Media
Media
Post EntreCard Blog Promotion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/04/2009 - 17:47Monday, the latest changes to EntreCard are scheduled to take affect and various people are saying their goodbyes. I think I’ll weather this latest storm out as well and stick around. However, I have thought more seriously about leaving and offer up recommendations for people leaving as well as for those of us being left behind.
EntreCard is different things to different people, so depending on your own reasons for using and/or leaving EntreCard, different parts of the recommendation may mean more or less to you.
Promoting your blog
One of the most important reasons I use EntreCard is to promote my blog. There are people that have visited my blog in the past through EntreCard that will no long be coming to my blog because they are leaving EntreCard. Many of them have moved over to CMF Ads and I’ve placed ads on their site through CMF Ads. Some of them are also on Adgitize, so I show up on their blogs from time to time as well. A few of them that filled out my survey include Turnip of Power, Top Ten Blog Tips, A Postcard a Day, Healthy Lifestyle Blogzine, Mom's Cafe Home Cooking, Internet Marketing with Steven Wilson, libdrone, That Grrl, and sixmats.com.
So far, I’ve found Adgitize ads to drive more traffic to my site than EntreCard or CMF Ads.
Monetizing your blog
Another aspect of advertising is monetizing your blog. I’ve used several different sites, including Google Adsense, Chitika, Amazon, and other large ad networks to serve ads. I don’t do a lot with this advertising and don’t give it prominent positions. Each of them provide a small amount of income from time to time, and every once in a while, provides a nice payoff. I did finally get around to linking my Google Analytics to my Google Adsense.
In terms of the bloggers advertising networks, Adgitize has consistently been the best performer. It usually only brings in a couple dollars after expenses, but essentially, I get paid by Adgitize for generating traffic to my site. A very stark contrast to EntreCard.
For Adgitize, I pay $14/month for my advertisement. As an advertisers, I earn about $4 worth of credits each month, so my real cost is more like $10. I earn another $4 by writing a post every day. It is good practice to write a post every day, so the added discipline helps. Then, I get about $4/day for visiting other sites through Adgitize. If these are EntreCard sites as well, which they usually are, it fits in with the EntreCard dropping. That leaves me with $2/month to cover through advertising revenue. My calculations are that most sites get up to about $8/month for advertisements on Adgitize.
Adgitize calculates the earnings based on the number of page views and the number of ad views. Traditionally, I had three Adgitize ads showing at a time. I like the idea of showing multiple Adgitize ads. People surfing my site through Adgitize have three exit points. Others add Adgitize at the bottom of their page, thus increasing the number of ad views, the number of exit points, and providing good above the fold and below the fold locations. I’ve now added three more ads at the bottom of my page.
My guess is that I make about $5/month on CMF Ads which I re-invest by advertising on other CMF sites. It doesn’t bring me a lot of traffic and I could perhaps optimize my advertising there as well as the rate that I charge for CMF Ads. Sometimes, you may get better total revenue by lowering your ad rates or adding more ads to view. On my survey, a lot of people said they used CMF Ads, which I do as well. However, I just don’t use it as extensively as other sites.
Recent Readers
Another thing that EntreCard does is that it provides information about people who have recently dropped cards on you. This is a nice improvement over the recent reader sites like MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog. With those sites, someone might have read your site and not liked it. In theory, a person visiting with EntreCard would only drop cards on sites that they like. However, in practice, that does not seem to be the case.
In my survey, I found that many more respondents use BlogCatalog than use MyBlogLog. This fits data that I get from Google Analytics that I get four times the traffic from BlogCatalog as I do from MyBlogLog. Because of this, I’ve moved BlogCatalog up on my screen and MyBlogLog down. These sites don’t generate a lot of traffic and 40% of people leaving EntreCard do not use them. However, if I were leaving, I would use BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog the way I use the EntreCard inbox now.
