As argued in“Online news: bloggers v newspapers”, we are entering a new era where the bundle of stories represented by current magazines and newspapers is being torn apart and being replaced by smaller publications and individual journalists/ writers blogging out there on the web.

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.

Posted under Unanswerable questions, Wait for release 2.0

The next information wave

It’s easy to hate the most over-used phrases used to describe the web age – paradigm shift, knowledge revolution, Web 2.0 etc.  

But hey we’ve all faced the tyranny of an empty page – it’s tough out there. And faced with amazing changes to how we locate information represented by Google and the other search engines it’s easy to reach for the bottle of superlatives.  

Even the growth of email has meant a phenomenal change to the way we consume and create information in the last 15 years as documents and comments flow back and forth in minutes that used to take faxes, printers, and letters hours or days.  

Despite all these examples of card-carrying “gee whiz”  moments however it looks like we are just about to be swept up in another wave.  

We are just starting to consume knowledge in another way which may result in an equally dramatic lifestyle change when compared to the growth of search engines, or the early days of the web itself.  

The on-rushing wave is the e-book (or more properly the ‘E-Reader’), with an estimated 10 million being sold by the end of this year just in the US alone and dozens of different E-Readers in the works from different companies emerging in the next 12 months – with a combined marketing budget in the hundreds of millions that will make the recent Apple iPad launch look like a hiccup.  

On the surface of it is this just another example of hyperbolic silliness? Because isn’t the E-Reader just another way to consume books that we’re already reading in hardcopy anyway, and as many have pointed out there are a lot of advantages of traditional hardcopy over the electronic alternative?  

What is interesting about E-Readers is not the ‘E-book’ part at all. Instead E-Readers are going to very rapidly reshape how we consume information on the web. This is not about a ‘new device’ it’s about a new way to consume information, because as is somewhat obvious most of the information on the web is just not available in hardcopy form at all. And that really matters.  

Backlit screen reading is hard to do (sorry Apple I know you’re trying with the iPad). It’s hard on your eyes,  it’s not very portable (try reading a laptop with your feet up), and in this information-packed age unless you’re looking at a huge screen it is hard to skim read and quickly identify the key points in screen-based information.  

This has lead to an emphasis on other aspects of screen-based information that compensate for these drawbacks of the web on a computer screen by adding new functionality: dense hypertext links to make cross referencing easy, the ability to comment and interact with authors as represented by blogs, the ability to locate and reassemble information in many different ways as represented by search engines, and in most journalism courses a recognition that writing for the web requires a specific style (admonitions to not write more than two sentence paras etc).  

But the E-Reader is changing that (read “Customized newspapers on e-books: Calibre cross-platform e-book subscription management” to see how you can subscribe to websites out there on the web on your E-Reader, via their RSS feeds,  just like you can subscribe to a podcast on iTunes).  

What happens when everything from the web is as portable and easy to read as paper?  

It’s not JUST the E-Reader: the way this is going to turn our information-consuming lives upside down is driven by a groundswell of the growth of machine-readable info feeds on sites represented by Really Simple Syndication, and emerging platforms like Calibre which enable you ’subscribe’ to any website on any E-Reader – for FREE.  

The E-book just happens to be the final crest of the wave which is about to sweep away already undermined sections of the publishing industry.  

Still not convinced?  

The only thing worse than a ‘paradigm’ shift is an attempt to predict the future so here goes with a few near-term predictions:  

