I’ve been having a go at the latest chic-geek blogging tool — posterous — recently, as you’ll be able to tell if you look at the posts I’ve made here over the last month or so. But, in the end, I’ve decided not to use it. Why? Read on.

Just to be clear, before I go on to my objections: it’s damned good. If you haven’t yet tried it yourself, the highlights, as I see it, are:

• You can post really easily using email (just email post@posterous.com right now, and it’ll start a new blog for you – the email address you send from is your log-in).
• No login; no set-up; no configuration. A monkey could do it.
• Free – always a consideration. And no apparent limits on anything.
• Great media handling out of the box – send photos, videos, mp3s and it will sort out a nifty player for you.
• Syndication – it’ll repost the content you send to photo/video/text sharing sites and twitter it as well.

See these posts by incumbent Edelman and iCrossing social media champions for a taste of the fervour that people are feeling.

That’s all dandy. It’s really dandy. If I had to set up a blog for someone, I’d send them straight to posterous.

So what’s this ‘past–posterous’ nonsense, you ask? Like most things, there’s a combination of reasons that add up to a discomfort about the whole thing.

(1) I can replicate almost all of those features in WordPress. Post via email; audio-player, all the rest. It’s not simple, but it isn’t that hard either.

(2) It may sound a bit sad, but I am concerned about ownership of my content. On my own (rented) server space, I have that (as long as I pay the rent). If I put my stuff on a third-party service, then I very-slightly lose ownership and control.

(3) I also wonder how search-engines will interpret this. The first posting of content is normally taken as canonical by Google (i.e the real, original source) and consequently appears highest in search results. Duplicated content is deprecated. This protects against content thieves in normal circumstances, but in this case, the canonical source would presumably be posterous.com, not your personal URL. Another reason to have one canonical source is to protect against black-hat SEO types posting the same content on multiple, inter-linked sites, much ermm… like a fully fledged posterous account might create. That’s a worry, too. I’d like my blog to be the canonical source and not marked as a content duplicator. I’ve had a quick look round the SEO blogs and don’t think anyone has an answer on that yet.

(4) Posterous will undoubtedly launch paid-for plans or advertising schemes to earn revenue. I don’t know what those are or whether they will be successful. I hope that they are. In the mean time, it’s a zero-revenue business. I don’t want to trust my content to that. And I don’t know yet what sacrifices I might have to make to keep a free service in the future. Adverts? Pop-Ups?

Beyond that, there’s another reason. One that twists my melon considerably.

Is there such a thing as too-easy?

For me, there is.

If creating a blog post is as easy as hitting a button and typing twenty words, then I’m opening a Pandora’s Box.

Because I could do that all day, every day. I just thought of a new blog post then – whoosh – there it is. I could be creating 12 blog posts while you’re in the bog. For many long-time blog owners it’s a blessed release. Coming up with new ideas and new posts is a pain. The hard part about blogging isn’t setting one up, as their proliferation shows. There are already at least 200mn blogs. The hard part is keeping with it. Journalistic writing is hard – if you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it right, then you’re thinking about the audience all the time and turning your words and how much or how little you give to make them happier.

One reason to keep with it (and I have several, just in case) is so that people will respect your blog as a quality source, in some respect. You’ve filtered and processed the information so they don’t have to. And hopefully presented it in an agreeable way. You are providing Signal not Noise.

There are some great posterous blogs and tumblr blogs, I’m sure. But they are different – not better or worse – from a really good blog. Some people probably have a twitter-stream that could be made into a book. Not me.

The internet would unbundle the various services provided by papers.

Nowadays, you might still use a newspaper for these things, but you have the choice instead to go to a number of specialist websites to get more of what you’re actually looking for at that moment. You can use something like Bloglines to create your own virtual newspaper — a custom bundle of the writers, topics and news sources you really care about. There’s very little wastage that way, and even less cost to the reader.

Because the technology is there, some of us have been predicting the death of newspapers. Their sales figures have been in decline for 40 years. Ubiquitous internet access and powerful tools for finding and assembling custom information seem the last nail in the coffin.

However, this isn’t what’s actually happening. Wired News reported yesterday that, in fact:

The average number of monthly visitors to U.S. newspaper websites rose by nearly a third in the first half of 2006, a study released on Wednesday said, though print readership at some larger papers fell…

The average number of unique visitors to online newspaper sites in the first half was more than 55.5 million a month, the study said. That compares with 42.2 million a year earlier.…

The Washington Post’s website increased its audience reach among readers aged 25 to 34 by more than 60 percent…

The number of page views at newspaper sites rose by about 52 percent in the first half…

Newspaper readerships aren’t looking so shabby after all. It seems pretty clear that people like and want bundles. While it is technically possible to create your own ‘newspaper’ the majority of people don’t want to do that.

