Nandini

Like many others I thought that Yahoo had the smartest media plan among the trio of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The media calls Yahoo’s plan of flying under the radar while the other two took all the spotlight heat a smart plan. I like What Yahoo is doing in Web 2.0 space. But I am not too positive with Yahoo’s plans for offering a solid challenge to Google in the Affiliate Advertising Business. It was also kind of dumb on the company’s part to openly acknowledge that Google was better in Search. After that fiasco, comes this.

Google Adsense is the top affiliate programs for online publishers with virtually no challenges from any other programs. Yahoo came in to this lucrative (an understatement actually) business a bit late and with a rider. The Beta version of the Yahoo Publisher Network was open to U.S. Publishers only. Lately many threads at various forums have popped up that few people have been banned from the YPN because of international traffic, which was a breach of their TOS.

The TOS states...

Section 11.l
Abuse of Services. You agree not to:
display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;

What I don’t get is why Yahoo! is hell bent on rubbishing its tag of “smartness”? First, this policy of excluding non-US users is silly. Secondly if had to do it it can do it itself by Geo-Targeting or even displaying Public Service Ads or no ads to non-US users.

Google might not be true today to its motto ” Don`t be evil”. Take the Google China episode for example. But it is way ahead in its key business. It is also way ahead with its unique brand of PR, for example, its refusal to bow down to the U.S. authorities on the search data episode. Google has banned users from its Adsense program but the public has not heard of any thing other than Click-frauds.
Now is the Time for Yahoo to step up, stop trying to be a mere smooth media operator and do some quick brand-loyalty-building exercises.

Anyways discussion continues at...
Digital Point Forums
WebmasterWorld

via Problogger

This post is inspired by a column in SFBG by Tim Redmont, where Tim gets kinda sick of ‘Craig Newmark’s Community BS’. Tim argues. He says he find it nearly impossible to believe community advice from Craig Newmark.



Tim goes on ranting,

How, exactly, does a San Francisco outfit moving into, say, Burlington, Vt. and threatening to eviscerate the local alternative newspaper, help build community? If he’s such an altruist, why does he have to keep expanding like a typical predatory chain? We all get the need for online ads and community sites now; why not let the folks in Burlington (or wherever) build their own? Why not (gasp) help them, instead of using his clout to hurt them?



This isn’t such a radical idea. Check out the blog world, where the best political bloggers don’t try to corner the market - they encourage others to start their own blogs.

It was quiet interesting to see Newspaper Editors getting so afraid of online communities that their arguments become garbled.



Here are my answers to these questions (although they were asked to Craig):



Community means participation. The old top-down approach of newspapers won’t do. Think about this. Have you heard about any communities of readers of Wall Street Journal Readers or New York Times? The participatory nature of all Craig list sites makes them stand apart. Just check out the Discussion Forums, personals and so on. If this is not a community, then what is? And remember most of these services are free except a few. They are also very cost effective compare to other media. The Spartan look of the site doesn’t scare the normal user.

Newspapers owners and editors are so dependent on their old models, that it takes real guts to think of new model. Where do you start from?



I have some suggestions

1. You have to do something about those fancy offices, and expensive pay packets. Forget all about that celebrity status.

2. Get serious about your online plans, instead of cursing Craig Newmark.



Do it fast, citizen journalism is not going to knock but break your fat doors.

Our dear blogger Jonty got struck today in the Metro train in West Delhi. While it was - “an experience of lifetime” for him, but our Editor, Pramit didn’t miss the opportunity to do the Live Blogging on his expense. This post at Indiadaily is based on the SMSs sent by Jonty to Pramit explaining the reasons why he would be late. But he converted his excuse into an opportunity to live blogging. Jokes apart, around 4 trainload of passengers were offloaded on either line on morning rush hour.

We have also done live blogging during the Delhi Bomb blasts in November 2005. If blogging has to evolve from the format of mere personal diaries, it will have to do more and more such news like stuff. First person experience reporting, maybe that’s where blogging will have an edge over other traditional reporting formats.

Everyone says the Blogosphere is expanding. But not really. Actually, the growth of number of blogs has exceeded the growth of blog readers. The Blogosphere is expanding more on the blogs axis, but a little slow in the other one. Hence we hear Blog network owners and bloggers complaining since everyone now wants a share in the apple pie. Even the established networks will start to feel the heat, since readers will be distributed in the future more among emerging players.



Though its true that more and more readers are fast picking up the blogs ditching the loyality of traditional media, the rate of growth has to be increased. The readership pie must expand more and quickly.



When we started Instablogs Network, we were labelled as First Indian Blog Network by many peers.



Paul Scrivs once commented on us. -

Instablogs did a genius job of drawing hype, not necessarily in the Western Hemisphere, but actually getting the people of India excited to see their own entry in the blogging arena. If you can get a small percentage of a country with over 1 billion people in it excited, you know you have something good going on.

