The dismantling of Tiger Woods fascinates me for several reasons. Sure, everyone loves a scandal involving a seemingly perfect icon in sports, especially when it involves sex. It goes further than that for me though.

As Gawker pointed out, this celebrity news story encapsulated the perfect media story that could only have developed at this very point in our history because of the Internet tools that enabled its dissemination and could devour it.

But while most of the reaction and analysis surrounding the story has focused on how Wood’s “handlers” mismanaged the entire situation and let it get out of hand to the point where he’s dropping sponsors and costing lots of people and companies money and embarrassment, I think the fallout has a lesson to teach — and it’s not the obvious one you’d expect.

I think we’ve all accepted the fact that celebrities exist now to be brands that others use to leverage other brands. Literally, we buy and sell people like we would the stock of a company. I’m honestly a bit shocked that no one sees this as a depressing development in society, that we find it an acceptable practice that we’re willing to support the dehumanization of real, talented people to be speculated and valued like a commodity. On a fundamental level, this is disturbing.

Whatever happened to the idea of, “I am not a number. I am a man”?

So to add to the chorus of lessons we can all learn from the Woods scandal — from “don’t cheat on your spouse” to “stay in front of the story” — I would add that as we enter an age where we voluntarily position ourselves to transition from individuals into brands that we have to be aware of the consequences of this mentality and look at how utterly destructive the results can be if we place ourselves in a situation where your name is bought and sold by forces larger than yourself.

While the Internet bred the trends of microcelebrity and microfame for the past few years, I don’t think we’ve seen it reach the nadir just yet. Simply put, we haven’t felt the widespread negative consequences of its pursuit as a generation. Instead, we’re still learning (quickly, mind you) how to become the masters of self-promotion to sell and expand our brand.

And I’m not just talking about those chasing a chance to be on reality television or even something to the equivalent of YouTube famous. I’m saying this is occurring on a granular, Dunbar-number level for almost anyone who has a nearly-daily online presence, which is pretty much all of us.

Obviously, we’ve always strived to put our best foot forward and the act of crafting a public persona the world sees isn’t some practice the Internet caused to happen. But the Internet allowed us to use tools that separated the persona from the physical person and being of who we really are.

No longer did our “happy face” have to fade as we exited a situation that required it. Instead, it could remain always “on” in some absolutely perfect format online. We could tweak it, crafting a static portrait from photos, text and video. Our personalities and values (or lack thereof) expressed in HTML (or, heavens forbid, javascript) to be called up at any time.

In reality, these masks we show to society as we interact with others are susceptible to flaws and as we wear them we have a conscious idea of the role we find ourselves in. We knew when the “real” us came out and who we could be such a person with.

The Internet’s tools, however, changed the way we interact with people and essentially forced us to adopt not just a static profile, but it’s now since morphed into an ongoing, dynamic personality punctuated with status updates. Smartphones and virtually constant access to the Internet feed our compulsive desires to continue crafting a narrative for a personality that is not truly us.

And I know it’s not who we truly are for several reasons. When you have complete editorial control over the content that your life produces, you opt to publish only that which you believe cultivates how you want others to see you. The whole point of publication is to put it in front of other people, and we tie ourselves to feedback. Likes, favs, diggs, reblogs, comments, etc., all provide a feedback loop that encourages us to produce more of our lives for public consumption. To continue this, we are discouraged from sharing the things that aren’t the us we want people to see, or at least that which doesn’t play well. As we adjust this content algorithm, we slowly eliminate that which our audience dislikes and focus on what garners the response we like.

It’s a relatively new movement for the masses — crafting a public personality at such a complicated level typically reserved for celebrities, who lived life on a stage. Before, personalities were rampant, but anonymous was the norm. And those who used their real names weren’t exactly out to build their names as brands like celebrities.

Facebook placed an importance on using your real identity online. And then this combined with MySpace, which encouraged the crafting of a personal brand and chasing the “friend” count.

And now here we are — turning elements of our lives into disposable, fast-food content and turning the idea of friendship into something superficial and worthy of mockery. (At least Twitter tried to draw a distinction using the term “follower,” but even this has become futile as users strive to “follow” more than they realistically can pay attention to in an effort to get others to pay attention to them.)

