Innovation in Software

One of my clients has hinted he wants me to talk about blogging to his team.

This surprised me.

Sure, I’ve blogged for years. Right now I have publish rights to about half a dozen blogs, the majority not created by me. I’ve got into some great events courtesy of my writing for MEN, won clients because of this blog, thousands of people read my words every month and I love writing and I want to continue doing it for the rest of my life.

However, I’m a developer, entrepreneur, analyst, systems administrator, systems architect, training guy and occasional blogger. I’m not one of the new breed of social media consultants who spend their days analysing how to grow blog and twitter audiences.

Can I tell anybody else how to blog? I’ve been thinking about where I’d start if I suddenly decided I was going to be a SMC, and came up with some questions I’d ask a client who wants to try and get into blogging.

1. What are your favourite blogs? If you don’t have any, that’s because you’re not reading any blogs. If you’re not reading material in the genre you’re writing for, you can’t understand how to write for it. It is evident that many bloggers do not read blogs just by reading the awful material they pour out..

   In a past life as an occasional freelance writer I had gigs writing speeches, editorials, in-flight magazine articles, essays, short stories and – yes, they really are made up by a staff writer in some cases – “Readers letters” for a top-shelf magazine. I have written novels for NaNoWriMo, attempted a screen play and I intend to write more just for the joy of writing in those genres. I researched each genre (the top-shelf research frankly left me disturbed), before I started writing for them. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what I was doing and the finished result would have been inadequate..

   If you aren’t up to speed, go and get a Google Reader account, learn about RSS and read some blogs in the area you’re writing for as well as blogs that interest you personally. Learn the styles, what works, what doesn’t, and ask around for other people’s favourites. An RSS reader like Google’s may allow you to skim through 30+ blogs a day in less than 10 minutes. If it takes too long, mark all as read and try again tomorrow.

2. What’s the style you’re aiming for? Do you need to remain formal and distant, or are you going to be more personable and “chatty”? It’s possible to be chatty *and* professional (I hope this blog proves that), but many new blogs seem to go too far into the extremes: they become stilted, boring diatribes in the style of press releases, or you discover an intellectual property lawyer going on about his cat three times a day. Both are wrong, and will fail quickly for good reason.

3. Do you actually care about what you’re writing about? If not, change it. You may need to write something in a particular area because your boss told you to, and you’d rather write about chocolate or your favourite football team, but you have to find the bit that excites you. If you can’t find something in there that excites you, maybe it’s time to consider whether you’re working for the right boss..

   It is nearly always possible however to find something that sings to you individually as well as is of appeal to the audience you’re aiming for – it’s only when you find that angle that the writing will flow and it’ll be enjoyable.

4. Who is your audience? This is critical. You need to think about your audience, why they should be interested in you, and how to make the most of their time. In the new information economy if somebody gives you their attention it should be considered a gift, so don’t waste it. Think about their needs, wants and expectations then try and work out how to meet them. In fact, no, exceed them..

   Interestingly, the audiences I’ve chased never arrived, and the audiences I have are people who just find something about me and my thoughts I didn’t know was there myself. That might be my bad execution, it could be a general lesson to learn. However not aiming at all is just going to result in a shambles.

5. Do you know what the basic blog article templates are? All writing is based on a template of some sort: boy meets girl movie scripts; best man’s speeches that leave the room laughing; murder mysteries littered with red herrings; etc. Blogging is no different..

   Here are some basic ones to get you going linked to articles I’ve written in template: response to news item or report; top tips for something (like this post); announcement of new product or service even if it’s quite small; link to article you liked with editorial (see below); rants dressed as analysis – even angry rants – seeking reaction or change; live-blogging of an event or conference.

   Mix up that lot within a niche, and you’re going to start building a brand.

6. You know it’s a conversation, right? I’m a hypocrite on this one as I link lightly, but blogging is a conversation. You link to articles you like by other bloggers, and they might link back to you. If your audiences are related, you both win. The link is like currency in the blogosphere as it greases the wheels of growing an audience.

