A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the amazing story of an autistic high school senior who was allowed to play in his basketball team’s last game and scored 20 points in less than four minutes. Well, it seems that others noticed as well :–)

I just became aware of an innovative blogging application from Fidelity Assets. A frequently updated, multi-user blog offers pointers to information about real estate trends like some port moody condos for sale and new luxury homes that are under construction right now. Many homes these days are being helped by the florida construction management agency. Fidelity Assets just put out a press release inviting realtors to post the syndicated blog content on their websites at no charge. It’s a nice way to get some free branding for basically next to no cost. It looks like all the Fidelity bloggers are doing is finding interesting articles online and pointing readers to them.

My attitude toward the flap about Wal-Mart enlisting bloggers to argue its case about its employee benefits policies was nicely summed up by Jeff Jarvis and others. Why is this a story? What did these bloggers do that most local newspapers and TV stations don’t do every day? Is it news to anyone that PR agencies influence the stories that are reported in the media? Is it news that reporters sometimes take shortcuts?

I’ve been in the computer trade press for more than 23 years and have seen some pretty ugly things. I’ve seen press releases reprinted verbatim with reporter bylines on them. I’ve seen reporters write single-source stories and pretend that they had done significantly more research than what was presented in the story. I’ve seen quotes invented or lifted out of press releases and submitted as original. I’ve personally had my work plagiarized by one of the biggest news services in the world. I’ve seen businesses and organizations present reporters with expensive trips and gifts, which the reporters accepted without question and didn’t disclose in their reporting. On the advice of my editor, I once accepted one of those trips myself.

These things probably don’t go on at the New York Times (though who knows what Jayson Blair was doing?) but they have gone on for years at small-market and vertical publications. That’s not an excuse, but it is context. The media takes shortcuts and works hand-in-glove with PR organizations at every level. Even the biggest and most influential publications communicate with publicists. Professional reporters at big media operations are very clear on the rules. People at mid- and small-market publications often don’t understand the nuances. Take a look at your local newspaper. Do you suppose the people who produce it are seasoned journalists with clear ethical standards? Most likely they aren’t, but that doesn’t diminish the value of the information they provide you if you understand where they’re coming from.

Most bloggers aren’t professional journalists and don’t adhere to the codes that journalists hold true. Nevertheless, I think the blogosphere is remarkably transparent and honest. The values that serious bloggers embrace are just as virtuous as those accepted by major media organizations. The fact that some bloggers don’t understand or adhere to the rules may make them amateurs, but it doesn’t make this a scandal. Or even a story.

William Powers’ National Journal article, Those Busted Blogs, is oh, so timely. Just last week I was speaking to a group about social media and noted that a backlash against the blosophere was inevitable. Blogging was too hot and the forecasts of bloggers’ devastating impact on traditional media too overblown. A time would come soon, I said, when the tide of public opinion would turn against blogging and bloggers would be pilloried for being dogmatic, amateurish know-nothings.

So it was kind of amusing to see Powers’ piece document just the kind of firestorm I expected. It cites a Gallup poll saying that only 9% of U.S. Internet users regularly read blogs. See my earlier post for my opinion on this kind of research. The article also quotes a New York magazine and Slate articles saying that the blogosphere is becoming pendulous and polluted with garbage, thereby limiting its value.

The latter point is valid. A lot of people are jumping into the blog pool right now just to test the water. But what’s wrong with that? I expect 90% of those people won’t stay very long but the blogosphere will be fine without them. This phenomenon has too much momentum and too much value to fade away. This backlash was going to happen and will probably continue for a year or so. Then it, too, will fade, blogging will re-establish itself as a valuable and viable medium and life will go on. This is so predictable.

I should note, BTW, that the Powers piece is critical of the critics:

“…Most bloggers are not in it for money — they do it for love. The mainstream outlets would now have us believe that this is a bit pathetic. Just look at those dreadful audience numbers, the scanty profits. I say 20 million or so bloggers know otherwise. Once they were up, and now they’re down. It’s the classic arc of an establishment-media fad. It’s weird that so many bloggers bought into it, given their feelings about the establishment. Never mind: They’ll be back.”

Indeed, they will.

