Guy Kawasaki is Wrong about Blogs

Guy Kawasaki has been tearing it up since he launched his blog, but he is wrong about a lot of his recommendations in The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog. He is consistently off in tone, like 90 degrees off course.

His first point:

1. Think “book” not “diary.” First, a bit of philosophy: my suggestion is that you think of your blog as a “product.” A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think “book” not “diary” and market the heck out of it.

Yes, by all means, think about your blog as something to be read by others, but a blog does not have to be “like a book” in order to be evangelized. A book is — generally — an object of limited length, something that has a beginning. middle, and end. And at some point, the reader puts it down: when it’s finished. Blogs, however, are potentially endless, and often do have a great deal of spontaneity: they offer insights into the person behind them. Reading Guy’s blog is like reading a book, and it doesn’t offer much of an insight into the author, aside from his workmanlike ethics. I would welcome more of the diary style in his writing, candidly. As it is, it feels like the weekly sermon from a good-spirited pastor in the chirch of marketing.

Some of the other points he makes follow the same theme, such as

“Take it from someone who’s tried: It’s tough to market crap, so make sure you have something worth saying. Or, write a diary and keep it to yourself.”

Guy’s thrust is that you should somehow have it all mapped out. Fine, if you’re that sort of a person writing that sort of blog.

And then there’s a list of relatively useful information for those who maybe have had zero to do with the blogosphere before, which I guess is the case with Guy, like the seemingly obvious notion that you should start with a list of bloggers that you read for a blogroll:

4. Collect links for blog rolling. This is something I wish I had done on day one, but I was totally ignorant of this linking thing. If I had to do it over again, I would look for all the interesting blogs that cover similar topics to my blog. Then, on day one I would have blog rolled them all and ensured that Technorati pinged my blog, so that the bloggers might find out that I existed.

Just proves that Guy’s success as a blogger is the direct outcome of his success as an author, and it’s no surprise that he would recommend bookish approaches to blogging. But I believe that his recommendations are just wrong for the average blogger starting out. They aren’t published authors with experience writing best-selling books, with a folio of topics ready to be repurposed in blog post form, and they don’t have 95,000 names in a database so they can email 10,000 close personal friends about their new blog being launched.

On the contrary, I would suggest Guy’s approach only for those who are already celebrities. For the rest of the population, do it the bloggish way, not the bookish way.

1. It’s more like a diary than a book. If you think it’s a book, then you will fall into Guy’s quandary: feeding the content beast. “I don’t know about other bloggers, but one of the biggest challenges I face is feeding the content beast. If you can help me feed it, I’ll gladly link to you and give you publicity.” Because it seems like a job to him, instead of writing about what is actually on his mind. After all this time, I still don’t have a clue as to what Guy is doing, day in and day out. Or who he is reading. So he sort of floats in space, instead of seeming linked to a world of other bloggers.
   
   
2. It’s bottom-up, a world of people writing their daily thoughts, individuals whose thoughts and writing could influence you, push you. Get enmeshed in the world, find the voices that move you, that matter, and let that push you over the edge from writing comments into becoming a blogger. Guy missed that whole evolution, and only after launching learned about the interplay between authors and other authors, and between authors and active readers. Too bad.
   
   
3. It’s not a book, it’s not a sermon, it’s a dance. There is writing going on out there, topics being broached, news breaking. The beat speeds up, you move faster, its slows, you chill. And you are not dancing alone.
   
   
4. Find your voice. Takes sides, write about what matters to you, don’t give up, and sharpen your pencil every day.

23 April 2006 Permalink

Guy Kawasaki on How To Suck Up To A Blogger

Guy Kawasaki is so off tone in his How To Suck Up To A Blogger that I am not even going to deconstruct his recommendations point by point, as many others have.

The ‘stroke their egos’ stuff is particularly abhorrent. Enough said.

Bloggers are people, and not a separate species. Many bloggers are busy, but are interested in information pertinent to their line of inquiry, whatever that might be. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to simply send an email, expressing your rationale as to why something might be of interest. But if you haven’t taken the time to figure out what the blogger is interested in, and you send junk instead of treasure, it will backfire.