   Some people have comments on their blogs. I do on some of mine. On this one, I don’t [edit: I now do] - that needs to change soon, but the Vagueware blog section is about to undergo a major re-jigging so it’ll wait until then. The conversation though is how you go from broadcast to social. If you’re not linking, you’re not commenting on other people’s blogs and you’re not open to people linking and commenting on your material, you’re not getting it. You’re just doing press releases in Wordpress.

7. Can you actually write? I don’t mean can you hold a pen, I mean can you hold an audience? Some can, some can’t..

   If you struggle to let writing flow, read more and think about what you’re reading. Roll nice sentences around in your head and think about how they work. Style guides might help, but only if you’re a robot. Read, read, read…

8. There are no forumlas, so why are you sticking to them? Everything I’ve just said could be wrong. It probably is. You need to experiment and listen to your own audience. I was on the panel at Speak To A Geek and when one audience member pointed out few in her target audience had access to a computer, I suggested she print things out and hands it to them – the blogosphere is not Neverland where all your communications problems are solved. Think. Act. Enjoy. See what happens.

I hope that helps somebody, somewhere. Writing it has helped me re-think a few things. And now I’ll see what I can do for that client…

I am truly amazed at the story the WSJ ran today suggesting that there are more people making money blogging than programming in America today. From the article:

When you think about it for a moment, this is insane. I don’t know how they are calculating their figure as there is no “blogger” row in the table they cite, but assuming it’s true It means that there are literally 452,000 people out there making a living (at least partially) from affiliate programmes, advertising and selling information products. Four hundred and fifty two thousand.

Maybe I’ve seen so many bubbles over the years that I’m now cynical of large numbers, that seems an awfully large number. What’s more, it’s no surprise that this content with its sensationalist, highly-segmented and tailored tone is taking readers away from newspapers. I’ve discussed before the problems of newspapers and I don’t wish to discuss them again just yet, but the WSJ does ask some interesting questions about this new breed of content producers:

“While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.

For now, bloggers say they are overwhelmingly happy in their work, reporting high job satisfaction. But what happens if they, too, lose work; are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America’s Newest Profession.”

I feel that as newspapers submerge into the quagmire of their own making, the trained journalists they release will emerge on their own two feet and find a way to take some of the earnings pie out there for themselves, whilst also addressing these issues. There are plenty of models on the horizon for individuals or small teams of journalists to be able to produce the content we need, get paid well for it and in a work setting that protects them, and all without the flabby masses of managers who don’t understand this new model of the World.

Interesting times we live in, eh?

For some reason, Mephisto isn’t behaving on my server right now, so comments aren’t working. I plan to move the whole shebang over to Wordpress sometime “soon”. That said, I’d like as a gentle introduction back into me blogging here again about “Innovation in Software” (less ‘what is happening in Manchester’ in future), to talk about comment systems.

This cartoon from the excellent xkcd strip sums up my problem with comments right now:

The problem I have is this: on any popular system where users are allowed to comment, as the number of users able to comment without fear of genuine peer review increases, the signal-to-noise ratio drops exponentially.

In other words, if I and 5 million other people can comment on a YouTube video without any fear of us being reminded of what we said not just in the future but the very next time we meet a friend, we are more likely to be flippant, irrelevant, and “noisy” than if we knew people whose opinion of ourselves mattered to us were going to be reading that comment and evaluating it.

It’s why social network status updates and posted items are relatively sane and measured and why blog posts are more considered. We care about what the readers think, because what they think will have a direct impact on our future relationship with them.

So, whilst thinking about kagtum a lot recently (background if you’re unaware), I’ve been thinking about this problem. How do you allow for user comments without them descending into noise?

The “mission statement” for kagtum in its current form is something along the lines of “delivering relevant news and event information”, where “relevancy” is the secret sauce that gets quite complicated. How do we make sure every comment you see is relevant in order for it to stay within that mission statement?

