10/90 and the Rule of the Reallies

I’ve been thinking more today about the conversation we had recently about the whole traffic verses content thing where blog building is concerned. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way choice of words affects the debate.

Last night, I talked a little to Seth Finkelstein and Brian Clark via our respective posts on the topic and the Comments thereto, and Brian and I concluded that most of us are largely preaching from the same book when it comes to content, traffic, links and the other aspects of blog building.

But today I started thinking that maybe I did short change the whole links business by focusing almost entirely on content. Yes, good content is the best way to cultivate links. Yes, I still believe the primary focus should be on content. I particularly enjoyed the conversation today on the Voice From the Cubicle podcast about writing a lot of content before you launch your blog or other website. As I said last night, far too many of these Web 2.0 science projects are tossing up web pages prematurely.

But as I also said last night, word of mouth is the best way to attract readers and links are, for better or worse, the blogosphere’s word of mouth.

All of which leads me to two points. One that I’ve mentioned in passing before and one that is new.

Let’s talk some about links. Not as the front-end goal but as a back end test to see what sort of content creates the word of mouth buzz that leads to more cross-blog conversation and, of course, to more inbound links.

The 10/90 Rule

I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to focus on it today. I believe, based on my experience and observations, that for most bloggers 10% of your posts will generate 90% of your links. Most posts will generate a link or two and maybe a couple of Comments, but the large majority of most bloggers’ inbound links will result from a small percentage of their posts.

The reason is pretty obvious. Once something gets raised in the distributed conversations that are the purpose and goal of the blogosphere, more and more people write about it and before long you have a ton of cross links, Comments and other conversational by-product.

The trick, of course, is to figure out a pattern that might make it easier to write more of those 10/90 posts.

One thing I have absolutely concluded is that it’s very hard to predict what will be a 10/90 post based on how hard it was to write or how much effort was put into it. Just because I think I’ve written a 10/90 post doesn’t mean anyone else will think so.

For example, when I published My Mobile Approach the other day, it was the culmination of around 6 hours of research and implementation of my mobile applications. I thought that post would jump start all kinds of conversations about mobile technology, and that I would learn about all kinds of mobile applications to add to my mobile application list. It got one Comment and died.

On the other hand, I have written many posts in just a few minutes that got picked up and resulted in a bunch of conversation. I wrote my Gatekeepers Strike Back post in about 10 minutes and it got all kinds of run.

The pattern, if there is one, is well hidden. But I have a working theory about it. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just my take on some things I’ve read, experienced and observed.

The Rule of the Reallies

The posts, both here and in other blogs I read, that seem to get legs on any consistent basis are the ones that do one of four things really well (thus the name the Rule of the Reallies):

1) Say something really right

Not in an arrogant, rock-star kind of way. And not in an I’m smarter than you kind of way. But in a “yes, that’s exactly right!” sort of way. For example, I was thinking about writing more on Web 2.0 this morning, until I saw Scott Karp’s post. He said what I was thinking, only better than I would have.

Being really right is what got Steve Rubel and Om Malik to the top of bloggers hill. Listen to 5 minutes of any of the many podcasts Steve was on yesterday and you’ll realize very quickly that he’s one smart, thoughtful guy.

My other smart blog of the moment is Techdirt– it seems like every time I read a post there, like this one for example, I feel like pumping my fist in the air and saying “yeah, that’s it!” I find a lot of the same sort of thing at Phil Sim‘s blog, Mathew Ingram‘s blog, Amy Gahran‘s blog(s), Zoli Erdos‘ blog and Seth Finkelstein‘s blog, among many others. It’s easy to toss up a link and restate the conversation, but these folks, even when they are disagreeing, always make good, sound points. You’ll never hear them telling you how smart they are- they just prove it day after day.

2) Say something really wrong

The other way for a post to get legs is to say something really wrong, so people have to correct you. Bloggers are like my mother the English teacher- they have the irresistable impulse to correct you when you say something wrong (Scott and Mathew have a grand time correcting each other).

