Center for Citizen Media » Business Uses

Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Search Engine Optimization

Ryan McGrady — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:39:52 +0000

(This is the seventeenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

In the previous Citizen Media Business Issues post, we took a look at Web statistics as a means to learn more about your site and the people who visit it. Now that you know how many visitors you have, what they look at, what sites are linking to you, and so on, the question becomes: how can one increase the performance in one or more of those areas?

This post is not about how to falsely inflate one metric or another. Nor is it about how to get traffic unscrupulously. It’s about how to use the tools available on the Web effectively, to accurately reflect the hard work you put in. There is no substitute for high-quality, well-presented content, but people need to be able to find it.

Traffic Rankings

There are several measuring sticks you can place next to your website to compare it with the rest of the Internet. A lot of people choose not to worry about such rankings, and their importance does certainly depend on your own personal goals. However, on this business side of things, which this series concerns, they matter.

First of all, they can provide good tools for goal-setting and motivation, and can sometimes act as a reward for a job well done, thereby facilitating the continued production of good content.

Second, marketers will often use them to gauge how much your advertising real estate is worth. You can have thousands of hits a day, but if, for whatever reason, you’re not popping up in a Google search, the rate you get for advertising won’t reflect its true worth.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, knowing the inner workings of the various rankings will allow you to utilize them to their full potential, thus attracting more traffic.

Social News Sites

Before we take a closer look at individual traffic rankings, it’s worth mentioning how much of an impact social news sites can have on them. Webmasters will often notice a seemingly random spike in traffic over the course of a couple days that ends up being due to incoming links from a site like Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, Fark, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon. And a sharp increase in traffic will, of course, result in improved traffic rankings.

While each of these sites functions differently, they are all based on a community of users who share stories they find on the Web. The submitted links are then augmented with conversational tools and/or some form of voting system, allowing the most popular articles to rise in visibility and accessibility. A lot of people use these sites as news filters, relying on the wisdom of crowds to save browsing time by going first to those sites recommended by the rest of the community.

The way most people promote their content on these sites is by placing one or more of the site-specific icons near each of their headlines or blog posts. The best known example of this is probably the “Digg This” button, which registers a positive vote (known as a Digg) for the article when clicked and displays how many Diggs it has received to-date. It’s tempting to use a lot of these to enable readers to use their social news site-of-choice, but make sure to display them tastefully, avoiding messy icon spam. One way to do this is to use something like the Share This widget you’ll see at the bottom of this post. When clicked, it expands into a neat menu of possible services.

You may also consider getting involved in one or more of these communities. Signing up with one just because it’s the biggest or prettiest isn’t always the best idea. Take a survey first of what’s available (there’s a good list over at Dosh Dosh) to find where content like yours is featured prominently. For example, if you run a technology blog a la Engadget, you would probably fit in better at Slashdot than Newsvine.

As a new member, you may find that the things you submit don’t seem to get as much attention as something similar submitted by another user. This is because, as a community, there are often reputational gauges of member contribution (“karma” on Reddit, for example) as well as personal relationships that develop among the most frequent users. As time goes on and you get more and more involved, you may find a greater number of your submissions doing well for these reasons.

Alexa

Alexa Internet’s rankings are very simple. Every time a page on your site is viewed by someone who has their browser equipped with the Alexa toolbar, a hit is registered. It assigns rankings based on those hits (pageviews) and on “reach” (the percentage of all Internet users who have visited the site in question), averaged over the previous three months.

The website says that there is additional “data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources,” but consensus seems to be that the toolbar is far and away the primary factor. And although there is some amount of data correction for potential biases, this has led to some controversy over how well the self-selected group of people who use the toolbar represents the entirety of Web users. The company’s disclaimers even include a note about data being less accurate for low-traffic sites: “the size of the Web and concentration of users on the most popular sites make it difficult to accurately determine the ranking of sites with fewer than 1,000 monthly visitors. Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable.”

Despite the controversy, Alexa rankings are important to many advertisers and are at least accurate enough to be meaningful.

In spite of the myriad “## ways to boost your Alexa rank” blog posts around the Web, there is no easy way to improve your standings. Alexa Product Manager Geoffrey Mack dispelled most of the rumors a while ago between a post on the Alexa Web Discovery Machine (an official company blog) and a comment on the Online Money Making blog. All you can really do to increase your performance here—other than attract more traffic via other means—is to encourage your loyal readers to install the toolbar, perhaps displaying a widget as a reminder.

If you’re not listed on Alexa, you can either simply visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed or submit it here.

A note about privacy: Before you decide to install the Alexa toolbar (or any kind of toolbar like it, for that matter), understand that there is more information gathered about you than simply counting your visit to a site as a hit. Make sure to read the Alexa Internet Privacy Policy, which makes clear that while it will not try to determine your identity, it does keep track of purchases, browsing history, searches, forms you fill out, and so on.

Search Engines

If you’ve looked at the data for how visitors get to your site, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of people find you through search engines. The major engines, led by Google, drive a massive amount of Web traffic these days. Most people have a few favorite sites that they visit regularly by typing the familiar URL into the address bar or clicking a bookmark, but odds are good that search engines are your gateway to most of the rest of the Web.

Search engines work by crawling, indexing, and then using that index to serve Web data in response to users’ search queries.

A “crawler” is a program that periodically visits many millions of pages, gathering data about their text, text location, headings, and so on. It essentially tries to figure out what each page is all about. That data is then “indexed,” or stored in a searchable database. So the first thing to note here is that the search engines have to know about your site in order to crawl it. To inform them of your existence, follow these links: submit to Google, submit to Yahoo!, submit to MSN Live Search, and if you have a blog, submit to Technorati.

When you search for something, the engine will look at its huge index and return a list of results in order of relevance. Through your own common practice you probably know the importance of this search result ordering. In what percentage of searches do you actually get past the first few results? For most people, it’s rare, and even rarer to see more than the first couple pages.

None of the big engines make public exactly how they organize and prioritize search results. Google, for example, uses over 200 factors to determine which sites in its index are most relevant to the search query, and according to the New York Times, “makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.” Publicizing all of those factors would make the system too easy to manipulate and duplicate.

Not all of these signals are unknown, though. Some are disclosed by the company, many are common sense to the Web savvy, and a few have been determined via trial and error and data studies. Examples include the weighting of titles and headings over other content, location of search terms on the page, how close the words in the search string are to each other, and so on.

Website Importance

If you perform a Google search for “muffins” you’re going to get millions of hits. To some extent, the results will be based on relevance. But how does Google know if you are looking for recipes, a definition, the name of a restaurant, or a YouTube video with that name? Search engines then have to apply a sort of “importance” factor. The idea is that, with equal relevance, a very popular site will probably satisfy a user’s request more often than an unknown.

