Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has an interesting post here about the rise of fast food content.
But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn't a copyright issue - the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it's far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it - if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.
But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.
So what really scares me? It's the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.
Michael Arrington is absolutely right that this is on the rise. There are new companies emerging that are hiring lots and lots of writers very cheaply to produce tons and tons of content. It probably isn't a coincidence that these companies have emerged during a recession when many people are looking for a way to increase their income.
The search engines will certainly point people toward some of this content. Not all of the content these companies create will be bad but some of it is bound to be. This shouldn't mean the end of original hand crafted content but these mass content producers will certainly increase the competition that content creators face. There are ways around it. Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can point readers to the higher quality posts and articles. If bloggers will link to each other more like they did in the early days of blogging that it will help too. This should, in theory, help weight the better written content above the subpar content.
Music Blogging Network Called MOG Gets More Funding
Venture Beat reports that a music blog network or social network named MOG has raised $5 million. Venture Beat says the site has 8 million uniques and has signed up large advertisers including Nike, Procter & Gamble and LG. The targeted niche content and demographics must be appealing to advertisers.
MOG has an advertising network called MOG Music Network (MMN). The faq here explains how bloggers can sign-up and how they get paid.
More people are using the Tumblr tool to make short blogs. According to Mashable, Tumblr generated an impressive 255 million pageviews in July. The source of the data is Quantcast. Mashable says Tumblr expects to serve 330 million page impressions in August. Tumblr also says they have had 50 million visitors in the past 30 days.
Bloggers Abandon Blogs For Several Different Reasons
The New York Times has a story about abandoned blogs. The article cites a 2008 Technorati study that found that about 95% of people who start blogs end up abandoning them.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Blog abandonment is not a new issue. There have always been people who have started blogs and then stopped blogging. Some quit because the issue or event that motivated them to blog faded away. Some quit blogging because of time constraints with work, family or health. Others quit when they found out blogging wasn't the quick path to riches they thought it was - this reason is probably less of an issue today. Some people have also left their blogs without updates for months because they found it easier to use Twitter or another microblogging service.
The Times says some bloggers quit blogging even though they managed to create a popular blog. They found the lack of privacy disconcerting.
"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.
Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.
But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.
As you might suspect, the Times story also says that many bloggers quit because it is difficult to attract blog readers.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"
Building a readership can be a struggle and not being able to build one is the reason many bloggers evenutally quit. At the same time there are bloggers content to continue writing even for very small audiences. Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, told the Times a joke about blog readership. He said, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."
Gawker Sells Consumerist and Plans to Sell Defamer
Gawker's Consumerist blog has been sold to nonprofit Consumers Union. Gawker Media's Hollywood gossip blog Defamer is also up for sale. The Gawker blog network has been steadily shrinking since last year. There's no official word on how much Consumerist was sold for but Peter Kafka at Media Memo says he's been told mid-six figures.
Denton wouldn't comment on the sale of Consumerist, an advocacy site with attitude that he put on the block last month. And he would only confirm that Defamer, his attempt to break into Hollywood coverage, is for sale.
But I'm told that Consumerist may have fetched something in the "mid-six figure range," and that a logical buyer for Defamer would be BuzzNet, the pop culture blog network that picked up Denton's Idolator music site earlier this year.
Consumerist never seemed like the kind of blog that could attract lots of advertising so it seems appropriate that it was sold to the company behind the subscription Consumer Reports publication. Some commenting on a Consumerist post about the sale sound concerned the Consumerist blog itself could go subscription but Consumer Reports has a number of blogs on its website (see here) that are available free to the public so Consumerist is probably safe from subscriber fees for now.
Pingdom analyzed the Top 100 blogs on Technorati and found that many of them have large-sized front pages primarily because of the use of a lot of large photos.
The average total size of the front page was 934 KB.
35% had a front page larger than 1 MB.
26% had a front page smaller than 500 KB.
39% (the largest segment) had a front page between 500 KB and 1 MB.
Pingdom says scripts from widgets and third-party analytics tools are also slowing down the load time of blog homepages. Pingdom notes that blog readers without broadband are really going to suffer as they try to load these large page sizes. They also say blogs may be doing themselves a disservice if they continue to get bigger and bigger.
Since many blogs try to attract a large number of readers, they may be doing themselves a disservice if they let their blog size get too big, which will result in a slow-loading blog. Browser-side caching will help things a bit for frequent readers, but any new or casual visitor will have to load the page in its entirety and some may give up before it is finished or at least get frustrated. (And no one wants frustrated readers.)
On the other hand the blogs with a large number of photographs may be benefitting from having all these images because they bring back readers. Some of the top blogs often have large photographs followed by a paragraph or two of text. A gossip blog may have large photographs of the latest celebrity hijinks and a gadget blog may have a large photograph of the latest Apple product. If the images are what is making the blog more popular then taking them away or shrinking them could actually reduce traffic. (via The Register)
AOL has released a press release applauding their blog success on the third anniversary of the Weblogs Inc. acquisition. In the release AOL notes that they honed the Weblogs, Inc. portfolio down to 29 blogs.
AOL celebrates the third anniversary of its acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. this month. In 2005, Weblogs had a large portfolio of niche blogs targeted at business and professional users, in addition to a general readership. Since then, Weblogs has honed its portfolio to 29 blogs focused on major consumer passion points such as technology, autos, finance, video games and travel. Since 2005, Weblogs has seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix.
In addition to Weblogs' own growth, the acquisition was instrumental to AOL's launch of successful sites such as TMZ, http://tmz.com, and Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, and Spinner, http://spinner.com. AOL is now the largest global publisher of owned-and-operated blogs.
"The acquisition of Weblogs was game-changing for AOL and the entire blogging community," said Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance, News, Sports, Weblogs and KOL. "Weblogs pioneered the development of professional blogging, and AOL accelerated its growth and leadership in branded content publishing by deeply integrating Weblogs throughout AOL's substantial network of programming channels. In doing so, AOL transformed its publishing model and increased its relevancy and reach for advertisers, while advancing best-of-breed sites in key consumer interest areas."
AOL says its in-house blogs and Weblogs, Inc. blogs generate a worldwide blog audience of over 30 million unique visitors monthly.
AOL's owned and operated blog network, including Weblogs, Inc. and AOL's other blog properties, is now the largest in the world in terms of unique visitors, according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix, with a worldwide blog audience of more than 30 million unique visitors and more than 650 million page views monthly. Leading brands in AOL's blog network include TMZ, http://tmz.com, Engadget, http://engadget.com, Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, Autoblog, http://autoblog.com, Spinner, http://spinner.com, Joystiq, http://joystiq.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, ParentDish, http://parentdish.com, Cinematical, http://cinematical.com, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), http://tuaw.com, DownloadSquad, http://downloadsquad.com, GreenDaily, http://greendaily.com, Luxist, http://luxist.com, and others.
AOL also plans more blog brands and more international blogs.
Over the next 12 months, AOL plans to launch of number of new blog brands in important consumer interest areas, as well as aggressively continue the expansion of its blogs internationally.
Evangelical Alliance Names The Ten Blogging Commandments
The Evangelical Alliance recently came up with the "Ten Blogging Commandments." The Evangelical Alliance says they are loosely based on the real Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. The Evangelical Alliance says these commandments are "intended to cause bloggers to consider the social impact of their blogging."
The commandments were released at Godblogs, a gathering held by the Evangelical Alliance. If you start breaking the 2nd commandment then your blogging has really gone to your head. Hat tip to J-Walk Blog who says he has already violated a few of the commandments.
You shall not put your blog before your integrity.
You shall not make an idol of your blog.
You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.
Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.
Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.
You shall not murder someone else's honour, reputation or feelings.
You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.
You shall not steal another person's content.
You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.
You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content.
Google's Blogger.com service suffered an unfortunate error over the weekend that marked some legitimate Blogger account as spam. These users marked as spammers were unable to use their accounts reports The Register.
Blogger.com emailed an apology to users on Saturday when access was restored.
The company said it was looking at extra monitoring and process checks to stop the mistake happening again.
One irate blogger said: "Google lost my trust yesterday. They'll have to work twice as hard to regain it due to their lack of acknowledgment of the problem."
Figures from Alexa.com found Blogger suffered more downtime in 2007 than any other Top 20 website.
There is an apology Blogger users posted here on Blogger Buzz titled "You Are Not Spam."
We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We've tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.
Google's Blogspot isn't the first social service to have its spam fighting efforts bring down legitimate users and it won't be the last. Twitter has also recently been suffering from similar problem as it tries to curb spam.
MediaWeek reports that People.com is acquiring the Celebrity Baby Blog, a blog covering celebrity baby news, from from founder Danielle Friedland.
For the time being, celebrity Baby Blog will remain separate from People.com. In the coming weeks, the blog and People.com will begin cross-promoting each other.
People.com hopes the acquisition will grow its appeal with its largely female audience, while it plans other additions, both home grown and through acquisitions, to build traffic to the site.
There is also a post by Friedland about People.com's acquisition here on the Celebrity Baby Blog.
CNET and its array of Internet properties have been acquired by CBS in a $1.8 billion acquisition. Paid Content says the deal is expected to close in Q3.
Said CBS CEO Les Moonves in the statement: "CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience. Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives. We could not be more pleased with the prospect of adding CNET Networks and its tremendous team of people to the CBS family. I look forward to working with Quincy Smith, Neil Ashe and the considerable combined talent at both companies, as we build upon our success."
Among the sites in the CNET family that will be part of CBS Interactive pending approval: CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic. The company has also been building out its China operations, with sites devoted to womens content and auto.
The press release can be found here. CNET has a lot of blogs and websites with a considerable amount of traffic. CBS should be able to use these blogs and websites to help drive traffic to other CBS properties.
ReadWriteWeb calls CNET the "the granddaddy of all the blog networks on the web." They run a number of well-known blogs including Webware, The Iconoclast, The Social and Crave. You can see all of CNET's blogs here.
The New York Times has a story about how deadly blogging can be.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
The New York Times deserves credit for stirring up the blogosphere but to pick on blogging as being dangerous to your health is unfair. Sitting for long periods of time isn't very good for the human body. That's what bloggers do. It's what writers and journalists did long before computers. It's also what millions of people around the world now do in the information age. The human body doesn't cope well with what people need to do to make a living in the information age - sit and type and move a mouse. This isn't a blogging problem - it is a widespread result of the information age. Even so there are many industries such as mining or foresty that put workers at far greater risk than blogging does.
Let's put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let's get real: If you're stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you'd be stressed by any profession you chose.
Careerbuilder has a list of the most dangerous jobs - blogging isn't on it.
