Performancing RSS Feed Fixed

Sheesh, you’d think that when we went full feed one month ago someone might have told us that there were no linebreaks in our RSS heh! It’s been fixed now, and the code to convert Drupal 4.6 to full feed (in the link above) altered to show the fix.

Thanks Ozh!

Performancing goes Full Feed!

A week or so back, we had a discussion and poll on what we thought about full or partial feeds. Surprisingly, the poll turned out very close to 50/50 on whether Performancing members publish full or partial feeds.

We’ve wanted this site to be full feed from the start, but the Drupal system doen’t allow for it, and i’ve been meaning to take a peek at the code, and try to hack it for a while. Last night I got a nudge in that direction from Robert Scoble though, and as a result, i’ve just hacked this beast into producing a full feed!

Funny, you could take Robert’s email the wrong way, and get all offended quite easily I think:

Please add full text RSS feeds. Partial feeds suck. Sorry.

But I think using his considerable weight (heh..) to push full feeds is actually quite good, it gave me the prod i needed to go look at the code at least, and now we’re all happy eh Robert?

Hacking Drupal to Produce Full Feeds

For those that want to do likewise with Drupal, here’s what you need to do.

Find /modules/node.module and locate this line:


$items .= format_rss_item($item->title, $link, $item->teaser, $extra);


Change that too:


$items .= format_rss_item($item->title, $link, check_output($item->body), $extra);


and you’re done. Don’t forget to write a hack.log text file though, else when you upgrade, you’ll be back to square one.

Hope everyone enjoys the full feeds!

Interview with Nandini Maheshwari, the owner of Instablogs

Nandini Maheshwari is the founder and CEO of Instablogs, the first high-profile Indian blog network. She is a rarity among blog network owners (Nandini is female, beautiful, and not (overly) arrogant). She graciously agreed to grant me an interview, good stuff after the jump…

As the owner of Instablogs, you are involved in managing in a large number of blogs. What is your least favorite part of this responsibility?

We are in a startup-mode here. There is so much to do. Consequently I am left with little time to do some blogging myself. Maybe once things settle down a bit, I will start doing that.

I know that you recently turned down an offer of venture capital. What factors went into this decision?

There were free speech issues. I was not comfortable with an outsider dictating what we should put in our blogs. I am open to like-minded, free speech supporting investors all the time. Anyway it’s too early to think about venture capital. First let’s make a name for ourselves. I want to build the Instablogs brand first and foremost.

What do you think is the forecast for content ownership on the Web? Will it continue to be a profitable business model? Or do you think it could take another downward swing like it did in 2001?

The owner of the best story will be the winner of any given day. This owner can be anyone – a single person-owned company or a big media house. Of course, the big media houses will do the usual thing – buying successful startups.

As long as anyone online, has saleable content, one will have a profitable business, and this will be a sustainable business if you are able to build a community around your content property. Having said that, a community helps you put other useful content that may not be so saleable, as well. Take our blog on The Muslim Woman, or Stolen Childhood for example.

Now about that bubble. As far as we follow common sense business practices there is no fear. For us that means, keeping our costs down, and producing good content day after day.

When Instablogs launched it received a great deal of criticism from various people (probably in part because they had very high, even unrealistic, expectations). What advice can you give bloggers and blog network owners in reference to dealing with criticism (seeing as it is inevitable)?

I honestly believe criticism helps you to improve. In fact we faced some pre-launch snags that somewhat diluted our initial claim of hitting the blogosphere with 50 blogs. But that’s an old story now. We have moved on from that stage. Our blogs are now getting regular links from A-list blogs. We have managed to become a part of the online community. People have accepted us. They like our stuff. Now our traffic is going up and up, everyday.

My advice to new bloggers and blog network owners is take criticism in your stride, because criticism will help your blog(s) establish better be it through good advices or the invaluable links that you get in the process.

I know that the majority of your readers are based in the US. Was this by design, or did it just work out that way?

You’d find it strange but it’s true. Even our blog on India – India Daily has most of the readers in the US, not in India. But now Indian as well as Asian readership is on the rise. There was no design. We just wanted to produce content for an international audience.

What’s it like to work at Instablogs? Do you run a tight ship?

