I posted the other day about Jason Calacanis’ allegations that Creative-Weblogging has duplicateed Weblogs look and feel. I suggested this would make for interesting reading in the days ahead.

Torsten Jacobi of Creative-Weblogging has responded with some allegations of his own, including that Weblogs has copied other sites in the past.

While this is fun to watch in and of itself, the more important issue is the effect this argument and others like it will have on internet customs and practices- meaning what’s OK and what’s not OK in the cyber-frontier. Not just what’s OK legally (the lawyers will sort all of that out), but what is considred acceptable and not acceptable by the blogging community as we try to police ourselves so Congress and the lawyers won’t have to do it for us.

I don’t know the answer, but it’s an important question.

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blogging

One of the challenges of the internet is how to put your product out there without getting it ripped off. Yes, imitation is a form of flattery and we have all been inspired by things others have done with their blogs, web sites, etc. For example, I started my Top 50 project because I enjoyed reading similar lists from others.

And it’s OK to borrow an idea about layout or design from someone- that’s the whole basis of the creative commons movement on the web.

But sometimes this so called flattery moves beyond an inspiration or the borrowing of a layout idea. Sometimes it crosses the “know it when you see it” line from OK to definitely not OK. As a musician, I struggled with the decision about putting hundreds of fully produced song demos online. But in the end the desire to be heard trumped the desire to be safe. That’s how it is with a lot of stuff, particularly with bloggers who by nature desire to be heard.

One time I happened across another web site (this was way before Flickr) that was using a photo from Newsome.Org as its logo. I wrote a mostly friendly email and suggested that if were going to use the photo they should credit the photographer (my then brother in law). They never responded but the logo was changed. A little odd, but no big deal.

But now that some people believe you can make money with blogs (you can, but you can also make money playing basketball and the odds are better that you’ll become an NBA star than that you can live indoors based on blog money), the game has changed. Much like musicians, who start out as artists but once in a blue moon catch lightning in a bottle and descend into money management induced madness, bloggers who believe that their site is a potential money-maker have a lot of good reasons to protect their intellectual property. Stated another way, when some dude appropriates one of my graphics, so what. But if someone steals one of my songs or content from a blog that has financial prospects, that’s a horse of another color.

I read two posts today from bloggers who have seemingly been ripped off. The first, from JKOnTheRun (another Houston guy whose web site somehow won’t let me add a Trackback because while I live near Houston, my web server is in Pittsburgh), involves the use by a company he used to be associated with of a name and graphic very similar to his blog. The second one by Jason Calacanis seems to be a concerted effort by someone to duplicate Weblogs look and feel. Jason is quite a bit less diplomatic than JK, which should make for interesting reading in the days ahead.

I don’t know where the legal line falls when it comes to this sort of thing, but this is a problem that isn’t going to go away. To the contrary, add the prospect of making money and it will become a free-for-all out there.

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blogging

Duncan Riley has a feature at The Blog Herald, an excellent blog that has been on my daily reading list forever, called 100 Blogs in 100 Days.

Newsome.Org was selected for today, day number 54 (which, perhaps appropriately, is also Halloween). I am truly honored to be selected. I have blogged quite a bit about how hard it is for a relatively new blog to get noticed, and this is, without a doubt, the best “notice” we have received. I have found a lot of interesting blogs via this feature, so hopefully a few folks will find me.

Many thanks Duncan!

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blogging

We had a good discussion a few months ago on getting heard- the reasons, challenges and benefits of attracting readers to your blog. I have thought about that some over the past few months and wanted to post my current thinking.

There are three primary kinds of readers of a web site, including a blog:

1) People who find the site because they know you or because you tell them about it. These folks don’t rely on external links and often are pretty sticky (meaning they generally spend a little time on the site and usually bookmark it and return to read new content). This is the “living Christmas card” concept that I’ve talked about before. This is a perfectly appropriate use of and purpose for a blog. In fact, I believe it is one of the most effective community building tools- tools that help a site gain critical mass by keeping readers connected and interested. It’s easy to get this sort of traffic, but the pool of potential readers is limited to people you (a) know and (b) tell about your blog.

2) People who find your site through web searches such as Google or Technorati. Newsome.Org has been on the web for 10 years, has a lot of links from (and to) other sites, and is highly ranked on most of the search engines under the logical key words (newsome, songwriting, music, ACC sports, etc.). As the site has transformed into more of a “tech for grownups” thing, the search engine placement has had to catch up, but over time it will. Search engine placement is good for traffic, but the readers who come via this path are generally not very sticky (they wander through and keep going, only to return the same way they came- via a web search for a key word, etc.).