In theory, I really don’t have a problem with people crafting a persona online or even chasing fame if that’s what they want to do and it makes them happy. But most of us aren’t really chasing high-level fame, yet we act in this faux-celebrity, alter-personality way. And let’s get realistic for a moment and really ask ourselves if spending hours on these social networks is making us happy.

Does Facebook make you react negatively to some of your friends? Does Twitter make you think the world’s trite? Does Tumblr make you think you just wasted hours of your time scrolling down your dashboard? Does reading the comments on a newspaper article, blog post, YouTube video or Digg thread disgust you?

What depresses me greatly though isn’t that we voluntarily engage ourselves in these activities — as we all deserve a chance to do some mindless stuff — but that we spend an excessive volume of time occupying this persona instead of being who we really are when we’re not sitting in front of a glowing screen adding to the narrative.

Worse still, we’re encouraging others along this same path and ignoring those who say we shouldn’t spend so much time online — obviously they don’t “get it”!

I’m not completely sure how all of this started to happen. It might be because we’ve grown up with the Internet and it logically intertwined with all of our communications as broadband and mobility became commonplace. Perhaps combined with the fact many of us are overeducated for the jobs we perform we’ve got excess time and this is the only way we can get away with killing our boredom and our creative minds have nowhere else to go. Or maybe it’s a coping mechanism against our generation’s quarterlife crisis. If life is some sort of game and we can’t figure out how to win in the real world, maybe we can take our avatar and compete elsewhere and win over there.

I’m not sure where this delusion of using social media to break through to some sort of success comes from, but I think we ought to strongly caution against it — or at least really think this whole thing through to the end by asking some hard questions.

This isn’t the selling of our souls. We’re actively participating in the dismantling and altering of who we really are to form something entirely new without knowing the societal consequences of what happens when the Internet we used to build ourselves up tears us down. If it does happen, then it’ll happen quickly and thoroughly.

When you fail in real life, you might have someone there to help you deal with it. When you fail on the Internet, you’re alone and others flock to mock you. I’m not sure we’re ready for the long-term psychological effects of such an incident.

We’re building this idea of the “perfect me” online, but we’re forgetting that “me” has flaws, imperfections, limitations and was never intended to be hidden away. We’re running away from parts of us that make us different and force us to confront adversity. Our lives shouldn’t be constructed to project the expectations and perceptions others have of us.

We are human beings. We are not brands.

I did this project because I feel that in this world of oversharing and constant content creation, we tend to forget what we actually said amid all the turnover of attention we pay to the digital tools that consume our lives.

To compile this list, I left out any @replies or tweets that were meant to share news or links. This list comprises a snapshot of moments of semi-original thought and observations of the world around me throughout the year.

I hesitate to say any of this is profound or relevant, but at points it might be witty or insightful at best — at worst, this list is quite self indulgent. Regardless, the exercise gave me a chance to look at how I used Twitter and remember some ideas I’d forgotten.

With that said, here’s my best tweets:

+++++

Bit of advice. The computer’s great, but meeting people in person is 10x better as far as networking goes. Beer over bits.

I hope the bits that I tweet (and read) end up in conversations over beer with my friends.

Advice: When something in the mail says ****FINAL NOTICE**** you should probably read it.

Facebook has gone mainstream. My friend’s aunt friended him. Weird! Twitter will go mainstream when it’s referenced in a major film.

My friend on people posting minutiae all the time on social networks: “Giving some people Facebook is like giving a baby a gun.”

Obama’s on Twitter, has a BlackBerry, a Tumblr, plus will be President tomorrow. It’s like a frienemy showing up to your favorite dive bar.

Ideal bar: plays non-mainstream hiphop, serves microbrews, classy atmosphere, wifi, TVs play indie films. Am I on to something? I think so.

Can we be honest & admit that a free breakfast at Denny’s isn’t worth it?

I’m coining a new term: metalocal. Definition: a news ecosystem that revolves around me. (Only being 50% sarcastic.)

The hash (#) sign is the new slashy (/)

I’m not interested in the State of the Union, just the state of my checking account.

