Ed Batista

Hi Tom! (And Friends)

I haven't been blogging much over the past week, thanks to a dead laptop, so when I took a look at my stats a few minutes ago, I was surprised to see a big jump.  What gives?

It turns out that Tom Peters (yes, that Tom Peters) found his way here, liked what he saw, and encouraged his readers to drop by.   And as Cathy Mosca notes, I've even been added to his blogroll.  (I'm currently between Dave Barry and the esteemed Gary Becker & Richard Posner, which seems oddly fitting.)

I'm honored by the visits, and I hope you find a reason to come back.  (I actually just upgraded my feed subscription options at the top of the left-hand sidebar, so if you like what you see, you can keep up with my posts from the comfort of your newsreader or email inbox.)

tag: tom+peters cathy+mosca

Google Analytics on TypePad

I began running Google Analytics here this morning, and even with just a tiny amount of data to work with, I can tell it's going to be a useful tool.  I signed up for an account as soon as they were available last year (before they shut down open enrollment), but I heard there were problems caused by user demand overwhelming the service, so I never bothered to set it up.  I finally got around to it today, and I thought I'd describe how I set up Google Analytics on a TypePad site like this one, since it's an easy but not necessarily intuitive process:

1. Copy the relevant javascript from Google Analytics.
2. Create a new "Link" TypeList and configure the Notes to display as Text.
3. Add an item to the new TypeList and paste the javascript into the notes.
4. Add the TypeList to your site at the very bottom of the right-hand sidebar.  (I'm not certain, but it appears that this is the only location that will work, since it puts the javascript just before your site's </body> tag, as per Google's instructions.)

I should also note that it's important to filter out internal traffic (from your domain or IP address), particularly on low-traffic sites (uh, like this one).  Setting up these filters is pretty straightforward in Google Analytics, but you have to remember to format the filtered IP address properly.  According to their instructions:

Remember to use regular expressions when entering any IP address. For example, if the IP address to filter is:

192.168.1.1

then the IP address value will be

192\.168\.1\.1

That's it.  More to come when there's some data worth taking a look at.

tags: google analytics typepad

Andrew Sullivan at Time

Andrew Sullivan moved to Time last week, and it's interesting that  what once would have seemed like a major event almost escaped my notice entirely.  Sullivan did more than any other single writer to get me reading blogs, not just because he was so early to the game or because 9/11 and the War on Terror gave his writing a uniquely compelling context, but because (as I wrote last February), he "blazed a path for people like myself who don't feel particularly well-represented by the reigning ideologies on the Right or the Left."

When Sullivan temporarily retired from blogging last year,
I missed him, but it wasn't difficult to fill that void.  Perhaps not suprisingly, Sullivan couldn't stay away from blogging, but I never got back into the habit of reading him--partly because I was simply tired of the shrillness of the blogosphere's political discourse and found myself more fulfilled by reading and writing on other topics, and partly because I felt that Sullivan himself had become somewhat shrill in response to his critics.  (While I'd praised him as "a sassy, snarky writer with a keen bullshit detector," I suppose the line between snarky and shrill is finer than I once thought.)

But reminded of his presence by the move to Time, I've added him back to my Bloglines subscriptions--I'm curious to see if I stick with it.

On a related note:  This is a win-win for both Sullivan and Time--he's freed from the headaches of maintaining his site while sacrificing relatively little (so far) in the way of branding, and they get the attention and traffic that come with a bigfoot blogger.  But I also sense that missed opportunities in the past have brought Sullivan and Time together today, and they're hoping to make up for lost time.

For example, a number of serious political bloggers who followed in Sullivan's footsteps have turned their sites into sustainable and freestanding destinations: Daily Kos, Instapundit, Eschaton, Michelle Malkin, and PowerLine, to name just a few that get more than twice Sullivan's daily traffic, according to the TTLB rankings.

And plenty of media & news sites are far more popular than Time.com, according to Alexa.  As of today, Time is a respectable #1,087 in Alexa's traffic rankings, but the BBC Online is #22, CNN is #26, the New York Times is #72, the Washington Post is #196, USA Today is #240, Forbes is #270, Fox News is #290, Reuters is #291, and the Wall Street Journal is #399.

