blogging

Blogger Louis Gray has been studying the referrals to his blog and has noticed that getting linked to by a large blog site or influential blogger doesn’t drive the same level of traffic as it used to. The move in traffic generation has been to the aggregators like Techmeme, Reddit, Digg etc. There is also a large shift towards readers consuming content through RSS readers rather than always coming direct to the website.

Both these trends are understandable to an extent. The sheer volume of content and the large number of blogs that are out there make it very difficult for people to easily find interesting or relevant content without the aggregators. This is a catch 22 situation. There is too much content out there for a user to filter it without taking up way too much time. The aggregator sites help with this by doing a pre-filter for us. This leads to a bit of group think though, where we only see the articles that algorithm’s have determined are the most important. RSS readers are also a way for us to deal with large amounts of information more easily

It is natural that a space that is as relatively new as blogging will evolve rapidly over time. The environment will continue to evolve as technologies grow and develop and as people throw ew ideas into the mix. I don’t think anyone can argue that we have the whole community information thing down perfectly yet. We have never individually had access to more information as a species and we need to work out exactly how to best process it.

I do not believe that the final solution is going to be the aggregators. This is not really a model that gives us the best information. It is the method that is easiest for advertising though, and since that is the prime method for revenue in the space this gives those sites the power at the moment. I would imagine that the future will be in more human edited content rather than algorithm generated content. For this method to succeed though a way to generate revenue directly from the content consumption needs to exist as advertising revenue is not large enough or stable enough to fund this.

Advertising also has a corrupting influence on editorial content. This is not necessarily in a pernicious way, but a subtle influence that this has when advertising is the only method with which a company gets its revenue. The people that give you your revenue are your real customers. If all you have is advertising then your business is to deliver people to advertisers, not to deliver a service to your “consumer”. Over time a couple of revenue generating models will emerge and then the game will change yet again.

If you have not updated in a while you may want to have a look at your templates and upgrade your installs. If you read the linked article don’t skip the comments.

This is another of many reasons why this site has remained on MovableType.

On a couple of my wordpress installs on other domains I have been negligent in updating the installs and have had issues in the past. It’s to bad that wordpress users continue to suffer from security holes in older versions. [Deep Jive Interests]

Over the past 4–5 years in writing this blog I have always been concerned about services that cause consumers of this content to get connected through a third party service.

As many of you I have signed up for most of the social networking services, for me anyways as more as a point of interest, that connects me with the family of consumers of this content, that I, and my team produce. If you read this blog on a regular basis you will know it is intermixed with Rich media containing Audio Podcast, Blog Post and Video.

While I realize their are a variety of ways and software tools that one can get to our content, down deep I hope that everyone comes here first. Geek News Central is, and always will be the primary point of presence for anything that I, and the contributing editors feel the need to post on.

With the invention of Twitter, FriendFeed, and several other services out their that is commanding a lot people’s attention. I have slowly come to realize that many people are only getting part of the ongoing  conversation, which in a sense is breaking the very thing I have tried to prevent over the past 4–5 years.

Part of it is my own fault for not making sure that the Twitter conversation and everything else I haphazardly post on is not also syndicated on this site.

I am torn though, as I am sure I could setup a widget and import, my flickr post, all my tweets etc..,  but I am also pretty positive not everyone wants to see all my tweets, after all why would you care that I am writing this post from LAX? You don’t but I did tweet I was in LAX, this trivial information has no added value to the content here, but at times I do have important things to say that could be carried here as well as being sent out on Twitter.

I think this is going to continue to be a hot topic for a while, as we all want the eyeballs here first, or people consuming the content via the primary RSS feeds, I am going to look into a way to easily get the content that is important onto and in this my primary content stream.

As a side note. This is one of the major things we took into consideration at RawVoice with our podcast publisher. We have built a great tool that does not de-centralize the conversation. [Loic Le Meur]

An interesting post on Wired about the way journalism is changing in the face of new media. Not that unexpected a perspective from a magazine that has morphed into something more like a blog itself. The gist is essentially that news media is becoming more of a service than a product with the major news publications being more of a consolidator that directs readers/watchers to where the news is located.