The more incredible technology becomes the more bored we get.

Don’t be on Twitter to appear relevant. Tweet relevant things.

Everyone complains when you spoil the night’s TV shows, but no one ever complains you spoiled the evening newscast.

No matter how good something is, you could’ve done better. Right?

Instead of going to a #teaparty protest today, just tweet your whines instead. It’s equally effective.

The Pulitzer Prize: the best of “tl;dr” for the American public.

We create a lot of crap & bullshit. And the majority of us, frankly, are completely content with this practice from ourselves & others.

Packing for a move is like playing Tetris in real life.

You never see a skinny pigeon in Chicago.

When will the Twitter equivalent of PostSecret happen? And how soon after that will the book deal happen?

Honest question: Is it possible to lose complete interest in the Internet?

When you say “don’t,” I say “too late.”

Intellectualism isn’t found in a bottle, but emotions are.

Cleaning out boxes. Found old undergrad transcript. 2 Fs, 3 Ds, GPA: 2.59. Still got into grad school. Life was good then!

Irony: a bar in Wrigleyville whose bathroom door reads “Gentlemen.”

What Twitter really needs is a function that tells you in 140characters what you did last nite while drunk.

Is the Perez Hilton vs. will.i.am feud the end of snark blogging & the beginning of online celebrity feuding blogging?

Forget the lawyers & guns, just send money.

I want to rock ‘n’ roll until a reasonable hour and party once every other weekend.

“If you’re gonna start a war, then you better end it. Twice.”

If Hell is other people, then what does that make Facebook?

Thought: Being a part of the Millennial Generation really sucks.

“Did you put that in your iGoogle?” – My mom to my dad.

It’s 2009. There’s gotta be a better way to find a dentist than manually cross referencing a provider list with Yelp.

Thought of the day: direct democracy doesn’t scale very well.

“INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.” In the age of the Internet & infinite space, it makes me sad when the NYTMag prints this phrase.

Forget “watchdog” journalism, we’re in the age of “watchpuppy” journalism.

“Wave envy”: When your friend gets a Google Wave invite before you do.

It’s kind of amazing that my dad has uploaded more videos to YouTube than I have.

I look forward to the day when someone legitimately asks for my dishonest opinion about something.

I wish my immune system was more like 50 Cent instead of Biggie Smalls.

The concept of “backspace” & “delete” is as powerful as the rest of the keyboard combined, yet highly under utilized.

“You’re a liar!” “No, I’m just projecting mythology.”

I can’t stomach the idea of eating what I kill. Seriously! I’m too full.

“Drill baby, drill!” Words you don’t want to hear at your dentist.

Some say sleeping in for 12 hrs is a waste. I say it’s an invaluable “reset” button for your life.

In the iPod era, no one gives a shit about radio “talent.”

Dear Internet: That full-page advertisement you make me look at instead of your content isn’t a “welcome screen.” It’s not welcome at all.

meta-napping — def. When one dreams of taking a nap while napping. See also: “Yo dawg nap.”

+++++

And, yes, you can follow me on Twitter here: @kiyoshimartinez

The latter half of the essay then moves into a theory about how this generation would make great Twitter-length copywriters that find a blend of fiction and fact matching the attention spans of our generation and our nature of crafting an online persona. It’s a compelling idea, but I want to get back to the first question of why this l33terati never developed (or has yet to).

It’d be tempting to blame it on the shortened attention span of our generation or the death of print (especially the consumption of literature that isn’t Harry Potter or Twilight), but I think that’s too easy of a target and would largely scrape the surface without finding the foundation.

It’s obvious to say a generalizing statement like, “kids don’t read anymore,” but I think you have to think about why that is — because of the attention economy.

But before the Internet, books consumed my life. I loved to read and it remained one of my core joys and hobbies in life until the Internet occupied my attention. In my school’s reading program, I excelled in a reading competition called Accelerated Reader (hopefully I’m not the only one that remembers this?) and you couldn’t pull me away from my books. Not being very skilled at athletics, I got a sense of adventure and fun elsewhere in the realm of fictional characters and their stories. This went on for a while, until I had access to the computer lab at my mom’s school library for hours after school.