These importance rankings tend to be what advertisers care about most. The main reason for this is that performing searches to see where in the results pages a particular site appears for a variety of applicable keywords just isn’t practical. Rankings are quantifiable, more static, and simple values that have a significant enough relationship with traffic and search result priority to merit a direct relationship with advertising dollars.

The simplest algorithm is Technorati’s Authority system. For every blog that has linked to you (and also pings Technorati) in the last six months, your authority increases by one. It doesn’t matter if they link to you once or a hundred times, one blog equals one authority point. When searching with Technorati, users can choose to filter search results based on authority (for example, only including those with high scores). Authority is also displayed in the form of Technorati Rank, which is just a list of blogs arranged by authority (the number 1 ranked blog has the most authority).

PageRank is Google’s way of quantifying the importance of a site within the link structure of the Web. Generally speaking, the more a page is linked to, the higher its “importance,” and thus the higher its position in the search results. On top of that, incoming links from sites that are themselves considered important carry more weight than links from less important sites. A link to you from nytimes.com, for example, will count more than a link from somewhere on Geocities.

The raw PageRank value is equal to the likelihood that someone randomly clicking on links anywhere on the Web will end up on the page (with a 15% chance of a truly random link). But you won’t see this raw value published anywhere; instead you can find a score between 0 and 10 for any site you visit with the Google Toolbar. The higher the number, the more important the site.

A common misconception is that PageRank determines search result order. Actually, it’s just a weight (albeit a seemingly heavy one), acting as just one of the aforementioned 200+ signals.

If you don’t want to install the Google Toolbar, a number of sites have programs that will find a site’s PageRank. One is SEOmoz’s rank checker, part of its SEO Toolbox.

[Note: Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Live Search all function similarly to Google, with similar processes to PageRank, but don’t seem to come into play as much for marketers. Keep in mind that while this post may reference Google far more often than the others, most anything you do to increase your Google performance will likely yield better results in its competition, too.]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of trying to improve the amount or quality of search engine traffic. It’s become a big part of Internet marketing as businesses have found that a place at the top of organic search results is far more effective than most any advertising they could buy—and unless you pay an individual or SEO firm to do it for you, it’s free. “Organic search results” means those that aren’t advertisements or otherwise sponsored results.

Some of the main areas of SEO concentration are keywords, code, and design/presentation. After a little explanation of keywords, we’ll give some examples of the other two.

Keywords

Let’s say you run a blog called The Bread Zone that’s all about sandwiches: where to get the best peanut butter and jelly, personal recipes, history, and so on. Now put yourself in the position of a potential reader/customer. What would you search for to find the information on your site? Certainly not “The Bread Zone.” It’s nice if you’re at the top of a search for your blog’s name, but if somebody knows the name of your site and is searching for it, it doesn’t matter all that much where in the listings you are. The idea here is to associate your site with certain words or phrases so that if someone does a search for, say, “best sandwiches Boston” or “Elvis’s sandwich”, you’ll be near the top.

The more your keywords are used, and the more prominent they are (i.e. in titles and headings), the more likely a search engine will be to associate them with your site.

Keyword associations evolve naturally, based on the sorts of things you write about. If you write a lot about the best sandwiches in Boston, you won’t be able to help Google automatically considering you more relevant for searches containing related terms.

The first thing you can do to let search engines know what sorts of words will be relevant to your site is to put them in your meta keywords tag. Unfortunately, while meta keywords used to be vital, their importance been severely weakened in response to rampant abuse by people using misleading information or entering a huge number of keywords (a tactic called “stuffing”).

“Keyword optimization” involves careful use and placement of the chosen keywords, aggressively pushing the associations. If you decide to attempt this, keep your writing organic! Be very careful not to get involved with practices that improve search results at the expense of content quality. It will backfire. Shoehorning “Elvis’s sandwich” into a bunch of titles, headings, text, links, templates, and captions without duplicating the rest of the content may be in line with what the search engines look for, so you might see a temporary boost in traffic, but then it will collapse. First your audience will fade because nobody will want to look at or read such poorly-composed text. Then because all the search engines have some sort of measure to catch this manipulative practice (another form of “keyword stuffing”), they will devalue your URL if not remove it from the index completely.

Even if you’ll be stopping at setting your meta tags, spend a little while really thinking about what words and phrases you anticipate using often anyway. Go as specific as possible, as long as it’s something you can see yourself writing a lot. Remember that crawlers don’t actually read English, so using the keyword “astrophysics,” even if it’s an accurate representation of the site’s content, is meaningless if the word itself doesn’t appear in the text. Also, “sandwich, bread, blog” isn’t going to help you a whole lot either. Even if they pop up often in your articles, those are such generic terms that you’ll be lucky to appear on page 10.

For an easy way to track how often you use potential keywords use the Webconfs Keyword Density Checker. It will display a word cloud, count how many times you use each, and calculate keyword density (keyword occurrence/total words, not including stop words like “the” or “and”). The ideal density for each keyword is somewhere between 1% and 6%.

Once you have some keyword ideas, you can throw them into Google’s Keyword Tool to analyze how often people search using those keywords, as well as some more specific alternatives.

SEOChat has one of the better articles out there about Choosing and Researching Keywords. It’s several years old, but still highly relevant.

Search-friendly coding issues

Title tags

Look at the top of your browser window. Right now it probably says either “Center for Citizen Media: Blog” or “Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Optimization:” (perhaps abbreviated), followed by the name of your browser. This is the title, and every single page on the web has one. Titles, because they are by nature relevant to the page’s content, are a big deal to search engines. Try to use a different, appropriate title for each page you create. Many blog hosts will do this automatically. A good format is to use the name of your site for the main page, and then on other pages use something like “[name of your site] – [name of specific page or post]”.

Alt attributes and picture names

Search engines don’t see pictures. Not even Google Image Search sees them in the way humans do. It looks at the surrounding text and page content, the name of the picture file, and the “alt” attribute (see below for an explanation of this), but it has no way to see the graphic and understand its contents. Many blog and web hosts’ uploading programs will rename the files you upload to some random combination of letters and numbers, so you may not have total control over that, but it’s easy to use alt attributes effectively. “Alt” is what would be displayed in place of the image if you were using a text-only browser. It is also what users of screen readers would hear (software for the blind that speaks aloud the words on a page). In some browsers, when the title attribute is missing (not to be confused with the title of the page), it is also what pops up when you hover your cursor over an image.

Some publishing software gives you an “alt attribute” field to fill in when you create a link; if not, it’s just a matter of looking at the link’s code. Find the appropriate line with an “IMG SRC” html tag. You’ll see the IMG SRC is equal to the URL of an image file. All you have to do to is add alt = “the alt text goes here” after the URL and before the close bracket. When you’re done it’ll look like:

The alt text should act as a substitute for the image’s existence, which doesn’t always mean a description of the picture’s contents. A mailbox icon, for example, is probably better described as “e-mail [your name or site]” than “blue mailbox with a letter sticking out and the red flag raised.”