1. the world of journalism is about to get vastly more competitive – journalists in a newspaper will be competing with bloggers with more specialist knowledge who previously had limited circulation because you couldn’t purchase your average blog conveniently on a newstand or read it on the way to work on the train. The blogger is providing the information for free.
2. intermediaries that seek out big stories will get more important in their own verticals (wherever those stories are) whether they are using algorithms like Google or whether they are using human curated approaches like ‘The Week’, or social media mechanisms like Stumbleupon or Digg. Try and find for example, amongst the 100m+ or so out there which are the most entertaining blogs? To some extent this question was irrelevant  if those blogs didn’t get read – but not any more.
3. new ways of consuming stories will arise – for instance ‘collaborative reading’. On my Kindle or Sony Reader or iPad or whatever why should I not be able to view annotations on a text by my colleagues, or classmates, or friends?
4. we’re not talking individual wikis – we’re talking wiki world – why buy a ‘How To’ manual for  your motorcycle when there is a completely portable version?
5. traditional publishers who are congratulating themselves on being web savvy like the New York Times or Guardian are going to come under even more pressure because E-Readers in many cases will have the effect of destroying ad revenue and their ability to really track readership. With the aid of software on an E-Reader like Calibre this is the equivalent of Tivo for the publishing world: in your Kindle DX via Calibre no javascript is active (so Google Analytics aint going to know you’ve read the story) all it knows is that someone downloaded their RSS feed (not which particular stories were read).  And fancy ads are not going to come across because people writing recipes to extract your content with Calibre simply don’t want them.  Even if you instituted counter-measures by embedding an ad image joined with a story image, it’s almost the equivalent of going back to the flat ad serving done in newspapers. 
6. even the acknowledged guru of the web commerce world, Amazon, may be shooting themselves in the foot. They want you to buy e-books from them – but why? If you can read any old PDF or niche website out there on the web from the comfort of the couch? Or a million free book titles? I bought an Amazon Kindle DX and have yet to buy a book on it (but thanks Amazon anyway for paying the wireless subscription charges).
7. if it isn’t already obvious the E-reader is going to reduce further the cost of information globally even more: expect to add value with your startup company by better locating information, or better curation, but expect an uphill road if you think it’s about unique content (Mr Murdoch take note).
8. a bit like podcasting has broken the barriers to entry for local radio talk shows your decision is not ‘which paper do I buy in my home town’, instead it’s ‘which blogs do I want to read from the entire internet?’ Publications are becoming ‘unbundled’ and publishing deadlines paradoxically may actually become less important in an age of instant satisfaction. Why should I read some crap which some journalist stitched together at the last moment to make the Sun weekend edition when I can read a combination of bloggers who only produce pearls once a month? 

Like the sound of this new world or hate it?  

Is it not going to happen at all?  This is a blog – talk back.

Posted under Kewl

With the aid of the public domain Calibre e-book management application, which enables you to automatically subscribe to any news website (via RSS) and the increasing prevalence of the open (non DRM) EPUB electronic book formats that you can dump Adobe Acrobat PDFs to, you may find that books are the last thing you read on your e-book.   Let’s face it, paperbacks are easily available.   Where e-books really come into their own (assuming you’ve installed Calibre)  is in pulling down content from the web (and making it comfortable to read anywhere without a computer), content you normally cannot get in hardcopy unless you want to run your laser printer overtime.   Documents and news content like:  

• those 140 page Annual Reports you have to read occasionally
• various frivolous and not-so-frivolous blogs that you’d love to keep up with
• mainstream news sites like the New York Times or the Economist where most of the major stories are actually carried for free online
• niche news sites you’d like to be able to browse occasionally
• 30-40 page PDFs that you have to read for work

If this sort of content appeals to you then it has definite implications for what sort of e-reader / e-book you buy.   For example, the following e-book features bear watching if you expect to be reading other things aside from books:  

• screen size: a lot of news websites and large PDFs contain tables and images. Unlike standard text, tables become meaningless when you can’t see the row labels.  You need an e-book with a 10 inch screen to handle this type of A4 content to be able read effectively, but  most e-books come in significantly smaller sizes. Screen size is measured diagonally so an average size e-book with a 6″ screen actually has a screen width of around 3 and a half inches … you won’t see an A4 width table in that – you really need at least a 5 inch wide screen (which roughly equates to a 10″ e-book screen size).
• battery life: as effectively a substitute printer you need a long battery life. You aren’t just going to be picking up your e-book as you sit back in bed at the end of an evening . Battery-draining features like wireless connectivity or colour LCD displays such as the new iPad provides need to be weighed up against battery life.
• page-refresh rate: on the Sony PRS-505 page refresh rate is about a second. This is probably the maximum tolerable if you are going to be reading a lot of content. Make sure the page refresh rate is faster than a second.
• data charges: if you’re going to avail yourself of all this valuable free content (if that’s not an oxymoron) do you really want to pay ongoing 3G charges for your reader? When you switch your machine on you will have dozens of publications to choose from all continually refreshed daily automatically by just plugging your e-book into your PC.  A current (or in the case of Amazon ‘implied’) 3G mobile data charge just doesn’t seem necessary.  Assuming you have a smartphone if you really want time-sensitive web content you can always use that.
• rich media support: closely related to the above issue, a 3G connection where you pay volume-related data charges could turn out to be quite expensive if your e-book supports rich media like video (for example the Apple iPad). Many of the news sites you are likely to use contain rich media (or in the case of blogs badly optimized large images) and you could even find that you’re paying to watch rich media ads!

