Blogging for fun (and profit)
: A good story about trying to make blogging profitable in the Guardian. Focuses on Denton and Copeland. Quotes me. (For folks coming across the ocean from the Guardian, if you're curious about the reference to video blogs, click here.)
: It has become tradition among bloggers who are interviewed (as if that were not ego gratification enough) to put up the entire transcript of the interview. Now just the other day, I poo-pooed a journalist putting up all his interviews, arguing that the value he added was NOT overloading us like that. But who am I to sabotage tradition? If you care -- and you shouldn't, really, you shouldn't -- you can click on the "more" link below (for those reading a direct link to a post on the archives page, just scroll past all this blather):
Q: What got you interested in blogs – when did you start blogging and why?
A: Two answers here -- one work-related, one personal.
For work (I am in charge of content, technology, and strategic development for the newspaper- and magazine-related online services of Advance, the Newhouse media company): We are enamored of audience content. Forums on such topics as recipes and high-school wrestling bring in up to a third of our traffic. So we value this content. We saw blogging, early on, as a potential for new audience content, and so we invested in Pyra (which created Blogger) and another weblog company. So we watched blogging for a long time and are now beginning to try incorporating some weblogs into our sites.
Personally: I started my own weblog (www.buzzmachine.com) only when I had something to say and that came after September 11th, when I survived the attacks in New York (I was on the last train into the World Trade Center and stayed to report the story for our sites and papers; I was a block away from the south tower when it collapsed; I put my story up online). I could not let go of the story and since I no longer report for a living, I started my weblog. I reported more memories and observations from that days but it quickly expanded, as weblogs do, into a broader range of the things that interest me. I also quickly found that I was meeting people and making friends around this weblog. Before long, it was an addiction -- or perhaps the better metaphor was this this was a cult and I was now a member -- and so I have not stopped.
Q: In general, people blog because they have something to say – they’re driven by passion, not the profit motive. Consequently, some people have suggested (Clay Shirky) that no one will ever make any money from blogging on its own, that the only bloggers who make money will be those with a foot in the old media world, who may make money indirectly (I’m thinking of his essay on the mass amateurisation of publishing). Do you agree with this line of argument – or do you think there is money to be made from blogging?
A: In one sense, weblogs are merely a tool. Quark brought professional publishing to the masses (but you still had to know how to write and design and distribute professionally if you were going to make money using that). Weblog tools bring online publishing to the masses (and here we do not need to worry about printing and distributing to newsstands to publish). I'm also very high on new video tools (to create what I call vlogs on my site) that similarly bring the ability to create TV commentary to the masses. So Clay is absolutely right: weblogging does lead to the mass amateurization of media -- but I applaud that, for, again, I know how valuable the audience's content can be.
You're right that most weblogs are products of passion rather than profit. But that need not be the case. As you know, Nick Denton is starting weblogs with profit as his goal and that influenced the subject matter. Gadgets on Gizmodo.com will draw high audience interest and there's a way to make money through affiliate sales, advertising, and syndication. There's money there. There just doesn't happen to be money in political punditry.
I think there will be other ways to make money in and around weblogs when they reach a critical mass of audience. I can see marketing specific products to specific audiences through them, for example.
Q: The blogosphere has got so big now, it’s hard for mainstream business/media to ignore it. What do you think they could learn from bloggers.
A: Big media can learn a number of skills from bloggers: namely, that brevity is a service; swiftness adds value; and voice and opinion make media interesting.
I'm fond of saying that The Week magazine is a weblog (without links); that's why I am a fan of the publication. It is not afraid of being brief (while other publications think they add value by adding words -- which really only adds to the audience's exhaustion); it is quick; it has a voice. I believe we will be seeing this influence spread through other publications and media products (including TV).
Big-time publishers can also learn from the size of these efforts. Media (and entertainment) have to get smaller to succeed in the future (when more products compete for smaller slices of the audience and of marketing dollars). I created Entertainment Weekly and I was very proud that I started it with a smaller staff than any other magazine in Time Inc., smaller even than the company's monthly magazines. I had 60 on the content side. Now compare that with The Week in the U.S. with 24 on the entire staff. That is a good trend.
Q: Do you think the thin media/nanopublishing idea being explored by Nick Denton will work in the long term?
A: Yes, I believe it will work. At moments such as this, someone always asks whether something new will replace something old and the answer is almost always no; nanopublishing will not replace magazine publishing or mass media. It is a new opportunity. It won't make money for political punditry or for the diaries of college students. But it will work for gadgets and sex and special interests such as disease (imagine a great weblog for diabetics). It will work because it is so cheap to publish.
Q: What about the blogads idea – won’t advertisers want to get their ads onto the big blogs and not be too bothered by the smaller operations – in other words can this ad-supported model really work for bloggers who don’t have huge traffic levels?
