The Downside

The blogospehere has been all atwitter lately about Nielsen’s latest survey stating that 60% of new Twitter-ers stop using the service after one month.  Many people doubted the number and ribbed Nielsen for perhaps overlooking the fact that many Twitterers use third-party apps to access the site.  But Nielsen checked their math and they’re sticking with their original assertion: 60% of Twitterers leave the site after one month.

I suppose it might be hard to believe that a site that’s growing as fast as Twitter only retains 40% of new users for more than a month, but if you’ve ever run a user-generated content site, you’ll know that 40% retention is fantastic, and most sites would kill for retention like that.  Most users who start a Wordpress blog, a Flickr account, a Delicious account, or an account on just about site, try it out for a day or two and never come back.  It’s the nature of the beast.  Further, most users are consumers, not producers, and while that trend is changing over time with the rise of the over-sharing Millennial generation, most users just don’t feel like sharing their stories, pictures, or current status with the world, so they try it out and then move on.

So congratulations, Twitter!  40% retention is awesome, so keep up the great work!

Who cares about comments on a blog? Answer: No one.

Think about it. How many times have you read a blog and actually read the comments on that blog? Maybe one time out of ten? Now, think about how many times you’ve read a blog and actually left a comment. Maybe one time out of 20? 50? Yeah, if you’re like the vast majority of internet users, you comment on a blog almost never.

So why are we now seeing all this activity around blog comment systems? You’d think that blog comments are the Friends List of 2007, at least to hear Techcrunch go on about them. Of course, TechCrunch tries to make everything sound interesting so they can justify all the articles they churn out every day despite the fact that there are only one or two Web 2.0 happenings that are actually important enough to write about on any given day.

But back to my point: blog comments just aren’t that important. In the big scheme of things, no one really cares. Read through the sites that have the most active commenting community like Digg and Slashdot, and you’ll see that most commenters:

1. don’t know what they’re talking about
2. don’t bother to read the other comments
3. are illiterate
4. can’t assemble their thoughts into a coherent point

The blog commenters have become victims of their own enthusiasm. These trolls who reside under the most-frequented bridges of the Internet have so much zeal that they ignore common rules of composition, grammar, and logic, and have therefore doomed themselves to irrelevancy. These trolls make up less than half a percent of the visitors to these sites (source: my flawless intuition), and they never click on ads, so they do little to actually contribute to the sites they comment on.

So, why do we need four companies (mentioned in TechCrunch’s article) devoted to helping us keep track of our comments? Why does the tiny, tiny fraction of people on the ‘net who comment frequently need such powerful tools to organize the dreck they serve up daily to the rest of us?

Of course, they don’t need them. No one needs them. These services exist because we’re in a bubble again, and any idea remotely related to social networking — or the new buzzword: conversations – can raise VC money and hope for a buyout by a company that makes a valid, useful product. And these companies are only buying because they’re also sucked in to the Web 2.0 hype, and they think they need some of that Ajaxy hawtness to justify their valuation multiples.

These comment systems are trying to exploit bloggers into sharing user data with them so they can because big all-powerful comment aggregators.  Perhaps they’re trying to take over MyBlogLog’s market position?  If so, they’d better focus more on what they can offer the bloggers and less on what they can offer the commenters.

So stop it, guys. Let’s make products for people who really need them. And for God’s sake, don’t comment on this blog.

There are lots of ways to help people navigate a website. My all-time favorite has to be the “tag cloud.”

If you’re not familiar with the tag cloud, it is a navigation tool that has gained prevalence with Web 2.0 and the abundance of user-generated content sites. Many of these sites realize that people are too lazy to categorize their pictures, movies, links, whatever, into a sensible set of categories, so they allow their users to just type any old word in to describe their content. Perfect for today’s ADD crowd. Then, these sites take the most popular words, and throw them in a big, steaming heap, and bump up the font size of the most popular ones, giving you the “tag cloud”. Examples from Flickr and Technorati:

Spend a minute browsing these images. Aren’t they beautiful? They give the user a visual workout, forcing them to scan line by line, looking for the big, important tags that are of interest. They help the user practice basic size-recognition as they try to figure out which word is in a larger font than the next, and they help them build those left-to-right reading reflexes that we all so desperately need to hone.

If there’s one thing we don’t see enough of these days, it’s navigation that really makes people use their head. There are far too many of these “ordered lists” that make it easy to distinguish which items are most important. If you want to do your users a favor, help them hone their visual recognition skills by presenting them with new and different navigation techniques that don’t follow traditional practices. Users love that.

Let’s say you’re Technorati, and you have the choice of showing your users a tagcloud or this:

Most popular topics:

1. Life
2. Blogging
3. Weblog
4. News
5. Music
6. Entertainment
7. Personal
8. Books
9. Friends
10. Religion and Philosophy
11. Blog
12. Writing and Poetry
13. Travel
14. Diary
15. Sports
16. Survey
17. Quiz
18. New and politics
19. Romance and Relationships
20. Jobs

Now wouldn’t any self-respecting user find this “list” patronizing? “Oh look, this site thinks I’m so simple-minded that I need my lists ordered by importance. Maybe they think I need a way to get back to the homepage from anywhere, too.” Never underestimate your audience’s intelligence or their desire to be challenged.