I have a possible answer, but I need to keep it close to my chest for now. Normally my ideas are thrown out into the wind as being worthless, however my answer has a direct consequence on execution of a business plan. That said, if you come and meet me at an event and ask me, I’ll tell you what it is if I trust you. ;-)

Organising BarCamp Manchester has allowed me to get to know some of the people over at the Manchester Evening News a little better, thanks to them hosting us on March 1st. In the course of events I suggested maybe a few blog articles about the local technology and geek scene would be a good idea on their blogs area.

Naturally, this resulted in me committing to producing said articles myself.

And so I have started contributing to “Manchester is Online”, which used to be called “The Mancunian Way” the blog that changed name and then back again to “The Mancunian Way”, (I didn’t get the memo :-) ) – one of the most widely read blogs in the region.

I should stress at this point that there are strict editorial guidelines on what I can publish there, so please hold back your press releases. No “advertising copy” is permitted whatsoever.

I’m just going to geek out there in a way that helps “normal people” relate to what it is the rest of us do. It’s a much more general audience over there, so it’s going to be interesting to try and work out how to relate to them.

In the very near future, things are going to be changing at Vagueware.

Firstly, the site currently at vagueware.com is going down. I’m going to release the code running the idea bank as open source and you’ll be able to also setup a free hosted version of your own on Vagueware’s servers. Think of it as a bit like wordpress.org & .com but for open innovation rather than blogging. This will mean you can create your own IdeaStorm for your company or product.

I think open innovation and getting customers or employees involved in product and service development is going to be big in the next few years, and I want to help people get involved. If you have Ruby on Rails skills, patches to the code base will be appreciated as well – it’s going to be MIT licensed so that it follows the “Rails way”.

That will of course need a new name, and given that it’s all about constantly evolving and changing what you do and how you do it, it’ll be named Fluxish.

There are quite a few major changes needed to get the current build ready for that release, so don’t expect it this week. The ideas on the current site won’t be lost: I’ll be creating a special little hosted fluxish install and moving all the data and users over – I won’t be destroying anything, just giving it a new home.

So what will go in the idea bank’s place at the main site? Well, the new Vagueware site will concentrate on selling my consultancy and development services. There will also be a mini-blog there about the business, freeing this blog up from posts like this where I discuss what is going on inside the business. I’ll be highlighting companies I’ve worked with in the past and occasionally posting a page up as a more detailed article about the process of development.

This blog will become much more focused on innovation and emerging trends within the digital sector. This is an area I’ve drifted away from in the last three months, and I’m keen to get it back on track.

In addition, I’m going to be blogging more elsewhere in partnership with other organisations.

I’ve agreed to start writing more for O’Reilly GMT to try and turn it into a more mature source of information for the technology scene within Europe. I’m still working out and proposing what kind of articles those will be, but obviously they’ll not be about vagueware, not about innovation in software in the sense this blog will be, but aimed at a tech-savvy audience.

Also, I’ve been asked to contribute articles to ‘Manchester is online’, formerly ‘The Mancunian Way’. It’s one of the most read Mancunian blogs, and I’m hoping to bring some insight to a slightly less geeky crowd than the usual readership I get to speak to here. This is more of an experiment right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. It’s the first time I’ll be stepping across into blogging for Mainstream Media, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’m doing it with the team at the Manchester Evening News.

In short then, I’ve got a lot of writing to get on with over the next few months, so please don’t be too upset if this blog gets neglected at times.

After a brief spurt of articles, I’ve slowed right down posting. It’s not accidental – it’s very considered in fact – and I thought it might be worth sharing a few plans.

I had a queue of about 90+ articles in draft ready to be finished and posted. At a rate of three per day, plus adding at least two more in draft form onto the queue I would have had the momentum to keep me going through to the end of the year.

I stepped back though and thought about why I wanted to publish here, what this blog was for, and whether that was a sensible strategy. I started asking whether I should care if this tool does this or that tool does that.

There are much bigger ideas we’re heading towards that need something more thoughtful than twenty blog articles a week.

