Summary: Let bloggers focus on getting the content right. Delivering that content to a large readership is another business altogether and one which media companies are best suited to provide.
My previous post was a rumination on whether the future for Web content creators is getting brighter, with the increased interest in bloggers by media companies such as Salon and MSN - not to mention niche companies such as Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc, whose business model is to harness blog writing talent.
Along these same lines, Peter Lindberg discovered recently that a Swedish media agency had included him on a top ten list of the most important/influential bloggers in Sweden. Peter was ranked number 10. The Swedish Blogosphere has apparently been abuzz with this and people are wondering why some bloggers were included and others weren't. Media Culpa had some great comments on all this, firstly about the big picture:
"Does this mean that my blog now is officially considered a proper medium and that all sorts of PR people will start pitching me now (that has already started but not by anyone from Sweden)?"
My take is that yes, this is another sign that bloggers are gaining some respectability in the media world and that it's an opportunity for unknown writers to gain a foothold in the media via their blogs. It's still early days, but the signs are there (especially if you're actively looking for them!).
Media Culpa went on to make the following observations, regarding why readership numbers (aka The A-List phenomenon) doesn't seem to have been a major factor in the top 10 selections:
"Some criticism to the list today has been around the fact that there are other Swedish blogs with possibly more readers than these ten. So why have Chadie for example been excluded? I think that Observer have ranked the blogs not only on number of readers but also considered:
1. Focus - are they trying to influence readers with a clear agenda?
2. Platform - are they writers that already have influence? If Göran Persson started
blogging tomorrow morning he would be the most influential blogger before lunch, simply
because of his position. Many of the names on the top ten list already are influential
people in media and/or politics.
3. Topic - these blogs are all focused on media and politics and other blogs that
comment on a broader variation of topics may lose out in terms of impact.
And because of that, my guess is that Observer thinks that some Swedish blogs may reach a lot of readers, but in regards of their influence over public opinion, they are not influential enough to be on the list."
My take: I find that criteria very refreshing! It shows that good focused content is just as valuable (if not more so) than number of readers or hits. Of course, I would say that... being a C-Lister ;-) But the Observer has it right I think: influence is all about targeted and focused content; and writing it in a compelling manner. Once a blogger has that bit right, then the likes of Jason Calacanis or Salon can take them to the next level by adding marketing and mass eyeballs to the mix.
What I'm saying is: let bloggers focus on getting the content right. Delivering that content to a large readership is another business altogether and one which media companies are best suited to provide. Unless of course you're already an A-Lister, in which case you can do both. But most of us just want to focus on writing great content - we need those media companies to take us to the next level.
UPDATE 12/11/04: An interesting conversation has developed in the comments to this post, spurred on by Phil Jones who disagreed with my position. Joshua, Liam and Matt Scofield also contributed thoughtful comments that are well worth reading. I'd like to get other opinions too... do you think there is a future - finally - for writers on the Web? Or am I deluding myself, as Phil suggested (in a nice way!). [end of update]
In all this ballyhoo about monetizing weblogs, the one thing that it comes down to for me is this: CONTENT IS FINALLY GETTING VALUED! I shout that in capital letters, because it's fundamental to my own ambitions and philosophy.
Thanks to Susan Mernit for pointing to this great article from OJR entitled Hold the Froth: MarketWatch, Slate Sales Signal Online Rebound:
"...Talbot says that Salon is looking hard at bloggers as the next great talent pool of writers.
"Salon and any enterprising company has to look where all the voices are coming from to drive you in the future," he said. "We need to find a way to incorporate the best of them. Like everything, there's the good, bad and ugly, and we want to discriminate when picking them."
MSN's Moore also noted that user-generated content was the most interesting area for the future. He floated some ideas of ways that MSN might work closer with bloggers in the future without necessarily buying them out.
"If you're a blogger, MSN might come to you and say, 'We want to distribute you. We'll send you traffic and we want you to run these ads on your site, and you'll get a share of revenues on that,'" Moore said. "That's probably an offer that many bloggers are going to be interested in because they don't want to have to invest in creating that kind of infrastructure, and they would value the traffic.""
My core skills are writing and analysis. And what are the two outputs of those skills? Content. Hopefully compelling content (if I'm any good).
People who've been involved in the Web for a while will know that making money off Web content has long been a dream. Print publishers make money off their magazines or newspapers. Television companies make money off their content. Radio stations make money off theirs. So it's only natural that Web Publishers want to make a living off their content.
Look, here's the thing... I'm not that good at programming and I'm merely competent at web design. I'm not extroverted enough to be in marketing or KM. What I am good at is seeing the big picture, analysing the little details, and writing it all up. That's my niche, but until now I haven't found a way to 'monetize' that - actually I prefer the phrase 'making a living out of it'.
