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Away From My Desk

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

You Need to Buy Low and Sell High, Stanley!
Creative Commons License photo credit: foundphotoslj

My blog aggregation experiments will have to take a break. I’m leaving Monday for a month of work related travel. That means a lot of hotels, sporadic internet connections, and lots of hours in a van without any internet. I’ve got a copy of Stewart Brand’s new book, Whole Earth Discipline to read. And I’ve just downloaded the Harvard Extension School Fall 2009 “Building Dynamic Websites” course taught by David J. Malan.

I knew this was coming up and so wanted to have put a lot of time into Readerss before I left. I wanted to have a good solid month of aggregation into the sites to see what would happen traffic-wise.

For whatever reason, WebDeveloperss.com has done the best. But we’re talking about 2-3 visitors a day. BlackSwanReport.com is up to about 20 visitors a day, but it’s been around longer. It’s also a much smaller niche that doesn’t have any ‘competition’ really. It’s nice that BlackSwanReport has generated some positive feedback lately. Some people have expressed their appreciation.

But what has impressed me the most over the last month is the amount of work that it required to populate these sites intelligently. There is just so much content in these internet related areas. Companies spewing out content in some cases. Pro bloggers obviously feeling compelled to write daily. You really have to read a lot of it in order to find the best. I’m not going to be able to sustain this amount of time investment. I’m going to have to make some changes when I get back.

What would be best is to find some other passionate people to share their favorite feed items with me. I do feel I’ve got domaining covered – I have a lot of energy  for the domain industry and can pour over all the news. I need people who feel similarly about blogging for a living, seo, web development, web design and internet marketing. If you’re one of those people please email me and let’s talk. If you’re using Google Reader it’s as easy as sharing your favs.



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Scrape Hate – Aggregate

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

day52
Creative Commons License photo credit: the half-blood prince

A lot of hate going on in the blogosphere around content scraping and aggregating. I noticed it first around a couple of posts coming out of Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com blog (here and here) directed at Jason Calacanis and Mahalo.com It boils down to this, again from Aaron Wall in a response to a question in the comments.

When you take 3rd party content (without permission and offer no way to opt out) AND then use that content to pad out a page AND then put it below the fold (so it helps pull in search visitors but rarely sends any traffic out to the sources) AND you strip attribution from the links THEN all that does is “borrow” content & steal traffic from smaller sites (using their own content against them).
I guess if the links were not nofollowed it wouldn’t be so slimy.

Wait a second, isn’t that what I’m doing? Let’s have a look.

Taking 3rd party content without permission…
Right, I’m doing that. I mean, but anyone could opt out with a simple email.
… below the fold
Well no, not in my case.
… AND you strip attribution from the links
Shit, I think I was doing that. I guess because I just copied and pasted the code. So I went back and fixed that. Those are now follow links.

In the absence of feedback I’m simply building on what I’m seeing other sites do.

In my naivete this is how I’m thinking about it, why I think it’s ok…
I’m not taking the full post-just a long enough, and juicy enough bit to whet the appetite of the reader and to let them see that the author is the real deal. In the rare instance I do take a full post, it’s because it’s short but deserving of attention and either to a blog that is just getting started, OR their ad is in the post footer. The link back to the original post is front and center.  And lastly I’m not running any ads.

What do you think? Is this a fair approach to aggregation?

See Also:
Excellent overview of the entire space How Search Engines, Aggregators & Blogs Use News Content
Blames Google for setting the bar so low Google’s Legacy – the Internet Cesspool
Changed his mind about full content feeds The Positives and Negatives of Having Your Articles and Website “Scraped”

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Startup Vacuum Road To Nowhere?

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Houston Skyline, from Old MKT Railroad Bridge over White Oak Bayou, near Studemont & I-10, Houston, Texas 0330090947BW
Creative Commons License photo credit: accent on eclectic

A vacuum. Attempting to ’start something’ you think could be cool, without funding, without partners, is hard enough. Add the fact that you’re not getting any traffic or user feedback and certainly I’m sitting here thinking, what am I doing? It keeps making sense, in my head, but I have a long history with ideas that didn’t translate into reality very well.

