With the aid of RSS feeds & cross-platform e-book software like Calibre (the equivalent of iTunes podcast subscriptions applied to blogs), and the e-reader of your choice like the Kindle DX or iPad,  you can now read the best blogs as a ‘personalized newspaper’, sitting feet up in the comfort of your own couch. Yep, the age of the personalized newspaper is here now, you no longer have to wait around for it to be lobbed onto your doorstep by the paperboy.

And with 100m+ odd blogs out there,  by anyone from your favourite novelist to the zany mommy-blogger types, surely there are bound to be some superb ones?

Well here comes the difficult bit.  How do you find them?

Does looking for the best blogs make sense in any case?

Arguably it’s a stupid task to begin with, because isn’t the whole point of the web the fragmentation of audience and content, letting a thousand content flowers bloom? You no longer have to write for ‘Mr Average Interest’ because there will be someone in Guatemala who even finds the drivelry on Drivelry interesting (no offence to Guatemalans). 

Surely it’s a bit like asking ‘how do you find the best music to listen to’?

Well the unlikely you can do today -  the impossible takes a little longer. It is a reasonable question to ask where to find the best blogs. We all expect that art gallery curators can put together the best art in a particular period and it also seems reasonable that you should be able to find say, ‘the best economics blogs‘ or more narrowly even the best blogs on New York theater.

Perhaps there are even weirdos out there who would like to read a smattering of  the best economics blogs out there, coupled with best cartoons, and the best blogs on the implosion taking place in the publishing industry (a dangerously close description of my own interests).

General characteristics of the best blogs for your own personalized newspaper

Even though it may make sense to start your search (more later) in your particular subject of interest, there are a number of generic characteristics that you will need in your blogs:

1. The blog will need to have full RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.  People who set up their RSS feeds to only provide the first para are not going to work for your personalized newspaper (even though it might work better for their advertising revenue). You would end up on the train with your Kindle newspaper consisting of first paras. Kinda annoying huh? When investigating a new blog go straight to the RSS feed. If it’s not a full feed, move on.
2. Blogs can’t be links to ’the best posts this week’ from other bloggers in that subject. Why bother? Again you’re after something that you can read on the run, in a plane, on the farm etc.  Sometimes it may well make sense to explore their idea of what blogs are best in a particular space - but you’ll probably end up adding that blog to your newspaper instead.
3. Blogs can’t be video blogs.  Apart from reservations that you may have anyway about  whether video suits you as an information consumer it’s simply not supported in many e-readers. Yes, it is in the iPad (albeit not Flash-based video) but that leads to a whole other discussion about whether you are using your e-reader to read (either skim reading or in-depth) or whether you are after a portable computing device. Video isn’t supported by the Kindle.
4. The blog needs to be regularly updated. One of the things you will find in your own wanderings of ‘best of blog sites’ (see below) is that half the blogs that are recommended to you were last posted to in 1996. Few bloggers heed the warning to write about what they like and you’ve got to really like your subject to keep going. For your own news service you won’t care if the blog is only published once a month (with RSS subscription software for your e-book like Calibre you can just set a retrieval interval of once a month) but once a year and you’re probably wasting your time even setting up a feed.

Best of blog directories and searches

A friend of mine who edits literary anthologies is hugely dismissive of search engines and considers that editors will always be essential and that you’ll always need an intermediary to curate information for you, “Google is useless“, she says, “it just returns so much crap!”

I have explained to her that Google partially makes decisions about what is important by looking at hypertext links created by humans to particular pieces of content (‘PageRank’) but in finding the best blogs there is an obvious flaw to Google in that ‘most popular’ – as expressed by the number of links to that content – is not necessarily ‘best’ (or we would be spending most of our time reading up on swine flu). 

Even where there is a more formal voting process for best blogs it suffers from the same issue of being driven by lowest common denominator numbers, and well known meta-blogging sites like Technorati also reflect their subject specificity (Technorati is great if you want to find out about technical blogs but not so good otherwise in my experience).

