A Letter from Dan Gilmor to the Bayosphere [this is a flaky link at the moment]. An incredibly idealistic “citizen journalism” website now a lost cause? This is an interesting thing to read if you’re into blogs and idealism. Dan’s own analysis, I believe, is totally wrong and he doesn’t really understand why his site failed. The fact is that this was never a citizens jounralism site, but a site about citizen journalism with some random contributions. There is a very limited audience for what is essentially a blog about itself and blogs. That’s how it eventually boiled down. Too much naval-gazing and not enough substance.
Instead of doing re-designs and re-thinking the site, he essentially bails out. From what I can tell impatience is not a positive thing in the online world. There are kids on Live Journal that had more patience with their blogs than Gilmor here.
I looked at the basic readership numbers on his site and it fluctuated wildly at times meaning there were some hot buttoms he was hitting. But he apparently was not studying it enough to maximize those jumps expecting the world to beat a path to his door just because he’s a nice guy (he is, in fact).
If nothing else, it will be interesting to analyze this after the fact. And, you never know, this could actually be a well-conceived publicity stunt to pump the numbers, wot?
I left what I considered one of the two or three best gigs in the entire newspaper industry. But having published We The Media — and seeing first-hand the application of bottom-up communications in all kinds of arenas, especially journalism — I knew it was time to devote my full energies to this emergent phenomenon.
I learned some things last year, about media, about citizens, about myself. Although citizen media, broadly defined, was taking the world by storm, the experiment with Bayosphere didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.
found by Chris “the cynic” Coulter
I am no expert on blogs, but the top three things that draw readership can be narrowed to;
1. Frequent posting – Doesn’t seem to matter what, as long as the F5Crowd can have fun all day instead of doing work.
2. Boobies
3. Boobies
My wife and I fail at making this concept work on our blog all the time, even though i keep trying to talk her into showing the boobies 🙂
Interesting. I agree there is a lot to be learned from looking at your statistics. Especially referers and search engine referers. For example, I get a lot of search engine hits from people looking for Patrick Norton, apparently people like him or something, because of one entry I wrote about him. Because of those hits I now keep an eye out for articles he’s written and post links to them, which I would not otherwise do, which further increases traffic to my site when people search for information on him.
I also try to do something a bit different with my site. As John C. has noted the whole “what I ate today” thing just doesn’t appeal to a wide audience. I also don’t especially cater to people who read on a regular basis. Instead I’m posting relevant information and commentary on articles as I find them. What happens is I get a very limited number of regular readers but I get a LOT of hits from search engines and thus a steady stream of traffic. These are people looking for information on a specific topic, not something to read everyday. This also allows me to have a more eclectic selection of topics and sustain a more irregular posting pattern. For example I post logs of all my vacations, commentary on IT news, directions and resources for software applications and various whitepapers and articles on anything from computers to education. This mix of topics doesn’t work very well with the regular reader model but it works for me because my approach is to develop it into a resource database for random search traffic (and myself). Something interesting to ponder anyway.
I’m no expert, so this is just my opinion, but I never thought the Bayosphere was supposed to be a blog as such, which is what it turned into. But instead a community outlet where I could write news / review / op-ed / whatever for and about the community. And I might have if I lived in the bay area.
Some may say I just described a group blog, but I don’t think that’s it.
It’s to bad though, I was following Bayosphere with the idea of doing something similar for my area. I may still, but I was wanting to follow a “proven” method if I could. In the end I think the problem is most people are fine consumers of news and such, but few want to be involved in providing that information.
~Mark