You just gotta give it to the guy. Genius isn’t in it. Jason Calacanis has just written not only the funniest post I’ve read in a while, but also the smartest traffic-hoovering machine in years. I’d call it the industrialization of backlink aggregation. Google watch out — Professor Moriarty is on the case.

Now, if you think I’m doing this post to get a link back from Jason, get a life! His post tickled me puce, that’s all.

Oh, and did I mention he is former Editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, “once profiled in New Yorker piece…,” former GM of Netscape, Brooklyn born, or “his trusty bulldog Toro by his side.”?

His injunction, “DO lie and say we hung out one night back in the Silicon Alley days or after a conference and that I’m actually a really cool guy once you get to know me.” is not possible since I NEVER lie. I once sang a duet with Elvis though.

He ends : If you follow these “Calacanis Link Bait” strategies I will link to you. If you just come out and beat me up I probably won’t… so, there you have it “how to get a link from Calacanis.”

I suspect this is a clever way of using his campaign against SEO, which I totally agree with in an unflashy sort of way, to practise a little of it himself.

Darren at Problogger take note, you have serious competition.

I’ve long been an advocate of the convergence of print and pixel formats. Each has something to learn from the other, and, despite the insistent claims, the online world will not replace print in a clean sweep any time soon.

Despite the obvious limitations of long text pieces online, there’s yet another outbreak of print-death fever going around. Tim O’Reilly has heard whispers that the San Francisco Chronicle is in “serious trouble” and is laying off journalists and staff. Dave Winer wades in with a thoughtful contribution, while Robert Scoble trumpets, “Newpapers are dead”.

The problem with that kind of headline is that this is a complex situation with many variations and possible outcomes. Certainty is not an option here.

Newspapers have been in trouble as long as they have existed. I can name a dozen national titles that went out of business in Britain in the 20th century. It happens — all the time. One failure doesn’t necessarily signal the end of an industry.

Most UK national newspapers now put their whole output openly on websites. They break news online and follow up in later print issues with in-depth analyses and commentary. They also give away DVDs and lottery cards with the print version and have a sizeable magazine-type feature-set aimed at specific demographics. Not many of their customers want to turn their computers on to access all of that when they can buy it in a convenient print bundle for around a dollar while they’re on the move.

As newspapers become more like daily magazines, with retrospective analysis of news already broken on TV and online, urban populations are still buying print products in large quantities. The evening papers, for example, are bought by returning commuters to make their homeward journey a little more bearable and to catch up on the stories of the day. Local papers are increasingly the glue that binds the inhabitants of towns and villages together.

What is actually happening is a convergence, not a replacement. Increasingly print publishers are becoming digital publishers, while maintaining their print operations. Imagine the major titles — the FT, WSJ, NYT, or Times (London) — without their immensely prestigious paper versions. They would lose considerable traction in the marketplace without them.

We forget at our peril that most people like the reassuring feel of a “real world” product in their hands. They go online for certain types of information, but relax with a book or magazine.

Breaking news is covered better on 24-hour news channels than on websites or blogs. Immediacy is the USP here. Fiction is a pain on-screen. Long, complex, nonfiction is easier to handle in book form, and some subjects are presented far better in print than they are on the internet.

What we’re seeing is a weeding out process that will result in rapidly-changing information migrating online — as it already has — while considered analysis will appear in hybrid formats for different audiences. More reflective, longer-term material and fiction will still remain predominantly the province of print formats and subsequent dramatizations.

It’s often forgotten that new technology has transformed the print world too. On-demand book printing, from disc in tiny batches, is already changing the face of book production and will continue to do so.

Can anyone tell me why a wealthy society shouldn’t support many communications formats to their mutual advantage?

When I write about blogging or blog networks on this site, it puts around 700 uniques onto the day’s stats. It also draws some interesting people into the comments section. Why should I not do it?

Despite those facts, there’s a lot of rumbling around the flogosphere [the commercial blogsphere] about the saturation of blogging as a topic. [Here and here] My own belief is that metablogging peaked as a useful activity around a year ago and continues largely as an echo chamber effect within the space. So what’s going on here?

Do you really want to read more about bloggers who blog about blogs now? Is another article about making money online going to contribute to your income? Is a further attack on b5media by the 9rules leadership, going to contribute to the stock of human kindness?

I don’t need to answer those questions. The fact is, subjects get stale with use and time. What was fresh and bubbly in 2005 is flat and fetid in 2007.

The real question is what can you write about that will hit the spot now?

The answer is : … given at the end of the post.

The usual way of framing this query is by asking, “What’s the next big thing?”

The NBT is supposed to be “social media”, something that promotes democracy to the point of anarchy and generates a lot of traffic of the type that just wants to be part of the crowd. What do you get when you invite scores of sheep to a party? A lot of baaaing noises.

So let’s leave social media to the teenyboppers and wearers of white socks. Ken Marlin, a technology investment banker in New York says : “The world is filled with companies that waited too long to sell and missed their window of opportunity. We think this land grab on the Internet probably will only last another year or two.”

