Puffbox

I’ve just started work with a local community group keen to build a civic website. I’m looking at open source CMS solutions like Drupal as the base system… but I must admit, I’m wondering if the best idea isn’t simply to aggregate stuff from elsewhere. Apparently that’s the direction the BBC is heading, according to this report of a chat between some of their leading lights, and their opposite numbers at the Telegraph.

But for me, it’s not so much the need to transfer (or shall we say abdicate?) responsibility for moderation. Instead, it’s a recognition that these specialised third-party sites are inevitably going to be better at what they do, than anything you or anyone else could cobble together.

Take the example of photo sharing… you won’t find a better website than Flickr. So why not just create a group, and let the members feed into it. Let Flickr take all the pain of hosting, user access rights, etc etc – not to mention the expense. That’s why they’re there. Meanwhile, you just consume the various RSS feeds (or whatever) back at base.

I’d almost describe it as the next step in ‘social networking’. Do what you do, in the best place (for you) to do it, and as long as RSS feeds are available, we can aggregate it. If anyone sees a catch, let me know. Preferably sooner rather than later. 🙂

I’m much more a ‘cat person’ – but there’s a lot to like about the new Doggysnaps website, launched by UK canine charity Dogs Trust. They’ve used the irPublish platform to build a remarkably good Flickr-like photo community,  with comments and the added ability to give ‘treats’ (and hence bribe your way to a huge social network). They reckon they’ve had a commendable 13,600 dogs sign up since a soft launch last September.

Why is a charity doing this? ‘As a thank you to all you dog lovers out there,’ they say. There are ‘donate’ buttons on most pages, but it doesn’t get too intrusive. Visitor numbers keep ticking upwards, Dogs Trust boosts its standing in the pets world, and I’m sure a good few people click to donate or buy merchandise from the online shop. This is Marketing 2.0 at its finest.

Oh… and while we’re on the subject of dogs… they’re being trained to use cash machines these days.

Mildly interesting to note that Georgina Henry, editor of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website has been ‘promoted’ to ‘executive comment editor’, with responsibility for the printed comment pages. Or to view it another way, the print version has now been consumed by the online version. Rusbridger’s web-first policy in action. (Details in Media Guardian.) Happy birthday to CIF, incidentally – one year old today.

Remarkably, someone at the BBC has deemed this blog worthy of front-page exposure on the BBC TWO website. Very kind of you, guys. Any chance of spelling my name right next time?

More interesting to most people, I suspect, is the link directly beneath my promo… inviting you to ‘Share your stuff with BBC Two’. If you’re hoping for a better definition of what constitutes ‘stuff’, the best you’ll get is ‘something cool that you think we’d like’. A rather vague step into user-generated content.

I’ve just had the extraordinary experience of having my broadband forcibly downgraded. Until the end of last week, I was happily receiving 2.3Mbps through my generally trusty ISP. Suddenly, it dropped to a snail’s pace – I’m talking slower than dialup. I stuck it out as best I could, until this morning, when I reached for the national-rate helpline number. After a couple of calls, I’ve managed to get 1.1Mbps connectivity restored… but the guy on the helpline tells me that’s the maximum I can get. He didn’t seem convinced when I told him I’d had double that until last week. I’m promised a response within 96 hours. It had better be a restoration of what I had. In the meantime, beggars can’t be choosers. 1.1 meg it is. Zzz.

Call it guerrilla development, call it skunk works… but I have to agree with the Economist staffer working for the magazine’s Project Red Stripe online innovation team:

One of the reasons I think Project Red Stripe exists is because, in general, companies are slow at doing anything other than normal business – and they are probably slow at doing that. It’s just that they have competition that is also slow so they get away with it.

The project consists of six people, a budget of $200,000, free access to everything the Economist does… and a six month deadline. I bet they pull it off, too. Whatever it ends up as. (Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and Antony Mayfield for the pointers.)

I started writing this blog for a number of reasons. Shameless self-promotion, sure, but also to get some hands-on experience of the whole blogging phenomenon. I never doubted it had something, but I’m a firm believer in getting your hands dirty before pronouncing. Well, I’ve now passed the 500 posts mark on this here WordPress blog, and it’s time to look back on the lessons learned.

(The controversial one is at the bottom.)

It’s a very pure form of communication.

Through this blog, and the various connections it makes, I’ve struck up pretty good relationships with a bunch of people I’ve never met, and probably never will. And yet I feel as if I ‘know’ them really well. It would take quite some cynic to bash out insincere material on a daily basis. And it’s a great way to get ‘free consultancy’ from some of the smartest minds in the business.

It’s addictive.

Once you start, and let it become part of your routine, it’s hard to stop. You develop an ultimately ridiculous sense of responsibility to your audience (that’s you, dear reader). You start seeing things in print or on telly, and think ‘I really must blog that.’ And then you actually do. So it’s not a question of finding the time to do it; pretty quickly, it becomes more difficult not to do it.

Statistics are dodgier than most, but still compelling.

WordPress.com happily churns out a figure for the number of readers I get each day, in terms of web visitors and RSS subscribers, plus details of most popular individual posts etc. Of course, being web stats, it all has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Several times I’ve seen inexplicable spikes in traffic, particularly on the RSS feed; with so many people using just two services (Google Reader and Bloglines), you’re very vulnerable to unexpected system tweaks. Page views tend to be to the blog’s aggregated homepage, rather than individual posts, so it’s hard to establish the precise popularity of any given item (in the short term). So I really don’t know how far to trust my numbers. But that doesn’t stop me checking them every couple of hours.

