Blogosphere

For ages and ages “publishing” has meant going to a whole lot of expense to get something distributed to a large number of people.

If you look at things on a large enough scale, it goes like this:

First, if you wanted to share information with someone, you had to see them and talk to them.

Then, you could write it down and give it to them. They could write it again or simply pass the original document on.

Then someone figured out how to make identical copies of an original item without actually re-making the original.

Then we separated information from its physical form, and freed it from the laws of physics entirely. Suddenly getting information from point A to a place where every other person in the world can see it is easier than cooking dinner.

Often, this is called blogging. If you’re a company and you’re blogging, are you in the publishing business? Are you competing with your local newspapers and TV stations to get your customers valuable information in your space?

If you’re not, you’d better think about starting. Publishing is so cheap, there’s no reason not to be doing it.

I know I’ve said it before, but if you’re running your web site and you’re not paying attention to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, you’re ignoring a very good resource.

Just yesterday, Sven Naumann (who is on the search quality team) wrote a post dealing with concerns webmasters have about scraper sites that pull exact post content and republish it as their own.

So what does Google do? They use a couple of methods, which they don’t identify, to determine which bit of duplicate content is the original piece, and then point to those.

For people who see scraping sites placing higher in search results than their own, original content, they offer this advice:

Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:

• Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
• You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
• Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

Largely, the answer seems to be “don’t worry, we’ve got a handle on it.” But if you want more details on how to minimize duplicate content within your own domain, you can go check out the post.

What I think Google really needs to solve though, is the arrival of “old” content for the first time online. How do you figure out who the real owner of that content is?

Over on the interactive marketing blog, you can find background information on the blog reader survey that Forrester gathered about four of their blogs: Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, Groundswell, and Being Peter Kim.

I thought some of the most interesting results are shown on slides 11 and 14. They tell you 1) how people are reading these blogs (overwhelmingly RSS) and 2) that these blogs are clear sources of authority in their space.

Here’s the slideshare of the results:

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A side effect of having a plethora of cool web services built by VC-backed entrepreneurs is that they all need to find an exit.

In recent times, that’s meant that companies get acquired as opposed to IPOs.

Check out Fred Wilson’s blog post today on finding new exit strategies.

I think it’s a good point that these services tend to languish under the ownership of large companies. It would be cool to find a new way to maintain high levels of innovation and still give investors and entrepreneurs the incentives to keep building them.

This big long post on Searchblog requires some chewing. I’m going to take my first bite in public.

If I were to take what Battelle is saying and massively simplify it, it would looks something like this:

Consumer brands love to advertise around media brands that generate a lot of enthusiasm and dedication from their readers. Combine this with the fact that the print advertising industry is extremely mature (there is a formula in place that more or less works), and you realize why magazines can charge a crapload for a full page spread.

And the online equivalent of those magazines are…drumroll please…blogs! Or, in many cases, media sites built on blogging technology and an ethos that more readily matches the blogger than the mainstream media outlet.

The trick to print advertising, it seems, is that it exists in a format that has a lot better chance of connecting with the reader than advertising online. And Battelle rightly reminds us that online media is still extremely young, and we’re likely to see plenty of permutations of business models in the next few years that we haven’t even thought of yet.

If Battelle is correct in predicting the rise of online media brands, and I think he probably is, then there are going to be a lot of opportunities in this space going forward. What I want to know is how much “old media” brands will catch on and run with it, and how much of the space is going to go to newer, different media outlets like BoingBoing.

Everyone knows what the holy grail of blogging is. You get 100,000 daily pageviews for writing three quick posts, and then you have your chauffeur drive you to the bank to deposit your ad revenue.

Everyone is also slowly realizing that this will only ever happen to Cory Doctorow.

The real question is this: for the average blogger, what are the revenue systems available, and how well do they work?

I recently had a chance to talk with Jeff Sable from Chitika, a blogger-centric ad network, and with Gail Bjork, owner of Digital Camera Help, which serves both Adsense and Chitika ads.

Here’s what they had to say about Chitika’s ad offerings, and how effective they were in comparison to other options.

With Jeff Sable from Chitika

BBS: According to your site, Chitika ads are “designed exclusively” for bloggers. How are they different from other CPC solutions?