There’s an old adage in marketing that when all the people who would buy your product have bought it, the only thing to do is to expand the usage of it. I once created the British campaign for Telex, which was then in every office in the land. My slogan was, “Please confirm by Telex”, and it was designed to educate people in new uses for that wretched old piece of kit.

My teenage niece once told me that she wore Lancome perfume in bed “just for herself”. I recognized instantly the work of a crafty copywriter trying to get people to make more use of a saturated product.

Does it work? For a while, yes, until the even craftier consumer catches on that they’re being manipulated. Eventually you have to admit defeat, or, more likely, you’re superceded by something new and shiny.

Let’s be clear, what we’re talking about here are ways of getting eyeballs to content to drive CPM and CPC advertising. That requires :

* Constant refreshment of the material.
* Knowing what’s going on.
* Writing for a much wider readership than your peer group.
* Improving the content platform to encourage people to stay.
* Targeting usability as a prime reason for writing.
* Keeping the commercial side below readers’ threshold of tolerance.

There are probably many more bullet points for that list, but you get the message.

The other reason is to develop credibility as an author on a topic. Again, a well covered subject.

When I started out writing for the print world, there were hundreds of books, magazines, groups, circles etc. specializing in advising the novice how to succeed — it wasn’t called metawriting in those days. The fact that very few of the advisers had ever succeeded themselves very much, told you all you needed to know about the trade. Blogging about blogging has reached that point now and needs to reconsider its gameplan.

So what’s the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post?

It’s a fallacy that there’s only one right way forward because there’s only one way back. At any moment going forward there are multitudes of choices available to you. However, the vast majority of them will be beyond you for one reason or another. Some will be dead ends. A few will have promise but are impractical. Around a dozen will be crying out for development.

The danger is you’ll be overwhelmed by the huge number of possiblities and turn back to the comfort zone of the crowd. Your face will set into a rictus and you’ll hear a familiar baaaaing sound bleating out of it. You’ll feel safe.

One thing’s certain though : being a pathfinder and failing is better than following the rest. For the pathfinder who fails gains precious knowledge of fields not previously ploughed. New stacks of possibilities will open up, a step-change in advance of those set before the crowd.

Always push the envelope. Test the future before it tests you.

The word “blog” and its derivatives “blogger” and “blogging” must be the most commonly used words in the blogosphere. You simply can’t get away from them. Some bloggers use them in every other sentence — at least.

For me, each time I read one of them in a blog, it’s like a very large cow pat falling from the sky in front of me. Bloggers [splat] who give a running commentary on their blogs [splat] and their blogging [splat] and then do the same for other bloggers [splat] and their blogs [splat] really need to get away from their blogs [splat] more.

The whole subject of blogs, bloggers and blogging [splat, splat, splat] has been obsessed to death on the internet. Even if you use asterixes you can’t escape : as in bl*gs, bl*ggers and bl*gging [spl*t, spl*t, spl*t].

Don’t get me wrong, I love the art and freedom of ******** [*****], but I just don’t want to see that word again in case one day a cow pat lands on my head [splat].

I work hard at not writing about blogging these days, but something always turns up and I’m forced to relent. This one is irresistible for a number of reasons.

Keith Waterhouse is a British National Treasure. He’s incredibly old, being the author of that 1950s smash hit novel and film, Billy Liar. He claimed to be one of the “Angry Young Men” — all the rage in those days — but his sense of humour prevented him ever being angry enough.

He went on to become a very good journalist and playwright, defender of the apostrophe (everyone’s entitled to some eccentricity), and author of a long-running column in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.

And it’s to the latter we turn for his views on blogging. Yesterday, he published a piece titled, “Blogging our way to the true story”.

He begins characteristically : “And a happy blogging New Year to bloggers everywhere. I don’t think.” That’s Keith for you. Sharp and to the point.

He continues, “Meaning I cannot be doing with blogging, bloggers or blogs.” He quotes an example of a typical Christmas blog : “Tarquin, as well as being Head Boy, is now First Triangle in the school orchestra, which gives him a place in next year’s Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Bowl all-schools production of Peter and the Wolf.”

But even worse, he says, is the rise of the grandiosely termed Citizen Journalism. “They print hearsay as hard fact. They lift news items from orthodox sources and embellish them in their own wild words. They twist the newspaper writer’s motto, which is Get It First, Get It Right, to read : Get It Second, Get It Wrong.”

Blimey, someone’s rattled his cage. I hope it wasn’t me.

But he has a solution to this morass of unseemly garbage into which he despatches all bloggers : “To all pejorative references to the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ please add : ‘– unless they have a camera’. … I make an exception in the case of photographs.”

Here he goes on at length about the Saddam Hussein execution : “The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage … was grisly enough. The bloggers’ contribution — grabbed at the gallows … shocked all right thinking people. … the sheer brutality of the scene takes[s] us back to the public hanging of felons at Tyburn in the 18th century.”

In other words, blogging is OK so long as it tells us a truth that mainstream media is locked out from. Bloggers are forever condemned to be bandits and outlaws, stealing banned information and news of private events that the law and other agencies try to conceal from us.

Well, it’s a tidy gap in the market, if a bit hard to live up to on a daily basis. If this is the view of an old-time journalist and general good egg, blogging does suffer from an image problem. But then, we’ve been saying that here for a long time.