Also, don’t use alt text that is redundant to adjacent article text. And it’s probably best not to use alt tags for graphics that are purely for decoration (frilly borders and such), as they don’t actually provide anything relevant to the primary content.

Sitemaps

From the Sitemaps website:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The easiest way to create a sitemap is to use XML-Sitemaps.com. Just enter your URL, wait for it to scan, download the file, and place it in the root folder of your website (so that its address is www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). If you use a blog that doesn’t let you upload files like this, the next best option is to use your RSS feed as a sitemap (usually www.yoursite.com/rss.xml).

Edit your robots.txt (a file on your website that contains instructions for crawlers and other robots) to include the line

Sitemap: [sitemap_location]

where [sitemap_location] is the complete URL of your sitemap. This is the only way certain search engines, like MSN, will find it. For more information about robots.txt, see the Web Robots Pages.

To add your sitemap to Google, just sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and click “add” under the Sitemap column.

Adding your sitemap to Ask is particularly important, since the Ask crawler isn’t quite as active as the others and there is no way to simply submit a URL to be crawled. To do so, just copy and paste this link, replacing the end with the location of your sitemap: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

301 redirects

If your site is located at www.yourdomain.com, a redirect is required to make sure people can get to you when they type yourdomain.com (omitting the www) into their address bar. Your domain registrar has probably already set this up for you, but check with them to make sure this is a “301 redirect.” This tells search engines that the redirect is permanent, not temporary.

A fast way to find out which type of redirect you have is to use the SEOmoz HTTP status code checker.

Search-friendly design and presentation issues

Frames

Search engines are not smart enough to be able to see HTML frames as part of a single page. So when analyzed separately, each is weaker. The main content frame has fewer links and the navigation frame (assuming a cliché frames layout) will more than likely be discounted altogether for consisting only of links.

Frames made with CSS are better, because you can do it without creating separate files.

Java and Flash

Search engines don’t see text embedded in JavaScript or Flash. If you make the design choice to use these to display content, know that it will not be searchable.

Duplicate content

Search engines have duplicate content filters so as not to serve the end user a bunch of identical results, and also to prevent someone from copying and pasting good text from a popular site like Wikipedia onto a dummy page where it is passed off as original content in order to bring in ad money. Therefore don’t repost articles, avoid overusing boilerplates, etc.

Persistent navigation

Avoiding duplicate content doesn’t apply to navigation. In fact, having a good navigation system is very helpful as it creates a dense web of internal links, which makes it easier for the crawler to find all of your files. A crawler might not find something that requires several clicks to access.

Linking issues

Search engines want to serve the highest quality, most relevant results to users. Since links are such a huge factor when determining search results, there are many ways in which yours can help or hurt you.

Fix broken links. If you use DreamWeaver or FrontPage, you can check for them from inside the program. If not, you can use a tool like Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Checker or iWebTool Broken Link Checker to scan for them.

Don’t link to bad neighborhoods (spammers, abusers of search engines, sites that install malware…use common sense). Inbound links from such sites won’t hurt you, though, since you are assumed not to have control over it and they won’t affect a user’s experience on your page.

Watch the number of outbound links on a given page and try to stay under 100. More than that and you may trigger a link spam filter (more on link spam in the Warnings section below).

Consistent and relevant anchor text

When you create a link on your page, you typically don’t display the full URL in your article. A link to the Wikipedia article on frogs, for example, will usually look more like than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog. These words that you show the reader to describe the link, which at the same time hide the unattractive URL, are called anchor text.

Anchor text is very important to search engines because it’s often very relevant to the page it refers to. The more often Wikipedia’s frog page is referred to as “frog,” the more search engines associate that particular page with that word. Knowing that, what do you think happens when someone links to you using nondescript text like “this post,” “here,” “a section,” or “great article”? Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that when somebody Googles “great article,” your page will come up. These terms are much too widely used, and aren’t informative so the anchor text ends up meaning nothing.

So use relevant anchor text whenever you can, especially for your own content. Be consistent, too. Use exact titles or the same keywords when linking to your other articles. However, going out of your way to shoehorn detailed anchor text for every outbound link isn’t always practical. It can cause some awkward sentences and take up more space than you want, but rewording whenever you can is good practice.

Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to view the most common words in anchor text linking to you.

Directories

Submit your site to the Open Directory Project and the Yahoo! Directory. These are not search engines and optimization isn’t a factor here, but many people use these human-organized and edited databases. Also, the data is used to generate search engine results, especially the Yahoo! Directory, which is drawn from for every Yahoo! search. They don’t accept everybody, but if your content is unique or very good, and if you pick the right category to add it to, you have a good chance.

Warnings

Spamdexing means to manipulate search results in a way that’s not in line with the way the search engine is supposed to work. At the beginning of this post there was a disclaimer that the information contained herein would not be concerned with unscrupulous forms of search engine optimization. Here we’ll detail a few of the most common such tricks. These are not just dishonest; they’re unsound and will backfire.

Google, et al, know about these scams and have been tweaking defenses against them for years. Most of these are now detectable automatically via the crawler, in which case the offending site will be significantly devalued. In more drastic instances, the site will be removed permanently from the index. The few of these that do work still violate the search engines’ terms of service and, if reported or manually caught, will result in similar disciplinary action.

In 2006, head of Google’s webspam group Matt Cutts confirmed on his blog, for the first time, a company’s removal from Google’s index: “Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.” Companies had been removed before, but this was the first noted by name. The impetus for the disclosure was to support the defendants in a defamation lawsuit filed by Traffic Power against its critics. Banning not just Traffic Power, but also its clients makes it clear that Google has no qualms about squashing sites that use shady SEO practices, intentional or not. According to Google, you are held responsible for SEO violations relating to your site, whether implemented by you or by an SEO professional you’ve hired.

So these warnings are not only for those with flexible ethics. There are many well-meaning webmasters that can accidentally fall into these traps, unaware that they are doing something wrong or raising a red flag.

Note: If you have been wrongly removed from Google, there is a reinclusion process you can go through. However, it can take some time to get your page restored to the search results.

Link spam

As we know, links matter when determining a site’s importance and relevance. Link spamming is creating links without merit.

One form this takes is that of a link farm, a community of web pages that all link to each other in order to boost search engine presence.

Similar is a link train, which acts like a sort of web-based pyramid scheme in which you place your link at the bottom of a list, publish it, and get other people to do the same.

Some people will create multiple websites themselves just to link back and forth and boost the primary site.

Others will place links in the comments of dozens or hundreds of blogs, often irrelevant or without reading the post itself.

