Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

A ballsy move

via blog.posterous.com

Posterous is running a campaign over the next few weeks basically calling out every other blogging platform. I've got to say, that's a damn ballsy move for a small startup. Then again, Posterous is fucking awesome, so perhaps it's spot on.

I use both Posterous and Tumblr. And while Posterous is, in my opinion, technically superior to Tumblr, the crew over at Tumblr has managed to create a community that can't be replicated with a few lines of code. They actually make an effort to be content creators. There aren't many other companies out there that make both a technology product and put hours behind shaping the content on the platform.

In order to make the checklist above accurate there should be a sixth bullet, "Incredibly active creative community," for which Posterous does not have a check mark. Still, props to Sachin Agarwal for having the huge balls to call out every other blog platform and let everyone know what they are missing. 

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Measuring copypasta

Interesting: When you copy text from a New Yorker article and paste it somewhere else, it automatically includes a “Read more: URL” at end of paste.
via 37signals.com

Matt Linderman, of 37signals, points out an interesting feature on the New Yorker website. Apparently The New Yorker uses a service called Tynt to track readers who copy and paste text from their articles. Tynt is piece of JavaScript that you can embed on a site which tracks every time a user copies text, and can even append that snippet with a "Read more" link if you desire.

A rather brilliant way to measure engagement for a blog. The insights from the data that a service like this would return could be used to better optimize individual blogs posts in terms of word count, sentence structure, and sentence length. I tend to believe that this is just one of those incredibly simple things that no one ever thought of before, but will end up being a standard feature in analytics software going forward.

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Why good ideas never fail

A few years ago I tried to start a company called Anatomy Ads. We tried to create a social advertising network. This company failed as a business. You can read a lengthy post about what we did and what happened here.

But it didn't fail as a concept. Someone, somewhere, is going to invent a social ad platform that works. It's just a matter of time. What I wanted to address is everything that we did right, and why there is an even greater opporunity to do it again—and do it right.

When we started, there was a [now defunct] company called TipJoy which billed itself a "a social micropayments service." It was the closest analogue to what we were trying to create. TipJoy allowed you to leave a tip for someone else, usually a blogger or some other kind of creative person creating new media content. If you were a blogger, you'd put their widget on your site and people could leave you tips. All your readers had to do was fill out a tip amount and register their email address. TipJoy would send them an email and ask them to pay for their tip. It let people tip first and pay later. It was very simple. In a lot of ways it was a Web 2.0 version of the PayPal "Donate Now" button.

I thought it was an interesting idea immediately, but noticed there was a problem. There was no real incentive to leave a tip other than the warm fuzzy feeling you might get for doing so. Unforunately, that's not enough for most people. Leaving a tip for a blogger isn't like leaving a tip at a resturant. If you don't tip them, no one is going to spit in your food if you come back. On the web, no one even knows who you are. Moreover, it's just not customary to do so. You're asking people to change their behavior and you aren't giving them an incentive to do so.

We looked at this and thought about what might happen if we gave people a real inventive to "leave a tip". What if you gave people impressions. What if you gave them a voice on the blogs and websites they admire so much. Would that be enough? How many people would be willing to pay a dollar to get on Mashable even if they didn't know how many impressions they would get?

These were among some of the questions we tried to answer with the Anatomy Ads platform, and we ran into problems:

  • The system we created was too complicated.
  • Our widget didn't work on enough platforms.
  • We deviated away from IAB standard units. Huge mistake.
  • We forced people to create a separate login with us.

Part of what made TipJoy work at all was that it was so simple. They took the PayPal model, made it a little bit easier and more user friendly, and created a business out of it.

Simplicity is what has got me thinking about the idea of social micropayments and tipping again. Now we've got single sign-on services like Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth, OpenID, MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect. What if you allowed people a quick way to create ads, testemonials, or leave shoutouts using Twitter and Facebook? Could you make social advertising work?