I’ve had a lot of issues with Facebook over the years, I wrote a big critique of the company’s data sharing partnerships last week, but I also have a lot of admiration for Facebook. I can’t go into great detail about that now because I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I hope you’ll join me there if that’s what you’re into.

Many people believe that no such change is happening, either. There’s a continuum of constant change, but tech blogging has never really been about just TechCrunch, Mushable and ReadWriteWeb. There are many other important tech blogs, always have been and always will be. ReadWriteWeb 2.0 is going to rock, too, by the way.

Either way, things are certainly changing. There are opportunities for new blogs and bloggers to rise into leadership positions. I thought I’d take a few minutes and offer three bits of advice about things I think could help make the new era of tech blogging even better than the last one. I just think these things would be nice.

Outbound Links

It’s sad that so few tech blog posts add the kind of value that can be added by including links to high quality off-site resources. It’s ok to send readers away, they’ll appreciate the pointers and they’ll come back. Some of the biggest sites on the web just aggregate links to other sites – why not combine that form of value with original content on blogs? Not only are the links valuable for readers, the research required to assemble those links is a big value add as well. Compiling research and links to other sites is a fine art. I know everybody wants to see more of this. Who on earth would believe that a single blog post’s author knows everything a reader wants to know about a topic?

This isn’t just a matter of principle, either. Outbound links can be good for search engine traction, though that’s not 100% clear and it’s not clear how much weight they carry relative to inbound links. As Google’s Maile Ohye said several years ago, “Thoughtful outbound links also help your credibility because it shows that you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject manner. You visitors may therefore want to come back for more analysis on future topics.”

Research, Including on Company Founders

One of the things I learned from Michael Arrington when at TechCrunch is that it’s always important to look at the backgrounds of founders of companies you’re writing about. Almost no one does that anymore though, I too often forget myself, but it’s so often a missing part of the whole story!

As VC Roger Ehrenberg once wrote, “There can be tremendous inefficiencies as founders ascend the learning curve, especially in areas that are not necessarily related to or interesting given the founders’ backgrounds.” Conversely, a founder’s background experience indicates the ways in which they are most likely to be particularly efficient.

The time and pageview pressure these days leads to short blog posts based on little more than the first impression of the blogger was left with after looking at a website themselves. It’s like the what, the why and the when of a news story gets adressed but the who gets too little attention.

Platform Implications

One of the things I have learned from Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is that news is always more interesting when you adress the long-term platform implications of anything. When might a certain app, trend or news development make possible in the future? That’s one of the most exciting parts of the story.

A contrary perspective is that, as investor Rob Go has written, the word Platform could be “the most meaningless and overused phrase that entrepreneurs and investors try to use to make companies seem more important than they are.” Maybe, but from a journalistic and analytical perspective, thinking about companies as parts of trends, which will hopefully lead to future opportunities, seems like something that can never be a bad idea.

Maybe all of this is just a way to say “I think tech blogging should be more like the way I like to do tech blogging. But these three ideas sure would help make the next era of tech blogging even better, I think. Maybe no more listicles, too. (Blog posts with numbered lists! Ha!)

Related: How to Quit Your Day Job and Become a Professional Tech Blogger

For what it’s worth, I should mention that all the outbound links in this post were added lickety-split with the help of Plexus Engine. Sign up now for beta notification – it’s coming along really well!

Startup emails me all the details about what they are doing and then says “oh by the way, this is embargoed until Monday.” Nice to meet you, too!

Fwiw, this is the 2nd [unnamed incubator] startup in the past few weeks who has written to us and just asserted an embargo we haven’t agreed to. It would be great if this post and the post it links to was read by your people: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_will_respect_your_embargoes.php

In short: if I don’t agree to an embargo before you give me info, then I presume you’ve reached out to others who haven’t either. That means I have a. no verbal contract to wait until the asserted embargo time and b. no reason to believe that other media outlets will wait. That means it is in my interest to write now and be first.
That’s how I understand it and I know I’m not alone.
best wishes,
Marshall Kirkpatrick
ReadWriteWeb

I think I remember the first story I got thanks to Twitter; I believe it was a +James Governor tweet that Google had acquired +Jyri Engeström ‘s Jaiku. Twitter quickly became key in my work. And it still is today.

