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Live.com is a Job Well Done

It’s difficult not to notice that MSN have finally put Live.com out in public and Search follks are already kicking the tyres plenty aswell.

I can’t help rooting for MS on Live.com — it’s a pretty neat service and it “feels right” from an interface point of view — there was a time when supporting MS was tantamount to devil worship but with GOOG looking more and more like the old MS as every day goes by that’s simply not true anymore, at least where Search is concerned.

MS the underdog, who’d a thunk it?

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Learning From Successful Blogs – Strobist

Learning from others is a far more pleasurable experience than learning from your own mistakes. People in all fields observe other successful practitioners and model (copy!) their best habits, incorporating the things that work into their own behaviour. In this post I am going to take a look at one of my favourite blogs, Strobist.

This blog came from nowhere to be, in my opinion, the best blog for photographers on the web. Even the blogger, David Hobby, was taken aback by how popular it became. The blog is about flash photography. A niche of a niche. Income is mainly from affiliate links and a donation button.

Why does it work so well?

Go take a look then see if you agree with my assessments.

First I will point out what I don’t think works so well.

Nitpicks

  1. Lame “blogspot” URL – where is the strobist domain? Not a way to build a brand with longevity, eventually subscribers and web visitors will need to be educated to a new URL and RSS feed that can’t be taken down or held for ransom …
  2. Plain black theme. In some ways it works well, and apparently ugly works for adsense, but for me (and we will cover this more later in the post), David needs to be branding his blog and himself with a little more polish.
  3. Using Flickr for community. This has pros and cons but while we are talking about cons
  • It sends community interaction away to yet another non-branded domain
  • David loses some control of the system
  • Flickr isn’t the best for discussion features

What Works

It’s hard to be too critical because really I think the blog is great. Here’s why

  1. Niche Focus – David focuses on one small subject and really works it. He is the “Off-camera-flash-guy“. Do you own your niche?
  2. Authority – He is an expert, he knows his stuff, and it shows in his tips and example pictures. The blog oozes authority.
  3. Content – 99% of what you see on the blog was written by David based on his own experience. Very little reference to other blogs/sites and when he does it is top notch stuff. No padding, no filler, all good nourishing information.
  4. Message – Between the lines there is a not-so-hidden message, “you can do this too”. He hasn’t set up the past masters on a pedestal, everything is oriented around showing how you and I, humble beginners with meagre budgets, can turn out top notch results.
  5. Community – He has worked hard to build a community, using Flickr as the platform. While I don’t like Flickrs discussion features in this case it works well because
    1. Photographers use and like flickr
    2. He can leverage Flickr features for his bootcamp tasks
    3. It’s another viral route for bringing in more readers

For revenue I am sure he has a rosy future. Right now people are very willing to support the blog through affiliate purchases (I have personally bought a few hundred dollars worth of gear through his links .. well, tried to, but that’s another story). He isn’t settling for that though, just like we advise anyone with the knowledge to do he is selling his expertise in the form of workshops.

Future Ideas

If I was him I would be doing the workshops, packaging up the workshop content into DVD, downloadable videos, ebooks, audio. The works. As someone with very little opportunity to see him in person but a need for his knowledge, a reasonably priced digital course would be well received. He has the name, the knowledge and the means. (Although it appears he hasn’t much in the way of time, oops).

The workshops and other product extensions are the reason I think he might consider proper branding, a domain, decent blog template, recognisable colour and design elements. This branding work could be taken through his enlarged product base to give recognisability, authority and reassuring consistency.

Summary

So, what have you learned? Have a good think how you can apply some of these lessons. Disagree with my assessment? Let me know in the comments!

Is Your Community Legal? Xanga Fined For Under Age Users

If you run a community one of the tricky tightropes to walk is that of data protection and privacy. All to often communities fall foul of this, finding out their seemingly industry standard approach has dropped them in hot water, as Xanga found out.

Check out the story at MSNBC.com

Xanga.com, a rival to the popular MySpace.com, allegedly permitted creation of 1.7 million accounts by users who submitted birthdays indicating they were under 13.

It seems most pundits are focussing on the fact they do ask a persons age so ignorance is in no way a defence here.

“COPPA requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13. A million-dollar penalty should make that obligation crystal clear.”

I wonder had they not had the date of birth field (and bizarrely a separate “are you over 13?” tickbox) would they have gotten into this mess?

Obviously that particular community was a huge target to be made an example of, but if you do run a community of any scale it is worth checking you are not breaking any laws in your region. It is a lot more expensive to put right after the fact.

Is the Digg Community Its Own Worst Enemy?

In all online communities there is a point, somewhere north of “critical mass” that marks a transition from benevolent community fluffiness to evil dictatorship in the eyes of a voiciferous minority of it’s top contributors. I think Digg may have reached that point if the rant, and subsequent uproar of it’s former top users leaving remarks are anything to judge by.

Get a load of this:

And for all of you that do nothing but bitch about your being PREVENTED from getting your stories dugg – here’s your chance! Now YOU can spend all the time, all the effort and get stabbed in the back by fellow Diggers (aptly named) and then tossed to the side by a Digg team that values toilet paper with more worth than the core users that feed this site it’s content every day.

