I'm currently taking a 5-week online course in Social Media through MN State Univ., Mankato. The first week we researched blogs, and I chose to follow up on some of the content referred to in the textbook we are reading. Pt. 1 of this assignment on blogging (posted below) focuses on John Blossom's blog ContentNation, and mentions his award winning tech-blog Contentblogging. This post is Pt. 2. In it I look at several other blogs that analyze social media content and Web technology.
INTRO:
Maybe it was last summer I found Technorati and Blogcritics, the former a sort of bloggers’ hub and advertising service station and the latter an online mag and branch of the former that writers contribute to for free. The benefit of belonging and publishing on those sites is exposure for your blog. I had set up some blogs, experimentally, and I was trying to figure out how to get some readers. I found the T and B sites. It didn’t take long to see both T and B are making money from advertising, and while some writers may benefit in the long run, it’s free fodder for T and B. I haven’t unsubscribed from their feeds, which I still get in my hotmail, but I never submitted a single article.
What I’m looking at now, for this exercise, has been a big step beyond the blog summaries on T and B. The blogs I’m analyzing in this exercise are written by software engineers and Web developer/design people who analyze social media content and tech trends across the Web, apparently from Web cross sections. These sites seem each to have their own niche, and they’re very well established. I started with John Blossom’s (from Chapt. 4 of our text) who writes about major trends in Web development (I wrote about his blogs in the first part of this assignment).
I looked at Blossom’s blogs for links and or clues to get to similar sites but found none, so I did Google searches with terms like “social media content analysis” and “blog content analysis”. After culling through much doo-doo, I recognized Mashable from our readings.
Mashable is totally cool. Mashable/the Social Media guide at http://mashable.com/
From About Mashable: “Mashable is an online guide to social media. One of the top 10 blogs worldwide, Mashable is a hub for those looking to make sense of the online realm.
What will you find here? Step-by-step guides to using popular websites, reviews of mobile applications, breaking news about what's happening on the web, the best viral videos, tips for marketing your businesses online and much much more!”
Here's my review of Mashable:
Look and feel (visual appearance) – simply the best, uncluttered and symmetrical, uses blues with sprinkles of brighter colors here and there. Plenty of white space.
User interface/usability – really good. Horizontal row of links at top of the home page give access to major sections: social media, business, entertainment, technology, web video, dev & design, apple, mobile. And there’s a sub-row of links to reader services, such as lists, how-to, guidebooks, announcements….
Frequency of posts—every day. They have staff writers—young, well-educated, and hip, to boot.
Breadth vs. depth of post topics—the breadth of coverage is crazy, across the categories listed above (social media, business, entertainment, tech, and so on….). The articles are relatively short. You click on the headline for the whole article since it appears in part on the blog. It’s enough coverage and you can get more by clicking on links that appear at the bottom of the article to other news sources on the same topics.
“Voice” of posts (authoritative, conversational, and so on). What I’ve read has been conversational clear writing that gets right to the point, and because it’s all linked up to other sources on same, and writers’ bios and credentials are available on site, credibility wasn’t an issue.
Audience engagement strategies—Supercalifragilistic…. Even I just posted a link to Mashable on my Facebook page because according to Mashable June 30 is worldwide Social Media Day. This is the kind of stuff I like to post on Facebook anyway—links to other stuff my Facebook friends might find interesting. Mashable is also totally hooked up to Twitter (and Digg).
Features (search, RSS, blogroll, tags, categories, comments, ads, and so on)—Signing up for feeds is easy. Beside each article are tweet, facebook, digg links. There’s a bing search bar. There’s no blogroll; Mashable totally promotes itself and nobody else. It’s self-analytical, with sidebars that analyze its own audience participation. And, it’s got ads, alright, and promotional contests. At bottom are links to every form of social media I’ve ever heard of and plenty I haven’t. This is totally Web 2.0—very interactive.
Here's my review of readwriteweb:
I remembered from having read staff bios on Mashable that some of them had come from READWRITEWEB, so when I came across this link in another Google search, I followed. http://www.readwriteweb.com/
This is definitely more of a technology analysis blog, though it bills itself as analyzing Web products and trends. It features articles about technological innovations in Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google, Mobile, I Phone, Video, and the like…. It’s self-promoting and snooty, I think, with a statement in its “About” section that reads: "The real users of the Web read ReadWriteWeb.” (i.e. people who are techologically learn-ed are real users and the rest of us are not? Give me a break.)
Look and feel (visual appearance)—also, professionally designed. Uncluttered and well-organized. Uses a dark brownish-red banner and has splashes of color elsewhere.
User interface/usability—very easy to subscribe and share. Not only can you comment on articles, you can easily read other comments, and you can subscribe to comments to articles that interest you. You can tweet, too. This site uses open ID, which is going to make it easier to participate online because you can use your Facebook or Twitter or blog ID on other sites. I think there’s a catch though; I think that the sites you use it on can track you back, which I don’t fully understand yet. If you do, please clue me in.
Frequency of posts—every day. They have staff.
