I read with interest Matt Haughey's essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google's Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a single topic. He advises:
"In order to have any remote chance of success gaining an interested audience and getting good on-topic ads showing up, pick a narrow topic you are passionate about and run with it."
I'm not that concerned with the controversy surrounding the terms and conditions of Google Adsense, as that has been covered by many others. What interests me is blogging on a narrowly-defined topic, which if it's one that attracts plenty of e-commerce action (like TiVo) could even make a buck.
But it's not a case of "there's gold in them thar blogs", like in the Dot Com days. The Google ads won't make you a paper millionaire and they won't lead to an IPO, but if you're fortunate you may get a comfy chair like Matt did. So just to get that straight, I'm not talking about anything that starts with "e-".
One person that has been pushing the envelope with topic-focused blogging is Elwyn Jenkins. In his case, it is also commercial as he runs a business based on his blog Microdoc News. The topic of his blog is nano-publishing:
"Nano Publishing is a tiny web-based operation that publishes online as its primary focus and usually runs a weblog as a core part of its primary income earning activity."
So Elwyn Jenkins is making money by blogging about how to make money by blogging. Niiice! But he succeeds because his content is (usually) interesting and informative. He does however employ some tricks of the trade in order to get people to read his blog, and hence make his money. These could be construed as cynical.
For example I am subscribed to Microdoc News in my RSS Aggregator, but when I see a new article that I want to read I have to click on a link that opens up Microdoc News in my web browser. Most blogs I subscribe to let me read the entire article in my RSS Aggregator, which is how I prefer it. I should add that some other blogs do it too - in fact Movable Type calls it a feature, making you click for the whole story. And there is another reason - web designers like Zeldman and Asterisk actually want people to click out of their RSS Aggregators to view their beautifully designed websites. Which is fine, because I enjoy viewing well-designed websites. But I believe Elwyn Jenkins makes people click out of their RSS Aggregators because it makes people visit his website, which earns him advertising cash.
There are other tricks too. Microdoc News is styled as an "online magazine", but it's just run by one bloke. It's amazing how many times I see people on the Web refer to Microdoc News as a "they" instead of a "he". Microdoc promotes itself as an authority on blogging and it runs a blog portal, under a different domain name. Microdoc is also almost obsessively focused on Google, which allows him to feed off of Google's high profile and success. It reminds me those birds that travel around on the back of large animals like rhinos, on the African plains. Oxpeckers, I think they're called. Google would be the rhino and Microdoc the oxpecker.
Now I don't mean any of this in a rude way, I greatly admire Microdoc News and have had it in my blogroll ever since my own weblog started. Microdoc News is one of the sites that inspires me and its content is always worth a peek. But it's also a good example of how weblog advertising is subtlely affecting the reader's experience, because of all the little tricks that Microdoc employs to entice people to visit it and treat it as an authority on its main topic (nano-publishing).
Finally, today I noticed that Tom Coates has started a new topic-focused blog called Everything in Moderation (the topic is managing online communities and user-generated content). There's no advertising on the site, so I'm not suggesting that there is a monetary incentive to this. But even if there was, I'd still applaud Tom's new site because it's focused on a specific topic and hence it will attract an audience of people who are interested in that topic. And if his readers are as passionate about the topic as Tom is, then it's likely they'll become regular readers. Perhaps even contributers.
In conclusion, I view topic-focused blogs as a further extension of the Two-Way Web rather than just another attempt to milk money out of the Web. Because these blogs are attached to a single topic, it means the content will nearly always be relevant to its audience. This in turn encourages interaction with the reader, maybe even the reader writing back to the blog. Yes I am beginning to like the idea of topic-focused blogs, even discounting the fringe benefit that they may make money. Hmmm, I'll have to think of what narrow topic I can focus on in order to start a new blog. I could use some pocket money too!
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I'm not sure I'm as big a fan of the concept. I think I'd rather see (a) 1 blog per person where they author everything across their universe of interests, then add (b) some sort of topic-specific multi-author aggregation model, pulling postings from (a). I guess that's what TopicXchange should allow.
Then, a TopicXchange posting could link to author-selected (a) other related TX topics, and (b) related author-blog topics.
I'm not sure why I prefer this model. Maybe because I want to encourage interconnected thinking on the part of each author (hence my wikilog medium)...
