By Will McInnes

Daily links: You spoke, 'we' listened

After some feedback from Matthew Hill saying that my blog 'used to be interesting but now its mainly pages of links' I thought I'd ask what others thought.

I guess I asked because daily links on other people's blog used to irritate me too. I remember chatting to Tom Hume on one of our annual lunches (!) about it - I used to go to his blog to read about the wonderful mystical-sounding Aikido sessions and cutting edge mobile gubbins, and it had become awash with links. My immediate reaction was to feel miffed (which is funny, cos what's it got to do with me?).

But I assumed it was just the change that had caught me out, and then I got used to it. And came to enjoy quickly scanning his links to see if anything of interest was in there.

And I was about to use Tom and Russell Davies as examples of others who do daily blog posting from their delicious, only to go to their blogs and find none...

So anyway. It seems people don't like a blog full of links (feedback in comments), and I can understand why. So it's gone gone gone. You spoke, I listened.

Thanks to those that took the time to opine.
Muchos gracias and a big cuddle from me.

The interesting side point, which is frankly one navel gazing step to far, is who is the blog for - the author or the readership, or both? Clearly for me it's both. But like I said, it's a philosophical bullshit inward looking conversation so I won't start it. Let's crack on, what what? :)

Poll: I need your input - to blog links or not?

Matt Hill said: What's happened to your blog Will? It used to be interesting but now it's mainly pages of links. Where's Will gone? Please get back to what you do best: writing great articles that make one think. If you have nothing to say sometimes, post nothing, that's cool.

Rather than get into the whys and wherefores I'd appreciate your input as a (ahem) valued reader.

Bloggers FAH-REEEEK me OUT

Written as if everything that each person is *thinking* is actually said out loud.

Normal person: You've got yer laptop out ya fucking gadgetised tech loving weirdo, this is a conference, yeah? Most of us come here to switch our minds OFF not on. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, so...if you brought your laptop to a conference and have it open on the table, I'm guessing you're a blogger - am I right (weirdo)?

Blogger: Yep, tosspiece, I'm a blogger, and I find your tone and that weird pathological foaming rar-ra look in your eyes slightly odd...

Normal person: Great, fuck me sideways, we've got a live one, a real BLOGGER weirdo right here. So why do you blog...no friends?

Blogger: Errrr, because I like to express myself and share that with other people I mostly already know.

Normal person: WEEEE-YERRRRD! Whoah. WHY??

Blogger: Ummmm, because I have opinions and designs and  I enjoy it...kinda thing.

Normal person: So do you like to write negative stuff, I mean - what motivates you to write bad stuff about people - are you angry, were you maimed as a child, are you broken and twisted inside?

Blogger: I don't write bad stuff about people

Normal person: But you're a b-l-o-g-g-e-r, yes? NEGATIVE! It's what you feed off, right? C'mon.

Blogger: No. I mean, if I was really unhappy about something I'd probably write about it, but most of the team I just toodle along.

Normal person: Right...I see...and what kinda shit do you EAT? Food? Do you eat food? Or do you melt down silicon chips and rub the hot fluid into your parched geek-thin lips? Maybe you're too busy watching filthy web cams and playing World of Warcraft to eat, yes?

Blogger: Ummmmmm.

Normal person: Why can't you be normal like me?

Blogger: ........

Bloggers beware: 'local warming'

Prawn starts a blog

It should be fun.

Is TypePad's comment spam protection getting worse?

Not sure how many of you use TypePad but of late I'm getting more and more frequent bursts of comment spam coming through. I know Akismet on Wordpress is sposed to kick ass - at the moment it's annoying enough to encourage me to switch platforms.

Anyone else suffering or is it just me?

Popularity vs Influence: Does it matter that Fred's traffic has levelled off?

On his blog A VC, Fred Wilson writes that:

Over the course of a month, this blog is visited by about 70,000 people on the web and I've got about 35,000 subs to my two primary feeds. That's a big number, but not huge. And it's been pretty stagnant over the past year.

