Tag Archives: writing

Remembering Aaron Swartz – “You should blog that.”

Tantek remembers Aaron’s encouragement to blog ideas and solutions:

But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I’d figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism.

And..

If you believe something passionately, you should blog that.

I agree. I’ve been thankful to myself for nearly every post I’ve ever written. Even if only a handful of people read them also I’d always have the posts for myself.

I need to blog a lot more than I do. About solutions, practices, and processes. And I’m going to. Just wait.

Tantek also has Part 2 up.

Pageview journalism

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:

We aren’t focused on pageviews, but rather posting things that interest us. Of course, the hope is that they’ll interest you as well.

This is an interesting topic. And “pageview journalism” is an interesting phrase. The post that Jim links to on ZDNet describes pageview journalism as the act of writing about topics that a writer or editor believes will get the most pageviews rather than writing about what the writer themselves may think interesting. In other words, writing about Apple rumors will more likely generate more traffic than writing about amps. So a publication will focus on writing about Apple rumors. Traffic dictates content.

The Loop, however, has managed to stay true to the author’s interests and still find an audience that appreciates a balanced approach to its content publishing. One that definitely bends towards keeping up-to-date with Cupertino but still finding several off-topic posts as interesting.

Pageview journalism has other nasty side-effects besides just dictating the topics a publication focuses on writing. As we all know it can also have adverse effects on the reading experience of a publication.

For instance, The Loop’s RSS feed is an excerpt-only feed. This forces people like me who subscribe to the feed to visit The Loop in order to read the entire post. I think I understand why The Loop does this; to generate more members (who get a full-text RSS feed) or to generate more ad revenue to off-set those (like me) who are not paying members. It makes total sense to me why The Loop has done this but it certainly is a direct result of how they choose to earn revenue for their publication.

Of course, this isn’t nearly as egregious as, say, a site that purposefully splits up articles into multi-page layouts to generate more pageviews. Most of the publications that continue to do that crap we’ve all simply chosen to ignore. But it is definitely something that fits under the umbrella term of pageview journalism.

Update; December 17: Jim has tweeted me to say that only the long articles are truncated. After looking, of course he is right. So only the full articles need to be read on their site. Which makes perfect sense to me.

Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web

The Oatmeal at his best.

/via Everyone.

The way we handle linking

For the past week or so I’ve been publishing Daring Fireball-style links for the links category (or as some call them, the link list). I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to link this way for years. (The things geeks worry about.)

Readers find these style of links much more beneficial. Especially RSS feed subscribers. And, indeed, it does seem less “spammy” when you’re linking readers directly to the sources rather than to a webpage of your own. Though, this site very, very seldom has any sort of advertising or affiliate links – it can still seem spammy. When linking to something the full credit for that something should go directly to those who published it.

I’m not the only one who was mulling this over, on 1 July Stephen Hackett made the switch.

Tommy Collison’s book of short stories

Tommy Collison, someone I’ve been following on Twitter since I went to Ireland (and then subsequently learned he was the brother of Patrick Collison the co-founder of the excellent Stripe), has published a book of short stories called A Certain Freedom.

Why link to Tommy’s book? Because it is always great to see people work hard on putting something together and then having the guts to publish them to the world. Kudos Tommy.

More writing tips from McSweeney’s

Colin Nissan (great name, by the way) writes The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Great list… here’s one tip:

STUDY THE RULES, THEN BREAK THEM
Part of finding your own voice as a writer is finding your own grammar. Don’t spend your career lost in a sea of copycats when you can establish your own set of rules. If everyone’s putting periods at the end of their sentences, put yours in the middle of words. Will it be incredibly difficult to read? Yes it will. Will it set you on the path to becoming a literary pioneer? Tough to say, but you’re kind of out of options at this point.

I agree with the entire list but I especially agree with this tip. I have my own style of writing. I over use periods. I’m pretty terrible. However, I’m terrible on purpose. I want to be a decent writer and I certainly want my writing to be readable – but I don’t necessarily care about following the rules perfectly. If I was worried about following the rules I’d never publish anything. I err on the side of publishing.

Paul Miller’s year offline is incredibly interesting

Paul Miller, a writer for The Verge, somewhat recently decided to take a year off from the Internet. You can call it a stunt if you’d like to – but it is turning out to be one of the most interesting public experiments I’ve ever seen online.

A recent piece and video by Miller was Against the future: inside the Jewish anti-Internet rally. Incredibly interesting, fun to watch, and definitely worth your time. And people are lining up to see what Miller covers next.

You can read all of Paul’s work on The Verge from his page. Presumably he and his coworkers have figured out a system of publishing for him. I secretly wish there was a weekly printed newspaper that could be delivered through the post of all of Miller’s entries for the week.

Fanfare for the Comma Man

Ben Yagoda on the use of the comma:

You see this kind of thing all over the Internet as well. People punctuate that way because, if they spoke these sentences, they’d pause after the conjunction (and because the extremely fanciful and undependable Microsoft Word grammar and style checker refrains from applying a squiggly green underline).