What the Times article is really about is overworking - getting so caught up in your work that you ignore your health and damage your body. Hard workers in any industry tend to not sleep enough, not exercise enough and not eat right. This happens to lawyers, CEOs, accountants and bloggers. It's easy for a doctor or New York Times journalist to tell people they need to take it easy when they are trying to make a living - when they are trying to provide for their family. Still it is a message that resonates and it doesn't do you any good to work yourself so hard to you get seriously ill and/or die.
Om Malik - a blogger mentioned in the article who recently survived a heart attack - blogs about the Times story in this post titled " Relax, Chill and maybe Blog." It is worth reading for anyone that may be pushing it too hard.
There is a second print publication about blogging called Artful Blogging. We blogged about the launch of Blogger & Podcaster magazine nearly a year ago but we missed the debut of this quarterly publication that also launched in 2007. Artful Blogging is focused more on creative blogging and the artwork and photography found on these arts and crafts blogs.
Take a virtual tour of some of the most visually inspiring blogs on the internet with the second issue of Artful Blogging! Each page of this captivating publication is like a digital gallery, filled with photography, artwork and blog excerpts sure to stir your imagination. Within this 144-page quarterly publication, you'll find features that include "Blogging Etiquette," "Blogger's Must-Haves" and "How to Get Started" on your own blog spot
You can see a few sample pages from Artful Blogginghere. The quarterly magazine is published by Stampington & Company.
Artful Blogging is now on its second issue. Several blogggers were more on top of things and caught the launch of this new print publication. The Guardian's blog provides a good explanation of what the blog is all about. Other blogs discussing Artful Blogging include Artsy Mama, Persisting Stars, Navylane and Blogher.
Senator Charles Schumer Says Young People Read Blogs Not Newsweek or Time
The Business and Media Institute reports that New York Senator Charles Schumer sees blogs as one of the reasons the Democratic Party has been able to reach young voters. In this year's primaries Democratic turnout has overwhelmed Republican turnout often by ratios of 2:1 or greater. Schumer says young people are reading blogs to find the news - not Newsweek or Time magazine.
"Politics has become more accessible to young people," Schumer said. "They didn't really get into TV news the way my generation did. You know, when I was younger, the national news was sort of the national living room. That is not even close to true. Everyone read Time magazine or Newsweek. Hardly anyone does anymore."
The second-term senator credited specifically bloggers and the Internet for early successes in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. According to U.S. News and World Report, from January 3 (day of the Iowa caucuses) to February 5 (Super Tuesday), 19.1 million Americans cast a ballot in a Democratic primary (or caucused as a Democrat) versus just 13.1 million on the Republican side in all the nominating contests.
"Instead things are more fractured, but the bloggers and the Internet has sort of become the medium of choice," Schumer said. "And it's gotten young people involved and excited in politics."
Time and Newsweek are still considered valuable sources but young people are more likely to first read about news on a blog or social news website. They then go and read what their favorite blogs have to say about a particular story. They might also check respected publications like Time and Newsweek. Schumer also noted that Internet is playing a much bigger role in this year's elections than in 2004.
"But I think it's different this time," Schumer said. "I think the Internet is much deeper and more pervasive. Howard Dean used it - it was a brand new thing, 'What is this?' Now it's part of the working world. Hillary's raising a lot of money on the Internet too - not as much as Barack, but she still is. But to me, more the motivation of young people ultimately is, this world is a different world and we better get hold of it and I think that's a great motivation."
Schumer is right about the huge amounts of money Democratic candidates are raising online. Today's candidates have managed to use the Internet to get people involved in their campaigns - both in turning out the vote and in raising money. Hillary Clinton raised over $35 million in February and Barack Obama raised over $50 million. Those are unprecented numbers. Ron Paul too discovered how useful the Internet was when had money raising days where he would raise several million in a 24-hour period.
A study conducted by researchers from New York University's Stern Business School found that online buzz from blogs and social networks can boost album sales.
The amount of online "chatter" about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University's Stern Business School. Professor Vasant Dhar and former student Elaine Chang observed the trends of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007 to see how different outside elements affected (or predicted) sales once the albums became available, and found that all of them had some effect or another. But certain elements of online chatter-namely blogs and social networks-seemed to be fairly accurate predictors of future success.
A post on Ars Technica discussing the study says the researchers found that positive blog posts are most strongly correlated to stronger album sales - providing the blog posts are made by legitimate bloggers. The study also found that albums from both major labels and independents benefit from blog exposure.
The researchers followed the Amazon sales ranks for each of the 108 albums over a period of eight weeks (they said that Nielsen SoundScan stats would have been ideal, but they are costly and proprietary), as well as articles, blog postings, and MySpace friend counts about them. The blogosphere appeared to be most strongly correlated to better album sales-if 40 or more legitimate (written by normal people and not by marketers) blog posts were made before an album's release, sales ended up being three times the average.
That trend doesn't just apply to music from the Big Four, either. Albums from independent labels enjoyed the same level of success. But if an album was from a Big Four record label, sales increased five-fold after 40 legit blog posts. If blog posts crossed 250, album sales turned out to be six times the average, regardless of label.
Ars Technica says the study also found that more MySpace friends on a band's MySpace page meant more album sales but the impact was weaker than the impact from positive blog posts. But blogs and social media still can't trump a great review in a publication like Rolling Stone.
The study probably won't surprise anyone who reads music blogs but it does help prove that blogs are important when it comes to marketing music. If you really want to get the blogs and social media site users talking about your band or music the best way may be to come up with a crazy new dance fad and upload it to YouTube. That should work until people get tired of it.
GigaOm reported earlier today that WordPress firm Automattic has raised $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding. The New York Times Co. is one of the investors in the blog software company. GigaOm says the funding will be used to hire engineers, expand product offerings and possibly add more social networking features.
So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure.
That would be a start. Anne Zelenka made an impassioned case for using WordPress to build a social network, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some social features start to creep into WordPress.com as well. They just boosted their storage capacity to three gigabytes, which indicates that they are serious about allowing bloggers to add video and other multimedia content to their blogs.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has a post about the funding on his blog called Act Two.
Blogger blogs returned online earlier today after a major two-hour outage. The Blogger status blog says many of Blogger's blogs showed the error bX-uxu3fu.
This afternoon, many blogs showed the error bX-uxu3fu for about two hours. This was caused by a bug in our latest release that affected highly-customized Layouts templates. We noticed the problem as soon as the release finished deploying, and worked quickly to find and fix the bug.
We apologize to the bloggers and readers of the affected blogs.
Blogger added support for three new languages today - Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. This also included some new layout templates which may have caused the strange error.
Paris Lemon was one of the first to report the Blogger outage on his Twitter account. Paris Lemon blogs that after he tweeted the news Duncan Riley at Techcrunch wrote a story about it and within 30 minutes Blogger was fixed.
And let this be another lesson in the fine uses of Twitter. I wrote a tweet a couple of hours ago to let people know Blogger was down but I could not write about it for obvious reasons, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch picked it up, wrote a post, and within 30 minutes everything was fixed. Nice teamwork.
The folks at Blogger may very well have seen the TechCrunch article that resulted from Paris Lemon's tweet and moved more quickly. The Blogger people were probably also watching these complaints on the Blogger Help Group. If your blog host goes down it doesn't hurt to tweet about it on Twitter. You will probably get someone's attention - maybe even the attention of a major tech blog like TechCrunch.
eWeek reports that Google is going to add blogs to its Universal Search alongside images, news, books, maps and videso. Google has been running Google Blogsearch as a seperate search engine. eWeek says Google will make the move to include blogs this week (which is nearly over) or next week.
Starting this week or next, queries on the leading search engine will return links to blogs alongside the images, news, books, local maps and video, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, told eWEEK in a briefing at the company's headquarters here.
Blogs have been gaining significant momentum in the last couple of years, fueled by everything from fascinating news revelations to gossipy snipes. The inclusion of blogs as a genre on Universal Search is a nod to their growing number and ability to get people to go online to find content, which is what Google is all about.
Universal Search is the fruit of a five-year effort involving hundreds of engineers working to refine the company's search algorithms and add multimedia content to its search returns to give users richer results.
It's a logical move for Google or any search engine that wants to provide current and relevant information for it users. Frequently updated blogs tend to contain news about what is happening right now. That's often just the kind of information people are searching for. Blogs have always been indexed by Google so it will be interesting to see how much more exposure this will give blogs and what the search results will look like.
Here is a video explaining what Google's Universal Search is all about. (hat tip Jim Kukral).
You have probably heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) but you may not be aware that it inspired the creation of a blogging couterpart called NaBloPoMo. Bloggers participating in NaBloPoMo have to blog daily during the month of November including weekends.
"What the heck is going on here?" you ask. Well, it's pretty simple. You get yourself a blog, if you don't have one already -- and don't mind me if I'm stupefied at the idea that there's someone left in the English speaking world without their own blog. Then you look at the calendar, and when the whole world goes, "Oh, I can't believe they're already playing Christmas music in the warden's office!" you'll know it's November and that is the month in which you post something to your blog every day, in accordance with the National Blog Posting Month challenge!
Last year everybody just went for it, posting thirty days in a row and maybe hoping to win a prize in the random drawing. This year, for those of you who suspect you might run out of gas, maybe you'd like to try blogging on a theme. Follow a news story for the month; get deeper into an issue that you want to educate yourself about; keep us abreast of how your yoga practice / daily muffin-eating regime / matchstick Eiffel Tower is progressing.
Or simply use NaBloPoMo as a writing exercise, as an easier-to-accomplish alternative to the marathon that inspired it: National Novel Writing Month.
NaBloPoMo has a lengthy blogroll of participating bloggers. There are many bloggers out there trying to increase their posts this month. NaBloPoMo also has randomizer that will send you to one of the participating blogs. If you are looking for blogging motivation NaBlogPoMo looks like a good way to keep you going - at least for a month. There are also lots of prizes. If you aren't participating this year there is always NaBlogPoMo 2008 when the monthly blogging event will likely be even bigger.
Now that we have a month for blogging and for writing novels someone will have to set one up for Twittering - National Twittering Month or NaTwiMo anyone?
Mixed Media, a blog from Portfolio, reports that according to Nielsen BookScan data Gawker's book The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media has only sold 242 copies since it went on sale earlier this month. Mixed Media says BookScan reports on about 75% of all book sales.
Of course, the tracking service only accounts for about 75 percent of book sales, by its own admission, so you can add another 81 units to that total. Still, it's probably somewhat fewer copies than Simon & Schuster's Atria division was hoping to sell when it acquired the total in what I'm told was a $250,000 deal. Especially when you consider all the freepromotion the book got on Gawker.com, to what was presumably its target audience.
Books like Gawker's book that are of interest only to those in the blogging and media industry probably only sell about 5,000 to 10,000 copies at best. It isn't the kind of book that could ever sell 100,000 copies. Even so it is clearly underperforming for its niche. Maybe they will see a pickup in sales with this negative press.
