davidconnell.net

Anyone interested in publishing words on the internet, or reading words that are published on the internet, should read the three essential pieces below from Mac developer Brent Simmons (he publishes the inessential blog). I’ve pulled out some nuggets that I particularly like here, but you should read the text of all three.

What Simmons is imagining is a world in which publishers care more about the product they are presenting than the advertising dollars and eyeballs they are pulling in. It’s a world where text and stories are given top billing and advertising is kept at a minimum. It’s a world where stats tell you how many people are coming, but editorial decisions are made based on the very best content, not SEO. I like this world, I like it a lot and it’s proven to be a successful model for bloggers like John Gruber, Seth Godin and The Loop. I think it can be successful for most independent bloggers or people creating content for organizations — like non-profits — where content generation is a side business designed to get people to invest in your core mission or product.

Unfortunately, I don’t see how this model scales. That is, I don’t see how big news organizations that depend on a large international staff to investigate and collect news and analysis could ever survive in a future where readability trumps all. There’s too much money needed and too long a history to move to a new model. It  would be interesting to see if a truly federated news organization — one where writers set up their own editorial presence on a loosely affiliated network — could scale an idea like this. Each writer could be responsible for his or her own revenue and pay a support fee (for back-end technology, design, etc.) to the federation. In this way, you could get a wide variety of sources and maintain readability. Think of The Huffington Post or Daily Beast, but much less sucky from a user-experience standpoint. Oh, and probably a lot less profitable.

Here are Simmons’s ideas:

The Pummeling Pages

I think it was in the Space Merchants (or maybe in The Merchants’ War) where this future was predicted: lower-class people would be subjected to a ton of advertising — accompanying every moment awake and asleep — while upper-class people would be insulated.

It seems obvious now, but in the ’50s I don’t think it was. And now we’d add that it’s not a class thing entirely — technical proficiency is part of the equation. If you’re technical enough to figure out how to install AdBlock (the most popular Safari extension, it appears), you’ll cut way down on ads. If you go even further and edit your hosts file and make your browser use an ad-blocking CSS file, you’ll cut down even further (and you’ll opt-out of a bunch of tracking too).

If enough people do this, publications will have to show more ads, just to make up for the ad revenue they’re missing from me and you.

Put Rules

Allow a single analytics system
I’d just call it stats, though.

Ideally stats would be completely unobtrusive — a system that reads the log every night and generates a report. Or it might be slightly obtrusive, like Mint, but no more than that.

Keep ads minimal
And no moving ads, or ads that appear above other things, or ads that need to be clicked to be closed, would be allowed. No interstitials. (It’s a sign of industry sickness that I even know the word interstitial.)

I’d want to use good networks like The Deck.

The Readable Future

Part of me wants to appeal to publishers based on the Apple argument. That argument says: if you do what Apple does — pay extraordinary attention to user experience; make elegant and delightful things — then you will make money.

Though Apple continuously proves this argument true, I’m not sure most people will ever believe it. It requires a certain amount of faith, and it requires trusting intuition and taste more than analytics and received wisdom. It requires a belief in humanity — or, perhaps more accurately, respect for humanity — that is believed to be incompatible with business.

And people don’t get fired for measuring things. People don’t often get fired for continuing to do things the same way they’ve always been done. But people do get fired for taking risks that don’t pan out.

At the beginning of this year, I made some pretty audacious plans to write more and publish to this site as well as two others — 500wds and aquariumdrinker. I was going to put out 500 words of fiction every day on Posterous and publish web links and detrius to aquariumdrinker on Tumblr and put formal stuff on this blog. I was going to be a one-man media machine. Oh, and I was going to completely excel at my job — you know, the one that actually pays the bills.

It was all so exciting and it was sheer lunacy. Trying to keep up that many sites and  produce that much content was simply unworkable.

Over the last six months I’ve shuffled things around, moving from platform to platform and trying to make it work until I finally realized it couldn’t. Instead, I essentially shuttered aquariumdrinker (which broke my heart a little) and 500wds, redirected their RSS feeds to davidconnell.net and started publishing everything here. And this is where I’ll stay. Here you can find everything I write and find interesting on the web, from fiction to technology, to Lego machine guns. As the tagline says, “What interests me might interest you.”

That’s why I decided to stay with davidconnell.net, because this blog is about me and my interests. The name of the blog shout set up that expectation. As much as I loved aquariumdrinker it was never really able to fulfill those needs for me.

And it will always be a WordPress blog. No more multiple sites, no more fooling with other platforms. Over the years I’ve blogged on every major platform and I’ve always come back to WordPress for its ease of use, flexibility and insane developer network. For those of us who want to write on our blogs, there’s nothing better.

So if my grand strategy hasn’t panned out over the last six months, what has worked? Well, for one I am writing more now than I have since graduate school. I get up every morning at 5:00 AM, walk the dog and then write. More often than not, it shows up here. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the point is I am writing, and that was always the goal of the December 31 declaration.

So I’m happy with the progress so far. My writing is improving, I’ve had a couple posts that sparked some genuine conversation on the web, the people I care about seem to be interested in the blog and — most importantly — it is an accurate reflection of who I am and what I love. For a personal blog, that’s about all you can ask for.

Notes:
There are a couple of ideas I have for the blog that I am going to be rolling out soon. One is more links — blogging is about sharing and there are tons of things I find that I would love to share but don’t. I do “hot friday link action” but that only covers a bit of what I find. So look for more link-style posts to appear on the blog starting today. I haven’t exactly figured out the format, so there will be some experimentation.

I’ve recently moved the blog from GoDaddy to LaughingSquid for hosting. I might have more on this later, but for now know that I was ashamed to be associated with a company like GoDaddy and am more than proud to be with LaughingSquid. Also, LaughingSquid has great customer service.

Actually, “web strategy” is a little too grand for what I’m talking about. It’s really more like, “New year, new way of thinking about the stuff I do online.” And I have been thinking about it a bit lately for a lot of reasons, both personal and professional that I won’t get into right now.

But, here’s what I’m looking at for 2011:

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