thing. It’s inevitable that there will be a correction. It’s not going away, but hopefully this is something that will evolve.

Justin BuddyPing: Mobile is exciting because you know what people are looking for. On mobile, people aren’t browsing. They are looking for specific bits of information.

Mike: Jemima, what’s your view of Web 2.0 startups?

Jemima: Lots of people talking about social networks and money to be made of. The voice in media are hearing are white male voices. There is only one social site where you see a lot of faces. There are a lot of people not being included in social networks.

E-democracy and participation, I’m interested in the social enterprise issue.

Philip: People invest in social networks. They don’t want to have to invest time in that, find something useful only to have to move to a new network.

Euan: Surprised how new media becomes old media. It quickly became something to own and be fought over and controlled over.

There is a complacency about how to manage this. Reboot last week, I found it quite smug. They were slightly disparaging about people who didn’t get it.

Walid: I don’t think that this is middle class thing. He pointed out a lot of ethnicities on TrustedPlaces like suggesting Ethiopian restaurants.

Mike: I just finished uploading all of my information to Facebook, and now I’m tired.

Paul: When people stop wanting to know information about the cities they live, we’re in trouble. We had a bit of a crisis with the whole middle class, white thing. Aren’t we all terribly white and middle class? Yes, we are. We’re the most likely to sit in a computer for half of our days.

But when you bring in mobile, that will change.

Question. Everything that we’re doing here in the UK is being done but on a larger scale and with more money. It’s a very advanced model. In the States, the venture capital that you can access is so much greater.

Mike: Perennial problem of UK start-ups.

Walid: Well, the US forget that we’re European. We know European cultures and norms.

Do you believe that there is sufficient capital in the UK to run a company?

Justin: A good idea in the US is based on your education and background. It is down to your academic background.

OK, my two cents here. I’m sorry Justin. That’s not true. Yes, there are a probably a lot of people from Stanford who get a look in from the California VCs, but the networks aren’t based solely on education. Certaiinly, just as in the UK, education jump starts your business social network, but unless you’re applying for a gig at Google, they don’t care so much about your educational background.

Besides, I know several British and European companies or entrepreneurs who went to the US for one thing: Funding. Surely, they didn’t meet their VC contact at Stanford. No, many left for VC or angel funding because the money was available and the terms were better. Someone Twitter-ed earlier this spring that a European VC wanted 5% ownership for a €5000 investment. That’s a ridiculously small investment and a big ask for a young company.

Jason Calacanis said that entrepreneurs need to support each other more and dream more. You guys are way too cynical. You beat each other more. The press is more pessimistic. He said that he got his ass kicked at the Geek Dinner last night. He said that 60 to 70% of the comments were negative last night. If I were you, I’d go to the US to start up my company. There is a reason that the big companies come out of the US. We dream bigger. Where is Europe’s Google?

Another comment from the audience was that the difference between the US and the European market was the angel investor. Angel investors not only provide money but also provide support and guidance.

Kyle McRae from Scoopt said that VCs here in the UK were absolutely risk-averse. (A guy applauded in the back of the room.) They got VC interest in the US, but it was on the condition that they move to the US. They couldn’t move, but they were forced to sell the business. And he agreed with Jason that cynicism reigned.

It wasn’t a very uplifting discussion. I didn’t like and don’t want to contribute to the US versus Europe feel to the discussion, but I also know from experience that it is easier for companies to get funding in the US than in Europe. It is changing, but unfortunately, for a lot of European entrepreneurs not fast enough for them to be able to grow their companies here.

06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Old Guard, New Tricks

  • Jem Stone, BBC New Media
  • Tom Bureau, Managing Director, CNET Networks
  • Meg Pickard, Head of Communities and User Experience, Guardian Unlimited
  • Adam Gee, New Media Commissioner, Channel 4
  • Paul Pod, TIOTI
  • Ashley Norris, Shiny Media
  • Nico Macdonlad, Spy.co.uk
  • Jeff Revoy, VP of Search and Social Media, Yahoo! Europe
  • Mike Butcher, moderator

I think I agree with Euan Semple sitting next to me. This isn’t a panel, it’s the Last Summer.

