Bloggasm

In many ways, Drew Curtis’ Fark.com was an early version of Digg. Community users could submit headlines and links and a few editors would comb through these and “greenlight” the best to the front page. Digg took it a step further, allowing the community itself to become the editors, letting them decide what becomes popular.

Both are incredibly popular today and can deliver server crashing traffic. But which one drives more traffic? Luckily, Digg has begun displaying the number of “views” on its newly launched DiggBar. Fark has always displayed the number of clicks in its comments section on each item.

To figure out which drove more traffic, I took 10 random front page links from each site that were submitted at least 24 hours before I began collecting the stats. I then averaged the number of clicks for each.

I found that, on average, Digg will drive about 18,920 views on each item, while Fark will drive about 10,759. The number of clicks for both sites varied widely depending on the item submitted. For Digg, the most popular item drove about 43,000 views while the least popular drove a mere 2,226. For Fark, the most popular item drove 17,197 clicks while the least popular drove about 2,700.

Overall, based on this small bit of data Fark’s numbers were more consistent while Digg drove a much wider variance of traffic. On average though, Digg drives almost twice the number of pageviews as Fark.

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For my latest PBS piece, I interviewed several people who have attempted to team up local bloggers and newspapers in mutually beneficial relationships: Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks

Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald’s website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply “Your Blogs.” If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would take you to an independent blog not affiliated with the Miami Herald, written by someone who lives somewhere in South Florida. Many of the blogs, though not all, have a regional bent. Some of the links would take you to film or music reviews, or commentary on national politics.

This blog news aggregator is a joint project between the Miami Herald and BlogNetNews, a company founded by David Mastio. For years now, Mastio has been pushing the idea that newspapers should be fostering closer relationships with local bloggers, linking to their content and in effect exposing their readerships to a wider range of media. Lately, he’s been meeting with publishers from local newspapers, alt weeklies, and radio and TV stations to set up such networks using his own software.

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How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting

At a quarter-past the hour, Daily Kos diarist Liz Arnett posted a diary featuring several videos tying Sarah Palin to the Alaskan Independence Party, a pro-secession fringe group in Alaska. The diary rocketed up the rec. list and a few hours later, georgia10 followed up with a front page post summarizing the questions raised by Palin’s apparent connections.

Later that day, the story was picked up by reporters at ABC, The Atlantic, and TPM. They fleshed out some of the important details: it was Todd, not Sarah, who was actually a member of the party, they found, but Sarah had addressed the AIP and members of the AIP felt Sarah was sympathetic to their pro-secession cause.

Flash-forward six weeks, and Salon published a detailed article by Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert showing the tight connections between the Palins and the secessionists, attracting CNN’s interest.

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Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has rarely been one to avoid responding directly to his right wing critics. He’s been on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on multiple occasions and has even appeared on Michael Savage’s show. As an opinionated pundit, he believes that people like him should be willing to face off with others in public forums that are not always friendly to their views, and he finds those that avoid doing so “cowardly and irresponsible.”

So when National Public Radio’s ombud, Alicia Shepard, refused to come on his Salon radio show to address his criticisms, he decided to write about it. Shepard wrote a column in June defending NPR’s tendency to refrain from referring to enhanced interrogation techniques as “torture,” and Greenwald followed it with a paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal the day after. Shortly after his response was posted, he asked a Salon intern to reach out to Shepard to see if she would speak to him for his online radio show. According to Greenwald, an NPR spokesperson said that the ombud was out for the week and would get back to him Monday. Salon’s intern said that when she spoke to Shepard on Monday she refused to go on the show because she didn’t “want to get into a shouting match.” (I reached out to NPR for comment this morning. A representative responded that he would try to get someone to speak to me on the record. I’ll update this post if I receive a response)

“I think Shepard has an obligation to engage NPR listeners when it comes to controverisial issues surrounding NPR,” Greenwald told me in a phone interview this morning. “Even that original column that she wrote was due in part to the fact that I had written about NPR’s practice of not calling interrogation techniques torture, and that’s what caused her to get so many emails in the first place and respond. So I felt like it was clear that my blog was sort of the centerplace where a lot of NPR listeners were voicing these complaints, so it was a natural place for her to go in order to have this discussion to address these issues interactively rather than the one way monologue.”