A little less common, but still disallowed, is the practice of paying for links at a popular site to be displayed in such a way that they don’t look like advertisements.

Keyword stuffing

Mentioned briefly before, this is when you place a very large number of keywords:

in the meta keywords tag
together at the bottom of a page
in the article text
pretty much anywhere else

Only use a few in the meta tag, and for everything else allow only whatever comes from natural writing.

Invisible text, single pixel links, 0-width DIVs, and tiny fonts

These are all tactics people use to hide link spam or keyword stuffing, attempting to get the SEO benefit without looking sloppy.

Some SEO-related links

HubSpot’s Website Grader is one of the most complete free SEO and marketing statistic tools on the Web. Just type in a URL, and after a few moments it’ll spit out a detailed report covering everything from PageRank and Technorati rank to recommendations for how to improve your use of metadata. If you’re looking for a simpler tool that will display the number of backlinks and pages indexed by the big three engines, use the Webconfs Domain Stats tool.
If you want to learn more about the variables search engines look for, SEOmoz put out a really valuable article in which they compiled the responses from 37 SEO professionals about the importance of many factors.
SEOTools has a couple useful Firefox add-ons called SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker. SEO for Firefox, when enabled, supplements a normal Google search with a heap of data underneath each hit. The idea is that it allows you to figure out why a page is ranked where it is. There’s nothing here that you don’t get from HubSpot’s Website Grader, but it can be useful to have the information displayed right under search results. Rank Checker can automate periodic keyword analysis. For example, find out where a particular page ranks on any of the three major engines for one or a number of keywords. Then store the information so you can see how it has changed over time.
If all this is a bit much, but your website is important enough to you that you would like it to be optimized, Google put together a guide to hiring a professional SEO.
Official information for developers about each site:

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Citizen Media Business Issues: Web Statistics

Ryan McGrady — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:59:46 +0000

(This is the sixteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

How many people are reading what you’re writing? Who are they? How did they find you? If applicable, how likely are they to click an ad or buy a t-shirt? And without negatively affecting the users’ experience, how can you attract more visitors or increase the probability that they’ll click the ad or buy the t-shirt?

For the final three Citizen Media Business Issues posts, we’ll try to answer these questions by exploring Web statistics, traffic rankings, search engines, and optimization (for search engines as well as for other goals).

Web Statistics

Often referred to as analytics, Web statistics are various measures of website activity intended to help the webmaster or marketer. Webmasters use the information to attract more visitors and improve overall user experience. Marketers use it to maximize revenue and determine the value of ad space.

While companies have been providing and/or selling analytics software and services since the mid-90s, the average webmaster without a budget for such things had to, for a long time, settle for the once-ubiquitous odometer-styled hit counter. The simple, public measure of how many times files were accessed since the counter’s creation, aside from being a little tacky, was too unreliable and subject to manipulation by those seeking to misrepresent their traffic data. Counters just didn’t do a good enough job of explaining what really happens on a site. Even if you found a free piece of real analytics software, you needed a good amount of technical savvy and access to you site’s server to get it going and maintain it.

Google Analytics has brought statistics to the Web mainstream, providing a free service that requires no downloads and very little effort. All you have to do is copy and paste a little snippet of code into each of your pages (or just the template, if you’re using one). Google Analytics’s metrics and features with which you can analyze them will likely be more than what you need (like which ISP your visitors are using most), but let’s take a look at how to use it so you can figure out which stats are most important to you.

[Note: The majority of this article deals with Google’s product because it is well-known, comprehensive, easy, and free, but it’s far from the only game in town. Drawbacks and alternatives will be discussed at the end, but almost all of the features and metrics discussed in the context of Google Analytics are applicable to its competitors, as well.]

Using Google Analytics

The default tab, the Dashboard, contains the information you’ll most regularly want to check. It’s customizable, so you can click the little X in the corner of each box to remove it and the sections in other tabs all have an “Add to Dashboard” button at the top. The first two things to note, because they apply to every Analytics page, are the date range and the graph. The date range (top right corner) is, of course, the period of time that the statistics reflect, and you can cover as much or as little time as you want by playing with it. The graph displays a measure of a particular spec over the selected date range (number of visits, by default, on the Dashboard). The drop down in the top-right corner of the graph allows you to change what it is that you’re measuring.

The rest of the data can be roughly explained in four groups: how many visitors you have, who they are, what they do on your site, and where they came from.

How many, which includes stats like the numbers of visits and pageviews, is, of course, the most definitive measure of how popular your site is and often the primary motivator to use this software to begin with. A visit is logged any time someone starts a new session on your site, with pageviews counting all pages loaded within that session. To Google, a “session” times out after 30 minutes of inactivity. If you visit, leave, and come back within 30 minutes, it will likely be counted as a single visit. Likewise, if you idle for 30 minutes and then click a link to another page on the same site, you’ll probably be starting a new visit/session on the new page.

Many webmasters want to know who their visitors are in order to improve user experience. Google tracks geographic data, browser types, operating systems, ISPs, connection speeds, percentage of users with Flash or Java installed, and the number that have been to your site before. If, for example, you find that half of the people looking at your page use Internet Explorer on dial-up connections, you probably wouldn’t want to require use of a FireFox plug-in or use a lot of large files like videos or high-resolution images.

Information relating to what people do on your site includes amount of time spent on site, average pageviews, and bounce rate (a term that refers to the percentage of visitors who left the page they arrived on without checking out any others).

Unfortunately, due to tabbed browsing, idle time, session timeouts, and wildly varying personal browsing habits, it’s hard to get a lot of meaning from the average logged amount of time on site/length of visit, but we’ll talk about some of its possible uses in comparisons later. Also, average pageviews, bounce rate, and depth of visit are really only useful to you if you’re not running a blog or news site. Blogs are almost invariably set up to display many articles on one page and the news sites that don’t use blogs still make use of scannable headlines, placing a good deal of content on the front page. What reason would someone have, then, to explore other pages?

A useful what people do stat is under the Content tab, where you can see a break-down of how popular each of your pages is in terms of pageviews. With this you can assess where your strengths and weaknesses are, perhaps spot a problem if something should be higher or lower (a mistyped link, for example), or figure out what sort of content the search engines most closely associate with your site (more on this in the next post).

If your goal is to get more traffic, then the most valuable data for you here probably has to do with where visitors come from, which can be found under the Traffic Sources tab. “Where” in this case doesn’t refer to geographical location, but how people find you on the Internet. Most people probably don’t type your URL into their address bar, but those that do are counted as “direct traffic,” as are those who have it bookmarked in their browser and access your pages that way. High direct traffic is usually the result of offline marketing (business cards, print ads, etc.), an extremely accessible/memorable URL, or high reader loyalty.