Jeff: There are a couple of aspects of our ads that have allowed bloggers, as well as other types of publishers, to improve the content of their web sites while making great money. First, our ads feature targeted products. This means the blogger or publisher can focus on writing great and interesting content and Chitika’s technology will automatically serve a relevant product-centric ad to the end user who is reading the content. Second, our ads are designed to complement a web site and “fit” into the site without adversely affecting the relationship with the reader. Because of the combination of these particular attributes and other features of Chitika ads, bloggers in particular have found Chitika ads to excellent and Chitika to be a great partner as they build their businesses.


 [click to continue...]

One of the things about advertising on the internet is that it seems to blend more and more with marketing and with content.

Good, relevant advertising is content.

I was reading I forget what earlier today and I ran across an AmEx ad that was so awesome I took a screenshot of it, not that a screenshot will really convey the value:

What are you looking at? This is a screenshot of an interactive video display. If I clicked on any of the thumbnails I got about a minute and a half of video with Seth Godin moderating a discussion between Jimmy Wales and Sean Parker.

Awesome. I watched each video, and they were all interesting.

The point is this: AmEx might as well have written a blog post with some YouTube videos in it. I got the same value, and that was clearly an advertisement.

Good for AmEx, for using ad space well.

Good for you for blogging about your business, because blogging is a lot cheaper.

The team over at 24/7 Wall Street have come up with a list of the 25 most valuable blogs (although they don’t tack a number on all of them), and topping the list is Gawker Media, meaning the complete blog network.

How does the valuation break down? Here’s the blurb:

If the [Gawker] sites generate one-and a-half page views per unique visitor and the total CPM value of the multiple advertisers on each page is $20, Gawker is an $11 million business which is still growing quickly. The company does not appear to be staff-heavy, so it is imaginable that the margins on the business are 50%. Would the business be worth 15x revenue or 30x operating profits? Could be.

As far as the math goes, I’ve seen worse attempts at breaking it down. The list tails off at just under a million dollars for Talking Points Memo.

I’m sure they missed several big blogs, and I’m sure they’ve got many of them pegged pretty far from what price they’d actually fetch, but it does underline the fact that blogs are still working as media properties, even if they’re out of the spotlight at the moment. They’re drawing revenue, and if they were for sale, they’d probably be fetching good prices.

Many of you probably spotted this post on Gawker last week about the hypocritical “pay-me” blogosphere. A survey recently conducted by APCO on the “state of blog relations,” apparently suggested that bloggers are asking for a little palm grease from the PR industry.

I wonder if that was intentional.

This survey was distributed to bloggers and PR people in order to compare the responses from each group. Let’s look at the question that evokes that response. According to Gawker:

And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”

But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!

That suggests to me that the question on the survey looked something like this:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.

I smell confounding variables. That is a two-part statement, and I could choose to agree or disagree to either part, neither part, both parts, who knows. A better survey would have broken them out:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statments:

1. It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients

2. It is not up to me to tell bloggers to disclose the payment

I suspect that most PR people thought to themselves “well, I’m OK with paying bloggers, I guess, but if I pay them I’d better tell them to disclose the payment.” So they marked disagree.

Similarly, most bloggers probably thought to themselves “I don’t mind getting paid every now and then, but damnit it’s on my terms, it’s my blog, and I’ll decide when, where, and how to make a full disclosure.” So they marked agree.

Are there some bloggers who are out there to make some cash by being dishonest? Of course. Does this survey prove that “some bloggers” is 50% of the blogosphere? Hardly.

As Mark Twain once said, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”

1. Your tagline is “just another wordpress weblog”

2. You’re on Blogspot

3. Your About page says “This is an example page”

4. You’re using the default template

5. You’re using a theme with the word “AdSense” in its name

6. Your permalinks end in numbers, like “?p=847″

7. Your posts end with “[souce: Engadget ]” or “Read original article”

8. Your readers get Carpal Tunnel from trying to scroll past the ads

9. Your posts are authored by “x9872ldy7d0-3″

10. You’re using a domain that ends with .info

Feel free to add yours in the comments…

Last week our friend Buzz Bruggeman pointed us to the New York Times article about being a “blogging star,” including a run-down of advice from popular bloggers like Mark Cuban and Xeni Jardin.

It reminds me of Calacanis‘ training video on how to become an A-list blogger in 30 days.

The Times articles is well worth a read even if blogging stardom isn’t what you’re after. There’s good, solid advice for everyone:

The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script.

If you glanced at Techmeme this afternoon, you’ve probably noticed that fully half of the screen is devoted to Arrington’s rant about the VC money pouring into the blogosphere.

