TheWayoftheWeb

It’s amazing how blogging guilt can motivate a post at 10.40pm on a Monday night, but I’ve been a bit lacklustre. Mainly because I had a great weekend hanging out with my baby son, playing a little Xbox 360 (Rainbow 6: Vegas 2 is still my game of choice), and generally staying off the laptop as I’d originally planned to start rebuilding my car. But as the rains came down, the only choice was to hang out in the dry - which I duly did.

Getting back online, I was reminded how much I actually enjoyed this blog in the gap between starting to write on this new url, and finally setting up Google Analytics. Because I had no way to tell if anyone was reading - except for the occasional comment - I suddenly started relaxing and writing for myself again. No pressure to hit keywords, or make sure I updated regularly, or to increase my audience. Hopefully I can carry on in that vein, despite my foolish registrations on Technorati, Feedburner, and even the Adage Power 150, to put myself up against a large number of quality blogs.

Related to that is my reaction to the news my colleague and friend David Cushman has started regularly contributing to Stowe Boyd’s /Message. In the old days, I’d have probably felt a bit jealous if someone got picked up by a bigger print publication. But now it’s a lot easier to be magnanimous - mainly because any link from either of the two blogs now helps me far more than before!

In all seriousness, the nature and power of an increased network means that building, maintaining and valuing the success of friends, colleagues and peers suddenly becomes a lot more important than cutting ties to anyone who dares move on to other things. You never know what opportunities it may bring, and who may end up following a link to Dave, and then to here. And suddenly it really does become more about the people within a team working collaboratively, rather than always competing - and despite the hippy sentiment, it’s easy to find the value that can bring to any business.

*In a wave of productivity, there’s also a new update by me on my new group blog, 140char.com, dedicated to all microblogging. And don’t forget to subscribe via RSS if you don’t want to miss any posts here.

For a while I’ve read various people debating whether ‘traditional’ terms for people online are still effective. Do we really just want ‘visitors’ - as if they turn up, pay their museum entry fee, look at the exhibits and then leave? Or is it fair to assume they’re users - as if we’re peddling heroin? Especially as a ‘user’ is linked to user accounts and usernames. And only those who actually make a transaction can really be termed ‘consumers’. (They’re not ‘Unique Users’ in analytics/metrics, they’re Unique IPs…but I think that’s not something that can be changed now!)

I think it’s a shame that ad agencies and computing have sewn up ‘client’. It’s more informal than consumer, and yet infers a bit more choice and power on the part of the individual than the other terms. And like an agency, any website publisher has to constantly evolve and adapt to meet the needs of their clients…

I did try to work out a reason for renaming the audience Flibbertigibbets, but even my tenuous grip on reality struggled with that one.

So, like an age old riddle, what’s someone who can come and read a website and leave, come and interact, or come and take part in spending money?

So far, my best effort is ‘Participant‘. If we accept that participation starts at going to a url and observing the content, and goes up to spending every second of the day interacting, posting, uploading and purchasing. And if you look at the Wikipedia entries for participation, it starts to make sense:

‘Participation, in addition to its dictionary definition, has specific meanings in certain areas.

• Participation (decision making), a notion in theory of management, economics and politics
• Participation (VR), a notion from virtual reality
• Participation (ownership), sharing something in common with others
• Participation (Finance), getting some benefit from the performance of a certain underlying asset

• Participation constraint (ER modelling), a special case of a multiplicity constraint’

So it can incorporate decision making, benefit, multiplicity, sharing, and being involved in a virtual reality? If you really want, you can split it into Reading Participants, Posting Participants, Uploading Participants, Buying Participants. You can even have a past participle if it makes you happy!

I’d be interested to know if other people think it’s a change worth making, and whether it’s worth participating or not?

I’ve just spotted some research by Emarketer on US blog readership which shows that, despite the justified excitement and uptake of Twitter et al, blog readership is set to grow from 94.1 million readers in 2007 to 145.3 million in 2012. That figure is people reading a blog at least once a month.

Whether or not that’s totally correct, what’s interesting for me is that the 94.1million in 2007 is 50% of U.S. internet users. So 50% of internet users in 2007 didn’t read a blog once a month in that year. Is this because they didn’t know about them? Didn’t care about them? Didn’t trust them? Need them?
Definitely shows there’s still room for growth in the blog world, with blog advertising predicted to more than double by 2012.

Get more details, and the option to obtain the full report from eMarketer.

As with any social network a pattern has emerged for me on Facebook.

The people closest to me, send the least application requests - and when they do, they’re pretty relevant and either useful or entertaining.

The people right on the very fringes on my network are the ones most likely to have sent me 20 pointless applications requests one after the other, meaning I’m going to delete all without even paying much attention.

At a time when I’m finding ways for a major company to choose quality over quantity for relevant communication, it’s ironic individuals, and in some cases, the users of that company’s products, are so prone to spamming without seemingly realising.