Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Blogs

The Problem With Comments

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:14:14 GMT

Another thing that Robert talked about in his post on tech blogging failing is that comment systems are pretty poor these days. I don’t think that is a tech blogging problem as much as it is a general blogging problem. I’ve had to sign in and enter a CAPCHA just to leave a comment on a blog that is going to moderate the comment before it appears. Talk about a pain. I have to be really motivated to leave a comment at some blogs. Often I just don’t bother. Other times I decide that if I am going to work that hard I might as well write a complete blog post and link to the original blog. That is probably not completely bad but really how often does one have time for that “solution.”

Of course the reason for those barriers is bad behavior. Spam comments are a regular problem for most bloggers. As painful as it is to leave comments here (sorry abut that) I still get a lot of spam comments. It is a pain to delete them but I do because I worry about the consequences of not doing so. It would be a lot worse if it were easier to leave comments.

The other problem with comments is people who only leave negative comments. Oh I don’t mean people who disagree with the blogger. I mean the people who are just plain disagreeable. Flames, profanity, name calling, and all sorts of things that add nothing to the conversation. Its hard to blame bloggers who get fed up enough to turn off comments completely. Comments could be the best part about blogging but all too often they are the worst part. Its a sad state of affairs.

Growing Pains in the Tech Blogosphere

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:01:59 GMT

Every so often Robert Scoble gets a bit melancholy and writes a long, some what rambling post. Frankly these are the posts I wait for because these are some of the most interesting insightful posts he writes. Today he wrote about how he believes that tech blogging has failed their readership. When Robert started blogging it was all about sharing the latest cool things in technology. I think that for Robert that is still the big thing but for a lot of others there is more (or perhaps less depending on your point of few) to it.

Somewhere along the line people realized that besides fun there was some amount of fame and fortune. Well perhaps the fortune is relative but at least there was/is money to be made in tech blogging. For a blogger to get the fame and fortune (or at least make some money and get tech attention) one needs a lot of readers, access to the best events (product announcements, conferences, tech parties) and a constantly growing amount of attention. One needs to scoop other tech bloggers which sometimes means blogging about things that are not completely vetted for reliability. It means getting the attention of the main stream media which means getting into the business of tech as well as the products.

A slight diversion for a minute. One would think that for a blogger only online attention means anything – links, comments, traffic from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. At one time that was true but in recent years, as the media discovered blogs and blogging, it seems to have become more and more important to have some main stream media attention to build up credibility and to attract readers who are not themselves serious blog readers/writers. It’s easier for a blogger to get that CxO interview or industry party invitation if they have been quoted in Fortune or Newsweek or the New York Times. Showing off all the new tech toys may get one in the news but being known for knowledgeable about the latest inside news about the business side of tech seems to be a more reliable way to get MSM attention.

So today we have a lot more people who are as excited about the Fame, fortune, and yes still the fun of tech blogging who are all competing for attention. If they lose their audience they loss it all. If they gain audience they gain in all areas. The stress on some of these people must be intense. That no doubt leads to some of the problems Robert talks about.

I see all this as growing pains. In time it may settle out. The people who really care about the business side will focus more and more on business and the people who just care about the tech will focus on the tech. Chances are good that some of the blogosphere will become part of the main stream media. OH I don’t mean they will move into print, radio or TV as much as I mean that the MSM will move into the Internet and impose some rigor in reporting on bloggers. Access to larger tech companies may start to require some additional credibility and partnership between bloggers and MSM with the rigor that means. Also as blogging becomes more of a real business some sort of corporate structure to support a blogger is necessary so the blogger can focus on the work and not where the money is coming from. The partnership between FastCompany and Scoble may be a model for that. Robert doesn’t need the credibility as much as he probably needs a good corporate structure to support him. In fact Robert helps FastCompany in the Internet where it is not as well known as the big media names. Win win there. Different relationships will have different balances though.

The other thing that is going to settle down is this hopping from one “shiny object” to another. One of the frustrating things for me lately has been Robert blogging less and using other tools. I don’t want to follow him from one shiny object to another. My life is too busy to do that. I like blogs and read a lot of them. I have a Facebook page and while I enjoy it I don’t have time to be there every day so I only use it occasionally. I like Twitter but I keep my use there light. I Twitter a couple of times a day and I follow a reasonable number of people. But I’m not moving to FriendFeed. My social computing time is full and since I am not going to drop something right now I am not going to add something right now. Could that change? Sure. it took me over a year to decide to try Twitter and when I did the time in Facebook dropped.

But what is going to happen is that some people will focus on Twitter, others on Facebook, still others on other “shiny objects.” Those people who want to stay with those objects will get supported by people with a more narrow focus. Lots of us will still follow the Scoble’s of the world to find out about the next shiny object but we’ll not automatically follow them around. We need people with short attention spans to be the early adopters, tell us about new things, and in a sense create the culture around the new things so we feel at home when we move there (if in fact we ever do). The early adopters will have to be patient with use when we don’t see the same value or get as excited as they do though. Sometimes we late adopters may completely skip whole fads. Hopefully that will not hurt too many feelings. :-)

The only way tech blogging will really fail the rest of us though is if the A-list bloggers stop looking through the long tail for shiny items. A Guy Kawasaki can launch something like alltop.com and it will get picked up by the A-list right away. But an Aaron White and friends who launch something like http://icantdeci.de/ (which is fun even if not “important”) and its not as likely to get picked up. There are probably a lot of serious and important things getting announced all the time that are getting the same lack of attention. The long tail is getting really long and it is harder to keep up all the time. Not sure how to fix that problem.

Well tech bloggers are doing their thing. Are they failing the rest of us? I think that is a little harsh. There is a phase that things are going though. It will all be fine in time as long as they all remember to blog about things that are fun and interesting and not worry too much about being relevant. :-)

Struggling with blogging

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:59:30 GMT

I guess the posting rate here is slow enough that it may actually look like I am blogging more lately but the opposite is true. This is only one of several places I blog and at my main blog I am really struggling. Usually I post 22 to 24 posts a month there but I am on a rate for fewer than 20 this month. Also I usually have posts ready days in advance but lately I’ve missed days and not had anything until later in the day if at all. A third blog where I post for a very small group I haven’t posted in almost two weeks compared to usually several a week. So what is going on?

Part of it is travel. I’ve been away on vacation and a long trip to Texas in the last several weeks. It looks like I’ll be in Phoenix AZ for Synergy 2008 next week for a couple of days. I’ll have a day home before I head out to Redmond for the Research Faculty summit after that. I have a family wedding to go to in August as well. A few months ago I thought the summer would be slow and then it started to fill up. So a lot of energy is going into preparing talks, getting ready for meetings and just plain travel time. I lose pretty much a while day on a coast to coast trip – each way. Lots of that travel is not conducive to work because I am burned out. So I sleep or read for fun. And then there is catching up with email and other tasks that build up while I am away. I’m not complaining BTW – I love the travel. But it can make blogging more difficult.

Part of it is that things are slow in the tech field. This is especially true in education technology. People try to announce things in the fall so that schools and teachers can start thinking about it while they are thinking about course changes for the following school year. I didn’t see many new things at NECC for example. Maybe they were their but not for computer science. Without external things to blog about it gets harder to fill up the posting schedule.

