The best things about Technorati

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry stepped down yesterday and the news gave cynics another opportunity to talk smack about blog search in general. There are a handful of things I really like about Technorati and I think the company deserves a bit of defense. If Technorati takes a dirt nap, I’ll be bummed for a number of reasons. (I’ve had the phrase “dirt nap” stuck in my head for weeks and am very relieved to have the chance to use it here!)

It’s not the full text search of blog posts that Technorati is really good for. Google Blogsearch is faster if you want to know if anyone has beat you to a story and Ask.com has much better spam control as it only indexes feeds that have a certain number of subscribers in Bloglines (hello, Google Reader and Blogsearch teams). Technorati has created a whole bunch of awesome experimental features, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I don’t know how many of the people behind much of that innovation are still at the company but I hope things brighten up over there in the future.

What is Technorati good for? First, the Blog Index section of the site is very useful. Go to http://technorati.com/blogs/wtfeveryourelookingfor and you’ll find blogs that have been tagged as a whole, not on the level of a single post, by their own authors. Sort by “authority” (shudder) and you’ll see the ones with the most inbound links. I was talking to a potential client on the phone last week he asked “are there a lot of real estate blogs?” I knew anecdotally that there were, but quickly visiting http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate told me there were more than 12,000 in Technorati alone! The Blog Index makes it easy to see which, by one standard, are some of the top blogs in any niche. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start.

Unfortunately, OPML export of anything more than the first 10 results of these searches isn’t possible. That looks to me like broken functionality and as the company slashes staff I have to worry that there’s little hope of the best parts of the service being maintained or improved upon.

The second cool thing about Technorati is the company’s partnerships with outside traditional large publishers. Specifically, the kinds of relationships they’ve built like the one with the Washington Post. In some sections of the WaPo website, you can see blogs linking to that article displayed in a little box, curtosy of Technorati. If those are sorted a bit for spam and crap then that becomes great stuff. I know that Sphere is providing related functionality on some sites, but it’s not the same. The ins and outs of this sort of service deserve a big blog post in and of themselves.

Finally, the Technorati 100 is a good thing. I know there’s a whole lot of criticism of it and a lot of that is valid. I don’t like the word “authority” and I don’t like measuring authority by links – but linking does mean something and the fact that Technorati shows off a leader board of that metric is worthwhile. FeedBurner ought to too, if the group feels like separating out blogs from the other feeds they publish.

I know that Technorati has been painfully slow at times, the most recent site redesign is awful and the focus on inbound links is overdone – but it’s an important company that deserves support in my opinion.

Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them

Update: Response to this post has been extensive – it’s going to take me some time to deal with all the replies! That’s great.

I’ve been getting so many inquiries lately from companies looking to hire bloggers, and so many responses to messages I send out about them over twitter, that I’m losing track. I really like helping bring these two groups together. Sometimes I fantasize about starting a blogger training and placement service, but for now let’s just try to get organized! I’m a big believer in paying bloggers – see this post for example on social media marketing at SplashCast, that’s good stuff. Want a sophisticated discussion on the value of social media content creation? I can’t stop recommending this podcast and transcript by Dana Gardner on the topic.

There are other places that bloggers can find paid work, check out the great community around ProBlogger.net for example, but I’m just going to introduce people I like (particularly good bloggers) to companies I like (good companies) informally and at no cost because people are already asking me to do so.

Am I available to write for your blog? Probably not, even if it’s very part time. Thanks for asking. Can I train a person already on your staff to rock the blogosphere and set them up with a bunch of resources to help make that happen? You bet; send me an email.

So, if you are a company who would like to hire a blogger for either in-house content creation or for news coverage for your blog network, send me an email at marshall@marshallk.com. Tell me what topic areas you’re looking to fill, whether it’s a part time, very part time or full time job and how much the position pays. (How much should you pay? See the bottom of this post.) If and when I find bloggers who I would recommend for the position, I’ll email you and offer to introduce you. This is where the quality control comes in, my reputation for this depends on my not recommending bad bloggers. If you would like to hire me to offer advanced training for whoever you select, that’s great – let me know. You’ll end up with a world class social media presence. I’m happy to make introductions regardless.