Traffic naturally rises.

Like anything else, you can expect to start off small. Visitor numbers might not reach double figures for some time. But as time goes on, people will start to find you, and some will stay with you. A couple of good posts with wide general interest, and you could suddenly find yourself with quite an audience. Of course, on the flipside, that means you can’t get too excited about a general upward trend. It’s kind of inevitable.

It’s not all about news.

Maybe it’s just the news junkie in me, but the majority of blogs I read are news-related: general news, or news on a specific topic or area, or news about a particular individual or company I’m interested in. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see some very old efforts continually showing up among my ‘most popular posts’. There’s real long-term value in taking the time to write something timeless. A round-up of good sources, perhaps, or a tutorial. (Or a summary of lessons learned whilst blogging?)

It really does help search engine placement.

Believe it when people tell you blogs will help your search ranking. I’m finding some of my posts coming up in the top three or four entries for (what I would have thought were) some highly competitive search phrases. Why? Because the semantic HTML templates encourage me to put the right keywords inside H1 tags (etc). Because the same keywords appear in the URL. Because blog tools like Technorati make others aware of what I’ve written, and some may even link to it. With search driving more and more traffic, is there any better reason for blogging?

but the most difficult lesson of all..

The content management industry is a sham.

I’m biting the hand that feeds when I say this. I’ve earned good money as part of several million-pound CMS procurement and development mega-projects. But the truth is, the vast majority of ‘content management’ needs (and I’m talking 75% or more) would be covered by downloading WordPress, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. At no cost. And they’d be in place within an afternoon.

Something like WordPress gives you a ‘Word-style interface’ to author your material. A very flexible ‘content architecture’ model, based on simple tagging (hierarchical if necessary). Interactive tools, like commenting and RSS feeds, out of the box. A search engine. Loads of free plugins and themes, with plenty of flexibility to add your own logo etc. Rudimentary workflow, which is probably all you need. What more is there?

And I don’t see any reason why larger organisations can’t embrace it, just as easily as smaller firms. Give every team or project its own blog, using WordPress MU or Drupal, and aggregate their content into a corporate homepage. A bit of extra design work at the upper levels, and you’re there.

Why doesn’t it happen? Several reasons spring to mind. The fact that it’s ‘too good to be true’. The negative baggage which the word ‘blog’ still carries. Risk-averse management culture. Too many vendors with businesses to protect. Of course there has to be a certain amount of compromise in adopting the ‘back to basics’ approach inherent in blogging; but I’m convinced the pluses far outweight the minuses.

Media guru Jeff Jarvis reports on a Guardian staff meeting, where editor Alan Rusbridger tells his people they all work for the web platform; and that they should regard ‘its demands as preeminent’. Innovations in Newspapers (which I’d never heard of before) reproducers Rusbridger’s ‘draft principles of 24/7 working’ – with two chunks catching my eye:

Generally, news material which has been written, subbed and legalled may be posted on the web as it becomes available. Exceptions can be made for any stories which the relevant editor wishes to hold back for the print edition.

So whilst it’s a big endorsement of the web (admittedly by probably the most web-friendly of the UK newspapers), that’s a big caveat. It’s entirely dependent on buy-in from the editors, and I suspect their biggest stories will continue to be held back for the print edition, unless they’re worried that someone else will break it first. Then…

We will continue to use news wires for breaking news but will seek to use our full editorial resources to add “Guardian/Observer” value as soon as possible. This means adding context, analysis and opinion – and, sometimes, colour.

In other words… their defining characteristic will be the ‘added value’, rather than the news itself. In one sense it’s a pragmatic decision, as other media will always be better at breaking news than a (long form) text channel. A broadcast channel like Sky or Five Live can ‘break’ a story with barely a single sentence; but it takes time to write decent text. But it clearly sets out what they plan to be in the future: come to us for a particular perspective, a particular style, a particular tone. And it’s the right way forward.

Over at the Telegraph, Shane Richmond (now described as ‘Community Editor’ – is that a new title, Shane?) reckons the Guardian is playing catch-up, and that they’ve been there for a while already. Indeed that’s true; but I can sympathise with those who don’t see that, and feel it’s still print-led. There’s something in the Telegraph’s presentation that looks or feels too much like a newspaper. I’m not a fan of the Guardian’s increasingly outdated presentation; but there’s no denying it looks like a website.

As of today, yours truly is the new ‘extra special guest blogger’ at BT Broadband Office. I’ll be contributing a good handful of posts each week on the subject of internet and broadband in the smaller business (in its most general sense possible).

The BT blog attracted quite a bit of attention when it launched back in August last year. (I was actually quite nice about it myself, saying ‘you get the sense that this is going to be a UK-based example that people will quote’.) It comes up by default when any BT business broadband customer logs on… and as a result, the visitor numbers  are actually sky-high by most blogs’ standards, although you probably wouldn’t think so by looking at most blogosphere measurements (eg Technorati).

The mission is to help businesses make the most of their broadband connections. Of course, we’ll be talking about BT products and services when it’s relevant and helpful to do so; but it absolutely isn’t intended to be a BT propaganda outlet. Expect lots of pointers to good websites, services and software from all parts of the web, which might be useful in the workplace. I’ll be joined by a couple of other specialists in certain fields over the next few weeks.

There’s a lot happening at BT in the field of business web presence, and business blogging in particular. All I can say is… it’s worth keeping an eye on them over the coming months. 😉