In Which I Give Advice to J.W. Richard of Mandrake Society Radio [#wcdfw09]

There’ve been quite a few folks who’ve come up to me after my various forays onto the the stage here at WordCamp Dallas this weekend with specific questions as to when they should try to monetize, and how.

The most common class of questions has come from folks who have emerging voices, that fall into the category of less than 50,000 or less than 100,000 monthly pageviews each month. To sort of collate those answers into one spot, I’ll delve into that here in a series of posts profile the folks who’ve come to ask me questions.

For those of you still here, it’s not too late to ask me questions and get featured here – just flag me down before we all get out of here for the day and we can chat about your specific use case.

Mandrake Society Radio – Growing LGBT New Media
JW Richard, who runs the Mandrake Society radio blog and podcast, came by after one of the sessions to pick my brain.  He’s got a moderately popular site that’s teetering on the edge between a small and mid-sized audience / community for his blog, and a small-sized audience for his podcast.  He’s growing at a pretty good clip, but he wanted ideas on where he could go to monetize his audience at this size.

For him – he’s catering directly to the LGBT community with relevant news and clips – there are a number of options open to him, but it’s best to continue to focus on growing his audience at this stage.

In particular to his podcast, it’s important the he sells his audience at this stage of its growth as a package of loyal subscribers, fans and community to sponsors.  We didn’t get into it in our conversation directly, but if JW isn’t particularly into sales as being his profession, it would do him very well to partner up with a New Media savvy salesperson who can really go to town finding folks in his niche who are willing to underwrite both the show and the site.

Having a dedicated person who believes in both your work and can sell is invaluable.  Finding that person to partner with is the best business move you can make for your blog.  This may mean joining a team of other content producers trying to aggregate their views, or it may mean finding this person directly and profit sharing, but it’s important, particularly for someone like him who’d like to focus more on content that business.

Moonlighting as a Day Job
Something that I’ve done a few times in my career as a content producer has been to take a news obsession for me and farm it out to a new audience.  I did this during 9/11, during the Atlanta Olympic bombings, and most recently during the Iran crisis.

I start out by doing what I call “penetration coverage” on a topic, just extracting every aspect and angle of a major watershed event that I can find, and after a couple of days, I’ll point to that coverage and shop it around to other larger organizations.

In JW’s case, he can probably think of at least three or four larger publications than him up the food chain that he could shop such a series out to.  The process is merely a matter of establishing yourself as “informed” about an event through extreme coverage, finding the one who will take your coverage, and then haggle over price.

It works in a number of ways – it’ll increase your profile and potential readership, and it’ll hopefully net you a few dollars, too.

DB Ferguson Talks Fansite Curation [No Fact Zone, #wcdfw09]

DB Ferguson’s (the curator of the Stephen Colbert fansite “No Fact Zone”doing a talk right now about her experiences as a fan-blogger, and ways to survive and thrive.

A lot of her advice is very common-sense for those who’ve been blogging professionally for a while, but bear repeating:

• Become best friends with your web-host.
• Reach out to publishers and producers who carry products related to your niche, it can often result in exclusive access.
• “Grow a pair and get after it,” as Stephen Colbert says.  This is something I can personally attest to. Act as if you have authority, and it gets you access.
• Grow your community – they’ll act as your support staff.

This is definitely one of the talks you’ll want to check out once the full episodes come out on WordcampTV.

If Iran Can’t Control The Net, Why Does YouTube Try? [#iranElection #youtubefail]

I can’t make a real cogent argument out of this tonight, because I’m sleep deprived, I need to finish my presentation for tomorrow, and I need to get to bed in the next 20 minutes or so.  I’m going to take a whack at it, though, quoting myself heavily from previous posts on the topic.

The UK Guardian has Eric Schmidt talking valiantly about the role of YouTube in #iranElection:

"We have lots of lawyers, lawyers in every one of these countries," Schmidt said. "We explain if they do this [block freedom of speech and communication] what will happen. Sometimes they moderate their behaviour and sometimes not. If they don't listen to us it is at their peril."

Speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk following the seminar, Schmidt expanded on this point: "By 'peril' I mean it is what the citizens will do, citizens can no longer be restricted by the kind of strategies evil dictatorships do... you can't keep people in the dark."

If it’s so important to let free speech reign, why does YouTube have such a crappy record with free speech issues?

