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.

On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Often, perception of a site or service's momentum can be self-fulfilling.

Even over the last two years of my writing on this blog, the companies I cover have changed, as what used to be relevant has become less so, and new hotshots have come to take their place. But while some niche services are on their way to becoming household names, others that could have done so are fading, when compared to their peaks of 1, 2 or even 5 years ago.

One tool showing the decline of brands relative to one another is Google Trends, which measures how frequently a keyword is searched for as a percentage of the total searches on the Web.

Using Google Trends, you can see the near-death of older Web 1.0 brands, like Netscape, Lycos and Alta Vista, the plateauing of early Web 2.0 brands, like MySpace, and the deflating balloon of weakened brands, such as Technorati, Digg and Microsoft.


Netscape's Downfall... In Graph Form.

And Lycos Follows Suit.
A little more than a week ago, Google Trends made news by introducing the ability to track data on Web sites, but the service's core element helps shed some light on the fact that the interest level in Technorati has been slashed in half in just the last 12 months, that MySpace peaked a year ago, as did Digg.


The Technorati Monster Is Starving.

And Digg Is In a Rut.

MySpace Is Floating in Space.
Meanwhile, as both Google and Yahoo! have continued an upward trajectory of world interest, Microsoft has seen steady decline every year, starting in 2004, when the data was first tracked.


The Only Thing More Depressing is MSFT Stock.
At one time, it was fun to point out that the Technorati monster had escaped, that Technorati wasn't up to challenging Google Blog Search, or to debate whether Digg's relevance was going to decrease with its move away from solely having a tech focus. But Google Trends lays out on the table the tougher news - nobody cares, and the number of people actively looking for news on Digg or Technorati is going down, while many, many other services are rapidly growing.

While the entire market of Web measurements is questionable, from Alexa to Compete.com and all sorts of competitors in between, it'd be interesting to see Google get even more aggressive with their trends, showing the velocity of a term's decline or ascension. Maybe that'd get the point across a little better for those saying their damaged brands aren't in trouble.

And lest you think Google Trends is all bad news, it's not. Take a look at hotter stories, like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or Google itself to see what an up and to the right arrow looks like. But if these brands aren't careful, like some of those listed above, they too could stagnate and fall. And once you slow, you're really just preparing for the inevitable drop.

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.

BlogPulse Offers Insight into Blog Trends, Conversations and Influence

While BlogPulse has been around since 2005, I have largely ignored it, relying on Technorati, Google Blog Search and my own internal metrics to gauge momentum, trends and how conversations get shaped. But in light of this weekend's discussion, I was drawn to the site, and found it offers the best, closest, picture to how the story developed, who linked to who, and how a story can gain influence.

You can even see which people, famous or otherwise, are getting cited most frequently, or are the most "bursty", showing they are climing the ranks. (Key People for April 13, 2008)

Part of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BlogPulse highlights the top blog posts, news stories and videos on the Web each day, and offers the ability to search for trends, track conversations across multiple blogs and get profiles of a site. Interestingly, I was alerted by Technorati to the fact that Friday night's post was somehow labeled the second-highest "top blog post" by Nielsen, and Scoble's follow-on "Era of Blogger's Control Is Over" ranked fifth. This was tabulated by the blog posts gaining the most external links. You can see the top forty for today listed on their site, ranging from technology to politics. Unsurprisingly, the weekend discussion on Shyftr figures prominently, with Scoble and me being joined by Tony Hung.


What makes BlogPulse most interesting, at least to me, is the ability to break out conversations between blogs, like a family tree, seeing who linked to who, and how while I may have kicked off the discussion, its clear that Scoble and Hung have their own spheres of influence. Of course, as some reactions linked to all sites, it's not a perfect measure, but BlogPulse is the best I've seen here. (See: BlogPulse: Conversation Tracker)

But BlogPulse does more than just track the conversations. Like Technorati, BlogPulse can show charts, displaying if one topic or another is capturing the fancy of the blogosphere as a whole.

