Category: Journalism

FLogging

How can blogs be aggregated into the next community model?

In October I posed the question about whether the online community model could evolve to associate blogs on a particular niche under a common umbrella. Jim Forbes and Chris Shipley (the duo who hosted the Demo conferences), had some suggestions.

The evolution of online community from USENET to hosted bulletin boards has, to some degree, stabilized over the past five years thanks to tools such as Ultimate BB, vBulletin, and a host of other fungible threaded tools that have brought some order to communities by providing their administrators and moderators with the tools that were sorely lacking in the mid-90s, when kludge systems such as HyperMail left moderators with few defenses again flame wars, etc.

My lack of familiarity with the web blog universe may work to my advantage in postulating that online publishers, or hosts of niche communities, can offer their users blogs and then, in the editorial role as a “meta blog” drive traffic to the individual blogs by aggregating the daily postings through category specific pages — obviating the need for less technically inclined users to configure a feed reader (which is still a bit of a daunting challenge for many users).

RSS lends itself not only to broadcast notification, but to the dynamic update of pages on a particular topic, if the individual bloggers can be conditioned to tick off the appropriate category.

Economically, the publisher can hard code the blog templates with the usual mercenary includes from Google AdSense to BlogAds to whatever the advertising model of the day is, and harvest the pennies. What needs to emerge is a tracking mechanism on the back end that will permit a split of those revenues with the bloggers.

The symbosis between blogger and publisher is simple — the blogger creates content which creates page views which yield impressions and click throughs. The publisher, if they are established enough, furnishes the community and traffic to light up the blogs.

Harkening to the Beatles lyric from Eleanor Rigby– “all the lonely people …” — an essential shortcoming of blogs is their one-way posting. I still fail, RSS feeds aside, to see what truly differentiates the typical personal blog from a Geocities or Anglefire page. Comment functions are a massive pain to manage due to comment spam. I receive a dozen notifications a day from Poker Palace.com or whatever scum is out there crawling my blog, to approve some heinous piece of crap. Blogs are not the next generation of a threaded bulletin board. However, a community of blogs — a set of silos under a common passion — could thrive if a couple tools were to be developed. Sure, the existing model of posting logs to friends or related blogs, is one step, but there is no real conduits — other than feed readers — to bring them together. Many blogs, to me, read like people talking to themselves. Quality will win out, and many have attracted significant audiences due to the quality of their content, the reputation of their owners, and the frequency of their postings. Somewhere there is a model to jumpstart an audience and I think that is the concept of the meta-blog.

Let’s for argument say bicyclists who like to drink beer are drawn to a particular niche site. For years they have regaled each other with bulletin board postings about riding bikes while drunk in a standard threaded BBS. They upload pictures of their bike, they post links to funny stories about other people drinking and riding bikes, and maybe the host of the BBS publishes a gallery of bike pictures, some articles about how to beat a breathlyzer test or evade police roadblocks.

Now say the publisher offers the faithful regulars the tools to manage their own blog. The publisher cracks the backend issues of how to automate the opening of a blog, figures out the legal issue of who owns the content, brands the template so his site is always hardcoded, adds some ad tags, develops a terms of service agreement so the bloggers don’t commit some heinous act of libel, and then turns it loose.

Ten drunk bicycle riders open their blogs. Name them, add links to the other nine blogs, and start posting.

The publisher then hosts a page which automatically is updated — like a newsfeed reader — with links to new postings. Those postings can be categorized — beer, bikes, bike parts, etc.

The better the tools for interconnecting the individual blogs, for publishing the “meta-blogs”, and, I think, the continued hosting of the BBS for those who are not inclined to blog (lurkers still dominate posters by a three-to-one ratio) could create the next generation of online communities.

I have such a scheme in development which will be unveiled in a month or two. A sneak peak is available here.

Niche communities are, I think, an organic phenemenon that spring up around passions. This is no different than an “enthusiast” or trade magazine, say Stereo Review or Water and Wastes Digest, where the subscribers, paid or qualified, flock to the content and the advertising out of professional or pure “pornographic” interest. Publishers or corporations that have tried to force the concept of community on their customers and subscribers, generally fail. We tried to go down the community path at Forbes.com by partnering with Raging Bull in the hope that the common community glue was ownership in a stock or mutual fund. The Forbes brand, I think, is too global and too broad, to build the passion that a weird little site like Fixed Gear Gallery engenders in its users.

There is no magic ingredient in building a community other than passion and good tools. Any hint of overcommercialism on the part of the host, any lapses in strict and transparent moderation will usually lead to rejection.

Bringing blogs into the equation — if the host publisher plays the role of aggregator, encourager, technical supporter, and ultimately, commercial partner — could, I think, mark the next big era in online communities.

Whoa. Thanks to my Google ad a link to “CheBlogs: A Left-Leaning Community With Room for Everybody” popped up. This is sort of what I am talking about. Woikers of the World Unite.