Of course, by wrong I don’t really mean wrong. I mean something that other people will strongly disagree with. For example, when I saw Adam Green’s memetracker blog post, I just about fell over my chair trying to get a response written and published- and this is at least the third time I have linked to that one post. (As an aside, I actually agree with most of Adam’s ideas.)

Another example is Dennis Howlett’s post dumping on Memeorandum. I beat my keyboard to death responding to, and linking to, that post.

The point is not that I’m right and they’re wrong, because these are just opinions and there are very few wrong opinions. The point is that, without link baiting or employing any other pseudo-mind tricks, those posts created the overwhelming need to talk about it.

The results of course are Comments, links and other interaction.

3) Say something really funny

This one of the reallies is sadly ignored, at least in the tech corner of the blogosphere. Funny is one of the most effective ways to get noticed and to generate a word of mouth buzz. If you can combine funny with one of the other reallies, you have doubled or tripled the potential for buzz generation.

I know and like Kevin Hales, but this post made me notice and link to his blog. This one and more like it got him on my daily reading list.

I think a funny techish blog, maybe even using bunnies, would be very popular, very quickly.

4) Say Something really helpful

People love it when you do something that makes their life easier. There are a lot of blogs I read every day because they make it easier for me to find out about stuff, including Thomas Hawk (media and photography), Download Squad (software) and Techcrunch (new play dough creations).

The helpful post is probably the hardest to write, but it will have a longer shelf life as far as the conversation goes.

So What Does it Mean for Blog Building

It means that slow and steady is the way to the top of bloggers hill. And it means that while you can’t predict which posts will be your 10/90 ones, if you stay reasonably close to the reallies, the climb might be a little easier.

Really.

Social Media Tour, Part 2

More content from Steve Rubel’s social media tour has been published.

MarketingMonger – Steve joins Eric Mattson in a podcast about corporate blogging and how companies can use blogging to connect with their customers.

Podleaders – Tom Raftery and Steve talk about his move to Edelman, the public relations industry and podcasting.

Jeffrey Treem – Steve joins Jeffrey for the initial Voice from the Cubicle podcast and talks about employee blogging, accountability, starting a blog and other interesting topics.

Why I’m excited about this experiment.

ScobleFeeds A-Z: The S’s

This is part nineteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There are tons and tons of S’s, but I narrowed it down to two:

Simon Speight (RSS Feed)

Seth Godin’s Blog (RSS Feed)

Simon Speight’s blog has a lot of good, useful tech-related topics. It also has the best and probably only zoo joke.

Seth Godin’s Blog is, well, Seth Godin’s blog. He is a marketing expert and author. He does a fantastic job of writing about interesting things and hitting the sweetspot in terms of breadth of topics.

Honorable Mention:

Scobleizer (RSS Feed) (ineligible because obviously I already read it)

Sifry’s Alerts (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it)

Solution Watch (RSS Feed) (ineligible for the same reason)

Scripting News (RSS Feed) (ineligible for the same reason)

That Traffic Thing Again

So Brian Clark is mad at Steve Rubel for saying that blogging is not about traffic in the face of Brian’s Trading Words for Traffic report. Scoble chimes in to say that, while Brian’s report is useful, Steve is right. Which is sort of what I said last night.

Let’s think about this for a minute. I believe the four of us are agreeing a lot more than we’re disagreeing.

Lessons Learned on Bloggers Hill

As I’ve worked on building Newsome.Org, I’ve learned some things I didn’t know when I started. As a matter of fact, a lot of the things I now believe about blog building would have been highly counterintuitive to me back then.

For example, when I started blogging, I thought the object was to attract as many eyeballs to Newsome.Org as quickly as possible. When I developed web sites back in Bubble 1.0, that was certainly the goal. My initial plan was to use the same tools that worked so well for me back then to draw traffic to my blog. What I didn’t yet realize is that a blog is not a static experience, where one guy talks and everyone else sits in rapt attention. Rather, a blog is just one part of a greater community which feeds and is fed by other blogs and the bloggers who write them. In other words, you aren’t asking people to come to your blog just to read what you have to say- you want them to read first and then write, comment and link. It’s a many-sided conversation, which takes longer to get going than a speech or a sermon.

