Not that long ago I was writing about how much I liked twitter.  It seems that as a fairly late adopter, I missed most of the glory days and it is now on the typical community life cycle:

Given that Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model, they may want to hurry up and accept that $230 million dollar price tag that’s being thrown around.  To me the biggest sign that it’s over the hill is the mad “popularity contest” component of it.  Your goal in Twitter now is apparently to be followed by as many people as possible, regardless of who they are.  There are techniques for finding more people who will “auto follow” you.  This leaves me with one big question:

Why Do I Want Someone Who Has No Interest In Me To Follow Me?

If that person isn’t ever going to be interested in, and probably won’t even read, my tweets, then why am I happy they’re following me?  At this point I feel somewhat silly that I persued a “quality over quantity” approach to my Twitter friends.  What the popularity contest tells me however, is that most people are not really reading anything that’s being Tweeted.  As people read less and less, the service becomes less valuable.

Soon enough, someone else will come up with some other new cool community and the early adopters will go have some fun there until it gets lame and they have to move on again.  Hopefully, next time I can be at the front end, instead of the back.  Anyone know what that next thing will be?

We were discussing the other day about future ventures and Annie basically put forth the contention that “forums were dead.” She said they seemed “archaic” and she didn’t know why anyone would bother making a free standing forum, when they could just make one on Facebook. This was troubling to me for a few reasons:

I Know Diddly About Facebook

One of the first things that troubled me about the whole thing is that I know nothing about Facebook. She is clearly the Facebook master in the organization. I’ve never even bothered to give it the rudimentary attention that I’ve given MySpace (which is next to none). I have no real reason to justify why I’ve been ignoring a huge social change in the area I’m hoping to build businesses in, but there you have it. I’m ignorant. That was the first troubling bit.

She Seemed Right

At first blush, the second troubling fact was that I could totally see her point. We’re out there trying to build communities, when Facebook is basically making all the same tools available to people who aren’t savvy. As Annie puts it, “Grandma won’t join a forum, but Grandma will get on Facebook.” There’s also all the advantages that come from the components being integrated so well. I can go to one control panel and see information about my whole online world. That’s very compelling.

Why Facebook is like Socialism

Finally I hit on why I think Facebook is not destined to take over the Web. It comes down to two things: Efficiency and Innovation.

Facebook is like a centrally planned economy. It’s clean and sanitized and easy to use. It sounds great in theory. Big brains in the sky make the decisions about what tools you need, how you’ll get them and how they’ll be delivered. The bad guys don’t get in and everything is great. In theory that all sounds great.

But just like Socialism, Facebook discourages efficiency. Why? Because no one really has much of a profit motive. They don’t really own their content there. It’s just as hard to compete with someone else’s forum there, but you don’t get any big prize when you win. In the early days that’s not a big problem as you see who the best early adopters are. But once you’re established, it’s really hard to displace the leaders, no matter how fat and lazy they’ve become. Moreover, there’s much less incentive to do so.

Also, Socialism and Facebook inherently deter innovation. On Facebook there’s a simple, “master planned” list of things I can and cannot do. All the innovation has to come from the big brain in the sky. While that helps have a orderly, sterile, nonthreatening environment, it’s bad for innovation. If only Facebook can think of things to do with Facebook, then they will always be trailing in the feature wars.

Thus it seems likely to me that while Facebook can get off to a start with “good” planning. Ultimately they will eventually make mistakes and as long as you are the only one making decisions, you will be the one penalized by your mistakes. I ultimately don’t think there can ever be a “super app” that replaces the Internet as a whole, for those two simple reasons: Efficiency and Innovation.

Photo By: NightRPStar

A while back we were mystified by the results we found with our tests of Stumbleupon. We’ve since concluded that our results stemmed from Stumbleupon’s advanced utilities to prevent people from “Stumbling” their own content.  The question that arises in my mind is:

Why Have Functionality To Prevent People From Stumbling Their Own Content?

So clearly Stumbleupon identified that the same group of people Stumbled our first and second submissions, so they didn’t show it to many, or maybe even any, other people. The pivotal question is: why? Why are they so concerned with preventing people from Stumbling their own work. Isn’t the whole point of their service that people in the aggregate decide if the content is worthwhile? If I submit several pieces of content and they aren’t any good, they shouldn’t go very far. Perhaps they should have spent less time discouraging self-submission, and more time making their promotion algorithm more advanced?

What’s Better About Digg?

It should first be noted that both Stumbleupon and Digg suffer from the same downfall, users who have ADD. Stumblers or Diggers might read your article, but the potential for them to become avid readers of your blog is pretty low. If they got their entertainment from reading just a few blogs they wouldn’t be on those services in the first place.

So why use either? Here’s a simple experiment. Go Digg one of your deep pages and wait a few weeks. Then search for the title of the article. There’s a good chance that the Digg page will outrank your original article. Moreover, in that Digg page, there is a Do-Follow link to your original article. While it kind of sucks that it’s outranking our article, if you could get some more inbound links from elsewhere you’d be moving.

Is This Another Anti-NoFollow Rant?