A: Yes, this is an issue. I threw out a trial balloon many months ago suggesting the idea of starting a foundation to create a network of weblogs of sufficient size to interest advertisers but I quickly realized that this would work only in a for-profit company and the effort that would go into starting it simply would not pay off today. Hell, the Internet is still too small for some (unenlightened) advertisers; weblogs are molecular compared to that. A few things will be required for advertising to work: Weblogs would need to create an efficient ad sales and serving network and they would need to create profiles of their audiences for targeting. I don't see that happening anytime soon for the reason above. Instead, I think there is a possibility that direct marketing will work with weblogs (note Amazon sales through them).
Q: On a related theme, this whole idea of setting up ad networks for blogs reminds me of other operations that were set up back in the early days of the personal homepage boom. Are we in danger of re-running a lot of ideas that were tried and failed back then? Or are people older and wiser now?
A: I answered the first part of this above. As to the second: No, I think we have learned a great deal. We're no longer pouring millions into (and expecting billions from) such ventures. They are appropriately small now.
Q: In the end, what did you think of Andrew Sullivan’s Pledge Week – you were quite critical of it, but it seemed to do the business – he didn’t quite hit his target but he got enough. And he did establish the idea of readers paying for blogs they like. I have my doubts about whether anyone apart from superstar bloggers can make this model work. What do you think?
A: More power to him for eeking out some bucks. But clearly, this is no way to make this medium work. Perhaps it's cultural: We are not accustomed to paying licensing fees for our TV; public-TV pledge weeks grate our senses; we are more accustomed to for-profit media making a profit; that's how we pay for our media. I think begging is a bit unseemly. Either your content is unique and worth money and you can charge for it and do or not.
Q: Most of the questions so far have focused on the idea of blogging as online media/publishing. But blogging is changing now – moving on from the initial idea (filtering the web, providing an easy to use platform for personal expression) to something that has more to do with letting groups form, share ideas, build some sort of shared culture – via things like Moveable Type’s trackback and various variations on it. Is this something you can see the business world getting interested in?
A: Perhaps. From the perspective of audience and present blogs: The metaproduct of blogs will probably be data about buzz: What is the audience talking about? What do they care about? Who are the influencers? What are the trends? Bloggers already influence Google; their links are a measure of buzz. I think there will be more sophisticated means of measuring that buzz.
From the perspective of the tools: See my answer to your next question.
Q: I’m planning to speak to John Robb about the k-log idea – which is about using the weblog form to help corporations pool and manage this knowledge, I guess – do you think it will catch on?
A: I've done a lot of thinking about weblogs and corporate knowledge management (spurred in part by Denton) and though I think weblogs could be of value (to better package corporate content and information, to capture expertise, to publish easily within the corporation, to publish the company line), I doubt that they will be used widely because this would require a sizable change of habit inside companies, because most corporate citizens are not writers and in fact fear writing (while bloggers clearly relish it), and because corporations and their managers are (necessarily) control freaks and they will not want spontaneous publishing happening under them.
What is more likely, I think, is what you see from some law firms and from Jupiter recently: People in the knowledge business (as someone I quoted on my blog said recently) will use weblogs to show off their own knowledge. It makes sense for a consultant or attorney or accountant or analyst to create a blog to share and comment on information. But that's very different from internal knowledge management....
Q: On the subject of big businesses getting involved in blogging, do you know anything about AOL’s plans to enter the area?
A: Evan Williams of Pyra said on his blog that AOL is definitely sniffing here. I believe that AOL will offer blogging tools because it's just the next generation of what they already have: personal home page tools. When AOL does do this, I think the end result will be less like the weblogs we see publickly and more like LiveJournal, which is really a closed community of online friends who use weblogging tools to communicate.
Beyond that, however, I do think that there will come a day when everyone will have a weblog of sorts: that is, a place to store links, information, photos, and anything we'd want anyone to see. I also think that people will start adding metadata about themselves to their weblogs (there was a recent riff among webloggers about adding tags such as $single or $seeking job or $seeking programmer to their weblogs or personal pages so that search engines will allow us to create dynamic directories of people who have or want what we want; see that discussion here: http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_01.html#000564)
Priorities, people!
: The Bloggies "controversy" is getting out of hand. I just thought they were lame, that's all.
Warblogs, the sequel
: Glenn Reynolds gives you a terrific warblogroll as we roll into battle, at GlennReynolds.com.
The reign of the stupid
: As it turns out, the biggest loss in the history of American business and the worst deal in the history of American business and the fall that will mark the end of an era in American business -- the vaporizing of the bubble that symbolized the previous era -- are not the result of vain greed, as we've been saying about Silicon (Death) Valley. No, AOL Time Warner was the result of stupidity, plain, old, simple, avoidable stupidity. It was stupid to think that AOL was going to keep growing. It was stupid to believe that AOL was making as much money as they said. It was stupid of AOL to mistreat its customers for so long. It was stupid of Time Warner to think that its customers would give an F about a holding pen for its brands called Pathfinder, which resulted in the strategic panic and aggressive stupidity that led to the AOL deal. It was incredibly, terribly, destructively, monumentally, historically, shamefully stupid to let themselves be bought by AOL. It was just plain stupid, that's all. At least the greedy fools of Silicon Valley were smart. The fools of AOL Time Warner were just dumb.