At least at the moment your choice of e-readers that fit these criteria is pretty limited (a nice comparision table, from which the simplified table below is derived, can be found on the MobileRead website).  The iRex Digital Reader probably claims the high ground with a 10 inch display but has a notoriously short battery life and at over $800 is quite expensive. The Kindle DX at 9.7 inches looks better price-wise and it’s claimed it will run for 2 weeks with wireless off – but it seems likely that Amazon will impose some sort of data charge as their Terms and Conditions state:  

“You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services. We will maintain a list of current fees for such services in the Kindle Store. Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.”  

If you need an e-book now (and if information you read is a key part of your job it’s worth  it!)  then probably the Kindle DX is the only option (and at the moment anyway the data charges are not an issue because you can leave wireless switched off and there is no annual charge imposed by Amazon).   However if you’re prepared to watch and wait, there are other large-screen devices emerging – devices and their estimated release dates below (see the MobileRead site for more):

Posted under Reviews

Amidst the turmoil in the newspaper publishing market there is one big problem for journalists leaving the safe-ish harbour of their big name publications and starting to experiment out on their own (if you are still wondering why you should be doing this read this as to why your safe harbour aint safe).

It’s distributing your blog to your readers.

Distributing your blog

Talking about distribution seems kind of odd in a way. Kee-rist, this is the world wide web isn’t it? Surely there are no problems there?

Well of course there are.  The majority of the population rarely read blogs at all. Blogs aren’t exactly a core part of their reading habits.

On commercial sites the volume of RSS-sourced subscriptions and even email-subscription  page reads usually make up the minority of traffic (RSS is barely a rounding error) and the ever present big brother Google accounts for 75% of traffic.  And of course Google readers are not ‘regular’ readers are they? They just happen to be doing a search where your blog came up.

RSS news readers, while they are available in all sorts of flavours (dedicated desktop software apps and web based ones like Google News Reader), are still the province of the technorati or news junkies.

The big hope for bloggers is of course the burgeoning electronic book reader market. With estimates that Amazon has sold about 1.5m Kindles so far  and 6m new e-book readers expected to be sold in the US alone this year, e-book readers are fast becoming mainstream, but at this stage a lot of e-book readers seem just that:  mainly for buying books (ignoring the Amazon hype that they sold more electronic books on Christmas Day than real ones – what exactly did anyone expect).

We can all buy books in hardcopy – we obviously can’t get blogs that way.

For bloggers the Kindle and Sony Reader were still relatively problematic as a distribution method because Amazon charged a subscription for you to subscribe to your favourite blog (imagine Dell charging you every time you downloaded a web page!) and required the blogger to sign up for the Kindle program for which Amazon generously gives you 30% of the revenue they earn.

And Sony’s reader has only just gone wireless with the ‘Reader Daily Edition’ targeted at newspapers.

Both the Sony and Kindle readers rely on an ongoing 3G connection which must be paid for somehow. The Sony PRS-900 unit (currently on back-order since they’ve sold out) for example is a minimum $15 per month.

Of particular interest for would-be bloggers wondering how they are going to get distributed to a mainstream readership is an e-book which does not require you to sign up for some sort of subscription for wireless access (a notable issue at the moment given the number of competing e-readers emerging, many of which are unlikely to exist in 5 year’s time), and being able to make a blog available all the time on the device.

Calibre

The most interesting development in this regard is not the hardware e book devices at all but public domain sofware that is emerging that will enable you to keep your e-book (whatever it is) synchronized with the bloggers you wish to follow (usually via RSS).

Finally, in following up on a concept that emerged way back in the mid 90s, you really can have a customised newspaper (for free) that is just as portable as your normal newspaper.

This missing piece in the jigsaw that gets you your customised newspaper effortlessly on your ebook today is a piece of free public domain software called Calibre, which has already been downloaded 500,000 times. Calibre is cross platform – for example it supports both Sony and Kindle readers as well as others.

Calibre: free, cross-platform blog and news management for your E Book

As with podcasts, Calibre will automatically synch free RSS versions of blogs (as well as log-in versions of major publications like FT.com or the New York Times by supplying your username and password during configuration) with your e-book. All you have to do is plug in your e-book to the PC and Calibre squirts all the content across (and with the WiFi e-readers emerging like PlasticLogics it is likely you won’t even have to do that at some stage in the near future).

