Last week I wrote about some examples of topic-focused blogs, all of which had technology-focused content. Josh Katinger left a comment pointing to his blog about motor racing, called Fast Machines. It didn't look like spam, so I clicked through and discovered that Josh runs a very good topic-focused blog. And guess what - it isn't a techy one! It's geared towards normal people - the phrase I'm using with alarming frequency to mean non-geeks. So I fired off an email to Josh, asking him if he'd answer some questions I had about Fast Machines. He agreed and I'm blogging his response with his permission.
I think Fast Machines is a great example of a topic-focused blog aimed at mainstream people who may not necessarily know what RSS or weblogs are. That's not meant to be condescending, it simply means that blogging is in the very early stages of public adoption. So I was curious how successful Fast Machines has been so far with its target audience and what lessons could be applied by future mainstream content blogs.
Here is a transcript of the email conversation I had with Josh (edited slightly for readibility). My thanks to Josh for taking the time to answer my questions.
Richard: Firstly, congratulations on the design! When did you come up with the idea for this website and did you immediately decide on a weblog format (with RSS feeds, comments, date archives, google ads, etc)?
Josh: Thanks. I worked pretty hard on the design and layout, so flattery will get you everywhere when it comes to that! :) I actually bought the URL FastMachines.com way back in 1999 and was going to put together a news site with a friend of mine. We had a front end design and a custom coded Cold Fusion CMS back end built, but it never really took off. I don't think either of us was really prepared for the amount of work it took to fill the site with content. So, we let the hosting account lapse but I kept the URLs for the heck of it.
Then in early 2003 I started to get into reading a few blogs and really started to understand the power of the blog format and blogging in general. I started a blog on my personal web site (katinger.com) but quickly realized I didn't have a ton of opinions or concerns about anything other than auto racing (sad...I know). So I decided to try a blog that was focused strictly on the topic of auto racing, and focused even further on just a few of the most popular series - in our case NASCAR, F1, IRL, Champ Car, NHRA, and various forms of Sports Car racing.
It was (and is) still a bear to fill all those content buckets with fresh postings and inevitably some of them are neglected. However, the reason this incarnation of the site has been going pretty strong for over a year is probably due to the MovableType blogging software we use to run it. The system was more or less free and makes posting and site management so very easy. The security and ease of use of MT allowed me to enlist the help of other bloggers - including my father, who has been a fantastic source of conversation-rousing entries. I've been working hard to try and get other folks involved and keep the content as lively and fresh as possible. However it is tough when the budget is tight.
As for all of the standard blog features that you mentioned (RSS feeds, comments, date archives, Google ads), I wanted to keep with the standard blog format, for the most part, so that it was still recognizable as a "blog" per-se, but be a little more flexible with the design and layout so that other features can be included in the future (we are planning on a forum, chat room, links directory, newsletter, etc). The one issue I have come up against lately is one that has been plaguing most bloggers and that is content spam. I've used a great plug-in called MT-Blacklist to combat this and it has made dealing with the problem a lot easier.
Richard: As you know, weblogs are still a minority activity. Are you finding that "normal" people (ie people who aren't geeks like me) are signing up to the RSS feeds? The reason I ask is that the so-called "A-List" in the blogosphere are either tech blogs or political blogs. At this point in time, it seems most normal people don't use RSS Aggregators. So I'm curious how successful you've been getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed. I know it's hard to quantify RSS subscribers, but do you have any anecdotal feedback from people on this?
"Right now my best source of revenue for the site has come from customized feeds and sponsorships."
Josh: I don't really have any anecdotal feedback on my RSS feeds. About all I can tell you is that my feeds are featured on the home page of two web sites (that I know of) and that my main feed received 11,577 "views" last month. I think one of the things that has, and will continue to contribute to the growth of people using RSS feeds is the inclusion of RSS Reader functionality in Yahoo!'s My Yahoo service. I experimented with several readers for my own RSS viewing pleasure, but now that it is part of My Yahoo! - a service I already utilized heavily - I have no need to go anywhere else.
