Category Archives: Web/Tech

How do web 2.0 / consumer web app-ish type companies generate buzz for their free product or service online? Online promotions? Email blasts? Pray to be TechCrunched?

I’ve seen an increasing number of companies do all this and one thing more: hire low-cost "evangelists" to sit at a computer all day and talk up their company’s free service.

Imagine if you had one person whose sole purpose in life was to personally reach out to potential users, surf blogs and message boards and comment favorably about the company’s service, and attend MeetUps and informal confabs. While this might seem like generic marketing or sales duties, in a web 2.0 word, it’s a different personality: it’s a single person with a friendly face do one-on-one marketing with influential bloggers or podcasters.

The economics aren’t necessarily obvious: Pay someone $30-40k a year to be an evangelist? How do you measure success? I don’t think you easily can. But it seems like many companies are at least giving it a try…with the hopes that with enough critical mass they, too, can reach the tipping point that Twitter seems to have hit at the South by Southwest Conference.

Stan James, CTO of Lijit, has been on a blogging tear. His most fascinating recent post is titled, "Not all links are created equal." He delineates three distinct kinds of links on the web:

1) The Pointer Link

This is the link we all think of, the link that was envisioned back when they were called "hyperlinks". It’s basically a citation, like an footnote from an academic journal.

English translation: I examined the exact content I am now pointing to, and I found it to be worthwhile. It’s worthwhile to go there.

2) The Subscribe/Friend/Trust Link

These links are the hallmarks of RSS and social networks. These links are not endorsements of the exact content pointed to, but of the author or creative source represented by the link.

English translation: I often examine content that comes from this source, and I find it to be worthwhile. Further content from this source is probably also worthwhile.

Note that this type of link talks not only about past content from the author, but is also a prediction that future content will also be worthwhile. (As Seth once said about subscriptions, it’s a promissory note for attention that will be paid in the future.)

3) Identity Link

These links are maybe the newest to grow in importance. With the proliferation of content creating platforms, it’s becoming more difficult to tie your online identity together. People must now create "identity indexes" that list who they are on different services.

English translation: "I create the content at this source, and take full responsibility for it."

Stan then predicts the next kind of link will be an "anti-link":

If I had to bet, I’d say the next important step in linking will be anti-links. In the real world, you also often recommend against things and clarify who you are not. For example:

• "Did you hear that Mary is now into multilevel marketing?"
• "Scrubs used to be funny, but now it sucks."
• "My name is Michael Bolton. … No, not the singer."

There are only a few parallels to this in the online world.

• rel="nofollow" : This microformat in a link indicates that the author does not endorse what is pointed to. It was developed to solve the problems of links in blog comments. If a commented leaves a link, the author of the blog does not want to endorse whatever the commenter linked to. (Okay, not really an anti-link, more of an un-link.)
• rev="vote-against" : This microformat in a link indicates that the author activly recommends against what is pointed to. It is not really supported, however.  (Except by Lijit!)

Chris Yeh presents his Grand Unified Theorem of Blogging:

The natural limit on the size of a blog’s audience depends on the degree to which the blog

1) sticks to a particular topic, and

2) creates a cult of personality around the writer.

Chris notes that we can’t read every post from every feed:

As a result, every blog reader will eventually find himself forced to winnow his feeds, to focus on those feeds that are richest in relevant content. The two basic measures we can expect him to apply are:

a) Does the post cover one of my preferred topics?
b) Is the post from someone I like and want to stay connected with?

The First Law of Blogging states that the more topics a blog covers, the lower the percentage of posts that will match up with the preferred topic set of any particular reader.

My blog is hardly "focused" — there are some themes, but it’s more general than most. This probably limits my readership (but it’s more fun for me). People, then, read my blog either because my eclectic set of interests happen to overlap with their eclectic set of interests, and/or because they’re interested in the author (me) and want to stay connected.

The maximum audience of a general blog like Ben’s depends on the extent to which he is able to build a Cult of Ben.

I would argue that "cult" blogs may have a smaller readership than a focused, rigorously topical blog, but the relationship between the author and readers is richer. In other words, because the ~2,000 people who read my blog regularly have decided to invest time in "Ben" (not simply in a sole topic like entrepreneurship), they feel like they know me, I feel like I know them, and it’s a more emotionally fulfilling exercise.

This being said, if your blog’s main purpose to make money from Google AdWords or be able to brag about having more than 10,000 RSS readers, by all means, the formula is clear: be focused, write a specialist blog.

What we’re discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would–and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, "Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture."

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact–quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up "putting themselves out there" and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it….

In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it–and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.

That’s from New York Magazine on young people, the internet, and the evaporation of privacy. Hat tip to the always-provocative Virginia Postrel for the pointer.

Here’s my post on how private conversations are becoming public in Facebook. Here’s Paul Saffo’s wrongheaded post on why teens are the unfortunate first generation to publicly air their musings. He "pities" my generation because "in a few decades their sophomoric musings will deliver a vast embarrassment utterly unknown to earlier generations." Or we’re the first generation that has the opportunity to publicly air our musings, get feedback, stand corrected, and express ourselves.

Tyler Cowen, in a post titled Blogging as self-experimentation, notes:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

Yeah! Three other effects for me:

1. It’s made me participate in more public conversations. When formerly private conversations go public, the quality increases.

2. Knowing you’re going to blog an experience changes the experience itself; as you live it, you think about it in the context of how you’ll describe it to others.

3. The transparency of personal blogs keeps you on your toes. To quote myself:

Auto-pilot is lazy. I try to avoid it, but since most strangers ask me the same 5 questions it’s seductively easy to slip into. Except when that person’s been reading my blog. They know my one-liners. They know my interests. They know when I’m bullshitting…Transparency forces me to really focus to what someone’s saying and to construct new ideas based on what I take in, instead of reverting to my theories of yesterday.