Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

In the mid to late 1990s, perception had it there was no more exciting a career title than that of Webmaster. It seemed everybody wanted to be one, and some called it the "Job of the Future". As a Webmaster, your code manipulation could change the look and flow of a Web site with each publish, and make Web pages spring up overnight, complete with hyperlinks, animated GIFs and comment forms with basic JavaScript. As seemingly every company needed a Web presence, the demand for somebody who could write HTML and handle Web operations filled them with incredible power. But as years passed, the title fell by the wayside, and you're now no more likely to find somebody with Webmaster on their business card as you are to find cars that come with cassette decks standard.

In the ensuing decade or so, the Internet has become part of the landscape, not the mystery it once was. The Webmaster position similarly faded to the background, and many companies tend to have portions of IT and Marketing share the load, outsourcing the Web design function to an outside agency. Larger companies keep the Web expertise in house, but don't call their employees by the dreaded "W" word.

As the Internet has changed, so too have the buzzwords. As one friend recently noted, simply having a blog isn't the differentiator it was a few years ago. Now, just about everybody has one (or more), so making you a blogger isn't anything special unto itself. But where the new frontier lies is where I see people positioning themselves - in social media.

Social media is a loose term that largely relies on user generated content, whether it be social networking, forums, web logs, social news or bookmarking sites. Those of us who have embraced the blogging boom have no doubt leveraged these tools: Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and the like, for starters. But I'm constantly seeing people giving me invites on LinkedIn saying their title is as a social media expert or social media consultant, or running into profiles online where social media is featured prominently, and their numbers are increasing.

I'm afraid that for the most part, their efforts to rebrand as social media experts will be short-lived and futile. Saying one is an expert in utilizing social media sites is akin to brand one's self as a "Web browsing expert", an "e-mail expert", or a "telephone specialist". While some will capitalize on the technophobes and newbies who don't know the difference between MySpace and NASA, or Hotmail and Hot Pockets, I believe it makes more sense that social media is spread thinly across all aspects of activity, be it a company's marketing activities, human resources, communications, and business development. Pretty soon, with any luck, social media won't be any scarier than opening a Web browser or writing a simple blog post.

So what should these so-called social media experts do to find real work? Some of them might get lucky. Every big analyst firm should have a social media expert on hand to help train the slow adopters, at least until they get the point the analysts have to change titles again. But to me, saying you're a social media specialist or a social media expert doesn't amount to a whole lot. What else do you do? What do you do really? There's no money to be made Digging up stories, hitting the StumbleUpon button or refreshing FriendFeed or Twitter, after all. Social Media is simply part of the landscape, in the background. Social media offers tools for communications and information sharing, but it's a means to an end, not the end itself.

Like the surge in Webmasters rose and fell, similar will be the rise and fall of people who flash you a business card with the term "social media" on it. It's the 2008 version of the Aeron chair and Foosball table so common in the days of the Web 1.0 startup. If you've got social media on your card, think about what else you do. Are you a trainer or a marketer? Are you a PR person, or an IT expert? Don't lose those talents, and be sure you make social media part of the landscape, not part of the headline, as it's not the tools you use, it's how you do it and what you're looking to get accomplished.

After 18 months of progressing beyond the rookie stages of product development, Ballhype, the sports story discovery, submission and voting site, announced this morning that they have been acquired by Future US, a San Francisco-based media company. The purchase, for an undisclosed amount, enables the company's properties, including BallHype and a sister site, ShowHype, focused on entertainment news and gossip, to continue, but with a partner to help increase their monetization as traffic and engagement grows.

As an early Ballhype user in the first half of 2007 (See: Hype It Up: Ballhype Is Here to Change the Game), the site quickly became a go-to for me in terms of finding the best sports news from around the blogosphere, without being married to the front page of ESPN. More than just a news discovery site, BallHype also offered community engagement through votes, comments, and contests, for game predictions and tournaments, like March Madness.

By October, the husband and wife team of Jason and Erin Gurney, saw the growth BallHype had delivered, and pointed their knowledge to Hollywood's glitz, with ShowHype (See: ShowHype Connects Hollywood With Silicon Valley Geekery)

When my wife and I met with Jason and Erin during a viewing of the NBA All-Star Game festivities at their home this last year, they told me despite its later start, ShowHype's traffic eventually eclipsed that of BallHype, soon becoming the primary driver of engagement, page views, and advertising. But the pair didn't want to reinvent the wheel again and again, making customized sites for the more mundane topics of technology, politics, or religion, choosing instead to keep focused on those things they themselves liked.

The purchase of BallHype by Future US shouldn't mean any dramatic changes for the pair of sites. They are still going to be running, and finding the best of the Web's news for sports and entertainment.

In an interview with AOL Sports' FanHouse, co-founder Jason Gurney said, "Our traffic had reached the point where it was substantial enough to prove the value of our model--but we weren't monetizing well, and didn't have enough resources to take advantage of some of the opportunities we saw."

The Gurneys built BallHype and ShowHype almost single-handedly, alongside some technical help, and partnership with other smart sports folks, including Tom Ziller of Sactown Royalty, as well as advice from Gabe Rivera of Techmeme. The pair reside in the Bay Area with their two young children, a boy and a girl.

You can learn more about the acquisition on the official BallHype blog or at AOL Sports' Fanhouse.

When Apple's iTunes application store opened up last week, I, at first, skipped over the free Remote application that offered the option to manage iTunes or the Apple TV from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It just seemed stupid at worst, or a proof of concept at best. Why would I want to duplicate the Apple Remote's capabilities with a much more functional device, I thought? But after checking the application out the last few days, I can attest to the fact I've been pleasantly surprised, and am now taking my iPod Touch with me around the house, acting as a DJ on the move.

As the screenshots included in this post show, the Remote application on the iPod Touch or iPhone does more than just meet the same capabilities offered by Apple's miniscule white remote. Benefitting from the wide touchscreen, I can browse thousands of songs, albums and artists quickly, and see a mirror image of what's playing on my Apple TV, letting me change the song with a single tap of my finger, anywhere in range of the Airport wireless network that both my device and the Apple TV share.


In contrast, the white remote has always been painstakingly slow to browse large libraries, practically forcing an indent into my thumb as I held the down key just to pass the letter "M". Given my library has almost 6,000 songs on it, and 23.6 days worth of music, that can be a frequent problem.

Once the Remote application is synched up with your Apple TV, using it is very simple. Choose "Playlists", "Albums", "Artists", or search for a song or any band. Unlike the white remote, you can actually type on your iPod Touch or iPhone, making this very quick.


Now, instead of relying on my iTunes on the laptop, and just turning up the sound to full blast, or resigning myself to not listening to my music as I move around the house, I can leverage the sound system on my TV set, and play DJ from room to room. I can even go to the "More" tab and select what the Apple TV was always intended to do - play movies and TV shows. But overnight, this little would-be useless application has become a must-have. I'm not leaving my iPod Touch laying around any more.