A week ago I would've agreed with Fred's implied disappointment that "AVC is not a growth opportunity".

Now though, having heard Flemming Madsen from Onalytica talk last week in London, I'm not disappointed for Fred, I'm happy for him!

You see Flemming's business Onalytica specialises in measuring, monitoring and assessing online buzz. And his presentation at the e-consultancy What's New in Online Marketing conference zoned in on the crucial and often forgotten difference between online popularity and online influence...

Whilst we intuitively understand that popularity and influence are different, it's not until someone explains it with real examples and illustrates the powerful and important difference that you really get it.

It was a fascinating and factual based talk, and for me A VC may not be one of the top 100 blogs or top 500 blogs or whatever, in terms of popularity, for that is what the Top XYZ are about: raw, democratic popularity, where every reader is worth the same amount of weight.

But it is surely one of the Top XYZ most influential in the topics that matter to Fred and his readers: on Internet technology, on venture capital (on the cultural aspects of NYC, I can't comment because I'm not well placed to judge this).

AVC may not have the *most* readers, but maybe it has the most influential readers?

In pursuit of popularity we need numbers - high volume, and growth thereof, right?

In pursuit of the surely more meaningful, and certainly more powerful chalice of INFLUENCE, setting the agenda, growth of numbers suddenly becomes much less of an important metric. The mass popularity may be garnered by some of Fred's readers, who are also blog writers, those individuals that he's in dialogue with and is listened to by, but what matters, really, when one is influential is not growth of raw numbers of readers, but in the value of that readership.

In an ideal world Fred should talk to Flemming, and get an intimate understanding of his position in the online conversations. I think it'd be a fascinating discussion.

Loving Jaiku

http://willmcinnes.jaiku.com/

Wickedly easy to use user-interface.
Getting up to speed is a dog-damn-doddle!

And I love how it works in the web 2.0 ecosystem - just pulling in feeds left right and centre with ease.

Very cool.

Any creatiing a new web application is this gorgeous new era of ours should play with Jaiku. THIS is user interface; this is good usability; this is how to build a sticky userbase of real people.

'Edgework' - a new term to help understand Social Media

Somehow I found a really great new blog by a guy called Brian Oberkirch.

This post, 'Branding and Edgework' on his blog sums up a lot of the threads I follow, themes that I educate on and practices that I advise (or we deliver) to our clients, and pulls them together into an extremely insightful and interesting reminder of the new paradigm of communications between organisations and people.

Brian says:

Edgework is the process of interpreting, responding to and integrating the vast and varied feedback modern brands generate.

Edgework has a varied terrain including marketing communications, customer service, sales support, developer relations, PR, internal communications.

The edge offers us contact via emails, chat, SMS, widgets, embeddable videos, podcasts and other time-shifted content, blogs, wikis, feeds, streaming multimedia, location-aware services.

ABSOLUTELY! I absolutely agree with this multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional mode.

The best equipped new operators for this new world that I know have backgrounds and so skillsets that span different fields - Jenni trained as a fine artist, moved through Interactive TV and now is an online marketing specialist; Antony has a very strong background in PR and now works for a leading search and social media agency.

I'm not sure that this topic Brian writes about is new territory per se - it's a new riff on the epochal Cluetrain Manifesto and writing by people like Seth Godin. But 'edgework' is for me  a particularly appropriate term to describe the activities / skills around contemporary online communications.

Looks like a great blog, I recommend you subscribe :)

Widget marketing case study - PollDaddy

I just wrote the latest chaper in our extremely useful (we hope :) ebook series on Widgets and their usefulness in marketing.

If you didn't BELIEVE, oh lawd, in the power, amen, of the miiighty Weeeee-jet, read this case study on how PollDaddy is kicking ass across the whole of the Internet, mostly via widgets: http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05/04/whos-your-polldaddy/

(via - obviously - the excellent Vecosys)