But I wonder if I am getting blogger burn out as well. I still get excited about some things and rush off to blog them. But it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. I also have to force the excitement sometimes. “oh no I have nothing to blog about. Think think think” Really though that doesn’t do anyone any good.

I need to make sure that I do things right. Earlier I came up with a blog post idea. As I thought about it I realized that it would take more work to do right then I have tonight. Trying to have it ready for morning would result in a fairly worthless post that was little more than noise for the sake of filling the schedule. I decided to put the idea aside until I had time to do it right. Ultimately it is, or should be, about quality rather than quantity. If I need a break for a bit to bring the quality back up that is what I will do. I’m going to try to stress less the next few weeks. If I don’t get a lot of posts in July so be it. I need to concentrate on doing other things well.

For now, I have to go proof read a document my wife brought home. It’s on paper believe it or not. :-)

Blogging Is Not Dead – It never was alive

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:25:07 GMT

I’ve been reading all sorts of “blogging is dead” or “blogging is not dead” sort of posts lately. I’m not going to link to them because they all miss the point. Blogging was never part of the main stream to begin with. OH for sure it is at the center of some people’s lives but main stream? Not hardly.

Most people I know have heard of blogging but very few of them actually read blogs and fewer still write them. And even those who do blog (what ever that means to them) few of them do it often.

Take my wife for example (but don’t take her away - I need her). She is a very tech savvy person. She is one of the real “go to” people in her school district for technology issues. She is helping other teachers integrate technology into the curriculum across the board. She understands a lot more technology than the average teacher or member of the public for that matter. Heck, the woman was an outstanding machine language programmer in the early years of our marriage. But she doesn’t blog. She doesn’t read blogs, she doesn’t write blogs and she keeps telling me that she doesn’t understand why people blog at all. She’s a very smart woman but blogging just doesn’t fit her world view. She’s not alone in that! And she’s not wrong. If she is missing anything she is probably making up for it in ways that may not make as much sense to me.

I work for a serious technical computer software company filled with lots of people much smarter than I am. There are literally thousands of employees who blog. There are tens of thousands of employees who do not blog though. For many of them the only time they read blogs at all is likely to be when someone sends them a link and a request to read something or when a search engine search returns a blog.

Most of the people in my family and in my non-geek circle of friends (I have lots of non-geek friends – really I do) don’t know any more about blogging then they read in the newspapers. Blogging is not now and never has been a part of their lives. That doesn’t mean they are not on the Internet though.

Lots of people get tunnel vision especially with the Internet. It’s like the story of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and describing it as if they part they were touching was the whole of it. The world wide web is just part of the Internet. Email is part. Blogging is part. Twitter is part. Facebook is part. AOL is part. Search engines are part. Instant message is part. Blogs are a part. YouTube and Flickr are parts. The balance between parts of what make up the Internet that each individual takes advantage of varies greatly. For individuals that balance may change over time. Email may go up and IM may go down. Newsgroup usage may go up or down. It may fade out completely or increase to take up ones whole day. But just because the balance changes for one person or even one group of people doesn’t mean that part of the Internet dies.

But people see the world through filters. If an individual and all of their friends move from Twitter to FriendFeed then in their eyes Twitter dies. At the same time many other people might be discovering Twitter and its total usage might go up. (Or not who knows? This is an example.) Facebook has not killed MySpace and yet if you ask some avid Facebook users they might wonder out loud if MySpace even exists while other people will explain that they are on MySpace because they don’t know anyone on Facebook. People define the world based on the people they know. It’s like the people who were surprised that Bush won because they didn’t personally know anyone who would vote for them.

I’m not going to try to predict the future on blogging except to say that it will change. Should be a safe prediction. :-) I’m also not going to change what I do based on the predictions or laments of others. Blogging works for me so I’m going to keep doing it. If that means I get left behind while to “cool kids” move on to the next shiny object so be it. One day maybe something else will work better for me and I’ll move on as well. But that will not mean blogging is dead.

How To Get Links To Your Blog

Tue, 06 May 2008 08:25:45 GMT

It is said that links are the currency of the Internet. Certainly they are important for bloggers. Links mean traffic – readers – discussion – credibility – and a feeling that one matters. Well to some degree or an other I guess. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the initial traffic from a link is only part of the story. Lots of blog traffic comes from search engines. Links are what make a web page or blog post show up highly in search results. So the more links a blog has the more likely it is to be found by people searching for something. The long term benefits of a link may be greater than the short term.

So how does one get links to their blog? The best way is to write brilliant, insightful commentary or wonderfully useful information. In other words great original content. People will read it and want to share it with their readers. This is not as easy as it seems though. Well not for me anyway.

You can also embed great pictures or videos – cute, funny, smart, educational – there are lots of options. People like pictures – its part of what makes http://icanhascheezburger.com the number 8 blog on Technorati’s Top 100 list. Embedding the images/video is best because that way people link to your post and not to the site of the original image (if it exists elsewhere).

Linking to other good content sometimes works. If your link is directly to an image or some file that is not a web page that’s best. If your link is to another web page people often just link to that page. Sometimes they link back to you as how they found out about it but not always. As a matter of being nice it is always good to link to the place one found out about good content as well as to the content itself. I try to do that though if it is one of those things that I see several places I might not. Anyway if you can link to a really useful resource (especially a free one) people will often link to your post.

Speaking of linking. Trackbacks and comments generally do not give one links that “count” for search engines or incoming links. Too many spam trackbacks means that many systems use the nofollow tag for those things. They do however let people know about you and you may get more traffic from them and that may lead to direct links. I am amazed at how many readers I get from people following back from a comment or a trackback. So don’t discount them completely.

Participate in interesting memes. My recent “book meme” post has resulted in three different people linking back to this blog. This one is tricky though. It requires an audience that is interested in the meme. I have a literate and fun loving audience here. They seem to like books and they are willing to participate in this meme. The audience for some blogs would see many memes as off topic, distracting and not useful. And if people do not want to participate there will not be any links. In fact in some blogs this may cost one regular readers. As with anything in writing knowing ones audience is important.

One way that seems to work wonders but that I don’t recommend is to really annoy an A-list blogger. This isn’t as easy to do as you might expect because they people have developed really thick skins so easily shrug off and ignore most insults. However if you do succeed in getting them annoyed to link to you and point out what an idiot you are you may get a lot of links. First off their fans will link to you so they can call you names, demand that you be fired and otherwise be very mean to you. That makes this strategy not for the faint of heart. Yes, the A-lister’s detractors may link to you as well and even say nice things. But honestly they probably think you are just pointing out the obvious and may not find that link worthy.

Now someone is going to say “how about positive links from A-list bloggers?” Sure that is always a good thing. But honestly that’s all about writing great content and I covered that already. Besides I am not convinced that a link from an A-list blogger carries much more weight in search engines than any other link. It may get you more initial attention and it may occasionally result in some of their readers also linking to you. But as a strategy “I’m going to get a lot of links by getting some A-list blogger to link to me” I think it is something of a lottery. Better to write for your core audience and just be happy if one of the links you pick up is from an A-lister. The big benefit from an A-list link is a few extra people dropping by with the chance that a subset of them will become regulars. The conversion factor from another more closely related blog that is not an A-list blog will often be a lot higher.