Let’s take a look at a site that needs a tag cloud: Billboard’s Top 40 Singles. Now, if these guys had any sense or knew what users liked, they’d show their Top 40 like this:

Akon Augustana Baby Boy Da Prince Beyonce Daughtry Diddy Dixie Chicks Fall Out Boy Fat Joe Fergie The Fray Gwen Stefani Gym Class Heroes Hellogoodbye Jim Jones Jon Mayer Jonas Brothers Justin Timberlake Lloyd Ludacris Mims My Chemical Romance Nelly Furtado Nickelback Omarion Paula DeAnda Pretty Ricky Red Hot Chili Peppers The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus Rihanna Robin Thicke T.I. Unk Young Jeezy

Much better. Billboard: this time the design advice is free; next time I charge you for it.

So keep using those tagclouds, guys. After all, they’re cool, they’re trendy, they’re so Web 2.0, and there’s nothing users appreciate more than a website that isn’t afraid to challenge their sense of logic and order!

Just when you thought the Internet couldn’t become any more cynical, along comes Payperpost.com, a site that pays “professional bloggers” to pimp products and services. Here’s the deal: if you have a blog, you can pick from a list of products and services to write about, and each one has a bounty that you will earn once your article is posted and approved by the company that’s paying for it.

For those of you who don’t have a background in journalism, there is supposed to be a huge, big, massive, ginormous brick wall between Editorial and Sales. That means that editorial should never be influenced by the people who pay the publication, but Payperpost flies right in the face of convention and does exactly that.

After running along completely without ethics for their first few months, they have now added a disclosure requirement thanks to FTC regulations, so their bloggers have to disclose that they were paid to post their articles. Okay, so it’s okay to be a slut as long as you disclose that you’re a slut, I suppose.

What really interests me, however, is the possible implications for search engines, and in particular, Google, who put a lot of weight on inbound links. A key point to think about here is that despite their happy, shiny marketing copy Payperpost will not be used by professional bloggers. A real blogger lives and dies by her reputation for honesty and impartiality, so they could never afford to put a disclosure on their site saying that they were paid for an article - their reputation would be shot, and it would be all over. Payperpost isn’t hiring professional bloggers, they’re hiring paid bloggers.

So, what good does it do to hire someone to write about your product if their blog isn’t a big, popular one? I’ll tell you: if you hire enough of them, the collective weight of their links to your site will give you more weight in Google. Although it isn’t written anywhere on their site, Payperpost’s purpose seems to be to help companies increase their Google rankings, so they can drive cost-effective traffic to their sites.

With dozens or hundreds of bloggers writing about your product, it shouldn’t be too hard to build a high relevancy rating at Google. Just tell the bloggers to link to your site using the text “Green widgets” and to talk about green widgets in their articles a lot, and before long you’ll show up on Google when people search for “green widgets.”

So what is a search engine to do? Google can try to give less weight to these paid blogs, but it’s essentially impossible for a machine-driven search engine to tell which blogs are paid and which aren’t, so Google will doubtlessly be fooled, and may end up full of spammy links thanks to little old Payperpost.

The only definite solution is to go social. People (as a whole) know what’s good and what isn’t, and will filter out the garbage that’s being linked to from a hundred paid blogs. Jimmy Wales is apparently working on a new social search, but it’s quite a ways off from being relevant. Perhaps Social Q&A will step up to fill the void?

I discovered early in my life that I have a gift for criticizing things. No matter what you’re talking about, I can find a downside to it. If I won the Lotto, I’d complain that I have to pay 1/2 of it in taxes, and that Bush will probably spend that money paying Halliburton to build another prison in Iraq, next to the still broken-down water purification plant. When Christmas rolls around, I lament the commercialization of the holiday and how sick and tired I am of hearing the same carols year after year. When I travel, I criticize the ever-changing security procedures at LAX and how poorly documented they are, so you only know what’s going on if you actually ask a security guard.

Does all this mean I’m a pessimist? Perhaps. You can make up your own mind from this blog as I progress.

I’ve been working on this creature we call the Internet for 10 years, and only now am I getting around to starting my own blog. To tell you the truth, I don’t really like blogs. I don’t even read my friends’ blogs, and honestly I’m not expecting my friends to read this blog. There are far too many bloggers who go on and on about their family or what they had for lunch that day or what movies they want to see this weekend. I only care about such things if I’m already a close friend of yours, and if I am a close friend of yours, I’d rather talk to you to catch up with your life than read about it on the web.

Perhaps we can chalk that up to my ADD. We’ll discuss that later on. Personally, I think it’s because you don’t get the “color” by reading something on the web - if I want to learn about your life, I want to hear what you have to say, ask you questions, and have a real conversation. Reading a blog is primarily a one-way conversation, aside from the highly asynchronous “comments” that lend an iota of life to the whole institution.

But here I am anyway. And now that I think about it, why am I doing this? I believe that, despite any pessimistic leaning, I have some observations on the world that I’d like to share. Particularly, observations about Media, Marketing, and Technology, probably the three professional/industrial worlds that I’m closest to in my everyday life. This unholy trinity does have some great things to offer, but they are also abused, and I’d like to take this opportunity to examine how MM&T affect our lives. More often that not, I find that they have a bigger impact than I first recognized.

My next post: Why Wikipedia just doesn’t matter