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Classifieds and Blogs

Whilst reading about Topix’s classifieds system over breakfast this morning I had some thoughts on blogs and classifieds in general. Hardly well thought out but interesting nonetheless.

What if bloggers were able to opt in via a simple plugin to a classifieds program that showed geo targeted, contextual classifieds. If we were able to distribute classifieds across the huge and diverse expanse of the blogosphere it could be awesome.

Of course there are some major considerations that need to be taken into account:

#1 what’s in it for the blogger?

The trend is that classifies are free to place right? But I don’t think that’s necessarily a must, they just have to be cheap to place, and simple to pay for, and hopefully successful. On that basis the publisher could be cut in on a revenue share basis much the same as any other kind of ad network deal.

Another way of looking at it might be that the ad is free to place, but you pay for connectinng to interested parties. So if i see your ad, click it, and get to fill in my email and phone #, you, the advertiser have to pay to get that response —fraught with it’s own issues of course, but worth exploring maybe.

The thing here is that if someone could figure out how to make it financially sound, distributing ads across opted in blogs via a simple plugin would not actually be that complex, someone should try it.

What I like in a Host

After jillmurray started a storm in the Forums with her question “Anyone LOVE their hosting company?” it got me thinking what features are important to me in a host. Every discussion about a favorite is clouded by personal preferences. If all you care about is price, then you’re going to disagree with someone who insists that their server runs on Solaris and has 24 hour phone support.

So, here’s a little discussion on what I expect from a host.

One thing to get clear first: like many people I’m pretty frugal. I think this trait comes out especially in the world of hosting because as soon as you start your search for a new host you get a bunch of advertising for FREE HOSTING NO ADS. So, this is really a basic set of requirements I expect from a budget host. Sure, you can go out and spend a ton of money and get something better, but I’m talking about hosts that are at or under $10/month for a basic hosting package.

Web Services

For me I expect to be using Linux with Apache and PHP and either MySQL or PostgreSQL databases aka the LAMP stack. There are some blogging platforms that either work with any web server (e.g. CityDesk) or those that work on Windows (e.g. DotNetNuke). However, it’s important to me that I use the best in breed blogging applications. For blogging and community sites – most applications are based on LAMP. I also expect to have multiple domains in one account. I run several blogs and while some are reasonably popular others just don’t get as much traffic. Some are new and, sadly, some are zomblogs. It doesn’t make sense to me to have 5 accounts with a provider when the sites only use 2 accounts worth of resources.

Finally – and I’m going into a new paragraph here because it’s important to me – I want shell access. While this is probably not a huge deal for many people, it’s a deal breaker for me. Using a shell has made me far more efficient than when I just used FTP and Cpanel. I can install, upgrade, and tweak, a dozen blogs in the time that it used to take me to maintain just one of them. Combine that with subdomains and all of a sudden I’ve got my test and production environments on the same server and can easily move code into the live site.

Email

I expect to be able to have lots of email accounts. I find that over time whether it’s for friends who are also blogging on the site or it’s for different generic email addresses it’s nice not to have a limit. I’d like the option of forwarders and the ability to access my email with IMAP. Spam and Virus filtering is a nice bonus but is not necessary. And some mailing lists would be a nice option.

Limits

Limits? Who likes them. Well, in the end we all need limits of some sort to keep from the server being a “tragedy of the commons”. Ideally it would be nice to have unlimited everything, but that’s not practical for the host. I do want certain things to either be unlimited or have very high limits: email addresses, domains and subdomains per account, disk space, bandwidth. This is all relative between hosts, but I want something powerful for my money.

Customer Service with a Smile

I don’t expect much from customer service and maybe that’s because my previous experiences with budget hosts. Submitting a ticket may give me temporary happiness that someone is dealing with a problem on my site, but it also makes me worry that the support folks are going to fire back a rude response. Ideally I shouldn’t have to submit a ticket: the services should just work. When I do submit a ticket, I expect a response within 24 hours and ideally within a few hours. I don’t expect a live support phone number, but a group chatroom is a nice middle-ground. For a budget host, that’s about all that’s reasonable.

Uptime

Well, for a budget host I expect at least some of the services to go down once a month. Whether it’s HTTP or MySQL or IMAP – something is going to break for at least a few hours every now and then. When that happens, all that I really expect is knowing that my host is working on it, resolution within a few hours, and maybe something saying “we screwed up, sorry about that, now your site is fixed” when it’s all said and done.

Constant Improvement

I think that the growing GMail inbox was the first place that I saw this, but it’s obviously the right way to go. This past February, an old hosting account that I had on autopay I was still paying 1997 prices for 1997 levels of service: upwards of $40/month for 25MB of space. Ouch! I asked them to immediately upgrade my site to their current offering. Not possible they said – I would have to cancel the account and create a new one. I want a host that will constantly keep my plan at the same price and level of service as the best match of what they are currently offering unless it becomes a worse deal for me.