So it heartens me a great deal when I read that major media websites are beginning to seriously look at blogging talent as a source of content for their large audiences. YES! That's what it's all about to folks like me, for whom content is our bread and butter - both philosophically-speaking and (we hope one day) literally!
P.S. I'm not expecting to be the target of a bidding war from any of these media companies (although that would be nice!), but it does give me hope that there is monetary value in Web content after all. Even if bloggers still only get nickel and dimes from the Salons or MSN's of this world, the increased profile and traffic will lead to other avenues of opportunity.
Does this make me a capitalist pig? Nope, just trying to make my way in the world doing what I love...
I'm exploring the Design for Data thread and later in this post I'm going to get arty on ya'll. I think tomorrow I'll begin to investigate Atomflow, but for now let me give you an informal overview of my thoughts so far:
- it's about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides. A word that I've been noticing lately, which I think sums this up nicely, is momentum. Portability is another word I like: not tied to one place.
- Design for Data is about the user being in control of their webfeeds (RSS and Atom). Whereas the reality circa 2004 is that it's still mostly the content producer that has control over feeds.
Think about it - blogging is currently more people-centric than topic-centric, because you're subscribing to a person and you generally can't filter out the content that you don't want to read from that person. What if you, the user, could aggregate feeds from people but only view the topics you want, or automatically filter content according to your tastes? This is something developers are beginning to explore now and it's basically all about giving control of data/content back to the user.
- Design for Data is about DYI websites for the users. If you can aggregate your own content from a variety of sources, then does that mean a complete overhaul of what a "website" is? Traditionally a website is a "place", but increasingly it's about taking bits of content from movable webfeeds and making your own "place" to consume them. You and I have RSS Aggregators and our weblogs for this purpose, but Yahoo! sees this as an opportunity to be 'the place' where ordinary people aggregate their content. And they're going to mix in music and other multimedia too.
- It's all about Information Flow. And it's going to affect a lot of content creation industries.
- And it's also about Rip, Mix n' Burn. Re-using content is going to be where a lot of current "consumers" find their value in the webfeed system. Whether it be music, podcasts, other audio, multimedia, or just plain old text - it's all there to be re-mixed (putting the painful legal stuff aside for now!).
- Web of Ideas. That's a phrase I've long been attracted to and Design for Data is bringing us closer. As Joshua Porter commented recently: "The more we rip content away from visual style and present it in different contexts, the more we get closer to pure ideas. That is the goal, isn't it?" Indeed! p.s. I must read Nova Spivack's The Physics of Ideas - that's sort of what Joshua and I have been rapping about (found via The Grandmaster Flash of Meme Rapping, Marc Canter).
Visual design is a package for our data/content, but we want to make it easier for users to get at the kernels of truth via webfeeds!
There's much more, but I'm still exploring... now for an artsy-fartsy segue.
I was feeling a bit down today. Being so far away from all the conferences and other Web events makes me feel sorry for myself sometimes. Which is why I can't understand all these disaffected US liberals who want to move to New Zealand - are you crazy? Webfeeds and ideas may be free to roam about the world, but the people who matter in the Web industry are still by and large in one place: America. You can't get anywhere in this world without F2F with your peers.
Anyways, at lunchtime I walked over to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, to draw some inspiration from an exhibition of New Zealand artists (some pxts here).
This one painting, by Toss
Woollaston, caught my eye because in a way it expressed what I'm thinking about with Design for Data. Here's the blurb which accompanied it:
"This orchard near Nelson was where Woollaston worked during the early 1940s. His landscapes are more a response to his surroundings than a literal depiction of them. He said he wanted to 'invent new strategies for reproducing not nature, but the emotions felt before nature.'"
I'm not sure if there is a connection... however one phrase I read later that was applied to this kind of painting (a form of expressionism I think, but I'm no art historian) is 'living paint'. There's a fusion between the oil paint and nature - and so the paint becomes 'alive'.
So too data (words, music, whatever is your preferred format) becomes 'alive' in webfeeds, in the sense that it moves, interacts with the world and is malleable...and produces ideas. So I think what I mean when I talk about Design for Data is 'living data'. Webfeeds (RSS and Atom primarily) are making content come alive to us.
Oh boy, this gets better... check out this extract from the latest issue of Fortune magazine (hat-tip Susan Mernit):
"The latest version of MyYahoo! allows its users to create custom home pages that automatically bring up headlines from any blogs you select, using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The software can also draw in stories from commercial sites, including FORTUNE's. What I wonder, as RSS and related software get better and better, is why readers will ever want to go to a media company's own website if they can craft their own out of the information feeds that they know are of most interest to them? Expect to see the very definition of the commercial media website evolve radically in the years ahead."