Don’t I have sites on the Net I count on to aggregate interesting content? Isn’t that what BoingBoing.net, TechCrunch.com, TechMeme.com etc. etc. Aren’t they doing rather well? Does it not follow that tighter niche aggregators could provide a valuable service to readers who don’t have the time to rummage through the daily pile of content?

So is it that I’m doing something wrong- could some slight twist in my approach start to bring a regular audience? Am I giving too much of each story, not enough? Is the theme too sparse? Is it that the stories I pick are too generic. Or does the topic itself actually break down into smaller niches.  Am I covering too much ground with WebDeveloperss.com for example- should there be subdomains for PHP, Ruby etc. etc.

Domaining brought me into this. It’s what I follow most carefully and also what I know best. There are hundreds of domaining blogs and already an aggregator. Is it that my audience is only other domainers who already subscribe to ALL the domain blogs? I had thought that people in web design, for example, would like to have a destination site for ‘catching up’ on what’s going on in the Domain world. But maybe they’re too busy checking out web design blogs!

I have one other aggregation experiment going on that is building very slowly. That’s BlackSwanReport.com, where I aggregate breaking news related to Nassim Taleb. Taleb has sold millions of books. A lot of people are fascinated with his thinking. His own website is a little bit difficult to navigate and doesn’t collect a lot of news. But over a year later I’m seeing only about 300 visitors a month. I’m on page 27 of Google Search for ‘Nassim Taleb Black Swan’ pg. 30 for Yahoo and 54 in Bing! At least I do score top place in all three for ‘black swan report’.

Not to mention I don’t really have a business model.
Thing is I hate ads. I could live with a sidebar banner add for a sponsor.
Perhaps some affiliate links for related products slipped into the feed.
But definitely not 2 columns of blinking anything.
Did I just shoot myself in the foot?
The guy who runs Help a Reporter Out charges $2700 for an ad in his newsletter which goes out 3 times a day.
Then there’s the Google factor. This whole methodology for posting depends on functionality Google Reader provides. I’ve looked around and no one else provides the same functionality. Pretty fragile place to be. If there was money though, I don’t think a stand alone CMS would be that hard to make. Then you might have another business model.

If you’ve read this far, please consider sending some feedback my way. From the hip stuff, whatever you think. Suggestions.
John


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Outsource Your Attention! Readerss.com

Friday, January 1, 2010

We read it for you. Readerss.com


Where we’re headed: We read it for you!
Readerss consume hundreds of niche topic news and blog articles daily, pick the best, and share them with you. Readerss are real people, not algorithms. We weed out the spam, the cheesy link bait, the SEO keyword dross, all the manufactured news, to connect you with what deserves your attention.

Where we’re at: Are you using Google Reader to scan 100s of blog posts a day for those choice bits of special information? Perhaps you’d consider becoming a part of an aggregation experiment. I started out to do this alone, but what I’ve discovered is that caring for even one of these blog niches is a LOT of work! I’ve got my hands full with Domainerss.com (130 blogs and counting). So I’m looking for some knowledgable, passionate, people to handle aggregation for these other domains: InternetMarketerss.com, ProBloggerss.com, SeoBloggerss.com, WebDesignerss.com and WebDeveloperss.com

Automated aggregation catches all the noise. And in a space where smart people are vying for search ranking by spewing out tons of content, the amount of information becomes overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a portal for a favorite niche you knew you could trust to find all the best new content?

Readerss.com wants to be a community of people-powered, domain-driven, blog aggregators. It’s not about ripping off content, it’s about weeding and pruning.

What’s in it for you? Right now it’s hard to say, apart from the satisfaction of collecting all your favorite posts, including yours, into one place. Online income derives from traffic so only if/when Readerss.com became popular would it be practical to attempt to monetize. But hey, who knows? With an expert (or at least aspiring to be) Domainer, Internet Marketer, Pro Blogger, Seo Blogger, Web Developer and Web Designer on board, we might have the beginnings of a startup.

Anyway, like I said, it’s an experiment for now and if you’d like to participate it’s as simple as hooking up a Google Reader feed to the site I’ve already built. Try it! Please email me, john@readerss.com for details.

Best,
John Humphrey

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