Our framework also allows fractional selection of blogs, which means that instead of reading a large blog every day, we can read it, e.g., only one day per week. This also allows us to ask: what is the best day of the week to read blogs?
In order to study whether fractional selection allows to achieve better benefit cost ratio, we split the blogs which had at least one post per day into 7 blogs, one for each day of the week. Fig. 7(a) shows, that by splitting big blogs, the population affected (PA) objective function increases for 12% over the setting where only whole blogs can be selected.
Returning to the original question, we performed the following experiment: given a budget of 1000 posts, what is the best day of the week to read posts (optimizing PA)? We found that Friday is the best day to read blogs. The value of PA for Friday is 0.20, while it is 0.13 for the rest of the week. We consider this surprising, since the activity of the blogosphere (number of posts and links created) drops towards the end of the week, and especially over the weekend.
You can read the entire paper in these two PDF files: here and here. The logic here might be that bloggers tend to blog less often on Fridays and so what they do end up posting might be more focused and more informative about what is going on in the blogosphere than what you see during the rest of week. That is providing they aren't Friday Cat Blogging or blogging about their weekend plans.
Carnegie Mellon Study Ranks Most Informative Blogs
A recent Carnegie Mellon study used higher mathematics to answer the question: if you want to be informed about what the entire blogospohere is talking about, but you can only read 100 blogs (out of the millions available), which blogs should you read? We were very happy to learn that BloggersBlog.com came in 8th on the list. Other blogs that ranked high on the list include Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Boing Boing, BlogHer, Gothamist and Micropersuasion.
You can see the website for the study here and a PDF file for the report can be found here. The paper was awarded the best student paper award at the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. (via Data Mining)
Valleywag and TechCrunch Changing Internal Linking Habits
We first complained about internal linking on a post in July. Blogs like Loose Wire have also complained about the practice. The good news is that it appears a couple of the bigger tech blogs may be changing the way they link.
Loose Wire points to this post from Digital Inspiration that says Valleywag has made some changes.
Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.
Blog posts on Valleywag look clean and more readable than ever before and it's now very easy to spot the phrase that links to the source of the story - no more looking at the status bar of the browser to find where a link leads to.
TechCrunch also appears to be changing its practice of internal linking. If you look at this entry by Michael Arrington about Flickr and Picnik you can see that he linked Picnik directly to Picnik's URL and he also included in parenthesis a profile link to Picnik's profile on the Crunchbase website. They still have an internal link but now they also have the direct link which gives you an opportunity to get directly to the company's website as well as to the Crunchbase profile which contains information about the company and links to relevant TechCrunch posts.
It is good to see these leading tech blogs pointing their readers in the right direction. Unfortunately, it looks like Webware has picked up the habit.
PaidContent reports that CBS has bought a relatively unknown celebrity blog called Dotspotter for about $10 million. That's right. $10 million! For Dotspotter!
CBS (NYSE: CBS) has bought 10-month-old celebrity gossip blog Dotspotter, for a price of around $10 million. The rumor was first reported on Valleywag, and has also been confirmed to us by sources.
The site, based in San Francisco, was co-founded by CEO Anthony Soohoo, who is a former VP from Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). Also read this background post from B2.0 on Dotspotter.
The price seems pretty high for a sector which is saturated with more high profile celebrity blogs/sites like TMZ.com, PerezHilton, and others...and, of course, the fact that the site was only launched mid-January this year. But one source close to the situation told us the price is not for the site itself, but the team that has built it...that may also mean there’s a heavy earn-out component, possibly. Would be interesting to see if the site lasts as a standalone brand.
Dotspotter doesn't appear to have the traffic to justify the $10 million purchase price - about 300,000 montly pageviews according to this post citing stats from Complete.com - that's $35 per pair of eyeballs. They also don't appear to have the inbound links to justify the $10 million acquisition - they have just over 330 inbound links according to Technorati but some of those have occurred over the last couple days after news about this acquisition broke.
Other blogs and bloggers are also questioning what CBS paid for this site including Profy and Mathew Ingram. The Last Podcast defends the site and says it has rapidly growing traffic. Bloggers are also reminding everyone that CBS also recently bought Wallstrip and last.fm. If you own a blog, vlog or social network selling it to CBS looks like a profitable endeavor - at least while they are trying to figure out what sticks.
To be fair Dotspotter does have a few extra features that make it more than just a regular celebrity gossip blog such as the celebrity ranker and celebrity sightings. But it still seems like a high price tag. There are many celebrity blogs out there that currently have a much bigger following than Dotspotter does.
Take Huffington. According to research firm Compete, it has an audience almost as large as the online version of the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a part of a larger newspaper organization like The New York Times (NYT) or Washington Post (WPO), that audience could probably be much bigger. NYT and WPO need a Huffington or two. Their internet revenues are under 10% of their total and not growing fast enough to keep up with falling print sales. Huffington has raised $10 million in VC money. What is it worth? $100 million. Maybe more. Worth it for The Times or The Post. With the trouble that are in, yes.
The big tech blogs are even larger than Huffington.
According to internet measurement service, TechCrunch has an audience about a third of CNet (CNET). And CNet is in bad shape. It's blog business has not caught on. In early 2006, its shares were $16. Now they trade at under $8. Do they need a way to improve their reach and image with the online tech crowd?
The $100 million evaluation may be steep - even fairy tale steep - but there's no question the major media companies will start looking to acquire the big blogs. Technically, they already have started. TreeHugger, which ranks 17th on the Technorati 100, recently sold for an estimated $10 million so the higher ranked and higher trafficked Huffington Post and TechCrunch sites should be able to sell for over $10 million. Some traffic may be lost if there is no talent movement as part of the deal. If the blog's founder(s) do not continue to blog following a sale people might lose interest in the bog. There is also the risk that a blog may not be as interesting once it is no longer independent. But popular blogs have constant traffic, large numbers of feed subscribers, tens of thousands of inbound links and large archives of content. At some point it will be easier for the big media companies to just buy the wheel rather than try to reinvent it.
CBSNews.com General Manager to Become Huffington Post's CEO
The New York Times is reporting that Betsy Morgan is leaving her job as the general manager of CBSNews.com to the be the CEO of the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post, aka HuffPo, is the 5th ranked blog on Technorati.
Ms. Morgan will switch from running the Web site for a prominent traditional media organization to running a news Web site that is just over two years old.
"Getting somebody like this to come to our site says a boatload about where the industry is going," said Kenneth Lerer, who has been acting as the chief executive of The Huffington Post and will move up to chairman. He founded the site along with Arianna Huffington, the political commentator.
Ms. Morgan, who is 38 and has an M.B.A. from Harvard, worked in business development at CBS before taking the top post at CBSNews.com in 2005. She said she saw her new role as a business position and not as a journalism position, and added, "It was an opportunity too good to pass up."
"Huffington Post has a lot of smart editors working for it," she said. What the site does well, Ms. Morgan said, is "take a news story and build a community of debate around it."
Jeff Jarvis says, "Betsy will turn Arianna's blogging phenom into a real media business." Besty Morgan's bio on CBSNews.com can be found here. The Huffington Post has been morphing itself into more of a general news this year. When they first started they focused primarily on politics. The progressive political angle persists today but the HuffPo also has categories for business, entertainment and "living now" in addition to their political and media news sections.
Oxford University Press Monitoring the Blogosphere for New Words
A short entry on OxfordMail.net says the Oxford University Press is searching the blogosphere to find new words.
Staff at Oxford University Press have started monitoring the use of English in web logs to find new words.
Lexicographers responsible for updating the Oxford English Corpus, which provides the basis for its dictionaries, will trawl through some 70 million 'blogs' in their search.
And with 120,000 new ones created every day, they may be in for quite a search.
A Guardian books blog post also discusses the decision by the Oxford University Press (OUP) to monitor "the use of English in weblogs." They also provide this recently published list from OUP of the 15 most frequently blogged words.
15 Most Frequently Blogged Words
blogger
blog
stupid
me
myself
my
oh
yeah
ok
post
stuff
lovely
update
nice
shit
These words don't exactly make us bloggers sound like masters of prose. In addition to scouring the blogosphere for new words the Oxford University Press also has a blog of its very own.
Former President Bill Clinton is blogging on the Join the Journey website at clintonafrica.org. In his introductory post Bill Clinton talks about traveling to Johannesburg, South Africa which is one of the cities partnering with the Clinton Climate Initiative. He also says the scientific evidence makes it clear that the Earth is warming and says Africa will suffer the most from global warming.
After the 14-hour plane ride from the Dominican Republic, it feels good to be on the ground again. I'm also delighted to be back in South Africa. It's been nine years since I was the first U.S. president ever to travel to this wonderful country. On that first visit, Hillary and I laid a brick at a women's center in Johannesburg, marking the beginning of my personal commitment to help rebuild a new South Africa. Since then, I've tried to return as often as I can. Almost a decade later, my Foundation carries on this commitment through its work here and throughout the continent, and I'm eager to see firsthand the progress we're helping to achieve.
Johannesburg is one of the cities partnering with my Clinton Climate Initiative to perform energy'saving renovations to their buildings. These simple, cost-effective measures, which we are working on in 16 cities around the world, will have a tremendous impact on lowering carbon emissions from urban areas while actually saving money for the buildings' owners and creating jobs.
Based on all the scientific evidence, it's impossible to deny that our planet is warming. Africa stands to suffer the most from global climate change, so it's only right that we partner with cities like Johannesburg to help them do their part to stop these alarming trends. By implementing eco-friendly policies and deploying green technologies, African countries have a remarkable opportunity to emerge as leaders in the fight against global warming.
Throughout our trip, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on what supporters like you are saying on our blog, so please share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading your responses as soon as I have a chance. Until then, I hope you'll support my Foundation and the important work we have begun. It's a great day to be in Africa.
It's great to see our former president blogging. Clinton's first post already has 62 comments.
Many Internet users have heard of the the I Can Has Cheezburger (ICHC) blog. The blog provides daily lolcats - cat photographs combined with funny captions written with special lolcats grammar. As the Wikipedia listing describes it an lolcat is "an image macro featuring a photograph of a cat with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption." While many have heard of lolcats and the Cheezburger blog most are popular unaware of the blog's growing traffic and advertising income. RedOrbit says the blog started by Eric Nakagawa now gets 500,000 pageviews daily and runs ads that cost between $500 and $4,000 a week.
He saw traffic on the blog, I Can Has Cheezburger, which he runs with his partner, "Tofuburger" [she refuses to disclose her real name] double each month: 375,000 hits in March, 750,000 in April, 1.5 million in May. Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000. Nakagawa, an accidental entrepreneur who saw his successful business materialize out of the ether, quit his programming job at the end of May: "It made more sense to do this and see how big it could get."
