Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

TechMeme is my source for tech news

Robert Scoble introduced me to TechMeme over a year ago. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand did an interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme. Great interview, especially if you are interested in how TechMeme works. Danny Sullivan is THE search engine analyst who has been covering the search business from day one. Coming from Danny this quote is powerful indeed "

“Over the past decade, I’ve seen a lot of search tools that were supposed to transform my life. Few of them have. But Techmeme was one of those.”

TechMeme tracks tech blogs and presents the headlines in a rolling fashion similar to a newspaper, but it constantly updates with new stories. TechMeme is a must read site that I visit several times a day. It is is easiest way to find out what is hot in the tech world, and get insight from some of the top bloggers in the world.

I did an interview with Gabe about a year ago. He is a very unique and talented guy. Here is an excerpt from that interview;

How do you compare Memeorandum to Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and others?

For readers of Digg (or Reddit, and to some extent, Slashdot), I'd say Memeorandum is:

- More focused (on either "Tech" or "Politics")

- More expert/authority-driven

- Better organized, visually

Of course for a certain type of reader, Digg's quirkiness, developer

orientation, and community are all pluses.  Many who aren't as interested in

these things prefer Memeorandum.  Many use both sites.  It's all good!

For the more ponderous set, I'd add that unlike all of those, Memeorandum

thrives on the web at large -- it doesn't keep its editors and content all

siloed and centralized.  Viva la edge, yadda, yadda.

How does Memeorandum decide what is important news? Some stories have no links, others have 10 or more links. How does content slide down the page over the course of a day?

Most-linked/most-discussed new stories are important.  Actually, all stories have been linked.  Items lack "Discussion" when people link without adding much commentary, since simple pointer posts usually aren't included on Memeorandum. Items fall down the page as they get older, or are displaced by bigger stories.

Since that interview TechMeme has branched out with separate "meme trackers" for politics, sports, and entertainment news.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column. 

Scoble and John Edwards in New Hampshire

Robert Scoble was with presidential candidate John Edwards in Portsmouth, New Hampshire today. Robert is shooting lots of video for PodTech, his employer who is paying his expenses.

The Edwards campaign invited Scoble to travel with them around the country to formerly announce his run for the presidency. Political bloggers played a huge role in the 2004 presidential election. John Edwards has decided to reach out to tech bloggers like Robert who are perhaps less critical than hardened political writers. 

I met with Robert and fellow Microsoft blogger Alfred Thompson backstage in the press section at the "town meeting". There was an area set up for bloggers and press people. There were at least 30 TV cameras from national and local press, and probably 10 videobloggers with hand-held cameras. My guess is there were about 10 regular text bloggers there as well.

Politics and technology don't usually mix very well, although Robert tells me that the most popular political blogs attract about 10 times more readers that the top technology blogs.

Robert is experimenting with videoblogging to see if there is an audience within the tech community for political topics. Robert is also looking at how presidential candidates use blogs and the Internet to reach the masses.

The Edwards campaign did a live webcast of the "town meeting" and will have recorded podcasts on the John Edwards web site soon. There were more than 1,200 people waiting in line to get into the small elementary school where the event was held. Only about 250 got inside due to fire regulations. Edwards went outside to address the people who couldn't get in.    That is Robert in the blue shirt, back to camera, holding the video camera.

Edwards came back inside to make a speech and take questions. He also took questions from webcast viewers from around the country.

The political world has already adopted blogs as a political tool. It will be interesting to see if 2007 will be the year that political blogs cross over to the technology crowd. TechMeme already has a political version of its tracker service. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that the political blogs took over the original Memeorandum, and a separate TechMeme was created for us technology people.

Here is a link to more photos on Flickr.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

50 Million views of reality - how to find the one that fits you

Dave Winer says there is a river of news...make that an ocean, of 50 million blogs and news sources publishing content every day. How do you find what interests you from new sources you may not know about? Shelley Powers is tired of the traditional tools like Techmeme and Digg, and wants to "give voice to the eloquent but unheard".

TechMeme, TailRank, Findory, Megite, and others use a Google like link ranking algorithm to decide which blogs get listed. Loren Baker at SearchEngineJournal explains "Basically what Gabe is pointing at here is the more blogs which cover and quote your story, the more importance it will receive on Techmeme. So, if you have breaking news on your blog, and dozens of other blogs cover your post, chances are that your blog will receive credit for the story based upon citations and times of posting."

There are no perfect solutions that combine serendipity, editorial intelligence, and popularity filtering all in one.

