Who Will See My Comment? [en]

Another interesting observation following my return to Facebook: when somebody responds to one of my posts there, it definitely feels like the audience for this response is primarily the people I am connected to. What I mean by that is that I expect that my contacts have a chance of seeing that response, because responses are closely tied to the original content (“comments and post“ format).

On Bluesky or Mastodon (or Twitter for that matter, and it could partly explain why I drifted away at some point and started spending more time on Facebook), when somebody responds to one of my updates, I do not expect the people connected to me to see it. And indeed, if they are not following the person who responded, if they do not specifically open up my update to see if there are responses or if it is part of the thread, they will not see it. On those platforms, responses are much more “their own thing” than on Facebook or on a blog.

On Facebook, there is an immediate and visible feeling of micro-community around a publication, when people start commenting. It feels like we’ve just stepped into a break-out room. Participants get notifications, and come back to see responses. If the conversation becomes lively, it is made visible to more people. People will end up connecting to each other after having “met” repeatedly in a common friend’s facebook comments.

Bluesky, Mastodon and Twitter (yeah, and Threads) feel more fragmented. It’s more difficult to follow for lots of people. They are faced with bits and pieces of conversations flying about, and access to the context of those is not frictionless. Part of this, I think, has to do with how publication audience is managed (I’ll definitely have to do a “part 4” about this in my Rebooting the Blogosphere series). And another, of course, is the primacy of non-reciprocal connections on those platforms.

What Facebook also does that blogs do not at this stage, is that Facebook makes my comments on other people’s publications candidates for appearing in the news feeds of people who are connected to me. Every now and again, something of the form “Friend has commented on Stranger’s post” will show up. The equivalent in the blogging world would be having a “reading tool” (now RSS readers, but we need to go beyond that, that’s the Rebooting the Blogosphere part 3 post that I’m actively not writing these days) which will not only show me the blog posts that the people I’m following have written, but also that they have commented here or there, on another blog. This tightens the connection between people and contributes to discovery – ie, finding new people or publications to follow.

In summary: there is something fundamentally different in how Facebook, the other socials, and blogs make visible to a person’s network the comments/responses they have made elsewhere. And the “feeling of conversation/community” of multi-person exchanges also varies from one platform to another.

Sauvegarder des publications et fils de commentaires Facebook [en]

Maintenant que j’ai de nouveau (contre toute attente) accès à mon compte Facebook, ma première mission est de préserver, sous une forme ou une autre, ce que j’ai contribué là-bas depuis 18 ans. Cette mésaventure (on va dire ça maintenant que ma “disparition” n’aura duré que trois semaines) aura eu le bénéfice de me faire sentir dans mes tripes à quel point il est important de ne pas laisser du contenu auquel on tient uniquement dans les mains de grosses entreprises capitalistes qui gèrent leur plateforme à peine mieux que le ferait un régime totalitaire.

Première étape, demander un export de toutes mes données. Je voulais le faire ce printemps, j’ai baissé les bras devant les 52 fichiers de 2Gb chacun qu’il fallait télécharger à la vitesse de pointe de la limace et qui faisaient planter mon réseau. Mais là je suis prête. Je câblerai mon ordi, je prendrai la journée pour le faire s’il le faut.

Si vous n’êtes pas prêt·e à voir disparaître à tout jamais les publications, photos et vidéos que vous avez confiées à Facebook, prenez le temps de le faire aussi. La liste de vos contacts, aussi, c’est là-dedans. Je rappelle que la suspension de mon compte Facebook (qui aurait aussi bien pu être une suppression définitive, j’ai eu de la chance sur ce coup) est l’équivalent d’une erreur judiciaire. Ça peut vous arriver à vous, aussi.

Ce que Facebook ne vous permet pas d’exporter, ce sont les échanges, conversations, et discussions que vous avez avec d’autres dans les fils de commentaires. A qui appartient une discussion? La discussion (comme la relation) est plus que ce que chacune des parties y met – le tout est plus que la somme de ses parties. Même si on peut exporter toutes ses publications, tous ses commentaires, on va perdre quelque chose. Imaginez, un commentaire qui dit “c’est exactement ça!” sans qu’on sache à quoi ça répond, ça ne veut rien dire. Il manque le contexte.