Cheezburger's story is unusual in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in that the time between launching and reaching a critical mass of readers who sustain the site is so compressed. But many of the most popular bloggers have similar tales of starting out with a niche idea -- an inside joke, a particular obsession -- and watching it explode. Of course, most blogs linger in obscurity and are read by only a handful of people, and few ever reach the level Cheezburger has. What about a blog like Cheezburger lets it break away from the pack?
The initial appeal of the blog may have been a fluke, but its growth since then has been part of a tightly controlled experiment to help answer that question. Nakagawa and his partner constantly tweak the site to see what draws readers and what leaves them cold.
"We basically have a playground where people keep coming to play, so we're trying to create new games all the time,"Nakagawa says.
The article doesn't disclose ICHC's monthly revenues but in addition to the upfront ads they also run Google AdSense text ads on the blog. The article explains how the authors of ICHC have added new features to the blog to increase traffic. They even added a LOLCAT Buildr that lets people create and submit their own lolcat.
The popular blog has inspired scores of imitators and variations on the lolcat theme. It is unclear how much traffic these other sites are receiving but it is probably less than the I Can Has Cheezburger blog gets. Some of the other blogs include LOL President, LOL Bots, LOL NIN, LOL Trek, lolkottke, lolcats.com, memcats, lolterrorists, lolgay, LOL Tapirs, LOL the News, lolgoth and LOLMaps. There is even a programming language based on the lolcats concept called LOLCode. If you do enough searching you will also run into some O RLY? Owls. There are plenty of ORLY Owls and Lolcats to be found on YouTube as well.
Some interesting posts about lolcats can be found here, here, here and here.
Find the right combination of photographs and amusing captions and maybe you can has traffic and muneez -- at least enough to buy a cheezburger.
For the past several months an annoying internal linking trend has been emerging on some of the top technology blogs. Some tech blogs are linking the name of a company to a special page on their blog or another blog in their network. TechCrunch has done it a number of occassions. For example, in this post about a company called Versionate TechCrunch links to this page on CrunchBase (one of the blogs in their network) instead of directly to the company's website.
The Valleywag and Mashbable blogs also engage in internal linking: see here and here.
Doing this every once in a while might be okay but some of the tech blogs are doing this more and more frequently. It is much easier for readers when blogs link the name of a company to the actual company's website instead of to a special page on their blog or to a page of posts containing that tag. Tech blogs could provide both links -- one to the company's website and one to an internal page about the company -- but it seems wrong to force the reader to double click just to get to a company's website.
CNET has actually been publishing blogs since 2005 -- see here. You might remember the now non-existent Blogma. However, CNET has only recently officially launched their blog network according to a recent CNET press release. CNET's newly expanded blog network can be found at blogs.cnet.com. The network includes these core blogs: CNET TV, Crave, The Daily Download, News.com Blog, ShopGrok and WebWare as well as over a dozen other tech and gadget blogs.
The 18 bloggers were invited to join the CNET Blog Network to bring fresh perspectives; CNET will be adding more topics and bloggers in the coming months. These bloggers are expected to uphold the same journalism standards as the CNET editors, so users can expect the same level of editorial quality from contributors to the CNET Blog Network as they do from CNET editors. The Blog Network will comprise 14 new blogs, including:
Cellular Obsession - Popular talk-show host Ronn Owens from San Francisco's KGO Radio has talked so much to his listeners about the latest cell phones that it's become a passionate hobby. Owens offers his opinions on the latest phones with the CNET audience.
Design and Technology - Design enthusiast Jean Aw finds the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places and loves bringing them to the attention of her readers.
(parent.thesis) - Author of a book titled, "Mojo Mom", Amy Tiemann and her husband Michael Tiemann offer the latest news and musings about raising kids in today's hyper-connected, 24/7 world.
Sports Tech - As one of the founders of golf's leading fitness resource, the Titleist Performance Institute, Dave Phillips writes about technology's significant impact on golf today, and the sports gear that is giving today's players an inside edge to every game they play.
Additional blogs include: The open road with Matt Asay, a blog focusing on open source; The digital home with Don Reisinger; The Macalope, a blog focusing on Apple; Politics, Policy, and Technology with Donnie Fowler; Speeds and Feeds, with Kevin Krewell, Peter Glaskowsky, and Jim Handy; Green Tech, with Vinod Khosla, Neal Dikeman, and Martin Tobias; The Web Services Report with Harrison Hoffman; Music and Technology with Matt Rosoff; Media Sphere with Josh Wolf; and Searchlight: an SEO blog with Stephan Spencer. In addition to this original content, CNET plans to syndicate blog content from Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban.
CNET says they will be adding other bloggers and blogs to the network. Clearly, CNET's editors foresee a very bloggish future.
Valleywag also has a post about their new hire. Owen Thomas appears to be replacing Gawker publisher Nick Denton as the main writer of the blog. The Valleywag post points out Thomas' experience at Suck so that you know he is capable of continuing Valleywag's tradition of snark.
Owen Thomas, the Business 2.0 editor whom we've lured to run Valleywag, is all smiles. But don't be deceived. This Silicon Valley gossip rag, after he takes over in July as managing editor, will remain as obnoxious as ever. You see, Thomas isn't just a veteran of business journalism, with excellent sources in the tech industry (most of which he will burn). The superficially jolly writer was, in an earlier life, one of the contributors to Suck, the legendary site that pioneered web snark. Here's coverage on All Things Digital and Gigaom -- Valleywag snags an editor from Business 2.0. After the jump, for the Valleywag-watchers, the highlights of my own seven months on Valleywag. And, this being a critical site, some lowlights.
In the Valleywag post Nick Denton also includes his highlights and lowlights from his several month stint as the blog's main writer. Denton admits his assignment at the blog ran longer than he intended: "Handing over Valleywag, finally -- it was beginning to feel like the occupation of Iraq, a quick one-month project, which turned into a costly long-term occupation, with no exit plan."
TimesDaily.com has an interesting article that says cyberspace is becoming littered with dead blogs.
Dead blogs litter the Internet like squashed bugs on a windscreen during a warm Southern evening. Since their christening in 1999, millions of people like Haddock have dabbled with blogs only to abandon them after a few months.
"I think a lot of people started blogs because they got excited; the hype was there, but they really didn't have a purpose," said futurist Jim Carroll, whose clients include the Walt Disney Corp., Nestle and the BBC. "There's only so much you can read about somebody else's life before you get bored with it," he said.
The blog rush has slowed down from 175,000 new blogs posted per day in July 2006 to 120,000 new blogs per day as of March, according to Technorati, a blog tracking company.
Blogs with staying power, Endgaget's techno-blog and Boing Boing's curios-blog, stick around because they have a direct purpose, Carroll says. That, plus paid staff and advertising dollars.
120,000 new blogs per day is still impressive but there is no denying that there are lots of dead blogs out there and there is no denying the number of new blogs per day is starting to slow. However, there are always going to be new bloggers just like there have always been new writers.
What's also being overlooked is that other forms of social media are continuing to grow rapidly. Social network profiles and microblogging tools are replacing personal blogs for some. Everything always comes back to the definition of what a blog is. It seems like profiles and microblogs are being excluded from the definition of a blog but it isn't crystal clear.
What's clear is that professional blogging has emerged as a new medium that is rapidly being adapted by the mainstream media. Online media companies are using blogs as a way to provide information and grow traffic online. Newspapers still seem to be launching new blogs daily. At the same time popular online blogs have been expanding into networks and hiring more bloggers so they are even more competitive with established media outlets. The number of professional blogs will probably continue to grow even as the overall blog growth rate slows. Media companies and bloggers recognize that the format is one that works very well online. It also helps that readers appreciate the layout and structure of blogs.
Citing a Gartner study the TimesDaily.com article says that eventually "200 million people call themselves ex-bloggers." That's a ton of dead blogs but it won't matter to most blog readers. Many readers may never even notice the dead blogs because sites like Digg will guide them to new sources. Search engines like Technorati will show them the new content from active blogs first. Readers will just move on to the blogs that are continuing to publish new content and new information. People will continue to want to find out what's new and that's just what bloggers will continue to provide.
All bloggers blog about blogging at some point in time. It is something that is pretty much impossible to avoid. Blogs that fit in what's become known as the "Blogs about Blogging" category tend to blog about blogging nearly all the time. To an outsider blogs that blog about blogging probably sound like they are all pretty much the same but there is actually a great deal of variety. Some blogs focus on providing tips for professional bloggers. Some blogs discuss blogging trends and provide blog publishing news. Other blogs might focus on a specific publishing platform like Wordpress or a specific revenue generating tool like AdSense. There are blogs that focus on a specific blogging niche like corporate blogging or pr blogs. There are also individual bloggers who blog about their lives as a blogger and provide thoughts and tips along the way. At BloggersBlog.com we tend to focus more on blogging news and trends with an occasional post offering suggestions and tips.
Daily Blog Tips has ranked the top twenty five blogs about blogging using data from Technorati, Bloglines, Alexa and Google. This list will show you the variety of blogs about blogging discussed in the paragraph above. If you are curious at all about blogs about blogging you should definitely check out the list. You will probably discover a few blogs you have never read before. We appreciate being on the list because no matter what algorithms or criteria you use to rank blogs in any category you are bound to leave out some worthwhile blogs. If you want some more blogs about blogging check out the Blogging News section on the left side of our homepage.
Print Magazine for Bloggers and Podcasters Launches
There is a new print magazine called Blogger & Podcaster Magazine. This is the first print trade magazine for the industry. The magazine's website is located at bloggerandpodcaster.com. The magazine also has a blog located here. Joe Wikert has a good interview with Larry Genkin, the magazine's publisher, here.
Robert Scoble is on the launch issue's cover as you can see in the image on the right. The cover story is about video podcasting and Robert Scoble's podcasting and vlogging efforts that include ScobleShow and PodTech. Scoble mentioned gracing the cover here in a post on his blog. TWiT's Leo Laporte is also in the issue in a feature called "10 Questions with Leo Laporte."
It is tough to remain timely in a monthly print magazine covering any topic these days. That is especially true in an industry like blogging. However, the articles in the debut issue do cover current events like the recent blogging and vlogging awards and the explosion of Twitter at the SXSW conference. The articles in the launch issue seem slanted a little more heavily at the podcasting and vlogging trade. That might make sense from a publishing perspective because producing audio and video requires more equipment and startup costs than text blogging so there might be more advertising potential.
There are full page ads in the debut issue for Kiptronic, Podango, BlogWorld, IBNMA, Podcast Pickle, BlogTalkRadio and Podcasting & New Media Expo.
