Jeff Barr’s Blog

As part of my job as Amazon Web Services Evangelist, I am planning to record some screencasts and some videos later this year. I am in the process of adapting my home office to the task. So far I have set up a green screen (so that I can use the Chroma Key process to put myself in front of an interesting background scene) and I have purchased a nice Logitech webcam.

The green screen is a simple piece of fabric from EEFX. They sell “remnants” for very reasonable prices. The remnants are very small when compared to the giant pieces that they sell to their commercial customers, but are perfectly adequate for use in a home studio.

I want to be able to use the same webcam to record myself while sitting at the desk or standing in front of the green screen. I explored a number of different ways to do this and finally decided to use some Vex Robotics parts to build a webcam platform that I could activate using the Vex remote control. Years and years ago, Radio Shack dumped their entire inventory of Vex parts at half price and I picked up everything I could find and tucked them away on a shelf.

Here’s what I came up with:

Here are two videos of the platform in operation:

And here’s the view from the camera as it pans up and down in front of one of my shelves of programming books:

I still have room to make this better, and I want to add a third servo so that I can rotate it, but I am pretty happy with my progress to date! Stay tuned for some AWS videos starting next month.

In the fall of 1979 I was living in Rockville, Maryland. I had been accepted at the University of Maryland, but decided to attend Montgomery College, right up the street from my house, instead. I wasn’t ready for that huge, sprawling campus or the large and apparently impersonal classes.

I entered the computer science program, and took classes in the contemporary languages of that era. I learned Fortran IV in my first semester. Around the same time I started my first programming job, at a small Bethesda company called Moshman Associates. My first task there was to write a macro assembler for the 6502 microprocessor. I wrote a Fortran simulation of the hashing algorithm that we had planned to use for instructions and labels, found that it had an excessively high number of collisions, and was given a nice raise for my trouble.

In my second semester I took a class in PL/I programming. Designed by IBM, PL/I was a clean, structured, and relatively complex language. The compiler had many, many options for optimization and for diagnostic output. I spent a lot of time experimenting with the options and carefully inspecting the resulting printouts in an attempt to write the most efficient code possible.

I need to explain how we would write and run our code at that time. We didn’t have our own PCs and we didn’t have terminals to log in to a time-sharing system. Instead, we would use an IBM 029 card punch to punch each line of code into a punched card. The 029 was a complex mechanical device, with noises, rhythms, and so forth. The cards were assembled into a deck, preceded by some job control language (JCL) statements which provided a name for the job and instructed the computer how to set up input and out devices and how to compile and run the code. Small decks could be rubber-banded together for safekeeping; larger decks (usually for COBOL programs) were best kept in the cardboard boxes that originally held the blank, unpunched cards.

Once the deck was ready, I would walk up the hall to the job submission window, hand it in to the woman behind the counter, and she would stack it up in the card reader for eventual processing. At crunch times there would be line of students and a big pile of unprocessed jobs.

When it was my deck’s turn to be run, she would load it into the card reader, the computer would read and process the cards, and print the results on a very fast IBM printer. The attendant would take the printout, wrap it around the cards, and file it away until I came back to the window to collect the results.

On a good day the turnaround time would be about 3 to 4 hours. At crunch time it might take slightly longer. If all went well the printout would include two sections — the evidence of a successful compilation, and the results of actually running the program. I quickly learned to be careful with my code and with my algorithms, so that my code would compile and run after just a few iterations. Others were not so fortunate, and would spend many hours waiting for their results, only to find that they’d misplaced some punctuation, forgotten to declare a variable, or made an algorithmic mistake. I remember one of my fellow students “bragging” that “I am getting pretty good at this, it only took me 30 tries to get it to compile.”

I remember taking away a couple of things from these early experiences. First, there was great value in desk checking your code and your algorithms to increase the odds of a successful run. Second, it was good to have several projects going simultaneously to make the best of your your time. Third, I was always shocked (from reading my printouts) to see that my code could wait in the queue for several hours in order to be compiled and run in the space of 2 or 3 seconds.

