The thinking behind Web 2.0 seems to be that anyone can create something successful and with user created content anyone can be become a star. Web 2.0 has done one thing really well and that’s given most of us a false sense of confidence in becoming big. If MySpace can create a piece of garbage and get over 60 million people to use it then just imagine what I could do with a half-decent designer and a programmer? Flickr and del.icio.us have tagging so if I add it to my site that’s guaranteed to make the masses happy. Or maybe I just need to create a site where the users do all the work and I collect the ad revenue.
This is the thinking of a lot of sites. They don’t breakdown why the successful companies have made it big. They only seem to breakdown what they think they can do versus what is already out there. Copying another site might guarantee you the same functionality, but it doesn’t grant you the same value.
Here are two of the video podcasting superstarts today, Ask A Ninja and ZeFrank:
Now these two shows have 100s of thousands of viewers and with those kinds of numbers it’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of starting your own podcast. Maybe you heard that in one week Rocketboom made $40k (doesn’t happen every week) and that is just even more incentive to go grab your camera and go to town. Again though we are forgetting the rules of the game. People only care about what is valuable to them. If it doesn’t add value to their lives their is no point in them paying attention to it.
Ask A Ninja, ZeFrank and Rocketboom have high-entertainment value for people so they watch them, link to them and talk about them. Just like with blogging, anyone can do it, but not everyone can be great at it. Some people have the talent while others don’t. The rules of entertainment haven’t changed, just the tools people use to create it.
You won’t find many references to ScrivsTyme around the web and the show is over 5 months old now. During that time though the show has garnered over 30k regular listeners and 100s of thousands of pageviews a month. How? Word-of-mouth. Nothing fancy and it kind of happened on its own since Tyme and I were focused on creating a great show to listen to. People like the show and tell their friends because of the value it brings their lives. Best type of promotion you could ever ask for and now we just have to start on the online promotion trail, but that’s the easy part.
MySpace got a little lucky because Friendster dropped the ball with lousy service and they were wise enough to get the right people on board first. Connections are even more important in this new era than ever before. Get a link on TechCrunch and that’s a mini-boost initially. Maybe if you are nice to Arrington that is a connection you can milk down the road. Myspace created social value for individuals with the connections that could be made.
That’s one thing people underestimate with 9rules and that’s the connections we are making. Imagine having 250+ contacts with the ability to spread the word about something you are excited about just one email away. Not just any type of person, but people that are influential in their fields and passionate about what they do. I think that is what threw people off when 9rules first launched. Everyone looked for the bottom-line first and without realizing that value isn’t always monetary. Now 9rules has a lot more revenue options than it did when we first launched simply because of the new avenues we have opened up and that is something that I don’t think could’ve been done if we solely focused on advertising and monetizing things. Same can be said with Myspace. Instead of worrying what’s the best place to put an ad they have the enviable task of figuring out how to monetize a site with 60 million people involved.
Digg doesn’t have the luxury of 60 million users, but it’s still no small fry when compared to other sites on the web. It’s content model is entirely based around user-generated content and giving the power to the users is a very enticing proposition for any site owner. That’s why it’s not hard to imagine why you see so many Digg clones popping up today, but they can’t provide the value that Digg currently offers. Digg can offer value in both its community and the amount of traffic it can send a site. And don’t go around thinking for one second that Kevin Rose was a nobody before he started Digg, the guy had some pull.
If you think about any modern sport and its history, you soon realize that the basic rules of the game never change. Sure little rules are added and changed over time, but a homerun in baseball still means you get to round the bases. What changes though are the tools used to play the game. They get more sophisticated as time passes just like the tools of the web. Web 2.0 never changed the rules on what makes something successful, it simply gave us more tools to play the game.
Believe it or not, I didn’t always use to be a kickass designer. Before all the fancy graphics hit this site I use to be a minimalist. There was so much beauty and functionality in just getting down to the root of a site and that was the draw. I am an aesthetic fiend, but the beauty of design for me lies in the architecture.
