Steve Newson posted a thought provoking article yesterday examining the return on investment for blogging. He linked to a post on markoos out and about where a software vendor found a post about its software and engaged in a very customer-friendly discussion via the comments. Steve’s point is that a large part of the return on investment for blogging is the goodwill generated thereby.

Even though there was not a perfect resolution to the problem discussed in the above example, the fact is that a software vendor set up a process to monitor blogs for posts about its product and came to the customer to try to be helpful. Think about that for a second. Instant goodwill.

I think Steve has hit the nail on the head. Amy Gahran feels the same way about Craig Newmark’s blog responses. Part of the reason I love Technorati so much is because Dave Sifry threw me the 99 yard pass when I had some (now resolved) indexing problems last year. This sort of goodwill is a win-win. The customer (and other customers and potential customers who read the exchange) feels genuinely important and the company builds goodwill, which translates to referrals, postive press and, most importantly, customer loyalty.

It’s not just Steve, Amy and me who are wowed by this sort of pro-active response. It’s everyone who reads these conversations and others like them. That kind of goodwill is a very good return on investment.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, the PC Doctor, posted a question today. He asked if blogging has become the new Solitaire, keeping workers pre-occupied at work and possibly driving down productivity, the way businesses feared computer Solitaire would when everyone got a desktop computer back in the nineties.

Ah, that first office computer…

I remember the first computer I got at my office downtown (not to be confused with my office at home, from where I write this). We were running what was probably the second or third newest version of DOS (that trend continues to this day). About all we could do was send emails (from some long-forgotten DOS-based interface) and use whatever the second or third newest version of WordPerfect was. If there were any games to be had back then, we didn’t know about it.

Some of us did figure out how to access other peoples’ email though, and I actually caused a fictional meeting to occur between two of my friends. I sent an email from each to the other asking to meet at a designated time and place about “an exciting new project.” Each one thought the other asked for the meeting and here’s the incredible part: they had the meeting and never figured out that it was bogus. They just started talking about all sorts of stuff and never got around to the “exciting new project.” That was almost as funny as the stuff some guys did back when we first got (and immediately hacked) voicemail. In the interest of CYA, let me note that I told both our IT department, who had asked me to fool around with the program to see if it was secure, and the two attendees about the joke; no one was offended and we all laughed about it.

We eventually got some two or three year old version of Windows and I remember that our IT folks went to great lengths to remove all the games. I really appreciated that when I was stuck on planes and in airports for hours and hours back in my traveling days.

Much later, we finally got access to the great big ol’ internet and, I guess because they knew we could find worse on the web, they actually left the games on our computers.

Did a ton of people play computer Solitaire then? Probably, but here’s the thing. There are two kinds of Solitaire players: those who play it for a while because it’s new and then lose interest (I went through that with Minesweeper back in the day) and those who become semi-addicted and play it all the time, either to avoid work or out of boredom, etc. The first group of people are not going to let it interfere with getting their work done. The second group would find some other diversion if the game was not available.

So is it the new Solitaire?

My observations from walking down the halls at my office lead me to believe that the new Solitaire is comprised of the same sort of things people did before blogs: computer dating services, online home listings, chat programs (for those who have figured out a way around my firm’s firewall) and a collection of flash-based online games (including, of course, Solitaire). Then there’s all the online newspapers, fantasy football pages and other online content. It may be different in other offices, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone reading or writing a blog at my office.

For most people, these diversions don’t interfere with their work in any material adverse way. For others, they do. But, again, if it wasn’t this it would be something else.

What about the Web 2.0 companies?

One of Adrian’s points is that all these people at work who are typing away at their computers doing what looks like work, but is actually surfing, taging, reading and writing on web sites like Technorati, Flickr, Bloglines, Delicious, Engadget, et. al, are creating mad value for these Web 2.0 companies at the expense of the companies who are paying their salaries. I’m certain this happens, but I don’t think it’s happening more with these companies that it did previously with Yahoo, Google and The New York times. It’s the same time wasting- only with cooler stuff.

Meet the new Solitaire…

So while I don’t know for sure, I suspect that, to paraphrase The Who, the new Solitaire is the same as the old Solitaire.

Gaping Void has a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why No One Reads Your Blog.

This is funny stuff, even if I am guilty of at least 5 of them (and that’s by my count).

Tom Reynolds posted a thoughtful comment to my New Years Day rumination on the difficulty of building a new blog. His questions and suggestions got me thinking about this issue some more.