Growing up, I had the unique experience of my generation to watch as the Internet exploded from something only a few computers in a building could access to nearly every home and every computer in the house. I remember the transition from dial-up to broadband. And in college I lived the glutton life of peer-to-peer consumption of all things digital.

All throughout middle school and high school I didn’t read anywhere near the volume of books I did in elementary school. I just wasn’t interested. And while my college years had a few moments of diving into post-modern minimalism (ie: Chuck Palahniuk), I read maybe a dozen books at most. Even now, I don’t read more than half a dozen books a year (and I haven’t been that big on fiction lately).

I don’t think it’s fair to say the introduction of the Internet provided me with one more generational distraction. That’s a huge understatement. The Internet provided my generation with an infinitely expanding distraction that probably gutted one’s path of jumping onto a literary movement.

Consuming the Internet is one thing. It’s another thing to be able to participate in its creation. And then use it to supplement your communication with friends. And share media. And play networked games.

At the end of the day, your life becomes consumed by a culture that’s managed to meld everything together into a seamless experience that places you in front of a screen and machine that incorporates all other media EXCEPT literature.

Long blocks of text never really went over well online. Yes, we read a lot of things online, but there’s something psychologically impossible about reading a whole novel on even the most beautiful of screens, let alone CRTs. And to read a book would mean unplugging one’s focus on the magic box that gave him everything else. Giving up literature seemed like a no-brainer decision that came with minimal sacrifice.

Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.

Indeed, “too long, didn’t read” exists, but the reason why that attitude came to be roots itself in the simple reason of one’s limited amount of attention. If one’s attention is finite, then it made sense to shift that attention to a place where multiple things happened at once, rather than literature which is quite singular.

Before our generation, the growth of media and distractions could almost be linear. We had print. Then radio. Then TV. But the Internet isn’t linear. While you could only read one thing, listen to one thing, watch one thing, the Internet’s nature of what it could offer wasn’t singular — it is many and exponential.

Something had to get squeezed, and indeed many things did. The lack of a literary movement might very well be one of them.

But, I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion or will never happen. It still could, but it’s going to take a unique group of individuals to make extraordinary counter-culture decisions with their lives to refocus on crafting literature.

This means unplugging. It means the end of pointless clicking. It means shutting out distractions and not chasing more followers or web traffic. It will mean filtering what gets in and resisting one’s output to just literature exercises.

I think this l33terati, should it exist, has a grasp of the unique world we’ve witnessed and doesn’t need to play with the rest of the kids anymore. It’s time to make intelligent observations about it and discuss what happened to all of us as a generation.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the need for publishers to tackle comment identity and filtering if they desired for their online communities to be successful.

Since then, I’ve come to a few conclusions about comments on Web sites:

• Comments are a form of content on a publisher’s site.
• Comments should be treated with the same level of care as the original content that it’s paired with.
• Bad comments (ie: “stupid” comments) are the equivalent of bad content.
• Like all bad content, bad comments bring down the value of your product and/or service.
• Publishers shouldn’t allow bad comments and should use moderation/filtering techniques. Or maybe not allow comments at all.
• If you allow bad comments on your site for the sake of increasing traffic and page views, then you really don’t care about your site’s content, users or overall value.
• As your site scales, the amount of bad comments typically will be exponential.
• If you allow one troll to post a bad comment, then you’ve established a precedent for an infinite amount of trolls to post an infinite amount of bad comments.
• Bad comments increase the amount of junk inventory on your site, thereby increasing the amount of page views you must fill with remnant advertising, which only adds more bad content to your site.
• Creating good comments — and therefore more value — is hard and takes more work than most publishers want to bother doing.
• Very few sites building traffic upon page views that allow bad comments are successful financially, simply because advertisers recognize bad content from bad comments.

I used to be completely in favor of allowing comments on news sites for the sake of increasing dialogue, debate and openness on the Internet between publishers and readership, however, I’ve since changed my viewpoint dramatically.

There are very few sites whose comments I read. And there’s even fewer sites at which I’ll post a comment. I’ve found that most of the time when I’m tempted to comment, I rarely have anything of value to add beyond the original post or it’s not worth my time to refute/debate with the post’s writer. I think if more people took this approach, we’d have a lot less comments and higher value in the discussions that did take place.