Here is the chart showing Shyftr's spike over the weekend:


The same chart for FriendFeed:


And for Twitter:


And if you're so inclined, you can even search for yourself, like I did.


Drilling down further, BlogPulse offers site profiles for the many blogs they index. The front page of the site claims nearly 78 million identified blogs, with more than 80 thousand net new in the last 24 hours, with almost 700,000 new posts indexed. Now that would make for a big fat, RSS to-do list, would it not?

Looking at my BlogPulse profile, common keywords in my recent posts include "TechMeme", "Blogosphere", "Subscriber", "Momentum", "Anticipated", "Linking", "Embedded", and "Screenshot", to name a few. BlogPulse also offers graphs showing the number of posts per day, and how often the site has been cited in the last month. The chart for my site is below:


Can BlogPulse replace Technorati, as many have expressed frustration with the one-time blog search king? Maybe not, but it certainly has a lot of very interesting elements that I like. While it's not new, I'm definitely going to be paying a lot more attention now to BlogPulse than I ever did before. After a crazy blog weekend, it's offered us the best picture of how it all unfolded.

Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours

Recently, Google's gained a lot of good feeling in the blogosphere for how rapidly they are indexing blog posts as part of their universal search. But while their search side is getting quicker and quicker, it can sometimes be several hours before some posts make their way from being published to hitting Google Reader, with no apparent cause.

It's enough to make me think we need heavy traffic advisories, or warnings that show when a specific hub is congested, the way we now can with airports or freeways.

Not too long ago, Google Reader added a seemingly-small feature that showed when an item was published, and also when it hit Google Reader. Maybe they thought they were showing off how quickly they were indexed. But without a doubt, it'll likely only serve to highlight the times when they aren't getting there fast at all.


Wow - That Timestamp Gave You Away, Google
Today, my post on AssetBar coming to Twitter's aid took more than five and a half hours to reach Google Reader. In the meantime, I saw the post indexed by FriendFeed and AssetBar, added to Spokeo, and listed under my blog on Technorati. In parallel, a response post at The Last Podcast hit Google Reader several hours earlier, but my original post was nowhere to be found.

Finally, despite being posted at 11:21 a.m., Google Reader didn't post the piece until 4:53 p.m., a virtual eternity in the rapid fire blog world. In those five-plus hours, 37 different posts were added to TechMeme's river. In those five hours, I received 149 tweets on Twitter. In those five hours, my story went from what could consider to be "breaking" to "tired".

At times, it's been obvious to me that while Google Reader leads in offering a simplified user interface and ease of use, it lags other services badly in how quickly they fetch items. I often see stories hit the feed, and click through only to find out they already have dozens of comments - making me late to the conversation. Today, that gap was huge. Google didn't just show up late, they showed up last.

Technorati's Latest Change: Front Page Revamp

If there's anything constant about Technorati, it's change. The last few months have been extremely bumpy for the once world-leading blog search and tagging engine, with executive changes, the more than occasional outage, and reduced relevance in the face of Google Blog Search.

But they're not going away any time soon, and tonight, it looks like they've reorganized their front page, to make the site more of a destination, rather than a conduit for you to get to tag data and ego-inflating blog statistics. Of note, Technorati might have gone the opposite direction, moving the most popular sites off the front page altogether, and instead, to Blogger Central.


The new front page highlights posts from my selected "favorites" as it did before, but displays the content in a more text-rich fashion, as if you were reading RSS in a feed reader. The site also brought forward the "My blogs" section, showing current authority level and my number of fans. (Not all that high, mind you)

Also highlighted is the integration of top tags, with a 30-day graph showing the prominence of those tags over time. The rising blog posts and rising news stories, determined by external links and discussion, has been pushed to the bottom, below that of updates from my favorites.

Will this make me visit Technorati.com that much more? Probably not, unless I were to start using the site to more thoroughly walk the blogosphere and tag my favorites. After all, given I have 240+ RSS feeds, and I'm only a fan of a small handful of sites on Technorati, I haven't been keeping up. But at least it shows the company is trying something new in another attempt to make traffic stick.

