I recently noticed, with horror, that most of my posting of late - in fact, the vast majority - has been simply stuff I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us, pumped across into my blog.

I’ve decided this is not what my blog is for. So, I now just have a nice, unobtrusive feed to the right of this page with items I’ve specifically tagged ‘forblog’. That is, if I find it interesting, and I think other people who read this blog might find it interesting, then it’ll appear. Not otherwise.

I’ve decided the blog’s the place for properly considered, joined-up thinking, not the occasional quick fix.

I know, I know, this is a very weak post but I felt the need to say it. There, I feel better already.

Which do you trust more, humans or machines?

Google has released a video showing a Digg-like interface to its search. I think it’s going to change everything.

A casual glance at Friendfeed picked up a link from Chris Brogan: entitled ‘Is this the future of search?’ Given that I’m currently scratching my head a lot and figuring out how best to pull together searches across social media, this sounded interesting. It pointed to this Techcrunch post featuring a video of a new feature that enables you to tailor how your Google results come in.

Essentially you can vote on results in a very Digg-like way. You can add comments to results, and link to your Google profile so people know who voted, how and why. To my mind, this is going to be incredibly powerful.

Google is the ultimate machine-based search, pointing you towards pages that are likely to be what you’re after, not necessarily because that page talks about it, but because other pages reference it. The more pages point to a page, the more likely it is to be relevant. At base, it’s crude, but you can’t deny Google works well enough.

This new ‘voting mode’ points the way to human-based search. It pretty much is actually going around and asking people what they think, to get the best result. It replaces the machine algorithm with sentiment - the ‘human algorithm’ if you like. In so doing, the new Google Search mode turns every node into a social object. It enables people to comment and vote on a result that they care enough about to do so.

Comments on Todd’s Friendfeed has been interesting. Most agree it’s highly significant, but some feel that it’s in some way scary - it’s ‘mob rule’, ‘it leaves quality content as the mercy of conventional wisdom’, ‘monumentally stupid idea’, ‘I don’t want marketers telling me the best search result’.

My take on it is that if - as I assume to be the case - you can switch between these two modes, then you can compare and contrast. It just depends on what you value, or how you want to search.  I don’t see why this is so scary - it offers the best of both worlds, both the machine-based election for what you’re searching on, and the human-based.

And would it be so easy to game? Can you really game Google? As in, something that large? And if so, how does that make it lesser than Digg - assuming that is also gameable - or indeed current Google? (note: these comments, including mine, have been copied directly from Chris’s Friendfeed comments).

OK, so sites like Digg, del.icio.us etc already do this. The real difference, as far as I can see, is that, if you ask people in the street about Digg or del.icio.us or Wangwack or Biffo or whatever’s coming along next, you’ll more likely than not get a blank look. But almost everyone knows about Google. Heck, even my parents have heard of Google. Even the cat looks up when I mention it.

So look out for this emerging from Google Labs at some point. It’s going to be intriguing to say the least.

So, as one of my ‘things to do’ before I start at Fleishman Hillard*, I’ve been going through my RSS feeds in Google Reader. A very timely post about organising RSS feeds came along on the PNeo blog reminding that I needed to do this, and how I’d in fact planned to do it some time ago.

So, I’ve done it. I now have four main feeds, for daily news, must read, should read and could read. They’re fairly loose definitions but ‘must read’ is by people/organisations that I consider dead-centre of what I need to know and consistently come up with good stuff. Should and could read are just lesser gradations thereof.**

During this, I noticed the following trends. Unfortunately I didn’t make note while going through all this of exactly who was saying what, so you’ll just have to accept them as anecdotally true:

• Several bloggers had just stopped. End of.
• Many had apologised, over the past few months, for not posting for a while. I’ve done the same myself.
• Several had moved, but not offered any RSS forwarding. As a result I hadn’t been getting stuff in from them for a while. This is quite an oversight on their part, and as good an advert for Feedburner that I can think of.
• Some, particularly those that had relocated, now seem to talk more about social media more than they used to, in particular Twitter and Facebook.

Taken together, these do all seem to point to a shift away from blogging and towards other more interactive forms of social media.

Actually, I can qualify this a little now - strangely enough, since setting up my contextual feeds, which is proof of a kind.

For example, Jennifer Gniadecki writes on Problogger about how blogging is more like an after-dinner speech than a true conversation. It’s akin to a quote I recently heard that, if someone spoke to you like they do in advertising, you’d punch them. Similarly, if someone pontificated at you like they do in blogging, without letting you get a word in edgeways, you’d probably wander off or fall asleep.

Neville Hobson also comes to the rescue by bringing up the ‘is blogging dead’ issue, via Jason Calcanis’s recent announcement that he’s - shock horror - going to be emailing instead because he thinks it’s a more intimate way to do business.  He also links to the CheapEasyGlobal post I commented on earlier this week which brings to the fore the idea that it’s a publishing revolution, not just blogging.

What do I think? Well, I do know that I really really really loved blogging but nowadays it’s become more of a chore than I’d like. I also think that other forms of interaction/publishing such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed are more ubiquitous and encourage relationship forming much more quickly, and at the end of the day maybe this is what clients are more likely to pay for.

It really is a bit like this, honest

So where does blogging fit? In a way I like the after-dinner speech analogy. To use another analogy, it’s the dreadnought of your social media arsenal where you put across good, solid ideas and opinions rather than the small arms of microblogging or the repeated stabbing of social networks. Or, to return to my food-related analogy when describing Twitter, your blog is the full Wonka bar. And suddenly I’m strangely tired but also hungry…

* I’m sure everybody is insanely jealous of my having a short breather between jobs, but unfortunately I have some sort of throat ‘thing’ that made the doctor whince, and which makes me fall asleep instantly and without warning.

** I‘ve plonked them into a Netvibes public tab if you’re interested. I’ve also used iGoogle for my own personal amusement, mainly because I’d like to integrate the presentation-friendly approach of tabs with the search/archive/analyse-friendly approach of Google Reader. But iGoogle does suck.

• List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008
  This is quite some list Jeremiah’s putting together and I’m not sure about it. At what point does social media ’start’? And surely this is for the likes of LinkedIn, not a central blog list?
  (tags: blogs lists socialmedia research jeremiahowyang forblog)

As from 21st July, I will be working as senior account manager in the digital team at Fleishman Hillard UK.

Of course it’s sad to say goodbye to my Porter Novelli colleagues - and judging from this comment I think the feeling’s mutual. However, it’s a great opportunity to work in an expanding team, with support from the already established US team and opportunities to find out what truly works when helping people communicate better using digital channels.

Strangely, I’m already fairly clued up on life at Fleishman Hillard. I went to their Digital Influence Index presentation, and have met Ed Lee, account director at Fleishman Hillard Canada’s sister company iStudio. I also met up with two of my future colleagues, Paul Borge and Joshua Davidson, at the Tuttle Social Media Club last week, and we had a great chat with James Whatley, Nancy Williams and Thibault Baradat-Bujoli.

All that remains is for me to give my swan song at Porter Novelli’s summer party next week (I’m the bass player for their kick-ass band Moscow Road so if there are any PN employees reading this, the band needs a replacement bassist pretty soon).

Any suggestions for how to go out with a bang? Flaming death perhaps? Mosh pit dive? Or maybe just a nice cup of tea and a biscuit? Answers please…

• Leaders in corporate communications and internal communication | Lawrence Ragan Communications
  I’ve been meaning to look at Ragan more closely for some time and it rocks. Oh, and I love MyRagan too.
  (tags: myragan ragan brands socialmedia)

It’s fascinating helping people get into blogging. It’s like teaching them to fly, given that you’ve been doing it for a while and you’ve got your dorsal tail feather control down and everything, but they’re still a bit ungainly and fluffy and, without guidance, would not fly so much as plummet.

I stumbled into it of my own accord and discovered stuff by trial and error - mostly error - but it’s interesting to realise how much I’ve found out along the way, while simultaneously realising how back to basics you need to go when explaining it all.

Given that the thorny issues of ‘what do you want to write about’, ‘who are you writing for’ and ‘what do you want to achieve’ have been covered, the nuts and bolts are the first difficulty. I tend to recommend WordPress as a nice, simple hosted solution because I find Typepad fiddly and Blogger spammy, and to my eyes WordPress is fairly friendly and easy to use. But then there are all sorts of problems for beginners, starting with ‘how do I write a new post’. OK, so the ‘New Post’ button is at the top, but sometimes the eye needs pointing in that direction. It’s not a big button, and it doesn’t wave at you or anything. Then there’s, well, everything else. How do I insert an image? How do I insert a YouTube video? How do I change the layout? What do all these blog stats mean? Etc.

Then there are questions about links, which become a bigger question about community. When to hyperlink? Where? Why? How do you get people to link back to you? My answers are generally along the lines of hyperlinking to improve usability and search engine optimisation (SEO), and you get people to link back to you by including them on your blogroll in the first instance, and then commenting on their blogs, generally interacting with them, and providing great content in the second. Over time you find out about people, and they find out about you. Links abound.

Another topic - how do you get ideas? This is where I point people to RSS and aggregators, namely Google Reader because it’s awesome. Most of my ideas come from checking what’s come through in my feeds - in fact, I actually tend just to check what’s come through in the feeds to the right of this page because they give me a snapshot that can often trigger something. You can also keep yourself connected through other resources such as Twitter and, more recently, the new super-aggregator Friendfeed, all of which are rich in comments that will pique your interest providing you use a client such as twhirl to get the most out of them.

And the more you do this, the more aware and alert you become. When I’m on a roll (a blogroll?) I’ll be noting things to write about left, right and centre, whether it’s something someone said, something I read, or just an idea that popped into my head (hey, that sort of rhymes). I sometimes get frustrated that I lose some of these ideas, which is why I’ve recently taken to adding them as notes in my mobile phone as and when I get them.

If you’re slightly geeky you can almost think of this all as input - process - output. The input is what you read, hear or see that gives you ideas. The process is formalising that idea and putting it down into a post. The output is actually posting.

But that’s a very dry way to think about it. For me, blogging is about increasing your expertise in your chosen subject area, being inspired and engaged, and coming across other people with similar attributes. What’s to lose?

• louisgray.com: The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining
  A neat study of where the google juice really comes from nowadays. Answer: not blogs any more.
  (tags: blogging seo forblog)

• gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: more thoughts on social objects
  Are social objects just ‘content’? As in, content brings people together?
  (tags: marketing geek socialnetworking forblog)

• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing
  It’s a bold claim but I’ve played around with Friendfeed and there’s something in it.
  (tags: metrics marketing journalism internet blogs blogging blog friendfeed forblog)
• Pre-Order Rovio Spy Robot
  Don’t want - need. It will be mine.
  (tags: robots coolstuff forblog)
• Marketing 2.0 Seminar - Ronnie Brown (LG Blog) | blending the mix
  I really really really really wanted to find out more about the LG blogging programme but I’m not sure this video’s going to help.
  (tags: blogging forblog)
• Quotes for the week ending 5th July, 2008 «
  I like this for 2 reasons: it presents material in a clever, compelling way that slots neatly into a content schedule; and the Twitter quote.
  (tags: hoipolloi twitter blogging forblog)