Blog News Watch

Internet users do not care if you can come up with a cute headline.

They don’t care if you can come up with some awesome wordplay or a lame pun to - as far as you are concerned - spice it up.

The attention span of the average internet user as they surf through site after site is microscopic. Nanoscopic, even. You may as well not even call it an attention span because it just doesn’t span.

But while you’re trying to get some of their nanoscopic attention, you have to make it damn clear what they could be clicking on or reading for the next few minutes.

If there is a niggling doubt as to what the page will actually be about, you’re out of luck.

If your pun is really bad… well, expect your RSS subscription to drop to zero. Just kidding about that part. Don’t panic.

Simple, descriptive, and as short as clearly possible.

What are the basic elements of a good blog post title? We all know there are a million ways to get attention above and beyond the basics. I used a “How To” in the title of this post, which makes part of an attractive headline for many web surfers. But forget them for now and leave them until another time; we just want the basics.

1. Simple

Keep it simple, stupid. Save the jokes for the text. Just blurt it out, clearly and simply, without embellishment.

We’re not going for a literary prize here. It’s a friggin’ blog post, remember? It just needs to say what the post is about and…

2. Descriptive

It needs to actively describe what the reader can expect from the post. If you intended to write a post about how to write headlines for blog posts and instead spend a whole post talking about why headlines are important, change the title.

If a reader wastes time reading something that was not what they were told it will be, they will feel cheated. Cheated of their precious time, that could be spent reading an article that truly is about blog post titles. This one, perhaps.

3. Short

“Short” does not mean sticking to a word count. It doesn’t mean cutting good information out for the sake of brevity. It just means: don’t repeat, don’t embellish, don’t make anything any longer than it has to be.

Some people make the mistake that embellishing or repeating facts will help the reader understand something better. If you have simply and descriptively stated something in the first place, there is no need to say it again and again in different ways. There’s no reason to add adjectives to nouns that don’t change the meaning to begin with.

Leave that crap to the tautologists (yes, I invented the word because so many of you bloggers seem to be running your articles on tautologies alone!).

There are a million psychological tricks and tips you can use to improve your blog post headlines. There are all sorts of simple changes you can make.

But without the basics, those tricks won’t make a damn bit of difference.

In fact, you’ll just be bloating something that was already bad to begin with.

When it comes to headlines, first and foremost: say it like it is, no more, and no less.

“Prominence” is a news value that many bloggers claim to hate.

But even they perpetrate it, because when some small-time blogger with two posts does something controversial, it’s going to receive much more coverage when, say, Darren Rowse does the same thing.

And, of course, it draws in more traffic, especially from search engines - why? Because people are actually searching for information on that person.

Prominence refers to how prominent and popular an individual or group is in any given community.

It’s truly the crux of much of the media, and when it comes to celebrity and gossip mags, pretty much the exclusive news value. Doesn’t matter how stupid or trivial something is… you can be sure the gossip mags will pick it up if it’s about someone famous!

Apply this one when appropriate for your blog, and with caution, but when you do use it, it can certainly help.

Prominence and Conflict are great news values to use in combination. On my blog Musician’s Notebook a post about the tensions between Dimebag Darrell and Phil Anselmo of Pantera might’ve been a great post around the time of Dimebag’s death, so long as I kept it relevant to the fact that my readers want information for musicians, not music fans (how to keep tension among musicians to a minimum might have been a good basis for the post).

Check the front page of your daily paper next time you’re walking past a news agency. I bet you that the majority of the stories on the front page have something to do with a prominent individual or group. The past few weeks here in Australia, it has been about politicians almost every day (we just had a federal election).

Now if only I could meet another Australian who cares about politics…

Just a few nights ago, Australia’s prime minister of 11.5 years, John Howard, was voted out and Kevin Rudd of the Labor party was voted in.

One of the key differences in the way the election campaigns were run was the use of the web and social networking quite heavily.

Howard used the traditional television-and-newspapers campaign in his attempt to win the public’s continued support. He lost.

Rudd used the Web 2.0 gamut (including a MySpace profile) in his bid pretty extensively. He won.

Was the election’s result simply because everyone is likely to get sick of any politician after nearly twelve years? Was it because the Labor party offered better policies? And how much did the social networking campaign really impact on the result?