See Also:
Technorati: Totally Toast In Tracking Real-Time Traction?
Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts
Technorati Down Again, Google Sure to Benefit

Technorati: Totally Toast In Tracking Real-Time Traction?

Sorry, Technorati, but while I want to root for you and give you praise, it's just not going to happen tonight. Because tonight, Google Blog Search is giving your behind a serious bruising.

Google Blog Search is easily proving to be the best way to find out who is talking about a topic, and who is linking my way, much more than you are. While you were once my go-to for so many things, my every click through your site is now like strolling through a museum, hoping not to touch anything, for fear it may fall down and become damaged.

The Case Against Technorati:

Once the premiere site for tracking tags, topics, and blog popularity, Technorati could be counted on to see who was discussing a story, or linking to the blog, ahead of anyone in the world. Now, Google Blog Search not only is indexing stories more quickly than Technorati, and getting them into Google, but it's doing it more effectively, in more quantity, period.

Tonight's Example:

Source: Technorati

There's no question the hubbub around ReadBurner, and my unveiling of it, has been noisy in the last day and a half. But if you checked Technorati, the only way you would even know it had taken place is through a single note from the official Readburner blog, titled "ReadBurner Updates", where Alexander writes, "The unintended alpha leak of ReadBurner through louisgray.com gave my “hobby project” the boost it needed, development-wise."

Elsewhere, we also see positive comments from Oliver Thylmann, who discusses an older article in his summary, "A few interesting predictions for 2008". He kindly says, "(Louis's) 10 Predictions for 2008 rock, especially as they are really clear, and sometimes weird." Bob Stumpel of Everything 2.0 also liked the predictions in a list he titled 500+ Technology Predictions for 2008 and Beyond.

And that's all we've got from Technorati. Thanks, Technorati! Now... let's check Google.

Source: Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search also found Oliver Thylmann's post, but interestingly, not the ReadBurner blog or that from Bob Stumpel.

Meanwhile, Google did more accurately, and more fully, index other pages, including a piece from JeffIsAGeek called ReadBurner : Aggregating Google Shared Items, explaining ReadBurner's functionality, and the story of how it was "discovered and outed".

Google also found John Battelle's coverage of ReadBurner, where he says, "This looks really cool." He's right, of course.

Meanwhile, keeping with the Web services theme, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica finally discovered FriendFeed, and says simply, Interesting: FriendFeed, adding "It may actually prove to be useful." I can promise that it is.

Google isn't done. They also found comments from Bill Wishon on last week's argument of the month, Scoble's deletion from Facebook, and who owns whose data. He writes, in Scoble/Facebook Incident: It’s Not About Data Ownership, "Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody?"

And lastly, in the Google trumping Technorati theme, we have Steven Hodson's excellent rant against the blindness of A-Listers who spend too much time admiring their stats and not enough time writing. As he notes in Stopping the Lazysphere? … Maybe when Pigs Fly, we're not really looking to the A-List for serious conversation. We're instead going elsewhere. He very flatteringly includes me as one of his "go to" guys for Technology and Apple specifically, and we're honored to be included.

Tonight, and for just about every night in the recent past, I think Technorati has lost. It's unfortunate, and drives me a little bit nuts when I see a smaller, would-be innovative company losing out to a bigger company with seemingly infinite resources. But it looks like this fight is coming to an end.

Web 2.0 Logos Celebrate Halloween - You Scared?

It's October 31st, which can only mean that while the kids go door to door to get candy, we're going from Web site to Web site to find out which Web companies are embracing Halloween in the true tradition of logo modification!

Google, which has a very long history of this thing, is of course participating. So is Google's subsidiary, YouTube, and Google competitors, Yahoo! and Technorati. Even Friendfeed, started by some ex-Googlers, has debuted a great Halloween logo.

Can you find any notable Halloween themed logos out there that I missed, and hopefully some that have absolutely zero to do with Google? Post them in the comments, and we can update the picture.

