Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams

Last week, Edelman's Steve Rubel made an aggressive jump - away from traditional blogging, turning over his site to a lifestream, which captures all of his activity from around the Web. His move, he reported, was due to a feeling that blogging "feels old" and that the new reality is about the flow of information. This followed on to a conversation he, Steve Gillmor and I had a month or so ago, which led to my post saying that RSS felt slow. But while I see some of the same issues Steve has, I haven't made a full move away from the blog, don't ever plan to do so, and for any company I give advice to, I tell them to do so would be a mistake.

The blog is the foundation and center for who you are - either as an individual, or a brand. While I believe the best bloggers in the world are participating outside of their blog, on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and everywhere else, to only participate in those areas leaves a gaping hole. The world of lifestreaming and real-time is fun, but it can be as deep as a soap opera in a world that still demands insightful documentaries and news reporting.

In August of 2007, I said there was a new reality and that "Your Blog Is Your Brand". Most of you weren't reading me back then, but it holds as true now as it did two years ago.

Fellow blogger Jeremiah Owyang added his thoughts on the issue last week, asking, Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? Interestingly, he noticed that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, who were the authors of Naked Conversations, were now more focused on micromedia (FriendFeed and Twitter) than they were on their own blogs. It's a big reason why Mike Arrington told Robert he needed an intervention at the end of 2008. (Amusingly, Robert is going 'blog only' this week...)



In the last two years, the rise of microblogging tools and lifestreaming services has given blogging a less-prominent role on everyone's tongues, but it, in my opinion, is as important as ever. One just needs to make a conscious decision as to what type of data is most appropriate where. Longer, more thoughtful pieces with graphics and type style should go on blogs. Maybe a few photos and text go to FriendFeed or Facebook, and short status updates go to Twitter. The addition of more options shouldn't mean the elimination of the original.


The Blog Is Still the Foundation
In a presentation I gave to one company this week, I stated the same - I said the corporate blog is the foundation of your entire social media strategy. It may make sense to have secondary and tertiary blogs, but if you tried to just use Twitter and other services and neglect the blog, you would a failure from the beginning.

Blogging is not for everyone or every company. Blasphemy, I know. But it is work, and it can never be stopped. Once you start, there is no finish line, until you drop and become a 24 hour trending topic on Twitter. But blogs are your public whiteboard - extending your voice to your peers, your family, friends, or in the business world, your customers, prospects, partners, competition, press and analysts, and of course, your own employees. 140 characters just isn't enough.

It's Not Too Late to Spring Into Reading 5 New Blogs

Fourteenth Edition Of a Monthly Series

The new tradition to our monthly highlighting of five less visible blogs appears to be delivering it at the very end of the month, rather than the beginning. Just because it's posted at the end of April doesn't make these selections any less relevant or important than any other month. This is a feature I look forward to every month, and it's always fun to make the selections.

If you are new to louisgray.com, we have been trying to extend the blogging ecosystem, finding what Tac Anderson calls "the good long tail blogs". We know many of you get tired of the the echochamber, so we are more than happy to bring you some new voices. To get on this list, bloggers need to post regularly, cover something resembling technology, and have less than 1,000 subscribers or so.

With that intro, here are this month's selections...

1) The AppsLab (theappslab.com)

Focus: Oracle, Web 2.0, Technology
Three Recent Posts:

• In Defense of Anonymous Commenting?
• Musings on Relationship Symmetry in the Enterprise
• When Are You Most Productive?

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Rick Klau's weblog (tins.rklau.com)

Focus: Blogger, Google, Twitter
Three Recent Posts:

• The Stand, Playing Out on Twitter
• Eight Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter
• Music Rights Are Killing Good TV Shows

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) The Programmer's Paradox (theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com)

Focus: Software, Development
Three Recent Posts:

• The End of Coding as We Know It
• My PC Crashed Again
• About, Next and Garbage

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) New Comm Biz (newcombizz.com)

Focus: Technology, Blogging, Social Networking
Three Recent Posts:

• Where Are All the Good Long Tail Blogs?
• Do Social Media Professionals Work Harder Than Their Peers?
• The Only Thing You Should Be Doing

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Guruvan (guruvan.gurus.net)

Focus: Social Networking, Marketing
Three Recent Posts:

• The Mine Is Caving In On Twitter's Gold
• Sphere of Influence Or Marketing Pool? How Do you use your Social Networks?
• FriendFeed vs. Twitter OR Remember the Tortoise and the Hare?

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Want to be on this list? You can catch my eye by posting great information in the field of technology, social media, blogging and the Web. I'll be more likely to highlight you if you blog almost every day, and bring new stories to the table that don't repeat discussions launched elsewhere. And if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you're probably too big for this.

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for next month's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

New FeedFlare Displays FriendFeed Likes and Comment Counts

Bloggers who are tied into social media sites have long used FeedBurner's FeedFlare functionality to help promote their blog posts, from pushing visitors to Digg or Stumble posts, add them to Delicious, or e-mail them to friends. But increasingly, information from external social networks is being fed back to the blog itself - from the number of retweets a post may have received to the number of Google Reader users who shared the item, for example. A new custom feedflare, designed by Kevin Fox, the lead designer of FriendFeed, and the artist behind popular sites such as GMail and Google Reader, is now available to display the likes and comments your post might have gotten on FriendFeed. It's already running on this site, and can be seen on his RSS feed as well.


FriendFeed Activity Displayed on My Site
The FeedFlare can be displayed on your site, on your RSS feed, or both - and clicking on the comments and likes statistics takes you to where your blog post is shared on FriendFeed, bridging visitors of your site to the conversation there.

Setting up the FeedFlare for FriendFeed likes and comments is not a one-click process, so if you are interested, here's how you do it:

1. Download this compressed .zip file. It contains the three documents you need, and an "About" file. Unzip the file and you will see a folder titled "friendfeedflare".
2. Open the file "flare.php". Next to where it says USERNAME, replace "notlouisgray" with your FriendFeed user name.
3. Open the file "friendflare.xml" and replace the pathname of "http://www.yourdomain.com/directory/flare.php" with where you will host the flare.php file. For example, I host mine at http://www.louisgray.com/feed/flare.php.
4. Upload the files "flare.php", "friendflare.xml" and "friendfeed.php" to a directory on your site which matches the path you provided in step 3.
5. Log in to your FeedBurner account, and go to the "FeedFlare" section in the "Optimize" tab.
6. At the bottom of the page, where you have the option to add a "Personal FeedFlare", paste in the URL of your XML file. (e.g. http://www.louisgray.com/feed/friendflare.xml)
7. Hit "Add New Flare" and then "Save".

The FeedFlare Displayed In FeedBurner
At this point, the likes and comment counts on your items will be displayed on your blog or RSS feed. They will continue to accrue until you have 30 newer items in your blog feed.

A year or so ago, the blogosphere lit up around how social sites were stealing the conversation away from blogs, and operating in silos. With tools like this, and Disqus and BackType's integration of FriendFeed comments, the disparate conversations are becoming ever more unified.

If you like this FeedFlare, be sure to check out Kevin Fox's FriendFeed here, or his personal blog at fury.com. And if you get it up and running, it'd be great to see it on your site, so post your blog URL in the comments.

Stand for Something and Become Someone

On Thursday, I was invited by Brian Solis to attend a dinner briefing in San Francisco with one of his clients. Shortly after arrival, other invitees began to dribble in through the door - a venerable who's who in the tech blogging space, including Jeremiah Owyang, Harry McCracken, Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur - making me feel very small indeed, not to mention a tad out of place. And while the client had an interesting offering (more on that soon), it was, of course, the side conversations between the attendees that drew the most value. (See the Photos)

Seated between Robert and Loic for dinner, I got the feeling there were Twitter users, bloggers and entrepreneurs who would have paid good money to trade places with me, but I wasn't out to sell anything or pitch anything. In fact, the best conversations I had were with Loic about why we do what we do, the reasons we don't push for ads on the blog, how we try to separate the work life and the blog life, and debate on whether I could be trusted with pre-release info on one product if I already used the competition or knew what they had planned.

To net down what was a great discussion, I primarily told Loic that:

1. Our reviews of products and services are honest, but primarily positive
2. We prefer not to write negative pieces, for our benefit and readers as well
3. That we can be trusted to keep things quiet when asked
4. We don't seek out or respond to controversy for page views' sake

And to me, all of those boil down to a major headline, which is "Stand for Something". Stand for being trustworthy and try to be remembered for quality, not controversy.

In the last few days, just following the conclusion of the dinner, you saw headlines about how Scoble has concluded his time at Fast Company TV - and speculation has started as to what's next for the visible technology evangelist. And yes, the issue was discussed a bit at the dinner as well. To be fully transparent, I knew about the change earlier in the week, from a phone call I had with Robert. And yes, he told me what's next, as well as some of the reasons for his leaving, which hasn't been discussed. But as a friend and someone I want him to trust, that's where it ends, as I believe the news is his to make and break - and if someone else beats him to the punch, it won't be me.

I could have stomped all over the relationship and posted the information Tuesday or Wednesday, but I thought it better to hold off - because the short-term burst of visibility and traffic would be outweighed by the longer-term negatives of breaking the confidentiality, and changing what you could expect from me on the blog.

At one point during Thursday's conversation, Loic said, "For some reason, I think you're someone I would trust." And this came even as we discussed the fact I helped raise the visibility of TweetDeck, a Thwirl competitor, when Iain first released his product. Would my previous posts on TweetDeck mean I would never give Thwirl the same opportunity? To me, it would not - with good examples being my coverage of Posty and PeopleBrowsr, when those products were launched or updated. Loic, and other entrepreneurs making news, should know that if they pass along confidential or embargoed information, that it won't be posted early, and it won't be sent to their competition. That's a big part of being trusted and standing for something.

For those longer-term readers of the site, you've seen me address the issue of writing negative posts, and another where I talked about what I believe as a blogger. I occasionally write these inwardly-looking posts to explain why I do what I do, and how I want to remain personal and understood.

Even though we don't have the strong traffic and visibility of some sites, the blog has gotten a good share of early access to services and to people. There are probably a dozen interesting products and services that I know are planning things before SXSW which have already gotten my interest. And every time I get an e-mail asking if I will respect a timeline, I write back "the next time I break an embargo will be the first time." As somebody who plays on both sides of the "make news" and "break news" wall, I get what people are trying to do, and the short-term rush of breaking the rules won't make me feel good for very long. And doing so can severely damage my reputation.

After discussing another issue, on how to deal with criticism, and ignoring those who would put you down for the sake of riling you up to get attention, Loic noted that we both try to be positive and avoid controversy, even if it can get you noticed. And that's likely a factor of why he posted a note to Twitter, saying, "You got me think again about quality versus quantity. Quantity matters less."

There's no question I would like to increase the quantity of posts here on louisgray.com. I wish there were a way to cover every single good story I run across with the same level of review and enthusiasm I can give the top stories. That's part of why we've gotten help from additional writers. But we will work very hard to avoid reducing the quality of the posts, even if it means we won't post as many, and we will miss stories as a result. And that's okay. Because I would rather stand for quality and stand for being trustworthy than to be known for throwing articles over the fence that could have been done much better.

As I told Brian yesterday, I greatly appreciated being invited to the dinner. It was at the dinner that I met Jeremiah and Harry for the first time, and it was also the first time where I could speak with Loic for more than five minutes. And as can always happen in a room full of people who really care about technology, we got to thinking again.

They say that everything you put online can eventually be found by Google. In August of 2007, well before most of you had seen this site, I said that your blog is your brand. So when you post things online, make them stand for something, and think about who you are and how you want to be interpreted. I want to stand for quality and trust, and we will refuse to compromise there.

Technorati's Revenge? The Site Is Beating Google for Blog Reactions

To laud Technorati is going against the flow, to say the very least. The once-omnipresent blog search engine has practically been reduced to a state of irrelevancy, thanks to inconsistent uptime, odd product launches and withdrawals, nonsensical redesigns, executive turnover and aggressive competition from others - primarily Google Blog Search. In previous posts on Technorati, I've referred to them as "totally toast" and "fighting off irrelevance". But surprisingly, especially in recent months, the moribund site has consistently beaten Google in terms of finding new and accurate links to my blog or mentions of the site, while Google's results have actually gotten less relevant over time, including false positives from blog rolls and the like. No doubt this had much to do with why Rob Diana, in January, said for the most part, that blog search sucks.

Google is set up to find all of the world's information, and it is doing a fantastic job at that, as we all know, and it is the gold standard for search in practically every regard. But it's maybe too good. The company's over-aggressive spiders are just as likely to trigger false positives in terms of knowing what is a blog and what is not, or what is a blog post or what is simply sidebar information. Last August, I highlighted one issue, when MyBlogLog activity was spawning false positives. On other occasions, I've seen updates from aggregation sites, like Socialmedian, do the same. At this point, my bookmarked blog search from Google to find reactions excludes no fewer than four sites, to try and filter down the accurate results.

And as I'm fighting off false positives with Google, Technorati is quietly finding me mentions that I can't get using Google, which relies on keywords instead of links. Not even the advanced blog search page on Google lets me find links to a site the way most bloggers want to find.

Technorati, for instance, found me links from LivingstonBuzz.com, BlackWeb20.com, and from Regular Geek in the last few days, which were pointing my way, but didn't mention my name or site domain - and I'm finding this to be the rule, rather than the exception. While at one point I'd stopped visiting Technorati, I've now returned to the site on a frequent basis to see responses, and participate in the conversation wherever it may be.

Technorati's benefits over Google Blog Search may no doubt be short lived. Maybe Google Blog Search will solve some of their issues soon, and develop new features, while Technorati has been relatively stagnant. And I'm still waiting for somebody to come up with the "inverse Technorati" idea I floated back in October of 2007. I'm not saying Technorati is perfect, or winning me over as a major force to be reckoned with in innovation, but if I want to know who is linking my way and extending the conversation, they're still doing a good job, and beating Google, which is a significant feat.

Are We Missing Something By Reading An RSS Feed?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

People that read this blog regularly know that I am a big proponent of the conversation. I blog about what conversation may or may not be. I have written a tool to let you track where in social media people are talking about your blog post or some keyword you want to watch. I do this as a software engineer with no formal training in psychology, sociology or marketing. I do this as someone who regularly engages in conversations each day, as a normal person. In order to keep myself up to date on what other people are talking about, I use an RSS reader, specifically Google Reader.

This weekend I read a post on GrowMap.com regarding a blog review contest. Obviously, this has nothing to do with "conversation". However, there was something said earlier in the post that got me thinking:

Regular visitors to GrowMap are bound to have come across some great ideas in the comments left by Dennis Edell. Hopefully you’ve already visited his main blog DirectSalesWebMarketing.

What is so interesting about that quote? Well, I read GrowMap while within the familiar confines of my RSS reader. I rarely go to the source of a blog post unless I plan on commenting directly on the site. By doing this, I am obviously missing something. I am missing the conversation part of a blog post, the comments. Generally, I do not even know if there are comments on a post if I am within my RSS reader. Yes, I know that many feeds include feedflares that may include a comment count, but how many people look at those unless they want to email, Digg, tweet or generally take some action on the RSS item.

By missing the comments, we are missing part of the conversation. It is a large part of the conversation because it is the one part of the blog post where readers can interact. Are we shortchanging ourselves by not reading the post on the blog along with the comments? How much more intersting would your RSS reader become if it included the comments in the feed? Can somebody work on that?

See Also:
louisgray.com: The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved
GeekWhat.com: RSS Readers Kill Readers’ Involvement?

Image by Photopia
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Plinky Launches With Prompts to Spur Stuck Bloggers

Starting a blog can be daunting for a lot of people. Jason Shellen, a key member of the original team that started Blogger, says that many people easily get disenchanted, asking "what do I do?", when viewing a blank page. His new service, Plinky, launches today, with hooks that not only help to connect friends, like many other social media tools, but also help to provide new discussion points, with an engaging tool called "prompts".

I spoke with Shellen today, in advance of this afternoon's launch, and he said he felt that while many different social media tools have focused on aggregation and developing rich media, less attention has been spent on the creation experience itself. As a result, many of these services have grown outside of the mainstream, limiting their potential market.

"I didn't think for the average user, there was really much work being done," Shellen said. "We wanted to develop something that was really fun, and I wanted to see answers to things I wanted to know from my friends. Plinky is to inspire people, and make them create content and look good doing it."


You Can Answer Plinky's Multiple Choice Questions


An Example Answer from Me On My First Paycheck
One of the quickest routes to creating interesting content through Plinky is answering one of the prompts, seen on the front page of the site. When you answer one of the prompts on Plinky, your answer is shown alongside other users of the service, and you can send the data out to any of third party services the product supports on day one - ranging from Blogger, to Twitter and Facebook, for starters.


Plinky Grabs Album Data from Amazon for My Mix Tape


I Can Send My Plinky Notifications to Twitter or Facebook
Plinky, which is starting off with a team of seven, based in Lafayette in the East Bay, also features many of the friend connection aspects you have seen in other products. You can browse all the users of the site, and choose to follow them, like making friends or followers in Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. By following them, you can go to the drop-down of Answers and see "Followed Answers", giving you all the answers to prompts from those friends you following on Plinky.


I Can Choose to Follow Other Plinky Users
And like Twitter, you can even make answers to prompts as your favorites. So if a friend of yours says he has an awesome answer to songs he would keep on his mix tape, one of the prompts this week, you can click Favorite and see it in your favorites list.

If you think you are a social media guru and power user, or you're one of those bloggers who is posting stuff every day, Plinky might seem a little light for you, but for the much larger audience who gets writers' block and can go weeks without updating their blog, or maybe they posted a picture of their kid once and never came back, after sending a mass e-mail to their friends and family, Plinky is a fun way to get re-engaged with new ideas, as you answer prompts, see what other friends have said to the same questions, and can pass that data out to the rest of your online presence.

In a world of social media when so many things are about how many places you're signed up and everything you're doing, Plinky gets back and focuses on the social. Now, I just might find out whether you change clothes when you get home, what your favorite venue is to catch a concert and how you got started in your career. You can, as always, find me with the ID of "louisgray", here: http://www.plinky.com/people/louisgray.

Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.

2008 Internal Year In Review (Month by Month)

At the end of the year, it's a tradition for many sites and blogs to pick "best of" lists, offer predictions, show their best posts and the like. At louisgray.com, we're no different. In fact, we're probably worse than most when it comes to liking to sort, use statistics, find trends and display highlights. I thought it'd be fun (at least for me) to do a quick run through the year soon to be completed, looking at how things progressed - the good, bad, interesting, and not so much. Below is a quick summary, somewhat, of how each month went, including the top stories and new companies and people we encountered along the way.

Question is... what's the most common word in this wrap-up? My guess? The word "debuted." See why below.

January

In January, I said I didn't care much for the year's MacWorld Expo, discovered ReadBurner in stealth mode, which led to the introduction of Shared Reader... considered joining Twitter... got in a quick tiff with Mashable... actually joined Twitter... hit the Techmeme leaderboard for the first time (which was short lived)... noted the passing of church president Gordon B. Hinckley... saw the launch of AssetBar, and became part of the Elite Tech News Reddit. And at the end of the month, Rating Burner debuted.

February

February saw Microsoft and Yahoo! start their mating dance, as I admitted rooting for the underdog, but voted for Hillary anyway... saw RSSmeme debut to compete with ReadBurner, the introduction of LinkRiver... I introduced the LouisGray.com logo and revamped the site... and revealed my wife and I were expecting twins. I noted issues with FeedBurner, and saw FriendFeed open up to the public with Series A funding. At the end of the month, I met Chris Brogan, and wasn't so impressed with MyBlogLog's lifestream.

March

In March, we discovered Yokway! incubating in alpha before launch, saw the debut of Mergelab and Shyftr, but in the bad news camp, ReadBurner shut down (temporarily). To welcome new readers, I gave a history of the site... and started highlighting new blogs for the first time. Meanwhile FriendFeed started to take off, even if I said Duncan Riley didn't get it right away. I also managed to smash my laptop at Spring Training. Later in the month, Toluu debuted.