Comments and Trackbacks from individual blogs provide some serendipity, but are constrained by that particular blog's sphere of influence and readers.

Google, TechMeme, and others use links as one measure of authority and popularity, and on balance I think they do a pretty good job of exposing blogs that cover popular, timely stories.

Editorial intelligence is tough to scale, is in the eyes of the beholder, and rarely right for everyone. Digg and Reddit try to do this with voting schemes. But, a few active people dominate the submissions, and they gang up to get their favorite stuff voted to the top of the list. Sad but true.

Perhaps someone will develop an algorithm that uses all three measures to create the perfect reading list. This is exactly what magazine and news editors do... decide what will be interesting to their audience and filter out all the junk.

All the existing approaches have flaws. Pick the one that suits you best. I like TechMeme.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

How to get your blog noticed by Techmeme, Findory, TailRank, Megite, etc

Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme, has some advice on how to get noticed on TechMeme. The advice works well for other blog meme trackers like Findory, TailRank, Megite, Blogniscient, and others.

Gabe's advice is simple; 1)Focus on content , timely, concise, and well written. 2) Link to other relevant blogs, and hopefully get links to you. 3)Link to TechMeme, share the link love. My take on Gabe's advice? Prioritize these steps in reverse order and you will do well on TechMeme. BTW, I love TechMeme. It is my major source of blog news. TailRank is right up there too. But, I scan them all regularly.

I wrote a blog "Make your blog popular - how to increase traffic" that got picked up by AOL, and is now permanently on their blog home page under "Recommended Reading". That post included these tips:

1. Focus on a subject area that you know well. Provide insight, experience, and real life lessons learned.
2. Write interesting stuff that is balanced, thought provoking, controversial, and if possible, funny and surprising.
3. Become an expert in one area. Act as a filter or editor to find only the best stories that you and your readers are interested in.
4. Summarize. Be concise and clear.
5. Participate in the conversation. Comment on other blogs and leave a link. Talkback in response to news stories. Link to them.

Participate and react are the two single most important actions you can take to get into the conversation and get noticed by the A-Listers, Blog Meme Trackers, and blog readers at large.

Participate - Read a few blogs that really interest you. Pay attention to their writing style and the topics they cover. Leave comments on their blog. Engage them and their readers in conversation. Leave a link to your blog where you might expand on the subject. If you have good insights these bloggers will start linking back to you. That drives traffic and builds an audience.

React - Read major news sources like C/Net News, The New York Times, Fortune, etc. Leave comments on their stories. React by writing a rebuttal or expand on the theme by adding your own thoughts and experiences. Leave a comment on their blog with a link to your blog. News reporters are always looking for snarky quotes and insights from notable people in the industry. They maintain a list of people to contact when they need a quote for a story. Get on their radar screen by taking an interest in what they write, by leaving comments, and by linking to them from your blog.

Most of all...have fun and write about things you truly enjoy.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Can blogs reach VCs, entrepreneurs, and press?

Can a blog reach a select market of influential VCs, entrepreneurs, and software industry trade writers? Are blogs an effective way to communicate with this audience? Can I write interesting material on a consistent basis? Those were the questions I sought to answer when I started The Next Big Thing blog one year ago this week.

Here is what I learned about blogging, and some statistics to set context. The short answer is YES, blogs are an effective communication medium to reach very specific audiences.

Big Break - My big break in blogging was Robert Scoble linking to me several times. Robert put my blog on the map early. I met Robert at Microsoft, quite by accident, one week after I started blogging. A link from Robert can drive a lot of traffic. Thank you Robert!

Big Break II - Cnet editor Charles Cooper read my blog post on my experiences at Napster and asked me to do a guest editorial on Cnet. This drove a lot of traffic as well and raised awareness of my blog within the software industry trade press. Thanks Coop!

Notable Commenters - Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com, Dallas Mavericks), Craig Newmark (craigslist), and Henry Blodgett (former Wall Street stock analyst) all commented on different blog posts.

Validation - I knew my blog was reaching the trade press and gaining lots of exposure when it started getting links from the big guys. Cnet, Fortune, Barrons, BusinessWeek, CNN Money, The Boston Globe, Seattle Post Intelligencer, The Guardian, and many more linked to various stories. These guys really validated the topics I was writing about. Thank you all.

Readers - Readers are what blogs are all about. Readers who participate in the conversation are what keeps me going. Thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, and linking. Here are some stats on readership and participation.

