Tag Archives: gigaom

A different perspective on Digg »

July 16th, 2012

Om Malik has a different way to look at the success and failure of Digg:

If the yardstick of success is making money for the founders, employees and the investors, then Digg will go down in the annals of web history as a colossal failure. However, if your yardstick of success is defined by a company or a product being a change agent and an instigator, then Digg was a smashing success.

Om was on the beach when the news broke making his piece later than most every other blog or news outlet. I think that made for a much better, more well rounded, and reasonable article than most of the other articles I’d read.

Om Malik interviews Kickstarter founder Perry Chen

May 22nd, 2012

Om Malik sat down with Perry Chen for a really great and in-depth interview about the success of Kickstarter.

I think, we’re able to offer people the ability to overcome that one core roadblock — the funding — and then additionally allow people to build this community and nurture an audience around a project.

I think the great part about the Kickstarter story is that the success of Kickstarter has meant success for more than just the company. It has meant success for every single successfully funded project (well over 20,000 now). It has meant that all of those people associated with those projects have been able to do something that they really wanted to do.

More benefits of turning off comments

January 5th, 2012

Over four years ago whether a blog should or shouldn’t have comments was a heavily debated topic in the blogging community. Back then I wrote about one possible benefit of disabling comments.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

WordCamp 2007 – Day one

July 22nd, 2007

The first day of WordCamp 2007 sucked. But only for me. I ended up getting really, really sick in the early afternoon and had to go back to where I am staying for rest. What started out as a headache earlier in the day quickly progressed into just feeling horrible!

The Skyline

Fantastic weather!

However, the entire first morning was pretty good, panel wise. The first panel on Podcasting was a cross between telling novices what a Podcast is and an advertisment for PodPress, a WordPress plugin to help the Podcaster. Not that PodPress isn’t worth its own session (it seems to be a pretty large project), but it seems that people wanted less milk and more meat and potatoes.

The session on Blogging vs. Journalism with John C. Dvorak and Om Malik (iPhone photo here) was an enjoyable discussion that involved the audience a lot more than I thought they would. Kudos to Om and John for involving everyone as much as they did while keeping the topic at the forefront. I’m hoping to get a short interview with Om Malik today.

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.”. Good advice.

I hope today goes much better, I’m looking forward to getting into the more developer side of things today and hopefully I can get some content up on the WordCamp tag on Viddler today.