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The Blogosphere Loses a Bright Light: Scott Adams

Over thanksgiving weekend, Scott Adams blogged that despite the great artistic satisfaction he derived from uncensored blogging, he felt he was alienating his core Dilbert audience - not growing it. So: he’s not going to blog controversially anymore.

Well. That sucks. Adam’s shit-disturbing “what-if” posts and the comments that followed were a highlight of many a blog-reader’s day. Its too bad that Adam’s is able to blog only for the hope of compensation, not for the pure joy of it. (from the post: “It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”) Perhaps his lawyers or agents suggested that he back off on controversial topics? Scott recently took on managing a restaurant, so I don’t imagine that blogging is the worst of his work/life/family balance issues.

A suggestion: persona management. Scott, if you take as much glee in your rabble rousing posts as you appear to, continue to make them under a pseudonym, as in the example of Fake Steve Jobs. Separate your “dibert author” persona from your “blog author” persona and grow both independently.

blogging, dilbert, persona scott adams

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My spare time TechMeme competitor

I have a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of things: statistics, programming theory, php, mysql, consumer behaviour, and so on. Individually, I’m an expert in none, and could not do any professionally to save my life. Taken as a package though, I know just enough info about just enough disciplines to have a little bit of fun.

In that vein, over the last week, while recovering from a flu/cold/lackofsleep, I glued together a clunky TechMeme competitor as a conceptual exercise for myself to see if I could apply the bits and pieces that I know to generate relevant results.

You can see the system’s (live) output here: http://hddb.net/techstream_index.html

(hddb.net is a different venture of mine, and a convenient development box)
(”techstream” is just my internal development prefix, not branding)

It refreshes every half hour, and as of right now, is actively following 167 blogs in the technology sector. It uses MagpieRSS to cache and check feeds, so hopefully if you’re on the list you’re not seeing weird spikes from hddb.net.

Once it picks up your post, it does a bunch of brute force, ugly stuff to it to try and place it in a larger context. It looks for other posts that yours links to, and other posts that link to yours. It splits up your post title into tags, and searches for other posts that share common tags. When all is said and done, it stitches together tag relevance, links to and from, how long the post has been kicking around, click-through popularity, etc, and through magic that I can’t even really follow any more, its spits out the output that you see.

The algorithm takes about a minute to run during low post volume times (like Sunday evenings), and swells to up to 5 minutes when the blogosphere is cooking.

The result? Not bad, IMHO. Its not as balanced as TechMeme, in that hot items will cling to the top of the page for longer than they should. The page is also longer than it should be. It also doesn’t have the breadth of TechMeme - I imagine Gabe’s algorithm is following more that 167 posts. I’m also manually adding feeds - one of TechMeme’s greatest strengths is that it (I think) picks up new blogs to follow automatically, based on link volumes that it sees. I’d like to get there eventually. I’m also missing any RSS output - there’s nothing to subscribe to yet, and I’m not even sure what form such a subscription would take (I’ve never really followed TechMeme’s bulk feed output).

Anyway, enjoy. Your thoughts/comments/etc. are welcome. If you’d like your blog added to the index, let me know.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs techmeme

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How To: Be a Successful Blogger

Jerry Bowles on the FASTForward Blog has the best post I’ve seen on “how to be a successful blogger” yet. His list includes the old standby’s like “be true to your self” and “be passionate about whatever you’re blogging about,” but also goes into some good specifics, like keeping posts at 500 words or less.

Has anyone built a word count widget for Wordpress yet? I see this one that does overall word count stats, but a javascript word counter that sits next to the text-editor box and counts as I write would be really neat.

bloggers, blogging, blogs success

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Part One - Dissecting the WordPress Import/Export Format: Categories

I’m working hard in my spare time on transitioning my longest running project - DVD review site UpcomingDiscs.com, which I co-own - from hand-built CMS to WordPress.

What I’m trying to do is move 3000+ reviews (including comments, screenshots, rankings, and DVD metadata) from my clunky, work-around riddled data architecture to nice clean blog posts. What this means is shoehorning the complete contents of UpcomingDiscs into the WordPress Import/Export format so that I can pull the whole site into a WordPress install - i.e.: I’ll be generating a fake WordPress export file from UpcomingDiscs and “importing” it into a real WordPress install. This is no simple task given the legacy complexities of UpcomingDiscs - but as I’m discovering with a lot of investigation, can certainly be done.

Continue Reading…

blogging, export, import, wordpress xml

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For love of money: the death of the blogosphere

Scobleizer chimes in after the Federated Media / Microsoft dustup over the weekend, asking why its “ok” for some tech-pundit types to sell their voices and not for others. Roberts asks the key question: would Leo Laporte be talking about GoToMyPC if they weren’t paying him? Likely not.

