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Chris Garrett

Performancing Partners to close

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I’m sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn’t going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn’t going to happen at all.

Any ads currently in the system will continue to run until the end of the month at which time the ad code will stop working. Please take your ad code down from your templates then. Remaining ad time will of course be refunded.

This news is surely not going to be popular. All I can say is thank you to all the publishers and advertisers who tried the service and to all the people in the forums who provided feedback and ideas. I am gutted I couldn’t have some time to act on your suggestions.

Why Do You Blog?

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Darren Barefoot is asking the question and it is one I would like to know the answer to

Why do you blog? Why do I blog? Why does anybody? As the medium enters its pubescence, it’s a question that I wonder about all the time. I’ve talked about it with a lot of different bloggers, and everyone offers a different reason.

In February, I’m giving a talk called “Why We Blog” at Northern Voice here in Vancouver. In preparation, I’m launching this ad hoc survey to gather more opinions and voices from the blogosphere.

If you have the time please go over and complete his survey – you might win a prize but more importantly Darren might publish his findings so we can get a picture of why people are blogging right now. Interestingly he has gone for free text replies so I am not sure how the survey results will be formulated.

In my experience there are many reasons people blog …

  • Personal diary/journal
  • I just like writing
  • money
  • fame/attention
  • sales
  • get a new job
  • make friends/network
  • …

When I started blogging there were many names for the activity but “blogging” wasn’t one of them. Back in the late 90’s people would have personal sites and just throw “stuff” up, links, pics, jokes, resume/CV, etc. A couple of people had sites with diaries or personal journals and I thought I would follow suit. While it took me some time to work out what I was doing, and the whole thing was hand coded seeing as there was no wordpress at that time, I got a taste for it and have blogged ever since. My first true blog was launched Friday 5th February 1999. Don’t bother going to wayback machine and reading the lousy first post, it’s embarrassing (makes a reference to a Red Dwarf character and our new fridge freezer – not exactly Shakespeare!).

My reasons for sticking with blogging are many and complex but I think one reason that stands out is I find it so rewarding. When we stopped blogging at Performancing towards the end of last year I really felt a loss. I still had my personal blog but it’s nice to have the Performancing blog back.

It’s a fascinating topic for me why people get into this and more importantly stay with it. This is one of the many talks I will be sad to miss at Northern Voice this year. I have my tickets but too much Performancing stuff going on now to make it. Maybe next year. I wonder if I still get my t-shirt if I don’t attend?

Why did you start blogging and why do you keep at it? Let me know in the comments …

Partners Ad Evolution Thoughts

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I have been thinking a fair bit about what I want to do with the Partners advertising, what is working and what could do with improving. The ease which people can sign up and advertise seems ok but I would like to simplify things somewhat further, I think the main thing will be have the ads just image based, see more on that in a second. From the publisher side there are still many publishers without paid ads.

I’m looking at the following options (which are not necessarily exclusive)

1) CPM ads where people buy X impressions across a category
2) CPA ads with better targeting than our last test
3) Textual ads

Textual ads would possibly attract advertisers who are put off by image ads. I’m not entirely convinced there is a market for these that is not already well served.

CPA will be easier to test as it does not require finding an advertiser to try it out, plus there are options where a single commission could bring the publisher $5, $10, and up, enough of those and I think we will all be very happy. CPM ads might well be popular but also might not be, I would have to try it and see but I think we all would like to see revenue sooner rather than later.

There are two selection options for CPA, the publisher chooses which ads to display or I choose and the publisher rejects. Many bloggers tell me they like the advertising to be auto pilot, particularly those with several blogs. Some tell me they don’t visit this site or read this blog and so wouldn’t know ads were available. At the same time there are bloggers who would want to vet any ads BEFORE they appeared. It would be unworkable with roughly 4000 blogs in the partners network now to book CPA ads individually. Perhaps the solution would be “reject before 48 hours is up otherwise it shows”? Obviously this all ads logic that slows everything down and adds to development time.

