Lately I’ve been following a few folks in my reading list that sound somewhat burned out on their reading lists. I mentioned recently that the summer definitely wasn’t as fruitful in my own reading list so I understand the sentiment, but this seems like a typical summer phenomenon. People are out of the house more and away from keyboards which is a good thing. Perspective is important and nobody can keep it if enough breaks and time away aren’t taken.

When the posts I’m reading feel too much like deja vu all over again (go get ‘em Yogi) it just means I need to create more original posts rather than riff off what others are doing or saying. Frankly, if I don’t get at least one of those days every week, I start to feel like I’m not stretching any real mental muscles anyway. Like jumping in a buddie’s car in the middle of a marathon.

More conversational blogs
Kent Newsome comments on his search for a more conversational group (emphasis mine):

And finally, I’m exhausted from trying to have conversations with people who don’t share my view of the blogosphere as conversational. Blogging is a lot of different stuff for a lot of different people. For me, it’s not about spouting off my latest philosophy and it’s certainly not about making money. It’s supposed to be about having fun. It’s supposed to be about learning stuff and sharing interests. The more I think about it, using blogging as a way to make money or become influential is, well, boring. Can’t we just be regular people and talk about interesting stuff? Sure we can. If we make an effort to seek out like-minded individuals.

There is clearly a group masturbation thing going on with the in crowd, if you will, and I can’t take too much of that crap either. My solution is to just skip more or unsubscribe for awhile from that group and let others link me back into the signal. Sure seems like it’s high school all over again. I was a geek that didn’t sync with that crowd nor the jocks; sort of somewhere in the middle and have no desire to play those clique games again. If I ever become part of that group I hope I screw it up badly so I’m ejected where the real people hang again. Hell is a place for people who smile to your face and stick a dagger in your back when you aren’t looking.

I don’t care for followers and fakes and have no desire to be part of their ‘what can you do for me’ sphere. Occasionally the egos run out of control and I need to blow off some steam and make a post or two on the clearly overhyped technology that stupid investors are dumping millions into out there. That money would be better spent putting computers in schools and aiding the poor than getting all giddy over AJAX calendar #101.

The new brilliant scheme is taking your failed web service to eBay? Are you kidding me? eBay is about as Web 1.0 as you can get. History repeating itself ad nauseum. If a business (read: not hobby, but professional) doesn’t build something with profitability at least partly in mind they are doomed to be eBay fodder.

Most of these companies think hey, we can get traffic first and then monetize the eyeballs. I’ve seen this strategy play itself out hundreds, maybe thousands, of times across a wide variety of websites over the last 10+ years. It is extremely difficult to monetize traffic that isn’t used to paying for something. Sure, collect 500,000 or a million page views a month and you can attract some heavy hitter sponsors but they are going to want an equitable amount of conversions and sales. They aren’t going to hang around if the conversions and sales aren’t there.

This could be part of the problem for Yahoo who took a stock hit after announcing that certains segments of the advertising market aren’t doing as well as expected. We’ve tried various Yahoo Publisher experiments here and on other sites and it has never done as well as Google Adsense. I know it yanks the Yahoos chains when you compare their offerings to Google, but it’s a fair comparison. I want Yahoo to do well, heck, I still own their stock, but they aren’t going to get it done showing mortgage ads to a developer audience. And they definitely aren’t going to attract webmasters until they can figure out how to send and share rather than take and bake.

Free first strategy risky
I’ve seen very experienced webmasters fail to succeed and ultimately sellout from frustration over a free first strategy. It’s a lot easier to amass large amounts of traffic for ‘free’ services than it is to monetize a site built off of free services. YouTube has a major financial challenge on its hands. What will be the defection levels when they start littering videos with ads? What will the creators of those videos think once their work is whored out without compensation to them?

Big challenges.

The flipside is there are still some really excited, promising developers out there who want to build something worthwhile. Kent Newsome could kick off some conversations with these people and help build the products / services he’d like to use. I think that might be the path he’s about to or has already embarked on.

As for the why do I blog? question that Kent asked awhile back (and I’d link to that post too, Kent, if I could find it with your blog search, hint, hint), for me, someone who contributes to multiple blogs the simple answer?

It varies depending on the blog.

Some blogs I contribute to are definitely for money, the thing that Kent says he finds “boring.” I disagree in general with Kent that blogs for money are boring. Some blogs for money are too obviously for money, shallow and a waste of time and maybe that’s what Kent really means? Yes, those blogs are boring. But look at Lifehacker and Download Squad. Two great blogs that are clearly there for the money. Good blogs and blogging can occur when people (or companies) do it for the money. I think that’s what Kent meant, and maybe he’ll follow up (a conversation) and clarify.