Quand quelqu’un supprime une publication ou un commentaire, toutes les réponses d’autres personnes partent avec. C’est comme si on vivait dans un monde où le droit de faire disparaître était très étendu, mais pas le droit de préserver.

Je vous donne un exemple. Dans la communauté Diabète Félin, nous avons une publication, que j’ai faite, qui est un fil de présentations. Il y a plus de 300 commentaires sous cette publication. Depuis des années, les gens prennent la peine et le temps d’écrire un commentaire, parfois long, qui les présente. Il y a des réponses, du partage, des échanges. Quand mon compte a été suspendu et que tout mon contenu a été “disparu” de Facebook (et ce serait le cas si je décidais, pour je ne sais quelle raison, de supprimer définitivement mon compte), tous ces commentaires ont disparu avec. Ils ne m’appartiennent pourtant pas – mais j’ai un “droit de mort” sur eux.

Il y a donc certains fils de commentaires qu’on peut souhaiter préserver – soit pour ses propres archives personnelles et souvenirs, soit parce que l’échange en question a de la valeur pour la communauté ou les personnes qui y ont pris part. Le jour où la communauté Diabète Félin déplace son centre d’activités hors de Facebook, peut-être qu’il y a une partie de nos huit ans d’histoire qu’on aimerait pouvoir prendre avec nous. Et il n’y a rien de prévu pour ça. Chacun peut supprimer ou exporter son contenu, mais une communauté en tant que collectif ne le peut pas.

Comment faire, alors?

Tout d’abord, il y a une extension Chrome qui s’appelle SingleFile. Une fois installée (ce n’est pas compliqué, c’est l’équivalent d’installer une app sur son téléphone, juste que c’est dans son navigateur web – Chrome) l’extension permet de faire une sauvegarde (une archive) de n’importe quelle page web, en HTML (le format de base du web, donc lisible dans n’importe quel navigateur). Cette sauvegarde est statique: on n’enregistre que ce qui est chargé et visible sur la page. Mais c’est bien mieux qu’une capture d’écran, car ce n’est pas une image, et ça couvre toute la longueur de la page.

Ce qui va nous embêter, c’est que Facebook ne “déroule” pas entièrement les fils de commentaires quand on charge une page. Avant de trouver la solution dont je vais vous parler dans un instant, j’ai passé des heures et des heures à cliquer sur chaque commentaire de longs fils de commentaires pour les ouvrir tous avant de sauvegarder la page avec SingleFile. Horrible!

Une autre extension, Tampermonkey, permet d’installer et même d’écrire des scripts utilisateurs pour son navigateur. C’est un peu technique, je sais, mais pas si compliqué. En gros, on installe l’extension Chrome Tampermonkey (si vous êtes dans Chrome, ce lien devrait vous donner accès à la gestion de vos extensions), et ensuite, dans Tampermonkey, on va installer un script qui s’appelle Facebook Comment Sorter, via la librairie Greasy Fork. Ce script fait deux choses (qui peuvent aussi servir en-dehors du cas de figure dont je parle aujourd’hui):

  • activer “voir tous les commentaires” (au lieu des plus récents, plus pertinents, ou ce que Facebook a choisi comme ordre par défaut ce mois-ci) pour afficher tous les commentaires et pas juste une sélection
  • charger et dérouler tout le fil de commentaires et de sous-commentaires.

Ça ne marche pas parfaitement, parce que c’est un peu du bricolage – ce genre d’outil finit d’ailleurs tôt ou tard par casser car Facebook fait sans cesse des changements à son code et à son interface, donc si ça se trouve, le temps que vous lisiez cet article, cette solution sera obsolète. C’est pas parfait, mais c’est nettement mieux que tout ouvrir à la main.