• Subscribers - 1,235 readers automatically get everything I write. For this reason I try to do the best job I can and only write when I have something meaningful to say.
• Readers - Weekly readers average around 6,975 visits per week.
• Highest Week  - One recent week registered 14,295 readers. I wrote a lot that week.
• First year total - 215,701 pages read.
• Posts - I wrote 226 posts over the past year. Wow! It didn't seem like that much.
• Comments - 668 readers posted comments. About 3 comments for every post.
• Links - Technorati has tracked 1,420 links to The Next Big Thing
• Trackbacks - Other bloggers have left 343 trackbacks to their blogs.

Best Posts - My favorites are;

• "Why the next big thing usually doesn't come from market leaders",
• "Innovate or Imitate...Fame or Fortune"
• "Napster, the inside story and lessons for entrepreneurs"
• "The web is the great magnifier"

Post with most hits - YouTube porn spawns Porno Tube - And all along I thought people read my blog for insights and opinion on the software industry. Another reminder that adult content is very popular on the web.

It has been a very educational and rewarding year. I have truly enjoyed the conversation with all of you and look forward to another year. Thank you!

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Is your blog one in a million? If so VCs may want to talk to you

Paul Kedrosky nailed it! This is exactly the point I was trying to make about VC investment in individual blogs. See Dr. Kedrosky's comment in my previous post. Bloggers are like Open Source projects in that there are millions of them, and a very small number of them attract enough attention and contributors to be interesting. However, unlike open source software, blogs don't have a services model to support them. Advertising is the game, and you need HUGE numbers to make that work.

Robert Scoble suggests that maybe Om and Arianna are building out blog networks. OK, that might be a big payoff, but I didn't know they were going after a blog network. If so, great, it might be a good investment. Jason sold Weblogs for a tidy sum, but I don't think there are too many of those deals around. Pretty risky bet if you ask me.

There will be a few brand name bloggers that can make money. I said these top bloggers would get 95% of the attention and advertising dollars.

Jason Wood, remember there are 50 million blogs, so the top 5% is still 2,500,000 blogs that are getting most of the attention and advertising dollars. That is a lot of blogs to be in the top 5%. Even the top 1% of all bloggers includes 500,000 blogs. If your blog is one in a million, or one of the top 50 blogs in the world, the VCs will probably be happy to talk to you.

Om Malik and Arianna Huffington are in the top .001% of all blogs and will do well on a cash flow basis. But, as Dr. Kedrosky says, I don't see this as a solid VC investment with 10X returns.

If Om Malik wants to pay me $1,000 a month to write for his network...great!! Sign me up. But even if Om signs up a 100 bloggers and pays them $1,000 a month, that is only $100K per month or $1.2M per year. What do you do with the rest of the $5M?

Blogging can be a great business for a select few A-List bloggers. Om and Arianna are definitely A-Listers. If anyone can do it they can. But it is a risky bet indeed. Good cash flow? Absolutely. But, will they generate the huge growth and profits necessary to generate 10x returns for their investors? Time will tell.

VC funding for individual blogs?

Several high profile blogs have taken VC money recently. Om Malik, formerly of Business 2.0 and writer of Giga Om, has struck off on his own with VC money from a startup VC, True Ventures. SoftBank Capital invested $5 million in HuffingtonPost.com, a blog written by Arianna Huffington. Hmmm...what are they doing with the money? What are the VCs thinking?

Om Makik and Arianna Huffington are very talented writers and smart people. I'm sure they have some plan for the money, but it isn't clear to me. Hmmm...they could throw a lavish launch party with open bar and live music. Party like its 1999. Those were the daze....

Blogs are like Open Source projects in that anyone can do them for free. There are literally tens of millions of blogs all available for free and produced by individuals with no investment. Why would you need $5M to write a blog when your investment is zero? What kind of return will VCs see from this investment?

Like Open Source, blogs will produce a few popular brand names that will attract 95% of all the attention and money. These blogs will attract advertisers and sponsorships. But, is there really enough upside to generate VC like returns? Perhaps in very rare cases, but it doesn't look like a very good sector bet.

The vast majority of blogs that do attract advertising and sponsorships will be what I call a "Lifestyle" company. A small fraction of these could graduate to "cash flow" companies, but I don't see any of them getting to the "high growth" high return stage. There will always be an exception, and Om Malik and Arianna Huffington are very high profile bloggers, but I don't see this as a bankable trend.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Blogging statistics from Technorati

The blogosphere continues to double in size every 6 months, according to Technorati. Technorati now tracks 50M blogs and 1.6M posts each day.  Wow! Last week I was disappointed that Technorati had my blog ranked 3,755th. But in the context of 50M blogs that puts this blog in the top 99.99% of all blogs.