Second, if you’re a blogger or otherwise skilled writer interested in a full or part time writing gig, send me an email at marshall@marshallk.com. Your confidentiality will be a top priority. Tell me whether you’re interested in doing news, company blogging or both/either. Tell me what topics you are knowledgeable about. Tell me whether you are available for full time or just part time work. Send me an URL where I can see your writing in action. If and when I find a blogging job that I think could work well for you, I’ll email you and ask if you are still available. If you are, and if the company in question is interested, then I’ll introduce the two of you. It’ll be great.

I’ve started a private wiki to keep track of leads coming in from both directions. I’ll be adding a link to the sidebar of this blog about this, linking to this post. Did I mention that it’ll be great?

How much should you pay a blogger?

I am asked frequently how much a company should pay a blogger. I find that bloggers who are paid per-post generally get paid between $10 and $20 per post by good sites for general interest topics. In most cases, I recommend asking yourself what monthly budget you have available for a blogger, about how many posts you would like to see per week (3 or 20?) and working backwards on the rate. The most serious blogs should be paid for on a monthly basis, not per post. I believe that top-tier bloggers that will be tied closely to your brand should be paid between $5k and $8k per month. Pay your blogger well, communicate with them clearly about expectations and if it doesn’t seem worth it after some time then fire them and find a new one.

Note: I’ve been told by a couple of people today that this pay is higher than is reasonable to expect. That may be true to some degree, but I think the range is reasonable. News bloggers typically have one pay range, bloggers representing a company have another.

If you are going to pay a blogger $500-$1000/month, it had better not take very much time or that blog had better be a great way for said blogger to gain visibility and move onto a better gig. That’s what AOL Weblogs Inc. paid me for a whole lot of posts, but the blog was great for my career.

Those are my thoughts about paying bloggers.

I hope this offer to introduce parties on both sides will prove useful for all involved.

Thoughts on product launch promotion

Update: This post is now years old but I think it’s still really useful. Related posts I recommend checking out include this one about relationship building and this one about embargoes. Please make sure you check out Little Bird, too – it automates a lot of the things discussed here!

One of the consulting services I offer companies is in launch strategy planning for social media promotion. Over at SplashCast we’ve done two major product launches in the last week and I thought I’d offer some observations here based on those experiences. If you’re interested in reading about SplashCast’s use of social media for marketing in general, check out this post.

The launch of our NPR Podcast Player was covered at Webware, StartupSquad, Mashable, Download Squad, WebProNews, CenterNetworks and Technically Speaking so far. Last week’s announcement was covered by TechCrunch and Mashable. Big thanks to everyone!

Here’s some things I have found to be helpful in efforts like this:

Writing a pre-launch FAQ is one of the first things I advise any company does before reaching out to bloggers. I believe a good FAQ includes all the basic background information that would be communicated in a solid telephone conversation: company history, funding, executive backgrounds and possible if not already available use cases of the product. Based on my experience covering startups at TechCrunch I found the majority of telephone conversations with CEOs to be frustratingly long, slow and unneeded. Tech news and review bloggers are hungry for content and if you give them all the info they need to write, in an easy to consume fashion, they will appreciate it and be more likely to write about you. This FAQ document should also include a good logo image and screenshots that can be included in any write up. An embeddable screencast or demo video is great but good looking screenshots go a long way too. Here’s an example of a good launch FAQ. Update: That page is now down, a good example of why you should save a screenshot of key pages before you leave a job! None the less, here’s a cache of that document, minus all the media.

Once you’ve got all this information available on your website, you can send a 2 or 3 line inquiry out to bloggers. “We’re launching a thing-a-mabob. Here’s the info if you’re interested. http://mycompany.info/thingamabob Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about it. Thanks.” That works great, especially if you are emailing bloggers that you’ve already built relationships with. For more on pitching bloggers, see also my list of links on the subject.

There’s probably more blogs worth reaching out to than you think. When we launched SplashCast in January, I reached out to about 25 bloggers, ranging from the big ones to some smaller, up and coming ones. We also put out a press release, attended the DEMO conference and employed a successful PR firm, Horizon Communications. The agregate result of all this was more than 250 blog posts about the SplashCast launch. Just TechCrunch and MasterNewMedia coverage alone lead to tens of other blogs writing the company up in the following 24 hours.

