I was talking yesterday with Phil Windley about what we both perceive to be a drop-off of traffic from other blogs as compared to a few years ago. Phil's thought — and I agree — is that the blogosphere has evolved to become a more real-time world. Twitter, TwitterGram, Facebook's status updates and similar short-format micro-blogs along with TechMeme, TechCrunch, Valleyway and (of course) Scoble have shifted the emphasis of blogging towards immediate and time-sensitive content. While there was always the concept of a scoop in the blogosphere, it's now measured in minutes rather than days. I don't know about you, and I'm not judging it as better or worse, but I find that much of what I read in RSS is now very current and transitory.
This begs the question: What *is* the best way to learn about long shelf-life content such as the programs we produce on The Conversations Network? Most of our traffic used to come in via links from bloggers, but those folks are now focused on more immediate short-term interests. RSS and blogs used to be a major recommendation engine for us, but that's falling off. We're trying to understand what's changed in the online world and what are the best recommendation systems and methods for long-format less immediate content.
Anybody searching on Negawatt, Energy, etc would eventually get driven to his speeches.
Good point. Unfortunately many blogs with long shelf-life posts tend to mix them with the transitory type (of which I deal in). Maybe this is a good opportunity for new kinds of link blogs.
Interesting, Doug. I find that my blogging has changed in that my blog itself does tend to have (I think) more "time insensitive" posts now…they may have to do with current events, certainly, but for the most part, I try to tend towards things that will be relevant longer term. I do continue to write "on the fly" stuff, but I do it in twitter. I've started using Dave Slusher's twitter shorthand "NL2: url" for what I'm listening to (and I'm working on improving my ability to automate those tweets).
I have changed my reference links to a certain extent, though…sometimes using Amigofish, or another "podcast aggregator" type service for the NL2 urls. I started that thinking it was a good idea, but this post points out part of the issue…I'm abstracting away from your site. Now, I'm certainly no traffic driver personally, but in the aggregate, that does affect you, perhaps. Amigofish is "well-behaved" in the sense that it doesn't cache your 'casts, or anything…it ends up pointing people back to ITC/MC feeds directly, but still, I think I'll change that practice for podcasts that have well-defined linkback pages (like you guys).
Thanks for the post, Doug. It's interesting to see behind the scenes on this stuff, and think about the big picture along with you.
It's my fault. I have lazy linker syndrome. I'd rather just refer to a site in text with enough detail for someone to search on it, than create a link. 🙂 Steve Gillmor was right; links are dead.
Another area is video sucking a lot of time and attention. However I think the largest contributing factor is the developing social graph. People are communicating and creating that many more relationships that leaving time for less interactive communication formats is difficult.
The little bit of revenue my blog generates comes form long term posts. How-to's and the like.
Twitter is nice because I'll find info and links very quickly that I in-turn post on my blog if I feel anyone will be interested or, more likely, if I want to remember them my self. That said, you may want to set up a twitter account that feeds Twitter the RSS from your Conversations Network. Sure it would be posting new stuff but we'll all follow and link to it and the long tail will be found. Plus, Google indexes Twitter.
Scobelizer's link blog feeds to twitter so there is precedence.
I've used Twitterfeed.com before and it works well.
Get tied in with universities. You probably are already. Also, get your subjects to link to you. Make it possible for people to embed in their sites with a link back to you.