Fun With Technorati Chart Matchups

A week ago, Technorati turned over a new leaf, with the return of charts throughout the company's blog search service. Very quietly, the company also has enabled Web surfers to compare trends between keyword pairs, by using the VS command.

This "officially unsupported" command (per ex-CEO David Sifry), allows for comparisons of what's hot and what's not, over a specific time period, to a stretch as long as six months.

(The code: http://www.technorati.com/search/TERM1+vs+TERM2?authority=n&language=en)

Running a few comparisons myself, we saw more people are blogging about Slashdot than I had anticipated, especially relative to Digg, that the iPhone shot like a meteor to eclipse the iPod, and that a battle for higher profile between Robert Scoble and TechCrunch or Jason Calacanis and ValleyWag just might never be resolved. It's that close.

For all charts: Note the peaks and dips for weekends, as well as the scope of the chart. The most popular keywords register in the thousands, while less frequently discussed items just crack triple digits.

First Up: iPod vs. iPhone



In the Search World: Yahoo! vs. Google



Building a Community: Digg vs. Slashdot (Big surprise here!)



Social Networking: Facebook vs. MySpace
(MySpace plunging, with Facebook eking up...)



Long-Time Tech Titans: Apple vs. Microsoft



New Age Blog Titans: TechCrunch vs. Scoble



Let's Be Friends Edition: Calacanis vs. Valleywag



Mix and match the terms and see what you come up with. Others I tried included "baseball vs football", and Plaxo vs LinkedIn. What can you come up with, and do these charts accurately track the blogosphere's momentum as you see it?

Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts

Given the discussions of the last few days, it's obvious there's little better the blogosphere likes to do than find new ways to rank one another, show charts and count links. That's why the on-again, off-again discussion of Technorati's potential demise is so odd, as if there's anyone positioned to own the stats sphere, it's them, if only they can execute and stay focused. But in a mix of feature missteps and general lack of reliability, they've lost face amid challenges from Google, TechMeme and others.

Today, they charged back in a good way with the return of keyword charts and filtering by blog "Authority" in search results.

Previously, I had wondered where the charts went, but hadn't given it too much thought. Now, like Google's Trends feature, I can see how frequently a keyword has been mentioned each day in the blogosphere over the last 30, or choose not to see results from blogs that haven't gained enough popularity yet to be deemed relevant.

While the additions were noted on Technorati's official Weblog, I was alerted via RSS from David Sifry, the company's former CEO. Additionally, it looks like he was so excited about the move, he blasted his Twitter audience as well. How did I know? Not from using Twitter, but instead, from Technorati.

You can see some quick examples of the charts provided by Technorati by way of searches for the aforementioned TechMeme, Google Reader and Technorati itself.

Who Can Build an Inverse Technorati?

With all the hubbub earlier this week around the introduction of the new TechMeme Leaderboard, the fading aura of Technorati was once again brought to the fore, as TechMeme's new offering was seen as challenging the longtime blog search engine's hold on who owns the most "Authority" on the Web - best indicated by the number of unique sites provide direct links to their blogs.

In the last 12-18 months, Technorati has seen more than its fair share of bad news and bad karma. From consistent bouts with downtime and sluggish responsiveness, an all-out assault from Google to own the blog search space, bloggers' gaming of the site's ranking index, and the loss of CEO David Sifry, many don't see the Web 2.0 pioneer pulling out of the spiral and reclaiming share - especially as its latest forays into innovation, WTF and Topics, are more confusing than useful.

Despite all the above, Technorati still performs an excellent set of functions - tracking who has linked to your blog, sorted by date, or "Authority", and giving you your own "Authority" count, based on the number of individual blogs pointing your way in the last six months.

But, partly due to our recent thoughts around internal links, and the work of Yuvi Panda, showing how some of the biggest sites link outwardly, I've been thinking we need a spider-driven search engine that will index blogs, and provide reports on who we link to the most frequently. The question is, who builds it?

