Tag: blogging

What do bloggers do at conferences? [en]

In the process of getting ready for managing blogger accreditations for LeWeb’10 in Paris (for the third time, but warning, the system will be different this year!), I’m having a good hard think about what bloggers actually do at conferences that makes them a valuable audience.

I mean, everybody today is live-tweeting (a bit of a pleonasm). Clearly, if a conference is to invite “new media people” or have “official bloggers”, something more is expected than a brain-dump in the real-time stream. (Not that I have anything against that, but the interest of such a dump fades quickly with time.)

Bloggers (and podcasters) have various talents. I’ve finally learned (after years of finding what I did pretty normal) that mine is live-blogging. Others, like Charbax, catch people in the corridors and interview them — I was so impressed by his Lift’08 videos (you can find his interview of me somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd page) that I invited him to come and do the same thing at Going Solo. These are just two examples amongst many others.

So, here’s where I need your help: I’m trying to make a list of “blogger/podcaster missions” for conferences. Here’s what I’ve got:

  • live-blogging of sessions
  • synthetic/critical blogging of sessions/event (somewhat less live)
  • photography (live and less live)
  • speaker interviews (written, audio, video)
  • corridor interviews (written, audio, video)
  • start-up/entrepreneurial scene coverage (maybe this needs to be broken up into sub-missions?)
  • “off” coverage: parties, networking events…

What else can you think of? If you’re a blogger or podcaster who likes to attend tech conferences, what value do you consider you bring to the event? I’m all ears 🙂

Scale in Community and Social Media: Bigger is not Always Better [en]

In his blog post Defriendization is the future of social networks, that I commented upon in Defriending, Keeping Connections Sustainable and Maybe Superficial, Laurent Haug mentions his previous article Openness is difficult to scale, about how the kind of community involvement that worked for Lift in the early days just did not scale once the conference became more successful. This is a rule we cannot get escape from. Scale changes things. Success is a double-edged sword, because it might bring you into a country where the very thing that made your success is not possible anymore.

Clive Thompson explains this very well when it comes to the number of followers on Twitter, for example, in his Wired piece In Praise of Obscurity. Even if as the person being followed, you don’t really care about the size of the community gathered around you, the people who are part of that community feel its size and their behaviour changes. Bigger is not always better. More people in a community does not make it a better or even more powerful community.

This is one of the reasons it annoys me immensely when people try to measure the value of something by measuring its size. More readers does not mean I’m a better blogger. More friends on Facebook does not mean I’m more popular. More followers on Twitter does not mean I’m more influential.

I think that this is one of the things that has happened to the blogging world (another topic I have simmering for one of these days). Eight-ten years ago, the community was smaller. Having a thousand or so readers a day already meant that you were a big fish. Now, being a big fish means that you’re TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb, publications that for some reason people still insist on calling “blogs”, and we “normal bloggers” do not recognize ourselves anymore in these mega-publications. The “big fish” issue here is not so much that formerly-big-fish bloggers have had the spotlight stolen from them and they resent it (which can also be true, by the way), but more that the ecosystem has completely changed.

The “blog-reading community” has grown hugely in numbers. Ten years ago, one thousand people reading a blog felt special because they were out-of-the-mainstream, they could connect with the author of what they read, and maybe they also had their own little blog somewhere. Nowadays, one thousand people reading a blog are just one thousand people doing the mainstream thing online people do: reading blogs and the like. The sense of specialness has left the blogosphere.

If you want to keep on reading, I comment upon another of the links Laurent mentions in Log-Out Day: Victims of Technology, or a Chance to Grow?

Something Strange [en]

[fr] Petit épisode étrange: pleine d'élan pour bloguer, je mets sur slinkset mes dernières idées d'articles, et pof! mon élan se casse la figure. Je n'ai pas tout à fait identifié ce qui s'était passé. (J'ai quand même blogué, hein.)

So, something strange happened to me a bit earlier. I went to bed yesterday with a huge drive to blog, ideas for articles, wrote them down in Evernote, got up this morning ready to blog, dealt with some domestic issues, and set to work.

Blogging drive intact.

Before I actually started writing, I decided that I would add my latest article ideas to the list on slinkset that people can add to or vote on. So I copy-pasted, went through my old post list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and… As soon as I had finished doing that, my blogging drive went *poof!* almost down to nothing.

Well, I didn’t bow down, picked a topic or two, and blogged happily — but still, I’m intrigued. What made my blogging drive deflate? I can think of two things:

  • taking the list from private to public
  • going through the complete list (overwhelming)

I thought I’d share this little episode with you to see if you had any insight, dear readers.