You know what time it is… it’s time for me to break out that old list of #youtubefail’s.  I’ll do that in a minute. Before I do that, though, I’d like to ask Eric why he allows this rogue arm of the company to continue to censor violence against protestors in Iran.  It continues to happen up to as recently as today – many of the protestors’ videos are taken down due to ‘violent content.’  Somehow, people aren’t willing to wag their finger at YouTube, even though I’ve clearly shown their horrible history on this topic and folks have seen Iran protest videos disappear before their very eyes.

I don’t know.  I’ll probably follow this up at SiliconANGLE or Inquisitr on Monday, but I wanted to get this out there before the whole thread died on Techmeme tonight.

Here’s the aforementioned and promised list of #YouTubeFail’s. Some updates since the last time I posted it.

Michelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.
BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.
Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.
This Pornography Advertisement Uncensored. It doesn’t show actual nudity or sex acts.
A Breast-Feeding Mother Censored over obscenity claims.
This Strip Tease Uncensored. A small area over the genitals remains covered for the duration of the minute and a half long strip tease.
An Egyptian Fellow Censored (then uncensored) for showing video evidence of local police brutality.
This GTA IV Ad Uncensored, despite depicting a police officer firing a gun into a crowd of civilians.
Iranian Protestors Censored (then uncensored, then censored) for showing peaceful protestors being killed by an oppressive regime.
Terrorist Recruiters Uncensored (then censored, then uncensored). Despite dire warnings from the US Senate, YouTube continues to allow Al Qaeda to recruit on YouTube, and vigilante groups / bury brigades do the work the company should do in the first place.

A Nuanced Look at the FTC’s New Retarded Blogging Guidelines

On a personal note, I’m completely floored by the fact that everyone who has written up the FTC blogger rules today has completely ignored the very extensive coverage I did over at SiliconANGLE almost three weeks ago, here at Rizzn.com, and the well formed opinions folks like Sean P. Aune and Steven Hodson have put out there on the topic.

Still, a trending topic on Techmeme today meant another round of articles that make the rest of the blogosphere look like goldfish (you know, because of the short memories).

The folks on the walk of shame, this time around?

• PCWorld: FTC Eyes Blogs for Conflicts of Interest
• Ars Technica: FTC to crack down on undisclosed “sponsored” blogging
• My friend Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb: FTC Plans to Regulate Blogger Freebies
• Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim: Should You Fear the FTC's Sponsored Blogging Crackdown?
• The Toybox: FTC to go after product reviews bloggers who accept freebies
• Techgeist: FTC To Make Blogging Better - Disclosure Coming
• The Friggin’ AP: FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments
• Windows Connected: FTC to crack down on bloggers.

Almost all of these guys wrote favorable coverage to the new guidelines.  Only Aaron Brazell and Peter Kafka expressed an ounce of incredulity at what was being proposed.

I had a conversation with Andrew Feinberg (a fellow contributor at SiliconANGLE as well as a deputy editor over at Broadband Census) this evening on the law proposed guidelines – something that he surprisingly seems to support wholeheartedly (much to my dismay).

Neither one of us seemed to be able to move the other from their respective position.  I guess because he views these moves by the FTC as a “a drunken, groping lurch in the right direction,” and I just feel as if I’ve been molested by a government agency.

So it’s clear – I’m not advocating non-disclosure in blogging.  I am advocating that it should be my free choice to squander my reputation if I like.

The blogosphere, though, is a self-regulating system.  Big brother doesn’t need to come in and enforce anything. If you squander your reputation on selling your opinion, then you have no authority or audience. It's the blogosphere. It's how it's engineered. Everyone's voices get through, particularly when there's scandal (and payola is always scandal), and if you’ve created scandal, your audience will find out from your competitors.

Call it deputizing the middleman, free market, or meritocracy – whatever term you use for it is semantics. The fact is, it just works. The decentralized and social nature are what makes it work, and it in part relies on basic human instinct to seek out scandal to keep it functioning.

Look, we've been bloviating on paid posting as a scandalous behavior for going on six years now - half the life of the blogosphere by most counts - and it's still a hot topic. If that isn’t an indicator of a system that works, I’m not sure what is.

I guess it comes down to (as someone who has blogged for longer than I care to remember) a feeling like when your parents come lecture you on something you very clearly already know.

“Son, let’s talk about the birds and the bees…,” Dad starts in.