April

In April, we looked at changes on the Techmeme leaderboard... I was not impressed with Favorit... Yuvi put me under the microscope... BlogRize and Socialmedian debuted on back to back days... and we first discussed fractured conversations. Alphatwitter debuted... ReadBurner relaunched... and I made no friends in the blogosphere by ranting against ads. FriendFeedMachine was introduced... I went to Web 2.0 Expo... where I learned about the Profy platform... and then ticked everyone off on Twitter by making up a "Noise Ratio". I later added Disqus comments and discussed my social media consumption workflow.

May

In May, the StatBot launched, but Mergelab closed down while still in beta. I noted Socialmedian's early growth... and Duncan Riley's first week at the Inquisitr.... started the weekly FriendFeed Friday tip series... saw LetsProve start up... and the introduction of FFToGo, which took FriendFeed mobile. I also added Lijit to my blog... and noted who first brought stories to Techmeme. The end of the month saw TweetSmart launch.

June

In June, we talked a lot about comments. Were they conversations or replies... and was FriendFeed stealing them away... I slammed TiVo for having no social media presence... saw FriendBinder debut... our 18 year old beagle passed away... we discussed five stages of early adopter behavior... I praised Disqus... and saw the debuts of Feedly, OneSpot and Loud3r... Sarah and Matthew were born... and I told you my expectations... Browzmi launched... as did NoiseRiver and MioNews, as new interfaces to FriendFeed.

July

By July 1, Sarah came home from the hospital... TweetDeck was introduced... and AssetBar relaunched with FanFlows... we encountered blatant racism online... Ballhype was purchased... and I mocked the title of social media expert. Twitter started limiting API requests... as Gnip went live... Socialmedian gave me an iPhone... Identica rose as an alternative to Twitter as the site found new ways to fail... Cuil was a dud... I joined SmugMug... and Matthew lost his job at CenterNetworks.

August

In August, I told you about a creepy would-be online stalker... California banned driving without a hands-free cell phone... the twins started slowing me down online... Feedheads launched on the Web... I joined ReadBurner as an advisor... YooPlace launched... we discussed why the embargo process was broken... rumors flew the church would buy Facebook... Strands debuted, as did BackType.

September

September saw the introduction of Google Chrome... FriendFeed rolled out lists... i.TV came to the iPhone... the falling stock market started to hit my wallet... Sitemeter laid an egg... I went to BlogWorld Expo... and I thought Chi.mp was a waste of time...

October

In October, I noted Obama's widespread support at tech companies... saw Spokeo give up on Web 2.0... started e-mailing RSS items... forecast the future of social media... and saw FriendFeed launch real-time updates. Guest posts gained momentum... and my kids got embedded in social media early... Twine launched... we discussed Prop 8... as Socialmedian made an election news hub.

November

November brought us instant streaming films via Netflix... Strands went mobile... I started using Wakoopa... Twitter promised (and failed) to open the firehose by Thanksgiving... I said to be a "real friend" to social networking friends... saw the Twitterank controversy... participated in an emerging media panel... watched Glue launch... saw the MotrinMoms issue explode... SocialToo added surveys... I kept losing money... slept next to the iPhone for comfort... and enjoyed new apps for the device.

December

I started off December annoyed at TiVo and Amazon... but still loved the iPhone... talked about Secret Santas and Amazon Wish Lists... PeopleBrowsr debuted... as did Kallow... ESPN.com introduced a beta version... and my wife started a family-oriented blog... Netflix came to my TiVo... BlogRize returned... I picked my top ten 2008 debuts... Twitter kept growing like mad... but last year's predictions sucked... TwitOrFit launched... Steve Jobs bailed from MacWorld... Gawkk opened up... Embargoes flared up again... Socialmedian was acquired... I got a new TiVo XL... promised to get better... Scrapplet debuted as did TechFuga... I even retold the Christmas Story through Twitter...

And... that just about catches you up. So if you're just visiting the site for the first time, started late, or missed a few months, you probably have a pretty good idea of how the year went, what we wrote about, and where we went. All in all, it reminds me of a lot of stories of months past, and services that need a revisit. It also tells me we had a pretty busy year. Should be interesting to see if 2009 is more crazy, or if I burn out. My money is on... "more crazy" - the exception being I don't plan on having two more kids next year. So... did I leave anything out?

Never Say Never Online. We're Keeping Records, You Know.

Two integral characteristics to the Web are that it is first, constantly changing, and second, practically everything is saved. So if you, like me, and many others, have ever said you will "never" do something, or will "quit" doing something never to return, you're just setting yourself up to be wrong. And once you undo that promise, you can look pretty silly in the process. So, if you are wavering in whether or not you will use a product, or if you're thinking of walking away from one you have already tried, it probably makes sense to keep the dialog internal, instead of sharing with the masses.

First, let me point out how dumb I was for trying this.

In January of 2007, I said, Why I Stopped Using IM and Won't Use Twitter. I wrote:

"What is said over IM is very rarely business, and prevents people from getting work done. It's a significant time-waster, and a technology whose time has come and gone. The idea that I would take it up a notch and tell Twitter my every step is yet another task that would get in the way of my actually working, so we're not interested."

So... yeah, how did that go? Well, a full year later (a long time hold out for me), I announced I "jumped the shark" on Twitter, and started using it. Almost a year later, I've now updated my Twitter account more than 1,400 times, and am following or being followed by about 4,000 people each direction.

In March of 2007, I took things a step further, and thought I'd be smart about saying not just one but TEN services I would "never" use. In a post titled, "Ten Geeky Technologies Not Coming to Our House", I listed Skype, Twitter, Linux, Plaxo, MySpace, BeBo, Piczo, XBox, PS3, the Wii, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo! IM, GTalk, Delicous, Flickr and EV-DO as things that would never make it in our home. In case you were counting, yes, that's more than 10 items, but I had grouped the game consoles, IM clients and social networks, for example.

So where do we stand? I have a Skype account, which I've used maybe three times in total. I have a Plaxo Pulse account. I signed up with a MySpace account, just to search for times my content was being used or linked to, we are big fans of the Nintendo Wii in our home, I've used Google Talk several times from within GMail, and I bookmarked almost 2,000 different Web sites on my Delicious account this year alone. Add onto that the fact I use my Flickr account for some photos of the twins, though I prefer SmugMug, and I look like a complete fool. Clearly, the mistake was mine to even say I was going to ignore these products, because in the interim, not only did those products get better, but I found more than an edge case to use them.

The same rule applies for those who might be using a service, and then loudly say they are quitting, never to return. Why do that, unless you're either looking for attention, or hoping others will join your cause?

For example, Mark Hopkins (formerly of Mashable) quit FriendFeed back in October, during a very political time for the site. He is back, of course, after a two-month hiatus. Similarly, when directeur, the creator of NoiseRiver, said he was going to leave FriendFeed (which we covered in October as well), the vacation didn't last all that long. He was back and active on the site within days.

More visibly, Jason Calacanis claimed in November that he was retiring from blogging, preferring to use an e-mail list to get his word out. While the e-mail list is alive and kicking, and growing, he has started posting to his blog again, practically every day, even if just to post pictures, or add a copy of his newsletter. It happens.

In May of 2007, we covered a topic I called "blog fatigue", specifically pointing to a few folks who were taking a breather from their sites. Truth is, we could all use a breather sometimes, be it from the blogging, or any services, but rather than say we're never going back, or never going to use something, it makes more sense to both keep an open mind, and probably, a closed mouth. I've proven I can be a leading indicator of nonsense, so don't expect me to tell you what I'll never use. I just might change my mind later.

10 Things I Wish I Would Do Better On the Web Come 2009

To most readers here, it's no secret I'm fairly active online. I try to keep up with the news by absorbing a strong amount of feeds in Google Reader, and then share the best of those with you on my shared links blog. I try to keep the blog consistently published with good insight, both from me and the rapidly-expanding team of contributors. I attempt to be visible and participate in a small array of social networks, from Facebook to Twitter to Friendfeed, Socialmedian and Strands. I try to answer e-mail as it comes in, and monitor or reply to comments. But I know I'm not doing a perfect job. If I only had more hours in the day, and made this my priority, here are some of the things I wish I would do better on the Web, and things I'll be paying more attention to as the calendar flips from 2008 to 2009:

1) Make More Comments on Original Blog Posts

Every day I come in contact with hundreds and hundreds of new stories. The vast majority of them I read in my RSS reader. I click through a small percentage, share a different percentage and e-mail others. I am also encountering many other new stories via FriendFeed and other social aggregators, exposing me to new ideas and news.

But while I already know I am not reading enough stories at their source, I'm certainly not participating and commenting enough. I need to make more time to do this in 2009.

2) Respond to More Comments on louisgray.com

Some days I do this well, and other days, not really well at all. A while ago, I talked about whether comments on blog posts were conversation, or just replies, and I find too often I lean toward the latter. Disqus makes it super-easy to blast through comments and respond via e-mail, so I should do a better job of being engaged with the best audience on the Web in 2009.

3) Be More Interactive On Twitter

There's no one right way to use Twitter, as we mentioned earlier today, but I'm pretty sure the way I use it isn't perfect. I signed up to Twitter in early 2008 after being, for me anyway, a longtime holdout. It's likely that more than half of my Twitter posts are simply announcing new blog posts here, and I could do a better job of listening and engaging than simply broadcasting in 2009.

4) Spend Less Time on a Few Sites, and More Time on Many Sites

Being visible and active on social networks that have similar capabilities, like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Strands, is hard. It's no secret that there is a tendency to pick one or two places to build up a community and leave the others dry, and in 2008, I overweighted FriendFeed for sure. It makes sense that maybe I should dial back a bit on FriendFeed and spend more time in far-flung places in 2009.

5) Have More Time for In-Depth Reviews

At the beginning of the year, I feel I did a fairly good job of having the time to invest in fully reviewing new sites and services, to explain their every feature. From Toluu to ReadBurner to Feedly and Assetbar, it was not uncommon to show you every nook and cranny of a new site, so you could join it as an expert. But in the second half of the year, especially after the arrival of Matthew and Sarah, this time comparatively evaporated, making my reviews less detailed. I still try to do a good overview of new sites and iPhone applications, for example, but it'd be good to feel sharp about these reviews again in 2009.

6) Follow Up On Sites and Services After Their Launch

I want to avoid being a "hit and run" blogger, as I put it the other day, announcing something and then only covering them again if they had something major. Doing that, I feel, makes you a tertiary part of the story, and certainly not an embedded expert. I'd like to look back on the many different services that have either debuted here or been covered, and see how they have progressed in 2009.

7) Attend More Industry Conferences and Panels

Given blogging and the social media space is not my full-time job, I can't exactly say attending all the different events in the space is something that makes sense for my career or pocketbook. But I did get to attend Web 2.0 Expo in the Spring, and BlogWorld Expo in the fall, and enjoyed meeting many of the people with whom I'd only engaged online. I would like to make more time to see the industry mingle and participate in 2009.

8) Participate More Visiblity on Conferences and Panels

I've been lucky to learn that a panel I'll be participating in was accepted for the South By Southwest conference (SXSW) this upcoming Spring. This follows the panel I participated in with Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski, and a pair of panels and BlogWorld Expo this fall. As the blog has gained visibility, opportunities are making themselves available, and I would like to be less of a wallflower and more active in 2009.

9) Be More Active on Podcasts, Videoconferencing

Having blogged on the site for three full years now, showing I can put a blog post together and cover a story, or participate in social media is not a surprise. I also had the opportunity to participate in the Elite Tech News podcast earlier this year when it was more regular, and the ReadBurner podcast through the year. I think it would be fun to get the opportunity to showcase new entrepreneurs, bloggers and services using audio and video in 2009.

10) Highlight More Bloggers and Entrepreneurs

In 2008, one of the major focuses I had was to bring to light new bloggers that had previously toiled in obscurity. By launching the series of five new blogs each month, by bringing on a stable of talented writers and keeping a focus on startups and the people behind those services, we played a role in making people more known by the end of the year than the beginning. I don't want to lose momentum on this, and keep bringing new people to the fore in 2009.

These ten items are on my list because I believe, in combination, they will help my understanding of technology, the industry, and the people better. It will help me have a more rounded tech experience without being too focused on niche topics and insulated. 2008 saw some strides in many of these areas, but I know I need to step up my game in 2009, and I look forward to the challenge.

New Blog for Family News: TheGrayEffect.com

Despite its more diverse start, there's no question louisgray.com has more than done its fair share of tilting toward tech - so much so that it practically seems out of place to keep you updated here on all our family news, including baby pictures, baby videos, trip updates, and the like. Meanwhile, at the same time, my poor wife has been itching to get a blog started so she can keep pace, not just with me, but all her lady friends who play the role of mommyblogger.

As a result, we've launched a new site for my wife, Kristine, at TheGrayEffect.com, to cover all her interests and whims. It will also be showing anything and everything we feel like when it comes to keeping you posted on Sarah and Matthew. While we both are authors there, I expect she will be doing the majority of the posting.

And, as usual, we will continue to keep tabs on the twins on our SmugMug account, on YouTube, and occasionally, via FriendFeed.


See Also: Two Thumbs Up: Louis Gray Effect on FriendFeed
(Image Borrowed from Two Thumbs Up)
The Gray Effect can be found at www.thegrayeffect.com. You can also subscribe by RSS here.

Wheee!

Pull Your Blog Into FriendFeed and Increase Exposure

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I've been following several people on FriendFeed that I'm a big fan of and are fairly active Twitter users. Until recently, I would like their Tweets and share them with my followers regularly. However, I'm realizing a trend amongst new FriendFeed users, including some of these Twitter users I follow, in which they pick one or two services and neglect to share the other places they belong to. Perhaps the most important of those is their own blog. I'd like to suggest this is a mistake - and I think it's mostly a misunderstanding of what FriendFeed can actually do for your blog.

Let's start with a simple diagram. Let's say you're Bob, and you set up FriendFeed to import you blog automatically. You write a blog post, perhaps similar to this one, which in turn gets imported into FriendFeed.

Now, let's assume you're John in the diagram. You're following Bob, so automatically, Bob's blog post immediately goes to the top of your Feed. You notice this, you click on the link, give Bob a little traffic, read the article, then click on the "like" link in FriendFeed. (Note that all posts on FriendFeed force users to click through to read the post - different than an RSS Reader, which keeps the traffic to the Reader)

Now, here's where FriendFeed is powerful. When John clicks "like" in FriendFeed, Bob's article now gets shared with all of John's friends, which sends the article to the top of their feeds as well. They then have the potential to "like" the article, and share with their friends, and it goes on and on. The same goes with any Tweet, Picture, Music, Video, or any other item you share on FriendFeed. The same thing also happens when Bob's friend, Fred, sees the article, and comments on it. Any "like" or comment on FriendFeed sends it immediately back to the top of all their friends' feeds and the post gets shared over and over.

RSS

Now, let's imagine Bob, after writing the article for his blog, does a search on FriendFeed for his article. Let's just imagine it's named "Is Your Blog on FriendFeed?". He puts "who:everyone Is Your Blog on FriendFeed" in the search bar at http://friendfeed.com (the "who:everyone" means he wants results from everyone that mentions it, not just Bob's friends), and the returned data shows every like, share, or comment about Bob's article. Those results are also available as RSS. Bob simply needs to add the returned URL to his RSS Reader (there is an RSS link down at the bottom of the search results page), and now he'll receive every "like", share, or comment about his article in his RSS Reader. Bob can now click on each one of those, and in turn, "like" or comment on those as well, bringing it back up to the top of both the submitters of those shares' feeds, as well as Bob's own friends' feeds. It also lets Bob track every comment on FriendFeed going on about his article.

Let's also add that every person that has subscribed to Bob's blog in Google Reader can now share Bob's blog post with their Google Reader friends. They can import their Google Reader shares into FriendFeed (which you should also do), and now every share in Google Reader gets recorded in FriendFeed, and Bob can like those as well. Bob now has full control over what is being said about his blog on the web, and he can enter each one into the FriendFeed promotional cycle. This is why FriendFeed is so powerful!

FriendFeed Growth

Recent Compete.com statistics show that FriendFeed in the last month has surged while Twitter growth has slowed. While far from Twitter traffic numbers, FriendFeed actually grew more in the last month than Twitter, and FriendFeed is only getting started. FriendFeed provides real-time updates, popular amongst bloggers and media for finding breaking news, along with the ability to thread comments and track all types of content on the web and discuss that content. There's no doubt FriendFeed is a threat to Twitter, and your blog has the potential to see even more traffic than Twitter, even at these low numbers. Now imagine what happens when FriendFeed approaches Twitter-level traffic and you got in early and now have one of the stronger followings on FriendFeed? You are now in a pretty powerful situation with your blog.

If you haven't considered importing your blog into FriendFeed, I hope I have made you reconsider. The ability for your posts to continually get repeated at the top of people's feeds as you write new articles makes it a must for anyone wanting to compete in the blogosphere. Have you imported your blog into FriendFeed?

You can discuss on FriendFeed below! Now, let's try a little experiment. If you read this in Google Reader, go and import your Google Reader shares into FriendFeed. Now, share this article. Then, watch that article and you'll notice that for each person sharing the article I will like your share on FriendFeed. Give it a try!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Blogosphere on Holiday: Thanksgiving Drops Posting by Half

Web site traffic and activity follows a fairly regular flow. Any administrator or stat junkie can tell you that the vast majority of sites see much more activity on the weekday than the weekend, and businesses tend to see Sunday traffic higher than that of Saturday, as people start to gear up for the coming workweek. Times of holiday, whether worldwide or just in the United States, also impact the activity, reducing traffic, and seeing a slowdown across the board when it comes to publishing. This year, Google Reader hints the slowdown is as much as fifty percent.

As I've mentioned a number of times previously on the site, Google Reader is my go-to RSS reader. It tracks the 400 feeds I view, when they publish, and how quickly I get to the new items. You can even look at the last 30 days and see just how many items were read versus the number posted.


My last 30 days, according to Google Reader
According to those stats, in a typical seven-day week, I take in about 4,800 new items, ranging from about 700 to more than 900 individual items from Monday through Friday, and between 200 and 300 on the weekend.

In the preceding three Thursday and Friday combinations, Google Reader offered approximately 1,600 items in each two-day set. But in this most recent week, with Thanksgiving coming on Thursday, that number plummeted to under 700 total items, a drop of greater than fifty percent. In fact, you could start to see a slowdown as the week progressed, with Tuesday showing fewer items than Monday, Wednesday fewer than Tuesday, and so on.

In fact, the decrease in posting on the two-day Thanksgiving holiday was so low, it barely eclipsed a standard weekend, eking above that number by about 10 percent, despite the fact the holiday is so US-centric, and we assume that the Web is worldwide. So if you were feeling a bit sluggish after the Thursday feast, and couldn't get out of the tryptophan haze to put a post up, you weren't alone.

And this trend is not new. You can also see a similar note I posted back in May of 2007: Blogosphere On Holiday Drops RSS Feeds by 40%

Introducing Exchange Rates for Blog Comments and Interactions

Editor's Note: Allen Stern and CenterNetworks are not affiliated with this post or the exchange rates table -- yet. The CN logo has been helpfully borrowed.

In May, Mathew Ingram, Fred Wilson and others said that for non-professional bloggers, comments were how they got paid. The interaction and discussion that takes place on blogs, between the author and the consumer, is what most write for - the conversation. But recent tools that let people comment elsewhere, or interact on the original content in other ways has some saying users' actions simply aren't enough. As much of the conversation moves off the original blog, or people are sharing items in Google Reader or hitting "like" in FriendFeed, they are showing interest, but not engaging, causing some to wish for a simpler time when those services didn't allow users to show passive approval.

One of the more outspoken voices on this topic has been Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, who wrote on this blog earlier this month:

"early adopters are screwing early adopter blogs - period. Clicking share on google reader is not like leaving a comment on the source. Clicking like on ff or retweeting on twitter is not the same as leaving a comment on the source. I will have more on this soon as I think that lazyness has slowly ruined what was something beautiful."

And while he and I don't always line up with our beliefs on the same spot in the blog evolution chart, there is no question that some activities do more to encourage the original author and their content than do others.

In that spirit, here is the first attempt at an exchange rate for interacting with blogs. As Allen has been a chief proponent of giving original authors their due, I believe the unit of metric is best labeled as a "CN", in honor of CenterNetworks. It's also no coincidence you could call these "C Notes" or "Comment Notes".

To start, I argue that a comment on the original author's blog post should be counted as "1 CN", to establish a baseline.