The real killer component for site owners is the link you can provide readers that automatically adds your feed to their My Yahoo! interface (see the top of the FastMachines home page, or the footer of any page - there is an "Add to My Yahoo" button). This makes it incredibly easy for anyone with a My Yahoo account to get started with viewing RSS feeds. Once the Windows operating system includes a similar feature there will be no stopping RSS.
Richard: This may be a sensitive question and I certainly don't expect you to give me any figures, but are you making much money from your blog? You've got Google ads, Amazon links, and quite a few other sponsored links. Is it meeting your expectations?
Josh: This is a great question...and certainly one that I would love to ask of many other blog owners. Right now my best source of revenue for the site has come from customized feeds and sponsorships. Google strictly prohibits Adsense users from sharing information about the revenue they receive via the program, but I will tell you that any revenue from something like Google Adsense or affiliate programs has been quite minimal and considered "icing on the cake." The only way I've made money is through providing a service via the site, like a customized feed for a specific e-commerce site that wants some content in conjunction with their product offering.
However, it is important to note that any money I have "made" on the site has been reinvested back into content. The site is not "making" any money month-to-month because I am trying to grow it and revenue is not the goal at this point in time. It costs me money each month. I want to continue growing our readership and the path to achieving that goal (along with grassroots promotion) is to provide something interesting for people to read. Despite some people's assumptions, that does cost money.
Before I blog the eBook Culture strategy I've been promising, I really need to get the strategy of Read/Write Web confirmed. Long-suffering readers will know that I periodically go through a hand-wringing phase where I question the meaning of my blog. I'm sure this is testing the patience of my readers, who probably want to slap me in the face and yell "snap out of it man!". So it's time I made up my mind, once and for all, on the question of: what does Read/Write stand for?
Read/Write Web is my personal weblog. Let's get that issue out of the way at the start. If you subscribe to my weblog, you're going to get some personal stuff thrown into the mix. I briefly toyed with the idea of starting a new blog just for personal stuff, but my conclusion is: no, why should I? Read/Write Web is my personal space, there's no need to run myself out of town.
But, Read/Write Web is also a topic-focused blog. Up till now the dominant topic here has been the two-way web (aka the read/write web). I've flirted with a number of other topics: web design, knowledge management, strategy, etc. But at heart this weblog has always been about the two-way web, or "the next generation of web publishing" as I defined it on day 1.
I need to decide whether the "two-way web" is still the right niche for me to focus on. There are a couple of key considerations here:
1. Is my focus on the two-way web helping my career goals?
2. Is the topic of the two-way web still fertile ground for me to explore? In other words, is it still relevant and will it continue to be?
On the first question, I have to say that writing about the two-way web isn't driving my career forward. Certainly not to the degree that, e.g. focusing on web design is driving Keith or Paul's careers forward, or focusing on KM is driving Lilia's career forward, or focusing on online communities is driving Lee's career forward (these are all people in my blogroll).
On the second question, I think there is still plenty of fertile ground to cover on the topic of the two-way web. For one thing, weblogs and RSS haven't even become mainstream yet. Plus there are lots of forks I can travel down on the two-way web road - e.g. eBooks. So if I do decide to change my focus, then I'd like to at least keep the two-way web as a topic to explore from time to time.
Writing, analysis and originality are probably my core strengths as a blogger. Those are the things that have gained me readers and a certain amount of respect. The mode of writing I favour is long-form analytical articles and those are the types of posts that have attracted the most external links (think: Microcontent Wiki, Fractal Blogosphere, Universal Canvas series, Information Flow). So my strategy for Read/Write Web has to reflect these strengths.
I've decided to re-brand Read/Write Web slightly, in order to try and steer myself into a fulfilling job or business. Instead of the two-way web being my niche topic, now I'm going to focus on web technology analysis.