He asked what I would consider a marker of success. Certainly not making money, as the primary point in my “closed blogosphere” series of posts is that the perceived possibility of making money is the root of the problem. As I mentioned in my follow up post, I think blogging to make money is sort of like playing hoops to get to the NBA- it takes the fun out of it and ultimately leads to disappointment. Yes there are NBA players (Jason Calacanis being, I suppose, the Kobe of blogging), but there aren’t many NBA players and there aren’t many million dollar blogs. A new blogger has about the same chance of getting rich like Jason as my son does playing for the Lakers one day.

Cyndi Lauper was right: money changes everything. Newsome’s Rule: add the prospect of money to any equation and things get very complicated.

My marker of success is getting the opportunity to participate in the discussion. It’s not about who the discussion is with- it’s the fact that a discussion is taking place via cross-blog conversations. Otherwise, a blog starts to feel like a neighborhood newspaper left to decompose in the yard.

It’s about the interaction that I believe make blogs the natural evolution of the internet message board and newsgroup.

Tom suggests that bloggers should develop their own network of similar blogs to develop cross-conversations with. I think that is a great idea and have used that as one of my approaches in developing Newsome.Org. The list of blogs that I consider part of my virtual watercooler grows every day. Hopefully, I get added to their lists as well. Before you know it, you can get some inter-blog momentum. And that is both fun and rewarding.

The thing I really began to understand when thinking about some of the things Tom said is that you have to grow your blog one reader at a time. It’s a hard, uphill climb. But if an independent blogger can, in fact, get to the top of the mountain, that’s the only to do it.

Tom said he added Newsome.Org to his reading list. And that’s a great compliment in and of itself. If someone somewhere is interested in what you have to say, can you ask for anything more?

Business Week has an interesting, if troubling, article today, wondering if big media such as Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal and The New York Times might decide to fire a shot across Google’s bow and created a closed search database for their content in an effort to preserve their place as gatekeepers. I can imagine why big media might think about doing just that, but here’s why it won’t work.

The whole move to the edge movement is about knocking down these walls and removing the gatekeeper altogether. I don’t think the hordes of developers and users who are embracing this move to the edge would react positively to an attempt to build another wall as the outer wall is being knocked down. I think the end result would be that the content secured behind this new wall would simply lose some of its relevance. The record label cartel has lost a lot of goodwill and probably a lot of customers by suing dead people and grandmothers in a futile attempt to stuff the cat back into the bag. Hopefully someone at these big media companies has been paying attention and will stop this proposed madness before it starts.

Rather than follow the record label cartel off the cliff, these companies should try to swim with the current and figure out another way to protect their business model via partnerships and licensing deals.

Hurting Google is not a sound business strategy if it hurts them too. And it will. If they try to swim upstream, they will drown in a sea of bad karma and blog rants.

Technorati Tags:
google, media

iMedia Connection has a post today about the five trends in consumer generated content from the last year that will have a profound impact on our internet experience in 2006 and beyond. Here are my thoughts on each:

1. Social networking comes of age

I have played around with Yahoo360 a little and have visited a couple of MySpace pages. I’m far too old and uninterested to care about Facebook. On the one hand, I tend to dismiss these pages as cyber-playgrounds for kids and young people. But the numbers indicate that a lot of people are using these sites. I suppose it will be a powerful trend, but I’d be surprised if much of the buzz is generated by the over-25 set. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love some sort of private internet space where I and my close friends and distant family could keep connected. But even if I found it or built it, no one else would use it. I just don’t think there’s enough desire and know-how to make these pages work for the parent and grandparent generations.

2. Wikipedia becomes the number one reference site.

I absolutely believe this. Wikipedia has been my first and nearly exclusive reference site for months. My prediction is that some of the current closed reference sites will become free, ad-supported sites in 2006 in an effort to stay relevant. Might work, but they better hurry.

3. Flickr and tagging take off.

Everyone who knows me knows I am deeply in love with Flickr. It should and will own the photo storage and community market. Tags are just a fancy word for keywords. I use tags on almost all my posts and I believe they will become an almost mandatory part of most web content. That’s a good thing. But keywords aren’t new- they’ve just been repackaged in a sexy package.

4. Blogs, blogs, blogs.

Yes, the move to the edge we’ve talked about is being driven primarily by blogs. This is a good trend that I believe took off in 2005 and will keep rising in 2006 and beyond.