Some other blogs I contribute to don’t even have ads on them and are tests of a system or highly experimental.

MakeYouGoHmm has a different purpose in that it’s one of the few that has clearly defined goals. Writing for this blog is my daily writing exercise.

I don’t want my writing skills to get rusty so I poke ahead every day with short, medium and long term word count goals. I used to keep more active private journals, but the blog format has replaced most of this activity and people get to see a lot of the raw material. Some hardcore writers might wince at this admission, but the truth is writers like any other professionals need practice. And practice might not make me perfect, but it makes me better. My guitar skills aren’t what they were in high school. Why? I don’t practice every day any more.

It is rare to have any preset plans what I’m going to write about here. Instead, I like to read and work throughout the day and then when something hits me, lay it down. If that happens to be something timely, great, if not, well that’s fine too. Someday maybe I’ll help spark something new become timely. Or not.

Many other blogs I contribute to aren’t as freeform as this one which in some ways is both easier and harder. In the beginning when there were no posts it was easy to generate fresh content but it’s getting harder not to trip over what I’ve written previously on topics of interest. In my quest toward the second million words on this blog, staying fresh has become the most difficult hurdle to overcome.

On one hand there are readers who start to notice recurring themes and I need to stay away from that to hold their interest and not have material generate the thought: does that white-haired dude have something new to say? This is why I love finding new things because there is never any concern tripping over the past with new things. On the other hand there is some history that begs to be revisited and updated and sometimes restated, particularly with news-oriented posts.

Some say news-oriented posts are the easiest to write. That they are just restating and passing along something else already reported. That they aren’t very original or fresh. I’m sure you’ve read or heard the bashing. Usually it comes from mainstream news which continue to have a love-hate relationship with bloggers.

Yes, news type posts are easier to write if you’ve never written about the topic before, but if you have then there are histories to deal with which in the case of somebody like me who injects opinion into almost every news-oriented piece that sprinkles another variable. What have you said about the topic before? Are you contradicting your own writing by presenting a new view? Why the change? What prompted the change, if anything? Consistency. Regular readers can spot inconsistencies a mile away and it shakes their confidence in your writing. Even semi-regular readers can home in on inconsistencies for certain niche topics.

None of these are concerns for those who have just started blogging, but this can be significant for those who have built an archive with thousands of posts across hundreds of different topics. These days I have to do searches for almost every news-oriented post I write before publishing, if I don’t then I end up with stuff like this where sharp readers like Nathan catch me being sloppy.

Some days the writing isn’t there and on others all cylinders are striking, but I press on here no matter what because that’s what writers do.

Back to the future … of conversations
During the exercise of writing here I enjoy meeting new people and carrying on conversations. I like a productive discussion and/or debate. I’m not in it here primarily for the conversation like Kent appears most interested in, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in having a good conversation and making new friends.

In fact, had a good conversation recently with Duff, the developer from Soapbox whom I hadn’t known before writing about his new service online. Duff must have been at least a little disappointed to see Microsoft name one of its new services Soapbox. I would have been anyway.

There’s a brief running dialog with a few writers both in the comments area and elsewhere that new readers can easily become a part of by simply using the comments/trackback area below a few times. I hang out in our IRC channel for daily conversation (it’s a public channel that anybody can attend) and some days I’m too busy to get much involved there. I don’t do much IM stuff and only up until recently began staying logged into Skype virtually 24/7.

Honestly, that’s enough conversation for me online. Keep in mind that we also own an entirely different and busy offline business complete with its own conversations on a daily basis.

The conversations are out there and I’m sure Kent will find them as he starts exploring deeper. I agree with him that conversations with people with tons of traffic and juice seem like they are harder to come by but as I’ve tried to convince webmasters frustrated with traffic over the years: you can attract your own audience over time. You don’t need the people at the top of the traffic chain in your niche to link to you. I get a relatively small amount of linkage from these folks, mostly because I tell many of them in brutal detail when they are full of crap, and when I do get their links, it’s a token amount of traffic anyway compared to what other sources bring. I don’t care. I’m not blowing them for traffic and neither should you.

So don’t waste time trying to engage them, engage tomorrow’s rising stars. I’d rather befriend 100 interesting people you’ve never heard of on the way up than one who everybody has heard of hundreds of thousands of times (and makes every toplist) and thinks h/she is god’s gift.