L’extension SingleFile, elle, permet de sauvegarder soit l’onglet en cours, soit tous les onglets ouverts. On peut aussi spécifier dans les réglages qu’on souhaite que l’onglet soit fermé une fois la sauvegarde faite. Jetez un oeil aux réglages – pour Facebook Comment Sorter aussi, on va modifier la ligne “expandReplies: false,” du script pour que ce soit “expandReplies: true,” et qu’il s’applique également aux commentaires qui ne sont pas dans la partie visible du navigateur web.

Voici donc comment je procède:

  • j’ouvre une série de publications que je veux archiver dans une série d’onglets, en faisant bien attention de cliquer sur la date pour ouvrir la publication, et qu’elle s’affiche seule sur la page
  • je laisse bosser Facebook Comment Sorter, ça prend un peu de temps, je vérifie que les fils de discussion se déroulent bien jusqu’au bout, j’ouvre les quelques commentaires qui auraient passé entre les gouttes
  • quand tous mes onglets sont bien ouverts et chargés, je lance SingleFile sur tous les onglets, et je vais faire autre chose pendant que tout se sauvegarde dans mon dossier téléchargements.

Voilà! Pensez-y donc, s’il y a des discussions auxquelles vous avez pris part sur la plateforme que vous souhaitez pouvoir assurer contre une disparition involontaire.

Evidemment, si vous êtes en train de préserver des échanges qui n’étaient pas publics, vous devez prendre soin de les stocker quelque part où ils seront en sécurité…

Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 2: Interaction) [en]

Start with part 1!

Yesterday I started writing “a blog post” to capture my coalescing thoughts about the open web and how to remove friction from blogging. Not all of it: some friction is good. But enough that people like me don’t get so easily drawn away from their blogs by “The Socials”.

So far, in Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 1: Activities) I have distinguished four types of “activities” we carry out in online social spaces:

  • reading
  • commenting/reacting
  • writing
  • sharing.

Today, I’ll focus less on the actions an individual carries out, and more on the interaction between individuals. The wonderful thing about blogs is that they lowered the barrier to personal expression online, which in turn makes dialogue possible. But dialogue can take many forms.

Some thoughts on Dave’s “new model for blog discourse

Before I go any further, I would like to address a few points Dave brings up in his podcast from yesterday, because I actually started yesterday’s post with the intention of responding to it (amongst other things), but he put it up while I was already writing.

I love what Dave describes doing in the very early days, if I understood it right: write something, send it by e-mail to handful of people, and have a first round of discussion with that smallish group before publishing, and including value-adding responses to the publication. All this, scripted so that it was as frictionless as possible for him. This reminds me of Bruno Giussani‘s “Promote Comments Plugin” idea. It also fits with the idea I insisted upon yesterday that there is an added value to making the discussion about something available in the same place as that thing.

It is also reminding me of one aspect that I hadn’t thought about covering in this post-become-series: managing who the audience is. I firmly believe that allowing conversations to take place in closed or semi-public spaces is vital (cf. context collapse) – proof the number of people who take part in closed groups on Facebook or who share updates to “friends only“. I might have to make this a fourth part…

Dave describes a future tool in which comments (responses) get posted to the commenter’s blog and sent privately to the author of the original blog post, who can then decide whether to make it visible or not. For me, the second part of this process is already widely implemented in blogging tools, and has been for over a decade: its upfront comment moderation. Some people activate it, some don’t. On this blog, for example, if you’re a first-time commenter, your comment is not published. It is sent to me and I decide whether it’s worth publishing or not.

The first part is more interesting. It addresses the “ownership” issue of the comment, as tools like coComment or Disqus have tried to by providing a place all a person’s comments are collected. But it goes one step further and says: that place is the commenter’s blog. This is great and has been long needed. It would be interesting examine why previous attempts to do this across platforms have not stuck.

And this leads us to the topic of today: show my comments on my blog, but in what way? My comments are not the same kind of content as my posts. I don’t want my posts to be mixed up with my comments, everything on the same level. I’ll explain why.

Finally, Dave identifies some of the challenges with blog comments that I covered in yesterday’s post, but I’m not sure the current situation is as “broken” as he thinks. All that is missing, really, is a way to collect-own-display the comments I make all over the place in a space that is mine. Moderate comments upfront, or not? Or even, not have comments? That’s already possible, and up to the blogger. And yes, moderating comments or limiting who can comment directly cuts down tremendously on the spam and other bad behaviour issue.

