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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Bounty for Blogads Logo 
| | Henry Copeland: we've decided to FINALLY adopt a new logo. Please help us do better. Here's the link to more information and the logo submission form. The carrot is in the headline: A new Blogads logo (and maybe make $1000 or $300 for you). |
Wow, that was fast.
| | In the Blog Herald, Rick Butts says Google is cracking down on spam bloggers, along with other search engines. The handwriting is on the wall - and it¹s time for the next big thing. |
| | 1G: the geek generation (1998-2002) |
| | The 1st generation in the blogosphere was the geek generation. The founding pioneers that staked their claims in cyberspace and coded and talked about tech, blogging and other geeky related stuff. Notable amongst their brethren was Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls.and a lot of the people attending ³Foocamp² and ³Basecamp² and other strange gatherings the weekend just gone. I¹d dont agree with the BlogHer crowd on a lot but I will on this point: the geek bloggers tend to be insular and link to each other. Take a look at how many times Dave Winer has mentioned and linked to Robert Scoble in the last week for example. Where we do diverge however is that the BlogHer crowd think that the geek bloggers are the A-List, but they aren¹t exclusively any more. Sure, they¹re the older statesman on the blogosphere, but they no longer dominate the so-called A-List the way they once did. |
| | Next came (and went) 2G: the extrovert generation (2002-2004). Now we're in 3G: the consumer bloggers (2005+). |
| | Of course, this is the way of all technologies that go mainstream. They have to pass through their techie and enthusiast phases. We watched it happen with radio, TV and consumer electronics, to name just three I'm pretty familiar with. Before I worked in the retail end of the hi-fi marketplace (in the early-mid 70s), I built (or helped build) Dynaco pre-amps and power amps and was a devoted audiophile. In those days the only line of amplifiers capable of near-zero distortion were McIntoshes (no relation to the computer with one more vowell that came along a generation later). The company toured the country running these amazing harmonic distortion tests at hi-fi salons, running customer amplifiers and receivers through tests on expensive Hewlett-Packard instruments that shamed just about every brand other than their own. (Including a Dynaco Stereo 35 amp I had built, which didn't come close to delivering the 17 watts per channel Dynaco claimed, and only dropped to tolerable distortions at under 10 watts per channel.) By the 1980s cheap cookie-cutter gear from a dozen Asian companies were putting out distortion-free (and personality-free) sound upwards of 100 watts per channel. Audiophile quality, or close enough, was now available for everybody. Of course, audiophiles are no less numerous, or important. (Come over to the Alexis Park Hotel in Las Vegas when CES rolls around to see just how big the audiophile business still is.) |
| | I really don't care that the geek blogging wedge of the whole blogging pie will get smaller and smaller. And I agree with critics like Duncan that geek blogging can often get insular. (What community doesn't?) But I think both factors (however well observed) are red herrings. |
| | What matters about blogging is that the "consumers" formerly known to producers as "the audience" are now producing for audiences that produce as well. For this we can thank geeks like Dave, whose vision for blogging was The Writable Web. (The editing view of my blog, with a back end written by Dave and Friends at a company called Userland, has had a button called Edit this Page since 1999). Their vision for publishing was Really Simple Syndication, which is changing everything syndicated publishing touches. |
| | It doesn't matter if most 3G bloggers don't produce quotable stuff that changes the world. It does matter than they can, and that there are millions of them. |
How to Save the Web from Splogonoma
| | This post started when I got an email from Jim Colgan of the Irish Times kindly thanking me for talking to him when he prepared a story — Podcasting finds its station as Apple's new toy — that ran last Friday in the Irish Times. As you see, if you follow that link, the story is now locked behind a subscription paywall. |
| | The Irish Times' system, like so many others in newspaper publishing, is almost the exact opposite of what you get in print. While the print version charges money for today's copy alone, the online version gives away today's copy and charges for what in print would be fishwrap. |