I was going to not say “link to other people as much as possible” because I thought that is sort of obvious. But maybe its not. Link to the sort of content that you appreciate. It helps out and encourages the people who create it. Plus it lets them know about you and maybe they will see content of yours that they will want to link to. Besides it is always right to treat others the way you would want to be treated.

What did I leave out? Any other recommendations for getting links?

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - 7 Blogging Statistics Rules - There is Life After Page Views

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:49:48 GMT

Scott's post on blogging statistics and what they mean is one of the best I've seen in quite a while. I like the two questions he posits. In some cases I do care who reads my blog. In the case of changing based on what statistics tell me about who is reading my blog it depends. I will change if statistics tell me that the people I really want to read my blog will find it more useful if I change things. But that impacts almost entirely my work related blog (the one I do for high school computer science teachers - gotta link when I get an excuse :-) )

This blog I don't really care too much who reads. Well I do hope that some read it and that they get something from what they read. But I'm not out to impress anyone in particular and I am not out to get huge numbers of readers. I have another blog that appears to be read by no more than a handful of people. Perhaps fewer than five. But that is ok as it serves as a place for me to write and get some ideas "on paper." One of the people who reads writes a comment on most of my posts and so I feel I am at least having a conversation. And that is more than enough to make me happy. Having people talk back is the greatest measure of success for me.

So I think a lot depends on why you blog. I've been looking at a lot of statistics lately and for the most part they don't change what I write or how I write. So they are getting boring.

One key factor that stats tell me, and Scott talks about this as well, is that all audiences on the Internet are global. Realizing that has changed a couple of things. I generally try to use metric and English system measurements since I don't want readers to have to "translate." And I am more careful about idiom.

Does your audience change how you write?

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - 7 Blogging Statistics Rules - There is Life After Page Views

Do you care who reads your blog?

and if so

Will you change your behavior given statistics on who reads you blog?

If you could read just five blogs

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:30:22 GMT

I'm behind in my blog reading again. The last two weeks I have been in Seattle on business. Every day started with an early breakfast and ended ended with a late dinner with meetings and sessions of some kind filling the time in the middle. By the time I returned to my hotel all I really wanted to do was sleep. And sleep is what I did so that I had a chance to get value out of the next day. Blogging suffered. Today I am home, back in the office and facing a backlog of work. The number of unread blog posts in my aggregator (I use RSS Bandit) is daunting to say the least.

I have hundreds of blogs in my reader. That's far too many to keep up with and honestly I don't keep up with all of them all the time. I skim the titles and delete many without reading them. So I was thinking, "what if I really did a purge? What if I were to keep only 3 blogs in my reader? What would I keep?" Well I thought and thought and finally decided that there were 5 I would keep if forced to cut back. Cutting more than those 5 would be pretty much the same as dropping out completely - a thought which also crosses my mind from time to time. I am somewhat addictive where it comes to things like this so maybe cutting them all out is something I may have to do. But not today.

So which would I keep?

I Forgot Where I Was Going With This - Helen writes the funniest blog I read. And I read the Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams as well. Lately I find that I read this one first of all if there is a new post. We all need to laugh and this one lets me to that. Even if I did throw her husband under the bus (figuratively speaking) last week. Sorry Steve.

Rob Miles and Didith Rodrigo - Rob is a lecturer at the University of Hull in the UK while Didith is a professor at Ateneo De Manila in the Philippines. Two faculty members on the other side of the world who I have never met in person but feel like I know. I have been reading both people so long that dropping either one just feels wrong. Plus they are both interesting people. Both write about teaching, life, and other things. Hard to categorize either one really.

Robert Scoble and Don Dodge - Initially I thought I would just include Scoble. I pretty much depend on Scoble to track the tech blogosphere and report the key things. Sure I could follow TechCrunch or TechMeme or one of those but I'd rather not. For his failings, and he has some, I like him and he seems to find the same things interesting that I find interesting. Don Dodge doesn't write about as many things but what he does write about he writes in more depth and with a lot more experience backed expertise. I have come to depend on that to help me understand some of the more complicated things in the tech industry. Scoble is the linker; Don is the explainer. The combo works for me.

So that is my list. It is not all serious and not all frivolous. Its a bit of a balance. But these are the blogs I read when I don't have time to read blogs. What does your list look like?

If you haven't got anything nice to say - blog about it

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:23:16 GMT

I've been reading (briefly) some of the blogosphere comments about Robert Scoble and enterprise software not being sexy and (completely unrelated) the discussions about the new Blog Council started by a number of large companies. Oh the claws are out.

And so much of it is just so pointless. Enterprise software and consumer software are different. And they are the same. I wonder how many of the bloggers getting their undies in a knot have actually either written or bought either? Don Dodge who actually knows something about all this has some of the rare blogging common sense on the topic. (Rare for bloggers not rare for Don) But in general people seem to be looking to start or at least take part in arguments.

And the fuss about the Blog Council? I have to wonder how much of the negative comments are because the bloggers making them feel left out. Some of these people make a lot of money or get a lot of attention telling people how to blog. It wouldn't do for people to share knowledge and discuss things without them now would it? I just don't think it is fair for the Blog Council to be jumped on the way they have been. I don't see the comments as helpful, positive or anything other than a chance to get some attention.

BTW Can't people discuss anything in private anymore? Does everything have to be in the wide open? John Paul Jones is quoted as having said "praise in public, punish in private." Now he probably didn't model that phrase but its good advice anyway. Maybe if we all tried a little harder to provide positive reinforcement rather than just negative things would be more peaceful on the blogosphere?

Yeah its tough. Lord knows I've done my share (at least) of negative posts. But it does seem like something to work on.

How many posts are too many posts

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:16:29 GMT

You wouldn't know it if this is the only blog of mine you read but I worry about posting too much too often. Actually you might not be aware of it even if you read all of my blogs. In fact I am sure that to many people it looks like I have slowed way down on my blogging. To some extent the later is true.

I recently stopped blogging at On10.net. About a month ago I stopped blogging at theSpoke where I used to blog just about every day. And of course volume here is down a bit as well. There are reasons for all of that but I'll save that for another time. The place I have been spending my serious blogging effort lately is my high school computer science teacher blog. And that is where I worry about too much volume.

What I try to do there is to post information that is useful/helpful/interesting to people who teach high school (and middle school) computer science. That's my main audience. I seem to have a real audience that is much larger than that which is of course great. I am mindful that it is a good idea to post interesting things for those people as well. But the main audience is high school teachers. And if you know anything about high school teachers you should know that they do not have a lot of free time. What time they have is valuable and I would not want to waste it.

So I set out a goal to post one really useful thing every business day. Some times maybe an extra post but never more than 24 a month. Is that too much? I'm not really sure. No complaints but then generally if people find the volume of a blog too much they just quietly stop reading it. Plus I don't know for sure how people are reading it. If they are using an RSS reader (and only about 42%of my traffic is from RSS reads) then it can be easy to skim titles and just read what looks interesting. If they are reading via the web then they are likely to only read the top article or two or maybe three. So unless they are reading several times a week (which seems unlikely given the time constraints that teachers are under) they may be missing things. A lot of the web traffic appears to be via search engines or links from other blogs though. Hence the uncertainty about how many people are using the more efficient RSS feed.

