Webby Thoughts

When I signed up for my Rojo account, I was automatically signed up for a feed that showed my local city news.

I have learned several things from that feed. Recently, while driving home from work, there were tons of cops on one of the main roads in the city. I learned the next day that all of the cities along the road were participating in a huge crackdown to try and slow down the traffic to prevent more accidents that have been increasing recently.

I also learned that while my daughter is not going to be able to go to public preschool because the funding isn’t there for 3 year olds with no at risk factors, a few private schools are eligible for some of that funding which might give us a better chance to get her in preschool at one of them if they increase their staffing.

I don’t ever read the newspaper or watch TV news and most online news doesn’t cover the local news very well. I’ve been addicted to this little innocent looking feed that I almost deleted when I first noticed it.

Just today I decided that I want to expand on my tightly targetted feeds to help me keep track of some niches that I’m interested in. I did a little research into how the feed was created and found that it is actually coming from Topix.net. I typed in a couple new searches and found that they somehow seem to provide some really nice information that I probably would never easily find and track any other way.

I don’t think that I ever plan on setting up a home page on their website, but I will be adding a few of their feeds to my Bloglines and Rojo accounts.

I have two issues with this bill. Everytime I talk about them I end up getting tangled up between the two issues. Here’s my attempt to handle both issues a little more separately.

1) Kids shouldn’t be using Myspace in school. Fine, I can agree with this statement, but it cannot be used as an argument in support of the HR 5319. The bill is intended to protect kids from online predators. Any mention of young kids today and what they get away with in the classroom is irrelevant to the argument about whether this bill will protect kids from online predators. There are plenty of things kids shouldn’t be doing in school that are not banned by laws but are still enforced by schools. I was never allowed to play yo-yo in the classroom and don’t think I didn’t try.

2) This bill will protect kids from online predators. I just don’t buy this argument. It strikes a very emotional nerve. Especially for those of us with kids. I have yet to see any numbers backing up this claim. When seat belt laws and speed limit laws were enforced, there were tons of studies documenting their arguments. If somebody could show me the study that indicates that online predators use Myspace more effectively than public parks, malls, churches, schools and anywhere else that bad things happen to kids, I might change my mind but so far I’ve just heard people talking.

If the politicians really think that Myspace is so dangerous for kids, then ban the site for kids. Everywhere. Don’t try some weak ineffective things like only preventing it at school and libraries.

How would you like to be one of the politicians that voted against the bill because you thought it wasn’t going to fix a problem? All of them are going to get abused during the next elections as being pro-predator. Hopefully people will be smart enough to realize that you can be against a bill that is against predators for reasons other than wanting to help them out. Sometimes, no matter how good the intent, the bill just isn’t right.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reported a Digg user account being sold on eBay.

Apparently even your identity and popularity can be sold on eBay these days.

A couple interesting things to note about this sale. The current bid is $325. But, the bid seems to be falsely driven up by a brand spanking new eBay Profile named onstartups who was created yesterday and so far never done anything on eBay. Not very subtle.

Somebody else has matched onstartups top bid, so the bidding war seems to be working.

Michael Arrington points out that the value of the Digg acount does have potential real monetary value both from Netscape’s offer to pay top Digg users to submit stories for Digg instead, and from the potential of using the Digg account on Digg to increase the chance of a users stories reaching the front page of Digg and landing the writer of the story extra adclick revenue.

Maybe that is the next phase. Maybe bloggers will start paying the big submitters to submit their own posts in the hope of attracting more readers and advertising revenue.

Everything online is for sale.

I stumbled on a neat new web tool today (I would provide the source, but I can’t find it now, sorry). The new tool is HitTail. They track the ways readers find your website. Specifically, they track the keyword phrases that the reader typed into the search engine that lead them to your page.

I added the little piece of JavaScript onto my websites and waited for people to find me. I don’t get much traffic, so it took a little while. I was shocked to learn that I was in the top 10 on Google for the phrase on the keyword “monetize” yesterday. As I am writing this, I am equally shocked to find that I can’t find myself anywhere for that same phrase today. You fickle beast, Google.

I also learned that I am the third hit on msn.search.com for the keyword phrase “waffle recipe”. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been more proud of myself in my life.

Anyway, it is interesting to note how people are finding you. In stats software like Sitemeter and Statcounter it is often easy to lose track of that amidst all the clutter of page hits and visit lengths. HitTail is all about keywords and that’s pretty much all they keep track of.

Right now, they focus on the traditional search engines. I suggested in their forum that they might want to start thinking about tracking the phrases people use to find you from Technorati and del.icio.us and the other bookmarking sites.

In addition to just showing you the keyword phrases, they let you save some of those phrases as ToDo action items that you can check off when you write about them. I think this process could be streamlined, but enjoy the concept. One of my requests is that in addition to including the search phrase that led to your site, they do a lookup in one of the services that track how often related keywords are searched and provide suggestions of popular related keywords you might want to pursue.

