A dot com millionaire tries to do it again

In my last post I looked at an idea for distributing social networking profiles and how that would be an alternative to data portability. Now I want to continue to look at what Scoble presents as the roadblocks and see if the rest can be solved with distributed profiles.

Deleting a Profile

“What if a user wants to delete his or her info off of Facebook.” In the data portability world the profile might be copied onto various other sites which might not agree to delete the info. In my distributed scheme your profile only resides at one place - the profile provider site - and therefor you can delete it once and rest assured that it is gone from everywhere.

Now it’s not really quite that simple. Once the information is distributed it can be cached in various other sites and if they don’t handle the caching properly your data might still persist after you delete it from the provider. In this distributed social networking world your profile provider will only distribute your profile to trusted third parties. Sites that don’t comply can be shut off from the feeds. Of course this same carrot/stick approach can be used in the data portability world as well. With the distributed model you can add one further scheme - remote content. If you (or your profile provider) don’t quite trust a third party site you can allow them to display your profile information remotely - via iframes or the like - rather than giving the third party the data to display. In this use however the third party would be limited in the use they can make of your profile information since they don’t have direct access to that information.

Noisy Systems

credit: cosmonautirussiSome people are sensitive to the amount of email sent by various sites and while you might be happy with the control your profile provider gives you the third party might make use of your email that you don’t want. My distributed profile scheme adds an element and that’s the profile viewer. What this means is that the profile information that is available depends on who is looking at it. You can present one set of data to family and close friends, another set to co-workers and still another set the the general public. You can also determine what information you want available to applications which tend to be a big source of email noise. You can use this to prevent those applications from having access to your email address. Now again this only really works with other sites that want to play nice and follow the rules. A site might obtain your email while showing your profile to a friend and then use that email address for other purposes. Sites that do that would be excluded from the distributed social world but that might not help you once your information is in the wild.

Ensuring Privacy

“You want your closest Facebook friends to know your birthday, but not everyone else.” Is this even possible on most social sites today? I think this is a major failing and one that’s caused by grouping everyone into a “friend” relationship. If sites provide fine grained privacy controls you might be forced to allow or deny every piece of information you have to each of your friends. If however they add the concept of defining the relationship type in the friend request/acceptance then the user can apply privacy controls based on relationship type. Family members get my birthday information. Co-workers get my birth date but not the year. The general public gets no birthday info.

What Data is Yours?

The question of what data belongs to the user and what belongs to the site is a good one and not really addressed via distributed vs portable data. The distributed world needs a standards body to work out how profile information is requested and used and what data goes into that profile would be part of that standard. The profile provider could of course give only a portion of the data if they chose to take the stance that not all the data belongs to the user. But the big benefit of the distributed and open model is that the user if free to chose their profile provider. Say Facebook doesn’t want to share photos you upload across other sites. Certainly another profile provider will be willing to do so. And you can use that other provider and still retain the ability to “friend” Facebook users.

The cross site nature of the open/distributed model also allows for some things that “don’t make sense” in the closed/data portability world. Scoble mentions a comment by a Facebook user not making sense on Flickr. I imagine this is because the Facebook user might very well not have a Flickr profile of their own. But since in the open world the Facebook user can “friend” a Flickr profile or comment on Flickr directly it really doesn’t matter.

Multiple Profiles

Scoble also talks about the complications that arise if someone want to share their profile information across multiple sites but have some bits different - eg. use a different email on Flickr and and Facebook. You can of course solve this in either the data portability or distributed world by allowing overrides - even if you profile is hosted a Facebook you can override some of the profile information when that profile is displayed at Flickr. Overrides aren’t the greatest solution because they re-introduce the problems of having dozens of profiles to update across dozens of sites when you want to change some information. A better solution is to allow - and encourage the use of - multiple profiles. In my own case the main reason I’d want to use multiple email addresses or different profile information across different sites is to segment my world. There’s Solo the entrepreneur, Solo the dad and Solo the poker player. Each of these could be separate profiles - either with different providers, with different accounts at the same provider or by a provider allowing different profile information depending on the relationship of the profile viewer. Just as you might give a different email address to a family vs a business contact so might you give different profile information to a public viewer based on site. Flickr that don’t have a relationship to Scoble would get the Scoble-the-photographer view while those on Facebook might get the Scoble-the-dad view.