Blogging and the blogosphere began with an implicit promise: that those who participated did so for the love of their community and interests, not for a paycheck, and that what they wrote was an honest snapshot of their opinions.

That promise defined the blogosphere: it created a fifth estate characterized by passion, opinions, and a chorus of overlapping, contradictory views - all in marked contrast to the dry, “objective,” produced mainstream media. That promise has encouraged millions to join “the” conversation as authors, free to be honest to themselves; those honest author’s personalities, opinions, and insights have created the world’s biggest reader base.

There are successful bloggers out there, however, that seem to have lost sight of what it means to be a blogger - presumably swept up in the opportunities of success. Can Leo Laporte sell his voice? Sure - I consider him MSM, living principally in TV and Radio, and thus compromised by the very nature of those industries. Can Michael A. and Om Malik shill whatever they want? Sure - go ahead. But when you do, your failing yourself and your readers, breaking the promise that you made to the blogosphere to speak your mind - not advertiser’s. Its disappointing to see.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, federated+media, fm, gigaom techcrunch

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Staying on TechMeme

Huh. Looks like I’m de-listed from TechMeme - again. TechMeme seems to drop sites from its “to-index” list if you don’t link to other stories that get on TechMeme regularly. To be honest, I don’t really like that - it increases the feedback loop that clusters blog posts around whatever the two or three hot topics of the day may be. That decreases the breadth of stories that get written as writers are encouraged to write on TechMeme’d topics and discouraged from writing on others. Of course it also decreases the breadth of stories that hit TechMeme.

Of course no one should be writing “for” TechMeme - but TechMeme to some degree has come to define what’s “topical” in the tech blogosphere. I think Gabe R. would state that TechMeme just chronicles the discussion taking place, but I’d argue that by virtue of existing, TechMeme is influencing. The traffic that TechMeme can deliver provides motivation to write on stories that are on TechMeme - making it an active part of the blogosphere - not an impartial observer. I’ve certainly written posts on TechMeme-listed news expressly to get traffic - and have been rewarded for it with nice spikes.

Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve been actively trying to read TechMeme less, so as to get out of the topics that bloggers flock to and focus writing on what really interests myself and hopefully TechFold readers. The hope is that in creating a blog with a personality of its own, as opposed to just a reflection of What’s Hot on TechMeme, will in the long run garner this site more & more dedicated readership.

Thoughts? Please share.

blogging, blogosphere techmeme

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Odiogo transforms blog posts into podcasts

Odiogo is a San Fran startup that provides a quick and easy means to genete podcasts from your blog on a post by post basis. Odiogo monitors your RSS feed and converts posts to MP3 “podiocasts” using a typically Stephen Hawking-esque text-to-speech converter.

Odiogo hosts the generated MP3’s and makes them available in your posts with an unobtrusive “listen” button. Clicking it expands a nice embed player (example):

The player currently includes a pre-roll audio ad for Odiogo itself; Odiogo’s business model includes selling ads for this inventory, and their hosting of the MP3’s makes it possible to do so. You can see their business illustrated here. It also makes it possible to look at the complete back-catalog of MP3 inventory that Odiogo will accumulate over time as active inventory - as the host, Odiogo can switch out adds on podcasts of any age. Odiogo includes an element of revenue sharing, although the thresholds and percentages involved are not publicized.

Clicking the “Get this feed on your iPod/mp3 player” link takes you a hosted Odiogo page with subscription and download options:

Odiogo also includes an Odiogo Wordpress Plugin, and somewhat more cubmbersome instructions for getting Odiogo links on Blogger.

Summary

Odiogo takes your text blog and automatically creates a podcast from it. Is there a market from this? The existence of the service seems predicated on the existence of a segment of a consuming public that given the choice would rather listen to than read blog posts. Personally, its not for me; refer to my feelings on vlogging for further explanation. As to whether there’s a larger market - train commuters who want to take some blogs with them on their ipod, for instance - that remains to be seen.

That being said, I wish the Odiogo folks all the best - I’m a big proponent of automated language & media shifting services, and I like the notion of “write-once” content that automatically ports to entirely different consumption modes.

Other Coverage

1. 901AM covers the Listen Button.
2. The Red Ferret puts it to use.
3. Jumbledthoughts also points us to Odiogo competitor Talkr.
4. A Chess World points out Odiogo’s utility for the visually impaired.

advertising, blogging, mp3, odeo, odiogo, podcast revenue

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Some Referrer Stats

I just wanted to share some thoughts on my first two months of referrer stats data, and what the implications are for how you should approach promoting your blog.

First, take a look at my top referrers. This data probably looks weird and confusing, so here’s the Google sheet with the details for your reference.

Ok - let’s look at the data a different way - here’s the “conceptual” sources of my traffic (from the above list still):

Things like digg and MyBlogLog fall under “social,” “comments” are those sites on which I make comments (WWD, TechCrunch, etc.). “SEO” is Google and Technorati. Etc. The sheets link above details how each referrer was categorized.