Nico: (In response to question about his criticism about the Guardian’s Comment is Free) I met Georgina Henry recently on a panel about social media, and I’m going to start writing for Comment is Free because it’s a great platform.

He says he has seen fads come and go. Media need to understand the trends. Disaggregation is going on. Many social institutions are losing their credibility. These trends are real. It needs to take an objective and rational view about them.

Mike: Can media win back trust?

Meg: Big media need to know that they have something to learn from our audiences. Gaining trust is not end. It’s a means. We need to learn from these social environments. Big media organisations don’t need to be all things to all people. We shouldn’t be trying to replace but embrace social media. Is creating a Twitter or Blogspot clone the business that we are in?

Adam: I think that traditional media are in a good place to achieve public tasks by putting participation in place. The project that I just launched is going to create the first map of public art in the UK in partnership with Moblog.co.uk. There is an underlying public task.

Jem: Lee Bryant talked about Comment is Free and the BBC and problem of social sites and news. He talked about ‘drive-by commenting’. I think that’s a fair criticism of what the BBC has done over the last 10 years. We haven’t been focused enough of why we are getting in touch with you. He quoted Maplin & Webb making fun of the BBC. “Do you reckon? What do you reckon? Get in touch with the BBC?”

He talked about sites like Flickr and YouTube. Should we get in there and moderate that? What are the rules? If we get involved, what are the risks? What are the risks to our brand?

Paul: One of the things with the BBC putting stuff out on the internet, out on YouTube, you have another layer of community. It’s getting quite complicated. Where does this stuff sit? We’re quite open to cooperation.

Jem: It’s a platform for discussion about content we produce. We’re comfortable with that. Is CBS, ITV or Channel 4 comfortable with that? I don’t know.

Tom CNET: Obviously, trusted content is our main business. A small group of users want to discuss the content. We call it an architecture of participation. We invite them to contribute the best quality content. We raise the bar quite high.

Jeff Yahoo: Two trends driving this. Broadband and technology. Anyone with iPod can be a DJ. Anyone with a computer and the internet can become a blogger.

It could centre around areas of passion like photos with Flickr. It could be about socialising with MySpace. It could be about information like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. It’s about providing the user the best experience.

Mike: Is Comment is Free it? Is Have Your Say it?

Meg: We’re looking to a more granular approach. People consume things. Casual users might rate or recommend. Interaction adding their comments, and then curation being the heaviest level of activity. Right now, we’re seeing one level of that. How do people move from consumers to creators on our site? How do fund that proposition? How do we encourage people to become catalysts? Certainly, this is not it.

It goes back to trust, but it’s less about being trust and more about creating relationships.

Mike: Where does the journalist sit in this?

Tom CNET: Great question. On Silicon.com, specialist site for CIOs. With a cross section of our audience, there will be members of the audience who know more. They might not have presentation skills like journalist, but they have specialist knowledge. But maybe they don’t have the story telling skills.

Users as a broad-based community are setting the agenda.

Mike: XFM has switched to user-generated programming. Does anyone want to talk to that.

Ashley: I think we’re a long way from that. I think a lot of journalists despise new media. They still believe that they are delivering the truth. New media are bolting it on. They are asking people for user-generated content.

From Shiny Media’s point of view, from the blogosphere, big media has very little respect for bloggers. Daily Mail or Sun very rarely link out. There is a thriving British blogosphere but they very rarely get linked to by big media. There has to be training of journalists.

(Yes, I’m working on that at the day job, getting more training for our journalists at the Guardian.)

Nico: Publishing tools for print don’t support links to content outside their sites.

Let’s not over-state what we can do with social media. Government is working to get back to us. They will use these tools in a real instrumentalist way.

I’m interested in a real high-level discussion. No publication make it easy for people to post. People need to see related content. People need to see content filtered through people through a few degrees of separation from you on social networks.

