Archive for the ‘Online’ Category

BoingBoing was one of the first blogs that I ever read, and it’ll always have a special place in my heart. (This post remains some of the best advice I’ve read on the internet.) I don’t subscribe via RSS or email anymore, but I still stop by once in a while just to see how things are going.

Over the past few months, they’ve been touting the BoingBoing Bazaar, a section of the Makersmarket website that features products hand-selected by BoingBoing staff.

More recently, they posted that they also have a BoingBoing online store on Amazon.

Presumably, the BoingBoing organization gets a cut of all products they sell through these online outlets.

So does that mean they sold out?

No. In a way, I think they did almost the exact opposite. While they used to offer their readers their opinions and thoughts on the weird internet ephemera that they found, now they can share the equally weird and cool physical goods

Better yet, by getting paid as affiliates (as I assume they do), they’re rewarded for all the work they put into the blog. I feel like by including these suggestions as part of the editorial content, the BoingBoing crew is walking a very fine line. However, if their users feel like they’re endorsing products strictly in order to make money, they’ll stop reading.

While micro-payment services like Flattr aim to make it easy for you to reward the sites or artist you like online, I think they are a bit idealistic (the world isn’t ready for this type of whuffie thinking) and don’t result in any reward for the person paying beyond a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Online advertising is dead and dying. The future of profitable websites is in their ability to develop content that they can turn into sales of actual, physical goods or services. Whether success comes in the form of the website selling branded goods related to its own brand (BlogCampaigning pogs, maybe?) or by setting up its own, shop like BoingBoing has remains to be seen.

This is an issue with all forms of digital media, from blogs and websites to music, movies and games so I’m definitely interested in seeing how it will turn out.

What do you think? Did BoingBoing sell out? Would you buy products that the BlogCampaigning crew recommended? What is the best way to reward your favorite website?

-Parker

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas this year, and it has been really enjoyable to use. It’s as light as a small paperback book, the screen has the visual characteristics of regular novel paper, and it can store quite a bit. For someone like myself who frequently has a few books on the go, the Kindle makes it easy to have them all with you in one slim package. (I’m currently reading Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, and The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. I’d like to say I’m also reading Jens Schroeder’s dissertation on the Kindle, but he only sent it to me in PDF and that type of document doesn’t display well on the device—sorry, Schredd.)

Add to that the convenience of being able to very easily add books to your collection (I went on a $50 spree in about five minutes when I first got it), and it makes for a nice little package.

Some of the other features I like about it are the ability to quickly search through the text. Although this isn’t a mind-blowing feature, I can definitely see myself using this when it comes to writing a blog post on a few books I’ve read recently, and I want to find key passages. Similarly, you can very easily add notes to yourself and browse them later, a feature that may come in handy for those doing reviews or research and not wanting to do all their reading on a computer screen or with a notebook in hand.

As a very avid Blackberry user, I find the keys on the Kindle are spaced a little bit too far apart, making the keypad difficult to use. Since the Kindle is mostly for reading and note taking for me is rare, this is a minor gripe.

The lack of other flashy features that something like the iPad might have is something of a feature in itself. With the Kindle, I’m able to focus on the book I’m reading without being tempted to switch into other programs, or check something else.

I’ve also been letting my roommate Annie borrow it now and then. Annie’s job is making clothing for the puppets on the TV show Glenn Martin, DDS. She also makes leather purses, and although she always buys the latest issue of Wired Magazine (normally the UK edition), she rarely reads it online. She never wants to own a Blackberry, and when I told her what I did for work, she asked me if I was a spin doctor.

Annie takes the Kindle for a quick rip

Her thoughts on the Kindle? She feels self-conscious using an expensive piece of electronics in public (even after I pointed that the Kindle probably isn’t high up on the must-have list for thieves).

The two of us also agree that until everyone has a device that can handle e-books, sharing books is a pain the ass. She has a few books downloaded on the device, and so do I. With one device, it means only one of us can read our books at the same time. I’ve been pretty good at sharing with her, but I know there are sometimes when she wishes she could read it on the train on the way to work while I’m already out of the house with it, having a coffee and reading my favourite book.

“I think there will always be a place for paper books and magazines”, Annie said when I told her I was writing this blog post. “They’ll just be a lot more special, like those Phaidon art books.”

