Author: admin

Yep, my first rant is live, I’ve signed on the dotted line to do a weekly column at The Blogging Times upon invitation from Chartresue.

I tossed up a couple of good ideas for the first post, but I kept coming back to the blogging market place, and the flaws in Long Tail Theory as applied to the current market for blog hosting. For some this will be dry (and maybe boring) stuff, but for others who are interested in the future trends in the Blogosphere, I hope you appreciate it. I was on a word count limitation for this post which I ended up exceeding by over 100%…but it could have been much longer had I dug a little deeper into some of the more imperical evidence to support the theory.

One note on the piece, the theory also applies roughly to Web 2.0 as well. Indeed, the first draft I wrote of it included Web 2.0 in it, but combining two markets (blog hosting and Web 2.0) in the same piece made it a bit confusing and way to long (it actually got out to over 2000 words at one stage) so I cut out the Web 2.0 stuff, but if you’ve got an imagination, what I’m say here can easily apply to Web 2.0 as well…particularly in terms of the tail not being long enough to sustain everyone, and the tsunami hitting when half of the long tail has a ROI = 0.

Anyhow, enjoy. I’ve promised Minic something less dry next week 🙂

Tags: Blogging Times, Blogging, Web 2.0

The end is nigh…we’ll it is for Mike Arrington, and I’ll tell you why: Crunchboard and Crunchgear.

Unlike a whole pile of other people who think that the move by Mike Arrington to launch a gadget blog is nuts (how many times have I read the phrase “not another gadget blog” or similar in Bloglines over the last week!) I think both it (Crunchgear) and Crunchboard are both great ideas that leverage the popularity of the core readership of Techcrunch into new media properties.

However, it also spells the end, if not now, but very shortly, of Mike Arrington as a reporter.

Why? because at the end of the day you can’t be a player and be seen to be an impartial reporter, and of all people I should know. It’s exactly what happened to me at The Blog Herald. Despite years of writing on topics I loved, once I started getting seriously involved in building a Blog Network, anything, and I mean anything I wrote about others in that business was taken by a loud minority of people to be slanted by my own business dealings….Duncan Riley, impartial reporter (at least by perception) took a bloody great big stab in the back, and instead of ignoring the knife wounds, I eventually sold The Blog Herald. Sure, I write about stuff in the industry here now at duncanriley.com (although not nearly as often as I once did), but when people read it, they know it’s my personal thoughts on the subject, it’s not attempting to provide something close to being impartial reporting on the subject because this is a personal blog. Techcrunch isn’t a personal blog, it’s setup as being a leading industry new source.

If Mike’s not in the situation now where he’s impartiality is being questioned (and I’d note I’ve already noticed some allegations upon a similar vain around the place), it soon will be. How can Mike write about people like Jason Calacanis or Nick Denton without people making allegations of a conflict of interest when he’s competing against them? How can he write about Web 2.0 startups in the employment industry when he’s competing against them? And with word that he intends on rolling out more blogs as part of the Crunch network, the conflict is only going to grow.

So what’s the solution? He either divests himself of Techcrunch, or he brings in talent to take his place….naturally given the huge dominance (in terms of traffic) Techcrunch has in his network, the later in more likely. Mike’s a smart guy, so expect to see new people writing at Techcrunch in the future, expect to see a set of policies for the site pertaining to its writers in terms of disclosures and editorial independence….basically, expect the death of Mike Arrington, the reporter.

Tags: Techcrunch, Mike Arrington

Quadszilla over at the SEO Black Hat blog has a very interesting tale of how Trackbacks can get you into trouble here….it’s a must read for every blogger…aside from a WordPress plugin though I’m not sure of any other way of avoiding this other than by not using apostrophes in post headings….which I personally usually don’t anyway, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

I’ve long been an advocate of keeping your feed subscriptions to a minimum, I know when I’ve read about ppl like Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble in the past where they’ve talked about having 500 feeds in their RSS reader accounts I’ve publicly said this is nuts (and 500, BTW, still is)…but I’ve discovered a nice new way of keeping your blogging fresh…and it’s so simple I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner:

Add new blogs to your feed reader.

Yep, simple as that, and while you’re at it, have a reorganisation of them as well. I recently purged a few feeds I wasn’t reading that much (mainly Topix/ Yahoo/ Google News style feeds), reorganised my folders…adding new folder topics such as SEO and Web 2.0, and then off I went. I’d say I’ve probably added 30 blogs to Bloglines in the last 2 weeks, and I’m still adding more now (BTW, I’m always open to pitches as to why I should sub to your blog…leave a comment, it won’t have no follow), and I’ve got to say I’m now enjoying my reading a whole lot more, and as a consequence, my general blogging endevours as well. Some of the additions are blogs I read fairly regularly anyway but didn’t subscribe to, some are people I knew from my time at the Blog Herald, and through contacts via b5media, and some are just sites I totally stumbled across (for example, I added about half a dozen SEO related blogs..some of which I’d read in passing before, some of which I’d never seen).

It’s well worth the effort, blogging, and the whole blogging business can become stale and boring after at times…, it never hurts to try something new, and in this case some new sites, and I’ve got to say at least 50% of the sites I’ve added are bloody good reads.

I’ve just signed up for a weekly gig at another blog (outside of b5..I’ll name it on another day..but it will be a weekly column working with some really cool ppl) but I’m a bit stumped if I know exactly at this stage what to write about (although I’ve got a few ideas)..it’s got to be about blogging or related to blogging (so Web 2.0 counts). There are of course two matters I can’t talk about, 9rules (I’m already on Jeremy’s bad side on this one 🙂 ), or the fact that b5media is about to surpass 100 million page views since we launched (proper page views as well, not spiders and feedreaders and what not)…suggestions anyone?

PS: if they are good suggestions and used, credit will be given + of course this blog doesn’t have no follow used so your comments count in the search engines as well…but I will delete spam naturally 🙂

Bizarre post from Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Techcrunch suggesting that Bloglines needs to look out because…wait for it…Newsgator has launched a toolbar.

To quote:

While Bloglines has long been the favorite feed reader for people looking for a simple but powerful tool, the new Newsgator toolbar means that users seeking many of these features now have options. Newsgator provides a river of news feature that Bloglines does not and handles OPML files much more gracefully

I couldn’t river a rats arse about River of News Layout, I like my Bloglines exactly how it is, and aside from maybe, very, very, rarely using a Bloglines button found on a blog to subscribe to it, I always add stuff to Bloglines by cutting and pasting the RSS feed URL into it using the Add feature.

Put simply, Bloglines is the market leader because it works the way people want it to, and no amount of bells and whistles from Newsgator is going to change this….and yes, I’ve tried Newsgator and a pile of other RSS readers out as well, still always end up back at Bloglines…to paraphrase Apple: It just works for me (most of the time).

Tags: Bloglines, Newsgator, Techcrunch