Ideally, the service would:

1. Provide aggregate reports on how many internal and external links were created, and in how many posts, over a given period.
2. Provide a ranking of the most-frequently linked-to sites or pages in a given period.
3. Recognize links from blog posts, and could exclude both "sidebars" and "action" buttons, (i.e. for Digg, Ballhype, StumbleUpon, etc.)
4. Be able to display subsets of data, such as the ranking of most-frequently linked-to sites in which I had a specific tag (i.e. Sports, Technology, Media).
5. Show me which bloggers have similar sites in my "Top 10 Linked", for example, which might indicate people who have similar interests, who I would undoubtedly want to read.

Yuvi Panda has created a statistical engine that crunches a single site at a time, reporting back on internal and external link frequency. Could this service be expanded to crawl the entire blogosphere, like Technorati, and provide individual bloggers with their own statistics? And could this service ever be marketized? I know I'd love to use it.

Tech Blog Link Power: Spiky Visitors or Sticky Visitors?

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While many tech bloggers live for the instant, drug-like satisfaction of hitting the Digg front page, or getting picked up by StumbleUpon or Slashdot, that rush of one-time visitors doesn't last long, and they won't come back again. A Digg visitor is usually one that won't comment, won't bookmark, and won't remember your URL.

Repeat visitors to tech blogs usually aren't forged by traffic spikes from well-known news hubs. Nor are they from search engines. It's a rare blog or Web site that can drive both high levels of both one-time visitors and repeat visitors. In fact, in my experience over the last two years of technology blogging, the very best sources for repeat, engaged visitors are:

1. Robert Scoble / Scobleizer
2. TechMeme
3. My own comments on similarly-focused blogs
4. Links from other B-List Bloggers
5. Shared Link Blogs (such as those from Scoble, Webomatica and others)

In fact, while I don't want to give Robert all the credit here, I have seen his hand in some of my highest-traffic posts. Often, his addition of my posts to his shared link blog or his own blog later leads to other bloggers linking, which pushes my post to TechMeme, in turn, leading to more follow-on posts and residual traffic.

But I can't just sit around and "write for Scoble", hoping he'll throw pixie dust my way. In order to engage with the crowd and encourage return visits, I need to link to others, make comments on other similar blogs, and make tools for engagement, like my RSS feed and MyBlogLog, easily accessible.

Thus, I've broken the Link Power Index into four sections:

1. High spikiness, low stickiness (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Megite, Slashdot)
2. Low spikiness, low stickiness (Google, Facebook, Technorati, Yahoo!)
3. Low spikiness, high stickiness (RSS, word of mouth, comments, LinkedIn, B-List linking)
4. High spikiness, high stickiness (Scobleizer, TechMeme, Shared Link Blogs, MacSurfer)

Last month, "BeachBum" asked, in regards to some of my less-desirable visitors from Google Images, "Do you find that the porn traffic converts or do they just come and go?". The answer is no. None of them convert. Unless I start writing about porn full-time, they're not coming back, and that's okay. While a one-time visitor may have found a keyword sequence on Google that had your blog listed #1 overall, it's unlikely they're your demographic.

In fact, surprisingly, links from B-List and A-List bloggers have been more useful to me than links from more mainstream media. While I was flattered to see coverage of one of September's posts on MSNBC.com and the Houston Chronicle, they didn't drive the traffic of a strong link aggregator, and their visitors, as far as I could tell, were one-offs.

If you want a one-time spike of traffic, go ahead and write to make the front page of Digg (Yuvi Panda's Round 2 analysis of Digg's front page shows how...) or get a group of friends to Stumble your content. But to cultivate readers and engage with the blogging community, you should comment often, share ideas with your peers, and hope somebody with real pull, like Scoble, or MacSurfer, notices your effort.

The above image is how I've interpreted sticky traffic vs. spiky traffic to louisgray.com in the last year-plus. Do you have any comments or insight? Am I off the mark, or have you seen similar behavior? Please let me know, and feel free to use the image yourself. Links back are always appreciated.