So with this in mind Wisdump goes back to my minimalist roots of almost nothing on a page. No matter what I do or try to accomplish with a given design I am always drawn back to this aesthetic. Oreo CEO has the longest running design of almost any site I have ever designed simply because it accomplishes its goals without adding anything unnecessarily.
Understandably this re-redesign took all of 10 minutes to do up after realizing all that I cared about on this site was:
- The latest entry.
- Sponsors.
- Logo identity.
Of course that leaves out search, about page, contact page, advertising page and archives so in some way those will have to be integrated. Maybe I will just add a super thin sidebar or put in one of those cool new footers that all the design kiddies seem to be using. This entry wasn’t meant to say look at me, look at me because in many cases this design falls apart (browsing, SEO, etc.) It was to remind that whenever I want something a bit fancier to try and trick Rundle into doing it.
Last February, I gave a less than glowing review of the old 9rules homepage. I really loved the design when it was finished, but after hearing how many people thought too much was going on I started to understand where they were coming from.
Fortunately, Mike Rundle (does he ever drop a design that isn’t hot?), understood the public’s reaction and we went back to the drawing board. We could’ve released another version of the homepage a week later and were very close to doing so, but realized that changing too quickly can wear people down and we did not want that to happen. We also knew we had some new things planned for 9rules and when I did the initial skeletons of the site, we found that these new features enhanced the homepage tremendously.
Looking at the screenshot of the previous 9rules you can see aesthetically it is a nice looking site. The problem was it was a very busy, nice-looking site. Instead of being able to scan the page you almost got lost in it to the point where you just wanted to get away before your brain exploded so our first goal was to simplify things. Here is what we came up with:
So even though we added a whole new dimension to the site, 9rules Notes, we were able to compact the page and make it easy for your eyes to skim. There are still some adjustments to be made such as short descriptions of what each column represents and a couple more stylings, but we are very happy with what we were able to achieve by subtracting from the previous design.
So please go check it out and take a tour for yourself and post some Notes and thanks for the incredible feedback after our last redesign. Without it we might not have been able to achieve what we did today.
Before the first bubble burst we saw companies popping up left and right with no real viable business plan, but a lot of money backing them up. We all know what happened and would like to think that those mistakes won’t be made twice. However, in this era if you visit any of the Web 2.0 (at 9rules we call it Web++ because it’s going to keep on changing anyways) news sites it seems that even more “companies” are being formed than before and even though not all receive the same hype they all get their 2 minutes of fame (the time it takes to read the entry). However, after the 2 minutes how many really thrive afterwards?
Everyone is so quick to go, go, go that they don’t realize it isn’t always who gets the fastest start, but who actually ends up finishing the race. What is the ratio of successful startups today do you think? How many just flounder off to nothingness?
Did you hear the big news that came out yesterday? SixApart released MovableType 3.3 and MovableType Enterprise and if you didn’t hear about it don’t be so surprised because I was only able to catch it on one site. The reason this might have been was because they didn’t do it through a blog entry, but through a Press Release. A Press Release…
Now I have nothing against Press Releases as I know many bloggers who use them to get the word out to traditional media, but for some reason I was under the impression that the company that essentially established the blogging world would complement a Press Release with a blog entry where users and the general public could at least leave trackbacks. They used to do stuff like this, but I can’t remember when they stopped since nothing newsworthy has been really happening over there (with the exception of TypePad outages).
Maybe this is the sign that shows they have truly given up on the last set of users still willing to use their product, which was never bad, but simply needed improvements. Maybe the community was just too harsh towards Mena so she figured in March that she would just give it all up. Do I think every company should start a blog? Of course not, but do I think a company who’s products and services revolve around blogging software should blog? Hell yeah.
So if you use MovableType there is an upgrade out there in case you didn’t know. If you are a company looking into blogs there is now an Enterprise version which has Oracle support. If you are anyone else you will find better alternatives around the web.
At least they’re still making money right?
Note: One from the lost archives with some new content added for relevance today.
I was browsing the Sitepoint forums trying to get some ideas about what I could write about when I came across a thread that talked about major sites using CSS. Half-way down the page I come across this statement:
Tables are so much easier to use. Why would anyone want to move to something harder.
