Jordan Golson at The Industry Standard reported yesterday that Dan Lyons is giving up on his personal blog, Real Dan Lyons, after he was forced by Newsweek to pull some of his recent, profane posts.
I can only assume that Newsweek was uneasy about Lyons gunning for Kara Swisher’s reputation and for calling the Yahoo PR team “lying sacks of shit.”
Of course, Golson faithfully reproduces the missing Lyons posts in his own, so you can check them out and make your own opinion.
I’m wondering where the line is on this one. On the one hand, it’s pretty bad form to go around mudslinging at everyone in your industry. On the other hand, an employee forcing a blogger to pull their posts is pretty high up on the evil scale as well.
And I have to disagree completely. Blogging is far from dead—blogging is thriving. According to Paul, the reasons you should skip the blogosphere are, roughly:
There are too many other blogs
Writing more than 140 characters is too much work
Media companies are now blogging
Jason Calacanis isn’t doing it anymore
Blogging has always been a medium. It’s a tool that you can use in many ways, and what’s happened is that this tool has been adopted by a lot of people for a lot of different purposes.
Some of what Paul brings up is actually valid: gone indeed are the days when a wayward blog post about a popular subject like “Barack Obama” could rocket you to the top of Google. But a blog still beats a static web site on SEO hands-down.
And there’s also the way that a blog lets you connect with your niche. The Techmeme leaderboard does not define the blogosphere. It tracks the “broadcast blogosphere” - blogs from people and organizations big enough that they’re essentially going back to broadcast models.
Today is an excellent time to start a blog, either for yourself or for your business. You will undoubtedly find your tribe.
As many of you probably already know, our CES Blogger Party last year was an awesome success, so we’re getting right back into it this year: the It Won’t Stay in Vegas blogger party is back in force, and this time we’re doing a contest to get several gadget bloggers onto a private jet flight.
Yes, you read that right. Yesterday we announced the rules on how to get into the contest and how to increase your odds of winning (and for the record, no, this post doesn’t enter me into the contest).
If you want to come hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk and Robert Scoble at the CES Blogger Party this year, go request an invite to the party.
Paidcontent and ProBlogger reported this morning that the Bankaholic blog, which launched in July of 2007, was bought today by Bankrate for a cool $12.4 million, and the option to earn another $2.5 million over the next 12 months.
That’s an astounding payout for the amount of time that John Wu (who is the one person behind Bankaholic) has put into the site.
If you look at the Google trends chart, you can see a very convincing argument for building a blog to flip it:
Having been in the blog space for a long time, I sometimes forget that there is an actual market for blogs, but there definitely is.
Some people like Yaro Starek have occasionally suggested that you can make a business out of buying blogs, building them up a little bit, and then reselling them for a profit.
Darren Rowse (of Problogger, in case you don’t know) is such a prolific blogger that even though I’m pointing you to a September 30th blog post, it’s already the fourth headline on his home page.
Darren does a nice job of summarizing Gary’s points, but the real gem is the 30-minute video attached to the end of the post, where you can watch Gary interact with the audience.
Between this video and his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, it’s clear what Gary’s advice is all about—and it’s really good advice: do what you do best, do it loudly, and do it all the time.
Below is the Web 2.0 Expo video, but I’d also check out the video on Darren’s post, it’s much longer and more informal.
Just tried QuarkBase, works great. Put in the URL, click the “technical” tab and voila, there it is. For years I’ve been viewing the source of a post and then trying to parse what the code is describing. Painful, but it worked.
I was hopeful that the service with the promising name: BuiltWith would do this for me, but IMHO it mostly overwhelms the user with SEO minutiae. It doesn’t actually tell you what the site is “Built With.” It can tell you a site is using WordPress plugins, but never gets around to telling you anywhere (I can find) that it’s built with WordPress.
I learn a lot by example. As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger noted recently, there’s a big difference between the “right” blogging advice and the “real” blogging advice, and it’s important to know the “real” strategies.
“Do as I say, not as I do,” is a great phrase for parenting, but it’s a lousy line for bloggers. If you see a successful blogger telling you to do something they’re not doing, or more importantly to not do something they are doing, red flags should start popping up.
One of the best examples of a successful and authoritative blog that regularly eats its own dog food is Copyblogger. Here are three great strategies for building authority gleaned from careful observation:
There are only a few sure-fire ways to get your newest genius product noticed. Maybe the A-list will start writing about you. Get a front page story in the New York Times.
Or you can get a free booth at the Consumer Eletronics Show, the largest new technology convention on earth. We’ve already submitted Sentimine, our unique sentiment tagging system, to the contest.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Joseph Gizzi at CEA about their i-Stage contest, what it’s about, and how the prizes work. Click through for the full interview.
Jason:i-Stage seems geared towards products that haven’t yet been launched. Is the competition open to anything that has already been seen by the public?
Joseph: CEA’s i-stage event is designed to showcase the world’s coolest tech products, whether they be from an entrepreneur in a college dorm, a university lab or an established company. If any person or company has something cool and new to show, they are welcome to show it to the world via i-stage. Greater weight in the judging area will be given to those products that have not been demonstrated anywhere else due to us truly wanting the the cool and new products.
At the Blog Business Summit in October 2006, John Battelle pointed out that search is in the “command-line” phase of user interfaces. Search is in DOS mode still, and we have yet to reach Windows.
In an interview today on i-media connection he says that the biggest surprise to him in search is that we are still in the same place:
Joe Kutchera: What is the most significant change we’ve seen in search since you wrote “The Search”?
John Battelle: The complete failure of any other company to gain significant share against Google.