A couple podcasters here and here pointed out that there was just one female blogger/podcaster profiled in the first issue. That's something that will need to be fixed in future issues. You can read some other comments and reviews from bloggers and podcasters here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
A one year subscription to Blogger & Podcaster costs $79 per year for U.S. residents and $99 for non U.S. residents. The entire magazine can also be read online free here using ActiveMagazine software from Olive Software.
The big discussion today in the blogosphere is about a proposed Blogger's Code of Conduct. It is currently the top story on Techmeme. Tim O'Reilly has posted a draft of the Blogger's Code here on his blog and here on Wikia. Tim O'Reilly says the "code" is a draft based closely on the BlogHer Community Guidelines. The code was devised following the recent blogger death threats. There is a sheriff type of badge for blogs that adhere to the code's guidelines. There is also an "anything goes" badge for blogs that will not follow the guidelines. This badge contains a stick of dynamite about to explode. Eventually the Blogger's Code of Conduct and badges bloggers can use will be posted at bloggingcode.org. Here is the first draft of the Code.
We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.
We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others
We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]
We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.
We connect privately before we respond publicly.
When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.
When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends. If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.
We do not allow anonymous comments.
We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.
We ignore the trolls.
We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.
There has been a backlash against the code by many bloggers and against the idea of badges for blogs. It is most likely that bloggers that choose to ignore the code are not going to post any kind of badge at all or they might alter the badges like Duncan Riley did here on a post at 901am.com.
Some parts of the code like not being libelous, not stalking and not infringing on copyright are things that we all hope reasonable bloggers are going to follow whether or not they have agreed to a code. There are also already laws that make many of these activities illegal. It is the parts of the Blogger's Code of Conduct about anonymous comments and trolls that are the most controversial. A lot of blogs allow the posting of anonymous comments and some bloggers talk to the trolls. Robert Scoble admits to feeding the trolls. Ensuring that commenters are who they say they are is also not an easy thing to do even if you wanted to. Zoli notes that commenters can hide by "just registering with bogus credentials."
The New York Times has an article about the Blogger's Code of Conduct. Jeff Jarvis points out that the code gave the Times an excuse to use "World of Nasty Blogs" in a headline. The article includes a photograph of the founders of BlogHer.org, where a similar code of conduct has been helpful in building that community.
David Sifry, CEO and founder of Technorati, has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report. As usual the blogosphere keeps getting bigger, spam keeps being annoying and the international aspect of the blogosphere becomes more significant. Here are some highlights:
70 million blogs tracked by Technorati: "Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day."
Splog Overload: "Technorati has been tracking between 3,000 - 7,000 new splogs created each day, but there was a significant spike in splog creation during early December, when we tracked over 11,000 splogs created each day during December - a total of 341,000 splogs that we removed from our indexes during that period."
Growth is slowing as the blogosphere gets bigger: "This shouldn't be surprising, as we're dealing with the law of large numbers - it takes a lot more growth to double from 35 million blogs to 70 million (which took about 320 days) than when it doubled from 5 million to 10 million blogs (which took about 180 days)."
More blogs entering the 100 sites list: "In previous reports, we looked at the popularity of mainstream media compared to blog sites. One interesting item to note in April 2007, the number of blogs in the top 100 most popular sites has risen substantially. During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites. In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list -- further evidence of the continuing maturation of the Blogosphere."
The blogosphere is worldwide which means lots of languages. But Japanese (37%) and English (36%) dominate with 73% of all posts written in these two languages.
Be sure to visit David Sifry's post for cool graphs that illustrate the above trends.
Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke Issue Joint Statement
Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke have issued this joint statement before making a CNN appearance. Both bloggers wrote in their statement about how important it is for last week's death threats to not be used in any way to limit free speech.
Kathy Sierra still won't be blogging for a while. She writes, "Although I've learned a lot in the last few days, I still do not know who made the unclebobism photo post, or why, or whether that person is a real threat. That part of the story has continued to devolve in even scarier ways. So, this is the last post I'll make for some time, and I've closed comments because I cannot keep up with the hateful ones (including those that post my home address and social security number, etc.)."
Virginia DeBolt at BlogHer writes, "My hope is now that they are talking together about the issue of online threats against women, the rhetoric surrounding the discussion will settle down. People can stop taking sides and move to a more rational examination of the issue and what actions should come out of it."
Wired's Epicenter blog says, "Unlike Usenet, when the going gets too vulgar on the blogosphere there's always somewhere else to go. It's good to know that people can occasionally come face to face to air out their problems in front of millions of television viewers. That, more than anything, is guaranteed to keep the eyeballs coming back to both of their blogs."
Robert Scoble has a lengthy post about the issue here. He notes that on Twitter flame wars may be more difficult because of the shorter posts there. "Really, the only one I can control is myself. That's how I'll get back to having fun again. In the meantime there's always Twitter. Where all attacks are 140 characters or less. Ever notice that a good flame is hard to write short?"
It is difficult to take much news seriously today with all the fakes and jokes being published. April Fool's seems to take on a special meaning in the tech world. As TechCrunch explains Google takes April Fool's Day very seriously and always comes up with something. Here a few April Fool's highlights as well as links to more April Fool's resources.
Gmail Paper: Google's Gmail Paper gag would have your printed emails arriving by the truckload. "You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It's whatever seems reasonable to you." The printing and postage costs will be offset with huge ads: "The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica."
Google also has the free in-home wireless broadband service from your Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP).
WiiHelm: For gamers, ThinkGeek is offering the WiiHelm where you move your head around instead of the wiimote. There's a goofy video as well. This may be the best joke this year.
LivePoke: Facebook had a series of fake news feeds. One read, "Introducing LivePoketm! Facebook will dispatch a real live person today to poke a friend of your choice."
TechCrunch announced that they had acquired the assets of F***edCompany.com which would have been interesting had it been true. For those who don't remember the F***edCompany.com website kept tabs on the web companies that were sinking during the days of the dot-com crash.
Starbucks on Twittervision. Online Media Cultist blogs about the giant Starbucks logo that appeared on Twittervision early this morning. It's gone already so if you didn't see it you've missed it.
Cows 2.0: Skype for Cows: "With illiteracy such a problem among cows, Skype is partnering with IBM for moo recognition of Skype commands. Students at the Open University in London are developing moo-to-text conversion."
The Matt Cutts blog was hacked prank: "The Dark SEO Team has had a bit of a beef with Google's Matt Cutts from back in 2005 over URL hijacking. Looks like they've pulled a prank on him today. Matt's blog is down, hacked -- and archives wiped out as well." See also CuttsCon: A Celebration of Madness.
The MMORPG blog lists some of the April Fool's jokes in the World of Warcraft. They write, "The entire World of Warcraft has gone mad. Today being April Fool's Day, madness has spread from the WoW forums to the Azeroth itself. Who said Blizzard doesn't have a sense of humor?"
CNET has an article about the start of blogging that includes an interesting timeline on blogging. The article discusses several early bloggers including Justin Hall, Carolyn Burke, Jorn Barger and Dave Winer.
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the "founding father of personal blogging"?
Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely "yes" to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title "first blogger" is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).
Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.
He boasts on his site that Scripting News "bootstrapped the blogging revolution" and that it is the "longest currently running Web log on the Internet." A decade ago, however, Winer wasn't actually using the term "Web log," nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming "the first blogs were inspired" by Scripting News.
There were also a lot of lesser known people keeping web journals and online diaries back in the mid 90s before anyone called it a blogging. The article also talks about the .plan files that people used to pass around in Unix.
Michael Arrington has confirmed that the TechCrunch Network has hired Heather Harde from Fox Interactive Media to be the new CEO.
I have the pleasure of confirming the rumors: Heather Harde, currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will start her new job as the CEO of the TechCrunch Network (and my boss) by the end of the month. This isn't the way I hoped to announce this news, but Om Malik broke the story after an internal Fox email got out.
It was tough to talk Heather into leaving Fox, where she’s been for the last ten years. In that time she's had a combination of operating and corporate development roles. Most recently, she was part of the founding executive team of Fox Interactive Media. At FIM she ran the mergers and acquisitions team, which was responsible for eight acquisitions, totaling $1.3 billion, and two equity investment deals. Prior to Fox, Heather was at business school at Harvard.
The original post from Om Malik that broke that news can be found here.
A lot of bloggers are still discussing Twitter, a service that lets you post tiny posts (140 characters) from the phone, web or instant message. This type of blogging has also been called microblogging. Here is a chart from Technorati that shows a growing number of Twitter-related posts over the past 180 days.
You may already know that Twitter was a big hit at SXSW. This was where the big upswing in Twitter posts started. Since then Steve Rubel has been asking if people will blog less now that are twittering more. Dave Winer offers some thoughts on Twitter's future. He asks whether Twitter will have competitors. Tara at HorsePigCow blogs about why Twitter matters to her. She has been using Twitter since last May or June. Hitwise offers more Twitter traffic data.
Meanwhile, some bloggers are already ready for Twitter to crash and die. Some argue that Twitter has already peaked or that it is just a fad. For example, Web1797 thinks that "Twitter will flame-out before the end of 2007." Creating Passionate Users reminds everyone that it is the face-to-face interactions that matter most.
Like many other bloggers we have also set up a Twitter for Bloggers Blog for random thoughts or ideas or for stuff that's just too short to blog. We also didn't want to be left lonely and twitterless. Twitter might be more useful to publishers if you could have Twitter on your own domain but that's definitely a feature or service that could (and should) be added in the future. It is impossible to accurately predict what will happen with Twitter but Twitter does seem to have already reached a traffic level that makes it unlikely to just fade away -- especially with zealous Twitters like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel.
For Twitter noobs there is the Twitter Fan Wiki which has links to lots of articles and resources. Webware has also posted a Newbies Guide to Twitter. Even professionals can make use of Twitter -- Web Worker Daily list eight reasons why.
Sahar Sarid at the Conceptualist brings up the possibility of a blogging subscription model emerging in the future. Sarid points out that newspapers, radio, television, etc all have subscrption models. Scott Karp, writing at the Blog Herald, discussed the concept more in this post.
The issue of whether any paid content online is "better than what you can get for free" has been debated since the dawn of the Web. What arguably makes some of the top blogs better than other blogs is that, by dint of their success, they have become scoop magnets, e.g TechCrunch, Engadget. That doesn't necessarily make their reporting or analysis better, but you can always get the information there first. Of course, if they were behind a pay wall, that advantage might disappear.
That's why the Seth Godin consultant model might be more viable. Darren Rowse at Problogger, for example, offers advice to bloggers equivalent to what you might get from a paid consultant.
The argument against a paid content model for blogging begins of course with ideology - there are many blog purest who would refuse to call a paid blog a blog. Blogging, traditionally, has been about openness and inter-connectivity, which a paid subscriber wall certainly does not foster.