As I mentioned earlier, the IBM line printer had a unique feature known as carriage control. By punching different special characters in the first column you could make the printer do some special things when it printed out your code. For example a “1″ would make it advance to the top of the next page of green bar paper before it would print. This was a good way to make sure that each function was on a page of its own. The “+” (plus) sign was magic; it would inhibit the printer from advancing the paper to the next line after printing. The next line would overstrike the current line.

I learned how to put it to very good use at the end of my PL/I class. The instructor asked us to make our final assignment look as pretty as possible. For most people this meant clean comments, good variable names, a clean structure, and so forth.

I decided to go a step further! Because this was a school, they would do their best to get as much use of each printer ribbon as possible. Instead of printing in a solid black color, the printer would usually produce text that was, at best, a medium gray. I did some experimenting, and found that 3 overstrikes would create nice, black text.

I decided to see if I could use the overprinting feature to make my final PL/I program look really nice. After getting my code to work as desired, I set out to use bold highlighting on all of the variable names. This turned out to be easy, although I spent a lot of time on the card punch. Here’s what I did.

First, before going any further, I should explain that PL/I used the characters /* to open a comment and */ to close one. The comments were free-form, and could flow from one card to the next as desired.

Let’s say that I was writing a simple loop. The actual, unadorned PL/I code and comment would look like this:

To make the MONTH variable bold I punched a series of cards like this:

 

 

 

 

 

The compiler saw a DO statement with a very long comment. The DO statement would look like this on the printout:

The use of this irregular carriage control upset the otherwise rhythmic sounds made by the printer and the operators sometimes thought that the printer had jammed and would cancel the job. Once they realized that it was me (one benefit of going to a small school) they allowed it to run to completion.

Needless to say, I aced the class!

My PL/I knowledge turned out to be quite useful. Within a year I worked on a project for the National Science Foundation. I wrote a very cool program that would verify the accuracy of grant data, basically adding up the rows and columns to make sure that they matched in the application (an inverse spreadsheet). A year or two later I used Digital Research’s very capable PL/I-80 compiler to prototype some of my own ideas for a spreadsheet.

Note: I used Ralf Kloth’s Punchcard emulator to create the card images.

Tom Churm dropped me a line to let me know that he has updated his popular RSS2PDF utility. He’s implemented Feedburner integration, FlickR integration, and has also built a desktop version.

Tom has also released Link Leecher, an “online link grabber.” Give it the URL of a web page, choose the link types that you are interested in, and get back a list — in your browser, as a text file, or as a CSV.

It is always fun to see something come full circle, even if it takes half of a lifetime.

Way back in 1972 or so, I was 12 years old and living in Framingham, Massachusetts. Somehow (the details escape me at the moment) I became the proud operator of a small paper route. I would get up at 5 AM 7 days a week, get dressed, push my bike up the driveway to the street, and find my daily pack of papers. They were secured with a wire, and I had a pair of wire cutters stashed near our mailbox so that I could cut the wire, load the papers into my bag, and pedal off to deliver my 15 or so copies of the Boston Herald Traveler. I had a long route, probably 2 miles or so. I do remember stopping to read the front of each section; this was probably the start of my career as a news junkie, and in some way led to my interest in RSS and syndicated content.

Since I only had 15 papers to deliver I didn’t keep any paper accounting records; most everyone paid me each week and it was easy enough to remember the 1 or 2 customers who hadn’t paid from week to week. I wasn’t one of those entrepreneurial types who started small and then grew the route to a gargantuan size. My job, as I understood it, was to get people their papers before they were awake, and I did my best to do this.

So, where am I going with this? Glad you asked!

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg noted that the Boston Herald (the Traveler suffix was dropped a while ago, according to the Wikipedia article) now has a bunch of blogs and RSS feeds.

I have added all of the feeds to Syndic8, which means that, 34 years later, I am still helping (in a small way) to deliver the Boston Herald Traveler. Its a lot easier this time, but somehow I am still doing that same job, but in a different way!

My friends at Knownow have been hard at work on the eLerts toolbar and it is now available for free download. eLerts runs inside of IE 5.5 and 6.0 and monitors a set of RSS feeds for changes. When a change is detected an alert is displayed, and the headline is available with a single click. You can see how this works by watching the Flash tutorial.

