Creative destruction (I): homepage link journalism
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Tuesday, March 1, 2011Once I’d realised what my passion was last week, the big question was: “what are you going to do about it?” The answer is: a lot of creative destruction.
I started changing this blog straight away and I have some ideas about where we are going to go. Things are moving very quickly and you can already see the first results on my homepage.
The first big change involves something called link journalism; link journalism means trawling the web for interesting articles and deciding which links to which articles are important enough for you to spend your valuable time reading.
Just as importantly, it means deciding which ones are not. It’s telling a story with links. In my case, trying to tell the world’s story with links.
If you pay attention to my homepage, you’ll now see a lot of links on the top half of the page. All of them point to other websites. You’ll be able to follow how global events are unfolding, as soon as I can find out about them for you.
Have you ever visited the Drudge Report? That one page site that just sends people to other sites’ stories receives 650 million visits a month. Why? Because he curates the news for people. Drudge tries to decide what’s the most important stuff that’s happening in the world right now, and just link to it.
People appreciate that because his editorial decisions save them lots of time. In the past, Drudge’s one page link site has set the news agenda for the whole of the United States, although his influence seems to have waned a little over the last couple of years.
If you want to read up on the theory behind why the concept of link journalism works so well and is so efficient, go and read Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 blog.
How I’m going to do it
Look at this next photo. That’s right, I have over 20,000 unread articles in my RSS reader. Why? Well, because somewhere in all of that, there’s a lot of information about how our world works and what’s going on in it right now.
Most of the interesting stuff is already going on somewhere in the world and someone has probably already published the story or the different bits of the story. Why waste time trying to beat them to it?
What we want to do is find it, make sense of it all and start thinking about what it implies. I do this anyway, and have been doing for months (years). I grab a coffee, start reading and think about which ones are important.
Now I’ve set up my blog so that I can share the things which are I think are important with you instantly. We now have a new and very visible way of doing something useful for you if you like to stay up-to-date with global current affairs.
I’m using RSS feeds and a nice (and free) RSS reader called NetNewsWire, with something called ‘saved searches’ to help us find good stuff. As soon as I read something interesting and think you should read it or watch it too, it’ll be on my homepage for you to find.
Thanks to Instapaper and a WordPress plugin called RSSImport, the process takes a couple of seconds from ‘I want you to read it’ to it being on my homepage.
I’ve also set the homepage to refresh every 15 minutes, so you won’t even have to keep clicking ‘refresh’ in your browser.
No fluff, no gossip, no football, no celebrities. If you’re interested in global current affairs, I want you to sit on my homepage and I’ll send you to all the interesting stuff.
I gave it a test run today. I chose a main story—the Libyan revolt—just for a bit of practice—and started reading and sharing. It works wonderfully. And the links get pushed out to Twitter and Facebook too, so if you follow me there, you’ll start seeing more interesting current affairs links in your timeline.
I don’t just want to send you a stream of all the latest news—you can get that by searching Twitter and Google News—but the latest and the most important to the development of the stories. The changes and thoughts which describe the development of the event and give it meaning.
Which is the bit computers can’t do.
News breaks all the time nowadays; it doesn’t wait until tomorrow’s newspaper anymore, or even tonight’s nightly news bulletin. So we should have the ability to follow it as it happens and as we find it.
Clearly I won’t be able to do this 24-hours a day, and it will take a while to get up to speed, but I bet I’ll sometimes end up doing for 12 hours a day…!!
And we can change the latest story as we go along, daily or even in the middle of the day if some big story starts developing.
Oh, and the new e-mail list is already set up too. You can sign up on the home page or on the top right of the sidebar. Not sure exactly what will be in it yet, but I’ll use it to send out an alert when I start a new live blog or link post and also for a round up of links and thoughts, perhaps weekly.
It’ll be good, so if you like global current affairs, go and sign up now.
More tomorrow…
Luke Spear
19/07/2011
Hi Matthew,
No need to publish this comment; I’ve used the comment box because I don’t have your email address.
I was just curious to ask how the change of direction has affected your website popularity (in terms of traffic). I have no intention of copying, of course, but as an avid enthusiast of all things ‘web’, I’d be very interested to hear how things are going, statistically speaking (please feel free to be as vague or secretive as you want with the stats, I’ll understand!).
I’d think you’ll be pulling in a lot more Google search visits. If you have managed to become listed on Google News or similar I could imagine you’d see huge spikes in traffic, but even organically there may have been a rise, moving from niche to more global topics of discussion.
Hope all’s well. Enjoying reading your curated news.