This is another reason why Yahoo!'s introduction of RSS feeds to its My Yahoo! service is a Big Deal, especially if it's true they're making a play into media.
Sorry for the multiple blog posts over the past couple of days - I can imagine some of you muttering: "Who does this guy think he is, Dave Winer?" This Design for Data meme has got me all excited...
Quick follow-up on my post from last night. Over the past week James Enck has been writing a series of posts about 'analyst blogging'. Ross Mayfield called it a "blog-based research model" and I wrote about it too. Now to be honest I'm not too sure what a "sell-side analyst" is in the investment industry, but what James is writing about is relevant to me both as a self-described web technology analyst (i.e. in my career) and as a topic in that field to analyse.
James' latest post touches on the 'design for data' meme that I'm exploring currently. James said:
"The point of departure for this whole debate was my view about how changing information flows may affect the industry which employs me, and whatever shapes the new information flows to, and between, investors take (centralized, decentralized, information darknets), the outcome for the brokers may be unchanged - marginalization, if they don't try to reposition their research products to be more relevant."
(emphasis mine)
I highlighted the bit that strikes me as being very important - networked information flows are changing rapidly and this is affecting a range of industries. From sell-side investment analysts to marketers to KM consultants to underemployed web technology analysts - and many more.
I'm interested in your thoughts on all this - but please comment here on my post from last night: Design for Data part 1.
Nearly a month ago I left a comment on Jason Kottke's weblog, in response to a post about his upcoming Web 2.0 conference workshop called Design for Web 2.0. He had listed 15 questions that were to be discussed in that workshop and one in particular caught my eye. It was:
"Right now, Web design feels like talking to the del.icio.us API and blending Flickr RSS with Upcoming iCal subscriptions. What happens when design(ers) has little to do with what's on the page?"
My comment on that question was:
"This is a fascinating question and it reminds me of a recent Tim Berners-Lee interview, where he talked about how the Semantic Web is all about re-using information. Yes I know TBL always talks about SemWeb, but there were some gem quotes in this one. eg:
"The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to
data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really
implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can."
(emphasis mine)
As I wrote a week or so ago about that: Nowadays it's not just about designing a beautiful website, it's about designing for re-use of information. In a way, that's what people are already doing with RSS - designing with data."
A few days after that, I submitted an article proposal to Digital Web Magazine on this topic of Design for Data. The proposal ended up getting lost due to the email woes Digital Web were having at the time, but I re-submitted it a couple of weeks later. In any case, I still haven't quite put my finger on what my approach would be with the article.
Then tonight I read a new Digital Web article by Joshua Porter called Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. This excellent article got me thinking about Data Design again. So I thought I'd note down some highlights from Joshua's article, then post some of my notes about Data Design - and maybe people can give me some feedback or pitch in with ideas for us all to explore.
Firstly, Joshua makes a distinction between human-aggregated content (e.g. blogs) and machine aggregators (e.g. search engines). He says:
"Aggregation hinges on gathering content from other domains. This dramatically affects the search for content. Users no longer need to start their search in the domain where the content lies. In fact, they almost never do."
...and then he asks the logical next question: "With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches for content, what will become of the home page?"
So we're getting into 'death of the homepage' territory, which I think is currently one of Steve Gillmor's hobby horses (but I couldn't find a link tonight). Joshua notes that the homepage is traditionally the top page in a website information hierarchy, but content aggregators often bypass this:
"...users navigate completely outside the site containing the target content. The only page they see is the one that the aggregator links to. So the IA that ends up getting users to the target content page isn’t the one on the site they end up on, it’s the aggregator’s site’s IA."
Nicely put! I think this is one of the reasons I've gone off the boil in regards to weblog ontologies and taxonomies - it's because RSS and syndication technologies have completely changed the rules. It's now less about the website as a "place" to organize information - it's more about how information flows, is aggregated and re-used.
I like how Joshua has put the 'death of the homepage' syndrome into the context of traditional IA (information architecture) - that ontologies are now just as important, if not more so, on the "aggregator's site" rather than the content producer's site. Joshua calls this "distributed navigation".
He goes on to say that it's a user-centered IA - the user makes your content work for them. Which is how it should be on the Web. Further, aggregators are "promoting a shift in the control of content" from the producer to the consumer. Again, a user-centered paradigm. Joshua lists some ways that web designers can tackle this issue - but it's at that point that I'll tack away to a different perspective.