I also remember the first story I ever got to first thanks to Quora. Eighteen months ago I was organizing an event for RWW and decided to ask on that hot new social network, “when is Twitter’s rumored first developer conference next Spring? I don’t want to schedule a conflicting event.” +Ashton Kutcher answered the question! With the correct date! It was awesome, so I didn’t schedule the event that day and in fact I wrote up the news: Twitter’s first dev conference is, according to the site’s then #1 most popular user, going to be on April 14th. And indeed it was.

I used to break a lot of news stories first using RSS to IM/SMS alert tools, and I still do sometimes – that’s how I got my job as TechCrunch’s first news writer. Strategic use of tools helped me get to news stories faster than Michael Arrington – so he called me and hired me. Now everybody uses those sorts of tools so you have to be extra crafty to figure out how to win with RSS.

I wasn’t the first on this story on Plus and I bet some other people have broken stories on here already. (I roughly broke the story of the Circles feature at SXSW, but that was all shoe leather and beer, no web tool hacks on that one.)

I just thought I’d post a little note, marking today as a little milestone for me and thinking out loud about how I want to try to use this platform for work in the future. Thanks for being my Plusbuddies, everybody, hopefully we can figure it out together. If you’d like to connect on Google Plus, I am here.

I’ve got important things in the sidebar of my blog, for example. I like having my contact info, bio, links to information about my consulting practice and my media citations sitting right next to every article, no matter what readers came here to read. I don’t want to lose control over my own Information Architecture, no matter how under-developed it is, to Google’s vision of “posts in one tab and about page in another.” I want to put those things where I want, in the order I want and make them look however I want.

I’ve got some of my most useful posts on this blog pinned in the sidebar as well. Several of them are 3 or 4 years old. In the Plus world, those would be washed so far down the stream!

I like being able to choose what commenting system I use on my blog. I really like using Disqus because I can click on any commenter’s avatar and see what other Disqus-using blogs they comment on and how often. That’s a great way to get a quick picture of someone’s community of participation.

I like offering a search box, I use Lijit that searches my own personal blog archives and an extended network of sites I’ve identified (my tweets, my bookmarks, some of my favorite RSS subscriptions). I really doubt Google Plus will ever enable something like that.

Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.

Rather than chasing people around from one platform to another, where they prefer to spend their time, I’m going to sit right here on a site I own and wait for the future to become interoperable with me!

WordPress plug-ins, the iPhone publishing app, the open source community, but more than anything my own control over how I present my self to the world – all those things are very important to me.

I do love Google Plus, though, and if you do too – here’s my profile there that you can add to a Circle so we can be Plusbuddies.

Five years later – only a handful of these methods below still work! It’s something I’ve needed to do a lot since then, though, so I’ve actually built a technology myself that I offer to my consulting clients and others. Email me at marshall@marshallk.com if you have a business need to find the top blogs in a field.

Presuming you’ve just got a casual need, though. Here’s what I suggested 5 years ago, now updated with some notes.

It’s true, almost every field of interest has bloggers now! So how can you find blogs about whatever you are interested in? Here are a number of ways I recommend:

• Go to Technorati’s Blog Finder and search by author-submitted tag regarding entire blogs as opposed to individual posts. You can view these in order of “most authority” (inbound links) or “most recently updated.” This looks like it could still work, but I wouldn’t depend on it. Technorati, unfortunately, has become primarily an advertising network in recent years. Give it a shot though and let me know how the results are!
• Here’s another cool service that didn’t make it, this site isn’t even online anymore: The other end of the spectrum, methodologically, might be Top Ten Sources. A fairly broad number of topics are covered here, with an expert human editor maintaining what they believe are the top ten blogs in their area of expertise. From Second Life to the Opera. For good times check out photoblogs and MP3 blogs. Since both of these are multimedia, the Top 10 pages themselves are less impressive than the individual blogs and feeds. I just subscribed to the OPML file of the Top Ten Photoblogs and yay am I excited.
• This remains one of my favorite free methods and still works quite well: Look at what other people have tagged with the terms blog and your topic of interest in del.icio.us. See, for example: http://del.icio.us/tag/library2.0+blog.
• Still smart: When you find blogs you like, check if they have blog rolls – a list of their favorite blogs – in the sidebar. Or, check to see who is linking to the blog you found already by searching for their URL in Technorati, Icerocket or another blog search engine.
• Haven’t done this in years: If you are looking through a large number of blogs and want to evaluate the quality of them, I like to open the Technorati Mini on my desktop and drop in blog URLs as I find them to see if other people are linking there. This only works when Technorati works, of course, and that’s only part of the time.

