Discovering Newsvine
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
I’m a perfect example of why blogs actually do work. This summer, simply because of people’s blogs, I have:
- Bought a book
- Subscribed to a magazine, and
- Signed up for three web services
The latest of these is Newsvine. After running across Mike Davidson’s blog (CEO Newsvine), I wound up poking around the Newsvine site a little bit. I never really took the time to figure out how it worked before.
So far it’s pretty neat, and it lets me find things like this:
Man Accused of Biting Off Rooster’s Head
NEW YORK — A man accused of biting the head off his pet rooster was arrested Friday and faces up to a year in prison if convicted, an animal protection spokesman said.
A neighbor had complained about a dead rooster near his Manhattan apartment and agents found the body of the beheaded rooster on a fire escape, said Joe Pentangelo, spokesman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The rooster’s head was not located.
I’ve discovered the secret to Dilbert’s success
Reading the comics section of the paper this morning, I realized why Dilbert is such an amazingly popular comic: it’s the only one that’s funny.
So it seems the secret to succcess is to be mildly entertaining in a world of mediocrity. Hurrah!
Phantom linkage from Technorati
Recently I’ve been getting a bunch of incoming links listed from Technorati that don’t seem to exist. I regularly check out blogs that link in (either here or at Flicker) to see what people are saying, but recently
I’ve been shuttled to posts that are not only completely irrelevant but also absolutely devoid of linkage. What gives, Technorati?
WOB marketing
There is such a thing as free marketing online. Some people think Viral Marketing is past it’s prime. It probably is, so long as it’s marketing.
What blogs have done is allowed content to market itself. We’ve moved from Word of Mouth to Word of Blog.
Unfortunately WOB marketing isn’t really marketing - you just have to make good stuff and hope people care enough to share it.
The importance of favicons
I just realized that in my little bookmark folder of blogs that I visit basically every day, I’ve been skipping basically all the typepad blogs because they have the same favicon.
My eye gravitates to unique icons, for some reason. Anyways, apparently it’s a good idea to have your own icon.
Tips on how to grow traffic with the right content
Part of what I do during all my sleepless nights (hey, I’m young) is try to think logically about how people browse about the internet (hey, I’m a geek).
To this end, I spend a lot of time thinking about what my browsing habits are, what I see other people doing online, and staring at boring-ass statistics like pages most frequently visited and yaddda yadda. Incidentally, the most popular thing I’ve ever written is a guide to making the classic video game TIE Fighter work on modern Windows XP machines.
When you break it down, people are usually online for only a couple of reasons. If you toss out shopping (because that doesn’t apply to me), then people mostly look at sites for three different types of content, and my guess is that it’s in this order:
- Reference (how do I…)
- News (what happened today in rhode island…)
- Editorial (what does Friedman think about what happened today in rhode island…)
So if you’re looking to grab traffic, you should probably focus heavily on those three types of content - in that order.
This post is basically a cheap trick to fit into the first category (how do I get more site traffic). What’s annoying about posts like this is that while they do offer good advice, the irony is often too much for me to bear.
Regardless, this is a strategy I’m going to start working on at Flicker, and we’ll see how well it does. Today we have two new editorial pieces up - I wrote about debunking the PS3 - iPod comparison, and our excellent blogger Corvus shared his thoughts on in-game advertising.
Now we need to work on having more how-to content.
Hooray Shawn Hogan
I’m glad some people are contesting ridiculous lawsuits (or rather, going to court instead of settling):
Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.
Magic traffic secrets
If anyone knows the magic secret to getting bunches of people to realize that your site is up online and is cool, now would be the time to let me in ;)
I’ve gone over the data a zillion times and I’ve made countless numbers of minor tweaks (remove a link here, add one there, change “blog” to “home,” make a “related posts” box, change the height of page elements) to hopefully make the site friendlier to folks of all stripes, but it seems like the big problem is just having people think of Flicker when they think of the web sites they visit.
Exposure takes money. Pure and simple. We’re back to the megaphone problem, and unfortunately my megaphone is still quite small.
Outsourcing creativity (to the long tail?)
I wish I had the readership and resources to outsource my business problems to the blogosphere like Mark Cuban does. Is this another example of pulling the long tail into the hit structure?