The Email Paradigm Reversal

Email – Becoming the Unnecessary Evil

Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0, in the November issue, has a great chart provided by Meng Wong on the flip in the “paradigm shift” of email – the great killer app of the Internet. The topic of the issue is the “accountable net,” but the Meng Wong graphic (on page 29 of the issue), essentially boils down the shift in attitudes about email from 20th Century Email to 21st Century Email into ten tenets.

Tenet number one holds that in the last century, “The average message is good. Spam is the exception.” In this century “The average message is spam. Ham is the exception.”

Tenet two: in the 20th century, “By default, accept a message unless we have a good reason to reject it.” In this century: “By default, reject a message unless we have a good reason to accept it.”

Which I tie together to the report this morning that Doubleclick is reporting a steep decline in “marketing mail” efficacy as reported on MediaPost

That report leads with:
“Revenue per e-mail delivered dropped by 19.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, even as the proportion of customers who made purchases after clicking through to the sites included in messages grew to 4.2 percent from 3.4 percent, according to DoubleClick’s most recent e-mail trend report, released Monday. The decrease in revenue per e-mail appears to stem from falls in both the percentage of consumers opening e-mail and those clicking on the links contained in messages, as well as from smaller median order sizes.”

Email newsletters were the hot property in the late nineties. Advertisers saw greater response rates when they sponsored and embedded their links into an old-fashioned ASCII email newletter than any banner or skyscraper unit on a page. While Doubleclick’s report doesn’t assail email newsletters, the syllogism can be made that a commercial link embedded in an email newsletter is losing its appeal.

I wrote a piece on the state of direct marketing one year after the passage of the Do Not Call Registry. With no where to go, the intrusive marketing crowd was expected to pile onto email, begging the question if a Do Not Mail registry was viable.

Apparently not, sayeth the experts. Too hard to manage and Sisyphean in the face of offshore spam.

Anyway, given the torrent of misguided bullshit that lands in the typical inbox everyday, email has lost for the time being. When you see good people like Sheldon Brown, the guru of all things related to bicycles suffer under the barrage of 4,000 pieces of Spam today, you come to the realization that the noise has thoroughly overwhelmed the signal.

Communities of blogs?

Can anyone point me towards a community model for “bloggers of a feather” — an umbrella community that sits over a group of bloggers with the same special interest

Here’s the scenario. For the last 9 years I’ve been running a site for saltwater fly fishermen — Reel-Time: The Internet Journal of Saltwater Fly Fishing — which began as an experiment in niche publishing focused on community. The 7,500 + users have flocked around a straight-forward threaded forum system (vBulletin) , generating a hundred postings per day.

There seems to be a good opportunity to introduce a blogging model so each can maintain their own content.

Pointer appreciated.

Another reason why I left daily journalism …

Newspapers – especially local rags – occasionally display flashes of brilliance but can be counted on to do the wrong thing every time when given the chance.

Today’s controversy over the Boston Herald running a bloody front page color photo of a dying coed, shot in the eye by a “pepper ball” during a fan riot outside of Fenway Park has sparked the usual hand wringing and reader outrage over the tabloid stooping lower than usual. Pissing on the city’s Red Sox love-fest with front-page bummer art will call on the shrieking handwringers faster than dissing the archdiocese.

Reporting on death was, for me at least, the single worst thing about being a reporter. Knocking on the door of the home of some family man killed in a car crash with the single mission of getting a photo for the story was painful enough, but doubtlessly the most ugly moment in my career was waking up a woman who’s son had been clipped and killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking home from hockey practice in the dark the night before. No one had notified her. The cops messed up. So I found myself on her door step at 6 am delivering the news.

That’s when I decided to switch from dailies to the technology trades.

PCs don’t bleed.

The general idiocy and reputation erosion of the newspaper industry has grown ever more stark as they try to blunder through their online strategies. Prohibiting deep linking, forcing useless “free” registration, and then doing their best to annoy with pop-ups and pop-unders is evidence of their conviction that somehow, somewhere, the public should and will be screwed. I fought pop-ups at a former online provider who shall go unnamed, but lost due to a moron from circulation who heard it was a great way to build print subscription at a Magazine Publisher’s Association symposium. Same employer also bought into one of the most moronic technologies ever inflicted … but that’s another story for another time.

Hey, the first duty of a free press is to turn a profit, but annoying, aggravating, shocking and disgusting the public is no way to insure one.

Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes

In this political season, Tip O’Neill’s observation that all politics are local struck me when I received an email last night alerting me and about 50 other neighbors to a developer’s efforts to build condominiums on a small lot in our quaint Cape Cod village.

The impact of email on local activism has been huge in the last year, with calls to arms being issued for opposition to piers in the crowded bay, a proposed wind farm in the center of Nantucket Sound, and other issues, which in years past, would have required phoning, petitions, and public meetings where the opposing side would have had little, if any, concerted strategy.

The availability of online petition services such as icount and ipetitions is a tool for local activists has the potential to transform the red-faced shouting of town meetings and other anachronisms of New England democracy into a much smoother process. For Wal-Mart haters, the tools are powerful – the issue is whether local officials and regulators will give them any credence.

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