21 February 2006 1 Permalink

The Conversation About The Conversational Index

There has been so much buzz about the Conversational Index idea, that many (if not most) people have lost the original context:

[from Blog Conversational Index: say what? by Jon Lebkowsky]

• This is an incentive to end the war against comment spam, because the more I get, the better my comment index. *8^)
• Am I more effective because I draw more attention from vocal people, and other bloggers? How do we measure the lurkers? How do we measure the quality of responses, and the cluefulness of responders?

[from Weblogsky: Blog Conversational Index: say what? by Nancy White]

Ed Vielmetti chimed into Jon’s comments with a good observation:

Some online conversations happen through blog comments, others through IM and email and in-person sideband and voice and … and …

No one index covers any meaningful part of it.

Stats lie. Using stats to measure utility just encourages people to game the stats. Not a game I want to play…

I added my agreement, noting that we’ve seen this metric come up in the “old days” of forum based online communities. Quantity did not equate to quality. It’s like confusing signal and noise. Unless you are going for pageviews for advertising models. And I thought we were “talking” about “conversations!” wink wink

The quality of a conversation is entirely contextual. Reducing it to a number does not give an indication of quality.

This goes to another assumption. Are all blogs about conversation? Are all conversations bloggy? Naw… we know they aren’t. But it is chic to glorify conversation the way we used to glorify “community.” (Yes, I’m getting snarky. IT must be all the SuperBowl testosterone floating around my house. I can’t help it!)

I’m not totally dissing the idea here. I find it very interesting to look at ways to discern patterns in blogs. There is value in looking at the ratio of post to responses. But it cannot stand alone as a measure of value. Conversation is still, thank goodness, a quirky human act that cannot be reduced to a metric.

Lots of good points. Yes, people will game any system. Yes, comment quality varies. Yes, people have tried to quanitfy the quality of conversation before. Yes, yes, yes.

But I do maintain that a healthy degree of conversational interaction is a necessary precondition for a successful blog, which was the original context of the idea. I noted that all the blogs that became successful at Corante — had steady link counts, regular readers, engaged authors — displayed a high Conversational Index (using Dodge’s variant of CI, CI=(Comments+Trackbacks/Posts)) from the very start, and maintained it.

Note that is may indiciate all sorts of causes:

• The author(s) of the blog may be tapping into an existing personal network or an existing community, and the blog meets the needs of that group.
  
  
• The topics being convered in the blog are extremely topical.
  
  
• The author(s) may be unusually gifted writers.
  
  
• The author(s) may be celebrities or may be involved in some controversy or scandal that leads to high traffic from the very start.

Not a comprehensive list, but good indiciators. Examples: Guy Kawasaki’s new blog has taken off, and the reason: a good writer who is a celebrity, talking about important topics. But the average unknown blogger, writing in the dark, divorced from a larger community of interested people? Hopeless. A relatively unknown genius, deeply thoughtful on the search for life balance and meaning, swept into the public eye by the Tsunami? Evelyn Rodriguez.

And of course, at least I hope, /Message, where the CI has moved up from 1.27 the day I wrote the first post about it to today’s 1.75, thanks to the lively conversation around the idea of the CI itself, and other posts, like the Cocomment release.

So, to put back into context: The Conversational Index is intended as a leading indicator of present and future blog viability and vitality. I don’t know whether an index of 3 would be twice as good as an index of 1.5. Perhaps there is some sort of reverse log scale involved, where 3 only indicates a slightly more engaged and active community than 1.5. But I do know, empirically, that those with subpar CI, where there are way more posts that comments or trackbacks, are unlikely to be successful in the long run.

8 February 2006 1 Permalink

Valleywag: Tony Perkins’ embarrassing web stats

Nick Douglas is off to a good start at Valleywag, going after the sacred cows of Silicon Valley, like Tony Perkins:

[from Valleywag: Tony Perkins’ embarrassing web stats]

Perkins’ new venture, AlwaysOn, has much the same lumbering style, and business model, playing to the egos of its contributors more than the curiosity of its readers. The one flaw? On the web, everything is measured, including AlwaysOn’s readership, which is miniscule, even for a site that calls itself an insiders’ network. AlwaysOn: not just a dog, but a chihuahua.

Nick includes an Alexa graph comparing AlwaysOn with TechCrunch, which is not flattering to AlwaysOn.

Just as bad, or worse is the Alexa comparison with Corante…

with Guy Kawasaki’s new blog…

And even with /Message, which is 23 days old today, and has edged up to like half of the reach of AlwaysOn…

3 February 2006 1 Permalink