What I Don’t Want

I don’t want a site where I’m a sub-member. Maybe it’s because I fantasize about being a blog overlord or maybe it’s because I want full control over my site, but for whatever reason, services like Blogger or Typepad just don’t interest me.

I don’t want a site to constantly try to upsell me. I’ve got my hosting package – if I want more, I’ll buy it from you! But don’t call or email asking me to buy extra features.

Finally, I don’t want to be resold. If I go through a reseller I feel pretty confident that I’m not getting the best deal and that the people working on my site are only hosting a couple hundred sites. I really prefer to be dealing directly with the people who actually own and run the servers and I want them to have tens of thousands of active domains – just not all on my server!

The Rest

So – what else? Is there anything else that you like? Anything else that you don’t want?

Once we nail down the list of features that are important we can really get into which host people love (and why).

Staying Ahead of the XUL Curve

Reading about what’s coming in Firefox 2, makes me think that we may want to brainstorm a bit on what performancing might do to stay ahead of the curve on XUL development.

Thoughts?

Permission to Launch

Has anyone else noticed recent launches do not seem to have created the buzz they might have once before? Is it possible that the web has come down with a bad case of “launch fatigue”?

At one time all you had to do was get a few well-placed mentions and you could ride the rollercoaster of IPO all the way to the bank. Now it seems much-boosted web2.0 launches, even with big money backing and brown paper envelopes well deployed in all the right bloggers pockets, do not seem to have made anything near the usual impact.

Take Sphere for instance. Have you even heard of it? Techcrunch have given them air-time, Time.com are in bed with them in a significant way, supposedly it makes up where Technorati leaves off.

If that is the case, why is nobody I know using it? Have you done any Sphere searches?

Actually do try it out, it’s not bad. I don’t mean to single out Sphere as I am sure they are doing good work. Just it seems good work, a bribed blogger or two and venture capital are not enough now.

This might hint at a larger issue that the web now is truly resisting the “broadcast” approach. Superbowl ads are just not the ticket now for launching a web service. We have talked many times before about word of mouth being the best form of advertising, and permission marketing being the most effective way of informing your customers while retaining loyalty. Perhaps we are seeing the evidence of this now.

There is little chance that we have gotten everything right but I am glad our launches were done the way we did them. Building an audience, working out what they need then trying your best to give it them, while tweaking as you go. Seems the right approach to me. At least this way we succeed or fail on what we do rather than what people are saying about us

Web Design Glossary, Nice Resource, Better Linkbait

I was just pointed to a nice glossary of web design terms. Old hands might find they know everything in there (you might be surprised) but they do take suggestions if there is something they have missed.

Rather than just have the term and a definition they have obviously worked hard to provide enough detail to be truly useful, with proper explanations that really describe the meaning. Where the source of the material is from outside they do give credit, only time will tell how much of it is original as surely the originator will come looking!

I have never heard of “Motive” before but now I can guarantee a lot more people now have this New Zealand web firm on their radar, if anything this shows how with a little bit of work you can get some great attention and links without having to go begging or spamming.

Have a think if your niche could do with something similar …

In Search of Interesting

“Give them what they want”. For blogs that translates to “write content that people want to read”. Easier said than done, right? How do you know what “they” want, are you meant to be psychic? There are a few ways of working out what is popular right now:

Digg, see what is hitting the front page
Del.icio.us, popular links
Technorati, see what the buzz is in blogs right now
Flickr, you can see if there is a popular tag being used
Wordtracker, see what gets searched most often in your niche
Your top posts in metrics, write more of what gets hit most

What would happen though if you only posted about what was already popular? A pretty bland blog where everyone who reads it ends up sounding like a frog; “read it, read it, read it”. The only idea out of that list that is not based on cribbing other peoples posts is number 6, but if you keep writing the same old stuff people will soon become bored.

So you have to look outside of what is already popular. For sure use those services listed above and do those things, but the aim should be to uncover previously less known shiny hidden nuggets rather than strip-mining the top 10 most popular links. You can guarantee BoingBoing and hundreds of other blogs already got there first. Your readers are coming to you for something different, something unique and special to you.

Hmmm, how do you manage “unique“?

Many writers suggest you should write for yourself. You can not please everybody so you are better off writing to your own taste and hope that enough people think the same way that your content is well received. There is a lot to be said for this tactic and as an everyday rule of thumb I guess it mostly works. Every now and then though something will come along and cause you to question that line of thinking.

On my photography blog I feel pretty tuned-in to the camera-geek audience, I am after all a fully paid up lifetime member of the photo nerd club. Darren Rowse though showed perhaps I am not so tuned in after all. He posted an innocent little post about how to hold a camera. I didn’t link to it, in fact I nearly snorted my cornflakes across the room when I saw it thinking it was downright hilarious that he wrote it. What a fool I was, I see that little post generated what he describes as a traffic tsunami. What I took as insultingly basic worked out to be a massive success for his brand new blog, he touched on a topic people absolutely wanted to read and link to.