So the rate I am using seems like a balance I can live with. But here is the rub. Sometime I find a lot of things that I think are high enough quality to post about. Do I add extra posts risking information overload or do I do something else? For the most part I use my goal of no more than 24 posts a month as an additional filter - a forcing function to only post the most valuable stuff. Sometimes though it is hard to leave things out. Sometimes the answer I come up with is to post something later in the week or perhaps the next week. But sometimes timeliness is an issue. One hates to post stale information.

Then the issue is combining posts or posting separately. What would the user prefer? No idea. Humm, maybe I'll ask the readers.

[This is an example of thinking out loud and coming to an unexpected conclusion. Anyone else out there use blog posts that way?]

Two Blog Posts Every Blogger Should Read

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:10:15 GMT

They say that blog posts that have lists in them are very popular. I'm not sure if that includes lists of two things or a meta list like I am about to give you. What I have is a list of two posts that proclaim to be important lists. Both of these posts list links to other posts that teach bloggers about things that are important, at least in the author's eyes, for bloggers to know and do to increase the success of their blogs.

There are probably more of these out there as well but I guess I lack the ambition to go looking for them. I haven't even read all of the posts these posts link to yet. And I may never. I have read some of them and for the most part they don't cover things I haven't read somewhere already.

But the fact is that I have read a lot of posts over the last few years about how to make a blog better or attract readers or make a blog successful by what ever one's idea of success is. If you are new to blogging those lists are probably a great place to start though. You probably don't want to spend a couple of years reading random blogs looking for nuggets of wisdom.

I know that people write blogs for different reasons. In fact I have several blogs and there are different motivations and goals for each of them. One of them I completely don't care about growing the readership. Another of them I totally care about growing readership of. And one of them (this one actually) I am completely schizophrenic about - sometimes I care and sometimes I don't.

But honestly the one constant is that I always try to write well. If I can't say something important at least I should say it as well as I can. I don't always succeed but I do try. I see blogging as a way to exercise the "writing muscles" and one should always try to do an exercise correctly. I continue to believe that in the long run good writing more than anything else will help one retain readers and hold on to readers who discover your blog in various random ways.

So go off and read the 65 articles to two posts above link to but remember that in the long run it is the quality of your content (facts, insights, and good writing) that matter most.

Note to nitpickers: Is a list of two items really a list? Not sure but in programming at least a list is a data structure regardless of how many items it has in it. Even if that number is zero. And I am a programmer at heart. That's my story and I am sticking with it.

25 Types of Blogs

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:29:43 GMT

Thanks to a link from Megan Golding I found this interesting post and slide show outlining 25 different types of blog posts. One of the things the post and the slide show talk about is that "top 10" style lists are great link bait. I wonder if they had that in mind when they posted this slide show.

The different types of blogs posts are named and described. For each one they rate it based on how many times a week you can make that sort of post, how strong it is for attracting links and how much work it is to write. The number of times a week you can post each type are interesting but it almost looks like they are advocating a lot of posts each week. Perhaps not because they do not suggest any number for the total number of posts a week. I'd be really careful about posting too many posts a week. More than 5-6 a week and I think they should be mostly limited to very small short posts. People burn out quickly.

The numbers about difficulty and potential for attracting links are, in my opinion, more useful. As I have written before I am leery of blogging specifically to attract links or extra ordinary traffic. Still I don't think it hurts at all to be aware of what sort of thing is likely to attract attention. The information on difficulty of writing each type of blog is one of the more useful pieces of information though.

I look at this slide show and think it would be helpful for planning the type of blog a person wants. By type of blog I refer to the style or perhaps the overall balance of post types. There are trade offs between difficulty and frequency. This slide show may be useful in determining how often one wants to post based on the type and difficulty of the post styles/types that a blogger feels most comfortable with. I think that for some people, particularly those with a business purpose for blogging, setting up a sort of schedule and posting a fairly consistent type of post sets a good level of expectations. One can really add other types of posts, especially those of the short - give them some information quickly - types interspersed with the main type being used. But consistency makes people comfortable and that is often a good thing.

Playing the Numbers Game

Sun, 13 May 2007 02:38:20 GMT

For the most part I am blissfully unconcerned about traffic to my blogs. While there was a time I dreamed about this one becoming a real hotspot propelling me to the A-list (or at least somewhere on the B-list) those days faded quickly. I am content with the small number of regular readers (some of whom followed me from theSpoke which was a great little community) and also with the small number of commenters. The recent spat of traffic (several thousand in a two to three day period) was more of a distraction than a reason to be happy. Not just because so much of the attention was negative either. Rather it was because the attention was because of misunderstanding and was not at all likely to lead to regular readers.

My work related blog is a bit different though. One reason for the difference is that there is a clear target audience (computer science teachers especially those who teach high school CS) and I am trying hard to get their attention. I am trying hard to find and write about things I think are useful for them so obviously there is more satisfaction the more of them find the blog. And of course the fact that my boss is interested in the traffic numbers is more of a concern then I would sometimes like to admit.

This week my Technorati "authority" ranking dropped over 20 points on my work blog. This was not unexpected because my ranging took a large jump about six months ago. I had posted something that quite unexpectedly scored big on Digg. In a couple of days I had over 50,000 readers on that one post. Quite a few people who hadn't linked to me before linked to that post. It was quite a nice boost and unlike my recent link from some A-list blogger there seemed to be a long term increase in readership. I should mention that a lot of the comments (148 comments in all) were not positive and many of the links were not positive either. But there was discussion, it was related to my overall goals, and it built up readership so it was a good thing in my opinion. Complete agreement is boring anyway.

I was a little surprised with my first reaction when I noticed the Technorati rating dropping though. I thought to myself "what can I post that will get people to link to me?" But you know that is really a vanity induced reaction. The goal should be to find and post things that are useful and interesting. That should be enough. If one does that then the likelihood is that people will link to you. Sure you can create link bait and grab some short term attention but that is often counter productive.

It's easy to get caught up in getting the numbers - be they links or hits or comments or something else - because numbers are concrete, they are objective (at least in theory) and they are a convenient way to "keep score." When one gets too caught up in the numbers it become easy to lose sight of the goal of providing useful information, interesting content, or other more worthwhile goals.

In the long term good content should bring the numbers. If the content is not bringing the numbers (readers or links) then it is the content that needs to be examined first. There are things that one can do to attract readers and for the most part there is nothing wrong with doing those things. Use tags, use the right keywords, pay attention to search optimization, link to others and comment on related blogs when it makes sense to do so. Ask people to vote for your blog in popularity contests. One wants to do things that bring people to look at your content but the content has to be good to keep them. All too often the link bait that brings in huge and unusual readers if somewhat off topic or otherwise atypical of your normal content. Unless new readers are finding something typical they are unlikely to stay and read other posts. Short term gains are usually very short term and they may turn off regular readers.

So make it easy for people to find you but not all attention is good attention. The focus should always (in my not so humble opinion) be about good solid content and not just getting attention.

Technorati tags: blogs, links, link bait, Digg, Techorati

Things are going to get random here

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:57:37 GMT

I started this blog about two years ago to talk about social computing. But really this blog never took off. Social computing is still a topic I am very interested in but I have learned a couple of important things. One is that I don't have as much to say about it as I thought I did. The other is that there are many others who have more to say, say it better and most importantly know more about what they are talking about than I do.

To some extent that is because I don't have the time to spend on the issue I would like. Some of that is prioritization - I have way too many issues I am interested in. That's life I guess.