I have yet decide my approach, but what readers enjoy matters. I get virtually no feedback about what people like beyond Google Analytics tells me, and it tells me little. I get few people quoting me and linking back to articles. I get few comments. In other words, it’s a little hard to know what is working and what isn’t beyond “being angry about Leopard” gets me traffic.

Questions for you then: what articles do you enjoy or hate? What do you want to see more of or less of?

As a rule, I hate blog posts about blogging. I also particularly hate blogs that cite posts that in themselves are citations on other blog posts. It is then, with regretful hypocrisy that I find myself citing Joel Spolsky whose post in turn cites Dave Winer. Even worse, Joel is citing a blog post made nearly 8 months ago. That said, I think the point being made is of interest and might change the way we think about user-generated content over the next 12 months.

Joel’s main point is that comments are next to pointless. He doesn’t allow comments on his blog, neither does Dave Winer. Their argument is that as a means to self-expression, the author has a right not to be bombarded with people shouting them down and they shouldn’t have to see “their space” polluted with garbage.

The flaw with this idea is the idea that blogs are a means of self-expression. They are not. They are a way to find like-minded people and to provide a low barrier of entry to getting involved in w global discussion about the things you care about. They are not billboards, they are not magazines, they are not leader columns in newspapers. Nor are they journals or fascinating insights into your unique and tortured soul (you delicate little snowflake, you).

They are about a two-way dialogue, a means to advance ideas and to further understanding in the most cost-effective and uncensored way possible. I could produce a magazine about innovation in software but that would bankrupt me – instead, when I get time, I put articles up here as and when. I might not get tens of thousands of readers, but I certainly get hundreds (in fact, 2,167 unique visitors in the last 30 days have visited blog.vagueware.com which is not too shabby). And some of them – very occasionally – leave a comment here.

The purpose of all this is to encourage a conversation. Comments and trackbacks are typically an important part of inviting people and saying “Please! Come on in and tell me what you think!” and help move things along.

The real problem is that really interesting ideas are never in the comments. I don’t get the turf wars that spark off on other blogs because every comment is moderated – I don’t allow through spam, abuse, or one-liners and so the comments are worth reading normally, but normally nobody ever reads them. The comments are typically idle thoughts, occasional insights, sometimes intelligent but often just a throwaway quip. They intrigue me, but the comments are not what excites me about the conversation around here – it’s the people who link here.

When somebody sits down and decides to push the conversation further by spending 30 minutes writing a piece about something I’ve written, edited it, made a decision that they’d be happy for their name to be next to those words for all eternity (the Web never forgets), and then publishes it with a link back to here, the quality is generally higher than somebody who quickly fills in a little box at the bottom of the page.

I haven’t had many inbound links, but the ones I’ve had have always made me think more about what I do and why I do it than any comment ever has. There used to be a load of links when this blog lived at a different URL, fewer now, but in time I expect that’s where the interesting ideas will come from.

This line of thinking seems to be an emerging trend out there.

Recently, there has been a lot of love for Tumblr, a blogging platform without comment facilities. I think it’s a daring tactic, and one that will improve the quality of the content they carry. It’s also wise engineering with a direct impact on profitability. All of a sudden they don’t need to worry (quite as much) about spam. They don’t need to worry (quite as much) about authentication. They need less storage on their servers. The code is simpler. It even helps their authors. If I see something on a tumblr blog I have a choice:

• Do nothing
• Link to it in an article here that expands my own thoughts on the subject

Either way, the noise level within the conversation is minimal and providing I’m not an illiterate moron, the signal goes up. What’s more, the author of the tumblr blog doesn’t just get his own audience thinking about what he wrote, but perhaps some of mine as well. A few people might link to my piece so I get their audience, and so does the tumblr blog. This is how it’s meant to happen.

The author has no worries about spam, or about people cluttering up their space with thoughts that just don’t “get it”. They just get to go on linking to people and watching out for who links to them by way of Technorati or similar.