| | One reason for that, of course, is advertising. The free online versions of most large papers are vast ad venues. The sell for those ads is the same as those newspaper's controlled-circulation (free give-away) opponents in the print marketplace: exposure to eyeballs. That's why features jump through two, three, five, even ten pages: to expose your eyeballs to more advertising. The editorial in those cases is, in the archaic vernacular of the dot-com boom, "sticky." They are billboards along an even more archaic trope, the Information Highway. |
| | As it ages, however, the editorial becomes worthless to daily advertisers, but finds a second life in bulk resale to the recycling market, comprised of subscribers willing to shell out 79 euros to the Irish Times, 49 dollars to the New York Times, or whatever to whomever. |
| | It then becomes, in modern parlance, "paid content." |
| | Which is where we are headed, folks. That's what the big publishers want. And they'll get it, with the right help from large intermediaries and blog spammers. Believe me, the two are related. First, the intermediaries. |
| | Somebody at a big paper told me this past Spring that by Fall Google would be searching the paid content archives of at least one major paper, and presumably of many more. Right now they don't. Most links to old stories are broken by the paywall. But if Google starts crawling past the paywall, life will change. Suddenly authoritative links to old Times pages will show up with high PageRank values. How long after that will Google offer a "passport" (or will we see the equivalent from some other intermediator) through any number of paywalls, for one low subscription price? |
| | The paid content market will then become a well-manicured digital suburb of walled gardens with secure entrances and exits. And plenty of well-protected professional careers. |
| | Outside will be the free markeplace where bad behaviors increase the value of paid content, while decreasing the availability of free content by burying it under a sea of money-making camouflage. |
| | Which brings us to blog spam. |
| | Blog spammers make money through what Mark Cuban calls "splogs": any blog whose creator doesn¹t add any written value. Here's one that showed up in my aggregator this morning, probably because it included a link to this blog, my name, or both. It was clearly created, and is kept up to date, by automatic processes of some kind. That one happens to be a Blogspot blog. There are others coming out of hosting services using Moveable Type or Wordpress. Surely many more come from other sources as well. What matters is that they are being created by the many thousands, every day. |
| | Now, for the advertisers, does this splog not add value? If somebody clicks through to any of those four advertisers, or to AdSense, is their per-click expense well spent? Whether or not the answer to that is "yes" for everybody else, it's certainly "yes" for the splogger who gets paid for the click. And that's exactly how sploggers will defend their business model. |
| | It's certainly "no" for a reader following links to a splog called "Internet History of Computers Information". It's a waste of time and energy for everybody but the advertisers. Worse, it polutes the World Live Web created and enlarged by real blogs written by real people adding real value to the world. (Which in the long run subtracts value for the advertisers, I would think.) |
| | Here's an exercize for you. Look up "asbestosis" on Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Blogpulse, Bloglines, Feedster, Icerocket, Pubsub, Technorati and any others I may have missed. On Google and Yahoo, you'll see top search results for static sites (universities, medical institutions), surrounded by a cloud of ads for law firms and others hoping to make some bucks suing deep pockets for causing mesothelioma (the medical term for asbestosis) and other lung diseases. On MSN Search the top result goes to this site, which looks scammy and is noticeably absent from top results on Google and Yahoo. The Live Web search engines find results that are, to put it charitably, splog-heavy. Some are also thick with AdSense ads. |
| | Clearly Google and Yahoo have the problem licked, at least as far as their own search results are concerned. MSN may have a bit of work to do; but they're still better off than the Live Web search engines. |
| | For Live Web search engines, splogs are cancer. Same goes for all of us who depend on those engines. |
| | I know, from reading Mark Cuban and from talking to the folks at Technorati (on the advisory board of which I serve), that (presumably all) the Live Web search engines are working their asses off fighting the problem. |
| | Which wouldn't exist if there weren't lots of money flowing through AdSense. |
| | I haven't talked to anybody at Google about it, but I'm sure they're fighting the problem too. Obviously, they'd rather have readers click through to advertisers from value-adding sites. |
