Mark Evans

Climbing Aboard Grand Effect

Not that I had to think about it much but I’ve decided to take the plunge and join a new blog network called Grand Effect.…and it’s all Corvida’s fault.

A month or so ago, I was reading Corvida’s SheGeeks (which I had happily just discovered), and noticed she was a member of something called Grand Effect. Curious, I learned this was a new network started by Sarah Perez that was going to have a small handful of members. That sounded good but what got me interested were the top-notch names on board. In addition to Corvida and Sarah, there was M.G. Siegler (ParisLemon), Federic (The Last Podcast) and David Peralty.

Impressed, I dropped a note to Sarah, and was pleasantly surprised (and flattered) when earlier this week, I received an invitation to join Grand Effect. I know Grand Effect is interested in attracting advertising. And while that would be a nice development, I’m more excited about joining a group of high-quality group of tech bloggers who are part of something new and exciting at a time when there’s so much happening within the blogging, social media and online advertising worlds.

To learn more about Grand Effect, click here, while you can get information on its bloggers, which also include fellow Canadian Steve Hodson, here.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Grand Effect, Sarah Perez

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Let’s Get the (Yahoo-Microsoft Blogging Party) Started

So, Microsoft has withdrawn its hostile bid for Yahoo - putting the Saturday night plans of tech bloggers around the world into total disarray with dinner plans cancelled, NBA and NBA playoff games abandoned, cold libations sadly gone lukewarm, and partners, wives and girlfriends left cooling their collective heels.

In other words, the blogosphere is furiously jumping on the Yahoo-Microsoft story like drowning sailors scrambling to get on life rafts. It’s the story and no one wants to be left behind. Because anyone and everyone can jump into the conversation, they probably will.

The heavyweights - CNet, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Paul Kedrosky, BoomTown, CenterNetworks - have already weighed into the fray with instant analysis. Pretty soon, Techmeme will be completely overwhelmed as the blogosphere goes into overdrive.

Stepping back from the news itself, it’s pretty fascinating to see how a major development can spawn a feeding (blogging?) frenzy with everyone excited about talking as opposed to simply listening. Since they (Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad) built it, they (bloggers) will come.

I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t blog to their heart’s content about Microsoft walking away from Yahoo after spending so much time trying to woo Jerry Yang et al into the fold. If you’ve got something to say, do it but you’ll have a lot of company…include me, I guess.

Update: Not that it’s a surprise but the Microsoft-Yahoo news has consumed nearly all of Techmeme.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Microsoft, Yahoo

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Does Length Suddenly Matter?

Here’s an observation that’s completely unscientific but, nevertheless, interesting.

At a time when Twitter - and its 140-character messages - is becoming all the rage (at least within the high-tech community, according to Kara Swisher), posts by some of the leading bloggers (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Valley Insider, et al appear to be getting a lot longer. RWW, for example, now has a “Continue reading” link at the bottom of every post rather than providing the entire text.

It’s a competitive landscape so perhaps the focus on length is being driven by the need to provide more details and analysis. This, of course, assumes that people have the time to read longer stories at a time when more people are spending an increasing amount of time trying to keep up with e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.

There’s clearly a delicate balancing going on as longer posts become a competitive tool because quantity/volume still seems to matter. As much as being comprehensive is important, being first and being seen as offering extensive coverage is still seen as a strategic necessity.

If longer posts are going to become a blog staple, then blogs may have little choice but to evolve into online newspapers with “front pages” that feature five or six stories, as well as sections (e.g. Analysis, Startups, Venture Capital, etc.)

Technorati Tags: Blogs, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch

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Talking to Disqus’ Daniel Ha

If you write a blog or read blogs, one of the major challenges is managing comments. For bloggers, comments can consume a lot of cycles and can be difficult to structure and manage. For people who like to comment on blogs, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of all the places where you’ve left your two cents.

Disqus hope to change things with a comment system offering benefits for bloggers and blog commenters. I’ve been using it on All About Nortel for the past few months, and been impressed. To get a better sense of Disqus, I fired off a few questions to co-founder Daniel Ha, who was good enough to respond.

When was Disqus started?

