Protoscopic

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.

I always enjoy Cory Doctorow so I was intrigued while I was reading a Chicago Tribune interview with him. He really kind of gives a “pat” answer to the question of the advantage of “first movers” in the current space.

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.

Like this, for example

Stock photos are an Internet entrepreneur’s friend. A surprising number of people are willing to allow you to use their work for free. In a lot of cases site administrators try to capitalize on this and put themselves in as a middle man, but there are still plenty of places on the web where you can get stock photography and graphics for free.

A good starting place is the Wikipedia Page listing a good number of resources on the topic.

If those don’t work for you, here’s an Older List, which has quite a few possibilities as well.

There are of course plenty of ’scams’ out there, so we have typically found a few that work for us and stuck with them. Some favorites of ours are:

• stock.xchng
• Public Domain Clip Art
• PD Photo

One way you can thank them is by putting a link back to them!