Actions that are worth more than 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Making a comment on the original blog, then blogging about that discussion on your own blog. (10 CN)
  
• Writing a new blog post on the same topic and linking back to the original author as the source. (5 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to StumbleUpon with a strong description and good tagging. (3 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. (2 CN)

Actions that are worth between 1/2 CN and 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Retweeting the item on Twitter. (.8 CN)
  
• Digging an already submitted story. (.6 CN)
  
• Adding a vote on Reddit, Hacker News, or Mixx. (.5 CN)

Actions that are worth less than 1/2 CN, depending on one's network size or influence, include:

• Posting the item natively to FriendFeed. (.4 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Socialmedian or Strands. (.3 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Facebook. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Tumblr blog. (.25 CN)
  
• Sharing the item in Google Reader. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Delicious. (.2 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the original item on FriendFeed. (.2 CN)
  
• Liking the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Adding a comment to a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Liking a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Shyftr. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Facebook. (.05 CN)

These exchange rates show current market valuations, and are subject to change, based on the increase and decrease in popularity of associated networks and the sway of conventional opinion. Rates quoted are valid as of November 23rd, 2008, and were determined by a non-scientific measure of effort, influence and reach of the aforementioned external sites and activities.

As your activity gets further and further away from the original blog post, and the blog post becomes less of the story, but the third-party service gets to be more of the story or the destination, it delivers less perceived value to the original author, be it psychological, social, or in some cases, actually financial. While some of us early adopters are all too happy to expand a blog post's reach through our various social networks, and enjoy the new communities that are built there, it's not surprising that those who are seeing less activity on the original source of their stories are feeling something's amiss. I know that as I've gotten busier, I've taken less time to comment on the many blog posts out there, even as I'm making comments on the various social media sites, and sharing like I always have through Google Reader.

So if you want to show your appreciation to the author of a blog you've found particularly insightful of late, or who has opened your eyes to a new topic, don't just take the easy way out and hit "share" as the item flows through your RSS reader, or hit "like" on your social site, but take the extra time to rise up the CN chart and put some food on that blogger's table by making a comment and engaging. Allen and many others will be happy you did.

Five Blogs To Be Checking Out This November

Part Nine In a Monthly Series

November brings a bit of coolness in the air as the summer heat becomes a memory and most of us in the Northern Hemisphere turn to Winter. But while it might be getting colder outside, there's still a lot of hot writing going on, both from sites you have heard of and many you likely haven't. For the last nine months, I've highlighted five blogs each month that I think warrant your checking out.

Each of the bloggers highlighted over this time period has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July, August, September and October.

This month's entries...

1) Rob Jensen / Microblink (www.microblink.com)

Focus: Microblogging, Twitter, Pownce, Plurk
Recent Highlight: Where to Find Election Coverage
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Cass / Media Geek Girl (mediageekery.blogspot.com)

Focus: Movies, Media and Life (from Singapore)
Recent Highlight: IM Just Got Interesting
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Thought Clusters (www.thoughtclusters.com)

Focus: Technology, Software
Recent Highlight:
Hindsight Experts
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Jason K / TekPopuli (www.tekpopuli.com)

Focus: Technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft
Recent Highlight:
Voter Suppression 2.0 — GOP Turning to Robo-Tweets
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Editechial (www.editechial.com)

Focus: Blogging, Funding, Media
Recent Highlight:
Hype Happens
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for November's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

BackType Adds Comment Keyword Trends to Its Arsenal

In late August, BackType launched to track comments across thousands of blogs, and seemingly nearly as many disparate platforms. The service effectively turned blogging on its head, providing a place where comments were king, and the posts themselves, secondary. With BackType, you can see a single individual's comments from around the Web, and follow multiple people, helping to discover new sites. (My ID can be found here) Today, BackType debuted a new trends application, at http://trends.backtype.com/, based on their API, which shows trends within those comments, including how frequently keywords were mentioned, who said them the most often, and on which blogs those topics came up.


BackType Trends Lets You Search Millions of Comments
The effort to harness large groups of comments and make sense of the noise is not new. Fav.or.it pulled in more than 13,000 comments per day as recently as August, forming the basis for its report on the blogosphere's commenting statistics in aggregate. (See: Fav.or.it Comments On Commenting Statistics) But despite that one-time blip, most comprehensive reports on the state of the Web (yes, Technorati, we mean you) walk right past comments and act as they don't exist. Now that BackType has been pulling in comments for a few months, they're ready to position themselves as the authority on comments, and will be writing about these statistics in upcoming pieces, said Christopher Golda, founder of BackType.


The Presidential Election Has Been a Big Topic of Late
The new trends site, found at http://trends.backtype.com/ lets you graph mentions of keywords or phrases from the millions of comments BackType has pulled from around the Web. The tool can be used to gauge a topic's popularity, based on the total raw number of results, or to see spikes in activity, like with "Joe the Plumber", or the word "Macbook", which, as you can guess, spiked upward around Apple's recent announcement, and then quickly fell.


MacBook Mentions Spiked With Apple's New Introductions
The Trends tool shows results over the last two weeks, graphing the total counts by date, and displaying the top five blogs where the keyword is mentioned, as well as the top five authors of that keyword.

The combination lets you know, for example, that Daniel Pritchett, Robert Scoble and Mark Dykeman are the three most frequent users of the word FriendFeed, and that you're most likely to see FriendFeed discussed on Scobleizer, TechCrunch or Startup News (Y! Combinator).


Who Mentions FriendFeed Most Frequently, and Where? BackType Knows.
Similarly, using the same query, you can find that Twitter is most frequently discussed on ProBlogger, TechCrunch and Mashable.

So what has garnered commenters' interests in the last two weeks? Unsurprisingly, a lot more than just tech, but also, politics and finance. "Obama" clocks in with 80,851 separate comments. McCain tries to match with 69,414 mentions and his running mate, Sarah "Palin" counters with 33,593. On the financial side, you see 7,765 mentions of "crisis", 2,344 mentions of "recession", and 2,681 for "depression".

You can even combine searches using boolean expressions. Searching for "depression OR recession" garners 4,666 responses, but "depression AND recession" only returns 359. Good thing, because searching for these negative keywords has me heading to the medicine cabinet...

What I'd like to be able to do in the future with BackType Trends is compare one term versus another over time, or extend the search over a greater period, or on specific blogs, for example, seeing if Twitter mentions are going up or down at ReadWriteWeb or Mashable. It's also not the most robust, beautiful presentation I've ever seen, but the data is more important than its shell. We're seeing the foundation of what could be a very interesting repository of data, one I'll be tapping into time and again.

Follow me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

Making Your Blogging Much More than Just "You"

On Sunday, Chris Brogan asked an important question: "How Often Do You Promote Others?", asking how often many of us are highlighting lesser-known people, sharing their items, or promoting their work, to expand awareness. One of the people Chris gave credit to was Robert Scoble, who Chris said "points me to new stuff all the time".

It's no secret a lot of my own online activity is the result of having watched watching Scoble's efforts. It was his pushing toward Google Reader, creating a link blog, and linking out to people big and small that has guided some of my own behavior. So, as I mentioned on Chris' stream in FriendFeed, here's what I'm trying to do:

1. Highlight new services when they debut, to help give entrepreneurs a running start.
2. Highlighting five new bloggers each month who I believe are undervalued.
3. Adding new guest posts to the blog to showcase talent.
4. Sharing dozens of sites on Google Reader each day.
5. Interacting with many new people on Social Median and FriendFeed.

It's true I could always do more. I know I haven't been doing my part to make as many comments on other people's blogs as I used to. I'm not adding as many new voices to my FriendFeed as I used to, or as many new RSS feeds to Google Reader and Toluu as I once did. And I wish I had more time to test some of the brand-new services that flow into my e-mail. But we are absolutely not going to forget that despite "the blog being your brand", that it doesn't begin and end with me. I hope you can take the time to check out Chris' comments and see what you can do to promote others.

His Post: How Often Do You Promote Others

What's Up With All the Guest Posts?

Warning: Some Internal Navel Gazing Ahead

Over the last three months, regular visitors to the site may have noticed a good number of posts to the blog that weren't from me. In fact, starting on July 8th, of the 175 new stories posted to the site, 34 have been from guest posters, representing approximately one of every five new entries, with me covering the other eighty percent. These 34 items have been submitted by a number of diverse writers, each of whom brings their own background and expertise to the table.

So what's going on?

Given the proximity of the first guest post, from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, on July 8th, to Matthew and Sarah being born, on June 20th, some have thought the guest posts were the equivalent of bringing new parents food, to help during the busy times. Others have hypothesized that this is the first step in a plan for world domination, as I try to catapult the site into the realm of GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb or other big-name brand sites.

But the truth is somewhere in between.

The visibility of louisgray.com, thanks to consistent posting and the increased activity on some of the social sites where I participate, grew more than I expected in the first half of this year. I recognize that the subscriber base here is a tad higher than that for other great writers I respect, and I thought it would be a win-win to bring these voices to a new audience, while also making the site a more trusted, consistently updated source for news and commentary.

So in July, after trading e-mails with Cyndy, I asked her, and later, a few others, to contribute, as they wanted. I set no criteria on their subject matter, frequency or length, and I've been very lucky to see many of them really step up and provide their very best work here, outdoing my efforts a number of times. The result, I believe, is a more diverse set of opinions, increased engagement, and an increased profile for those participating. I have also made the choice to stop calling my partners in crime "guests". They have the full keys and are active writers in their own right.

In this quota-free environment, you can see some have grasped the opportunity and posted frequently. Others saw it as a one-off and went back to their own sites. But all still have the open door policy. In fact, it's my hope they continue to feel comfortable here. And, if you think you have something to contribute, and would be interested in adding your voice to the mix, let me know. Just remember this is all for fun and excitement around tech, so there are no ads, and therefore, no revenue. So send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com if you're up for it.

I've taken the time to highlight the guest posts below in case you missed any. I'm sure you'll find a topic you like. And, don't worry, I'll still keep posting here. But maybe by the next update, I'll be pushing out less than 80 percent of all new stories.

---

Charlie Anzman

• Google at 10 - a Decade of Innovation - But Challenges Ahead

Colin Walker

• Is There A Way Back From Free?

Corvida Raven

• The Importance of Setting Goals To Grow Your Network

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

• Late-Night Seesmic Desperation Yields Results
  
• Walking the SEO Balance Beam
  
• The Hubris of the Twitterati and Twitterati Wannabes
  
• Everybody Wants to be Internet Famous
  
• For My Next Trick, Watch This Comment Disappear!
  
• Selling Ourselves Short as Women In Tech

Hutch Carpenter

• Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence

(Jeff)isageek

• Trimming the Fat On RSS Feeds - You Could Lose 99%!

Jesse Stay

• To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question
  
• Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.
  
• New Facebook Design Confuses Many, Obscures Features
  
• Exposed: Blogging's Secret Next Generation
  
• Identi.ca and the Power of Microbranded Communities
  
• Twitter Implements Threaded Comments, Sort Of
  
• The Following/Listening Ratio - Are Your Followers Actually Listening?
  
• The iPhone's Missing Link: User Profiles
  
• OpenMicroBlogger Shows Steady Growth in First Month
  
• With Facebook Connect, Google Has Unique Integration Opportunity

Mark Dykeman

• Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience
  
• Netvouz – A Quality One Man Bookmarking Show
  

Mona Nomura

• Top Resources to Help Stay Informed In a Crazy World
  
• Web 2.0 and Democratization of Data - Say What?
  
• Microblog Megaphoning: Informative or Irresponsible?
  
• Microsoft and RIM? I Don't Think So.
  
• Silicon Valleywood?
  

Phil Glockner

• What Google Chrome Gets Right
  
• Google's Suggest And Search: Never Completely Private
  
• iPhone Application Review: Mobile Fotos

Rob Diana

• Throttled By the Twitter API? Try Something New.
  
• Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?
  
• Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views
  
• Is There Less Funding Or Are Startups Just Cheaper?
  
• Increased Activity Streams Boost Social Median's Chances
  

Robert Seidman

• Google Has Leveled the Internet Playing Field
  
• Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

Treat or Treat: Five Obscure Blogs for October 2008

Part Eight In a Monthly Series

Just because there is a slowdown in the economy, and quite possibly, a slowdown in innovation in some arenas doesn't mean there is a slowdown in new, interesting bloggers who write good quality pieces that make you think. With this month's installment, forty separate blogs will have been highlighted as having a high content to subscriber ratio. A good number of those people have catapulted to new jobs and gained visibility. Others, have fallen away. How will this month's fare?

Each of the bloggers highlighted in the last eight months has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July, August and September.

1) Bwana McCall / Bwana.org (www.bwana.org)

Focus: Podcasting, Gaming, Social Media
Recent Highlight: Twitter 2008: Get Used To It (Goodbye IM/Track)
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Ken Stewart / ChangeForge (www.changeforge.com)

Focus: Technology, Business
Recent Highlight: The Heart Of A Technologist.
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Kipp Bodnar/ Digital Capitalism (www.digitalcapitalism.com)

Focus: Marketing, Internet, Social Media
Recent Highlight:
How to Be Successful in Social Media: Take Action and Hustle
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Daniel Pritchett / Sharing At Work (www.sharingatwork.com)

Focus: Business, Technology, Human Factors
Recent Highlight: Getting Better All The Time
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) 14 sandwiches (www.14sandwiches.com)

Focus: Technology, Video, Media
Recent Highlight:
From Homing Pigeons to Micro-Blogging: Regional Media Strides Forward
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for November's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Web 2.0 and Democratization of Data - Say What?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

If George W. Bush and John Kerry campaigned for the presidency on the Internet four years ago, I wouldn't have seen the point and likely would have laughed in their faces. Who would have heard and listened to them? Fast forward to today, and the joke is on me.

In case you haven't noticed, both of the presidential hopefuls have a presence on the web. John McCain and Barack Obama have accounts on the major social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube channels, and even Twitter accounts. Social networking is no longer just for geeks. Web 2.0 is going mainstream and everyone (that means you, reader!) has opportunity to be more than an audience. Data is democratizing and everyone's voice can be heard.

Need more proof everyone has a voice that's heard? Take the Steve Job's false report of a heart attack debacle. A simple post on CNN's affiliate citizen journalism site, iReport, generated a massive ripple effect. Within minutes, the unconfirmed "news" spread like wild fire. CNN and Apple quickly issued official statements that report was false, major blogs picked up the story of falsified reports, but Apple's stock still dropped 10%. All from one silly rumor, started by a Joe Schmoe from who knows where. Everyone has opportunity to be heard. Hence, democratization of data.

So what does that mean?

Well, stay with me, as I take this a step further. Most of you probably know me through FriendFeed, where I spend almost 90% of my days posting random pictures and or links. Now FriendFeed was once dominated by veteran bloggers, Internet personalities, - basically folks who have been around for some time, and put years of efforts into their well deserved titles by their names - or the tech 'elite'. It's now been a little over three months since I signed up, and still can't believe I interact with the information sources where tech-news (data) start and circulate around. But honestly? The 'elite' in my eyes, are regular people who are a part of the FriendFeed I love so much. And it's not constrained to FriendFeed. Whether you or anyone else for that matter, likes it or not, there are so many people from all walks of life, from all over the world sharing and discussing information on all social networks across the board. How can every single voice not be heard? Again, democratization of data. And this is only the beginning.

Think about it.

New sites and services are popping up every month. Established, major Social Networks such as MySpace and or Facebook are adding features, functions, and tools encouraging users to share data. The way Social Networks will be used are changing. There are millions of active users like us, sharing our personal stories, the latest news, information pertaining to our professional life, or even stupid cat photos since we - the users, have the choice and control to share whatever we feel is important to share. The bottomline: Information is no longer consolidated, centralized, or coming from a few selected sources. Data is now and will only continue to be democratized.

The path is now paved, so the choice is yours. How will you exercise these options?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

BackType Launches Widgets and Alerts to Extend Comments Tracker

At the end of August, BackType launched an interesting tool to track individuals' comments across the Web - no matter the commenting platform and no matter the blog, and letting you subscribe to other BackType users to see their comments, wherever they were. In the last few weeks, BackType launched alerts, letting you follow search terms, and today, they launched widgets which enable you to show the places you are commenting around the Web from a single place, most likely your own blog.

As the world of blogging is changing, tweets on Twitter and comments on blog posts are becoming nearly as important as dedicated posts themselves, and BackType has served as a way to find out what other blogs people you follow read and comment on, or to show who is more likely to launch a new story, yet not participate in the following discussion. The service also serves to show if bloggers tend to only participate in the comments on their own site, and not around the Web - something I myself have been guilty of in some weeks.


BackType's New Alerts and Widgets

Alerts

After logging in to BackType, go to http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to see how you can follow individual words or search terms, and have them deliver e-mail alerts each day, each week, or in real time. You can even choose to follow terms but keep them on your dashboard, without spawning an e-mail.

Widgets

Just about every service has widgets these days, and the new challenge as a blogger can be which ones to install at the expense of others. If you've got the real estate, BackType's new widget shows you comments you've made across the Web, with a favicon of the blog, and its recency - showing how fresh the comment is. Interestingly, clicking on the widget takes you to the actual comment within BackType, and from there, you can click through to the blog post in question.

In case that wasn't enough, Christopher Golda of BackType says more features are planned. BackType has been expanding their coverage through scouring more and more blogs, has been improving the service's search engine, and they're developing an API. Hot on the heels of Disqus' launch of their own public API. it should be interesting to see how innovation in the comments space is developing.

You can find me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray

Outbrain to Extend Blog Recommendations With Third Party Content

Outbrain is best known for its easy to install blog widget that allows readers to rate posts on a one to five star scale, from "Bad" to "Excellent". I've been running it myself the last few months, and have seen some consistent, if not overwhelming, activity on the widgets each day. Outbrain is looking to extend their service by adding stories they believe you may like in addition to the current post, both from the site you own and from third party sites who are fellow Outbrain users. The idea, in their mind, is to deliver a wider range of content to readers, no matter the source.


Outbrain recommends other posts you might like and lets you rate posts.
Today, those who install Outbrain's blog widget also see stories "You might like", but they are limited to the blog on which the widget is installed. The new extension will, in effect, act like the "Web rings" of old, by syndicating your content on similar sites and extending the potential audience. Outbrain also is a big fan of Scott Karp's recent article on Publishing 2.0, which showed that sites which have the highest reader loyalty also are heavy linkers outside their own blogs.

This change is expected to roll out in the next few weeks, Outbrain told publishers late Tuesday night.

While the most visible aspects of Outbrain are the stars on users' blogs, there is actually a good set of statistics being tracked on the back end today, including a record of all blog post ratings, including the score, the post and the rater's country, the ability to sort all posts by total number of ratings, average rating and total popularity score (tabulated by the number of votes and average rating), and how many page views you have gained from the Outbrain network at large.


The most recent ratings on Outbrain.

The most popular posts, by rating, on Outbrain.
Given I'm not a high-traffic destination site, I doubt I'm exactly lighting up the Outbrain leaderboard. Most of my posts get a couple votes, and the most popular posts have received from 12 to 15 votes apiece. This could be due to people's unfamiliarity with Outbrain, reluctance to use the widget, or my low visibility.


My most active post on Outbrain got 15 votes.
Tonight, I logged in to my Outbrain account, and turned on story recommendations, both from my own site, and from third party sites. Over time, we'll see if Outbrain can deliver customized, quality, suggested links, and if this will increase the reader experience. Keep me posted on your thoughts.

Find Me at Blog World Expo This Weekend In Las Vegas

Even as the blog has gotten more visible through the last two years, I've largely stayed behind the scenes (or behind the monitor and keyboard). I haven't attended large industry events, or tried to make the story so much about me. I'd rather keep the highlights on the many services I enjoy and the people making the Web and technology better. But this weekend, the gravity pull from being requested to participate in two panels was too great, and you can now find me at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, from this afternoon through Sunday.

At the expo, I am participating on two panels, with esteemed peers, including Matt Dickman, Neil Vineberg, Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, discussing changes in the blogosphere, and how microcommunities are impacting where we participate, share ideas, and communicate.

Panel One:
Micromedia: The Next Big, Small Thing:

Description: "This session shows marketers what the true power of services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Flickr and Facebook have on a micro level. Also known as "micro blogging", micromedia has exploded with the growth of mobile technology and lets us look into the future of platform-agnostic marketing. Don't be left behind."