It’s fun; lots of freedom here. There is an atmosphere of easy collegiality. Of course it’s like a newsroom here, but a newsroom with lots of fun and enthusiasm. Also, we are planning some innovations with our newsroom that you will soon learn about.

—

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Nandini! In case anyone hasn’t yet seen Instablogs, go take a look–there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on over there.

PFF Ad Contest Winner!

Since we set our Performancing for firefox Ad Competition last week, we’ve been lucky enough to have a whole bunch of good stuff to pick over, not to mention a few folks to note down for future work heh..

In the end, it was unanimous (me, patrick, chris, andy) that the ads we think would work best, on-site and off, would be those of smarthomeschools, aka: Alex, of Still Thinking Designs. You can see what he conjured up below:

I don’t think we can quite decide on the orange or blue, but Alex did kindly offert to tweak a little before it goes out.

Congratulations Alex, and thanks!

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John Battelle Talks to Performancing about FM Publishing

Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to John Battelle of FM Publishing, a new but much discussed blog ad network that’s currently in beta. FM has a whole bunch of high profile bloggers working with it already, and from what I can see it looks near to making a formal debut, so it was good to get some answers from the man himself.

In this interview, John talks about FM, blog advertising in general, and the integrity of FM bloggers. Enjoy!

Q. For those readers not familiar with FM Publishing, can you tell us in a nutshell what it is, who it’s targeted at and what makes it noteworthy?

Federated Media (we call it FM) is something of a mashup of business models, all of which exist to support what might be called “talent” – think of the music labels, agents, book publishers and the like, but without the evil approach to intellectual property rights. Federated is a service business that partners with authors of great websites to bring them services and revenue. From our overview (not yet up, but soon): WE SELL ADVERTISING, indeed we do.

But that’s not all we do. At FM, we believe great voices attract great audiences. We’re in the business of supporting those voices, by both connecting them to great marketers, as well as providing a suite of services that let authors focus on what they do best: make compelling media. In doing so, we hope to create federations of respected voices which prosper on their own terms.

We have a platform (in limited alpha right now) that connects marketers with great authors, and we focus on the human side of it – making sure that it’s a great fit. So far, we have about 20 sites in the network, with another 20-30 in the works to join over time. We are creating category clusters for the marketers, and meta sites for audiences. But we are not telling the authors what to write, how to design their blogs, or what to do in general. We are providing them with services that will help them make their sites better, if they care to use them (for free). And all advertising must first be approved by each author before it runs. That’s why our tagline is “author-driven”.

Q. FM Publishing is pitched at the higher end of the blogosphere from what I can see, and what I’ve read. Is it fair to say that your most direct competion is from Henry Copeland’s BlogAds, that also clusters topic groups and authors?

Sort of. I sense Henry’s model is to be big (certainly that’s AdBrite’s and Google’s model!). Ours is to be focused. We believe that the human touch – between marketers, authors, and the audience – is key to the highest value relationships. We do not strive to have thousands of authors in our network. Scores of just the right ones will do. There are probably many more differences and many more similarities, but we’re pretty focused on our business right now. I wish Henry the best as his success means ours, and vice versa. It’s a very young market.

Q. Do you have any plans for lesser trafficked blogs?

We are not as much concerned with the size of a blog, as we are the quality of its audience, voice, and its influence.

Q. What kind of criteria are you working to when reviewing applications from publishers wanting to join FM?

Again, from our soon to be up website -

FM looks for passion, integrity, authority, and strong community support in all the sites we invite into our network. An FM site has influence not because its author is well known, but because the author has earned the trust of an influential community.

FM’s authors are characterized by highly original and intelligent voice and a strong sense of community. Their sites attract an influential and strongly opinionated audience who feel a strong bond to the author and the author’s subject whether it’s a focused business oriented sit like GigaOm or a broad cut of digital culture like Boing Boing. And, of course, all the authors in FM’s network believe that advertising, appropriately voiced, is an important part of his or her site’s ongoing conversation.

Q. In your opinion, what is it that bloggers need to be focusing on in order to attract advertisers, other than traffic figures?

