A story about User X:

1. User X subscribes to TechSite on Bloglines
2. Google Reader v2 is released, tech people say how awesome it is
3. User X imports feeds into Google Reader
4. Bloglines and Google Reader both report User X as a subscriber to TechSite
5. TechSite boasts large increase in readership

Repeat above * 500+ users for popular tech blogs. End result: an anatomy of inflated RSS stats.

I suggest FeedBurner allow you to insert a 1×1 pixel on every post. Track IP, get ‘unique readers’ and ‘pageviews’ for a post. This method has its own set of flaws, but it should be some interesting numbers.

If there is one weakness I have, it is my ability to ramble. I ramble on like no one I have ever met - ideas and thoughts and what not just spew out, often times incoherently.

I’m sure regular readers know what I’m talking about

So amidst the recent surge in ‘copywriting’ posts, its been odd that very few have actually tackled on the meat of the issue. Almost every single one talks about using bullet points, how to ‘engage’ the reader, how to use the word ‘you‘, and what not. Over and over we hear about engagement, conversation, persuasion, and other multi-syllable words that will take you to riches.

And yet none explicitly deal with the fundamental issue: too many damn words.

Blogging can be a very narcissistic exercise. And while in regular correspondence people love to ‘hear themselves speak’, online (and in blogs) people love to throw out lengthy posts that could be summarized in roughly 1/10th the time.

I’m not picking on personal blogs. Those are exempt. Me too - this blog is more about my ramblings than any effort in creating money. But ‘professional’ blogs - those are ripe with excessive words. Dean (link above) was right in characterizing these words as ‘lazy.’ The education ’system’ (I use that word lightly) has, over the years, shoved long essays down our throats. Write 15 pages on why Dr. Faustus was an idiot. Give me a 20 page essay on catharsis found in King Lear. Spend 10 pages explaining to me how hubris and MacBeth did not mingle well. It was rather odd - we were never told to focus on our argument, or on a number of points to argue … oh dear no, the damn exercise of writing was simply to get to X number of pages.

If you need X words instead of Y words (where X < Y) to get your point across - then bloody do it.

UPDATE: About 15 minutes later, I decided to test myself. Re-write what I just wrote. Prove my point. The results:

I ramble. Its what I do. My thoughts and ideas just spew out unfiltered.

I’m sure regular readers know what I’m talking about

Recently there has been a surge in conversation about ‘copywriting’. Heavy on fat and light on substance, they all recommend the same things: use bullet points, engage the reader, make it about ‘you’ (the reader), and so forth. Buzzwords like engagement, conversation, and persuasion fly around like a magic-bullet to riches.

None deal with the fundamental problem: too many damn words.

Blogging can be very narcissistic. Classic narcissm involved people who loved to ‘hear themselves speak’. The blog world replaces that with ‘love to write excessive text.’ 90% bloat comes free.

Personal blogs are exempt. Mine included - this blog is for rambling, not to make money. But professional blogs - they consist of excessive word usage. Dean (linked above) was correct in calling them ‘lazy words’. The education ’system’ has conditioned us on writing pages, not content. From why Dr. Faustus was an idiot to catharsis experienced by King Lear to Macbeth’s hubris, our only requirement was the nubmer of pages we wrote. Forget the actual argument or points being argued - it was all about the page count. And that has translated to blogging.

If you need X words instead of Y words (where X < Y), only lazy people go with Y.

The above ended up with 229 words. The original was 326 words. 97 less words, or ~30% less than the original.

Comments?

I hate affiliate programs. Not the actual concept, or what happens when you make a sale. Oh no - I hate the actual programs. Many of them are setup in a rather sneaky way that do nothing but try to extract money from your traffic without giving up a dime. And then you have the problem of cookie stealing, and companies building up their brand without paying you a dime - argh!

I make more money from affiliate programs than advertising or sales. But - every single one of the affiliate programs we use (we use 5) all provide XML systems. We are able to complete a transaction without a user ever knowing that we are just a frontend. The most important part here is the provider is never able to exert their brand influence on the end user. Next time User X wants to buy a product, he (or she) will come back to our site and re-purchase. Huzzah!

Actual example: iBegin Toronto. Revenues from ads: $x. Revenue from hotel reservations: $x * 4.

And our partners treat us well. We get solid traffic. We don’t trick our users or annoy them. And we have generated millions in revenue (literally) for them. Its a relationship where both parties try hard to make the most of it.

Speaking of which - none of the companies I work with actually advertise an XML system. We contacted their affiliate manager, talked about the high quality traffic that flows through us, and reached a deal. Simple and easy

[this post catches me up for the weekend so I am again averaging exactly one post per day]

No ‘niche’ gets as nasty and personal as politics. It seems as time drags on, more and more people are convinced that the only way to co-exist with someone else is to hammer in your beliefs and ideals into them, whether they believe it or not. The idea of intellectual discourse seems almost dead.

So when you take user generated content and mix in politics, what do you get? Digg’s political news, political opinion, and world news. If people thought the tech side easily skewed to topics that were pro-Apple, pro-Ubuntu, or anti-MS, the political/news areas are about who can troll best.