Disqus was started by Jason Yan and myself, Daniel Ha, at the beginning of 2007 while we were still in school. We were working on better tools for online group and forum discussion. Both of us were active on a number of forums and bulletin boards and we felt that the software behind these were just incredibly lackluster. As we moved forward, we uncovered bigger problems, mainly fragmented conversations. After receiving funding from Y Combinator that summer, we restarted Disqus to focus on the conversations that happen on blogs. While we weren’t prolific bloggers, we experienced how broken blog comments can be.

How did you decide on developing a blog commenting service? What did you do to create a service that bloggers wanted?

The gap between forums and blog comments was actually quite small. One of the initial ideas involved bridging communities across forums; we learned that this was much more applicable to blogs, especially since a lot of the conversation happens right in a blog’s comments. The first few versions of Disqus was relatively light and bare-bones. We allowed a lot of focus and direction to be directly influenced by what bloggers were passionate about. Along the way, I’ve been learning a lot about bloggers and the communities they run. It helps greatly in deciding the direction of the service.

What has Disqus being doing to spread the word about the service? What is the company’s marketing strategy?

We don’t really have a marketing strategy. For the most part, it’s been purely word of mouth. At the very beginning, I contacted a number of my favorite blogs to let them know that we existed. After getting discovered by blogs in a variety of categories, Disqus has been growing pretty well. Since Disqus aims to connect readers across blogs, bloggers benefit greatly from having other bloggers use the system. This certainly helps.

What are some of the new features coming down the pike later this year?
Lately, we’ve been releasing features that makes things easier for blog admins, such as more tools for moderation. Moving forward, we’re focusing heavily on making Disqus easy to use for new bloggers. Integration needs to be easier, our plugins needs to be rehauled, and a new version of the API is being released.

How many users does Disqus have?
Over 80,000 different people have left a comment through the Disqus comment system.

How does Disqus make money?
We don’t at the moment. We’re still very focused on building a product that bloggers love.

How has the company been financed?
Disqus was seeded by Y Combinator in 2007. Earlier this year, we raised a financing round with Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures along with some great angel investors.

More: Loic Le mur recently did a video with Daniel, which you can find here.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Daniel Ha, Disqus

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Four Reasons Why Blogging is Easy; Getting Traffic is Hard

Every day, there are more than 100,000 blogs launched as more people climb on the user-generated content bandwagon.

While starting a blog is a snap, attracting traffic is a major challenge for most people.

To test this theory and start a new blog with fairly unique content, my brother, Sean, and I created Four Reasons Why in August 2007. The approach was simple: provide four or five reasons about a variety of topics. E.g. Why I love Pancakes; Why Google is Evil; Why Online Dating is Better than Real Life Dating; Why Bert and Ernie were Pioneers.

Rather than announce the birth of 4RW on this blog, which has a fairly healthy following, we decided to grow it organically on its own merits. With more than three years of blogging under my belt, I figured that I knew many of the tricks to attract an audience, so off we went with high hopes.

Nine months later, the results are mixed.

From a content perspective, it’s been fun, satisfying and creatively challenging, which is the reason we started 4RW. From a traffic perspective, it’s a bit of different story. The number of pagviews/day has averaged about 75, although there have been a few glorious days with a 1,000 pageviews, most recently after StumbleUpon users latched onto “Why Aquaman is the Lamest Hero of All Time”). Meanwhile, the number of RSS readers has plateaued at about 70. Not bad but not great.

It hasn’t been for a lack of trying. We’ve used a bunch of tools and techniques: StumbleUpon, which delivers a lot of “dine and dash” traffic, Digg (little impact), del.icio.us (none), Facebook (fairly good response), comments on other blogs, posts about posts on Techmeme (haven’t been able to get 4RW on it), Reddit, and the list goes on.

The lack of success from a traffic perspective probably has something to do with the fact 4RW covers a variety of topics as opposed to being focused on a single theme or sector. That has made it difficult to become part of a particular community. A design with more sizzle would probably help as well.

It may also have to due with the reality there’s so many blogs out there, and the market for readers is fragmented to the point where only blogs associated to well-known brands and bloggers have a chance to attract critical mass. That said, there are always exceptions to the rule. A good example is Stuff White People Like, which has become a huge hit because it’s, well, different.

In the case of 4RW, we continued to carry on in anonymity looking for the big break if someone with some street cred would notice our efforts, and lead us to page view and AdSense glory. Sadly, that has yet to happen but that’s okay.

