Well, along with launching a book, tweaking our Web site and keeping a business a going concern, why not redesign the blog? Hey, it's a living. ContentBlogger has had a couple of minor redesigns through the years, and more is slated for the future, but it seemed time to correct some key best practices no-nos and to add in the headlines that I've been broadcasting on Twitter.

Twitter was an especially key concern, as I had given up finally on doing headlines the hard way: looking at dozens of Web site bookmarks, compiling and categorizing the best of them in an HTML editor and then cutting and pasting them into a ContentBlogger post. Yuk. How did I do that for four years? Finally last year I started to pop out headlines with links and a touch of commentary in Twitter every now and then. It seemed to be promising and I got strong feedback from folks that they were really useful. The Twitter convention is to insert keywords preceded by a pound/hash mark ("#") into the 140-character messages to help people provide categorization, so I started adding some of the key categories in the content industry that Shore tracks and analyzes, with a few extra Shore-specific categories for promotional purposes. Best of all, Twitter's real-time orientation meant that I could pound out a few headlines, go back to other tasks, and then come back and do a few more. It made for a more newsworthy approach to content news.

OK, great, but how to integrate this into ContentBlogger? Pumping them into a consolidated blog post was one option, and I may yet do that at some point, but that would take away their timeliness. I also found that the headlines were a bit of a distraction to people visiting the blog: they concealed the meaty entries that were the real "bait" for visitors. So embedding a feed of headlines seemed to be the best solution. But how? Hash marks and little personal comments had to go to make the service more readable and professional, filtering of some sort was a must - and I knew already from experience that it's hard to beat Yahoo! Pipes for reliable and quickly developed feed filtering and processing. It took just a few minutes in Yahoo! Pipes to hack together a filter that translated the hash/tags in Twitter to meaningful phrases and to filter out messages that wouldn't fit on ContentBlogger. Fortunately, having built our newsletter filter using Pipes made this a cinch. Then the question was which service to use to embed the feed. I've looked at all sorts of services that do this, and most of them are kind of half-baked. Yahoo! Pipes' badged feed widget wasn't too much better than most, but it integrated nicely with our existing formatting styles so it seemed a small price to pay for unsolicited advertising. Sorry for the badge, I try to avoid them like the plague so that you can have an impartial service, but sometimes compromises are necessary. If there's something better for embedding feeds simply, let me know.

Finally, some style nits that have been bugging me for a long time. At long last I took a deep breath and switched the main text column to the left and the secondary column to the right. It's really the way to go for readability, and I regret having ever set it up the other way. Sometimes old code is just not fun to look at, especially when you have much better things to do. I added iGoogle and Google Reader to the feed bookmark list and replaced the old "XML" feed icon to the newer and more standard orange feed logo. The AddThis bookmarking graphic I changed to the "share" label from "bookmark," as this fits better all of the options availble on AddThis. Finally, a little sidebar promo for the Content Nation book was in order, and easily done.

I hope that you enjoy having headlines back on ContentBlogger, you'll get them in a more timely fashion if you subscribe directly to Twitter or the Yahoo! Pipes feed, but if you're not that type of person you can at least know that you can view the most recent headlines easily on the scrollable sidebar. In the meantime my Twitter friends can get the hottest commentary as quickly as possible while ContentBlogger afficionados still get the best of it. Next is getting them sorted into a weekly summary for ShoreLines. Doable, but still thinking about the value of this. Let me know your thoughts on these changes, not revolutionary, to be sure, but I think that it makes for a better reading experience.

Labels: Best Practices, books, content nation, Feeds, integration, Twitter, weblogs

Read/Write Web notes a hue and cry rising up from bloggers who are concerned about their content being appropriated by aggregation services such as Shyfter that take blog feeds and develop ad-based services using their content without bloggers' approval. Bloggers are apparently concerned that aggregation services are stripping off revenues from their ad-supported services. I suppose that there's more than one publisher chuckling on the sidelines of this affair as bloggers by the bucketful begin to discover an uncomfortable fact - if you decide to be a publisher via social media there's no magic spell that removes one from the problems that all publishers have. Commoditization, unfair use and redistribution of content without verifying a publisher's rights in a new context - these are common complaints in the publishing industry as a whole. This is, unfortunately, where many social media platform providers have fallen short.

Quick to create new features to embed content and to distribute it, many social media platforms have fallen short in their ability to help people monetize their content effectively. Yes, we've had contextual ads on blogs for years, but in essence contextual ads are telling bloggers and other social media creators using them that there's enough demand to sustain their publication on mass media ads. Unfortunately this is rarely the case - the supply of social media content is vastly greater than the demand for media-scaled ads and programs such as AdSense, while beneficial, will not pay huge dividends for most bloggers. It takes blogs with large, media-scaled audiences such as TechCrunch to sustain business with the existing advertising tools. The irony here is that as some social media properties have grown to such proportions they are recognizing that they really have the same problems as any other mass media-oriented property. Aggregation without licensing for commercial purposes draws off a blogger's revenues as much as it does a major newspaper's revenues. In Content Nation the problems of traditional publishers have become the problems of social media publishers, and vice versa.