In the future there will probably be some blogs run by experts in a particular field that will be able to charge a fee for access to their blog or feed. However, this will most likely be blogs/feeds that have to do with legal, medical and financial subjects that require an extensive knowledge base. There
have always been financial newsletters that people are willing to pay a fairly high fee for and there is no reason why this won't translate into paid blogs. But paying for blogs that simply offer blogging or marketing advice seems highly unlikely because there is so much of this information already readily available. If someone offering blogging or marketing advice tries to move their blog behind a subscription wall people will just go to other blogs offering similar content. There is no shortage of good blogging or marketing advice on the Internet.
The paid blogging model technically already exists as the New York Times has some blogs that are behind the Times Select subscriber wall. The Times has a blog called the Opinionator that can't be read without a subscription. There are several other blogs behind the Time Select wall as well -- see the "select features" section on the right.
Radar is reporting that Gawker is close to launching a new blog for female readers. Radar says former In Style editor Anna Holmes will be heading the new blog.
Back in November, Denton was rumored to have hired Eurotrash's Geraldine "Delly" Hayward as editor, a fact that he refused to confirm—with good reason. The blog, under the codename "Girlie Gawker," has finally resurfaced with a different editor, whispers of a not-too-distant but still unspecified launch date, and a mission: capturing a female audience in the flyover states, sources say.
At the helm of the lady-centric site will be Anna Holmes, a former In Style editor and Entertainment Weekly scribe who is solidly entrenched in the chick-lit world. In 2003, she edited Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair, a historical survey of scorned and bitter femmes that O Magazine called "cathartic."
Gawker publisher Nick Denton hinted at the launch of women's blog in this post about Glam Media's traffic numbers. Denton wrote in that post, "Disclosure: Gawker Media may at some point launch a women's title, in which case we would compete with Glam."
Paul Scrivens at Wisdump has a post about why he thinks blog networks have failed.
Do you remember those things that we called Blog Networks? You might have paid attention or you might have went about your life like nothing changed and that's one of the reasons why they failed. 'Failed' might be a harsh term to use, but of the hundreds of blog networks that started in 2005 and 2006 which ones are thriving and by 'thriving' I don't mean staying above surface?
But why did they fail? Were they just cool because anyone could start one and it was a sweet buzzword to associate yourself with for a while? It is not that hard to understand why they didn’t live up to the hype that they created for themselves.
Some of the leading blog networks have been shutting down some blogs. For example, Weblogs, Inc. recently shuttered AdJab -- a blog that had the kind of traffic and readership most publishers would covet. Gakwer shut down Sploid last year. That's another blog a lot of publishers would like to own. Today, Sploid just sits there waiting to be purchased.
But are blog networks themselves a failure? Hardly. Nearly every newspaper and magazine in the country is building one -- many of them are aggressively building blog networks. Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson is blogging about Wired's blog network in a post today. Anderson even says, "we're having fun by launching new blogs right and left." Blog networks are not a failure. In fact it is a business model that the MSM is adopting as their own. Blog networks are facing increasing competition from magazine and newspaper blog networks but many of the networks that launch a year or two ago are still around today. To be fair Paul Scrivens did admit that failed "might be a harsh term to use."
Here is another point of view: One by One Media looks at the blog networks issue from a writers' standpoint and the possibility that maybe some writers are better off solo or as part of a blog network.
ESPN Acquires Independent TrueHoop Basketball Blog
ESPN has acquired the TrueHoop basketball blog (hat tip Micropersuasion) from Gekko productions, a company founded by husband-and-wife team Henry and Jessica Abbott. ESPN has also hired the blog's author and former owner Henry Abbott to continue writing the blog. Abbott writes about why he sold the blog and what changes will be made in this detailed explanation post.
For me personally, there will be some change. For the first time in nearly a decade, I'll have a regular paycheck, benefits someone else pays for, and paid vacation. And TrueHoop will, I would assume, reach a bigger audience than ever. It will soon be moving to ESPN.com (although you will always be able to reach it at this address, which will redirect).
I'm very excited that TrueHoop is just going to be better than ever, honestly. Not to sound all cornball about it. But I really buy that. The timing here is perfect: I'm joining a respected mainstream media site with a massive audience, working alongside some professionals I deeply respect, just at the moment in history that mainstream media sites are really starting to appreciate the power of the blog. My job description is essentially self-created and it's my dream job--which I know because I have already been trying it out for nearly two years.
If this doesn't turn out to be fun, then I'm doing something seriously wrong.
Abbott also admits that he needed some income out of TrueHoop: "To be honest, I wasn't looking to sell TrueHoop, and I liked owning it. But TrueHoop needed a new model (besides the zero income one) if it was going to pay my mortgage."
There hasn't been much of mainstream media companies buying up independent blogs yet -- mostly they have been trying to launch blogs of their own. But the pace of these types of acquisitions could quicken as media companies realize it is sometimes easier to simply acquire an already established blog than to try and create interest in a brand new one.
In case you missed it AdJab was shut down at the end of January. The blog seemed to be doing very well traffic and blog ranking wise. The writing was also great. But all this must not have been enough for AOL's Weblogs Inc.. There is one final jab from AdJab's bloggers with farewells by Chris Thilk, Tom Biro, Adam Finley and Bob Sassone. You can also read some other posts about AdJab's closing from AdJab bloggers here and here. AdJab offered great commentary on all types of commercials as well as great Super Bowl ad coverage. The ad analyst wizards at AdJab will be missed. Jaffe Juice wants to know what AOL was thinking when they decided to turn off AdJab.
Is this blogfading? No. Are these blogging layoffs...yes, but why? Both blogs have impressive Technorati rankings. So why then? Where's the explanation from AOL? I feel they have an obligation to justify this decision. Actually I feel the AdJab guys should have been a little more upfront as well?
There is also a farewell post here on AdJab about Super Bowl ad coverage redirecting to this section of tvsquad.com.
SplashPress Media has acquired the Performancing.com website including the bloggers community and metrics assets. They can add the Performancing blog to their list of blogs about blogging that already includes The Blog Herald and Blog Network Watch. There do not seem to be any valuations for the sale floating around despite a fair amount of discussion about the sale. You can read some posts discussing the sale at Shoemoney, Bloglogic.net and the Blog Herald.
David Krug says he will be running the show over at Performancing.com. David Krug also has a post up on Performancing about the future of Performancing. Technosailer has a podcast interview with Krug about the sale and plans for Performancing.
The word "beme" was mentioned recently in an ABC News story (see the 4th page). Tom Hayes says he coined the word beme to describe a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers. Now Tom Hayes has a lengthier explanation of beme (via Doc Searls) on his Tom Bomb blog.
A beme is a turbo-charged meme made possible entirely by the existence of the network affect. A beme can be impactful because it is lurid--a photo of a panty-less Britney Spears, or humorous--a whimisical video of the band OKGO on treadmills, or gut-wrenching--the sad tirade by comedian Michael Richards. A beme can cement an idea with the public in a way that cannot be legislated or regulated. No legal effort by Cisco to enforce a trademark, for example, will make the public unlearn that Apple produces the iPhone.
A meme is old media, a beme is new media.
A meme takes off by accident, a beme by design.
A meme can take years to surface, a beme hours.
There are not very many mentions of beme on Technorati but it is a word that could ending up sticking.
The Guardian's Organ Grinder reports that John Zogby, president and CEO of Zogby International, gave some stats on media usage at the WeMedia Miami conference.
Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.
32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.
40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.
Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.
The Guardian says Zogby also gave a very bloggy prediction of his own:
He reckons on more and more blogs: "We'll reach a new principle in the democratic experience - one man, one blog."
The Organ Grinder's WeMedia wrap-up has a lot more summaries and snippets from speakers. A lot of the discussion at WeMedia Miami was about the death of print newspapers and the idea that editors and journalists will still be very much in need even as the format of media gets more digital and social. Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org was one of the speakers and Mathew Ingram has a post about Newmark's appreciation of newspapers and editors.
Bright Station Ventures has invested $4.5 million in UK blog publisher Shiny Media. The Times Onlinereports that Bright Station also took a 50% ownership in Shiny Media. A blog post on the Shiny Media blog (thx Blogging Times) says they are hugely excited about the funding.
I don't have a great deal to say at this moment other than to state the bleeding obvious that we are hugely excited about how we can use the cash to develop Shiny.
We started Shiny with nothing other than some great ideas and a passionate belief in the potential of blogs. We now attract almost three million readers each month to our 22 sites, employ over thirty bloggers (some full-time, some freelance) and regularly attract big name advertisers.
We have come a very long way in a short space of time with no money. The investment will help us make some of more ambitious dreams realities.
The post also says that until a year ago Shiny Media was "headquartered in three London bedrooms." Shiny Media's most recent launch was Techscape. Techscape launched a couple weeks ago and it's a good thing because it was about time another tech blog was brought into the world. Shiny also has some blogs with clever names like WiiWii (about Nintendo's new game system) and Who Ate All the Pies, a football (soccer) blog. Shiny Media currently has blogs in four categories: fashion, lifestyle, technology and sports.
In the past six to twelve months funding for blog networks has ranged from under a million to around $5 million. Glam Networks received much more but technically they are more of an advertising network than a blog network. Here are links to some past articles about blog networks recently receiving funding:
The Blog Herald reports that three blog and rss directories have been sold recently by the Bloggy Network. Here are the three directories that were sold:
Eatonweb Portal, one of the earliest blog directories, was sold for $10,000 to a bidder "who has chosen to remain nameless."
Despite selling three directories Bloggy Network is not out of the blog network business. They still have the BlogFlux blog directory and blogging tool provider thanks to a merger with BlogFlux founder Ahmed Farooq. Ahmed Farooq talks about his experiences selling the blog directories in this post (thx ProBlogger).
Note: This is not Bloggy Network Ltd., the UK blog publisher that acquired The Blog Herald a couple months ago. That network is now going by the name of Splashpress Media.
More discussion of the directory sales can be found at Blogging for Money and BloggingPro. Former Blog Herald founder Duncan Riley has also noted the blog directory sales in posts on his blog at duncanriley.com here and here.
The wizardry of contextual advertising and blog publishing platforms will allow internet publications to flourish in a thousand niches. Well, that was the theory. The practice? AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from entrepreneur-provocateur and Valleywag staple, Jason Calacanis, in 2005. The bulk of AOL's ad revenues from its blog network, running at more than $1m a month according to Calacanis, come from a few star brands such as Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. They're in traditional broad categories: consumer electronics, autos and video games. The Time Warner internet unit has told editors of smaller and unprofitable sites that they will be shuttered at the end of the month. So far, we're hearing lesser-known titles such as BBHub, Divester, DV Guru and PVR Wire; do let us know about others, so we can establish a count. Grounds: budget cutbacks. The new publishing? Much like the old.