Through that trial and error (and thanks to some helpful advice from the Roberts and Steves and Oms of the world) I have learned that focusing primarily on traffic is not the way to build a blog. If you obsess on traffic, you won’t get the flow you hope for right away, and even if you did, it wouldn’t stay. People notice a car wreck immediately, but they don’t make it a point to come back to the place where they saw it. It’s immediate interest, but it’s also fleeting interest. On the other hand, people gravitate to a new park or other destination site more slowly, but they come back a lot.

One of the things a lot of these Web 2.0 companies/science projects are doing very wrong is throwing their web page up with little more than a logo. People stop by, but they don’t come back. And it’s hard to open twice.

After you get your content ready for a grand opening, then you want traffic. The best way to get traffic is by word of mouth, and, for better or worse, links are the blogosphere’s word of mouth. So I am not about to say that links aren’t important- they absolutely are. But it’s hard to grow links in a laboratory. You need to let them grow naturally.

And of course it would help if Technorati got a little more reliable at aggregating the ones you get. I am in the process of concluding that Technorati’s constant indexing breakdowns are a much bigger impediment to building a really successful blog than the lack of a link from a proverbial A-Lister. But that’s a topic for another post. And it will be.

Now About that Report

I read Brian’s report the night it was published, and some, but not all, of what it says is both logical and consistent with my current thinking. The biggest problem, for me and perhaps for Steve as well, is the link baiting part. Most bloggers you’d want to link bait know exactly when they’re being baited and most of them won’t bite. I’ve been link-baited a couple of times. Sometimes I responded (honestly because I was honored that anyone would go to the trouble of link baiting me), but sometimes I didn’t. Say what you will, but writing with the primary goal of mind-tricking someone into linking to you doesn’t work very well. I know, because I tried it a few times (not doing that is one of the lessons I learned along the way). Writing good content, commenting and becoming a part of the conversation works a lot better.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to be gleaned from Brian’s report, because there is. But disagreeing with one of its express or implied themes should not incite a blogospat.

It’s About Relationships

Rather than focus on links, the better approach is to focus on relationships. The blogosphere is a small place in a lot of ways, and if you add to the conversation, people will notice you. Not might. Will. Relationships allow for traveling companions as you trek up bloggers hill as well as Adam Green‘s link clusters.

Do I want links? You bet I do. I just know that there’s a better way to get them than begging, link-baiting and hoping.

Preachers Sharing a Corner

So in a way, we’re all preaching variants of the same sermon. Good content and good relationships builds connections which lead to links which leads to traffic, which leads to more good content.

You just have to put in the time and effort to create organic growth.

And where growth is concerned, slow and steady wins the race.

Notes: Steve Rubel's Social Media Tour

Steve’s social media tour is today.

I’ll say it one more time: this is a great way to add more voices to the conversation, and I applaud Steve for spending 12 straight hours doing so.

I’ll add notes and links to the various tour stops as they are published. Here’s the list so far:

Brian Oberkirch – Steve joins Brian in a podcast, in which they talk about the beginning of Steve’s blog, the combination of blogs and marketing and other interesting topics (including some kind words about Newsome.Org).

Fard Johnmar – Spoke with Steve about blogging and the healthcare industry.

Drew Benvie – Interviews Steve about blogging.

LTU Web Design – Steve joins Dino Baskovic in a podcast and talks about how communications practictioners can embrace blogging as well as what Web 2.0 means for the communications industry. The conversation covers full vs partial RSS feeds, social bookmarking and other interesting stuff.

I’ll add more links in another post, as additional content gets published.

Web 2.0: ‘Tis But a Scratch

tisbutascratch

Alex Halperin has a great read today about some of the social networking sites that are at the core of Web 2.0 and beneath the bubble that threatens to grow amid the frenzy that erupts every time someone uses the words “social” and “networking” in the same sentence.

