Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Blogs Building the Next Media Empire
In my last post I asked "When will we see a whole news site composed only of blogs?" It's not far off, but I wanted to share a few sites I bumped into recently that are starting to do this for particular niche industries:
http://www.propolitics.com/
http://www.searchbrains.com/
http://www.prperspective.com/
These sites are lists of blog posts from bloggers around the web. They're targeted by niche. So what's missing here?
The first thing is meaningful organization on the page. If you look at a news site it's easy to see what's the most important story. It's at the top. The problem with blogs is that they don't allow any clear way to make a hierarchy of importance based on placement.
So what should they, and by they I mean iEntry, do with these sites? I think they should make them look more like webpronews. Though their main hierarchy now is date too... hm... I guess what I'm looking for is something with the look of WPN but more organization.
Within the searchbrains site why can't we break it up into ppc and organic, and then organic into onsite, offsite, and then just regular search news. Does a site that meaningfully organizes search blog writing in one place have a chance to get more traffic than the originators?
Could the searchbrains site, with organization and editing, get the traffic that would normally go directly to Beal and Battelle? Probably. Especially if they had a newsletter with the latest in search blog blab.
How does this relate to the free content frontier? Well, again, search brains and the others aren't paying for the content. They're just linking to it. And I can guarantee you could go to searchbrains right now and buy an ad. And I can guarantee you that the next major media empire will be one built of blogs (and probably a forum or two).
(I'd like to think I'm the first to talk of a blog empire, or even a news site composed only of blogs but I'm sure I'm not. So where are people talking about this? Show me the blog or website. Hell it's probably in that Time magazine article...)
http://www.propolitics.com/
http://www.searchbrains.com/
http://www.prperspective.com/
These sites are lists of blog posts from bloggers around the web. They're targeted by niche. So what's missing here?
The first thing is meaningful organization on the page. If you look at a news site it's easy to see what's the most important story. It's at the top. The problem with blogs is that they don't allow any clear way to make a hierarchy of importance based on placement.
So what should they, and by they I mean iEntry, do with these sites? I think they should make them look more like webpronews. Though their main hierarchy now is date too... hm... I guess what I'm looking for is something with the look of WPN but more organization.
Within the searchbrains site why can't we break it up into ppc and organic, and then organic into onsite, offsite, and then just regular search news. Does a site that meaningfully organizes search blog writing in one place have a chance to get more traffic than the originators?
Could the searchbrains site, with organization and editing, get the traffic that would normally go directly to Beal and Battelle? Probably. Especially if they had a newsletter with the latest in search blog blab.
How does this relate to the free content frontier? Well, again, search brains and the others aren't paying for the content. They're just linking to it. And I can guarantee you could go to searchbrains right now and buy an ad. And I can guarantee you that the next major media empire will be one built of blogs (and probably a forum or two).
(I'd like to think I'm the first to talk of a blog empire, or even a news site composed only of blogs but I'm sure I'm not. So where are people talking about this? Show me the blog or website. Hell it's probably in that Time magazine article...)
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Blogger discusses why he publishes with WPN
Veddy Eeenterestink. Neville Hobson published a blog post that got published inWebProNews about how he's publishing his blog in WebProNews.
"Clearly this arrangement means there's a huge potential benefit for my blog in terms of increasing visibility: in addition to being an article portal for internet and technology professionals, WebProNews also has an email newsletter that has over 800,000 subscribers delivered in two separate editions of 400,000 each.
"I believe it also represents an evolution in traditional journalism, linking commentary and opinion in blogs written by people like me who are not professional journalists with news outlets run by professional journalists.
"I'm sure we'll see more such relationship developments."
Here's the whole story.
Are there any other publications publishing this way? When will we see a whole news site composed only of blogs? Laid out like WebProNews? Now that would be SMOKIN'!
"Clearly this arrangement means there's a huge potential benefit for my blog in terms of increasing visibility: in addition to being an article portal for internet and technology professionals, WebProNews also has an email newsletter that has over 800,000 subscribers delivered in two separate editions of 400,000 each.
"I believe it also represents an evolution in traditional journalism, linking commentary and opinion in blogs written by people like me who are not professional journalists with news outlets run by professional journalists.
"I'm sure we'll see more such relationship developments."
Here's the whole story.
Are there any other publications publishing this way? When will we see a whole news site composed only of blogs? Laid out like WebProNews? Now that would be SMOKIN'!
Sunday, January 09, 2005
The Frontiers of Free Content
Because of my former job at WebProNews, where we did not pay a dime for content written out of house, I became interested in developing streams of free content. As iEntry has over 80 different business and tech related newsletters this became pretty tough sometimes.
Anyhow, I'm pretty impressed with their latest content stream, especially because it's so relevant to their web business audience. They've apparently organized relationships with bloggers and are now publishing blog posts on their site. The only place I've looked for this is on WebProNews, where they recently published an awesome blog post from Jeremy Zawodny of the Yahoo search team.
So what's so awesome about this?
Well, WebProNews gets the advantage of having a top tier search engine writer associated with their site (there are LOTS of folks who visit WPN who don't necessarily get out and visit various industry blogs...).
There's no way they could PAY this guy to write for them, but it ends up paying for him to allow them to republish his posts because of the added publicity it gives the Yahoo search team. And this is because WebProNews has become a decent source for search marketing news and information.
I know my buddy Jason's blog posts, from his data marketing folksonomies blog, have appeared as articles for WPN, and so do Andy Beal's. Jason's told me several times that publishing with WPN delivered the best business results from any other publisher.
Anyhow, if you're a publisher searching for free content consider contacting bloggers. They're cranking out content all the time and could possibly provide you with some of the latest and most relevant content available. And they will probably let you publish them for free.
Anyhow, I'm pretty impressed with their latest content stream, especially because it's so relevant to their web business audience. They've apparently organized relationships with bloggers and are now publishing blog posts on their site. The only place I've looked for this is on WebProNews, where they recently published an awesome blog post from Jeremy Zawodny of the Yahoo search team.
So what's so awesome about this?
Well, WebProNews gets the advantage of having a top tier search engine writer associated with their site (there are LOTS of folks who visit WPN who don't necessarily get out and visit various industry blogs...).
There's no way they could PAY this guy to write for them, but it ends up paying for him to allow them to republish his posts because of the added publicity it gives the Yahoo search team. And this is because WebProNews has become a decent source for search marketing news and information.
I know my buddy Jason's blog posts, from his data marketing folksonomies blog, have appeared as articles for WPN, and so do Andy Beal's. Jason's told me several times that publishing with WPN delivered the best business results from any other publisher.
Anyhow, if you're a publisher searching for free content consider contacting bloggers. They're cranking out content all the time and could possibly provide you with some of the latest and most relevant content available. And they will probably let you publish them for free.