3) People who find you via a link on another topic-compatible blog. People who read blogs have learned to appreciate the new distribution of information model that blogs allow. I was very late to the game, originally thinking that blogs were merely online diaries (most of my over 30 friends still think that). I am a convert now, and get most of my tech and entertainment news from blogs. A link from another blog is the highest and best way to attract readers who want regular content in blog form. The problem is that these links are, by far, the hardest to come by. The so called A-List bloggers (meaning those with lots of traffic) tend to link mostly to each other, enjoying a virtual watercooler where they discuss a series of topics. There’s nothing wrong with regularly linking to a group of blogs, as that produces the sort of distributed conversations that make blogs so interesting. But after a while it seems like only some people are talking. Those who aren’t involved in the conversation eventually get frustrated or bored and stop listening. Not only is that bad the person who wants to talk, it’s also bad for the person doing the talking. If no new perspectives are introduced, the conversation around the water cooler can become stale and repetitive- leading to a loss of readers. I’m not criticizing the A-List bloggers (I read many of them daily). I am simply expressing the frustration felt by those of us who would like to join the conversation but have not yet been able to effectively do so.

Robert Scoble, one of my favorite bloggers and the A-List guy that seems to me to be the most open to new participants, has a post today about Memorandum. He mentions another post by Nick Davis in which Nick says he’s over Memorandum, seemingly in part because it always features posts from the same group of blogs (mainly the aforementioned A-List). Scoble’s advice is to “write a more interesting post.” That’s great advice, but it only gets you so far. You can write like Carl Hiaasen, but if no one links to you, few people will ever find your interesting post and you will most assuredly never show up on Memorandum.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I can tell you that getting a place at the virtual watercooler is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

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blogging, blog promotion

One of the things we did successfully with a number of the websites I have developed is create a sense of community. With websites, community means that communication is a two (or multi-way) way process, with more than one party providing input, expressing opinions, etc. That’s easier to do with message board sites like ACCBoards.Com and The Cat’s Domain. It’s harder to do with other sorts of websites, including blogs. But it’s just as important.

One reason I changed Newsome.Org from a traditional website, which looked and worked something like a newspaper- content was here, but it flowed one way, to the current blog format is because the new format makes it easier to create conversations and connections. Conversations via the Comments feature and connections via links I include in my posts and the Trackback feature.

Another reason I made those changes is to reconnect with old friends and meet new friends. Over the past few years a lot of people have told me that they visit Newsome.Org from time to time. Many of these people know each other. Until now, there was no way other than email for these people to communicate with me and no way at all for them to communicate with each other.

I know from my stats reports that there is a good amount of traffic here, and I know from my age and that of most of my friends that the internet as a two way proposition and blogs in particular are relatively new concepts. So here’s a short primer on how these features work.

Most posts have several links at the bottom, and here’s what those links do. The “Permalink” is a link to a separate page (called a “post page”) that contains only the post in question. This allows people to link to a particular post as opposed to the main Newsome.Org page, where the posts that are here today will be pushed to the Archives pages (see the list in the left hand column) by new posts. A few posts which are mainly family news and photo items don’t provide for comments, but that is the exception

The “Post a Comment” link is a way for visitors to respond to, comment on, agree with or disagree with anything in a topic or post. When you click on that link, a box pops up where you can type a comment, opinion, etc. and have that comment added to the bottom of the post. One thing to remember: the text of the comments appears only on the post pages. On the main Newsome.Org page, you’ll merely see the number of comments made at the very bottom where it says:

X Comments
Y Trackbacks.

There are three ways to access the post page, and the full text of all comments. Click on the title of a post, click on the Permalink or click on the “X Comments” link. Each of these links leads to the same place- the post page containing only the post and the full text of the comments.

The Del.icio.us and Furl links allow visitors to easily bookmark the post on one of those social bookmarking sites. If you don’t already use those sites, you can ignore those links for now, but I would suggest you check them out. Those sites are great ways to share links and find other interesting pages, posts, etc.

The Trackback feature allows visitors who have blogs themselves to link back to a post on their site that refers to the post. For example, if I post about my problems with Technorati, a visitor who has similar problems may want to post a topic on his or her website and link to it from here via a Trackback. It’s a way to create natural connections about related content over multiple websites.

That’s about the sum of it. If you’re here, have your say. It’s much more fun to discuss things that to read things. Don’t you agree?

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blogging