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A podcast community

We've started a podcasting site, Muscle Ventures. The local community seems to be working. Let's see what we can do for the distributed Internet community.

For some time, I've been wanting to create a video podcast site and see if I could get a community going around it. Based on things I've learned from blogging bootcamps and dealing with consulting clients, I'm convinced most successful communities have to have some real world basis. It's not that purely online communities cannot thrive, it's just that they tend to be composed of true topic devotees who are also facile with computers and use them as a principal means of accessing information. That tends to limit the possibilities of what can work.

By the way, by community, I don't just mean site visitors but rather people who are aware of each other and care what each other is doing. So, I'm not just talking about pulling in readers with adwords and getting them to convert.

So, what we have done is put together a site called Muscle Ventures. It offers text content, exercise analysis videos, and podcasts. The site seems to be working for the local community. We'll see what we can do for the Internet community. I'll be writing more on this topic as the situation evolves.

Bud posted this on May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

In the Tail of the Long Tail

Blogging is about communicating with specific audiences. In and of itself, it is not really a commercial proposition.

In January, I wrote a note regarding the long tail, in which I said the whole notion of people writing blogs to hit it big at the scale of mass media is crap. After completing the last formal session of a recent Web 2.0 Business Bootcamp at Michigan's Ross School of Business, I think that even more (see participant blogs aggregated here). Participants created blogging projects to communicate with other, well-defined groups of people. Some of them absolutely did not want to hit it big, but all were thrilled by interaction with a previously unknown audience. In other words, the motivation seemed to be primarily social and communicative.

So, how do you make this kind of activity economically sustainable? Research shows that attempts to monetize individual content through ads and other promotion make it less credible. People wonder if they aren't being spammed, and bloggers themselves feel the pressure to conform with the advertiser's wishes. That kills the advertising revenue model. The subscription model is also probably dead since it runs counter to a small-scale blogger's desire to be heard.

The remaining revenue model is ecommerce. Believe it or not, I suspect many bloggers are missing out on affinity products. Scoble has it somewhat with his Channel 9 guy, but what he really needs is a scobleizer t-shirt. Perhaps more in line with many bloggers self-perception, the other version of this opportunity is sales of professional services and other products such as online courses. So, maybe Dave Winer is right, blogging is really just advertising for the other stuff you do. Make money using your blog to sell that.

Bud posted this on February 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

How much Internet can small businesses digest?

A problem that most Internet cognoscente face is that they don't realize the difficulties others have in keeping up.

With limited resources, small businesses seriously need to harness the Internet. The web gives small businesses more bang for their buck. As is the point with this particular teleseminar, the Internet can provide a system to help small businesses be more efficient, productive, and strategic with their time. Definitely worth the investment.
Ken Yarmosh - TECHNOSIGHT » Small Businesses Need to Harness the Internet

At first blush, it's hard not to agree with this sentiment. But, if you deal with real small businesses where owners are time-constrained and chasing to make a buck, you start to wonder.

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Bud posted this on January 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Blog Burnout or Burning the Other End of the Blog Candle

Ken Yarmosh helps me avoid blogging burnout by giving me something to rant about.

An issue with blogging is that it is public speech. People get to reading your blog and developing a perception of you. You feel you need to live up to that expectation. Blogging slows dramatically or stops as you attempt to stay on message. Ken Yarmosh might call this one type of bloggin burnout.

I let this blog go for a while in December at a time when I thought I might actually accelerate. As it turns out, I was actually blogging elsewhere, almost daily. Sometimes since Christmas, I have been blogging multiple times a day on a personal blog, Michigan Muscle Boy, “A michigander who sometimes feels like a god in the gym”. Hey, who's going to debate the finer points of the long tail when they can talk about feeling like a god. Not this correspondent. I was also blogging in the BIT320 Remix trying to corral the final round of student activities.

Frankly, I got tired of debating things like the long tail. I'm just not convinced they are an adequate description of what motivates people. I think I'm blogging as a part of a larger social enterprise. I'm a bit amazed that I am now keeping a personal blog, something I thought I would never do. But, it's refreshing.

I also got a little tired of blog gaming, commercial enterprises that seem to try to manipulate the blog conversation for their gain. I think commercial speech in blogging is fine, but sometimes you just want something you know is what the person really thinks. That's not always the case when it's team against team as it often is in the commercial arena.

Much in store for the new year by the way. We've got another bootcamp on the way this Saturday.

Bud posted this on January 9, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

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Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Internet Weightlifting

Our search for good weightlifting blogs hit gold when we used Technorati's blog finder. Once we found one legitimate good blog, that blog led us to many others. In essence, we used that blogger's knowledge of what was good and bad as a guide for avoiding SPAM.

I've been working on a little project with a friend to try to figure out what legitimate weight training resources there are on the Internet. Most specifically, we are looking for weightlifting blogs and sources of practitioner knowledge.

We're doing this because weight training is a sport that is sparsely practiced, making it hard to find good information. Further, the information that is available is a mix of oral tradition and science. In such a situation, a good approach is to look for many sources of information to see what are the general practices and different people's reviews of what works and what not. Blogs would seem like a natural place to look.

Our search was instructive because it shows, even with a good knowledge of search technology, how hard it is to get to find non-spam content when information is relatively scarce and disorganized. The key seems to have been finding one good source of information and then following his links to discover a whole knowledge network.

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Bud posted this on November 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Innovating for Value in Blog Search

Innovation in blog search will be more and more driven by the extent to which it can be used for business intelligence. Three players, bloglines, technorati, and blogpulse have all made important advances in this regard. Rests to see whether they can capitalize on them.

In response to my post about blog search imitation on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Peyer of pointblog has asked if we could not benefit from a little more innovation. That seems reasonable, and I'd like to frame my response in terms of where we have already seen innovation based on the revenue potential. I expect that that is where we will see more in the future.

The first thing I note is that blog search engines exist because blogs are different from traditional web pages. Blogs are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average update frequency of once every 10 days, are updated more frequently than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average of 100 outbound links, have more outbound links per site than the rest of the web.

As a result of these differences, the value of blog search engine's indexes is closely tied to timeliness and the ability to represent linking relationships in addition to the traditional elements of coverage and relevance. Businesses in search of market intelligence seem the most easily monetized market for this kind of data. Businesses are typically aware of the need for market intelligence, and they are willing to pay when they perceive significant opportunity. By contrast, monetizing blog readers through contextual ads does not offer significant revenue potential.

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Bud posted this on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

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