Online Media Cultist

Hang out with any website publisher long enough, and the subject will eventually turn to traffic. Numbers. Depending, the terms uniques, page views, impressions, or even hits may be tossed around. All web publishers are interested in the subject, even if some take a pointed disinterest in knowing how many people are visiting their site.

A Seth Godin piece called Silly Traffic got me to thinking about the subject last week. He smartly points out that most traffic that hits any site, perhaps 75% or more, is “unfocused” and therefore largely useless in a general sense except in beefing up site page views and, perhaps, fragile publisher egos.

In other words, most of the time, a vast majority of people who land on any website aren’t sure what they’re looking for, are confused once they land there, and are apt to take off again within a few seconds or less. The best a publisher can hope for in such cases is that they’ll accidentally or purposefully click an ad on the way out!

A great majority of this unfocused traffic is driven by search, particularly Google search. For some reason, a story I wrote on the most popular websites in the US in February ranks very high on Google for searches for “most popular websites,” so I get a lot of traffic hitting that story. But most of the time Site Meter records that the visit length was one second, so where’s the value in that?

Godin advises that publishers should simply ignore unfocused traffic (as opposed to stressing out over SEO or seeking ways to “lure the bouncers”) and instead focus on deeply engaging existing users.

In other words, return visitors are treasures for publishers, highly valued entities that need to be tended and minded and catered to. That’s why I was so excited to trumpet about hitting 200 RSS subscribers yesterday. All of y’all are people who arrived here – somehow, someway – and found the experience valuable enough to take action to add the RSS feed so that future posts would be automatically sent to you.

So while I’m apt to “stats junkie” out as much as the next guy/gal/geeky web publisher extraordinaire, I definitely try to keep the silly traffic quotient in mind. Google search is fine, and traffic stemming from StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit is all well and good, but return visitors are the prize which must be eyed.

How do you generate return visitors? Well, that’s a subject that can take some time to get into. I suppose the simple and not terribly magical answer is to write great content consistently, network with publishers and influential types who write similar kinds of content (and read and engage on their sites), and then hope to get linked.

Those links will bring focused traffic: people who know what they want and recognize it right away when they get there. Those are the kind of folk most likely to convert to regular visitors.

On a personal note, I’ll throw three sites out there that have been greatly beneficial of late: Techmeme, Twitter, and Friendfeed. Knowing what’s being said (and not said) on Techmeme, and engaging in the Twitter and Friendfeed communities is a dynamite tool for people writing about Internet-related topics to generate links, focused traffic, and regular visitors.

Other people have also been talking about stats and their relationship with them of late. Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica is distracted by blog statistics, and has limited himself to checking them once a month. Louis Gray, on the other hand, provides in depth analysis of his site’s remarkable growth over the last four months or so. As a stats fiend, I love that kind of stuff!

Lots of fun stats to pick through from a recent Universal McCann report on social media (found via ReadWriteWeb).

Some quick takes:

83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007

The maturation of social media tools based around video has just begun. This is going to be an area of experimentation, funding, and entrepreneurship for years to come. Video advertising and video metrics is in its earliest stages as well.

78% read blogs, up from 66%

A remarkable figure, particularly in the face of those who dismiss the blogosphere. It’s here to stay kids.

RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%

Many inside the web-obsessed folk take RSS for granted these days, but we see that it’s really starting to tip over into mainstream consumption for the first time. That’s great news for innovative plays like Readburner, which harnesses RSS feed reading and story sharing and creates community features around it.

China is the world’s largest blogging market with 42m bloggers versus 26m in the US

Social media is worldwide and growing. It will be fascinating to see if and how social media and blogging adoption in China will affect government policies and reaction.

Overall, it’s easy to conclude that the social media monster is growing with no signs of slowing anytime soon.

A piece on Mapping the Web called Why I Stopped Reading TechCrunch and Mashable led me to consider my own take on the top tier, high volume blog publishers and how I’m moderating my own information-intake of late.

To put it more bluntly, I know I’m not alone in being terrified of my RSS reader at times. Oh man, I have 1,400 unread stories? Not an uncommon thought. TechCrunch and Mashable are great places to catch up on the newest product releases, start-up doings, and other inside the social media and tech beltway kinds of stories, but keeping up with them can be a nearly full-time endeavor.

I’ve been using my RSS reader more selectively of late, as a place to browse around when I have the time rather than looking at it as a mountain must be climbed everyday. My day-to-day strategy is to use Techmeme and Twitter as the places where I can quickly get caught up on what’s going on in the tech and webby world while still allowing my community to provide me with the latest news, insider gossip and tips, and all the other juicy stuff that gets an online media cultist up in the morning.

There used to be a saying that if you simply read all of the stories published to The New York Times front page everyday, you’d have a pretty solid understanding of what was going on in the world. I think that you could do worse than scanning all of the headlines on Techmeme a few times a day for understanding what’s going on in tech and online media.

Having that basic understanding, Twitter can then be a place to get the really good stuff, quickly and easily. The key is to set up your Twitter profile to follow those people who are going to deliver the good stuff, which can take some time but I have found to be rather fun.