Free!
" I just signed up for a free trial subscription to the LA Examiner. You should, too.
Naked Canadians, pasty white
: Marc Weisblott sends us news of more naked Canadians (following word that Naked News will air on Canadian TV): An almost-naked cooking show:
There's a new show on the block that promises to entertain as well as...enlighten. Enter the world of cooking with two pairs of chefs, Murray Bancroft & Dena Ashbaugh and Gennaro Iorio & Eva DeViveiros, who will alternate hosting duties each week. Clad only in "strategically placed" aprons, they'll explore the relationship between sex and food in a playful, sexy, adult way -- Food as Aphrodisiacs, Breakfast in Bed for Two (or More), Dinner as Foreplay...it's all here. Move over Emeril!
Pass me the oysters.
: And through this, I learned that Canada has a SexTV cable channel. Who'dathunkit?
The new boss
: An interview with the new boss at MSNBC.com, Dean Wright: More broadband, more useful news; smart on both counts.
Gray on gray on gray
: A New York winter day.
: A very nice photolog from Germany (don't worry about translating; it's all about the photos. Just click on anything that says "mehr" or "weiter"; that means more).
Freeing Iraq
: A new weblog on Germany's view of America and vice versa, Amiland, finds this eloquent quote:
At a ceremony on Sunday, Paul Spiegel -- the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany -- criticized the German government's position on Iraq. "One can't be a priori against war," he declared. "The concentration camps weren't freed by demonstrators."
One more thing... Your blood type, please
: Glenn Reynolds whines about sites requiring registration. I agree. He's not saying it's all bad; he understands we folks have to make the money to buy our suits; he's primarily complaining about sites that ask you two dozen dumb questions (to which you will give two dozen lying replies) and then still give you a bad site. When you get right down to it, some sites need to know just a kernel of information to serve ads more efficiently (and thus make money). A local site needs to know where you're from (thus what content and ads you need to see). A b-to-b site wants to know that you're in the industry. A little goes a long way.
The reviews are in
: The LA Examiner, from Ken Layne, Matt Welch, Dick Riordan, et al, got a good review from its whipping boy, the LATimes:
Graphically, the new weekly's 52-page prototype is a handsome, highly readable package with a promising and intelligently arranged editorial format....
Taken as a whole, the Los Angeles Examiner wants to be something novel in the alternative press, what might be called the voice of the beleaguered former majority, an insurgent establishment.
Dear Scumbucket,
: Former TV critic Gary Deep is selling celebrity letters to him on eBay. But it's a real D-list list -- all Chicago radio "personalities," like Larry Lujack.
I can beat that from my days as a TV Critic at People, TV Guide, and Entertainment Weekly.
I have hate mail from Bill Cosby. He hated it when I said his sitcom went downhill and he regularly sent nya-nya mail.
I have a whining letter from Alan Thicke begging me to lay off him; must have been his therapist's idea.
I have a letter from Pat Sajak pissed off that I didn't like what they'd done to Wheel of Fortune.
I have thank-you notes from Rosanne [Barr]; surprised she's so well-mannered.
And I have a nice letter from David Letterman, thanking me for my support, signed, "Your friend, Dave."
Sorry, not for sale.
But I will be happy to sell you autographed first editions of Entertainment Weekly. I'll sell you lots of EW launch swag.
And I'll sell you that hat (below) worn by a former TV critic who may look down on his luck -- bad enough to sell old letter from the star -- but isn't... yet. [via Romenesko]
Pop culture jury psychographics
: They're doing strange things to pick juries these days:
: A friend tells me his panel for a criminal case was asked what bumperstickers they had on their cars. American flag? Fine. Police Benevolent Association sticker? Defense says, good-bye.
: In a New Jersey criminal trial, the defense laywer wanted to ask prospective jurors whether they listened to Howard Stern. He didn't want any Stern fans on his jury. The judge said he couldn't do that.
: The judge did, however, allow the lawyer to ask whether jurors watched CSI or NYPD Blue.
Work: The Ultimate Reality Show: The Sequel
: When I pitched work as the Ultimate Reality Show, I forgot to link to the best cast you could imagine: Just read Nick Denton's tales of ex-colleague Julie Meyer (and links to her alleged memo writing on f'd company). You know that people in that office ask themselves every day: What's worse -- this or poverty?
How cold is it
: Cold enough that I don't care if I look like a dork in that hat. Colleagues dared me to put this picture up. So there.
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