Sadly, the human-curated websites on great blogs like ‘Best of the Web’ (botw.org) or Eaton Web (eatonweb.com) seem to have a lot of out-of-date content and attempts to use these to browse interesting sites were not very successful (these days they look to me more like ‘pay to play’ linkfarms if you were going to be overly reductive).  Blogcatalog (blogcatalog.com) also seems not to live up to its home page promise “we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Browse blogs by category to find the best in class”.

Software recommendation engines to find blogs you like

What seems logical is a recommendation engine that matches your personal subject area interests with that of others who have the same interest and which only returns recommendations to pages that are current. Two significant players in this space are Digg who introduced a recommendation engine in 2008 and an older company in this space, Stumbleupon.

A key point to keep in mind is that recommendation engines involve a hefty time investment to produce good results (you’ve got to spend time telling them what you like).  Some commentators discount Digg on the basis that their recommendation engine tends to reinforce suggestions to pages and sites that your friends like rather than finding you ‘hidden gems’  so I focused on building up a Stumbleupon profile (which you do by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the pages they suggest).

Results have been mixed from Stumbleupon - after what I’d estimate at 5 hours of solid recommendations (much of what you will see is collegehumour.com style graphic humour) I’ve only selected 44 favourites from the pages I’ve been shown and I estimate I’ve found about half a dozen blogs that I like (yeah it’s entirely possible I’m just hyper-critical). 

For the moment I’m keeping going with Stumbleupon, to some extent out of sympathy for what is a great concept but a terrible name – stumbling is not exactly the most useful sounding activity is it?

Conclusion: it’s just plain hard to find a good recommendation source for blogs

With the emergence of e-readers in large numbers it seems to me that there is an opportunity here for someone to produce a better human-curated selection of great blogs than some of the moribund websites mentioned above like BOTW and Eaton, and possibly there is such a site but I was not easily able to find it (let me know in the comments). 

Producing a good recommendation software engine by contrast requires a great algorithm and a lot of users (Stumbleupon after several years has 10 million+ users) but when you consider that many of them would be inactive and therefore generating little recommendation data, and that they’ve got several hundred subject categories, Stumbleupon’s source of preference data looks a lot poorer (perhaps my literary editor friend was right after all).

The best source of good blogs I found in the end was via Tweets from people I follow on Twitter, so if you can get access to Twitter’s data that looks like a great source. Whilst it appears that Facebook leads sharing of content, Twitter seems to be the only ‘open’ source of information (i.e. you don’t have to be accepted as someone’s friend to see what they recommend).

Otherwise there must be someone in an organisation out there, perhaps at Google or an ISP, who has a lot of blog content preference information.

C’mon venture capitalists! With the explosion in electronic books, creating a good blog recommendation engine is a non-trivial (i.e. barriers to entry) and potentially lucrative problem to solve.

A great case in point is the film “The Jane Austen Book Club”. Despite the title you really don’t have to know anything about Austen to appreciate this film.

Written and directed by Robin Swicord its dialog sparkles along at a pace that it makes typical action pics look slow. With more layers than wedding cake you could watch it half a dozen times and still not pick up on all the jokes and nuances.

Ok it is a romantic comedy but it’s also a labor of love because behind a lot of the excellent jokes and gags are some serious and subtle points about relationships.

Labelled a ‘chick flick’ any man would enjoy the byplay in this film - there are a raft of muscular characters here and not just Sylvia’s gay daughter Allegra.  It is also full of surprise twists and shocks - you’d defy anyone to come up with anything so true-to-life awful as one of the opening scenes with Daniel and Sylvia in the restaurant.

Great film – terrible box office takings

 But the thing that is really most shocking about “The Jane Austen Book Club is how such a good film did so relatively badly at the box office taking only $7 million in revenue.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (which is a veritable pastiche compared to ”Book Club”) took $245 million….  Even Swicord’s previous film “Little Women” took $50 million.