I tend to agree with her when she says that, and I said as much in a blog post about the magazine industry a while ago. Just as MP3 players have made it easier to share and enjoy music while increasing the demand for box sets and live music, I think e-readers will do the same for literature. While everyone will have freely available articles and books on their devices everywhere they go, true collectors will spend hundreds of dollars on super-glossy, limited edition runs of books and magazines.

But that’s really all an aside… at the end of the day, the Kindle is a great device.

How long until we read everything on e-readers? Have you got one? Will there still be a place for books and magazines?

-Parker

Last week I found myself in the middle of one of those conversations that keeps you thinking into the wee hours of the night. By no means did we reach a resolution; however, I’ll do my best to recount some of the main positions and posits of the conversation. Hopefully you can provide some insights of your own.

Like most brain busters it began simply enough. My friend told a story of how she had been in the car with her dad watching him manoeuvre between his cellphone, blackberry, MP3 player, and the steering wheel. “He was like a zombie”, she said, “doing a million virtual things at once”, barely even conscious of the conversation he was supposedly having with her. In that instant, almost all of her dad’s faculties were fulfilling virtual obligations over a variety of virtual networks.

Envision a matrix, each technology filling a virtual space around us, connecting slowly but surely with other virtual spaces until we are in fact living most of our conscious lives in a virtual realm. Kinda scary, but not that far-fetched.

This brings in the discussion of augmented reality, the real-time intrusion of technology into our physical environment. However, I am not talking about overlaying our environment with technical or digital information. I’m speaking more about disconnecting from our physical environment altogether.

Forget the notions of Second Life, where users are still quite present in the physical realm. The reality of our current situation mirrors science fiction, whereby our physical selves are not necessarily needed for much of our day-to-day lives. The matrix of different networks is definitely starting to fill out, taking more and more of our consciousness with it.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We put so many hours of energy into virtual worlds and networks every day—tuned to our laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries so as not to miss a single nanosecond of social networking, emails, video games, online shopping, or music. If the law above holds true (and it does), where does this energy go? Does it flow out the other side in the form of new creations, products, events, and innovations? Or does it get trapped behind the screens in a virtual space awaiting our next visit? If we are engaging in three or four or five different mediums at a time, giving small pieces of ourselves to each one, how much of our conscious minds are “here”, and how much is already residing in virtual space? And more importantly, what end are we all working towards?

We need to ground ourselves and remember that at least for the time being we are existing in the physical realm. It is important to turn yourself off of social networks, cellphones, and other virtual devices every day. Spend some time and energy with your feet rooted in the soil.

What do you think? Have you found yourself having this same conversation? Did you get any further in your discussion than we did?

A few weeks ago, my friend asked me if I could help him build a website for his band, A Northern Drawl. They’ve already got a MySpace page and a Twitter account, but they wanted another presence on the web that they had more control over.

Rather than just setting them up with a blog and saying “have fun”, I wanted to make sure it would be something useful. My friend and I went out for coffee, and talked about what they’d be using it for and what they wanted.

Some of the initial things that we agreed the site needed were a way to advertise their upcoming shows and a way for people to contact them for bookings.

My roommate Micker (“a sustainable designer”) gave me some ideas on how it should look, and I used Artisteer to put it together (well worth the $50 if you ever design Wordpress or Joomla sites).

I also convinced them that it would be great for them to post any tracks they record and make them available as a free download. As a band that is still building up a fan base, giving away MP3s for free is a great way for people to easily learn about the band without having to put down any money. Its also a great way for existing fans to share the music with their friends, potentially growing their fan base.

A newsletter plugin (via Satollo) was also added, and I’ve encouraged the band to tell people to sign up for this newsletter. Rather than just sending all their posts like Feedburner might, a news letter plugin like this instead allows them to capture the names and email addresses of their fans so that they can send them more personalized, relevant updates later on.

While all you social media types that read BlogCampaigning might be hip to the RSS scene, I don’t think the average music fan is, and I think a newsletter like this will be a good way to reach their potential fans. Later on, I’d like to expand this newsletter function so that it captures which city the subscriber is in, as well as their name and email address. That way, the band can reach out to fans in different regions when they go on tour.

They asked me if I could set the site up so that any updates they made on the blog would be posted to their Twitter account and MySpace page, but I advised against this. It isn’t because I didn’t feel like doing it (setting up a feed to Twitter is easy, one to MySpace a pain in the ass), but because I think they’ll have different audiences on each of the different sites. As a new band, they’ve got a huge opportunity to start connecting with fans, and automated messages across different social networks isn’t the way to do this.