There was a question from the audience about whether big media saw UGC as a cheap replacement for content.

Meg quoted me in what I often say that not all content should have comments, meaning that a blog post is different from a news article. I think it’s better to make it simple to people to blog about, recommend or share traditional content than simply throw comments on everything. Meg quotes me in that a work of journalism is meant to tie together as many threads as possible, whereas a blog post teases out a thread for discussion or debate.

I also wanted to tease out my tongue-in-cheek post from last week. I wasn’t saying that journalists can’t be trained to be good bloggers but rather that many times, in the obsession with big names and branding, news organisations rush their most prominent writers to blog instead of looking for passionate niche writers who love the interaction to blog. I give props to the NYTimes for getting their wine critic Eric Asimov to blog on The Pour. It’s a brilliant blog, a great virtual tasting room.

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06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Calacanis condemns ‘internet pollution’

Jason Calacanis doesn’t mince words. He calls SEO optimisers ‘the slime of the earth’.

SEO is destroying the web.

Search engines created the market for SEO optimisers because there wasn’t a way to correct search results. Today, we don’t build web sites for humans but for machines, to appeal to Google’s spiders, Calacanis said.

We’re not focused on the right things. If you create open system on the web, it will be abused by everyone. Technorati is open to everything and is being flooded by ‘splogs’. Technorati indexes everything so it is promoting garbage, Calacanis said.

The web and the blogosphere is being destroyed. Bloggers are being plied by marketers, and he mentioned Microsoft and their Acer Ferrari laptop marketing programme with bloggers. He mentioned Edelman’s Wal*Mart faux blog campaign.

We need to stand up to one of these slime buckets who comes into our town and pisses in our well. We have to stop them.

If you’re trying to do this marketing, ask Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer or Dan Gillmor before you do this, he said.

Months ago, he started doing user testing with Google, Yahoo and Ask, asking them what they thought of their experience with search. They had cameras on iMacs. He played some of the videos. People said that it wasn’t easy to get the information they wanted. People felt that the results were based on what marketers wanted, not what they wanted.

Jason said that user testing was a ‘truly humbling experience’. He announced Mahalo a couple of weeks ago at the Wall Street Journal D5 conference. That was about a third of the strategy. The new Mahalo Greenhouse is the other third. Another third, he hasn’t figured out.

They will do one of three things when they get sent a link. They will either accept it, ban it (if it’s spam) or let it sit to see if a number of people submit it. If you deserve to be on the page, you can debate it, in public, on the discussion forums.

He accused Ask of being deceptive with their ad placement. You get one ‘organic link’ if you search for iPod on Ask, Calacanis said. On Mahalo, not only do you get links to Apple and about iPods, but you also get links to videos on YouTube showing someone putting an iPod in a blender.

He has been criticised by SEO companies, but he hopes to put them out of business so that they ‘stop polluting the internet’.

They are looking for people with experience in social networks and directories (think DMOZ). Some people have criticised me in the past for paying people for work.

It’s one of the contradictions of Web 2.0 that VCs, CEOs, programmers and marketers get to make money but not writers and editors.

He was asked about internationalisation. Results chosen by Americans in Santa Monica might not be the same as those in London or Sydney.

Calacanis agreed but said that payment systems, taxes and internationalisation were too much to bite off in the first pass. He wanted to focus on the US market and build the business there before trying to expanding to other markets.

This is a question I don’t have the answer to. How does Google’s algorithms or Technorati’s, for that matter, do international search? Beyond language or domain restrictions? How does it determine results in English for the UK market, Australia, New Zealand?

Who are the guides? Calacanis says that there are a lot of under-employed people in LA. Euan Semple just asked, “With people losing faith in institutions like the BBC, why should I trust a bunch of under-employed people in LA to make judgements for me?”

The way you earn trust is everyday, Calacanis said. If we screw up, I’ll admit it, and I’ll fix it. As long as I’m there, you’ll be guaranteed that we’ll fight bias.

Euan remains unconvinced. “That’s so naive.”