Those are perhaps unfair comparisons, but I think its fair to say that neither Time nor Sullivan took full advantage of their respective opportunities (Time as the leading pre-Web newsweekly, Sullivan as the first political blogger with a national profile), and that perhaps this union will be a fresh start for both of them.

tags: blogging journalism andrew sullivan time time magazine

Open Source Journalism: True Hoop

Henry Abbott is a sportswriter who started blogging at TrueHoop last year.  I'm not a basketball fan, but I've been following Abbott's work over the last few weeks because of his ongoing experiment in what he's calling open source journalism.

Abbott has been looking into the identity and dealings of William "Wes" Wesley, a former shoe salesman described by ESPN's Scoop Jackson as "the most powerful man in sports."  But despite Wesley's supposed influence, he remains a mysterious figure.  According to Abbott, "the Detroit News, the Akron Beacon-Journal, the Oregonian, the New York Times, GQ, and reportedly Sports Illustrated and HBO" have all written about or investigated Wesley without being able to fully explain just what he does or how he earns a living.

Abbott's not making any allegations of wrongdoing against Wesley, but he's intensely curious about how someone becomes so influential at the highest levels of sport and society, with links to Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Jay-Z, Phil Knight and even Bill and Hilary Clinton, while remaining so far in the background.

Abbott decided he was going to learn as much as he could about Wesley, and he's done an impressive job of piecing the facts together.  Here's his description of the process:

In 2006, we're going to find out who [Wesley] is...  And we're going to conduct the investigation in a new way. Welcome to open-source investigative journalism (as discussed in The New York Times and carried out at TalkingPointsMemo). It works like this: I'll keep blogging away as always, putting all of the William Wesley news I can get my hands on in the new "Who is William Wesley?" category you'll see on the right.

I will also pick up the phone and even leave the comfort of my office to conduct actual reporting. If the people I'm talking to will go on the record, the interviews will be recorded and shared here in podcasts and/or transcripts--so that you can judge the story for yourself.

But you will also do a lot of the work. I'm counting to readers of TrueHoop to help in a lot of important ways.

• Tips...
• Searching online and off...
• Photos...
• Chronology...
• Sightings...
• Fact-Checking...

So why do I care about all this if I'm not a basketball fan?  And why should you?  Because more and more journalism is going to be conducted according to this "open source" model, and the absence of an editorial apparatus constraining the journalist is going to create unique opportunities and challenges.

The opportunities are obvious: Engaging readers as fellow journalists and leveraging their collective knowledge, and having the freedom to pursue stories simply because they're fascinating top the list.  I'm sure you can think of a few more.

The challenges are more subtle.  One issue Abbott's running into right now is knowing when to stop, when to let go of a story and move on. In a recent comment on TrueHoop, UNC-Greensboro economics professor and occasional blogger Dan Rosenbaum raised some thought-provoking questions:

When Henry began this, I think William Wesley was such a "black box" that this reporting arguably struck the proper balance between the public's desire for information and some respect for Wesley's privacy.

But at this point, I think Henry has uncovered a lot about Wesley and now we know more about him than we do many public figures. Are there holes in what we know? Of course, but what has been uncovered is substantial.

Thus, for me personally, this has turned from the justified investigative reporting that it started out as to an invasion of privacy that serves few interests other than our prurient curiosity.

It appears that in this guy's line of business, keeping out of the limelight is an important part of what he does. That is perfectly understandable. (To a certain extent, that is true in my line of business, as well.)

So now that Henry has reported a great deal about Wesley, has this project crossed the line that divides justified investigative reporting from paparazzi-like hounding of a semi-public figure?

Despite the tremendous respect that I have for Henry, I worry that it has.

Not suprisingly, Abbott disagrees.  My point isn't that we're better off when our individual freedom to investigate is curtailed by an editorial apparatus, but rather that in unscrupulous hands, that freedom can and will be abused.  (And some people already feel that Abbott's investigation has crossed that line.  I disagree, but I think he's come pretty close.)

Given the ever-lower barriers to entry in online publishing, and the inevitable development of attention-based services that will help individual authors find their niche audience, the question isn't whether we should adopt open source journalism; it's how we will best support this new model, take advantage of its strengths, and address its shortcomings.

tags: open source journalism journalism blogging truehoop henry abbott attention attentiontrust

Custom CSS on TypePad

From TypePad's knowledge base:

Why Use Custom CSS

When a user converts their design to use advanced templates they sacrifice certain weblog design and configuration features for the advantage of being able to modify the page's HTML directly. Using Custom CSS to modify your weblog's design allows you to retain all of these features while also keeping the convenience of all of TypePad's design features and capabilities.