I also added a plugin that would enable users to vote on the comments. In my discussions with the band, one idea we came up with was that before a show they could ask their fans which song they should cover. Fans would be able to make suggestions via the comments, and then vote on the suggestions that they wanted to hear. Its a great way for the band to get feedback about what kind of music their fans want to hear. I think it is also a great way to draw people to shows, as people might be more interested in going if they think that the band is going to play one of their favourite songs.

Once the band makes merchandise, I’d like to add some sort of system so that people can order it from their site. I’m sure that as the band’s needs change, so will the site, and I look forward to working on it with them for the next little while.

If you’ve got a few minutes, check out ANorthernDrawl.com, and let me know what you think of the design. I’m particularly interested in hearing what you think of how the background image shows up on your monitor. I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a “web designer”, but I do like making and designing sites like this.

They haven’t started posting anything yet, but if you like Pearl Jam-inspired alternative music, it might be worth your while to subscribe their RSS feed or follow A Northern Drawl on Twitter to get updates from the guys. They frequently play shows in Toronto, and are worth checking out.

What sort of things do you expect your favourite artists to have on their websites?

-Parker

Adam Gorley: Gentleman, Scholar, Blog Editor

Adam Gorley is BlogCampaigning’s copy editor, and the one responsible for scheduling our posts.

Sometime he doesn’t get a chance to edit one of my posts until a few hours after I send it to him.

That’s because he also has another (read: real) job that keeps him busy. Part of this other job involves writing articles for the First Reference blog, a site about “Business, Payroll, Employment Law, Internal Controls & You!”

For an example of one of his recent posts on the First Reference Blog, check out Workplace human rights: Overt racism in the workplace – it’s still here.

A few weeks ago, he also wrote a post about what to do about the problem of employee theft in the workplace that I thought was hilarious, but only because I read it a few hours after finding out that April 15 is Steal From Work Day. (I probably won’t be adding that to my calendar.)

Thanks for your work, Adam.

-Parker

As regular readers of BlogCampaigning might know, I also write a music blog. That means aspiring artists, their labels and their PR people always email me new music. Some of it is good. Most of it isn’t.

Nearly all of the pitches I get are amateurish at best, and nearly all of them are poorly targeted.

However, one name has consistently stood out over the past few months for sending me music that I usually like wrapped in well written emails: Alastair Sloan from Spread The Noise. Curious to find out more about what he’s doing, I wrote him an email and he was nice enough to answer some of my questions.

Describing his company as a “music marketing agency specializing in digital relations”, Alastair explained to me via email that he got his start because his own music blog, Noise Porn, received so many poorly written pitches that he recognized a need in the market.

Alastair also mentioned that he doesn’t have any formal marketing or communications training, but rather draws on his experience as a music blogger and from time spent working for newspapers and the PR department of a major organization. I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future, as PR education programs start to focus on production and internships rather than teaching the theory, while many more self-taught online communicators will have the skill and self-confidence to start their own companies or enter the working world.

Since I’ve always got an interest in how artists feel about giving away their music for free, I asked Alastair for his thoughts on it.

“It tends to be larger labels with an established position within the industry who are less keen to give away music”, he wrote. “Sometimes I convince them; sometimes I don’t. The important issue to point out here is that the business model of the record industry can have a ‘free’ aspect to it. Building your profile online can lead to more gigs, and more money. And building that profile is a lot easier if you’re prepared to give away something to the bloggers.” He goes on to mention that in a lot of cases, the artists he represents are actually paying him to see that their music is given away to the blogs, quite the reverse of the traditional model.

His parting advice for others wanting to reach out to bloggers and the online community is to be personable and not too formal. “Follow up your emails, and show you care”, he says. He also adds that if you are a large PR agency, you shouldn’t be sending the same formal news release to blogs that you would send to more traditional publications.

From what I can tell, this British bloke seems to be doing pretty well for himself, so go check out SpreadTheNoise.com to see for yourself.

For some more posts on music blogging from BlogCampaigning, check out A Round Table of Music Blogging Knights and Music Blogging: Posting, Pitching and PR

-Parker

Congrats to a few members of the BlogCampaigning crew:

The official notice of Heather Morrison’s new position at Sequentia Environics went out (over the newswire, no less) last week, saying that she’ll “supervise the daily operations and performances of client service teams.” A good move indeed; Sequentia is  a digital communications firm that “focuses on the online relationships between companies and their customers.” It’s also part of the Environics Group.