The good thing about Twitter, Facebook and other sites that focus on personal thoughts on shared media is that we’ve now outsourced and begun to silo commenting to separate sites away from the original content. I think this is a good thing and hopefully will be encouraged. A “tweet this” link is better than “post a comment” in most cases. A “reblog this” link, however, I feel is even better. A StupidFilter would be best.

Here’s a list of recommended reading that’s helped frame and shape my thoughts on the subject of comments:

• NYT: Comment is King
• Howard Owens: If you’re not doing comments right, you shouldn’t do them at all
• iA: Kill blog comments?
• Ryan Sholin: Why commenting on news sites still stinks
• Paul Graham: Trolls
• Shawn Blanc: Blog comments are like cash
• Marco Arment: Comments
• OJR: How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online
• Joel on Software: Learning from Dave Winer

And here’s a few humor-related links on the topic:

• CollegeHumor: We didn’t start the flame war
• xkcd: Listen to yourself
• Penny Arcade: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

Twitter makes it easy to follow more people than you would friend on Facebook, simply because it’s not a two-way relationship. You can follow. They can follow. But you don’t have to both follow each other. So, you can quickly accumulate more people than you ever would on Facebook, because one doesn’t require another permission to see tweets.

It’s this relative ease of following that leads to users introducing a lot of noise into their use of the service. That’s what I found to be the case when I followed more than 400 accounts. Many of these I followed because they followed me first. I was doing it to be nice, not because I really knew who they were. Many were journalists that found me via a blog post from 10,000 Words, who recommended me as one of 10 journalists to follow on Twitter.

At first, it was very exciting. My Twitter feed was constantly refreshed and there was always something new. No more waiting around for my friends to start updating their own feeds — look at what these other people are saying! But then came the PR, marketing, SEO guru types, who I fell into a trap adding.

From there, the noise continued to increase. And then it reached a tipping point where I found I was missing the tweets of those I really wanted to hear from. Personal friends and people I actually knew in real life. This is what led to me going through the list of people I followed and started unfollowing to find the signal.

I know some people actually have thousands following them and follow thousands themselves, but I think that’s just absurd. If Twitter is supposed to be about what you and your friends are doing, then how can you have that conversation if there are so many others burying the more important, more real voices in your feed?

A year ago, I asked whether Twitter was useful or useless. At the end, I concluded that it’s not a “must-use” service. Using and observing Twitter for the past year has changed my mind on that. I still wouldn’t say it’s a “must use” service, but a “helpful service.” However, it’s only as useful and helpful as you make it. It’s very easy to abuse it and let yourself be abused by it.

I also wrote this in my blog post, which I proceeded to ignore as I added more people to the list of those I followed:

I will admit that Twitter can become a bit spam-ish (or is that bacn-ish?) if you follow too many people. While some people have chosen to follow me, I’ve made the decision to not follow all of them back. Frankly, I’m just not interested in what they have to say. And I don’t feel bad if people aren’t interested in following my Twitter feed either. Social tools shouldn’t mean social obligations, it should be about providing utility.

I emphasized that last line because I think it’s important to remember and generally can make anything more enjoyable.

On Facebook, I opted to completely deactivate my account. Several of my friends have tried this before and failed, so who really knows how long this will last for me. As one of my friends said, “There have been more determined people than you who tried and failed.”

I won’t deny that Facebook can offer you value in several ways. It’s a great one-stop site that has all your friends in one place. It’s easy to see their photos (as it’s the largest photo-sharing Web site in the world), organize events, get phone numbers, share links, etc.

But Facebook has social consequences, too. I won’t go into elaborate detail on this, as plenty more people have detailed this before, but there reaches a point where your social circles overlap then collapse upon each other on Facebook. You have people you would really consider your “true friends” that you want to share everything with. Then there are coworkers and former coworkers. Then there’s acquaintances, friends of friends, Internet “friends,” former schoolmates from gradeschool and classmates from college. And then there’s family.

