http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/14/sterling_sxsw/
*Look, I told you that blogs were in for it. People didn't get that! No, no, "too vague," the geeks said! They couldn't imagine anything replacing blogs. They thought maybe I was saying that blogs would die on their own and we'd have to fall back on some archaic thing like newspapers.
*Besides, what scifi New Thing was supposed to obsolesce blogs? Two years ago blogs were everybody's darling. Blogs were supposed to be unbundled newspapers with keener long-tail coverage and better-targeted ads. Blogs were supposed to be a communication business.
*TWITTER?! You're kidding me, right? Twitter is for people who wanna micro-blog what they're having for lunch! Twitter is a kid's toy! All the heavy operators are on Technorati!
*Okay, two years ago, Twitter was like being beaten to death with croutons. Now it's turning into a river of croutons, a vast surging social stream of croutons, surging into a big lake of data-dredgeable croutons.
http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Management/google-social-shift/
"The traditional forms of measurements no longer make any sense. We need to look at it differently.
"Traffic vs. Influence
"Measuring how many people that comes to your site is no longer really relevant.
"People no longer exclusively read your content on your website, via a browser. They might read it on Facebook, in an RSS feed, on one of the many news aggregators, or via other sites that are republishing your article, either in full, or as quoted segments.
"On baekdal.com, more than 30% never read my articles via the website. That is a lot of people. Also measuring traffic, as in absolute unique visitors, has always been a bad idea. A person who visits your site does not necessarily read your content (in fact, many just skim the top part and move on). And even if a person does read it, it doesn't mean that she remembers it.
"You need to forget about measuring traffic. It's inaccurate and it's irrelevant. Instead you need to measure ‘influence'. How many people have you really connected to today? How many people chose to make you a part of their stream? How many people decided to come back another time? That is your new ‘how many are there' statistics. ..."
(((Do you hear that, blogs? That's the sound of you getting craigslisted. Don't get me wrong here: I said you'd be gone in ten years, not overnight. So you still got eight years. You'll be getting a little more corny and antiquated ever quarter, but hey, eight years: enjoy it.)))
(((And "social streaming"? You haven't even been properly named yet. But you're not gonna live very long, either.)))