In fact, my thinking in recent days has become somewhat radical. When I find a new blog that I really like – such as yesterday when Louis Gray wrote about Five More Blogs You Should Be Reading, But Aren’t (I was kindly included on this list, thank you Louis!) – I considered if it would be more beneficial to me to follow the Twitter profiles of the bloggers Louis wrote about rather than add their RSS feeds.

Has Twitter become the new RSS reader?

There was a meme over the weekend (kicked off by Mark Evans and the provocative Dave Winer) posing that many bloggers blog and blog but have nothing to say, or something to that effect. I don’t necessarily agree, and would further go on to say that there’s a vast and massive galaxy of blogs out there that get very little notice or attention.

Sure, many are lame or abandoned or not worthy of attention, but there are still more – untold millions perhaps – that are interesting in some way, particularly if someone or someones out there figures out how to aggregate, filter, organize, curate, or feature them in a way that brings value to them. That in effect then makes them worthy of attention.

One such category that I talk about from time to time is all of the tech and online media companies out there that run blogs. It’s becoming more the norm than not for companies to run at least one blog these days. Occasionally, big announcements or controversies will gain some wider attention, but the other 99.9% of the time, there’s blogging aplenty going on that mostly gets unnoticed.

I’ve been aggregating RSS feeds from company blogs for a while now, and am always fascinated to take a look at what’s going on. A quick scan over the weekend provided the following random cross-section:

* blist sees bad tidings for Microsoft; seems that no one wanted Windows Vista at a charity auction held in Seattle.

* CrowdSpirit says that US consumers plan to buy fewer gadgets.

* Kindo explains how to use its new contact importer. I love when company blogs are used to help people better understand and use products.

* Ning shows off its Skydiver Network: “Skydiver Network is a network for skydiving, base jumping and tunnel-flying enthusiasts. Just looking at this network is like taking a shot of adrenaline, even if you’re looking at it from the comfort of the earth’s surface.”

* Sphere talks about itself versus the competition: “Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources - including articles, videos, photos and podcasts.”

* mEgo is now available in 16 languages.

Go Big Always takes some “older” new media companies, such as CNET and MacWorld, to task for not fully embracing social media and declares, consequentially, that “they’re getting their ass handed to them by blogs.” And that’s quite a large collective ass at that!

The rationale for the ass handing basically boils down to the fact that those companies/blogs who do “get it,” such as TechCrunch and Wired, make it easy for you to leave a comment, while the CNETs and MacWorlds don’t, forcing users through a more laborious registration process.

I agree that a “registration wall” is a great way to drive away potential commenters and active site users, but I would argue this is but one reason among many why some online media companies are more successful than others in embracing social media and fostering active communities.

But just to take a step back for a second, I think it’s hard and in some ways to unfair to compare CNET directly with TechCrunch, for instance. CNET is a monstrously huge online property. It has news, reviews, and features coming out of its ears. It’s a big bad go at a technology portal, with all the ups and downs that come with that. One of the downsides is that it probably can’t be quite as immediate and accessible as a TechCrunch, which remains a straight-ahead blog in terms of structure.

So that said, registration is but one place to look in terms of making it as easy as possible for users to engage with the site and interact with each other.

CNET does call out “latest posts from CNET blogs” on its front page, but they do run beneath the fold on my decently large monitor (Buzz Out Loud podcast makes it above the fold though!). How content is presented on the front page and other key or top level pages plays an important factor. Are blogs and user generated content the most important things on the page, or is editorially-driven or selected content the most important?

That’s not to say that having your pages dominated by user generated content will drive up page views or your number of comments, but it does play a role in telling your community how important your community is. It’s easy to make fun of MySpace, but one of the first things that you see when you hit the front page is “cool new people.” That’s a nice way of telling the audience that you too can be one of us. And let’s face it, it’s difficult to argue with that level of success.

Staying with CNET blogs, I checked out “Mytopia: Yet another casual-gaming start-up goes live” by Caroline McCarthy. Before I read the article, I was thinking about how blogs can be more effective at fostering community by publishing articles that are, well, more bloggy. Bloggy can be a duel-edged sword of course, which is merely to say that content quality is a factor. If it’s consistently great, people will be back.

At the time I read it (a fine article by the way!), the story didn’t have any comments, which might let you circle back to Go Big Always’ registration argument. But then I realized that CNET’s front page recent blogs section also makes no mention of recent comments.

So just to put it all together: what if McCarthy’s Mytopia story ran above-the-fold on CNET’s front page, with the three most recent comments running beneath the headline (with associated profile thumbnail pics of the commenters) and finally a call out to comment now!

I bet if CNET did that and didn’t put up a registration wall they’d see an increase in site comments. And once you get people “in the door” by taking action to leave a comment, your odds go up dramatically that they’ll stick around, create a profile, and do other stuff that drives page views and the bottom line.

Ah, to be filthy rich and living the blogger’s life…

Oh wait, there’s no such thing? Well, pretty much. The vast majority of the hyper-rich who happen to blog (and in Mark Cuban’s case, he’s both hyper and hyper-rich) get rich first and then decided to blog somewhere down that gold-lined road.