Didn’t he do well? There’s a ton more like that, and it’s an absolute corker of a tantrum post.

Having made no small number of noisey exits myself, being a consumate community tantrum thrower, I can understand what this users going through. But having run a few communities aswell, I can also sympathize with the dillemas the Digg management are facing right now..

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Clay Shirkey’s A Group is its Own Worst Enemy which seem relevant at this time:

The problem of size

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

Gaming and Policing

So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can’t be ignored, and it can’t be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that’s worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.

Users, ownership and rights

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

Sheesh, i could quote from that all day, it’s all relevant to scaling communties and Digg is scaling very very rapidly, and clearly experiencing some growing pains.

What Should Digg Do?

To a certain extent, you have to accept an amount of rotation of top users. And also except that often they don’t go quietly. But these things absolutely do blow over. Other users take over from the old, and cycle rinses and repeats.

A stagnant community can be pretty boring, so you can view the loss of members and an inevitalbe consequence of scale and handle any problems it causes as and when they occur.

Now im not saying top users dont deserve respect and consideration. Far from it in fact, if you disrespect and undervalue your top users you’ll have more noisey exits and administrative headaches than need be, and the whole group will suffer more. But there is a limit to how far you should go to appease the core groups wishes and whims.

In summary, I’d be in favor of acceptng a few casualties as par for the course, but also it seems (and i dont know enough to comment with authority here) that the Digg management are making the situation worse than it needs to be — the galvanizing effect of Jason Calacanisis Netscape shinanigans is being counteracted by a lack of respect for core Digg users.

Still, it’s easy to sit here and comment. Dont forget, Digg has half a million users, and it’s surely no easy task managing them, and you just cant always get it right.

Either way, it’s pretty interesting and educational to watch. Let’s hope Digg manages to work through the blips and come out on top.

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Audio: Monetizing Your Blog

Paula B of the Writing Show has just published our third podcast together: Monetizing Your Blog. It’s completely unrehearsed, but Paula does a good job of getting me to cover a lot of ground in a short space of time so if you have some time to spare, get the mp3 here.

Some subjects covered include:

  • What options are available for making income from blogs and Web sites
  • Why affiliate schemes (cost per acquisition) have been slow to take off in the blogosphere
  • Where to place ads for best results
  • What some of the pros and cons of the various options are
  • Why people click on ads
  • What you can do to get higher-quality ads
  • Which strategy is best for most people
  • How readers feel about Web ads
  • Which sorts of visitors are likely to click on ads
  • How to evaluate blog topics for their financial potential
  • Why selling a blog is tricky
  • Whether it’s possible to make a living from your blog
  • What Performancing is planning in the way of an ad network for bloggers.

Thanks once more to Palula,it’s always a fun experience doing these shows!

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How to add MicroFormats And Why You Should

Are you still writing your articles as simple plain text? There is a hidden trend going on which is not obvious by looking at a page but which allows your content to be spread in a much more qualified way then the good old plain text. Use microformats as hidden structure in your content.

What are microformats? Luckily we have a nice website for that. Microformats.org explain in in their Wiki: . Every Microformat is simple and an element of meaningful XHTML. Everybody should be able to handle these little creatures 🙂

Setting up a new site without a microformat concept might be a bad idea!

John Allsopp has published a nice article about The Big Picture on Microformats:

Few really dispute the potential of microformats, but all technologies, no matter their promise, live and die by their adoption. So, how are microformats faring a year or so after their coming-out party? Since microformats are markup, their impact is less obvious than, say, AJAX—whose dynamic visual effects are usually a bit of a giveaway.

He gives a qualified status overview about how microformats are developing and what they are used for. Like the Technorati tag search which checks and indexes web pages for links with the markup rel=”tag” (which you can add i.e. with Performancing for Firefox to your article) and more.

But he goes further. John recommends to use microformats because they will enable your content to travel to new sorts of aggregation services independently. You, the author, will not have to submit your data to the new sites. Instead the new services will come and fetch your data contained in the microformats like rel-tag, rel-license, XFN, hCalendar, hReview, hListing or hCard.

Let’s practise …

How to create that mysterious microformat?

One big question is always how the microformats should be created. As a first step there is who offer web forms to create the entries for you
.

hCard Creator, hCalendar Creator, and hReview Creator allow you to develop complex microformats – simply enter the necessary information into a web form, and then paste the output right into your source code.

Having an existing blog or CMS system means that you should do a search for a plug-in which will help you create the microformats you need. If you are doing reviews i.e. you should add reviews to your page in the hReview microformat. If you don’t find a plug-in then you still can create your own article form template for this (Textpattern speak) or insert the code directly into your editor form.

Example microformat hReview code created with the hReview tool from Microformats.org:

Server based statistics package from performancing.com (Javascript required)

Sep 4, 2006 by

Markus Merz

PMetrics from performancing.com

????? Performancing .com delivers a free and very powerful statistics package, a so called 'counter', with the name to monitor the traffic on your blog or website. The outstanding feature is that data is kept on the performancing.com servers 'forever' and that this feature is free of costs for you.