Nick Denton, who wrote this entry on Valleywag, admits to having an "aesthetic aversion to those blog networks which measure success in the quantity of titles rather than the quality of the writing." Blog networks that focus on quantity over quality will probably struggle as readers gravitate towards the best written blogs. It doesn't mean there are not opportunities in niche publishing but jumping around and publishing small niche blogs in several different categories probably isn't a very effective strategy for a single publisher. For example, Krause Publications succeeded with print magazines in the unexciting hobby and craft niche by publishing dozens of craft-related titles. However, Krause never leaps outside this craft and hobby niche by randomly publishing niche magazines about yoga, hair care or DVRs. Individual bloggers and small publishers with little overhead costs should be able to profit with niche blogs providing they are one of the top blogs in the particular niche and they can get enough traffic to interest advertisers.
Jason Calacanis, the founder and former CEO of Weblogs, Inc., has a comment on the Valleywag post that says these blogs are probably being consolidated into other blogs:
My guess is they would consolidate DVGuru and PVRWire into Engadget and EngadgetHD, BBHUB into EngadgetMobile, and Divester into Gadling.
Niche blogs are great, but when you're running a scale business like AOL is you're better off focusing on your HUGE winners like Autoblog, Engadget, Joystiq, etc.
Nielsen/NetRatings study has found that the traffic to newspaper blogs at the top 10 online newspapers soared 210 percent from December 2005 to December 2006. The growth means it is likely that newspapers will get more and more bloggish in 2007. Jeff Jarvis says, "I'll bet this helps take the cooties off the word 'blog' in newsrooms."
A Reuters blog post about the news throws in a couple spinach and Popeye graphics to indicate that blogs are to newspapers as spinach is to Popeye. In other words, blogs are a big strength booster for newspaper websites.
On a less interesting note the survey also indicated that blog readers tend to be male and for some reason newspaper blog readers skew even more towards males. The study found that blog readers are 60 percent men and 40 percent women and among newspaper blog pages, this skew intensified, with 66 percent men and 34 percent women.
The Nielsen//NetRatings press release is located here. More discussion of this story can be found at Techmeme.
Wikipedia's War on Blogs Continues as Matt Cutts' Page is Targeted for Deletion
We first mentioned Wikipedia's war on blogs before in a post on December 7th when Tony Pierce's Wikipedia page was up for deletion. Pierce's page survived an initial round but was eventually deleted during a second round. In that post we referred to a Wikipedia entry by an obnoxious Wikipedia user named Timecop that declares a war on blogs. Tony Pierce has more on this user here.
Wikipedia's war on blogs did not stop with Tony Pierce's entry. Danny Sullivan reports that now blogger Matt Cutts' Wikipedia page is up for deletion. Some of the Wikipedia users seem determined to eradicate as many of the blogger pages on Wikipedia as possible. You would think they would be more considerate considering how frequently many bloggers mention and link to Wikipedia. Maybe some of these ungrateful Wikipedia users get their kicks by deleting bloggers' pages because they know it will lead to criticism and complaints from bloggers. Wikipedia should not have deleted Bloggie Award winner and LAist editor Tony Pierce's page and they should not delete Matt Cutts' page either. Danny Sullivan explains why Matt Cutts passes Wikipedia's notability criteria guidelines in this open letter.
In a previous post we posted Nielsen BuzzMetrics list of the Top Ten most linked to posts of 2006. Now BuzzMetrics CEO Jonathan Carson has followed up on the top ten list with a post about the Top 100 Posts of 2006. The PDF file containing the complete 100 posts can be found here.
The top 100 posts of 2006 were made by only 18 different blogs. Carson says many of the posts were by Alisters, top blogs and Google's Official Blog.
Several uber-A Listers have multiple posts in the Top 100, if not in the Top 10. Michelle Malkin does have the #6 post ("Danish cartoonists threatened by Muslim extremists"), plus 17 more. Engadget has ten in the Top 100, including a hilarious comment on a Teddy Bear USB drive with a removeable head at #22; Think Progress also has ten, including a clip of Bill Clinton talking about the war on terror from Fox News, at #11; Boing Boing lists eight times, including a critique of the digital rights protection measures on the new Coldplay CD, at #21.
As in life, all things Google resonated in the blogosphere - the Google Blog registered 11 top 100 posts, including a post on the company's acquisition of Writely at #10, and a post about Google in China at #17.
Some regularly-cited top bloggers did not make the top post list, including Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, and Gawker. Daily Kos had just one post on the list (#85, a transcript of Stephen Colbert's White House correspondents dinner speech).
It is very interesting to see this list of the most linked to posts -- thanks to Jonathan Carson and BuzzMetrics for releasing it into the wild. If only the other blog search engines would do the same.
Dave Winer has posted a response to the ongoing blog comments argument. He says that a blog is the "unedited voice of a person" and that comments may actually interefere.
Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.
We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things. A few voices can drown out all others. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.
Adding comments does not unblog a blog anymore than not having comments makes a blog not a blog. However, on some popular blogs comments do lead to a community atmosphere that may change the blog over time. Comments can make a blog more like a web forum if there are enough people leaving comments.
Those urging Google's Blog to add comments may be upset when Google finally does add comments and the conversation (and traffic) moves to Google's Blog and away from their own blogs. What if Techmeme added comments? Wouldn't this drain traffic from top comment blogs like TechCrunch?
Will some pro-community bloggers eventually argue that all blogs must have a feature like MyBlogLog in order to be a blog? Will they insist that these blogs allow little faces of other bloggers to appear on their blog? Will they argue that Google and other companies need these features on their corporate blogs in order for them to really be corporate blogs? There are good arguments that adding comments can increase traffic to a blog. There are also strong arguments that comments make a blog more interesting. However, there are not any good arguments that a blog is not a blog because it does or does not have comments.
Here we go starting the new year with a topic we have seen many times before. Zoli's Blog says that Google's Blog is not a blog because it does not have comments. TechCrunch followed with a post asking What Is the Definition of a Blog?
Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad - 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog. Just one accidental deletion and a couple of hacks added a bit of spice and drama.
But today bloggers are starting to ask if the Official Google Blog is even an actual blog. The reason? It doesn't allow readers to leave comments. The Official Google blog does list links to other sites referencing any given post (a sort of trackback), but that's it. The conversation ends there.
We have seen this question manytimesbefore. The topic always ends up with those supporting the "blogs without comments are still blogs" argument pointing out that blogs like Boing Boing, Seth's Blog, Post Secret and this blog (BloggersBlog.com) are still blogs despite lacking comments. Technically, you can continue the conversation by pointing each blog post to Technorati or another blog search engine like we do at the end of each post. Trackbacks are another option.
Other bloggers will make counter arguments that Boing Boing, Seth's Blog, Google's Blog and Bloggers Blog are not blogs at all because they do not have comments. Still other bloggers will argue that these blogs are blogs but that they could be much better blogs if only they would allow comments.
Update 1-2-07: Mathew Ingram explains why he thinks blogs with comments are better. Meanwhile, a Lifehack post suggests adding or fixing comments as one of six improvements you can make to your blog.
TechCrunch reported yesterday that PayPerPost would be acquiring Performancing, a provider of blogging tools and a blog advertising network. Today, the official press release is out and PayPerPost has bought Performancing's blog analytics tool and online classifieds service.
PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers. Through its purchase PayPerPost gains a number of powerful blogger support tools including Performancing Metrics, the leading, free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online "classifieds" for bloggers.
Online Marketing Blog says the Firefox plug-in and the Performancing Partners ad technology will be retained by Performancing and relaunched as new brands. The Online Marketing Blog post also points out that Patrick Gavin, one of the owners of Performancing, is also a cofounder of ReviewMe -- a PayPerPost competitor.
TheAlarmClock.com reports that CoComment, a service that helps track and store blog comments, has raised $1.5 million.
CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.
Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.
CoComment has some very active users. At least twenty of the top users have made over 1,000 comments using CoComment. Jackyn from New Zealand has made 3,700 comments.
Want to Share Your Life Online With a Blog? is the question Google is asking to promote its Blogger service in Google search results. Google Blogoscope reports that Google recently started pimping its own blogging service in search results when a search for "blog" is conducted. Google's pimp for Blogger looks like this:
Even Google searches for "blogging," "blogger" and the nonsensical "bloggisaurus rex" will show you the Blogger "B" and the tempting Want to Share Your Life Online With a Blog? question. Googlified is also covering Google's Blogger pimpage.
The Red Herringreports that Glam Media has raised $18.5 million. That's significantly more than other recent blog network funding. It is over three times what Sugar Publishing recently raised and over nine times more than b5media recently raised.
Glossy online fashion portal Glam Media has gotten $18.5 million in Series C funding to expand the Web site and its sales and editorial staff, the company announced.
Duff Ackerman & Goodrich Ventures led the latest funding round, which was announced Thursday.
Also participating were existing investors blue-chip VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which helped launch eBay, Accel Partners, an investor in Facebook, as well as WaldenVC and Information Capital.
In a separate announcement, Glam said that CNET Chairman Jarl Mohn had invested in the company and would serve as an advisor.
Glam has also cut a deal that will include content from Hearst magazines beginning with content from Marie Claire. Glam currently claims 7 million visitors. However, Valleywag posts that
the Glam.com website has just 527,000 unique visitors according to Comscore. If that's correct then the bulk of Glam's traffic comes from the 200 blogs included in its blog advertising network. They will need hold on to these blogs -- that agree to place Glam ads and features in exchange for a payment -- in order to maintain this traffic level.
A couple of the blog networks that have raised money seem to be rapidly mutating into social networking communities. PopSugar has one called TeamSugar and Glam has one called GlamSpace. That may be the direction the blog network companies that get a large amount of funding take in order to drive up pageviews.
Lycos has announced that Perez Hilton's blog was the most-searched blog on Lycos in 2006. Perez Hilton is also being pursued by angry photo agencies who accuse him of constantly stealing their photos. Perez had 91% more searches the second-most searched for blog, the Huffington Post. Other top searched blogs included TMZ, Pink is the New Blog and PostSecret.
And from the blogosphere, Perez Hilton is the most-searched blog site of 2006, generating 91 percent more search interest than the second most popular blog site with web searchers, Huffington Post. While Huffington Post provides news and opinions, three of the top five most-searched blog sites this year cater to celebrity gossip news, including Perez Hilton, a.k.a. Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., TMZ, a.k.a. "Thirty Mile Zone" around Hollywood, and Pink is the New Blog. The fifth most popular blog site in 2006 is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people anonymously email their secrets on postcards.
You can see the entire Lycos 50 here. The Lycos 50 also has a blog but it could use some new posts -- the last post was in October.
The BBC reports that analysts at Gartner believe blogging will peak next year around 100 million blogs.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
***
Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.
He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.
