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- Is Blogging Dead? (Wait: Is It That Time Of Year Again?)December 1
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The “is blogging dead” meme (although no one has the chutzpah to call it what it is) rears its interesting head today over at the FastForward Blog — and much like other memes about blogging (there is / is not an A-list, your blog really is / is not a blog if you have / do not have comments, its impossible to start a blog these days, etcetera etcetera), will likely never go away, and pops up from time to time on the meme-radar.
Granted, I have not been blogging as long as some graybeards, so the earliest recollection I can recall was when Technorati revealed some data on blogging which suggested that it had plateaued off. It was last year, as I recall. Lots of handwringing around that time. Twitter existed. Facebook existed.
I think my position then is the same as it is now. For those who like / love / accept blogging, the diversification of online voice is an inevitable non-threatening event. There were a LOT of blogs pre-Twitter (and even pre-Facebook) that were false starts and abortive events in the making. There were many people calling themselves “bloggers” who were not really — in the sense that they tried it, then gave it up. Wasn’t really their cup of tea.
And I think that is, as they say, totally “ok”.
The explosion of the ways people can share their op
- Will Qik Be The Next Twitter?November 27
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There’s been a lot of good debate around the use of Twitter at a time of crisis with the terrorist attacks in #Mumbai. I think its probably going to be one of those perennial topics any time there’s a crisis until Twitter becomes as mainstream as blogs, although I knew something crossed the threshold when I noticed CNN regularly including Twitter chat streams in its 2008 election coverage.
Say what you like about CNN, but when a major cable news network starts using a single service as the “real-time” voice of opinion, I think its really says something about not merely “just-in-time” reporting, but opinion and news as it happens — rightly or wrongly.
So, if Twitter has finally hit it big time, it behooves me to ask the question “who will be the next Twitter?” I think there are a number of contenders, but for the purposes of just-in-time video streaming from your phone, I think there’s no one else in the space except for Qik.
Check out this video on Qik of Mumbai trying to recover from the terrorist attacks one day later:
I may be wrong, but Seesmic,
- Does Not Leaving Comments Matter?November 24
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Louis Gray spent a lot of time crafting a satirical post on the alleged “exchange rate” between comments and other means of interacting with a post — launched in part due to Allen Stern’s public bemoaning of a lack of comments thereof, and who is not alone in voicing there support for comments-on-blogs.
There are a lot of dimensions to this issue. I sympathize with Allen because not every blogger is doing this for the hobby and the egotistical pat on the back that traffic and comments bring (myself included) — some are trying to make a go out of it.
Traffic DOES matter when you’re trying to sell ads to support yourself or business.
But let’s rephrase the question another way — do a lack of comments mean that there’s a gap in reaching the maximum traffic potential?
As part of a larger discussion about the utility — or futility — of socially driven traffic, I’m not so sure. I love Allen (in a brotherly blogging kind of way), but when your bottom liine is governed by pageviews and uniques, I would argue that the level of user engagement is but a secondary metric. It is neither a necessary, nor sufficient, factor for success if your primary goal is traffic.
That is to say, I am of the opini
- The Predictable (And Tragic) Evolution of New MediaNovember 20
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Some news today on the tragic suicide of a young man captured on Justin.tv — Justin.tv being a tad different than, say, YouTube, as its one of those video services which streams content live. That is to say, he committed suicide on “live” internet-streaming video.
The loss of a young life is always regrettable. I think the real bit of news is merely that it may have been the first time it was captured in this way. As new media evolves, and as a newer generation of users become comfortable with capturing every facet of their life permanently (as debatable as that is), suicide captured in the medium of the day is inevitable.
As is the birth of life (cue: Robert Scoble Some other dude twittering the birth of his child). And the suffering of people in life.
The “new” web is more than the spectacle of the crushingly banal or the bruisingly idiotic, an
- Text-Link-Ads Debuts Inlinks.com — Hopes To Fly Under Googles RadarNovember 19
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Text-Link-Ads (disclosure: they had advertising on this blog for a loooong time — what’s up Patrick!) has recently unveiled one of its newest products: InLinks.com. This service aims to match bloggers with advertisers in the paid-link arena, and makes no bones about it. This is a marketplace which allows bloggers to sell their pagerank, as what makes this venture different — and stealthy, I might add — is that InLinks aims to be the silent broker between advertisers and bloggers.
What do I mean?
Advertisers pick the inline, or anchor, text they want to be the link through a search bar. Inlinks combs through its database of content to find blog posts with that particular inline text, and serves up a listing of such posts, that are sorted according to Alexa score, PageRank, and Date of post. Once the advertiser selects the blog post, some magic happens, and the link is rented. The starting rate for many links are about $10/month.
On the blogger’s side of the equation, the a static link is created on a given page to the advertiser’s designated landing page / URL with no “nofollow” attribute — pasing along the linkjuice accordingly.
The trick? Unlike other marketplaces, such as ReviewMe.com, you never get to see *who* those bloggers ar. And also unlike Payperpost, no one is asking you to write about, or review any particular thing. And obviously its not advertised *as* a paid li