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Scoble Nails It: Why Full Text Feeds Are GOOD

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Not only does Scoble do a fantastic job of describing why full text feeds are good for everyone, including pro/commercial bloggers but he also nails Duncan for slapping Steve Rubel about over his views on RSS which is quite amusing in itself. Much as I’m loathe to break the habit of a lifetime and agree with Steve on anything, I have to say that him and Scoble are bang on the money, and Duncans views are just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Duncan Said:

How bout then RSS advertising actually pays out Steve? The reality is RSS advertising sucks (sorry to my friends at Pheedo who are trying very hard to make it work, and continue to get better at it). I’m yet to find anyone who is making decent money from RSS advertising, particularly compared to traditional on site advertising (both CPC and CPM). Firms like Weblogs Inc can offer full feeds with RSS advertising only because they’€™ve got enough revenue coming of the main blogs themselves.

[……..]

In another note Steve, I’€™m starting to worry about you, you are starting to sound more like Scoble every day, please don’€™t join the everything for free and damn the money crowd, some of us are trying to blog for a living.

To which Scoble went completely off on one, in the nicest possible way of course, but a slaps a slap, and as far as they go, this was pretty interesting, because what came out of it was a fantastic post on why FULL rss feeds really work for both those of us making ad $$$’s on regular web pages and readers. Its a long post, and I suggest you read all of it, but here’s a little snippet to whet your appetite:

So, how does anyone make any money?

Well, let’€™s stay in TODAY’€™S world. In today’€™s world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That’€™ll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.

I tend to view the full text vs we want to make money debate a little like the p2p vs record industry debacle. It’s been proven, i think, that p2p users buy more records. And in the same vein, having more link friendly bloggers read your work, weather it be on your blog or in a news reader, the more your influence spreads, and the more links you get, and……. the better rankings, page views and ad clicks you get as a result.

Time Wasters Need Not Apply

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I got a great lesson in how to stop other people wasting your time yesterday. Its one thing to be efficient, and dilligent in your productivity efforts, but when you start adding other people to the equation you can quickly get bogged down in tedious, unproductive tasks, conversations and meetings.

I got a chance to talk to Merlin Mann from 43Folders, and before we’d even spoken he’d politely asked if i’d like to bullet point what we needed to get done in our discussion, and asked me if 15mins would be sufficient.

As a result of sticking to a time frame, and having a defined structure to the call, we got what we needed to do done in time, and managed to chat about his odd way of scheduling calls in the process. In fact, he posted about better meetings later that day, and its well worth a read.

The act of deciding what had to be accomplished in the call, followed by agreeing how long it would take made for a very productive meeting, and I learnt a lot about getting other people to be productive when it would affect me in the process.

From now on, im going to adopt the same strategy, as i can’t stand rambling, going nowhere conversations when im busy 🙂

If only we could do that for IM heh….

By the way, the other thing I learnt was that though I consider myself a fast thinker, there is always someone faster — The only reason I dont suspect young Merlin had amphetimines for breakfast is that he actually managed to talk a lot of sense, even at 90mph heh!

PageRank: The Blogosphere’s Stupidest Metric

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Hmmm… So i break my blogging silence of a week or so to post about bloody PageRank? Sheeesh, it just doesn’t get any funnier, or perhaps sadder heh! Out of all the many, many things that we can judge a blogs worth by, judge its meaning by, and it’s contribution to the ‘sphere, PR has got to be the stupidest.

Im just starting through an enormous backlog of RSS and of course am seeing all the “update!” posts. Good grief, what drivel;

It was useless 3yrs ago, and it’s still useless.

You’d have more luck judging digestion by turd length than trying ot work out how well your blog is doing by it’s pagerank 🙂

Conversational Advertising

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Somewhere during the struggle to reconcile the need to bring in revenue, and maintaining the “purity” of the medium, some bright spark thought she’d ad comments to ads. This idea grew a little, and we eventually had “story ads”. Neither of these attempts to take advertising into the conversational space is particularly groundbreaking. Its a painfully obvious step toward breaking out of interruption advertising and truly engaging the reader, but it is necessary.

My friend kpaul recently got a nice write up from Steve Outing over at Poynter about his efforts in this field at the Muncie Free Press

Mallasch, who describes his strategy for the site as coming from the “Craig Newmark school of business” (a reference to Craigslist’s founder), says he’s had some success recently selling “advertorials” along with banner ads — “basically, a story page labeled as an ad where customers or potential customers can comment.”

And he seems to be doing a little better than I. We played with this over at Threadwatch a while back (I ran that site untill Performancing for those that didn’t know) and although it was fun, and personally I felt, and still feel it has promise, didn’t have a lot of success with it.

Inherent Problems

The biggest problem with running story ads is that as a group, advertisers are a lazy bunch, they want the world, and expect it for little or no effort on their part.

That could be a fault of ours, of mine, us the bloggers, who’d like to show ads that engage our readers, keep our content relevant and fresh and STILL bring in the $$$’s.