I will spare you the “nofollow” rant today. Everyone should know my feelings about “nofollow” by now. Instead I will convey an interesting anecdote about Digging your own pages. During my article marketing test I wrote an article titled “Learn To Read Stock Market Quotes.” If you search for it, my article currently shows up as results 2-4. Your milage may vary. Not long ago a spam blog “syndicated the story” (stripping the link back to me as spam blogs are wont to do) and dug it. The digg page ranked 5th and the spam blog was nowhere to be seen. So you can see that there is some benefit to be had by digging your own story.

Secondarily, your Digg profile can also have dofollow links back to your sites. So they actually reward you for participating in their community (a lost concept these days.) They also do not frown on submitting your own story, although you’ll usually do better if someone else submits it. While Digg has it’s own set of problems, it is vastly superior to Stumbleupon for promoting your work.

The post that we were the most excited about was <a href=”http://www.protoscopic.com/articles/tim-ferriss-po-box-solution”>Tim Ferriss’ P.O. Box Solution</a> where we actually empirically put his claims to test.  We’ve read in many places about what a great “hack” it is to get a PO Box and use it as a “Suite” to disguise your business address.  It’s a fantastic idea in theory, but certainly failed dismally in our tests.  I was simply thinking today that it’s really interesting that the post we put the most effort into and was the most original wound up being the most popular one as well.

Not too long ago we did a quick article on stock photos. I really didn’t have much of a problem with the results we were getting, however I was reading an article on skelliewag.org about how she uses flickr to get pictures and thought we might give it a try here. You should read the article but the the gist is:

• It’s easy to find photos on flickr, which I’ve found to be quite true.
• Only use photos under the Creative Commons license, which you can find here. This license allows you to make changes to the photo, like cropping our putting text over it, as long as you credit the artist.

Obviously the photos themselves are generally very striking. There are a lot of talented photographers on the site. I’m not completely sold on the idea however for a couple of reasons:

• The photos don’t lend themselves as much to our “captions” which I think are sometimes funny.
• Our plug-in that we use for the captions won’t let us credit the photographer in it, so I’m going to have to find a new plug-in
• Most importantly, in another article by skellie on problogger, she was advocating against changing the “style” of your image usage. So I think she would disapprove of me sometimes using stylish flickr photos, and sometimes using silly cartoons. She’s pretty successful so I’m reluctant to ignore her advice, but I’d hate to commit to never using cartoons and such again.

I may have to disregard her advice for the time being and mix pretty flickr photos with the other stock media. I think in many cases they’re a visual draw and more compelling than the art we’ve been using. I just hate to give up my opportunity to try to be pithy. Either way it is definitely something to consider for any blogger.

I’m a complete miser when it comes to my time and looking for ways to keep from wasting it. Nearly everything I do is calculated on a cost-benefit equation and potentially discontinued based on whether it was worth my time. In fact I’m timing how long it takes me to write this blog right now. Ignoring the question of whether I’m a soulless automaton, let’s get to the question at hand:

How can I tell which blogs are worth the time to post comments on?

I have a pretty simple formula for this. Just like PPC, I value a click at about 10 cents. If I were buying ads from Google, that’s about what I’d pay. When I go back and look at my Google Analytics, I can quickly tell how many viewers my post got me. So the obvious formula:

($0.10 x Visitors) – (Hourly Rate * Hours Taken To Post)

If I have an hourly rate of $50 and it took me 3 minutes (1/20^th of an hour) to post a comment that got me 10 visitors, that post was worth:

($0.10 x 10) – ($50 * 1/20) = $1.00 – $2.50 = -$1.50

I got $1.00 of value for $2.50 of work, so that probably wasn’t a great use of my time. I could have invested my $2.50 of effort and bought 25 clicks from Google. In this scenario my break-even is 25 visitors. If I get 25 or more it was worth it.

If you don’t know what hourly rate to use, check out our article on Valuing Your Time.

What about quality?

There are a ton more variables you can use in this equation, like bouce rate, pageviews or return visits, but I am just looking for a simple rule of thumb. I can pretty quickly assess whether the traffic I’m getting is junk or not without getting too technical. It’s never going to be a science, but as long as you’re posting on relevant blogs and keeping an eye on the quality of traffic you’re getting, this method should help you keep from wasting time.

But there are plenty of old blogs that are still being written whose popularity waned over the years. It takes more than just being first. First helps, but… And there are plenty of new blogs that do very well.

This made me wonder: Obviously there is still room for big offerings, but for a moderate sized site, is it too late to get involved in the Web 2.0 revolution?

Web 2.0

The term “Web 2.0″ can mean different things to different people, but most people seem to agree that a pivotal point is collaboration and user-generated content. Hence the rise of sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube. This of course is a site owner’s dream come true. Not only are the site’s customers providing content for the site, but they consider it fabulous and empowering to do so.

So many of these sites are basically a framework put up by a very forward thinking mind who then lets other people generate a gold-mine. Obviously keeping these people in check and not letting them run amok is not a trivial problem. In essence this problem and this model is just an evolution of the Internet itself. The power that brought the Internet into the limelight was the reduction of barriers to entry, for good and bad.