While the new Plastic Logic e-book for example touts about 30 news sources Calibre out of the box already supports 400 mainstream news sources for free - in multiple languages at the time of writing with more being added every day. And it is simple to add an additional news source of your own like your favourite blogs just by telling it the location of that blog’s RSS feed. Then tell Calibre when you want to synchronise (once a day at 9am for example) and you’re done!

You don’t have to wait: you can put together a customised newspaper template for yourself out of your favourite blogs today, and you can do it without paying a subscription charge with practically any e-book out there. If your e-book reader is WiFi or 3G equipped then the hyperlinks that show up in the publications that you’re reading will be active, but if you’re using say a more basic e-book like my Sony PRS-505 you are still way ahead of the non-e-book world.

PS If you use Calibre already (or after reading this article) you are reading publications where the ‘recipe’ has been written by Darko Miletic. To help him keep purchasing devices to test recipes on you can contribute here (Chip In below).

Posted under Reviews

If you are a blogger just starting out, there is a bright shiny world of poor blogging advice to be discovered.  It covers the full spectrum:

• how (not to) build an audience for your blog,
• how (not to) to monetize your blog, and last but not least 
• how (not to) choose your blog topics…

At times it may look like the most successful blogs are themselves about blogging and are mainly read (and monetized) by other up and coming bloggers (yep I can see the hypocrisy warning light flashing a bright orange  on the Drivelry editorial floor).

The number of blogs is growing globally at 50% a year

It is also a highly competitive world. 

When Drivelry.com started in August 2008, Wordpress.com maintained a count of the number of blogs they hosted on their home page and it stood at 3.9 million (bear in mind that Wordpress is only one of several free hosting platforms that include Blogger and many others).

In January 2009 (6 months later) Wordpress stopped revealing this information, perhaps because they thought it would discourage newbie bloggers, or because it was information they didn’t want to make available to their competitors.  However January’s (last published) Wordpress figure of 5.2 million blogs hosted  implies a growth rate of over 2 million new blogs a year – or to put it another way that the blogging community (as represented by Wordpress.com) is growing at an annual rate of 50% … 

Although not every blog is active that is still a truckload of text being generated every day to be chewed through by search engines which typically account for 60-70% of most website’s traffic. 

Links to your blog are important: so how do you acquire them?

What makes your blog more important to the mother of all search engines (Google) apart from the text you use? 

Links to your blog, which Google regards as a proxy for your blog’s  importance, aka ‘PageRank’.

It’s at this point that we come back to the conventional wisdom about links.  

Essentially it says ‘give the A-list bloggers links and comments and they will reciprocate’ (it’s kind of like the trickle-down theory of economics).  Well it could be that Drivelry frequently verges on the obnoxious but …. we haven’t seen much trickling down yet.  This might have worked as a technique in the days when people were not so ‘link-aware’  but seems not to be the case in 2009.

The community out there is generally aware that links are valuable and that even leaving comments helps generate indexable text.  And frankly most A-list bloggers have enough of both.

If you think you can get around this by leaving a link on someone else’s blog you need to be aware that nearly all blogs implement the “no follow” directive on their comment links which tells Google to ignore the link in calculating PageRank (and this is also implemented on authoritative sites like Wikipedia).

So what’s the alternative?

Link to (and comment on) blogs who appreciate links and comments!

They are likely to be smaller blogs and they need to be ‘link aware’ so that ideally they will a) notice your link to them and b) allow you to make a ‘followable’ link in your comments on their blogs (it is possible to turn off the standard ‘NoFollow’ that is generated in Wordpress on links in comments).

Sounds pretty logical – so how do you find these sorts of blogs?

Well it’s actually not as hard as you might think.  Bloggers who implement ’DoFollow’ functionality on their blogs are:

1. Obviously aware by their use of ‘DoFollow’ of the value of links
2. Likely to be smaller as the very popular (higher PageRank) blogs tend to get targeted by spammers in comments – eventually causing these blogs to revert back to ‘NoFollow’
3. Often advertise the fact that they are ‘DoFollow’ so that you can find them in ‘DoFollow’ directories or Google Custom Search engine instances which only return search results from Blogs that are DoFollow

Drivelry.com is itself a DoFollow blog.