Time: Friday, Sept. 19, 2008: 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM, 222

Panel Two:
Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations:

Description: "With content spanning across social networks, miro communities, and media aggregators, comments, conversations, and responses are taking place on and around the original blog post. This panel will explore distributed conversations, fragmented expertise, and also the challenge of being everywhere - and whether or not it's not only necessary, but also feasible."

Time: Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM, 229

Outside of these panels, my schedule is not 100 percent set by any means. I've already started to hear from many online friends who I will be seeing for the first time, and look forward to finding many more, through seeing presentations, walking the exhibits floor, and through getting abused by e-mail and cell phone. If you're going to be attending, it'd be great to see you at either of these panels, or any other time. Please do reach out by phone at 408 646-2759 or by e-mail at louisgray@mac.com.

My BlogWorld Expo bio can also be found here.

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

By now, we've all likely grown used to the fact that RSS readers don't often see a blog's redesign. For those who choose not to click through and leave comments, there's little reason at all to visit a blog directly any more, considering it's possible to power through dozens or hundreds of feeds in a feed reader, be it Google Reader, BlogLines or any other. With tangential services like Disqus enabling me to even engage with readers via e-mail, instead of through the blog, there's now even less reason for me to even visit my own site.

At this point, I probably, on most days, can't even tell you my daily RSS subscriber count, visible on the blog, or see the MyBlogLog widget's most recent visitors, as I'm using my blog as a way to project content outward - to RSS readers, to aggregators, like FriendFeed, Strands and Social Median, and to connect with readers via e-mail, using Disqus. It also, via RSS, powers popular sharing sites, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme. But none of those activities, with the exception of comments, require actual visits.

While it's still important to be sure the blog itself loads quickly, for those who view it for the first time, or for those who do click through RSS and choose to leave a comment, the look and feel of the blog is less important over time. I expect fewer people are typing in the louisgray.com URL and viewing pages directly, as they accumulate feeds and read more, and see the blog's UI more as a shell for content than a destination where a reader would spend a good amount of time. At this stage, the blog is simply a point in time for the content to begin its journey.

The life of a post, as always, for me anyway, starts out in e-mail, where it's authored. Then it's copy/pasted into Blogger. Then I visit the site, quickly, and ping FeedBurner. Subsequently, I refresh the blog feed in FriendFeed to keep it up to date, and send a TinyURL copy to Twitter. At that point, I really don't have to come back. Should someone opt to comment, I can reply via e-mail in Disqus, and even Delete unwanted spam or other messages.

The bulk of the activity around the blog is pretty much happening someplace else - making the number one purpose for the blog site itself to convert new visitors into signing up for the RSS feed. So if they bump into the content, via Techmeme, Digg, StumbleUpon, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, or anywhere else, they'll sign up and take in my content in the way they choose. But my blog is not the destination. It's a point in the journey. For those who are relying on ad revenue to come through via page views, this won't be good news, but that's what I see happening. For me, as I'm not trying to convert visitors into cash, this is the new reality, and we're fine with you just signing up, passing through and being part of the conversation as you choose.

Statistics Are Your Friend, Even When They're Bad

By Robert Seidman of TVbytheNumbers (Twitter / FriendFeed)

It should be no surprise that being part of a site called TVbytheNumbers that I’m obsessed with statistics and this obsession extends to all the web site analytics and statistics that are available to us.

While I hear and read things often about how Feedburner’s stats stink and Google Analytics stats stink and none of them ever sync up well, that really hasn’t been my personal experience. Using either Feedburner or Google Analytics as an intraday tool is certainly problematic, and I have had a day or two here and there where Feedburner did lose data for an hour of five that it never recovered, but mostly both are just slow and do recover. Google Analytics typically tracks visits and visitors correctly intraday within reasonable timeframes, but lags behind in counting total pages for hours. Usually, by 8am Pacific time (but not often before then) all the page views for yesterday show up. And once they do, on a page view basis, Google Analytics, Feedburner and Quantcast all seem like they wind up syncing up within 2%-3%.

Given everything involved, I find the 2% difference very reasonable and it doesn’t bother us any. We wind up triangulating between Feedburner, Google Analytics and Quantcast and it’s less of a hassle than managing our Web logs.

Because of the problem cited above with Google Analytics being slow to capture all the page views, it does make intraday monitoring fairly worthless, aside from tracking visits and visitors. All the other stats – time on page, bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. – are all wrong until all the page views are captured. But there’s little we’re doing that requires great analytics on an intraday basis. There are certainly times when it would come in handy, but even as it is, it works well enough intraday where we can at least figure out if we add something or move something around whether the desired result was achieved.

As a tool used after the fact, I find Google Analytics to be an extremely valuable tool, though I often don’t like what I see!

One thing we’ve thrown in the towel on is that referral traffic is almost always bad, no matter the source. There are some rare exceptions where linking produces good traffic (high time on site, number of pages per visit, etc), but that’s indeed rare. In fact, in almost every instance where a specific post is linked, the traffic is bad, with bounce rates often in excess of 80%. That’s whether Louis is linking to it, whether someone throws a link on Twitter, or even if Matt Drudge links to one of our stories. StumbleUpon and Digg show similar results.

Such traffic is great for jacking up visits and visitors, but bad for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. We’ve pretty much thrown our hands up in the air on that score and attributed it to web surfing behavior via links. As an aside, the stable link we have from Drudge to “TV Ratings” produces much better results, but if he links to specific story on our site and gives it any prominence on his site, the traffic has a very high bounce rate.

That seems largely out of our control, however there was still one stat that really bothered me. That was that if someone landed on our site via our home page, the bounce rates were still pretty high, approaching 50%. Better if someone came directly instead of via a referral, but still bothersome either way. Here's the landing page results for our site for August 1-31:

Recently, with that and a couple of other factors in mind – mainly wanting the ability to showcase more content on the home page – we redesigned the site. The bounce rate for traffic landing on our home page was around 47% for August. In the last week, post- redesign, that is now around 25%. The bounce rate for referral traffic to specific posts is still lousy, but again, we don’t feel like we can do much about that. Here are the landing page stats from September 6-12.

All of this has me wishing I’d gotten around to redesigning the site sooner. Who knows how much repeat traffic we may have lost as a result of design? I also feel silly because once upon a time I actually had responsibility for the web design/UI group at Charles Schwab. I recently had lunch with the VP who ran that group in my org and when I told her about the results she shook her head and laughed at me. My mentality had been this: our blog is a blog, pretty much like every other blog and designed pretty much like every other blog so spending a lot of energy on design tweaking didn’t seem like a worthwhile priority.

I definitely should’ve known better. I’m still not very happy about the bounce rates on referral traffic, but am quite happy about the reduction in bounce rates for people landing on our home page and would ascribe that improvement completely to redesigning.

By the way, for anyone interested, we went with the Live Wire theme from Woo Themes that we modified a little. So far I’d consider it the best $70 we ever spent. It’s not a perfect world, so the theme isn’t perfect, but setting the navigation structure (which we’ll certainly still need to tweak) and other modifications didn’t take much time. For $70 and time spent, cutting the bounce rate to our home page just about in half seems like time and money well spent.

Read more by Robert Seidman at TVByTheNumbers.com.

Five Blogs to Take Back to School In September

Part Seven In a Monthly Series

Sometimes the best blogging is going on well away from the most visible places. Since March, I've taken the beginning of each month to showcase some bloggers that are writing some solid content in their corner of the blogosphere. They may not post as frequently as some of us do, and they certainly don't have the readership they deserve. Just maybe, with this little boost, it can give them the encouragement they need to keep going, and get more prolific.

Each of the bloggers highlighted in the last seven month has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July and August.

1) Matt Rhodes / Fresh Networks Blog (blog.freshnetworks.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Online Communities
Recent Highlight: Social Networking for Spies
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Cyndy Aleo-Carreira / Shakespeare I Ain't (www.fourlittlebees.net)

Focus: Technology, Parenting, Journalism
Recent Highlight: On Being a Feminist Parent
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Andy DeSoto/ AndyDesoto.com (www.andydesoto.com)

Focus: Social Media, Technology
Recent Highlight: Blogging Is a Big Game
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Alex Payne / al3x.net (www.al3x.net)

Focus: Software Engineering, Software, Computing
Recent Highlight: al3x's Rules for Computing Happiness
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Elliott Hughes / elliotth’s Blog (elliotth.blogspot.com/)

Focus: Apple, Linux, Software Engineering
Recent Highlight: Desktop Linux Suckage: Introduction
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for October's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Blogs' Never-Ending Battle of Page Views vs. Conversation

In a perfect blogging world, the very best writers with the very best content would get the most visitors, page views and subscribers. Every visitor would leave comments, send the links to friends, click through ads, and engage in thoughtful dialog with the author. And authors would be more than happy to pass along credit to other blogs for finding stories early, link to lesser-known voices, and admit when they got things wrong. But, alas, this theoretical utopia doesn't exist, and as a result, there's always a gap between what authors expect from readers and vice versa. And this gap can at times send even the best among us muttering to ourselves or launching into screeds when wronged.

The truth is, if you ask just about any blogger who has been active for a while, they could tell you some of their best posts withered into the dustbin of history, while a quick post that took no thought grabbed completely unexpected attention.

A couple examples on either side were visible this weekend:

On the up side: Adam Ostrow of Mashable posted to Twitter:

"looks like I posted one of my most successful (in terms of traffic ... thanks digg) posts ever on 2 hrs of sleep from Vegas hotel room."

On the down side: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also posted to Twitter:

"omg pageviews are SO low on both of the posts I've put up today. dreadful. must write a big one next. i try to do 1 fabulous thing each day"

Adam and Marshall are among the most visible authors to post to their very popular blogs. ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are professional blogs with a staff of reporters, that rely on ad revenue to make money - making the battle for page views much more important for them than for those of us who look at blogging as a hobby, or at least, not the prime source of income.

Whether they receive a small handful of visits, or thousands per day, it's a rare blogger who doesn't look at their statistics, or at least at broad trends that tell which posts were the most popular, and whether visits are trending up and down. For the better part of the last year, I even took to posting my statistics at the beginning of each month, only recently having chosen not to as some people misinterpreted my goals as being promotional, as the numbers increased over time.

But statistics aren't why I blog. (See: Why Do I Blog? An Introspective Look and What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations for more about that.) For me, I like engaging in conversations about technology, trends, and business, and providing commentary, while learning from smart folks around the Web. That's why it's less important to me whether comments take place here or on Friendfeed and other aggregation services, and that's why you don't typically see me begging for Digg votes.

In fact, the only time I ever made the Digg front page, back in April 2007, was when I noted that Google's Earth Day logo was an homage to global warming. It was a post that took maybe 15 minutes, and got a lot more attention than I ever had anticipated. Since then, the closest I ever got to the Digg front page was when in July, I announced the introduction of TweetDeck. It actually reached the precarious top position of "Upcoming" before dying on the vine.

Knowing one's statistics and caring about writing articles that find an audience aren't bad things at all. Seeing which articles are most-widely read, and which topics spur engagement are often key ways to let your readers guide what you should be covering. But when page views drive ad dollars, and income, the entire foundation of why people blog changes - as blogging moves away from conversations and more toward revenue creation.

Following Marshall's comments on Friday, there was a short discussion on FriendFeed that covered the push-pull of conversations versus page views. After I asked if it was "really about pageviews or about getting a good story and discussion", Marshall answered, "it is about good stories and discussion generally - but pageviews are also important. I do this for a living..." which had Svetlana Gladkova of Profy hoping for a long thread on "blogging for a living vs. blogging for passion", which she saw as core to the debate. The debate wasn't settled.

If all ads on all blogs disappeared tomorrow, cutting off the revenue air supply to professional bloggers, it would be interesting to see how many of them would keep going in their spare time. How many of them would change what they cover, or change the way they write headlines, or link to other peers, once money was removed from the equation, assuming they kept writing? Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, in a Monday article, quoted Gabe Rivera of Techmeme as saying that in today's competitive landscape where page views are king, that sites like "Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don't--they only link if they have to." Linking is part of the conversation, something we talked about at some length this time last year, when I said Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control.

It seems the only way to take page views out of the equation, and reduce the number of Shouts I get from Digg on a daily basis from authors trying to promote their own blogs' articles, would be to find ways to compensate writers that are not linked to advertising. But trends seem to be going in the opposite direction. Gawker Media has famously offered to pay reporters by the page view, a practice that came under fire from many corners of the Web, but continues, even as those who question the landscape are some of its biggest practitioners. In fact, back in 2006, ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, in an article called Page Views 2.0, wrote, "It's funny that this page views model is at its foundation almost identical to the Dot Com days (bubble 1.0). Drive as many users to your site as humanly possible."

We all know how the Dot Com days and bubble 1.0 ended. We've already debated whether ads and blogs are a good mix. But the idea that conversations and commentary can trump the importance of the almighty page view looks to be losing out. It's no wonder that blogs looking to keep their costs low in a time when users are clicking on ads a lot less than they had hoped are often hiring inexperienced, inexpensive, young journalists looking to take a bite out of old media.

I know I couldn't quit my day job and try to make money from blogging, and I wouldn't want to be a slave to the page view. But for those who lay awake at night designing Google AdWords copy and trying to think of the next big headline that will take Reddit, Digg and Yahoo! Buzz by storm, sending a swarm of readers that send page views through the roof, I wonder if they miss the simpler time when they could write more for themselves and engage with their readers to share a story and ideas, before feeling pushed to get their next article out the door in an assembly line of online copy or finding themselves redesigning the site to optimize for page views and increased ad displays. That's worth having a conversation about.

DISCLOSURE: In addition to his work at Mashable, Adam Ostrow is also the CEO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

If You Look Hard Enough, Conflicts of Interest Are Everywhere

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, contributing editor at The Industry Standard and professional guest poster in a number of Web sites, including this blog and Duncan Riley's The Inquisitr, has a great discussion starter this evening on bloggers and their conflicts of interest. The piece, titled Out of the Navels and Into the Mirrors, asks specifically if bloggers should talk about companies where they have a financial investment, any kind of part-time or full-time role, or if they should become friends with those they cover. Though broad, her questions likely resonate with many of us involved in blogging and reporting in general, and it's very likely you'll find a wide array of answers, depending who is polled. But each of us comes in with specific likes and dislikes, or personal history, which impacts everything we do, and displays our underlying bias, financial or not.

First, she asks, "Should bloggers cover companies they invest in?"

I almost immediately want to say no. But in actuality, investors in a company usually know it very well, especially if it's an early-stage situation, where they will know it better than the general public. It's no secret they'll likely be more positive on the company, but if they're fair and disclose the relationship, you may learn a great deal.

Good examples of people who talk about companies they are invested in include Fred Wilson of AVC, and Mark Cuban of Blog Maverick.

Second, she asks, "Should bloggers continue blogging once they join boards, take day-job positions with a company, or start/buy a company?"

Again, disclosure is needed. There are many official company blogs that are written by employees, openly. There are other blogs, like Mini-Microsoft, written anonymously, by an employee who is not an approved representative of the company who has unique insight as a full-time employee.

In a more close to home case, Adam Ostrow, CEO of ReadBurner, stopped blogging about ReadBurner on Mashable when he helped acquired the site. (See also: Did ReadBurner Acquisition Cause Conflict of Interest for Mashable?) When I joined the team to help as an advisor, I spelled out my hope to be transparent, and will disclose the role any time I get close to talking about the space.

Finally, she asks, "Should bloggers make friends with people from the companies they cover?"

I think this is absolutely human nature. I have a tendency to be positive on this blog. I talk about companies I like, services I use, and others I have big hopes for. In the process of investigating these services, often I trade a lot e-mails and phone calls with entrepreneurs, which can get to knowing them well or considering them friends. Most of the time, it's not the same kind of friend you can watch a baseball game with or catch a movie, but you do end up rooting for them and may at times gloss over some bugs in hopes they'll suceeed. (See also: My Double Standard for Web Services and Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.)

Being friendly can lead to a more collaborative environment, where you can both get information early, but also lend a helping hand to those who need it. I've never shied away from playing an informal QA role for services that need aid, and I want to instill a level of trust with those I do engage so they know they can trust me with confidential data.

Beyond these questions, my biases are everywhere, and they impact how I write and my opinions, which do show up. I happen to prefer Apple Mac OS X to Windows, even with the occasional glitch that impacts my Apple experience. I happen to be LDS and wasn't too excited about the rumors spread last week. I like sports, I tend to think Cal is better than Stanford at just about everything, even when it's clear I'm wrong, and I do have friends in the blogosphere - some of whom I've done podcasts with or traded e-mails with or phone calls. I will link to them more often, I will interact with them on social sites more often, and I will comment on their posts more often. (Cyndy and Duncan included)

On rare occasions, interactions with people behind services also results in free stuff, which for some, could lead to bias. I have free t-shirts from Disqus, FriendFeed, and Browzmi, for instance, all which came after I wrote about them a few times. I have a world-famous CenterNetworks sticker, and my babies have schwag from ReadBurner, Shyftr, NewsCred and other places (largely because I asked for it). I also represent standard demographics. I'm male in my early 30s. I live in California, in the Bay Area specifically. I work in the tech sector for a private company, and have since 1998. I have two young kids. Each of these things impacts my view of the world and what I like or don't like.

Rather than setting hard and fast rules about bloggers going out of their way to avoid topics they likely know well, or asking them to be friendless automatons, we should ask them to be more transparent and clear if they are acting with real bias. It's that which will make the difference between trusted and untrustworthy - and enable bloggers to look in the mirrors comfortably again.

Transparency, Disclosure and Opening Up the Kimono

On Wednesday, I was pleased to announce my beginning a new, formal, relationship with the ReadBurner team as an advisor, where I'll be looking to help provide guidance and strategy and be more of a colleague with the already-successful team, who is looking to make the site a one-stop destination to find the most popular content online, today starting with RSS feeds, and maybe tomorrow, much, much more. Who knows?

In advance of this announcement, I reached out to a pair of folks who I perceive to be competitors of ReadBurner, and told them exactly what the plan was - that I was going to be helping ReadBurner out, and that I wasn't going to be paid, but instead, would essentially have a small potential equity stake, just like any employee, advisor or board member at a private company. ReadBurner's success, essentially, could be my success as well, should the stars be aligned.

Crossing the chasm from a completely neutral party to a biased party, or at least having the perception of bias, isn't something I'm used to. My enthusiasm for ReadBurner, as well as my enthusiasm for FriendFeed, AssetBar, Social Median, Feedly, Ballhype and other services over the last few years, has been seen here, and in each case, it has been done so without compensation, or expectation of compensation. Now that this has changed in one specific example, it of course raises questions. Will competitors of ReadBurner ever talk to me again? Will other companies try and guess where ReadBurner is headed, and trusting me less, go a different route? Maybe they will, and that's a risk that's assumed.

Only hours after my first post did I get a question like this from one developer, asking if ReadBurner should be considered competition to their work, and should they "be careful about sharing things we're working on"? Well, in all truthfulness, you should always be careful about sharing pre-release content with anyone, to start with, and second, you should always think about whether that person will have pre-conceived biases, or will be abusing your trust. And it makes sense to protect your proprietary data.

With that said, over the last few years, I have tried to be as transparent as possible, and it is important to me to be trusted. I have never written a single post on this site for pay, or in exchange for goods. I've also tried to be reachable by anyone, occasionally to my detriment. My cell phone number and personal e-mail address have been on this blog since early 2007, and even in the footer of every RSS feed. In one example where I was concerned there could be a perception of bias, I told you when I won an iPhone from Social Median and asked you to judge me to see if I unequally gave praise to the site as a result. And I expect to keep telling you if I can be found in any way to be uneven in how I view a site, person or anything else.

In 2008, especially, I've worked with developers and entrepreneurs, getting early access to sites sometimes weeks or months ahead of their roll-out, and have done so without leaking their information early, and often, worked to provide informal QA to help get their product ready for announcement, with Feedly being the best example. As I said this evening in a fun ReadBurner podcast, if I can help make the products and services we use online better, then I've done my job. I often want these products to succeed, even if I'm not their target demographic and am more than happy to keep things close to the vest, and often offer advice for free. It's what I'd been doing with ReadBurner off and on before they asked for more of my time and make it official.