No Easy Solutions

I’ve shown here that an open/distributed social networking scheme can work and can solve most of the problems of difficult cases that Scoble brought up. Such a systems is a much more drastic change from the current world than even the data portability model and that makes it even less likely that such a scheme will be adopted any time soon. The key points of this model are:

• openness - can “friend” across sites and use foreign profiles
• more nuanced relationships than just “friend”
• information controls based on relationship with the viewer of the profile

While the distributed/open model solves some problem (and I think is just plain better than what we have now) it does introduce some new problems of its own and I’ll address those in the next post.

Top bloglebrity Robert Scoble has long been a proponent of data portability on social network sites. He’s a heavy user of many social sites and was famously booted from Facebook when he ran a script to extract his friend’s data. He recently posted about the roadblocks to data portability that raised some good points and I’d like to see if I can address them through my distributed/open/inside out social network idea.

Scoble’s proposed solution to the issues with multiple closed social networks is fundamentally different from mine. He (and this isn’t just Scoble I’m just using him to represent this camp) proposes data portability which means data that you enter on one site would be able to migrate to other sites. Update your profile picture on Facebook and that change would propagate to MySpace. Follow someone on Twitter and also “friend” them on Facebook.

My plan is a bit different in that I don’t distribute the data to be hosted by the various sites you use. I have a profile provider which gives the data to a profile consumer on demand and based on the credentials of the profile viewer. It’s OpenID on steroids. You want to update your profile picture so you go to your profile provider site - say Facebook - and update it. You also have pictures posted on Flickr. When someone visits your Flickr profile, Flickr software - under the covers - requests your profile information from Facebook using the credentials of the viewer - in this case it might be an anonymous unregistered user. Facebook then sends to Flickr the profile information you have marked as publicly available - which includes your new profile picture.

Would this scheme solve the problems that Scoble and his Facebook engineer friend raise? Lets look at them and see.

Multiple Profiles

credit: Arkansas ShutterBugThe first problem that Scoble raises that he’s trying to solve is the issue of having multiple profiles across many sites and the pain that causes when you try to update profile information. “this year I wanted to change my email … Doing just that simple action is a pain in the behind.” In my scheme it’s a piece of cake. You don’t have profiles on the dozens of sites you use you have one at your profile provider site. Change your e-mail there and it’s automagically changed everywhere

From Facebook to Email

“When a Facebook user … gives you his/her email address it’d be nice to have that automatically placed into your favorite email client”. Not quite automatically placed in your email client but automatically available to your email client. You login to Gmail using your profile and therefor your profile’s contacts are available within Gmail.

Friend Discovery

When you visit a new social networking site you need to find which of your friends are also using that site. No longer. Under this scheme your relationships are cross site. A Facebook user is able to friend a MySpace user. And if both of those users are on Twitter they are automatically friended there. They way it works is this:

• Every user has a unique id based on their profile provider - could be the url to your Facebook profile
• When you sign in to a new site you sign in via your profile information ala OpenID
• That site - the profile consumer - requests all your information from the profile provider which includes your list of friends
• The new site now automagically knows about all your relationships and can connect you with those who are also users

What exactly consumer sites do with your relationship information would be up to the sites (and the user). You might determine that you really don’t want to follow all of your Facebook friends on Twitter so Twitter might instead present you with a list of your friends who are also Facebook users and allow you to chose which to follow.

The Low Hanging Fruit

So far I’ve addressed - I think successfully - the problems that Scoble is trying to solve via data portability but in this different distributed profile way. That’s not a huge accomplishment though since data portability Scoble’s way also solves these same problems. Next time I see if I can address the issues that Facebook raised along with some new issues that arise out of this distributed scheme.

photo credit: sergis blogI’ve been thinking a bit about some of the projects I’ve worked on in the last year or so since the “big successful site” and most have been failures. Certainly some have failed because I didn’t give them what they needed but some are I think inherently bad business models.