06.13.07
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Mahalo Greenhouse to crowdsource search

At the NMK Forum in London, Jason Calacanis has just announced Mahalo Greenhouse, part of the recently launched Mahalo human-assisted search directory. The Greenhouse will allow the public to add search results and, if accepted by the site’s guides, get paid for them.

Mahalo launched on 30 May at the D5 conference. It’s been billed as a human-powered search engine, but it’s more of a ‘human-powered wiki’ listing search topics and links instead of encyclopedia entries like Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, Wired called it “a version of Wikipedia with advertisements“. The launch was met with much fanfare and a fair number of questions. Would it scale? Could it beat Google and its voracious algorithms? Why would it work better than Ask Jeeves or ChaCha?

A week ago, Jason asked on Facebook and LinkedIn:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo? … Wondering if you guys were me, what would you do next with Mahalo.

In response to the suggestions, they will now allow the public to submit search results on the Mahalo Greenhouse site to be evaluated by the full-time guides that site employs. Right now, they’ve got 40 full-time guides, but they expect that to increase eventually to 100.

Jason’s thinking is that Reuters, AP and DowJones employ hundreds of people to write editorial content, why not employ 100 people to curate search.

He’s not trying to compete with Google and Yahoo on ‘long-tail search’ but rather focus on curated results for the top one-third of search. This is not about being broad and deep but about being relevant and providing results for the most lucrative search terms. Right now, they have about 5,000 search terms, but they plan to eventually reach 25,000.

To scale to that number faster, they decided to use the Greenhouse to crowdsource the best links, paying $10 to $15 per accepted submission. The more submissions a part-time guide submits, the more money they make per submission.

But what is the business model, and how will it scale to paying all of those guides? The business model is advertising. Search ads are the most desired ads for a reason, Calacanis said because people are indicating an interest at a particular point in time. They have entered something that they are looking for in a search box. It is not passive and wasteful, he said, like display advertising at a bus stop or on a billboard.

In many ways, it mirrors a commercial Wikipedia. Calacanis and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have clashed over whether to include advertising to support Wikipedia, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say that Calacanis is out to prove a point with Mahalo. In a not unsubtle rebuttal to Wales, Calacanis said that if part-time guides don’t want their payment because they believe in the concept of free culture, they can donate their payment to Wikipedia. Mahalo has already earmarked up to $250,000 this year to donate to Wikipedia in lieu of pay for guides who request it.

Mahalo may sell their own ads in one to two years’ time, Calacanis said, but right now, he believes it would be a waste of time and money trying to sell ads on the site before it reaches critical mass, a lesson he learned at AOL.

But he knows that this will take time to build out the number of search terms and also to build the traffic necessary to attract advertising. “This is a big project like building the Brooklyn Bridge or Central Park,” he said, adding that he’s committed to the long term and has enough money to fund the site for five to six years. Backers include, Sequoia Capital (where Calacanis is an entrepreneur in action), Mark Cuban, Ted Leonsis of AOL, CBS, News Corp and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and SpaceX.

Calacanis believes that Mahalo is needed because:

the internet faces an environmental crisis of spam, (search engine optimisation), phishing, adware and spyware.

The internet is becoming polluted, he said. The amount of bad information as well as good information is exploding. The internet needs curation. If nothing is done, he worries that in a few years the internet will become too difficult to navigate.

Some have questioned the value of subjective choices made by the Mahalo guides. Calacanis responds:

I would rather have a little bit of bias and debate and refine rather than have the machine get it wrong and not to get to talk back to the machine

Also, on controversial issues such as abortion or George W Bush, the site will list general information but also provide search results showing different points of view, such as pro and con, for and against.

Will they have Digg-like voting? No. Calacanis says that voting is meaningless because people often vote before visiting a site in Digg not after they have gone to the site to evaluate it.

Calacanis also wants to build in accountability for search terms submitted. People should own their words. Part time guides will have to use their real names if they want to be paid. In general, he believes that anonymity is useful in limited cases such as whistle-blowers.