It’s almost impossible to quantify, but I believe that it certainly would’ve had an impact on many of those in the younger age bracket who are new to politics, and perhaps taking an interest for the first time now that they are old enough to vote. In Australia, that’s 18 years and over.

I voted Rudd, but was never involved in his online campaigns at all - the first time I heard about them was when the press covered it because they thought it was way too strange. Truth is, as my American readers would know, American politicians are all doing this now and have been for some time.

However, the “Kevin 07″ catchphrase spread like wildfire through the net and really made a difference in the online component of the campaign.

We can never say for certain how many votes are to be attributed to social networking or blogging.

But we do know that he won, and that he was the only major candidate to use this tactic. What do you think?

Blogged with Flock

I did a little experiment recently on another blog I am involved in.

This blog rarely uses graphics in its posts, but I have started including an image in each and every post, in part because it’s good practice and secondly because, while I started this practice on 451 Press blogs much earlier, I wanted to be able to quantify the effects of this small change.

I’m not at liberty to release all the statistics to you, but I can tell you for a fact that using images increases page views by a factor of four, at the minimum.

Sometimes it was a factor of four, and sometimes it skyrocketed to a twenty.

That’s up to twenty times the average number of page views just by throwing in an image or two.

This blog was not doing too well before and the average page views per post was almost ridiculously constant, so we can safely assume that these increases are almost solely thanks to the inclusion of images.

The Many Aspects of Successful Images

Not just any image thrown in anywhere in the article will work.

You need to consider a variety of factors to optimize the results that images help you secure.

The contents of the image

We’ve probably all heard the story of the blogger who used images of hot women in every post, regardless of relevancy. It worked. Hot women increased his traffic.

While I like to go for something a little more relevant (I have used the above tactic with success and relevancy), consider how attention-grabbing the contents of your image are. Even if it’s not a hot half-naked woman, something that is odd, intriguing or just interesting works better than something mundane.

The colors of the image

This one is a no-brainer: bright, interesting colors work better than dull and subdued colors. Black and white pictures can draw interest, but on the internet, they have a lot harder time of it.

Not only is it better when colors are bright and interesting, they should also be bold. Instead of that lighter red, choose that in-your-face blood red.

The placement of the image

You can and should use more than one image per post. Spread them out fairly evenly throughout the post, with the first one right at the top - either to the side of the first paragraph or above it, beneath the title.

The lower down in your post, the less effective your image will be.

The size of the image

You obviously have to work within the confines of your blog’s theme and the widths it allows, but the bigger you can get the image without detracting from the content, the better. It’s there to grab attention so having an image right at the top of the post that takes up the maximum width of the content area is fantastic. Small images don’t get noticed.

The number of images

As I briefly mentioned in placement, the more images you can put in a post the better. Balance is important, though, and you shouldn’t overcrowd your content.

One image to every three paragraphs is a good rule of thumb, but you can get away with less. I only use one image per post, right at the top, most of the time.

There you have it; the five factors that determine how successful your images are in increasing an article’s page views. I hope you learned something from this post, and please feel free to leave your questions and comments.

For quite some time, the sentiments expressed throughout the blogosphere regarding Technorati have been less than picture perfect. Bloggers are unhappy with a number of things going on with the popular site, and one of those things is the spam.

rssHugger is apparently the answer, according to guys like John Chow. We’ll get to why in a moment.

What does the rssHugger service provide?

For the $20 that you pay - it’s $10 if you write a post about the service first (that’s not why I’m writing this, by the way) - you basically get a listing in a web directory for RSS feeds. Feeds are ranked and promoted in a variety of ways, and the goal is to send more readers in the direction of rssHugger’s members.

The service makes use of a Top 100 list, though these are only good for ranking stuff and supporting existing hegemonies rather than giving newbies or unknown bloggers using the service half a chance.

To make up for this, there is a Random Blog feature that takes you to the contents of a completely randomly chosen feed, and a New RSS Feeds page.

How is rssHugger supposed to replace Technorati?

The main complaint bloggers make about Technorati is the amount of spam and splogging going on there. rssHugger hopes to avoid this problem by charging a $20 fee that will allow them to manually review each blog that is submitted, as well as deter the cheap n’ dirty spammers from applying in the first place.

If it beats spam, my best wishes for the success of their endeavor.

