The amazing Gary Veynerchuk, the most digitally savvy retailer anywhere, has now parleyed his wine vlog into a wine book.
: LATER: Further testimony to the power of Gary’s vlog: The book is ranked 101 (yes, that’s kismet) on Amazon.
Posts Tagged ‘Weblogs’
Thunderstruck
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008Guardian: The value of this blog
Monday, April 14th, 2008For my Guardian column this week, I put a price on my blog:
Some people think I’m nuts for blogging when I could be doing real work (as if writing newspaper columns were the only real work). They ask me how much money I make directly from my blog and the answer is: not much. But to me, the blog is worth a million dollars – or more – for it brings me value in many other ways. So I thought I’d give you an accounting of that worth.
Last year, Buzzmachine.com, which has been in business, loosely speaking, since 2001, made $9,315 (£4,655) from two blog ad networks, $1,866 from ads on my RSS feeds, and $2,674 from Google ads, for a total of $13,855. Though I’ve written many a blog post and column lamenting that there aren’t better, richer ad networks to support grassroots media, when I add that up, I’d say it’s not too shabby. Nonetheless, you’d still be forgiven for thinking I shouldn’t have quit my day job.
When I did quit that day job – as president of an online division of Condé Nast’s parent company, which I left in 2005 – I got my next job thanks to the blog. If I hadn’t been pontificating about the state of the news in the internet era, I wouldn’t have come to the attention of the City University of New York, which appointed me to the faculty of its journalism school – a job I love. But I must confess that my teaching post pays a fraction of my prior salary. So you may still think me a fool.
To make the money I don’t make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I’ve also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I’m not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.
It was also because of the blog that I got this column. The MediaGuardian editors asked me to take some of the topics I write about online and turn them into columns; the newspaper is an aftermarket for the blog. It pays a bit, a few hundred dollars a column, but that’s not why I do it. I enjoy the discipline of taking the lumpy clay of a blog post and moulding it into a column. I like discussing column ideas with my community before I write them. And I quite like having you readers as an audience. So please don’t tell my editors that I like doing this so much I would do it for free.
I just got a book contract because of a notion that began in the blog and that I kneaded over and over for about a year. As I write What Would Google Do?, I continue to explore ideas on my blog, helping me to think them through. The US contract roughly doubled my consulting income last year; international contracts may add more.
If I add all that up over the past five years and the five to come, to me the blog is worth a few million (dollars, not pounds, sadly). But it’s worth even more than that. Buzzmachine has taught me about the new architecture of media; I wouldn’t have learned that without jumping into the new world myself. The blog has stoked my ego, getting me on TV and on conference stages to blather to audiences far and wide.
It has also checked my ego, as my readers never hesitate to challenge and correct me. It has forced me to be more open to new ideas. It has given me a second career playing with new toys; professionally, it keeps me young. Personally, it has made me countless new friends and reconnected me with old ones, owing to a blog’s ability to give a person a strong identity in Google searches.
People ask how I have the time to blog on top of everything else. But the real question is, how could I not blog when it leads to so much more? Finally, for a proper accounting, I should also give you the other side of the ledger: the blog costs me $327 a year for hosting. So this is one web 2.0 venture that is profitable.
Hothouse blogs
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Whenever anyone doubts the potential of the web to grow new journalistic enterprises, I point to PaidContent.org. Rafat Ali and his colleagues have built an incredible venture that hosts more tenacious reporting than most any news organization I know. I check it more than any other news source I depend upon. Now they announce a bunch of big appointments with big talent. It’s an impressive path of growth managed with cagey strategic care by Rafat.
The other great example of the web as journalistic hothouse that I always point to is Brian Stelter, boy-blogger at CableNewser and now New York Times scribe. I praised his story earlier today but didn’t realize until I picked up the print edition that he got great Page One play. This from a young man who wouldn’t have stood a chance getting hired by The Times before the blog era. And The Times wouldn’t have discovered his talent without his blog.
Who says blogs don’t improve journalism. There are no better proofs than these that they do.
