June 2011 Archives - 2/4 - TheWayoftheWeb

A blogging #FollowFriday

June 24, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

It seems that the rise of social networking has led to two effects on blogging and the interlinking between bloggers. Facebook and Twitter aren’t killing blogs, but they do seem to have led to a lot of people dropping blog rolls of their favourites, regular recommendations of others, and the classic blog memes whereby you’d tag other bloggers to respond to a challenge or question.

And while recommendations via Twitter, Facebook or any other social network are always great, I figure it’s time I started recommending people once more. So here’s 10 blogs I read religiously for consistently good quality content, inspiration and advice, which is generally delivered in an entertaining way. And for an atheist/agnostic to read something ‘religiously’ that’s gotta be pretty good praise.

Tara Hunt: Online Marketing person turned entrepreneur, and really insightful for the whole ‘running a business’ thing.
Neil Perkin: Another person with a history in magazine publishing, and someone who keeps me thinking I need to raise my game.
Jonathan MacDonald: If you’re not familiar with ‘choice architecture’, you really should be.
Eaon Pritchard: Moving down under doesn’t appear to have mellowed Eaon – in fact his blogging appears to be better than ever.
Mark McGuiness: As a creative coach and poet Mark shares really useful creativity and productivity techniques alongside his fomal coaching.
Sizemore: Sometimes rude, and infrequently updated, but consistently packed full of interesting and unusual inspiration, as you might expect from someone who writes interesting and unusual scripts.
Adam Westbrook: Given the rise in online video, you need to be using it well. And I can’t think of much better places to get tips.
JP Rangaswami: Longer, thoughtful, insightful posts on internet culture, with the occasional diversion into cricket and the Grateful Dead.
Louis Gray: Not only did he start blogging about news fillters, aggregators and curators the same year I started this blog, and have children around the same time, but just as he had two offspring to me one, his blog justifiably rocketed for news on a valuable growing area of the net.
Danah Boyd: Anytime anyone talks about teens, privacy and the internet, I reckon Danah Boyd is the sanity check to measure their plans against.

And now for some bonuses:

That list isn’t particularly focused on the big names, the rising stars, or anything other than these are 10 people who if I’m short of time, I’ll skim through Google Reader to see if they’ve posted anything and make sure I’ve read it before skipping other stuff (generally the things I skip tend to be the generic news from bigger tech websites). That’s not to say they’re the only people I read a lot, though.

Others in the list include: Dave Cushman, Chris Brogan, Fred Wilson, and loads, loads more.At Paid Content, Rob Andrews is excellent, and at ReadWriteWeb I always make time for Marshall Kirkpatrick. I’ll look at other ways to recommend more people in a more accurate and dynamic way some in the future.

In the meantime, you can see what I like enough to share via Google Reader, or via an automated Twitter feed.

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Business, content, creativity, marketing, recommended bloggers, recommended blogs

Rethinking how I manage my sites

June 23, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I’ve been pretty busy with client work and my own sites recently – and managed to commit a cardinal sin in forgetting to renew the hosting package on one of my oldest projects, 140char.com.

I still own the domain, which I registered back in 2008 to give me a place to write about Twitter and Microblogging as it started to gain interest from early adopters and a wider audience, and over time I included the likes of Tumblr, Posterous, Plurk, Yammer etc, with whatever insight and analysis I could provide, as well as covering the bigger news stories.

Over time it proved reasonably popular, and a few articles got some great links from prominent bloggers such as Stowe Boyd, and prominent tech sites such as Engadget – but I always saw it as a smaller side project alongside this blog and my day job at the time. Move onto the 2010 and having seen traffic level off, and given the launch of other projects which seemed more viable, I decided to effectively park it for a while, and operated it as just a link blog, reposting everything on the subject which came into my Google Reader via Diigo, while I considered what to do with it, and whether or not to keep it or sell it etc. At the same time, I saw the deserved success of virtual friend Shea Bennett when he launched the far more focused Twittercism, which has now become AllTwitter after acquisition by MediaBistro

Traffic obviously dropped due to the linkposting, to the point where it was steadyish at around 1000 uniques a month, but in terms of priority, it’s dropped below all my client work, this site, and 3 others I’m currently working on… So when the hosting account was coming up for renewal, I planned to transfer it over to my main reseller account, and at the same time, work out the best use of the domain for the future…

And whereas I always set-up all client and current projects with multiple reminders to ensure this never happens, as an older project from the days before I was so diligent, it didn’t have any of that in place.

So the question is what I do with the domain and content now?

And at the same time, it seems like a good chance to re-evaluate all of my websites, profiles and web activity to ensure that I’m practising what I preach when it comes to an effective, efficient and productive internet strategy.

So be prepared for a bit of soul searching over the next couple of days as I review everything I do. And at least I’m not alone in a hosting slip-up, considering Disney managed to forget to renew the Club Penguin domain and leave several million users without a site!

In the process of re-evaluating everything, I’ve also started to tidy up my old accounts on places like Tumblr and Posterous, and start using them with a bit of actual purpose, so if you’re interested in the somewhat esoteric interests I have in cult books, music, films and comics, then you can always see what I’ve been enjoying at http://badgergravling.tumblr.com/.