How To Use Custom CSS

To use the Custom CSS feature, navigate to the Design area for one of your weblogs. Then click the Edit Custom CSS link next to the Change Layout and Change Theme links. You will be taken to a screen with a large text field. Type your custom CSS information into this field.

The information you enter will be appended to the end of your existing stylesheet. This will override any custom CSS properties and existing CSS properties that may have been defined elsewhere.

Nice.  There are a number of tweaks I've wanted to make on TypePad sites that would have involved CSS, but it wasn't worth it to make the switch to an "advanced template" and lose the ability to use TypePad's very cool drag-and-drop layout editing.  More cake for everybody!

Now all I have to is actually learn CSS.

UPDATE: It works.  I just tightened up the top and bottom borders around my banner by adding the following to the Custom CSS:

#banner {height: 160px; background-position:16px 10px; }

I was pretty pissed at TypePad over the the outages a few weeks ago, but I have to say that I love the feature set.  I really hope they can scale up and put the downtime and latency issues behind them.

UPDATE: TypePad stores this site's CSS at <a href="http://www.edbatista.com/styles.css">http://www.edbatista.com/styles.css</a>, simply enough.  Scroll down to the /* user css */ section at the bottom to see the line I added.  I generally understand how each element's attributes work within CSS--the basic concept seems similar to HTML--but I'm not sure what components of the site are governed by the various CSS sections.  Complicating matters further, I'm not sure whether there's a universal CSS taxonomy, or whether TypePad uses special terms to describe things like sidebars.  (I'd like to change the spacing of the sidebar elements, which seem to fall under the /* modules */ section of the CSS.  We'll see.)

tags: typepad css

Exporting and Importing TypePad Posts and Images

Continuing the process of merging my professional and personal blogging, today I imported all the posts from my old personal site to this site.  (So if you enjoy my cocktails, no need to go back to the old site to find them.)

The process of exporting and importing posts within TypePad was ridiculously easy.  It couldn't have been any simpler, so all I'll say is RTFM.  But it is worth noting that I would have had a much harder time moving any images if I'd been maintaining them conventionally within TypePad.

TypePad makes it easy to insert images in your posts--just hit the "Insert Image" button on the editing toolbar and follow the instructions.  The problem is that all images uploaded in that fashion are simply dumped into a directory entitled "photos" which is associated with your TypePad account but is inaccessible to you as a user.  Once the images are uploaded, you can't manage them in any way--you can't even delete them.  (You can remove them from a post, but they're in that directory forever.)

And even though TypePad makes it very easy to export posts and very easy to insert images, if you've used their process to insert images, they will not be included in the exported data.  Stupid.  I inquired with TypePad support to confirm this, and they said, yep, you'd going to have to move the photos manually (and even after all that effort, you're still going to have to edit the image URLs in the exported posts.  TypePad does have a search and replace function to make this a little easier, but still--it's crazy.)

I wasn't comfortable having so little control over the images on my site, so instead of using the "Insert Image" function, I used TypePad's file management features to create a directory structure where I could upload, save and manage my images.  Going to Control Panel > Files opens up the root directory for your TypePad account, which contains folders for each blog on your account.  Within each blog's folder, I just created a folder entitled "images," within which I created sub-folders for the year and each new month.  (Note that TypePad doesn't allow you to move folders or objects within them--you can only delete them--so you need to think through your schema before you get started.)

To add an image to a post, I just go to Control Panel > Files and the appropriate image folder, upload the image to TypePad from my hard drive, grab the newly created URL for the image, and use the "Edit HTML" tab (rather then the WYSIWYG editor) to insert it within the post.

This is admittedly more cumbersome and time-consuming than TypePad's standard image-insertion process, but I think the ability to manage, delete and export the images after they've been uploaded to TypePad is well worth the extra effort.  (Note that the images that I imported from my other site still reside in that blog's image folder within my TypePad account, so I can't ever delete it, but that's no big deal.)

tags: typepad

A Little Housekeeping

I've been blogging for just over a year now, and it seems like an appropriate moment to make a few changes.  It's more than just re-arranging the furniture--the spiffy new banner and the tweaks in the color scheme are meant to signal a more substantive shift in the topics I discuss here.