The service is free for everybody under certain traffic levels. I couldn’t find the number, but I’m sure a quick question on their forum would get a reply. They seem to answer all questions very quickly.

Here is a link to the HitTail blog where they discuss their opinions on SEO, how to optimize your website, and how they think search engines work now and what kind of changes might be coming up.

Go check out their site. It is a really useful tool for days when you have trouble thinking up something to write about.

Reddit recently add sub domains for Slate and The New York Times. So far, Slate seems to be quite a bit more popular if the number of votes is any indication. It sounds like Reddit is trying to demonstrate to potential buyers how much they can help increase traffic. Or maybe one of the developers just thought it would be a good idea.

The question is whether the voting capability of a site like Reddit would ever have any value to a traditional media brand.

Netscape is finding out the hard way that making big changes from passive to active users does not always happen without complaints. Not everybody wants to spend time participating. A lot of people are just spending their lunch time surfing the news and expect the site they are visiting to organize it for them. There is a certain comfort that comes from repeated use of sites with strong editorial control.

A news source like Slate and The New York Times could get a nice benefit from the risk, though. In real time, and in a very direct way, they would be able to see which articles were the most popular. If analyzed properly, they could use that information to target news stories that would appeal to their readers.

That benefit comes with its own risk. Slashdot gets suggestions for articles from users and then the editors decide what belongs on the main page and what belongs on the category pages. The editors are frequently accused of supporting or being biased against certain topics. When people feel proud or slighted, it is normally the edge cases that seem to have the strongest reaction. If an article on a school board voting on discussing Intelligent Design gets a ton of response from the pro/con-ID groups, does that mean that the readers want more stories about ID, or are there a large group of readers that are bored by the story but just remain silent.

The writers would have to sort through the noise and find a way to figure out what the readers really want.
If one of the traditional media sites decides to try to give the story placement control to the readers, they would be better off offering the new Diggified version of the site AND the old editor sorted version of the site. To try and encourage voting from the old school users, they could include the vote buttons next to each story in the old layout, too.

Netscape should have gone this route with their recent change to user controlled content. There’s no reason the two kinds of filtering of data couldn’t have occurred together.
Somebody like Slate or The New York Times would be at an even greater disadvantage to switch to a voting system since they would have a much smaller story base to pull from. It’s not like The New York Times is going to want you reading editorials from other newspapers that are hosted on their competitors site. They need you focused on their own articles and ads.
Very few readers are going to get too excited about having the small number of articles a traditional print media site deals with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis on a voting type site especially if all the articles come from one source and without allowing users to submit their own stories they find on the internet. They’ll just go to Digg or Reddit and read the best of the newspapers and magazines that make it to the top of their aggregator site.

There is a big stink going on right not because Jason Calacanis of Netscape is offering to pay top submitters at competing social networking sites.

Kent Newsome says that he thinks “the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape … is nutty” but concedes that Jason has made a lot of money doing seemingly crazy before.

The last time I visited Netscape I noticed that they monetize their site with ads. That means they are hoping to get more people to click the ads and the best way to do that is to get more eyeballs on the site.

If Jason really can attract some of those top submitters (and for $1000 a month, he will), then he will have managed to attract people to his site that know how to find articles that attract attention and probably improve the content of the site.

More importantly, he will have attracted a strong group of mentors who can help lead the newbies into the land of social bookmarking. One of the changes Netscape recently made included letting users vote on articles and having the most popular articles get the best real estate space on the home page. A lot of the current users of Netscape don’t really understand how to thrive in this kind of system which would explain the strong backlash to the changes from the existing users.

The new power users for hire might manage to excite the everyday users at Netscape and attract new eyeballs, I mean users. People online like to participate and vote for things once they realize that is what they are supposed to do. 12 of those power users will cost Netscape about $144,000 a year. Can Netscape really make $144,000 a year in ad revenue just by having 12 good submitters on their payroll?

Maybe Jason is nutty. But, Jason is looking at the bigger picture. He is not trying to beat down digg. He’s just trying to improve Netscape. Digg will continue to thrive. People will step up to fill in the spots of the people that leave for Netscape. Jason said, “It really isn’t about Netscape vs. DIGG… in reality the battle is ’social news vs. top-down news.’”

He’s just trying to position Netscape to get in a position to be one of the leaders in social news while there is still time.  A couple years ago, he might look like a nutty rich man, again.

For some reason I got swept up recently with the Digg and Reddit social bookmarking sites. The lure of thousands of people digging what I have to say got the better of me and I started submitting some of my own stories. Lame.