Joshua's focus in his article is on the web designer and how distributed navigation is "bypassing much of what we’ve built for them [users]". My interest is more in the underlying technologies - RSS, Atom, syndication - and their affect on web publishing (...which makes me wonder if my article will be suited to Digital Web's audience?).
So what should I look at in my quest to understand Design for Data? I've noted down these things to explore:
- Atomflow - Matt Webb and others (see also: 1, 2)
- Attention.xml - Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry
- Matt Mower and Paolo's experiments with "RSS Archive"
- The latest features in Blogdigger and other content aggregators
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee's "semantic web is a program" theory
- The results of Jason Kottke's Design for Web 2.0 session at the Web 2.0 conference (does anyone know if that workshop was blogged? I haven't been able to find anything on the Web about it and I even emailed Jason himself, who said he wasn't aware of any coverage)
- Probably get back into XML - e.g. Jon Udell's XPath experiments.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other things to consider. What else do you suggest I/we explore for Data Design?
My fellow bloggers: like a lot of you, I'm disappointed that Kerry lost. FWIW here are some quick thoughts from a non-US citizen:
- I watched the coverage on CNN and BBC yesterday (yes we get both tv networks in New Zealand). CNN seemed to be very cautious about predicting results... a bit like Kerry's campaign? One piece of coverage that resonated with me was from the BBC, after it was clear Bush had won: an analyst said that Kerry's campaign showed a lack of strategy and imagination. Which was evidenced by people who voted Kerry really voting against Bush, not for Kerry. The analyst went on to say that "you can't back into the presidency" (or something like that) - a "mistake-free campaign" isn't enough to win the presidency off an incumbent during a time of war. An interesting line of thought, which I will try and read up on...
- On CNN I watched Barack Obama being interviewed just after he won his race for Senator. Watching him, I thought: wow, this guy should be the next President. I've seen him before and read up on him a little (back when Howard Dean was the bee's knees in the blogosphere), but this only reinforced my initial impressions from back then that Barack Obama has the intelligence, passion and clarity of vision to make a great president. I guess we'll see how he grows into his job as Senator, but for now I am very impressed.
- It's amazing how many of the bloggers I read are Kerry supporters (or simply anti-Bush, as the case may be). I'd say up to 95% - but it could just be that the Democrat supporters in the blog world were just far more vocal than the Bush supporters. But in a way this reinforces that the blogosphere is an echo chamber, at least among the liberal-minded and international spread of bloggers that I tend to read.
- Why do tv networks continue to run fluffy stories about "the innernet" (aka the internet)? One of the NZ tv networks ran a story from one of the 3 big US networks - ABC, NBC, or CBS - about how "the innernet" influenced the 2004 election. And what did the story focus on? Web cartoons and Eminem's mosh video. That's all the Internet is good for, apparently. After the piece, the TVNZ anchor quipped "Love that Internet!" and then segued into the weather. Hmmm.
- I found a website this morning called Globalvote 2004, "where non-americans get to vote". I only discovered this website today via an American blogger who pointed to my hometown newspaper which ran a story about globalvote 2004! Anyway - unsurprisingly, non-americans were overwhelmingly Kerry supporters. Kerry got 77% of the globalvote and Bush got 9%. Bush did win the Iraq vote though(!)
- Other noteworthy international views, from my neck of the blog woods: Mathemagenic (who points to a great post by Alex Halavais); Paolo.
OK, that's my political ranting out of the way. Back to the business of web technology...
Jeremy Zawodny has written a terrific post about what makes a successful Web 2.0 company. It all comes down to ubiquity, according to Jeremy. The themes he covers dovetails with my next Web 2.0 interview (coming soon!), so I'll review his main points here in anticipation of that.
Jeremy starts by noting that the main computing platform in the 80's and 90's was the desktop PC - which of course Microsoft went on to dominate. In the early 21st century, the new platform is the Internet - which Jeremy says "has the effect of leveling the playing field." He divides this specifically into 2 parts:
"1. The web enables infinite distribution of content without any special effort or infrastructure.
2. The web extends the reach of our apps and services as far as we're willing to let them go.
Both notions come back to ubiquity. If your stuff (and your brand) is everywhere, you win. The money will follow. It always does."
And by ubiquity, he means "every Internet-enabled device: cell phone, desktop, laptop, tablet, palmtop, PDA, Tivo, set-top box, game console, and so on."