DoFollow blog search engines

For example here are a couple of search engines that find text contained in ‘DoFollow’ blogs if you want to add these to your browser toolbar as additional search providers:

http://w3ec.com/dofollow/

http://atniz.com/dofollow-search-engine/

http://www.commenthunt.com/

Health warnings about the use of DoFollow blog search engines

It is worth noting three things in relation to DoFollow search engines:

1. these search engines are not necessarily maintained by the providers out of their goodness of their hearts (in many cases they only maintain these engines so that they can use them as a data source to run search engine optimisation link generation campaigns by inserting spammy comments of their own) and,
2. due to the abuse of  ‘DoFollow’ blogs as they become more popular, sites listed in DoFollow search engines may ‘revert’ back to NoFollow so it is often worth checking whether the blog still remains ‘DoFollow’ by doing a ‘View Source’ on their comment page
3. blogs listed in DoFollow search engines typically moderate their comments to avoid becoming a target for spammers – if your comment says something like ‘Great post. Here’s a link to my blog ….’ it is typically going to be rejected by the blog owner as they are looking for you to add comment value with your link.

Despite the pitfalls above it is worth focusing your interactions on smaller DoFollow blogs rather than the A-listers.  Most of these people will value you linking to them and may reciprocate by doing the same, and will reward you for interacting with their posts in comments by enabling links you leave to count towards your blog’s PageRank.

If enough blogs do this it may help all of us find a way out of the cul-de-sac  that PageRank has led to where bloggers are sometimes unwilling to link to good information sources out there. A quick look at Google Trends for ‘DoFollow’ suggests there is hope here.

You may even want to think about making your own blog DoFollow!

Posted under Hate pets

A year ago I wrote an article titled ‘why write another blog‘  (the emphasis being on another if you take a look at the numbers of blogs out there) when I started Drivelry.com. 

Now that I know most things there are to know about blogging I thought it was important to give something back to the community.

So here are the hard-won lessons I learned about blogging that got me to where I am today, thousands of dollars of Adsense revenue every week and regular speaking opportunities (contact me for details on my new Nichesplog™  system, “‘the only program you’ll ever need to make thousands of dollars on the internet with just 5 minutes effort a day.“)

Rule 1: You must post several times a week

The success of your blog will be driven entirely by search crawlers, who read it 97.8%  more frequently than human readers (NB always provide high quality estimates to at least one decimal place).  Search crawlers have limited comprehension (less than that of your average 2 year old) so quantity beats quality every time. 

Better to post drivel than nothing at all.  Drivel is particularly good because incoming readers are more likely to click on one of the advertisements embedded in your page, rather than read your post, so drivel makes you money!

Rule 2: Write posts with titles involving the phrase  ’the 10 best…’

For example, ”The 10 best ways to lose your virginity”, or “10 shortcuts to becoming an internet millionaire”,  or “10 most popular blog topics to make money online“. 

These kind of posts are  scarce so you will be strongly differentiating yourself by doing this. 

With these kind of socially affirming titles you also appeal to the kind of people that read self-help books. These kind of people are charismatic and are bound to virally spread your message to all their friends by spruiking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.

Don’t worry if you can’t actually come up with 10 points. If you skip a point or two ( for example going straight from Rule 3 to Rule 5) most readers are unlikely to notice anyway.

This rule is sometimes referred to in the blogging community as the ‘Number – Adjective – Subject’ rule for obvious reasons.

Rule 3: Focus your blog on a clearly defined niche

For example, ‘Railway Travel’ is a good topic for a blog.

However ‘Railway Sleepers‘ means you’re really honing in on a  clearly defined niche. With a ‘niche dominator’ like that (unafilliated with the excellent blogging software of the same name that I have loosely based Nichesplog on) you are bound to attract most of the keyword searches that companies selling either concrete or wood railway sleepers really want to target.  Pick a market that is growing – clearly train travel is growing as environmental issues make public transport more important.

Sure, it may be a little bit difficult coming up with something that interests you about railway sleepers every week but focusing on a niche will:

a) help keep your posts short

b) you can only be accused of ignorance by other bloggers about one subject, and,

c) always remember RULE 1 (search crawlers don’t care what you write anyway).

Keep at it! Get in a routine by writing at least a  sentence  each day and just copy and paste them together every couple of days to form a post.

If you can’t think of anything to write get angry (apparently this helps).

Rule 4:  Make your blog look like something that isn’t a blog

Out there on the internet many readers do not read blogs because, unlike proper journalism, blogs are factually unreliable, prone to bias and they may be hiding computer viruses that can raid your online bank account.  Readers are aware that there is no quality control.

When you think about it even the very word ‘blog’ sounds kind of unnatural.

For this reason it is best to hide from the reader that they are looking at a blog.

For example always refer to posts as ‘articles’ and if you have control over your hosting template it is best to change things like ‘Blogroll‘ to ‘Sites I recommend‘ and ‘Categories‘ should be replaced with ‘Topics‘.