What Proportion of Ideas Do I Carry Out? [en]

[fr] Moi, en train d'essayer péniblement d'évaluer quelle proportion de mes idées je réalise.

That is the question that was put to me by Siegfried at the TEDx conference in Geneva last December. So here I am, struggling to answer.

Where Does Tumblr Fit in? [en]

[fr] Tumblr est un outil génial pour rassembler et republier les choses sympa que l'on trouve en ligne, agrémenté d'un réseau social à la Twitter (non-réciproque) qui nous permet de suivre sans difficultés les publications des personnes qui nous intéressent.

Last night on the way home, I was telling a friend about Tumblr. I have a blog there, Digital Crumble, and really really like using it. Many of my friends do not use Tumblr, and I realize that some explaining is not useless.

Tumblr is great as a scrapbook (scrapblog!) of content seen online. Not to say it can’t be used for original content, but that’s not where it shines (in my opinion) and I personally hardly ever put original content in Digital Crumble.

For me, Tumblr is somewhere between Twitter, Buzz, and WordPress.

One reason many people do not get Tumblr is that until you get an account, you do not know about the dashboard. The dashboard is the Tumblr equivalent to the Twitter stream. It is a neverending page of posts by people you have chosen to follow. That’s the big difference between Tumblr as a blogging tool and WordPress: Tumblr is really built around the following/being followed dynamic of Twitter and Buzz.

Here are two zoomed-out shots of parts of my dashboard page so you can see what it looks like:

Tumblr Dashboard Tumblr Dashboard

Two things make Tumblr great for collecting non-original content:

  • the “reblog” button on each post in the dashboard
  • the bookmarklet.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, the “reblog” button is like Twitter’s “retweet” button (but the Tumblr reblog button was there way before Twitter’s retweet one). See something you like in your dashboard? You can “like” it, of course, but in a click of the mouse you can reblog it, publishing it to your tumblelog and pushing it along to your followers. A lot of the content in Tumblr is visual (photographs, design, videos…) — which is pretty cool.

When you stumble upon something interesting online, you can hit the Tumblr bookmarklet, and a pop-up window allowing you to instantly publish what you’ve found to your tumblelog appears. Tumblr makes a guess as to the nature of the content, too: video, link, quote, photo. Hit publish, and get on with your browsing. Tumblr takes care of the rest — including a link to the original source.

Share on Tumblr

A lot of the things I post to Digital Crumble come from the people I’m following on Tumblr. Aside from that, I also reblog a lot of quotes from things I read online. If I’m reading something interesting, I have just to highlight the paragraph I want to save/quote, hit the bookmarklet, hit publish, and it’s on Digital Crumble. Let’s say it’s the web 2.0 equivalent of when I was a student and painstakingly copied out quotes and paragraphs from books I was reading into a small notebook. 😉 (Here’s an example of a recent quote I captured like that.)

What makes this all the more precious is that you can afterwards easily search through your Tumblr Dashboard or your own postings to bring up snippets you’ve saved. When I’m doing online research for a blog post or article, I’ll stick all the interesting snippets in Tumblr, which means I then have them handy (with link to the source!) when I’m writing up.

Finally, what I like about Tumblr is the playfulness of the community. It’s fun. It doesn’t feel too serious, or like the geek/intelligentsia quarters. I think that for non-bloggers who do spend time online reading and browsing without feeling the urge to crank out pages and pages of original writing, it’s a great publication platform to start with.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Seth Godin on Benefits of the Blogging Process [en]

[fr] A force de se concentrer sur les bénéfices qu'il y a à avoir un blog (= des articles publiés), on perd de vue les bénéfices du simple acte de bloguer -- de l'utilité pour soi de cet exercice d'écriture.

Take 90 seconds to listen to the following video:

I found it thought-provoking. It reminded me of the fourth principle in my journey out of procrastination: find pleasure in the process rather than only the goal.

What Seth Godin says here is how beneficial the act of blogging is in itself, independantly of the impact of the published post on others. You know, the therapeutic effect of writing, and all that.

I think we’ve lost track of that with all the focus on the benefits of blogging as a finished product (the published post). The process of blogging is actually what is the most precious in this whole story.