You might notice that I've dropped the old banner's tagline: "Thoughts on design, technology, advocacy and marketing."  When I launched this site, I expected to use it primarily as a platform for my professional interest in those topics.  At the same time I set up a personal site where I talked about everything from cocktails to tech tips to music reviews.

It was helpful to have two separate forums while I got my feet wet, but I think that structure has outlived its purpose, for several reasons.  First, although as recently as last June I felt that it made sense to maintain separate professional and personal sites, at the same time I also wrote that "...it's essential to let people know who you are as an individual and to speak in your own voice when you're working online.  That means exposing yourself, speaking authentically, and being unafraid to share your silly passions."  Having found my online voice over the past year, merging the two sites now will make it easier to speak more naturally and to cover the full range of topics I'm passionate about, from the silly to the serious.  (In fact, I've already started.  You'll also find my photo albums and recently-played music in the sidebars--they don't have much to do with technology or marketing, but they have a lot to do with me.)

Second, even though the old tagline initially gave me plenty of room to explore my professional interests, it was starting to feel a little cramped, like a shirt that shrank in the wash.  I could sense myself backing away from topics that interested me but didn't quite fit the old schema, and that's just ridiculous.  Using Doc Searl's metaphor, this site isn't a "channel" or a "pipe," it's a place.  My primary purpose here isn't "delivering content"--I'm stretching my mind, thinking out loud, and occasionally meeting others doing the same.  And I don't want to be bound by a predefined set of topics, however broad.  (Just as a heads-up, these days I'm particularly interested in issues related to organizational culture and executive coaching.  I don't know where those explorations will lead, but I'm looking forward to covering some new ground.)

And finally, thanks to my association with AttentionTrust, I have every expectation that more sophisticated attention services will be coming online soon that will allow readers who are interested in my professional musings but not my music reviews (and vice versa) to sift through my feed and find the posts that are most relevant to them.  Those services aren't here yet, so there's certainly the risk that merging these streams will just muddy the waters, making it more difficult for people to find what interests them--in fact, I expect that to happen in the short term.  But hopefully the advantages described above will be worth it, and the geeks won't keep us waiting too long.

It's an experiment, and who knows?  Perhaps the tangle of topics will get too messy, and I'll have to switch back.  I'll keep VivaBatista in suspended animation, just in case, but I'll be bunking here for the time being.

Doc Searls Closes Syndicate

Doc Searls' closing keynote at Syndicate was an inspiring talk.  It was a natural extension of the ideas he first laid out in "Saving the Net," the Nov. 16 article in Linux Journal that Doc called the longest and most important piece he's ever posted online.  I've interspersed my headers with direct quotes and slide text from Doc's presentation to try to render the hour-long talk as a reasonably concise blog post--it's still long, so follow the jump:

Jonathan Schwartz Keynote at Syndicate

Doc Searls interviewed Sun President & COO Jonathan Schwartz as the Day 2 keynote here at Syndicate.  Most of their discussion focused on hardware, business models, DRM and other topics better covered elsewhere.  But what little Schwartz had to say about blogging was compelling.  He's adamant about the need to eliminate almost all the distinctions between internal communications among employees and external communications with customers, partners and other stakeholders, and he clearly sees blogs as the best way to make that happen:

There's very little communication internally that you want to keep private.

Intranets are such an anachronism...they’re going to die.

The dividing line between what's internal and what's external is diffusing, and the utility is dying away.

The defensive approach is "Don't give employees [blogs]—they’ll leak information."  The offensive approach is, "Give them [blogs]...they can communicate and create more opportunities."

Schwartz also talked about how Sun used blogs to proactively address criticism of the company from competitors and others:

Blogging has played an enormously important part in the revitalization of Sun’s reputation...

Rather than spend $150 million on an ad campaign, let’s just start speaking in our own voices [on our blogs]. And guess what? Authenticity wins out.

If you are authentic, if you communicate consistently, you can basically counter anything anyone says about you.

This resonated with an earlier comment he made:

Doc Searls: So transparency is the fulcrum on the lever now?

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is the fulcrum.

tags: syndicate syndicate conference doc searls

Jonathan Schwartz on Authenticity

Doc Searls is interviewing Sun's Jonathan Schwartz as the opening keynote on Day 2 at Syndicate.  I'm sure I'll have more to say on this later, but I wanted to post this exchange immediately:

Doc Searls: So transparency is the fulcrum on the lever now?

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is the fulcrum.