Great content and keeping an honest and high integrity dialog up with your audience. It’s as simple as that. We have posted a draft of our author mores – a philosophy of sorts that our authors support – which state:

Authors who join the FM network of sites hold these values in common:

• Voice and Point of View: Strong voices and intelligent points of view drive robust conversations.
• Accuracy: Some FM sites are journalistic in nature; others are not. Regardless, FM sites strive for accuracy regarding items we post as facts.
• Community: Weblogs are conversations, not lectures. The community that gathers around each site is the essence of its value, and we treat that community accordingly. We listen and respond to feedback, and incorporate it into the way we manage our sites.
• Responsibility: We take our role in the community we serve seriously, and feel responsible for our own words. When we make mistakes, we correct them. We do not seek to use our sites maliciously.
• Transparency: We err on the side of disclosure to our readers. If we have an interest in something we’re writing about, we disclose that interest. We are as transparent as we can be about our site’s statistics, practices and policies.

Q. Will advertisers ever get over their fear of blog advertising?

I think so. We’re very very early, but are working with the likes of Microsoft, GM, Sega, Citibank, and scores of others. The key is for marketers to see this medium as one of conversation and dialog, not interruption and dictation or entertainment.

Q. What’s your take on ads with comments? It’s something I’ve had middling success with, readers liking it, advertisers being wary, but I feel this is the way forward for companies wanting to engage blog readers. Your thoughts?

I think it’s a good step toward what I mentioned above. But I think we need to remember that the advertiser has a right to comment as well! I think many innovations like this are in the works, and I hope FM will be in the thick of it.

Blog Network Payment Strategies

I have been thinking a lot lately about becoming a blog overlord. There seems to be some options in how you pay others to blog for you so I thought I would discuss them here to see what you think.

First off before we get into the options I am thinking of I will explain what I am thinking about doing. Writing quality posts on your own takes a lot of time. Even blogs that do not have the word count of Performancing posts take time because even with linkblogs you need to find the stuff to link out to. We all have a finite amount of time and I don’t want to produce something mediocre just so I can produce quantity. This means I need to bring in other bloggers.

While I know people will blog for nothing, just for the joy or recognition that comes from blogging, this is only usually with an established blog. There is no cache with a startup blog until down the line and then, even though obviously being my blog it will be brilliant, there are no guarantees.

So I need to find good bloggers and I need to find a way to reward these bloggers.

If the blog monetization strategy, at least initially, will be from advertising and affiliate sales, then the revenue will be slow to start while the blog is established. I do not have any startup capital. On the other hand I need to believe the income will come eventually.

On to the blogger rewards.

Blogger Payment Strategies

Salary Bloggers

It looks like the majority of the blog networks they are paying their bloggers a fixed salary. That might be a viable option for companies with VC capital behind them but not something I could foresee for a little while.

Pros: Predictable, monthly income will attract bloggers with a certain mindset and will also be a predictable expense. It would also allow fixed terms and conditions so would provide potential for strict posting schedule etc.

Cons: Expensive option, at least initially, unless it is possible to find great bloggers for low monthly fees. Would need to pay out a lot of money from day one without knowing what revenue is going to be for a fact. Requires risk and a lot of faith. And a tax headache. More messy, but not impossible, to fire them.

Contract Blogging

Thinking about the monthly salary option there is another option with less of a tax headache and that is to pay a work for hire retainer contract to bloggers. This might be an option. If they don’t work out it’s less messy to get rid of a bad blogger too. Still many of the same downsides though.

Pay Per Post

Rather than pay the blogger and setting a fixed posting schedule there is the option of taking freelance submissions. So someone would submit a post and you would pay up a fee. This is how it works in magazine world and it seems to work quite well, particularly when you can vet the authors writing style and agree on a topic.

Pros: Only pay for work produced and only if it meets your criteria. Also, as Andy likes to say, the main money is in the archives so eventually you ought to make your money back. Freelance networks already exist so ready source of authors.

Cons: It’s difficult to estimate how much to pay, some posts will be real money spinners while others will drop off your homepage never to be read again. Still got that up front cost. You need to be strict with your criteria of what a good post looks like. Might be difficult to get a loyal set of bloggers?

Profit Share

That last point worries me. Many blogs get popular because of the personality of the bloggers as much as because of the topic or content. How do you maintain a loyal blogging team when you are paying by the post?

