March 29th, 2012, 1 Comment »
I try not to write these inward-looking, inside-baseball posts anymore, but I’ve been wondering about this one for a while. I know few people want to read blog posts about blogging, but throw me a bone.
Michael asks a question that I’ve been wondering about for a while: “should you close comments on older blog posts?”. This September, this blog will be ten years old (the site itself is a couple of years older). I’ve published roughly 5600 posts over that period. A handful of them remain–relative to the others–quite popular.
Why are they popular? Because they accidentally appear high in the results for related searches. For example, last year nearly 25,000 people searched for some variation of “worst baby name ever” and found this paltry post from 2005. It has 910 comments on it.
Lately, this longer piece about Freedom 55 Financial has attracted lots of comments. 5000 people visited it last year, and it’s up 286 comments, mostly of the highly incendiary variety. For search, the most popular post on my site remains this 2005 post about textual tattoos. Over its seven-year lifespan, nearly 750,000 people have viewed it, and 100 have commented.
Any site publisher or blogger has pages like this, where a long tail of visitors carries on and on and on. A page on Michael’s site, for example, has become host to a discussion of tax software. My favourite is probably this one where 101 commenters have shared their weird, creepy tales of sleep paralysis.
There’s over 40,000 comments in all. I wonder who has written more words on this site: me or all the commenters put together?
The deal I made with the Internet
When I started writing this site, what deal did I make with the Internet? When I say ‘the Internet’, I mean all the people who, in the ensuing decade, would visit and possibly comment on this site.
Did I, for example, guarantee that the information I published would remain timely and accurate? I hope not, because much of it is out of date and, in many cases, totally wrong. And some of the sites I linked to are gone. For very boring reasons, I’ve been revisiting some of the very oldest posts on this site. As part of that work, I’ve been sampling the links I’d published in 2002 and 2003. As of now, 48 of 74 old links are still live. Am I going to try to fix those other 26 links? Nope.
And what about the ad hoc communities that form around these unexpectedly evergreen blog posts? Advice is shared and debates rage without any input from me. Why wouldn’t I leave comments open?
The only reason might be comment spam. While Akismet does a fantastic job of killing 99% of spammy comments to this site. 99.93%, to be exact, which means that it’s handled about 2.2 million spammy comments since I installed it in 2006. That 0.07% still represents 10 or 15 spam comments that I have to manually remove every day. It’s less than five minutes of work, and not a burden at the moment.
Occasionally, a commenter thinks better of what they’ve written on this site, and emails and asks me to remove their messages. I’m usually happy to do this.
So, until I get busier or lazier, comments will remain open on all the blog posts on this site. Those ongoing discussions don’t particularly interest me, but nor do they feel like a burden.
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November 19th, 2008, 1 Comment »
The Northern Voice 2009 website has been launched. And, thanks to Alexa Booth, it is a serious improvement on previous years. Additionally, the committee is now accepting speaker submissions. The deadline for submissions is December 19, 2008.
Given my relocation to Victoria and busyness, I’m taking a year off from the organizing committee. We’ve got a schwack of great new organizers this year though, with fresh blood and ideas. I’m planning on attending the conference and volunteering on the day. I may try to organize a panel or something, time-permitting. I’ve been kicking around some ideas about the social media sphere and maturity.
It is thrilling to see how our little conference has grown since its humble origins in 2005 (website only sort of works).
1 Comment »
February 8th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Disclaimer: Regular readers know that I have some issues with financial institutions. The Royal Bank is no exception.
James pointed me at the Royal Bank’s newest social media nugget: RBC p2p. Here’s the blurb:
RBC p2p is a Royal Bank of Canada site for students and by students. This is where you’ll learn about budgeting for books and maybe a reading week vacation. This is where you can ask how to save money when your next paycheque will be 3 digits (it can be done). This is where you can read about people diving for change in the couch, without shame.
Before discussing where they went wrong, I do want to first applaud the sentiment. They appear to be seriously trying this conversational marketing stuff, and getting student bloggers to write first-hand about personal finance is a smart approach.
It’s just that the implementation, by Delvenia Interactive, needs some help:
- Though they recently picked six student bloggers–actual humans–most of the site’s photos are of ethnically diverse, attractive young models. The bloggers themselves are less representative–five dudes and a dudette, sans visible minorities.
- The site design is a bit too Degrassi Junior High for my liking.
- Where is the integration with other social media channels? Why aren’t there videos on YouTube and embedded in the site? How about photos from Flickr? Or updates from Twitter? They have a sizable Facebook general RBC student group (are a bunch of images broken for you too on that group, or is it just my dodgy connection?), but nothing specific to RBCp2p. Plus, there are no links to Facebook or badges on the site. They’re blogging like all those services don’t exist–like it’s 2003 (the name doesn’t help in that respect). Lots of companies have already made this mistake–why repeat it?