Not only has Google continued to dominate search, but search has not really changed much in terms of what it means.
Battelle thinks—and I agree—that Google’s dominance will continue until we reach a point where current search is supplanted with something drastically different in terms of how the user interacts with it:
The big change will be a redefinition of search to a new, more useful result. In other words, the shift from DOS to Windows — that kind of shift, metaphorically, applied to search.
Microsoft is looking the wrong way if they’re only trying to increase the quality of their search results. Google search results show 70% spam and people still use it more than any other engine. It’s not about what you find, it’s about how you find it.
For an industry that is often criticized on its monopolistic practices and habits of relying on cripplingly intense DRM, the Hollywood studios sure got Hulu right.
I’ve never bought the idea that consumers are “entitled” to free content. That’s crap - creative content costs money and takes time to create, and video especially can be an expensive and risky product to make.
The problem has always been a question of lock-in and user experience. So long as the cost of buying video (or music) is greater than the inconvenience of getting it illegally, people won’t be buying video.
And since people are already paying for their internet connection, you can scratch off trying to get people to subscribe to an extra fee for TV online. So the studios figured correctly that if you made free video widely available in a really great player with limited commercial interruption, people would flock to it.
I logged in to Hulu today to watch Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog, and I realized that Hulu has taken a swing at one of the bigger problems with embedding and sharing video: sometimes you only want to share a segment.
When you click to embed a Hulu video, they let you crop the embed video to whatever segment you want. Think that one-liner was the most hilarious thing ever? No problem - share just those 10 seconds.
The search for the holy grail of targeted advertising is still on. Veoh just recently announced that they’re going to start letting advertisers target video and display ads based on their users’ viewing habit.
Blogging and other web 2.0 and social media platforms are now maturing to the point where businesses are really starting to look for the business model. Nick O’Neill talks about how many blogs are turning to events or maybe even newsletters for revenue.
I think that moving to a place where consumers will pay for premium content is not unreasonable. Freemium should work as a content business model.
But I have maintained for a while that the best way to use blogging in a business atmosphere is as an architecture and a marketing tool, not a business in and of itself. If you were doing a direct mail campaign, you would not expect to make money from the mail. You expect to make money from the sales that it would generate.
Blogging is the same way. Most businesses should not expect to make money by selling ads or sponsorships or t-shirts on their blogs. They should use blog architecture to make their web sites dynamic and search-friendly. They should use the blog as a marketing tool to drive interest and sales in their primary product.
That is where I think businesses will get the most use out of blogging.
Although they do refer to it as a “blog” in the article, the Wall Street Journal headline In Big Sur, Web Site Run by Resident Is Key Data Source exemplifies the trend we predicted back in 2005 when we said that blogs will be the Web “sites” of the future.
“The Web site and blog are run by Lisa Goettel, a temporarily homeless Web designer whose move to a new Big Sur house about 150 miles south of San Francisco was derailed by the wildfire, which was 18% contained Tuesday. Ms. Goettel runs the site out of a coffee shop with free wireless Internet in Carmel-By-The-Sea, about 25 miles north of Big Sur. She depends on five residents and businesspeople who remain in Big Sur — defying mandatory evacuation orders — for on-scene reports.
The site has become a must-read for Big Sur residents, the media and even fire officials. It routinely scoops fire officials and newspapers. The site also provides displaced residents a space to find temporary employment or shelter. The blog has already received 73,000 hits since it went up on July 3.”
And it’s no surprise that the blog is driven by WordPress, our favorite blogging engine for this type of site. We’re converting more and more traditional client “sites” to WordPress these days…
“The gap between blog hype and reality widened in 2007,” said Laura Ramos, Forrester analyst and chief author of the report. “After counting 36 companies that started promoting corporate blogs on their Web sites in 2006, the number of B2B firms starting up blogs dropped sharply to 19 in 2007.”
One of the big problems with blogging is that it’s too easy. Twenty seconds on WordPress.com and you can start posting to the world at large without having to talk to a single person in the IT department.
But there’s a big difference between simply blogging and blogging well, and that’s why businesses aren’t necessarily seeing the kinds of results that blogging hype has promised them.
To be fair, hype is hype, and there was a lot of it in 2006 (although the trend still points upward). I can understand why some companies who haven’t seen ridiculous upswings could think they’ve been had.
There really is value to be gained form blogging, but it’s all about the kinds of conversations you start and the relationships you build, not it how well you can, in the approximate words of Eminem, “get up on the mic and spit it.”
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.
It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.
One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.
But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.
And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).
So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?
I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.
Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?
I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.
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?
Fred Wilson is absolutely right about web discussions: Information can be sucked out, but it needs to be pumped back in as well.
If I write a great blog post, and it gets sucked in to Facebook as a note, and the conversation happens there, inside Facebook - it doesn’t automatically get attached to my site. The problem stems from the fact that all these different web services get value from having the conversation happen on their servers.
Facebook gets value from having a complete social environment going on inside their walled garden, so they’re not dependent on search.
Disqus gets value because all the comments left in their system are regarded by Google as their original content.
FriendFeed gets value from having conversations happen ON friendfeed, which keeps people on their service.
Business bloggers get value from having comments on their site because Google sees it as original content and because smart commenters frequently add to the knowledge available in the post.
Google is the largest roadblock in this process. As long as it provides an incentive to web sites and services who collect comments and discussion on their server (first), then it’s only smart business to keep things segmented.
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.
I’ve been asked to talk about blogging and how it relates to business at the Rainier Club in Seattle on May 12, if you’re a member and plan on attending. Let me know what questions you have ahead of time and I’ll tailor my presentation. Steve [at] blogbusinesssumit [dot] com
