The next 3 days i’ll be blogging at OFFF 2009, the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture. From multimedia to design and motion, in 2009 the festival is celebrating visual culture on an incredible venue. Believe me, i’ve been there yesterday and the place is huge with a kick ass audiovisual setup. Besides the Roots room, Loopita also looked great and Mercadillo reached the largest number of guests of all editions.

You probably can meet me at Mercadillo, on Prt.sc boot, as i’ll be covering the event for the blog network and joining the winners of OFFF Screen Challenge.. Expect a few video interviews on the next few days, from Sagmeister to James Paterson, along with the occasional Twittering, but go easy on the WiFi, ok ? (after all, we’re more that 3500 OFFFers).

Let’s fail miserably. Let’s frail gracefully. Starting tomorrow, at OFFF.

• 
  After a fast and furious brainstorm yesterday on Twitter, here’s the full list of The 10 Social Media Commandments:
  1. Thou shall not publish partial RSS feeds.
  2. Don’t follow anyone, before starting to follow Scoble
  3. You shall not use n00bie aliases like pawn3d_1982
  4. Remember to renew your domain every year
  5. For six days you shall read your feeds and remember the Sabbath for Facebook
  6. You shall not make Twitter an idol for there is still IM and email.
  7. You shall not steal. Use creative-commons instead.
  8. Honor your reader comments, but feel free to ignore the trolls.
  9. You shall not covet a Page Rank 9
  10. I am Google, your Lord …
• I’m finally attending a Sigur Ros concert tonight. For those who couldn’t make it, enjoy their MoMa concert video.
  
• As promised on my latest Alt.Prt.sc videocast (portuguese only), here’s the link to podcast #5 of The Age Of Conversation, where i team with Efrain, Ernie, Mark, Mike, Cam and Angela, trying to sound interesting with sayings like:
  

  We have to realize that most of the jobs that will be here in ten years haven’t been invented. So it’s hard to set up a curriculum for these new kind of creatives.

  Great work on the podcast, Jay.
  RSS readers have to visit the site to listen the audio

Have a great Tuesday.

The gap between offline and online has narrowed in 2007, blurring the difference between consumers and users. The so called web 2.0 has reached mainstream, with regular users adopting Rich Internet Applications like online word processors or flocking to virtual worlds. The convergent consumer created a online hub for work and entertainment that nurtured the growth of technologies that enabled the creation and distribuition of immersive experiences.

Online Platforms

The digital lifestyle was also adopted by other platforms, with the iPhone becoming one of the main icons of convergence in 2007, a landmark in technology and a mobile device sales champion. Also in mobile, Google took a major step away from the desktop, with the Android platform, converging the interest of companies, developers and consumers. Other technologies, such as multi-touch devices, with research from PerceptivePixel for Microsoft Surface or the hack on the Wii remote, envisioned the need to integrate offline experiences with online.

Will it blend?

Even one of the most famous online videos of 2007 had convergence in mind, reminding us that the power of word-of-mouth is still the most effective forms of marketing and that advertising should be seen as a conversation igniter about products and services, and not a trespasser on consumers’ lives.

More consumer power

As consumers felt empowered, the need for defining their digital self grew stronger, with a louder online voice. Consumers are now brand ambassadors or become part of online communities, with social networks creating major buzz in 2007, Facebook beeing the rising star.
With great power comes great responsibility, and new concerns arose regarding digital privacy, an important on the main online advertising deal of the year: Google buying DoubleClick.

Online moves

Other online advertising moves were made by companies like Hitwise, aQuantitative, Nielsen or Compete, with innovations on services and metrics provided, questioning even more the obsolete model of traditional media. Google, despite too many product launches (Street View, Knols), etc, etc) has strengthened their lead on search advertising, and also bought RSS advertising network Feedburner. But there’s life beyond Mountain View, with Yahoo, Live.com and Ask.com showing that they’re still around, with some refreshing competition from niche search by Wikia, Spock or Mahalo).

A small, small world

Media convergence creates an apparently smaller world, that set stage to new forms of publishing like microblogging (Twitter) or tumblelogs (Tumblr), and promote a more imediate and objective communication. With the dividing line between online and offline-online blurring, more creative campaigns are set to connect these two realities: the promos for The Simpsons movie or the Year Zero ARG campaign for Nine Inch Nails were amongst the most memorable marketing moments of 2007.

Something to remember

Finally, in Portugal, a promising year in tech and new media events, with e-Mkt 2007, TakeOff and Barcamp in Coimbra, and a big November with Sapo Codebits plus the news of OFFF 2008 in Lisbon. In blogs, the launch of blog networks Tubarão Esquilo and Prt.sc were a sign that Portuguese online media is shaping up, perhaps encouraged with the growing interest of brands on social media, as for instance with the Rexona blog. In fact, Rexona has also one of my favorite international campaigns at “Quien es Fermin“, joining “Good Things Should Never End” and “Get The Glass” at my top online marketing campaigns of 2007.

