When the songbird sings

Seth Godin gave 56 tips on how to attract traffic to blogs. Items that I think I’ve done so far are in bold font.

• Use lists.
• Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
• Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
• Break news.
• Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
• Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
• Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
• Announce news.
• Write short, pithy posts.
• Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
• Don’t write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
• Write long, definitive posts.
• Write about your kids.
• Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
• Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
• Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
• Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
• Coin a term or two.
• Do email interviews with the well-known.
• Answer your email.
• Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
• Be anonymous.
• Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
• Post your photos on flickr.
• Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
• Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
• Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
• Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
• Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
• Point to useful but little-known resources.
• Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
• Write about Google.
• Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
• Don’t include comments, people will cross post their responses.
• Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
• Run no ads.
• Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
• Write about blogging.
• Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
• Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
• Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
• Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don’t bore your readers.
• Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
• Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
• Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
• Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
• Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention.
• Be patient.
• Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
• Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
• Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
• Write in English.
• Better, write in Chinese Tagalog.
• Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
• Don’t be boring.
• Write stuff that people want to read and share.

NOTE: This post is scheduled to appear tomorrow on Pandora Squared, but in case you don’t visit the site regularly, I’m also posting it on this here blog:

Media of the Masses

Majority will agree that much of what is being written in the blogosphere is pure nonesense. Still, the power that used to reside solely in the hands of select fortunate individuals is now being scattered, redistributed via blogging, the internet age’s Gutenberg press. Media firms - especially print - has every reason to panic and not without a good reason, unless they scramble with millions of bloggers around the globe.

While blogging has been around for only less than a decade, one knows that it has reached the tipping point when mainstream press has noticed it. BusinessWeek covered blogging in January 2005 by featuring the blogging revolutionaries: developers, leaders and celebrities of the online world. While blogging has tipped the scale as far as numbers go, one knows that it has reached another level when businesses - and governments - started to wary of bloggers and how these self-publishers could possibly affect their PR and ultimately, success. Last year, Google terminated Mark Jen for blogging about its relatively meager health care package (compared to Microsoft’s 100%) and other fringe benefits that the employee wrote as actually benefitting the company instead of the employees? While many believe that Jen exercised poor judgement in blogging about his employer, news of his termination still earned the “do not be evil” Google negative marks.

Recently, Apple lost a source disclosure case when California’s Sixth District Court of Appeals ruled against efforts to subpoena Apple Insider to reveal sources who leaked about Apple’s future products. This decision spelt First Ammendment protection and gave bloggers a characterization different from the usual depressive online diarists or desktop pundits. While this protection is being enjoyed by bloggers in the US, there is hope that the same will be granted to bloggers in other territories.

After only a few years, as opposed to centuries of traditional journalism, the blogging community is achieving a level of credibility as arbiters of information and public opinion. On the other hand, what separates the professional bloggers from the personal diarists that most in the community are better known for depends largely on how they uphold journalistic standards, such as adhering to code of ethics and verifying information and resources. These are not rocket science, but not easy acts to follow either.

If the market is nothing but a sea of conversations, then the blogosphere is your chattering Pacific Ocean - too important and too huge, in fact, that even business journal BusinessWeek joined in via its own Blogspotting, Time magazine leased Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish and Robert Scoble evangelized for Microsoft. If search engines crawl cyberspace for generic search, specialized engines are now gaining traction in the search business by focusing on blogs: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask.com (Bloglines), to name a few.

Whereas the conversation used to be in text, new formats and publishing media add sound and moving images to the buzz with video sharing sites, vlogging and podcasts. Citizen journalism has never been this fun and far-reaching with moblogging which first gained global attention as images of London Underground’s bombing taken with camera phones hit the web.

If, as the adage goes, one should put one’s money where one’s mouth is, then advertising money is slowly being diverted from print to digital. What started off with Overture and Adsense is now a free market of various advertising programs from search to RSS feeds.

There is so much that serious bloggers and traditional media practioners will learn from each other as businesses rethink their advertising strategies. Bloggers do not have the same clout that mainstream media currently enjoys, but who knows what the webscape will look like, say two years from now? Journalism matters, as Mark Cuban wrote, and I believe it will always matter - but perhaps not in the traditional way that it is being packaged and delivered to a public that eagerly awaits, shares and talks about the latest feed.