Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Anne Holland over at Marketing Sherpa has written a really thoughtful article on how to calculate a blog’s reach & influence. I have roughly 1,000 Feedburner subscribers, most of which probably read my posts & another few hundred/thousand unique daily site visitors (depending on volume of posts). This blog is admittedly not a mass market blog, so I doubt I’ll ever get to the numbers that TechCrunch get to, but at least I feel that my readership is influential and consists of a number of bloggers (as you can see from MyBlogLog).

Anne points out the following points to be used in order to measure influence/reach (edited - read full article here):

#1. Traffic (don’t trust it alone)

Media buyers usually ask, “How much traffic is there and how much is unique?” and leave it at that. Paul notes the problem with traffic stats for blogs is that so much may come from search engines and other sites linking to one particular posting.

#2. RSS feeds

Hundreds of thousands of sites — ranging from automated splogs to high-profile online media — use RSS feeds from good independent bloggers as part of their content. Paul noted that his own posting headlines often show up on places, such as O’Reilly media. That’s pretty impressive reach.

#3. Inbound hotlinks

As with other media, traffic volume can be far less important than traffic quality. In the blog world, quality usually equates with influence. A blog read by a tiny group of people can have gargantuan influence if they are the right people.

#4. Search position, part one

You can research a blog’s search position in two ways — first, does that blog appear for key terms related to your business or brand?

#5. Search position, part two

Separately, also review a bloggers’ general search ranking under keywords associated with his or her own “brand,” such as their personal name, their blog’s name, their tagline, etc.

#6. Voice

You want to allay your brand with the type of voice that you feel your audience (investors, press, customers, etc.) would respect.

Llewellyn Claasen, who co-founded incuBeta with me, has spent the past 18 months completing his masters degree in technology and has today launched his new blog - CorpV2.com in which he will focus on providing startups with better management practices, and exploring the many facets of the online world that has become a reality for most businesses.

His opening post is titled “The Impact of Network Effects on Online Technology Plays… Part 1″, and is a great prelude of many good things to come!

I have a bit of a rough week ahead, and will be spending 3 days attending (and presenting) at a University of Cape Town Course on what is in effect, Web 2.0, called Nomadic Markets. I’ll try to blog some of the material, if I can get permission.

Social Media is becoming the dominant topic, other than FaceBook, which is a subset. Last night, I found out about two of my best friends finally getting engaged - through my newsfeed on Facebook, about 30 minutes after they posted it. They didn’t even have a chance to call me and I knew about it… how our world is changing!

One of South Africa’s social media experts, Mike Stopforth, discussed the impact of Social Media on South Africa, with CNBC last month. Here is the YouTube clip:

Something tells me that Facebook is quickly become the most talked about company on the Internet. Even more so than Google, as it extends past just Google geeks and into the broader mainstream.

In the past week, I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation or meeting that Facebook wasn’t brought up in. Even when I’m having a nice dinner with my wife out in the town, the couple next to us is yapping on about Facebook! South Africa has nearly 5m Internet users, and only about 125k Facebook users, but it’s like everyone in the youth market (20-35’s) are talking about Facebook! And according to Alexa, FaceBook is the 2nd most accessed site in South Africa at the time of writing, with the 1st, being Google.

As if that wasn’t enough, Facebook.co.za (out local domain) is being (allegedly) cybersquatted and Facebook hasn’t even noticed yet! Not going to delve into this, but here are some other blogs about it.

The stats that Techcrunch recently reported on Facebook’s growth is astounding and it’s becoming a category killer in Social Networks. You cannot compare MySpace to Facebook - they are different beasts altogether.

Facebook’s API move was so significant that Venture Capitalists are launching Facebook Apps funds, which is a GREAT idea!!

Facebook is creating havocs in people’s relationships, but arguably, from my perspective, it’s exposing weaknesses and incompatibilities that already existed in their relationships. Here are some examples:

1. I know someone who’s significant other broke up with them because they found them using Facebook and saw all their ex’s.
2. I know someone who doesn’t tell their significant other about them and hides it…
3. I know someone who is not allowed to use Facebook by their married partner
4. I know someone who watches everything their partner does on Facebook looking for any hint of indiscretion.