Selling Scripts

I own two sites that sell scripts (small programs to install on a website) to webmasters. Both are sites I purchased with the scripts they were selling. One has been moderately successful but I think the niche is dying. With the other I failed to do enough checking and the software is lacking in features vs its competitors and probably not worth updating. Overall however I think this is a bad business model for a few reasons.

1. The buyers tend to be “poor” webmasters who have little desire/ability to spend a lot
2. There’s a relatively small pool of potential buyers
3. There are free or cheaper alternatives available for at least some of the scripts I sell
4. People steal the scripts and the really brazen will resell them

Overall for the cheap prices I’m able to demand I’m not able to provide a lot of customer support even though some of the buyers demand quite a bit of support. I don’t enjoy having unsatisfied customers so I do provide some support but it’s not worth the time and effort spent. The fact that people steal and redistribute the scripts really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. There are ways to at least deter people from doing so but they’re expensive to implement and make it difficult for the buyer to customize the script so they’re not really for me. Overall I think any business model that relies on selling something that can be copied and distributed for free is going to face the issues of theft.

The Me-Too Site

While I was looking for sites to purchase I noticed that there were a lot of sites making decent money in the “weird auctions” on eBay space. These sites tracked the odd/funny things being sold on eBay. I missed out on a couple auctions for established sites in the space but decided to build my own. I found a site with a good domain name that was abandoned and contacted the owner and was able to purchase it. I then slapped up a Word Press install and began tracking funny auctions. So what’s the problem with this business model? Well nothing really except look again at the first sentence in this paragraph: “there were a lot of sites” in the niche. The site I put together had really nothing new to offer and while it was amusing at first to maintain I quickly lost interest and the updates came infrequently. Oddly enough someone else contacted me to buy the site and I sold it at probably break even though I had made a few dollars along the way. Last thing I know is that the new owner too started strong and lost interest and had placed the site for sale. It’s hard to get passionate about a site that really adds nothing new and stands little chance of catching the leaders in a crowded space.

The Cheap eBook Site

Along the lines of the script site I had a site that sold (or attempted to sell) eBooks about “making money on eBay”. I bought the site thinking it would complement my weird auctions site. It was a cheap turnkey site that had no traffic and sold eBooks that were duplicated a million times around the net. I’m not even sure the creator of the site had permission to resell them. At any rate I did very little promotion and never sold a thing. I attempted to sell the site after I sold the weird auctions site but no one was interested and I let it expire.

The Common Thread

The common thread with these failures is that they’re niches I don’t really care about and sites which add nothing new to the web. That meant that I didn’t work hard at them and they never went anywhere. It’s hard to commit yourself to something that you don’t like doing when you’re not forced to do it by some external power (a boss or other authority figure). Some of these sites would have worked for a different person - someone who had a passion for the niche and was willing to do the work to promote and support them. You’ve heard it before - if you’re working for yourself you have to work at something you love.

I’m sure some of the Internet entrepreneurs out that have other stories of businesses they tried that failed and I’d love to hear them and the lessons learned. Or if you made one of these businesses work let me know how you did it.

Continuing with my post yesterday about how social networking sites miss the mark with their “friend” relationships I’d like to look at the number of faces you have (or would want to have) online and the implications that has on your relationships and how you use online communities.

If you’re like most people I know you can’t classify everyone you know as “friend”. There are family members, co-workers, neighbors, parents of your kids friends, people who share your hobby and if you’re lucky some long time personal friends. And that’s just the people you know in real life. If you’re active online you likely have “friends” that you’ve never met who participate in some online community.

Exposing Yourself to Your Friends

photo credit: akegThink carefully about how you interact with the various people you know in real life and you’ll see that you present many different faces to different people. How are you doing? To a neighbor it’s almost always something like “Not bad. You?”. To a close friend it might be a complaint about your job or some personal news “We’re expecting our second child.” People who you know only through a particular hobby will generally get an answer related to that hobby. Ask a poker player how they’re doing and you’ll hear something like “Took a couple bad beats but I’m still grinding out a small profit.”

photo credit: EVAN BAYHWhen you publish personal information online (through a blog, participation in a community or via a social networking site) you’re putting a certain face on yourself. On a community related to a hobby that face is generally the one you’d use within that hobby - on the poker forum you’ll go by your poker nickname and your identity will be tied to what you reveal about you poker playing. On a community based around your working field you’ll likely adopt something closer to a professional face. On a social network however your typically going to be revealing more details about your personal life and should be aware of who that information is exposed to. For example I don’t necessarily want to share details about my kids with just anyone - my poker buddies would be bored to tears and the general public contains some number of “bad people” who shouldn’t have access to personal information.