Basically avoid anything that is a giveaway to readers that they are looking at a low quality blog post, as opposed to a high quality website.

Rule 6: Blog readers have miniscule attention spans – keep it short

Screen readers only ever read the first two sentences in a paragraph. Use lots of subheadings.  And short sentences. 

The average blog reader spends 32.4 seconds reading a post. Did you notice that there was no ‘Rule 5′? I rest my case.

All posts should be able to be expressed in 3 paragraphs – anything  longer than that is just self-indulgent.

Most readers will never waste good printer paper by actually printing from a blog.

Rule 7:  Blog rules rule over traditional publishing

Because blogs are going to sweep the old publishing empires before them there is no need to worry about grammer – or syntax; or spelling.

Traditional dead-tree based publishers also have this concept of an ‘editor’ who was not intimately involved in writing the piece, who may be able to see where you are making logical leaps that leave the reader behind, where your sense of humour deserted you, or where you just entirely omitted words. There is no need for one of these editors (or volunteers to perform the role) as editors are part of a cost base that is driving traditional publishers to the wall.  Blogs are ‘personal’ (see Rule 9) and readers are well aware there’s no quality control (see Rule 4).

Typography is just a form of Onanism for publishers. Very small fonts that don’t cater to the over-60s crowd do help you to fit more in ‘above the fold’ (an odd term that we bloggers use to describe the screen text that can be seen without scrolling down) and the over-60s are unlikely to engage with the medium anyway for all the reasons cited above.

Think about search engine optimization all the time. Before you write each post work out what keywords you wish to target and then repeat them a lot. Links to other websites fritter away your ‘Googlejuice’ (a term we bloggers use). It’s best to be self-contained (see Rule 9). Use lots of textual emphasis like italics and underlines as this is apparently also good for your Googlejuice.

Rule 8:  Create lots of buzz about your blog

Engaging with anyone else’s content can really fritter away your time. 

Instead, focus on making comments on other people’s blogs that will help get your articles noticed and really get the attention of other bloggers e.g.:

“You’re wrong. See my post at http://railwaysleepers.blogspot.com/etc.”

Use channels like Twitter and Facebook to broadcast your new posts as much as possible.  When you’re emailing each post to your address book remember Rule 4 and refer to your post as an ‘observation’, ‘explanation’, ‘article’, etc – in short anything but a ‘blog post’.

Create 50 Hotmail accounts and then use them to recommend your best articles at social bookmarking sites.

Mail prominent bloggers interesting questions that could concievably form their next blog post like “could defining your fears be more important than defining your goals?” Or  ask them about blogging – navel-gazing is a habit no self respecting blogger can resist.

PS Talking to people on Twitter can really waste your time.

Rule 9:  Personal is everything

Unlike your email, or dinner parties with your friends,  blogs are for letting it all hang out.  Pictures of your children or pets help to add that personal touch which creates a deeper relationship between you and the reader.  Pictures of your babies are a must.

It’s ok to comment about your company, your partner, and your personal habits. This helps you establish your credibility as an individual and not just a corporate stooge.

With the sheer amount of text being added to the web every day it is highly unlikely that any of  these comments are actually locatable by people close to you at your workplace, school, or other institutions you’re involved with, and people will obviously acknowledge in 10 years time that your opinion may change. Most people also lack anything approaching real search skills.

Rule 10: If you paid for something for your blog you paid too much

If you have to pay for something you’re getting ripped off. You’re already investing a lot of time, why invest money as well?

Registering and finding a domain name takes ages and then you’ve got to wait in the ’sandpit’ until Google decides you’re not just some web spammer.

Use default designs and create your blog at one of the free blog hosting sites at Blogspot or Blogger or Wordpress.com. After all it’s the text that matters (see Rule 1). 

If it starts to go really well you can easily move your blog somewhere else.

Posted under Hate pets

An interesting article from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand this week on tracking traffic into his website via Twitter.

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? (-:

Posted under Unanswerable questions

Tourism and mental baggage

Travel is an odd business.  The more you think about it the odder it can seem.

We all ‘get’ the idea that it’s supposed to be ‘enriching’ and ‘inspirational’  but we actually arrive at a new city with a whole trolley-full of mental baggage.  After all, that’s why we bought the ticket to that particular destination in the first place…

We bought a ticket to Marrakesh with a dim memory of Laurence of Arabia, we bought a ticket to New York with a mental picture of 5th Avenue brownstones and glitzy department stores, we bought a ticket to Paris to marvel at  French women who were so immaculately turned out they modelled their facial expressions for the benefit of passers-by (or some of us did).

