gregword

I like Alex Iskold’s article over on Read/Write Web entitled There’s No Money in the Long Tail of the Blogosphere.  I said the same thing once upon a time, a while back, but apparently it wasn’t on any of my blogs, so I can’t find it.  But, yes, the only money to be made from the “long tail” is if you’re aggregating it (or as Alex puts it, “on” the tail, and not “in” the tail).

That being said, I still think there’s opportunities to make money not in the long tail, per se, but as a niche content provider.  I guess if you’re making enough money to live off of (which certainly wouldn’t apply to 90+% of bloggers), you’re not really long tail, but the nature of the web is such that you can aggregate a global audience on a niche topic due to the distribution being next to nothing in cost.

Perhaps we should focus less on long tail economics, which are really just aggregation/network models, and promote the idea of niche content.  Could be another book/slogan/conference series in the making…

I’m hoping to have some time to play around with the Netflix recommendation data, time permitting. The terms stipulate that one can’t use proprietary thrid-party information, which I’m hoping just means that you can’t attempt to force Netflix to buy something you’re selling to work your solution.

To me, the biggest problem with Netflix recommendations (and I’m quite obsessive about filling them out) is that they will often include a lot of stuff that is related to a movie I rated, but not really related to why I liked the movie. So, if I say I like Caddyshack, the presumption is that I like the original goofball comedies, when really I just like Bill Murray. This is where having access to my blog (or blogs) would come in extremely handy, because I’ve probably said as much at one point or another in some old post that would really help narrow down the recommendation and pinpoint what aspects of a flick I find interesting.

I did think of alternative recommendation solution that I think would pretty much work regardless of the user. Here’s how it works:

1. User rates any movie.
2. Netflix asks: “OK, have you seen The Shawshank Redemption?”

Some good (and informed) discussion going on over at Greg Linden’s blog.

A few thoughts spurred by the latest blogosphere pile-on*:

• Nothing in life is easy, most of all success (not that I’d know…). Very few people succeed without trying, and those that do succeed work hard at it; even those that work hard have to count on a sufficient amount of luck, but like the old proverb says, you mostly got to make your own of that stuff as well.
• It’s hard to be profound and erudite all the time (especially when we’re talking technology). It’s not hard to point to lots of other people, all of whom are probably profound and erudite about something once in a while.
• The tools we use predispose our blogging towards attempting to be profound, when really, we should probably just be pointing to others some place else.

Think about why someone would read your blog. Are you an individual of note? Do you represent an important company, orgranization, or have personal noteriety? If yes, people will read you for that reason (take Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Rosie O’Donnell, etc.) If no, you have to come up with some other compelling reason for people to read your blog. One way is to be insanely brilliant (both in mind and in writing), and let’s face it, only a few people fit this bill. Another is to be a reliable source of good information. Think Dave Winer; while Dave is often profound, I think the reason his blog is so popular is because, more often than not, he’s acting as a reliable source of good information. The best bet would be to combine the two of these, and be a profound source of reliable information.

It’s really a shame we don’t have better tools to encourage more link-oriented blogging; there really are only a handful of folks out there that write in the style (actually, the only one I can think of is Dave). The MovableType/Wordpress blogging paradigm discourages one from posting short, quick links as you notice them (A title? We don’t need no stinkin’ titles). I’m still looking for a Wordpress plugin/template or something that let’s me do this gracefully (Ross has been using del.icio.us, which works, but doesn’t quite have the same effect).

* - It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these echo-chamber, blogging-about-blogging-type threads pop up on Techmeme; in the early days, they came up quite frequently, I assumed Gabe tweaked things to devalue intra-blogosphere conversations. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was kind of enjoying it. ;)

** - Another (amusing) question to consider: if someone besides Doc Searls had been at Heathrow, would the whole thing have ever mattered?

*** - at some point I want to seriously address the issues raised by Mark Evans (which is what drew my attention to this whole discussion in the first place), which I think are very, very important, and to which I’ve given a considerable amount of thought (even before he mentioned it).

Jason Calacanis:

While some folks have been shocked–SHOCKED!–that I offered to pay top bookmarkers, others have taken a day or two to think about the idea and realize that it is the totally logical evolution of “crowdsourcing” and Web 2.0.

Forgive me for not saying so before, but I thought it was a good idea; I just couldn’t believe you were offering to pay them so little. One thousand dollars a month may sound like a lot, but it’s really not.

Either way, it’s nice to have a little dose of capitialism injected into the Web 2.0 world every once in a while. For a while there, I was beginning to think we were back in the USSR.