The installation requires write access to you page templates and that you can insert a small peace of Javascript code into the template.

And so on and so on ...

This
hReview brought to you by the
hReview Creator.

Note: I added a rel=”tag” microformat to the link inside the review. The review URL is linked to the original PMetrics start URL but it can of course link elsewhere i.e. your article page or homepage. As I understand it you can put any content you like into that description.

This will look like this (not sure what p.com makes of it :). I only had to add the abbreviation for the rating:

Server based statistics package from performancing.com (Javascript required)

Sep 4, 2006 by

Markus Merz

PMetrics from performancing.com

Very recommended Performancing .com delivers a free and very powerful statistics package, a so called ‘counter’, with the name to monitor the traffic on your blog or website. The outstanding feature is that data is kept on the performancing.com servers ‘forever’ and that this feature is free of costs for you.

The installation requires write access to you page templates and that you can insert a small peace of Javascript code into the template.

And so on and so on …

This
hReview brought to you by the
hReview Creator.

That markup is very easy to design with CSS and every service understanding this microformat hReview is now able to take that review and put it into a database in pieces and not only as a.chunk of plain text.

Working with a classical Blog/CMS it means to create an article template from this code structure where all contents will be variables introduced to you by a plug-in or through custom fields.

In Textpattern I would use custom fields and overwrite the default article form with a review form (or any other microformat template). The titles of the custom fields should mirror the relating multiple hWhatever content if you use more than only one hWhatever microformat.

If you are afraid that bad people rip your valuable content from your site then you can do the same as with RSS … simply put an excerpt into class=”description”and insert a “read more …” link.

Microformats – Interesting for you?

Technorati Tags: microformats, tagging, structure, promotion

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Search Engine Redundancy: The Final Countdown

Until now, the process of consuming content was of a very primitive type – Search and consume. We searched for information using certain keywords and then converted it manually to knowledge. If we wanted to access the information at a later date, we simply printed it out. If we wanted to re-search it (pun unintended) we searched it again! There was no way of storing or retrieving this data for later usage.

Enter del.icio.us, one of the first social applications.

All of a sudden, you could bookmark pages you liked AND store them too! Searching for that page on Shark bites you saw two months ago simply transformed into searching through your list of bookmarks. Your bookmarks could now travel with you wherever you went!! The sharing feature meant that now your friend could easily send you that link to the direct downloads, bypassing all the popups and ads along the way. 😉

The process of consuming information now became three-tiered: Search, Store and Retrieve.

Somewhere between then and now, we instinctively developed a habit of consuming content, gaining knowledge, and stashing it away for further usage. A lot of Web purists call this approach as the River of News approach.

Drink hard, drink deep…

We live in a dynamic world that survives on a River of News.

The River of News concept, as described by Dave Winer, goes something like this:

Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It’s like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal.

… which is exactly how we parse our daily newspapers for news! If a story is interesting enough, it will be back again the next day. If it ain’t, down it goes…

The River of News concept assumes a relaxed outlook towards the consumption of content by any user. It relies on the fact that if an older item is to be revived, then it will be revived, no matter how or why*.

The only hitch to this concept is the duration of focus in an avergae human. Somehow, the concept of a limited attention span has seeped on to the Web. Conversations (a.k.a posts, articles, etc.) have a specific life span depending upon a variety of factors, ranging from authority to popularity. The previous post touched upon four of these factors that I personally belive to be important.

As the river of news concept washes the Webosphere, the content generated by users (erm, I mean, the knowledge shared by the netizens) becomes outdated as soon as the attention-span of the article ends. For some posts, the span is as short as 30 seconds, for others it might last for weeks.** The keep-alive time of the post is enriched by a variety of parameters, with the element of chance also playing a significant role, sometimes.

The Bottom-line: Find, not search

Traditional Search Engines search for content based upon classifications of keywords and various natively built algorithms. Earlier, when the internet was an array of ‘webmaster-maintained’ static displays, search engines had to be relevant. In the days to come, I foresee the River of News flooding the Blogosphere: Freshness of results will definitely be paramount, then.

The trade-off between freshness and relevancy is one of the factors that will see a good sound debate in the days to come. This, unless the Blogging trend tapers off suddenly instead of continuing to rise.***

One question I have purposefully (and successfully) avoided so far is this: Will we be able to match people to keywords?

A search engine will match content to your keywords. But there are three Shrikant Joshis and many Shrikants and many more Joshis who are regular bloggers. How do you differentiate them? Again, what happens when you are looking for a solution to a problem? Would search engines in the (near?) future also throw up results like:

“5 user(s) can solve your problem! Do you want to hire them?”

More importantly, if they did, would you believe them?

Footnotes:

*One of my reasons for posting this post so late (inspite of my previous assurances) was to check if there was any interest I could generate, and how it varied with time. However, I miscalculated one of the most important aspects. Subscriptions. Since I never had any audience to begin with, there was no way I could anticipate anything. That’s called counting your results before you have keywords. 🙂

** Wondering what category my posts fall into? Well, somewhere close to the 30 second limit.

***For more details read David Sifry of Technorati

Technorati Tags: Search Engines, Tags, River of News, Future

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