PS - for those who have been asking, I am still using Dvorak on the laptop and getting faster - if improvements continue at this pace I will switch the Mac mini’s keyboard too.

Blogged with Flock

The four or five owners of major newspapers with websites really took a bundle of cash home in quarter three, with a growth of 21.1 percent to $773 million compared with the same period of time last year.

Since the NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004 the figures have continued to grow, grow and grow for - believe it or not - fourteen quarters in a row. The print papers, with advertising spending dropping off in huge sums, must be giving the online industry the envious eye right now as they pick up all the cash that wasn’t spent in the dying print industry.

What does this mean? Papers who are still print papers should jump ship now. Not only is there more money, but when a ubiquitous distribution system is in the hands of almost everyone you might want to distribute to, it’s simply irresponsible to continue running printing presses and contributing to an already dire environmental situation.

To anyone who still prints media: get online, now. Whether you’re Rupert Murdoch or grandma, I don’t care; the money is online. The responsible thing to do is to get online. I don’t know how much more clearly it can be said!

Are newspapers themselves becoming less of a source for the public and more of a source for gatekeepers who do not stick to a corporate bias? I’d love to see some comparative ad spending data, since in the end it’s all a matter of economics and if sites like Boing Boing, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon can continue to filter the mainstream media’s content the average individual gets to read more great content in less time.

It seems you’re depending on the list you’re looking at; either Impact strikes at number one or number three on the News Values list.

When I was studying journalism, impact was the first on the list, but the list of news values that I used to plan this series had it down on number three. I wish I’d picked up on this before, but it is how it is.

In my opinion, Impact is the most important news value in the world.

Consider these two example story headlines:

Neighbors Fight Over Fencing

OR

Mother Kills Daughter During Fight About Preschool

Both headlines possess the news value of conflict (timeliness isn’t apparent but can be assumed), but which one has more sheer Impact?

Nobody cares about neighbors fighting over fencing, but when a mother kills her daughter because she doesn’t want to go to preschool, the reactions are certainly not so apathetic. Why? Because the story, and the events, made an impact.

When does impact occur?

According to a dictionary, when something has a strong effect on someone. That means when it offends their sensibilities, makes them emotional, or has to do with something the reader has a Strong Emotional Investment in.

The higher the Strong Emotional Investment, the higher the impact

Impact is all about emotions, so think about your readership and what the people in your niche are likely to be emotionally affected by. Remember, impact doesn’t always have to be negative, and I believe that we need more positivity in our information channels while the mainstream media does nothing but pump hate, war, violence and doom into our heads.

So do me a personal favor, and when you first try implementing Impact in your articles, try and make it a positive impact.

It’s a good idea to sit down and really analyze the type of readership you’re likely to attract. What creates Impact in a story depends on your niche and readership a lot more than most other news values.

Here’s what you do: define what your readers have a Strong Emotional Investment in, and what they have a Weak Emotional Investment in (what they don’t care about). You can leverage your list by writing stories with the following components:

• A criticism of something the readership has a Strong Emotional Investment in
• An article criticizing someone who has attacked or done something to damage the subject of your reader’s SEI (this will gain you favor with the audience as their “voice”)
• An article that connects a topic readers have a Weak Emotional Investment in with something an SEI, therefore making their emotional investment in it stronger and opening up further possibilities for future articles

How you use Impact is up to you, but learning to define it is the first step.

Since Facebook removed the word is from their status updates I have been a little worried.

Flicking through my RSS feeds, it seems several publications I enjoy and respect have written about this “development” and in some cases the posts are embarrassingly long.

I recently wrote an article entitled 5 Ways to Avoid Blogger Blindness and I think that it may just be time for the blogosphere as a whole to read that particular article. It seems they may have become a little blind as to what’s worth writing about.

And then, of course, when everyone’s refreshed and ready to get back to writing, they might find the News Values for Bloggers articles here useful.

Come on guys, is the presence of a two-letter verb on a website really that important? Is its removal really making so much of a difference in your lives that you have to write long posts about it?

If the answer to that is yes then this is not the blog for you to be reading. This is.