Well, there’s a few tips. Hope they are useful.

Another method I like: Take blogs you have found that you like, copy their URLs and paste them into a Google search. One of the links on the results page should be Similar. Like this. Give that a try.

If you’re doing this for work though (and you should, reading top blogs and finding industry leaders on Twitter can lend you a huge information advantage) then send me an email. I’ve been finding the best blogs for people for years on a variety of topics and can do a better job, faster and cheaper than just about any other method you’re likely to find.

Dear friends and neighbors, as part of my ongoing practice of using robots and algorithms to make grandiose claims about topics I know too little about, I have enlisted a small army of said implements of journalistic danger to assemble the above collection of blogs about data. I used a variety of methods to build the first half of the list, then scraped all the suggestions from this Quora discussion to flesh out the second half. Want to see if your blog is on this list? Control-F and search for its name or URL and your browser will find it if it’s there.

Why data? Because we live in a time when the amount of data being produced is exploding and it presents incredible opportunities for software developers and data analysts. Opportunities to build new products and services, but also to discover patterns. Those patterns will represent further opportunities for innovation, or they’ll illuminate injustices, or they’ll simply delight us with a greater sense of self-awareness than we had before. (I was honored to have some of my thoughts on data as a platform cited in this recent Slate write-up on the topic, if you’re interested in a broader discussion.) Data is good, and these are the leading people I’ve found online who are blogging about it.

How the Blogs Are Ranked

I then ran these blogs through my favorite web service, Postrank, which looks at every post across every one of these blogs and scores them in terms of social media engagement: comments left, inbound links from other blogs, times that link was shared on Twitter, bookmarked on Delicious and more. Postrank then ranks all the blogs in any collection in terms of the amount of social media engagement they have received in recent history. That’s where this ranking came from. Nothing but which sites get included is under my control – so I think I can be objectively proud that my co-workers at ReadWriteCloud have come in at #3. Note that you might find a blog or two here where Postrank’s analysis of its feed needs a reset, because it’s hit an error and returned blank results. That’s what happened with the primary O’Reilly feed about data, and I’ve emailed Postrank to ask them to reset their scoring machine for it. That’s especially in need of remedy given that O’Reilly is working hard on a forthcoming conference all about data called Strata. (I’ll be there, moderating a panel on data-driven journalism.)

After I ran these through Postrank, I pulled down the data the way I wanted it using Needlebase, then put it in this Google Spreadsheet and embedded it here.

I did the same thing with 300 blogs about geotechnology last week – and just like I did then, I’ll ask now: who did we miss? I’d love to get these leader boards built out for several of the top topics ReadWriteWeb covers and turn them into weekly posts, covering the leading and ascendent voices in niche blogospheres covering topics that will change the future of the web and world.

I imagine that Data Blogs may be a bigger world than Geo Blogs, so I may have missed more this time. Let me know in comments if you’d like your blog included in the index and I’ll add it. Or if you know others that ought to be included. Fun times – and thanks for continuing to blog, folks, in this era of 140 character utterances!

It was just two months ago that Michael Krigsman welcomed Adrian into the Enterprise Irregulars working group.  Other members of the group work in big firms as well.

Adrian credits boutique analyst firm RedMonk with inspiring many of his strategic beliefs about how analysts can participate in social media and offered a good critique of standard practices in response to a James Governor blog post discussing Gartner’s social media last Spring.

As for participation by the old guard, they have a way to go. Just today I heard of an analyst being called out for putting “too much good stuff” in his/her blog. The notion that it might be a way to draw eyeballs to the for-pay content is still beyond all of them. And with rare (though exemplary) exceptions, twitter is for broadcast, not for dialogue; even if they tolerate some limited interaction with those outside the paywall, it’s probably that they aren’t noticing it. They are most definitely not encouraging or motivating it.

That should give you a little taste of what Merv Adrian will try to bring to the biggest analyst firm in technology, and a firm that is widely considered behind the times when it comes to social media.  (Though neither Governor nor Adrian agree with that sentiment.) I haven’t listened to the Sage Circle podcast linked-to at the end of his announcement post yet, but I’m sure that will be good too.