Companies such as Newstex help bloggers to benefit from companies who want to play by copyright rules and license social media content, but in general there is little to be found in most standard weblogging packages that help a publisher to capitalize on the value of their content in contexts other than their native Web site. Some of the solution is better standard features for bloggers - technology such as Attributor can enable a publisher to track content usage more easily and relicensing services such as Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink and iCopyright can help companies to manage content relicensing opportunities more effectively. And on Near-Time, the platform that we use for Content Nation, there is the capability to define subscription access to content, a "gated community" that sets a bar for both content access and creation as desired. These types of tools are the basic "block and tackle" for any online publisher today, whether in social media or mainstream media, to ensure that they understand who is using their content and making it easy to establish good commercial relationships with those valuing content to make money through content aggregation or reuse.

Unfortunately the technology for social media ads and licensing is really only addressing one part of extracting value from social media. Individuals such as myself build value for focused audiences that gets converted into marketable value other ways - through consulting engagements, through the sale of research and other services that we provide. Other people look for more broad social transactions, building a reputation and relationships that can be converted into personal or professional brand value on any number of conversational and tribal levels. Be it positioning yourself for your next job or promotion, fostering a willingness to participate in events and projects, giving or receiving endorsements or just being tapped into the things that you really love, social media creates value in ways that advertising and licensing don't begin to encompass.

What's really needed to help make social media more successful are better tools to extract value out of social relationships when one's content travels into contexts away from their own home base for their social media. For example, when my blog is picked up in a feed reader, I'd sure like it if there were an easier way for me to embed offers from other people in my social networks that were valuable to them as well as to me. Some of these might be monetizable, others more purely social, but it's the weak point for most ad networks - they assume that transactions have to be based on mass marketing rather than personal marketing. This is one of the reasons why marketing events, services and publications via Facebook is becoming increasingly popular - the groups and people who congregate there are explicitly opting in to relationship networks, making marketing on any level far more effective when done as a member of the community.

So my condolences to bloggers who are burning out as their dreams of big-media glory come face to face with the true nature of electronic content. If you came to glory because you were glad to have free distribution and never demanded any better of your social media platform providers, then shame on you. But as important as it is to have better tools for commercialization through aggregation and reuse it's more important to think about the basics of how to create value in social media.

Labels: aggregation, Licensing, Social Media, weblogs

When first I checked out Mochila a couple of years ago they were booting up their business plan around self-service licensing for premium content - largely a storefront approach for licensing individual premium articles and other content that could be used in a Web site. Lots has changed since then with Mochila. While integrating individual items of content from premium sources is still a key component of their solution today the Mochila platform is far more about delivering streams of premium syndicated content via widgets, with licensing pushed to the background as terms and conditions rather than a marketing theme.

In the time that it took Mochila to hammer out this positioning many services have sprung up to deliver contextual ad and content widgets. From Inform to Sphere to Voxant and even traditional B2B licensors such as Alacra there is a broadening mix of players trying to get valuable content in context. Like some of these plays Mochila also offers contextual ad services that can benefit both the syndicators and the licensors, which gives some flexibility in monetization. Mochila also upped the breadth of content being syndicated, including photos and videos in the mix as well. Now Mochila has announced a slideshow player that makes it easy for sites to embed photo slide shows in their sites - a feature already popular for those wanting mashups of celebrity photo-ops.

The bigger picture, though, is that content syndication is becoming far more self-service for a far wider array of publishers, with tools like Mochila enabling content brands to travel further, wider and in a more integrated fashion more automatically than ever before. Syndication used to be more about going into the back end of content services, but in today's federated content environments content finds itself increasingly aggregated on the front end of publishing platforms, with database integration either bypassed altogether or an afterthought at best. In essence the only database that really seems to matter to many online publishers is the index in search engines trying to help people find their sites - and the rich array of content than can be embedded via services such as Mochila.

Labels: content in context, mochila, syndication, weblogs, widgets

My apologies to ShoreLines subscribers, there are problems with the FeedBlitz system that seem to be impacting our newsletter delivery. When we try to put out a newsletter we get just a blank page instead of content. Their weblog indicates that they've been working on this problem for about a week, so it must be a fairly serious issue. Hopefully we can restore service some time soon.

UPDATE: One blog post later, problem solved. Social media is great.