Harry Joiner, who wrote the post where I found this video, says the following about his own blogging practice, which I think is worth quoting — also as food for thought:

My point is this: For a while last year, I began to think that — for me, anyway — blogging was simply a means to a marketing end.  It was about being #1 on Google for my primary keywords, and once that was accomplished — what was the point of blogging more?  After all, I had a company to run.

Turns out I was wrong. The primary benefit of blogging is to develop and maintain a teachable point of view on something of value.  It’s about learning to communicate more effectively.  And as Seth says in the video above, “to contribute something to the conversation.”

Happy blogging!

Content: Paid vs. Free [en]

[fr] Quelques réflexions sur le fait que produire du contenu n'est pas gratuit. En général, celui-ci est subventionné soit par des pubs, soit l'accès est payant, soit il fait office de "budget marketing", ou alors les canaux de distribution sont payants.

Zeldman just wrote that content wants to be paid for, sending us to read Erin Kissane’s Content is Expensive (followed by Paying for it, which examines the four ways in which content can generate revenue).

Although I’ve been writing online for free for over 10 years now, I agree with the premise that content — especially good content — is expensive to produce.

I have a few thoughts around that.

If I can do something, and people have a need for that particular skill (or what I produce), it does not mean that (a) they are ready to pay for it or (b) if they’re ready to pay for it, that they will be willing to pay enough for it to be worth my time/skill/effort/expertise.

For example, I can write blog posts. I’m not too bad at it (I’m not the best, but I’m better than most people). Some of my clients need content on their blogs. I can do it for them. BUT there is a problem: often, the money they are willing to invest for that content, and the value it has for them, sets the price way too low for it to be worth my while. If we actually do go through and reach an agreement, chances are that I’ll feel underpaid and they’ll feel they’re wasting money.

One of my blogging friends is currently in this situation with a client — and maybe in some cases (like ours) part of the problem is the client not realizing exactly how valuable this content can be to them. But the fact remains that it’s not because somebody is ready to hire you to do something that it is a viable commercial endeavour. Another example of this situation is home arts and crafts — Suw and I had a discussion about this a couple of years back on Fresh Lime Soda (remember the times?) for home-made lace she was making: people would simply not be willing to pay a high enough price for it to cover materials and work.

This is also true in the sense that if people want something for free and enjoy it, it doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to pay for it. In that respect, I think that people like Philippe Barraud and Thierry Crouzet aren’t being very realistic if they expect to make their blogs paid content in the future. The fact that people read their blogs (and enjoy them) for free is not an indication that they would be ready to pay for it. That would be misunderstanding the power of free.

Erin talks about the subscription model in her second post:

Subscriptions didn’t keep most print publications profitable even when print was doing well—classified and display ads did. Legal databases, academic databases, super-specialized content . . . that’s something a lot of people or institutions will pay for. News? Bloggy or magazine-style content? Not so much.

That’s the conventional wisdom, which seems to be validated by disasters like Newsday’s acquisition of 35 whole subscribers in its first three months of operating behind a paywall. Jack Shafer provides a nice summary of paid content woes in Slate:, listing the NYT’s TimesSelect, the LA Times’s CalendarLive, and Slate itself as publications that tried and failed to make subscriptions work.

[…]

So what’s the upshot? People will pay for content that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere, either because:

  1. the information itself is unique, as with Consumer Reports, Cooks Illustrated, and the Gaming Industry Weekly Report, or
  2. the information is surrounded by obviously and uniquely valuable analysis and context, as with the financial newspapers.

The first is an easy sell; the second is a bitch and a half.

If your content meets either of the above criteria, you’ll also be attractive to advertisers. Funny, that.

Philippe and Thierry are both “writing professionals” before being bloggers — in my opinion, paywalling content (just like slapping ads on pages) is pretty much an “old media” way of doing things.

Now, does it mean that I believe we writers should not be compensated for our work? Not more than my stand on filesharing means I believe that musicians and other artists should not be compensated for theirs. Let’s go back to Erin’s article Content is Expensive and look at the two remaining “monetization” solutions for content (aside from paywalling and advertising). This is where things become interesting:

  • Marketing. A lot of “free” content is subsidized by its function as a marketing tool for the content producers or the people who pay them. Many, many blogs work this way. A List Apart now runs small ads, but long before it did, it worked as a marketing channel, establishing the expertise and credibility of its publishers and writers. Most non-fiction books are also subsidized by their value as marketing tools: they don’t pay well enough to be worth the effort for royalties alone. Most commercial content strategy work deals with this kind of content.