I’m also looking at losing the rollover. As well as simplifying the advertisers job as mentioned earlier it would also allow publishers to place the code at the end of the HTML before the closing body tag and have the ads display anywhere on the page. This will allow any ad layout you want plus will not hold up page execution if anything goes wrong.

Let me know your thoughts on all this or any ideas you have.

Server Woes

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Well my LAMP server education has been short and intense over the last few days but I don’t think it is quite up to the task and the hosting company while probably better than most haven’t been much help.

I do apologise for any hassle this is causing to you and your blogs. For all our sakes I hope this is sorted soon.

Anyone here an expert on MySQL administration?

[Update]

The hosting company is having another crack at putting the load balancer in place – brace yourself

[Update]

Load balancer is balancing the load … anybody notice?

[Update]

Hopefully I have fixed the feed. Please let me know if you find anything else broken

Is Digg Self-Destructing?

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Communities need their own rules and of course anyone who wants to be part of a community has to understand that. I can’t call myself part of the Digg community so perhaps I have no place to comment. Never stopped me before. That said, for a while I have worried that Digg is losing its way.

Nick points to Muhammads List Of Sites Banned From Digg.com – not the first of its kind apparently. I’m sure people who follow Digg closer than I do will have seen some surprisingly popular domains banned from Digg. It doesn’t matter if this is caused by competitors, abuse of the system, if the bans have merit, whether anyone agrees or disagrees. Any successful property inevitably builds a backlash. Either way, if Digg is meant to point people to hot web content then banning popular domains is potentially counter to their mission …


It seems the problem is self-promotion, over-promotion or just the number of submissions being interpreted as spam. First of all my own core definition of “spam” is “unsolicited”. Digg solicits submissions openly. Not all banned domains apparently are commercial either …

So perhaps the argument is people are over-submitting a particular domain. If this is the case why do certain sites appear over and over while others get banned. Why do they encourage people to use Digg tools and widgets? Another complaint is over people getting their friends to Digg a story up, but they offer an “Email It” facility to encourage you to do just that. Digg will not succeed without good word of mouth working in their favor.

The key system that makes Digg work is the voting up or down of content. This in my opinion is where the emphasis needs to be placed, backed up by an effective algorithm that detects the “gang digging” problem if indeed that is a problem. Banning domains seems heavy handed, over used and too easily subverted.

Do you see any similarities between the comments about Digg and talk about Google? It feels quite familiar to me, the love-hate, we need it but don’t necessarily have to like it … perhaps that is where the problem lies. Too many webmasters see Digg as a source of traffic rather than an interesting and fun destination. It is a resource to benefit from rather than a community to take part in. Especially in the SEO forums and blogs most of the talk is around how to manipulate Digg for your own gain.

While I have no evidence to support this hypothesis I have a theory that at least some of those banned domains and the users who submitted them were unknown to the Digg community at large outside of the Digg submissions.  Nobody likes people who take take take without giving back. Just an idea.

I think the main element of this growing dissent is how strong feelings are getting. It demonstrates to me, at least to bloggers, how important Digg has become.

powered by performancing firefox

Servers moving, expect some turbulence [Update]

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Over the weekend the site and services will be moving hosting provider (the first of two moves), there might well be small pockets of turbulence but downtime will be kept to a minimum. Watch this space ..

Update: Looks like our interim hosting solution is not coping as well as hoped. I am going to begin moving over to (our hopefully long term) new host immediately.

Sorry to anyone who has experienced problems with the service, I am doing my best to keep things working.

Is 2007 the year for Blog Communities?

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Towards the end of last year there started a growing trend. More blogs were adding community features such as MyBlogLog or forums to their offering. Some had off-site forums, such as Flickr, others such as Darrens Digital-Photography-School and the mighty Techcrunch chose full forum software.

Blogs are a great focal point for ideas and with comments there is some opportunity for conversation. Real vibrant exchanges require a bit more.  Firstly people need to be able to start their own threads, blogs tend to be “I speak then you reply”. Second with forum software people can contact each other and make connections reader to reader using your community as a conduit but not necessarily as a venue.