Traffic that isn’t “direct,” then, must have come from some other point on the Web. The Referring Sites section displays not only the names of pages that link to you and how many of your hits came from there, but also the trends of each group of referred users. So you can see how the average pageviews, time on site, or bounce rate differs between users who clicked in from stumbleupon.com and those who found you through your friend’s blogroll. The only search engine you will probably see on the list is Google Images. Search engines have their own section (not sure why Google Images isn’t included there).

By taking a close look at your referring sites, you can tell why people are linking to you (they’re probably linking to particular pages or topics), how relevant the referral was (a visitor from Site A may spend twice as long and look at twice as many pages as Site B), learn your strengths and weaknesses, and gain feedback about what you’re writing (though rarely criticism—that usually just shows up as a lack of hits unless you’re sufficiently polemic).

The last major part of where users come from is your search engine data, including keywords. The next post will cover all things search engine in detail.

FeedBurner for RSS

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool that can really help you improve your site (or at least provide you with some fun trivia about your readers), but the major thing it’s missing is data about RSS subscriptions.

Many if not most regularly-updated sites have RSS feeds these days. If you run a blog via any popular weblog software, in fact, you definitely have one. Unless you’re hiding it, odds are that a significant percentage of your visitors get your content that way. So if you have an RSS feed and want the same kinds of information about it that you now have for regular Web traffic, head over to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner was recently acquired by Google, so may be integrated into Analytics soon, but for now it’s the best place to get statistics and add features to your feed. The service works by replacing your current RSS or Atom feed, directing visitors to subscribe to your FeedBurner feed instead. The end user’s experience doesn’t change unless FB’s compatibility tweaks makes the content more readable or you add features.

The two main RSS stats of note are subscribers and reach. Subscribers are a measure of how many people used their RSS reader to check in to see if you had new content. Reach is the number of people who actually see content either through an RSS reader or otherwise—like on a news aggregating website or an RSS search engine.

Drawbacks to Google Analytics and Privacy Concerns

The major feature-based drawback to Google Analytics has to do with the availability of the data. Google decides when reports are generated, not you, so information you see is usually from at least a few hours ago. But features aside, perhaps the biggest concerns people have about using this software have to do with privacy.

While use of Google Analytics is monetarily free (unless you get more than 5 million pageviews per month), you are paying them in the form of information. All of the data you collect about your site, including the information visitors “give” to you, is collected by Google. Per the Google Privacy Policy and Analytics Terms of Use, the company can/will collect information you provide in user sign-up forms, search histories, emails, information about your browser and computer via cookies (which includes at least that which you can see about your own site’s visitors), what sites you’ve visited (lots of pages use Google AdSense and/or Analytics), and so on. And though they assure us it will not be shared with any third-parties (it’s mainly for making Google AdWords/AdSense advertising more relevant), Google has a massive amount of data about the world’s Internet users, and that makes some people uneasy.

Alternative Statistics Programs

If it’s possible for you to do so, the best options will generally be programs that you host on your own Web server. They’re the most reliable, most customizable, give you total control over your data (and ownership thereof), and won’t limit how many pageviews you can analyze like most of the hosted services. The downside to these is that they require access to your server and the technical knowhow to install, configure, and access the software yourself. If you feel comfortable going down this route, Piwik’s website should be one of your first stops. It’s a very good, free, open-source program with a large base of developers behind it. It positions itself as the “open source alternative to Google Analytics” and it’s about as user friendly as this sort of thing can get. Other free server-based options include AWStats, SlimStat, and Webalizer, but while each of these has its own unique benefits, they are decidedly more difficult to use than Piwik.

Hosted (where a company has the software on their server so you don’t have to worry about installing it on yours) alternatives to Google are generally pay services or limited in the number of pageviews per day/month you can have analyzed. W3Counter, for example, has a good free service, but it’s limited to 5,000 pageviews/day and you’re required to display a small logo of theirs on each of your pages. The upgraded plan, which is currently $9.95/mo, removes the logo obligation and allows up to a million pageviews/month (among other features). As another option, StatCounter’s free plan offers almost all of the features of the premium plans, which range from $9-$29/month, except for the amount of analysis it will perform, which is broken down into two levels. At the no-cost level, basic statistics are viewable for 250,000 pageviews/month, but detailed information is limited to the last 500 visitors. Both W3Counter and StatCounter offer real-time reporting.

Almost all of these services have a demonstration page on its website for you to test drive the program before you sign-up or install it, so check out a few before deciding.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Citizen Media Business Issues: Website Development

Ryan McGrady — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:20:23 +0000

(This is the fifteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

You have a web host, you have a domain name, and you have an idea for a great site. You might even have a plan to earn a little income with it. The only things left to do before you start writing articles and showing off your vlogs are to design and develop it. That means deciding where the different elements of your site will go, what color scheme you’ll use, how everything ties together, and basically figuring out how to make it look and feel like you want it to look and feel.

The easiest solutions to your development challenges are a) to use a web or blog hosting company’s design tools, which allow you to easily plug your content into pre-created templates; or b) to hire someone to do it all for you; the latter is, of course, monetarily impractical for most individuals just getting off the ground. Fortunately, it’s probably unnecessary, too. Years ago, you had to be a pretty savvy programmer to be able to set up a web page. Today there are so many easy web development tools available that you can launch a pretty nice site without having to call in a professional. Many of the templates offered by web/blog hosts are attractive enough and functional enough to get you started (sometimes good enough to stick with) and web design programs make it possible to create professional-looking websites in a few hours with no programming experience.

So when should you think about hiring a professional? Ask this question first: Will you be selling anything directly through your site? CafePress shops and PayPal transactions don’t count. Do you want to be able to save and retrieve customer or user information? Do you want a message board or a wiki? Answering “yes” to any of these questions means you may have some challenging work ahead of you (and some legal issues related to taxes and maintenance of customer data). You can learn to do it yourself, but these may be the times when—if you have a budget that allows it—you might want to consult a professional. Keep in mind when you’re looking at your budget that beyond the costs of initial setup, you will likely need the designer’s services occasionally down the road, too, for updates, changes, some kinds of maintenance, and so on. There are a number of guides available out there to help you pick the right designer (see here and here, for example).

Once you’ve decided to take care of the design yourself, there are a few different things to consider.

The preconfigured layouts (templates) provided by your web or blog host can look pretty good, but the problem with these (other than their relative indistinctness) comes when you want to change one little thing about it, and you suddenly find yourself digging through a pile of CSS codes. Templates also make outside-the-box designing more difficult because you’re just rearranging a set of elements and altering their colors or putting pictures in them. See our previous post about blog-hosting sites for more on templates and some tools you can use to tweak them.