I got a chance to speak to Dan Bricklin last week about his forthcoming Wikicalc product, a spreadsheet in a wiki metaphor. It’s easy to take for granted that these kinds of programs are easy to write but Dan described some of the inherent limitations of wikis that make Wikicalc such a challenge.

For example, wikis are not designed to support recalculation of a large spreadsheet. They’re basically vehicles for displaying information. A wiki also doesn’t understand the concept of interdependency, which is essential to a spreadsheet. You can change one cell in Excel and kick off 100,000 calculations. A wiki just doesn’t know how to account for that. It’s very good at noting that a word was changed or a sentence deleted but not that a formula in cell A189 changed a result in cell AB258.

Interdependence has other effects. I may be working on one page of my spreadsheet and you on another page. In a text world, that’s reasonably easy to track. But if a formula on my page references a cell in your page, any changes you make will be overwritten by a change that I make. A wiki can deal well with pages, but not with pages that are linked to each other.

Also, people tend to work on spreadsheet models for a long time, trying out different what-if scenarios before saving. I could have my spreadsheet open for an hour working on a model that’s changed in the meantime because someone else is working on the same spreadsheet. Then I save my file and overwrite the updates that were made by the other user. In essence, I write the old data back to the workspace because there was no way to lock the document while I was working on it.

Of course, Dan has figured out solutions to all these problems :-). Wikicalc will have a check-in/check-out function to limit versioning problems. He’s also writing a sort of replication function that lets people work on a model offline and then upload the result while recording any changes. I’m not sure quite how he’s doing that, but I’m sure it will be elegant.

There are a lot of exciting possibilities about this product. Imagine cells that refer to real-time temperature data or stock quotes on other websites and incorporate that data into calculations. You can do that with Excel, of course, but it’s real hard to share.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports on Gallup and Pew research that finds that only 20% of Internet users read blogs. Not to impugn those fine research organizations but how the heck do they know? Do you really believe that if you asked average people about blogs that they would be able to identify Engadget.com or Boingboing.net as a blog? I can barely tell in some cases. According to whatis.com, a blog is a “personal journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.” If you believe that the average user can make that distinction, you’re smoking something.

A big reason that blogs are successful is because they’re indistinguishable from websites. Trying to measure their influence in terms of reader perception is ludicrous. We keep seeing this kind of research, but it makes no sense because it’s attempting to measure the unmeasurable.

Is there any doubt that podcasting has hit the big time? 🙂

Steve Rubel comments on his first day on the job at Edelman PR. Sounds like it was a sleepless affair. His story will be interesting to watch: How a successful blogger adjusts to a major shift in work life and still keeps blogging. He says he’s going to do it.

Nike has launched a new blog to promote its basketball shoes. But there’s no commenting allowed. I wonder why?

Technorati’s got a new feature (at least, I think it’s new) that ranks blogs by the number of members who have voted them their favorites. It’s a great idea and should work over time as the number of votes grows. Of course, it’s also open to manipulation…

There’s a lot of buzz about a new product from Microsoft code-name Origami. It’s supposed to be some kind of mobile device. People are expecting big things. Tell me: when was the last time Microsoft surprised anyone with breakthrough technology?

Here’s a challenge in opacity. Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s #1 blogger, writes about the danger of concealing product plans from your internal blogforce. And he cites several third-party accounts that speculate about what Origami is. Now Scoble presumably knows what this mystery product is, yet he’s writing about what people are speculating about it and not confirming or denying anything. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s developers have the freedom to write about what they know as long as they’re not covered by NDA, from what I understand of MS’s blogging policy. It’s an interesting exercise to keep a secret when you’re openly encouraging blogging at the same time. I give credit to MS for even trying.

As the parent of a learning disabled son, I almost cried watching this video about an autistic kid who got a chance to play in his high school team’s final basketball game. If this doesn’t boost your faith in the human spirit, I don’t know what will.

Wal-Mart has created a website to counter criticism that its employee benefits are below par. It’s nicely done. There’s a blog, too, but that’s evidently an after-the-fact idea, since the most recent post is Nov. 23. That’s a cardinal sin in blogging. You don’t let your site lie fallow. It makes it look like you don’t care, have nothing to say or aren’t really committed to the topic you blog about.