HuffPress
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008I commend to you Eric Alterman’s New Yorker piece on the state of newspapers. It’s a very good casting of the state of newspapers as a business, a technology, and a player in society. It’s also the beginning of a discussion about the resurrected debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey almost a century ago over the proper role of the press, objectivity, viewpoint, and discussion in a democracy. The piece doesn’t advance that discussion greatly but I wouldn’t expect it to, given the venue. What it does, instead, is advance The New Yorker’s view of media and the world well past that presented there by Nick Lemann (here was my response to Lemann at the time). Alterman’s is, I believe, a superior piece of magazine scholarship and I hope and presume it’s the start of a new book — with an extended conversation about the role of conversation first.
In the piece, Alterman also reports that the Huffington Post sees itself as the new newspaper. I wonder why that would be their ambition. I don’t mean that as a crack about newspapers or an obit. Instead, I think we need to redefine the players in the press sphere and their roles based on new realities. (I’m working on a post about that; have to make some drawings to illustrate it first.)
Related: See David Carr’s funeral dirge for newspapers from yesterday’s Times.
(Disclosure: Alterman — with whom I’ve had my share of blog sparring — is a CUNY colleague.)
My blog is my network
Friday, March 21st, 2008Flixwagon, one of the companies offering the ability to broadcast live on the internet from your mobile phone, has added the feature I’ve been wanting: a widget-player you can put on your blog or web site so people there can catch your live broadcasts. Now, you have to put up a link to sites like Flixwagon’s and Qik’s and embed your video in your blog after it’s over.
Between this and Twitter, it begins to turn blogs live. Of course, we often live-blog events. But now we can also have a live flow of text and video from anywhere, anytime.
I’ve written about the challenges and opportunities live broadcast from anywhere brings to news. It’s also interesting to see the impact this will have on blogs. I can’t watch 10 bloggers at once. How can I know who’s live doing what where right now? It’s another need for live search — or call it live discovery. It makes me think I want an alert service — but then, the last thing I want is a bunch of those irritating tweets that tell me that so-and-so (you know who you are) is broadcasting live. I want context: the live TV Guide. But that’s hard, too: As I’m broadcasting, how can I tell you what I’m broadcasting? If someone else watches and alerts others to the fact that I actually have something interesting to say, then that’s necessarily syncopated; it’s not live.
All that aside, I’m glad to see Flixwagon’s widget and I look forward to seeing how YouTube handles live.
Cause and effect in a two-dimensional world
Thursday, March 6th, 2008I got an email from someone writing about the suicide of an adman and those who say that nasty blog comments about him had a role in it. The question to me was the ethical responsibility of bloggers regarding their comments. My response:
First, I think you’re making a leap that is, unfortunately, frequently made when it comes to media and tragedy: the implied causality of song lyrics or a game or a movie and, say, a young person’s act of homicide or suicide. The implication is that there was nothing else wrong in this person’s life that may have caused this tragedy and that it could somehow be brought on by one song or scene and that that media is wrong or even evil. Clearly, that’s absurd — and offensive. It’s convenient to try to find such an easy cause and an easy answer. But it is shallow and dangerous to not look deeper.
I don’t know anything about this case beyond what I’ve read in stone-skipping-water news stories. But I would caution against making this same presumption here. In doing so, you’d also be indicting and convicting the commenters in a serious act. This is a tragedy and I imagine there are more causes than we can see, just as there will be more effects than we can see.
So please don’t be quick to condemn interaction online on the basis of this one tragedy. One effect of that would be to dismiss and devalue so much of the good that comes from the ability of everyone to speak today.
As for a blogger’s — or publisher’s — responsibility regarding comments: That is up to them. Under Section 230, a publisher is not legally responsible for content not created by them. That was necessary to insure an open forum for dialog and as a nation we are privileged to have it; it is our online First Amendment. I know you’re asking another question: the ethics of it. I don’t think there is a blanket rule. I say on my blog that I will kill comments that are patently offensive in their use of hate speech or in personal attacks. I’ve been attacked often in my own comments, of course, and I’ve killed only a few of those; I’m more likely to kill comments attacking others, but even then, there’ve not been many. Part of the problem is that there is a falling bar on the definition of offensiveness; we live in an age of offense and political correctness when someone can be offended by anything said and someone can insist that that speech should be silenced. There’s danger there. In a free democracy and an open market, we must value open discussion and the exchange of views and ideas. So who’s to say what goes too far? There is clearly no one standard.