MicroPayments
The one thing that EntreCard has that I haven’t found a good replacement for in other sites is a working system of micropayments. The EntreCard micropayment model is broken in that there isn’t a good way to cash out credits. Personally, I think a micropayment system, tying into some of the big players in micropayments from the gaming space, like Offerpal would be great. If I could easily drop credits on friends that would be great. Anyone who wants to collaborate on a viable blogging micropayment system should drop me a note.
Traffic Exchanges
For many people, it seems like EntreCard was an informal traffic exchange. Drop a card on me, and I’ll drop one on you. The only traffic exchange that I pay any attention to is BlogExplosion. I sometimes use this to find new sites to visit and get surprisingly good traffic from them. Interestingly, nearly half of the EntreCard diaspora that filled out my survey does not use BlogExplosion.
Of course, the best way to increase readership is to write good content, and I enjoy visiting the blogs that have well written articles. With that, I’m giving a shout out today to Ask the Blogster for EntreCard: Great Concept, No Business Plan and Advertising Is Not Free—It’s Too Expensive & Other Paradox In Entrecard Town. Writing great content and linking to other articles that you like is always a great way to promote your own blog.
So, have I hit the way you promote your blog? Are there things I should have suggested and missed?
Update:
As I continue visiting various sites, I just came across EntreWas, which is an effort for people who connected via EntreCard to stay connected. It seems like a great idea.
Legal Issues
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 17:52I am not a lawyer, and I don’t particularly think of my blog as a law-blog, however, I do cover legal issues from time to time. People interested in my posts about legal issues are encouraged to read the law section of Orient Lodge, or subscribe to the RSS feed of the law section.
With that, there are several interesting issues that have recently come up that I would like to highlight. First, the Valley Independent Sentinel has an article about user comments triggering a Derby lawsuit. According to the article, Renee Luneau is suing Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow alleging that they “failed to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net”. The article goes into a little detail about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which seems like a pretty solid defense in this case. One person commented about how the recent lawsuit to get Google to reveal who has written anonymous blog posts may change this, but I think that is mixing up issues and I went into details about why in a comment, which I encourage you to stop by the Valley Independent Sentinel to read the comments.
While the case appears to have no merit, Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow are likely to incur legal fees defending themselves. This leads me to the next issue. On Tuesday, Pam Spaulding put up an important blog post entitled Hanging citizen journalists out to dry: shield-law amendment excludes unpaid bloggers. The fact that bloggers and citizen journalists may not get paid is no excuse for excluding them from laws that protect other journalists. As we have seen, unpaid bloggers can run into the same legal issues and traditional journalists and need similar protection.
Bloomberg goes into another aspect of the protections that citizen journalists and bloggers need to consider, media liability insurance. This is another expense for serious bloggers and citizen journalists, which can be particularly expensive for unpaid bloggers. However, not having this sort of coverage could be even more expensive.
In other legal news, a new book out about the Cheshire triple murder is stirring up all kinds of issues. The New Haven Register quotes a defense attorney describing it as "scurrilous trash". The article notes that the lawyers “served notice they intend to seek an arrest warrant against Komisarjevsky for contempt of court for violating the court-imposed gag order -- if McDonald’s ‘public statements can be relied upon.’” People in the comments section have noted that to a person facing the death penalty, being found in contempt of court is unlikely to have much of an affect.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has just upgraded their website. You can follow the DOJ on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube, as well as sign up for all kinds of different messages from the DOJ. I signed up and am getting a lot of messages from the FBI right now. I’ll probably cut back on some of the feeds I’ve subscribed to. Otherwise, it could be overwhelming.
In the pipeline, I received another brief on the Doninger case, which I expect will be heard in the Second Circuit before too long. In addition, I’m keeping my eyes open for developments in the Citizen’s Election Program case. That provides a brief update on some of the legal issues I’m currently watching. I do wish more bloggers would cover legal issues, and I think the DOJ updates could be a very valuable tool for bloggers and citizen journalists.
