Time for a little roundup of some loose ends rattling around my brain these days. But first I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be taking Sundays off from posting starting yesterday. I’m getting some more freelance work, and I’m going to dedicate most of my weekends to that for the near future. Now, on to a Monday Night Grab Bag!

1. Joost
Last week I got my beta invitation for Joost, and I’ve been playing around with it some. For those who don’t know, Joost is a new Web 2.0 company that has created an application for streaming television on your computer. As opposed to the majority of Web 2.0 apps, which use your Web browser to push their user interface, Joost is a program you have to download and run locally. Another innovation of Joost is their adoption of a peer to peer back end for distributing the server load of their streaming content.

So far, it’s worked really well for me. I think I was one of the first couple of rounds of the OS X beta testers, and the program is a little buggy. Also, besides MTV, BET, and Comedy Central, there aren’t many channels of recognizable programming. I know that CBS just signed a contract to supply content, and I’m sure other networks will follow suit. But for now, there isn’t a lot on that struck my fancy.

If Joost takes off, I think we’ll start to see a lot more of these hybrid client apps that run on your desktop with Web 2.0 functionality. And on a related topic…

2. Adobe Apollo
Adobe has released a new runtime environment and SDK for developing applications that could run a lot like Joost using traditionally Web-only programming languages (HTML, Javascript, Flash, etc.). I haven’t downloaded it to check it out yet, but Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight could set the stage for the next Web revolution. Or they could fizzle. Time will tell.

And speaking of fizzling…

3. The Web 2.0 Bubble
I subscribe to Mashable, a blog that covers news and trends in social networking sites. It’s an excellent blog, but every day I’m amazed by stories they cover of some new Web 2.0 startup getting funding for letting users share pictures of their cats or some such thing. It reminds me a lot of the last days of the Web 1.0 boom during which investors were throwing money at any- and everything that had .com at the end of it. The recent buzz around twitter, a fairly useless one-trick pony with a funny name and some shiny graphics, has me worried. Could twitter be the death knell of Web 2.0? I can only hope investors and entrepreneurs are wiser this go around.

So there you have a few things I’ve been thinking about recently. Looks like I’ve got some waiting and seeing to do. I’ll keep you posted down the road.

Excuse my absence yesterday. I was under the weather with some sort of pollen-related cold. But now I’m feeling better, and I want to talk about the notion of bias in the blogosphere. I read an interesting post by Matt Coddington, a fellow South Carolinian, over on his Net Business Blog talking about how subjectivity and bias are (or should be) natural aspects of the blogging medium. And I tend to agree. But if blogs are biased, can they be a form of journalism, too?

As long as there have been newspapers, there have been writers using the medium as their platform to advance personal agendas. One of the first concepts I learned when I took an Intro to Journalism class in college was “agenda setting,” the theory that popular media can influence the masses by what stories they cover and how much coverage they give them. So, even if the writers try to be as objective as possible in their stories, their editors’ bias shows in the length and placement of their stories. Subjectivity is part of being human, and I think traditional media does itself a disservice by trying to hide it.

There have been those throughout the history of journalism who have embraced their subjectivity: satirists, political cartoonists, columnists, and now bloggers. And that is the beauty of blogging. Not that bloggers are subjective — everyone is subjective — but that they embrace their bias to provide their readers with content no one else can give them. Through the filter of the blogger’s bias, readers get a wholly unique perspective on words that would otherwise just lay on the page. Instead of “just the facts,” bloggers make the news more accessible by giving a face and a personality to what they report.

But do they get the facts right? Skewing the facts to suit your agenda can be a dangerous thing (Iraq war, anyone), but that’s why, if it’s important to you, you should get more than one opinion about a story. And goodness knows there are enough bloggers out there happy to oblige. On this recent fracas between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team, I must have read at least 15 stories from all sorts of points of view before I formed my opinion.

In this growing world of subjective media, the onus is on the reader to sort it all out. And, while some folks don’t like to do their due diligence on any one story (the big reason why traditional media isn’t going anywhere, by the way), I’m of the opinion that the more points of view I read, the easier it is to make up my mind.