He goes on to tell us how and why Amazon, Google, EBay, Flickr and others have set about attaining ubiquity on the Web. Jeremy identifies 3 key factors for these and other Web 2.0 companies:
"1. do something useful really really well
2. put the user in control by allowing access to your data and services in an easy and unrestricted way
3. share the wealth"
Numbers 1 and 2 are pretty self-explanatory. Number 3 perhaps needs some further explanation - he's talking mainly about affiliate Programs such as Google's AdSense.
btw I'm quoting so much from Jeremy's piece because he said it so darned well! Here are some more takeaways from Jeremy's post:
On web services (including RSS) and syndication: "Giving users the ability to access your data and services on their own terms makes ubiquity possible."
On User Generated Content: "The more your service can be affected by user input, the more users are likely to come back again and get involved. This is personalization taken to the next level."
I recommend you go and read the whole article. Oh and check back here at Read/Write Web in a few days for an interview with a Web 2.0 visionary that will extend on these very themes.
Interesting line of thought inspired by Ross Mayfield's post Blog-based Research Model, where he talks about research services shifting "from the end analysis product (.pdf) to the open process of research". That is, instead of relying upon bulky and expensive PDFs from the traditional analyst companies (Gartner and so forth), we are seeing blogs form a new open and 'on-flowing' (to coin a phrase) research model. Open because so-called amateurs can contribute to this research model, not just the elite analysts, and 'on-flowing' because it is an ongoing process of information flow. But what makes a good "open research" analyst? Ross points to James Enck's post, which lists 3 examples:
"I select these three [Andy (http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/), Om (www.gigaom.com), and Martin (www.telepocalypse.net)] because they, to my mind, demonstrate the highly individual qualities of blogs which collectively deliver what brokers' research typically lacks. All three have very sensitive BS meters, and are not afraid to court controversy. All three possess wide expertise and that rare quality of 360-degree, joined-up thinking, which allows them to consider the broader implications of what Company A is saying/doing [...]"
James goes on to describe a potential business model for a "cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam." So he sees this as a business model and so does Ross. For my purposes, I see it as an opportunity and also a validation of my approach to blogging (longer, analytical posts).
I then clicked through to Andy Abramson's blog (one of the 3 referenced by James) and scrolled down to find a reference to Asymmetrical thinking, which caught my eye. In that post, Andy described two of his business mentors and he says of one of them:
"Ken, who was the master of controversy for the sake of change for the better, was my first mentor in what I now call Asymmetrical thinking. This started when I was 16 and the discussions about how things were, what they meant and how the implications impacted a set group were what Ken's daily interactions gave me. More important was the reading of Ken's writing on issues and matters. Long, page after page discussions that often put people in the proverbial box because Ken presented facts, line by line, word by word, and often to the chagrin of the offending party.
It clearly explains to me now why I blog the way I do."
That extract led me to google on the phrase "Asymmetrical thinking", which linked me to an article entitled When Uncertain Try Asymmetry, by a fellow called Watts Wacker. Mr Wacker said:
"The strategic approach that is the first that we have embraced is an asymmetrical strategic orientation. When you design a strategy with an asymmetrical framework you look at the strengths of an adversary… not their weaknesses."
NB: asymmetric means "having no balance or symmetry".
Watts Wacker finishes his article with this gem:
"We used to count on the mainstream defining where the fringe would reside. Now, it’s the fringe that dictates the mainstream."
The fringe dictates the mainstream...I love it! That's a feature of all original thinking - how could it be original otherwise? There's a great Kierkegaard quote that I've blogged before, which starts: "Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority..."
All this reminds me of the recent Wired article The Long Tail. Well, the Wired article was more saying that the fringe (or the edges) is just as viable a market as the mainstream. But the concepts are not that far apart in tone... a lot of our thinking or business or marketing is increasingly at the edges. Blogging opens up that edge thinking to potentially a worldwide audience. I like to come up with catchy new terms :-), so I'll call this type of blogging Asymmetrical Analytics.
So after all this hyperlink travelling, where have I ended up? Well I've also been browsing Dave Pollard's series of posts on how to build a Natural Enterprise. I got onto that via one of his recent posts - which was a call for IT people to build products or services that address fundamental human needs, instead of building more geeky toys. Dave put it like this:
"If KM people are the most creative in the company, IT people are the sharpest analytical thinkers. [...] Here's my point: For restless and dissatisfied IT people, unlike their KM counterparts, there is an alternative, a career path that could really make a difference: Science-Based Enterprises. Your bright, disciplined analytical minds are desperately needed to develop practical new technologies that can solve the global problems of our world.
I think I'm half KM / half IT, but in any case it's clear to me that open research models and natural enterprises both require thinking at the edges (asymmetrically) in order to succeed. I see my blog as an ongoing research flow - perhaps even the foundation for my own natural enterprise!