Posted by: Bill Seitz | October 15, 2003 9:08 AM
I'm also keen on the author-centred blog (or your wikiblog, which I'm a fan of because it's a great way to interconnect nodes of thought). But I think the two can live in harmony - author-centred blogs and topic-focused. eg as a kiwi I'm a big rugby fan. But most people wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in reading rugby rants on my weblog. So if I was motivated enough to want to write on it (I'm not though!), I'd create a rugby-focused weblog which would be separate from my main blog.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 15, 2003 12:33 PM
Oops, sorry yes I did get the name wrong...spelling of names hasn't been my strong point this week. It wasn't intentional, so my apologies if it caused offence. I'll fix it up now.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 17, 2003 1:45 AM
When you do a review of a site, be sure to get the name of it correct. It is Microdoc News and not the other name you mentioned so many times. Then you will get attention of readers a lot more -- negatives you portray in this article would have had more power with a correct spelling of the name!!
Posted by: Elwyn Jenkins | October 17, 2003 12:22 PM
When you do a review of a site, be sure to get the name of it correct. It is Microdoc News and not the other name you mentioned so many times. Then you will get attention of readers a lot more -- negatives you portray in this article would have had more power with a correct spelling of the name!!
Posted by: Elwyn Jenkins | October 17, 2003 12:22 PM
I like full-text in the RSS as well, but not providing it can act as a safety feature for your content. If you publish a full-text description, someone could, theoretically, store that content and republish it, perhaps making money in the process of republishing, without your knowledge or consent. Providing a preview/link ensures that this kind of thing wont happen.
It is a tricky situation.
Posted by: Greg | October 20, 2003 11:22 AM
Hmm, that's an interesting point Greg. A few people have copied my content before in its entirity on their weblogs, but usually I don't mind as long as they attach my name to it. But is there something inherent in RSS that opens up a legal can of worms if people copy the content? ie what's the difference between that and someone copying and pasting my content from their browser? Plus I use a browser-based RSS Aggregator, so the lines are further blurred...
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 20, 2003 1:03 PM
Well, I could charge you to get an RSS feed of search results from Blogdigger. I could claim that you are paying for the cost of me providing the search functionality. I could put the full text of your post in the search result, and a user would never visit your site. They may read every single one of your posts, and you wouldnt see a dime, but I would make money.
This strikes me as wrong, but I'm not sure.
Posted by: Greg | October 20, 2003 5:40 PM
Yes there are some intriguing legal ramifications to that. I wonder if there's been an actual case yet? It's sort of similar to when Mark Pilgrim created "Winer Watcher", which re-published Dave Winer's RSS feeds without Dave's permission. There was no money involved in that case, just principles.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 20, 2003 7:27 PM
I suspect that the single topic blog, if driven by ad-sense, is a negative development for blogging.
As a blogger, I'm tempted to write more than one blog too - but not for the money - for the audience-building and maintenance factors. I have two main blog topics - (1) personal technology and (2) a clump of related topics: free agent nation/social networking/social software/technology-driven social trends. I include both on my blog, Tech Ronin. Personal technology is really a sub-topic underneath topic 2 in that personal technology constitutes the tools of production for a free agent.
Give me author-focused blogs with categories that can be clicked to narrow one's view to that category. Ad-sense should be able to handle this rather than blogs accomodating ad-sense's crude initial methods.
Perhaps someone will come up with a way to *subscribe* to a blog and specify the categories we want to read. That way, I could filter out your rugby posts and focus on the meaty stuff that turns me on. However, one of the key aspects of blogs as a publishing medium is that they provide lots of context and personal information about the author. The personal diary aspects including your rugby stuff (maybe minus extended rants?) do two things for me (1) help me know you in a pattern-recognition kind of way (and feel that I know you - extra experiential and impact value) so that I interpret your posts with that additional information on *where you are coming from* and (2) adds a *story* aspect that makes it more fun to read your blog - you become a hero of sorts to your readers in the drama of your life and issues that you are passionate about. I often am drawn to read the biographies of famous thinkers rather than their own works because I get the context and story along with the *contribution* and serious *work* of the author.
Here's hoping that however things go, blogs don't lose their context, story, personal stuff. It would really be a profound loss to the medium.
Posted by: Janet Tokerud | October 21, 2003 11:35 AM
I second those thoughts, context and personal story is important.
Re your comment "Perhaps someone will come up with a way to *subscribe* to a blog and specify the categories we want to read." Have you checked out k-collector and Topic Exchange. Topic subscribing for weblogs is going to be the next big thing, IMHO.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 22, 2003 1:58 AM
Thanks for the tip, Richard. I'll check them out.
