Microblogging

Social Syndication

SMM vs SEO

It’s not a question of having either good SEO or a decent Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy in place. You need both.

In the recent past, many former bloggers have been saying that blogging is dead. They have abandoned the act of blogging and moved on to the greener pastures offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Social Media and mobile are the buzzwords and blogging is old news.

Frankly, I found this to be an absurd notion. Over the December holidays I encountered three people ranging from the ages of 25 to 56 who had just taken up blogging. They weren’t tech-savvy programmers but a lawyer, a student traveller and a house wife.

If they were taking the time to get into blogging, and for no immediate financial gain, surely blogging couldn’t be in it’s death throes. It seemed to me as though the whole “Death of Blogging” thing was nothing more than hype created to get some attention.

But suspecting wasn’t good enough. If I wanted to make a contradictory statement, I needed some proof.

The Quest for Statistics on the State of the South African Blogosphere

Finding any decent information on the South African Blogosphere proved very challenging. I contacted the Letterdash blogging platform – as part of News24 I am convinced that they must have a thriving community of bloggers – but their contact form was non existent with a 500 – Internal Server Error staring me in the face. Local Blog aggregator, Afrigator, also didn’t provide me with the information I needed.

I had no other choice but to turn to our friends, the Americans…

The Stats from the States

At a loss for finding statistics for our local scene, I consulted the excellent Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report published every year. Surely if blogging was in the decline, it would be visible in the USA first.

While this report doesn’t give a definite number to all the bloggers in the world, studying their methodology does yield an insight into the burning question of whether or not blogging is indeed still alive and well, kicking and with a pulse.

Technorati have an Internet survey conducted every year among bloggers nationwide. The survey group was shrunk from 2,828 bloggers in 2009 to 1,091 respondents in 2010.

However, the Report also uses data collected by Lijit, a trusted publisher network of over 12000 publishers and 700 million page views per month.

Lijit-collected data for the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources.

• 13,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog (up from 11000 in 2009)
• The network of 3.8 million blogs that those 13,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit (up from 2.5 million in 2009).

If Lijit could expand their survey group from 2009 to 2010 because they now have a larger pool of active users, then the Lijit data corroborates that Blogging isn’t dead and thriving still.

I’ll state that blogs have come of age. They have been around long enough to be effectively
assimilated by the mainstream. Blogs have gained legitimacy and are read by most internet users every day, in one form of another. The humble blog may not be the hotshot new kid on the block anymore, but it’s here to stay.

As Warren Ellis said in a recent Wired magazine column:
“When any medium starts getting “the death of…” articles, it doesn’t mean the medium in question is dying, so much as that people are bored with it and are looking for the next thing. And while they were looking for other things to be interested in, Chicago street gangs started blogging to protest against police harassment. Remember Blogger‘s original tagline? “Push-button publishing for the people.” That looks alive and well to me.”

Look out for the next post, where I will delve a bit deeper into the findings of the State of the Blogosphere Report and what it says about Microblogging and SEO.

The recommendation is that if you are writing content about topics whose value is short lived (Timely) you should continue using dates, but if you have old content that is still of value (Timeless) and users are no longer clicking on your results in the search engines because they prefer to read a new article you can consider removing the post date from your posts.

The problem arises that the content creators can choose to remove the dates of their posts regardless of the nature of the content. Let’s take a look at an example.

Case Study

If you take a look at this post on Search Marketing Standard, you will find a very informative piece of writing on the new index, Caffeine, used by Google when compiling their search rankings.

Informative: Yes.  Timely? I don’t know.

Why don’t I know? Because there is no date on the blogposts. This causes a serious problem for me. How am I supposed to know if this technology is new, or if it has been implemented months ago and might have been amended in the mean time?

A news blogpost without any date - Useless?

That’s the problem with removing dates from blogs. Sure, this can help users click on your older content or blog in their search results, unhindered or deterred by a old date. But is that fair?

The argument for excluding the date of the Blog is that this way your timeless content will be discovered by your users, without them being prejudiced by the date, resulting in them thinking that your content is old and no longer relevant.

Fair enough – But who is to say your content IS relevant? Perhaps you wrote a stellar expose on the newest search technologies or the latest in ergonomically designed office furniture in 2008. It was a momentous piece of writing, it generated wide reaction and was well received. Is it still relevant 2 years down the line? Would it be ethical, or fair, to cheat users into clicking on your link in their search results, thinking they’ll find the latest info, when your content isn’t the latest?

In this case of the Google Caffeine blogpost on Search Marketing Standard, in order to determine whether or not this is timely news, I had to google ‘Google Caffeine’ and find other blogs and information sources that affirm that Google Caffeine was indeed launched on June 8 2010, making the news relevant to me, now.

This took extra time. FAIL.

When making the decision to remove dates from the blog on your website, do take into consideration what type of content you are handling on your blog. If, as in the case of the Social Marketing Standard, you’re blogging on current news events, it might not be the best move to remove dates from your posts.

Dates give context

Think of old fashioned newspapers. Yes, they are still around. And yes, it’s true that with more and more content moving online, that all news will ultimately be distributed online in the not too distant future. Newspapers mark their articles with dates, they take care to report accurate dates within their articles to better shape and communicate the context of the content. It can be argued that without a date, some if not all newspaper articles would be irrelevant.

Case in point:
If the results of a sports match was reported without the date, it would not have the same relevance or impact as when attached to the date of the match. Let’s look at this news snippet:

Sports: Australia beat South Africa 41-39 in the Tri Nations.

Without a date, this fact becomes a lot less valuable, as this could now refer to any match between these two teams in the entire history of the tournament. Removing the date actually devalues the content.

The final word

I think that a lot of Web writers can and SHOULD learn a bit from the practices of good journalism. If you’re going to blog, you still have a base responsibility of reporting your facts as accurately and within as decent framing context as possible.

If you are creating ‘Timeless’ content – a term that should be treated with some scepticism since what is timeless for you might not be timeless for the rest of the world – the argument can be made to not include dates. Just be sure that you are doing this because your intended audience is still people, and not our robot friends, the search engines.

Of course it’s not just working I did during my period here, but I also had fun, a lot of fun. Ashley took us to Beaverlac, a camping site in the middle of nowhere, and I had a great weekend there with Ashley, Frank and Linda. I also went for the Garden Route with Linda where we went to the Cango Caves, we went to an ostrich farm, ride an elephant, did the highest bridge bungee jump of the world and saw lions, rhino’s and giraffes in a wild park. Last Sunday I did the shark cage diving which was a little bit of a disappointment, because I became seasick and we only saw one shark for a few minutes during the 4-5 hour boat trip. At the point where we could go into the cave to see the shark in the water, the shark was gone and we where freezing because of the cold water, we stayed in that cave for 10 minutes without a shark around. This great trip costed 1430 ZAR, so not really worth the amount of money we paid for it.

Today my girlfriend is coming over for a week, so I have a little holiday with her in Cape Town. I want to take her to  some great things Cape Town has to offer like Table Mountain, Lions Head, nice restaurants, let her meet my friendsI’ve met here and of course visit Cape Point. We also want to do the skydive in Blauwberg if the weather allows us.

Next month if I’m finished with my internship at LightSpeed, Linda en me are going to do the Nomad Cape to Vic tour. We will go from Cape Town to the Vicoria Falls in 20 days. We will visit Namibie, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Johannesburg and then come back to Cape Town for a few days and then return to Holland. More about that in the next post.