Some bloggers got particularly excited about the fact that Twitter was rendered obsolete by this move, which really made me laugh. For starters, Twitter was never such a crucial service to anyone for any purpose that it could be rendered obsolete. And secondly, you have to be logged in to Facebook to see your friend’s status message. Sounds like too much hassle to find out some pathetically unproductive and useless piece of information about your friend’s nosepicking adventures.

I looked really hard to find something profound in my Facebook friend’s status messages, yet I’m still here quite uninspired on that deep philosophical level.

I realize that this post has ranted on quite long enough about people who rant about insignificant things. It’s a countermeasure, you know. You’ve got to counter every opinion with its opposite in equal force and length.

And with that bullshit theory of blogging, good night.

Like the Wraith of Stargate Atlantis (I just revealed my nerdishly huge appetite for good sci-fi), Google are showing themselves more and more to be sucking the life out of the Internet, attacking those who would make an honest living out of it, despite many of those sites having great content (and on that topic, here’s some irony).

All the while, the splogs abound, supported by income from Google AdSense, while the company singles out legitimate AdSense publishers and cancels their account without paying out the balance for no real known reason.

It seems to me that Cory Doctorow was right on the money when he wrote his short story, Scroogle. Maybe in the near future the frightening events he describes will come to pass.

Also scary is that the need for a service with the same name as Doctorow’s story exists in order to protect your privacy; since Google keeps your search data for two years, one man created a site that accesses Google through his own servers to keep your search terms anonymous.

I recently posted an opinion article here on Google’s attitude towards site ranking which flies in the face of the very nature of the Internet and the values it was founded upon as an open forum free of nearly unbreakable entry barriers; something quite unheard of in the rest of our materialistic and corporacratic world.

Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just sick of Google’s monopoly on the Internet and its privacy-endangering habits. I am sick of Google sucking the life out of the Internet, especially after the news of the past few weeks regarding paid text links and the trouble it has caused for reputable services for honest website owners like Text Link Ads and PayPerPost.

Google is a company that was started in a garage, and that the citizens of the Internet once loved. It used to deserve that love, and it made the Internet a whole lot more accessible for everyone.

What happened to the “Do No Evil” policy that once set it apart from thousands of other corporations that really don’t care if their dollars came to them through evil or good?

I wish good luck to anyone who is actively trying to break Google’s monopoly, such as the RealRank endeavor.

Conflict is the first news values journalists use to determine newsworthiness, and the first news value that bloggers can apply to make more compelling content.

The second news value bloggers can apply to their writing is timeliness.

The mistake bloggers make is putting timeliness at the top of the list. Sure, blogging is more time-centric than many mediums for your message, but certainly not as much as newspapers.

And if blogging is more timeless than newspapers, and journalists put timeliness as number two… well, you should to. Get the order right: it’s important!

Timeliness: The When Factor

It’s a pretty simple concept: timeliness as a news value means that the closer in time your blog post is to the event that you are writing about, the more valuable that piece is.

It’s also important if you care about search engines because if you’re first in and best dressed, you stand more of a chance of getting indexed on the first page for certain search terms.

Choose Your Timely Stories Wisely

Sometimes a bit of considered planning is better than being the first to publish a post on something. Use your discretion here. If you can get an article out before everyone else and it’s a considered, useful, valuable piece, you’ve hit the jackpot… while the news is still timely, anyway!

If something requires perusal of long, complicated documents - legal ones, perhaps - then peruse them (and understand them) before you jump to conclusions and write about it. You can be sure of two things:

• Smart bloggers you are competing with will wait until they have perused, so don’t worry about them beating you too much
• Stupid bloggers will fire off a half-assed article because they want to be first and be flamed to hell and back for all the inaccuracies and incomplete thoughts they publish

Want to be flamed because you’re stupid?

…

I didn’t think so.

Timeliness is an important factor. The news values exist because writers have identified what attracts the readers interest; however, that same factor has also imbued many news rooms with an unhealthy mentality that is all about timeliness. It means many papers are driven by disasters and crises.

Value For Readers is your first consideration. News values, including timeliness, are your second considerations; always, always, always put value first.

Here’s the question to ask every time you find yourself rushing: does getting this post out before everyone else really provide much value to my readers?

Don’t get me wrong, I may have spent most of this article warning of the dangers of this news value, but it is still important. And while it’s important, the most important thing that can ever be said about it is a warning.

So use Timeliness - when it is appropriate.