About Face

If you’ve determined that you need multiple online identities to handle the various aspects of your life how do you go about doing it? Do you run multiple blogs? Do you control access to your blog? If you use a social networking platform how do you go about expressing the nuances in your different relationships? While some online sites actually do allow you to segment the information you publish, most do not. For the most part if you want that separation you’re going to need to either run multiple blogs or multiple profiles in your social network. Beware also that some services might not support multiple profiles or if they require you to use your real name you might not be able to segment the areas of your life as neatly as you’d like.

Many who inhabit the world of blogging and social sites believe that they should openly expose all of their lives to anyone who cares to - see Scoble tweeting the birth of his child. Certainly that’s a viable option for some but think about both the implications of sharing your information widely - will anything you say hurt your chances to get a job or a future relationship - and also the needs of your reader - how many of Scoble’s reader really want a minute by minute account of childbirth?

Youth Culture?

I think some of the problems with social networks (or at least the ways in which they fail to meet my own needs) is caused by the fact that social networking is created by the young, for the young. At 38 I’m old in Internet terms. When I was 24 “friend” would be a good descriptor for nearly anyone in my life. Now that I’m over the hill the term fails to convey what I need out of my relationships. Do you find yourself wanting more nuanced relationship management online? And if so how do you deal with it?

It seems to me that today’s social networking sites have things all backwards. Yes, I too would like to build a backwards company with a valuation greater than the 2007GDP of Jamaica but let me explain.

Social networking sites are all the rage these days. MySpace and Facebook are top 10 sites and are mentioned in every other Internet related blog post. Clearly a lot of people use and enjoy these sites, but I really don’t get it.

According to Wikipedia social networking sites “provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.” That’s all fine but there’s nothing new there. In fact the services provided by social networking sites are either a poor copy of previous services (compare MySpace blogs to Wordpress) or closed versions of previously open protocols - messaging within a site vs e-mail for example.

In today’s crazy spam filled e-mail world a closed messaging system has some merit I suppose but why would someone chose a messaging system that only lets them communicate with a small portion of the people they know vs one that allows them to communicate with everyone? There’s also some value in integrating a number of services that people would have to get through multiple other sources - combine your Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Wordpress blog in one spot - but I still think not enough value to justify the popularity of these sites. Clearly the appeal of social networking sites is not just in these services. So what’s the innovation that social networking sites provide?

The Social Graph

The social part of social networking comes not through the simple fact that you can do messaging and share photos but through the expression of social connections. The sites allow you to declare that someone is your “friend” and if that other person agrees the relationship is expressed on both profile pages. Once these relationships are expressed the site can use them for various purposes to either limit access to information - only friends can send you messages and view your profile - or to push information - automatically alert you of the actions your friends take.

Even though these social relationships are the key innovative feature of social networking sites, I still think they miss the mark and quite widely. Namely in the fact that there are many more social relationships in the real world than just “friend” and the access to information that we’d want to apply varies so much by the type of relationship. It’s natural - and good - to want to present a different face to a co-worker, a parent and a college drinking buddy. The lack of this fine grained control over what you share about yourself can create problems when you leak information from one area of your life to another where it might not be appropriate.

So Why Backwards

Perhaps social networking sites have their flaws in the services they provide and in the way the express social relationships and control information but why would I say that they’re backwards? Social networking sites of today create their own little walled off community and allow the communication and expression of relationships only within that community. Maybe I’m idealistic but the basis of the Internet in my mind has always been standards and openness. Social sites do provide a useful function - they’re a place where people can create a profile. Even though there are many places where people can create a profile most people don’t bother to do so. Even though people can get a better blogging platform a better photo album or a better chat system elsewhere most are served with the limited functionality and ease of use that they can get at a social site.