A lot of these social networking and other Web 2.0 sites are well designed and interesting. One or two of them will get enough mindshare to survive and make some money. But somehow, just making some money isn’t good enough any more. We have to huff and puff these applications into some sort of a world-changing, IPO-in-the-making, eBay slaying juggernaut.

Let’s set forth a universally recognized truth from one of the great artistic creations of our time and see how we can apply it to the current situation.

First, a Reading

King Arthur: I am your king.

Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you.

King Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.

Woman: Well how’d you become king then?

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Farcical Ceremony

Again, a lot of these Web 2.0 applications are cool. I use some of them.

But let’s do a reality check. Web 2.0 and its creations are the playground of a very small subset of the population. Most people don’t know what Web 2.0 is, much less what tagging is. Say “social networking” to 98% of the people you know and they’ll think you’re talking about online personals.

Add the fact that the low barrier to entry for some of these applications results in a crowded space.

Then add the fact that very, very few of these applications have any hope of revenue other than via the crowded and cyclical online advertising game.

And you end up with something like this:

small user pool + lots of competition + no non-ad revenue = ?

And then try to tell me how there is enough money to be made to warrant all the buzz some of these applications are getting?

It’s like a bunch of kids making play dough creations. Every few minutes someone jumps up and says “look what I made!” Everybody oohs and ahs and then resumes working on their own project. The only difference is that at the end of the day, the play dough goes back in the can. Some people have convinced themselves that the Web 2.0 play dough will go in the bank.

The Moral of this Story

The problem is the scale, or at least the desired scale. Not every great idea or technological advance lends itself to the sort of scale and revenue it takes to become a juggernaut.

If I were the developer of one of these applications, I would try to think more like the family owned corner market and be really good at it. Pretending to be the next IBM is not only a waste of time, but it keeps the focus macro when it ought to be micro.

Bubble 2.0: Nick Carr Nails It

To my knowledge, the following sentence is the longest one I have ever written.

Trying to work his way back onto my reading list after being one-half of the most arrogant conversation ever held, Nick Carr takes a look at the ludicrous amount of over the top buzz surrounding Edgeio and basically puts one right between the eyes of the lesser fools who are trying to huff and puff up a new bubble in the hopes that some greater fools will toss cash instead of blue ribbons at the latest round of science projects that some are trying to spin into businesses.

That’s 88 words of bad writing, but it says exactly what I want to say.

Snared in the Censor's Net

When I read the post the other day at Boing Boing about internet censors denying people access to Boing Boing, I thought that was stupid and mentally wished Cory, et al. success in their efforts to expose such nonsense.

Then I sort of forgot about it.

Until, that is, Steve Newson discovered today that Newsome.Org is also being blocked by these idiots. Steve has all the particulars posted on his site, but the bottom line is that some outfit called Websense has decided that Newsome.Org is forbidden entertainment and has added it to its blocked sites list.

Let me first say a word about my censorship philosophy.

Business Context

There are only two legitimate reasons to censor adults at work- bandwidth issues and security issues. If everyone is listening to online radio at the same time, that can bring the entire network to a crawl, and that’s not good. Additionally, IT departments simply have to protect people from themselves where viruses, etc. are concerned. 99 people might know better than to open an email containing a virus, but the 100th person will do it every time.

Otherwise, if you have people who want to goof off and they can’t goof off on the net, they’ll goof off some other way. If they are not getting their work done, keeping them from reading Boing Boing and Newsome.Org is not going to change a thing.

That is an HR issue, not a technology issue.

Family Context

My kids aren’t yet old enough to surf the net (thankfully). But when they are, you can bet Daddy will lock down the family computer in a material and redundant fashion to keep them from seeing stuff on the net that we don’t let them watch on TV.

So I’m not a censorship basher. To the contrary, I am a future customer.

But this is Horse Manure

But for some jackass sitting in a cubicle somewhere to decide that this site, which by design is very family friendly, should be blocked is utter nonsense.

I’m going to look into this business and see what I can find out. I’ll leave it at that for now.

In the meantime, please read Boing Boing’s Guide to Defeating Censorware.

And stay tuned.