Also on this topic: Chris Brogan: Scoble Effect Better Than Digg and Search Engine Land: December 2006 Statistics Review

Why My Technorati Ranking Is Slip-Sliding Away

It'd be great if Technorati took a daily snapshot of a blog's influence, and tracked that Authority over time. Rather than a single number to define influence, bloggers could have a six-month or greater graph of their influence as it waxed and waned, or see just how many new links each story gained, with considerable spikiness. Given Technorati's struggles to remain a leader in the face of the Google Blogsearch onslaught, further tweaks to the statistics and tracking models they do best could help gain stickiness and relevancy.

It's no secret that the Technorati Authority ranking system works by tabulating the number of links by unique blogs in the prior six months to your site. Elite blogs can rank in the thousands, while "B-List" bloggers tend to occupy a lower tier, commonly in the 100 to 500 space. But given the tendency of certain stories to get a cluster of links, and those clusters being irregular in timing, it's no surprise that sometimes, one's Technorati Authority can take a steep dive in a matter of days - as a watershed moment or popular post passes the six month point.

Just this Saturday, in my "State of the Blog", I noted my Technorati Authority was 117 - signifying that 117 unique blogs had linked my way in the prior 180 days. By the time I got home from the Cal game late that night, the number had dropped to 108, then 104, and it now sits at 103. While I have attributed previous drops in this ranking to the company's work to eliminate spam blogs that artificially inflated the number, this time it's clear the drop has a lot to do with me, and I can see future drops ahead.

Six months ago, the blog had a serious traffic event when my comments on Google Reader reached Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, Robert Scoble's Scobleizer, and TechMeme. By the end of the rush, Technorati noted 30 unique "Blog Reactions" to the article. But the article's publication date was March 3rd, a full six months and one day ago now. So, unless each of those blogs linked again to me later, their contribution to the Technorati Authority ranking will be removed, and my count will go down.

This isn't to say that my Technorati Authority hasn't increased in the last six months - for it has, quite a bit. When I first passed 100, I was fairly pleased, but given the spikiness of external hyperlinking, there's no doubt that the count will vacillate upwards and downwards, and at this time, we're headed on the side of gravity.

As the six month window first erases early March links and moves onward to mid-March, and eventually April, I can expect additional bites out my ranking, as I lose the ten external links to my comments on Google's Earth Day logo, made on April 22nd, and the ten others I gained from the aforementioned Technorati Spam Blogs story from late March.

Not only will I be losing those spikes in linkage from the "six months ago" window, but even in that short time, the world of blogging has changed considerably. Even since this spring, the rise of microblogging with Twitter, moves to Facebook, and reliance on bookmark harvesters like del.icio.us or Google Reader shared links will drive down the amount of external linkings from the general blogosphere.

I also believe that we're seeing an incredible amount of clique-like behavior among similarly themed blogs (something I'm guilty of as well). Those who find similar blogs to theirs get comfortable and link to one another, or rely solely on RSS feeds for all news, not stepping out to see what others are saying. Yet, if I continue to simply link to known quantities like ParisLemon, Webomatica, WinExtra and Kent Newsome, I won't be helping their Technorati Authority or their mindshare any more than my own. Instead, I'll just be extending the cycle.

Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies

Most companies would prefer that if you have questions or comments regarding their service, you would send them a nice e-mail to their support staff, or post it to a company-sanctioned, moderated forum. But as we all know, sending e-mail to busy support people can be a guessing game as to how long you'll wait to get a response, if you hit the right person, or if they will answer your question at all. I've found the absolute fastest, sure-fire way to talk directly with people at Web-aware services is through the blog.

Blogs are the future of company to customer communications. Those companies that allow the highest transparency to customers to management or rank and file employees will win the much sought after "hearts and minds of the people." It's already worked on me a number of times in the last few months, with small companies like Technorati and LinkedIn to larger companies like Google and Yahoo! subsidiary MyBlogLog, as you might have seen over the last few days.