The Knownow Channel Guide features a search tab that is powered by the Syndic8 Web Services.

Kevin Burton, in a post picked up by SlashDot, was wondering about the number of feeds that use gzip compression. I have been tracking this for a while, and the answer is “not nearly enough.” Kevin guessed that 1/3 of the feeds might be doing this, and he’s way too optimistic.

Out of 423,105 feeds in the Syndic8 database, just 12,106 respond with gzip compressed data when asked to do so. The space reduction is pretty remarkable, as shown by this chart:

As you can see, most feeds compress down to 1/3 of their original size, or less.

The last time I wrote about this I was flooded with requests for more information on how to enable gzip compression. I wrote about this in my posting titled Enabling mod_gzip.

RSS is suddenly everywhere. Here are a few choice articles:

• Kevin Hale on The Importance of RSS. Also discusses Google, tagging, advertising and such.
• Erick Schonfeld talks about the RSS Nation, as an answer to information overload.

I’m doing my best to add to that overload today, clearing my desk and my inbox by blogging about everything and then deleting, filing, or reycling it.

I met the principal developer of the Firefox version of Pluck last Thursday at Gnomedex. We talked about the issues involved in building and debugging a large, complex application using XUL and JavaScript.

He directed me to a private download site, and I gave it a whirl as soon as I got home that night. It looked really good, and I am happy to see that they are now opening up the beta. Follow the directions on the page to apply to be a beta tester.

RSS is great, and enterprises are willing to pay real money for real solutions. Put them together and you get RSS for the Enterprise. Here are some resources that happened to cross my inbox today:

• Moreover is offering a free whitepaper, RSS and the Enterprise. Registration is required.
• eWeek says that RSS Sets Its Sights on the Enterprise.
• KnowNow offers RSS for The Enterprise: A Primer.

Getting the right info to the right people (and keeping it out of the hands of the wrong people) on a timely basis is a real challenge for an organization of any size.

In addition to the folks who need to stay informed on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis, a good enterprise information distribution system should allow newcomers to easily delve into historic information, and it should allow more casual observers and overseers to take a quick peek at what’s going on. Also, many organizations have permeable boundaries. In the old days, there were insiders (the folks who worked there) and the outsiders. These days, there are often partners, contractors, outsourced laborers, advisers, and so forth, all with some level of elevated privilege.

A nice set of RSS feeds can definitely play a part in keeping all of these parties in the loop. Getting this all set up is still not trivial, but I know that some really good people are working on this.

Like any really great technology, it often turns out that the highest and best use isn’t the one that it was originally designed for. I could definitely see this happening with RSS.

I just found out about a new book from O’Reilly, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, by Ben Hammersley. According to the table of contents, there are 11 chapters: Introduction, Using Feeds, Feeds Without Programming, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS 1.0 Modules, The Atom Syndication Format, Parsing and Using Feeds, Feeds in the Wild, Unconventional Feeds, and Developing New Modules.

Looks very interesting…

The latest issue of Newsweek has an article on tags.

The Syndic8 menu now includes a Tags entry, for direct access to the Tag List. As of this morning there are already 203 tags in the system.

My friends at Feed Burner have just announced the closing of a $7M round of funding. That’s awesome!

Podcasting is a relatively new phenomemon, and I’ve only had time to listen to a few so far.

It reminds me of AM talk radio for some reason. Back in the 80’s, newly married and house-poor, I bought a Dodge Dart from my father-in-law for something like $200. The radio was AM-only, and I had to use needle-nosed pliers to tune it. Once I found a good station I tended to stick with it. I used to listen to Bruce Williams, Dr. Gabe Merkin, and others. Later, I got a better car, and was able to tune into Bruce (again), and Art Bell.

Ok, so now back to the present. Podcast brings together cheap storage, high-bandwidth connections, portable MP3 players, and people with something to say.

For example, my onetime co-worker Dave Schappell recently did his “Early Retirement Dot-Com Guy Podcast“. The sound quality is high, and Dave is focused yet informal, and quite entertaining. When his wife calls in mid-cast, Dave answers, talks to her, promises to edit it out, but doesn’t. He doesn’t say “call me back, I’m podcasting,” or anything like that. His recitation of the email from overstock.com is worth the 14 MB download all by itself.

