I was just reading Valleywag and it hit me: Nick Denton is taking the community out of Web 2.0. Why? easy: closed comments. This whole you’ve got to apply and be approved to be a commenter on his sites….well it sucks. Sure, we all know the difficulties of managing comments and the risks open comments present, but you’d think a company the size of Gawker Media could manage it, Weblogs Inc., does, and does it pretty damn well I’d add. Gawker Media’s model is elitist and does nothing to add to the community.

Sorry Nick.

I’ve got my little list of brilliant ideas (I seem to have new ones every day…so I just write them down, 99.9% never go any further) and I was wondering: which is a better way to develop tools to help bloggers: with an online ad supported site or via software?

Software can of course appear spammy, and with affiliate programs and what not you run the risk of abuse, however pages can be intensive (server wise) and with ad support don’t always deliver ROI.

There is always the possibility of combining the two as well, and software can also be ad (or search) supported.

Any one have any thoughts?

I’m not sure how long this listing will last….but I’ve got to love the response:

Project: Blog commenter
ID: 1145900161

Status: Open
Budget: N/A
Created: 4/24/2006 at 13:36 EST
Bidding Ends: 5/1/2006 at 13:36 EST (6 days left)
Project Creator: oxley1165
Rating: (No Feedback Yet)
Description: I would like a program created which will post comments in thousands of blogs and guestbooks on the internet.

Regards,
Joe
Additional Info (Added 4/24/2006 at 13:42 EST)…

The programmer would have to get a list of blogs to comment on. Idealy I would like to be able to enter a desired keyword and have the program comment on many blogs and guestbooks relating to that keyword.

The response:

hex251 $27,650 850 days 4/24/2006 at 14:02 EST
10/10
(1 review)
My standard bid for spammers.

Just an idle thought. A lot of people I’m talking to online and offline lately involved in Web 2.0 (including some cutting edge blogging stuff) are 25-40 and have young kids. Am I falling into the trap I was always afraid of when I wrote The Blog Herald where I’ve become insular and naturally refined myself to those similar to myself, or is there something more to this? (in case you didn’t know, my new boss will be 4 in August…and that will be 100 metres of track laid thanks daddy).

I mean, really, when you’ve got young children, you shouldn’t be taking risks…right? And yet, more and more people I’ve met are! And its like there’s a majority in the field to some extent. I’ve done no hard figures on this, but I’d think that this demographic seems to be quite over represented as a proportion of the general population.

Share your thoughts. Am I on to something, or do I just need to get out more 🙂

Having finally got through a backlog of work I wanted to post about my trip to Perth the Wednesday night just gone, and the great people I met at the Perth Blog Meetup.

Worst thing, I didn’t take notes so I’m going to forget some names, but if I have missed you, apologies in advance.

A meetup that was suppose to go from 7-9pm finished a bit before midnight. I could have talked to this group for twice as long again.

I wont give a full run down of everything that was discussed, but I’ll make a couple of points.

Australian Blogging and Web 2.0 is really amazing. Even amongst the odd 12 people in attendance (the number varied throughout the night, with the last guest arriving at 11pm) there was a group of people doing some amazing things. And I know these guys (and gals) are only a very small sample of what’s currently going on in the Australian blogging and Web 2.0 communities.

As big Kev use to say: I’m excited. And more now than ever I want to do more towards (time permitting) being a part of the greater community and helping provide ways and means of promoting Australian bloggers and projects.

Of course I’ve got one semi-secret project that will work towards this (it’s secret in that I’ve posted what I’m doing, but I’ve never publicly really tied together the subject matter previously, but it’s not hard to guess, and certainly most there on Wednesday know what it is). It’s not earth shattering, front page of the news paper sort of thing, but it will hopefully become part of the bigger jigsaw puzzle.
Continue Reading…

You’d think a site like MarketWatch would try to provide impartial reporting of the news, but one can’t help thinking that Frank Barnako doesn’t like Jason Calacanis, check this out on the AOL social networking rumours:

Dave Winer started it with blog post that AOL was a few weeks away from launching a competitor to MySpace.com.
It was picked up and reprinted by Jason Calacanis, a self-promoter of epic proportion, on his own blog.