I also have way too many blogs. I feel scattered and distracted by them. I often find myself in a debate as to where a specific post belongs. Lately those internal discussions have resulted in things not getting said at all. Is that a blessing? Perhaps. I have no delusions that millions of people (or even dozens of people) are waiting with baited breath to read what I have to say. But I blog as much for the release it gives me to post as I do for the thrill of having people read my posts. Actually perhaps more for the release. Often times I find my thinking stuck in a circle until I write the thoughts down. Only than can I widen my thoughts and expand my thinking past a given point. My mind is weird that way.

Also the place where I have blogged my most random thoughts (an online community called theSpoke) is morbid. The community is dieing from neglect. The site has technical problems that make blogging there not as easy as I'd like. Windows Live Writer is not supported for example. So I have been thinking about moving from there. This is a logical place to move to.

So for the time being I'll be confining my blogging to this site and to my high school computer science teacher blog. What will show up here? All kinds of things. You'll be surprised. Perhaps bored. Perhaps you'll all go away (not that there are that many of you.) and I will miss you. Perhaps you'll find it interesting like a train wreck. If you find it interesting that's great. If I bore you away I'm sorry. But I have to blog some things out of my system and this is where it is going to have to happen.

Stick around for a while and see if it's worth staying for.

A Blogger's Code of Conduct?

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:16:15 GMT

Via Robert Scoble's blog I read about Tim O'Reilly's draft Blogger's Code of Conduct. The basic points are:

We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.
We connect privately before we respond publicly.
When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
We do not allow anonymous comments.
We ignore the trolls

I really like 1, 2 and 4. I have mixed feelings about 3,5 and 6.

The problem with trying to connect privately (item 3) is that this doesn't often scale in "Internet time." What is a reasonable time to wait for a reply? An hour? Twenty four hours? A couple of days? In Internet time the wrong information could be all over and accepted as truth in short order. Without a timely and public reply and correction things can be hard to get corrected. Sometimes it is a great idea to try and get things corrected privately and I have done that myself. Other times it is clear that trying to get a correction in private communication is not going to be sufficient.

In general I don't like anonymous comments (item 5). In general principal I do like the idea of requiring a valid email address that is not displayed as a check against both spam and unreliable comments. On the other hand I do understand the need for comments to be anonymous at times. Perhaps an option to give an explanation for why anonymity is necessary would work as a second option. Let the owner of the blog decide if the explanation meets their standards. If someone unfairly blocks anonymous comments that word will get out and people may choose not to read, link to or otherwise support that blog. Let the market decide but let bloggers have some principled control over their comment sections.

Trolls? (Item 6) I think that trolls can make a blog interesting and even fun. A reply to a troll can be a great opportunity to make or defend a point. I think that people can deal with trolls reasonably without always ignoring them.

BTW I object to Robert's writing the term "back channel" as if it were some sort of dirty word. He intermixes discussing differences of opinion publicly or privately with back room deals between bloggers in a way that makes any non public discussion look wrong. Not every communication needs to be public for it to be honest and reputable. (Full disclosure: I have sent Robert private email messages. Some of them have actually been link bait.)

Just how useless are blog statistics anyway?

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:31:03 GMT

I've been experimenting with different sources of blog statistics lately. Most of the blogging sites I use show some sort of basic blog statistics. Live Spaces of course shows a daily, monthly and all time count of hits. I'm skeptical as to if it is complete or not though. At least it is interesting looking at the referring web sites.

My main blog is a Community Server site and it shows RSS and web hits for each post. It also shows counts of comments and some referrer log information. What is interesting to me is that the count for specific posts does not seem to relate all that closely to the monthly total count of hits provided by the hosting service. This disparity is what started me looking at other sources of statistics.

The first one I tried was Tracker.icerocket.com. This site provides the user (accounts are free) with some JavaScript code to embed in ones blog to aid tracking. The site will then provide information about the number of hits, referrers, and the countries that your readers come from. I've been pretty disappointed with the results from this site though. There have been times when I've had more comments than the site reports visitors. The counts it reports are generally about two orders of magnitude different from the states that the Community Server reports. That is a huge difference. What I have enjoyed is the reports of countries. Tracker reports visitors from well over 60 different countries. That has been fun to watch.

More recently I signed up with Feedburner and asked it to track this blog and the Computer Science Teacher blog. It's closer to the stats that are reported by my blogging hosts but still different. For example Live Spaces reports that this blog has been visited 67 times so far today but Feedburner says six times in the last 36 hours. That's off a bit but only one order of magnitude. Feedburner says that my CS teacher blog has had 25 visits in the last hour while Tracker says only about 20 during the whole day. They almost completely disagree on what countries have visited as well. Which one is right? Well probably both are right locating the hits they actually see but they are clearly seeing different hits and both are seeing fewer than the hosting sites themselves.

Of the two services I like Feedburner a little better. It doesn't require that I embed anything special in my blog and it seems to count more hits. I'll probably keep using Tracker for a while yet though. Inertia perhaps.

There are a lot of valid technical reasons why collecting blog (or any web) statistics is difficult and that complete accuracy is impossible. And I am certainly not going to get all wrapped up in it. I think the best thing for most people to do is to pick one source of statistics and stick with it. They should use it as a relative guide to see when traffic goes up and down. It's a lot like the commercials for cars and gas mileage that say "Your Mileage May Vary Use for Comparison Only." It may be reasonable to compare stats on Live Spaces blogs from Live Spaces with each other. It's probably not reasonable to use those stats to compare traffic with other blogging services though.

On the other hand comparing Feedburner or tracker statistics on two different blogs at two different sites may make sense. But you will want to compare Feedburner stats with Feedburner stats and not Feedburner with Tracker.

In any case unless there is money on the line all of these statistics are more interesting than actually useful. If there is money on the line be sure that you have a good common understanding of what statistics you are using and what they actually mean.

Technorati tags: blogs, statistics, tracker.icerocket, feedburner, icerocket

Blog Reading Triage

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:15:44 GMT

I've been of the Internet except for some email access and one brief connection at an airport a week ago for about ten days. One of the consequences of this is that my blog aggregator has almost 1300 unread blog posts saved up for me. That is much to many to read in a reasonable amount of time. I will be on the road again in a couple of days so I don't really want to try to catch up over the next week as I have often done in the past. So the only solution for me is to pair it all down in a hurry.

I've identified three possible actions for each blog I track.

Read them all
Scan the list for interesting ones to read and forget the rest
Mark the whole blog as read without actually reading anything

The next step is to identify which actions to take for which blogs. I've decided that people who are either close friends (most of whom I know in real life) or who are almost always very interesting will be read completely. People like Maryam Scoble and Helen Teixeira are always interesting. Don Dodge has never posted something that wasn't worth reading or that didn't teach me something. There are a couple of others that are on the edge of this group and it will largely depend on how many posts they have posted recently.

People who generally write the sort of thing I like enough to link to or who are "important" by some arbitrary definition will be scanned for interesting titles. Robert Scoble wrote way too many posts for them all to be worth reading. (Sorry Robert) So I'll scan the list hoping that his titles are informative enough for me to choose wisely.

Most of the rest will be just marked as read wholesale. While there is often good things in those blogs the heat/light ratio is highly variable. The news section (Wired and Slashdot for example) will just be ignored. If it is important it will show up in email or some other blog eventually.

