John Walkenbach is doing an experiment to see how easy it is to find blog references.

Given my extreme difficulty getting Technorati to index this page (no response to my last pleading email), I’m in.

Yesterday, after reading Randy Charles Morin’s post about the internet “A-List,” I wrote about the difficulties in promoting a web site to its target audience. There were a number of interesting replies to Randy’s post, including a good one by Richard Querin, who wrote that it’s the writing, not so much the reading, that makes all of this rewarding. Brad Kellet agrees.

I agree too, to an extent. I don’t think you need to have 2000 hits a day (much less 2 million) to make all the effort worthwhile. On the other hand, as I have written before, my goal is to encourage the exchange of ideas which in my experience is the first step to community building. Communities can be built around a location, a relationship or a common interest- anything that a few people who know about each other care about.

I spent a lot of time writing the policies that apply to ACCBoards.Com (spam is a problem with big message board sites, but it pales in comparison to schoolyard-type fighting and the protection of a user’s right to express unpopular ideas). The terms of service there is an evolving document, even today 9 years after we started that community. The main thing is to encourage the respectful exchange of information and ideas. If that happens, the commnunity will grow naturally and police itself. The trick is to figure out how much of the stuff we learned there applies to web sites and blogs. I think a lot of it does.

For example, if I’m in a group that’s discussing photography, whether that group is at dinner together, on a message board or on a blog, I love to listen and learn. But at some point, I also want to ask a question or perhaps make a point. If I can’t be involved, even in a small way, in the conversation, eventually I will get discouraged and bored. I can tell you from experience that graduate students are that way too. I believe most of us are. The only difference is the method of cimmunication.

So while I obviously enjoy writing, I want this site to be more than an online journal or a living Christmas letter for my extended family. I want it to be my side of a discussion on whatever topics come up. If my extended family was more interested in the internet as a way to stay connected, I could community build around that. If our friends had web sites (fat chance, it took all I had just to get them to sign up on flickr), I could build around that. I don’t have that luxury, so I look to build connections with other people who write about the things I’m interested in.

In sum, for me it’s a lot about the writing, but it’s also about the building, and the reading and even the being read. The potential for conversation and community is why I’m here.

Technorati Tags:Blog Promotion, Community Building

On the internet, but no one saw it. One of the hardest things about creating and operating web sites is trying to attract enough traffic to make it worthwhile. You can have the best web site in the world, but if no one notices, it becomes a ghost site. Often, web sites that one might think should be popular go unnoticed while others become popular overnight.

I have created a ton of web sites: AVBoards.Com, The Cats Domain, The Cardinals Nest, Songwriting.Org, ACCBoards.Com and others. Of those, I caught lightning in a bottle exactly once- with ACCBoards.Com. It became the most visited Atlantic Coast Conference sports site almost overnight. Not because of some nifty angle I dreamed up, but because it filled a need. Once the dot.com bust forced me to affiliate with a network, ACCBoards was surpassed by other sites, but it still gets a ton of traffic. The Cats Domain and Songwriting.Org are still active, but neither of them get a fraction of the traffic ACCBoards.Com used to get. In fact, I keep those sites online mainly because I am grateful for the small group of core users who have used them for years. The other sites are but memories of a virtual day gone by (the links above are from the Internet Archive).

So here we are in 2005. I don’t start many new web sites these days. I still write and speak frequently at seminars and conventions; I still make music; I still write articles for various publications. Other than my music, all of these endeavors, which generally cost money to attend, are popular. I also write almost every day on this site, which is both free and much less popular. Why is that? A couple of reasons come to mind.

First, a lot of people who attend my seminars and read my articles are less comfortable using computers to gather information. That will change over time, but it hasn’t yet. Second, I am not an A-Team internet commentator. Randy Charles Morin’s interesting piece yesterday about this problem got me thinking about what to do about it. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know this: just because people will pay money to hear me speak and read my print articles doesn’t mean they will bookmark my web site and read my posts.

So how do the rest of us get noticed? Here’s my approach so far:

1) Let folks know you have a web site- I have just begun adding a reference to this site to the bio I use when I give speeches and write articles. It will be interesting to see how this affects traffic, since previously most people I interact with in that way didn’t know I had a web site. My guess: moderate traffic.

