March 3, 2004

Failed Blogger Believes Media, Quits

Technology blogger Frank Catalano says he's quitting his Random Bytes blog because a recent research study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that "two-to-seven percent of adult Internet users write blogs, and only about eleven percent read blogs."

Catalano started Random Bytes on March 20, 2003. He gave it less than a year. There's no traffic tracker on his page, but Technorati finds that his blog had been linked to by just 5 other blogs - and four of those are very recent linkers, having linked to his blogging swan song. Apparently, Catalano wasn't very good at letting others know his blog existed. For comparison, my blog has existed since Nov. 30, 2003 - and today it has been linked to by more than 200 other blogs. (Technorati says 194 while the TTLB Ecosystem says 240 unique inbound links. Catalano's TTLB count: ZERO.)

Catalano was as bad as marketing his blog as he is at math. That 11 percent of American adults reading blogs regularly amounts to some 14 million Americans - well more than the 3.6 million Americans who tuned in to CNN during the Iraq war. Frank, the truth is that millions of Americans read blogs, and there are lots of blogs with significant numbers of readers. HobbsOnline, for instance, is read by between 1,000 and 2,000 people every day. Frank, the truth is, millions of people are reading blogs. It's just that almost nobody was reading your blog. Until now, that is - when ironically, you're going to have your biggest readership.

Frank Catalano. Nothing became his blog like the leaving of it.

UPDATE: My readers astutely note some more things about Former Blogger Frank Catalano. 1. He calls himself and Internet marketing consultant and is co-author of a book, Internet Marketing For Dummies. So how come he failed to market his blog? 2. "It certainly didn't help him that over the period of 12 months he didn't have a single post in 7 of those months and had a grand total of 12 posts." - Rob Bernard. Yeah, it's hard to see why he didn't have a flood of readers, with all that good bloggage to read. 3. He had no blogroll - you don't get traffic in the blogosphere without sharing it too. 4. He has no Site Meter or other traffic-tracker on his site, so he can't know, really, how many readers he had - and wouldn't know if another blog linked to him. And if you don't know where your reader is coming from, you can't thank the blog that sent him to your blog, meaning you fail to encourage the development of a relationship that can lead to more traffic.

In other words, Frank Catalano was a lousy blogger. Based on my inbound links and average daily readership, I'm anywhere from 200 to 2000 times better at marketing a blog than Catalano is - and he co-wrote this book.

Life is not fair.

UPDATE: Catalano responded in the comments below, and also via an email which, being a reasonable guy, I'll share with you.

You seem like a reasonable guy from reading your other posts.

If I'm going to be slammed, at least the facts the slam is based on should be accurate. The Pew study had nothing to do with me quitting my blog. It was, as you'll appreciate being a former news reporter yourself (as I was, if you check my bio), a news hook.

My professional blog (Byte Me) continues to do well - a small but appreciative audience. It's my personal blog (Random Bytes) I'm killing for all the reasons clearly stated in my essay.

Blogs are a publishing MECHANISM, not a medium. They require the same kind of work any other Web site promotion requires. (Just as discussion lists are a publishing mechanism for e-mail.) I just didn't have the time to put into it for a personal blog. And you have to admit - there are a lot of very crappy blogs out there that make vanity presses look like the height of professional publishing. Giving someone a blogging tool does not a writer worth reading make.

Oh, and without a tracking tool, I wouldn't have known about your post. So I do use one.

Thanks. Interesting blog of yours, btw.

Frank Catalano

SECOND THOUGHT: Blogs are both a publishing mechanism, as Catalano says, and a publishing medium. Catalano is wrong on that. What makes blogs a different kind of medium is the interactivity with readers and with other blogs, which has created a new kind of journalism which, in the past, I've called "collaborative peer-reviewed journalism," but in fact is more accurately called "collaborative reader-involved journalism." Whatever you call it, the blog medium allows for stories to evolve over time as readers add their insights, provide links to new data and documents that support or challenge the original post, and use hyperlinks to build the structure of the conversation. It's a paradigm shift from traditional media's philosophy of only publishing (or broadcasting) a story when it is considered "complete."

In the blogosphere, stories are never really completed. In that, the blog medium more nearly approximates the reality it covers - for in life stories are rarely complete either. Blogs done right chronicle ever-changing life, while traditional media reports snapshots and fragments of a moment in time.

But Catalano's not totally wrong. The way he used the blog publishing mechanism made no use of the blog medium's revolutionary nature. Along the way he experienced the truth that a blog that doesn't invite readers to be involved in the conversation won't have many readers.

A final point: In his farewell posting, Catalano said blogs by bloggers with traditional media connections tend to do better than independent blogs. He notes the success of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's blog. But according to Technorati today, HobbsOnline has 198 inbound links from other blogs and 267 total inbound links, while SeattlePI.com's Buzzworthy blog has just 49 inbound links from other blogs, and 73 total inbound links. Admittedly, my blog had a traditional-media tie-in in its early months, via my weekly column in a start-up newspaper. But that newspaper had yet to attract any significant readership, and when I stopped writing that column my blog had no more than 50 readers per day. Today, HobbsOnline has 1,500 daily readers, on average, and has achieved that as an independent blog with no media tie-in. How did I do it? In part by inviting my readers into the conversation.

UPDATE: Here's one news outlet that got the story right re the Pew Internet & American Life project's recent data on blogging. The headline: Most Web Users Write, Not Just Read.The story lead: "A new survey says that 53 million American adults - 44 percent of Internet users - have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online."

It's a conversation.