But truth be told, in the online space, sites that look completely different today could look similar tomorrow. The LOUD3R family of Web sites offers many different topic-driven news aggregators, as did the Ballhype/Showhype/Beltway Blips family, each of which I covered. SocialMedian, similarly, can offer an aggregation of news on the same topics, and sites like MyBlogLog, Fav.or.it and Technorati use topics to bring similar bloggers and posts together. In theory, so could FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Feedheads or RSSmeme. And each of the last few sites could be rejiggered to take on more horizontal plays like Google News or Techmeme.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, on the podcast, made it clear that if he were a competitor to ReadBurner, not only would he not want to share any information with me, but he recommended to us on the call that we should be especially careful, so no entrepreneur could claim we had stolen their ideas. Allen is a smart guy whose ideas I respect, and he's right. But you shouldn't expect that overnight I'm going to start saying ReadBurner every other word and talking smack about their competitors. And I've never received anything like a confidential roadmap from anybody - so that's not an issue.

To help with clarity, I am going to add details about the ReadBurner relationship to my "About" page, and I'm going to get even more transparent so that anybody who does have questions can get those answers. There is one more small company I've been helping in an advisory role since early this Spring, and soon, they will be public, so I can talk about it, and again, be transparent. But that's in a space I don't write about, so much of the above doesn't apply.

Since starting this site, I've very visibly eschewed advertising, and haven't been making any money for what I write or where I participate. Maybe working in a consultancy or advisory role to companies like ReadBurner is where I end up "monetizing the blog", even if that isn't my sole goal for being here. As previously mentioned, I enjoy the conversations and the camaraderie, and have been doing a lot of "advising" for free for a lot of different sites. That's why I wrote "10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader" back in March of 2007, and offered "10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn" that same month, as well as 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed last December. That's why I asked What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?. In none of those cases were my suggestions requested or compensated, and I hope to keep thinking out loud and offering advice for free.

My activity with ReadBurner, in actuality, will be very small, compared to everything else I'm doing. But if there's ever a chance where I could be seen as being biased, or needing to disclose that relationship, I will absolutely do so, and I both expect you to and want you to keep me honest - as I've tried to be so far. And if or when I screw up, call or e-mail. Transparency is the best policy.

Exposed: Blogging's Secret Next Generation

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

I'm afraid to admit it, and feel ashamed for the Stay family name, but I can't take all the credit for my last article on Facebook removing features and the confusing nature of the new design. Yes, it's a shame, but I'm going to have to tell you the real story behind us guest bloggers on LouisGray.com. You see, it's not really us blogging most of the time. Louis Gray has an entire army of baby guest bloggers that post for him regularly. Louis recruits us, but in reality he really is looking for the amazing talents of our babies.

I'm going to come clean on this one though. I'm going to have to blame most of my last article about Facebook on my 4 month old son, Jesse III, who has recently been recruited as a new guest blogger for LouisGray.com. It appears we got the II's (from my name) and III's (from his name) mixed up as we were entering our logins that night and he very easily and mistakenly posted as myself that night.

I caught the mistake the next day and was able to quickly correct it, showing that Facebook's new design was definitely not easy enough for a baby to use. I mean, if he couldn't figure out the new Facebook redesign, how could I? I have since docked his allowance and limited him to just one binky per day for the incident, and it will never happen again. Coincidently, it was also him who posted on my blog awhile back, under his own name, saying he was on hiatus from Twitter. He didn't tell me beforehand and I was stuck eating his words as people thought it was actually me leaving Twitter. I mean, why couldn't Twitter allow suffix meta tags so we didn't have to share the same username? I have since found his counsel quite comforting though, as Identi.ca and FriendFeed seem to be working out pretty well for me so far. He certainly knows how to cause a stir though!

Louis Gray, in his open, family-oriented format, is no stranger to baby-blogging. After all, it was his baby Matthew that recently was the center (no pun intended) of the Gray Family/CenterNetworks controversy, and after much heartache and emotions he is now back blogging so I hear for his Dad when his Dad is too busy with work. You often wonder how Louis does it, following everything on FriendFeed, posting sometimes multiple times a day to this blog, and now on SocialMedian. Well, the answer is, so I hear, he doesn't - this is a family establishment here on LouisGray.com and Matthew is as much a part of the family as the rest of our babies are.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is also a welcomed guest blogger on LouisGray.com. What you may not know is that her 2-year old daughter, Pete, has been moonlighting on the side of her job with CenterNetworks.com to occasionally help out her mom on LouisGray.com. Yes, while Matthew has been criticized by Allen Stern for slacking on the job, sweet little Pete has also been spending a little time over here helping out in her spare time. We certainly appreciate the help! In fact, Cyndy's first post to LouisGray.com was actually a Seesmic video from her daughter, Pete. Cyndy does such great posts, it's hard to tell which ones her daughter may actually be helping her out on and which ones are actually Cyndy. Thank goodness they don't have the same name!

Next time you read a LouisGray.com guest post, think of the babies behind those posts. We may put our names in front of them, but in reality, our babies are the true reason behind Louis Gray's success. Louis wasn't joking when he said he is an "early adopter".

Jesse III's next post will be on Facebook privacy, for babies.

Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There's No Quota.

In May of last year, noticing how some bloggers I read often had slowed their publishing, or found alternative routes to express themselves, I asked if they were suffering from what I termed "Blog fatigue." With the dog days of summer upon us (in the Northern hemisphere), I'm seeing the issue crop up again, as peers are talking about taking time off from blogging or social media, explaining holes in their publishing schedule, or openly questioning their enthusiasm. And while I understand the occasional self-assessment, I believe many are feeling pressure to hit a certain number of posts in a given time period, or are feeling challenged to keep pace with much more visible, prolific, people for whom this is much more aligned with their career.

See:

• SheGeeks: The Repetition of The Blogosphere
  
• Colin Walker: Hiatus?
  
• New Comm Biz: Blogger burnout? Give up or dig in.

The truth is that unless you're being paid specifically to blog:

• You don't need to blog every day.
  
• You don't need to post more than once a day.
  
• You shouldn't feel guilty about "gaps".
  
• You don't have to explain yourself to anyone.

Unfortunately for many of us who participate in the tech blogging space, there are many examples of blogs or individuals who can crank out more than one post a day, every single day. There are examples of people who seemingly offer strong content with every article. And there are also the uber-connected, who are seemingly ever-present in a wide variety of social networks, always seem to get to things before you do, and are "ahead" in every statistic, be it number of contacts, comments, or posts. And this doesn't even begin to take into account the professional multi-author blogs, run like an assembly line.

The fact that these individuals are both visible and measurable can bring others to feel inadequate, or challenged to "keep up" when it's actually not necessary. It makes more sense to "be yourself" than to try and match up with somebody else who has different goals and set of circumstances.

I had lunch with a friend this afternoon who said he often won't post to his blog for upwards of a week if nothing strikes his fancy. For him, there's no inner push to meet a quota, to post every day, or provide a take on the last 24 hours' happenings. And I found his counsel wise - to not forget why you started blogging in the first place. For most of us, it wasn't to compete with the professional blogs or to get a scoop to a story, or to have the most followers on the favorite social network of the month. Instead, it was to communicate and share ideas, or just to act as a log of your thoughts and activity.

In the world of business, your revenue starts over at zero every fiscal quarter. If you just had a great quarter, well, good for you and get back to work, because you need to hit quota and make your number in 90 days, or you and the company might be in trouble. But in blogging, assuming you don't have a boss paying you for each entry, there is no quota to fill. If you don't post in three days, you're not going to be fired. Instead of adding stress to your life by setting artificial standards on what you need to do, and posting for the sake of posting, or not giving it your best effort, it makes more sense to let the content drive your effort, and not the other way around.

So don't stress out. The only person keeping score is you.

Five Cool Bloggers for The Hot Month of August

August marks the sixth month where I've tried to highlight five lesser-known bloggers who are quietly toiling in relative obscurity. Each of the bloggers highlighted each month has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Most are focused on Web applications and social media.

There's no simple rule for determining obscurity, aside from the fact their content consistently outproduces the number of comments they receive, or likely, traffic. They don't rank highly on common measures, such as Technorati, and have, to date, avoided controversy. As this is the sixth month producing this list, don't forget to check out the archives and find 25 other sites who have been featured. Prior editions can also be found for March, April, May, June and July.

1) Chris Baskind / ChrisBaskind.com (www.chrisbaskind.com)

Focus: Environment, Technology, Social Networking
Recent Highlight: Dear Twitter: It’s Over. And It’s for The Best
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Mona N / Pixel Bits (pixelbits.wordpress.com)

Focus: Wikipedia, Social Networking, Humor
Recent Highlight: Screw Facebook, I’m Learning How to Unclog Toilets from Knol (Google’s “Wikipedia”)
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Kyle Lacy / KyleLacy.com (www.kylelacy.com)

Focus: Social Media, Web Applications, Marketing
Recent Highlight: How to be Productive with Social Media!
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) David Griner / The Social Path (www. thesocialpath.com)

Focus: Social Media, Marketing
Recent Highlight: In a Free Online World, What Are You Willing to Pay For?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Justin Korn / Justin Korn’s Blog (blog.justinkorn.com)

Focus: Photography, Social Networking, Technology
Recent Highlight: The Online Participation Factor
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for September's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

State of the Blog: July 2008 Recap

July 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,443

Total stories published in July: 54
(About 1.7 per day, up from 1.3 in June)

Total stories in July with comments: 53
(98% of all stories, from 37 and 97% in June)

Total comments on July posts: 783, approx. 14 per post.
(From 493 or 15 per post in June)


July statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 978 (up 190)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,989 subscribers (up 777)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 64 subscribers (up 8)
MyBlogLog Members: 311 (up 31)

Twitter Followers: 1,569 (Up 312)
FriendFeed Followers: 3,268 (Up 726)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall.

Month over month growth: 42.6%
Year over year growth: 1,197.9%

Top Five Most Visited July Stories (According to Analog)

1. Seeing the Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking
2. How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers?
3. TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining
5. Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air

Others receiving votes: TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups, Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience, July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle, As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier, Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence, and To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier (61 comments)
2. Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking (59 comments)
3. Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence (53 comments)
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining (52 comments)
5. Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail (32 comments)

July of 2008 could have been a challenging one. The first month after having twins, some thought, as did I at times, that the new family obligations could make efforts here come to a screeching halt. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Being on paternity leave for most of the month helped, as did the addition of some great voices as guest bloggers, who I've enjoyed having profiled here. In June, there were guest posts from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Jesse Stay, Hutch Carpenter, Colin Walker, Mark Dykeman, Rob Diana, and (jeff)isageek. I hope to see their names here quite a bit going forward, and maybe some new names as well? Stay tuned.

Product news in the month saw new Twitter clients TweetDeck and Posty get some solid traction, the opening up of SocialMedian in beta, AssetBar's launch of FanFlow, the acquisition of Ballhype and launch of Beltway Blips, not to overlook the controversial launch of Cuil, and rollout of the new 2.0 software for iPhone and iPod Touch.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience

Guest post by Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Let's take a moment to pause from our normal pontifications about A-Lists, aggregators, egoism, elitism, monetization, commercialization, capitalization, and such and talk about something bigger. This is something that would ultimately benefit the overall audience that we all share today and something that would act like the fabled tide that lifts all boats.

Let's make the social media audience bigger. Let's get more readers, more engaged commentators, and more bloggers. Let's permeate into even more sectors of interest. Let's aim for every adult in the world to be an active reader of blogs.


You might think that I'm joking, but I'm not. I think it's in every blogger's interest to make the blogosphere, and its reading audience, bigger.

Why do we need to expand?

• Attrition - eventually we'll move on for one reason or another (yes, I'm thinking very long term here) and the blogosphere's audience will eventually be reduced to a smaller, weaker size
• Increase adoption and acceptance of blogging as a serious, valid form of content creation to a significant population that doesn't view it as being significant
• New blood and new ideas can help refresh us all and combat the echo chamber effect IF we are also prepared to accept the need to retread some old ground to educate the newcomers
• To introduce people to new creative outlets to give them the opportunities for personal development and self-actualization

If we believe that it's worthwhile to expand the size of the blogosphere, and social media in general, how can we make it happen? Here are some suggestions to welcome more people into the community (or communities):

1. Continue To Make Our Technology Easier and Simpler to Use

Blogging has come a long way, particularly with content management platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, and Moveable Type, but there's still a learning curve, particularly if you want to do more than type and format and include links. New developments continue (Profy looks like a step in the right direction) and will need to continue. If we compare the development of blogs to that of automobiles, I don't think we've quite hit the power steering era yet.

2. Look Outward, Not Inward

We need to look outside of our niches for new and useful ideas. Tech blogging, as an example, tends to be the stomping grounds of the earliest adopters of technologies and tools, but maybe the members of this niche aren't always the best at how to communicate and persuade. Maybe we don't think of the most creative ideas to combine images, text, audio, and video.

3. Partner With Complementary Skills to Achieve More

Maybe tech bloggers can help other niches with the tools and in turn can get coaching on the “softer” skills of blogging. This encourages movement and sharing between niches which could have other beneficial effects.

4. Sell the Benefits to the Unconverted, but in Practical Ways

How can we help real-life organizations and communities in need? Can we help them communicate better with each other? Can we help them disseminate accurate information? Can we help them learn and teach each other? In short, can we show them how to use technology to address some of their existing problems?

5. Encourage Listening and Participation

Hutch Carpenter proposed that bloggers become more social and better networked as their “careers” progress, but after a certain stage the audience of people that they listen to begins to shrink again. This is a natural phenomenon that occurs to anyone as their schedules load up with requests and “must do” items. In my opinion we must continually try to fight that urge, otherwise we develop tunnel vision and lose sight of what is happening around us.

6. Apprenticeship

What about volunteering to take new users under our wings and be a resource to them, but in a more proactive way? Maybe create a general “helper” community for new users, or to promote these things better to the entire world. I proposed the concept of a social media apprentice a number of months ago. Maybe we need to work it in large numbers.

7. Focus on Long Term Payback

The networking component of social media is sometimes overlooked and undervalued. It seems that a lot of people enter social media with the primary intent of earning income purely through their blog. Some people are clever with the use of copy and advertising (or gobbledygook and advertising) to make a quick buck. Most of those people will eventually alienate any possible audience that would come voluntarily, when in fact, the most valuable “win” in social media is the strength of the personal network that you build. This is why LinkedIn is quite possibly the ultimate social media application because it has a very practical, serious purpose that many other applications don't have.

8. Jettison Your Bratty Side

Let's be blunt: there's a lot of posturing and acting that occurs in certain segments of the social media communities. Yes, there's no doubt that people reap certain rewards by behaving in certain ways to please the crowd. Unfortunately, those rewards don't spread very far - they tend to reward the actor. Will that work in the long run? For some, it probably will (unfortunately). For most of us, it's not worth it to tarnish your character in such a manner. Civility, respect, and compassion will probably go a lot further, unless, of course, you're the type of person who enjoys being manipulated by MSM (main stream media) techniques.

9. Keep Exploring - There's Always a Cutting Edge Somewhere

The frontiers that we can explore are only limited by our creativity, determination, and resourcefulness. Other people will want to see where you are going and what you are doing.

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder

We can complain that the early settlers took all of the good land, staked the best claims, and have put a stranglehold on the riches so that no one else can do well. Perhaps it's true. But consider this:

• For every Wal-Mart, a K-Mart may suffer, but a Target and countless niche retailers can thrive
• For every IBM, there's a Microsoft that comes along and reinvents an industry by being nimble, clever, and focused
• For every Microsoft, there's an Apple, a Google, and a Yahoo that changes the world under their noses.

However, increasing the size of your market, and your audience, is a key ingredient in any growth strategy.

What do you think? Why not share your thoughts?

Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence

Guest post by Hutch Carpenter of I'm Not Actually a Geek (FriendFeed/Twitter).

I had an interesting discussion with Robert Seidman on FriendFeed about whether bloggers need to actually interact with their readers. Here are two comments Robert made on the subject:

Hutch: here's one for you to ponder. If Seth [Godin] is the smartest guy on the Internet (and I think he is), why isn't he on FriendFeed? : ) He also doesn't allow conversation on his blog posts!

Interactions aren't really ever needed when the content by itself is really valuable. But why do so many people make such a big deal about "the conversation" then? So on the one hand you want to say it is a big huge honking deal, but on the other hand not so much?

Robert is right about this. Interactions really aren't a requirement for bloggers. Think about the core essence of blogging: things that you care about. Whether you get anyone else caring is secondary.

But of course, it's really not that simple, is it? You blog because you feel like you've something of value to impart, be it telling the world about feeding your cats or nailing the next trend in technology. A point I made to Robert was that interactions are important for learning. Assuming you are a student of life, you will need interactions with others to test out ideas and to learn different facts and perspectives.

Interactions with readers, wherever they occur, are also an important part of maintaining "presence" on the Web. No beginning blogger should have the conceit that people will just show up to read his or her blog. You've got to establish yourself out there by making your blog posts, and thinking, visible to a wider audience.

But at some point, bloggers seem to move into a different point in their blogging career. They no longer need the interactions with readers so much. They've arrived. And in the case of Jason Calacanis, after arriving, they leave.

One observation to make is this: the level of interaction seems to vary by the blogger's level of established reputation. As a blogger gets more well-known on the Web, the level of interaction declines.

In fact, I'd wager that blogger interactions follow a predictable curve.

Bloggers' Interactions Vary by Blogging Stage

The chart below graphs the level of blogger interaction with different levels of being "established":


Four stages are depicted along the X axis. Left-to-right, the stages indicate increasing degrees of success in blogging. "Success" in this case being defined as establishing a voice that resonates with the audience you want.

And what are "interactions"?

• Allowing blog comments
• Responding to blog comments
• Commenting on FriendFeed about your blog
• Tweeting links to your blog posts
• Digging your blog
• Stumbling your blog
• Pimping your blog on others' blogs

With that, let's run through the four stages of the blogger.

1. Blogger n00b

When you start out blogging, you don't know much. Most likely, you're somewhat sheepish about your writing, but you press on because you know that's the only to get better. No one leaves comments on your blog. And you're too embarrassed to try or don't even know the different ways to raise awareness of your blog.

You're not interacting a lot. But that's a good thing. You need the time to get some seasoning.
2. Figuring Things Out

OK, you're through the n00b stage. People occasionally leave a comment on your blog. Someone actually linked to a blog post of yours. You've noticed those "digg this" buttons on blogs. You're gaining confidence. "Hey - I actually can put two sentences together!"And it appears at least some people care about what you write. This is the stage where interactions are ascendant. You're carving out your piece of the webscape, and finding fellow travelers. You're learning who the A-Listers are, and how Techmeme works.

In this stage, bloggers do a ton of interacting. It's a wonderful time. The trial and error of it is liberating. You post crazy stuff, and see how it plays. You'll find surprising success every so often, as some site picks up your blog posts. As you rise up the curve in this stage, you find success by being out there. The more you interact with readers everywhere, the more established you become.

It's in this stage where you really discover your blogging voice. Discussions with others, and seeing what plays out there really help you in this process.

3. Established Voice

When you hit this stage, congratulations. You are now a bona fide figure on the scene. And there's a change in posture when it comes to interactions. Stage 3 bloggers still interact with their readers. But you're not going to see them doing all the other types of interactions: tweeting blog posts, digging them, etc.

Fred Wilson strikes me as a blogger in this stage. He has certainly achieved a wide following with his blog A VC. And he replies to commenters on his blog. So he's maintaining a decent level of interaction. But do you think he's digging his posts? Leaving comments elsewhere with links to his blog?

Fred is a solid Stage 3 blogger. He knows his voice, he delivers quality content and he's become something of a household name among the digerati. He gains new readers based on those qualities, not his interactions. But he's also an ongoing student, trying out ideas to help make him a stronger venture capitalist.

Two characteristics of Stage 3 bloggers also emerge:

• The sheer volume of readers makes keeping up with all of them impossible.
• A new kind of reader shows up, people who exhibit troll-like behavior.

It's these two dynamics that cause some bloggers to head onto the next stage.

4. Industry Legend

Go to Seth Godin's blog and try to leave a comment. Or comment on Marc Andreessen's blog. Robert Seidman's comment at the top of this post mentioned that he thought Seth is the smartest guy on the Internet. I personally am very impressed with Marc Andreessen, both for his entrepreneurial accomplishments and his blogging.

