backtype – Climb to the Stars

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

: Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now, because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links [en]

I hope the provocative title grabbed your attention.

Let me say it straight out: my blog is not dead, neither are our links.

But I still have a point.

Twitter is IRC on steroids, for those of you who have already experienced the irresistable draw of a chatroom full of smart witty people, 24/7. Twitter is my very own IRC channel, where I do not have to hear those I do not care about. It’s less geeky than IRC, which means that many of my “online spaces” collide there.

It’s intoxicating. I love it. I can spend all day there.

But that’s not why I would provocatively say that it has killed my blog. Twitter is a content-sharing space, not just a super IRC channel. Found an interesting link? Five years ago, it would have morphed into a blog post, because that was pretty much the only way to share it. Nowadays, dump it in Twitter. Arrived safely at destination? Again, 5 years ago, blog post. Now, tweet.

New tools have an impact on how we use old tools. Sometimes we abandon them altogether, but most of the time, we just redefine the way we use them. This is what I was trying to explore in the first panel I ever moderated, at BlogTalk 2008 (crappy video).

So, no, Twitter did not kill my blog, but take a group of bloggers and give them Twitter accounts, and the temperature of the blogosphere changes. All the high-speed stuff moves to Twitter.

If you just look at the present, it’s no big deal. People are still connecting. That’s what all this social media/software is about, right? Connecting people. Online. But the problem with us spending all our time swimming in the real-time stream is that it’s just that, a real-time stream. Not much is left of it once it has passed.

Take this short piece about translation I wrote nearly 10 years ago. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s still there, as readable as it was when I wrote it. Had this taken place on Twitter, nothing much would be left of it. Gone with the wind, if I dare say.

Many many years ago when I first started blogging (can you tell I’m on a nostalgic streak?), blogs did not have comments. Hell, I barely even had permalinks when I started. Permalinks were the key, though: they allowed bloggers to link to each other’s writings.

And we did. Conversations would bounce from blog to blog. They weren’t chatty like on IM, IRC, or Twitter. They were blog-post-speed conversations. We would have to think (a little) before we wrote.

Even though comments are a wonderful invention and I would never want to take them back, they did ruin this, in a way. People started leaving comments all over the place and didn’t come back to their blogs to write about the conversations they were participating in. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited about coComment when it came out, or services like BackType (which also seems to have backed out of tracking comments one makes) or Disqus. (Aside: see, I’d love somebody to hire me to do some research and write a memo on the current state of the comment-tracking-sphere and all the players involved. I could totally see myself doing that.)

With comments came less of an incentive to link to each other on our blogs. With Twitter (and Facebook), less of an incentive to share certain things on our blogs, and also, less of an incentive to comment, as it became much easier to just “tweet a quickie” to the post author (therefore making our activity visible to all our followers). And with the death of Technorati tags (I’ll call it that), we bloggers are now connecting to each other on other social networks than the blogosphere.

I think it’s time to actively reclaim the blogosphere as our own, after leaving it for too long at the hands of marketing and PR.

Bloggers, it’s time to wake up! Write blog posts. Link to your fellow bloggers. Leave comments on their posts, or better, respond to them on your blogs.

We don’t have to abandon Twitter and Facebook — just remember that first and foremost, we are writers, and that “conversation” (though ’tis a wonderful thing) is not writing.

Secrets of my Online Presence Revealed! [en]

[fr] Un tour d'horizon de la façon dont je gère ma présence en ligne, des outils que j'utilise et à quelles fins.

I was having a chat with Kevin this morning, and realised that though the way I had organised my online presence seemed obvious to me, it could hold some interest for other people. So, for your enlightenment and enjoyment, I am sharing with you the secrets of my life online these days and how the different tools and services I use fit in.

The backbone of my online presence is my blog Climb to the Stars, which you’re reading. That’s where my thinking goes. This is, I hope, my contribution. I don’t write here as often as I’d like to.

Aside from Climb to the Stars, I have a professional website (a bit static and inevitably out-of-date, but it’s a start). I’m intermittently active on project-specific blogs of mine: Going Far, Going Solo, eclau, Coworking Léman. I’m also involved professionally on two blogs which aren’t mine: Fleur de Pains and the ebookers.ch travel blog, both in French. At some point I did a podcast with my friend Suw Charman-Anderson, Fresh Lime Soda.

As you can see, blogging in the traditional way is far from dead for me.

My photos are on Flickr (thousands of them), most of my videos are on Viddler (a few dozen). I use Skitch to take screenshots (= photographs of my life in cyberspace) but I publish them to Flickr too.