Comments are about interaction – so are links between blogs. And as I mentioned yesterday, one thing the socials are really great at is interaction. You can spend your whole day on there (don’t I know it) interacting.

A way to look at interactions

I’m going to start by sticking with 1-1 interactions, to make it simpler, but I think this can be applied to interactions with more actors.

I think we all agree that exchanging letters with somebody (which I’m old enough to have done in my youth) is very different from talking on an instant messaging system. The key dimension that varies here is how (a)synchronous the interaction is. This drives a lot of the features we have in our social tools, and what makes them different from one another – just like in martial arts, the distance between the practitioners constrains the kind of techniques, and therefor the kind of fighting (interaction) that can take place.

I’d like to summarise it this way:

The length of contributions in an interaction is inversely proportional to how synchronous, or how conversational it is. And vice-versa.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

When Twitter showed up with its 140-character limit (which didn’t come out of nowhere, it was SMS-based), and constrained how much we could write in one go, it quickly became a place where we were “talking” more than “writing”, as we had been doing on our blogs. It was not quite as immediate as instant messaging, but somewhere in between. Like text messages.

In the early days of Facebook, if my memory serves me right, there was a distinction between sending a message to somebody (sorry, I can’t remember the terminology that was used, I’m not even 100% sure I’m remembering right) as some kind of internal mail, and chatting (or maybe they transformed the former into the latter and it changed the way we used it). In Discourse, you have both: you can send a message to somebody, or chat. Like you can e-mail somebody, or instant message them.

And I suspect I am not the only person to feel some degree of annoyance when I receive an “instant message” that should have been “an e-mail”, because it requires me to sit down, absorb a “speech”, and then figure out how on earth I’m going to respond to all that was said in one go, particularly now the person who sent it is not online anymore, because I had to wait until I had enough time to properly read it, digest it, and figure out my response.

Instant messaging works when it’s used for short things that you can take in at a glance (or barely more) and answer without having to think too much. It is conversation, with an asynchronous twist. When both parties are connected and interacting (synchronous), it is very close to in-person (or “on the phone”) synchronous conversation, but with this “optional asynchronicity”, as there is a blind spot regarding the context of the other party, and how it impacts their availability to read or respond right now, or even, to keep the conversation going. (If you’re on the phone with them or in the same room: they are available.)

When in “conversation mode”, contributions can become a bit longer, but not too long: if you throw a 3-page essay at somebody in an instant message or chat conversation, chances are you’ll lose them. Just like in-person conversation: if you monologue for 10 minutes at the person you’re talking with, you don’t have a conversation anymore. And actually, this pretty much never happens: there are non-verbal cues that the person opposite you is going to give that will either interrupt your monologue, or reveal that it is in fact a dialogue, when taking into account non-verbal contributions of the listener. But when you’re typing in an instant-messaging box, there is none of that.

Back to blogs. A blog post does not have the same conversational qualities as a response to a tweet. Blogs live in a more asynchronous interaction space than the socials or chatting. Comments are generally more conversational than blog posts. But probably less than updates on the socials.

“Allowed length” of contribution plays a role in shaping the kind of interaction, as well as design. If you’re typing in a tiny box, you’re less likely to write an e-mail or a blog post. If you’re typing in a box that uses up the whole screen, you’re less likely to write only one sentence.

Why did so much conversation move from blogs and chats to socials? I think that it is because they are in some sweet space on the (a)synchronicity continuum. They allow belated responses, but also real-time interaction. Notifications are key here, as is the fact that writing/responding are pretty much the same thing (same on Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon, not-quite-same on Facebook, but close enough) and in the same space as reading/listening. It’s super easy to jump in and out of conversation. Frictionless.

So, it’s not just about reducing friction around reading blogs, writing blog posts, and commenting on them: it’s also about how we integrate the blogosphere and the socialsphere. One cannot and should not replace the other. There will always be people who like writing stuff. And others who are just happy to interact or react. And it doesn’t make sense to corral them into separate spaces.