5. Video search goes viral.

Maybe, but does anyone really search the net for videos? If there’s a good one (like the Narnia rap), I’ll find out about it via someone’s blog post. I’m just not sold on video search. If Thomas Hawk (who I predict will give me a link in 2006 if I keep applying blogger lie number 9) is right and Flickr does video, Flickr will own that market as well. Anyone else think Google knows about this and that’s why it’s falling all over itself to get out there first?

Technorati Tags:
trends, web 2.0

I’ve been tiptoeing around this issue for a couple of months, trying to figure out how to approach it in a positive and diplomatic manner. I’m not sure it’s possible to be all that positive about such a difficult fact of life, but here goes.

It is virtually impossible to build a new blog in 2006. Here’s why I have reached that conclusion over the past year.

First, to have a successful blog, just like any other web site, you need readers. The difference (at least I thought it would be different) is that unlike Yahoo, MSN and Google, blogs are not supposed to be about making money. They are (I thought) supposed to be about having conversations and sharing perspectives and ideas. Sort of a natural evolution of the newsgroup or message board.

But the more I think about it, the less I believe that.

The very large majority of the most successful blogs out there have one of three things working in their favor.

1) They got there first and filled an empty space. I know exactly how that works, since getting there first was a major factor in the growth and success of ACCBoards.Com. Once you are there and fill the space, growth comes organically and it is a lot easier to maintain your position in the space.

2) They have a unique platform that almost guarantees them an audience. If you are the representative of a larger company, especially one that is a player in the blogosphere, your audience comes pre-packaged- from traffic from that company and other bloggers who want to link “upstream.” Granted, you have to deliver to keep and grow that audience, but a ready made group of users is a gigantic (and I believe necessary) advantage to growing a blog.

3) They get help from other established bloggers, either directly via a formal or informal network or because someone with a big audience throws a line to them via links and inter-blog conversations. This is the only way I can see a new, unaffiliated blogger actually growing a blog. Unfortunately, this probably has a lot to do with pre-existing relationships, making the chances of a truly independent blogger being thrown a rope very small.

If you don’t have one of those three things, I believe you are trying to push a heavy rock up a steep hill as far as developing and growing a new blog goes.

Let me be clear about one thing, however. A ready made audience doesn’t guarantee a successful blog. All of these A-Listers have to keep bringing good content to stay at the top. You can have a ready made audience and still not have a successful blog. But I no longer believe you can have a successful blog without a ready made audience.

Why? Because, unfortunately, the blogosphere is a closed system. There are too many people who believe they are going to get rich by writing a blog. Once you add the element of money into the equation, the element of competition soon follows. So you get the haves linking to one another (and largely only to one another) and ignoring (or at best tolerating) the have nots, in an effort to boost their status and, perhaps more importantly, protect their shares of the readership pie. Anyone who argues this isn’t true hasn’t spent much time surfing around the blogosphere.

Yes, there are exceptions. Scoble and JKOnTheRun being two that come to mind. Both seem to be really good guys and both seem to be doing the blog thing for reasons other than the prospect of a dollar. There are others, both A-Listers and not, who simply aren’t interested in adding any more voices to the conversation. Logically, that’s understandable when you look at it from the capitalistic/competitive perspective. But if you believe the blogosphere is or ought to be about conversation and not solely about making money and inflating egos, it’s not good for the blogosphere.

Stated another way, if Firefox, Flickr, and most of the blogging platforms are free, why are links and seats at the table guarded like Fort Knox gold?

Am I talking my position? Am I discouraged and perhaps a little bitter? Probably, I can’t deny that. But I believe I am right about this. And if I don’t write about something that affects me, I’m not writing from my experience- and no one should write from anything else.

So let me briefly dispense with my place in all of this and then move on with the conversation.

I believe my varied experience in programming, web site development, writing, teaching, music making and lawyering gives me a fairly unique perspective on the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular that should be as valued in the blogosphere as it seems to be in the real world (I make my living and give 20-30 speeches a year about one or more of these topics). So, yes, I do feel like stomping my feet and screaming when I can’t fully join the conversations out here. But this is not a problem that is specific to me- and the point I am making here is not about me.

It’s about the ability (or not) of new voices to find a place in the conversations at the virtual watercooler.

Unfortunately, like the real world, sometimes the blogosphere is about who you know as much as what you know.

A lot of bloggers just give up. I can totally relate to that. But I am a fixer and a builder by nature, so giving up isn’t appealing either.

I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s a problem.

Technorati Tags:
blogs, blogging