Navigating the CT Media Ecosphere
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 11:32Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the future of journalism here in Connecticut. Back on September 14th, Colin McEnroe talked about the decline in local news coverage, and asked about whether or not local bloggers are filling the gap. Then, on September 22nd, Tom Brokaw spoke about the Future of Journalism at Yale. Two days later, Where We Live ran a segment on Hyperlocal journalism, which was followed by a panel, “Hyperlocal: News In My Back Yard." sponsored by PRSA-CT.
These discussions have become more common and fairly predictable. No, bloggers haven’t filled in the gaps. Some will say that they aren’t even journalists, and the discussion will turn towards how journalists can make a living these days.
I do agree that bloggers have not done enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional news organization and I have a few suggestions for bloggers interested in this. First, for the time being forget about whether some representative of the waning wing of the fourth estate considers you a compatriot. Get out and cover the news. Cover the stuff that others aren’t covering. Go to local school board meetings and provide information that doesn’t show up in your local papers and that you can’t get simply by watching the recordings of the meetings on your local government access channel.
Beyond that, go out and get some training in journalism. I strongly recommend courses that the Investigative Reporters and Editors provide. In their commitment to investigative reporting, they welcome bloggers to their organization and their classes. While you’re at it be sure to take the online course Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers at NewsU developed by the Media Bloggers Association, the Citizen Media Law Project and the Center for Citizen Media. It is a free online course that I believe everyone doing online media should take. Then, get out and collaborate with other news organizations. I am fortunate that various traditional news outlets pick up and carry some of my blog posts.
The legal issues are important for bloggers and citizen journalists. Recently, a fellow blogger in North Dakota received his first subpoena to turn over information that he considers protected under North Dakota’s shield laws. It illustrates why the NewsU course is so important and why the question about who is a journalist is so important.
I made a comment on Where We Live about volunteer and paid journalists. I believe it is useful to look at journalists in a manner similar to how we look at firemen. Large cities have fire departments staffed by professional firemen. Smaller cities will have fire departments with professional firemen, which are supplemented by volunteer firemen. Small towns have volunteer fire departments where professionals only arrive if there is something really big going on. Yet even with that, the volunteer firemen often receive great training. We should be looking at this model for news organizations.
The issue of how journalists get paid is very significant. A recent article in Editor and Publisher reports that journalists are losing jobs at three times the rate of other workers. There has been recent talk about what can be done to address this, including President Obama expressing concern about the future of journalism. At the PRSA panel, I mentioned Spot Us which is a great organization to raise money to fund investigative reporting.
Yet there are other important issues that need to be considered in the future of journalism that too often get overlooked. Recently, I received an email from the Waterbury Republican American. This is not a paper that I typically consider leading the way on journalistic reforms. However, a note at the bottom of the email caught my attention. It urged readers with questions, comments or wanting to advertise to contact Kevin Johnson, Online Sales Manager.
I was curious about how many papers have ‘online sales managers’ and what sort of experiences Mr. Johnson had had to make him a successful online sales manager. It seems like too many news organizations simply take their print sales managers and ask them to sell online ads as well, without really understanding the differences between print and online advertising. Indeed, there is little about the Republican American site that would make you think they have made any great progress with online advertising, with the exception of the peel away ad for their dining guide.
The peel away ad and the dining guide are good examples of what can be done to improve online advertising by local papers. I spoke with Mr. Johnson who acknowledged that he had grown up in the world of print advertising, but has spent considerable time learning about online advertising. When he came to the Republican American, he came in as the Online Sales Manager, and besides spending time finding advertising he spends a lot of time mentoring print sales managers so that they can be more effective in selling online advertising. It seems to have worked since the Waterbury Republican American has had a substantial and impressive growth in online advertising revenues.
