March 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on Compete.com stats about blogging platforms § permalink
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great post with charts and numbers from 2011 on three most famous hosted blogging platforms. it clearly shows that blogs are not declining, and we at Zemanta saw a huge influx of bloggers with new years resolutions in January!
Round 2 of Tumblr vs. WordPress vs. Blogger: FIGHT!
Tumblr is up almost 70% from last December, steadily gaining share. WordPress seems to have followed a similar path on par with an audience size close to Tumblr. Lastly, Blogger seems to be on a steady albeit conservative growth path.
blog.compete.com
March 15th, 2012 § Comments Off on Slovenia’s Big Pay ‘Wall’ Has Made €26,000 § permalink
it’s actually not a bad result, they managed to reach everyone possibly interested in just a month.
slovenia has 2M population, but the largest print daily newspaper had 200k circulation. so it’s safe to assume that only 0.5M people read newspapers, and 5000 customers online is exactly 1%. that’s the penetration you can always count on, regardless of what you’re doing.
I’ll bet that they will never get above that 🙂
Piano Media, the online news payment system which first launched in Slovakia last year, says it made €26,000 in its first month in Slovenia this year. Users pay €4.90 per month for access to new paid parts of all nine participating sites from the country’s main publishers. So I calculate Piano has 5,306 paying customers in Slovenia.
via: paidcontent.org
March 14th, 2012 § Comments Off on Creative is in Detail § permalink
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I spent some time last weekend creating my first e-book. I’ve done hardcopy books before, but e-pub is a new thing for me.
Converting couple thousand pages of text into a book that I can read on my iPhone was fun, and it remembered me just how much work goes into getting all the details just right. If you don’t do them, it’s not a book anymore – table of contents, named index, both cross-linked to correct pages, cover design, font sizes, headers and footers,… as a reader, i really appreciate these ‘features’, and I miss them when they are not in.
As I was programming these features (because doing it manually in some Adobe software would be just too long give the size of the book), I realized that it’s not much different than programming a web site – getting core content online is easy, but these days to actually call it a website, it has to have so many more features working hand in hand with the content, that it takes 5x longer to do it than it did 10 years ago.
and I realized it’s the same with any creative industry / work – there’s so many details in every good picture or motion picture, that a random viewer can’t really grasp, but she will nevertheless recognize ‘good’ from ‘bad’ based on them. Print is just the oldest ‘industrialized’ creative industry, and web the youngest.
This is why this is sad news – there will never be as much effort put into making such large volume so useful, as EB was for over 200 years.
Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop publishing print editions and go digital-only – a huge step for the encyclopedia which has been in print since 1768. The sales of Britannica print editions has been on the decline since 1990, when 120,000 32-volume sets were sold.
via: mashable.com
March 12th, 2012 § Comments Off on The Internet: It’s like Real Life, Only With Buttons § permalink
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the article is actually about SEO and designing buttons, so not really what i was hoping for, but i really love the title:
Every time I read about social media these days, I end up hearing about how social sharing metrics are becoming a bigger factor in everything from organic rankings to driving additional clicks from visitors already on your site. And it makes total sense.
via: searchengineland.com
… it expresses without hesitation the promise of the web, and what it actually is striving for – reinvent and emulate everything that makes us humans. just think of all the catchy buzzwords flying around past two decades: shopping, socializing, mobility, expression, gaming… it almost reads like titles of books on philosophical anthropology at the beginning of 20th century: homo faber, homo ludens, homo creator, homo socius… (full list)
if only we were more aware of the similarities and not reinvent the wheel all the time.
March 7th, 2012 § Comments Off on Guest Blogging And Black Mailing. Or What Is It? § permalink
I was really sad when I read this article. So far I have rarely came across misunderstandings amongst fellow bloggers. Â Every time a blogger screws a fellow blogger, a pony dies somewhere.
I love doing guest blogging. And I love so many genuine guest bloggers who are nurturing the blogosphere with awesome content on other blogs, apart from their own. Since I’m so much into guest blogging and since I’ve experienced all its goodness,…
via: www.probloggingsuccess.com
Related articles
March 5th, 2012 § Comments Off on The Content Industry has Made Everybody a Pirate [Video] § permalink
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not sure why i skipped this when it was happening, but Fred is totally right on this one.
Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, passionately argues that “everybody is a pirate” of copyrighted digital content because internet content isn’t convenient for consumption. The content delivery system is flawed, he believes, and “in a world where everybody is breaking the law, you got to look at the law: is it the right law?
via: www.geeksaresexy.net
his argument reminds me of public trash cans situation – if you feel people should trow less garbage on the streets, the first thing to do is to put up more trash bins, not increase the fines.
March 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on great debate on how & why linking from media § permalink
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there is a really interesting discussion going on this week, whether online journalists should cite other online “journalists” who “broke” the stories. it’s actually pretty complex question and this article sums it up greatly. it actually touches some points I wrote about a few days ago – the new, self proclaimed “tech journalists” have no idea how the real media ethics works, yet they demand same credit and awe.
Why Journalists Need to Link | Epicenter | Wired.com
If it was Siegler’s article that caused Vascellaro to call Apple, then Siegler certainly counts as an online resource used in writing the WSJ story, and should therefore, by Stray’s formulation, be fully linked and credited. On the other hand, if Stray agrees with Siegler, that doesn’t mean that Siegler agrees with Stray. Siegler cited no source at all, named or anonymous, for his scoop that Apple had bought Chomp: He simply asserted the fact. “Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.†If every statement in news writing needs to be attributed, then Siegler just failed that test.
www.wired.com
it’s great to see journalists are starting to be aware of the need to link outside their own domain.
February 27th, 2012 § § permalink
the guardians...... (Photo credit: simada2009)
Roughly a year ago, we had an incident with neighbors in the co-working space in NY. They were two writers for an online magazine, fairly young, geeky, caffeinated.
Now, in this co-working space, the only thing separating the offices is a one-layer glass, so you can hear the other people if they talk a bit louder. During one of our skype meetings, when we had bad wifi reception, so our VP Sales tried talking louder to get the message trough, those two writers got annoyed and started tweeting confidential information about our clients. I learned about it when a friend from an ad agency sent me an email with screenshot from his FB wall.
It took some more shouting to resolve it and get the tweets removed, but the damage has been done already.
I’d like to believe that well-bred old-school professional journalist would never do that. Because my generation thinks that internet changed the world so significantly, they do not learn from previous generations and are reinventing the wheels. those two kids probably call themselves journalists, but in reality they are just reckless kids, who will need another decade or so to grow up and start behaving responsibly.
this article brilliantly talks about similar situation with tech bloggers:
A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 20.37 GMT on Sunday 26 February 2012 . A version appeared on p28 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Dan Lyons used his personal blog to attack Michael Arrington and MG Siegler.
via: www.guardian.co.uk
… I wholeheartedly agree with his points, but unfortunately there is no way back. the geeks rule the internet, for better or worse. and media is not the only part of the old world order that is deteriorating, all other industries that are being ‘disrupted’ are bound to this same ignorance – disruption brings more efficiency to the market, at the cost of ignoring inherent value system.
actually, i believe that the ‘gain’ of disruption is just temporary and the cost of building out value system is simply deferred for later stage of the cycle.
February 23rd, 2012 § Comments Off on how big is twitter vs the web § permalink
website ideas (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
today Twitter will get it’s 500Mth user, and that facebook is way past that for a year already.
it’s fascinating in a way, that almost 10% of the population of the world is tweeting, but then i noticed another information:Â WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16% of all websites. (business.financialpost.com)
this is amazing % for one single cms, but what really surprised me, is that it seems there is really just 400M websites out there in the web. i kind of assumed there has to be more than that.
February 20th, 2012 § Comments Off on how scoble is wrong in calling open web dead. § permalink
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superb analysis, and best piece in the end:
Chris Saad | Paying Attention: Personal Blog of Chris Saad
To put it another way, the reason Google was possible was because the open web was crawl-able – for free – with no biz dev deal. The reason FB was possible was because the open web allowed any site to spring up and do what it wanted to do. Today, too much of our data is locked up in closed repositories that can and must be cracked open. Google’s moves to exclude other socnets (besides G+) from their search results until they had free and clear access to them might be inconvenient for users in the short term, but, as a strategic forcing function, is in the best interest of the open web long term.
blog.areyoupayingattention.com
… in essence, everybody is free to “just use” proprietary parts of the web, but don’t go out preaching the death of openness that makes proprietary possible. no need to do so, and it can have lasting damage.