Authenticity

We think we are searching for something ‘different’, something ‘exotic’ but we are also searching for something that is the same as our preconceptions.  We want something that is authentically a close match to movies, books, or just to match some vague recollection of an intriguing relative who once lived there.

Dahab pre-Lonely Planet

There is an also an industry (the travel industry) that sells us authenticity by the bucketload and in the process destroys something (albeit something that actually was probably never there in the first place).   

Lonely Planet had a nice little writeup of a page or so on an ‘unspoilt’ beachside town in the Sinai called Dahab where you could get fish cooked on an open fire. A year or so later (see photo at right) and it could pass for any Mediterranean resort. 

It can all be quite annoying this dearth of local authenticity. 

There you are, sitting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in a building that smells more of Cairo than it does of Europe, and  a car cruises past outside playing the same song that you were listening to in London 12 hours earlier. Why bother coming?

You go to Australia with an image in your mind of wide-open spaces and people in Akubra hats on horseback with corks hanging from them (the hats I mean).  How trying is it that a higher proportion of the population lives in the densely populated urban coastal fringe than in the UK, or that Australians are the highest per capita consumers of books in the English speaking world? 

Re-framing of tourist destinations by travellers

Re-framing of tourist destinations by travellers

 At a literal level we tend to simply re-frame our travel destinations to ignore those parts of foreign cultures or experiences that are inconsistent with our preconceptions. 

We arrive at a place and we immediately begin looking for the vantage point for the ‘perfect’ shot (an artist I know refused to travel with a camera when she realized she was doing this).

Framing can be as simple as choosing to photograph iconic sights to exclude inconvenient objects in the foreground like hotdog stands or whole cities (don’t tell me you weren’t surprised to find the pyramids ensconced in a suburb of Cairo rather than the open desert), or it can be as complex as creating theme parks like Disney World where you can experience all the cliches of foreign countries without ever leaving your own.

Travel ‘orientation stress’ and travel ’option stress’

We shouldn’t blame Disney World or package tours for trying to make things easy.

In parts of Oklahoma where I lived for a while it was pretty unlikely that you had been out of the state (Texas being the possible exception), travelling to the east or west coast was considered really avant-garde, and leaving the country was unheard of (estimates of the number of Americans holding passports seem to range between about 7% and 20%).

Travelling  imposes ‘orientation stress’ as we try and get used to different languages, currencies, geography and transport modes.  Worst of all we’ve got to make decisions about what we see every day (for an ‘all option evaluator’ such as myself who has understand the full gamut of choices before making one this is terrifying) aka ‘option stress’.

Buy your $1000 airfare & I’ll sell you a blindfold to wear on your trip

And thus we come to the travel guide, a way of reducing both our option and orientation stress. It tells you a) what to ’see’ (because travel is like… errr … a visual experience apparently) and b) how to get there.

Problem solved? 

Well … errr… no. As a friend of mine notes there is a very good case for banning travel guides. Right now, in the southeastern quarter of Barcelona, 7 people are standing in a queue outside a bicycle rental shop clutching a heavily-thumbed book noting to ask for Peter, their experience of the city completely mediated by a red travel guide with a million print run and a few Almodavar films. All big cities are now for sale to anyone without making any more effort to communicate than that involved in forking out 10 bucks for a copy of ‘Let’s Go’, or the Rough Guide. 

Sure you’ll ’see’ a bunch of sites but not have to make the effort to communicate with the locals to find them, or even understand what the locals themselves recommend (hotel concierges excluded). When was the last time you went round the top 3 tourist spots in your own city in a day? Most of us would rather eat sand.

The travel guide is just a further disconnect  that robs you of any understanding of the place and culture at which you’ve arrived. Increasingly you get there by plane in an experience that is like timetravel- you wake up in a different timezone after being shut in a metal tube with no context of how you got there.

And even for the ‘independent‘ traveller once you arrive at an airport there is often the temptation to book hire-cars and negotiate freeway systems that use largely the same conventions the world over.  The old question of the journey or the destination comes to mind: getting from point A to point B the fastest stops you developing a gradual understanding of the differences between them, like negotiating a city by bicycle as opposed to taxi (you have not experienced Shanghai for example until you’ve got on a subway train simply because a lot of western tourists never go near it).