“Marketing” or some kind of self-promotion is the obvious. For more years than I care to count now, I have been answering the tired “so, how do you make money with your blog?” question with “I don’t. I make money because of my blog.” The time I invest in writing on my blog is my marketing budget.

And that doesn’t mean there is no love, or passion, and that this writing is narrow-mindedly self-promotional. I was a blogger before I became a social media professional, and will most probably continue being a blogger if I change my line of work. I am a thinker, and a sharer, and by genuinely providing content because I love writing and I hope I can be useful to others, I happen to also be promoting my business (business which, incidentally, grew out of this blog — and not the contrary).

This is a tough message to pass on to a client: “The money you’re paying me to write is actually marketing money. The content I provide will add value to your website for years to come, and help build your reputation and credibility. How much is that worth?” It’s not just words on a screen, disposable stuffing like so much of what is unfortunately filling our newspapers today. Scanned today, gone tomorrow. Great writing, online, has no expiry date.

Back to Erin:

  • Paid Delivery Channels (The New Hotness). The paid iPhone app is a way of getting people to cough up money for content that they normally wouldn’t dream of paying for so they can receive it in a convenient way. Kinda like how we used to pay for newspaper delivery instead of going to the library to read the paper for free. (Spoiler: there is nothing new under the publishing sun.) We’re going to see a lot more of this in the nearish future as publishers realize that the race to free has resulted in a pileup of bleeding, sad people with no income.

This, honestly, is something I find exciting. As a customer, I will definitely pay for convenience. I may not be inclined for the right to own a file which happens to be a song or an ebook (the slippery terrain of IP — my jury is still out on that one, to be honest) but I will without hesitation buy a song on iTunes, because it’s easy to look up, easy to pay for, unexpensive enough, lands directly on my iPhone and computer, is guaranteed good technical quality, and it comes with cover art. I’ll pay for an iPhone app if it makes it easier for me to access content that is precious for me. I’ll pay for a concert if it allows me to watch a song performed live 🙂 (I’m not sure that’s still in the “delivery channels” department, though…)

Ah well, this was supposed to be a short blog post with just a few links. Now look at me. No wonder I get blogging-anxiety when I haven’t written in a while.

Not Writing, Again [en]

[fr] Clairement, un autre phase de non-écriture. Ça passera.

Another post on writing/blogging, yes, another one. I am in a “not writing” phase. I actually want to write. Ideas keep flapping around in my head. But the idea of actually disciplining myself to focus on writing about them just makes me want to hide under the covers.

I go through these phases regularly, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months. They last for a moment, and then I get back into writing.

I haven’t yet clearly identified what sets them off and what makes them end. I know there is a vicious/virtuous circle effect involved. The less I write, the more stressful the idea of writing again becomes, because all the things I have wanted to write about — but haven’t — during the “no writing” phase have piled up in my mind, and I feel that blogging regularly again means that I have 20 posts to write, and that they all need to be long, documented, enlightening masterpieces. It’s as if the “idea of blogging” or the “idea of the blog post” grows like a weed in my mind when I’m not actually doing it, and that makes the process much more scary than it actually is.

On the positive side, I know that “blogging again” always starts with publishing a blog post or two — which is what I’m trying to kick off here. Never know.

This is a pretty boring post. My apologies.

I’ve gone down the rabbit-hole of blog-reading on Penelope Trunk’s blog. Go read her. (And follow her on Twitter if you’re so inclined.) I’ve finished reading the Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J. Anderson (not this Kevin Anderson! another one!) who is also on Twitter, I’ve just discovered. I love the idea of being able to follow SF authors I’ve enjoyed on Twitter. Cinema-side, I recommend you go and see The Hurt Locker if you haven’t already done so. It’s a beautiful — and hard — movie which rattled me a bit in the same way that the essay “I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War.” did. (You might want to read that one with Readability to make it a more comfortable experience.)

Ada Lovelace Day and Backup Awareness Day: Today! [en]

Completely accidentally, Backup Awareness Day collides with Ada Lovelace Day in March. And it’s today, March 24th.

So, I’m going to ask you (yes you, faithful readers!) — if you have a blog — to write two blog posts today, as I will. They don’t have to be long. They don’t have to be perfect. L’essentiel, c’est de participer — taking part is more important than performance.

I would also be very grateful if you took a few minutes to spread awareness about these two events amongst your friends and network. Post a link on Facebook or Tumblr, tweet about it (hashtags are #ALD10 and #backupday), send an e-mail or two, mention them to your IM buddies.

Thanks a lot for taking part and helping spread the word.