Closing the Door

Too late to start building?

It is to some degree troubling to see the giants of the industry immediately begin making rules to make it hard to compete with them. One of the most noteworthy examples of this was (old news I know) Wikipedia’s shift to put “nofollow” tags on all its outbound links. Suddenly all the people who had volunteered time and information for their site had the terms of their deal shifted. They were suddenly getting one less benefit for their contribution (Pagerank) than they were before. Basically they’re saying that now that their users have made them the “standard,” they can retroactively make their part of the bargain less valuable and offer less in the future.

A more insidious result of the “nofollow” proliferation is that it has helped people realize the value of their links. People are much more reluctant to link to someone now, not only because they are giving away something of value, but because it seems it can potentially damage your Pagerank. So now that everyone knows their links are valuable the people who already have them can decide who gets into the party. If you have a Pagerank 6 you can basically dole out success. Moreover in the process you are probably getting something back that will continue to help keep you in that position.

Is The Door Closed?

So is it all pointless? Is the idea of a grassroots, DIY website empire dead before we’ve even started. I tend to think we’ve got quite a while before that happens and it may never happen. Much like in “real” markets, when people get powerful, they get lazy and inefficient. Nevertheless I do feel that the egalitarian nature of the Internet has been somewhat diminished by the dominance of certain players. It’s also made it a tougher challenge and, therefore, a better game.

Both of these issues cause us to be inclined to give up on our current project, Walt Disney World For Grownups. A part of us wants to either start a new site and “start over” or give up altogether. We hope that a “clean slate” might allow us to circumvent this Pagerank problem and we are honestly doubting our timing. It may be that we got in late enough that it’s difficult to make a name, but too early to catch the economic recovery at the end of the next downturn.

All that being said, we ultimately will persevere for one simple reason:

If you want to become good at something, you have to play against the hardest competition.

We're Feeling Stronger Already!

If we started in more fortuitous times, we might meet with initial success, but when hard times hit we wouldn’t know how to handle them. By starting with a lot of cards stacked against us, we will really know how to make a reproducible success story (and incidentally share our progress with you). We’re hoping that our current difficulties are simply part of a crucible that will make us stronger in the end.

That’s what we’re telling ourselves anyway…

One mistake I have managed to make over and over again in planning my online projects is the assumption that all my friends are going to rush to support it. Typically when I’m imagining the testing process, I write down all my friend’s names and assume they will all be drooling with anticipation at the opportunity to help me out. With all these friends I’ll have a baseline of twenty users a day working my system over–we’ll get the kinks worked out in no time.

This of course is not the case.

You will be shocked and amazed at how little your friends will do to help you out. This is not because they are horrible people, it is simply because even though you really want your blog to succeed, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be enthralled with it. While it’s what you’re “into” at the moment, their priorities most likely lie elsewhere (we hope!).

You kind of assume everyone would be interested to read your blog, but in the end probably most of them won’t. Those who do will probably do a cursory glance, say “looks cool,” and move on. Even though it doesn’t seem like much to ask for them to invest a few minutes in supporting your endeavor, it’s just not going to be at the front of their mind.

If you are lucky enough to have the kind of friends that will check in on your blog periodically, or post on your forum, or even just give you feedback on your theme and usability, be sure to show your thanks and help them out in their endeavors.

While people are going to continue to give away their work for free, they are going to give it to established sites. If you’re trying to develop a new product and expect people to work for you, you are going to want to give them something in return. While links are a common source of compensation, the logistics of giving these out has become problematic. If Google is going to punish me for linking to content, I don’t want to have to vet every outbound link I give.

Ultimately what people would most like and what we’d most like to give them is money. We don’t want to actually have to PAY them, though. Obviously we’re not the first people to think of this, and the solution has been instituted by several places: Revenue Sharing.

The beauty of this is there are a plethora of ways it can be implemented, and I don’t ever have to have a financial relationship with my content generator. If I’m monetizing through Adsense, I simply rotate our Adsense IDs. If I want to give them 60% of the revenue, I use their Adsense ID on 60% of the Pageviews and mine on the other 40%. There are just a few problems with this:

• It seems like Google isn’t wild about the idea.

  Digital Point forums is one of the places that uses a variation of this methodology and they managed to get some feedback from Google on the subject. I read that to mean that while they don’t really “like” it, they don’t explicitly prohibit it. But they warn about my second misgiving…

• I don’t want to be liable for other people’s link fraud.

  As Google points out in the link above, pretty much everyone involved is responsible for the actions on that page. So if I have a revenue-sharing page and the nimrod I’m working with decides to get all his friends to click on his Adsense links, I’m responsible, too.

• We have to bring something to the table.

  Sites like Hubpages already have a strong Pagerank and other content to give incentive to people to put their content on their pages. I always think there’s value in aggregation, but we have to make an appealing value proposal. Additionally once you get people thinking in terms of what their content is really worth, they may have a tendency to overvalue it. While they might be fine with giving it away for free, if someone’s being explicit about paying them for it they may want a bigger cut.