TechWag

Image via WikipediaThis is an excerpt from the upcoming book - Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere. The book has gone to the publishers, and should be out at the end of the year.

Chris Pirillo is a unique blogger in that he runs multiple ways of getting information to the people who follow him. He shares many of the similarities in terms of background that other successful bloggers has, such as a journalism degree , and a long time blogging. He also does life streaming , runs forums , and runs a trade show called Gnomedex in Seattle.

He is based out of the Seattle area, and lives his life on line. That is what makes him more of the total package blogger than other successful bloggers out there. What makes his model interesting as a blogger is that essentially he is on line all the time, and has a live webcam in his house that shows him working at his computer all day long.

Originally, Chris got started in television, being a host and co-host of the TV show “Call for Help” where people would call in with live questions about problems with technology. Since then he has moved on line and uses his “total media” concept to deliver information to people who follow him. His site Pirillo.com is one of the smaller successful blogs, measuring his page views in the tens of thousands rather than millions per day, but because he is so multi-faceted, and has so many things going on the internet at any given time, his quanticast statistics could be deceptive .

There is no particular focus of his blog, which can be disturbing to some viewers as it follows a more beat generation style stream of consciousness viewpoint. Where Chris’s mind wanders on issues and ideas, his blog and journal entries reflects that stream of consciousness. This also sets him up as a unique resource on the internet. While most blogs focus on one thing, or writers focus on one thing, Chris is more of a renaissance person when it comes to the internet. His primary focus though seems to be on marketing, but also on technology, general geekery, and using technology to bring people closer.

The thing to note about Chris is that based on what is available him is that he has more of the traditional look and feel of the consummate sales person. The web site is literally infested with branding, advertising, and ways to interact that deliver content and more advertising. He has a very large registered followership, and builds on that to help drive buzz around his web site. If you watch his life video feed, there are ads every 15 seconds, and it is branded with his own image. The key point to the blog and various web sites are to sell Chris Pirillo, and at times offer content, contests, and information that people will someday want. This is in contrast to other bloggers who try to build a corporate profile; Chris’s website is all about building out the personal brand. He is his own market, and has taken personal branding to a level that is not often seen on the internet.

Everything that Chris does seeks to entertain, enlighten and expand the personal brand. This is one of those cases of where the brand becomes indistinguishable from the person involved. If you want to create a truly personal brand around an internet persona, then Chris is the example that you would want to follow. This is also what makes him unique from other bloggers or even other internet personalities, he has the background in traditional media and has worked out ways to ensure that his traditional media background stays relevant in the modern internet age. By life streaming he stays with his traditional TV roots, by blogging he stays in line with his journalism degree, and by the way, that he uses advertising, he is able to make money from the internet. His site is not for everyone, it is busy, cluttered, and the ongoing sound track from the life stream in the background can be distracting. The scrolling feed of comments from his forum/board information system can also be distracting. The lockergn0me web site that he runs is more traditional, but the articles are short, and the entire article is framed in advertising. He carries on the same idea as Gawker in that the web site is for advertising with some content wrapped around it. The things that make Chris successful are:

1. He has successfully blended both old and new media standards into his web site playing on his strengths, the live interactive support and help process is still on going on his web site, and the life streaming plays to his television background

2. He has incorporated personal brand and internet brand so that the two facets of Chris are indistinguishable, he is his web site, and the web site reflects who he is

3. He has successfully marketed himself into multiple internet venues as well as a trade show to extend and expand the personal brand

By playing on his strengths, television and journalism Chris has been able to build a powerhouse brand for him, ensuring that he will always have an audience. His demographics point to the valued 18 to 34 and 35 to 49 age range visitors . What is interesting about his demographics is that they point to a disjointed audience set, as the majority of his traffic is passersby. That is in contrast to the number of people who have signed up to participate on his site, the repeat customers are the important ones in blogging.

The official statistics might be flawed, as he has a very large participation rate, in contrast to the statistics. They are less likely to go somewhere else to get something similar. Yet the personal brand is probably Chris’s greatest strength, it is by blending personality and brand, creating the brand of Chris Pirillo that other bloggers are going to want to focus on. It is one of the best examples for developing a brand around the name in a funny and technologically perceptive way that provides many ideas to emulate.