Best, Luke
Matthew
19/07/2011
Hi Luke, no worries, that’s what comments sections are for…!
For the moment, there has been a relative drop, if we compare say, the last 5 months since the big change to the five months prior to that. For it to be a proper comparison, I need to develop things a little further, start posting more frequently again and then let it run for a few months. Then I’ll be able to see if statistically it appears more or less successful than the old project. We’ll be able to look at this question properly in December, probably.
I’m not worried about it for now because it’s understandable, for five main reasons:
i) There are still lots of visits (about 25,000 since mid-February) but it was a pretty huge change in focus. People who were mainly interested in improving their languages (albeit via the news) are not necessarily interested in mainly news. I still have the language-learner list though, and one of the larger items on my to-do list is “work out how to encourage more of the old crowd how to join in with the new project” (see point v) below). Until I can coherently explain the long-term reasons new visitors should keep reading and sign up to follow my thoughts—and they certainly exist—I don’t expect them to do so.
ii) I haven’t finished setting up the new project yet. As weird as this may sound 5 months into it, I’m still not where I want to be with the components of the new project, nor their interrelation. I’m talking about conceptual things (where exactly does all this news lead us?) and mechanical stuff on the blog (a newsletter without a free report and a clear long-term reader objective encourages fewer people to sign up than one with those elements, what are the right formats for writing and talking about all of this stuff?, etc).
iii) I haven’t got into a regular publishing rhythm—but this won’t happen at least until I’ve finished working on point ii), something I hope to do over the summer.
iv) There is a steady trickle of newsletter sign ups, interested e-mails, comments and thank you notes about the new project, with the new direction. Given ii) and iii) that’s more than I was hoping for right now…
v) I think it’s going to be compatible to continue to teach some languages with the new project, with a reduced version of what I was doing before. Audio + vocab should do the trick. Have sounded out a couple of students and online readers and they seem to agree. See what you think: http://matbe.net/cWqxE0
There have, however, been massive advances structurally and on the deeper-thought stuff which are necessary to make this a successful project long-term.
I did a lot of work on finding the right formats for this during the spring—which is why we’ve ended up with the Top 10 stories, daily comments and news briefs. I can’t see a better combination for saving you time as a reader whilst transmitting as much information, reference material and narrative into your mind as possible during the time you are reading.
The monthly PayPal subscription system is up, working and has been tested. The sales-page and deeper explanation structure is there.
Now I need to spend a couple of weeks filling out the structure and preparing the examples and then a few weeks to get into a regular writing rhythm.
I’m currently working on the pdf report thing explaining all the deeper thinking I’ve been doing about a framework for understanding what’s going on in the world, which I then need to combine with a brief autoresponder e-mail series for new readers.
I’ll send out a note when I’ve finished it to everyone who’s currently on the list. The PDF will then become the ‘interesting free report’ bit of the newsletter sign up process for new subscribers, so they can learn more about i) their world and ii) me and how I think and whether that’s going to be useful for them. A kind of intellectual framework and basis for us to work off, if you like.
Luke Spear
20/07/2011
Thanks for your comprehensive reply, Matthew. Those are great traffic numbers, and I’m sure that once your direction is made even clearer the only way for them to go is up.
A few further comments:
i) it will certainly be a challenge to merge the two target groups, but not impossible as you have so far proven in continuing to keep numbers up. As you say, not entirely unrelated.
ii) conceptually I think you are at the forefront of news and comment distribution, and would only add that you can’t expect a solid and clear path to emerge when innovating. At some point you will probably gain enough traction with what you are doing to start to cement things, but adding and removing features (and getting feedback on their popularity) will only help you to get to that concrete idea quicker. Deciding on who you want to read you, and under which circumstances (prolific blog readers with 10 minutes to kill, for example) may also help in that vein.
iii) so it goes! Perhaps regular isn’t important, perhaps just being there (via Google) when the reader wants something in particular?
iv) as long as you continue to make it easy to do, signups will only increase with your popularity. Not a great deal to be done short of those first-visit pop-ups which may annoy, but do seem to drive up conversion rates.
v) as above, this is an interesting aspect, where you can really add value. It could also, theoretically, distract focus from the key audience of news readers. Experimentation and innovation may be the only ways to get the two aspects to play nicely.
The Paypal system seems better suited to the language side (I presume that’s your direction) than the news, as of course online news comment competition is somewhat greater than language teaching. I, for one, would not be averse to subtle ads being placed around your posts, as it seems you are reaching traffic numbers that start to warrant its use.
Luke