Most of the discussion is about who would make the dream team?, or, is Arrington just trying to rattle the boat?, or even making a bid for inclusion.

But what does this mean for business bloggers?

Money pouring into the blogosphere

This is going to sound similar to my answer to the next part, but here goes: 90% of all business bloggers will not be significantly affected. VC money is for media companies who aim to make their money by producing blog content.

You are blogging to create a connection with your customers, and to build a relationship that leads to trust, friendship, and hopefully, patronage.

The number of venture-backed, advertising-based media properties on the internet is not going to make much of a difference in your blogging. The same was that, if you’ll buy the analogy, a few new newspapers wouldn’t affect the way you go about conducting a monthly luncheon.

Should you network multiple blogs?

Again, wrong field. Don’t let Arrington’s call for uber-networkness tempt you to explore dividing your blogs.

Mike’s concept is interesting in itself: do blogs really offer the same product that the standard news media offers? I think the answer is a resounding no. I’ll let Paid Content speak to issues of factual accuracy.

The media-producing blogs will probably roll up in some way or another. Blog networks invariably seem to do better as a business than single blogs do. But again: don’t be tempted to follow that model if you’re blogging for a business.

Why would your customers want to see multiple blogs? The advantages of a network apply to companies trying to develop a media property: larger footprint, more ad inventory, diverse but niche topicality.

For the typical business blogger, these do not fall high on the list.

If you live in Seattle, you ought to check out the Seattle PI’s big kahuna: The Big Blog.

Mónica Guzmán (who writes for The Big Blog) and I were having a discussion a couple weeks ago about whether or not what she does should really be called “blogging.”

There’s a whole list of things that she has to do that have nothing to do with the way that I post. What she does is absolutely, unequivocally, journalistically superior.

She checks her sources. I make up words. She clears posts with an editor. I am source, writer, and publisher. She writes about things that are verifiable. I operate on wild speculation.

Why in the world should what I do be given the same name as what she does?

No matter how many times we tell people that a blog is just the system you use to publish, the fact is that people have not separated the platform from the content in their minds.

It’d be nice if you could say “I’m a blogger,” and get the follow up question, “what kind?” — the way that if you said “I’m a writer,” people might ask, “for what? TV? Magazines? Newspapers?” — but you can’t. And ignoring that won’t fix it.

She does “blogging PLUS,” and I think that giving it a linguistic distinction is probably a good idea. Mark Cuban explains why pretty well in his post:

I’m sure the NY Times, like all major media outlets hopes that because it is branded a NY Times blog, that readers will have the perception and expectation that it will be of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com.

That when readers actually read the blog, they will see that its of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com. It may well be that some do. The marketing reality however is that there is a significant risk that they will not. That rather than assigning the brand equity of the NY Times to the blogs hosted, they will take the alternative path of assigning their perception of what a blog is to the NY Times, there by having a negative impact on the brand equity of the NY Times. That’s an enormous risk for any mainstream brand to take.

I don’t think it has to be “Real Time Reporting” (kinda lame sounding), but it shouldn’t just be straight “blogging.”

There are satsumas and there are oranges. I feel like right now we’re calling everything oranges.

OK, you can all tell me why I’m wrong now.

According to Wired, the Air Force has decided to block “just about any independent site with the word ‘blog’ in its web address.”

I’d imagine that rules us out. It rules out blogspot, too.

Looks like wordpress.com should be OK, as long as you don’t put “blog” in the name of your blog.

Before I start painting with too broad a brush, the Wired piece makes it clear that not everyone in the Air Force thinks that preventing soldiers from the dangers of inaccurate reporting on blogs is a good idea.

To me, the whole thing seems a little knee-jerk to me, like sticking your fingers in your ears, chanting “the blogoshpere doesn’t exist” three times and clicking your heels. I wonder what they’re reacting to?

I also wonder if they blocked Google Reader?

If you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s latest idea-behemoth (ideahemoth?) Free in this month’s Wired, you should probably do yourself a favor and check it out.

If you’re too lazy to go read it now, here’s the important bit for what I’m talking about:

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

The essential idea is that the cost of thing on the internet is dropping to the point where those costs might as well be nothing.

This is especially true for blogging.

If you’re in a business where the cost of production is very real, and will remain very real (think: building lawnmowers), there’s no reason why you should offer your customers something for free that is not your primary product.

If you build lawnmowers, and you offer free, good advice about lawnmowers online, who do you think people will go to for their lawnmower needs? I bet you’re higher up the list.