Jimmy Wales is also working on a new search project possibly with some human element. The details remain vague, although Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a good interview with Wales about the project from last December. Like Wikipedia, many expect to have some human element in the search project, but all Wales said was:

Exactly how people can be involved is not yet certain. If I had to speculate about it, I would say it’s several of those things, not just community involved with rating URLs but also community rating for whole web sites, what to include or not to include and also the whole algorithm … That’s a human type process that we can empower people to guide the spider

Calacanis doesn’t see Wales’ project as a competitor. “I know that will be a disappointment for the media. It’s not a battle royale.”

In the interest of disclosure, I conducted this interview the day before the NMK forum in my role as blogs editor at the Guardian, not simply as an independent blogger. In as much, I agreed to abide by an embargo this post until the announcement at NMK.

06.12.07
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Did newspaper companies ever build printing presses?

Today, I was sittting in the lobby of a posh hotel waiting to interview Jason Calacanis about Mahalo, the human-powered search site that he recently launched. His plane was delayed for five hours, but he was on his way. As we watched members of Motley Crue traipse through the lobby, I got to chat to Wil Harris, and we were talking about innovation and news organisations, or possibly the lack of innovation. I said it was not in the DNA of most news organisations to develop products or software. Wil put it a great way:

Newspapers never felt the need to build their own printing presses.

Why do they feel the need to re-invent the wheel? We both asked. There is Drupal, WordPress and any number of third-party software vendors.

Just look at Mahalo. It runs on MediaWiki, and Jason uses Google AdSense on a few entries already to earn some revenue. As Jason told John Battelle:

Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We’re not going to sell ads directly… we’re gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.

Especially for a lot of small news organisations without the development budget, there are a lot of great web services that can quickly be adapted to build sites and services and generate revenue. Why build it all over again?

06.12.07
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links for 2007-06-12

06.09.07
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links for 2007-06-09

06.08.07
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links for 2007-06-08

06.08.07
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Blogging is like sex

Journalist attack threat level

Hang on, this is a bit of a conceit, an extended metaphor. I’ve heard some suggestions such as from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 that all journalists should blog. Sure, I’d love more journalists to embrace blogging. I am after all the blogs editor at the Guardian. Scott’s post has some great suggestions and tips for journalists who want to blog, and it’s worth a read for curious journalists who need to be pointed in the right direction for technically how to blog.

But I’d have to disagree that this is like writing a column or that it should be a place to publish things that you can’t publish elsewhere. Too often, news organisations who blog are accused (sometimes accurately) of populating their blogs with content that doesn’t quite make it onto their main news site.

Rather I’d suggest, both in content, tone and approach, news or media organisations have to editorially make it clear that this place is different, this is where we discuss things. This is where we engage with our audience for a number of reasons including transparency, debate and discussion or for tapping the wisdom of the our communities.

Now, if this is a place for engagement, media have to ask themselves before throwing their writers into an engagement space whether their writers want to or are able to engage with members of the public. Over and over and over, media get caught up in this silly brand/celeb obsession and push their biggest names to blog when really it’s more about getting your passionate members of staff to blog. We’ve just launched a food blog, Word of Mouth, at the Guardian, and it’s doing a storm because we’ve got a lot of passionate ‘foodies’ on staff writing about what they love and enjoying the conversation with others who share their passion.

This is a special skill, and to be perfectly honest, there are some journalists who not only don’t want to engage but, frankly, should be kept at a very safe distance from any member of the public. Some journalists who blog for their publications I’ve begun to assign a ‘personal threat level’, akin to the US terrorism theat level. “Today, there is an elevated chance of said journalist attacking a commenter.” You’ve all heard about when communities attack, but what about when journalists attack? This is social media, and you’re going to need some social skills.

The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can’t fake it. You can’t fake passion. You can’t fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers. Sure, for a while, the self-confident writer might sit back after crafting a lovely piece of prose and have some post-creative puffery, patting themselves on the back for their performance. But soon, they’ll find their blog is a very lonely place.

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