Metblogs

Qwitter is bad for everyone

I’ve been meaning to write something about Qwitter for a while now but have been holding off because of two main reasons, namely that I really despise the app coupled with the fact that I really like the guys who built it. If you don’t know already Qwitter monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you. It’s built by Ireland’s Contrast who are extremely cool and totally rock in my book. So, there you have my biases front and center.

My biggest problem with Qwitter, and the one that covers all the bases in one shot is that is creates drama and negativity from something that should be innocuous. Can you imagine if there was a service out there that notified you when someone you know chose to move an e-mail you sent them from their inbox to their archive folder, or worse to delete it? If you got a notice saying “Britney Spears just deleted the e-mail you sent on the 5th of October with the subject ‘OMG R U Pregnant AGAIN?!’ ” – Even if Britney had already responded to your e-mail you’d be forced to wonder what she was thinking when she clicked delete. Maybe she was pissed off at you and steaming at the thought of it, or maybe she was just deleting all the e-mails she’d gotten last month that had already been responded to. You wouldn’t know either way, but are now forced to wonder. An act as simple and common as deleting an old e-mail has now sparked feelings of resentment.

In a way that is what Qwitter does to twitter. I’ve written before about how I use twitter and have heard from a good number of people that their usages follows mine to some extent. On any given day I add 2-3 people, remove 2-3 people, read the tweets by several people that I don’t follow by looking at their page on the site, and maybe turn notifications on or off for a person or two. If I’m traveling, that gets compounded. Frequently when going to a new city I’ll start following 10-20 new people who I might be interacting with, and I might stop following 10-20 people from a previous city who I won’t be running into on a daily basis. I’ve written about how when I start following more than 200 people the flood of tweets is so constant that I miss more than I get and it becomes useless for me. And the beautiful thing is that because of the web version of twitter, and tools like Facebook, Ping.FM, Friendfeed, Loopt, etc – I don’t need to actually “follow” someone on twitter to read everything they post to twitter. To go back to the e-mail analogy I don’t need to keep an e-mail in my inbox to be interested in what the person has to say.

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Craig in New Orleans

I mentioned this earlier in the day, but seriously, go read New Orleans Metblogs. Craig, one of the bloggers there, is disregarding the Mandatory Evacuation order and staying through it, and blogging the whole thing. From a post earlier today…

A hell of a lot of us have managed to wrest a living and a life out of what was left at the end of 2005. We’ve managed to do it with the help of family, friends, neighbors and, in a lot of cases, mysterious folks who just seemed to want to help. Note that I didn’t mention “government” in there. We’ve done it despite our government(s). And it’s not done yet. It likely will never be “done.”

Now we have to deal with this latest threat. We have put too much into what we have (personally, professionally, physically) to simply sit in a motel room someplace and watch it all get washed away again. We wouldn’t be “in our own home.” I agree that to stay is a type of madness. But it’s preferable to the madness we felt in our Being Away the last time.

And he just followed up with a new post, as things are getting underway…

We’re actually SMOKING in the dining room, which would be a violation of state law if we were open. Ha fucking ha. I bought new cigars yesterday, so I’ll fire one up in a little while and break out the bourbon. We’re already missing ice — though we froze some in advance that we’re saving for later if we really, really need it.

We have loaded the guns, though we haven’t shucked shells in the chambers yet. We have also posted a sign in the front window, saying WE ARE HERE INSIDE AND HEAVILY ARMED.

The only traffic outside is police, usually going the wrong way on our one-way part of Magazine. We’re also seeing the occasional Guardsmen and it’s good to have them back in force. I was joking with one officer earlier today that what they need to do is park at the top of the Crescent City Connection bridge and keep any Westbankers from walking across the bridge into New Orleans. He shot back, “Yeah. We’re afraid they’ll clean the place up. We’ve got our pride.”

Presenting… Presentations!

Much the same as every year, when the call for SXSW presentations was made I thought of a few ideas and then didn’t do anything about them. Before I knew it the deadline hit and I realized I hadn’t submitted anything. I started sketching ideas out on my wiki like crazy. Jason and I had talked about a “lessons learned” kind of thing for Metblogs so I whipped that idea and submitted it. I also figured, what the hell, and made up another one on the spot about changing the world. Truth is I didn’t think either one would get accepted, but the panel picker went live today and both ideas are in there.

Chaos Theory: Global Blog Network Politics & Scaling
In the five years we’ve been running Metblogs we’ve made more than our fair share of mistakes and walked headfirst into crazy problems. We’ll share some of those including managing a massive publishing platform with no staff, international politics, raising money, and more. What we’ve learned, and what we’d do differently.

Change the World in 5 Easy Steps
Revolution begins at home, this will focus on 5 easy things you can do personally that will actually have an effect on a global level. Go vegan, ride a bike, stop buying crap, visit a different country, do something you love rather than something that pays the bills. Wake up and live.

You can click the links above and vote if you want. The Metblogs one will be cool and fun if it goes through, and I think it’ll provide some insight. The other one, wow… I really didn’t think that would make it at all, and now that it did I’m kinda nervous. What the hell did I get myself into? Or maybe it’s a good thing. Who knows, anyway, um.. yeah.

City blogging and comments, thoughts from barcampseattle

Why city blogging sucks and other wonderful things. That was the title of Dylan‘s talk at this weekend’s BarCampSeattle. Dylan of course writes for Seattle Metblogs and I’ve gotten to know him a little bit over the last month while I’ve been back and forth to the city. Josh and Beth were also in the audience and chimed in from time to time. As you might suspect this was one of my favorite sessions of the weekend if only because the topic is something I think about on a regular basis. Daily, hourly even. Here’s a few pics I took if you want to check them out for some reference.

The talk started off with a few topics that city bloggers are well aware of, and people who don’t write city blogs might not be – how local is too local, or what isn’t local enough (city, neighborhood, block, bedroom), and what are people really coming to the sites to read? In Seattle the number one most read post, by a long shot, is one about horsesex. No, really. I wish I was joking but it’s the truth. People on the internet are weird. And while this initially started off talking about the bloggers, it wasn’t too long before the topic shifted to readers, and specifically commenters. This is where things got really interesting I think, and yes even more interesting than horsesex.

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