Dave recently created a Seattle Podcasting Meet-Up, and I’ll try to get to one soon.

Finally, Syndic8 has been tracking RSS enclosures for a long time. I recently added a “River of Podcasts” page, featuring the newest podcasts in 6 languages (English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, and Dutch). Some people are casting things besides audio, such as images, video, and even PowerPoint presentations.

According to Paid Content, NewsGator has signed a deal to provide a custom version of their product to VNU. Congratulations, Greg and the rest of the team.

I was a paid tech reviewer on Ellen Finkelstein’s forthcoming RSS For Dummies book. The listing just showed up on Amazon and the book is now available for pre-order, for shipment in late March.

The book is chock-full of useful content! It is not just for ‘dummies’ and it is not solely for beginners. Intermediate and advanced producers and consumers of RSS are going to enjoy and find some valuable information in this book. There is great info on blogging, data formats, hosting, podcasting, and much, much more.

I really enjoy the tech review process, and I would be happy to entertain offers to do more such reviews. I enjoy reading and providing quality feedback to authors, and I also like the chance to be a bit ahead of the curve by reading new material before it is available to the general public. I have also done tech review for Amazon Hacks, for Google, Amazon, and Beyond, and for Mining Amazon Web Services.

I wrote a separate blog entry on the subject of tech reviewing.

While viewing the nifty RSS news page at Yenra.com, I found the equally nifty RSS Specification Blog.

One of the items in that blog is the RSS Submit tool. This tool automates the submission of RSS Feeds to a number of directories, including Syndic8. The screen shot on that page shows the product in action, submitting a feed to Syndic8. That’s cool!

After yesterday’s Blog Business Summit, it seems appropriate to link to this free Guide to Business Blogging. Unlike most PDFs, this one can be read on-screen without an excess of scrolling, or you can print it out (41 pages) and take it with you. The document is being offered by ChangeThis, and today is the last day to get it for free.

I will not be at the Summit today. I need to return to the real world, and travel to Salt Lake City on behalf of my employer. I am going there to attend a career fair and to give a “tech talk” on the Amazon Web Services to those young, impressionable students.

By the way, I find that travel time is perfect for reading documents like this guide. I have a pile of stuff here that I can read then discard. I can then return with less paper than I started with.

Topic is writing for blogs, we’ll hear from Halley Suitt and Stowe Boyd. Halley is also editor of Worthwhile magazine. Stowe runs Corante.

Halley started blogging about sexy stuff, wrote about death for 18 months, then back to sexy stuff. HBR asked her to write a fictional horror story about corporate blogging. Most important thing about blog writing is good writing. There are probably some wonderful passionate writers in your organization. You have to find them. Get them, balance rebelliousness with good information.

Need good stories. Here are some catchwords to make your blog something people want to read. Use stories, read Gladwell’s Blink book.

Go for truth, watch out for the CEO who wants to write everything. Writing must have passion or nobody will care. Passion for industry, subject, or for whatever is going around the blogosphere. What’s the news, watch the news aggregator. Writing and ethics, know what is going on, take a stand.

Talk about things of this world. Don’t be too abstract, it is boring. (pops out an umbrella). Don’t just talk. Boring blogs have no passionate language.

Go for brevity, write 12 posts not 12 paragraphs.

Go for freshness, post a lot, every day. Scoble is the marathon runner blogger. At least 1 thing per day, better is many things per day, people will come back. If you are prolific, take 2 days off, make you audience worry about you. Play with them, see if they are really reading.

Have a voice. Sound like your blog. Fortune Magazine, Mena Trott is on the cover as part of this year’s “10 trends”. Reads some of Mena’s old posts, crisp clean authentic writing. 2001, its a girly kind of blog. 2004, the product and the company has grown, now she has Mena’s Corner. She will be the friendly, intelligent voice of the company. Read lots of entries and you can get a good sense of who she is.

The things she is doing so well: good at telling stories, she tells the truth, she is passionate, and she loves her company. She uses the things of this world, tangible stuff, she’s not brief, very fresh in writing and perspective, great voice. A great writer. Good example of how a corporate blog should sound.