The topics du jour mostly revolve around how evil Islam is and/or how evil Iran is. An occasional story about a US presidential candidate is thrown around.

A few case examples:

http://digg.com/politics/Group_for_former_Muslims_threatened_by_Muslims
The most obvious case of focus groups pushing their agenda is if one reads the comments. As one progresses down the article, you can see that the original comments are all virulently anti-islamic. As you progress down, the entire tone of ‘discussion.’ changes. Users like patriotickiwi and tomcpp continue to fan the flames for as long as they can. The reality of the content was ‘Leader of ex-Muslim group anonymously threatened.’. The sensationalist headline was ‘Group for former Muslims threatened by Muslims’

Unfortunately I cannot find the link right now, but there was a delightful link to the LittleGreenFootballs (one of the most popular right-wing/anti-Muslim website) which talked about the large influx of traffic by working on Digg. There is a post though on where its readers are recommended they report a blog that was on Digg for an anti-LGF post. (mouthful eh?)

Next up we have example users. Included with delightful users like patriotickiwi and tomcpp we have users like copmoore, Robbie Cooper, davenp35, and so forth and so forth. These are people with a specific agenda. In the tech news, the general idea is that people love Apple. So when they see an Apple story, they digg it. But they also digg other stuff. The above subset of people have only one goal - to use Digg as a mouthpiece showing Muslims in a bad light. Every single one of their comments … well, I will let the comments speak for themselves.

The other interesting example is as follows: http://digg.com/politics/Digg_Presidential_Data_Who_s_hot_and_who_s_not. The original poster himself is a Libertarian. So while the 41.6 percent number is bolded (in BIG RED), isn’t it a bit odd how 10 posts still got through to the frontpage? At a ~9% success rate, our fearless Ron Paul has almost 4x the success of Obama (the current media ‘darling’), and over 9x more success than Clinton. Obama, Gulliani, and McCain are all around 2%, and yet Mr. Ron Paul clocks in at 9%? If anything, his numbers show an odd affinity between Ron Paul and Digg’s frontpage.

I could go ahead and showcase the diggers fro Ron Paul, but I leave that as an academic exercise for the readers

Digg’s wordly news sections are fraught with people and agendas. And it is something that needs to be fixed (how? I don’t have a solution in that case).

I like Google’s webmaster tools. Definitely the best ‘out-reach’ system from any of the major search engines, it is an awesome way to get a quick snapshot on your sites (as Google sees it).

One thing that has recently annoyed me is how it deals with sitemaps. Why can a sitemap only link to 1,000 other sitemaps, and only 50,000 urls in one sitemap? It may seem like an odd comment, but when you have the formula of popular site + lots of users + tags it is easy to generate a lot of pages. Not to say that it would generate over 50 million pages, but I like having my sitemaps categorized. And it would be easier to have a sitemap_tags.xml, sitemap_pages.xml, etc. Maybe I’m lazy, but the 50,000 number seems arbitrary.

Same goes for 1000 other sitemaps. On a recent site I created (standard disclaimer of it being unique - cost me roughly $500,000), there were a total of 16 million pages. Two hours later I’m still struggling with the sitemap system (it complains I have over 1000 sitemaps when in fact I only have roughly 800 (20k links per page)). I’ve gotten as high as 13.9 million pages, and without the ability to actually contact Google Webmaster Team (can’t find that anywhere), I guess I have to settle there. But again - that 1000 limit seems completely arbitrary.

Update 7 hours later: I re-visited the page, and now its finding them all A-Ok.

UPDATE: Read more about this site

There are few things in life that bug me than inefficient systems. I don’t mean inefficiency for the sake of art or beauty. Hell, I hate cellphones etc because I find it imperative to get a break from being connected all the time.

There are two common place systems that are the bane of me: traffic lights and elevators.

Now that I’m no longer in a bustling metro (Toronto), the elevator issue is mostly gone. But oh dear did it used to bug me - you would imagine such a system would put a high priority on efficiency. When I was in Toronto, I lived in a pretty upscale condo (my rent was 25% off as my friend owned a few condos in that building). I was on the 30th floor - my office view was fantastic (for those in Toronto, I was at Yonge/Yorkville and could see all the way up Yonge). But I remember once waiting 15 minutes to get to the bottom floor. Absolutely insane. You would think a building with three elevators would be able to get me down to the ground faster than 900 seconds.

And now traffic lights. While in Toronto, where the subway/walking was the norm (I miss walking), traffic lights weren’t a big headache. Now living in a more subarbanish US city (still with a population over 750,000) the traffic lights drive me insane. Green left turns that stay on when there was only one car (and why even bother with a green left turn). Lights that turn red because they are based on a simple timer. Lights that turn green for a single car and literally take over 30 seconds to turn over.

What bugs me about the above two is that the problems are not unique to a geographic area or special circumstance. They happen in every damn city everywhere in the world. You would think the control logic would be smart enough to make choices (as a computer engineer by degree I can see the logic involved).

Not that it has gone nuts or anything … just that I am waiting on things that are out of my control. Is it ready? Yep. Is it live? Newp.