So the question is whether I pay to just renew my hosting with all the original links intact, and then start transferring everything over to another site with the appropriate 301 redirects to maintain most of the value of the original links, which would be time consuming, but would retain something from the 3 years of posting, and would be generally what I’d do with clients. Or in the interest of time, just nuke my past like Steve Rubel.

Do I set myself up to continue a half-hearted attempt at updating by linkposting for the sake of it, or is there a more valuable use for that domain?

I could probably sell it for a tiny amount, considering that although it has respectable page rank, I’ve never really monetised it effectively.

Or is there another way to utilise it which would mean that it’s providing value to people – considering that Twitter coverage in particular has spread to mainstream traditional news publications?

In the meantime, my current main sites are:

TheWayoftheWeb – you’re here, so should have an idea what I do. Hopefully. But it’s all around freelance digital content, marketing and running that business.

OnlineRaceDriver.com – online race games. Currently growing by over 20% every month, and getting to a good, solid traffic level.

FPSPrestige.com – FPS games – i.e. Call of Duty, Battlefield etc. Far newer, but growing faster than ORD, and again, getting to a decent traffic level already.

MyDpip.com – the site for Digital People in Peterborough. Slightly neglected due to the fact that both of the people originally involved have been a bit distracted recently, but getting a bit of a reboot in the near future.

Jodanma.com – and this is why we’ve both been a bit distracted. As the non-designer in the company, it’s been slightly frustrating to be waiting with a holding page whilst we’ve been working on client projects, but we’re building in some space soon to finish our own site, which will be a relief.

Not a bad tally, even without 140char.com, and without including a few smaller, more experimental ideas…

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, Business, domains, hosting, planning, strategy

A brilliant and inspirational talk about passion

June 22, 2011 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo.

H/T to Neil Perkin.

Yes, the video is 50 minutes, but it’s definitely well worth watching to be inspired by Sir Ken Robinson as he discusses the disconnect between the tremendous capacities we’re born with, and how so many of us lose them by ‘aiming low and succeeding’ in spending our lives in doing things we don’t enjoy – whether or not we’re actually good at them.

It reminded me that early on in school I was as good at Maths as I was in English or History, but as time progressed, I found myself enjoying it less, whether it was a conscious or subconscious decision, and my marks dropped a bit. It got to the point where my teacher predicted fairly average grades based on what I’d done in class, and was amazed when I actually got really good results because I’d re-applied myself for the exams.

Or the fact I actually studied Biology at A-Level, and then ended up doing a degree in American Studies, which isn’t necessarily a logical career route to becoming a journalist. Which again, isn’t necessarily the route to a job in marketing. Or to starting my own businesses combining writing, marketing and tech devlopment/knowledge.

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Filed Under: Business, Entrenpreneurship, Inspiration Tagged With: doing what you love, entrepreneurs, finding passion, finding what you love, freelancing, starting a business

How things are changing

June 22, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I just posted a comment on Lois Gray’s latest post, which celebrated the third birthday of his children rather than his usual stream of quality tech news and insight – having a child at a similar age, I identified with the relationship his kids have with technology, and it made me consider the rate of progress and how institutions in education are going to need to adapt their systems and topics even during the course of a year, and certainly in the course of a child’s time in the school system, rather than over the course of generations as previously seemed to happen.

It also reminded me to post up some interesting stats that have been cropping up and I haven’t had a chance to share – all of which are symptoms of a wider change:

1/5 of UK grandparents are using social media - and a lot of them are very active, not just registering and then forgetting about it.
The Royal Mail is cutting thousands of jobs as the volume of letters sent each day dropped 22% – I can’t remember the last time I sent a letter which wasn’t required for business reasons. I do still send greeting cards, and often mail eBay and Amazon items to people, but if I’m not using email/social networks, the phone is the personal communication choice for me (Either my mobile or Skype these days!)
53.5% of US internet users will read blogs this year – Ignoring the argument over what a blog actually is these days (Is Techcrunch a blog or a media site? Is Tumblr blogging or microblogging? Does any normal person actually care about these semantics?) – it’s interesting to note that this prediction by emarketer is despite the huge numbers of people claiming blogging was dead due to Facebook (Which was recently claimed to have lost some users for the first time), and Twitter.
The UK bought 20% more eBooks last year – That’s only going to increase – I wonder if there are also stats for downloads of free eBooks, and how many more were purchased that weren’t recorded, such as the eBooks almost every marketing blog now offers?
42% of UK adults don’t read a daily newspaper – I’ve spent 10 years thinking and talking about the future of print and digital media. The ‘death’ of print always involved overestimating the rate of change and the lack of support for niche print products, but the need for printed news delivered to your door in the morning was initially removed by radio, then television, then the internet, and now the mobile internet.

Steering a course through all of this can be challenging, but the core principles of business,marketing and being a human remain the same… It’s how you achieve them that differs, and how you can improve on them by utilising the most relevant bits of technology.

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