Why though should the relationships that you express be limited to relationships with people who also host their profile at the same site? Wouldn’t it be much better and much more in keeping with the “spirit of the Internet” to express those relationships in an open way that crosses site boundaries? The current situation requires that people either join multiple social networks to connect with all of their relationships. On top of that it seems that every other site is building social network functionality. Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow people to create a profile in one place, use it across the web communities they participate in and express their relationships profile-to-profile regardless of which site hosts that profile?

It seems to me that eventually users will come to the realization that their relationships extend beyond the users of a particular site and they’ll demand that their relationship and communication tools extend beyond the users of a particular site as well. There are movements underway to work toward this goal with things like the distributed social project and standards based expressions of relationship like FOAF. It’ll be interesting to watch this area and see the kinds of opportunities that will develop.

Does it Work for You?

What’s your take? Do you find yourself wanting to express relationships outside of facebook? Do you need more nuanced expressions of those relationships and finer grained controls over access to the information you share? If it doesn’t work for you give some thought to what would work and how you can either influence existing services in that direction or seek out new services that will work.

Through the previous “Idealistic Friday” posts I’ve talked about the various things I want to see in consumer electronics devices - open source software, wifi connections, touch screens and APIs. What kind of device would combine all those attributes? My dream device - in my estimation - would sell billions of units. Well maybe hundreds of thousands at least. I offer up the idea in the hopes that someone will actually run with it. I’ll take 5 at least.

photo credit: laihiuMy dream device looks an awful lot like a digital photo frame. The digital photo frame has really come into its own in the last few years. A couple years ago they were expensive, small and only in the homes of the techno-geek early adopters. Now they sell them in Target and CVS stores, they’ve grown much bigger and they’re pretty cheap.

Now apply our new attributes to the digital photo frame. Our new digital frame has a touch screen, runs extensible software and has a wifi connection. There’s one in my kitchen. It normally cycles through pictures of the family but pick it up and touch it and you get the menu. The menu has a couple of the applications I’ve installed on it - a grocery list that automatically syncs with the website of my local grocery store. When I walk into to grocery store there’s a little kiosk where I swipe my card and get it prints out a list of the groceries I need to buy. Conveniently the list is sorted by aisle so I know that in this particular store bread is in aisle 3. Peanut butter is on my list and so Jif and Skippy have added competing coupon offers. There’s also a recipe application I’ve added that connects to various recipe sites on the net.

Also on my kitchen device is a family calendar. I can see when the kids have soccer practice, when we have a party to attend and can add the fact that I’m ducking out on Thursday night to go to the poker game. When I’m in the family room I can add entries to the calendar and they will appear at all the devices throughout the house. And of course it’s synced with my Google calendar so I can add entries online too.

The one on my nightstand in the bedroom has a couple special applications I’ve added. There’s a small digital clock at the bottom and the current weather and today’s forecast in simple icon form. If I want more details about todays weather or want to check further into the future I can just touch the weather icon and explore further. And of course it can act as an alarm clock and wake me to random tracks from my MP3 collection. Not all of these devices are identical. The come in various sizes and capabilities -  not all of them need the nice stereo speakers built into my bedroom unit.

I’m embarrassed to say that the one in the family room - the one that charges in a dock and slips out for hand held use - also has my Google Reader application installed so I can keep up with my RSS feeds and accesses my Gmail account. Someday I’ll learn to be disconnected for a few minutes a day.

My parents have a few of these in their house too and because they’ve given me online access to the units I can beam them pictures of the grandkids directly from my digital camera (which also has a wifi connection). Using the API I’ve added some simple functionality to have my units monitor the health of all my websites and alert me when something goes awry. It wasn’t hard but did of course require a bit of programming. For most people however the devices just work - and popular applications are a one touch install. They’re based all on open standards so even though they’re made by different manufacturers they all work together.

Is it a crazy dream world that I live in? Not really. Such devices could be made today pretty easily using commonly available components. It’s the kind of device that no one (well not many) knows that they want until they see it. But once you get it you won’t be able to imagine how you lived without it.