Go on over to iBegin Source and be sure to pop in your email. It may just be worth it … or not. I am leaning towards it being worth it, but no guarantees!

Beyond my little plug about iBegin there, the real meat here is about how managing a business brings about frustrations people normally don’t deal with. When I was a wee-one on my own, making a website was easier. I would get a designer to quickly make a design, or alternatively I would go and use a template (as a placeholder). Programming, writing content, hammering out the non-spam emails … it all counted on me. I had no one to blame for failure but my self (and in that same manner, no one to pat on the back for success but me).

Things are much different now. A larger organization (we have dedicated programmers, designers, artists, writers, server-admin, etc) means that while we get a lot more stuff done (in the same timeframe), but it also means that sometimes Person X is waiting on Person Y. And in my current situation (with iBegin Source), I am waiting on Person X, Person Y, and Person Z.

This can be quite terrifying. For micromanagers, having such ‘idle’ time can end up with you interfering in your employees’ progress (something I used to do). People hate losing control … (most) business owners completely loathe losing control. Trust is hard - but worth it in the end.

I remember a time when Blog Networks were the it thing. Everyone and their mother was setting up blog networks. People actually cared when a name was changed from ‘Pajama Media’ to ‘Open Source Media’ (though I do agree OSM doesn’t sound very good).

Blogs were the path to easy riches.

About time reality set in.

Perusing around, I came across this sale: Parents Behaving Badly for sale. On its own not very notable, but what was interesting was that they were under the b5Media umbrella. For those that don’t remember, the network recently announced 2 million in funding.

This sale sets off some questions. What exactly does it mean to be ‘owned within the network’ - does b5 own it, or does Person X own it? If b5 owns it - how did it sell? If Person X - why is it under b5’s brand? I assume that b5media actually does own it, and Person X was just running it (and now wants out). But then - is Person X actually selling her ‘webmaster’ position? Can she even do that? Is there some sort of easy answer I just don’t get?

Through all those questions, the real point was that people are finally realizing that blogs are not easy money. Blog networks are not easy money. It takes a lot of time, dedication, and great staff to get to a successful position.

If it wasn’t for Splashpress buying out sites like Blog Herald and Performancing, things would be getting boring

I read the Technosailor no-sale-happened post with a bit of interest. We had taken a quick look, but had decided to pass (more on that later).

We’ve been involved with selling blog resources (but never blogs) and also been involved in acquiring blogs ourselves. And while Jacob does all the heavylifting in finding great bloggers and so forth, there is one condition I have always placed on any purchase involving a blog:

If the blogger does not come with it, we don’t want it

Jacob picked up Blogging Pro and ForeverGeek before we merged. And the lesson he got there was that half the value is in the blogger. What I like about blogs is that it is filled with personality - when I read it, I am subjected (to use that word) to a certain style of english. There are thousands of blogs regurgitating the same information over and over. I like my regurgitated news with a certain flair

So back to Technosailor - things he did wrong:

1. Care that people said he was asking too much. Almost all sites I have sold I have had people complain that the starting bid was too high (nevermind the actual BIN). Every single one has hit the BIN. People always whine and complain … don’t forget, they don’t care about you. They just want the best deal possible.
2. Use of the word potential. Any time I look at a sale and I see ‘lots of potential‘ I immediately hit BACK. Every website has potential. To me it says - “I haven’t done much with this site, but if you work your ass off, you may be richly rewarded. If not well - you didn’t unlock its potential”
3. He was Aaron Brazell. Lets be honest - he is basically the IT/server guy at b5 media. His audience is interested in how Digg is nothing compared to Grey’s Anatomy. The new buyer couldn’t emulate that. If it does have so much potential, why doesn’t b5 push it more?

Aaron’s writings are interesting. His blog is pretty good. But a buyer would have such an uphill battle that unless the blog was highly niche-based (ala Blog Herald), acquiring it at a high multiple just doesn’t make sense.

When it comes to the US, Yahoo! Local is by far the best site. As I outlined in my previous post about scrubbing local data, they have taken extra steps to make sure their data is accurate and clean. They have a ton of data and information - from local reviews to web-results to even extra information gleaned from sources like Delicious.

Yet dammit to hell, they have by far the most complex interface I have ever come across. Eg I was looking at this listing for Chipotle Mexican Grill. What do I see on the top:

Save to Collection | Save to My Web | Send to Phone | Add to Address Book | Email to Friend | Print

Someone tell me the inherent difference between ‘Collection’, ‘My Web’, and ‘Address Book’. Not only is the ‘Collection’ link on top, but also on the side.

Of course, at the same time Yahoo! is trying to convince me to read a review, to rate it, to edit it, to map it (whats that on my right), to get directions, to see a larger map, show various things, save to my collection, write a review, see Donny O’s reviews, (boldfaced) write a review, search the web (even with web references), a link to alternatives (with a list of alternatives right under neath it too), a plug for Yahoo! Answers, and then … way on the bottom (building value for advertisers) … the category sponsors.

And then those damn links again.

I feel a headache coming on …