Narrow it down to Austen literary territory and the comparisons look equally bad:

• “Bride and Prejudice” took $24 million
• Keira Knightley’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” took $121 million
• Emma Thomson’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility” took $134 million
• and the  recent biopic about Austen herself “Becoming Jane” took $37 million

Perhaps one could argue that Austen fans like their adaptations as close as possible to the original based on the above but it is still interesting to ask why ‘Book Club’ did so comparatively badly (unless you think all of the above are so much better than it is).

What went wrong with this movie?

Here are a couple of guesses which have more to do with marketing than anything else:

•  why-oh-why did they call it “Jane Austen Book Club”? It’s like holding up a large sign to say “don’t come to this unless you are a) a woman and b) you ‘read’ with a capital R. Well, that’s 3/4ths of the filmgoing population gone then… What about Truths Not Universally Acknowledged? Read My Lips? The Club? Anything would have been better. Was Swicord so shocked when a producer said yes to her pitch (“I have this idea about a film about a book club…”) that she felt she had to stick with it?
• nobody seems to have really liked Fowler’s book amongst my acquaintances although I appreciate that somebody liked it in order for it to end up on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 13 weeks.  Was the film too closely tied to the Fowler book but actually aimed at a different demographic?
• did it need a more bankable star – would it have been the same movie with someone else as the female lead Jocelyn? It seems thoroughly unfair to even suggest this as Maria Bello played the role so well but would a Cameron Diaz or Michelle Pfeiffer have had more drawing power?  Would a better known male lead in the place of Hugh Dancy have delivered better box office returns – and again Hugh Dancy played Grigg’s role to perfection so it is unreasonable to suggest this on anything more than marketing grounds.
• did it need to be rewritten to appeal to a slightly younger audience? As a 16 year old said the other day “it didn’t speak to me” – with it’s acutely drawn portraits of middle age as delineated in the Daniel sub-plot did it just leave a younger audience too much in the cold?

We’ll never know the answer of course but someone should look beyond the box office results above and give Robin Swicord more money to make another film, this time with a better marketing plan.

The only strangely Austen-ish happy ending outcome of all of this was that the film was nominated for the Gladd Media Award and lost to another greatly unappreciated film which Drivelry has also reviewed, Stardust. The co-stars of the two films, Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, announced their engagement this year.

What motivates people in chosing media types to publish their content? Why, for example, produce a video on a topic which would be far better expressed in print?

How do we benefit from having a talking head pushing their favourite stocks or shares in a video, complete with fleeting verbal references to the  key figures on which the whole argument rests like year-on-year increases in turnover, profits etc?

Is it just that a lot of people secretly fancy themselves in the moviemaking business or, is there some deep dark secret here that accounts for the proliferation of video in a lot of people’s sites?

For instance is it just that:

• video is harder to copy and host so spammers are less likely to rip off your content?
• video creates a deeper rapport with your audience?
• you’re tapping an audience (YouTube?) that you can’t reach in another media?
• the video is a disguised advertisement for speaking engagements?

Sure video is harder to copy but it’s also a hell of a lot harder for search engines to index… It may well be the case that in 10 years time it will be fully indexable with a speech recognition engine – well if you’ve got a 10 year plan to build an audience that’s great.

If you have the comic timing of Stephen Colbert or the beauty of Angelina Jolie  it may well make sense to produce a video, but if you don’t personally have either of these traits you’re wasting your time.

On the negative side with videos:

•  you’ve got to be running sound (perhaps in an open plan office) to watch a video,
• there is no way that your viewer can quickly skip to the bits that interest them (so the first time you’ve lost their attention you’ve lost them totally as they hit the stop button) and
• you require their full attention e.g. they can’t be listening to music as they watch.

Why is it that people don’t get podcasting?