Read Write Web does a nice feature on some of the richest bloggers around, like George Soros, JK Rowling, and Cuban.

For those like Donald Trump, whose name is synonymous with the Trump brand (for better or worse) a blog is a perfect way to extend that brand on the Internet. For others – like Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo – blogging is PR… and in Yahoo’s case, they can’t have too much good press on their side these days. And as for Rowling, the merest hint of more Harry Potter adventures to come can cause the entire literary world to flutter with buzz.

The piece also mentions those billionaires that they would like to see blogging, like Bill Gates and George Lucas. It’s fun to think about what people now long gone too might have been like as bloggers. Imagine Jack Kerouac or Winston Churchill (who would orate his daily blog posts of course to a dutiful assistant) or Andrew Carnegie (getting back into the realm of billionaires) getting their daily blog on.

Who would you like to see blogging – past, present, or future-tense?

Mapping the Web is disappointed in “Big Blogs,” and I get the point to an extent. Successful bloggers turn into rich bloggers by taking a step back, running the business, marketing, and advertising side, and hire writers to carry out the vision that they used to solely handle.

For me, I go through phases where the tumult of information and blogospheric conversations gets a little dull and overwhelming at the same time. After I unplug and go through a book reading or music listening binge, I’m usually good to go again for a while.

It’s also helpful (for me) to mix in the Big Blogs with “smaller” and more interesting voices and opinions. And, really, it’s nice to mix up the topics too.

All web all the time can be a bit much. Even for an online media cultist.

The blogosphere took a strange turn (but aren’t they all?) for me recently when I learned that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran – he of wanting to destroy Israel fame, and so on – gets his blog on every now and again.

Not only that, but he either takes a relatively liberal view on deleting commenters, or no one is keeping an eye on people who think he should “shut up” and believe he’s an “evil leader,” and so on.

Rock on, random commenter people.

A Mark Evans piece that muses about the possibility of a “web 2.0 aggregator” that could bring applications like GMail, Skype, and Basecamp all to one My Yahoo or Netvibes-like personalized homepage got me thinking about an only partially related idea having to do with web start-ups. But sticking with the personalized homepage thing for just a second, what I would dearly love is to have the ability to bring a few widgets right into my GMail page. GTalk, an IM application, is integrated into GMail, so why not give people a little widget for their calendar, for instance. This would make me very happy, even though I’m revealing what a slave I am to Google products!

Okay, onward. Here’s one of the things that I would love to do if someone threw a few barrelfuls of VC cash my way: run a blog that smartly aggregates blog posts everyday from web and tech start-up companies. So in other words, when MyBlogLog announces an interesting feature rollout or when Evan Williams writes (incredibly concisely) about nifty things going on at Twitter, this site would annotate it and perhaps add a pithy comment or two for good measure.

I think this would provide a valuable service for the web obsessed TechCrunch/Techmeme crowd as well as for industry insiders and journalists.

I’m a sucker for what I think of as “smart aggregation” and believe that the proliferation of web content will allow for plenty of these kinds of ideas to do well and make money when executed properly (accounting for all of the mistakes, pitfalls, acres of quicksand, and all the rest of the problems that every start-up faces!). Think about… a place that compiles the most interesting or strangest MySpace blog posts, a place for celebrity blog posts (Britney, Rosie O’ Donnell, Fifty Cent, etc.), sports figures, TV and movie personalities, and on and on.

It’s Friday. What better time of the week to let your geeky entrepreneurial dreams cry free?

There’s barrelfuls of chatter to spare today stemming from the announcement that David Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati, and that the blog search engine/portal is laying off eight employees. That, coupled with news that PodTech CEO John Furrier is stepping down is causing speculation about where the web 2.0 cycle is at – pre-pop, popping, or pop-as-overhyped. Jason Calacanis does a good job of framing the last three “down-and-up” cycles, 2005-2007 being a largely up-up-and-away period.

Mike Arrington’s characterization of Sifry’s goodbye message is pretty hilarious:

me….me…me…and oh yeah we layed off eight people.

Sifry also refers to himself as a “great leader” in the fourth paragraph of his post.

Mathew Ingram concurs, writing that “he certainly seems to have gotten the hang of the cold-blooded CEO dismissal message.”

What I’m hoping is that the Internet economy will see a soft landing over the next year, with an inevitable shakeout in oversaturated spaces, and with continued growth in companies that provide value for people. A lot may ride on the overall health of the advertising industry, although as we’re seeing, the trend in ad spending is moving rapidly away from traditional media and toward the online world.

David Dalka looks at a potentially post-Technorati landscape and runs down other blog search engines, such as Ask, Google, and Icerocket. My personal take is that there is yet to be the “Google” of the blog search market (and that includes Google blog search!). Technorati is actually just about the best at present, and I like the introduction of its “authority” system, though how it works is somewhat mysterious to me.

BlogStorm and a bunch of others point out that Technorati’s troubles have accelerated as Google has been eating away at its traffic. Mark Evans makes the interesting counter-argument that while Technorati’s traffic and revenue growth has been “solid… it’s simply not sexy to potential suitors.”