Does anybody remember Backtype? I didn’t. Well, I do now after reading my blog post. The idea was to find a way to bring “back to the blog post” conversation about it that was happening on the socials (gosh, I really hope it’s not too annoying for you all that I’ve started saying “the socials”, it’s just really practical; my apologies if it grates on you). What about Diigo comments?

There is a common theme here: somebody writes a blog post. There is discussion about it or prompted by it – in the comments, on other blogs, on Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter and Mastodon, even Threads. How do we give easy access to these fragmented conversations (I think conversation fragmentation is now something that we have accepted as inevitable and normal) to those who are reading the post? And how do we do that in a way that a) leaves some control in the blogger’s hands over what to show and not to show (less spam) and b) allow people participating in the conversation to keep ownership of their content, in the sense that even if it can be made invisible in a given context (e.g. on the blog post), it cannot be outright removed by a third party, and remains “on the record” of the person who wrote it?

Who owns the conversation?

There is a lot of talk about retaining rights or ownership to one’s content. But who owns a conversation? Or beyond that, a community? The whole is more than the sum of the parts. When people come together to create something together (including relationships), who owns that? I mentioned previously that when facebook allows you to “download your content”, that doesn’t seem to include comments (wait, I have a doubt now – I think the export used to, but not anymore, correct me if I’m wrong, as I can’t go and check easily). Or comments by others made on your posts. In any case, say you can download your comments: a lot of them are contributions to conversations, and make little or no sense without their context – the publication the conversation took place about, other people’s comments.

I think there needs to be some kind of “collective ownership” understanding, which is more nuanced than “I wrote it, I have power of life or death over it”. When does something you offer up to the collective cease to be completely yours? In my opinion, it remains yours in the sense that it cannot be taken away from you against your will. Corollary: if contributions to a conversation or a community also “belong” to the conversation or community, then it should not be possible to take it away from them unilaterally. This is something that needs to be thought out further: does it mean that I should not be allowed to remove my blog from the web?

What is clear at this point: we need to think beyond “atomic” contributions and also think about how our tools manage the collective creations that are conversations and communities.

So, let’s sum up today: interaction is not a monolith. Online conversations occur at varying speeds and are made up of contributions of varying nature. Reclaiming and rebooting the blogosphere and the open web needs to take that into account and embrace it, and figure out how to bring it together in an open way, with frameworks, standards, protocols or the like, not yet another “One Platform to Replace Them All”.

That will be tomorrow, in part 3.

Thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to react: on the socials, here in the comments, or on your blog!

When Do You Wear or Remove Your Hearing Aids? [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

As somebody with mild/medium hearing loss, I guess wearing hearing aids are more of a choice than a necessity for me. I mean, I functioned without them for nearly 40 years. Today I wouldn’t give them up for anything in the world, of course, and I really prefer wearing them for anything resembling human interaction. But I can get by without. (An audiologist I had a chat with one day told me I’d be surprised at how people with much more hearing loss than me “get by just fine” without aids. Anyway.)

So, when do I wear them, when do I remove them? As a general rule, I wear them when I leave the house. (My cats aren’t all that talkative.) I remove them when I get home. Since I got my V90 aids though, I often forget to remove them when I get home.

I don’t wear my hearing aids to watch TV.

skiing-022515-940x492

I’ve been watching TV so long with headphones that having “ambient” sound on actually makes me self-conscious about bothering my neighbours with it (this is Switzerland). I used to always remove them to listen to music or podcasts. Now that I have the ComPilot Air II I sometimes keep them in (more for podcasts than music, with open tips there are frequencies missing for the music). If I’m travelling or wandering around on my own and not really expecting to interact with people I might take them out, too.

At judo training, I usually keep them in for warm-up and maybe the first rounds of “light” practice. Then I remove them so that I don’t have to worry about paying attention to what’s going on around my ears.

For skiing, I keep them in, despite the helmet. With my old Widex aids I’d given up on that (they really didn’t cope well with the helmet), but my current ones are fine. When driving, I sometimes wear them, sometimes not (depends if I was wearing them just before taking the wheel or not, I guess).