Hmmm, “a self-promoter of epic proportion”. Nice, but it gets better:

Calacanis acts just the opposite. Maybe he planted the story with Winer. Picks it up immediately on publication. He’d be ready to catch it. Passes it along as if it were about a third person. Then, one of his network’s top blogs repeats it. Brilliant self-hype.

NASTY!

Digg is in strife. Big time. Despite some unfortunate comments from Jason Calacanis which I think were totally unhelpful, For those of you who haven’t been following the whole thing, I’ll try to surmise it (some parts may be missed, comment if I need to add anything).

1. Jacob Gower (good bloke by the way) from Forever Geek posts here about suspicious activity at Digg, in particular 17 people Digging 2 items at A List a Part in the exact same order. I’d note that Jacob neither accused Digg, or Digg Founder Kevin Rose of doing the wrong thing, but did ask whether it was more than a coincidence, a not unreasonable question in the circumstances.

2. Other blogs pick up on it, and they get Dugg. Then mysteriously their stories are manually removed, and in some cases their accounts are suspended. Digg responds to these bloggers it was because their posts supported accusations of wrong doing at Digg.

3. Forever Geek is suspended from Digg according to Kevin Rose, for spamming Digg

4. Now its on Slashdot, tech.memeorandum, and all over the place. Jacobs follow up post is here that fills in the rest of the story.

5. Digg results start going wonky. Posts with 44 diggs make the front page. Something is going on at Digg, something very strange.

OK, so thats the short version. I don’t have any evidence that Kevin Rose or others are doing the wrong thing here, but I do know that the odds of having 17 odd people digg an item in the same order for the same blog in a short time frame are astronomical if we were to presume that they were all done legitimately. If these diggs were blogs everyone (including Jason Calacanis) would be yelling spam blogs from the tops of the tallest buildings.

Reality is: it smells, and it smells big time.

Digg also now has a pretty big PR disaster on it’s hands, and its founder is totally compromised because it would appear, is some respects, that he may have been involved in the matter. For him to rule that nothing was untoward and then accuse Forever Geek of spamming has absolutely no credibility.

I like Digg, and a frequently visit the site mainly because of the interesting things I can find there. Now that I know that potentially the content delivered is potentially no reflective of the interests of the greater blogging community….well I’m not going to stop using the site, but I’m certainly not going to hold it in the same esteem anymore, and I would suggest, neither would a whole lot of other people.

Interesting discussion between Alan Meckler of Jupiter Media and Jason Calacanis at the Wall Street Journal. The truth, of course, is some where in between. Meckler is right when he says 99.99% of bloggers aren’t going to make any serious money, but lets consider the fact that even if 0.01% are, that’s roughly 20,000 people out there who are going to make serious money from blogging. Then look at the long tale. Say if only 1% can make what Meckler refers to as candy bar money (they must have expensive candy bars in the states when he’s talking $1-3k US a month), you are talking 2,000,000 people. Lets take the long tail even further out to real candy bar money. Say $10 a month. I’m yet to meet anyone with advertising on their site but can’t bring in $10 per month (US) if they are trying. Say in theory 25% of all bloggers run ads on their sites, Adsense or something similar, thats 50 million people bringing in $10 a month. $500 million going into the economy by blogging alone in the long tail.

Of course to some extent I’m generalising on the figures. Calacanis naturally defends blogging, Meckler takes the piss in terms of the numbers, but when you are looking at something so amazing big as the blogosphere, even small percentages can equate to some amazing figures, and hence, the truth lies in between what both men are saying….if you know what I mean.

Maybe it’s time to go back to earning some more candy bars now 🙂

blogging.wurk.net does some detective work and tell’s me that I should stop using my registered business name to register for other services. I won’t say what it is, but it involves Web 2.0, it’s close to home, and I’ve written about the idea at The Blog Herald before.