I’m no writer. I’m sure I get this wrong all the time. In fact, I know I do. (See what I did just then?) I do exactly as Yagoda suggests. I write commas based on how I would say or read the sentence.

He goes on about the use of the Oxford comma as well. Which I wholeheartedly agree with and strive to do myself though I’m sure if someone ripped through the catacombs of this here blog they’d find a million grievances.

Yagoda has a follow-up coming. Stay tuned.

/via John “I’m using Facebook by way of Instagram” Gruber.

How do blogs need to evolve?

This is a subject that is near and dear to me. It is a bit cliché to say this but I’ve been blogging since before it was a common verb. I’ve watched, very closely, as the blogging world has evolved over the last decade and even took some small part in that evolution.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

More benefits of turning off comments

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.

The definition of Communism

Many people born over the last half-century have the habit of misusing, abusing, or flat out being ignorant of the true definition of words. Myself included. So I thought I’d start a series here on the blog that, quite simply, points to a few of these that I’ve noticed over the last three decades and provides the true definition.

To begin, and for no reason whatsoever, we’ll start with Communism.

“Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production.”

Now you know.

Om on writing

Happy Anniversary (sort of) to Om Malik of Gigaom for a decade of blogging. I haven’t shared much about Om on this blog save this experience from Wordcamp 2007 in San Francisco when I wasn’t feeling very well at all (travel often makes me sick).

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.

That is Om in a nutshell. Easily one of the nicest and hardest working guys around.

His and Fred Wilson’s post made me try to figure out exactly when I began blogging. My best guess is somewhere in 1997. Unlike Om I haven’t been blogging every single day and I only made my living on blogging for a short period of time in these last 14 or so years. Someday I’ll have to write up my experiences though… it’d be fun.

WordPress for iOS 2.9

A very, very nice update of WordPress for iOS was been released. The application for iPhone and iPad now has a simple content editor and the QuickPhoto feature can now post images from your Library instead of going straight to the camera.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

The Daring Fireball Recipe

When a recipe works it is generally riffed on by countless cooks. Each riff becoming its own unique dish and, chances are, riffed on once again.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a recipe that is working and the cooks are busy in the kitchen adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that and seeing what works for them.

So far none of these recipes have become better, in this blogger’s opinion, than its master recipe but several have certainly managed to create their own dish that works well enough to feed their own mouths.

What is the Daring Fireball recipe? It consists of the following:

1 multiple-times-per-day updated link log.
1 not-so-frequently updated blog with longer, well-written posts.
1 (or two) audio podcasts (to taste).
1 weekly RSS feed sponsorship.
1 well-curated image-based ad on each page view.

From outward appearances this recipe nets Daring Fireball a very decent sum – which is why the cooks are in the kitchen. With no inside information here is what one can surmise based on what is public knowledge.

The three main ways Daring Fireball generates revenue is through its weekly RSS feed sponsorship, The Deck Ad Network, and sponsorship of 5by5 Network’s The Talk Show. Daring Fireball also uses affiliate links and sells Tshirts from time-to-time but I do not believe these to be major contributors to its profit. They may both contribute to its ability to generate revenue but I believe the bulk of its profit come from the three channels I’m covering here. Without knowing more about how The Deck Ad Network and The 5by5 Network distribute revenue it is impossible to know exactly how much revenue goes to Daring Fireball but we can do exactly what the other cooks are doing; make assumptions and get close.

Daring Fireball currently charges $6,500 USD per week to sponsor the RSS feed. This recently increased from $6,000 within the last few weeks, and increased to that not too long ago from $5,000 USD and so on. So to figure out the yearly revenue generated through this single sponsorship program would depend on where you start and end the year. But, lets jump out on a limb and say that a weekly sponsorship has cost at least $5,000 for the last year. That’d be about $260,000 USD per year from the RSS feed sponsorship. At $6,500, should it maintain or go up higher from here, it’d be $338,000 USD for the next year.

The Deck, of which Daring Fireball is only 1-of-52 members, has a current cost of $8,300 USD per month. Or, sponsors can pay to buy a day, called a “roadblock”, for $8,300 per day. With 27 sponsors in the month of September that is about $224,000 USD generated. (Assuming The Deck had sold absolutely no “roadblock” ads. If they had it’d be significantly more.) I’m assuming that The Deck distributes revenues based on a traffic-based model of sorts (more page views == more moolah) but I don’t know exactly. But even if you were to split this revenue evenly among all parties that’d be nearly $8,300 per month for Daring Fireball. Based on nothing other than my gut Daring Fireball’s 4M+ page views per month make up a fair amount of The Deck’s overall traffic and so, one could assume, that Daring Fireball gets a slightly larger share than my math suggests.