I think the best idea is this one.
This is another almost great idea. I think it needs to be “before release.”
Lastly, I like the ideas in this comment.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
no hope for bluehost
It seems that no matter what I do, BlueHost keeps dropping Flicker down. Now that we’ve moved server boxes, our site is down and the other sites I know on BH are up. Guh.
As soon as our prepaid year’s hosting is up we’re moving to dreamhost.
We need a new cookie system
Between my desktop and my laptop, I use about four or five different browsers every day, on at least two different computers.
Generally speaking, Google Broswer Sync is godlike, and keeps all my passwords and login info synchronized between my computers, and has really narrowed my browser use down to Firefox and IE (for the rare occasion that something isn’t compatible).
But I am never logged in to Google or Yahoo!.
It used to be that whenever I opened up my browser I was logged in to Yahoo! (when it was my homepage) or Google (it is still my homepage, but it’s worthless because I’m never logged in).
I want Google to remember me, so that I don’t have to log in just to check my customized home page. It’s worthless as a home page if it’s, well, not really my home page.
So we need a new system where Google can remember what browsers and what computers I’m logged in on, and then make it so I don’t go to their annoyingly generic splash page everytime my browser loads.
Dear iTunes
When I hit the randomize button, I want it to randomize the order of play, not screw up the order in which I’ve listed my songs.
Hit or Miss
It’s funny that Seth Godin is posting a few throwback posts while I’m reading The Long Tail. In a thought apparently from 2004, Seth said:
Every time you launch a product or service, every time you apply for a job or start a nonprofit, you’re either going to hit or not. If you get lucky, you’re entitled to deny that luck had anything to do with it.
So I guess now we should say you’re either going to hit or you’re going to be in the Long Tail. Although I’m still not convinced we’ve figured out how to produce for the Long Tail yet.
IntelliTXT is annoying
Does anyone else think that this IntelliTXT style advertising that keeps showing up (on a lot of gaming sites, incidentally) is extremely annoying? The last thing I want to see while I’m scrolling through an article is for an advertisement bubble to pop up over what I’m reading.
One of the keys to successful advertising is not being annoying.
This is true for the product being advertised, and it’s true for the site the advertising is on. I’m going to steal a quote I saw recently to underline this:
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
If your site is annoying because of your ads, I’m going to visit it less often (unfortunately true for the Dilbert Blog, one of my favorites). I’m simply trying to escape a disagreeable situation.
ps. I’m downloading a file at 780 KB/sec! I remember when that was impossible, so this still impresses me.
pps. I need to find a good desktop blog client - that means a desktop app for composition that allows me to save and retrive drafts from my server. This is the second time today my browser has randomly deleted a half-finished post.
Some things I don’t want to learn
I can’t usually tell people what I do at work. This is largely because I don’t think that what I do is very easy to classify; half the time I’m not even sure what I’m doing.
Between what I do to pay the bills (Blog Business Summit) and what I do for fun to try to pay the bills (Flicker Gaming), I end up spending a lot of time doing things that I never thought I’d know how to do in the first place.
When I first bought the Flicker Gaming domain, I had no idea how to install a CMS of any kind, not even a blog. I hired a friend to install e107 and tweak it so I liked how it looked. It worked OK, but I’m a control freak and I like to keep tweaking things, and that wasn’t really going to work for both of us, so I set out to teach myself Wordpress.
I think I’ve done a decent job. Decent enough that I get paid at work to develop sites in Wordpress, and that’s pretty impressive.
But as I keep going I find that the things I end up doing are getting ever more technical. I look at sites like Mike Davidson’s blog and I realize that there’s a certain level of complexity I don’t think I ever really want to understand.
I’m far more interested with the superficial tweaks, and frankly, I’d rather come up with an image file and have someone else do all the crazy coding that needs to happen behind it.
At the same time, every step of the way I see things that look hopelessly complex, and then three months later I’m actually trying to do them. I never wanted to be a crazy techie webmaster, but I keep finding myself further down that road.
I just hope I keep doing other stuff as well. Eventually, I’d like to hand off the webmaster work at Flicker to someone who really knows what they’re doing, and move to blogging and, for lack of a better term, managing things. But that’s gotta wait until we have revenue.
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