In the meantime, our stealth project became less stealth - probably because I kept putting 4RW posts on Facebook and have it on MET’s blogroll.

So now we’ve decided to come out of hiding. Why? Partly because the experiment has run its course; partly because quite a few people know who’s writing 4RW, and partly because AllTop has been nice enough to put 4RW on its Lifehacks channel, along with some terrific blogs, including 43 Folders, Lifehacker, LifeDev and Make Magazine.

It’s been a nice behind-the-scenes run but we’re looking forward to a new beginning!

More: There’s no lack of advice out there on how to make your blog more popular/successful. For some interesting reads on starting a blog, check out these posts by Dosh Dosh (here and here), and this post “101 Ways to Make Your Blog More Popular Successful” by SEO 2.0.

Technorati Tags: AllTop, Blogging, Blogs, Four Reasons Why

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Noise, What Noise?

Only one thing to say about the complaints among the digerati that they’re being overwhelmed by having to check too many places to stay in touch - Twitter, FriendFeed, GMail, Facebook, GTalk, NetVibes, e-mail et al.

That, and get a life and some digital discipline. Alexander van Elsas nails it here.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter

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Show Me the (USG) Money!

In the wake of all the talk involving about Shyftr and its service that pulls content and the conversation from blogs, there was some discussion about monetization. For people interested in make money, Shyftr and its ilk are bad; for people more interested in building brand and distribution, Shyftr’s doing nothing wrong.

But let’s put aside Shyftr and the issue about whether blogs will slowly see their traffic erode as consumers read content in a variety of external places. Instead, let’s focus on the money. In particular, let’s focus on advertising dollars attracted by user-generated content makers (bloggers, podcasters, video-bloggers).

Before we do that, let’s look at some bullish sexy numbers from eMarketer (aka The New Forrester Research of Web 2.0). According to eMarketer, the number of USG creators in the U.S. will jump to 108 million by 2012 from 77 million in 2008. Meanwhile, the number of consumers using UGC will climb to 130 million from 94 million.

Impressive numbers. More impressive - and somewhat hard to swallow - is eMarketer’s contention that UGC advertising revenue will jump nearly four-fold to $824-million from $162-million.

So let me get my fact straight: While there will be a lot more UGC consumers, there will also be significantly more competition at a time when content is going to be more widely dispersed. At the very least, that sounds like a challenge environment for advertisers and content producers seeking advertising.

The way it looks from here, the major brands (traditional media moving online, and online players with significant footprints) are going to attract a vast majority of the advertising dollars, while everyone else will scramble for a tiny crumb from the UGC ad pie.

Update: Louis Gray has a post suggesting that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue because they don’t attract enough traffic to be valuable to advertisers. Still, you can’t blame people for trying because what’s wrong with trying to make a few bucks from all your hard work. That’s just capitalism, baby!

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Blogs

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I’d Like to Thank the Academy….

The snow’s gone, the sun is shining and there’s playoff hockey on TV every night. How could things get any better?
Well, I was pleased to discover today that I’m one of Canada’s top-10 tech bloggers, according to itWorldCanada. The list includes my friend and co-organizer, Rob Hyndman.

Truth be told, there are dozens of terrific tech bloggers north of the 49th parallel. People like Mathew Ingram, Tony Hung, Steve Hodson, David Crow, Aidan Henry, Jevon MacDonald and Kevin Restivo are just the people off the top of my head who regularly write excellent content.

It explains why there four Canadians currently on the Techmeme Leaderboard - quite a feat at a time when more blog publishers and traditional media bloggers are having an increasing presence.

Technorati Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, Techmeme

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Who’s Louis Gray?

At a time when blogging is evolving and the high-tech landscape is being dominated by blog publishers such as TechCrunch, GigaOm and Mashable as well as blogs operated by mainstream media, it is good to see that it’s still possible for one-man/woman shop to capture the spotlight using a combination of quality content, enthusiasm and energy.

Some good examples of people who have jumped on the scene include Paris Lemon, Tony Hung and The Last Podcast. These days, one of the hottest one-man shows on the tech blogging scene is Louis Gray, who has literally come out of nowhere in the past few month. Now, Gray is literally everywhere - breaking stories, providing in-depth coverage of new startups such as FriendFeed, and cementing himself within the Techmeme 100.