Now, of course, I’m not defending gratuitous and anonymous attacks on people. I value civility in my blog comments and in the forums I used to run for publishers. I ran operations to kill the worst of those comments. And the communities were grateful for that effort. But I also would have fought any effort to take some number of comments or some event attributed to them to shut down all that discussion. That, too, would be a tragedy.
I urge you not to fall into the media trap of making this a simple cause-and-effect story. Note well this from the New York Times story on the event:But a colleague and friend of Mr. Tilley’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “There’s no way you or I will know why he did this, but it’s certainly not because of blogs.â€
“I know it bothered him,†the colleague said, referring to the public criticism. “However, he was very intelligent, with lots of talents and skills, and this was not his whole life. Pointing to blogging and the media just trivializes a man whose life was not trivial.â€
Love the customer who hates you
Friday, February 22nd, 2008I have a column in Business Week’s customer-service issue arguing that customers who complain about you are doing you a great favor. Here’s the foreshortened version that fit in the magazine. And here’s my longer draft. Snippet from the draft:
Here’s some free advice: Go to Google, enter any of your company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,†and you will see the true consumers’ reports. Brace yourself, for it won’t be pretty. Wal-Mart’s unofficial Google Sucks Index turns up 165,000 results; Disney 530,000; Google 767,000. What’s yours?Now don’t get mad at these people. Instead, help them get even with you. For these angry customers are doing you a great favor. They care enough about your product or service to tell you exactly what went wrong. Other customers may just desert you and head to the competition. But these customers are telling you what to fix. Listen to them. Help them. Respond to them. Ask their advice – and they’ll give it to you. . . .
You see, this is about more than putting out blog fires or quieting complaining customers. It’s about more than customer service; indeed some say that customer service is the new marketing (that was the title of a conference this month in San Francisco). No, this is about collaboration with your customers in every aspect of your business. If you enable them, they will provide customer service for each other. They will help design your products. They will sell your products. They will create your marketing message – they always did control your brand.
So when you reach out to that kvetching blogger you found online, you’re engaged in customer service as well as PR, market research, marketing, sales, and product development. You are reinventing your company – and, if you get there before your competitors, your industry. That is why you shouldn’t relegate this vital task to one department or some interns or consultants. You need to reorganize the company around this new relationship with your customer, finally putting that customer at the center of everything you do because – thanks to Google – you can. If you don’t, well, you’ll suck.
: Also in the current Business Week: a collaboratively annotated and updated version of Steve Baker’s and Heather Green’s popular cover story on blogs.
For bloggers: A stay-out-of-jail card
Friday, February 1st, 2008My colleague at CUNY, Prof. Geanne Rosenberg, has just put up an online course for bloggers and media practitioners of any stripe with the 10 things you need to know to stay out of court.
It’s quick, clear, easy, and fun with videos and quizzes. This was produced with experts from the Berkman Center at Harvard and the Media Law Research Center. The course is funded by the Knight Foundation and its Knight Citizens News Network.
The 10 rules to blog by:
1. Check your facts.
2. Avoid virtual vendettas.
3. Obey the law.
4. Weigh promises.
5. Reveal secrets selectively.
6. Consider what you copy.
7. Learn recording limits.
8. Don’t abuse anonymity.
9. Shun conflicts of interest.
10. Seek legal advice.
The press release says:
Each rule in the educational module is aimed at helping citizen journalists avoid lawsuits; each rule serves as an entry point for more in-depth material. While other educational materials on online publication are organized by legal doctrines such as libel, privacy, laws of access, and intellectual property law, the “Top Ten Rules” are organized around practical guidelines for safer and more effective journalistic conduct.The module aims to educate citizen journalists about legal hotspots, help them distinguish between genuine legal problems and intimidation tactics, learn simple practical steps to reduce legal risk, find additional resources and information, understand rights related to news gathering, and recognize when to reach out for a lawyer’s advice.
I’m included in the credits but this is all Prof. Rosenberg — and good thing, since I don’t even play a lawyer on TV. All I did was say that I wish bloggers and citizen journalists had this kind of help and there was Knight to fund it and Geanne to write it. So here is a gift to bloggers from them and CUNY.
But wait, there’s more: For a graduate-level course with lots of in-depth details, the amazing Berkman is, at the same time, putting online a legal guide with information on such topics as setting up a publishing business.