Three possible reasons, dreamed up off the top of my head:

(a) It takes time and effort and little bit of technical confidence to assemble your RSS-aggregated custom paper. Most people, if you recall, only visit half a dozen websites on a regular basis.

(b) People trust newspaper editors to guide them towards what’s important. And they trust mainstream media to deliver the truth to a far greater extent than random internet sites.

© We’re more and more pressured for time. A bundle of the items we feel we ought to know about saves us time. The ‘logical reason’ Gates was searching for, for all those items being bundled together, is that they help us cope with staying informed in an efficient way.

What is happening is that newspapers are losing revenue. Even with larger online viewing figures, the revenues from advertising on their websites is a tiny fraction of what they previously earned from advertising in their print publications. With a very few exceptions, they also don’t get to charge their readers the way they can by selling print editions. The problem isn’t with circulation, it’s with ARPU (average revenue per user). Print readers converting to online readers loses them money.

The endgame of that movement is already evident. Cost-cutting measures are rife: papers closing; papers becoming online only; more and more reliance on syndicated news rather than correspondents; more reliance on unpaid ‘citizen’ contributions; expensive senior journalists made redundant; increasing (cheap) feature content as opposed to (expensive) reporting. The bundle that you really wanted is being forced into extinction.

Elsewhere, Michael Urlocker reports today on advice from the American Press Institute to help reverse this decline. They need to find the non-consumers and seek to convert them. Michael says, “To disrupt themselves, newspapers need to zero in on the attributes that readers and advertisers value and pay for. And they need to cease working on the attributes that readers and advertisers no longer value.”

On broad terms, I agree. But my anxiety is that what a lot of readers and advertisers may really value is a bundle with an independent voice, quality, ethical, honest writing and reporting, and high production standards. These are exactly what are under threat as papers seek to find fresh markets.

A lot of the content was covered in the original post but two key ideas for right now:

1) The best place to start is a recruitment blog. “Every company should have one.” It has to be the place where a company wants to talk one-to-one. Also, the ROI is completely apparent in terms of the number of applications. Experimenting here might help clarify the reasons for blogging more generally in a company.

2) The “biggest piece of advice is to just get started”. Take out a Typepad or WordPress account and start to blog. Keep it password protected for the first 30 days while you work out your voice and what is and is not right for your company. Write down the top 20 posts you might want to write and have a go at them.

I’d temper the second piece of advice with the need to involve other key decision makers — get them to look at your blog and submit comments. You can always remove them, and any incendiary posts before you go live.

The second piece of caution is, of course, to know a little bit about blogs and blogging. “Read 30 blogs religiously for a month” is a piece of advice I have read or been told elsewhere (sorry for the lack of attribution).

The comments section on Charlene’s blog post also contains an interesting note from David Phillips who challenges the idea of ROI. Since it can’t calculate the incalculable value of some aspects of blogging (relationships), then should it really be used as a way of judging its value? Would SMART objectives be a better measure?

Li has previously been quoted as saying that her blog could be associated with $1mn of revenue at Forrester, but ended up regretting having said that: “it’s a highly subjective, qualitative measure that’s hard to measure”. So how do you arrive at solid figures?

As she says, the benefits you measure depend on the reasons you started to blog in the first place. If the point is to drive sales then you have one metric — traffic from the blog to your point-of-sale; but if the point of it is to generate buzz, then you might develop a formula based on your Technorati ranking. She suggests taking the metrics you already use to measure the success of aspects of your business through more traditional marketing and PR efforts and adapt them to your blogging activities.

There’s also a very handy table categorising some of the different benefits you might achieve for your company from blogging, and how you might measure them:

Of course, it can often be more difficult than that. If you blog to be ‘more responsive to customer concerns’, it might not be very easy to separate the impact of your blog from other influences. Perhaps your product got better; perhaps you’ve employed someone really good in support; perhaps someone else is blogging tips about your product.

This is a fascinating project, though. Charlene and her team are looking for figures and case studies to flesh out the concepts and attempt to add some proof. I’ll certainly be following its evolution with interest.

Birch, 36, is almost dismissive of the need for Bebo to generate revenues at this stage. For the next two or three years, his priority is to establish the firm as one of the global leaders in social networking. The big challenge is in America, where Bebo is currently a distant third behind MySpace and Facebook, a college-based site.

