aqualung

Topic vs Author

The grit for this little pearl came from this Tweet from a local and active blogger, Shai Coggins about offering one of her blogs for sale:

after which ensued a discussion via Twitter that involved myself (@aqualung) Oli Young (@oliyoung) and Shai (@shaicoggins) around determining the value in blogs.

My query: was a blog worth much without the originating author? Oli's point: "it's not just the author, it's the subject and the community". Shai's thought: "Certain blogs may seem to have their authors tied 2 the blog. But, there are those that're more abt the topic/content- not author."

Thinking about this kept me awake for quite a while, and I came to the conclusion (i.e. I fell asleep) that blogs fall somewhere along a continuum between topic-centric and author-centric. Note - i don't think there's any hard delineation between the two, and having a topic-focussed blog doesn't mean the author sucks, or vice-versa.

But it did occur to me that topic-centric blogs seem more likely to be monetised in some way, and were also likely to feature multiple authors - possibly to deliberately de-emphasise any single personality involved (yes I know there are plenty of single-topic, single author blogs that aren't monetised in anyway - I'm talking impressions here).

The corollary is that monetised blogs (and especially blogs that can be sold) should probably focus on a relatively narrow range of topics and be multi-author. This not only keeps a steady flow of posting, it also builds value around the topic(s) rather than the individual so that the departure of an author is more easily survived. This applies not only to blogs selling ads or similar, but to blogs which indirectly support a business - the Redmonk blogs (while being very individual) serve to build the company's community/brand/reputation etc.

Personally, I'll admit to following authors rather than topics, even for James, Stephen and Cote. I have a few subscriptions to topics, mainly professional interest things like Enterprise/IT architecture and SOA/BPM, but even there I tend to only read those where I like the author's style and reasoning.

Warning: being in my feed reader probably means your blog won't make much money for you ... but then I've always been a subscriber to Doc Searl's tenet that you get value from blogging "because of, not with" - you won't get rich in a hurry, but you can build long-term value.

BTW - if you want to know how Shai goes with the sale, she's tracking the process right there on the blog.

More playing

I seem to accumulate more ways to post entries here than topics i can get around to writing about. This is the updated typepad ui for the n95 - not sure you'd want to write a novel on a phone keypad, but it's useful for short posts, especially if you're including a photo. It also removes another excuse ...

disqussion underway

Being a completely shameless Fred Wilson fanboy. I've started using the disqus commenting system, having watched Fred play with it for a while now. I'll be interested in any feedback you have - first issue I have so far is that it doesn't seem to be coComment-enabled, although I think I was able to start tracking the comments on that previous post using the coCo Firefox extension.

Stream of Presence

No sooner had I signed up for Twitter finally, than Stowe Boyd pointed the way to Jaiku. This seems more complete - you can actually include anything with an RSS feed - Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, your blog, last.fm ... so it gives a much broader view of your Web presence, or "lifestream", as Boyd phrased it. The really sweet thing is that you can have comments on anything streamed through Jaiku (is this a meta-community - comments on comments?). When you find someone on Jaiku, you can be selective about which of their streams you subscribe to - for instance if you have already subscribed to someone's blog, you don't need to do it again via jaiku (but you COULD swap your subscriptions around ...). If you want to check it out, I'm aqualung there, too.




Technorati Tags: twitter, jaiku, presence

More Redmonk schwag ...

   

Mr and Mrs aqualung at Adelaide Airport seeing junior aqualung off to Phuket for 10 days (she'll be blogging it at MySpace). I'm tipping Redmonk won't get this much airspace on too many other chests ...

More Redmonk schwag ...

A reputation economy via "via:"?

As posted at the end of last year, 2006 was the year I really got into del.icio.us, in large part due to Cote' pointing me to the "for:" tag (the other large part due to the Firefox extension for replacing the standard bookmarks with del.icio.us tags).

The corollary to "for:" is "via:" - if somebody tags something "for:aqualung:" and I like it, I save it too, add some tags of my own, and tip the hat with (for example) "via:JamesGovernor". Go search del.icio.us for THAT tag, and you find (at time of writing) there are 113 occurrences - 113 times that James has alerted somebody to something of interest that the somebody has appreciated, AND tagged it with the "via:". Over time, I would expect this to add to James' whuffie, and for an open-source analyst to be seen as sharing useful information it must be a positive.

Now, at the moment, while "for:" has some 'official' status at del.icio.us, being included in their Help as a means of sharing links with your network, the use of "via:" APPEARS to be limited to the Redmonk circle of acquaintances (please correct me if I'm wrong, because if it is more widely used I'll be very happy) - how do we get del.icio.us to include the complementary "via:" in their "for:" advice?