At first glance, this may seem to be a more general topic than the two-way web! But allow me to explain. Web Technology Analysis is a specialist profession - like web design, KM and online community building. It's perhaps harder to get a job or build a business as a Web Analyst than say a Web Designer. But it's doable and if I put my mind to it, and focus my blog on it, I stand a good chance of achieving it. The 'two-way web' on the other hand is not a profession - it's more a vision or manifesto.
If I really get into semantics here, I'd say that the "web technology" part is the topic and "analysis" part is the focus. Arguably I'm replacing two-way web with a broader topic, but defining what I do more strictly (analysing, rather than exploring).
This is just the beginning of my own re-branding exercise and I may not even blog about the rest of it, because it's not really about Web Technology Analysis is it? ;-) Plus, I'm sure you're all bored with all my self-absorbed ruminating on blogging. So I'm going to start writing analytical articles on web technology again... very soon. That's my strategy, in a nutshell.
I'm going to do a review of all my metatags, category names, and other content (such as the About Me). Firstly I have to think of a new byline to replace "Richard MacManus explores the Two-Way Web". It may be as simple as "Web Technology Analysis by Richard MacManus". I may also do a re-design, but we'll see how my time pans out.
One final thing, I really like the catch-phrase that Keith at Asterisk came up with: One Focus, Many Offerings. It neatly encapsulates what blogging is about if you're aiming to have a 'professional' blog (which is different to say a journal-type blog). People will more than likely subscribe to your blog if they identify with its core 'brand' or niche. But it's your personality and participation in the blogging community that will connect you to your readers and keep them - and you - interested.
So I'll continue to offer a mix of professional and personal content on Read/Write Web, but focusing on the professional (and no I won't be changing the name - I still believe in the vision!).
Andrew left a great comment on my previous post about blog branding. I'd mentioned I was number 1 for the Google phrase "two way web blog". Andrew also informed me I'm the number 1 search result in Google for these phrases:
"microcontent wiki"
"fractal blogosphere"
"picked a fight with clay shirky"
I love that last one! Andrew's number 1 Google phrases are a crack-up too:
"absence makes the heart grow fonder blog"
"how to sleep with your eyes open blog"
"christian aerobics blog"
So I thought it would be fun to ask my readers - what is left of them ;-) - what Google search results are YOU number 1 in?
It's Friday where I am, so I'm in need of a bit of fun. Feel free to leave a comment (I don't bite).
Keith Robinson is going through a re-branding exercise for his weblog. Even though I'm not focused on web design, I identify strongly with what Keith is trying to do - because I've been doing much the same thing over here. A few weeks ago I updated my About Me to reflect my new more narrowly focused goals for Read/Write Web. This followed on from the Generalists vs Specialists theme that I'd been exploring previously (which incidentally got some great responses).
Keith is "narrowing the focus" of his weblog too, so his readers know what to expect from him. His primary focus is web design, but he said this doesn't mean he won't blog about other things. The phrase he used, which I like a lot, is: "one focus, many offerings". He compared his website to Starbucks, who focus on coffee:
"Sure, most people go to Starbucks to get coffee, but you can also buy coffee accessories, food, music, reading materials and more. Coffee is the focus yet there is more to Starbucks than coffee. So it is with Asterisk. I want my readers to think of Asterisk as primarily a Web design focused site, but to know that there is more to be had here."
He also mentioned he's the number 1 result in Google for the phrase "web design blog". I was very impressed by this fact and it made me wonder: what's the key phrase that describes my blog? It strikes me that this is something I should find an answer for, as it would help me define myself even more. But first, I decided to take a look at how other bloggers fare in Google for certain key phrases:
web analysis blog: Phil Windley and Elise Bauer (of elise.com)
knowledge management blog: Lilia Efimova is no.2 and Dan Pollard no.4. Michael Angeles and Jim McGee are both on page 1. My KM archive makes it to pg 4.
information architecture blog: all the usual IA suspects are on page 1, so I don't need to list them.
social media blog: Ross Mayfield no.1 (I think he coined the term 'social media').
social software blog: Many-to-Many no.1; thesocialsoftwareweblog of course; Matt Webb and David Weinberger as well.
web strategy blog: nobody I've heard of on pages 1-2; I make it to page 3.
two-way web blog: I'm number 1 & 2 for this phrase, and so I should be given the headers I have on all my pages. But it's not quite as in-demand a category as 'web design' or 'knowledge management'...