Many of the smaller blogs that wrote about that first and subsequent launches send significant traffic as well. Traffic can come from unexpected places – for today’s NPR launch, for example, StartupSquad is sending us more traffic than almost anyone (their coverage was included in Robert Scoble’s link blog, for one thing) and our press release got picked up by Mashable, which was then linked to by WebProNews. We’ve never reached out to WebProNews before, but the point is that some coverage leads to more coverage when you make it easy for the ball to start rolling.

How do you find the blogs to reach out to in the first place? Some good tips can be found in my post here titled How to find good blogs on almost any topic, which I’m proud to say is the #1 Google search result for the phrase “how to find good blogs.”

There are any number of strategic details to take into account as well, but I hope that this post will prove useful to readers doing social media promotion. If you’re interested in working with me on a project like this for your company drop me a line at marshall@marshallk.com. My other consulting services include development and design feedback reports (because you’ve got to have something great to launch!) and working with companies to leverage OPML for competitive and market intelligence.

John Dvorak isn’t just cranky, he’s cranky and wrong

John C. Dvorak, Cranky Geek and long respected old dude, has penned a shallow but multi-part whine about the web 2.0 economy and the likelihood that it’s going to collapse at any moment. It’s titled Bubble 2.0 Coming Soon and it’s crap. This stuff drives me nuts – so I’m going to blog about it.

Ubiquitous broadband and the clear utility of the internet is changing the world and all our lives. Millions of people are using MySpace and YouTube and they are never going back. Small companies are seeing their technology get acquired or licenced and leveraged by large brands left and right. There are countless parts of everyday life that are or could be benefiting from asynchronous, distance-free communication online. In the mean time there’s an entire economy being built and it’s ok to be excited about it.

Dvorak’s screed has hit Digg and Slashdot, probably because there are lots and lots of people who are in a position similar to his. They don’t want to lose face by being enthusiastic about the internet again for fear its economy could take another big downturn. They aren’t paying enough attention to tell the difference between Blip.tv and Vimeo. (Blip works closely with publishers of grassroots serialized content and is licenced by CNN and Vimeo is an IAC property that emphasized privacy, the arts and is being used to serve ads across IAC properties. Neither is a “YouTube clone.”) Finally, I think they are freaked out at their oncoming loss of status when the media gates are thrown open, the youngsters freak out over incomprehensible rock and roll and these oldsters are plagued in their sleep by Dramatic Chipmunks turning and looking at them accusingly – over and over again but saying nothing.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Everyone can appreciate the awesomeness that is the emerging web of user generated content, online video and countless other paradigm shifting innovations. This is like the invention of the printing press or the television. It really is.

First though, we’ve got to clear up some misconceptions. Conveniently, Dvorak today posted almost every tired trope of the web 2.0 cynic. His list in italics, my responses afterwords. I wrote this on the city bus going home from work – I think it warrants even if it doesn’t require a more thorough engagement.

Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust…

Neo-social networking. Today everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle. And this doesn’t even consider the actual social-networking sites, from MySpace to LinkedIn to Facebook to even Second Life. This scene is totally out of control and will contribute to the collapse for sure.

I say: Social networking is an emerging utility that combines the functionality of blogging’s self publishing with the usefulness of email list serves. Social networking services make these activities more accessible than ever before. They are a great way to find people you’ve lost touch with (MySpace, for example) and the local church is going to continue eating up the collaboration and easy content management that social networking provides. Niches here will be even more viable when profile and newsfeed portability is made easier. These services provide substantial value to the lives of everyday people and they will never go away as long as the internet exists.

Video mania. With dozens and dozens of YouTube clones cropping up to get on the “throw money away” bandwagon, you must sense that the eventual shakeout in this space will have a negative impact.

I say: Ad networks (ok, ad networks) tell me that there are countless niche video sites, from car lovers to cooking, that are already making money on video. There are food blogs alone with subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. Make it even easier to incorporate video into these strong niches online and the money being invested in this sector will make plenty of sense. I work for one of these vendors, but I took the job because I believe in the sector’s future.

User-generated content. This idea has been around since Usenet and just keeps improving. It will make no contribution to the overall collapse except for users reporting the collapse.

I say: UGC is the content that ads are sold against and publishing services themselves are in some cases directly monetizable (Flickr, for example). Dvorak should have argued that fear of brand damage by UGC is a threat to the web 2.0 economy – I think it’s one of the most viable threats, in fact. In the long run, though, there’s just too much money to be made in an entirely new economy for advertisers to stay on the sidelines much more for much longer.