The big question is how many of the blogs I don't read in the next couple of days should really be kept in my blog roll. Well that and when do I actually dig in and start implementing this plan.

Feedburner Address for Subscriptions

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 06:26:38 GMT

I'm trying to get a little better information about traffic on my blog. Please subscribe using (or change the address you are currently using to subscribe to) the address

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberspacePeopleWatcher

for this blog. I'd really appreciate it.

Three Years of Blogging

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:11:57 GMT

Three years ago I wrote my first blog post (at another site). I have to say it has been a lot of fun so far. I have learned many interesting things and met many interesting people. Today for example I met in person someone from Taiwan who I have known through blogging for years but never met in person until today. There has been a lot of that and the people I have met in person or just over the Internet have enriched my life.

In some ways it feels like I have always been blogging and in other ways like it was just yesterday that I began. Time flies when you are having fun.

Scoble Berates the A-list For Not Linking

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:03:10 GMT

Robert Scoble is at his most interesting when he shoots off his mouth and gets a lot of people upset with him. Right or wrong there are times when he really gets the conversation going. Recently he complained about some powerful and very popular blogging sites not linking enough. Today he has some follow up on the issue.

I have long thought, and maybe it just means that I'm paranoid, that many of the top blog sites and in fact the top news sites are careful (nice non pejorative word there) about who they link to. They understand that most people will only subscribe to a small number of sites and they do not want to risk linking to someone who may take readers away from them. So linking to another A-list site is safe as long as that other A-lister links to them. Linking to someone who has a one hit wonder of a post is safe because people are not going to find them interesting often. But someone who is often interesting or who often has things they do not? That's not so safe.

The A-list has a vested interest in retaining their position on top of the list. That is how they get the attention and in some cases the income they desire. They have to link out to retain value. On the other hand they don't want to be too helpful to other blogs that are struggling to catch up with them.

The open question is of course is readership a zero-sum game? If I send you off to someone new and interesting am I taking a risk that you will drop me and start reading them with your limited blog reading time? I try not to think about it but then I am somewhere in the Z list. If only a couple of people find me interesting I'm fine with that. I don't expect to become a famous blogger and it is not my goal. On the other hand if I were part of Engadget staying on the top of the heap would likely be very important to me. I'd want people reading about cool things on my site not watching a 45 minute Scoble interview.

I think this is especially an issue with the web editions of the main stream media. They are by far the worst at linking to anything outside their own web site or that of their media partners. That doesn't make it right of course and the so-called "new media" shouldn't follow their example. Linking to other information adds value and makes the conversation worth following.

There are A-list bloggers who are worth reading purely for their own content. Mark Cuban and Guy Kawasaki who both seldom link to others come to mind as examples. I'm sure there are other - people who talk about big ideas, share deep thoughts and add insight and understanding from their own depths of experience and knowledge. As much as others would like links from those sites linking is not really what they are about. News sites, be it tech news, political news, or any other category of news, should be largely about linking. Give us the commentary - that's valuable. But link to the source material. Link to others who have the primary source - video or interview transcript - so that we can add to what you've shared and make up out own minds. If you've got it right then linking only helps you build the case.

I don't much about the cases Robert grips about. I don't follow Gismodo or Engadget or any number of other tech news sites. I already have more tech info than I can handle. If there is something at the big sites that is really interesting I'll read about it somewhere else. Well I will unless some of the sites I do read get fed up with those sites not linking enough and drop them.

Should I Even Bother Posting on Friday?

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:33:38 GMT

I've gone most of a week without posting here. I have been busy and I haven't had much to say. Today I posted something in my CS Teacher blog that I think is pretty good. It will show up on Friday Eastern US time. But I'm wondering if I should have had it show up next Monday instead. Why? Well, posts I post on Friday never (well hardly ever) seem to be read as much as things I post on Monday. Things on Tuesday seem to be read the most though. Why? I have no idea. But it seems to be true at least for my blog.

I read blogs seven days a week. I am an addict and I confess to that. It doesn't much matter to me what day someone posts on as I am still going to read it. But I am of course an exceptional person (some would choose different words I am sure.)

Of the several questions that come to mind one of them is "what should one do when they have something really interesting to say and it is not Monday or Tuesday?" Should one wait or post right away? If it is really good will people read it any way? Unlikely I think unless others link to it. I mean really how are they going to know if it is worth reading without reading it? One can only do so much with a good title. Hyperbole helps of course. (Interesting discussion on hyperbole on Don Dodge's blog BTW.) But as Yogi Berra used to say "if people are going to stay away there is nothing you can do to stop them."

I guess people have other things to do on Friday and the week-end than read blogs. Some people have this thing I have heard about called "a life" I guess. By Monday there is so much old stuff that people just make it all read without reading it. One can't blame them of course.

So what do you do? Do you wait to maximize readership or do you strike when the muse hits and if people miss it that is their problem? I guess that if one were to only post once a week shooting for Tuesday (if experience shows one that is the best day) is the way to go. On the other hand it is probably better for most people who post more often to post at will and let people catch up. If information is timely (and event it covers is happening soon or a dead line is coming up) it usually makes little sense to lose extra days for a few extra people.

I don't know though. Am I the only one who thinks (worries) about this stuff? People who get paid for their traffic (fortunately I am not one of them given my levels of traffic) probably think about this. Don't they?

Spaces v. Blogger

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:25:33 GMT

I found these numbers on blogging world-wide to be pretty interesting. The short version is that blog reading is done by a much higher percentage of the population in Canada, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK then in the US. Also that the big winner in market share among blogging services is Windows Live Spaces. To be honest the second bit of information doesn't surprise me that much. The first bit does.

I am curious about why the percentage of people reading blogs is so much higher outside the US. I have no idea where to start looking for that answer but it seems to me to be an important question. Time magazine, not an outlet I think of as having a real international view, named people who generate content as people of the year. Imagine what they'd have to say about Canada and Spain where over half the population reads blogs compared to the US where it is something over a third.

Also all of those numbers seem high to me. In the isolated world I live in, even with all it's high tech people, I would be surprised to find 30-40% of them reading blogs. Perhaps they are including a lot of people who rarely but occasionally read blogs? Probably but still ...

The lead that Windows Live Spaces has over Blogger in most of the world doesn't surprise me. I have a blog on Blogger that I created as part of getting a Blogger account to leave comments on some Blogger blogs and so I play with it from time to time. I can't see ever making that my home blog though. Windows Live Spaces just has so many more options and allows me to do so much more customization without playing with HTML and CSS. Sure I can handle those things but I have many outlets for that and that is not how I want to spend the time I spend on a blog. I want my blog to be about content. Any effort that I have to spend on customization, adding/editing lists, etc takes away from the content.

For example, everything I want to edit a list on the main page of my Blogger blog I have to find the HTML, edit the HTML and worry about getting the tags right. Doable? Sure. As easy as editing the content of a form on Windows Live Spaces? Not a chance. Ease of use is probably what is winning over so many fans for Windows Live Spaces around the world. As a Microsoft employee I have to say this feels pretty good.

What is it that makes a blog great?