I know that there is no money to be gained from the viewers of these sites because they normally block ads or just ignore them. Still, there’s something about trying to reach as big of an audience as possible and it is so easy to submit a story that I got carried away.

It is exciting to submit the story and then watch 30-70 people come to the site over the next 12-24 hours. How much easier could it be? And when stories take off, the traffic is insane, so I hear. If I ever do write something that gets popular over there it will be interesting to see if my Go Daddy hosted website can survive and how much bandwidth really gets used.

Fortunately, before I got too carried away, one of the Digg users called me out saying:

Last time I checked, Digg was a news site, not a “link your lame blog” site. This isn’t even general science related. It’s full of assumptions, presumptions, and opinions.

There’s a reason your blog doesn’t get traffic as it is. Thumbs down.

Of course, I was pissed at first. But after thinking it over for a couple minutes I realized he was right and just doing his best to help protect Digg. If people continuously submit their own crap instead of articles that are actually interesting, then sites like Digg and Reddit will be worthless. There’s a reason Netscape is willing to pay the good submitters $1000/month to find good content. Good content brings eyeballs. People submitting their own websites is just more spam on the internet.

I decided that I do not want to be a part of any kind of spam. So, I made a promise to myself that I will not be submitting my own stories to any of the social bookmarking sites from now on. If you write something of your own that you’d like me to read, send me a link and if I like it, I will submit your good stories to Digg or Reddit.

When I go to somebody’s blog and see adsense or any other type of advertising, I barely notice. I’m starting to get disturbed when I see it on service sites. Even more disturbing are service sites that don’t have any way of earning any money.

Having no income stream on a service site tells me that the creators are only hoping to get bought out by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Then what happens to the service. In the best case scenario, it will continue to be free but probably with more advertisements on it. In the worst case scenario, the site won’t earn the money the buyer expects and they’ll kill the project.

I like Writely quite a bit. I’m a big fan of any service that let’s me store my information online since I like to be able to access things for short periods of time from lots of different locations. If Google decides that it will take too much work to make Writely fit perfectly in their business plans, what will it’s future be.

Bloglines is a service that I use daily and that I’ve already bragged about here. I would hate to see Bloglines disappear or really altered that much. I like it as a big fancy rss bookmark organizer that I can access from anywhere.

I read a lot of complaints that Bloglines doesn’t handle search very well. I’m not concerned with using them for search. I would prefer if they gave up that avenue for a while and focused soley on making my big, fancy rss bookmark organizer work flawlessly. I would be willing to pay a small fee, probably up to around $5/month to use Bloglines in this manner.

Paying a fee does not guarantee that the creators of a site plan to stick with the project, but if the money starts to roll in, it sure makes it a little harder for them to bail on the project. Plus, if a project can convince people to pay a few dollars a month, that has to look like a better business prospect to the Big 3 when they come around to buy something.

Flickr and Myspace both survive entirely by advertising revenue. I am the last person to suggest that advertising money is going to be leaving the internet. I expect it to be around in various forms for as long as the internet is around. The big monsters of the internet like Flickr and Myspace can make quite a bit of money from advertising and good for them.

The internet is an enormous market place. I think some of the niche service sites would do better to focus on making money by making a product that people love and are willing to spend a small sum each month on. Once people commit their money to a product, they are going to be a lot more loyal to that product as long as it continues to serve their needs.

I’ve had my Bloglines account for a while now. Whenever I hear of a new aggregator, I always go sign up and try it out for a little bit. So far, I haven’t found one that I like better the Bloglines.

1) Bloglines is quick. Clicking on anything and everything happens fast enough to keep me happy.

2) Bloglines is simple. The folder interface works very well for me. I like being able to select any individual feed, group of feeds, or even all feeds at once depending on what kind of mood I’m in. The layout is very basic and non-fancy. Saving posts is as easy as clicking the check box at the end of the post.
3) Bloglines is organized. In addition to being able to create folders, all of your feeds can be organized by drag-and-dropping them into the folder they belong. I just found out this morning that you can control-select multiple feeds and drag them all at once. Very slick.

4) Bloglines is online. This one is extremely important to me. I do a lot of my web reading while on break or lunch at work. I refuse to use a desktop aggregator. Online is the way for me. I much prefer that whenever/wherever I am connected to the internet to read the posts, I am also able to add the feed to my aggregator.

I have been playing with Rojo a bit recently and like a few of there features. The mojo system is a pretty good way to let the users help highlight the best things on the internet. The Rojo Top Stories section is a great way to find new feeds. I really don’t like how few options you have for sorting saved feeds which makes it even worse that you can’t create directories to group similar feeds together.

Rojo is good for reading the news, but not managing my special sites I want to keep track of. Bloglines is not as good at keeping track of what is new in the world, but it is the best for managing the feeds I want to keep track of.

If you want to see what I’m reading these days, here is my Bloglines feeds list.