March 17, 2011
Announcement: Changes…
I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and its future. As many of my long time readers have noticed, the amount of blog posts here has risen exponentially to the point where I’m posting 5-10 a week. I get home each day, clean house and start writing and it’s amazing. I like the amount of content being posted and it’s a frequency I can continue to meet assuming I’m not traveling or have the flu. Maybe I haven’t done a “survey” in a while into what everyone here is looking for and I just decided to flood the blog with fresh content but I still keep things very fragmented very much like my life as in I like photography, travel, ranting, motivating, telling stories and talking about technology.
It makes for an interesting readership but also a fragmented readership.
Could a tech company buy ads on my site and know they’ll get their money back in sales? Probably, but I don’t plan on selling more than one or two ads here ever and instead this blog to push my brand and maintain relevance in the industry and also, to keep family and friends up to speed with what I’m doing in life.
Three changes are coming:
- This blog will lose the comments field. I love comments but the majority of the quality comments come via email or private note from readers. I’ve killed comments before and no one really cared. Each post gets 0-2 comments and I don’t write for comments, I write to share and a lot of the feedback I get is private and the readers don’t feel comfortable adding a comment in a public forum. I like what Mike Matas has done with his site where the comment button opens as window that says @Mike_Matas and a space to post your comment then a tweet button. You reply to his posts by tweeting him. Genius.
- I’m going to begin sharing links here instead of Twitter (think DaringFireball). Links will have their own category and I’m looking into an RSS feed that does not contain links. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll stop tweeting out links to things and they’ll go here instead. I am really thinking hard about this one so the concept is still in progress but I’ll be using this plug-in and this blog will get its own Twitter account so I’ll share only limited blog posts with Twitter. If you want the links and blog posts, you’ll either subscribe to my RSS feed or follow the special Twitter account.
- In May, I’m 80% sure that a photo blog will be launching. A link to the photo blog will arrive at the top of my website but the domain, design and color scheme will be a radical departure from the current site look. This will be its own site. Most photography “tips” will remain on this blog and that site will be one single photo each day. I’m taking hundreds of photos a week and I’d like to share 7 per week that are my absolute favorite along with a story. This blog also won’t allow comments. I already have a designer and we’re finalizing details
Since October, the page views of this blog have grown by 50% each month and uniques are up pretty high but not as high. Page views going up is simply due to more content and I’m starting to see a growth in readership mostly from the loyal readers who share my posts with their friends (thank you). I doubt that this will ever be monetized but the growing age of Twitter, Flickr and Facebook and their lack of data portability (put data in and can’t get it out) makes me want to own my content a bit more where I store content here and it belongs to me and no one else. I also want to release my dependency on Flickr for the sole marketing engine of my photography. Having my own photo blog will showcase the best photos. As for comments, well, I just think it makes the page look bad and there more than a few reasons to kill them.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the now almost retired comment form!
I rarely do this enough but thank you for reading this blog. You are one of a small group that’s always growing. Maybe one day we’ll all look back and laugh because I take this small time readership way too seriously. Good evening and gracias.
PS – You can use the new “linked” format because I already implemented it. You must be subscribed to the RSS Feed for now (no auto-tweet feature yet). Any post that starts with “Linked:” is a link to someone else’s site. Click the title in your RSS reader to be taken to the page I’m linking to. Pretty nifty.
I'm Adam Jackson and today, this 24 year old helps companies do cool things with technology.
6 comments
I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and its future. As many of my long time readers have noticed, the amount of blog posts here has risen exponentially to the point where I’m posting 5-10 a week. I get home each day, clean house and start writing and it’s amazing. I like the amount of content being posted and it’s a frequency I can continue to meet assuming I’m not traveling or have the flu. Maybe I haven’t done a “survey” in a while into what everyone here is looking for and I just decided to flood the blog with fresh content but I still keep things very fragmented very much like my life as in I like photography, travel, ranting, motivating, telling stories and talking about technology.
It makes for an interesting readership but also a fragmented readership.
Could a tech company buy ads on my site and know they’ll get their money back in sales? Probably, but I don’t plan on selling more than one or two ads here ever and instead this blog to push my brand and maintain relevance in the industry and also, to keep family and friends up to speed with what I’m doing in life.
Three changes are coming:
Since October, the page views of this blog have grown by 50% each month and uniques are up pretty high but not as high. Page views going up is simply due to more content and I’m starting to see a growth in readership mostly from the loyal readers who share my posts with their friends (thank you). I doubt that this will ever be monetized but the growing age of Twitter, Flickr and Facebook and their lack of data portability (put data in and can’t get it out) makes me want to own my content a bit more where I store content here and it belongs to me and no one else. I also want to release my dependency on Flickr for the sole marketing engine of my photography. Having my own photo blog will showcase the best photos. As for comments, well, I just think it makes the page look bad and there more than a few reasons to kill them.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the now almost retired comment form!
I rarely do this enough but thank you for reading this blog. You are one of a small group that’s always growing. Maybe one day we’ll all look back and laugh because I take this small time readership way too seriously. Good evening and gracias.
PS – You can use the new “linked” format because I already implemented it. You must be subscribed to the RSS Feed for now (no auto-tweet feature yet). Any post that starts with “Linked:” is a link to someone else’s site. Click the title in your RSS reader to be taken to the page I’m linking to. Pretty nifty.