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:38:50 GMT

The question of what is a great blog started rolling around my head earlier this week when I read about the EduBlog awards opening for nominations. For a fraction of a second I thought about nominating the Education Blog at On10 as best group blog or my own contributions there and my high school computer science teacher blog as best individual blog. But then I asked myself if those were really good blogs and worthy of such attention. So I decided not to do anything but think about what other blogs (there are some 70 blogs in the education section I have in RSS Reader) I might nominate. I'm still thinking about that because I am struggling with "what is it that makes a blog great."

I got some help in the struggle today when Alexander Russo's This Week In Education pointed me to an article by Jay Mathews in the Washington Post where he asks readers to send in their suggestions for best education bloggers. Jay compares good blogs to good letters to the editor. That was and is an interesting way to look at things. It gives me another data point to think about what is a good or great blog. So it is time to put some thoughts to bits and post them.

A great blog is well-written. I start with that because I think that what sets a great blog apart from just good, let a lone the truly dreadful, is that it is well-written. If the purpose of ones writing is communication than one has to take the writing process seriously.

Some of my favorite bloggers tell stories of everyday life but do it in such an entertaining way that I have to read them when ever they post. Helen at I forgot where I was going with this is essentially a "mommy blogger" who writes about her life and family in a most entertaining way. Maryam Scoble is at her best writing about her life with some geek blogger she is married to. One begins to really care about these people because they tell a story so well.

A great blog is authoritative. By that I mean that when the writer writes they do so with a base of knowledge, experience and credibility that lends it instant authority. I don't mean an old-fashioned and weak argument that they have "been there and don that" but that the fact that they have is so obvious from the knowledge base they exhibit that they don't have to say it. Guy Kawasaki, Don Dodge or Rick Segel talking about venture capital and start up companies for example. Even without knowing their resume's one would quickly come to understanding that they really know there stuff and have experience just on the authoritative and knowledgeable nature of what they write.

A great blog has an opinion. This opinion has to be clearly stated and backed with facts and information. A great blog may very well point to and/or quote someone else but it will include its own commentary. Oh sure you can communicate an opinion by just quoting someone else with a minor introduction. That is useful and may make up a good blog but a great blog adds value to every link or quote it provides.

A great blog is part of the community. By that I don't mean it has a large readership. A blog with a large readership can and often does build a community around itself and that is fine as far as it goes. But a great blog links to others in order to bring others into the discussion. A great blog may very well have a series of blogs that include an ongoing discussion with another blog. Just getting a lot of inward links and scoring a top Technorati ranking doesn't make a blog great. it may indicate that a blog is great but it is a trailing indicator not a leading one. A great blog reaches out and draws others into the conversation.

A great blog publishes regularly. There are important blogs that publish rarely. Think Ray Ozzie and Tim Berners-Lee. Both men write well, with authority and with opinions. But they write so seldom that it is news when they do. I never miss a one because when they do write it is well worth it. But would I nominate either as a great blog? Not really. They are almost as much isolated essays as real blogs. I great blog doesn't have to write every day, perhaps not even every week, but you shouldn't be surprised when a post shows up from them.

So that is my thinking so far. What do you think? Have I got the right things listed and if not what should I change? How do you define a great blog - something above the ordinary?

BTW I finally decided that my blog entries on education at On10 are not written often enough or quite well enough for me to nominate for anything. Daniel Shapiro's nice words to the contrary not withstanding. I'm going to think about how hard I can afford to work to make that blog more than just ok. My computer science blog I'm not going to nominate as it is too focused on one curriculum specialty to nominate for a general education award. I did suggest a set of awards for specific subject matter blogs though. Now to find someone to help me get that going.

Be careful what you wish for

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:55:46 GMT

As regular readers (both of you) know I have from time to time shined about a shortage of comments. Well I think I am going to stop that silliness right now. The other day I wrote a post in my High School Computer Science Teacher blog about a 12-year old boy who'd written a pretty nice little program. Someone put it on Digg - a web site for recommending interesting things in blogs and news articles - and it got a lot of attention. By a lot I mean on the order of 46,000 hits and over 120 comments in a 24-hour period. That is about 10 times the traffic my average post gets and 10 times the number of comments I have ever gotten on a single post in the past.

When I last checked it had 1888 recommendations and another 235 comments at Digg which seems to be a lot. Certainly it was a lot more than I ever expected it to have. It was actually a "throw away" sort of post that I posted because it was somewhat interesting and I didn't have something "important" to post. Apparently I am a poor judge of what is interesting or important on the Internet.

So now I have had my first taste of what a phenomenon like Digg or (I assume) other recommendation sites like Slashdot or an A-list blogger link can do to a blog. I'm glad I am not paying for bandwidth on that other blog. I suspect that if I was I'd be a bit worried about the bill. Other than that the shear number of reads doesn't have a big impact other than a sort of nice feeling about being noticed. Comments though are a little different.

I had to spend some time reading all of the comments. Mostly I was looking for link spam but the spam handler took care of most of that. I left the insults and there were a good number of those. I did have to go back and remove some links to the student I wrote about. He was getting a lot of email traffic and some load on his personal web site that was a bandwidth concern. I felt bad about the volume of attention and also some of the comments I am sure he was getting. Unfortunately if you are doing work with Microsoft products you can expect some people to be mean to you. Some of the comments left on my blog were pretty harsh and unfair. I can only imagine what may have been sent to the poor kid in question. That's just wrong and I really feel bad about that. It's not what he deserved at all. He should be encouraged and supported.

Every time I start to think that the Internet is growing up something like this happens to disabuse me of that idea. Maybe I shouldn't be so naive though. I read the comments in Slashdot from time to time so it is not like I haven't seen the brutality of some Open Source proponents towards people who make different choices from them. But I guess it seems more shocking when it shows up in comments to my blog. That's more personal.

In any case my blog there is calmer and quieter today. I don't know if all that traffic on one day will result in more subscribers or even if people read more than that one post. But for one day at least the Internet seemed to be paying attention to me in a small way. An interesting feeling.

Technorati tags: Digg, blogging, blogs

Your Blog Does Not Suck

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:12:30 GMT

I've read a couple of places that attendees at the recent business bloggers conference were told that if they were not A-list bloggers it was because their blog sucked or they were not working hard enough. Well I'm calling shenanigans on that. Oh sure the A-list bloggers like the idea of it because it makes them feel like they got where they did because they are so much better than everyone else. But frankly I don't think it is near completely true.

There are bad blogs out there. I'm sure there are. But I doubt you could read through the blogs I read and pick out the A-list blogs from the B-list blogs just on the basis of what you read there. It's not a lot about quality of writing. For example compare Robert Scoble and Maryam Scoble. Robert is an A-list blogger by all accounts and ranks around number 18 on the Technorati Top 100. Maryam was running at about number 20,000 on Technorati's list this morning. You'd be hard pressed not to see Maryam as a much better writer. But she writes as a more personal blogger while her husband writes on more tech topics so there is a difference in incoming links and readership. Maryam's is a great blog. There is no way one can say it sucks. But hers is not the message that has a lot of bloggers linking to her so not as many people discover her.

Or take the blogs by Rick Segal, Guy Kawasaki and Don Dodge. They're all in the same basic genre of blogs - venture capital and business start ups. Go ahead and read them and without looking them up tell me which ones are ranked 56, 4140 and 5256 in the Technorati rankings. Now arguably those are all pretty high numbers but is there that much difference in the quality of those blogs? I'm not so sure there is. In fact the one I read last of those three is the one with the highest Technorati ranking because I think it is the least serious of the three. By the way the one at 56 is the newest one which pretty much kills the idea that longevity is the only way to get to the top.