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Image by davemc500hats via FlickrThis is an excerpt from the upcoming book - Boom and Bust in the Blogosphere. The book has gone to the publishers, and should be out at the end of the year.

There is a lot of creative destruction to industries when people, regular people, take to the public forums and start talking. With blogging and community, building, creative destruction can be considered part of the business . One of the key commonalities amongst all the popular blogs is that they have been able to develop community. One of the commonalities of blogs that have failed due to their business model is that they have been unable to develop a community.

Some communities are better for you in the longer run as you build your blog and its audience. As your current and potential employers, family, friends, and others read your blog and have comments about it, you have an opportunity to break down barriers. Some barriers should not be crossed, like badmouthing your co-workers, talking about something in the family that does not need to be aired in public. Other barriers are good to break down, like if you are working on a problem and using the blog to write down your ideas on how to solve it, or talking about the arrival of a new family member.

While some of those will make decisions as to your employ ability, or ability to be a member of a community blogs can very creatively solve some problems for you. If you write a professional blog and cover the industry that you work in, when it comes to being employed, your potential employer will find that your work shows you do know your stuff. Blogs have had an enormous influence on many industries, and the way that people communicate to each other. This is the important part to remember when you start your blogging career, that the world will come visit your site.

One of my blogs only 23% of all readers is from the USA, the rest come from around the world. You quickly learn to write to an international audience if you want to keep those readers. The other issue is that it is very hard to find advertising that works in the international environment of the blogging world. Google Adsense is probably the best example of how international advertising can work for you, and works against you. This is where language issues come in, social issues, even the color scheme of your blog comes into play. The more you understand about localization or automated translation programs can help you gain a bigger audience.

If you know what you want to write about, what you want to do with your entries, and how you feel about what you are writing about on your blog will help foster an international break with what can be considered stereotypes in people. Your blog becomes your voice, and the communities’ voice for that niche and for what you are writing about on your blog. Creatively breaking down barriers between cultures is one very good benefit to blogging.

There is no debate that blogs have had an influence on newspapers, and television. There is also no debate that the internet has altered how business works, people communicate, and communities form. The internet provides a platform for people to do just about anything they want to do, get anything they want to get (illegal or legal), and explore or discover anything they want to know about. The internet as a delivery vehicle for data and information is superior to the paper, the radio, or the television. The idea of on demand information, what you want when you want it, and how you want it is something that some companies get, while others do not.

Big companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and others all run company sponsored blogs where ordinary employees can write about the cool things they are doing. Larger press style blogs, Techcrunch, the Huffington Post, and Gawker media also have had an influence on how we get information and what information we subscribe to on line. It is hard for traditional media to meet or beat that process of instant information about what you want to know about when you want to know it.

While you might not know what a blog is, or you might not have worked out a business model for your blog when you participate in blogging you are joining the very few whom blog. If there are 120 million blogs as reported by Technorati, and the earth’s population is six billion, that is not many blogs in relationship to people. Most people do not participate in web 2.0 preferring to lurk on line rather than participate. Wikipedia’s own participation statistics point out that only .003 percent of people make the most edits on the site . This participation inequality is also going to influence your blog. While people lurk, few will comment, and even fewer will participate. While traditional media relies on lurkers buying the paper or watching the TV show over the air or on cable, the same rules apply. Before the advent of Web 2.0 we were trained as a passive audience , it will take decades to get past that to the point where we do start participating in media more.

If we talk with our audience rather than “at them ,” we stand a better chance of reaching out to our audience and developing community.

Blogs, wiki’s, and other interactive forms of communication break down barriers and enter into the idea of creative destruction of information models . Rather than information carefully controlled, blogs and other web 2.0 media sources open up whole new avenues for people to get information . People are blending traditional media and new media resources to come up with a more comprehensive picture of the things that are important to them. What might be important might be pizza and beer, celebrity screw-up news, or saving the planet.

The wonderful part about that is the niche you choose should be a niche you believe in, it will be easy to find readers, but harder to find people who will do more than read one article, or participate in your on line community. While you should not worry about not getting an audience right off the bat, as you develop your own style, you participate where few others do, and that is how you help create and add to a global voice. While some might call it digital anarchy , for many it is their one way of showing that there are bigger issues, and bigger ideas that must be presented to the world. It does not matter what the idea is, but that there is the desire to share the concept with as many people as possible.