To me this is tragic, but also reveals that the old media doesn’t have the business sense to deserve to survive. The news media was caught with their pants down, thinking they controlled the market and only had themselves to compete with they became less news, more current affairs, then more gossip and speculation offering opinion over insight. Blogging came along and suddenly there was an alternative and better method for people to get their gossip, opinion and even some current affairs. Better because they could also be part of it, offering their own opinions and helping determine the relevance of particular pieces.

Faced with this, the ‘old’ media had a number of options, but by this stage was too used to taking the easy road and finding better profits down them, at least in the short term. Rather than try and re-invent themselves, use their structural difference to build some sort of differentiation from the new entrant, they tried to emulate their new competition in the false belief that they could take it over. A bit like Microsoft came into the Internet game too late and tried to take control. This will probably have the same success.

It is tragic because we have lost truly objective investigative reporting that was an important part of the checks and balance on power and privilege. It is not too late for them to change path. Corporate media cannot compete with Blogs and social networking on new media’s terms so they must find a new purpose if they are to survive, what better as a new purpose than the one they used to fill. Blogs have not been able to fill this place yet as true investigative journalism needs time and resources and does not work well to deadlines and daily posts. The gap will not be open very long though. Look at some sites like Groklaw that produces great insight on some of the legal wranglings, or some of the detailed analysis that is appearing on sites like TechCrunch. Not all Bloggers will morph into real journalists, but some have the ability to and will given time.

The past decade has taught us that when politicians and business do not fear the public eye some will test those new limits and we all are worse off for it. I’ll avoid the controversy that mention of some of the political ones would create but highlight things like the dot bomb, Enron, and the current mortgage crisis. All of these might had been avoided if there were investigative journalists still around rather than gossipers and mouthpieces.

The discussions about PPP over the past weeks have me thinking about how Bloggers can turn their effort into reward.  The difficulty that smaller bloggers have in monetising their blogs is no secret, and while there is no reason that any blogger should be able to make money from their content it would be better if there was some link between quality of content and reward.

I understand there is some link, major blogs like Engadget, BoingBoing and GigaOm did not get to their position by luck, but by recognising the potential early and acting on it with good content.  They are getting rewarded for the past quality of their content.  It is hard for new entrants to work their way up the chain and become a new Engadget.  Second tier blogs seem to be able to make enough to get by, although I have not been able to find much info on the sorts of revenue they can pull.  For a new entrant, even if you have a good level of content it is hard to get commensurate reward

This was brought into focus for me when Scott Adams announced he was cutting back on his blogging.  The main reason being that it was not rewarding him in relation to the effort he was spending.  The Dilbert blog has a huge readership, a selection of easily defined and great to target demographics and regular content for 2 years.  If these advantages were not enough to turn a buck then what hope the rest of us?

I believe that the key lies in post quantity.  Even with its regular daily posts, the Dilbert blog is best read with an RSS reader.  This is much more convenient for the reader as they get the updates from multiple sites at once.  While easier for the reader it reduces the ad displays and therefore clickthroughs, compromising that revenue model.  I see this on my own site, where most of my traffic comes from RSS readers, but most do not click through to the actual site.

The major blogs and blogging companies have multiple writers and many posts per day.  I cannot keep up with sites like BoingBoing in my RSS reader, I end up missing too much. It’s better for me to go to the site itself.  The money making sites become those that offer enough content, and wide enough coverage of news to become destination sites.  If you do not, or cannot attract people to actually come to your site you are less likely to make money from your content.  Without RSS though, few people would even bother reading your content.  The thing that gets you noticed is also what limits the value you can claim.

In my opinion this is going to drive two trends.  The first is more and more alternate revenue models like PayPerPost and the like. Some bloggers want/need to make money from what they do and there are companies out there who would like to make a cut for enabling that.  The second is greater consolidation of individual blogs into networks.  The meta sites don’t cut it as the content sources are too unpredictable for bloggers to rely on.  The future is probably networks like Weblogs Inc or GigaOM, where multiple bloggers team together to create location blog networks.  This may happen organically or via large company buy-outs/employment of smaller blogs.  Hopefully GNC can become one of these network locations.

Tonight while getting ready for my Podcast I removed a RSS feed from my regular reading list because of excessive advertising in the feed. I’m serious — the stupid ad TechCrunch has after every article in the feed measures 612 pixels in height.

Nothing like being stupid and making me see it after every article. This is abusive and I refuse to read his feed with that crap in it.