the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Newspapers and the Internet - Good, Bad and Ugly

Editor and Publisher has an interesting article "Web Editors Reveal Flops and Failures" discussing the ways that newspapers have succeeded and failed with their online initiatives.  For anyone with an interest in online content strategies the article is quite interesting in describing the lessons learned.  Among those referenced are the following:

1. Blogs can backfire - typically from lack of reader interest or from content that doesn't connect
2. Technology can flop - interesting discussion of how the The Denver Post added a feature where content was refreshed every ten minutes in an effort to be very timely only to find that crossword puzzle lovers complained after losing their work or the failure of contextual ads for example where one paper had a story about unusual adult coated brownies only to find a Google ad next to it for brownies.
3. Readers can get ugly - with reader opinions ready to go ( I know I've added my voice once in awhile), content filters that editors provide have been missed with racy or inappropriate comments.
4. Not everyone wants to chat
5. Local content might be limiting
6. Pay for content can backfire
7. Print stories don't always translate to the web
8. Be selective in Podcasts
9. Manage the obits
10. Watch out on the types of databases that you provide
11. Separate Web and Print Sales Staffs Don't Succeed
12. Traffic spikes can cause unintended consequences

Read the article for specific case studies for each lesson learned.

Technorati State of the Blogosphere

David Siffry, from Technorati has released his quarterly status report on the state of the blogosphere.  Their research findings indicate a continued growth in the number of blogs with 120,000 new ones being created every day and a total of 70,000,000 being tracked by Technorati, a doubling since the last quarterly report in October.  In parallel with the creation of legitimate blogs, Siffry reports on the growth of splogs (spam blogs) indicating that they had removed 341,000 splogs from their indexes during the last measurement period.  The number of posts/day has started to decline according to their tracking results. 

One interesting result is that when blogs are compared to the mainstream media among the top 100 visited sites, the number of blogs in these rankings continues to grow, now at 22/100.  Another interesting factoid is that Japanese is the number one language of blog postings followed by English.

Look what's in the baby carriage....

First came spam, then came spim (instant messaging spam), then came SPLOG...

Netpreneurs of the sleazy type have discovered that they can create havoc or generate money or both with the addition of spam blogs or SPLOG.  As Internet Week in a recent article states:

"Currently, at least one-fifth of the blogs that turn up in search results are spam blogs, researchers say."

According to Wikipedia,"SPLOG are fake blogs which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed."

Technorati claims that of the blogs they track, anywhere from 2 to 8% are splog with over 50,000 splog postings a day.

Much like with SPAM, we've seen the arrival of the good guys trying to fight the growth of SPLOG.  This includes the blog providers like Google, Six Apart etc., but also services like SplogReporter and SplogSpot which allow you to report splog.

Beyond splog, bloggers are faced with several other types of spam - comment spam and pinging spam (Sping).  I'll talk about those in a future post.