I have no problem with this argument. In fact I would agree that in some situations developing with tables could be easier. My problem is the fear that is laced within the statement.
I hate to generalize, but the majority of old management type people I have come across fear change. They like being settled into a routine that they know they can handle. The same can be said about designers who like to only work with tables. They learned to design using tables and find no reason to change. The problem is that it is hard not to change when the rest of the world is changing around you. For anyone who works in computers there should never be a day where you believe you have learned everything possible. This is why I love computers because I know there is always something new I can teach myself. You cannot fear the unknown, but you must learn to embrace it or you will be left behind.
For the older crowd out there do not fear the young people because you think they will take your jobs. If you are constantly teaching yourself new technologies then you should have nothing to worry about because most of the time you already have a headstart and real world experience. Just do not be scared to keep moving.
If you are a designer who loves to only work with tables because that one time you did try CSS it just didn’t work out then keep doing what you do. Do not get mad however in a couple of years when everyone else is getting the work you think you should be getting. Major sites are already moving their sites over to CSS. The business benefits really are too hard to ignore. Imagine the bandwidth savings Yahoo would get if they moved to CSS.
It is one thing to just jump on every new technology that comes out. That is plain ignorance. But when major companies and most major designers have been moving towards CSS for a couple of years now, it would be foolish to not start tweaking your Knowledge Portfolio to include CSS and all of its benefits.
COBOL was and in many cases still the defacto programming language for business mainframes. I have never come across a twenty-something COBOL programmer. One reason may be that they do not seem to be in high demand and another is that the language is something you just do not hear about anymore. All the COBOL programmers that I know are 40+ years old and the only reason they still program in COBOL is because 1. They have job security or 2. They fear moving to something else because COBOL is what they have been doing. My point is that there are a lot of COBOL programmers out of a job because they feared the unknown. They could not see Java catching on in the business world. It is not like they missed the boat because the boat sits there until you are ready to get on. It is your job to get on.
Learning a new language or technology is like learning to use a new tool. You know the end result that you want to achieve and have been getting that result for 20 years with COBOL. However, what if you find that Java is a better tool for the job and can cut your production time in half. To be honest you would be foolish not use that tool. As someone in the computer industry you should know that for any job you should use the best tools for the job. That is why we have so many programming languages to work with because someone thought they could come up with a better tool. The more tools you learn how to use the better off you will be.
I have a pretty broad technology portfolio. The reason I do is because I love to learn new stuff. When XML first came out I saw the benefits that it had and began diving into the language. The same with Java and PHP. Fortunately, my love for learning new technologies also happens to make me more attractive to our clients. Being scared to learn something new is as foolish as being scared to make money.
CSS is here to stay. XML is here to stay. If you are a web designer you should make it obligatory that you learn these technologies. If you are a Java or C# programmer why not learn some Python and see how it can increase certain parts of your production. See how they can help make your job easier both now and in the future. If you become too scared to learn new things then you are too scared to grow and to be honest if in the future you cannot find work then usually you only have yourself to blame. Love to learn new things even if you already know Ruby and Rails.
In today’s ScrivsTyme my entry on TechCrunch and Basecamp were discussed a bit and the question arose of why we haven’t seen any FeedBurner alternatives yet. Let’s face it, some of us feel more secure about our data when we get to host it so why isn’t there a hosted FeedBurner alternative? I believe Mint has a plugin that track RSS readers, but no matter what I do Mint kills my database.
So is anyone aware of a FeedBurner alternative that accurately tracks your RSS stats? If there isn’t one why do you think no one has taken the plunge to create one yet? With today’s technology you would think something could be whipped up fairly quickly, at least on the backend, but maybe its just not a viable thing to do programatically for some reason.
If you know something please help me out.
