Thank You and Congrats to ReadWriteWeb
Last month marked the end of one of my longest-running consulting engagements, with popular technology blog ReadWriteWeb. Founder Richard McManus announced last month that ReadWriteWeb is being acquired by Say Media, a company formed by the combination of VideoEgg and Six Apart (formerly the maker of Movable Type). Congratulations to Richard and the rest of the RWW team on this exciting next step!
ReadWriteWeb will soon be migrating from Movable Type to a proprietary SAY platform, which, based on publicized rumors (I have no inside knowledge), may be based on the TypePad platform that came with the Six Apart acquisition (which in turn, many moons ago, was based on Movable Type).
During the fours years that I worked with ReadWriteWeb, most of the services I provided were Movable Type management, maintenance, optimization, and custom development. Projects included at least one major re-design integration and a hosting migration from one provider to another. I also helped RWW integrate social media services through several of my Movable Type plugins including FriendFeed Comments, Twitter Commenters, and Twitter Tools. My Visitor Stats plugin helped provide real-time stats about traffic to RWW stories and show which posts were most popular.
Once again, congratulations to ReadWriteWeb and thank you for 4 years of interesting projects. I wish them all the best in future.
Mark, it was wonderful to get to work with you at RWW. Your work making MT move in mysterious ways was invaluable. All the best for the future and I hope we cross paths again soon.
3 days ago LikeiOS App Development - Coming Soon
In 2011, I stared learning how to create iPhone and iPad apps. In 2012 I will start offering iOS app development services, in addition to Movable Type development, SEO, PPC advertising, and other internet marketing services.
I have one iOS app that is a work-in-progress, which I plan to finish soon. I had to put it hold due to higher priorities but hope to jump back into that project very soon. I also have another idea for a "fun" app that mixes photography, art, and social networking -- this one remains at the idea stage, but hope to start work on it soon.
After one (or both) of these projects launch, I will begin to offer iOS app development services. Stay tuned for more details.
100 Million Page Views
One of my sites sites received almost 100 million page views last month. Fantastic, but not as much as you might think. I made approximately zero dollars from this. One of the things on my 2012 todo list is to do something about this. I am still not sure what, but i gotta do something. It is not conventional traffic, so its complicated. But even a CPM of $0.10 would be very nice. Hmmmm...
Return to Blogging
It has been 4.5 years since I have posted to this site. Time flies, different things vie for for attention, etc. etc. So it often goes in life, and things - like this site - get neglected. With a new year beginning, this is as good a time as any to start blogging again. Daily would certainly be good, but i won't set such an ambitious goal.
What will I post here? I am not sure, to be honest, time will tell. In the past, I have posted mostly business stuff here, leaving personal stuff for other venues. Maybe its time to mix it up a bit, so I think it will be a mix of things to start with. If you care, reply in the comment if you think the entries are too varied as to be distracting. I may try to aggregate some post from other sites here, or perhaps just link to them, we shall see.
I have just change the site's theme to Free Flow, a theme that I am working on for Movable Type (another unfinished project that needs to be finished in 2012!). It's not quite finished, there are likely bugs, but feedback is appreciated.
Here goes nothing.
Public Domain Web Content Experiment
I recently returned from an amazing vacation to the Galapagos Islands. What an amazing place, its hard to put into words. I will soon be posting some stories and photos on my Galapagos Travel Blog. I just need time to sift through 1,300 photos and pages of my hand-written journal.
As I mentioned briefly in my previous blog entry, my Galapagos blog currently contains a bit of fun: the first 33 entries were not written by me, but by Charles Darwin way back in 1835, when he first visited the islands. At the same time, this also serves as an experiment in public domain web content. The 33 entries were taken from a single chapter of "The Voyage of the Beagle", a book written by Darwin about a trip around the world, that included many stops, including the Galapagos Islands. The book is now in the public domain, which means that the book is no longer covered by copyright. As such, it can be republished freely and legally.
Of course, my travel blog is not the only site on the web that includes some or all of the text of the book. The key question for the experiment, therefore, is would I be able to generate search engine rankings and traffic using content that has been previously published many times over?. The answer, which is a little surprising, is yes.
Here are some stats since I left on vacation, April 23, 2007:
- 141 visitors
- 205 page views
- 140 people came from a Google Search, 1 from an AOL search
- 94 different keyword phrases were used to find the site
- several top rankings, including a #2 for tortoise mating, a #10 for Galapagos Climate, and a #12 for the non-specific phrase "different plants".
Since I don't have any ads on the blog (yet), the site has made no earnings. But 141 visitors from search engines within less than 3 weeks from public domain content that I cut-and-pasted isn't bad at all. And remember, I used just one chapter from the book. If I had used all 21 chapters, perhaps I would have received 2,961 visitors. And what I did the same for 10 public domain books of similar size? Then the total would have been almost 30,000 visitors in just over two weeks. Now we are talking significant traffic.
Of course, this experiment in public domain web content is not completely fair. Based on my experience building web content and search engine optimization (SEO), I did a number of things to help improve my chances of success. I am going to continue to research and experiment with public domain web content. Look forward for more from me on the topic in future.