But doesn’t a person have the right to refuse an interview? After all, some have refused to go on shows like the O’Reilly Factor because they felt like they wouldn’t be given a fair platform to present their views, and many that have gone on such shows have come out regretting it. Greenwald seemed to agree that there are certain circumstances in which it would be practical to turn down an interview request, but he said that when you opine on controversial topics you should make a reasonable effort to respond and engage with your critics or those you criticize.

“That doesn’t mean you have to go and confront every single person,” he said. “If you’re inundated with requests I think it’s fair to pick and choose based on audience size and other factors, but it was pretty clear that I was the primary critic in this regard. I played a large role in spawning the controversy in the first place. I think it was pretty cowardly and irresponsible for her not to being willing to address it.”

Greenwald said that he has conducted over 100 radio interviews for Salon Radio, and not one has degenerated into a “shouting match,” so he finds that excuse without merit. I suggested that perhaps Shepard felt that she had addressed the criticisms against NPR and readdressing them in an interview would seem redundant.

“I thought that her column left a lot of questions unresolved and unanswered,” he replied. “You can write a column addressing critics and be pretty thorough and address all the arguments, where you won’t satisfy your critics but at least you would have answered them, whereas I felt like her defense of NPR’s policy left open more questions than it answered. So I thought that it made sense to try to explore those questions with her.”

Greenwald said he still hopes to have Shepard on the show, and there has been at least some conversation via email with an NPR representative about that possibility.

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Politico’s Washington Coup

Politico puts its current traffic at 6.7 million unique visitors per month (down from a high of more than 11 million during the campaign), yet it still can’t support its staff of about 100 on the Internet’s low advertising rates (although, with its agenda-moving audience and its preponderance of advocacy advertisers, it manages to get a higher rate than most sites). But one effect of its Internet traffic and notoriety and the ensuing attention of cable news shows is that the original Allbritton idea for a Capitol Hill paper—one that now largely reprints Internet content—has become, with its special-interest-size circulation of 32,000, a major success. Internet cachet, in other words, has enabled a tabloid-size print version of Politico (also called Politico) to thrive and more than double the company’s revenues—which, just about evenly split between Internet and newspaper, will, it appears, be more than $15 million in 2009—meaning, according to C.E.O. Fred Ryan, that Politico, paying its staffers at nearly the level that The Washington Post pays (starting salaries for reporters at the Post are about $45,000 per year), has hit breakeven.

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Let me give you an example of what I can do. Back in May a film company approached me because they were trying to push out a YouTube video that was highlighting what they perceived as unfair labor practices from a well known brand. I wrote up a short post about the campaign and then that night spent about two hours pushing it out to a number of bloggers and social media users that worked within niches that I thought would be receptive to the content. One of the talents I have is using analytic search tools to identify specific micro niches of influential bloggers that are most likely to write about the content I’m pushing.

By the time I woke up the next morning, the post was getting over 1,000 views an hour. It was linked to by some of the most popular sites on the web (at least one of which receives over a million visitors a day) and several large marketing blogs. Several dozen smaller blogs wrote about it and links to the content were tweeted by several hundred Twitter users. It also gained strong traction in Stumbleupon and the post received nearly 500 hits an hour just from that site alone.

When all was said and done, the story had been placed before thousands of people, many of whom took the time to take that content and push it out to even more people. And all this was done because of two hours of work — I knew the exact bloggers and online journalists to seed the story to, and once they had it it was just a matter of watching the flames spread.

Drop me a line if you’d like to talk strategy for your content or brand: simon.bloggasm@gmail.com