Think ... ART!

As we attempt to feature the blogs more prominently, here's something you can do to help ...

When putting together your entries, do everything you can to come up with usable, solid art that we can utilize for the photo position.

Many of you already do this, and it's appreciated, but it's going to become more important as we move forward.

A really great idea ...

I love what Ramiro Burr did here in Latin Notes Now.

Beyond simply saying "Sign up for our e-mail updates," Ramiro tells people exactly why they should ... and with a little panache, too.

Well done.

Bear in mind, this works particularly well because Ramiro blogs really, really frequently. If the last entry you posted was sometime in May, you're probably facing a tough sell, no matter how much panache you bring to the table.

Nicely done.

Gone Tinkerin' ...

Hey all,

If you notice something weird about your blog in the coming days, weeks, months ... it's probably just me.

I've been figuring out some of the background code for Movable Type, and that's letting me do things like expand the number of entries per page (examples Geek Speak and Move It!) and also do some interesting things with comments (At Large).

If any of my tinkering creates a problem, please let me know as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Matt

Wanna be a better blogger? Try this ...

Forgive me if this is a trifle obvious, but I guess it bears mentioning:

Read blogs. It doesn't have to be a ton of them, just one or two good ones that involve an area you're interested in (not even necessarily within your beat).

Find a good cooking blog. A good hunting blog. A good golfing blog.

Whatever.

But read them.

You're not going to have a chance at becoming solid bloggers if you're unfamiliar with the form.

Piling on pageviews ...

So what constitutes a "meaningful metric" and what doesn't? In other words, are "pageviews" better than "time spent" or vice versa.

It's starting to look like "time" will win out.

First, there was news that Nielsen was junking pageviews as its main metric in determining the most successful sites.

Nielsen is part of a growing number of institutions realizing that with the advent of new technologies, the pageview's value isn't necessarily as important as it once was.

As the New York Times puts it:

Yahoo and others, however, are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax that allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

And then the reaction began to flow in ... most of it excited at the prospect of being freed from the tryanny of the pageview.

Richard MacManus of Read/Write/Web:

Blogs are a good case where 'time spent' is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the 'quantity over quality' problem. It's easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the 'time spent on site' figures for those blogs and I think you'd find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn't. So in the case of blogs, I'd argue that 'time spent on site' is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

His point was echoed by Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism:

Say I go to site “A” and view eight pages, but I never stay on one page longer than 2 seconds (because I don’t see anything that interests me). I go to site “B” and view only two pages, but I spend 8 minutes on each page.

Current page view metrics say that site “A” is better, more trafficked.

I say that’s just stupid, because on site “A,” I consumed no content or advertising.

Other reactions are similar.

While I agree the pageview is a particularly benign creature that is consistently overvalued, I'm not sure if "time spent" is going to work, either. I tend to leave numerous browsers open constantly, so I'm not sure if that's skewing undue "time" for all these various sites. Maybe there's a way to determine this and I'm showing my ignorance, but my larger point is that any metric we work with will have strengths and weaknesses.

And, while the view will, eventually, become obsolete, let's not forget that advertisers love 'em ... so until THEY are convinced, expect to still be taking pageviews way too seriously for a while longer.

Mindy had one other point I'd like to underscore and emphasize:

For me, that’s been the horrible thing about the page view metric — padding the numbers by adding unnecessary and highly annoying extra clicks to Web sites. Newspaper Web sites have been some of the worst offenders in this respect. (Emphasis added.)

Agreed. So let's not do that.

We get letters ...

Well, sort of.

I got this question this weekend, and it's a question ... frankly ... that I've heard before. Pruned down a bit, here's the gist:

Q.: A couple of us bloggers were talking and we all noticed that if we don't get promo'd on the MySA home page the day our blogs go up, no one knows we have a new one, so no one reads them. ... But if no one is reading them, the reporters aren't eager to spend time on them. Is there any way to push the idea with everyone who's posting blogs at MySA that new E-N blogs should, if at all possible, get a good ride on the home page the day they are posted? Or is that not likely for various reasons?