So my key phrase? Hmmm, I have to think more about that. But at this point you may be asking why I am so hung up about specialising on certain topics. Why not be happy with your Generalist nature, I hear you say. Well actually I am happy to be a Generalist, but it's a fact of life on the Web that people search for and want to read specialized information from authoritative sources. Who better to quote on this than Mr Usability, Jakob Neilsen:
"the Web's strength comes from narrowly targeted sites that provide users with highly specialized information that they need or care about passionately."
It's all about the users, in other words (leaving aside for now that I'm not overly keen on the word "user"). Users or readers who don't otherwise know you (e.g. they arrive via a search engine) don't care about your diverse interests. Why should they? They visit your website to satisfy their own unique needs.
Most of the time strangers will come to your site via a search engine, using a highly specific search query. Once they find what they want, more than likely they'll leave immediately. If they're bloggers or familiar with RSS, then they may decide to take a look at your website to see if it's worth subscribing to. But they'll only subscribe if they think your ongoing content will be of interest to them. Hence why topic-focused blogs are more likely to attract new subscribers - if the topic fits the user's own interests, then there's a good chance they'll subscribe. If they see posts about Elvis Costello and the writer's personal life, they will probably pass (in fact, coincidence or not - I lost a few Bloglines subscribers after my previous post).
At first I didn't think it was about re-branding myself, but actually it is about stamping my mark on the 'sphere. So in effect I do want to put my brand on the Web. Just what that brand is, I have to work out some more.
Elvis Costello and I share a birthday today. He's the big 5-0, while I'm the next generation down (I'd tell you my age, but I'm not ready for Google to know). Elvis and I also share the same name. He was born Declan MacManus and I was born - and still am, unless you count Read/Write Web as my stage name - Richard MacManus. So, same birthday and same name. Those are novelty facts that I usually pop into conversations around this time of year.
My Dad always sends me an email on my birthday with a story about what he was doing when he was the same age as me. I call them "nostalgic vignettes" and I look forward to reading them each year. On this occasion the year was 1980. My hazy memory can pick out elements of my life at that time... fish n' chips with my family on a Saturday evening while watching Ready to Roll (a top 20 music video show, where Split Enz or Blondie or Shakin' Stevens would be at number 1)... playing out in the long green grass in the back yard, of which my most vivid memory is once getting a grasshopper stuck inside my jersey and feeling it hop around between my chest and the inside of my jersey while I mildly panicked... playing imaginary rugby games on the small front lawn, complete with fake crowd noises... trading marbles with kids on my street... me and my brother Paul wearing CHiPs tee-shirts - he was dark-haired Ponch, I was blond Jon... me holding my 3-month old sister on the patio and smiling sweetly at a camera (there's a great pic capturing this moment somewhere in my parents photo albums)... those were the days. And now I have my own family, with a daughter the same age as my youngest brother was in 1980.
So I guess after that flashback to my youth, in the context of my family life then and now, the comparisons to a pop star named Elvis Costello matter less than I thought they did. What's important is right here [thumps chest, where a grasshopper once jumped up and down].
I've been meaning to add the RVW module for reviews for a wee while now and tonight I did it. RVW is an RSS module created by Alf Eaton. It's basically some extra metadata you add to your RSS feed that describes reviews - of books, music, anything you like really. Reviews is one part of Marc Canter's crusade for open microcontent formats.