Another very important way of “being online” for me is Twitter. Using Twitter has brought about a change in my online habits: I’m on IRC way less than I used to (still there, on irc.freenode.net, but idle and disconnected usually) and I’ve more or less loss the use for my Cheese Sandwich blog, where I used to write more “uninteresting” and personal stuff. It remains online, of course, and every now and again I write something in it, but Twitter turns out to be a better outlet for these short snippets of life I used to post there. Another “new” tool (new in the sense that it wasn’t around when I started blogging nearly 9 years ago) that has also reduced my need for a second, “personal” blog is Facebook.

I know a bunch of techy-type geeks are poo-poohing Facebook now (after the honeymoon), but I’ve actually become more involved in it during these last months, as a greater and greater proportion of my offline friends (people who don’t have blogs, don’t IM, haven’t heard of Twitter) are joining it. I use Facebook and Twitter in parallel, but I guess for me the major difference between the two is that I reach a very different audience. Facebook also has some measure of privacy, and I’m connected to way less people than on Twitter, so you’ll often find me a little bit more personal over there. That’s also the reason why I don’t crosspost my status messages between the two services.

I chat on IM a lot, and now on Facebook too. For me, it’s the necessary one-on-one complement to the rest of my rather public life online. I don’t use Skype much (usually upon request, or for certain people I have on Skype but not on my IM list).

For many years now, I’ve been storing my bookmarks on del.icio.us. I’m not somebody who enjoys organising things in hierarchies, so the tag-based mess over there is fine for me. Feedburner inserts a daily summary of those links in my RSS feed. I’ve tried Diigo, and liked it, but for some reason it didn’t stick and got lost in a browser upgrade. Maybe I’ll try again one of these days. I have a very passive account on Last.fm, and the obligatory YouTube, DailyMotion, Dopplr (etc.) accounts, but I’m not very active on them.

I have a VodPod account which I use a bit like “del.icio.us for videos”, but which I’ve fallen out of love with because it keept logging me out and wouldn’t let me log back in (with OpenID) in the pop-up window. So much for one-click bookmarklet publishing. In the video department, I also have a seesmic account, where I am intermittently active. Huge bursts during a few days/weeks, and then nothing at all for month.

I’ve always wanted a way to collect all the stuff I do/publish online into a single lifestream somewhere. I’m not sure anybody would actually want to follow it, but I guess it helps me feel “whole” rather than scattered all over the place. I tried out Suprglu for this ages ago, and was happy with it until the service didn’t seem to be able to follow anymore. Then I used Jaiku for that purpose, and briefly Tumblr (but I was feeding Tumblr into Jaiku too, so it was a mess and I stopped quickly).

Friendfeed came along and seemed the ideal lifestreaming application. SocialThing looked promising, but like Diigo I guess, it didn’t stick for me. I tried being active on friendfeed, but it didn’t really stick either (a few things bother me: I can’t have a summary page with just the items of mine which were liked or commented upon; it’s also very “noisy” for me, in terms of the amount of data it displays, and it displays it in an incomplete form, forcing me to click and come back, click and come back& anyway). So friendfeed sits there, happily lifestreaming me to the world, and to the sidebar of Climb to the Stars.

One old obsession of mine has always been comments. Way before cocomment, I had a tendancy to keep copies of my long comments elsewhere, or bookmark them. I now use backtype to capture my comments. (I also have a Disqus account but it’s pretty passive.)

I’ve recently become much more active on Tumblr, where I have a tumblelog, tentatively named Digital Crumble. As with many tools, I had an account for a long time before finally “getting it”. I’ve found a good handful of interesting people to follow and reblog, and I use it to publish all sorts of random “secondary” content: short notes, my comments (imported via backtype), my screenshots (via Flickr), my collected videos (via VodPod, but probably in future directly through Tumblr). But mainly, I use Tumblr to publish quotes. I’ve always been a note-taker. When I read a book, it’s with a pencil. When it’s only, I highlight paragraphs I like and with the click of a bookmarklet, send them to Tumblr, complete with an automatic link to the source.

This is one of the reasons I use feedly as my feed reader (when I use one), as it allows me to publish quotes and annotations to Tumblr.

Digital Crumble is quickly becoming an important companion to Climb to the Stars: Climb to the Stars for my stuff, and Digital Crumble for things that others have said or created.

I will spare you the long list of services I have an account at but don’t use actively (plus, I’m sure as soon as I’ll hit publish, I’ll think of something I should have included).

I hope this little peek into my online life will have satisfied your curiousity about the life of the pink-haired online geek :-).

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