It’s interesting, Jason is really just doing what he did before with Weblogs, Inc. He’s taking a medium that had previously been the dominion of the hobbyist, and turned it into a market. While most entreprenuers get lucky, if Jason pulls this off, I would say that’s a little bit more than luck.

I’ve been casually tracking the brrreeeport phenom, which, as far as I can tell, grew out of the masses complaints about the A-list stranglehold on the attention of the blogosphere. Now it’s turned into a Google Blog Search/Technorati pissing contest, with everyone dutifully linking back to Scoble, and forgetting what got us here in the first place.

The issue is attention, everyone wants it, but no one wants to work for it. Instead we’re looking for the magic bullet, the link from Scoble or Dave or Doc that will instantly make us blogging superstars. I have, on occasion, gotten links from the big guys; it doesn’t necessarily have the life-changing affect everyone seems to think it does. You may get a little surge, perhaps a few subscribers, but unless you’re getting linked day after day, it’s not going to change your life. The dust will settles, and life goes on. And what’s the point anyway? AdSense revenue? Page views? Brief exposure may give you a nice tickle when you stat meter reaches a new high, but long term, if you’re looking to be a media outlet like these guys are, if you’re not constantly producing or changing the game, it won’t make a difference.

So why do we keep fawning over there link power? Because it’s the easy solution. The alternative, which has worked more times than it has failed, is to find your voice, link to others that have similar interests, and engage them in conversations.

Scoble doesn’t need your links, but there are plenty of other people who do, and would appreciate them a lot more (not that Scoble’s unappreciative, he’s just overwhelmed). Next time you’re writing about the top story on Memeorandum, use an alternative tool that doesn’t filter out the little guy (or perhaps, as Chris says, we need new tools), find someone you don’t know, and bring them into your conversation. Don’t be shy, the worst that could happen is they ignore you, and at best, you’ve got a new friend. If you do this everyday for a week, I’ll bet you’ll have half as many new links to your blog in that amount of time. Keep it up, and everyone in the “magic middle” will start to look at little fatter around the waistline.

And guess what…the way sites like Memorandum work, the more links you have across the broader network of blogs, the more likely you’re to be found as they add in new sites (if I understand how it works). It’s like the whole unconference thing; the majority of the knowledge doesn’t exist on the panel, it exists out in the audience. There is good stuff out in the masses, take time to find some of it; the tools are there, you just need to use them.

* - Please don’t take offense to the title of this post; I had to grab your attention somehow, afterall ;) Keep in mind, I’ve never done this, but I’ve seen others like Pete do it, and if you work at it, it can work.

Pete Cashmore says CoComment is the best Web 2.0 app launched this year. I haven’t used CoComment yet, but from reading their site, my feeling is that while it may be a useful service, to me, comment tracking should be a feature of an aggregator application, not an app in and of itself. Of course, I’m still waiting for the aggregator that does this (Alex King of FeedLounge dropped some hints a while back, but I haven’t followed up). Granted, comment tracking, until recently, was difficult, but it’s much easier now. Aggregators developers should be looking at comment tracking as an important feature.

Other than that, CoComment does look nifty and useful; I just don’t want yet another account to log into. It is interesting to consider the data they may be able to collect and how that may be used to track active/popular content, and how they may correlate that information across various blogs. Especially since some subsets of the blogosphere tend not to link, but they do comment like crazy.

I’ll post more thoughts once I get a chance to use the app.

After less than a week of blogging on Wordpress, I’m converter. It’s just much easier to use than MovableType. Can’t really compare it to Blogger because of the feature set, but if I had to choose, I’d go with Wordpress.

Rocketboom is pushing the envelope in more ways than one. Rather go the old route and take someone elses commercial and put it in their post-roll, Rocketboom is auctioning off a weeks worth of Rocketboom-produced commercial time. It’s really quite smart; for a price, you get access to Rocketboom’s audience, but Rocketboom gets to choose how to expose your product to their audience in a way that they know their audience will best receive it. It’s funny because, totally unbeknownst to us, Rocketboom has been preparing us for this for quite some time…all those wacky, off-beat commercials they’ve placed at the end of their shows are all advertising, but repositioned in a context that makes the viewer appreciate them as content at the same time their seeing the advertising. And auctioning off the first week on eBay…brilliant!

I had a chance to meet Andrew Baron (the one behind the scenes) at BarCampNY, and besides being a nice guy, he’s got a lots of ideas for the future of online media, from a new perspective. In more ways than one, Rocketboom is one to watch.

Oh, and apparently Rocketboom will be on CSI tonight. Wacky.