Inferences that I make from all of this:

1. Comment, Comment, Comment: Get out there and visible in the community by commenting intelligently on other’s posts. Blogs that I commented on contributed more traffic than TechMeme, Technorati, or Google.
2. Cultivate relationships with reporters - MSM is still mainstream and drives big traffic. The biggest single source of traffic was from a single mention in The INQUIRER in their article on Truemors. Awesomely enough, their ultra-crappy site search doesn’t even list the article anymore.
3. SEO is important. Google and Technorati are huge sources of traffic.
4. Tag and categorize your posts - for Technorati’s benefit.
5. Post on Hot Topics: Techmeme is an important source of traffic too.
6. Few people click through from RSS readers or email subscriptions.

blogging seo

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Seth’s Day Old Sushi

Seth - I wanted to point out that your day old sushi example is great illustration of how the lines between marketing and operations work to the detriment of businesses large and small. Certainly a sushi counter is a pretty small example, but they key question to ask (in my mind) is…

If the counter staff are discounting or throwing away old product regularly, why are the operational staff over-producing?

Is it a failure of communications between the front and back of the store? Front/Back, Marketing/Operations, Whatever/Whatever, should be transparent to each other. Many businesses seem to lurch from one decision to another because arbitrary organizational divisions interfere with communications. The sushi counter is a microcosmic example of such. Blogging (in a corporate setting) is one way to work around those divisions.

blogging, organizational theory, seth, sethgodin sushi

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Engagement - 4 tips for Startups & Established players: using digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and google to build your community

Companies on the web (speaking in terms of 2.0 startups here) can be sorted into two categories - those that actively engage their communities, and those that don’t.

I base that on my first 2 month’s experience blogging here. Some reviews have been actively commented on over time by the company reviewed - take a look at the Collanos post, for instance: the Collanos folks are all over it with opinions, other ways of looking at things, feature updates, and so on. Same thing with Teqlo - lots of conversation flowed from that post.

Most reviews, however, haven’t gotten any attention from the firm in question. SuTree? TxtVox? Meshly? Hellooooo…?

There’s a number of ways that engaging Bloggers with comments or trackbacks is valuable for web companies (or any, for that matter) new or old:

1. Establishing a relationship often turns critics into advocates.
2. Share your side of the story: supplement, complement, and correct.
3. Gather feedback.
4. Gain eyeballs - posts with good discussion get more readers.
5. Build brand equity - your company looks better if its approachable and engaged.

Anyway, the benefits of Naked Conversations have been endlessly hashed out elsewhere.

So - how to go about realizing these benefits? Doing so does not have to be arduous or time consuming, nor do you necessarily need to rush out and hire a community manager. There’s 4 simple, fast ways to identify, track, and stay on top of conversations about your company:

1. Technorati: Subscribe to your tag. Enter this in your browser: http://technorati.com/posts/tag/YourCompanyNameHere. For example, here’s the Collanos page. Then, subscribe to it (there’s a nice RSS link right there). Now, you’re instantly updated in your feed reader whenever someone out there properly tags a post about you. For thoroughness, be sure to subscribe to feeds for all variations and misspellings of your name.
2. Google: bookmark searches for all common variations of your company’s name, as well as things like “YouCompanyName Review.” Try searching for “SuTree Review,” for instance. My SuTree post is on the first page.
3. Did you know you can subscribe to Digg search results? Well, you can. And you should. Digg weilds undue influence - you should be commenting on posts about your company, and ready to throw out a “Welcome Diggers!” message onto your site if a post goes front page (you should have a page ready to go, designed to convert notoriously shallow-browsing digg readers into members). Here’s the digg search for SuTree - the subscribe icon is innocuous, but there.
4. Del.icio.us: You should be following what’s getting bookmarked about you - your company, reviews, and so on. Read the user notes - those capsule summaries provide a good window into how your brand is perceived online. Finding yourself on del.icio.us can be cumbersome, as del.icio.us uses their own id strings for URLs. Here’s SuTree for example: http://del.icio.us/url/76ff772c19d0c546a3b70fc4e24b6080. Click that link though, and you’ll see a URL search box: enter yours there. And, if you scan all the way to the bottom, there’s an RSS feed for it too.

So there you go: adding RSS feeds to your reader from Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Digg, and bookmarking a few Google searches will keep you generally up to speed with what’s being said about your company. Following those feeds is a matter of minutes in your feed reader. Now, the onus is on you to act on that: get out there and comment - engage your community and enjoy the rewards.

EDIT: Guy Kawasaki posted an article today about DIY PR by Glen Kelmann. The 4 tips above would be good tools for someone going the DIY and engaging customers and stakeholders directly.

blogging, community, delicious, digg, feeds, google, howto, reputation, rss, startups, technorati tips

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