Breadth vs. depth of post topics—Variety within the tech realm and just enough info for their tech-savvy readers. Their lead article on trends in I phones explained with text AND graphs and charts.
“Voice” of posts (authoritative, conversational, and so on)—Professionally-written, i.e. clear and write to the point, but laced with a bit of tech jargon, of course.
Audience engagement strategies—You can like, tweet, comment, and you can share any article, links provided.
Features (search, RSS, blogroll, tags, categories, comments, ads, and so on)—They’ve got it all, except for blogroll. This blog is also self-analytical and reflective. By that I mean it analyzes how its readers are using it, and then it posts that information. It’s social media that’s about social media trends, and it’s therefore self-analytical. Make sense? I think that’s totally Web 2.0. This one has select ads, too. They don’t show a lot of ads, but I bet they are expensive.
Matt Mullenweg at http://ma.tt/
I found this guy’s blog on a list of recommended sites on another Web development analysis site I now can’t entirely remember. I hadn’t heard of ma.tt, but when I clicked on it and I saw a very cool design that emulates the art of Roy Lichtenstein, with this 1950’s style high school graduation look-alike portrait of a young kid in a suit, I was immediately engaged. It turns out that this is the kid (now 26?) who started Wordpress, and this is his personal blog on Wordpress.
At first, I didn’t know whether to believe this, but after reading on, I do.
This is not a staff-written fully-developed, frequently updated blog like the other two (above). This is a personal blog, but he posts stuff like links to articles on Wordpress he’s found interesting, links to what others have written about Wordpress (self-promotional, and I guess that’s the name of the game in the Web tech World), and commentary on what’s going on with Wordpress development. But the blog has personal stuff, such as random photos (sidebar), photos of what he eats (from his mobile and linked, but not to Wordpress), and things he finds funny.
My review of ma.tt:
Look and feel (visual appearance)—Outstanding. A real attention-getter. Cartoon-like pop art graphics explode on the page in bright colors. Gotta see it for yourself.
User interface/usability—Fine. Subscribe easily. He invites comments to what he writes. This site is not Twitter intense like the other two. It’s actually a lot more personal. In the Contact section, Matt invites e-mail and/or phone calls. He must have a separate cell number that an assistant answers.
Frequency of posts—almost every day, and that’s pretty remarkable.
Breadth vs. depth of post topics—Clearly, this is stuff that interests him or promotes Wordpress, or it’s lighthearted, and that’s all what it is. It’s certainly not shallow.
“Voice” of posts (authoritative, conversational, and so on)—Some articles and interviews at the links are professionally done, so they are social media journalism. His own writing is informal, conversational, and he actually sounds like a pretty nice guy with a sense of humor. I also did not see anything offensive. There’s a copy of a funny text message he apparently got on his phone one morning that he titled “Wrong Number Flirt.”
Audience engagement strategies—It’s accessible, casual, and interesting. It loads easily, actually. And, the combination of personal and professional is really engaging. In short, it’s inviting.
Features (search, RSS, blogroll, tags, categories, comments, ads, and so on)—I haven’t been able to find a search bar. The entries are dated and the archives are dated by month. Subscribing is easy. No blogroll to other blogs, just to his archives. He uses tags, but relatively few. He invites comments, and he cleverly displays the number of comments for each blog entry with the number in a thought-bubble, like the kind of thing you find on a cartoon when someone’s thinking something. You click on the bubble to get to the comments section. He doesn’t have ads, just links to, apparently, his own projects—big stuff like Akismet, Wordpress stuff, intensedebate, Poll Daddy and the like.
SUMMARY COMMENTS: In our first class chat I’d asked, “What’s Web 2.0?” I’d never heard the term. Looking around at some of the social media content and tech analysis blogs, I think I just got a big dose of it. They analyze themselves, constantly, because what they are is hotspots of interactivity for other software engineers and Web development people who are also into social media trends. In particular, the big staff written blogs like Mashable and readwriteweb (the purpose of which is to analyze trending) are therefore also analyzing what people are reading and commenting about on their own sites. Also, Matt Mullenweg’s site does that in a simpler form (although he may apply some analytics that are hidden, too). Now I see that John Blossom’s tech analysis blog Contentblogger (not ContentNation) that I said in the first part of this assignment I couldn’t relate to very well because it’s about the tech side of social media analysis, is also first rate. I’ve got these other major staff-written blogs to compare it to. The latter are published with more frequency. It looks like Blossom's part of an old guard, while the staff written Mashable and readwriteweb appeared on the scene more recently (Mashable the most recent). Robert Scoble (from our book and linked in Content, here) actually has a vlog, as he interviews all these Web movers and shakers and posts interviews there. I bring that up to illustrate that these people/groups are carving out niches for themselves, apparently. They all analyze social media content and tech development on the Web, so they have to somehow have to do it slightly differently in order to get and keep followers.
On a personal note, to sum it up—I feel like I dove into the deep end with my little plastic tadpole life preserver on and doggy-paddled around in a school of some really big fish. What’s next?