And my lengthy answer:

A.: The correlation between home page promotion and pageviews is not something that's escaped our notice. The obvious problem is that of labor supply and the steady flow of blog entries. An example, on Friday — a day when we're relatively short-staffed (meaning, I'm off) — we had at least 24 blog entries posted. I'm not sure what qualifies as a good ride, but trying to squeeze that much new content into the limited space we have to work with is a challenge on our best days, and it really is more time-consuming than it might appear to the outside viewer.

We have made efforts to improve homepage visibility of the blogs in general, and we do have some fixes in mind to try to increase overall blog visibility.

(Note: Here, I turn on the bloggers a bit ... I might sound harsh, but please bear with me ...)

Indeed, one of the biggest challenges here has been the obsession with traffic from the bloggers, and the concept of "it's not worth my time" is a familiar one to me. Problem is, NOTHING on the Internet is a success out of the box. The standard growth pattern of any online venture — whether a blog, a new overall site, or anything — is a long, steady, period of limited to no growth, and then — if it's to be a "success" — a tipping point at one point where traffic begins to grow exponentially. They call it the "hockey stick" graph. (Cuz the chart of growth looks like a hockey stick.)

Problem here is, reporters are so used to believing that everything they've written in the paper is read by each and every person who picks up the paper, they become — frankly — a trifle snobbish when it comes to only a few hundred readers (or, in some cases, 50-100). I know this, because I lived it from the other side ... making the jump from newspaper to the Web, where I could actually see the readership numbers ... well, the ego does take a bruising.

What this adds up to is a nasty mix of flagging morale and resignation that sort of cripples things before they have even a chance to hit that critical mass.

I suspect that many of those who feel like blogging isn't worth their time haven't been following best practices in regard to posting frequency. As long as you blog regularly (and well) and people know when to expect new work out of you (in other words, blogging Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays by 9 a.m. is MUCH better than blogging 15 times in one day, then twice another, then not at all for a week), you will build a following, modest though it may be ... especially at the beginning.

Which, upon reflection, is a little puzzling. A roomful of 100 people would make me nervous to speak in front of ... yet we dismiss them as "not worth the effort" when the blog numbers roll in. Even 75 people extremely interested in what you have to say are, in my opinion, worth at least as much as ten thousand who might — or more likely, might not — catch a whiff of what you're saying on the way to the the sports pages (or, in my case, the funnies).

The homepage promotion is a great way to expose a blog ... but it's not going to single-handedly elevate it into the "worth it" strata. Only time (and extremely hard work) is going to do that. The beauty of it is, once a blog is rolling, it's really hard to derail it, and it becomes an entity almost unto itself.

Well worth it, in my opinion.

I should note the blogger did respond with some good points, though they were a bit beyond the scope of what I wanted to discuss here. I wanted to post this because, again, I hear this quite a lot, and it is a major problem for our various ventures together. If you'd like to comment on this, either drop me a line at mthompson@mysanantonio.com or post it here.

Blogs I Love: Comics Curmudgeon

It's the essence of simplicity: Posting comic strips and then making fun of them.

Potential copyright issues aside, the Comics Curmudgeon is a daily, if mildly profane, hoot, and has actually managed to help make some obscure, dated strips, such as Mary Worth (a frequent target of his barbs), a small sensation on the Web.



But what can we learn about blogging from Mr. Curmudgeon?

It's a fantastic example of community. Check out the number of comments that fly up shortly after he posts. His most recent one, posted around midday yesterday, has over 350 comments already.

These are dutiful fans who have already, largely, made friends with one another, and they attempt to one-up each other (and the blog's author) on a daily basis.

Josh (the blogger himself) breaks character a couple times a week, identifying the "comment of the week," listing a dozen or so other ones he finds humorous, and hosting various "Meta" events. (This one, inviting his readers to recreate a particularly ridiculous event from Gil Thorp, is my personal favorite.) He, and his readers, have also created merchandise based on the blog at Cafepress.

It's the community aspect of blogs I'll be dealing with over the next few posts. Keep an eye on the Curmudgeon as a great example of what you can do with what following you have ... and how you have to be in position to boost and solidify that following when the opportunities present themselves. (And they will.)