I've said before and will say again that there are a lot of things that take a blog to the top of the A-list and that having a great blog may be necessary but is not sufficient to the task. I think this is a lot like music or acting. There are lots of performers who have the talents and ability to make it in those fields but for a variety of reasons never make it. Perhaps they never get heard by the right person. Or perhaps they just don't have the right personality or physical appearance. Or maybe they make a personal decision to focus on other areas in their life. That doesn't mean they suck as performers by any means. It just means that the stars were not aligned in favor of them making it in that particular way.

Personal fame from outside of blogging attracts a lot of readers. There is some self-fulfilling prophecy about someone who is famous must have something worth saying/reading/linking to. Having the right friends is key. If you are part of a circle of bloggers who all have a large audience the echo chamber effect is going to bring someone into the top circle. Having the right job - say CEO/CTO of a large tech company - is going to bring a blog a lot of attention even if the quality or quantity of posts doesn't deserve it. Frankly I think that people read Tim Berners-Lee's blog because it is written by him and not because it is a great blog. He writes very seldom, I am not a big fan of the way he writes, but let's face it he carries a lot of weight in the web community just because of who he is. Sometimes being important is enough and you can break all the other rules about posting often, linking a lot, and the like and still have people read and link to you. I'm not convinced that just because someone is famous outside of blogging that means their blog is great. Or that the converse, not being famous outside of blogging makes your blog poor, it true either.

So if your blog is making you happy; if your friends read it and like it; and your ego doesn't need the padding of a top Technorati ranking just relax. Your blog does not suck. Let someone else lose sleep over the "cool kids" not linking to them. You're ok. Your blog does not suck. It's just that life isn't always fair.

Technorati tags: blogs, blogging, a-list

Quiet Desperation in Cyberspace

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 02:45:32 GMT

A couple of things over the last couple of days started me thinking about why people blog. One was that I posted my updated blog roll at Share Your OPML again today. (You can read the list of blogs I follow here.) I started to notice how many blogs I follow are only listed by me on that site. Now obviously all of those blogs are read by other people and you cannot judge a lot by the very limited number of people who share their blog rolls at this one site. But that was just one piece of the puzzle.

The second piece was an audio essay on Public Radio's Marketplace last night. I can't find a link to that audio but in brief it was about why people where (and are) making videos and posting them to YouTube and similar sights. They talked about people's need to express themselves and to put something of themselves "out there."

Henry David Thoreau wrote "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I had not idea what that meant until a few years ago when my own life because full of "quiet desperation" and I fell into a deep depression. It has occurred to me time and again that to some extent Thoreau was right. One thing that has changed a bit is that people don't have to be as quiet as they used to be. The Internet gives everyone a voice. Of sorts.

Technorati tracks some 55,000,000 blogs. Over 52,000,000 of them are not linked by a single other blog. One would be tempted to think that those bloggers are shouting in an empty woods. "If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears does it make a sound?" might almost be translated into "If a blog is written and no one reads it does it still make a sound?" I would answer in both cases that it does. I'm not so sure that the action on a listener is as important in either case as the action on the object making the sound.

There is something freeing about shouting even if no one hears it. Likewise there is something freeing about writing something in a place where people could read it even if they don't actually read it. I wonder how much of blogging, the more personally reflective sort of thing often called journalling, is actually just someone venting their feelings in an attempt to voice what is on their minds? Do many of these people really even care if someone reads what they write or at they mostly interested in taking the feelings they have inside and putting them somewhere?

I think that a lot of the blogs that are not linked to by other blogs are read though. Perhaps not by many but perhaps what is important to some is not how many read their thoughts but who those people are. For some it may be a small group of trusted friends. For others is may mean a small number of complete strangers. I think different people want different things. The Internet and blogging fills a need that until know has been all but impossible for the mass of people to satisfy. That I think is a good thing.

Survey on RSS Usage

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:11:34 GMT

I read today that Microsoft Research in Beijing is doing a survey of RSS usage. The survey is here and they are looking to get as much data for their study as possible. There are only 8 questions in the survey so it is not painful at all. Please drop by and take the survey. Oh and if you'd link to the survey as well that would be appreciated.

Robert Scoble says you should talk to me

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:30:49 GMT

OK actually what Robert said was that people who have news to break should break it first to Z list bloggers. Well am I not a Z list blogger? So if you have breaking news related to social computing, blogs, or related stuff you should come tell me so I can blog about it. Somehow magically A list bloggers and the news media will find out about it and have a better story. Not buying it? I'm not so sure that I do either but it has made me think a bit. Maybe Robert is as smart as he thinks he is.

The big problem is how are those big name people going to find out about it? I think Robert's theory is that 10 people who read my blog will blog about it and ten people who read each of their blogs will blog about it and some how the pyramid of blogging will bring the news to the attention of the media or big name bloggers and off it goes. It could happen I guess. That seems to be the way news of Robert leaving Microsoft got spread. (I'm not so sure it was quite that simple though.)

The problem is that ten links to a post is a lot for a Z list blogger. According to Technorati fewer than 1,455,000 of the over 50,000,000 blogs they track have even one link. That's for all of their posts for at least the last three months. Links from 8 blogs (what this blog has BTW) gets you into the top 355,000 which is quite a way past to bottom but nowhere near having much influence. Having 10 people link to one post here would be pretty amazing. So the reality is that you need to get the news to someone who if they don't have a large audience at least has someone who does have a large audience in their audience. You probably can't count one more than one step between who you leak to and to some A list blogger or news source if you want to get the news out. Figuring out who those people are is quite a trick.

I don't know if anyone has done a good map of blog paths but I suspect it would be an interesting, and potentially valuable, exercise for someone in the PR business. Take a look at the public OPML lists at A list blogs or on Share Your OPML and find out who the A list bloggers are reading. While you are at it do a search for the blogs your target A list bloggers have linked to in the last year. If they liked the news at those blogs or the way those people wrote it up before enough to link to them they are more likely to link to them again.

Once you have that list you can make a list of bloggers to cultivate with the idea that they will post things that will travel into the A list without you looking like a blog whore who sucks up to A list bloggers. I suspect that most A list bloggers like finding big news on an unknown or little known blog and bringing it to the world's attention as much if not more than they like hearing it directly from the source. The former makes them look like a good part of the community while the latter risks making them look like PR flacks.

If someone builds one of these lists and makes good use of it to make some money please remember where you heard it. Or better still where the person you heard it from heard it.

Testing Windows Live Writer

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 01:33:48 GMT

I've been using Word to write most of my blog posts for a while. It supports the API for Windows Live Spaces and for one of my other blogs but not for some other sites that blog at irregularly. Today Microsoft released Windows Live Writer (blog here - download here) and I thought I would try it. I've set it up to post to this blog and to my other ones so I can use one tool for all of my blog posts. SO far I'm pretty plased with it.

Windows Live Writer supports spellchecking and WYSIWYG editing. It also supports catagories which Word doesn't at this time. A little more information from the announcement on the blog.

Writer is a great client for Windows Live Spaces but also works with other weblogs including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others).
Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API.

There is a lot more information about features at the Windows Live Writer blog.