Google Reader Example:

In March of 2007, I listed ten improvements I hoped to see from my RSS go-to destination, Google Reader.

A little more than a day later, Google responded, with Mihai Parparita, an Engineer working on Google Reader, writing in the coments, "Funnily enough, the Reader team just had a big all-day brainstorming session about where to go next, and ideas similar to many of your suggestions were discussed."

I've since been told that the post is occasionally referenced within Google and helps add signal to the noise of user feature demands. Though I was initially nervous they would take my suggestions the wrong way, I am glad they recognized I was and remain quite positive on the service.

LinkedIn Example:

Later that month, I offered similar suggestions for LinkedIn, the leading business-focused social network. Steve Ganz, of LinkedIn, later wrote to let me know that some of the suggestions had just been implemented, and more were to come! As he kindly wrote, "These are all great ideas. Thanks so much for the great feedback, Louis! Stay tuned."

Technorati Examples:

Despite Technorati's occasional issues and recent management changes, I enjoy the service. But the downtime can make users weary. In June, I noted another outage, and not too much longer after my post, Ian Kallen wrote to say "We're bringing our systems back online now".

In April, I was eagerly awaiting the new issue of Technorati's popular state of the Web and openly speculated it was imminent. Then-CEO David Sifry took time from his busy schedule to say "LOL, keep your eyes on the blog.", and later returned, after 2:30 a.m. to say "The new State of the Live Web is now up!", which was very cool.

And that leaves one more, for now:

MyBlogLog Example:

On Monday, I discussed what the future of MyBlogLog would be after their acquisition by Yahoo!. While I wasn't overly glowing in my comments, two MyBlogLog employees offered their comments, with Ian Kennedy first saying "We're alive and well thanks and have been busy...", and later, Robyn Tippins coming back, offering thanks for the comments, and unexpectedly, a free Pro account! Of course, I recognize I'm being wooed, but I can take it. Now I'll have an even better chance to look into MyBlogLog's services and can speak more directly to what they're doing well and how they could continue to improve.

Not every company comes by when I make comments. Apple doesn't, and likely won't. Microsoft hasn't yet, and neither has TiVo. That could be due to internal policies on communication, PR, customer service and blogging, or they aren't as in tune to the Web's power to connect customers with companies. I appreciate the extra effort taken from Google Reader, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and Technorati to talk to me directly and openly as individuals, and outside of the corporate firewall. I look forward to more, and encourage the rest of you bloggers to be comfortable in analyzing what you use every day and thinking aloud about how you could make change and make a difference.

Who Me? Featured in a Podcast?

In a world where total page views don't amount for much, and spikes of unique visitors from Digg, StumbleUpon or Slashdot can be gone in an instant, there's something to be said for the more "squishy" metrics, like how many comments a post received, or whether bloggers found your work interesting enough to link to. Out of the ashes of Web 1.0's eyeball-oriented metrics came the rise of Google's PageRank, and Technorati Authority, as well as other, rarely useful sites, like Alexa.

If a comment to a post carries a certain amount of weight, it's safely assumed that a link carries more weight, as it potentially drives new visitors your way. With that said, how many links does a podcast count as? That's the amusing conundrum I've hit after hearing WinExtra's Steven Hodson's soliloquy on Web services Last.fm and MyBlogLog, in large part spurred by discussions here over the last week or so. It's odd enough finally putting a voice to a person whom I've traded comments and e-mails with over the last few months, and even odder still to hear my name mentioned as provoking thoughts on where these services are headed.

(Download the Podcast Here)

Steven wasn't the only one who sent links this way today. The MyBlogLog story was captured in Robert Scoble's Link Blog, which always leads to a short-term spurt in visitors from Twitter, and these days, Facebook. Later, the surprisingly popular blog "Grow a Brain" caught up to a post on how your blog is your brand, from earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Kent Newsome rounded up his ninth edition of the Swivel Feeds, in his one-man battle to test the limits of his RSS feed reader. This week's additions included names I had provided, from the aforementioned WinExtra, to ParisLemon, Ken Jennings, Yuvi Panda and Ben Rockwood.

