2007 October archive at Facibus On Blogging

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Archive for October, 2007

Blogging is dead

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 30 October, 2007 in Blogging and Consulting. 5 Comments

…or is it?

I presented on social computing to a group of recruitment professionals last week. They assured me that blogging was dead - they’d been to a conference somewhere and it was common knowledge there - apparently.

Without getting antagonistic, I asked them if any of them blogged - they did not. I asked them if any of them read blogs on a daily basis - three did, and several others admitted to doing it on occasion.

So where did they get this from? With a little more discussion, it seems that a couple of presenters at the conference had discussed old-school “I woke up today with a pimple on my bum” personality blogging - and how it is on the way out. This is something that we’ve known for a while. People want relevance more than personality (unless the personality itself is the relevance). Where there is relevance and good content there are readers - for HR/recruitment bloggers like Alli as well as everyone else.

So is blogging dead? No. It’s just changing.

Twitterpimping your blog

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 28 October, 2007 in Tips. 5 Comments

Selling products to your friends is sometimes referred to as pimping - the inference is that it is a bad thing (and if they don’t need what you’re selling, then this is right).

I’m part of a fairly small circle of friends on Twitter - there’s a couple of dozen people that I know well enough to consider Twitter friends and allow access to my feed.

Still - it is acceptable to send a tweet (Twitter message) announcing a new blog posting. You could almost call this Twitterpimping. I think that it is OK - I bought a bass and amp from Nathanael today because of a Twitter post.

If the post (or whatever other ad) sounds interesting, chances are that your friends will follow the URL to find out more.

As far as getting real traffic goes (as opposed to inbound links from Flog on Facebook) this is a fairly successful strategy, especially when you’re starting out. Friends make good readers.

Try it.

Don’t get bitten on the bum by the long tail!

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 17 October, 2007 in Blogging. 3 Comments

Wikipedia has a go at defining the Long Tail:

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article^[1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

Hmm, that doesn’t really say much.

Basically, to the marketer, the long tail means that small percentages of really large numbers of customers can still provide an enormous amount of revenue. A couple of percentage points of a multi-billion dollar industry (like e-commerce) is some serious money.

To bloggers, this means that niche is important - a lot of niches are actually big enough to attract tens of thousands of readers, and some, many more. 0.5% of the world’s RSS-reading public is (depending on whose figures you use) still more than a million readers. Small percentages, multiplied by large numbers, equal potential success (if you’re worried about making money from your blog, that is).

To bloggers, this also means that web client compatibility is an issue - I saw a comment on a mailing list today that bugged me - a bloke who should have known better said that his company really didn’t worry about customers with Macs as they only made up a small number of the total. They’re in the web service delivery business - do you think that dismissing 6.1% of their potential customers before they’ve even reached the home page is a good idea?

This is the reason why I keep banging on about blog compatibility with Opera Mini and other mobile web browsers - even though they total less than 1% of total browser market share, they are growing rapidly. Basically, if you are a professional blogger, a 1% income loss is something that you do need to worry about - and when you’re just starting out, every reader is worth keeping.

So please, think about how you can better serve the needs of all of your readers, so that you don’t get bitten on the bum by the long tail.

If you are not hated…

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 14 October, 2007 in Blogging. 10 Comments

…then you’re doing something wrong. That said, it doesn’t make it any easier.

I received my very first troll comment over on HumaneIA this morning. I feel all grown up now

I am not sure what got this guy’s attention, but he doesn’t like anything that I’ve written there, especially my article on meta-thinking. Perhaps I insulted a relative of his, or maybe he is feeling cocky because England finally beat Australia in a sporting competition, I don’t know.

I looked at the website that his email address shares a domain with, and it is one of those “we don’t have to tell you what we do on our home page, because if you have to ask then we don’t want to bother with you” too-cool-for-school web design houses. So, the guy (or his boss) is a total tool. Perhaps I should have marked the comment as spam, but like I said to him, I am genuinely interested in why he doesn’t like my face.

One thing I do know for sure, based on past experience as an online community volunteer, is that I’m not going to feed his insanity by posting a link to his site.

What would you do in my situation?

Community Blogger award

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 12 October, 2007 in About. 11 Comments

I’m a Community Blogger Award recipient

Thanks heaps to Cellobella from SultanaBlog for creating the award, and Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond for passing it on to me.

Community is important - without it, things are just not as enjoyable (or as bearable!).

In the spirit of sharing the love, I would like to award this in turn to members of my own blogging support community:

Jeri Merrell from UnGeekit. Jeri’s advice has helped me through a couple of rough spots and while she doesn’t have as much time to blog as she would like, I read everything she writes still.
Maria Murphy from BA Rocks. Maria has always been there as a colleague and as a friend.
Matthew Hodgson from Matt’s Musings. Matt has been an inspiration and a supporter.
And Meg - if you hadn’t given this award to me, I would have had to give it to you. Thank you

How much guest posting is too much?