- It’s about students blogging, but the blog isn’t on the front page. Maybe that’ll change once they officially launch on March 1.
- The design is a bit b0rked on Firefox on my Mac. Good thing no students are using that browser-OS combination, eh?
- No RSS on the front page, and the blog RSS feed is excerpts only. Boo.
- Does anybody else find this a little creepy: “The bloggers are now in blogging boot camp, being trained by the RBC p2p host, Michel Savoie.” That reads to me like “The bloggers are now being indoctrinated by Royal Bank staff to ensure they remain on message at all times.”
Surmountable Problems
Fortunately, none of those issues are insurmountable. You could correct them without too much pain or effort.
Unfortunately, it sounds like their blogger search campaign was wanting. From a recent article which discusses various Royal Bank marketing efforts:
RBCp2p.com, also developed with Delvinia, went live in time for the back-to-school season, with former college student Michel Savoie as host. The bank is offering a laptop, digital cameras and part-time wages for six postsecondary student bloggers who will represent their peers on RBCp2p.com, with winners announced in January. Users uploaded videos to the site until the end of October, while Savoie hit the road to capture on-the-spot video submissions at various campuses. By mid-November, the site was hosting pages and pages of user-generated videos by students pitching themselves for the job, while RBC encouraged visitors to rate submissions – many of which racked up hundreds of views.
‘Hundreds of views’? Any marketer knows about the usual numerical amplification that goes on with this sort of thing. I’m guessing by ‘hundreds’ that they mean, at most, 200. And that’s being generous. Either they made a mistake in disclosing those numbers, or in running a campaign which displayed the meagre number of views the videos were receiving.
Seriously. This is the Royal Bank. They had a record year for earnings in 2007 (a mere $5.5 billion). They surely have enough money or marketing savvy to, you know, push those views into the ‘thousands’?
I hope I’m wrong, and that after they launch, they demonstrate more savvy than I’m seeing. And I hope they’re successful with their target demographic. University students (or, you know, recent graduates) out there, what do you think?
UPDATE: Todd points out two other peculiarities. The Royal Bank has a trademark symbol beside ‘p2p’ (though they don’t list it on their trademarks page). Todd also remarks (I can’t find this, specifically, but I suspect I’m just missing it): “one terms of service for the blogs and another for the RSS”.
6 Comments »
September 11th, 2007, 6 Comments »
I was just over at From the Grey Box, a blog entirely about what a guy finds in his apartment building’s ‘free box’:
Look, I know for a fact at least a few of my friends check out this blog occasionally. I also know for a fact that at least one person I don’t even really know checks out this blog occasionally (that would be my friend Liz’s friend, to whom Liz introduced me as “the guy with the grey box blog” (I’m paraphrasing), which friend said he checked out my blog occasionally, which made him the first person I’ve met who’s read my blog before actually meeting me, which I’m not sure what I think about this.
I left a comment, which I thought bore repeating. I’ve tweaked it a bit:
As a, er, student of all this blogging stuff, I’ve observed a recurring theme: there comes a time in every blogger’s life when they recognize, for the first time, that strangers read their blog. Or they discover that a particular peer group–say, their workmates–know about and read their blog, despite their not having revealed it to them.
The response, especially among personal diarists, is often to immediately shut down their blog and start again, anonymously.
It’s like being on stage, and looking out into the audience expecting only to see friends and family. All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of strangers looking back at you.
Maybe this has been one of the appeals of Facebook (and previous such networks)–that you can have precise control over your audience?
6 Comments »
August 8th, 2007, 1 Comment »
I’ve been running around comme un poulet sans tete, and trying to recover from jet lag. Things may not improve on the blogging front until the weekend. I’m working on it.
1 Comment »
August 4th, 2007, 6 Comments »
For a couple of weeks, while doing the dinner dishes, I’d watch some of Inside the Actor’s Studio on YouTube. It’s pretty much the only celebrity interview I can watch, because it’s mostly a discussion of craft, instead traffic violations and adopted babies.
At the end of each interview, before the guest takes questions from the student audience, inscrutable host James Lipton asks them ten questions. The questions are apparently Proustian, and based on a similar practice by French TV host Bernard Pivot.
Becky answered those ten questions recently, and seeing as it’s Saturday and all, I figured I’d do the same:
- What is your favorite word? Serendipity
- What is your least favorite word? Tumour
- What turns you on? Originality
- What turns you off? Bureaucracy
- What sound or noise do you love? The jungle at night
- What sound or noise do you hate? A Harley Davidson engine
- What is your favorite curse word? Bollocks
- What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Archaeologist
- What profession would you not like to do? Surgeon
- If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?“Nice work”
The Q & A that Lipton does is quick and fairly spontaneous, so I tried not to dwell on the questions.
And here’s a Fowleresque request–if you like, answer these ten questions in the comments, or on your own blog.
6 Comments »