Back in April I wrote Being 37signals for Free and it was easily the most popular entry so far this year on the site due to the emotions that a company like 37signals brings up and also the fact that it asked a question that many people themselves had been wondering. Fast forward to last week and TechCrunch reports on a Basecamp alternative that can be hosted and its creator has cited my entry as inspiration for getting the wheels moving. I think that’s pretty cool. It would’ve been better if there wasn’t a need for people to write entries to inspire others, but if it happens then it happens and who am I to complain? In any case, I thought I would do another entry similar to the 37signals one, but this time focusing on TechCrunch (TC).
TC is a great success story. Started a little over a year ago, the site has reached levels of traffic that most of us could only wish for after 5 years of working on a site. The site is frequently updated and seems to have the break on news stories before anyone else. So how do you get like that? Well it takes a lot of different factors to all fall into place and the sad thing is it doesn’t seem to be many of the qualities that we are ourselves work so hard to attain on our own sites. In my mind, what will make a site successful is:
- Quality content
- Fresh content
- A strong voice and personality
- Ability to get the word out on your site
- Knowledge of the topic
The great thing about the web is that anybody can start a site and work to become an expert in whatever genre they choose. TC tackles the Web 2.0 space and many would argue has become the definitive resource for all Web 2.0 news. The problem is that TC isn’t always accurate with its dissection of products. In fact, many times it’s a bit too obvious that the product/service/site that are being written about haven’t really even been reviewed at all. For example, in this entry on FleaFlicker the original copy spoke of the great AJAX work in the FleaFlicker application. Looking at the screenshot you can tell the application has nothing to do with AJAX at all, but is actually a Java applet running.
So I figured something about the site/company had to revolve around AJAX and I went to the site, took the time to setup an account and did a mock draft and guess what? It’s the same Java applet as the one that is shown in the screenshot and it took me 90 seconds to go through the trouble to discover that. Rundle pointed out the error in the entry and his comment was deleted and the entry changed, but I guess that’s another story for another day. The point is, TC has been able to become one of the stops to go for Web 2.0 without ever really being a knowledgeable resource. Would it be possible then to achieve TC status and make a claim for yourself as an expert in the Web 2.0 field?
Brian Benzinger over at Solution Watch probably writes the most indepth reviews of Web 2.0 products anywhere that I have seen, yet his traffic can’t compare to TC’s. Brian unfortunately doesn’t get the scoop as fast as TC and therefore isn’t as frequently updated as TC, but even if he did get the scoop he would be hard pressed to continue producing quality content on his own and pushing it out on a more frequent basis.
The lesson to be learned from TC is that most users love content on a frequent basis. The numbers behind TC, Engadget, Gizmodo, BoingBoing and other frequently updated sites don’t lie. The more unique, fresh content you can produce the better your chances of success. Unfortunately, for many who live at a higher standard this doesn’t play out too well. It doesn’t always have to be accurate and you certainly don’t have to be an expert in the field to be successful, but you do have to give the impression of quality.
Have a strong voice and don’t be afraid to promote you great entries. Don’t run around thinking everything you do is link-worthy, but if there is something you truly believe deserves recognition then don’t hesitate to spread the word. You will find a lot of TC entries make it to the frontpage of Digg and if anyone has ever had their site on Digg you know what kind of boost that presents. Also don’t think you just have to promote to an American audience. Reading the comments on TC there are many Asian-based comments which makes me wonder if they ever purposely did any marketing out in that region. If so it’s a brilliant move.
Finally, treat your readers, audience and peers with the respect they deserve. You don’t have to like everyone and many people will disagree with you, but at the very least show them respect. There are times when people have lost the right to get your respect, but if those times never occur don’t think you are better than the next person because of numbers that you can produce. Mark Fusco has been arguing with me on my site for over 2.5 years now and although we butt heads and don’t see eye-to-eye I respect him more than anyone else around because he gives it to me straight. Yeah, there have been times I have called him names after reading something he wrote, but after the cooldown period I read it again and try to understand where he is coming from. He’s earned my respect and kept it.
So if you want to build a TC the tools are right there in front of you. If you want to build your own unique experience the tools are right there in front of you as well. Just remember though that popularity doesn’t make you an expert and never gives you the right to look down on others.
