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Aug
31
Canadian Bullet Questions
August 31, 2005 |
As The Canadian Bullet drives towards an actual launch a couple of questions have arisen which I would like feedback on. This is still very much a work in progress so changes are relatively easy at this point.
Conceptually, The Canadian Bullet should act as an amplifier for Canadian blogs. If it works properly bloggers should see increasing traffic driven by their inclusion in the Bullet. They should also see people coming to their sites who might never have found those sites otherwise. But building an amplifier raises its own issues. Here are a few.
1. My ads: There has been what might be described as “disgruntlement” over the presence of my advertising - adsense and otherwise - on a site composed entirely of other people’s work. At the moment, and without violating Google’s TOS, I can confirm that in the month The Canadian Bullet has been up I have netted less than $2.00 from those ads. But the principle is important.
My own view is that the advertising is designed to offset the assorted hosting costs. Those amount to $10.00 Cdn a month. I hope, in time, that the various sites will hit that number. When they do I will certainly revisit the question of advertising revenue. One thought that I have is to look at reinvesting any profit from The Canadian Bullet into some sort of Canadian blogging fund which might contribute to promoting Canadian blogging in general. But profit is some distance down the road.
2. Exerpts and linkbacks: I have discovered that the software I am using is not great at ensuring that only an exerpt is published. In a perfect world no more than 400 characters including title of any blog entry would be published. However, this is dependent to a degree on what sort of feed is provided by a given blog. I have been in touch with some of the blogs which run long with suggestions as to how they can truncate their feeds.
I don’t want to publish whole posts where this can be avoided. The objective of the Bullet is to provide a quick snapshot of what Canadian bloggers are writing and therefore generate traffic to the featured sites. This is an ongoing issue and I hope to have it resolved. Frankly, no matter how brilliant or cogent a 1000 word entry may be, it spoils the flow of the Bullet.
On my end I am having some trouble with ensuring that every post has a link to its author. There is a bug in the WordPress/RSS interaction which I have yet to find. That linkback is critical to the success of the Bullet and I will find it.
3. Hotlinks: Some bloggers publish pictures on their blogs and those pictures may or may not be picked up in the feed from their blog. When they are the image remains hosted on the blogger’s server and The Canadian Bullet automatically hotlinks the image. This means the blogger’s bandwidth is being used by The Canadian Bullet.
At the moment this should not prove too great a hardship as a) traffic on the Bullet is currently all of 50-100 visitors a day, b) 90% of those visitors hit only the front page, c) the front page rarely has the same entries for more than a couple of hours. In total the Bullet’s current bandwidth usage is seldom over 5MB a day.
However, if the Currie plan for world domination is a success, traffic will radically increase and the hotlinking issue will become significant for some bloggers. There are a couple of solutions. First, a blogger who is concerned can set up a feed which excludes images. Second, I can see if the software I am using can be set to exclude all images. Third, if the problem persists and is actually causing real economic pain I can drop the feed from a particular blog.
One suggestion which I do have is that people refrain from putting up big, unoptimized images. Thumbnails are often a better alternative.
4. Inclusion: a number of people have written asking to be included. Truth to tell I have been busy trying to solve technical problems and have fallen behind on adding people. This should be caught up (yes, Scott, I do mean you) shortly. There are also some people I would dearly like to include who do not have working feeds - I may be able to help there. Finally, there are lots of blogs which I am simply unaware of. If you have one of them or know of someone who should be included please drop me a line.
In general people write their blogs in order to be read. The tradeoff at the Canadian Bullet is my use of an exerpt against a particular blogger getting a few extra visitors. In time I hope that becomes a lot of extra visitors. While I think this is a very decent trade off, some bloggers may not. Fair enough. If a blogger is concerned I’d appreciate hearing about that concern. I may be able to resolve it or my techno-ignorance may make resolution impossible. Where no resolution is possible there is always the alternative of simply dropping the feed.
Like any other new internet service, The Canadian Bullet will take time to attract its audience. It will also take time to work through the exerpting, backlinking, hotlinking and revenue issues. That process will go much more quickly the more input I have from the bloggers whose work appears.
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Comments
4 Comments so far
I would have no problem with the advertisements so long as only excerpts are shown. And if you can find a way to strip out images from the feeds, that would be a very good thing. Thing is, some of that responsibility rests with the feeds, and I think a number of users consider the feed an afterthought. I myself had no idea I was displaying full posts on my feed until you told me and I fixed that.
I think you are right about how many bloggers see feeds - they may not even know they have a feed.
It will all evolve. (And, of course, it goes without saying that I will achieve world domination…)
I’m fine with ads. I think most bloggers know Jay has given far more to the blogosphere than he could ever take back, I can’t see why ads would be an issue.
One feature that might be useful, if you don’t have it already, would be a category or tag for each blogger. That way you could see all recent posts from a blogger on the Bullet. It would be a great way to get a feel for various blogger in one place.
I don’t mind you slipping ads in amongst the excerpts if you’re throwing traffic my way.