"Daaad. I heard the birds and the bees talk when I was 11," comes the inevitable reply. “Besides – I’m 30 now.”

Yeah, it’s just like that.

It Would Probably Be Best if You Didn’t Choose This Week to Become a Hacker [#iranElection]

I’ve been noticing a lot of tweets coming across my personal stream (not just the stream monitored by iran.twazzzup.com) in the last several hours begging me to hack or jam servers in Iran.

Let me first just start out by asking you not to pass along those sorts of requests.

 
Now, let me tell you why:

Me, you and your American follower list aren’t savvy enough to know the effects of your actions. Have you checked a network routing path? Do you know whether or not when you auto-reload that Iranian government page whether or not you’re also clogging up valuable bandwidth for protesters, demonstrators, and others still trying to get around the intense media blocks?

My guess is no.  I guess that because I know I haven’t, and I’ve thought to look.

Going around and creating DDOS attacks, be they crowdsourced or scriptkiddie, is something akin to an “eye for an eye” approach.”  There might be a time for some measured electronic retribution against the Iranian government.  Now’s not the time.

 
Don’t Participate in the Propagation of Conspiracy Theories. This is a big one.  I know that every time @Sam1 and I get together or I visit Austin, we enjoy waxing philosophical on what may or may not be a conspiracy or covert political plot.

That’s fun (and fine) at most times.  Right now, though, seeing things like “@iranianTweeter is a Government Spy!” or “Beware of dis-information,” as a tweet only serves to devalue the service that Twitter is serving here. Give specific warnings about something you know is bad advice.  Not something that might be bad advice or an un-specific threat that could exist.

There are dozens of wide-reaching entities in this whole fiasco that would benefit from the spread of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt over Twitter as a reliable news source, and we all know that social media can sometimes be prone to spreading disinformation.

 
A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve been following closely and extensively the stream of tweets (preferably through an aggregator), then consider yourself an authority on what’s going on. That way, you’re a good source on who’s trustworthy.  If you see something suspect or something that sounds too good to be true – investigate, don’t retweet instinctively.

This Is Too Important to Mess Up
It’s obvious that this is becoming a turning point for the way the world views information dissemination in crisis situations.

Twitter themselves realize the importance of their tool in this situation.  They rescheduled major downtime around this revolution.

Matthew Devries really said it best on a Friendfeed thread earlier yesterday:

It's not really a good thing, but more a realization of the power they have. Zuckerberg could never fathomed this with his closed off service. @ev is now sitting there thinking "This is the finger I use to turn on and off the revolution of the second biggest country in the middle east, and it's the same finger I use to scratch my ass.

You have that same power.  It only takes two keystrokes to retweet.  Think about your actions before you do.

Update: this applies to blogging, as well.  Much of Cory Doctorow’s advice today at Boing Boing is ill advised.

“Change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30.”

“Don't blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don't publicise their name or location on a website.”

By not publicisizing genuine sources, you’re inhibiting the flow of real information, allowing disinfo to take further root.  Changing your time zone to Tehran time does nothing to obfuscate a source’s location.

The last time I checked, Biz wasn’t giving out IP and locality info to the Iranian government.  These people are safe, and changing your timezone to Tehran time only confuses aggregators trying to find primary sources.

Friendfeed Blocked in Iran [#iranElection]

You’ll probably be seeing quite a bit of Iran-related news around rizzn.com for a while.  It’s a topic that I find fascinating both as a technologist and as a student of politics, and I think it’s important to keep abreast of what might be one of the major defining political events of the decade.

This item has a tech-aspect to it – I caught a Friendfeed post from site co-founder Bret Taylor a couple of hours ago, talking about the sharp decline in Iranian visitors they experienced yesterday, during the rioting in Tehran.

It’s interesting to note this puts Friendfeed amongst an elite group of services – you know you’ve made it once you’ve been blocked by a country.  As Bret noted in statements to Techcrunch’s MG Siegler, “Iran is one of the service’s most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day.”

Bing Pr0n: Not Safe For Work

Warning: This post is not safe for work.  Or children. Or people with any morals or sense of decency. You’ve been duly warned.

 
Guess what happens when you search for porn on that brand new Microsoft search engine “Bing.”

It returns porn! And LOTS of it!

Somehow, my friends Loic Lemeur and MG Siegler are spinning this as a total fail.

To me, this is how a search engine is supposed to work – you search for something, and then you find it.

Incidentally, this also works in Google.