We'll have our peaks and valleys in this whole blogging exercise, but it's nice to be noticed.

Blogging: Set Goals Or Let Fly?

Steven Hodson of WinExtra has an excellent post on his top 10 suggestions for new bloggers, including advice to set goals, narrow your focus, choose the right tools and pick a theme. If done well, he suggests you should have a target number of RSS feed readers, individual site visitors or even advertising dollars, whether for six months or twelve.

While good advice for those with specific goals, does that mean those without goals, and without limits, are inherently unsuccessful? I recently noticed I'd passed through both the Technorati Authority rank of more than 100, as well as a Feedburner subscription base of just over 100. Did I count that as achieving my goals? No, because I hadn't made them a target, but they are good benchmarks nonetheless.

I think there's something to be said for blogging for the sake of blogging, for not always narrowing your focus if you just don't feel like it. While I might get more readers if I stuck to just Apple Macintosh coverage, or Google watching, I enjoy talking about sports, or our dog, or the latest hits on our TiVo or Nintendo Wii. For me, while I've said my blog is my brand, it's not so narrow as to show me in a niche. Instead, while my interests are diverse, so will my blog be.

I don't have specific goals for my blog, except that I keep it up in a timely manner, that my posts maintain interest and quality, and that I keep conversations alive. For me, the blog is an outlet of discourse with people I may never meet, and a clean slate that captures those things I'm thinking about or want to call attention to. The WinExtra guide is fantastic if I were looking to start a blog with a target of being on the B-List or the A-List, and gaining notoriety, or simply covering the yearly hosting bills, but for me, I'd prefer to let fly, so I can communicate at my own pace and not feel as if I'm forever falling behind my own expectations.

TechCrunch's Celebrating Failure Doesn't Help Anyone

Though the argument could be made that for all of the breathlessness that follows the debut of Web companies and services, there should be an equal amount of noise on the down side when some of them fail to meet expectations, I don't quite understand the seeming excitement around seeing others struggle or even close their doors. Today, TechMeme and the blogosphere are abuzz over two prominent Web 2.0 companies, Technorati and PodTech, who saw changes at the executive level, and much of it is seemingly celebratory. And that makes no sense at all.

The news you likely already know. At Technorati, David Sifry, after previously stating there was a search for a candidate to replace him at CEO, announced he would move to a board-only role. Meanwhile, PodTech, home of well-renowned "on sabbatical" blogger Robert Scoble, promoted from within, giving the COO the CEO position.

Change happens. It's a well-known industry norm that startup companies see change as they grow. Founders often first move from CEO positions to "strategic" positions, and then later, out of the picture. But to see some talk about it, you'd think that as this change occurs, that it's an opportunity to pile on and throw dirt on those who were often the biggest risk takers of them all.

Take, for example, TechCrunch's coverage of Sifry's very transparent note on his blog, which chronicled the change, and noted the layoff of eight employees:

"Sifry’s last blog post as CEO of the company was representative of his entire tenure - vague and cold. Layoffs also occurred today but Sifry didn’t mention them until the end."

Though I don't have any specific insight here, it's most likely the small (and eight people is small) layoff was not given top billing out of respect of those who just lost their jobs. No company likes to highlight bad news, and it's not the CEO or former CEO's role to highlight the very personal loss on his or her blog. For Sifry, his blog is to be about him and his company. Let those others who have left talk about the story from their words if their story is to be told. And for TechCrunch to dump on Sifry by saying his entire tenure was "vague and cold"? Where is the backup on that? It's complete balderdash. Sifry, through his blog, and through frequent comments in the blogosphere, including here, was hardly vague, and hardly cold. TechCrunch is wrong, period.

TechCrunch's negativity feeds the beast of those who like to pile on. Comments on the site said, "for Sifry, his arrogance and constant self-crooning have half the Valley clapping hands," and "Sifry misspelled “loser