October 21st, 2009, No Comments »
Last week was a research-intensive week, and in my online travels I encountered three interesting new blogs. I have little sense of their relative popularity, so apologies if you all have seen them already:
- Regretsy - You’re likeliest to have seen this one, which is kind of a People of Walmart for crafting. The site features the worst and strangest products advertised on Etsy. Speaking as a craft-free zone over here, the site comes off as rather cruel: “ha, ha, look at the crap people are trying to sell”. But, each to their own.
- Hey Oscar Wilde - “This website, now in its tenth incarnation since being launching in June, 1998, is an extension of a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character.” A source of excellent illustration and portraiture work–I quite like this vogon.
- 2000 Dollar Wedding - These folks are, you guessed it, planning their $2000 wedding online. I found this site because she was a Blog Action Day participant.
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March 4th, 2009, 2 Comments »
At Northern Voice, Rob from Techvibes introduced me to Frank, who (I gather) created ZinePal. Here’s the elevator pitch on ZinePal:
Use zinepal.com to create your own magazines or zines for short. Select content from your favorite blogs, websites or RSS feeds and put it in your zine. zinepal.com creates an online version and a printable PDF. Then you print it and read it in your favorite coffee shop, e-mail it to your friends or just let them subscribe to your online zine feed.
There are bunch of these print-your-blog services out there, but what I liked about ZinePal was the sample Frank handed me. It was a two-page version of the recent posts from Kitsilano.ca (another of the aforementioned Rob’s projects). I snapped a photo:
Kitsilano.ca is a hyper-local blog, covering a particular neighbourhood of Vancouver. It’s easy to imagine that they could produce monthly “best of” editions of their blog using ZinePal, and distribute them to local businesses. They could replace the charming but goofy Coffee News (I recently took a photo of that publication as well). Local businesses could buy a combo advertising package, with their ads appearing both online and in the print edition. Briana from Tenth to Fraser (a blog about New Westminster) should check this out.
I created a quick ZinePal edition of my own site, picking entries that didn’t have embedded video. ZinePal provides a dedicated page for each, uh, zine, or here’s the direct link to the PDF. I didn’t go to the trouble of uploading a custom header or deploying a few other bells and whistles.
In an age of embedded audio, video and other Flash-powered widgets, ZinePal certainly isn’t for every site with an RSS feed. However, I do like the idea of extending a hyper-local blog’s audience into the offline world.
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May 12th, 2008, 4 Comments »
As some readers may know, there was another foofaraw last week in the world of online PR. Gina Trapani, editor of the super-popular LifeHacker, posted a black list of PR spammers. Like Chris Anderson before her, she was tired of being inundated with press releases and spammy PR email. Unlike Mr. Anderson, she’s blocking entire domains instead of individual email addresses. Blogger Matt Haughey added his two cents along similar lines.
And, as you’d expect, there was much fretting and gnashing of teeth from the PR blogosphere. I commented on a couple of sites. I was a bit bemused by the sense of entitlement from some of my peers.
In particular, they were very critical of the black list as a tactic for dealing with PR spam. I’m not. It’s imperfect, but I’m sure it’s turned down the tap on Ms. Trapani’s and Mr. Haughey’s deluge of marketing email. From the only perspective that matters–theirs–it’s a workable strategy.
An Uneasy Collaboration
There’s always been an uneasy collaboration between journalists and PR people. The rise of the web has stirred up that alliance, and the power has shifted away from the marketers. Here’s the truth: bloggers don’t need marketers. If you start with that humble assumption, you’re better off.
We’re busy revising a book on this topic, so I’ll spare you the (frankly, quite obvious) song and dance about joining the conversation, listening first and all the usual bollocks.
Instead, I’ll tell you what works when I get pitched. I’m in the somewhat unusual position of being both a–all gay jokes aside–pitcher and catcher in this relationship. I’d been blogging for years before I sent or received my first pitch. Fortunately, I don’t suffer a flood of inquiries. On the average day, I might get five. But it’s enough that I’ve stopped replying to them all. And, as you might imagine, I’m pretty sympathetic to marketers.
How to Pitch Me
I’m going to skip all the obvious advice, and focus on when strangers have successfully convinced me to write about their product or service:
- Demonstrate that you’ve read my blog. And by ‘read’ I don’t mean that it showed up in search results and you emailed me. If you’re monitoring mentions of competitors’ brands and found my site, that’s cool. Just recognize that I’ve written about your competitors, and explain why you’re different.
- Figure out what I write about. It’s not rocket science. Last year somebody pitched me a biography of a 17th century Portuguese nun. That’s not something I’m in the habit of writing about.
- Geography matters. If your project is Vancouver or BC-based, I’m likelier to write about it.
- If your project is a good cause, or has a social change angle, I’m likelier to write about it.
- If you include references to photos or video that I can embed and link to (shamefully, this almost never happens), I’m likelier to write about your project.
- Make me feel special. If I recall correctly, Bill from Workspace (where I currently sit, writing this post) invited me for a preview tour of his coworking office.
- In terms of ‘breaking a story’, I almost never care about exclusivity. I think I’m an exception in this regard.
- If it’s something you created (as opposed to being a PR flack), I’m likelier to write about it. Last month Ellen Bernfeld, the singing voice of “Pizzazz” from the 80’s cartoon “Jem and the Holograms”, pitched me on her YouTube video. I didn’t write about it–I’m not backing Senator Clinton–but it was cool to, you know, get pitched by a cartoon villainess (and the video’s creator).
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April 16th, 2008, 2 Comments »
That’s the thing about blogs: you can always slice a topic more thinly. There are obviously plenty of blogs about tattoos out there. Recently (thanks to my popular old post about textual tattoos) I got an email from Jen who’s started a blog only on literary tattoos. If she keeps it up, it’ll be interesting to revisit the site in a year or two, to see which writers are most popular. I don’t really think that, say, Chuck Palahniuk is a writer for the ages, but what do I know?
Next up, a blog featuring only literary tattoos of twentieth century poets. Or literary tattoos in Korean. Or whatever.
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