One option might be a profit share arrangement. With channels you can even divide up the revenue right in the advertising network consoles.

Pros: Bloggers know if they write good posts they will earn more. Success and responsibility is shared. They will not only post but actively promote the blog. Bloggers might even be incentivised to attract advertisers. Transparency builds trust.

Cons: You no longer get the ongoing passive archive income. How do you cover overheads?

That last point needs consideration. Obviously you would not payout 100% of the income, so maybe the bloggers get a percentage of a pot rather than their complete share of the total.

Summary

I am leaning towards the profit share model until my blog business empire is more cash rich! Which of these options would you consider from a bloggers point of view or from the blog overlord point of view? If you are already paying for content, how do you do it?

Bug Tracking Enabled for Performancing Firefox

Due to the many duplicate bug reports, not to speak of the amount of bug reports which aren’t actually bugs in our Performancing for Firefox blog editor, I’ve enabled bug tracking via the website.

Bug or Feature?

To submit a bug or feature request, please do a search first, then submit an issue here. You can find that link under “create content” on the right hand menu also, along with “forum topic” and “homepage story”.

Hopefully this will allow us to better track bugs, and be able to nuke dupes more easily, keeping the recent posts list a little cleaner and easier to use.

Thanks everyone!

What Happens to My Blogs When I Die?

Reading this thread at WebmasterWorld really made me stop and think about my blog empire. I own interests in about 5 dozen blogs, spread over multiple servers and platforms, with revenues coming into different accounts (and from different companies). Really the whole thing is a bit of a mess, but of course I know where everything is in my head.

That wouldn’t help my family though, if I suddenly keeled over.

Any sound business plan should include an exit strategy, and a plan for passing on the torch if the CEO/leader is suddenly unable to work. This includes the scenario of death.

The way I see it, there are basically two ways to pass the value of this type of asset (passive revenue stream) when you die:

1. Auction your sites off, and your family receives the proceeds from the sales
2. Simply have the accounts (Adsense or whatever) switched to the new owner’s name

The trouble with #1 is that sites usually sell for 10-12x profits — this is really a cheap valuation if your site is relatively stable (or even growing). I think option #1 is only smarter when a blog isn’t a passive revenue stream — i.e., the blog only makes money if you continue posting. Your family will most likely not want to post on your blog, so this is a no-hassle way for them to extract value from it.

My own sites mostly make money off of Adsense revenue from archived pages. Thus, even if I died, if the Adsense accounts were switched to another person, this person could receive passive income from these archives without maintaining or updating the sites. But they would still need basic info about them, so they could pay the annual hosting bill, for instance.

From the above thread, member icedowl lays out a good, but brief, plan of action for his sites in case he died:

Here’s what I’d leave behind:

1. URL’s and login information for anything related to your sites. Be sure to include your domain registrar, hosting company, your control panels, databases and whatever else you might be using.
2. Info for any recurring fees such as site hosting and domain renewal with amounts, how paid, etc.
3. Definitely a will.

What else should a person organize for this scenario? And I wonder what percentage of you have ever thought about (or, done anything about) it?

And what if you have partners? How do you handle that? How do people handle it with brick and mortar businesses?

HOWTO: Using Performancing for Firefox with Radio UserLand

I took a quick couple of minutes to download, install and configure the Firefox plugin called Performancing that allows you to easily post weblog content. It’s really handy and a much better solution than we currently have for Radio users. Here’s the quick “how to” guide.

1. Download and install Firefox 1.5 as the plugin won’t work with anything older.
2. Follow the instructions on the Performancing website to install the plugin.
3. Open the editor window by clicking the pencil/pad icon on the lower right corner of the window.
4. Configure a blog using the “wizard” with the following settings:

• on the right side of the editing window, click “Launch Account Wizard”
• choose “Custom Blog”
• chose MetaWeblogAPI as the type
• enter Radio’s XML-RPC interface URL–typically http://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2
• leave “Add API Key” unchecked
• Enter in the username and password you use for Radio’s remote RPC access.  Haven’t set that up yet?
• Enable XML-RPC access on the pref page. Make sure you have the Blogger API pref enabled too.
• Enable Remote access with a username and password on this pref page.