So if looking to what is already popular doesn’t work, nobody else was writing about how to hold a camera after all, and writing for yourself also doesn’t work, what is left?

Well I would say don’t dismiss keeping an ear to the ground for what is popular, it will inform your thinking and a small amount of linking to stuff people have already seen is fine providing you can put your own unique commentary or spin on the theme. Also I would say your own feelings and tastes are a good barometer for what is right or wrong on your blog. Your audience though is who you write for, you need to see things from their perspective.

There are two techniques for getting into your audiences heads; empathise or ask.

Asking is the obvious one. Simply approach readers individually, in a post, do a survey/questionnaire/poll, etc. The method is not as important as the results. Also approach people in your target audience who are not already readers. These will be in real life or in forums related to the niche. You have to remember though that what you ask and how you ask it are very important, do not ask questions that lead your interviewee to answer a certain way and do not presume you know the answer before asking it. Sadly also don’t expect the answers you get back to be entirely honest or accurate. Too many focus groups have jaded me to thinking people are very vulnerable to the herd instinct. Again your gut will have to be your guide.

Finally we are left with empathising. Empathy is in part reliant on all of the above. You are feeding your subconscious mind with as much information you possibly can for it to stew on and hopefully ferment up the perfect picture of your gestalt reader. For many blogs there will not be just one type of reader, you will have newbies, old hands, experts, trolls, hobbyists, pros, socialisers, just-the-facts … you need to cater for who you think are important and work out what motivates each one. Some will not be your audience, they will have just parachuted in from a search engine and will never be seen again, working out your loyal core is increasingly important.

Many people find it useful to create a pen portrait or “profiles” of their most important “typical” reader(s):

Give your reader a name, for example Brenda Blogger, Randy Reader, Andy Amateur, Tammy Troll. Some times it is useful to give them demographic details such as gender and age. You may or may not want to give them opinions or political biases.
Think about what attracted them to your blog
Determine where they mostly come from
Develop a list of tastes and items they would most like to see
Are there services they use or would love?
What do they also read, online or off
… Etc

By building up this picture you can work out where you are serving your audience and where you are failing. You can also generate ideas for attracting more of them.

This sounds like hard work. You might be thinking “people seem to like my blog already, I don’t need to do this”. It is surprising how effective spending a little time trying to get into your audience heads can be. Look at how popular our firefox extension was, it blew us away as we thought it would be a nice little download but never as interesting as people found it. When you hit the spot it really pays off.

You have to remember you are not your audience, you only get really successful not when you entertain yourself but when you are interesting to your readers. The keys to this are locked in your audiences heads and you need to work to reveal them.

#33 Was My Favorite

Funny, contradictory, and contraversial. Just what I needed this evening.

#33 was my favorite: “Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.” Cos really, the state of blog advertising sucks.

Digital Magpies and Usability Ignorance

Whilst out and about on my travels a couple of days ago, I happened across a blog that had had an article syndicated on a favorite read of mine, and wanted to email the author rather than comment. I spent nearly 10 minutes scouring the page for a simple contact link or form. I waded through heaps and heaps of useless digital trash in the hope of being able to contact the author and ended up giving up.

To make a point, let me share with you what I had to traverse in the sidebar whilst squinting at the tiny fonts for a link:

A bunch of feed button links, all for the same feed but hosted at different feed services
A form field that wanted my email address for no dicernable reason
9 or 10 other buttons all one after another in the sidebar that advertised and linked to a bunch of trendy services i had absolute no need of
A block of recent posts provided by Technorati — why the blogger didn’t use their own blog softwares version of this or why such a useful set of links was buried under all of the above escapes me
A pile of recnt comments
A stack of the authors comments on other blogs
A bundle of “incoming links”
Some related links — at least that’s what the title said they were
A “bitty browser” monstrosity that looked more like an adsense block and had the audacity to scroll me through a bunch of the authors favorite blogs
A set of links offering to let me read the same post as opml, or at a bunch of other gimmick services aswell as in pdf format or read it at various other rss/opml service and as if I’d not already had my fill, an invitation to browse the authors OPML at Dave Winers site
More options in the form of “rojo” links. Lord knows what they are or why they were there.
A creative commons copyright button, followed by a copyscape button
Another block of incoming links, this time with handy rss links in case i wanted to subcribe to the people that were linking to the author based on a text link to their blog
A broken “my pagerank is” button, just in case i was mentally ill and felt the need to know…
A map widget, in case my curiosity about the page had not been slaked yet
One more widget for incoming links, Zzz….
A blogshares widget (haven’t they died yet?)
“My blog is worth”… oh god, don’t tempt me…
Half a dozen or so more widgets to useless web2.0 services i’d sooner cut my arm off than visit
Some more generated bookmark/tagcloud links
Lastly, the authors recent bookmarks at del.icio.us

On revisiting the blog today to write this post, i actually found the contact link. It was hiding in a graphical button, naturally. God forbid it should be a blue underlined link in a prominent location..

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