If use of the "via:" tag increases sufficiently, I believe it would be valuable as an indicator of reputation as a source of information, contacts, network etc - not the only one, but since it is applied by others, not yourself, it would tend to have greater validity than an ego-boosting blog post, or rigged Digg results (although I'm sure someone either more nefarious/clever than I would find some way of gaming it ... am I naive to imagine that this would self-correct? I COULD tag this post with a lot of "for:" directions, but those people would have to decide to tag with "via:" for it to be of value to me ... let's watch what happens! I will apologise to all the people "for-red" in advance, and absolve them of any obligation to reciprocate).

Anyway - this is the sort of idea that pops into my head when woken for work at 3:30am ... vintage has well and truly started.


[Aside: my Redmonk schwag arrived today - Flickr pix when I get time to take them!]


Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, via:, tagging, Redmonk, for:JamesGovernor, for:sogrady, for:bushwald, for:annez, for:hortovanyi, for:steph, for:leisa, for:johntunger, for:dahowlett

A follow up post ...

My last post about IBM's apparent reluctance to go down the SaaS path has generated some activity - James included the story in his 'Blogs as RFPs' post, Cote' had some more words to say, James and I have been swapping emails about it, and the mysterious "IBM channel partner" is now thinking about blogging (good move, Nick). Oh - and I have had a few IBM-ers show up in my traffic stats ...

Nick has managed to get us a 90-day free trial of RequisitePro (had to use his OWN license to do it), so we're sorted for this project, and maybe that will be enough to persuade us to purchase an on-premise copy. But the points I made in the previous post still stand - I wasn't insisting on a freebie - I was happy to pay a reasonable rental for 'on-demand' access to the product (remember IBM - they're the 'on-demand' company?), and if and when we needed it again, we could have done the same thing. We might even have found it SO useful that we'd be happy to buy on-premise licenses - but a SaaS model reduces the risk for potential customers, without having to give away software.

Never mind - there might be some good partnerships come out of this anyway.


Technorati Tags: IBM, SaaS, Redmonk, Toast

Pay-per-Performancing ...

Writing this post back in the Typepad editor - why? Performancing have sold their metrics business to Pay-per-Post (no link love), and that isn't where I want my data. So - no Performancing metrics, and no editor until I found out where Nick and Co. end up.

I'm it ...

Over the last few months, I've been watching the "five things" meme, mainly from a distance. Over the last 2 - 3 weeks, though, it has shown up regularly on blogs in my blogroll, so I was wondering if it might happen to me ... thanks to JP, it has.

One of the problems with being a Z-lister is that by the time this tagging meme gets to you, it's harder to tag someone else who hasn't been "got" yet - the five things is probably the easy bit - the next five will be tougher!

It's also interesting that a number of people playing the game have done so hesitantly, likening the meme to a chain letter (which would be summarily dispatched to a waste bin). I'm a little uncertain myself, but given that no-one is threatening me with  plague, pestilence or tonnes of manure on the front lawn, I'll play.

Five things you might not know about me:

1.
I wore these boots under my wedding suit - my mother-in-law suggested that "you can't get married in THOSE!", which virtually guaranteed that I would.

2. The only horror movie to give me nightmares is the 1956 version of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers"

3. I read virtually all of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances when I was a kid

4. I dropped out of high school at fifteen, had 13 gap years, than spent the next 14.5 years in part-time study, ending up with a technical certificate in IT, a marketing degree and a graduate diploma in applied finance - I guess I wasn't interested as a teenager! In my defence, at that time in Australia, people were offering jobs on the street - earning money seemed more attractive than doing law (yes I realise that MAY have been a little short-sighted!).

5. I've been listening to music since I was three - I remember hearing when Elvis went into the Army (at which point he ceased to be the King of Rock'n'Roll) on an old bakelite valve radio ... and I still love finding new music.


And just 'cause I can, I'm tagging some locals: Tim, Ben & Trevor; project management guru Glen, and the always interesting Steph (I'll have to re-learn French to read the rest of her blog!).


Technorati Tags: 5things, fivethings, meme

TypePad succumbs to public pressure

Well, it's not not necessarily like that, but there were certainly a lot of calls for TP to implement CAPTCHAs to help reduce comment spam, and on Tuesday they did. So this post is just a quickie to let you know that (having received my very first comment spam recently) I have turned the feature on, which hopefully means less angst about whether or not to delete crap comments! You can use a TypeKey ID if you want, but it's not required - I prefer to have the comments as open as possible. I'm actually going to post a comment to try it out now ....

Hat tip to Fred Wilson.