In Stage 4, the blogger is less a student of life, and more a professor.

You're also going to come under fire for your lack of interaction. A lot of people question the lack of interaction by top bloggers. Duncan Riley wrote this comment on FriendFeed in response to Louis Gray's post about rules for social following:

Louis, I still think you're the exception to the rule, maybe Scoble to, because you interact with people even if you don't follow them. I still think though that many in the so-called A-List don't care about their followers aside from bragging rights, which is why reciprocity isn't unreasonable as a mark of respect.

The blogger really is playing a different game at Stage 4. At this point, you've become established in the market, you're busy with a lot of non-blogging endeavors, you've got too many readers to count, the trolls love to come at you and you've become expert in a field.

Not surprisingly, your interactions decline. Jason Calacanis folds up his blogging tent. Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen don't accept comments. Even Robert Scoble feels it.

Robert Scoble is a Stage 4 blogger who interacts more than anyone on earth. He is truly the exception that proves the rule. But the limits of his interaction have been tested as well. In a post entered this morning, he decries the types of comments he receives on his blog as those from people "with an axe to grind". Digg readers' comments "are simply disgusting cesspools."

In a post I wrote a couple months ago, How Do Solo Bloggers Break into the Techmeme 100?, I noted that stars in the non-blogging world would immediately have a huge following. Assuming any blogging skill, they would pretty quickly have a presence on the web. Their star power would carry into blogging.

I would expect them to immediately go to Stage 4 on the blogging cycle as well. If Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang decides to start blogging, don't expect him to have any "conversations" with his readers.

What Do You Think?

The blogger lifecycle is not a perfect description. Many bloggers don't ride the edge of the curve (or in the case of Robert Scoble, sit above it). But as general framework for considering when blogger interactions are more likely, I think it does the job.

As a Stage 2 blogger myself, I'd love to hear your thoughts! You can find me regularly posting at http://bhc3.wordpress.com/ and interacting on FriendFeed.

Techmeme and TechCrunch's Detractors Prove It's Hard to be On Top

One downside of being in a visible leadership position is that you often have a bulls-eye on your back. Sometimes it's from your competition. Sometimes it's from people who feel what you offer isn't benefitting themselves personally, and other times, it can arguably be your biggest fans, who want to change what it is you do to serve their whim of the day. In the tech blogosphere, there is no single blog more influential and visible than TechCrunch, and there is no single aggregator or news site more influential and visible than Techmeme. That the two's fortunes are at times seen as being closely linked only helps to fuel the flames of frustration by those eager to see change, be it through finding alternative sources for news, or, instead, asking for either site to change its tone, its breadth of coverage, or its methodology.

From a third party point of view, it seems the day in and day out potshots against both Techmeme and TechCrunch have taken their toll on the most visible representatives of each site. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera is well-known for his sarcastic, evasive, answers when his site's reputation is questioned, and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is often described as short-fused and sleep deprived. Recently rumors have circulated saying Arrington wants out of the blogging business, and is looking to sell, no doubt in part due to stress of the "always on" atmosphere and ruthless competition. Of course, rumors are simply rumors... but given most PR firms have gotten to the point where reaching out to TechCrunch is part of their standard shtick, it's likely not as fun fielding all the inquiries and sticking to others' schedules as openly writing once was. And TechCrunch has burned through its share of strong writers, with talents like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley leaving, one on good terms, and the other, not as well, as it turned out. (See: On Arrington, My Final Word)

The two sites' major detractors tend to rail on common topics. TechCrunch can be seen as egocentric, and Arrington is perceived to have a bee-line on exclusives. Techmeme similarly has been described as elitist by those who don't get included, navel-gazing by those who think it's too insular, biased by those who feel they have been overlooked, or a single person's playground, by those who feel Gabe's claims to automation are overblown. And some industry blog veterans who regularly appear on Techmeme have even taken to saying it's not as relevant and influential as it once was, replaced by other sources of news.

The complaints around either service became so commonplace that a new word, bitchmeme, was made, loosely defined as "bitching about Techmeme", usually on the weekend, when some tech bloggers had no news to write about. The phrase since took on a life of its own, meaning any silly conflict between blogs that took place on the weekend.

TechCrunch and Techmeme get as much grumpiness tossed their direction as they do because they each own a valuable niche in the blogosphere, and are expanding their lead, rather than relinquishing it. While you could say that TechCrunch competes with ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOM or others, they have cemented themselves as the go-to site for new services entering the market, and even their opinion pieces are widely read, with almost a million unique RSS subscribers taking note. Techmeme's best competition at this point is BlogRunner, with Hacker News, Dave Winer's TechJunk, Duncan Riley's QMeme and more organic sites like RSSmeme or ReadBurner coming up in conversation. But Techmeme's original perceived competition, like TailRank and Megite, are mere shadows of what they initially promised. Meanwhile, TechCrunch is bringing on new writers, and posting more stories than ever (See: The Statbot: TechCrunch Statistics A-W), and Techmeme is going more mainstream, with news sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times featuring more prominently than most individual bloggers.

And with this leadership position, the sites don't have the luxury of acting without criticism any longer. Gabe almost has a part-time position made for himself just to go from blog to blog and explaining that in fact, Techmeme is not evil, and that it is relevant, explaining that TechCrunch has built a reputation as a reputable source for tech news, and therefore, is adequately represented on his site and in the leaderboard. Seemingly every day, Gabe is having to answer questions on Twitter or FriendFeed from people like Robert Scoble (or me in one example, when I wondered why a hot topic wasn't getting airtime). Meanwhile, Arrington gets called nasty names, mocked by Valleywag, and yelled at on Twitter.

But if you take a step back, TechCrunch's goal is to be a technology blog focused on Web 2.0, and it's doing that. Techmeme's stated goal is to be like the front page of the memes that are happening in the tech blogosphere at any given time, and for the large part, it does do that. While there is some uncertainty as to all the criteria that makes up being part of Techmeme, or rising up and down the page, or when something makes the site, it typically takes discussion, not only on the original site, but through links from other blogs, on Twitter, and other sharing sites.

The argument could be made that you could possibly find your technology news faster in another way. Maybe you could find it on FriendFeed, and get a broader scope of sources. Maybe you prefer the democratic approach of ReadBurner and RSSmeme. Maybe you want to go through Google Reader yourself, or rely on others' shared link blogs. But there is no question in my mind that Techmeme is relevant, as is TechCrunch, and being mentioned on either site continues to drive traffic today.

I also believe that Techmeme does a very good job at being available to those bloggers who aren't elite household names. Just tonight, we saw a blog that was born only three days ago make the site, and Yuvi Panda's work on The Statbot shows one third of all Techmeme headlines come from the "Long Tail". Techmeme is accessible to bloggers who write quality content and spur discussion. While I'm absolutely active in places like FriendFeed and Twitter, I don't believe that discussions from FriendFeed belong on Techmeme any more than do popular Twitter posts or popular YouTube videos. Techmeme has specialized in bringing us top tech blogging news, and it's doing it.

The bottom line? If you don't like Techmeme and you don't like TechCrunch, stop reading, or go out and make your own. The best way to show they're no longer relevant is to take them down yourself through competition. But today, they are both standing strong whether you like it or not. I just hope Mike Arrington and Gabe Rivera are enjoying what they do as much as when they first started, and that the daily body blows haven't gotten them so jaded that they want out, for that would be a big loss.

To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question

Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

Staying Loose Can Help Keep Your Ego In Check

A common complaint I run into in our little bubble of the tech blogosphere is that the most widely known bloggers are ego-driven, and will pull any shenanigan to keep themselves on top. Sometimes, they are accused of making themselves part of the story, if not the story itself, eschewing traditional journalism rules that separate the subject from its author.

While I have personal high expectations, I hope not to convey the same type of "it's about me" nonsense people have seen elsewhere. That's been helped of late by some very silly peers who took the time to mock my seeming omnipresence online with a pair of interesting endeavors - first, a parody site, and second, a room on FriendFeed that parallels the Internet meme of "Chuck Norris Facts".

Unlike other recent skirmishes online that have taken place around parody and satire, these haven't sprung up with ill intent, and I don't have any plans to stop either one, although I think it's best if I leave them be without being all that involved. After all, it's much more fun to watch the nonsense from the sidelines.

LoisGray.com: A Blog for Late Adopters

The satire site, started on Thursday, is called www.loisgray.com, featuring my inverse logo, and billing itself as a "Tennessee Valley Blog for late adopters, technophobes, RSS oblivious, and apple growers. (May also occasionally contain some TV, news, recipes, and politics...)"

Early posts on loisgray.com (which were quite funny) explained the difficult issues of getting online without AOL and using Google to search the Web. But as the article warns, "never click on the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button because that takes you to the internet porn that you hear so much about." Good advice.

Louis Gray Facts (A FriendFeed Room)

Developed out of a silly conversation with Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily, some enterprising FriendFeeders made a room dedicated to what they called "Real, true, verifiable facts about Louis Gray", promising the ability to surpass the commonplace.

Some of my favorites from "Louis Gray Facts"

• "Louis Gray doesn't have a Backspace button on his keyboard. It's humanly impossible for him to make a typo."
  
• “There's a reason Louis Gray isn't on TechMeme more often: it very rarely meets Louis Gray's strict standards.”
  
• “Louis Gray only uses Excel for the pretty charts, Louis Gray crunches all the stats in his head.”

The second I start believing this stuff, I'm in trouble. I'm clearly getting mocked. But I appreciate some good-natured amusement, and it certainly isn't expanding my ego any. That people care enough to take time to pull my chain is fun, but I know where I stand, and it's not at the top. Now go pressure LoisGray.com to post some more. (As if I didn't hear that Lois and Clark nonsense all through elementary school)

July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle

Near the beginning of each month, I try to highlight five bloggers who have recently caught my eye, who I think you should take a look at, who are offering good insight, especially into the world of tech or social media.

While there's no specific criteria for naming what's well known or what's obscure, each of the blogs mentioned don't get mentioned often alongside so-called A-List bloggers, and rarely, if ever, have made the rarified air of Techmeme. Prior editions can also be found for March, April, May and June.

1) Bob Warfield / SmoothSpan Blog (smoothspan.wordpress.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Enterprise
Recent Highlight: The Rule of 10’s Makes the Internet an Early Adopter Amplifier
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Jesse Stay / Stay N' Alive (www.jessestay.com)

Focus: Social Applications, Twitter, Networking
Recent Highlight: Developers Bailing on Twitter
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Franklin Pettit / FPettit.com (www.fpettit.com)

Focus: Microblogging, Firefox and Extensions, Web Applications
Recent Highlight: FriendFeed Temperature Taking
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Nathaniel Payne / NerdFlood (www.nerdflood.com)

Focus: Video Games, Social Media
Recent Highlight: What the hell is Toluu? And does it require a prescription?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) David Risley / DavidRisley.com (www.davidrisley.com)

Focus: Social Media, Early Adopters, RSS
Recent Highlight: Scoble is Wrong About Blog Comments Being Dead
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

FriendFeed Doubles Share of Comments in 2nd Month Tracking

Last month, in Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?, I reported that comments on blog posts and Twitter post notifications on FriendFeed represented about 40% of the total comments I received on the same number of posts, natively, on louisgray.com, for the month of May.

As June drew to a close, the issue of FriendFeed owning the comments flared up again, with Robert Scoble claiming "blog comments are dead". I can report they're not dead, but for the month, conversations on FriendFeed jumped to more than 78% of the comment activity here. This trend, if it tracks for just one more month, will see that FriendFeed has the majority of my comments.

All told:

* There were 493 comments on the blog.
* There were 254 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 133 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.

On the 38 posts:

* On 1 occasion, no comments were on either site.
* On 2 occasions, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 4 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 31 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.


June's Comment Counts for FriendFeed and LouisGray.com
(Click for Larger Image)

You'll note that the overwhelming majority of posts saw more activity here. So why the jump from May to June? Because, due to the more family-oriented updates, FriendFeed's very real community got engaged. While 14 of my more tech-oriented posts got absolutely no comments, I had 40 responses to my sad news of our dog passing away, 31 on a post saying our twins would be on their way in weeks, and 26 more when they finally showed up. For as much talk as there is at times about sites like this being circular in how they celebrate themselves and their underlying technology, when it comes to people and family, the community there is very real.

Also a change from May were a few discussions that struck around my Tweet updates, rather than waiting for the blog post to arrive. The mioNews story, which so far, has no comments here or my stream, has 22 comments on my Tweet, and there were 39 more around the same for Feedly's arrival.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

As I noted last month, the data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,543 people following me on FriendFeed, and 2,336 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

Will FriendFeed grow to the point that I should close down Disqus and rely solely on the service to get me the conversations? Absolutely not. But I've made extra effort to participate and engage, and the result has been a more diversified discussion, wherever it makes sense, without demanding it be here. I'm looking forward to seeing just what these numbers look like at the end of July.

State of the Blog: June 2008 Recap

June 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,389

Total stories published in June: 38
(About 1.3 per day, down from 1.5 in May)

Total stories in June with comments: 37
(97% of all stories, from 43 and 91% in May)

Total comments on June posts: 493, approx. 15 per post.
(From 456 or 9.7 per post and 10.6 per commented post in May)


June statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 788 (up 129)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,212 subscribers (up 181)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 56 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 280 (up 34)

Twitter Followers: 1,257 (Up 148)
FriendFeed Followers: 2,542 (Up 544)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
2nd overall, behind only April '08.

Month over month growth: 12.7%
Year over year growth: 1,074.5%

Top Five Most Visited June Stories (According to Analog)

1. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.
2. The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior
3. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next
4. Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS
5. What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Others receiving votes: Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?, The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah!, Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud, RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares, LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network, and OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah! (57 comments)
2. All Dogs Go To Heaven. For Molly, It Took 18+ Years. (41 comments)
3. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. (37 comments)
4. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next (34 comments)
5. RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares (27 comments)

June of 2008 was a month I'll never forget, obviously - for reasons much bigger than this blog or any dumb statistics. The month started off sadly with our 18 year-old beagle's passing, and culminated in the arrival of our twins. While some thought the doubling of our family overnight would dramatically impact my ability to keep up on the blog and elsewhere, it hasn't yet happened. There are definitely more distractions, and there will be gaps in publishing, thanks to family obligations, but my goal is to keep going. Should be a fun ride.

In between all the changes to the family, it was a great month, where we saw the debut of Feedly, mioNews, NoiseRiver, twitAbit, Loud3r, OneSpot, and FriendBinder, to name a few. Some you will hear about a lot in the coming months, and some, maybe not so much, but they're all trying to make a name for themselves, and they shared part of their stories here.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Sometimes, when I talk to people about why I blog, and what I set out to accomplish through covering what I do, and engaging where I do, I say that I am trying to help shape the Web, and blogging as a whole, to be what I want it to be - a better community with some strong standards for engagement, ownership, news gathering and innovation. Over time, as the number of posts here has racked up, you can see some of these core elements throughout the site. As an exercise, I thought I'd outline my beliefs, and I'm eager to hear your comments, whether these are shared or we disagree.

1. I Believe You Should Enjoy What You Do

Whether you are are the co-founder of a hot startup, an entry-level programmer at a technology monolith, a blogger, or simply a fan of social networking tools, you should be sure you're doing what you're doing because you enjoy it, and at its core, it brings you happiness. At times, I've seen people succumb to the stress of posting every day, of racing up or down the comparative measures out there, or slog day in and day out at companies because they're too unmotivated to seek an alternative. Even on those days when the work required seems overwhelming, it's worth stepping back and saying, "Are you having fun still?" As Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford University a few years ago, if the answer is no too many times in a row, it's time to think about doing something else.

When you're not having fun, it shows. Your work gets sloppier. Your posts get crankier. You start talking more about how much time it's taking, how much pressure you're feeling. And when that happens... take a deep breath, or take a break. Reevaluate why it is you're doing what you do.

2. I Believe In Supporting and Promoting Innovation

Without an entrepreneurial spirit, change in our technology landscape would be muted. Innovation can be sparked from a single idea, whether creating a new market, or simply improving a new one. When I see potential, I want to highlight it, and work as a partner with the team aiming to deliver a new experience, and fulfilling their dreams.

Often, a rush to call "foul" on a product, to give it a negative label, or call failure, is done more to grab attention than through benevolence. You're not doing the innovator a favor, or their potential users a favor, but seeing the glass half full.

3. I Believe In Trusting First, Looking for Holes Later

For the most part, people don't start businesses or create products with ill intent. New services crop up every day, and the overwhelming number are there to help you learn something new, find something more quickly, or reach peers in a new way. As it can be relatively inexpensive to launch new Web services, or to start blogs, there are, simply put, tons of them out there. Many do very similar things. But at their core, most are well-intended.

For every spammer or troll, content scraper or hacker, there are thousands of others working on the right side of the law. And sometimes, when it looks like a service might be on the border of what's "right" and what's "wrong", I tend to give the benefit of the doubt, so the entrepreneur can explain themselves. I also believe that every service out there, from those a day old, to the market monoliths of Google and Microsoft, has issues. It can be fun to focus on those issues, but unless they completely disrupt the user experience to the point the product is unusable, I feel the product owner is both aware of them, and is working behind the scenes to make the product more robust, faster, and more fully featured.

4. I Believe In Equal Access to Tools and Opportunity

I believe in the availability of free or inexpensive services that enable people to broadcast, share and collaborate. I believe that for-profit institutions should make efforts to spread the availability of the Internet, broadband and wireless access to bring this information spigot to people everywhere, regardless of their financial or geographical status.

5. I Believe In Portability Of Content and Clear Ownership

I believe that products should enable support for open standards, such that data can be simply exported and imported from one service to another. I believe that these open standards should be deployed such that content, be it blog posts, news, comments or other actionable items (be it up/down votes, likes, avatars, etc.) be easily transferred, while retaining clear ownership by the original individual performing the activity. This portability should be developed in such a way that the third-party service, the content creator, and the person reaction to said content, all have the option to approve or disapprove portability or modification.

In those cases where full portability is not yet available, I believe services have an obligation to state their intentions to move toward an API, an open standard, display best intentions, or publicly declare their position to keep data siloed, buyer beware.

6. I Believe In Giving Credit Where It Is Due

I believe in bloggers giving best effort to determining the original source of news, and providing linkage, especially when the alternative is to link internally. I believe in making it clear who the entrepreneurs are behind services, and displaying a human face to what could otherwise be a personless brand.

I believe in displaying clear attribution for the source of quotes, paraphrasing or other use of third-party content, even if it is from what's considered a competitor.

7. I Believe In Supporting The Little Guy, While Not Hating the Leader

I believe in giving a new service or a small company its unfair share of support and coverage, as they make a valid attempt to enter a market. I believe in helping the service clarify their message, their features and benefits to the point they achieve critical mass on par with other market leaders. I believe that this presumed bias can be shown without disparaging leading services, or holding ill will against those already having achieved success.

8. I Believe In Transparency and the Removal of Barriers

I believe that those services who make their intentions, their product plans, and their updates clear to users and partners will achieve a higher level of success and trust than those that do not. I believe that company representatives should be easily accessible through clear methods, and should give best efforts to rapidly respond to feature requests, downtime or other concerns.

I believe that activities or barriers which reduce transparency, reduce access to company representatives and create confusion will be extremely damaging, reducing trust and good will.

Similarly, bloggers should be extremely reachable and should display and pre-existing biases, monetary engagements or sponsorships, be there any.

9. I Believe In The Ability to Disagree Without Ill Will

I believe that it is absolutely possible for multiple people to look at the same data set or service and achieve completely-differing conclusions and perspectives, without meaning either person to be lacking in intellect or experience. In the event that disagreements do occur, I recommend open communication and statement of beliefs will be much more successful at proving a point than labels, one liners or personal attacks.

In parallel, services can expect that not every review will be one they want to print out and send home to mom. If the author's found to not have a conflict of interest, efforts should be made to expose that, but otherwise, it can be assumed there might be some valid points, even in the most vile of screeds.

10. I Believe In Finding New Ways To Find, Share, Manipulate Data

I believe that the creation of data and content is nearing commodity status. New blogs and services debut every minute and die almost as quickly. But each month brings new and exciting ways to manipulate, share or otherwise locate the best data, through the launch of new social networks, aggregators, search engines, or semantic tools. The services we all use today will almost with certainty be different than those we use next year at this time.