Posted by: Janet Tokerud | October 23, 2003 7:07 PM
Posted by xian at October 17, 2003 10:55 AM
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Lis all lies. Jenkins is a fraud and DID DEFRAUDS Standard Transactions and ruint many peoples' lives - he also owes max and commerce over $300000. He ruint Standard Reserve too. Their are lots of folk in Atlanta GA after Jenkins blood coz he theived them too. He also is selling a fake cancer cure in AUstralia. Just do a google search on "elwyn jenkins" and read all about his B.S.
Posted by: Life Rast on November 8, 2003 05:51 AM
Case Study No. 2
Another tale of blogging excess
Elwyn Jenkins was the founder, CEO, and chairman of Standard Reserve, an Internet "digital cash" currency company with several subsidiaries and offices in several countries, that was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Jenkins' wife Glenda and son Loryn were also involved in the company. In 2002 it went bankrupt and customers lost their money. Lawsuits were filed by other directors against Elwyn Jenkins, who was fired, because customers' funds had been commingled with funds used lavishly for company expenses. (That's their choice of words, which softens those directors' own apparent negligence. Burned customers, on the other hand, prefer the term "stolen.") Mr. Jenkins now resides in Sydney, Australia and is known as "Microdoc," a blogger whose favorite topic is the Wonderful World of Google.
Mr. Jenkins has a number of blogging and other sites, most of which were set up in early 2003. Most of his domains are heavily interlinked. (Half of the sites below began timing out on 2003-06-02, a day after Mr. Jenkins read this page. Another has an empty home page and returns "not found" for old links. The blogrolls on his home pages have been cut back drastically, although they can still be seen on a few hundred archive pages.)
www.microdoc-news.info www.microdocs-news.info smoogle.info
googlevillage.info blogging-news.info googlology.info
microdoc.bloki.com www.question-factory.com meeting-mentor.blogspot.com
radio.weblogs.com/0111745 verityintellectualproperties.com textchunk.info
personalbrain.info technacy.info verity-ip.com
bloggers-news.info
His pro-Google blogging reflects a bizarre penchant for coining new words. The so-called "Google research" on his blogs does not meet any standards for research that we've ever seen, and some of his conclusions would be laughable if they weren't so vague as to defy any sort of reaction whatsoever. Together with the made-up words to define the role of Google and bloggers as the new players in "technacy," the entire effort fails to instruct or impress. Print editors often have to "edit to fit," to squeeze into column inches. Bloggers edit for PageRank.
Wise words from blog spammer Elwyn Jenkins, PhD
"There is an additional idea that you need to implement to get good results from Google and that is as you write each day, make sure you are using new words connected with your area of interest. I have a list of 158 words that must arrive in my text over a two month period -- these, if you like, are keywords that have to do with my area of interest. Make a list and make sure you get through all of them over a certain time. This will increase the number of people arriving at your site from Google who put in all manner of query strings." -- found on a pro-Google forum, 2003-05-02
There's also another method to the madness. Mr. Jenkins gets on the blogrolls of other bloggers, and his traffic to the two Microdoc News mirror sites is respectable. Some A-list bloggers such as Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and Evan Williams (evhead.com) have unthinkingly complimented him and linked to these sites. Williams, the co-founder of the company behind blogger.com and now a Google employee, actually has Microdoc News on his blogroll. In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content.
Making money is clearly his goal. The key sentence from one of his pages, titled Make Money Online, is this: "Dr. Jenkins has pioneered a unique approach to using Google and blogs to build traffic." Another page plugged a book on the topic of email marketing, titled Discover the Hidden Power of Email.
Screen shots of Make Money Online:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4
Screen shots of Discover the Hidden Power of Email:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4 PgDn5 PgDn6 PgDn7 PgDn8
In other words, if you pay him money, he'll tell you how to game Google through blogging in order to make even more money. This is nearly identical to the familiar schemes of link farms, or of selling PageRank -- except that the outright sale of text ads with pricing based on PageRank is much more honest than what Mr. Jenkins is doing. The new twist on these old schemes is that Mr. Jenkins actually claims that PageRank doesn't matter that much for Google traffic. All the time he claims this, he uses every method known to increase his PageRank, and brown-noses Google at every opportunity. It's basically a covert gaming technique that uses old schemes covered up with vague and questionable content, while denying that such schemes have any relevance at all.
In spy tradecraft, they call this a "cover story." The A-list of bloggers, who cannot see past their own brown noses, are buying into it uncritically.