No 2008 predictions, please

I won’t do the usual 2008 predictions, despite my pretty good hints last year. Instead, I’ll ask you to reflect on this: more than blogeratti or geeks, it’s regular consumers that will set the trends, and they will keep visiting MySpace, wondering around on souvenir shops and eating Oreo pizzas. No matter how strange and un-convergent that seems to “us”.

This article will soon be available in Portuguese, at blog network Prt.sc

The reason is quite simple: Sapo Codebits, the programming contest i was in the last 3 days, helping out a Prt.sc team last night.

Master coders and blog mates, Samuel and Luis (photo by JPAntunes)

Our project “Sapo Boa Vida” (Sapo Good Life) was a winner in the Mashup category, an idea of social recommendation based on geo data and Sapo webservices.

Time to get some sleep now.

Basic Conditions

First thing first, the network members should write blogs, in the form of a daily journal with original content updated regularly. If we agree on this obvious premise, that immediately excludes networks such as MyBlogLog or social bookmark services such as Digg. Also excluded are multi-author blogs since these are themselves a author network.

My second premise is they should have some sort of quality control, with a human authority determining which blogs are included and assuring premium content, leaving out networks such as Blogger.
Following the same line of thought, but with a more technical focus, the network should not enforce any platform or domain name, leaving out WordPress.com or Instablogs for example. Both power and identity should be distributed across the community, so it makes no sense to require members to adhere to a particular set of tools.

One thing I’m not considering is the quality of blog content as a determining factor, since it’s subjective and biased to each network.

Having focused on the blog side of things I’m moving now into the network aspects. One thing that arises above all aspects is the community building, the conversational network, the bonds that establish between the blog members, way besides link-baiting or SEO concerns. I truly believe that you can only become a blog network if the members are passionate about it, help each other and feel responsible for the future of the network. One example that stands out amongst all them is 9 rules, that has a devoted community, greatly supportive of the network initiatives.

Being a network also means that you are able to aggregate information or have a global overview of content stream, whether through aggregating portals or tools such as widgets or rss feeds, allowing readers to browse the blogs from a nuclear location. That alone leaves a big player such as Gawker out, that I’ll rather classify as a media network.

As Duncan puts it, these are my basic criteria for being considered a blog network:

• network members are individual blog authors
• admission isn’t automated but based of human judgment
• network does not enforce publishing platform
• encourages community building
• nuclear aggregation of content

Classification

If a blog network complied with the previous conditions, then it could fit in one (or many) of these classifications:

• Category Network: network members write mostly about a particular topic. Examples include SBNation, a blog network discussing sports;
• Affiliated Network: that shares a common feature between bloggers: Example includes Prt.sc, where all authors are Portuguese;
• Local Network: members write about local subjects, geographically determined. Example includes MetroBlogging;
• Commercial Network:Network generating revenue to their members either through advertising revenues or paying their authors for published content. Examples include b5media.⁽¹⁾

Advantages

• For Blog authors: they apply or are invited to become part of a blog network with the perspective of increasing their audience and gain some additional advertising revenue;
• For Blog network owners/promoters: with dimension comes personal visibility and advertising opportunities;
• For Readers: they can find good blogs on a particular topic (by aggregation or hyperlinking between network members), a task increasingly difficult with today’s information overloa;.

One thing i must address here is that a blog network that doesn’t promote their own internal community (blog authors) has few chances of being successful, since no synergies or innovation occurs.

Ranking

Although some have tried to rank blog networks, there is much work to be done. Weblogs SL from Spain is in the right path by distributing metrics provided by third media parties (Nielsen Netratings), and it would be interesting if there was some way to judge blog network reach and frequency besides Technorati or Alexa.

List of Blog Networks

• 451 Press, http://www.451press.com
• 9 Rules, http://9rules.com
• Corante, http://www.corante.com
• Fodder Network, http://www.foddernetwork.com
• MetroBlogging, http://www.metroblogging.com
• Podcast Network, http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com
• Prt.Sc (Portugal), http://www.prt.sc
• SBNation, http://www.sbnation.com
• ShinyMedia, http://www.shinymedia.com
• Web2.0 Workgroup, http://www.web20workgroup.com
• Weblogs Inc, http://www.weblogsinc.com
• Weblogs SL (Spain), http://www.weblogssl.com
• TC Magazines Network (Germany), http://www.tcmagnet.com/

(*) Note: the list above is incomplete, so feel free to suggest any other networks that meet the criteria.

References

• http://tihane.wordpress.com/2006/12/24/3-blog-community-paradigms/

This is a work in progress and perhaps i’ll even submit it to Wikipedia, so let me know in what you think, and what other issues i should address.

(1) Deleted the Advertising Network (blog networks can exist without advertising, it’s not a common feature), and is now included in the Commercial Network, since by legal reasons no advertising revenue can be collected without a owner or company.