Though it was intended as satire, there is a very useful hidden thought. If it could be explored further, it could help the blogosphere grow in both directions. It is quiet true that most of our traffic comes from the western hemisphere, which initially surprised us. We expected at least 25% traffic from India and other developing countries, but we found that even our India-centric Indiadaily blog has 80% readership from the Western Hemisphere. My point is: it’s high time we need to get more people from the developing countries to the blogging arena, and help catalyze the uniform growth of readership from all over the globe. It goes without saying that blogs are also the best way to give the ‘teeming’ billions a free voice.



It does not surprise that most of the bloggers are young. The older generation is highly opinionated and experienced in their respective fields. But they are not very comfortable with blogging. Few months ago when I was delivering a presentation on blogging, young journalists who were keen to shift to blogging found most of the blogging tools and jargons confusing, whether it was uploading an image or understanding common stuff like Trackbacks and Permalinks. If young journalists get hassled intially, you can very well imagine the state of mind of our elders.



I have said before that web 2.0 is not all about Ajax, CSS, big fonts or bright colors. it is about Social Networking. It is about people discovering other people’s work. I did an experiment with one of my blogs - Unholywars, which is about Human Rights and Terrorism. The Author is a senior journalist, full of powerful ideas and opinion, but makes simple mistakes like uploading wrong files, or not giving right links etc. He takes an awful more time than us young folks to ‘really’ grasp blogging. This is understandable. Our generation is used to it now.



There are many easy blogging tools, and after spending just a couple of hours you can start working on your own blog. But what also holds back many -would-be bloggers is the scary thought of competing with the zillions and gazillions of competing blogs. Now, opinions are competing for attention.



I feel it is the job of Blog Network owners to increase the readership-pie rather than concentrate on getting existing readers only. It is clear that 1 billions blogs also means 1 billion blog readers. We must encourage and nurture more and more bloggers, wherever they reside.

If you have blogs, you must also deal with the memes. A new one comes up every day. The latest meme: Blog Networks will go down in 2006. All the ‘pundits’ are saying this thing. Their reasons: Where is the money? How will you pay your writers? The Western Hemisphere can be a very expensive place to live in.

Work Boxers, Andy Hagans, Barry Bell, Nick Wilson all have some thought provoking points.

Nick in comments stokes the fire by saying that the big boys are coming.

But the Big Boys have arrived much earlier; The Guardian has very fine blogs. So does CNET and many papers in the States. Even the New York Times is said to be delving into blogs. Guardian, CNET, MSNBC and many more have sensed the market and are already in here for their share. My point being - the blogosphere is not about big companies or Blog networks, but the bloggers themselves. I will say it again; the writer of the best story will be the winner of the day, and that makes the blogosphere a rocking place. This writer could be anyone; he could be a seasoned journalist from a big media house or could be novice who has just arrived at the gates of blogosphere. The internet has given us a voice and our challenge as blog entrepreneurs is to find profitable ways of channeling great content from this new breed of individual publishers.

This might start a controversy. But the truth needs to be told - if Blog Networks have to remain profitable they have to follow some strict guidelines of keeping the cost low, and keep producing the quality content on a regular basis. Andy Hagans has done a good job through his Network BizNicheMedia by selecting high CPM niche blogs and outsourcing the content to the third world countries. Paul Scrivs, and Mike Rundel have devised a Community over their Network, which binds their users and readership more closely.

Now is the right time for us Blog network owners to realize that just listing various blogs under one umbrella is not going to do any good for blogs. You don’t go to Wonkette because it is part of Gawker. Our networks must provide some good reasons for bloggers and writers to join them. Revenue sharing won’t be the best suited for each Blog network, though I have heard it is doing okay for the B5media guys. But still I feel that a Blog network should be able to provide either financial security to the bloggers or drive substantial traffic to them.

We at Instablogs are constantly working to provide both these things to our bloggers - financial security and traffic. You are able to give your best only when you are in a peaceful state of mind. And with the Instablogs Community we would be able to give them a platform where their content gets a response in various rewarding ways. You will soon find out more about this.

Wouldn’t you agree with me when I say: Better interactivity builds better communities?

Its been almost a week since the launch of 9rules Community. Been hell lot of busy this week, couldn’t get time to post something about it earlier. 9rules is growing at an amazing pace. And the 9rules Community could be the peacock feather on their hat. The Community currently has two main sections, Browse and Featured. All of the blogs are listed under various tags, and you can browse through the current posts of each blogs by browsing the tags. While Featured sections are the posts written by the 9rules members. The community no doubt will bring the readers and writers of the network more closer. More visibility for everyone, the bloggers will get their updated posts in the eyes of readers browsing the tabs, while readers now don`t have to search all blogs to find what they want to read, they can pick their tags.



Web 2.0, in my opinion is all about Social Networking. You need to make your social network more powerful to serve it better. Currently, most of the blog networks are just listing all blogs under their right-hand or left-hand bar. 9rules showcases the content of blogs to readers more effectively. Mike Rundel at Businesslogs has hinted about more features like user profiles, active caching of user sites, and advance search, all will lead to more powerful social network.