“At the moment there’s a race for traffic,” says Birch. “Implementing a successful business model does not necessarily help in that goal. There are so many avenues that social networking can go down.”

So Friday’s revelation that Bebo is planning a mobile service isn’t about revenue? Pete Cashmore notes:

…it seems that Bebo Mobile is a step closer — mobile phone group O2 is in talks with the company, although discussions are still at the early stages. There were rumors earlier this week that Bebo plans to extend the site via SMS, rather than the WAP-based services that other social networks are pursuing.

As Pete says, SMS messaging is extremely popular here in the UK, far more so than WAP or Mobile Web, where Bebo is also the number one social network. It’s also a technology that’s already been well integrated with other youth media such as voting on Big Brother or Pop Idol.

Teaming with one or more of the mobile operators to share revenues from moblogging, update messages, photo, ringtones and video services seems like a win-win for both the operators and the social network.

It may seem ironic that Web 2.0 social networks may ultimately find one of their best revenue streams from working with a completely different area of the telecommunications industry. But if brand advertisers are not yet ready to pay high rates for what is perceived as low quality social network traffic, and the users themselves are resistant to advertising, then it’s certainly time to move sideways.

This seems part of a wider strategy to look at non-orthodox sources of revenue. Jim Scheinman, the Bebo’s VP of business development and sales told e-consultancy something pretty similar in regard to Bebo TV. They’re working towards something called ‘Engagement Marketing’, which seems like a good move under current circumstances:

Web 1.0 advertising is dead. If you look at Yahoo’s last quarterly numbers they’ve seen a decrease in graphical advertising when in fact online advertising has gone up. It’s not that people aren’t buying banners any more, it’s that they’re not core any more.

Birch himself spoke out in August about traditional media buyers not really ‘getting’ social media. Bebo certainly does care about revenue, though. It just isn’t the revenues you might initially imagine that it is chasing. Let’s hope it can move to the point where it can ignore those not agile enough to keep up.

One spot of weirdness: I already have a gmail account, though it wasn’t the one I used to sign up for Writely. Hope there’s some way along the line to switch my documents over if the integration goes further — and I hope it does.

Dear ********

In a few days, we will be switching over to Google Accounts for Writely registration and sign-in.

To make things simple, we will create a new Google account for you at *********@********.com as part of the migration process.
You don’t have to do anything different — just sign in as usual, and your documents will be right there.

For more information about signing into Writely with your Google Account, see the FAQ at http://www.google.com/support/writely/bin/topic.py?topic=8615
Thanks!
Google Writely Team

“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace … There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business … Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we build adequate, if not superior, competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them, if not exceed them”

It may be naive, but I can see two issues with this strategy.

(a) Part of the appeal of MySpace is to be able to plug-in bits of media — movies, pictures and music — from other web services. “One of its most popular attributes,” according to Pete Cashmore. Removing this ability could increase the appeal of competitors like Facebook which has opened its API to third party developers and is soon to open its doors to non-academic members.

The claim that other Web 2.0 services are ‘driven’ by MySpace runs both ways, I think. Isn’t MySpace’s success partly driven by the availability of all these other services?

(b) Doesn’t MySpace save money and increase its profits by having other providers host and serve videos/pictures/music that are then placed on its members’ pages? YouTube, for example, is rumoured to be paying $1mn a month in bandwidth costs. Take into account that MySpace is expected to make just $350mn in revenues this year and only just profitable at that level. Result of running own video service = serious loss.

via Techcrunch, News Multichannel

It’s not important for you to know my name -
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me -
And what you give is what you get.

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again,
What we have said will always remain.
If we get through for two minutes only,
It will be a start!
(The Jam, Start!)

There’s nothing like statistical rigor when it comes to research. And my little poll here is nothing like statistically rigorous. However, it’s been sitting there for more than two weeks while readers patently ignored it and it’s time to talk about the results. Anyway, it seems that it is at least as valid as a lot of the polls you read in the papers.

It’s good news for the Web 2.0 guys. While they were the least popular of the three options I presented, they still managed to garner six votes. Since the combined forces of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google only managed ten, I’d call that a pretty solid presence.

“Yeah, right, Ian,” I hear you mutter. “Twenty-three votes is nothing, for a start. Plus you’re polling people who read a blog about Web 2.0 and stuff.”

True enough. However, my own expectation was the mainstream sites would completely dominate the newcomers, and that most people would vote for no personalised homepage. I use vanilla Google myself, but most of the time I’m actually going somewhere else, so “about:none” (which gives you a blank start page) would actually make more sense. Because of this bias, I assumed most people were the same. They’re not.