To get something of value out of Facebook, you have to share. But the nature of human relationships dictates that we don’t want to share equally with everyone, and vice versa. This forces you to do one of several things: overshare to everyone, share nothing universally or micromanage your sharing by grouping your “friends” into Facebook friend lists.

It’d be easy to say that Facebook is a vortex for wasting time, but I think there’s also some mental stress associated with it, too. You’re forced to spend a certain percentage of your time doing mind exercises about what goes where to share with whom.

Certainly, some people receive entertainment (or other) value from Facebook that makes using it worth it for them. But for others who do the cost-benefit analysis of Facebook, it can fall short.

I found that I only really appreciated the shared items (now renamed “Links”) from one person. But these shared links can be imported to an RSS reader and once I did that, I found no reason to keep using Facebook.

For me, the overwhelming reason to use social networks is to share and discover new things or ideas. Facebook is built upon the idea that the main content being shared and discovered revolves around personal media, which I’m going to coin as the term “metalocal.”

But when you consider how much value this actually has and whether it’s something worth spending your time sifting through the noise to find better signal, I think there reaches a point where you can say, “I’m not missing anything if I’m not here.”

How long will this last? Again, I’m not sure. But I like the idea of deactivation and seeing where I shift my time and attention to.

The main problems with comments stem from two areas: identity and filtering.

Comment identity

I remember in my first journalism class I was fortunate enough to have Roger Ebert visit our class and he said something that stuck with me. A student asked if he has a pseudonym on RottenTomatoes.com, which Ebert replied that while he read the site quite often, he did not anonymously post on the site.

Ebert’s personal policy was that he signed his name to anything he wrote. I remember thinking, “If it’s good enough for Ebert, then it’s good enough for me.”

Since then, I’ve always registered for new web services with my full name and I make it a policy to never leave an anonymous comment. I figure if I’m not willing to put my name next to what I write, then it’s probably not worth writing and won’t contribute to the conversation. While this has prevented me in several cases from writing a really snarky and biting comment in the past, I think sticking with this personal policy has many advantages.

For one, it makes you accountable for what you write. It means that you’ll actually take the time to reply with something thoughtful and well-written, rather than just the online equivalent of a drive-by shooting. And when you write better comments, people tend to respect your thoughts and opinions over those who hide behind their Internet mask. It adds a sense of authority to what you have to say. Also, conversations tend to be me polite and productive when you know the people you are talking with.

Additionally, using your real name when you comment helps build your own personal branding online. Extending this to any service you use on the web, people recognize your name and are more likely to connect with you at other places. This furthers the personal social network you create for yourself. It’s a good thing.

Information Architects now demands that you use your real name when commenting, and they had a very robust and thoughtful debate on the topic. Frankly, I agree with their philosophy, but I don’t believe it’s the perfect solution for all situations.

Obviously, at AngryJournalist.com I don’t require or even request that contributors identify themselves. In fact, I discourage the use of real names. Part of the reason: I didn’t want to deal with any potential libel suits stemming from the comments. The other reason, however, was that I really didn’t want to place any barriers between getting people to open up.

I think many of the comments AngryJournalist.com received would never have seen the light of day if I required something as simple as an e-mail address, let alone sign-up and registration. To get people’s raw emotions and uncensored stories, I had to give them a sense of privacy and extend trust to the extent of anonymity.

For my situation, this worked out. But as I said, comment identity is only half of one problem.

Comment filtering

The other half is how you moderate the conversation. The more elements you remove from true identity online, the greater the number of responses you’ll elicit. The problem associated with this is that with the increased volume comes even more noise.

To create a worthwhile site online and develop the kind of community atmosphere that’s sustainable, I believe you need to truly define your role as the administrator and balance identity and filtering. To be blunt, most sites do a poor job of filtering and this is despite having way too many identity restrictions.

Let’s be perfectly honest. Most newspaper sites that allow comments to go unmoderated have threads that aren’t worth anyone’s time. Any pageviews generated by people following the supposed “conversation” isn’t worth the loss in quality of experience that the site’s providing.

Yes, you’ll lose pageviews if you filter the conversations of your community, but you’ll build a better reputation. Your users will reward you with more return visits and brand loyalty.

