strategy - TheWayoftheWeb

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

BBC’s The Apprentice needs a disclaimer

June 15, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

One of the few TV programmes I end up watching against my better judgement is BBC’s The Apprentice, which never fails to provide irritation and bemusement in equal measure. Ironically having created a mobile app in a previous challenge, this week the contestants were tasked with creating a print magazine, essentially acting out my career path in reverse.

One of the few positives is always the hilarious commentary provided by my Twitter network, and one very valuable suggestion appeared tonight courtesy of @kaigani

Now I know that The Apprentice is a reality gameshow and not a business documentary. It’s easy to forget that behind all the apparent analysis and insight, that it’s essentially Big Brother in the Boardroom, and I’m not going to start going into psychology when it comes to first perceptions, interviews or workplace performance.

But there are times when it really is legitmately painful.

Besides claims that engineers can’t run companies (Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford and originally an engineer, for example?), or Lord Sugar doesn’t need to be taught how to use a phone (Amstrad E-M@iler anyone?), it’s the judgements that tend to make me want the disclaimer more than anything.

So far we’ve had the better mobile app return a lower amount of downloads due to a crap app store description, and the better magazine idea return lower advertising revenue due to the refusal to negotiate at the end of the first pitch to an ad agency, for example.

Despite the fact that the losing idea and team would have been likely to be far more successful in the long run, the ‘rules’ state that they’re being judged purely on one number, generally the financial return.

At which point, the person responsible for the app store description and the refusal to negotiate is selected to survive for another week due to a perceived ‘glimmer’, and a candidate named Glen is fired primarily for being an engineer as far as anyone can tell.

If you’re going to claim that it’s all about the numbers, then you’ve wrecked that by ever seeing or meeting the candidates.
If you’re claiming it’s about someone you’re able to work with, then actually the decision could be made after the initial few minutes with them.
And if you think The Apprentice is about business, then presumably Fawlty Towers was a guide to hospitality management?

Obviously Lord Sugar has been hugely successful in business, but does that actually give him the best insight into what was responsible for his success, and would he have actually made it through his own gameshow?

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Filed Under: Business, Funny Tagged With: Business, lord sugar, strategy, the apprentice

The natural decay of business structures

March 8, 2011 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

I’ve been interested in how businesses organise themselves for a while, but working outside of a corporate structure has been allowing me to think more about what works.

As I previously posted, I’ve been reading PW Singer’s Wired for War recently, and nature is a huge influence on the world of robotics and AI – after all much of the work is finding automated equivalents to the brains and mechanisms of humans and other animals. But is was catching some of Professor Brian Cox last night in a programme about Destiny and time that sparked this particular idea (The show is currently on BBC iPlayer here)

Big piles of sand by cobalt123 on Flickr (CC Licence)

Basically in a section on entropy, the example used was a pile of sand, which could be re-arranged in a huge number of ways without really altering the structure of the pile, and therefore it demonstrated ‘high entropy’. By comparison, a sandcastle containing the same amount of grains would be changed significantly by even just a small re-arrangement, and therefore demonstrated ‘low entropy’.

So with an extremely limited knowledge of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, what on earth does this have to do with business?

Entropy, time, nature and businesses:

Well, entropy affects all things, and is really a measure of energy changes as things disperse – think of a block of ice melting. And these changes which can increase entropy can happen spontaneously.

So busineses which arrange themselves like a pile of sand should retain their broad shape through a far bigger number of changes. The prime example could be the branded venture capitalism of Virgin. By using a branded VC model, they’re able to get in and out of various industries and fields relatively quickly and painlessly, whilst the overall company values remain. And they can experiment with space flight, for example, without fear.

Technology companies seem to be more adept at this – the 20% Google time for engineers to work on pet projects in one example of expanding and changing whilst apparently staying somewhere within the Google values (e.g. ‘Do No Evil) – hence the search and advertising business also includes a range of other projects which tie-in to a greater or lesser extent.

And smaller businesses which follow these ideas seem to be growing – for instance, the virtual agency model which tends to be occurring more often in the creative and marketing disciplines (as opposed to the crowdsourcing model which can often be more akin to ‘spec work’ – i.e. you just post your demand and someone meets it for the lowest cost). The virtual agency should be a collaborative co-creation environment, and certainly the better ones seem to fit that build (Disclosure – I’m a member of both Blur Group and Guided Collective)

The natural end of the formal structure:

The entropy idea seems to suggest that initially you had small, local groups, which turned into large formal ones due to advances such as the Industrial Revolution etc. In terms of the impact, the change was massive, but in terms of the duration of the change, 200 years isn’t such a long time.

Which makes me think that the move towards collaborative groups coallescing, splitting and reforming may well be the most natural state, and the time for the large formal institutions really is at an end.

Ronald Coase is attributed with the idea that economic tasks are performed by firms when the transactional costs suggest it. (Cheers to @jobucks for succeeding where Google and my memory failed).The earliest reference to it via Wikipedia comes from John R. Commons:

It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man.

But the digital age seems to enable a shift back to commodities and individuals with a basis in natural and social relationships. If each grain of sand is an individual loosely linked to the others in the group on the basis of selling a commodity, then it can exist with high entropy and continue to retain its shape in the face of the majority of external forces. Whereas tight formal rules of an institution bind ‘man to man’, but mean spontaneous external forces are far more likely to blow it apart.

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Filed Under: Business, strategy Tagged With: business organisation, business structure, co-creation, collaboration, entropy, strategy

Two results for December already!

December 8, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Having written about how I was going to work flat out in December, it’s nice to be able to share a couple of examples of it working already.

Firstly – I’m pleased to say that a recent pitch has been successful, and I’ve now got a couple of new clients to work with. Happily news of my availability appears to be resulting in a steady growth in demand for my services – which is brilliant news both for me and my bank manager. And a big part of that has been down to the fantastic response by a group of wonderful people I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with over the years – your assistance continues to be invaluable, and without naming you individually, I just wanted to say a big thank you for all your support and more!

While I’m thanking people – every blog comment, link to my sites, reweet, like on Facebook, @ message, DM, recommendation to a social bookmarking site etc – these are hugely appreciated and they all have an effect on me personally as well as helping to improve everything I’m doing – so thanks to everyone reading this, whether it’s on the site, via RSS, a social network….

Secondly – I’ve been thinking a lot about the potential concerns clients may have, and finding solutions for them. One potential concern might be that by hiring what is essentially me on my lonesome, they might encounter some risks if I get abducted by aliens, or that I might not be able to offer the range of services that a larger, full-service operation might be able to provide.

So, I’m pleased to say I’ve been speaking to a small number of the very best people I know in various areas. That means that I’m not only able to plug-in respected experts to cover in the event of an emergency, but I can also offer project-managed delivery of various additional services, whether it’s a design for a social media profile, or a complete website or mobile application build. So you really can go from nothing to a complete website, social media presence, and have content supplied whilst only ever dealing with one person!

Not a bad start for the month!

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