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 9

It’s time for Round 9 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 9:

AllPeers
Orb
Rallypoint
Zoozio
Blogbeat
Ziggs
Zoto
vSocial
Boltfolio
Wink

AllPeers is a Firefox extension based on a bittorent application that allows groups of buddies to share files. I have not used it, but it looks very, very cool.

Orb is an online application that allows you to stream live and recorded TV, photoes and audio files to any wifi device.

Rallypoint is a web based collaboration tool where groups can create and share documents. The web page is thin on detail.

Zoozio is a customized portal creator, similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes. It is not yet live and there are no details on their web page. This is a crowded space.

Blogbeat is a stats tracking service for blogs. It’s cheap (starting at $6 a month), but Google Analytics is free.

Ziggs is a people search for professionals. I suppose amateurs have to look elsewhere. You can have a listing for free or pay a little for search engine optimization.

Zoto is a photo storage and sharing site, similar to Flickr, except that I’ve heard of Flickr. May be a great service, but a lot of others have more mindshare.

vSocial is a video clip storage and sharing site. Again, where’s the FAQ? People want to see an FAQ.

Boltfolio is a media storage and organization service. It seems to want to be the Flickr of video. But it’s not. I am not crazy about the interface.

Wink combines a search engine with the social network implications of tagging. It incorporates tag results from other services like Delicious, Digg, etc. The search database seems pretty deep. I think it has potential.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

0 out of 10. Our second 0’fer.

And the Winner of Round 9 is:

AllPeers, a unique idea that could be very useful to a lot of people.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Sorry, Steve, But I Think It’s the Other Way Around

Steve Rubel wonders if Technorati might be the silent Memeorandum killer. He makes some good points about Technorati’s Explore pages. Specifically, he likes the way Technorati’s evolving Explore pages may allow users to create content streams, similar to the traditional meme trackers, for dozens of topics.

I am on-record over and over about how much I love Technorati. And I have defended it against its critics on many occasions.

But while I like the idea of customized content streams, I don’t fully agree with Steve. In fact, I think if there’s a killer on the loose, it’s Memeorandum.

And here’s why.

The Reliability Factor is Hurting Technorati

While I continue to think Technorati is doing a pretty good job, the fact remains that Technorati is broken a lot of the time for a lot of people. On my Favorites list alone, there are blogs that have not been updated by Technorati in 148, 116, 104 and 88 days. In Steve’s list there are blogs that haven’t been updated in 418, 121 and 106 days. And these are popular blogs.

More importantly, there is a growing feeling in the blogosphere that Technorati is unreliable. Too many people have given up trying to get indexed properly, and there is a growing sense of frustration.

The Negative Buzz is Getting Louder

When I wrote my most recent defense of Technorati, I got a few Comments and several emails from people complaining about various indexing problems they have be unable to solve. I’ve had my own share of Technorati problems, and have written about them here on many occasions. Yes, they all got fixed. But they all came back. In fact, my last several posts have not been indexed by Technorati. Is this evidence of a problem? I don’t know, but this is how they start.

Which Causes Even Others to Wonder

The end effect of all of this is that people who read of these problems can’t help but wonder about Technorati’s ability to reliably gather up and present content the way it is designed to do. If a bunch of people who write on the topics that interest me are not being indexed by Technorati (and based on the Comments, emails and Favorite lists I have read, they aren’t), then how can I say it’s the best place to go to reliably find the best content?

So Maybe Memeorandum is the Hunter and Not the Prey?

On the other hand, Memeorandum is very reliable and tends to give me exactly the sort of content I want to read, written by the people I want to read. Sure, there are a lot of posts that don’t make it on Memeorandum. But that’s by design, not the result of a technical failure.

My Challenge to Technorati

I’m still hanging onto my title as a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati, but it’s time for Technorati to face these problems head on. Assure people that the problems will be fixed. Make your email support meaningful, as opposed to the black hole it is now. Better yet, find a bunch of people, maybe even volunteers, and turn them loose to search the blogosphere for problems and see that they get fixed.

Do it. It’s smart, easy and the right thing to do.

If not, there’s always Memeorandum. And, so far at least, it works.