So it turns out I was wrong to say yesterday that Lisa Williams’ plan for her useful new site Placeblogger.com included “selling ads across its whole network of sites.” That prompted queries from some curious bloggers who bristled at the possibility that Placeblogger was going to try to make money off their free content, without their participation or renumeration. I thought I had heard Lisa describe this approach last summer at Dan Gillmor’s “unconference” on citizen journalism that took place the day after Wikimania at Harvard, but I guess I didn’t listen carefully enough. So let me correct the record and offer these amplifications directly from Lisa:
I read your blog entry yesterday, and I remember being a little surprised by it because you said that I had plans to advertise across a network of blogs. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not something I’m working on.
In general I’m interested in two things:
1) Making it easy to discover local sites and sending interested people to them. Placeblogger is explicitly designed to NOT keep people at Placeblogger. One of the major investments of time and what money did go into it went into making modifications to Drupal’s aggregator module to limit how much of a post was shown. For awhile, I actually ran it (in test mode, before it went public) with headlines-only. What I discovered is that most people don’t write good headlines. Some were just dates; in any case, they didn’t give a visitor enough information by themselves to let someone decide if they wanted to click on that link or not; I wanted these to be comparable to what a search engine like Google shows along with the text link in search results. So now it’s headline plus ~200 characters, enough to give a visitor encouragement to go there but no more. The other main thing we had to develop was automating the creation of OPML lists of feeds that people can download and use in their own RSS reader. This would send people directly to those sites, not to placeblogger, because the OPML files contain RSS URLs for the original sites. Placeblogger doesn’t produce new RSS feeds for anything other than its own original content — basically, the blog that’s on the front page and some longer feature articles, and profiles of projects and placebloggers. Come to think of it, the only other thing we spent time and money on, from a development standpoint, was making a new Yahoo! maps module for Drupal, which Bryght will be making available to the Drupal community at large.
2) An open, widely adopted geotagging standard. In my view, one of the reasons that local sites (both independent placeblogs and newspaper sites) don’t do as well as they could, economically, is because they are at a disadvantage in a keyword-driven online advertising economy. But what is discoverable will be advertised against. So if all local sites had easy-to-use tools to tag stuff, they would, I hope, be able to generate more online ad revenue. This effort would be a failure if Placeblogger were the only organization using it — I would hope that it got used by all sorts of organizations to develop all kinds of yet-to-be-imagined stuff.
I think another thing to consider is that I don’t have a written business plan, I’m not making the rounds at investors, and the whole site was done with “sell stuff on eBay” levels of money, not big grants or big investments. I have an experimental attitude towards the project — I want to see how far I can get towards the two goals I talked about above. Now, it’s true that getting there would take more money, and it’s the kind of money I couldn’t pull out of my wallet. The question is, which kind of funding and which structure works better at achieving these goals? I haven’t answered that question myself.
Now, this all sounds pretty cool to me. I especially like Lisa’s point that “what is discoverable will be advertised against.” In my view, there’s really nothing wrong with that, and more people with websites–be they bloggers or nonprofit groups–really ought to think about more ways to make themselves findable online, and then allow context-relevant ads alongside their content if they need the income. If Placeblogger helps galvanize wider use of geo-tagging (are the microformats.org guys thinking about that?), that would be a good thing.
Technorati Tags: Dan Gillmor, Lisa Williams, Placeblogger.com, Microformats.org, wikimania