Posted by: Justin Langa | November 8, 2003 6:00 AM
Posted by xian at October 17, 2003 10:55 AM
TrackBack (0)
Comments
Lis all lies. Jenkins is a fraud and DID DEFRAUDS Standard Transactions and ruint many peoples' lives - he also owes max and commerce over $300000. He ruint Standard Reserve too. Their are lots of folk in Atlanta GA after Jenkins blood coz he theived them too. He also is selling a fake cancer cure in AUstralia. Just do a google search on "elwyn jenkins" and read all about his B.S.
Posted by: Life Rast on November 8, 2003 05:51 AM
Case Study No. 2
Another tale of blogging excess
Elwyn Jenkins was the founder, CEO, and chairman of Standard Reserve, an Internet "digital cash" currency company with several subsidiaries and offices in several countries, that was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Jenkins' wife Glenda and son Loryn were also involved in the company. In 2002 it went bankrupt and customers lost their money. Lawsuits were filed by other directors against Elwyn Jenkins, who was fired, because customers' funds had been commingled with funds used lavishly for company expenses. (That's their choice of words, which softens those directors' own apparent negligence. Burned customers, on the other hand, prefer the term "stolen.") Mr. Jenkins now resides in Sydney, Australia and is known as "Microdoc," a blogger whose favorite topic is the Wonderful World of Google.
Mr. Jenkins has a number of blogging and other sites, most of which were set up in early 2003. Most of his domains are heavily interlinked. (Half of the sites below began timing out on 2003-06-02, a day after Mr. Jenkins read this page. Another has an empty home page and returns "not found" for old links. The blogrolls on his home pages have been cut back drastically, although they can still be seen on a few hundred archive pages.)
www.microdoc-news.info www.microdocs-news.info smoogle.info
googlevillage.info blogging-news.info googlology.info
microdoc.bloki.com www.question-factory.com meeting-mentor.blogspot.com
radio.weblogs.com/0111745 verityintellectualproperties.com textchunk.info
personalbrain.info technacy.info verity-ip.com
bloggers-news.info
His pro-Google blogging reflects a bizarre penchant for coining new words. The so-called "Google research" on his blogs does not meet any standards for research that we've ever seen, and some of his conclusions would be laughable if they weren't so vague as to defy any sort of reaction whatsoever. Together with the made-up words to define the role of Google and bloggers as the new players in "technacy," the entire effort fails to instruct or impress. Print editors often have to "edit to fit," to squeeze into column inches. Bloggers edit for PageRank.
Wise words from blog spammer Elwyn Jenkins, PhD
"There is an additional idea that you need to implement to get good results from Google and that is as you write each day, make sure you are using new words connected with your area of interest. I have a list of 158 words that must arrive in my text over a two month period -- these, if you like, are keywords that have to do with my area of interest. Make a list and make sure you get through all of them over a certain time. This will increase the number of people arriving at your site from Google who put in all manner of query strings." -- found on a pro-Google forum, 2003-05-02
There's also another method to the madness. Mr. Jenkins gets on the blogrolls of other bloggers, and his traffic to the two Microdoc News mirror sites is respectable. Some A-list bloggers such as Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and Evan Williams (evhead.com) have unthinkingly complimented him and linked to these sites. Williams, the co-founder of the company behind blogger.com and now a Google employee, actually has Microdoc News on his blogroll. In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content.
Making money is clearly his goal. The key sentence from one of his pages, titled Make Money Online, is this: "Dr. Jenkins has pioneered a unique approach to using Google and blogs to build traffic." Another page plugged a book on the topic of email marketing, titled Discover the Hidden Power of Email.
Screen shots of Make Money Online:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4
Screen shots of Discover the Hidden Power of Email:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4 PgDn5 PgDn6 PgDn7 PgDn8
In other words, if you pay him money, he'll tell you how to game Google through blogging in order to make even more money. This is nearly identical to the familiar schemes of link farms, or of selling PageRank -- except that the outright sale of text ads with pricing based on PageRank is much more honest than what Mr. Jenkins is doing. The new twist on these old schemes is that Mr. Jenkins actually claims that PageRank doesn't matter that much for Google traffic. All the time he claims this, he uses every method known to increase his PageRank, and brown-noses Google at every opportunity. It's basically a covert gaming technique that uses old schemes covered up with vague and questionable content, while denying that such schemes have any relevance at all.
In spy tradecraft, they call this a "cover story." The A-list of bloggers, who cannot see past their own brown noses, are buying into it uncritically.
Posted by: Justin Langa | November 8, 2003 6:00 AM