The idea behind business blogging and marketing online is to establish expertise, so that when a need for your product or service arises (as it surely will), you are the person that your customer seeks out.

That’s what Jeff Jarvis is asking on BuzzMachine.

I’ve written before (yes, I know the page formatting is broken) about why I think Big Media as a collective is going to stick around a while longer, and while the piece is pretty outdated by now, I still stand by my conclusion: I would love to own a newspaper right now.

It’s not what the property is inherently, it’s what you can do with it. I think that big media stands to gain so much from the internet and newer, digital media technologies. By now, many papers are embracing blogs as new tools for news and commentary…and finding them successful.

The problem that old media faces is not that the fundamental demand for news has gone down, but that the fundamental desire for personal touch has gone up.

First thing I’d do with a newspaper is experiment. Tell all my reporters to start writing in first person. I understand the sanctity of impartial news, but I think there’s a difference between bad reporting and personal reporting. Lord knows I see right through the phrase “When one reporter tried to…”

Let’s shake it up, newspapers. Let’s make it more personal.

What would you do?

Yes I did just fit that all into a post headline. I don’t think it’s news to anyone at this point that Microsoft has proposed a buyout of Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

I do happen to think that Robert Scoble has called exactly what Google is doing in it’s work to oppose the bid:

Google stands to gain HUGE by slowing down this deal. Every month longer that this deal takes is tens of millions in Google’s pockets. Why? Well, the real race today isn’t for search. Isn’t for email. Isn’t for IM. It’s for ownership of your mobile phone. I met the guy who runs China’s telecom last week in Davos. He’s seeing six million new people get a cell phone in China every month. So, every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal.

Scoble’s absolutely right, the place you want to be right now is in mobile phones. Between the iPhone and Google’s phone operating system, Windows Mobile is going to start facing some tough competition.

I also think that Fred Wilson is right about what Yahoo! should do: break into little pieces.

There’s another reason why I don’t think a purchase of Yahoo! makes much sense for Microsoft. I suspect that many of Yahoo!’s best services will languish under Microsoft’s ownership and that users will leave. It’s happening already under Yahoo!’s ownership to services like Flickr and Delicious and MyBlogLog. It will be worse under Microsoft’s ownership.

There’s a definite lack of innovation in the innovative services that Yahoo! gobbled up recently that Fred lists there. It’s disappointing, and I think it’s in some ways an inevitable side effect of being part of a larger company that needs more “organization.”

Things get done faster when there are fewer barriers, period.

The news is out today that Google has launched a Social Graph API - basically an open tool for charting social connections on the open web. They say it best themselves:

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

What this means, in short, is that XFN matters now. Google launched with some example tools that let you map out what link relationships they’ve found with your blog and other web sites. Your report looks something like this:

I’m assuming this list will grow as you all start adding relationship metadata to your blogrolls. I’m going to go start filling in ours.

This type of link data has existed for a while, and if you’re using WordPress, you may have already put it in. The big holdup has really been that until now there hasn’t been much use for that metadata—if you bothered to fill in all the information about how you’re connected to the people you link to, nobody cared. So why bother?

Well now Google is trying to pull the kind of relationship superdata that people are generating in Social Networks like Facebook (which, incidentally, Google can’t crawl like it can crawl the open web) out into blogs and web sites.

In all honesty, I can’t say I’m too upset about the idea. I’ve always thought that there’s so much more to linking than just links, and this is a cool way to start quantifying that information.

In WordPress, if you want to start adding the XFN metadata, just go to your blogroll tab, then edit any one of the links, and expand the “Link Relationship” tab. Looks like this:

For a while now I’ve been used to clicking the little “more” tab at the top of my google homepage to select blogsearch. It has been at the top of the list - first thing you go for.

Looks like people aren’t searching blogs as much as they used to. Now the top hit is Video:

In fact, now the list goes:

• Video
• Groups
• Books
• Scholar
• Finance
• Blogs

Eh? I refuse to believe that people use Google Scholar (what is that anyway?) more than they use Blogsearch. Although to be fair - it’s probably easier to click a link right next to the bottom divider than something in the middle.

Still, Google’s making a conscious choice to throw blogging farther down the list. I never understood why it was hidden in the “more” menu in the first place. Over the past year I think Google has been consistently the best blog search tool for me.

I wonder what people are using. Or if they’re not, why aren’t they searching blogs?