In other celebratory news, Jens “Schredd” Schroeder sent me an email last week to say that he handed in his doctoral thesis last Monday. “I can’t really believe it’s over… ” he wrote. “But I suppose you never reach the point where you’re convinced that it’s the right moment to hand in a project of this size.” The paper is titled ‘Killer Games’ versus ‘We Will Fund Violence’ :The Perception of Digital Games and Mass Media in Germany and Australia, and Jens is hoping to make it available here on BlogCampaigning sometime soon.

-Parker

Last week, I realized that there was an error with BlogCampaigning’s RSS feed. Although some feedreaders were still able to grab the content, others were getting XML Parsing Errors.

As I often do when I get a warning message I don’t quite understand, I Google it. Chances are, someone else has had the same problem as me and figured it out.

Quick Online Tips helped me fix the problem. The error was caused by some blank spaces in one of my .php files. Since I often muck around in the theme, this could easily have been caused by me or one of the plugins I added.

Going through thousands of lines of code didn’t seem like a good way to spend my afternoon, so I installed the Fix RSS Plugin. It scanned all my code, and quickly fixed the error. While the appeal for a $4.99 donation to the creator of the plugin is the first time I’ve seen something like that in Wordpress, I think it is worth the money.

The lesson to learn here is that even if you think your site is working perfectly, other people might be having problems with it. After making any major changes, you need to thoroughly check to make sure everything works (or have a good team of writers that occasionally check things for you).

Thanks for reading BlogCampaigning—and if you notice any other errors, let me know!

Cheers,

-Parker

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the case of a journalist that had posted a copy of my friend’s news release as if it was his own article.

This got me thinking:

The smart newspaper editor (or whatever the title of the guy who is in charge of the copy on a newspaper’s website) might see this and start to look at his website traffic more closely. If he was really smart, and had the right information, he’d begin to find out whether it was the articles written by journalists or the news releases written by PR pros and simply posted by journalists that got the most traffic.

The smart editor would also have to pay attention to the types of traffic he was attracting. 1000 visitors that don’t click on ads or otherwise generate revenue are worth less than the one visitor that buy’s a print subscription to the newspaper, clicks on an ad or otherwise helps them keep the lights on and server running.

The smart PR pro might then realize that they could tilt the balance of things in their favor by writing news releases that can be easily re-purposed by journalists, and that will also result in revenue-generating traffic. It is probably easier said than done, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

And is it a slippery slope, as Todd Defren writes? Definitely.

-Parker

I have been listening to a lot of NPR’s On The Media podcasts on my way to and from work.  A few weeks ago the show focused on the past, present and future of books, and ultimately the publishing industry as a whole. The November 27th podcast, “Book It”, talked about the rising number of new books hitting the shelves every year, and how this number would inevitably increase with the influx of scanned content, e-books, and do-it-yourself publishing. This “content overload” (half a million books published each year) has led to the invention of new business models for publishing and selling written work. One publishing company looking to capitalize on this shift is OR Books, an alternative publisher that is highly selective, publishing only one or two books per month. There are a few things that set this type of model apart from the HarperCollinses of the world.

First, they sell directly to you, the consumer. By cutting out the middleman (i.e., Chapters and even Amazon), they are able to keep costs low and print-on-demand or sell content as e-books. Getting rid of storage and additional print costs means less expensive books for you.

Second, by keeping overhead costs low, OR Books is able to offer writers between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of publicity for each book. As co-owner John Oakes puts it “you’re more likely to see a Unicorn than a non-celebrity author who has had that kind of publicity commitment from his/her publisher“. They are also experimenting with digital channels like Facebook, Twitter, and online publications like BoingBoing and Alternet.

Third, because OR Books is focusing on one or two books per month, the consumer can foster an expectation of the quality and progressive content published. John and his co-founder Colin Robinson have previous experience in politics, history, cultural analysis, popular science, and various forms of literature, including science fiction and translation. They intend to continue to rely on their publishing expertise in these areas.

So far, John notes the experience has “been thrilling, really, to see how quickly consumers have embraced this concept. We’ve had many thousands of orders, with only a few people even raising the question of why we don’t sell via Amazon or any other retailer” While this changed December 1st, when their latest book, Going Rouge, hit stores, it seems like both consumers and producers of the written work stand to benefit from publishers like OR Books.

On a personal level, I often have a hard time sorting through the millions of books to choose from, and will definitely check back on OR Books’ site for their “book of the month”.

Still not sold? Check out their video: