Ok, so here’s the deal. I’m giving this seminar thingy in cooperation with Media Tectonics. The purpose of the talk is to explain to people who write for a living how they might use a blogger’s web-tool arsenal to be more competitive in online publishing. (Update: Just to clarify, the talk will be in English only. I wish I could do it in Japanese too, but unfortunately my skills are still lacking in that department!)
I’m a little nervous using the word “journalism” in the title, seeing as how I’m not a journalist myself. Hell, I’m a pretty average writer to be honest. But I think I do have a pretty awesome collection of web tools that allows me to grab a few writing gigs that I might otherwise have no shot at. So I figure, if proper journalists knew this stuff there’d be no stopping ‘em.
Myself, Chris Amico and Alex Bowman have talked this kinda stuff to death over the last few years. Chris has come up with Tools for News which is so awesome I’m going to have to stick it on page 1 of my presentation (check it out if you haven’t seen it). The benefits of collaborating with guys like these is something I hope to get across in this talk as well.
But in a nutshell I hope to just help people do the shit that they love a little bit better and more efficiently. I’ll incorporate a little bit of what I spoke about at Tokyo Barcamp, but this will be more organized and thorough and I’ll be providing some helpful documents to attendees that they can take home to use as a reference.
With that in mind if you are a writer who’s struggling a bit these days, or one who wants to upgrade their online presence, feel free to come out and have a listen. You can read a detailed description from the event organizers here (.doc, .pdf or just read it), and if you’d like to attend please drop a line to Cindy Mullins ASAP because space is somewhat limited. Price is ¥4,000 prepaid; ¥5,500 at the door. If you can’t make it for some reason or if you are a starving writer who doesn’t want to dish out the cash (lets face it, that’s entirely possible!) don’t worry because I’ll be chatting extensively about this on my blog in the near future.
Ironically…
Oddly enough, during a time when I’m looking to help some people shift from traditional to new media, today I find myself going in the opposite direction. I have my first Japan Times article out today on the subject of last week’s Apple event and the new iPod upgrades, so please check it out. Big ups to Hideki Francis Onda (@onebeat) and Steve Nagata (@stevenagata) for answering some of my questions. Both damn knowledgeable guys, and both very gracious on short notice. Here’s the link to the online version:
Japan Times: Apple polishes up its gadget arsenal
You’re needlessly being modest. Writing well is not easy, and does not come easily unless well practised, refined, trained, and always needs that bit of spark.
Producing (not necessarily good) content is easy, if time consuming. And tools, as Chris’s, should make writing less time consuming. Why should a camera not have built in GPS, WiFi and if needed a satellite uplink connection – in today’s tech these are pretty inexpensive, and result in instant news.
But I think the next challenge to content producers, and those that pay them, is less aggregators, more branded niche services no one really needs. People like Scribd ripping stuff off and saying they’re doing a service by putting it into a PDF, Twine using sock-puppet accounts copy-pasting things from Twitter, or SWIK where keywords links rank higher than the articles they link to?
Google doesn’t love small people, it loves trust and branded domains, and that does content producers who by necessity are people and are not large branded domains a disservice. Is producing content a commodity, at best, in Web3.0?
I’m curious to hear you talk more about this (your idea of web 3.0). Producing content on your own website for a profitable living is a daunting task, and in my travels I can’t think of many who do.
One thing I’d like to highlight during this talk is that it’s likely easier to use your blog as a springboard to better paying platforms, rather than investing years of grueling blogging on your own and hoping to profit from Adsense sidebars and affiliate ads.
Another option is collaboration. One individual blogging away by himself might now grab much attention. But put a few like-minded people together publishing on the same blog, dividing the work among many hands, then it stands a better chance of being widely read. That’s been the case with DSninja.com, where frequent updates has resulted in the site reaching a Google Pagerank of 4 very quickly. (Not that I place much faith in pagerank anymore).
Then there’s the other side of the coin — Who cares if you’re being widely read? For example, I use this blog as a hub for my other stuff, and a platform for random thoughts about stuff that interests me. I don’t intend to put ads here, because I’d expect traffic here to be quite low.
Break-down the payoff: Payoff may come in the form of:
- Avertising revenue is a function of pageviews and ad revenue per pageview;
- Subscription revenue is a payoff, that is a function of number of views and dervived value per view;
- Other monetary style payoffs may include throwbacks from reviews, etc, which are a function of number and impact of views too;
- Non-monetary benefits may arise from building a personal brand, a space for self training/improvement (technical or writing skills), or an online portfolio – these are harder to quantify;
- Finding old fashioned customers who want to buy a product.
Web3.0 and Aggregation:
Two ways to get load of content (and boost possibility of getting indexed for load of stuff) is either to pay lots of writers or to aggregate lots of stuff for free. Google likes brands, and a site with lots of content instantly copied from ‘long tail’ sites gets that brand, while ‘long tail’ sites remain in the long tail. Should the long tail writers be forced to brand themselves and collaborate in order to avoid being copied by link harvesters and web apps?
What were black hat techniques of harvesting content (actual bots crawling pages, rather than just aggregating anything in an RSS feed) now get VC funding. For example love.com http://www.seobook.com/does-google-love-com-spam or Google Squared where a carefully written article gets sliced and hacked into a spreadsheet format http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/what-is-google-squared-it-is-how-google-will-crush-wolfram-alpha-exclusive-video/ .
There’s always been a lot of badly written ‘keyword optimised’ rubbish on the Internet, what I believe Eric Schmidt refers to as ‘the cesspool’.
In a common story I’ve seen written in a few places why does a blacksmith in Norway need to learn about SEO, content acquisition, keywords, AdSense and incoming link quality? He shouldn’t. And that’s what is wrong with much of the way content is treated on the Internet today.
I feel I’m getting far too tangential r.e. the original topic. Main point: Making news/content can be made easier, but being small and getting burned/having your content stolen is a big liklihood unless you’re with a big brand that is already recognised on the Internet and that has staff dedicated to making content doesn’t get appropriated too easily.
I like how you’ve broken down the possible payoffs. It’s something that I’ve been trying to find the right words to describe for a while.
As for the ways to get loads of content, I think there’s one that could be added to the list (besides aggregation and paying lots of writers) and that’s enlisting the help of other like-minded bloggers/writers and sharing the load. That’s sort of what we did on http://daliandalian.com, in that we divided the work among a group and in the end built a chunk of content relatively quickly. And nobody was paid.
I mentioned dsninja.com which allows/encourages writers to insert their own ads in their posts is quickly amassing more content (far quicker than if it was just me writing) and moving up in Google’s rankings as a result. Ryan’s http://lostlaowai.com/blog is the same thing.
r.e. collaboration: Collaboration is great when a group of people have a common goal, and gets stuff done at an impressive rate. But should collaboration be necessary for an independent author with damn good content not to get associated and buried in ‘the cesspool’? If the independent author doesn’t get their attribution, and under the above examples probably doesn’t, that’s probably not good in the long term interest of content.
An author should not need to become expert in these areas. But ’should’ is not pragmatic, being smart about how content is used adds value. On a post about tools used to create news, my focus on how content is used is a bit offtopic.
Here’s a recent collection of several news stories relevant, questioning whether content is a final product: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/20/1444228/News-Content-As-a-Resource-Not-a-Final-Product?from=rss