I also ended up removing my hearing aids once at a very noisy party. Even with the highest “speech in noise” setting, I actually managed better without them. But that was really an exceptional situation.

What about you? Do you put them in first thing in the morning and take them out last thing at night, or are you like me, sometimes in, sometimes out? And when? I’m curious to hear how other people do this. I suspect our wearing vs. not-wearing habits are also linked to how much hearing loss we have.

How I “Get” People to Talk to me so I Can Understand Them [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

A complaint I’ve heard a few times lately in the hearing loss support groups I hang out in is that “full-hearing” people resist making the effort to talk to us in such a way that we can understand them. Or they do sometimes, but then forget. I feel a lot of frustration around this for some people, sometimes translated into judgements about the other “not caring” or “not paying attention” or “being offended”.

Misunderstanding

This reminds me a little, in a “through the looking-glass” way, of how we “less-hearing” people are sometimes accused of “not paying attention”, “not making an effort”, or “being distracted”.

I try to always look at situations like this from the various points of view of the players involved. My work with people and technology, as well as teaching, have led me to adopt a kind of “user-experience-centric” attitude. Now, UX is definitely not my primary field of expertise (so forgive me in advance if it’s yours), but one thing I do quite consistently is try and put myself in other people’s shoes and see the logic in their way of thinking or doing things.

How does this apply here? What does it look like for people with full hearing who are trying to communicate with me?

People have communication habits. Volume of speech, but also, they know from experience when they can be heard or not, at what distance conversation becomes impossible. Most people being “well-hearing” (I kind of like that expression), their communication habits are adapted to people without hearing loss. Years ago, a friend of mine commented (when I said that I didn’t seem to have too much trouble understanding people) that everyone around me made efforts when speaking with me, but that I didn’t see it. They subconsciously spoke louder, learned to get my attention before saying something, etc. It was a bit of a shock for me. But it made sense. (This was before I got fitted.)

So, basically, when we have hearing loss, we’re requiring of people around us that they communicate differently with us, and break their deeply ingrained habits of speech for us. They need to learn and remember that they need to speak to us from distance x < “standard intelligible conversation distance”, for example. Or they need to remember not to speak to us when we’re not looking. Or when we’re in another room. Or too softly. All these things that “work” with almost everyone they know do not work as well with us. They’re used to talking to other neighbours from their balcony or across the street, but that’s too far for us.

I try to keep this in mind. I approach it like training. It’s my responsibility to teach them what works and doesn’t work with me, communication-wise. And sometimes spelling things out is really useful.

I usually take a moment at some point to tell “new people” that I don’t hear well, and that even with my hearing aids I might ask them to repeat stuff if they are looking away from me or in another room. If I’m without my hearing aids, I tell people.

I know they are going to forget even if they don’t intend to, and it’s never pleasant to be reminded that you forgot to do something that is necessary for somebody else. So even though it’s not my fault I have hearing loss and I don’t have to apologise for it, it’s not their fault either and I am asking them to do something out-of-their-ordinary to accommodate my particular circumstances. That’s why I often apologise when I ask people to repeat things (not systematically, but at least a few times in the beginning). I’ve never seen anybody be offended that I’m asking them to repeat. I’ve seen confusion when they repeat and I still can’t hear, irritation maybe at being asked again and again to repeat, or at failing to communicate.

When that happens, I try to give people clearer instructions: for example, I say “for me to understand you easily, get my attention first so that I can look at you” or “if you’re this far from me I probably won’t understand” or “if you’re in another room I probably won’t either”. Or “I’m sorry, even with my hearing aids in my hearing isn’t as good as yours, you need to speak louder for me to be able to understand you.”

I need them to do things differently for me, but if I don’t tell them clearly what it is they need to do, and if I don’t patiently give them feedback, they can’t guess.

How do you deal with this? I think strategies are going to vary a lot depending on the degree of hearing loss we have.