Q (from Stow): Can this be learned? A: If you want to learn how to paint, go to museums and study the paintings. Study the master writers, the masters of corporate blog-writing. With blogging you are writing all the time, so to help your writing, just blog.

Ok, over to Stow. He’s on a “mission from God”, his True Voice tour, 12-15 conferences over the next year to spread his gospel. From Zuboff and Maxmin, the Support Economy. . Legitimacy based on inclusion is replacing legitimacy based on hierarchical authority.

Find your true voice. How?

Good writing. You need a strong emotional commitment to the stance that you are taking on the subject.

Art & science to blog writing. Science is analyzing length of blog posts from those who you think are good writers, and following what you find. Art is the intuitive, dark part. You need to break your own guidelines, get on your hobby horse, and rant on occasion. The devils have to be there with your angels.

This is a social media. Comment on and reply to discussions with the really smart people out there. Corante is a confederation of thought leaders. Not just because they have great thoughts but because they are involved in smart conversations with 50-80-100 others, to comment on, riff on, and develop an interaction with the inner circle. This is a critical aspect of developing good blog writing. Getting good comments.

Read first, then write. You can’t step in and just write, you have to know what you are stepping in to.

Authenticity and authority. Its nice to be old, occasionally (he’s 52). You get the sense of understanding and people will give it to you.

Draw a line, howl at the moon when someone crosses them. For him, flu vaccine shortage set him off.

Scribble, scribble, scribble. Do it every day. Get up every day and write before breakfast (Hemingway). Just write all the time, solicit feedback and advice.

Halley, sometimes you need to rewrite your life, story of her divorce, restyling who she is, becoming who you have become.

Don’t rewrite your posts, even if they stink. Fix your spelling errors, maybe. Don’t go back and change your opinion. Stow: 15 second rule on dropped food, you can tweak it a bit right after you post, but that’s it.

Finally, by their tags shall ye know them. FlickR, Technorati, Del.icio.us. Empowers users, once again.

Mostly, write things in one sitting.

Q: (Anil: My typos don’t show up until I hit publish). If you publish something you don’t like, write more and scroll the old stuff away. Refine, and people can see your increasing focus.

Q: (Marc Canter): What about aggregators? A: Most people are very individual in the way they use aggregators. The way your blog looks shows if you are using other sources. Bill Kearney points out that people will use things in very different ways. If you publish items 1..10, you think that 1 & 3 are the good ones, and 6, 7, and 8 get people to your site, that’s worth knowing.

Discussion about changing your mind, and how to do it, link back, say why, etc.

Stow: Forgot to talk about having a sense of humor, it is important. Halley says she gets a 9 AM Monday morning traffic spike, and she writes her silly, sexy, crazy stuff aimed at that time. Fun, fast, dirty.

Permalinks and deleting posts, does it leave a scar behind.

Halley: Know when not to write, because it all stays there forever!

Topic is picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared.

DL Byron of clip-n-seal, innovative product. A blogging success story Also built the Blog Business Summit web site.

Molly has a book on Movable Type coming out, and an instructional video.

Survey: Who runs a blog using a hosted solution? 25% Survey: Who uses something more robust like WordPress or Movable Type? 25%

Blogging engine is the software that drives your weblog. Numerous admin features. Types are: Commercial, hosted, server-side, roll your own.

Commercial solutions — AOL Hometown, MSN Spaces. Pros: Free or low cost, basic templating options, no high-tech experience required. Probably integrated with other stuff. Cons: Very little in the way of customization features. Not scalable to professional level. Companies can sometimes own content, you loose IP rights to your own info. Association with strong brand weakens your own brand. Limited (if any) export. Not great for the long term. Good way to get started and to test out the concept and your ideas.

Hosted systems. Demo blogger, and DL showed some old blogs he’d written, abandoned, and forgotten about. Demo TypePad, which has some rich templating options. Overall, pros are that they are low cost or free, easy to set up, feature rich, including comments and photoblogs, include import and export features, good for new bloggers or bloggers without high-tech experience. Anil Dash notes that the better ones can create a staging server to let you build stuff, test it, and then roll it out. [Note: I have learned that the ability to do this can be important given that there are often timing considerations when you need to coordinate with a product launch or traditional PR.]