It gets worse. Technology is rapidly reducing the amount of interaction you have with locals even further. Why not load an audio description of the city before you go from hearplanet.com so you don’t actually have to hear anything; why not look up your current location on your GPS phone so you don’t have to ask directions when you’re lost?

If you didn’t photograph, blog & twitter it you were never here

“From that time on he began to pay careful attention to all his thoughts and ideas, and to admire them.  For example, it occurred to him that if he were to die the world in which he had been living would cease to exist.”

Milan Kundera – Life Is Elsewhere

Try meeting someone in a hostel these days who is available for conversation and not a) tapping away at a laptop or b) sitting in a corner with headphones on listening to MC Hammer.   Want a list of the electronic devices for today’s traveller ? It will take up quite a chunk of your weight allowance.

Because, as we all know, travel is about documenting it.  It used to be done with a couple of postcards and a camera but now we must emulate our travelling literary heroes ranging from Jack Kerouac to Alex Garland. It’s so darn busy there’s barely time to read a novel by a local author…

Travel is also about self-discovery and we need a diary to do that.  It’s not just about ‘seeing things’ it’s about ‘getting away from me’.  We all have met f**ked up people in hostels ranging from young foreign Zionists in Israel to I-participate-in-medical-experiments in Denver.  So many travellers out there are just getting away from a bad relationship or some other huge negative in their life; the cheaper the destination the worse the problem they’re trying to overcome.  We have all in the active or passive voice been part of a conversation where we explain to a boyfriend or girlfriend that … cough … “it’s just not a good idea you join me here …”  Yep, it is difficult to be with you, whom I have known for years, when I am trying to reinvent myself.

It’s not that we don’t all have a travel story to tell but it’s also the case that (because of  many of the reasons above like travel guides) we also all often have the same story. We’ve been to the same must-see places, been ripped off by the same vendors, and have the same bank balance damage to show for it.

New ways to understand travel

Ok, it’s not the end of the world. It’s hard to buy an argument that  people who travel or live outside their own culture “is bringing with it the condition that the Greeks called ‘anomie’, the losing of all moral and social guidelines to behaviour that go witha traditional way of life.‘ (in a delightful irony I read that a couple of years ago in a Virgin travel magazine). Travel probably does make you more tolerant of ‘difference’ but it seems to be the case that travelling as a recreational activity might seriously benefit from being re-thought.

Otherwise we have knowledge but not understanding of where we’re going.

Maybe the answer is couch surfing?  Maybe it is thinking more about how we move from place to place as in ‘Blue Highways’?

'Experimental Travel' by Rachael Antony & others

 Maybe it’s the new “experimental travel” genre, where destinations are picked  with dice, hitchiking,  exploring suburbs rather than city centres, or variations?

 Maybe we even should envy my work colleague’s father who is British and has never been on holiday anywhere further than Wales (no airline related carbon footprint issues there!). Isn’t it good that he’s happy with himself and his own surroundings – what more could we all wish for?  

 What do you think the answer is? It would be genuinely good to know.

Posted under Hate pets

Dash across to wordpress.com and as of today you’ll find 3.9 million blogs listed. Sheesh. Makes you want to stop right there. Because that would only be a fraction of the actual blogs who want more control than Wordpress or other free services like Blogger can offer them.

Ok but there’s a little more to it than that. Reading Wordpress’s tagline “3,965,250 blogs, 124,346 new posts, 41,331,398 words today” a little division tells us that if we divided up the total posts for today (well that’s how I read the tagline …) amongst Wordpress’s total blogs then at one post per blog (yeah well nobody said this was going to be scientific) only 1 in 31 blogs has a post today.

Expect to see this very stat quoted soon as gospel truth, “recent surveys have shown that only 3% of bloggers continue their blogs”.

Oh yeah, and just in case you’re wondering, “the average blog post is 330 words”.

Pretty daunting if you’re thinking about blogging.

It’s enough to make you think that perhaps self doubt is not a characteristic of your average blogger?

Yep. Google “why write another blog” and you get just 5 results:  http://www.google.com/search?q=%22why+write+another+blog%22 I shouldn’t have asked.

So why should you (or I) keep going? Well I guess for only 2 reasons:

1. to mangle a quote from someone (from memory it’s usually George Bernard Shaw) ‘only paint or write something if the not painting or not writing of it is too difficult.’ Try everything else! And then if you still feel you have to (sigh), go ahead.
2. this is THE medium for conversation. If you’re the kind of person who is as interested in questions as answers this is your medium. If you just want to give other people your opinion be a columnist, a TV host, or dinner party prima donna. 

Posted under Self doubt