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 i
There is a second print publication about blogging called Artful Blogging. We 
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Former President Bill Clinton is blogging on the 
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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 