It is not only sales people and advertisers that are having difficulty connecting in this new media ecosphere. As more and more people leave traditional news organizations, it becomes harder for public information officers, communications directors, public relations staff and others to find the right people to pick up their media advisories and press releases and write about them. To address this problem, I’ve created CTNewsWire. This is a Google Group where local and state officials, candidates, agencies and other organizations can send press releases and media advisories about things of importance in Connecticut to bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone else who wants to subscribe to Connecticut related releases. The list has been going for several months and continues to grow.
The media ecosphere around Connecticut and around the world is changing. There are lots of great opportunities to sit around and discuss these changes. However, here in Connecticut we are seeing some interesting efforts to move beyond the discussions and actually take action on ways that we can keep the media ecosphere vibrant in our state. If you’re a blogger, I hope you spend more time covering local events, and perhaps get some training in reporting and join the CTNewsWire. If you’re an advertiser, I hope you press the local news organizations to provide better and more innovative advertising opportunities, and if you are a newsmaker, I hope you find ways, like the CTNewsWire to reach out to some of the new players in the Connecticut media ecosphere.
Californinger's Sage: Total Recall of Things Past
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/27/2009 - 06:05“There was a king named Fornjot, he ruled over those lands which are called Finland and Kvenland; that is to the east of that bight of the sea which goes northward to meet Gandvik; that we call the Helsingbight.”
“I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”.
It wasn’t particularly The Orkneyingers’ Saga that was on my mind as I fell asleep, nor was it Remembrance of Things Past. Yet both of them related back to a single theme. Instead, I was thinking about the book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
I had heard a discussion of the book on an NPR radio segment a couple weeks ago, and have been trying to get a chance to write about it ever since. It is a fascinating project to record ever increasing details of our personal lives. All kinds of concerns were raised about this. If we keep all our memories online, will we lose our ability to memorize things? There were discussions about how memorizing things actually makes one’s ability to memorize additional things easier. If everything is recorded for us, does our mind atrophy? What about the privacy issues, if every detail of our lives is recorded will we change the way we behave? Will people tap that information for marketing purposes or as part of criminal investigations? Will it move us closer to a world of thought crime?
How does blogging fit into this, and do we run the risk of becoming simply diarists spending too much time looking at what was as opposed to what could be?
It seems to me that the real issue isn’t how much of your life you’ve recorded, but what you can do with it. The simplest part is, can you easily find and retrieve the information that you’ve recorded?
In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust starts out, “For a long time I used to go to bed early”. There isn’t a specific date on this. He doesn’t start, “On July 17, 1876 I went to bed at 6:47 PM”. He continues with “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”. He does not state that they took a particular turn at 7:13 PM, although scholars might be very interested in when he really did go to bed and exactly how long it took for these thoughts to take a peculiar turn. Instead, it is all generalized, a collection of rather
imprecise memories.
The Orkneyingers’ Saga is even less precise. ““There was a king named Fornjot”. While we know that Proust was born on July 10, 1871, the day or year of Fornjot’s birth is not easy to find anywhere. Yet The Orkneyingers’ Saga was an important part of early collective memory.
All of this comes back to a few different themes for me. First, is how do we organize, search, retrieve, and make sense of information? I’ve not read Total Recall, but it seems as if this is the interesting part that is overlooked. How do we make random associations? I suspect that not many of my readers have associated The Orkneyingers’ Saga with Proust and Gordon Bell before.
Beyond that, when we make our random associations in our efforts to make sense of information, how do we tell the story? This is one of my gripes about all these “future of news” discussions. Whatever the media, video, print or online and whatever the label, be it journalist, blogger or some combination of the two, we need to make sense of information and tell it in a compelling story. The Orkneyingers’ Saga did that. Proust did that. Yet so much of the minutiae of modern news is just that, minutiae that has not been fit into a bigger picture, a more compelling story.
There are many more places I could go with this, but while Proust went to bed early, I’ve woken up early. It is still dark outside. The rain is falling and sleep beckons me back to another opportunity for my thoughts to take peculiar turns.