In 2005 the hype that currently is devoted to apps like Twitter or Facebook was all about the new medium of podcasting,  hype that Drivelry signed up for at the time.

In contrast to video this really does seem to be a publishing medium that makes sense for a lot of content.

Yet very little onscreen commentary acreage is devoted to podcasting these days, and the growth of podcasting has been relatively slow with about 12% of people interviewed by the Pew research study having listened to podcasts in 2006, and 19% listening when Pew re-ran the study in 2008.

All up a very pedestrian 7% growth in podcasting usage in the 2 years (presumably Pew is unlikely to rerun the survey till 2010 albeit newer July 2009 figures suggest that growth might be accelerating somewhat).

In a sense it’s a testament to the power of advertising. As in ‘podcasts are free so there’s little incentive to push them’…

You can identify popular podcasts on iTunes but it will default to popular podcasts for your country (using automatic IP address location) rather than globally, thereby undermining one of the principle benefits of podcasts: that they enable you to listen to the best radio in the world at the time of your choosing, with the most recent episodes collected for you automatically.

Podcasts make sense as a publishing medium because they enable you to:

• target otherwise unused audience time (for instance when you are driving or on public transport)
• they do not require your full attention (you can cook or clean whilst listening)
• they take advantage of radio’s traditional ability to build rapport

In theory you can monetize them by using a system such as Wizzard’s.

There are absolutely superb podcasts out there from organisations like NPR, the BBC and assorted smaller producers that mean you should never have to listen to a boring radio program again (you can find a few of  Drivelry’s favourite podcasts here  if you want a random playlist you can import into iTunes).

If you know why podcasts are so under-appreciated hit the comments box below and tell us why!

Twitter as a publishing medium

It’s impossible to consider the appropriateness of publishing technology without mentioning Twitter.

It’s not that SMS’ing is a bad concept (think of the positives for a whole younger generation who now have to be functionally literate to socially interact) but with Twitter we have a publishing medium where the length of your story at 140 characters is dictated by a technology launched 17 years ago.  If Douglas Adams was still alive today it would form a key joke to build a novel around. 

There is not a frequent Twitter user out there who hasn’t spent hours of aggregated time trying to work out how to compress something meaningful into 140 characters and then hoping that the mishmash of bad spelling and abbrevations can actually be understood by the recipients.  And yet the constraint is also useless because anyone with any Twitter volume (Following say 20+ people) is unlikely to have it routed to their mobile phone by SMS lest they be drowned in low value messages.

Twitter’s principal claim to fame (that you can build two-way interactions with complete strangers you couldn’t otherwise reach by Following and Tweeting them) rings hollow when you’re talking about a recipient who is Following even 50 or so people. In practice they are likely to have a list of  Favourite Twitterers and use something like Tweetdeck to filter out those people’s Tweet’s into a Group, thereby insuring that they rarely see Tweets outside that Group. 

Without this sort of grouping  the volume of messages would again be unmanageable by anyone with any constraints on their time – drowned in updates from people noting who they’ve just had a beer with, or that they’ve just landed at LAX.

Twitter is therefore unlikely to become a meaningful substitute for more proprietary instant messaging clients like Skype.

As with any new medium (Twitter started in 2006) there’s no question that what was initially a more focused medium is being increasingly targeted by spammers and direct marketers of all shades and to add insult to injury if you use Twitter to inform readers about new articles (say blog posts) you are probably losing ad revenue as well.

There is no question that the Twitter audience is growing at the moment so if you’re a ‘momentum publisher’ it may be the place to be it’s also evident that it’s underlying structural problems could cause it to plateau equally rapidly.

Social media interaction & publishing

Amongst the cheerleading that is going on about social media participation generally it also pays to realize that you are basically building up someone else’s content for them. Great proposition really:

“Hey! How about you spend your time writing a whole bunch of stuff for me on my website so that I can insert ads around it and make money from you and others clicking on the ads? Sign here ….”