Alf has created a plug-in for Movable Type that I installed tonight. It was relatively straight forward, except for one slight puzzle that had me chewing my pen for a bit. In order to 'force' your RSS feed to include the RVW metadata, you need to add a little something to the URL for the book/CD/whatever you are reviewing. Basically you need to add a 'title', with the rating data, to the link tag. Like so:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/etc" title="The Coma - rating:6">
If all goes well, your RSS feed will now include the RVW metadata. Take a look at my RSS feed, for my previous post - a review of Alex Garland's book The Coma. Look for the <rvw:item> tag, within the <item> tag of that entry.
Of course if lots and lots of people add RVW metadata to their RSS feeds, then we can start to aggregate reviews data from all over the Web - a bit like All Consuming already does as a web app. I think at the moment few people are using RVW, mainly because it takes some geekery to install the MT plug-in. Most other tools like Radio Userland don't yet support it (as far as I know), but apparently one called Blogware supports it out-of-the-box. So it'll take more tool vendors like Blogware to add support, more folks like Marc Canter to evangelize the good work of developers like Alf, and more geeks like me to be early adopters... and then eventually open reviews will be a reality.
Update: It's not mentioned in the documentation, but you also need to add a bunch of namespace declarations to your RSS 2.0 feed. Here's what I added, based on what I saw on this page over at Alf's:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ent="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:rvw="http://purl.org/NET/RVW/0.2/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
First impressions. Short book, more of a novella than a novel. I finished it in one day (a day off work). Alex Garland, if you don't know his work, wrote a famous novel called The Beach in the 90's. The book was much better than the Leonardo Di Caprio movie of the same name. Garland's second novel was called The Tesseract and was set in the Philippines. So this is Garland's third novel (although as I said, it's more of a novella).
Without spoiling the plot, the bulk of the book describes a dream world. It's a rather tired theme in literature and indeed cinema - the blur between reality and dreams. And to be frank, I thought the middle section of the book was weak. The dream world was never very convincing to me. But the start and end of the book saved it. This seems to mirror the main themes of the book: waking/dreaming, birth/death, reality/dreams, start/end.
So the novella format Garland adopts is I think deliberate. He wants us to finish the book in a day, or read it all in one sitting even. So that it's similar to the timespan of a dream, which typically occurs during a period of sleep.
To the plot. Basically the main character (it's a first-person narrative) gets beaten up in a train and falls into a coma. The dream world described in the book is a result of the coma. That's about all there is to the plot. But Garland wraps it up very well and the ending circles back onto the beginning, in line with the themes mentioned above.
Well those are my first impressions of this book. I may read it again to get a better handle on it.
My Rating: 6/10
So I've started a topic-focused blog, eBook Culture. Yesterday I outlined my personal goals for the site. Today I'm going to review examples of successful topic-focused blogs, from two people who are leading the way in this type of blog.
Probably the most well known example of a topic-focused blog is PVRblog. It's about personal video recorders (PVRs) and in particular Tivo. It features news, reviews, and how-to articles on this topic. Launched in July of 2003, it was created by Matt Haughey. If that name seems familiar, it's because he also runs the community weblog Metafilter and a popular personal blog (plus some other blogs). According to the About section, there are 3 other contributers to PVRblog apart from Haughey.
Tivo dominates the PVRblog homepage - as I write this, 8 out of 10 articles have the word 'Tivo' in its header. Otherwise a good indicator of the content is the category list: Gaming Consoles, How-To, News, Op-Ed, Product Reviews, Products, Q & A, ReplayTV, SuperTiVo Project, TiVo, Windows Media Center XP. We can see from this list that PVRblog is highly product-centered, which may sound obvious given the title of the blog. But in many ways it explains why PVRblog is such a success - it focuses on a trendy technology product that a) consumers want to buy and b) people want to learn more about because it's so new.
PVRblog makes its money from advertising. So let's take a look at what adverts populate the homepage. They're all on the right-hand side and led off by Google ads, followed by 3 small text ads with the header "Current PVR Deals". Further on down the page, there are Amazon links to "Books on PVRs". The same ads are on the individual entry pages.