Q: Hosting photos on blogger? A: On blogger, can tie in to Picasa, FlickR, and something called Hello.

Q: Right-click “blog this” favelet? A: Yes, there are lots of favelets around.

Note to crowd, be careful to turn pinging off or people will find you before you are ready. Make things private until you are ready.

Note from audience, Blogware is a good, low-profile hosted service. They use a reseller model, and the brand is kept in the background.

Q: Speak a bit more about the concept of a staging environment? A: Keep stuff off of public servers until you are ready; this is a common thing we’ve done for years in the web development space. Marc Canter chimes in, use a separate private blog, never publish, while you get the requisite corporate approvals. Anil follows up, Washington Post created a blog using a server on a laptop, do it all locally, test out workflow, get it ready to go, then copy & paste to get the stuff over to the production blog. Scoble notes that these staged delay-blogs can be sensed, they are never current. Molly agrees, you can’t catch the wave of a topic that’s of the moment. She doesn’t do any staging on her blog; it is all spontaneous. She notes that these are all nascent technologies, that this stuff is all brand new and that it will be years before real best practices emerge.

Q: Take us out into the future, what will it look like? Where is it trending, what might we expect? A: From DL, RSS workflow. Got newsreader, find the posts about something, automate the blogging process. Drop it into a box, get Google to auto-populate it with links to the stuff you are writing. [I could go for this; adding outside links while blogging live is hard]. From Molly: TBL and the semantic web, social layer and technical layer. More interaction between a variety of devices: PDA, phone, pager, web. This is the harbinger of that vision. DL: It may be a blog but not called one, just part of the web site. From Bill Kearney, a lot of this is reinventing the wheels that the KM (Knowledge Management) invented a decade ago, including workflow and staging. You need to try a couple of tools along the way, figure out the right direction before you spend a ton of money on a full-scale solution like Vignette. Molly notes that CMS is getting easier, Bill replies that more choices are always better. Molly notes that the user doesn’t and shouldn’t care what technology you are using. DL notes that most CMS implementations fail, but blogging is rock and roll, phenomenal.

Molly talks about Jeff Veen, CMS’s and why we don’t need one.

Back to pros of hosted service. Great for new bloggers. Now the cons: Perhaps limited in where you can host, some feature limitations, extensibility can be limited. Reliance on templates can create a less professional result. Less scalable.

Ok, on to server-side solutions. Movable Type from Six Apart and WordPress. Molly notes that she gets a lot of Word Press comment spam; I already fixed that. Open source or licensed, complete customization, db-drive, scalable.

Cons: need technical knowledge, template customization is hard, vulnerable for comment spam, mixed quality of tech support, exxcellent for long term scalable professional blog (that’s a pro, not a con). She would recommend either one for her clients.

Getting started, try commercial or hosted first. Prime time, look into server-side hosting solutions.

DL, first you pine for comments, then you get some only to find that they are all spam. Demo of comment moderation.

Ok, that’s a wrap we are running late!

Glenn is about to get started, along with Steve.

Steve starts out with a story of how he used a Google ad to shame the Muse hotel into admitting that the so-called free wireless wasn’t in fact free. He spent $4.20 on the ad, and then the manager called him up, admitted to the problem, and changed the site. He’ll walk us through the use of AdSense. Started with a site, rawformat.typepad.com. Applied to Google, got approval within 24 hours. On the AdSense site, choose how to style and display the ad. He gets money when someone clicks. At this point he gets “a dinner out” each month (Google prohibits people from saying what they make). Matt Haughey (pvrblog.com) documented earnings in late 2003.

To blog and make money, find intersection of two circles. What you like and can blog about, and what you can make money at. So, he cares about digital cameras. Get a list of top digital cameras, go into AdWords account and walk through creating a new ad, to see how valuable the ads and keywords are. Enter the list of cameras as potential keywords, then see how much you are willing to pay for a click, in slot #1. Look at CPC (Cost-Per-Click), that’s all you care about. Past into Excel, choose. Analyze, pivot. Multiply average CPC by clicks/day, create an index to judge value. Nikon and Canon come out on top. Find connections, decide to focus on Canon. Build canonupdate.com .