Mobile everything. Here is another concept that has been in play since the mid-1990s. It cannot trigger a collapse since it will never fully get off the ground, although the iPhone mania may be a bad sign of something.

I say: Oh come on, now. Can anyone really not tell the difference between the mobile economy of today and of 10 years ago? Everyone has mobile phones now and the mobile experience is much more compelling. I’m not talking about the iPhone, I’m talking about global demand for mobile content and services that blows away anything in history and makes supply an undeniably big business. Unless, that is, North America turns out to be some freak of the developed world.

Ad-leveraged search. Most search engines will fail as a matter of course. This segment of the industry is mundane. It would be affected by a crash but not trigger one.

I say: Maybe maybe not. There will probably be a lot of consolidation here but good search is good search. Google’s not going anywhere and it’s the foundation of the search economy.

Widgets and toolbars. I cannot see the widget scene going crazy, and the jury is still out on toolbars. But there is the potential for nuttiness, I think. The problem here is that these things tend to be dependent on the stability of operating systems and browsers. One bad operating-system patch and suddenly nothing works.

I say: What on earth is he talking about? Are widgets an OS dependent application on the desktop? Maybe 5 years ago – today the vast majority of widgets live on web pages and make the *proven* “small pieces loosely joined paradigm” accessible to people with fewer technical skills than ever. Monetization? Advertising, data mining or loss leader – there’s plenty of hope for widgets.

Toolbars? The jury is still out on toolbars? Who does Dvorak hang out with that even talks about toolbars anymore – much less for whom the jury is out?

Why on earth is this man considered a leading voice on tech? I’m guessing that it’s because he speaks to the potent paranoia of much of the aging population – afraid in the face of a changing, confusing world that they will face humiliation if they bet on new tech, that they will be unemployed if things take a downturn or that they will lose their self-righteous know-it-all credentials if this new economy does succeed.

I for one am sick of it. I’m excited about the direction the web is going in and I think many people truly paying attention are as well.

Help Beth Kanter train Cambodian bloggers

Is video-philia killing great online audio content?

Over in a Facebook video thread about video consumption, the prolific blogger and thoughtful student of trends around the web Tinu Abayomi-Paul mentioned that she likes long-form audio media. It was shocking! In the rush of enthusiasm for short form video content I think that audio content has lost a lot of its momentum. I love short videos online as much as anyone, but I also have literally hours every week (walking my dog) when I’d like to be listening to audio podcasts if I could find more that satisfied me. This didn’t use to be a problem.

I love good audio content and I like it to be long. Give me hour long, smart tech podcasts! Please. There is a real market for this kind of content, even if video is what everyone says is hip these days. Remember all the arguments in favor of video that people used to make? You can listen to audio and do other things at the same time (unlike video) and audio is something that can be produced by a wider range of people than the aesthetically demanding medium of video.

What bright lights are there in this neck of the woods? BlogTalkRadio is a service that’s getting loads of traction right now and deserves some more attention from listeners. ITConversations continues to publish really great stuff every once in awhile and if your tastes are different than mine you might find even more there to be valuable than I do. Two good shows recently from ITConversations include an interview with Elizabeth Ferranini on getting your customers to market for you (not nearly as insipid as the title makes it sound, trust me) and another on Web 2.0 for scientists by Timo Hannay, the head of the Nature web publishing group – that conversation with Jon Udel was *awesome*.

I’ve also been meaning to post here about Dana Gardner’s recent podcast Sam Whitmore Helps Parse Search Marketing, the ‘Content Pyramid,’ and RSS Strategies – one of the best things I’ve listened to in months. If you’re an in-house content creator or sympathetic to that emerging job description, that podcast is “required reading”.

All of these great podcast episodes are things I’ve listened to over the last 6 to 8 weeks, though. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the audio podcasting world ought to be producing far more high quality content than it is – and part of the problem is the over emphasis on online video.

The Blogher conference rocked!

I’ve been so busy with day job and consulting work that I haven’t been able to post here for some time but thought I’d cross post this write-up on the fantastic Blogher conference I just returned from in Chicago. It was so much fun! I got to meet a number of web pals face to face for the first time, including the super cool PR guy Jeremy Pepper. Jeremy, who’s been to every Blogher since the conferences began, says of the Blogher scene – “You won’t find a better community where stuff actually gets done.”