This is getting a bit nuts, and I’m no relationship therapist, but I can say that people who are insecure about their partners using Facebook, might as well lock them up at home as well. A social network mimics real life networks and fills the void created by distance to friends and family. If you can’t trust or be trusted, you’re probably in the wrong relationship, so get over it and move on (yeah yeah, I know, often easier said than done!).

What does the future hold for Facebook? I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s pretty big, due to the vast number of minds applying themselves to the platform.

Here is a suggestion for Facebook:

I have 500+ friends, and I don’t add people I don’t know to my profile. However, in those 500 friends, there are probably only like 10-20% that I really trust. I would the ability to be given points and be allowed to allocate points to my top 25 friends.

Best friend: 25 points
2nd Best : 24 points
3rd Best: 23 points

etc etc etc

This way, I would infer trust to those people that I do trust, and given a decent distribution, each user would have a different friend point allocation. Those people in the network with the highest points, would be given a higher “Trust Score”. This would far better enable me to use the Facebook Marketplace whilst shopping for goods and services, as I would know who I could trust and it would mimic the offline world trust aspects. Facebook can become the new eBay in this way, but creating a network where trust is established.

There is my contribution, now with a few million more suggestions, I can see how Facebook will rule the Internet

The big question: Who is going to buy Facebook and for how much?

My bet: Microsoft for like $10bn… (because they just need to do SOMETHING - Live.com is not exactly keeping Larry & Sergei awake at night, but Facebook probably is!)

I cannot thank the guys over at Blazer Six enough! They have done an excellent redesign which will expose far more content and given me a far better use of space and also integrating a Chat Room, Photos . Brady & Brody are a real professional duo and I actually got the recommendation from Ken Yarmosh when he redesigned his Technosight blog - and I can honestly say I was not disappointed in the least!!

Although I highly doubt it, there may be some bugs in the site - please let me know if you find any! The fact that this entire blog is built on open source software (Wordpress) is truly a testament to the future of open source.

I’ve been holding off on doing too many posts this week, until this new theme was in place (and also, the Synthasite launch was a great success - with nearly 4,000 signups - so I’ve been pretty busy). I have quite a number of posts lined up for this week, including an exclusive interview with eBay’s “San Dimas” (new Apollo Application) product manager Alan Lewis - as I was the lucky recipient of the 2nd invitation to the closed Beta test.

David Bullard is surely one of South Africa’s (formerly) great print journalists, and I read his weekly column in the online and print edition of the Sunday Times (which has a readership of well over 1m people) with much eager anticipation, with the exception of this week’s post on bloggers. I am not going to echo Vincent Maher’s rebuttal, except to say that outright that I think Bullard is a fool with no understanding of new media and it’s impact on society.

To quote from David’s post:

Allow me to explain what I mean. I used to play air guitar with a band called Deep Purple. My playing was perfect, I had attitude and I even smashed my air guitar at the end of the number. The reason I played air guitar is that I couldn’t play real guitar very well so I was forced to dwell in this fantasy world where my guitar playing meant something only to me. I should point out that this was years ago when I was still young and foolish. These days I play air tenor saxophone, which is far more challenging.

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It’s even sadder when someone reads them.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors.

And this piece:

These are the sort of wackos who gun down their fellow students at university.

This is exactly the mentality that is leading to the decline of offline print as a source of information, because the people entrenched in the offline world are so resistant to change, they cannot keep up with the times.

If I had to paraphrase what Bullard is saying, then basically Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Robert Scoble, Jeremy Zawodny, Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts wouldn’t ever get hired by a print publication - (like hell) - but even more to the point, why would they want to write for a bunch of anally retentive middle to late aged complacent publications that are in a declining market. Most of the CEO’s and editors of these publications are hoping to retire before they go bust and Web 2.0 becomes and entrenched way of life - and this is probably one of the biggest drivers of their resistance to change - with maybe the exception of Rupert Murdoch.

Ok, so you may have guessed that this is one of the very few times I rant on my blog - but I think it’s insane for a well reputed journalist to write such a scathing post about something he obviously knows nothing about! Ingorance is bliss, I’m afraid…

David Bullard : Wake up and smell the coffee - just because bloggers want independence from beaurocratic print houses and leveraging the reach of the Internet, this does not make their work of a lower quality than yours! Life is about choices, and we CHOOSE not to work for print and have editors telling us what and how to write - freedom of speech is grand!! Good luck to you though!