While some people are geared towards doing blog spam, splogs, ripping content, and doing things that you might not agree with or even like, when you participate you join the very few, and in some ways very cutting edge group of people who are doing the same thing. It is hard to think that .003 percent of a population can have the influence and the effect on newspapers, television and other traditional media, imagine what the influence would be if one percent of the population would have. This is where creative destruction of current models comes into play. As globalization takes deeper roots in our culture, as computing becomes ubiquitous and more off the desktop and into the actual network (called cloud computing) the change in communications technology via blogs and other systems is comparable to the printing press, the mass newspaper, the invention of the radio and the invention of the television. The good part about the internet is that to take time out and start writing requires no overhead what so ever, just you, an idea, a desire, and the willingness to write every day and you can get started.

The changes in the journalism industry are the most documented, and much of it is caused not just by bloggers, but the freedom in how information can be obtained. Prior to the internet, there were magazines, newspapers, television, and radio that we used in very orderly hierarchies of the type of data that we would get. The information in magazines had to be durable enough to be interesting for the month or longer. Information in the paper had to be durable for 24 hours, or until the next edition of the paper came out. Television and Radio came closest to being entertaining in 5 to 60 minutes increments. With the internet, you have 15 seconds to engage a reader . The more you engage the readers on a regular basis, the better off you are as a blogger.

Magazines and newspapers were not geared towards this kind of shortened attention span, and have suffered reductions in readership and subscriptions as they have tried to reinvent their industries model to support the shortened attention span . This is classic creative destruction of their business model . Blogs might not be completely to blame, but they are a causal factor in how the industry is changing. This is also, why your voice as a blogger is so important; we need more than .003 percent of the population adding to the society. It is much like having newspapers owned by a few families or companies ; the most popular blogs are controlled and owned by a small group of people. Bloggers can change that too, all by engaging and understanding the audience we write for.

Tags: web 2.0, education, technology, fun, Participation, data mine by admin
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Image via CrunchBase

It is almost as if Sequoia Capital has set off the triggering event of 2008, and while the news might be great for companies trying to survive, the layoffs of 10, 20, 30% of employees are going to cause serious problems down the road. In many ways, and given what we saw in the 2001/2002 recession season, these people, who are otherwise great employees are not going to come back. While we are seeing employees let go, we are hearing little about equality in layoff’s with management. Which is also interesting, as companies that need to save money by slashing anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of their work force should be seriously looking at executive compensation to go along with that.

Kicking off the parade today, Comcast, Ticket Master, Mania TV, Mahalo, PermissionTV, and a whole host of local companies cutting down on what they are spending. Even the Seattle STS (Seattle Tech Startup) list is pushing out how to turn doors into tables for workers. At least that is cool if everyone shares the pain. Moreover, smacks of Mahalo’s viewpoint as well. Maybe the new office décor is going to be strip lights and homemade furniture.

Of course this is the best time to start a startup, bootstrap your way to not having to worry about being laid off, there also has to be some social reasoning on this one. If you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, then this might be the way to go. Finding money is going to be difficult via VC or Angel funding, but that does not mean that the Small Business Administration will turn you down. As weak competitors fall off and die, this is also the best time to pick up technology or systems that you could not otherwise purchase. It all depends on what you have, what you want to do, or if you even want to go back into technology after this one.

The advertising model is OK, we sort of use it here, but in the longer run, it is going to boil down to the must have product. Your best bet is going to be going into the casual game space, and the Iphone, Android application system if you really want to make money or have a chance at keeping yourself at least paying bills. With unemployment spiking this morning, people with time on their hands are going to be on MySpace, Facebook, and they will keep their cell phones. They will also spend time at casual gaming sites, and other things that will waste time or occupy time.

Who knows, for those so inclined, with good programming, business and marketing skills, this might just be the silver lining.

Tags: layoff, continues, Comcast, Mahalo, permissiontv, ticketmaster, ticket master, mania tv, fired

Tags: layoff, business, sad by admin
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