Blogging

Ads in Feeds? Please, no.

Feedburner

Hmmm. So FeedBurner is going to start allowing folk to embed Adsense in their RSS feeds. I don’t like ads on blogs much, I have to say, and getting content through RSS usually lets you avoid them. I really don’t like the idea of ads in my feeds.

There is one thing that is worse, though, and that’s partial RSS feeds (damn you, BBC!). Maybe with ads in feeds being more easily accessible – previously it’s only very well read bloggers that have ads on their feeds – we’ll start to see a two-tier system. Get the partial feed for free, or the full one with ads.

What an awful thought.

Anyway, DavePress is remaining ad-free, both on the site and in the feed. Just thought you might like to know.

Telling stories at DC10plus

As part of our work social reporting the Digital Inclusion conference last week, David and I agreed to write some posts building on what we had done on DC10plus’ own blog, which is hosted at WordPress.com .

The first of my posts has now gone up – do subscribe to the blog for some interesting reflections on technology and local government service delivery.

Public sector blogging in the Guardian

I had the pleasure of talking to Patrick Butler of the Guardian the other day on the subject of public sector types blogging. He did a jolly good job of editing down everything I said into one paragraph in his article:

There are still few blogging bosses out there, but as Dave Briggs, a blogger and full-time public servant, notes, chief executives are rapidly running out of arguments not to go online. When blogging is this easy, this cheap, and the potential benefits so great, he says, the question is not so much why blog, but why not?

How do you measure blog success?

What sort of things do you look at to measure the ‘success’ of your blog, whether as a whole site or on a post by post process. I guess it might depend on why you are blogging as to what your actual definition of success might be.

Here’s a few basic ways that I thought of:

  • Page views
  • Number of comments
  • Saves to del.icio.us etc and other social bookmarking sites like Digg etc
  • Links to you from other blog
  • Number of RSS subscribers

I suppose even these measures aren’t definite. For example, a few comments having a quality discussion are probably more valuable than hundreds saying ‘Great post!’ or something equally rubbish.

But of course there are other things to, which might tie in more to your reason for blogging. For example, campaign blogs which have a particular cause in mind, or blog that promote a new way of doing things. You might not get many comments, but if you manage to change the way people are doing things, then you have been successful. I guess the only problem is that you won’t know about it!

The great thing about blogging, though, is that if what you are doing is useful to people, or if it is something that folk find interesting, then people will link to you, or comment, or bookmark your stuff. It’s almost inevitable.

How do you measure your blog’s success?

BBC blogging

Interesting re-post of an article that appeared in the BBC’s in-house magazine Ariel by Rory Cellan-Jones on the issues around the launch of the various blogs written by BBC journalists:

It strikes me the initial concerns were twofold – that nobody would be interested in our blogs so they would be a waste of a correspondent’s effort, and that they would threaten our impartiality. But the blogs have attracted plenty of readers – Robert Peston’s Peston’s Picks gets a million page views a month – and they’ve done that without descending to the opinionated, loudmouthed knockabout which was previously seen as the prerequisite for success in this arena.

What blogging does allow a broadcaster to do is to cover stories that would never make it onto the airwaves, and, in my case, to engage with a different and very knowledgeable audience. Mind you, that’s bound to be a minority audience and the danger is they become a distraction from the job of reaching the mass of licence-fee payers. Alf Hermida suggests that the BBC bloggers need to do even more to have a conversation with these people – I think there are risks in getting too involved.

Are these issues peculiar to the BBC, I wonder, or indeed peculiar to journalism?

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