If you’re starting from scratch, you might consider using a web page design program, roughly equivalent to a word processor. These will generally allow you to type in text and add pictures to a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface using the types of graphical icons and familiar applications that are found in most software suites. The most well-known such software are probably commercial packages like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage/Expression Web, but there are also a number of cheaper (even free) programs out there that may be worth checking out. KompoZer and SeaMonkey, for example, are two very good, free, cross-platform (made for Windows, Mac, or Linux) web editors that, while offering different features, both exist as evolved versions of the now discontinued Mozilla Composer (SeaMonkey is still connected to, though not officially developed by, Mozilla). Another interesting free option is Amaya, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3) web editor, which is also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but might cater to a slightly more tech savvy user. For Mac users there is also iWeb, which ships with most—if not all—current Macs as part of the iLife suite. For some less-expensive commercial product ideas, you might want to take a look at Softpress Freeway (Mac), Evrsoft First Page (Windows), and Sandvox (Mac).

While use of this software has obvious advantages, and is probably the preferred method of most amateur developers, there are some problems that occur when it translates the page you’ve designed to a real web page. Often what you see in the program’s preview screen looks or functions a bit differently than it does when actually accessed via web browser (or particular browsers, which is why you should use Browser Shots as soon as you publish). This isn’t usually devastating, but means a fair amount of trial and error will be required if you don’t know how to look at the code and find the problem.

Note: If you plan to use FrontPage, make sure that your web host has “FrontPage extensions” turned on to make publishing easier for you.

Some web hosts provide their own website building software, which are usually in-browser applications that function like extremely simplified versions of a Dreamweaver or FrontPage. For uploading to your server you usually just click “publish” or “submit” – and due to the more basic capabilities, this is about the easiest way to set up your website other than simply choosing an as-is template. Take caution when using these tools, though, because many (RVSiteBuilder, for example) have license agreements dictating that designs created through use of the software cannot be transferred should you switch hosts. In short, if you use RVSiteBuilder to create your website, you must start your web design anew if you decide to switch hosts. Even if you find one that does allow you to transfer your files, the next host’s builder may operate very differently and you may not be able to easily input what you’ve already made. Learning a third-party program like those discussed above will ensure that your design—not to mention the skills developed when using the software—will be able to go wherever you do. See the Citizen Media Law Project’s Legal Guide for more information on evaluating terms of service and other legal issues to consider when getting online.

Most guides to creating web pages recommend that you learn at least some HTML if you’re not hiring someone who does. Having some working knowledge of the language is the best way to ensure that your page looks and works how you intend it to and can save a lot of design and troubleshooting headaches. There are a number of on-line tutorials that treat the subject in varying depths. Community journalism how-to site J-Learning has a tutorial meant specifically for citizen journalists that even covers XHTML, which combines traditional HTML with a newer standard, XML. HTML Goodies and Webmonkey also have HTML tutorials for beginners. If you want to go even further in your education, Lynda has a comprehensive paid-access library of beginner through advanced tutorials that cover Flash, JavaScript, Photoshop, AJAX, CSS, and other useful tools in addition to every language and program we’ve talked about here.

[Note: Thanks to the Citizen Media Law Project for sharing some of this content with us]

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the in

Citizen Media Business Issues: Blog-Hosting Sites

Ryan McGrady — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:30:44 +0000

(This is the fourteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The last two Citizen Media Business Issues posts concerned registering a domain name and finding a web host. Among the suggestions in the latter was to generally avoid free web hosts, but providing for the notable exception of blog-hosting services. Here we’ll discuss what these are, their pros and cons, and some differences between companies.

First, a blog (short for weblog) is a collection of hypertext writings, typically displayed in reverse chronological form and including a variety of content including text, images, audio, video and more. Blog software makes it easy for the author to regularly update site content without editing HTML files or creating new ones. Due to the ease with which new content is added, blogs are ideal for anyone with a lot to say or report on.

There are two primary ways to get blog functionality on your website: download blogging software and install it on your web server (or your web host’s server) or use a blog-hosting service. This post will primarily concern the latter—the alternative to finding web hosting, not just the software. For more information on the kind you download, the Wikipedia entry on blog software has a good list of possibilities and Weblog Matrix has a great tool to compare features.

Advantages and disadvantages of using a blog-hosting service

Ease of Use – Blog hosts are often the easiest way to find a home online. Not only are they easy to set up via design templates, but also simple to use via a web-based interface that you just type into and upload media with a click of a button. Designing your own website from scratch, on the other hand, is much more complex (though we’ll give you some pointers and resources in the next Business Issues post). These sites are often free, but additional features—such as a greater ability to customize the site’s appearance—may come at a premium.
Credibility Concerns – The very ease of their use may lead a blogger to adopt standard blog-hosting templates and thus project a less professional appearance than a well-designed, customized website. Also, use of the web address you’re given by one of these services may result in you not being taken as seriously as you would be if you had your own domain. For example, some blog-hosting services give you an address that they choose, like “www.blogservice.com/3k6jrv,” or they append your name to their URL via a folder or subdomain, like “www.blogservice.com/yoursite” or “yoursite.blogservice.com.” One possible way around this is to register a domain name like “www.MyBlog.com” and have that redirect to your bloggingservice.com page. This allows you to promote your site using your “www.MyBlog.com” while retaining the ease and cost benefits of using a blog-hosting service. Even better, a feature usually called “domain mapping” allows you to treat your space on the blog host the same way you would a web host (more on this below). For more information on domain forwarding, see the previous post on Registering a Domain.
Functionality – When you use a blog-hosting service, you’re operating on their site, so you don’t have access to all of their site code to make your page do exactly what you want it to do. On some blog-hosting sites it can be difficult to do much more than a straight, reverse-chronological record of posts with, perhaps, a collection of links in a side bar and a place for users to leave comments. This means there often cannot be any non-blog pages (like an About page, Features, Topics, Contact Us, or anything else that isn’t a blog entry). Further, while they are customizable to a degree, that customization can be limited compared to the possibilities provided by a conventional website. The more ability to customize, the better. (The major blog-hosting companies do provide a substantial degree of customization.) Even if you don’t know anything about HTML or CSS now, you may still want to change some things later. Access to template code and CSS is a must.
Anonymity – For some people who deal with controversial material, the major advantage of blog-hosting providers is that they often provide the easiest way to write anonymously. Many of these services do not require names or identification for registration, so by signing up through an anonymizing service using a free e-mail account, you gain greater protection from being unmasked, even in the face of a subpoena to the hosting service. For more about anonymity, see the Citizen Media Law Projects section on Anonymity.
Advertising and Revenue Generation – Unlike free web hosts, blog hosts that force you to display their advertising are rare. In fact, some don’t allow any advertising at all. Many that do allow advertising have affiliations with particular ad networks (such as AdSense or BlogAds) that you can implement for your own profit with the click of a button. While this easy integration is a good start, it can sometimes make it difficult to bring in alternate or additional advertisement systems. It’s important to think about where you want to go with your blog in terms of expanding your revenue model. While a simple Google AdSense sidebar may seem fantastic early on, you should consider your future needs for expansion. Also, the “real estate” available on your page for ads may be limited to certain areas (like along the left side, in the top-right, along the top, between two toolbars, or at the bottom of every post). If you create your own website from scratch, the type, format, and location of the ads on your page are much more customizable.

Common features

Domain mapping – Whereas forwarding a domain name just redirects www.yoursite.com to yoursite.blogservice.com, domain mapping effectively changes yoursite.blogservice.com to www.yoursite.com. This makes the blog host truly act as a less flexible web host.
Import/export – This must-have feature refers to the ability to move your blog from one site to another relatively painlessly.
Template code access – Another must-have. You need control over what your site looks like. Even if the starter templates look great, there will almost certainly come a time that you’ll want to change at least some detail of your site’s design, which you often cannot do without access to the code.
Integrated advertising capability – As discussed above, this is a common feature but not a huge one. At best, it saves you from pasting code in the right place. At worst, it precludes you from signing up with another, perhaps more appropriate company.
Categories/tags – Useful systems to organize your posts.
Non-blog pages – Allows you to have web pages that are not blog posts. This can be very useful, but you can’t always find this at no cost (WordPress is one example of a service that does offer this without a premium account).
Templates – All blog hosts have some kind of design/layout preconfigurations available to you. Some will look and function better than others, but you’re probably best to come up with your own (although perhaps based on a template). There are a few tools out there to help you with this, but they’re service-specific. For Blogger, there’s PsycHo’s Free Template Generator, for WordPress there’s the WordPress Theme Generator, and CSSEZ works with both WordPress and TypePad.
Cost – Many are free, many are not. Some, like WordPress, allow you to create a free blog, but will charge for features like CSS access and domain mapping. If you’re paying, remember that you’re really just paying for the convenience of the interface. Regular web hosting isn’t much more expensive (if at all), and while it’s more difficult to set-up, there are a number of free blogging programs you can download to run directly on your website. A major consideration if you host your own blog, however, is keeping the software and plugins up to date. Blog hosting companies rapidly update to eliminate security risks, and if you run your own software this becomes an essential chore.
Mobile blogging – The ability to send blog posts, images, or audio directly from a cell phone is getting more and more popular as more and more people own cameraphones and smartphones.

There are a number of services to choose from when picking a blog host, so shop around. The Citizen Media Law Project has a comprehensive comparison of the three largest (Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad) including an examination of their Terms of Service. Other useful comparisons can be found at Online Journalism Review, Climb to the Stars, and ProBlogger.

As a final bit of advice, before you sign up anywhere, make sure to read the terms of use! All of the services mentioned here have extensive terms that govern who owns the content and data you and your users create, when the service can remove content that it deems to be problematic, and what your rights are if a dispute arises. The Citizen Media Law Project has a great guide to Evaluating Terms of Service that’s definitely worth a look.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Citizen Media Business Issues: Nonprofits and Tax Issues

Ryan McGrady — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 03:15:53 +0000

(This is the tenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Regardless of whether you sold ad space, referred people to buy things at Amazon, or hawked a couple t-shirts, as soon as you make money through your website, the government considers you to be in business. Except in rare circumstances, that makes you responsible for reporting income, and paying taxes.

If you are the business’s only owner, you are operating as a sole proprietor (assuming you haven’t formed a legal business entity like a limited liability company or corporation). If you own the business with someone else, you are considered to be in a partnership.

Net income from sole proprietorships and partnerships is taxed as part of the owners’ personal gross income (the income is “passed through”). For IRS purposes, you are responsible for paying self-employment tax (social security and Medicare taxes that add up to a little over 15%) and for filing section SE and section C of your 1040 income tax return if your business revenue less expenses amounts to at least $400. This minimum is good news for small projects, which are exempt from paying and filing if their net income totals less than $400. Partnerships must also file a yearly informational return (form 1065) that says how finances were divided. As with any other income tax, there are likely to be state requirements as well.

An invaluable resource for these matters, the Citizen Media Law Project has recently launched the first sections of its Legal Guide.

“The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues, and addresses the legal issues that you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work online…[it] covers the 15 most populous U.S. states and the District of Columbia and will focus on the wide range of legal issues online publishers are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; intellectual property; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business.”

The currently available sections are titled “Dealing with Online Legal Risks” and “Forming a Business and Getting Online“. The latter contains a wealth of national and state-specific information about issues such as taxes, business creation, legal documents, and nonprofit status-an idea that appeals to many citizen media types.

While the term “nonprofit” is sometimes used informally to refer to any organization that does not seek to make money or simply does not turn a profit, the legal definition is a little more complicated. Legal nonprofits are typically corporations that have applied for and are granted tax-exempt status with the IRS for federal income tax purposes. Depending on where it was incorporated, an organization may also be granted exemption from state income taxes.

The fact that corporations, not individuals, are granted tax exemption will probably be a deal breaker for most. Forming and maintaining a corporation requires a burdensome amount of time and paperwork, a host of legally required formalities, and in some states, prohibitively high fees. The Citizen Media Law Project section on How to Start a Business can give you a good idea of what goes into this process.

One way to get many of the benefits of being a nonprofit without all the work is to find a fiscal sponsor. Some organizations will extend their nonprofit status to groups or even individuals whose activities are within the scope of the sponsor’s purpose. This typically involves donations or other transactions going through the sponsor, who keeps a percentage (or charges a periodic fee), before untaxed money is passed along to you. One example of this is Fractured Atlas, which offers sponsorship to artists, acting similarly to PayPal in the way it accepts donations and charges administrative fees to withdraw.

Keep in mind that nonprofits are still responsible for paying taxes on “unrelated business taxable income.” The IRS considers this to be revenue received from any business trade or activity that is ongoing (one-time events, even if they last a week, are ok) and not substantially related to the organization’s charitable purpose. Generally speaking, a good way to gauge whether something is unrelated is if the only reason you have to call it “related” is that the revenue it generates will be used to further the organization’s cause.

Selling ad space is usually taxable, but underwriting or sponsorship-when a company donates money and is simply recognized as such by way of a logo or neutral text acknowledgement-is usually not. Most merchandise income will be taxable unless the sales come from a one-time special event or if the products being sold are directly related to the organization’s purpose (CD copies of your podcast are ok, but not a branded keychain). Affiliate income would almost never be considered related, but donations from the public would (both for you and for your donors, who can write it off of their own personal income tax). Please note that due to the room for interpretation the IRS leaves, there are exceptions to all of these rules. For more detailed information on unrelated business income, including dozens of examples, refer to IRS Publication 598.