Blogging will certainly peak at some point but the 100 million blog count sounds low if they are talking about the total number of blogs worldwide. There is some discussion about Gartner's prediction going on here on Gartner's Prediction Blog. The actual prediction available here reads like this:
Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.
The Bloggy Network, a UK blog publisher, has bought the Blog Herald from Problogging, Inc. This is the second time the Blog Herald has been sold in the past year. The Blog Herald was purchased by BlogMedia (now Problogging, Inc.) from its creator Duncan Riley earlier this year.
There are two Bloggy Networks. This is the Bloggy Network that bought the Blog Herald not this one. The Bloggy Network that bought the Blog Herald has a post about the acquisition here on their blog called Bloggy News. The fact that the new Blog Herald owners already own fifteen blogs that start with the word Bloggy makes it very tempting to now call the Blog Herald the Bloggy Herald but so far there has been no name change and there probably won't be one.
A couple bloggers have departed the Blog Herald including Muhammed Saleem, who announced he will now be blogging at David Krug's 901am blog and focusing more on his personal blog. Martin Neumann is also leaving. Tony Hung has made the decision to say aboard. Some announcements from new bloggers at the Blog Herald can be found here, here, here and here.
Matt Craven reflects on why he sold the Blog Herald here. Matt Craven also blogged about the sale on the Blog Herald on December 3rd. You can also read a post here by Duncan Riley who originally created the Blog Herald.
Meanwhile, Valleywag bags on the sale and the entire blog industry saying there is "no reason to care about the disposal of the Blog Herald, a small site which covers the blog publishing industry, to the extent that one can call it an industry." In the same post Valleywag also posts erroneous information about recent Blog Herald transactions.
Wikipedia Blogger Pages Being Targeted for Deletion
A war against blogs is being waged at Wikipedia. Bloggers are being targeted for deletion as you can see on this Wikipedia page. Here is an excerpt from the page where a Wikipedia user named Timecop claims there are "hundreds of utterly worthless blog-related pages" on Wikipedia.
So, there are hundreds of utterly worthless blog-related pages on Wikipedia. Some are genuinely notable, but others are just self-promoting vanity / spam.
Here's some quick guidelines for a non-notable blog:
Is it an article about a blog?
Is the article title the blog title?
Is the blog's first hit on google when searching for the said blog title?
Can most of the "about" info be gathered from clicking "about" link on the blog?
Is the rest of the shit inane garbage blatantly promoting the said blog?
If so, the blog is a perfect candidate for getting deleted from Wikipedia. Make sure to check alexa and google, and search for "exact" blog name. Skip through a few 'next' pages on google, to get total number of 'unique' hits, the rest being uselessly duplicated content. Then nominate it for deletion
Wikipedia's blogger pages can be found here. Blogger Tony Pierce's Wikipedia entry is one of the first blogger pages up for deletion. Tony Pierce is the editor of LAist and he also has a personal blog called Busblog. Blogging.la's David Markland explains how Tony Pierce is an accomplished blogger and asks whether blogging itself is being targeted.
Pierce defends himself by listing his accomplishments, including appearances on G4TV, mentions in the New York Times and Washington Post, having a word he coined ("blook") a nominee for Oxford's word of the year, and is the number three result when you Google the name "Tony". This doesn't mention the hundreds of additional bloggers who credit Pierce with inspiring them to write, or influencing their style. Rank wise, of the millions of blogs online, Technorati has listed his Busblog in the top 500, and Blogebrity ranked Pierce an "A List" blogger when it launched almost two years ago.
It would seem that within the field of blogging, Tony Pierce is doubtlessly notable - so is the notability of the field of blogs a legitimate issue, or coud this be a coordinated attack on blogs by Wikipedia users who don't like the medium and some of its players?
Tony Pierce also won a Bloggie Award in 2005 for his post "How to Blog". The "War on Blogs" posting by Timecop and the fact that the Wikipedia page of a notable, award-winning blogger like Tony Pierce has been targeted for removal indicates that blogs and bloggers in general are being targeted for removal from Wikipedia. That's a sad thing especially considering blogs are at least partly responsible for the success of Wikipedia. Pierce's page survived an initial round for deletion but it is now up for deletion for a second time.
Tony Pierce has blogged his own thoughts on the Wikipedia issue here, here and here.
New guidelines for the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes allow the submission of a blogs. A press release from the Pulitzer Board discusses the widening of the range of online journalims to include blogs and other online content.
The purpose of the new category is to encourage and honor exemplary local journalism, marked by strong reporting across a spectrum of potential subjects. "The Pulitzer Prizes have long valued such reporting," Gissler said, "but this makes our interest much more explicit."
While the local category replaces the Beat Reporting category that was created in 1991, the work of beat reporters remains eligible for entry in a wide range of categories that include-depending on the specialty involved-national, investigative, and explanatory reporting, as well as the new local category.
With its new rules for online submissions, the Pulitzer Board will require each online element to be a single, discretely designated presentation, such as a database, blog, interactive graphic, slide show, or video presentation. Each designated element will count as one item in the total number of items, print or online, that are permitted in an entry.
The How to Submit a Entry PDF File also contains the following Q&A:
Q. What is an online element?
A. It is a single, unified, discretely designated presentation. For example, it can be an online story, database, blog, interactive graphic, slide show or video presentation. Each designated element will count as one item in the total number permitted in an entry.
Q. How much online content can a single element contain?
A. There is no absolute limit. However, the burden on a jury should be kept in mind. An online element with multiple parts, such as a blog with manifold postings, should be a cohesive presentation. The conceptual logic tying the parts together should be clear.
Most of the language on the pulitzer.org site and in the PDF talks about newspapers so there may be a bias towards newspaper blogs. There is also no specific award being offered for a blog. More information about the Pulitzer's submission process can be found here. (via Journalism.co.uk).
As many of you have noted over the past few weeks, we've slowly been divesting ourselves of much of our blog network. This is part of a deliberate strategy to move beyond the "wide & deep" network strategy that we have employed in the past in order to refocus our efforts on our consulting business and expand more into services for professional bloggers, including directly consulting in that arena.
Thus, it only makes sense for us to rebrand ourselves as Problogging, Inc.
Our focus will be on serving the needs of the Professional Blogging community and those who wish to enter that arena.
The company is selling some of its smaller blogs, like Sporty Blog, but it is retaining its core blogging sites including The Blog Herald, Blog Network List, Blog Network Watch and BloggerJobs.biz. ProBlogging, Inc. is also offering blogging services including web hosting, consulting and blog/web design. You can read more about ProBlogging's plans in this interview with Matt Craven.
California Supreme Court Protects Bloggers From Libelous Comments
The International Herald Tribune reports that a decision by the California Supreme Court gives bloggers, forum owners and publishers immunity from libelous comments posted on their websites by others. It is a good decision because bloggers should not be punished for any annoying trolls that stop by and post vicious comments and/or start flame wars.
The court, in a unanimous decision overturning a San Francisco appeals court ruling, said that those claiming defamation could sue only the original source of the disputed comments, not publishers or distributors, even if the distributor was an individual.
Internet users are protected by the same 1996 Communications Decency Act that grants immunity against defamation claims to publishers in most cases, the court said.
MSNBC.com has an article that includes what the California supreme court said.
In today's ruling, the California Supreme court said that granting such broad immunity for posting defamatory statements "has some troubling consequences."
Nevertheless, the court said, "Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area" people who contend they were defamed on the Internet can seek recovery only from the original source of the statement, not from those who re-post it."
Instapundit calls the decision a free speech victory for blogs. Talk Left posted a link to the PDF file containing the text of the decision. Tony Hung at the Blog Herald writes, "And to that I say - let the libelous trolling flame wars begin!"
TechCrunch reports that Jason Calacanis will be leaving AOL. Calacanis sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL in October, 2005 and relaunched a digg-like Netscape in March, 2006. Those two AOL companies will now be managed without Calacanis and might even be sold to a new company if Time Warner unloads AOL. AOL also just purchased the Blogsmith software, used to build Weblogs, Inc. and some AOL blog networks, from Calacanis and Brian Alvey.
Nick Denton at Valleywag predicts Jason Calacanis will now try podcasting, wikis or some other internet media venture.
So, what next? My guess: a rapid re-entry, with a well-funded venture in internet media, probably podcasting or wiki directories, judging by the topics Calacanis covers in his personal writing. He'll be loud, infuriating -- and probably, irritatingly, successful.
Calacanis has not yet discussed leaving AOL except for a "no comment" on his post about the departure of AOL CEO Jon Miller.
Update 11-17-06
Jason Calacanis has confirmed that he is leaving AOL. The New York Times is now covering the story. The Times says Calacanis did not want to start over with a new CEO.
In recent months, Mr. Calacanis said he was considering leaving AOL to start a new company. His decision to resign was hastened by the news that Time Warner, AOL's parent, had replaced Mr. Miller with Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group.
"I'm not inclined to start over with a new guy," Mr. Calacanis said in an interview on Thursday. As for what to make of the treatment of Mr. Miller, who discovered he was being replaced after a reporter called AOL asking about Mr. Falco's appointment, Mr. Calacanis said only: "I'm perplexed. Why now?"
It will be interesting to see what AOL does with Weblogs, Inc. with Calacanis at the helm. Peter Rojas, the Editor-in-Chief of Weblog Inc's most popular blog Engadget, is staying with AOL according to Beet.tv. (thx Scoble)
Venture Beat 
Gawker's Consumerist blog 
AOL has released a 
Google's Blogger.com service suffered an unfortunate error over the weekend that 
MediaWeek 
CNET and its array of Internet properties have been acquired by CBS in a $1.8 billion acquisition. Paid Content 
There is a second print publication about blogging called Artful Blogging. We 
The Business and Media Institute 
GigaOm 
You have probably heard of 
Mixed Media, a blog from Portfolio, 
A recent 
PaidContent 
Former President Bill Clinton is blogging on the 
Many Internet users have heard of the the 
CNET has actually been publishing blogs since 2005 -- see 
There is a new print magazine called Blogger & Podcaster Magazine. This is the first print trade magazine for the industry. The magazine's website is located at 
The big discussion today in the blogosphere is about a proposed Blogger's Code of Conduct. It is currently the top story on 
David Sifry, CEO and founder of Technorati, has posted a new 
Michael Arrington has confirmed that the TechCrunch Network has 
A lot of bloggers are still discussing 
ESPN has acquired the 
In case you missed it 
Bright Station Ventures has invested $4.5 million in UK blog publisher 
The Blog Herald 
Nielsen/NetRatings study 
We first mentioned Wikipedia's war on blogs before in a 
Here we go starting the new year with a topic we have seen many times before. Zoli's Blog 
TechCrunch 
The Red Herring 
Lycos has 
The 
New guidelines for the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes allow the submission of a blogs. A 
BlogMedia, the publisher of the 