Of course I’ve read it (and you have too) blogging is hard work. Trying to generate quality content day after day can be difficult. You’ve also heard that one of the keys to success with blogging is persistence. Few make much of an impact early on and it may be months or longer before a blogger attracts a following. I’d been going full steam ahead for a while now and hit a bit of a mental roadblock this week. The promotion I’ve been doing has been working somewhat but traffic and regular readers have been slow in coming. Then just now I got a boost. A post I submitted to Blogsvine won in their free ad campaign contest.

If you’re not familiar with Blogsvine you can be excused since they’re pretty new. Blogsvine is essentially a Digg-like social bookmarking site that’s focused on (you guessed it) blogs. You can submit entire blogs (homepage) or specific posts. Unlike Digg you are welcomed to submit your own posts and also unlike Digg bloggers tend to get a friendly reception. Blogsvine has the familiar vote up/vote down/comment on submissions and of course a profile and friend system.

I’m proud to say that my post on capitalizing on accidental traffic not only got 7 up votes and 2 comments on blogsvine (which is pretty decent for stories there), it was also judged a top 10 story by blogsvine and earns me an ad spot. I’ll certainly be giving blogsvine a bit more of my attention and I’ll keep you posted as to any results from the ad spot.

Oddly enough that post (which I do think is a good one) was one that was written fairly quickly and as a reminder to myself to take the very steps I recommended. A site of mine is getting a fair bit of accidental traffic and I can use it but haven’t to this point. Guess what’s tops of my todo list for today?

If you run a website and look through your web traffic logs you’ll very likely find that your site is getting at least some “accidental traffic”. What is accidental traffic, you say? Accidental traffic is visitors that you didn’t seek to get who are coming to your site looking for something you don’t have. This could be because you mention something in passing that gets indexed in a search engine or you have a domain that’s similar to one used for another purpose. You can spot this traffic by looking at the keywords that drove the visitor to your site and observing their behavior once on your site. Accidental visitors come via a search term you wouldn’t expect to see and generally leave almost immediately. So what can you do with this accidental traffic?

Deter It

photo credit: JASON ANFINSENIn some cases you might want to deter the accidental visitor. If your site serves only a specific geographic region you can avoid serving people outside that region. When you notice that a prominent site links to you when they meant to link to another site with a similar name you can refuse to serve visitors who come from that site. Or you might deter visitors who come via certain terms in a search. I won’t go into how to do such things because for the most part you shouldn’t do it. Unless for some reason your hosting costs are unusually high the accidental visitor costs you very little and even if there’s only a minuscule chance of you getting something out of them it’s better to serve them in some way than to turn them away.

Ignore It

If you’ve never thought about accidental traffic before chances are you’re ignoring it. Even if you did notice some visitors via an odd referrer or search term chances are you never thought about doing much about it. Now despite what you think may be coming, I’m not going to say that ignoring this visitor is necessarily a bad thing. If you get very few accidental visitors and they come via a wide variety of off topic search terms then sometimes it’s just not worth your efforts to try to capitalize on them. Another example might be if your site serves such a wide audience that the visitor who stumbles into your site might very well convert into legitimate visitors. For this visitor you need only have good site navigation or search capabilities and they may very well find their way to something you do have that interests them.

Serve It

While the web developer who deters the accidental visitor sees them as an annoyance, a developer with a broader view might see the accidental traffic as an opportunity waiting to be served. Whether or not you take this approach largely depends on the type of accidental traffic you’re getting. If you’ve unknowingly stumbled upon a term that people are interested in and you have the ability to provide content to serve that interest. This site - because of it’s name - draws traffic from the search term “solo programmer” which is generally used in the context of the extreme programming methodology an it’s “pair programming”. If there is enough of this kind of traffic I can write a post on solo programming vs pair programming and perhaps serve those visitors. A post like that wouldn’t be (far) off-topic for the site and is something I could address. You might find that your photography site, which you simply intended to show off your work, draws visitors looking for stock photos. If there’s enough of that traffic you could install some software and sell your images - or give them away with attribution that will get you backlinks.