Other interesting statistics;

• 175,000 new blogs created every day, currently around 50M blogs
• 1.6M new legitimate posts every day, meaning spam is excluded.
• 70% of all pings to Technorati are from known spam blogs and are filtered out of the Technorati index
• Language of blogs - 39% English, 31% Japanese, 12% Chinese, everything else 2% or less

It is important to note that Technorati does NOT track all blogs. I believe Dare Obasanjo pointed out last quarter that MSN Spaces had more than 25M blogs itself. I don't recall the exact number but it was huge. MySpace also has spaces that could be considered blogs but are probably not counted in the Technorati numbers.

The bottom line is that self publishing through blogs and spaces is huge! And it is growing at an incredible rate of speed. My guess is that entrepreneurs will be coming out with better blog software, better reporting and tracking tools, and better advertising targeting programs.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Youtube porn spawns porno tube

It is commonly known that porn is the number one attraction on the Internet. I remember analyzing the search logs at AltaVista and at least a couple porn terms were always among the top 10 queries.

The people at Pornotube.com must have figured this out too. They saw that "Youtube porn" was a very popular search term and built a porn search engine called Porno Tube. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch discovered this site and wrote about it on his blog. Otherwise I never would have found it. I can't bring myself to call them entrepreneurs, but they did jump on an opportunity.

I have been analyzing my blog traffic logs and have discovered several interesting trends.  First, Google searches account for over half the traffic to my blog. Second, guess what the most often repeated search term is? Youtube porn. I am stunned. I wrote a blog about Youtube and MySpace facing copyright challenges and filtering out porn. That blog post ranks in the top 2 or 3 results for the query "Youtube porn". Why? I have no idea.

Here are the trends I have noticed.

1. Google searches account for about 55% of the traffic to my blog. Sadly, Yahoo and MSN are in the low single digits.
2. TechMeme generates about 10% of my traffic but can spike up to 20% or more when there is a hot story. TailRank, Findory, and Blogniscient also send a fair amount of traffic.
3. CNN/Money, The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, C/Net and Seattle PI also send spikes of traffic when they link to specific blog posts.
4. Links from other blogs account for about 10% of daily traffic.
5. New posts usually get over 1,000 views on the first day. When several A List bloggers link to a post it jumps to more than 5,000 hits.
6. Blog reader software - Bloglines (24%), Newsgator (13%), Feedblitz (7%), Netvibes (6%), RSS Bandit (4%) and Rojo (4%) are the most common blog readers.
7. After about 9 months of writing this blog and almost 200 posts, the traffic from search queries on archived posts exceeds the daily traffic on new posts.
8. The Conversational Index trend has continued and improved. My CI is now 4.04, meaning there are 4.04 comments and trackbacks for every 1 post. My CI was 3.08 about 6 months ago. This means that readers are participating by leaving comments or trackbacks which makes the blog more of a conversation. I read every comment and follow every trackback. It is a great learning experience.

Have any of you seen similar trends on your blogs? This is still a very new medium for me so I am curious about what works and doesn't work. Please share your experience.

Cheers,

Don

Make your blog popular - how to increase traffic

Most people write blogs for the fun of it, but many people also enjoy the feedback and popularity a successful blog can bring. WiredNews reports David Sifry's (CEO of Technorati) advice on how to get your blog noticed. Coincidently, NY Times writer David Pogue also has an interview with former Wonkette writer Ana Marie Cox, on how she became so popular.

Here is WiredNews rendition of Sifry's advice.

1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.

2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.

3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.

4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”

5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?

My take? I agree with all the points except the last one. Don't post a lot unless you have something meaningful to share. I think readers are looking for insight, perspective, and personal experience that relates to the subject matter. Anyone can simply repeat what they have read or heard...that doesn't help much.

I would add the following advice for blog writers.

1. Focus on a subject area that you know well. Provide insight, experience, and real life lessons learned.
2. Write interesting stuff that is balanced, thought provoking, controversial, and if possible, funny and surprising.
3. Become an expert in one area. Act as a filter or editor to find only the best stories that you and your readers are interested in.
4. Summarize. Be concise and clear.
5. Participate in the conversation. Comment on other blogs and leave a link. Talkback in response to news stories. Link to them.

The David Pogue interview with Wonkette writer Ana Marie Cox is a happy, lively conversation, with not much useful substance. I did find this one response particularly interesting;

DP: So what are the ingredients then for a successful blog, apart from being entertaining or snarky?

AMC: I think it’s changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.