Echapper aux notifications Facebook des conversations groupées [fr]

[en] How to mute a facebook chat with lots of people in it. Sometimes those notifications get a bit out of hand, don't they?

Si vous utilisez Facebook autant que moi, vous vous retrouvez probablement de temps en temps dans des chats “à plusieurs”. Voire “à beaucoup”. Et comme vous avez activé les notifications en cas de message privé, à chaque fois que quelqu’un dit un mot dans le gros chat commun, votre téléphone s’affole ou votre ordinateur bipe.

La solution radicale: quitter la conversation. Quasi tout le monde sait faire ça. Mais des fois on ne veut pas quitter la conversation. On veut rester dedans, mais on ne veut pas être prévenu en super-priorité quand quelqu’un dit “:-)”.

Sachez, mesdames et messieurs, qu’on peut couper le son à la conversation. En anglais, c’est “mute conversation” — quelqu’un me dit ce que c’est en français? C’est dans le menu “roue dentée” juste au-dessus de “quitter la conversation”. Oui, je vous fais un dessin:

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Voilà, en espérant que ce sera utile à certains!

What We Write And Where We Write [en]

[fr] L'environnement dans lequel on écrit quelque chose change ce qu'on y écrit. Le blog n'est plus aujourd'hui l'endroit où on va "vite publier quelque chose" -- Facebook a pris cette place.

Lately, Loïc has been writing “long stuff” (“post-length stuff”) on Facebook. I enjoy reading him. Here’s his latest post, on meditation. Maybe because I’ve linked it I’ll be able to find it again in the future, but otherwise, chances are this post, along with all the other status updates we’re publishing on Facebook today, will be lost forever in the corpse of the real-time stream.

Oh yes, Facebook is giving us search, but there are two reasons I’m not holding my breath:

  • we have search in groups already, and as you’ve probably also noticed, it sucks
  • Facebook status updates are a mess of re-shared stuff, “in the instant” messages, photos, funny things, serious things, more cat photos… will search allow us to say “find me all Loïc’s status updates which are longer than 500 words”?

Anyway. Ben dropped the “blog” word, I piled on, and an interesting discussion ensued. My suggestion was that Loïc copy-paste what he was publishing in Facebook into his blog (once he’s retrieved the password ;-)). This made me think of what Euan has been doing recently: he publishes both on his blog and in Facebook. I don’t know where he writes first, but the content is in both places.

Long ago I remember reading about some people who wrote their blog posts in their email client, because it helped them get into the right brainspace. I suspect something like this is going on with Loïc, who hasn’t blogged in a long time. Facebook is where the audience is (not in a marketing sense, in a “not talking to an empty room” sense). Facebook is where we’re expected to write a few lines, not full-blown essays. No pressure.

I’ve been feeling that kind of “pressure” for years on my blog. Look at what I write now. And look at what I was writing a year or so after I started blogging. My blog, initially, was this space where I could just spit out something and be done with it. Over the years, things changed. Now, a blog post has to be meaningful. It has to be worthy of the big bold title that introduces it (no mystery there, when I started blogging blog posts didn’t have huge bold titles). It has to be illustrated. It has to be well-written. It has to be thoughtful. This can be paralysing. The rise of “professional bloggers” doesn’t help.

What I’ve been doing with #back2blog and to some extent The Blogging Tribe is try to resuscitate this mindset. Just blog something. But the landscape of tools has changed.

Now, the space where you go to “just share something” is Facebook. “Everybody” you know is already there. They don’t have to fill in their names to comment. They get notified when there is a reaction to what they say — and so do you. You think of something, you start writing, and oh, you’ve written 6 paragraphs. This happens on Facebook now, not on your blog. And I’m guilty too.

More than once, I’ve found myself writing stuff on Facebook that could be a post on this blog. So I’m going to follow my advice to Loïc next time that happens, and post it here too. And move this blog off this email-less server so people can get comment notifications.

Here Comes Everybody: Journalism and Ease of Publication [en]

I’m reading “Here Comes Everybody“. I’m taking notes.

In the chapter “Everyone is a media outlet”, Clay explains very well what is the matter with the journalism industry. (He has since then co-authored a report on the future of the news industry, which I need to read.)