Remember: Most news is available just about anywhere. Content is duplicative. What will differentiate your site above others won’t be what people are talking about, but the quality of the experience of the interactions they’re having with others while viewing that content. People will live in communities they find friendly, and they’ll leave those that refuse to filter the signal from the noise.

I understand that to do community moderation properly that you’ll need to spend a lot of time and resources to do it properly. This means having people dedicated to guiding conversation and regulating it. It’s going to take a lot of work and most sites probably won’t do it, but the smart ones will. Nothing worth doing is worth doing halfway. Either make a commitment to building a community or don’t bother. why make something that sucks? It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

At AngryJournalist.com, I quickly discovered that if I was going to let people be anonymous, I’d have to moderate everything. At first I worried that delaying the posting of comments would take away from the site’s appeal and hurt traffic. But the reward was getting rid of spammers, trolls and making it a better quality site. It’s cost me time, but I found a solution that worked.

News organizations and their sites will also need to juggle their resources to tackle filtering. This is a new form of editing the Letters to the Editor pages, except it’s in real time and the stakes are much higher. Instead of this being one of the few pages without advertising in the newspaper, it’s the part of the site that will underscore the traffic, which drives the revenues.

But right now I feel that most news organizations don’t really give their comments section a second thought. Instead, they’re still panicking over the idea that people can just say anything. Or they’re patting themselves on the back for finally adding a feature that’s years (aka, an Internet lifetime) old on the web. How many of them realize the monetizing power that comes from this simple feature? And why aren’t they doing a better job of protecting this investment?

Conversation is migrating elsewhere. Right now, the early adopters have begun to crown Twitter the winner (despite their problems), but no one has perfectly merged news and conversation. There’s still time to jump into this niche and begin the battle for people’s loyalty.

As we approach a consumer culture where time will become scarce and content will be plentiful, we’ll turn to places that can provide quality filtered experiences. Content isn’t where the money is, that’s all free. The money’s going to come from meaningful interaction.

Stop treating comments like a feature that’s just something you activate on your site’s blogs and start viewing them like the key to making your sites profitable.

(Naturally, I want your comments and thoughts on this topic. I’d encourage you to use your real name, but it’s cool if you don’t want to. Also, you can find me on Twitter or just e-mail me.

Additionally, for more resources, check out my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with comments and community. Lots of good reading there.)

Technorati Tags: community, comments, journalism, media, web+2.0, anonymous, real+name, identity, filtering, signal+to+noise+ratio, moderation, Twitter, conversation

+ Beck Diefenbach has started a blog featuring some of the photos he’s shot during his internship at the South Bend Tribune. I’m not a huge photoblog person, but I get more interested when it’s photos shot by people I know.

+ Things that could kill me in Vietnam is the blog of my friend Jenette as she prepares to go to Vietnam to teach English. Landmines or avian flu? What’s worse?

Previously:

+ More friends who blog
+ Friends who blog
+ Friends who blog (and are worth reading)

Muxtape has a lightening-fast sign-up process and it’s functionality is dirt simple to use. Upload up to 12 mp3 files (no larger than 10 mb each) and then send your friends an easy to use URL — like kiyoshimartinez.muxtape.com. The interface is elegant. Click a song you want to hear. Use the arrow keys to toggle forward and back and the enter key to pause/play.

If you’re on Tumblr, I recommend following muxtapelist.tumblr.com, where people are linking to their Muxtapes. It’s a fantastic way to discover new music and share some of the rare tracks you own with others.

You can also follow the official Muxtape Blog and also the site’s creator, JSTN.cc on Tumblr, too.

Time to make my Muxtape!

Technorati Tags: music, mp3, filesharing, mixtape, muxtape, web2.0

Not that the comparison above between Republican and Democratic donors from Chicago is any surprise, but the Huffington Post has a nice Google Maps mashup that geographically charts presidential campaign contributions.

Found any other nifty charts, graphs, maps, interactive Flash apps, etc. that deals with the primaries tomorrow? Put them in the comments, I’d love to check them out.

Technorati Tags: Chicago, Illinois, campaign+finance, president, election, politics, money, Google+maps+mashup