Haughey wrote an informative article in October 2003 entitled Blogging for Dollars. In it he tells how he immediately made money, a lot more than he thought he would, from the Google ads. He gives 4 pointers to making money from Google ads:
1. Pick a topic.
2. Consider your topic as it relates to the web.
3. Be passionate and write your ass off.
4. Design for Google and your audience. ("About half of all the traffic to PVRblog is from a Google search.")
Paul Scrivens has been described as "the busiest man on the web" - shades of a James Brown complex perhaps ;-) But seriously, Scrivs does indeed have many irons in the fire. As well as operating a successful web design blog called Whitespace, he has at least 6 other blogs on the go which he's dubbed a "network". Initially I think Paul had a plan to make all of the sites have similar branding, so that it would be obvious they're all part of a whole (the 9rules network). However I believe he has gone away from this approach and is now trying to give each site a unique brand. In either case, it shows that branding and design plays a big part in Paul's topic-focused blogs.
In order to study Paul's approach, I thought I'd review his latest blog called (interestingly!) Big Money Tip$. It's about "the many different ways people make money online" and gives a lot of great advice for optimizing your website in this regard. Once again, I'll list the categories as it gives a good indication of content: Ad Networks, Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Google Adsense, Online Money, SEO, Webmaster Tools.
A feature of Paul's blogs is that he writes often and fast. Well he has to in order to cover 7 blogs! The articles on Big Money Tips are mostly short and sharp, but there are typos that give it away as being quickly written. However, don't mistake this to mean a lack of quality content. The advice on this blog (and all his others) is always interesting, very focused and often very informative. He must do a power of research and work on his blogs, so as far as I can see the "busiest man on the web" label is well-deserved.
On the homepage of Big Money Tips, there is just one block of Google ads in the centre of the page. They're unobtrusive, as they use the same style as the rest of the content. The same ads are on the individual entry pages too. I looked for the other types of advertising that Paul mentioned he uses in his network - eg MarketBanker. I couldn't see them here, but I see he runs non-Google ads on Version2. The other feature Paul has on his network is an Amazon store called The Roe.
Both Matt and Paul show that to run a successful topic-focused blog, you have to put a lot of effort into delivering highly-focused and informative content. This has the double benefit if delivering the content that your readers come looking for (and if Matt's advice is an indicator, half could arrive via Google), and also ensuring that the adverts on your site consistently match up to your topic. It also helps to be passionate about your topic, so that you as author learn as much out of the site as your readers!
Lucas Gonze comments on my post from yesterday:
"Richard MacManus is throwing himself into eBooks. A synchronicity is that I ran across an excellent bit of non-fiction by Phillip K. Dick which is available freely on the net and couldn't figure out what to do with it. It's not desk reading -- it's too long, and it needs to be read with patience rather than the half-attention I usually give writing on the web. It needs to be read after work, with a beer, on the couch instead of at the desk. Like a videoblog, it's couch media, not desk media."
Couch media is a good term. I also think of it as mobile media, because I make most use of my PDA on the bus and train. I spend about 2 hours each weekday travelling to and from work, but I optimize that time by reading blog posts and other content on my PDA. I don't get anywhere near 2 hours of couch time per day (except in the weekend, when I'm likely to spend it watching rugby). So for me 'mobile media' is how I usually participate in the 'read' part of the read/write web.
I have to admit I'm not totally wirelessed up (if there is such a phrase!). I don't yet have a decent bluetooth or wireless internet-enabled mobile phone... although I have a birthday coming up, so maybe that is my opportunity! So what I do is save webpages from my desktop onto my PDA, so I can read them offline and when I'm on the move (bus, train).
This is why I've never objected to long-form blog posts, and in fact I favour reading them over the short and sharp 'shoot em up' linky style blogs. As Lucas alluded to, long-form style writing isn't designed to be read sitting at a desk. That's where PDA's and other mobile media devices (such as the iPod and the latest in mobile phones) come in. They're ideal tools to feed us our daily doses of media, in whatever format bakes your cake.