I got to go to the 3rd annual conference on women bloggers in Chicago this weekend and it was awesome. Though this was the first time I was able to go, I’m told that year after year the conference doubles in attendance. I can see why – it was well worth the trip.

For my contribution to the discussions that went on there, I thought I’d post a few things here. To the right you can see I’ve built a very simple Blogher channel in SplashCast. I used the Blogher logo at a channel preview image, then put in two shows – one the most recent videos on YouTube tagged Blogher and the second the same tag on Flickr.

Add Blogher on Flickr and YouTube to your page

Some of the things I’ve been thinking about since returning home yesterday:

* Different rock stars. I was surprised that the session on blogging more efficiently was not packed with attendees despite being put on by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker and Barb Dybwad of AOL’s Engadget and Joystiq. As Liz Henry pointed out to me on Twitter, though, the Blogher community has a different set of rock stars than the tech blogging community I’m most familiar with. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman gets more comments per post than any blog I’ve ever seen – and I’d never heard of it before! Did you know that Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes has over 232,000 (!) subscribers by RSS and email? Mommy bloggers have another community altogether still.

* Blog atmosphere. One classic dilemma on any web site that allows visitor comments is whether some comments should be deleted because they are offensive. People who feel they should not tend to think it’s the most obvious thing in the world but I heard someone express another perspective at Blogher better than I had ever heard it expressed before. When you allow comments that are read as oppressive by people of color, women and others to remain on your blog it requires members of those communities to prepare themselves emotionally for a hostile environment before participating in conversation. That’s not something I want to ask of people who are already outside the dominant power paradigm- so I’m going to make it a practice to delete comments like that if and when they appear on posts I write anywhere.

Though that opinion was expressed well at Blogher, there was hardly consensus around it. For example, I heard a number of women say things that I personally thought quite oppressive – from “retard” and “ching chong” jokes to shutting down question askers with “you just don’t get it” arrogance. In other words, it was hardly one big perfect PC-fest.

* Powerful women. Blogher co-founder Lisa Stone is a great interviewer, keynoter Elizabeth Edwards was better though at answering her questions than she was at being interesting in response to audience questions. Hopefully the interview will be posted in video online so you can see one way to do a great interview. After hearing people talk all weekend about how much smarter Elizabeth is than her Presidential candidate husband John Edwards, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the large audience that was grinding my teeth a bit every time she said “well, my husband’s position is this…” It’s not fun to listen to anyone use a phrase like that more than once or twice in a conversation.

* Blogher seemed very well sponsored. GM, Dove, Yahoo! and Google were all major sponsors. Butterball (yuck) sponsored the food sessions (food blogging is huge) and even PayPerPost was there. One of the recurring themes of the sessions, though, was the need for financial support in underrepresented online communities, women bloggers outside the US in particular. Perhaps they already have, but I think it would be nice to see some of these sponsorships come in the form of donations to international organizations in Blogher’s name.

* Social media production. Blogher is not just a yearly conference, it’s also a great place to read womens’ blog posts throughout the year and an ad network for blogs all around the web. Judging from the photos and videos uploaded quickly to the web tagged Blogher, one outside organization has done a particularly good job of producing media content arround the conference. Check out the player above and you’ll find a whole bunch of interviews with speakers from the conference produced by an organization called The Experience Project. Experience Project is a privacy-centric social networking service and anyone who is searching for Blogher video on YouTube in the days after the event will now be exposed to their company and their approach to engaging with related issues. It appears they are collaborating with podcast network Podtech. Way to go Experience Project!

Blogher was a great conference to go to and something I will do my best to go to next year. So many tech related conferences are completely imbalanced with 90% or more male attendees and speakers. It was fantastic to be at an event that was split the other way. Conversations were very friendly, the content was broader in concerns addressed than at many tech conferences and there were any number of psycho-social ways this conference was different that I as a man won’t even try to describe. It was great and I highly recommend attending next year’s conference to anyone able to do so.

NTEN’s Tools You Should Know Video Podcast

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Earlier this week I was interviewed by Holly Ross at NTEN about some of my favorite new applications on the web. NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, is an organization worth checking out. Whether you’re in the nonprofit sector or not, I hope some of the tools we discussed will be helpful. Here’s the first interview we did, last month.

Here are the links to the things discussed in this video: