Blogging Archive

NY-based microblog service Tumblr has been busy over the past month. They’ve launched reader submissions and photoset functionality. Today they have announced the launch of  ”TumblUpon”.

TumblUpon may sound very similar to another service, StumbleUpon and from what I can tell the basic functionality is the same. As you “like” posts on Tumblr, it learns about your likes and when you use the TumblUpon option, Tumblr will recommend other posts you may like.

TumblUpon uses a frame (grr!) to move from one Tumblr page to another. It allowed me to jump around even though I have never used the like function on Tumblr.

This is an important move by Tumblr as it will help keep readers inside of their network and will help with discovery, something I believe in strongly.

Mashable has additional thoughts on TumblUpon and some metrics that Tumblr will release today.

Blog network GigaOm has announced the launch of a Pro service today. The Pro service is a premium paid subscription option available at $79/year. GigaOm founder Om Malik has a blog post which provides details on why he decided to launch the Pro service and what the service will offer.

Om discusses the importance of multiple sources of revenue and notes that their core competencies are, analyzing key technology trends and business news”. Sites like PaidContent sell research reports but the GigaOm Pro offering will be a bit different. The content areas will include:

• Weekly Updates
• Long Views
• Quarterly Wrap-ups
• Research Notes
• Research Briefings

There are 17 research reports available on the service today and Om says they will be adding more soon. What I liked about the PDF reports is the internal links inside the reports which link to content online.

It will be interesting to watch which pieces of content make it to the free site and which are pushed into the paid side. Normally my view is that companies should offer as little as possible for free to get customers to  upgrade — not sure that will work with a blog-freemium model. The key is to make sure that the paying customers always feel like they are getting something special over the content on the main GigaOm blogs.

I’d also look to integrate the “pro” option throughout the network of sites so that Pro users are recognized and new content can be pushed to them no matter where they are on the GigaOm network. Maybe even remove ads for Pro members and replace the ads with suggested/related content from the Pro site.

Apparently there has been a battle going on between gossip blogger Perez Hilton and Miss California Carrie Prejean. You can read about the battle on the Vancouver Sun website. I haven’t followed the battle so I don’t want to comment on it. However this morning on the Fox News channel former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was one of the guests on the Fox and Friends show.

I’ve posted a video below where Huckabee discusses his take on Perez Hilton as I thought it was worth sharing. He begins by saying that no one should care about Hilton’s opinion on anything because he hasn’t done anything significant in his life. While it appears that Hilton has used some very strong language with regards to Prejean, at the end of the day, he is a blogger.

Using Huckabee’s view, over 90% of bloggers, journalists and analysts should never share their thoughts and/or opinions on a topic.

Last month we reported on Zemanta’s launch of a rich email widget for Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Today I met with Zemanta CEO Aleš Špetič while he is in NYC on business. Ales tells me that very soon they will launch their email widget for the Outlook and Thunderbird email clients. They have also opened an office in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn.

Zemanta’s goal is to bring together relevant databases and help enhance content across the Web and in email. They use a variety of databases including Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, Last.fm and Crunchbase. I’ve noted in conversation that Crunchbase should probably be paying Zemanta for all of the free SEO-rich links Zemanta provides.

Zemanta uses "entity extraction" to determine what terms and phrases they should offer suggestions for. They are currently at about 80% accuracy rate and are working on continuing to improve the accuracy and Ales says this piece is very expensive as it requires a lot of machine computing power.

Zemanta offers the links I noted above along with the ability to add related links to content. Related links can come from anywhere and are basically randomized and there is no weight to the links so that a link from a lesser-known blog may show up while the category leader isn’t displayed. A link from Mashable or CN will never appear as an option inside the content of the story, only as a related link.

Ales says they have 30,000 active authors and are a 10 person team with 8 people at their headquarters in Slovenia and 2 people in NYC. They are funded by two venture capital firms in London and Union Square Ventures here in NYC. They began working on the product in mid-2007, raised their first round in January 2008 and launched the product in March of 2008.

We spoke about Zemanta’s business model and Ales noted that they will use a combination of highlighted stories/links and affiliate links. They plan to go to media organizations and offer to "highlight" a link in the list of links that are presented to an author. They also are working on getting paid from affiliate revenue.

We concluded our chat and Ales shared another stat about Zemanta usage — a 41% retention rate which is measured six weeks after widget installation.

Etelos has announced a new partnership this morning which will bring Six Apart’s Movable Type blogging product into a "cloud-hosted" environment using the Etelos platform suite. Basically Etelos sets up a virtual server instance which includes the Movable Type software already installed and configured.

It looks like the new Etelos/Movable Type combination would be considered a competitor to the hosted WordPress.com offering. This is the concept behind the Etelos platform suite – software companies can create hosted versions of their software products which run as instances on the Etelos platform.

Pricing starts at $19.95/month for an single author blog and goes up to $99.95/month for a ten-author blog with more power on the virtual server side as well.

Here are the pricing plans:

I wanted to write this post last week but never got the time. And it has actually worked out well because today Brian Stelter at the New York Times wrote an article about scraping. He (and many others) call it "excerpting" which is fine when you take a paragraph from an article. When you take a good percentage of an article and place it on your site, it’s scraping. I wrote about scraping and profit last December and offer additional input after a post I read several weeks ago on Alley Insider. In fact, it’s the same post that Stelter discusses in the Times today.

Let’s start by saying that there are two types of scrapers: those who scrape full rss feeds and those who scrape just enough to keep you on their site and keep the conversation there as well. In both cases the goal is to profit by keeping the reader interacting chatting on the scraper site and will rarely send any traffic back to the source. I’ve thought about this a lot and for a long time thought the full-feed scraper was the "bad" one and the other was "ok" but I’ve changed my mind. Both suck.

Alley Insider is one of the worst scrapers I’ve seen to-date in the "conversation" category. It seems you can’t go a day without some post being scraped. Frankly as I’ve said before I don’t get it. They have talented writers and have a bank of venture capital so why not write original content all the time?

The story discussed in the Times is one where editor Henry Blodget basically lifted nearly 400 words of an article by Peggy Noonan. And what’s on their site today is actually cut back! Note that Blodget added zero original content to the post. At the bottom Blodget notes, "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you." What I wonder is why not quote one tiny bit, add some original analysis and link to the source?

Last week I had lunch with an NYC entrepreneur and we discussed the Peggy Noonan post at length. He said that the reason Blodget does this is because the WSJ will never email him and ask for the post to be removed. The entrepreneur went on saying that assume that the WSJ did ask for the post to be removed. Blodget would post the request on Alley Insider noting that it’s a great example of old media, yadda yadda. The reasoning makes sense.

Blodget has authored a post today about their excerpting policy. Here’s his policy, "We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us." No, seriously that’s what he said. What Blodget is saying is that they will scrape/excerpt as much as they please.

The interesting thing is that Alley Insider added a link post a few times a week. This is a good thing and should continue and replace 100% of the scraping.

Why scraping will continue and will get worse this year

Scraping will continue because it’s easy and drives revenue, SEO credits and pageviews. And it requires no work. Here’s an example of a Digg frontpage entry by Digg top user Muhammad Saleem. In this case, he submitted the absolutely 100% scraped story from Alley Insider instead of the source. How many pageviews and users came to the story via Digg and never visited the source?

The goal should always be to excerpt the bare minimum and send the user to the source. It’s ok to include a small piece of another’s writing when needed to make a point, but whole posts shouldn’t be made of someone else’s work.

And understand, this is not just an issue for Alley Insider. I’ve written before about many other scrapers including so-called aggregators like Socialmedian. In SocialMedian’s case, they too have no reason to scrape so much of the content of a story. Unfortunately I’ve never received a direct answer to why they scrape so much content on stories that are shared on their service.

I will never understand why writers feel the need to scrape other’s hard work. You spend hours or days researching a story only to have someone scrape it in a minute and grab all the associated goodies. All the scraping does is hurt the overall blogging/media industry so let’s stop it now.

The popular iMedia Connection site apparently has been hacked based on the message seen below. None on the site is functioning. It does appear they have started to publish static articles so they can continue to get content online. How much income are they losing because the site is down?

I have emailed the staff to see if I can find out more as to what happened but it clearly was a major hit as the site has been down over 24 hours.

I posted this quick message to give ya’all a reminder that this is a great time to backup your blog content. I backup my sites daily and put the backups in multiple locations. The interesting thing I’ve learned since the Magnolia outage is that it’s not good enough just to have a backup. You must actually test the backup on a regular basis to verify that if the need should ever arise, you can actually use the backup!

How are you backing up your blog content? Are you?