Google Analytics Gave Me Profiles, Santa Gave me Insight

First of all, let’s establish that writing for a living is not some sinful activity. Agreed? Okay, so why are so many bloggers seemingly against blogging for a living? True, not everyone can write – but having spent significant parts of my life encouraging new writers with that necessary spark to continue writing, I see that writing is a skill, to be developed like any other. Some bloggers will get better, others will give up. However, blogging requires more than just writing ability, as I’ve consciously come to realize just this morning (still Xmas over here).

Now I’m not going to tell you things you probably already know as a Performancing reader. But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned, both as a published writer/author, a former search engine webmaster and a general tech-nerd, and now as an aspiring pro blogger: have a plan for your blogging career, just like you would any other. And stay on that plan, or revise it as necessary. But always keep researching.

If you don’t have a plan, develop one. Do your research. Find your niche. Would you jump into a new career without knowing its potential and what it entails? Of course not. So why jump into blogging about a topic without knowing its potential? I’m extremely guilty of this, too. In my desire to be just like successful but very hard-working Darren Rowse (who took about 3 yrs to get where he is), I’ve been focusing on the wrong blogs in my “network”. When Google Analytics finally increased the number of website profiles on my account last night, I saw the truth of this in the numbers.

Now I’ve read the blogs of numerous other aspiring bloggers. What I’ve noticed is that the more technically-minded the blogger, the more likely that they dislike seeing advertising on a blog. This is especially true of younger bloggers, who are used to all the freebies on the Internet. That’s fine, have your opinion. The truth is, there are two key categories of blog: monetary and non-monetary. I call the non-monetary blogs “hobby blogs”, which is not to say that their quality is bad.

If you want to write a blog and not earn any money for it, then I’m hazarding a guess that Performancing is the wrong website for you to read. Write your hobby (non-monetary) blog, and godspeed to you. Maybe success will come from other quarters. But if you plan to earn a living as a blogger – even just part-time – there are only so many ways you can do so:

• Sign up with ad networks, such as Google, YPN, Chitika, Adgenta.
• Sign up on affiliate programs to sell someone else’s products or services.
• Advertise blog-specific merchandise, such as t-shirts with your blog’s logo.
• Advertise your own products, ebooks, or services (including blogger-for-hire).
• Build your own private ad network by contacting potential advertisers directly. (Or try the Azoogle.com network, who only accept publishers with a very high daily pageviews level, compared to Google, YPN, Microsoft, and others.)

To earn blog-based revenue, you need to choose any or all of these options, depending on your own comfort level. If you don’t like any of these, then you really need to consider another career. Or consider blogging for a network that pays you either by the post or as a percentage of their monthly revenues. Patience is a strong part of this career. After 5 months, I’ve just started acquiring clients that want me to show them how to blog. And I only managed this because of building business relationships with other people who then told their acquaintances about blogging to promote their business. (In other words, I didn’t even have to start calling business owners to tell them how great blogging is.)

I may have missed something, but the above list covers most of the ways to make money on a blog. Some of it is not very palatable for some people. In fact, a lot of people are against Google or other contextual advertising. However, my own research of other bloggers show that contextual advertising is ideal for new bloggers because of the simplicity of setting up a revenue stream.

If you don’t have the blog traffic, it’s unlikely you can get your own advertising. That time should be spent writing, promoting, analyzing, and generally blogmastering. Believe me, sell advertising is not easy work. I used to publish a free monthly “fringe culture” print magazine in the early- to mid-90s. I had to compete with another magazine I used to write for who lied about their circulation. (Although that problem is not an issue for publishing on the Internet.)

Even though I had a lot of contributors, I did all the infrastructure work, including publishing (that is, promoting, selling ads, collecting ad payments), general editing, and page layout. Does this sound anything like blogging? It should, because this is what a to-be-successful blogger has to do: be a publisher, act like a publisher, research like a publisher, and be an editor-in-chief finding topics that can be monetized. And that’s on top of being a writer, photographer, statistician, marketing expert and blogmaster. I repeat: this all means picking subject matter that CAN be monetized, no matter how much you want to write about something that has no market value.

Technorati Tags: blogging, problogging, blogrevenue

Technorati Tags: blogging, problogging, blogrevenue