Adrian describes himself as: Technology analyst and consultant, 30 years of industry experience, covering software mostly, hardware sometimes. Former Forrester SVP.

I don’t know Adrian, though I have been following him since putting up this post on ReadWriteWeb about how to follow hundreds of analysts on Twitter with a single click.  Anyone who gets props from James Governor, Carter Lusher and says the kinds of things it looks like Adrian does has got my interest piqued, though.  Good luck in the new gig Merv, and keep blogging.

via Going to Gartner « Merv Adrian’s IT Market Strategy.

This post is the beginning of an experiment wherein I put up quick bits about found links that are too long for Twitter but not quite the right fit to post on ReadWriteWeb.

Well that’s not how it works, folks. We get excited, I get excited, about potential. About early startups that are opening our eyes to new possibilities for utility and value creation. I don’t know which ones will work out long-term and I don’t really care. When I write about technologies, I write about what they do for me and what I like about them.

Note that one commenter below makes a good counter-argument.

The feature I wrote about today is a simple button that website owners can embed that launches a pop-up to add visiting a location as a “to-do” item on your Foursquare account. That means that when ever a user checks-in at a location near by the location of that to-do item, they will receive a pop-up notification on their phone.

Isn’t that incredible? It’s like online annotation of the off-line world! I love it! It’s nothing super complicated, in fact it seems rather obvious in retrospect (a Foursquare button like the Tweetmeme button, etc.) but I hadn’t thought of such a thing, had you?

I get excited about things like this – and I blog largely for myself. I don’t care if only a few million people use Foursquare, I don’t care if it is unappealing to many more people, I don’t care (ok, I really do care) if the app is inflexible, crashy and frustrating. If the CEO seems smug, if Gowalla is prettier and if it’s a pain to pull out your phone and check-in when you arrive someplace. All of those things are relevant – but today the company launched an awesome new feature (and version 2.0 of its iPhone app, though that’s of less interest to me, to be honest) and I think it’s awesome.

I write for myself, even on ReadWriteWeb, because I like what I like. Fortunately, enough other people get excited about the same things I do that the readers come and the checks clear. But at least most of the time, I’m writing about things that I find of interest, whether readers will or not. Perhaps that’s not entirely true, but some things are so interesting to me that I don’t care if there are loud voices telling me it’s really not interesting.

And I think a social network of people registering their location around the world, complete with annotations and push notifications, I think that’s super cool. If you don’t think it’s interesting, maybe you should just skip those articles. If people want me to spend some time thinking real hard and writing really critically about Foursquare in particular, I could do that (maybe I should some time) – but I’m still going to write with excitement about the things I’m excited about.

In fact, earlier this month I exchanged emails with several of the people at Foursquare concerning statements that founder Dennis Crowley made that I was just about ready to slam him for. But upon reading his clarifying remarks in response to my email, and upon talking to other people with a diversity of opinions about the matter, I decided there wasn’t really a story there. I was ready to be critical of the company, though.

But today? I’m really excited about what they are doing!

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?

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.

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.

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)

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?

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.

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.

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

I feel conflicted about the decision I have learned that the Expo has made to do a publicity deal with Izea/PayPerPost, who are scumbags. I can understand why the Expo would do so and I can understand why armies of beginning bloggers would work with Izea. However, I do not like the idea of advertisers paying for blog coverage and I do not believe them when they say disclosure is required. See image below, click for full size.

Why did I contribute to the BlogOnExpo? I didn’t know about the Izea partnership until after I already had and I’m not sure how big a deal it is. I do want to be clear though that I am in no way in support of Izea.

That said, I hope you like the content that I and a number of other bloggers contributed to the Expo.

Personal

Most important, I’m getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven’t met Mikalina but many of you have. She’s wonderful and I love her very much. We’ve been together for more than 4 years already and she’s studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist – she’s a rock star in both and hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.

We’re looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast.

Yay!

Work Changes

Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September. That’s now going to change.

The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now.

I absolutely love consulting – but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development. I’ll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we’re saying that I’m going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I’ll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well.

I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard’s support, though. I’m very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today. (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger, we’re coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.)

Consulting

I’m really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you’re interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here.

Did I Mention That I’m Getting Married?

Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I’m very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I’d let readers here know about it too.