Netvibes apparently has at least four million users and recently attracted $15mn in seed financing. Leading competitor Pageflakes — backed to an undisclosed figure by Benchmark Capital — presumably has similar user numbers. New entrant Webwag will have fewer, having only just launched. It’s a rocky market, though: Fold.com ahem.. folded on June 3rd, becoming the first entrant to Techcrunch’s Web 2.0 deadpool. On the other hand, single page aggregators, like popurls, are also on the rise. These sites are similar in some respects to the Netvibes crowd, since they put together a bunch of related feeds onto a single page.

It’s pure speculation, of course, but the popularity of these pages might be ascribed to a couple of things:

1) It takes me an hour to read through the 107 111 blogs I subscribe to through bloglines. If I miss a day, it might take two hours. I don’t always have that sort of time. What if I could just get the important stuff on a single page? (cf. Ross Mayfield’s desire for a version of Techmeme that is actually MeMeme)

2) If I then need to visit a calendar, to-do list and a webmail site to complete my catch-up, that’s at least another 30 minutes. The personalised home pages can stick that on the same page as my news.

There are good reasons to use these pages. The question remains, though, as to how these sites are going to make any money. Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag haven’t even got any adverts. There’s talk of affiliate deals with Kelkoo, Amazon and so forth, but I see no evidence of that on the pages I’ve set up for myself using these services. Plus, there’s intense competition from mainstream players like Google as well as other AJAX homepage startups. Chris Lake raised this issue back in June.

If I were the boss of Google, Yahoo or MS Live — you know, companies that have (a) an existing personalised start page service and (b) loads of advertisers looking for inventory — I’d be looking very carefully at Netvibes et al. Then I’d copy whatever it is that they’re doing to attract so many users and try to shut them down. Wouldn’t you?

Frankly, even though I’m supposed to be an investor, the ideas that excite me most are not necessarily the ones that make the most money, but the ones that blow away evil old monopolies. For example, I love collaborative news sites not so much because they make a lot of money — though they might — but because they’ve shown what a bad job the ‘old media’ were doing.

Most people don’t understand what a social force startups can be. There are a lot of changes that can only happen through companies. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies. You know your business model is broken when you’re suing your customers. The new business model must be out there somewhere, and my guess is that the way to beat the bad guys is not through political action (or at least, not only that), but by inventing
whatever replaces them.

(Parochial headline alert: PG Tips is a brand of English tea.)

1. Start using tags.
2. Provide full text RSS feeds.
3. Work with external “social” websites.
4. Link to relevant blog entries.
5. Get rid of all registration.
6. Partner with local bloggers.
7. Offer alternative views of your content.
8. Modernize your site’s graphic design.
9. Learn from Craigslist.
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs.

Reader response to the post has now prompted a further list collating their comments:

1. Allow Readers to Comment on Every Story
2. Improve Search Features
3. Use Better HTML
4. Focus on Local and Regional News
5. Open Up Your Archives
6. Provide Multilingual Versions
7. Offer Supplemental Content
8. Open Up the Letter to the Editor Process

One way to summarise a lot of these pieces of advice is ‘be a bit more like a blog and a bit less like a newspaper’. Make it easy to get to particular stories; distribute your content freely; be a part of the blogosphere.

On the face of it, it makes sense. Blogs are successful, right? So why not follow their pattern. I genuinely believe that a lot of these suggestions would improve newspapers’ online services. On the other hand, though, I’m not sure many of them are really addressing the fundamental problems faced by papers.

Not that many blogs make big money, and even those that do retain very few staff. Editorial costs on newspapers, though, remain massive, online or offline. The reason for this is that it takes a long time and lots of resources to produce news stories. Bloggers don’t face this issue because comment, as they say, is free. And the papers can’t skimp too much on these costs. If newspapers don’t remain the best source for news, become just another site, then they lose more readers and advertisers. The rest of the blogosphere has suddenly got nothing to write about but itself and their cats.

Stories predicting the imminent death of newspapers may be somewhat over-exaggerated, though — there’s news this morning from MediaPost that:

NEWSPAPERS’ ONLINE AD REVENUE TOPPED $667 million in the second quarter, marking a 33 percent increase from last year’s $501 million, according to industry organization the Newspaper Association of America.

But the Web’s contribution to publishers’ bottom line was dwarfed by contractions in the print ad market. Print revenues dropped .2 percent to $11.7 billion, and combined revenues were almost flat, growing just 1.1 percent to end at $12.4 billion.

Just the $12.4bn, eh. Poor lambs.