Redirect It

credit: SqueakyMarmotIf you determine that you don’t want to directly serve your accidental visitor, a good alternative is to redirect them. You can redirect them to another site you own that would serve their needs. This is a great way to leverage multiple sites to increase targeted traffic. If you don’t have another site to serve the visitor you can look for an affiliate program that would serve them. If visitors to your book club site want to buy the books you talk about, redirect them to Amazon and collect a small commission on their purchases. When the accidental visitor isn’t a prospective buyer you can redirect them to a site that will meet their needs without an affiliate program. Giving away your traffic might seem like a poor choice but depending on your niche and the size/stature of the site you link to, you might get a return link in exchange that will send some of their accidental traffic your way. If your accidental traffic is people looking for Google, you’re unlikely to get a home page link from Google in return for sending them your accidental traffic but maybe that small gesture of goodwill can encourage the accidental visitor to check out what you have or just make the world a better place in some tiny way.

Deal With Your Accidental Traffic

Take a moment to look at your web traffic reports and see what kind of accidental traffic you’re receiving. And then decide what’s the most appropriate thing to do about it. If ignoring it is best then ignore it but make the decision to do so. And whatever your decision is no revisit it periodically to see if your accidental traffic has changed and if your response is still appropriate.

photo credit: Steve RhodesIf you’re a blogger there’s a good chance you don’t regularly read a newspaper. Bloggers (and actually most people these days) tend to get their news online. However if you’re a blogger, some of the conventions and reader expectations from the newspaper world still apply to what you write whether you know it or not.

Consider the various sections found in your typical newspaper and then think about where your own blog would fit. The expectations of that section still apply to your blog.

News

The key expectation of a the news section is objectivity. A reporter is supposed to report facts without their own biases or opinions. There are a lot of blogs online today that publish primarily news stories and the good ones at least follow the unbiased, objective reporting standard. There’s another expectation about the news section and that is that news be observed or researched. If your blog belongs in the news section then it can’t be based entirely on your own thoughts or feelings. Be sure that your news posts answer the “5 W’s” (who, what, where, when, why) of journalism and retain an objective tone and your readers will be getting what they expect.

Columns

The columnist must be the most coveted job in the newspaper world and it’s no surprise that this is where most bloggers would rightly place themselves. A columnist has a lot more freedom than a news report in the things they cover. The columnist is also expected to inject their own biases and opinions into a piece though the piece must be more than a simple emotional rant. A good columnist, like many good bloggers, specializes in analysis - they present a story or situation and explain its ramifications. A blogger who seeks to be a columnist will need to establish them self as an authority in the field they wish to cover. Be sure that over time and within your posts you cite reasons for why your analysis should be trusted. Famous bloggers don’t need to worry about this but if you’re not an A-lister you’ll want to interject personal experiences that helped you reach you conclusions and establish your authority.

Reviews

photo credit: habitatgirlWhile everyone working as a journalist might want to be a columnist, everyone else in the world wants to be a critic. Whether the movie critic or the restaurant reviewer who wouldn’t want a job where dining out or watching a movie is your work? It’s not coincidence then that a lot of blogs focus heavily on reviews. Reviews, perhaps more than any other type of blogging, rely on the blogger conveying a sense of who they are. People like to read reviews by people who have the same tastes they do. If you’re reviewing the real key is to build a consistent style to your reviews and build a following of people who trust that they will like what you like - or perhaps like what you hate.

Conclusion

You might not read a newspaper and your readers might not read the newspaper but consider how the newspaper conventions and expectations affect what you are writing. While you can mix various types of posts throughout your blog, you should be very careful to avoid switching mid-post and if you primarily write news stories for example be sure to make it evident when a post is breaking out of that mold. By sticking to the conventions your readers expect, you’ll make it easier for them to read your posts and more likely to return to read more.

photo credit: bbaunachHow do you normally write? I’ve always liked to pretty much get the whole idea in my head (or at least the general overview all worked out) and then just sit down and write beginning to end. That’s great if you can write with no distractions but if you have a spouse and kids around you don’t often get a lot of distraction free time.

Try jotting down the outline of what you’re going to say. It makes it far easier when you do get interrupted and may help you write better focused posts that arrive at the conclusions you want to reach.