For a blog reader, who is interested in a particular topic or a blog, flagship of the blog or the blog network which owns the blog does not matter for much. An established Blog Network can only give a new blog an initial boost of traffic or give blogs its link value (which gets diminished day by day due to the ever-changing algorithm of Search Engines). A Blog Network doesn’t serve much purpose unless it’s able to nurture a strong feel of a community among all the network participants or until it highlights the individual blogs more effectively. Gawker Media has done extremely well by building a unique style (that is, its unique voice) which can be seen among all its blogs. Weblogsinc, being an early starter was able to rub off the link popularity of its highly successful blogs on other blogs, and hence was able to get the high Search Engine Traffic. With changing times, it’s very important to form a Blog Community rather than a Blog Network.



We launched the Instablogs Community on 1st January 2006. As of now, it is not open for the public. Ankit and his team are busy adding all the bells and whistles. I needn’t remind his team that we need to hasten things up.

Andy Hagans of Performancing asked for my interview. It was hard saying no to him. So if you are interested in my banter. Check it out at Performancing.

Tuesday I will be attending an open debate organized by N Ram, Editor of The Hindu, widely read news daily in India, and one my favourites when I was in college. The debate is also attended by two eminent personalities from The Guardian including Ian Meyes. The debate will be on ‘The future of the newspaper vis-a-vis the new-age information tools’ - i.e. online news reportage and blogs.



Collecting a few thoughts.



In India senior journalists and editors are quite confident that blogging won’t be posing any threat to newspapers just as the satellite TV wasn’t able to do it. The newspapers didn’t face real threat when the satellite television invaded our bedrooms with news coverage from all over the world some two decades back. Why?



1. Though news changed as the news broke, yet, it couldn’t give a summary of the background leading to the news every time. You couldn’t go back as you wished to get a deeper analysis of any event.



2. The news was not customizable. E.g. if you wanted to hear news about say weather or sports, and there is a big political story going on, you had to wait till the story is covered and only then the weather or sports news is broadcasted. With newspapers, you can choose what you want to read first. Newspapers gave you the option that news channels didn’t.



3. If you missed a news item, you had to wait till the news bulletin is broadcasted.



4. TVs are not really portable. You can’t carry them on your laps or under your armpits to places.



5.When satellite channels started broadcasting news 24 X 7, we had to depend on cables to get the feeds.



Now, will it be the same for the newspapers in the face of adversaries like online news content and blogs?



Yes, in my opinion, the impact will be nothing short of significant for the newspapers. Why?



a.) Social networking. It was the same thing that put fear in the hearts of Encarta and Britannica from Wikipedia. With newspapers, no doubt you can put news in front of masses but blogging brought the masses to work on news and distribute among ourselves which actually paved the way for unbiased two way information exchange among the people and put the power back into the hands of masses. Now you don’t need to wait for your letter to be published in the newspaper, neither you have to search for a source to raise your opinion. Blogging gave you the power to express yourself, and not be censored or edited by the editors and corporates. Not only you can blog your opinion on your own, you can go and agree or disagree with others on their blogs via comments and trackbacks.



b) Every man is an expert in his own field. Could the senior journalist and editors who have working for years and years in news business be beaten by young and novice bloggers? At first impression it seems highly unlikely. But let’s scrap the surface a little. N Ram whom I greatly admire for his columns in The Hindu. The quality of his writing, narration is second to none. Similar are the other senior journalists. But these newspaper were left as only spectators during Iraq War, when the layman didn`t know whom to believe with Al-Jazeera on one hand spewing venom against the west, and FOX News that was dishing ridiculously opinionated news against Iraqi Government, it was Salam Pax whom the world read with some trust, because he was the one who was witnessing fireworks and facing the sufferings.



c) Choice: The internet provides us with choice of information that is beyond any measure. Like, we can keep hopping endlessly from one site to another reading, viewing or hearing different opinions from different quarters about a single thing. With newspapers it is possible only to a very small extent, but then too it is not viable for the general public. You just can’t buy a newspaper and throw it away after having a glance like you can close a window if you didn’t like a certain thing.



d) Two way Interaction. You can post your comments/opinions and hear on what people have to say on your views.



e) Winner of the moment. Future trend will be that whoever has the best story will be the king for the day, be it an individual blogger reporting from a war zone or someone who just witnessed a bomb blast in front of his eyes. The days when a certain media publishing house was considered to be the best amongst equals are over. Today everything depends on the content - its quality, its relevance, its speed and accessibility.



f) Costs: The cost of running a newspaper is, well, beyond the reach of a common man. But it hardly costs a dime to have your own blog and run it. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to be an Einstein to maintain a blog, anybody who can work on a computer can do it, be it a computer whiz or a kid who loves games or a homemaker who wants to share her recipe.



g) Voice: Though the language in blogs may be a bit stronger than what you read in newspapers, the best things about blogs are that they are individual (and sometimes collective) opinions and not the opinion of a certain editor with long scissors. This way you get a more or less unbiased opinion on a certain issue reading blogs of various bloggers that newspapers seldom can.