Blogging

I wrote a piece today that raises some interesting questions. Have methods of viral distribution spread widely enough so that an online word-of-mouth campaign can bypass techie bloggers? The MSN Found campaign — slammed by Scoble and dissed by other bloggers — is aimed at mainstream consumers. It doesn’t have RSS distribution, it doesn’t allow videos to be downloaded, and the “blogs” are fake (though in their defense, they are designed to be fake, from characters in an ongoing narrative).

So if early-adopter techie bloggers find MSN Found uninteresting, is that it? Does the meme go no further? Or will e-mail “forward to a friend” and more mainstream (read: teen diary) blogging save the day for MSN? Time will tell, I suppose. MSN isn’t talking about it and they’ll probably only spill if it’s eventually successful, but one wonders whether this will become one of those cautionary tales of online marketing gone wrong (like Raging Cow).

UPDATE: MSN responds to the Found controversy via its blog, saying it’s going to add RSS feeds though “very few updates” to the campaign are planned. Kudos to the firm for acknowledging the discussion that’s been going on.

UPDATE2: Scoble apologizes.

Threadwatch has an update on the Mark Jen story.

UPDATE: Even more on Mark Jen (with an interview and a picture!) from Gelf Magazine. [thx for tip, David]

Ross Mayfield blogs Mark Fletcher’s first presentation post-Bloglines’ acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The talk was at the Media Center Emerging Tech conference in Palo Alto I attended yesterday (and will join up with later today, as well).

Another interesting tidbit: Fletcher said Bloglines is working to build out social networking features that would allow users to share their subscriptions, clipblogs, etc. (not sure of specifics here and of course left my notebook at home). You’ll be able to share only with a certain network of people, rather than the public at large (you can now do some of this with a Bloglines public profile). He also said it wasn’t antithetical to Bloglines’ business model to share data (in the aggregate) about subscriptions, views, etc. (This last was in answer to a question by Seth Goldstein, who I haven’t seen since back in the day but was glad to chat with briefly yesterday.)

Also… Jason Calacanis on Bloglines’ business model.

So, the big spam attack has had another interesting consequence. Apparently, the new MSN Search indexed the The-River.net page with all of the crazy, nasty spam on it, so the new, revamped site is getting traffic from people searching for unspeakable things on MSN. How disappointed these folks must be when their search for “horny drunk girls hardcore sex pictures” (just one example) brings them here. (This is my not-so-techie interpretation of my referrer logs.)

When you search for my name (ah, vanity searching) on MSN you get The-River.net as the first result, and the cached page leads you to the spam-ridden version.

The result looks something like this:
The River
… material now manuscript horsewomen clothesbrush noetherian jobholder somewhere poultry posted by Pamela @ 6:51:10 PM | 0 comments Invest in your own home business Subscriber …
www.the-river.net Cached page

Zach posts on “blogs vs. everything that is not blogs“.

My brother sent me (and others) a link to a blog today via e-mail. He didn’t refer to it as a blog, just sent the link along, saying it was a good view of what’s going on with troops in Iraq. It’s a totally different type of blog than I’m used to reading, but still fascinating and encouraging to see the blog format, and the individual expression it allows, getting more mainstream.