For me right now, eBooks on a PDA do it for me. But I also think of long-form blog posts as a kind of eBook. That's why I'm busy exploring the 'eBooks as social media' theory currently over on eBook Culture. It's a new take on eBooks and also a new take on blogs.
One of my stated niches is 'web strategy' and I've written a couple of posts on this subject. However strategy is one of those things that is better practiced rather than preached. I could write a whole bunch of articles on strategy, but the only way for someone to be credible on this topic is to execute a strategy - and preferably be successful at it! It's the same for web design. If you're going to spout theories on website design, then you better make sure your personal website is spiffy and professional-looking. You can get away with not practicing what you preach in programming (just claim you're an architect), in usability (ever seen Jakob Nielsen's website?) and in Knowledge Management (in the real world KM is an oxymoron). But in design and strategy you need to back up your theory with real-world evidence. And this is one of the reasons why I started a topic-focused blog.
In order to explore the art of strategy, I've decided to openly discuss and publish my strategy for my new topic-focused blog called eBook Culture. I'll be doing this in a series of posts here on Read/Write Web, starting with this one. Today I'll outline my high-level goals for eBook Culture, and in my next post I'll review some successful examples of topic-focused blogs by other bloggers. After that I'll get stuck into the nitty gritty of my ongoing strategy for eBook Culture. All the while of course I'll be implementing my plans.
btw eBook Culture is only a couple of weeks old and very much a work-in-progress. At this point I'm building up the 'eBooks as social media' theory, via a bunch of quickly-written posts. By itself, that's unlikely to appeal to the masses. Pretty soon I'll start publishing practical things (how-to's and introductory articles) and introduce some basic web services.
So what are my goals for eBook Culture? Well actually they're closely related to my goals for Read/Write Web and blogging in general. In approximate order of importance, here is what I want to achieve with eBook Culture:
1. Explore the niche world of eBooks. I see eBooks as an extension of my read/write web philosophy, plus they combine two of my core interests: books and computing. Learn by Doing is a maxim that I live by, so a topic-focused blog gives me the opportunity to dive into eBooks as a specialist interest. At this point in time I'm not an eBooks expert by any means. But as I build up the new website, I'll learn more and more about its sole topic - eBooks. Hopefully I'll end up loving eBooks as much as I love working on the Web!
2. Build up a weblog community of eBook users. I'm not looking so much at folks who are already sold on the idea of eBooks, although it's important I attract existing eBook experts to my site so that I earn their respect and patronage. My aim is to convert a whole bunch of new people to the world of eBooks - myself among them!
3. Prove to myself and future employers or customers that I'm able to successfully implement a web strategy and build a social media website. If I can provide eBook Culture with compelling content and useful, easy-to-use services - and along with that build up a community of people who regularly visit the website - then that alone would be an achievement to be proud of. But frankly it also has to benefit me - and to that end if eBook Culture achieves the above, then it'll be a very powerful addition to my CV or portfolio.
4. Earn some money and potentially grow a business. You may wonder why this is only number 4 on my list of goals? Well actually I'd love it if I could eventually earn a good living out of eBook Culture. To achieve that though, I'd need to make some sacrifices and devote myself full-time to this venture. I'd need to actively sell my ideas and plans to business people, a la Nick Denton. While I may well attempt this in the future, the time isn't right for me to do it now. Even though I won't be giving up my day job just yet, it is my goal to earn some money out of the site - certainly more than the pennies I earn off Google ads at Read/Write Web. I'll provide more details on this when I get to the nuts and bolts of my strategy for eBook Culture.
So my goals for eBook Culture are mainly to explore eBooks (learn by doing), build up a community of eBook users, prove to myself and future employers/customers that I can successfully build a social media website, and make a few bob on the side.
An ideal payoff for me would be to land a job doing the same kind of strategy / social media work for an organization, or become skilled enough to offer my services as a consultant, or use my experience as a springboard to launch other business ventures as an independent.
First I have to do it.