2) Use blogrolls and trackbacks- I link to other writers fairly regularly. Eventually, the hope is that some of them will link back to me. It’s not cool (at least in my book) to ask for a link, so I keep writing and hoping. My guess: not a short term answer, but some potential for traffic over the long term (limited perhaps by the fact that it will be harder and harder to get linked as more people clamor for the same audience).

3) Cross promote- I have started linking to this site from ACCBoards.Com. I have to be careful because that is a college sports site and this is not. But occasionally there are things here that might be interesting there. My guess: steady traffic (the most promising so far).

4) Keep on keeping on- I think my legal/musical/technical experience gives me a somewhat unique perspective. Everyone else may think it’s the cure for insomnia. But I’ll keep writing in the hopes that if I build it right, they will come.

We’ll see how things go. In the meantime, check out Randy’s interesting RSS blog.

Technorati Tags:Blog Promotion, Community Building

As I’ve been rewriting most of the Rancho DeNada pages, I’ve been thinking about the internet and its evolving role in the American family. I think we’re about to get to the point where the internet moves beyond on online phone book, atlas and catalog and becomes something very useful- a way to stay connected in a hectic world. Here’s why.

When the internet first came into the nation’s consciousness, it was a place to send email, which was new and novel at the time, and a place to explore- like an online text based adventure game. Emails oddly enough replaced more phone calls than letters, since most heavy letter writers (such as everyone in my extended family over 50) didn’t embrace the internet. So what was intended to connect people had the opposite effect. People simply used email rather than the phone. It was fast and cheap, but very impersonal.

Then there was the world wide web. For early users, it was fun just to be on the net looking at a page created by someone far away. I remember late one night back in the mid-nineties I found myself chatting on an IRC program with a fisherman from Japan. It was pretty amazing at the time.

The problem was that content (or more specifically the web pages that displayed it) was very, very hard to create and so expensive to maintain that the big media companies pretty much controlled the distribution of information. The internet was becoming an online newspaper, but there was no reasonable way for the average person to create, maintain and distribute content. It took me hours and hours to create the original version of Rancho DeNada (which would look like my 3 year old’s coloring book by today’s standards), and every update was painstaking. I caught lightning in a bottle when I created ACCBoards.Com back in 1996. At one time we were doing 2 million hits a month. But when the dot.com bust happened and the internet advertising revenue model vanished overnight, I had to affilate with a network just to keep the site online.

Now, things have changed. There are so many applications that allow developers and writers and truck drivers and housewives to create professional looking content and publish it immediately (Blogger being one of the best for non computer types). Lots of families now have year-round, current “Christmas letters” in the form of a web site or family blog. Here is the best example I have seen (I don’t know them- I found their excellent family blog on Feed Map), but there are many others, including, to an extent, this page. One or two families that are connected in some way create a family blog and link to each other. Before you know it, the thing gets legs and there is a little neighborhood of family web sites. It isn’t just limited to families either- photographers, bird watchers and banjo players can do the same thing. Add some photograph serving by flickr to the mix and before you know it, you’ve got something really cool. Fred Wilson has a neat post today about the scalability and leverage of the new internet. Good post by my favorite blogger.

These interconnected pages make it easy to keep in touch with your neighbors as well as people you know in other parts of the world. I grew up in South Carolina and live in Texas. As anyone who knows me will attest, I am a terrible correspondent. I don’t call and I don’t write (and I am not proud of it). But I do update Rancho DeNada, so someone across town or across the country can see what we are up to with the click of a mouse.

And maybe the best thing about it is that these pages make it easy to stay connected on a meaningful level with people you care about. They even inspire people to make phone calls, or plan camping trips or do something else that groups of families can enjoy together. Finally, the web becomes a way to stay connected. That’s what Al Gore created it to do in the first place.

There are some turnkey solutions out there, Yahoo!360 being one I have experimented with. And while those sites are great for someone who hasn’t the time or inclination to build a site from the ground up, they are not flexible enough for a lot of people, myself included. I want a free standing site where my imagination is the limit and I can make every little corner the way I want it to be. But whether you want to build the whole thing or use an existing platform, the choices are there. And most of them are free.

Later this week, I am going to start a survey of Houston blogs and we’ll see some real examples of what I am talking about.

Now if only our friends would create some sites we could link to.