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 11 October, 2007 in Blogging. 2 Comments

Darren Rowse took some time off for another project and a few different people guest blogged.

This is a good thing - everyone deserves time off when they need it, and if any of us have paid their blogging dues and are entitled to declare a guest blogging week then it is he.

The tone of ProBlogger.net changed slightly with the guest posting - all the material was good (indeed, some of it was really good) - but it wasn’t Darren, and I have to admit to being a little disappointed at the time. But life goes on, and I got over it.

I ran into one fellow blogger at Oz-IA who said something that has had me thinking ever since - he said that he enjoyed my blog more than the current ProBlogger lineup because I was more focussed. While very flattering, it did get me to wondering if there was something that had changed to make him say something like this.

ProBlogger has a long tradition of guest bloggers - some of the truly greats among them. I’m now wondering if it was the temporary move to a wholly guest-blogged stream of articles that prompted my friend’s comment. The timing would be about right.

I thought about how people select the blogs that they read.

We come to a given blog seredipitously - that is, we stumble upon it (perhaps even through StumbleUpon, or a link on another blog, or via Google). If like what we see, then we may subscribe to that blog’s RSS feed. We stay because we like that blog - it is interesting from one life-facet or another (such as professional development, a hobby that we’re into, a cause we support, or a friend that we want to stay abreast of). We also stay because we like the writer(s) and the style they use. When that style changes, we may not like it, and could unsubscribe as a result. Nothing is forever, and change is inevitable, but again, we may not like the change (and some people handle change better than others).

Let’s suppose that this is the reason that both I and my friend lost touch with Problogger.net at around the same time. That is, there was enough of a change that we both noticed it, and both didn’t like it.

So, the question remains - how much guest posting is too much?

I’ve heard that system performance drops become noticeable at 12.5% below normal levels - that is, that you would notice if your PC suddenly became 12.5% slower. I’d really like to know if there is a magic ratio of owner-blogger to guest-blogger postings - below which the blog has noticeably changed (and therefore at risk of losing change-averse readers).

What do you think? Is change a bad thing? Do you notice when your favourite blog has guest bloggers? How many guest posts are too many?

Blogging with humanity

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 9 October, 2007 in Blogging. 0 Comments

Humane Information Architecture is based on a fair whack of social conscience - that is, it is based on the idea that design professionals should always strive to do good with their work. For a start this means doing no harm - not allowing people to come to harm as a result of the designer’s actions, or through inaction on their part.

As bloggers, I believe that we have a responsibility to our readers - to be of service, to work to improve their lives as well as our own.

A while back I criticised John Chow for not showing humanity in his blogging. Where do I think that John went wrong? Where was he doing harm? By arguing that minimum wage payments cause unemployment I believed that he was advocating a return to dog-eat-dog tribalism - that we should look after our own families first and last, with no care for the people down the street or in the country next door. I think that we’ve (thankfully) moved beyond that.

Blogging with humanity is not easy. It means staying away from prejudices and ideas that reinforce them. It means thinking about the implications of what you write, the effect it might have on the people who read it.

I wouldn’t claim to have always blogged with humanity. But I think that it is something worth aspiring to.

Sex Sells!

Published by

AndrewBoyd

at 6 October, 2007 in Blogging. 5 Comments

I mentioned before that there are keywords that are worth links just in and of themselves - like references to Paris Hilton’s nether parts.

Let’s face it - sex sells. Blogs that use a lot of “bikini babe” photos seem to do well - even if they are about technology or car reviews.

How do you use this to your advantage without compromising your integrity? Or are you prepared to do whatever it takes to get your blog promoted?

Here are a couple of ways that you could do this:

discuss your personal life every now and then and be open and honest with your audience about your past misdeeds/misadventures (although beware the risk of becoming less employable as a result). There are a number of highly respected bloggers who have taken time out every so often to discuss their bodies/relationships/relatives and sprinkle a few sex-linked keywords in their posts - and I’d be really surprised if they have not all gained some traffic that way from the porn-hunting public.
join campaigns like Boobiethon - while breast cancer is a very serious subject, I’m amazed that there have been linkbacks to my post on Boobiethon from full-on porn directories. I’ve marked them as comment-spam so that they don’t show up, but even still, the mere mention of breasts brings out the savage beast (at least in those who are running porn directory autoblogs).

As the comments on Better to be hated than ignored? show, it can be hard working out if you really want traffic from people looking for porn (unless you are actually running a porn site, that is).

What do you think? Is a little titillation good for your numbers? Or would it make you feel cheap?