Labels: feedblitz, phil hollows, shorelines, weblogs

The Alacra Store sells a wide variety of high-grade research reports targeted at business information consumers across a wide variety of business sectors, but like many premium content plays it's not always easy to get people enthused about new research offerings. Some services market content proactively via telemarketing forces and push out traditional press releases to beat the drum for new premium reports, but with their awareness and enthusiasm for Web 2.0 technologies it's not surprising that Alacra opted to launch Research Recap, a weblog highlighting recent additions of reports to the Alacra Store. Research Recap is based on standard WordPress weblogging technology and features some of the nicer capabilities of that service, including a handy tag cloud that helps people see what research topics are hot, category-based navigation and RSS feeds.

The feed is particularly important for analysts and business intelligence professionals who want to get tuned into the latest research as efficiently as possible: instead of having to slog through
press release feeds with lots of unrelated topics or deal with search engine alerts filters that can find documents but not necessarily recommend the most significant content a weblog of editorial recommendations can focus potential buyers on the content that's not only pertinent but also provide insights into the content in an editorial style that is more engaging than your usual report abstract. It turns newsworthy research into news right away, rather than having to wait for a journalist to get a press release packaged into a more readable format with an editorial voice. You may not sell premium research every one who reads a summary (2/3 of Research Recap reports profiled are free) but by packaging the summary as a highly readable blog you establish a conversation with your markets that's more likely to result in research getting the context that will lead to more report sales. We've been doing the same for quite a few years, so it's a positive development to see a company like Alacra putting their beliefs and talents on the line to build both great newsworthy content and better sales channels.

Labels: alacra, blogs, First Research, reports, research recap, Web 2.0 Expo, weblogs

Several weblogs are reporting on anonymous comments appearing on a prominent political weblog that appear to have been posted by a high-level member of the Bush administration based on their detailed knowledge of the inner workings of their national security operations. As in the famous reportage of Bob Woodward who used his "Deep Throat" source Mark Felt of the FBI to learn tangentially about many details of illegal Nixon White House operations this new anonymous source seems to like to play cat and mouse with his/her online questioners. An interesting exchange goes as follows:

mo2: Could it be that they did do something, but that something was illegal?

You are correct.

mo2: "And they feel it is better to be called do-nothings than criminals?"

Also, they like the idea people are focusing on the wrong surveillance, wrong time period: The confusion means they can blame Congress for "not asking the right questions."

While such exchanges could only be used as notes or deep background references at most rather than quotable sources it is interesting that in today's world of social media high-level governmental figures might feel more comfortable leaking their view of issues to the public over the Web rather than via established media channels. There are obvious opportunities for abuse in this methodology - facts can be tailored easily by such a source to whatever effect they may have in mind - but it may be indicative of a problem that journalists in general are facing. One of the key remaining advantages that journalists in established news organizations have is their relationships with key figures that they can mine for inside insights. If those key figures are just as disposed to tell their story to the public through exposed or anonymous channels the ability to cultivate exclusive news contacts is weakened considerably even at the highest levels of news gathering.

While many relationships in journalism with sources are bound to stay in place based on well-established personal trust the hard fact is that such trust is not strictly necessary today for a public figure to get their story out. A comment here, an RSS feed there, and before you know it each person can have an amazing amount of power to tell the truth as they see it to the world at large. Much is made at times of the power of citizen journalism, but perhaps one of the most important aspects of the trend is that webloggers seem to be developing quickly the personal relationships with their audiences that are calling forth from their online following the kind of trustworthy sources that used to require a lot of wining, dining and weekends to develop. If the words and the medium itself are the power that can draw out news sources the days of expense account journalism may become ever more lean. Call this an isolated example for now of where news sourcing is going, but as more people gain the ability to put their view of the world out to the world anonymously as well as personally the profession of journalism is going to emphasize online relationship building as much as face-to-face connections for a long time to come.

Labels: citizen journalism, TPMmuckraker, weblogs

When Techobabble 2.0 ranked information and communications technolgy (ICT) industry analyst weblogs recently I was pleased to discover our own ContentBlogger in the top ten of all ICT weblogs. More specifically, sandwiched in between Forrester and Jupiter's top weblogs and several notches above Charlene Li. The blog acknowledges that heavies such as Charlene came in low in some objective criteria such as Technorati rankings, but still, this is a very cool thing. Especially cool is that ContentBlogger was tying the very top analyst weblogs in TB2.0's own ranking criteria.

Wow.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to Jonny Bentwood over at Edelman for his analysis and for his recognition of our efforts. It's rewarding to see how our efforts rank amongst the leaders in the industry. Our heartfelt thanks go out also to everyone who tunes in to ContentBlogger online or via our ShoreLines newsletter. It's a privilege to be of service to you and an honor to be amongst such talented peers in this recognition. We'll just keep on doing our thing here at Shore, and make it only better as we go along.

Labels: analysts, ContentBlogger, ICT, Technobabble 2.0, Technology, weblogs