I thought we were past this
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008From Simon Collister’s conclusions in his dissertation:
Despite the above findings, 100% of the journalists interviewed claimed they did not use material from blogs when writing stories, while 50% of journalists said they did not even read blogs.
A diploma and a blog
Friday, January 11th, 2008I’ve been quoting Neil McIntosh of the Guardian to my students this week, saying he expects job applicants to have a blog. And conveniently, here’s Neil today leaving a comment with his rationale (responding to a question from Paul Bradshaw):
I tell all the journalism students I meet this: blogs are the minimum. There’s no excuse for a student journalist who wants to work online not to have one. The only exception (and even then…) might be if they were heavily involved in student media, or were working for a publication part-time, or were doing some kind of other digital work which trumped having a mere blog. And no, MySpace/Bebo/Facebook pages don’t count
Moreover, the quality of the blog really matters, because it lets me see how good someone is unedited and entirely self-motivated. If I were to see a decent pitch with a blog address on it, I’d look, and the quality and frequency could count heavily in the author’s favour. And if a brilliant graduate didn’t have a blog, but still made interview, I’d be asking, politely, why not…
LATER: John Robinson, cybersmart editor of the News & Record, weighs in.
I ask job applicants if they have a blog. Most of them don’t. Then I ask them if they read my blog. About half of them haven’t.
The two questions tell me a lot about the candidates. First, if they have a blog, it gives me an indication of their passion for writing and communicating. It also allows me to see how their unedited writing reads. I rarely pay attention to submitted clips; I know how good editing can make a mediocre writer appear positively Halberstamian. Finally, in answering the question, they usually let on what they think of blogging and digital. Believe it, some trash blogs.
Second, if they haven’t read my blog, it tells me they haven’t done their homework. That makes the candidate a non-starter.
Actually, it helps winnow down the candidates pretty quickly.
In the comments, there, Mark Potts adds:
It’s not so much that there’s great magic in writing a blog—it’s just another publishing tool, in my book—but it certainly reveals a lot about their comfort and facility with the Web and new media. It also is very revealing about what their raw writing skills are like, as you point out.On the digital side, especially, we need people who are “native speakers” or as fluent as possible in the new ways of presenting information and interacting with readers. There’s no question they’re more qualified if they’ve walked the walk, talked the talk and blogged the blog.
What he says
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008Mike Arrington gets it right in the kerfuffle over Robert Scoble using a Plaxo scraper to take email addresses of his friends — mine included, I might add — and put them into their damned spam machine. Scoble’s doing to loud public crying act over this but I agree with Mike that Plaxo is wrong and Facebook is right. I want Facebook to protect my email address. I don’t want Scoble downloading it and giving it over to Plaxo, a brand and company I will never, never trust and would never choose to do business with or hand data to on my own. So much of the reaction to this little incident gets it backwards; there has been much talk about how we should be able to get our data out of Facebook and that’s fine but we also need to protect our data from others making use of it without our permission and that’s what this is about in the end.
: And what she says: Dawn, comment on Arrington’s post:
Facebook has created an environment where we only allow access to certain items that we want people to see. If I have let Scoble see my entire profile, meaning my education, my employment, my DOB, etc., and he takes any of that with him, to where ever he is taking it (and he could take it elsewhere), he is violating my right to privacy.Not only does this affect the careful identity construction that I’ve done, but it also undermines my ability to only be a part of communities that I wish to take part in. He is porting my identity to sites unknown and using it in a way that I haven’t consented to.
If today it is Robert Scoble, who is to say that tomorrow it’s not someone stealing my identity and using it on sites that are unsavory?
Instead of jumping on a revolution bandwagon, we should be thinking about the overwhelming social issues here. I believe in portability for MY OWN identity. I don’t think that you should be allowed to take my information anywhere you want to go with it.
Right. Especially Plaxo.
: LATER: Good gawd, Nick Carr and I agree. Jack Schofield of the Guardian agrees, too.
: Scoble is back up on Facebook. But he now has fewer than 5,000 friends. Did some leave him?
Mobile on mobile
Friday, December 28th, 2007Andy Carvin tweets that we can listen to his NPR report on mobile blogging from our phones. Just call: 202-683-7002. This is, indeed, where content and communication merge: We can listen to whatever we want whenever we want as if we’re just phoning up content. We can create and interact with content that way. Phone? What’s a phone?