I can’t help feeling that if Waterhouse rewrote Billy Liar for our times, Billy would be a blogger.

Filed Under : Don’t give up the day job

According to Long-Tailist Chris Anderson, business guru, Guy Kawasaki, who started blogging just a year ago, makes around $280 a month from a site which attracts a readership of around 3,000 a day, plus lots of links from the A-list fraternity.

A best-selling author and genuine tech celebrity writing a thoughtful essay nearly every workday on a top-50 blog for an audience of around 30,000 [sic] people/day.

And the pay for that is about $280 a month. If Guy can get Google to write a check at all.

It’s an interesting benchmark for a year-old site. I would say that’s about average for a site which hasn’t been pushed aggressively into ads. I wouldn’t expect much joy out of Adsense in the the first year, whether they pay up or not.

We have sites that earn more than that on a fraction of the traffic. It’s not always traffic that determines these things, more often what niche it’s in and knowing where to get paid advertising. With a cpm (cost per thousand impressions) of $1.39, my guess is that Kawasaki’s niche should be doing better, but it’s not always the ones who should do better that do. Some sites do better with one type of ad — say, text links — than another type.

The whole of online advertising is a mish-mash of inconsistencies. Two of our lowest trafficked, PageRanked sites make over three times more each than our highest. Square that circle, if you can.

It’s not really a red rag to a bull, more a spinnaker in a field of Spanish fighting bovines. Joseph Rago (note the name) has a total pop at the blogocracy in today’s Wall Street Journal, and boy does he land some heft.

“Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

First into the ring to challenge raging Rago is former heavyweight champ, Duncan Riley, a blog evangelist of some years standing, but now reduced to a small outpost somewhere in Western Australia. I won’t quote Duncan because a lot of it is unprintable in a family publication like Syntagma.

What Rago is doing is to lament the “passing” — or imminent demise — of the words-on-paper publication. He believes the editorial expertise and fact-checking that underpins print media is being shredded by the instantaneous hullaballoo of the blog form.

He’s right on that, of course, but in the process he’s tarring everyone with a large, but broadly insignificant, brush. If anyone wants a considered, fact checked, intelligent opinion on events, they wouldn’t necessarily turn to blogs. They would probably still buy one of the weekly current affairs magazines, or read the op-ed pieces in the Times or indeed, the WSJ, possibly online. But there are blog-like alternatives emerging now.

In the world of “blogs” you can get finely written and expert articles on most topics if you know where to find them. At the higher end, blogs are not like newspapers, they are more like authored, opinion columns in newspapers, where a single, authoritative voice expounds on a topic of the moment. That the piece is self-edited is the real distinction. The voice is more able to be itself. If it’s a good one, that’s a real plus.

But this type of column is not really a blog in the commonly understood way. Bob Cringely’s weekly piece over at PBS.org, for example, is more a part of the mainstream than the blogosphere. Online content platforms shouldn’t all be rubbed with the ashes of MySpace. The top end is converging with the mainstream and morphing into it as papers and magazines get digital and learn the tricks of the trade from online journalists and technologists.

There’s no either/or here. Why should there be? Let’s welcome the craft of print to the internet, not forgetting its wealth, and develop our own native pixelcraft to help the mergers along. That’s happening already.

Ultimately, in any field, only 5% succeed, and they can usually do the job anywhere. Blog “culture” will quickly be submerged by the need to present top quality content to a discerning readership, as printed pamphlets were replaced by organized newspapers in the 17th/18th centuries. As more people read online, so will online content reach out to meet them.

Rago and Riley are opposite poles of the debate. As always, the future lies somewhere in between.

It’s good to see the new owners of The Blog Herald bringing in some heavyweight writers.

The latest addition to the new crew is Scott Karp, fresh off the ink at Publishing 2.0, where he writes at length on all aspects of online publishing.

First off is an interesting piece on “user generated content” : is it exploitation, or the legitimate satisfaction of a craving for attention?

The key issue in my mind is how the explosion of user-generated content will affect over the long term how the finite pie of media attention is allocated. If media consumers start to spend more time with user-generated content (i.e. content that is produced “for free” by users of open platforms) than they do with “professional” content (i.e. content that is expensive to produce — think Hollywood), then this issue of allowing users to choose to share in the cash economy will come to a head because the cash value of each user contribution will increase over time.

Scott’s doing a weekly column at TBH. Should be worth following.

A reminder that our 2006 Writer’s Blog Anthology in book form is now available from Amazon, thanks to the hard work of Deborah Woehr, who edited and designed it, as well as pushing it through the publishing process.

Having just received my copy, which was printed by Lightning Source, I must report that the quality of printing and production is amazing for an on-demand book. Too often POD (print on demand) books look and feel trashy and badly produced. The Anthology is indistinguishable from a good trade paperback.

It also contains some fine writing from a wide range of authors. The work was submitted from blog posts written by members of Writers’ Blog Alliance, all of whom are writers in one form or another.

This would make a great gift for anyone who likes a good read, or who is caught up in blogging.

Buy it here from Amazon.