It is with these 10 tenets, and likely more, that I look to engage. Through my small voice here, I believe I have been lucky enough to play a role in discussing how blogs give attribution, how they prioritize external links vs. internal links, the growing issue of RSS repurposing and comment fragmentation. I've tried to support the little guys and highlight individuals doing innovation. I've made a small number of negative posts, in contrast to my more supportive posts, and avoided throwing the second stone at times when my views weren't universal. The Web, and our ability in the blogosphere to impact it and play a role, is ever changing and exciting to me.

Giving a Service Wings By Pushing Them from the Nest

For those of us blogging who like to break the news by announcing new services, and using our site as their platform to debut, it can be tempting to pull an "old world" journalism mentality and claim that topic as "our turf", resenting anybody else who tries to step in and steal the thunder by posting the news first, or even feeling betrayed if the entrepreneur takes the news somewhere else. But I've seen that after what I consider an incubation period, the fastest-growing services do best when I can step back and let them take their first steps away from the nest, as they engage with other bloggers, gaining them a new audience and greater exposure.

In this analogy, it can be nerve-wracking to see the little ones as they leave the nest. I worry the new caregivers might not see them in the same way I do. The new influencer might be cruel or may not recognize their talents. But to try and protect them by keeping them in the nest could stunt their growth.

As mentioned in yesterday's popular post, the first stage of being an early adopter can at times be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing firm, as you try to make a product you like extremely visible. You've no doubt seen me do this, as I'll not just help by introducing a product, but keeping you posted on its updates, from Assetbar to ReadBurner, FriendFeedMachine, RSSmeme and Toluu.

But there comes a time when the right thing to do is let go, when the service has gained such momentum that I instead suggest the developer reach out to other sites to get a broader perspective and more exposure, so that their service is less tied in with me, and seen, instead as more of the broader landscape.

Don't get me wrong. I love exclusives, and part of my journalism background makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I know that someone who might be considered competition is writing about the same topic at the same time with the same deadline. But lately, for services that have gotten some traction, I've opted out of story opportunities and encouraged the developer to get some new voices talking instead.

A prime example of this was with Toluu yesterday. On Wednesday, Caleb Elston reached out to me with some great new service updates, including details on subscriptions within Toluu by feed, and story popularity, in part helped by AideRSS. I told Caleb that instead of waiting for me, to take his outreach to the next level, and it worked, without question. Yesterday ended up being a record-setting day for Toluu, after what Hutch Carpenter called a great example of social media marketing, by participating and reaching out to bloggers and following Toluu references on both FriendFeed and Twitter.

Similarly, RSSmeme announced options to find similar sharers of data to you, and integrated widgets on each page that show top tags and sharers for that blog or topic. See: Using RSSmeme To Find Similar Sharers: Louis Gray’s Example. Having just given RSSmeme a ton of credit last Saturday on being the authority on Google Reader sharing notes, I again waved the white flag, and told Benjamin to spread the word. He did, leveraging a custom room on FriendFeed for RSSmeme, to update followers, also adding RSSmeme as a user of the service, and today, leveraging the FriendFeed API to speed up the site.

You can see how other services have taken steps to leave the nest, as other sites, often much bigger than mine, take up the rallying cry:

ReadBurner:
The Inquisitr: ReadBurner Gets Digg Like Features

Shyftr:
Mashable: Shyftr Beats Google Reader with OPML Imports

LinkRiver:
SheGeeks: LinkRiver is My Personal Techmeme

Part of being a good partner to new services is knowing when to let go, and to see if the service has wings. A few weeks ago, I wrote to one pair of entrepreneurs, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do, but I do believe it's going to come down to you guys being more visible." With everything else that's going on, I can't possibly do it all myself. That's why, even though it can be bittersweet on occasion, the right thing to do is let them take a risk and let go. It gives others, like Corvida, the opportunity to do a social media roundup on service updates, and it's best for the community at large.

The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior

Early adopters serve an important role in the world of Web services and technology gadgetry. helping to act in a multi-pronged position that can blur the line between journalist, customer and partner.

The best early adopters not only help spread the word about a new product, but they can help argue its features, they are eager to offer feedback to its developers, and at times can be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing team. But with time, if not coddled, this crowd can often turn against the very service they helped champion, as they move on to the next new thing, sometimes taking an army of followers with them.

This relationship between service and early adopter is a healthy one, assuming the Web service has, in the interim, grown to the point they no longer need the initial proponent's efforts, having expanded to a more mainstream audience, or achieved sustainable organic growth. But if this doesn't happen, it's a very short trip from promotion to abandonment indeed.

With not too much research, you can see evidence for five major stages of early adopter behavior, as I've summarized below.


1. Discovery, QA and Spreading the Word

The first weeks and months of a service can be very exciting. The early adopter often works with the developer behind the scenes to learn as much as they can about a product, often posting a new story that introduces the site. If there are any bugs with the product, they are easily glossed over as ones which will undoubtedly soon be fixed. If the site doesn't seem all that useful without a multitude of users, this too can be ignored, as the early adopter hopes everyone will see the service's full potential, and will use it the way they expect to.

In this phase, the early adopter has what can be construed as a personal interest in the success of the product, as he or she has gone out on a limb to associate the name with the third party brand. The adopter will not only be a frequent user of the service, but will track other posts or comments about it everywhere, and repeat the agreed upon talking points. Should they actually find a major issue with the product, they will e-mail or call the developers directly, rather than making the issues public.

At times, everything on the Web can be seen through the lenses of just how this new product will be affected, or how it could change everything else. All of a sudden, what may have been a hammer is proclaimed to be a Swiss Army Knife.

2. Promotion and Collaboration

As the service gains momentum, the early adopter befriends the first users of the product, who may have nothing in common except that they share interest in that product. At times, the product may be used only to discuss the product itself.

The early adopter, as new voices discover the service, will push follow-up posts, giving public suggestions to the company, in an extremely positive way, on how they believe the service should change and grow, showing themselves, in front of the world, to be an integral part of the product's development. Should the product incorporate any of these suggestions, whether due to the adopter's input or not, the early adopter will either take credit, or follow up and show how they were "right".

Now using the product a great deal, at the exclusion of others, the early adopter will openly mock those people who haven't jumped aboard yet, pointing them out as being stuck in the past, or married to clearly inferior products.

3. Mainstream Use and Engagement

Having grown tired of the part-time job of delivering free PR for the service, at this point the early adopter no longer feels the need to architect every story and every product through the lens of the service. Instead, having felt vindicated that the masses are now seeing the potential he always knew the product had, he or she remains engaged, trying to act as a "model citizen" for the product, engaging with newer users, but keeping in mind the higher visibility and trying to act as an example.

At this point, follow-on users have now picked up the ball in terms of promoting the product, announcing each of its aspects in the same breath-taking manner the early adopter once did for the service itself. At this point, the early adopter already knows his or her readers and peers know they like the product, and the need to constantly remind people they are using it is no longer necessary.

4. Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use

At this point, often in part due to favorable feedback from the service's authors, the early adopter feels a sense of entitlement, that the product absolutely must be architected in the way they say so, even if to move in that direction wouldn't serve the larger installed base. Now, instead of suggesting quick ways the service could update, the calls are more like ultimatums, and if not quickly seeing a response, the early adopter can get extremely frustrated, at times, seeing this annoyance bubble up to the same degree their first comments on the product reeked of praise.

Now disgruntled, the early adopter can be seen using the product less frequently, with less enthusiasm, and will even take consecutive days off, hoping the remaining audience notices the change.

5. Migration to Something New, Call to Move Followers

Having come full circle, from the exciting discovery stage, where the adopter considered themselves a team player, helping a threadbare company grow on the back of continuous praise and promotion, to a high-profile user role, the individual can come crashing down, lashing out at the product, the company's leadership or the product direction. The adopter often finds a tangential service that now draws their eye, and is seen as a replacement for the original product.

The adopter will, at this point, start heaping lavish praise upon the new product, in a quest to assert their dominance, and prove that they can, again, make a service successful, and to prove that all their belly-aching in the preceding months was valid. The adopter will use their blog and both the new and old service to call followers to migrate as a group, both helping the new shiny toy, and in turn, damaging the old one, out of spite and frustration.

---

On the Web, this process can be extremely fast. One month's golden boy can be next month's afterthought. One week's addiction can be next week's memory. For a service to succeed, it needs to attract those early adopters who can help propel a strong population, but it needs to do all it can to keep those adopters feeling like partners and mainstream users, before letting neglect fire up their egos so much that they leave you altogether. Making a successful Web service is more than writing the best code. It's also about relationships. And while the early adopter crowd is notoriously fickle, they're not going away all that soon.

Take a tally in your head of some of the services you use each day. If you're an early adopter, what stage are you in? If you're not an early adopter, but you know someone who is, what products do they make themselves part of? And do you see these stages progress? I know I do.

Five Blogs For June on Your Summer Reading List

While some out there are looking to refresh their RSS feed subscriptions by starting from zero, I believe you can still get the benefit of new voices by selectively adding individual feeds, without getting overloaded.

In the vein of the last three months' offerings of new blogs you're likely not reading, (March | April | May), below are five more bloggers who I think are worth taking a chance on, whose writings have caught my eye of late, and who need a bigger stage.

1) Coding Experiments (http://codingexperiments.com/)

Focus: Technology, Development, Coding, Social Media
Recent Highlight:
How Many Features Can Be Cut from a Service without the Users Leaving?
RSS Feed: http://codingexperiments.com/feed

2) LiveCrunch (http://www.livecrunch.com/)

Focus: Social Networking, Plurk, Twitter
Recent Highlight: Things To Do Before WWDC 2008
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/livecrunch/technology

3) Broadcasting Brain (http://broadcasting-brain.com/)

Focus: Social Media, Podcasting, FriendFeed
Recent Highlight: Punching above your weight with social media
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BroadcastingBrain

4) Neoformix (http://www.neoformix.com/)

Focus: Statistics, Data, Twitter
Recent Highlight: Top Twitter Users StreamGraph
RSS Feed: http://www.neoformix.com/index.xml

5) Michael Fruchter (http://michaelfruchter.com)

Focus: RSS, FriendFeed, Social Media, Toluu
Recent Highlight:
Cleaning up my Google reader with the help of Toluu.
RSS Feed: http://michaelfruchter.com/blog/feed/

As mentioned last month, I'm always looking for more new bloggers and interesting voices to be added to my Google Reader feeds. You can get an early tip as to new bloggers I'm following and sharing by signing up for Toluu, following me on FriendFeed, or following my Google Reader shared links blog. If you think there are more I should check out, please leave them in the comments.

Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud

I am a happy Disqus customer. Implementing Disqus comments on this blog, enabling people to track their conversations around the Web, show personal custom avatars and thread conversations, has been among the better things I've done with the blog. Since installing Disqus, total comments have increased, I can get a better sense of my most frequent participants and they can connect one to one. My Disqus comments, and those of others, can even be shared on FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services.

My enthusiasm has not been unanimous across the blogosphere. Some have been concerned that Disqus' hosting the comments on their own site reduces the control a blogger has on this critical element of their site. Others say that Disqus effectively "steals" the SEO value of those comments, robbing you of the Google juice that's yours.

And to date, I've defended Disqus in every way. I'm not an SEO nut, so I can shrug my shoulders at these so-called issues. Until today.

Starting last night, I was surprised to find my e-mail empty of Disqus comments flowing to my in box. Checking the blog, I found many heartfelt comments on the passing of our dog yesterday. But Disqus wasn't sending me the updates. I logged in to the service, and ensured my preferences were set to notify me, and they were.

This morning, the situation is much worse. No comments are showing. The Disqus widget on the right side of the blog is missing. And every Disqus comment that every person posted on any Disqus-powered site is gone. This highlights the concern many have had on trusting the cloud and putting your data in the hands of others. It's always good to make a copy, especially if you don't know their infrastructure, or the company doesn't have a decades-long track record.

I trusted Disqus to host my comments, to run the show, to power my blog and to take on the challenging task of being my connection to my audience. Now, they're down hard. Their blog hasn't been updated to say what's going on, and the last update we got from Disqus' Daniel Ha is that he was playing poker 10 hours ago, via Twitter. I just hope he didn't bet the future of Disqus on a pair of 3's.

In this time where users are turning their data over to the cloud and trusting the underlying Web services, downtime can be a killer. The second half of responding to downtime? Transparency. And right now, Disqus is failing at both.

See also: FriendFeed discussion on Disqus downtime.

Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?

One of the biggest worries I've seen in blogging over the first half of this year is that with the conversation shifting to social aggregation sites in addition to the originating blog, FriendFeed being the most notable, with Plaxo Pulse, Shyftr and other sites being part of the discussion, that comments on the originating site will disappear, or erode, as activity at the secondary site increases.

As one of the most visible and active participants on FriendFeed, I looked into my data over the month of May, and saw that on my 47 posts last month:

* There were 470 comments on the blog.
* There were 162 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 25 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.


May Comment Counts: Click for Much Larger View
On these 47 posts:

* On 3 occasions, no comments were on either site.
* On 1 occasion, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 6 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 37 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

The data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,013 people following me on FriendFeed, and 1,969 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

I believe that as FriendFeed grows its user base I will see an increase in total comments on my FriendFeed activity, but it has also helped drive traffic and comments back here, in turn spurring the activity and discussion higher. So, has FriendFeed comment activity eclipsed conversations here? No. Not yet.

This serves as a good point in time capture for where we are today. I'll be watching this for sure.

Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?

The issue of comment fragmentation has been rearing up every other week or so since the initial discussion flared up in early April, but of late, I've been thinking about the purpose of comments in the first place. When you make a comment on a blog, is it to respond to the blog author and say they did a good job, especially if comments are currency, effectively making a longer version of a "thumbs up or thumbs down," are you looking to further the conversation with the blogger, or are you instead using it as a reply, without anticipating a response from the author?

This morning, I posted a question, using Google Talk, to FriendFeed, saying:

“Are blog comments a "conversation" with the author, or just answering and responding to the author? Do you expect the author to respond to your comment?"

For me personally, on those posts I do where there is a lot of conversation, I'm pulled in two opposing directions - the first, to reply to comments and engage with readers, and the second, to instead not reply and avoid dominating the comment thread. With Disqus tracking my every comment on the blog, I can make myself look like a fairly noisy egoist in no time. So, it is tempting to see the comments on posts as only replies, and fight the urge to respond. Typically, I end up replying to those comments that ask new questions, or spur the conversation forward, but of course, I read every single one.

When I post to other blogs, I don't usually expect a reply from the author. The bigger the blog, the less likely the response, and for small blogs, responses are almost a guarantee.

In response to my note on FriendFeed, the answers were strongly weighted toward conversations, rather than replies.

Brian Sullivan said, "The most successful bloggers it seems to me are conversational."

J.C. Hutchins said, "I always assume that author will read my comment, but rarely respond. Always feels validating when they do, though."

Susan Beebe said, "Blog Comments = Conversations with the world; AND yes, most importantly the author. I do not expect the author to respond to me; however, I am always really glad when they do!"

Of course, if every comment on every blog gained a reply from the original author, the most popular bloggers would spend just as much time responding to comments as they would creating new content. And if you take it one step further, if those replies also generated replies, in theory, the conversation would never end.

As Steven Hodson of WinExtra wrote in Comment Fragmentation isn’t the Blogger’s Fault earlier today, "In the end though we have absolutely no control over where the conversation; if there even is one, will take place." That works both in terms of the blog author not fully controlling where comments take place, and also from the commenter, who cannot force a conversation through leaving a reply. Now that comments are being bandied about like currency, both at the blog and through a myriad of RSS readers and social aggregators, maybe it's time to think about the whole structure of blogging and commenting in the first place.

State of the Blog: May 2008 Recap

May 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,351

Total stories published in May: 47
(About 1.5 per day, up from 1.3 in April)

Total stories in May with comments: 43
(91% of all stories, up from 34 and 89% in April)

Total comments on May posts: 456
(About 9.7 per post, 10.6 per commented post)


May statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 659 (up 88)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,031 subscribers (up 394)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 47 subscribers (up 5)
MyBlogLog Members: 246 (up 43)

Twitter Followers: 1,109 (Up 308)
FriendFeed Followers: 1,998 (Up 1,008)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
3rd overall, behind the last two months.

Top Five Most Visited May Stories (According to Analog)

1. Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers
2. The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War
3. FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function
4. Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
5. Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Others receiving votes: Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality, FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?, Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget, Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May, and Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
2. My Social Media Consumption Workflow
3. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
4. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
5. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

After a continued "up and to the right" graph over the last few months, May's overall visits fell about 24% compared with April, at levels 4% lower than even March, according to SiteMeter, while in all other aspects, the surrounding elements of the blog have grown. Part of the reason for the decline? To be direct, the answer is a lowered presence on Techmeme. In April, a number of my more controversial posts, especially around the weekend, drove a significant portion of traffic. In May, I consciously made the decision to not only not launch these controversies, but also to not participate once they had started. It had a negative impact on my simple visitor traffic, but I believe a more positive impact with the blog overall. I didn't exactly want to get the reputation of being a controversy-stirrer, when not necessary.

Now, partly due to not engaging in the more-visible Techmeme headlines, my position on the Techmeme leaderboard is in doubt. At peak in April, louisgray.com had been above position #40, drawing amusement from fellow bloggers like Robert Scoble, who needled me about the positioning on video earlier this month. But now, I'm lingering in the precipitous #98 to #100 position, seeing folks like Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot blow by me.

As mentioned last month, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

Making My Blog Search Legit With Lijit

Blog widgets are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, but offering a strong search function on your Web site is a must, regardless of how cleanly you've laid out your archive pages, or how well you've implemented tags or labels. A little over a week ago, after seeing Lijit growing its presence on many other blogs I follow, I integrated the service into my site, letting users find older stories I've written on topics they find interesting, and opening up yet another box of stats for me to play with, including most frequently used search terms.


Looking back in my e-mail archives, it looks like I first signed up for Lijit back in June of 2007. If I remember correctly, I think I implemented it, but later, it got pulled in some blog redesign. This time, it's likely here to stay. On May 16, I undoubtedly polluted the Lijit user database, signing up again and getting a second account. Oops.

Acting as a front-end for Google Blog Search, Lijit places a simple search box on your blog, letting visitors search your archives, but also, it pre-populates if somebody arrives on your site from having completed a search elsewhere. For example, if I do a Google search for "FriendFeed Tips", and click on FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, Lijit helpfully asks, "Looking for more about friendfeed tips?" and gives what it would provide as the best links in my blog, as well as through content delivered from other services I use around the Web, such as MyBlogLog and Del.ico.us.

Search results from Lijit are displayed as a pop-in window in the Web browser, not asking you to leave the site, but instead, showing you the results, surrounded by Google AdSense. Of interest, Duncan Riley said on FriendFeed yesterday that not sharing the revenue with the bloggers themselves was "not cool", but I hadn't given that much thought before implementing.

The most visible benefit of using Lijit is showing site visitors what the most popular searches are, either on my blog, or used to find the blog. As of today, the top ten terms are: FriendFeed, Twitter, Blogger, Lijit, Techmeme, BlogRize, MyBlogLog, ReadBurner, FriendFeed to Watch and Duncan Riley.


Also very helpful is the ability to filter what is displayed. I've mentioned before that there's a core element of Web perverts who like some pages in my archives, so I get all sorts of odd traffic from dirty keywords, which I don't want shown, so I can hop into my Lijit page and add these unwanted terms to the filter.


Meanwhile, as Lijit is watching my site traffic for search activity, it's also monitoring standard blog tracking tools, including page views, how many visitors are coming, and where they are coming from. Combining the two facets of the service, from search to statistics, Lijit can tell me which countries search for what most frequently, what is the city that offers me the most visits (Mountain View, CA), and from what country did my most recent search terms originate. I can also see which pages proved most popular after search terms were entered.

So it works. Good stuff. And while I underplayed Lijit's integration with other services like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, etc., this element may become more important in the future, as site visitors can do more than search just my blog, but they can search all across my network, essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web. I'll be watching this to grow over time, and hope to report back and say if site visitors are doing more than searching my blog, but searching my content as well. I've enabled a dozen different sites to pull from, so have at it.

Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers

Duncan Riley is on a roll. After a multitude of posts from around the Web this weekend once again debating whether comments away from the blog were a good thing, or if new Web services like Twitter and FriendFeed were useful or were instead creating too much noise, Duncan checked in from The Inquisitr and came to the conclusion I'd reached long ago but not said as eloquently: "It's All About the User".

Duncan, as I have, argues also that those bloggers who embrace changes will leap ahead of the competition, by being more visible in more places, and finding engagement where it has ended up, rather than trying to force it back the way it was.

See Also:
Coding Experiments: The Blogosphere’s Changing Opinions on FriendFeed
Hutch Carpenter: The Noise About FriendFeed Noise
ReadWriteWeb: Don't Be So Naive: Friendfeed Adds to the Noise
Scobleizer: Why Google News has no noise
Scobleizer: Why FriendFeed won’t go mainstream (Part I)
Scobleizer: Why FriendFeed will go mainstream (Part II)

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

* Amass the most page views
* Display the most ads
* Get the most comments
* Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

* Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
* Readers installed ad filters, and didn't click
* Comments started to live elsewhere
* Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

This change has caused serious strain for those living in Blogging 1.0, as they've seen their page views fluctuate, and as comments moved to third party sites, be they RSS readers, social networks, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they're the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they're the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise.

Some bloggers, like Robert Scoble, have successfully made the transition to Blogging 2.0. Robert has embraced the new noise of Twitter and FriendFeed, and worries less about where the conversation is taking place, but more about whether it's taking place at all. I've similarly engaged the new places to hold conversations, including Shyftr and a new host of social media sites, like Assetbar, SocialMedian, BlogRize and Yokway.

Since adopting FriendFeed and Twitter, both sites have enabled the conversation to be in new places, and each site refers more activity to my blog. Others, including Charlie Anzman and Hutch Carpenter, have publicly said FriendFeed ranks among their top referrals. And now, Duncan Riley can be counted firmly in that camp. He writes:

"I’ve come to the conclusion that what is happening in blogging 2.0 is something that I can’t stop nor change, so it is something I’m going to fully embrace, for all the inherent risk part of me is telling me it represents. I accept that others will rally against this: it’s human nature to do so, but no amount of protest will change the evolving reality of blogging 2.0. My advice to others: embrace it, or miss out."

My position, repeated a number of times here, and elsewhere, including today's Elite Tech News podcast, is that the world of blogging has changed. Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it's hard to understand for those who've always accepted things for what they are.

Just Like High School: Your Blogging Clique Will Move

Most bloggers who have spent a good amount of time building their site and community end up with a small group of peers who share the same interests, discuss the same topics, and more often than not, frequently link to one another's blogs, or feature links to friends' sites in their blog roll. This cliquish behavior can result in something of a larger echo chamber where friends talk to friends, and it can be hard for someone new to break into the circle.

But just like in high school, cliques change. Maybe as a blogger, you've found the people you thought were your friends are now not paying attention to you. Maybe, they've stopped blogging altogether, and you now have to look around and find new friends to talk to, link to and discuss the same stories. Maybe they stopped talking about one thing, and now you don't have the same interests.

The resulting feeling as a blogger can be just like it was back then when acne was a major concern - one of loneliness, and questioning who you really are. Do you need to change who you are to fit in with a new crowd? Or is it possible you're just not interesting to anyone and you too should quit?

Just in the last 18 months or so, I've experienced this to some level with my site.

When I first started getting my footing back in early 2007, one of the major peers I looked up to and shared stories with was Tony Chung of GeekWhat.com. Tony and I both shared an interest in Apple and next generation technologies like wireless power. But Tony gained a degree, moved to Taiwan, started blogging less, and changed his focus to be more philosophical, or covering the arts.

Another Web peer with whom I could exchange ideas and argue (at times), is Kent Newsome of Newsome.org. Kent is a great writer, and would often burst onto Techmeme with thoughts on the Five Stages of Blogging or when he wrote a fantastic Declaration of Blogging Independence on the fourth of July. But seemingly just as he was rising to Web stardom, posting to his site almost disappeared. Now, his last note is from late March, and he's had three notes since February. Another peer, leaving the clique.

Sometimes, good news for one friend could mean bad news for you. MG Siegler of ParisLemon got a new gig at VentureBeat, and has seen the majority of his efforts turned that way. Our co-authored Techaiku site lies largely dormant, the two of us haven't been on the same Elite Tech News podcast to date, and when MG does get the chance to talk on his personal site, it hasn't been to join my conversations.

These are just a few examples of how my blogging clique has changed, and one of the reasons I dumped the blogroll in a site UI update a few months back. No sooner would I highlight one friend, but I'd have to go back and pull their site when they stopped updating or got otherwise distracted. Seeing my blog clique change makes it even more important to make sure I'm blogging with a purpose, to start conversations, announce news, or engage with new communities, rather than trying to be popular. I expect that in twelve months, the circle of friends in the blogosphere I have now will be wildly different.

That's part of why I started highlighting five new bloggers a month who are engaging and having great voices in the blogosphere... not so much to beg them to be my next BFF, but to ensure those who are adding value are recognized, and will get the satisfaction they need to keep going. After all, if this is something like high school, somebody has to play the role of the upperclassman showing the new freshmen around the place.

So what do you do? Has your blogging clique changed? Do you want to join my clique? It's not where the cool kids hang out, but it's not like we're sitting around playing Dungeons and Dragons either.

Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May

In March, we highlighted 5 Blog Candidates for Tomorrow's Techmeme Leaderboard. In April, I suggested Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren't. Since then, a number of these lesser-known bloggers have seen their posts gain higher visibility, including hitting the aforementioned Techmeme, and gaining both RSS subscribers and repeat visitors. (See: SheGeeks Reaches New Heights and When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched... as good examples)

With the new month upon us, I'm thinking we could make posts of this sort a regular feature. Over the last 30 days, I continue to be impressed by the solid writings of many bloggers who, to date, have been below the radar. Here are five who cover the social media space who've I've enjoyed getting to see of late:

1) Colin Walker (colinwalker.me.uk)

Focus: Social Media, Blogging and the Internet
Recent Highlight: Why do we need social media role models?
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Regular Geek (regulargeek.com)

Focus: Programming, Social Media and the Internet
Recent Highlight: Comment Where You Want, Just Let Me Know About It
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Chris Miller / The Social Networker (thesocialnetworker.com)

Focus: Virtual Gratification Syndrome, Twitter, Data Portability
Recent Highlight: Tweeting In the Bathroom - the New Social Crime
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Julian Baldwin / Notes, Thoughts, Ideas and Responses (julianbaldwin.com)

Focus: Social Media, Twitter
Recent Highlight:
Killing Many Birds With One Boulder, How and When Social Media Can Go Mainstream
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Alexander van Elsas (vanelsas.wordpress.com)

Focus: New Media, Technology, Social Behavior
Recent Highlight: The Tech Elite Creates Its Own Web 2.0 Bubble
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

I'm always looking for more new bloggers and interesting voices to be added to my Google Reader feeds. You can get an early tip as to new bloggers I'm following and sharing by signing up for Toluu, following me on FriendFeed, or following my Google Reader shared links blog. If you think there are more I should check out, please leave them in the comments.

State of the Blog: April 2008 Recap

April 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,304

Total stories published in April: 38
(About 1.3 per day, up from 1.2 in March)

Total stories in April with comments: 34
(89% of all stories, up from 29 and 76% in March)

Total comments on April posts: 364 (95 on Disqus)
(About 9.6 per post, 10.7 per commented post)


April statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 571 (up 200)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 1,637 subscribers (up 810)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 42 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 203 (up 110)

Twitter Followers: 801 (Up 488)
FriendFeed Followers: 990 (Up 472)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall, by 25%.

Top Five Most Visited April Stories (According to Analog)

1. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?
2. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
3. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
4. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
5. Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren't

Others receiving votes: TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In, My Social Media Consumption Workflow, Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy, Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close., FriendFeed's Increased Filtering Clears Deck of Unwanted Junk, and Alpha Twitter Ranks Most Popular Shared Links from Twitter...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves
2. Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones
3. LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel
4. Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag
5. ReadBurner Lights Up In Simmer Mode

While April again saw personal records fall for blog traffic, it's clear the real growth and engagement is found in Web services, external commenting and linking. Overall traffic grew 25% from March, measured in unique visitors, and individual days saw spikes that rivaled a month's traffic for me less than a year ago. Yet it's activity at FriendFeed, Twitter and Disqus that is really growing. Technorati and MyBlogLog rankings also spiked dramatically in April.

One word of caution, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on our shared link blog!

Should Bloggers Open Up Their Statistics?

The Web makes it incredibly easy to be measured, and to be measured publicly. There are many metrics out there, be they Technorati Authority, based on unique external hyperlinks, total RSS subscribers (via FeedBurner), total Twitter followers, and friends of all types, from FriendFeed to Facebook and back. But while most of us are more than eager to share that data, when it comes to actually sharing the traffic we receive on our blogs, it can be a closely-guarded secret. Talking about visit counts can be seen as off-limits as one's salary.

As today is April 30th, wrapping up another month, today offers yet another opportunity to sum up the month's statistics, show trends, and compare to the past. (You'll see a "State of the Blog" post from me on this early tomorrow, as we do each month) But while, to date, I've shown graphs, I usually hide the total number of visitors, page views, etc. And now, I ask openly, why?

I think there are two major reasons that bloggers as a whole don't open up their statistics for others to view:

1) The Inferiority Complex

By sharing my statistics openly, it will now be obvious to the world how little real traffic I get, opening me to ridicule. The emperor has no clothes, it could be said. Also, maybe the traffic I receive isn't seen as "quality" traffic? I still get a lot of visitors from Google image searches looking for R-rated material in vain. Maybe I don't want everybody to see that, and, therefore, take the site less seriously?

But yet, the reverse problem also holds true.

2) The Big Head Complex

By sharing my statistics openly, it could be shown we're bragging, highlighting traffic, growth, and the trends. Smaller bloggers just getting started might see the data as unattainable and could throw potshots.

It all depends on perspective.

So why open up? We've come a long way since free hit counters were the rage back in the mid to late 1990s, and one could up the number just by refreshing a page in the browser. Now, whether your stat package of choice is SiteMeter or Google Analytics, your site traffic has likely been made invisible to your readers, making actual, true, traffic a mystery. But in the interest of openness, data sharing, and collaboration, I think it's time to consider making our blog traffic 100% available and visible.

Advantages:

1) Making traffic details public establishes a data point

Just as it makes sense to visit Salary.com and determine what other people with your title in your geography are commanding, viewing other's statistics can give you a reference point for how you are performing against your peers.

2) Making traffic sources public enables new sites' discovery

One of the most interesting things I find from my statistics are where people are coming from, in the referral logs. It's likely that those people caring enough to send a link my way might be interested in the same topics I am, and, using the transitive property, my readers would be interested in what they are as well.

3) Making content details public shows popularity of topics

Despite one's best efforts, not every single story gets the same amount of solid traffic. There are peaks and valleys. Making this data public could better give guidance to other writers as to what topics are most interesting, might get the most engagement, or views.

Disadvantages:

1) Establishing that data point puts you on a chart somewhere

Whether the total number of unique visitors, page views, referrals is in the hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands, by establishing that data publicly, your traffic now becomes part of the conversation, relative to yourself and relative to others, so you'll need to come to terms with this in advance.

2) Exposing traffic details could lead to others' snooping

A good blogger who knows their statistics can get used to specific readers. With a good combination of MyBlogLog, and location-based visits, I have a good idea of who the most frequent visitors are, and I think I know what stories they read, if I get the time to look it up. Maybe others could be as aggressive and figure out the same information. Some visitors might not like having this potential to be snooped expanded to the masses.

3) Your statistics could actually go down

It's one thing to post data at your peak when things are going well. But if you have a slow week or months, and your numbers collapse, there's no hiding it. You can't undo a number once it's out, so that too would be a risk.

So here's what I'm thinking. I have nothing to hide. Tomorrow, when we do our statistical summary for the prior month, I'll use the statistics I have on hand, and expose the sources of the data. We'll see what happens. And maybe, as you go about your efforts, you'll consider opening up. This isn't a question of who's bigger than anybody else or what's good traffic versus bad. I feel that as bloggers, the more data we have available, the more empowered we are. Let me know if this is something you would be eager to participate in, and what your thoughts are.

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

louisgray.com Reader Survey (April 2008)

As the site has grown over the last year or so, the content on louisgray.com has changed. (Go directly to survey)

Sometimes, friends tell me the blog isn't as fun as it once was, while newer readers tell me it's a must-read. I'm sure the answer lies somewhere in between. So if you wouldn't mind, it'd be great to learn how you first learned about louisgray.com, what you're most interested in reading, and where you want the site to go. We are listening.

Questions:
1. How long have you read louisgray.com?
2. How do you access louisgray.com?
3. How did you first hear about louisgray.com?
4. What topics do you look for?
5. Should we focus more or less on certain topics?
6. What do you like or dislike?

It's anonymous, and only takes a minute, so, get your voice heard, and take the first louisgray.com survey!

Click Here to take the louisgray.com survey! (And thanks in advance)

Banning by Computer, Repairing by Hand, Google KOs TechWag

For many blogs, Google traffic sends the overwhelming majority of visitors. TechWag, a technology blog authored by Dan Morrill, claims Google constitutes upwards of 80 percent of traffic. Or it did... because earlier this week, Google identified his site as harmful, and instead of sending people to his site, would-be visitors are instead warned that by visiting TechWag, their computer could be harmed (See why). As a result, traffic has, as you would expect, evaporated.

Dan walked through his site, contacted his hosting company, and resolved the issue, before April 16th. But by the 19th, the issues still have not been resolved. As he writes in a post today (We are not a Malware Site), "Google is going to take its own sweet time cleaning up the disaster in their index. It does not matter how fast you clean it up... what matters is how fast Google can clear an erroneous flag in their database."


Google Warns Visitors to TechWag.com
Dan estimates it took five hours for Google to block his site, and another five hours to resolve the initial issue. But Google's Webmaster tools claim resolving the block will take "several weeks", and they "unfortunately ... can't reply individually to each request."

Google's not being evil, and was well-intended to steer would-be victims from what could have been seen as untrusted code. But the disparity of time taken to block and that taken to fix is going to have a real toll on Dan and his site. And while I may not be the biggest fan of ads on blogs, Dan does have them, and if he was looking to get any kind of paycheck off this week's activity, he's going to be sorely disappointed.


After Clicking the Link in Google...
As he writes, "Come on Google, if you are going to kill off a web site, at least have the courtesy to respond at Internet speed. Taking two weeks to check to see if we are “ok” is absolutely unacceptable."

Why can I read his site? Because I trust him and TechWag. It's a great blog. (Also I use a Mac, so I'm not too worried...) Too bad most visitors from Google are likely going to be scared away. I dare you to take the risk. Go to www.techwag.com and sign up for his RSS feed. It won't hurt. I promise.

Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue

It's routinely shocking to me that so many bloggers think they should try and make a profit from their Web site.

Urged on by the success of mega blog networks like TechCrunch and spurred forward by stories from ProBlogger, or corner cases like Dooce.com, Daily Kos and others, an inordinate amount of people are hoisting ads on their blogs, from Google AdSense, from AdBrite or Federated Media, in the hope of turning their daily rantings into big dollars that could possibly change their life. It's no surprise that blogging for many has the shiny look of a "get rich quick" scheme, when actuality is far different.

Their hopes are misguided, and for most, a serious reality adjustment is needed.

(Also: The Web Advertising Bubble Has Got to Pop, Advertising for Bloggers Has to Change)

Why and Where Do Advertisers Advertise?

Advertisers post ads where their potential customers may be lurking. If the demographic you serve doesn't match the demographic the advertiser is looking for, then it doesn't do either of you any good to hustle for leads that won't close.

Advertisers are looking for high traffic areas so their ads can be seen by a wide audience, giving them the highest number of impressions and potential for brand recognition.

Advertisers will pay a premium, be it cost per impression, cost per click or cost per conversion for those sites that can bring the highest quality customer, often found on sites that offer significant differentiation, whether that be popularity, reputation, quality of content, or ownership of a specific niche that nobody else has covered.

Where Bloggers Are Going At it Wrong

Most sites are not big enough, traffic-wise, to generate significant revenue. Assuming a mid-size blog gets about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and an ad delivers 1 cent per impression, you're only talking ten dollars a day. If you're instead getting 25 cents for a click-through, you would need 4 percent of your visitors to click on an ad to achieve that same ten bucks. And advertising click through rates are usually in the low tenths of a percent, let alone full percents, so most numbers would actually be much less than this. Even if you move any of the dials up by a factor of ten, you're not talking about life-changing money. The Web is full of stories around bloggers who took months to get their first $100 check from Google, the barrier for payment.

Most sites don't have real significant differentiation interesting to an advertiser. If you look in the tech world, just how many tech bloggers do we really need? How many of them are breaking stories or offering a unique angle for a unique audience that nobody would serve if they completely pulled up stakes and disappeared? Not too many. With the exception of about the top five or ten blog networks, no tech blog offers enough of a pull that an advertiser would consider them a must to invest with. And even among the top networks, the rush to publish is becoming silly to watch, as my RSS feed reader will fill up with near-identical stories, usually written by people who haven't done any original reporting beyond reading a press release, other blogs, or listening to a financial earnings call, if they're really serious. (See the graphic on today's acquisition of FareCast by Microsoft, for example)

On the E-Consultancy Web site, this issue is bluntly addressed:
"Most bloggers don't make a cent from blogging and the global demand for mostly poorly-written blogs about technology news pales in comparison to the global demand for music."

Yet, some bloggers act as if it's their God-given right to write, post a few ads and start raking in cash. In my opinion, content is absolutely cheap. It costs nothing, except time, to put text on paper or computer screen. In the world of journalism, finding willing reporters for newspapers hasn't really been much of a problem. Instead, there's a dearth of readers, and advertisers, which the Web has helped accelerate, as paper circulations dive and reporters are laid off. And while Google is reporting great earnings, the same rules will hold true online. Bloggers are a dime a dozen in most cases. Those that offer non-unique blogs without significant audience or differentiation might as well not exist as far as ads are concerned. Delivering more posts per day won't fix that. Following the big, successful networks won't do that. Spamming and trackback abuse won't fix that.

Services Offer Real Value, Bloggers Don't

Sometimes bloggers on the periphery of an industry get jealousy over seeing the dollars thrown around from mergers and acquisitions, or funding. It is human nature to see when a service might be bought for millions, that fans of the service or bloggers covering it feel they are entitled to a "share". But Web services like Facebook, Digg, or TechMeme are in themselves destination sites that are sticky, pulling in consistent viewers and repeat visits, made even better when these sites have personal, demographic information that helps tailor ads and messaging. These Web services are adding real value to the Web by changing the way we interact and communicate. Bloggers, myself included, are not. We are more like consumers than producers in this case, and the last time I checked, consumers pay, they don't get paid, no matter how excited we might be about a product.

The Focus Must Be Away from Ads

In a recent discussion on this topic, a blogging peer of mine said, "What's "fair" to me is making enough to cover hosting costs and buy myself some toys every once in a while. I do that, which is enough. But if I couldn't even cover hosting costs, I'd stop blogging."

And to me, I don't possibly see how the word "fair" can come into play. As bloggers, the ad industry, and our readers, truly owe us nothing. If we have opted to start writing, it is on our own choice. What we write about? Again, our choice. Where we opt to be hosted? Usually our choice. Our page layouts? Our choice. Our blogging platform or schedule? Our choice. So how does "fair" come into it? The goals must be somewhere else, whatever they may be for the individual, be it a hobby, setting up for the "next" job, continued writing practice, or enjoying the community.

There are millions of bloggers out there today, screaming for their "fair" share of the advertising pie. And while Google rakes in cash from vendors by the billions, some smaller bloggers are crying foul at the perceived inequalities. But it's more likely they are getting exactly what they deserve when it comes to ads - pennies. They would be better served to pull the ads off their site altogether and find different ways to make money, because for most, blogging will never get them what they want.

Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.

Over the last 18 months or so, I've gained something of a reputation for being an early adopter more likely to heap praise on early versions of software with clear bugs than to drag services through the mud, calling out their every hole and flaw. I've stated that I do champion the little guy, and w