Government data as a platform for innovation is something I find exciting. Unfortunately, every time we write about it at ReadWriteWeb, very few people read our articles. Consumer data from private companies, be it Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, for example, finds far more interested readers.

Both have a few things in common: they are stories about data that you and I produce being leveraged by independent developers to build new services and ways to make use of that data. I love EveryBlock and the way it shows me the 911 calls, restaurant reviews and news stories about the area I live in. It uses mostly government data. I really liked the story I wrote about it (“The Day Everyblock Came to Town“) but it got far fewer pageviews than the equally local story Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion.

Maybe that’s because it was about an explosion, and maybe because it indicated some fulfillment of the promise of data exploited. But I think it’s in part because it’s about Twitter data instead of about public data in the traditional sense of the word. Readers just don’t find government data very interesting. It’s a part of a larger problem I think: people don’t care about nonprofit or social good stories either. Far, far fewer people read stories about human rights, watchdog organizations, etc. than they do the big corporate market leaders online. We cover social good stuff anyway, because it’s important, but we always recognize that those stories are going to perform poorly in terms of readership.

Thoughts?

Nate Silver, author of the political stats blog FiveThirtyEight, is now writing for the New York Times. That’s very cool. It’s an inspiration to try and write better blog posts and fewer mediocre ones. ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the NYT, but that’s different. You’ve got to be pretty consistently awesome, I’m guessing, for the Times to say “hey, come put your blog on our site.” That level of consistent awesomeness is an inspiration, for any blogger, anywhere. I feel a long, long way from so consistently awesome right now. I’d sure love to grow as an author to feel like I wrote fewer mediocre blog posts than I do today.

One step I’d like to take is to learn to stop before publishing and ask myself: how could this post be better in a big way? What fundamental insight can my noggin’ churn up with just five more minutes of slowing down from the perpetual mad dash of blogging? Publishing immediately is hard wired in my brain now, though, and it’s going to be easier said than done to change that habit.

I got my list of 100+ applicants for this evening news writing position at ReadWriteWeb whittled down to a list of top 10 applicants tonight. (Related story about how to get a job as a professional blogger here.) I mentioned on Twitter that in summarizing the pros and cons of leading applicants for the rest of my team to evaluate I’ve included an evaluation of their Twitter accounts. A good Twitter account isn’t a requirement at all but… it helps. A number of people asked me just exactly what that meant. And so I wrote a song about it, and it goes a little something like this…

It’s not really a song, sorry! It’s just me talking. It got cut off at the very end by an incoming phone call, but I suspect you may find it interesting none the less. Speaking of Twitter, here’s my account there. Let’s be buds if we’re not already, huh?

Direct MP3 download here, iTunes subscription link here and podcast subscription feed here.

I’ve long been impressed with the rich-media popup tool Apture. If you’re actually on my site and not reading this in a feed reader, you can see the little book icon in the previous sentence. Hover over it and you’ll see a Wikipedia entry I selected to appear here. It was really easy to do using the Apture plug-in for WordPress.

Last week semantic web company Zemanta released a very similar but open source program called Balloons. I’m going to try to install that next here and compare the two services. Alex Iskold got me thinking about it. (Oh wow, look at that double LinkedIn and Twitter pop-up – that is awesome! I hate reading peoples’ names online and not being able to see where they work. This is great.)

So far Apture is pretty impressive. I did the wrong thing with it a couple of times, but I think I’ve got it down now. This post will evolve as I find the time to try out Zemanta.

Here's how a link I added to an RWW post about Zemanta looks....in Apture!

Ok, Zemanta plug-in now installed. The company says the Balloons feature is automatically included. Let’s see.

Update: You can’t really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta’s balloon links. You probably won’t be able to see Zemanta links now, but I’ll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.

Test: Pablo Picasso

Related articles by Zemanta

• Introducing Balloons: Free multimedia overlays for bloggers (zemanta.com)
• Zemanta Gives Bloggers Balloons (centernetworks.com)

1. Find story idea
2. Reach out to sources for info
3. Research online using various magic research tools, while I wait for sources to get back to me
4. Stop and think
5. Talk to sources, maybe research some more based on what they say
6. Write!

All of that needs to get done in two hours, tops. Two or three times a day. When I can master that, with quality written output, then I will feel like I’ve made big, big progress in my work.

Several of those steps tend to get under-prioritized or put in the wrong order in my current workflow. Reaching out to sources right away and researching while I wait for them to respond is what really needs to get turned into a new routine. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Hello dear readers and thanks for stopping by again.  I’ve decided I’m going to try and make some changes to this, my personal blog.  Every day I write two or three blog posts over at ReadWriteWeb. They tend to be long and somewhat formal.  I have a lot of little thoughts in my head, though, and some that aren’t really appropriate for RWW.  So I’ve decided to change my personal blog from a seldom-updated site to highlight my (still available, but limited) consulting work into a place where I can share small thoughts with anyone who wants to read and discuss them.  I’ll probably share some long-term RWW article ideas here too, so we can discuss those projects I’m researching over time.

I might post a little tutorial type post here now and again as I used to do, but I expect it will mostly be ruminations on the web, on tech writing and on where it all seems like it’s going.  I hope you enjoy it.  I’m excited, I’ve been itching for an outlet like this for awhile.

OpenID community leader Scott Kveton noticed this morning that his Twitter profile page is now the #1 search result in Google for his last name, not his blog. This is something TechCrunch reported on earlier this month, but people are just starting to wrap their heads around it. I know I want this blog to remain the #1 search result for my name, not my Twitter profile.

In a conversation on FriendFeed, Ben Hedrington pointed out that in addition to the page title change that TechCrunch reported on – Twitter also uses the rel=”me” markup and Kveton’s blog does not. I looked and realized that my blog here doesn’t either!

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel=”me” to a relevant link on your blog. I’ve added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that’s a good page for me. It’s as simple as making the link text read a href=”http://marshallk.com/feedback” rel=”me”.

That may not solve the entire problem but it should help and it’s good form. Machine readable microformats like rel=”me” are likely to be an increasingly important part of the web in the future. Would readers here suggest otherwise? If I’m reading too much into this, let me know.