Unfortunately we’re a lazy bunch too. We don’t appear to be taking steps to change the advertisers opinion, to coax them over their fears of (omg!) the prospect of public criticism but like the advertisers, we still expect it to work, and at least for my part, are dissapointed with the results.

Solutions?

Im not sure. It really is a tough one for both advertiser and blogger, neither has the luxury of an effortless success, both risk public criticism and it’s a hard balance to strike with regular readers.

I don’t have an answer, but im all ears if anyone would care to offer one.

Some random thoughts I’ve had on this in the time its taken me to get to this sentence:

  • Could advertisers be bloggers? Guest bloggers?
  • Could the lure of the giveaway overcome the fear of a “bad comment” and keep readers relatively positve? // Do we want that?
  • If not story ads, how else can we engage the reader, without overstepping editorial bounds?
  • Perhaps we need to push editorial bounds, no pain, no gain

Interesting challenge isn’t it?

Airblogging, Conferences, Meetups and Beer

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Im on my way to San Diego again, yet another meeting with the dev team, but this time they have WIFI on the transatlantic flight from Denmark to Chicago, how cool is that?

Im supposed to be doing a little bit of work on some more serious stuff than telling you lot about how good the inflight internet is, but hell, i’ve not done this before and it IS cool heh… It wouldwould be fantastic for us to hook up with any members that are in the area though, so let me fill you in on the schedule for the next few weeks…

San Diego

So, im bound from Chicago to San Diego later today, and I have a whole week over there this time, with Chris joining me tomorrow sometime.

Do we have any Performancing members in the area that might like to hook up for a drink or something to eat? We’re dead pushed for time, but if anyone fancies it, i reckon a little time could be made for beers 🙂

SES with Andy Hagans

Im at Search Engine Strategies New York with Andy Hagans on the 1st of next month, where we’ll both be speaking at a session on tagging — the same one i had to miss in Chicago last year due to passport issues, so again if any one is going to be there, let us know.

New Communications Forum

After that, Im in Palo Alto for the New Communications Forum where i will be generally hanging out and catching up with a few folks. So again… if anyone is going from here, please let me know!

Im hoping to catch up with the folks from BlogHer, Tom Foremski and a whole heap of folks over the thursday and Friday, and will post about it seperately in the week as it really does deserve it’s own post!

As those that are paying attention to my occasional ramblings on travel will have guessed, we’re getting closer and closer to announcing our next tool for bloggers — when we’re ready, it’ll be on the homepage, so stay tuned…

Blog Hijacking

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I was speaking with Tris earier this evening, and he drew my attention to a nasty little case of blog hijacking involving Blogger, and Gmail. According to his post about the hijacking, its been about 24hrs since the distraught blogger put in a help request to get Google to help her get her blog back, but still no help.

Come on Google, you should know better than this. When the shit hits the fan, someone needs to hustle before things get out of hand.

See Tris’ post for the full scary details, and if you have Blogger and Gmail account, start taking some steps to protect yourself from similar problems. Changing your password immediately would be a good first step, and reading Chris’ post on personal information would make an excellent 2nd step.

Risk Aversion Kills Creativity

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I’ve always felt that committees were pure evil, something to be avoided at all cost. The decision making process grinds to a halt, creativity is throttled into submission and the life is kicked out of any potentially great project.

I’ve been neglecting my blog reading this week (and last) as we all scurry around in a kind of organized chaos getting ready to release our somewhat 007 major product offering for this year this month, but happened to stop by Jeremy’s site and see his post about how committees suck the life out of projects and displaying this rather natty graphic from a post about risk aversion at one of my long time (hehe, well a few months at least) favorite blogs, creating passionate users.

The post at CPU is superb btw, read it.

Being a company of 3 and a half (i dont get to steal all of andy’s time..) we dont suffer from this particular ailment, if we all agree, great, if i want to get my own way i just shout and scream untill i do 🙂

Spread Performancing Firefox

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If you’d like to show your support for our Performancing Firefox Blog Editor, or just tell your readers where they can get it, then please feel free to use the images on this page in your blogrolls, sidebars or posts.

Choose an Image

You can just right click and choose “save as” with any of the images below, or even grab a zip of the whole lot so you can play around with them, modify or alter to suit. The zip is posted at the bottom of the page.

The following two sets of images were contributed by Wayde Christie and were the winning entries in our first PFF banners competition.

      

      

Grab the Code

You can use the code below, once you’ve uploaded the image you want, or do anything you like with them.



Get the Zip

If you want a zip of all the images on this page, you can download it here

Made Your Own Banners?

If you’d like ot make your own buttons/banners we’d love to see them! email a zip file of your images to [email protected] and we’ll post the ones we like best on this page.

Thankyou!

Thankyou for your support of PFF, its a great tool, even if we do say so ourselves, and its all down to you. Fueled by your feedback, support and help over the last few months we’ve managed to shape PFF into one of the finest blog editor platforms on the market.

Not only that, it’s free, and will remain free!