If you still have questions about taxes, want to learn more about forming a business, want some examples of fiscal sponsors, or want to research these topics in more depth, much more information can be found at the Citizen Media Law Project. Moreover, you may well need the advice of a tax professional such as a certified public accountant.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Citizen Media Business Issues: Blogs for Branding, Promotion and Support

Ryan McGrady — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:32:36 +0000

(This is the fifth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Not every business model includes the direct exchange of money. A blog or other website can have an economic impact in more indirect ways, such as branding and promotion. While such sites can use affiliate links, banner ads and other means to raise money, they’re much more about playing a supportive role in boosting the career of the author.

Let’s be clear first what we’re not talking about: pure marketing or sales sites. Almost any business’s web site that exists solely to sell a product or service fits into this category.

One group that has learned to use blogs and other conversational media effectively is lawyers, who’ve even created a clever word for the genre: blawgs. The term, which, by most accounts, was coined by Bag and Baggage’s Denise Howell, refers to any blog about law (usually by a lawyer). While the majority of “blawggers” do so in some part for enjoyment, a great professional benefit comes with a well-executed blawg. An ideal situation would have a lawyer so proficient at running her blawg that it was popular enough to directly attract clients. Indeed, Howell says her blog reinforces her expertise, and that people can easily find her via search engines; the result is significant business derived from the brand she’s created in part via the blog.

As Eric Turkewitz explains in his own blawg: “If someone published an article in a legal journal, will that gross them any money? No. Except as an indirect form of marketing as they become known in their field for what they do. Blogging is conceptually no different.” The benefit of blawgging comes from building a personal brand. Such can be seen in examples like MassLawBlog, GrokLaw, and PrawfsBlawg.

The last of those, PrawfsBlawg, is a blawg written by professors of law. Blogging by academics, once widely regarded as professionally dangerous (see Ivan Tribble’s 2005 article “Bloggers Need Not Apply”), has trended towards widespread use as a showcase for ideas and research, not to mention an avenue for getting one’s name out. Just as getting one’s name out could mean more clients for a lawyer, it could mean more (or higher-profile) consulting gigs for an academic. One of the earliest and best threads on the subject is from CrookedTimber in a post that asked academics if and why they write or read blogs. Some of the common themes from the numerous answers involved the idea of personal branding, but other reasons included writing practice, class preparation, sharing and getting feedback on research, and using their blog as a platform to discuss or start work on a publication of some kind.

Eric Gordon, Assistant Professor of New Media at Emerson College and author of PlaceofSocialMedia, says:

While [books and academic journals] are still essential for career building, increasingly, scholars are looking to blogs to assess “what’s going on.” Beyond the assumed affordances of blogging – immediate, networked, participatory – it has taken on a new function of stake-claiming. For instance, I’m working on a book about location-based media and situated computing. If I were to simply write it and wait for it to “hit the stands,” it wouldn’t be until mid-2009 that I could join the conversation. Through my blog, I am able to join the conversation right now by opening up the research process to readers. This is good for two reasons: 1) I can join the conversation, and 2) I can begin building a reputation based on a work-in-progress. With the rapidity in which technologies change, this rapid-prototyping of academic ideas has become essential to intellectual and cultural life. [Disclosure: Eric Gordon is one of my professors and advisors at Emerson.]

Writers of all kinds are using blogs to promote, research, and develop their books. Several examples of this can be found in the comments of this thread on Global Neighbourhoods, which is, appropriately, a blog started in 2004 to promote a book that is still regularly updated today.

Professionals and academics are not the only people using blogs to enhance their careers. AlmostDailyBlog is run by an animator who, since making the switch to computer graphics, found he missed drawing and so created a blog to post doodles. As it became more popular, he started to sell prints and eventually put out a book of them—all stemming primarily from his blog and networking with other animation bloggers.

Business blogs have a similar purpose. Technology companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have launched a variety of blogs, including a popular CEO blog by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz. Smaller enterprises benefit, too. ClearAdmit runs a very detailed blog as part of its site dedicated to providing information about MBA schools, programs, and the admissions process. These all serve to build the ClearAdmit name and reputation so that, when the time comes, interested parties may think of ClearAdmit for its off-line consulting services and events.

A word of caution, however: Just as a great blog can build personal brand, a rarely updated smattering of nonsensical or thoughtless entries or a page that looks like it came direct from a public relations department can be more of a drawback than aid. The best blogs have human voices and/or relentlessly useful information; they don’t sound corporate or like a sales or PR pitch. Also, with the rate at which blogs are increasingly aggregated, archived, and referenced on the web, an unflattering moment has the potential to haunt you.

For anybody passionate about what they do and with enough time to commit, blogging is a way to not only develop your own knowledge and skills, but also to share them, get feedback, and (most importantly in the context of this series of postings) to build a personal or business brand. If your only goal is to market yourself in the short-term, you may want to consider other avenues.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Palm Cancels Product — via Blog

Dan Gillmor — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:33:30 +0000

In “A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers,” Palm CEO Ed Colligan announces the cancelation of a new product. He writes, in part:

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Be sure to read the comments, which combine disappointment and relief with understanding.

Google News to Let Subjects of Stories Comment

Dan Gillmor — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:55:45 +0000

UPDATED

From the Google News blog comes news of a new initiative “Perspectives about the news from people in the news.”

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as “comments” so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.

How will this work? How will Google verify that the people commenting on what’s been written about them are actually the people in question? What kind of data-gathering will this lead to on Google’s part?

The fact that Google is trying this is, in one sense, testament to an abject failure on the part of traditional news operations. With the Net, they could have given people the chance to comment in this way — above and beyond the standard comment published as part of a story or a letter to the editor. They didn’t, and left this opening.

If Google pulls this off, it will be a huge boost for one company — Google — because people looking for responses to news articles will head to the search site, not just to the site of the original story.

It’s a fascinating initiative, no matter what. And it’s not too late for news organizations to get their acts together and give the people they write about a convenient platform of their own — Dave Winer suggests blogs (“Let the readers sort it out”) — to reply.

More from Steve Rubel, with interesting comments…

Sun Microsystems Takes Important Step in Releasing Information

Dan Gillmor — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:08:47 +0000

The Silicon Valley company’s general counsel, Mike Dillon, writes that on Monday Sun:

will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.

This is a step forward in corporate transparency — not a gigantic one but nonetheless important. The company is using technology in a smart way, good for investors and regulators alike.

(Via Dave Winer)

Welcome Transparency from Google

Dan Gillmor — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:33:20 +0000

Google has launched a Public Policy Blog that is a model of the genre. A principal author is Andrew McLaughlin, the company’s director of public policy and government affairs (and a Berkman Fellow to boot).

This is the kind of thing Google should do to excess, because the its growing clout — and knowledge of what so many people are doing — is making a lot of folks nervous.