Ok, over to Glenn. He’ll talk about “The Entrepreneurial Blog”. He does wifinetnews.com and droxy.com. The fun is figuring out a way to transfer the obsession into a way to make a living.

So, start with obsession, find a topic, and perhaps a network of people who care about that topic. Figure out obsession and then tap into it. Archives build up and are very valuable. Basically an obsession integrated over time. Example, 802.11N, upcoming standard. It is his #3 page getter right now.

First, obsess. 802.*, WEP, WPA, etc.

Exhaust the space, fill the zone. Broaden focus, cover anything that happens, e.g., in WiFi, for him. Be omnipresent, tracked using Technorati and trackbacks. Sifry at Technorati used this to be omnipresent when Technorati was getting started. Glenn watches what is written about him and responds in a similarly obsessive fashion. Cultivate cross-links, as long as relevant and germane. Show that you are all-encompassing. Be helpful to colleagues and readers. Submit to Slashdot and BoingBoing. Create a voice that makes you sound exhaustive and authoritative.

Report. He started by putting overflow from an interview online. Do real reportage. Links don’t bring bucks, you must do analysis. Bring in your authentic experience to make real revenue. How to break news? Scoops he has done: WPA broken, AMD postering, Broadcom interference.

Choose. Find some empty space. Harder, with things like weblogsinc.com and grokker media. Hint: Find a site that you like, that’s not syndicating, do some Google tests and keyword tests, and see if there’s something worth doing. Stick with what you do, sometimes things look like they have dried up for a while, and then come back. For example, satellite radio. Sirius pays $60 for affiliate signups.

Sell sponsorships instead of / in addition to AdSense, fill some space with higher revenue ads. This can happen as your traffic and notoriety grows.

Contact companies in the space, get to the CEO. He gets 4000 visitors per weekday, and hears directly from the people involved. Perservere. WiFi blog took a while to get rolling. Memes can suddenly explode, so the longer you stay in the space the better, as long as it is growing.

Expand. After filling the zone, launch more blogs. WiMax blog coming, and another for European WiFi. Do a good job on one topic, others can follow. Add more, get more traffic, cross-promote, cross-link, get overall traffic increase. Rise of the divided blog. Engadget needs to be divided; the space is now too big. So crowded that nobody goes there anymore.

Example: Om Malik, brand of one. Gets 350,000 page views per month.

Many voices, with more blogs you can involve more writers.

Use special coverage to your advantage. Trade show can draw people in, huge spikes, e.g. an auto trade show or the CES, with original coverage from the show floor.

His spawn: Alan Reiter, Steve Stroh, Om Malik, Sam Sellers.

Earnings. Unlabeled graph of AdSense earnings, no real trend up. Some spikes when there’s some high ad spending, others correlated against big news and traffic days. Sponsorships and partnerships work well for him, cross-linked. Many ads, are more Google ads better? Look at wifinetworkingnews.com, partner ad in top right. Partner search, AdSense, Google Search, banner ad. RSS feed, mailing list, a lot going on. All for monetizing and increasing subscribers. Content in center, the stuff around the edges is set dressing. 1-line bar on droxy.com for woot.com, RSS, multiple Google ad blocks (and it boosts revenue).

Affiliate Marketing has worked well for him with non-blog sites. Find companies that work about products and services that work. Sirius, $60/signup. Amazon Associates. Sell stuff with a high value. Satellite radio has a lot of money in the system, so that works well. Half.com bounties, $10, and eBay.com bounty, $12. Both work well on his isbn.nu site. Distinguish editorial from advertorial. Track performance, percentage of sales from different vendors.

Perform. Blog like you don’t need the money.

Steve’s AdSense stats come out to around 1.3 cents per visit.

Comment from the audience, dumb traffic vs. smart traffic. Dumb traffic comes in from search engines and follows more outbound revenue-oriented links. Smart traffic follows the site, come for the content. So suppressing ads for non-searchers might improve the site without having an adverse effect on revenue.