Want your own website to rank well for the phrase ‘forestry products’ ?

Well if you create a lot of content in a prominent social media site it is more than likely that the search engines are going to rank that site higher than your own… Even better, most of the time you will find that ’No Follow’ tags are automatically inserted around any link pointing back to your own site that you place on the social media site, thereby insuring that you get no PageRank benefits from doing this.

So social media participation may be important but it’s also important to understand where you could be shooting yourself in the foot…

In a nutshell (and he’d probably be horrified to see it oversimplified like this) he was pointing out that for one of his articles only about a sixth of the traffic it actually got from Twitter showed up in Google Analytics.

The thing that really struck me was not so much the problem with Google Analytics but more what the implications might be for Google’s revenue and control over the search engine space.

Why? Well Danny’s suggested explanation for this missing traffic was that a lot of Twitterers use Twitter applications under Microsoft Windows or on mobile devices that don’t support javascript (Google Analytics tracks visitors to your website using javascript).

Twitter means less advertising revenue for Google’s Adsense product

However more importantly to Google’s revenue,  javascript is what Google uses to embed text ads in many websites (with a normal browser that supports javascript you’ll see ads in this page)  where the website participates in Google’s Adsense program.

No javascript (because someone looking at your website or blog coming from a link posted in Twitter is using some Twitter application that doesn’t support it) means no ads.

No ads means no revenue for Google or the blog owner.

How significant a problem are Twitter applications in this regard for Google and bloggers?

It’s hard to say at the moment. Danny was just looking at one article but the implication might be that up to 5/6ths of readers might not be seeing Google Adsense ads.

On a B2B site I consult for they receive a few million page impressions a year but within a few months of implementing a Twitter feed we now find that Twitter is the 7th largest referrer of readers to the site.

Imagine the revenue loss to this site if it turned out that only 1/6th of the actual Twitter users of this site were seeing our ads?

Yep, bloggers who thought Twitter was their friend would turn out to be wrong.

For Google it’s not the end of the world as  9/10ths of their revenue comes from direct search advertising (where they don’t have to share that revenue with any grubby bloggers).  However  the development and increasing popularity of applications that bypass javascript to view pages could be a threat and compete with their own browser Chrome, and Twitter’s willingness to let Google index the Twitter stream in real time could also be a problem (if there’s a better Twitter search engine because Twitter creates it or gives a 3rd party privileged access then Google is ‘on the outer’ when it comes to search ad  revenue from Twitter).

Perhaps the rumours earlier this year about a Twitter acquisition by Google might even get a second run? (-:

We had moved on from the doctor and lawyer aspirations that our parents had for us as children to lionize careers in banking and finance, but now bankers and financiers are lying gasping on the floor and the coroner is on the way.

Stockbrokers and equity analysts who used to be badgered for hot tips at cocktail parties don’t get invited because their social circle got burnt listening to them.

Hedge fund managers are regarded as Ponzi scheme promoters.

Marketeers (rhymes with ’musketeer’) are just trying to get us further into debt buying stuff we don’t need.

HR managers … hmm:

“Come right in, look there’s no easy way to say this but we’ve decided to make your position redundant.”

Doctors (well at least GPs anyway) in countries like the UK and Australia are merely badly paid public servants (with the current US adminstration aiming to head the same way).

Computing people after 2001 are merely car mechanics that got too big for their boots during the dotcom boom with no communication skills to ‘boot’.

The most popular area in the legal world these days is of course insolvency and litigation (taking people’s homes away from them and the stuff you do prior to taking people’s homes away from them).

Perhaps boilermakers are going to come back (I was never exactly sure what they did anyway)? What about bartenders – somebody has to mix the drinks for people to cry into?

Personally my plan is to further develop the field of blogotherapy. With 47 million of them out there it has to represent rich pickings. Workshop details to be posted shortly.