Early on in the life of Performancing it became obvious we would build a community. While there are arguments in favour of running a traditional blog the amount of feedback and conversation you can get with free-form discussion threads provide real win-win benefits for you and your readers. We quickly saw the fruits of this strategy. Many ideas were generated in the forum and I know one or two business ventures were launched between members who hooked up through forum posts and private messages. If two heads are better than one, how about a few thousand? Heh.

In terms of financial benefits there are few factors in forums favour. Advertising is perhaps least successful on forum threads. People after a while tend to read posts and forget advertising is even there. Clicks tend to come from random search engine drop-ins. On the plus side you get a ton of those search engine visitors because of the natural language people use to title their threads, language that tends to match what people will be looking for in their searches.

For a community to work you have to put the time in. With a blog you can on occasion get away with putting your stuff out there and forgetting about it. Forums run 24/7 on your members schedule. While you are sleeping someone could be posting (good or bad). Sometimes you will wake up to some brilliant discussion that makes you proud you started the site, on others you will have the online equivalent of graffiti or see the devastation a troll has wrought. This means you should not launch a forum lightly.

While at times a community is hard work it can also be the most rewarding effort you can put into the web. Let’s not forget that when we use the word “community” we really mean a group of people. I have heard before you get the community you deserve. Perhaps we did something right, the Performancing community is great! I think it’s safe to say there are members here I can now call friends.

It feels to me like the start of a turning point where some larger blogs will change from being “just” blogs into larger properties with blogs as one aspect of a wider offering. See again as well as Performancing, Techcrunch with their job board as well as the already mentioned forum.

Darren provided a list of lessons he learned from launching his forum over at Problogger. Here are a few of my  additional thoughts.

  • Size matters – start small, it is better to grow to encompass every topic in your niche organically rather than try to cover everything from day one and have empty areas. Just like a restaurant window people will look to see if the place is busy or a ghost town. Best to not give the wrong impression. Also with too many choices people make no choice. Should my post go in “Misc, foo, water-bound-mammals or animal dentistry? Oh forget it…”
  • Encourage and lead but with a light touch – forums need active participation and leadership. Start threads, give ideas, encourage people, show gratitude. You need to balance engagement with the community with being over-zealous. It’s not all about you and for better or worse the community decides what shape it will eventually take.
  • Monitor the atmosphere – there is nothing worse than a budding community that turns sour. Too many communities go this way unfortunately. Things to look out for:

    • Trolls – they are there to make trouble, don’t feed the troll and encourage others to leave them alone also. Trolls wither and die without attention.
    • Flamers – banter and to and fro is all good, but watch out for comments with a harsh edge. Sometimes this stuff is well-intentioned, such as people saying “RTFM”, but it leaves people feeling bad.  If this grows you get a bad reputation as a forum, people do not separate the individuals from the venue. Make sure your community is a place where people feel comfortable asking questions and not risk getting their heads shot off. Think about it this way, even if a question is old to the long term members, it might not be to the new guys and easy answers allow anyone to answer a question making both feel more involved.
    • Cliques – after your community grows closer you get in-jokes and cliques forming. This, while being nice and cosy for the old-hands, stunts the growth of the forum because people feel less welcome and have the hurdle of all the shorthand and incomprehensible “funnies” to contend with. Make sure you make a point to really welcome people and perhaps have a FAQ specifically mentioning all the odd community idiosyncrasies.
    • Intolerance – haters tend to be trolls but there are occasions where otherwise nice individuals will have a chip on their shoulders about a certain type of member or opinion. Like when religion or politics crops up in an otherwise unrelated discussion, or when brand-allegiance becomes them-and-us. Sometimes even intolerance against new members (I stopped visiting an otherwise great group on Flickr because of the “this place was a lot better when there was only NN of us” threads). Have a zero-tolerance rule for intolerance, heh.

If you feel inspired to start a forum for your
blog look into your hosting control panel. Many provide forum or
bulletin board software as part of the one click installs facility. Forums though I think are just the start, I fully expect blog based communities to grow in ways I couldn’t possibly predict.

Know of any blog based communities I have missed or started your own? Let me know in the comments …