And could implode next week.

Not all the people at the top of the traffic chain are egomaniacs though, so don’t want to leave that impression, but folks can easily forget how hard it is to build traffic if they don’t try to keep it real or fresh with their own growing (or diminishing) audience. Yeah, maybe when you start out it’s just a couple of friends and family. Eventually some search term will net you a few new readers. And then someday you’ll get a regular or two. Three. And it all grows from there. And then you’ll get slapped back by a regular or two. Three. And have your first regular publically “unsubscribe” you and/or piss with you, and the cycle begins anew. Don’t let what appears like setbacks deter you from carving your own creative niche. I don’t. Won’t.

This is one reason why our company tries to start at least one new website every year that has zero visitors and seeing if we can build it into something. We’ve had far more misses than hits, but the hits pay for lots of misses. I find this exercise very stimulating, rewarding and keeps me grounded about how hard it can be to build a site from 0 uniques to 100 to 1,000 a day and up.

I enjoy new conversations and making new friends along the way. Some people are very jealous over others who refuse to get stuck in the mud and bitch about how unfair life is to them and their surroundings. I can’t get with that crowd for any length of time. Those type of defeatists rarely take you anywhere worth going. I’d rather dig in and try something new. Even if it fails. Even if people tell me that they told me so. Even if they are right about something being hopeless and I’m wrong. It’s the effort that counts. And over the long term effort does produce results.

See Kent, there are a few conversations out there. I’ve sat on this post for a little while as I added and subtracted thoughts here and there but something you wrote two weeks ago still has legs. Ahh the power of archives. There might not be as many people engaging as there would be on other sites but perhaps someday that will change. Maybe the legs will start running. It never will happen if we stop trying. Let’s revisit this again in five years: September 6, 2011. My health withstanding I hope to be here. Who else will be?

Update 9/21/2006 6:05am PST: Kent responds in detail to this post. One thing he is curious about is where he might find a better search for his blog (see screenshot above). I learned from a previous post of his that he wants to get out of Blogger as the software used and move to something else, possibly Wordpress which has a better built-in site search and can be tweaked further using various (free) plugins.

I think that’s the best answer without spending any money and you probably should bite the bullet and make that switch, Kent ASAP. Writing a script to import and maintain the archive linking structure from Blogger to Wordpress shouldn’t be too complex, although it might be a bit time consuming to work out all the details and make sure nothing goes haywire. You should also be able to emulate your existing Blogger permalink structure in Wordpress. Something along these lines:

/%year%/%month%/post-slug.shtml

Where ‘post-slug’ is the existing slug used for past archive posts. The importer script could spider your old archives and update the WP database with the proper slug to use so none of your old archive posts are broken. The .shtml part is kind of redundant so you might want to drop that with a redirect for all old posts, but WP could be tweaked to add that on to every post as part of the slug if you really want to keep that.

This should be enough of a starter for a programmer/scripter to be able to write the necesary importer program from Blogger to Wordpress if one doesn’t already exist for use.

This could also be something where maybe you could barter with an up and coming or hungry programmer or scripter looking for some additional exposure for his/her programming/scripting business. Right now might be kind of hard finding that type person though as there is more work out there than programmers looking for work. Can’t speak for every programmer but I know how full my own plate is and those of my friends who are programmmers.

But first I would try searching Wordpress support to see if somebody else has already done a Blogger to Wordpress import script that fits your needs. If one doesn’t exist (but I know some are out there, so check around) then a less technical workaround could be something like what I did with Pivot which created a server side redirect script which analyzes the old archive page structure requests and maps and points to the newly structured pages. I didn’t like the old structure which employed a query string in the URL and wanted it changed. You don’t need to go this route though Kent, but others reading this considering switching from different platforms might find this strategy helpful.

Google didn’t have a problem with this technique used and the payoff ultimately was more SE traffic than we were getting while using Pivot. After about 3-6 months I deleted the old pages from the server so that we weren’t penalized by having duplicate pages. I did have a few outright page breaks which were the old generated archive pages, it wasn’t a perfect switch where every archive page was smoothly redirected, but the engines were smart and they caught up over time. I did, however, make it so any other site that used the individual post permalink to the old Pivot post would not have their link broken. That was the most important thing to me at the time, not breaking the old permalinks links from other sites. I would suggest to anybody migrating from another blog system to remember to retain permalink structure either through a server side redirect or modding the new blog software being used to accomodate the old format.

I will write a new post with a couple other alternate site search possibilities for those who don’t want to switch from using the blog software they’re currently using.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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