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LinkedIn Jumps on the Feed Reader Craze, Buys Pulse

posted on April 12, 2013

pulseEvery since Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader, a dozen others have popped up with plans to fill the void.

Today’s entry comes from LinkedIn. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they bought one – Pulse: Your News, Blog, Magazine and Social Reader. The app was designed as a class project by two Standford boys who were looking for a better way to keep up with their favorite blogs and newspapers.

Now, 20 million people use Pulse to keep up with their favorite content streams in 190 countries. Pulse says they consume more 10 million stories a day and that’s music to this writer’s ears.

LinkedIn bought Pulse because well-written content is slowly pushing random blurbs off the page.  Here’s a quote from their announcement post.

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Tumblr Shuts Down Their One Attempt to Rise Above the Noise

posted on April 11, 2013

storyboardSocial media has a higher than average noise to signal ratio. For every truly creative or informative blip, there are thousands of useless blurbs, nasty retorts, misinformed mentions and lots and lots of spam. Tumblr is like this. You can skim through page after page of duplicate celebrity photos, bad manips and overused pictures of animals making funny faces. If you keep digging, you will find a few gems like Restaurant-Restaurant (a man who turns restaurant stationary into art) and Last Book I Loved. These are the kinds of Tumblrs that made it to the Storyboard and now Tumblr is shutting it down.

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Revitalizing the Classics: About.com and Digg Say They Have a Plan

posted on April 5, 2013

1415159_47821948Is anyone surprised that About.com is still standing? Before Wikipedia, it was the best place to find a lot of specific information about a wide range of topics with everything from Action Figures to Zoology.

What sets the company apart from standard blog sites is their extremely specific template style which leans heavily on evergreen resource pages. They’re also known for the amount of text they publish on a page and they are the reigning champs when it comes to internal linking.

They’re also king of the adsense placements. They weave so many plain text ads into their template it’s often hard to tell what’s content and what’s not. And I guess that’s the point.

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Ning Tries to Recover its Zing

posted on March 26, 2013

ningDo you remember Ning? Back in 2005, Ning launched an unusual social networking tool that combined the conversation of a forum with the content of a website. Thousands of people signed up to create communities dedicated to their favorite TV show or movie, hobby or cause. You could also build a private Ning space for members of your local little league team, club or company.

Back in the day, I belonged to several Ning groups, so I was extremely disappointed when the free service converted to a paid service. That was the beginning of the end. Because they were doing it for fun, not profit, thousands of community owners shut down their sites and reopened in places such as LiveJournal and Facebook.

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Tumblr’s New Posting Tool Puts the Emphasis on Fast and Photos

posted on January 24, 2013

tumblr front pageTumblr may be a blogging platform but you wouldn’t know it from their front page. I don’t know if it was their intention all along but, the free blog site has become known for it emphasis on graphics over text.

Because of this, it attracts an artistic crowd. Fashion, comics, art, architecture, design – they all flourish here. As does visual humor and celeb sites with miles and miles of both legit and manipulated photos.

These numbers tell the story:

tumblr numbers

Yes, it’s a busy place. But for everything they’ve done right, their posting blank has been wrong for so very long. It was long and required too many steps. Photo handling was atrocious, which is ironic given the graphic nature of the site.

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Q&A Site Quora Launches Free Blog Platform

posted on January 24, 2013

Last week, LinkedIn announced they were shutting down their Q&A section which prompted me to ask the question “are we over the Q&A concept?” Now here comes Quora with a new twist – Blogs on Quora. I’m not sure if that helps or hurts my argument but let’s take a closer look.

The set-up is ultra simple. Name your blog, choose one of two plain themes, add a logo and you’re live. Now all you have to do is post. To test the system, I set one up to go along with my TV blog: http://tvoftheabsurd.quora.com/

quora blogThe text editor has minimal options and there doesn’t seem to be a way to wrap the text around the photos. Maybe I’m missing something. As simple as it appears, I’m still confused.

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New Tumblr Metrics Define the Power of the Reblog

posted on October 5, 2012

The success of a blog is generally measured in terms of incoming traffic. Social media is all about outward traffic – how many people reTweeted your Twitter post or shared your post on Facebook. Tumblr is unique in that it combines these two elements – you want people to visit your Tumblr blog on a daily basis, but you also want them to share what they find there via a reblog button.

Reblogging is such an integral part of Tumblr, they’ve partnered with Union Metrics to provide custom analytics for blogs on their system.

Union Metrics for Tumblr reporting includes:

  • Post and note volume to show overall engagement levels and trends over time
  • Top contributors and curators to help identify key influencers