In a world where everyone is a publisher, journalism is becoming an activity rather than a profession — activity which can be carried out both by those employed by the news industry and the “amateurs” (oh heck). A profession serves to solve a hard problem, that requires specialisation. Reproduction, distribution, and categorisation are now orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than before: professionals are no longer required for these activities.

Look at iStockPhoto and professional photography: the price of professional photography not so much due to the incredible quality of the professional’s work, in many cases, but comes from the difficulty of finding the right photo. iStockPhoto helps solve that problem, so the photo now costs 1$ instead of 500$, can very well have been shot by an amateur, and be no lesser in quality than a more expensive, specially-commissioned professional one.

As it has become easier to publish, public speech and action have become more valuable and less scarce, just like the ability to read and write became more commonplace with the invention of movable type, and scribes lost their raison-d’être.

Journalism is a profession that seems to exist because of accidental scarcity of published material due to the expense of publishing in the physical world. Scarcity (and therefore cost) is not an indication of importance: water is more important to life than diamonds, but that doesn’t make it expensive (The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith).

When everybody had learned to read and write, and scribes weren’t needed anymore, we didn’t call everybody a scribe, we just stopped using the word; reading and writing is ubiquitous and so not rare enough to pay for, even if it’s a really important skill. Scribes as a profession died out.

As for music and movie industry: the service they performed was distributing music and movies, but now anybody can move music and video easily and cheaply. The problem they were solving does not exist anymore, and so they are trying to maintain it by turning on their customers and trying to make moving movies and music harder artificially.

Because it’s so easy to publish, making something public is less the momentous decision that it used to be. The general criticism of the low quality of online content has to do with the fact we are judging “communications” content (conversation, often) by “broadcast” content standards of interest and quality. We look at Facebook statuses and think “was that really worth broadcasting?” — not realising that it was never intended for broadcast in the first place. It was not meant for us. If you eavesdrop on a dining hall conversation at the table next to you, doubtless you’ll find it uninteresting, but you won’t think “why are they speaking so loud I can hear what they’re saying?”

There used to be a distinction between communications and broadcast media, which has now broken down. Broadcast is one-to-many, a one-way megaphone which attempts to reach as many people as possible of a target audience. Communications, on the other hand, are two-way conversations for specific recipients, one-to-one. Now we also have many-to-many, communications tools which enable group conversation. There is a continuum between broadcast and communications rather than a sharp break neatly following the lines of the technology used (TV/radio vs. phone/fax). Communications and broadcast are mixed in the same medium, and we make the mistake of judging communications by the standards of broadcast.

Do Not Use Your Brand Name to Sign Comments [en]

Never use your brand name to sign comments. You are a person, not a brand.

How do you want to be perceived?

As a person?

Or as “advertising-disguised-as-conversation”?

There’s nothing wrong with representing a brand. You can even sign “Judy Smith (MyGreatBrand)” if it’s important to you — but be aware that it will make you sound like a commentor-for-hire or a “community manager” (note the quotes and the lowercase, not to be confused with the Community Manager, reserved for people who “get it” and usually occupy a senior position).

Signing with your brand name is also the surest way of being identified as spam — whether you really are spam or not.

You don’t want to make things difficult for the blogger who is deciding whether to approve or trash your comment: identify yourself clearly as a human being. Whether you use a name or a stable, recognizable nickname is not a big issue (at least for me). But using your brand as your nickname is so… cheesy.

And also impolite. You know who I am. Your comment is an open door to a conversation. Why would I not be allowed to know who you are? Even the robots who answer the phone in the worst of customer service call centres tell you their name.

Don’t be a ghost, hiding under the big white sheet of your brand.

Please do not sign comments with your brand name. Be a human being. Give me a name.

I’m toying the idea of replacing brand names with something witty (“Insert Brand Name Here”, or preferably something better I’ll think of under the shower tomorrow morning) and making them link to this article when people try signing comments with them. What do you think?

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 representing BackType as depicted in Cru...
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.

  1. 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.
  2. Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
  3. The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.