| | While AdSense is popular to the point we can call it a monoculture (another of the search terms sploggers are infecting, I just discovered), The Problem is much bigger. |
| | The Problem is the corrupting influence of Big Ad Money itself. |
| | I was told today, by somebody in the online advertising business, that this here blog might easily make $100,000 annually in advertising. The source of that advertising? Companies gaming the AdSense system, for one. But also companies that simply put a premium on sites with high PageRank values. This blog, according to the PageRank readout in the Google Toolbar (which currently only works on Internet Explorer on Windows), has an 8/10 "measure of the importance of this page". As Tim O'Reilly just discovered, advertisers gladly pay premiums for high PageRank. And, as Phil Ringnalda suggested in the first place (on that thread), at least some of those advertisers look kinda scammy. |
| | While that thread goes on, let's revisit paid content. |
| | I can tell you that there are plenty of folks in the stable (if threatened) business we call publishing that are glad to grab some ad money on the Live Web, then charge for access to the same content on the Static Web, in faith that this is the model that will work in the long run. |
| | And for them it will, especially if they get group subscription and single-sign-on help from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or whomever. |
| | Meanwhile, those of us who developed the Live Web in the first place, and who add value to it every day, are left out here fighting the cancer fueled by advertising flow. Most of us are doing it alone. I found that out after I introduced a large hosting service to the intelligence Technorati had gathered about sploggers lurking there. The hosting service had no idea splogging even existed, or the scale of the problem, so this was a Holy Shit moment for them. Earlier a Yahoo employee told me Yahoo has more people working on blog spam than Technorati has people. Yet the hosting service never heard from Yahoo about the blog spam problem, even though the Technorati people told me this hosting service unwittingly harbored some of the biggest offenders. |
| | So, do I have a constructive suggestion to make? Yes. Glad you asked. |
| | I suggest that everybody in the search engine business, including all the Static Web and Live Web companies I listed above, pool their knowledge and expertise, and beat a cancer that (in my humble but considered opinion) threatens the whole Live Web, including blogging in particular and frequently updated free content in general. |
| | Across the search engine marketplace, there is an enormous amount of duplicated effort fighting splogs and other forms of blog spam. There is also an open source solution to this: share the know-how. Even the data (perhaps through a public list of offenders). |
| | It's been done before. At the corporate level, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein open-sourced OpenAdapter, to the benefit of the whole investment banking marketplace (as well as the company itself). At the individual level, Doug Cutting released Lucene, which leverages the key word search expertise he developed at PARC, Apple and Excite/Home (as well as patents he holds), benefitting the whole search engine marketplace. |
| | Open-sourcing expertise is the right thing to do for the free marketplace we call the Net, as well as for all the responsible leaders there. Especially when we're fighting a cancer as malignant as this one. |
| | [Later...] More from Emiliano Martinez Luque of TheThingsIWant.com (one of the advertisers mentioned above), Mike Sanders, Toivo Lainevool of Fight Splog, Steve, Hugh MacLeod, Damien Mulley, Sam, Fighting Splog, Dick O'Brien, Rex Hammock, Eric Norlin, IrishEyes, Jeff Jarvis, Erick Shoenfeld, Tim O'Reilly, Dave Kearns, Richard Linde, Phil Windley (who says Just as phishing has essentially destroyed email as a channel for financial institutions to communicate with their customers, splogs threaten search engines and blogging), Ben Barren, James Kew... |
There are responses to this message:Re: Thursday, August 25, 2005, John Di Saia, 8/26/05; 4:20:56 AM Wiki question, Rikard Linde, 8/25/05; 11:31:37 PM Curious intersection, Mike Warot, 8/25/05; 9:49:13 PM I'm not convinced it's all due to AdSense, James Kew, 8/25/05; 6:22:52 PM Re: Thursday, August 25, 2005, Steve, 8/25/05; 6:16:43 PM My small contribution, Toivo Lainevool, 8/25/05; 6:12:15 PM Re: Thursday, August 25, 2005, Emiliano Martinez Luque, 8/25/05; 5:55:24 PM Maybe some kind of rating system could help?, Sam, 8/25/05; 2:26:38 PM Re: Thursday, August 25, 2005, Damien Mulley, 8/25/05; 2:10:56 PM
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