So I asked myself “Who is this Louis Gray guy, anyway?”. Rather than speculate, I figured the best approach was to simply ask Louis Gray himself. Here’s a Q&A we did recently.

Who is Louis Gray?

I’m a 31 year-old Silicon Valley resident living in Sunnyvale, Ca. with my wife, and our 18-year-old beagle. We’re also expecting twins in the July timeframe, a boy and a girl, which just might be a little disruptive. I’m one of those odd people with a liberal arts degree who is completely enamored with technology, but can’t code much more than HTML and simple JavaScript, so I cling to all things technology from a consumer perspective. I also enjoy the culture and innovation available in the Valley and it’d be hard to think of living anywhere else. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1999, I was already working at a small startup in Burlingame, and have been doing the startup thing ever since - both in real life, and through engaging with entrepreneurs on the blog.

How long have you been blogging?

I’ve been blogging in a few places since 2004, starting with a multi-author family blog in 2004, which my mother had started. I also contribute to a few SportsBlog Nation blogs, including Athletics Nation (www.athleticsnation.com), covering the Oakland A’s baseball team, and Sactown Royalty (www.sactownroyalty.com), covering the Sacramento Kings basketball team. I started working with Athletics Nation in 2005 and Sactown Royalty in 2006. I’ve also contributed to the Apple Blog (www.theappleblog.com) since 2006, although I’ve been much more focused on my own site of late, and have admittedly been a horrible slacker there.

While I’d had my own personal home page way back in 1995, hosted from my UC Berkeley dorm room, and registered louisgray.com for the first time back in 1999, I didn’t transform it into blog form until January of 2006, after finally finding a working solution that let me post and save files to the FTP server behind louisgray.com.

One of the major reasons I started blogging on louisgray.com, instead of sticking with the family’s blog, was that, as with most families, not everybody shares my same interests. While I would get excited about what Apple or Google were doing, they wouldn’t, and I didn’t feel it was right to post with the kind of regularity there that I could on my own site.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Louis Gray

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Shyftr’s Lessons for Bloggers

In thinking some more about the enthusiastic discussion about Shyftr over the weekend (and I refuse to call it a “Bitchmeme”), a few major themes for bloggers emerged, especially those interested in making money even to cover monthly costs such as hosting. (Hat tip to Steve Hodson, who wote an excellent post yesterday, and Deep Jive Interests, who accurately described Shyftr’s activity as “scraping”, although Shyftr claims it’s going to change its scraping ways.)

1. As long as RSS receives little love, attention and money from advertisers, pageviews are still important. No pageviews, no advertising revenue - regardless of whether it’s CPM, CPC , AdSense, sponsorship, etc.

2. It’s your content so make sure you control it. If brand and readership are important, be a Robert Scoble and share it as much as you can. Encourage people to subscribe via a RSS reader or e-mail, and participate join in social networks/aggregators such as Facebook, FriendFeed and Shyftr.

If, however, you want to also make some advertising revenue, think about only offering partial RSS feeds. If your content is good enough, people will, in theory, click through to your blog. Or, for that matter, don’t offer an RSS feed at all. As well, make sure other services aren’t using your content (and the associated conversations) without sharing the revenue. The fact that Shyftr wants to make money by leveraging content it doesn’t own or license is just wrong.

3. Use social networks as a tool. Get a news feed on Facebook that includes your new blog posts, use Twitterfeed to announce new posts on Twitter and register your blog at places such as Techsted to highlight what you’re doing.

4. Do whatever you can to make your blog a destination. Use cool widget, blog asides, newsletters, polls and, of course, a user-friendly design. Whatever it takes to convince people that visiting your blog is worth it can only be a good thing.

4.. As Steve Hodson explains so well, there needs to be a better and more fair way for bloggers to make money other than using AdSense, Adify, etc. Right now, the scales aren’t balanced, especially if you’re not attracting a lot of page views - and the scale will become even more imbalanced as other services steal your page views. Maybe the answer is new players such as the Rubicon Project.

In some respects, Shyftr may be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The sharing phenomena has gone so far that original sources are becoming second-tier citizens. It may be time for things to change, including the economic models involving people who write blog content.

For an overview of the Shyfyr “discussion” over the weekend, check out The Blog Herald. As well, Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has a great piece on content becoming a commodity.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, Advertising, Blogs, RSS, Shyftr

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