5by5 is currently charging $3,000 USD a month for its Livestream sponsorship (which The Talk Show does each week) and $3,000 for its bandwidth sponsorship as well as individual show sponsorships which they don’t publicize the price for. It is very difficult to tell how 5by5 would distribute this revenue but, again, I’ll make some assumptions. I assume that a bandwidth sponsorship is all for 5by5. Bandwidth is a bill that goes to 5by5 and not the hosts. Bandwidth for a show as popular as The Talk Show could easily be a few thousand dollars per month (not to mention editing costs, etc.) So if we take the bandwidth sponsorship off the table I can only assume that The Talk Show generates about $9,000 USD per month. $3,000 for the Livestream sponsorship, and $6,000 for the two episode-based sponsorships that are within the show. Plus donations, Tshirts? I think I’m underestimating the revenue-generating power of The Talk Show but I can’t be sure.

Not counting the revenue Daring Fireball generates with its affiliate links and tshirt sales; it is my assumption that Daring Fireball could generate upwards of $550,000 USD per year (going forward). And I believe I’m underestimating because my assumptions are probably low. Again, the affiliate links and tshirt sales are probably fairly good revenue generators but the bulk of Daring Fireball’s profit likely does not come from these two channels.

Why go through all of this to figure out how much revenue Daring Fireball generates? Because it is exactly what wannabe-pro-bloggers are doing every single day. They do this math based on the information they can gather and decide to take a stab at it themselves. And with Daring Fireball’s RSS feed sponsorship increasing every few months why wouldn’t they? And good for them. The more the merrier. I just have one request.

I hope that those that decide to use Daring Fireball’s recipe decide to do whatever they can to make it all their own. Don’t just add a little more salt and pepper – change the main course from fish to beef. Make every ingredient from your own garden and don’t use the same brand ingredients Daring Fireball does. Make something unique that will inspire others to do the same. Be a good cook not a copy cat.

Using Markdown

I know I’m late to the game but I’m now using John Gruber’s Markdown for writing on this site as well as documentation at work. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Oh, I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Markdown on Save WordPress plugin and it works great.

Writing helps you think

This isn’t news to anyone. But I thought that Meagan Fischer had an interesting way of stating this in a recent post.

“For me, that’s the real beauty of writing. Ideas can be noisy, heavy things. Trying to ignore them is like trying to ignore a bored cat. It will sit on your chest while you’re resting. It will paw at you while you work. It will purr, it will scratch, but it will not go away until it is acknowledged. Writing is how I acknowledge an idea, so it will finally go to sleep.”

See, I’m not the only one that uses cats to illustrate an idea.

Informed enough to be misinformed

Inside sources, rumors, conjecture and even reasonable assumptions based on experience and knowledge – all lead to what can only be called educated guesses.

For years I’ve been following the speculations thrown-out by industry pundits in order to formulate my own opinion of what’s to come at Apple’s next event. This year is no different as I’m tuned in with my ear-to-the-ground and my finger-in-the-air about what is to come at WWDC. I’m really very, very excited about Monday’s event. Moreso than I’ve been for a WWDC in a few years.

But I may choose to back away a little from all of this speculation because the phrasing of various bloggers is getting a bit out of control and it ends up in me being misinformed rather than informed.

Let me explain. When someone is riffing on what Apple’s upcoming, already announced, iCloud service will be it is OK to write posts like “What I think iCloud will be?” or “Based on the current information, iCloud could very well be”. But, that isn’t what is happening. The expectation for what iCloud will be has already been molded over months-and-months of rumors that “people in the know” (that is, people that have been following the rumors for months) already have a pretty hard and fast opinion about what iCloud is.

I’m included in this group. I’ve read enough speculation about iCloud and examined enough about iCloud’s competition to have already formed my opinion of exactly what iCloud could be. On Monday I’ll either be very happy or very disappointed as whatever iCloud ends up being may not align with my idea of what iCloud should be.

Take for example AOL/TechCrunch’s MG Seigler (whom I read regularly) who recently wrote a rather gloomy post about iCloud.

“One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary.”

Emphasis mine. Notice “was supposed to be”.

Was supposed to be? How does he know what iCloud was supposed to be? No, no. What we’ve all wanted from every product from Apple, including the upcoming iCloud, was for it to ease the biggest pain points in whatever area Apple happens to be touching on with its next product. In reality what we all wanted iCloud to be was a much, much better and more consumer-friendly offering than Google’s or Amazon’s music-in-the-cloud services. One of those pain points is obviously this whole uploading your music to the cloud business. But that doesn’t mean that it will be (though I’m willing to bet it will be better in many ways). But, supposed to be? No. Only in our minds.

I realize that we’re all supposed to read these speculative blog posts with our “hypothetical glasses” on but after a while it begins to grate on me that writers (and Seigler is not alone) tend to believe there own opinions as being fact before they’ve even seen the products they are speculating about. That somehow their own ideas about what a product should be become what the product “was supposed to be” even before they see what the product actually is. And I think that leads to people like me being misinformed.

So, perhaps I’ll slowly back away from all of the speculation that happens before an event like this and try only to follow the headlines. I want to make sure that I’m informed enough to know what is going on but not informed enough to be misinformed.

cdevroe.com

by Colin Devroe