So, are bloggers biased? Sure. Is that wrong? I don’t think so.

Last Friday night, Jimmy Kimmel guest hosted Larry King Live, and the topic was “Paparazzi: Do They Go Too Far?” Near the end of the show, they brought on Emily Gould, an editor for the celebrity gossip blog Gawker. Apparently, Gawker — which I’ve never read — has a feature called the Gawker Stalker Map which uses the Google Maps API to show locations in Manhattan where Gawker readers have reported celebrity sightings. Kimmel, having been the subject of a Gawker sighting, lets Gould have it pretty hard, noting the potential ramifications of real-time celebrity tracking: “that way when Gwyneth Paltrow comes out of the movies, there would be at least a dozen psychopaths waiting for her.”

Now, celebrities and paparazzi have gone around and around in the debate about right to privacy for public figures, and I’m not going to get into that here. What I thought was very interesting was a line Gould came back with that redefines the rules of the game a bit:

“Honestly, I think that there’s a shifting definition of what is public and what is private space for everyone not just celebrities. The Internet, blogs, MySpace, no one has the reasonable expectation of being able to walk around the street and not being noticed by someone.” - Emily Gould

And I think she’s right to say the definition of privacy is changing for folks on the Web. But there is still — and probably always will be — a distinction between two types of public/private interactions. It’s the Cult of Personality vs. the Cult of Information.

Celebrities like Paltrow or Tom Cruise, etc. have chosen a public life in the cult of personality. People want to be them and to be close to them. While folks on the Web who participate in social networking sites are participating in the cult of information. People want to know about them and about what they have to say. It’s really hard to be popular on the Web if you don’t have something interesting to say (porn stars excepted). A majority of the time, users on the Web just want information about other people. Paparazzi and the abusers of the cult of personality want the people themselves.

Typically, surfing MySpace, looking at stranger’s profiles is no different than peeking out your front curtains, trying to figure out what your neighbor’s building in his garage. In the cult of information, once you figure out what it is, you’ve gotten all you need from that person. In the cult of personality, someone would probably steal it.

That’s the fundamental difference between these types of interactions, and I think Gould misses the boat by not making this distinction. Granted, she had Jimmy Kimmel ramming his foot down her throat at the time, but I think she does Web 2.0-style social interactions a disservice by lumping them in with traditional invasions of privacy.

And please don’t think that I’m saying all peepers in the Web 2.0 style are above-board (ask Kathy Sierra). The world is a big place, and there are just as many bad people as there are good. I’m just pointing out a flaw in Gould’s statement.

CNN transcript of the show in question.

Another April Fool’s Day has come, and another hundred Web sites have decided to pull pranks on their users. From Google announcing “Gmail Paper” to ThinkGeek publishing a list of fake gadgets (including the 8-bit tie that’s actually pretty cool), sites all over the net have switched up their regular content in favor of these gimmicky jokes. But I’m wondering if these stunts — which are really marketing ploys — are effective anymore.

First, when we know the joke is coming, is it funny anymore? I’m talking to Google here, who has been pulling April Fool’s pranks for years. Maybe it would be more effective if they took a few years off and posted pranks only when they were worth posting (this year’s Gmail Paper doesn’t exactly have me rolling on the floor).

And second, if everyone is doing it, the impact is diminished. And not just the impact of their jokes. It’s getting to the point that April Fool’s jokes are so widespread on the Web that you can’t tell what information is real. I’ve read so many blog posts in the last 24 hours that started off with something like “This isn’t an April Fool’s prank…”, including a job posting on Mashable. How could a job posting be considered a prank, unless everything on the Web today is suspect?

I’m really not trying to be a killjoy here. I enjoy a well done prank as much as the next guy. I’m just wondering if April Fool’s Day on the Web has become meaningless. For me — at least this year — it has.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of this year’s April Fool’s jokes.

No real post tonight. I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve finally launched RobLindsey.com.

Please, everyone check it out and let me know if you find any bugs or if the design breaks on any of your machines. The only known issue I’ve found is some misalignment of the navigation bar in Opera. So, any other observations would be very helpful. Thanks!