In short, comments aren’t a bad idea because you have a right to not be shouted down, they’re a bad idea because they slow the conversation down. They raise noise, deplete signal and keep the A-list static.

As such, I’ve decided that as of today comments are closed here. It makes my life easier, and hopefully yours too. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, you can make comments on the notes that get imported from here automatically if you want, but if you really have something to say about anything you read here, I’d ask you to post a link on your own blog. I’ll see it (I track every inbound link) and if I think it’s relevant I’ll update the article you point to. I may even write a new article pointing back at you. We both benefit.

If you don’t have a blog, I have to ask: what on earth are you waiting for? Tumblr awaits…

Blogging is all the rage, and not just with the cool kids but with the suits who chase the money-dragon. We’re told that TechCrunch earns around $60,000 per month. Not far off a cool three-quarters a million dollars a year. Just off the back of a blog. Not everybody can get that kind of traffic, but the money in the industry is flowing well and to a diverse group of people.

Steve Pavlina writes a personal development blog, and he’s posted an article claiming each post he makes is worth $2,400 total over a 10 year period, or about $20/month. He also discusses how the articles he writes have a ‘timelessness’ to them which means they’ll keep on getting traffic for many years after he writes them – something TechCrunch will struggle with, I expect.

There’s a real conundrum for me in all of this.

Firstly, I set up vagueware.com as a blog instead of a ‘normal’ business site because I wanted to show that I respected my clients and potential clients more than would be suggested through an animated, flashing pile of bland marketing speak. I could have thrown together a pretty site with mission statements and splash screens and lots of detail about how ‘dynamic’ and ‘cutting edge’ Vagueware Ltd will be in carrying out ‘our objectives’, but it would have all been bull. I don’t like businesses who operate like that when I deal with them, so I figured I’d do something more true to myself.

I want to demonstrate a knowledge and attitude that clients will be able to understand and identify with. They can sift back through my posts and work out what kind of guy they are dealing with – do I know my stuff, or am I just full of bluff? – whilst at the same time being educated about some of the choices a developer might have to make. An informed, educated client is ten times easier for me to work with than one who thinks a developer is nothing more than a grumpy stay-at-home version of a TV repair man.

I also want to establish a reputation for being a half-decent developer. I’m not being full of myself here, I have 13 years commercial development experience (despite only being 28 right now) and as none (or very little) of that code has managed to go into open source projects, I didn’t know how best to demonstrate that. Yes, I still need to throw more code out into the wild to really build reputation, but this is better than nothing, and it’ll get better.

In the first 25 days of going, this site is doing an OK job – I think a total of over 4,000 visitors and nearly 6,000 pageviews in less than a month is doing pretty well. However, at this rate if I continue to write about generic development topics instead of just shoving out code snippets, its potential as a revenue source could outstrip its ability to draw in clients and customers. So what to do? Most people would say build the blog as a vehicle in its own right, whack some ads on, enjoy your new villa in the Pyrenees.

For me the biggest issue is that I don’t want to run adverts. I believe adverts steal attention and life is short enough without me stealing some of your thoughts so I can make $20 RPM – one of the deals I made with myself when I set the business up was that I would try to never run an application with a ‘made by Vagueware’ logo on it that runs ads, precisely for that reason. It may be that in the style of all successful entrepreneurs I end up deciding this is “a strongly held opinion that can easily be changed”, but I shouldn’t give in so easily as to change my mind 25 days into a project.

At the end of the day I want to write about development, and I want people to enjoy that writing. If I have choice though of giving that content away for free and not earning, or making money from it but worrying that I’m just stealing moments of consciousness from the audience, then I’ll just have to make my money some other way.

With that in mind, here’s the deal: I’m going to do my best to write about development, particularly the back-end of web development, in a way that educates/entertains/informs/interests, that provides a reference over time, and helps build reputation. It might mean I don’t end up earning $20/month from each article, but the true answer for me to the title of this post will hopefully prove to be, in the words of the advert, priceless.