Friends

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how to make the 3DN Technology Blog successful and what this means. In the about page I have stated that I do not want people to write good articles without some form of compensation. For many people compensation means just cash but in this context it’s slightly more complex than that. As the founder and primary maintainer of this blog I started the blog in order to try branding 3DN as a company knowledgeable in the area of technology and with lots of connections to other people knowledgeable in the area of technology. That would be my compensation for founding and maintaining the site so that others can write articles on it and amplify each other’s efforts.

I also started writing articles as initially I did not know about any of my friends or colleagues having any interest in writing articles on technology. I also had lots of things to figure out about WordPress, what plugins to use on the site, what theme would look appealing to people etc. etc. so writing articles by myself gave me an opportunity not only to ventilate my many opinions but also to explore WordPress and to find the pitfalls other technical writers might stumble upon. WordPress is an excellent blogging application but it can, and should, be tweaked to a point where the blog looses its anonymous look and gets an appeal to the readers that will make them come back to the site. At this point I feel rather comfortable with WordPress’ inner workings and my ability to help fellow authors to make their own articles look good so the next step is to find authors willing to write more articles. As I’ve written some articles myself I realize that there’s another, much more compelling (at least to myself) reason to write articles:

• It is fun to write articles that many people like to read!

I wrote one article called Don’t be evil on the subject of Google taking a stand against China’s alleged hacking attempts of its property. The article included a poll where people could voice their opinion on Google. I posted a link to the article in a Slashdot comment thread on the subject and the number of views were totally amazing to me with people viewing the article to date from 500+ unique IP addresses and voting eagerly on the subject. While I consider this to be a one-hit-wonder I thought it was a very cool experience which I would like to share with other authors on the blog.

I would really appreciate your opinion on the following:

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

as I myself obviously voted (almost) all of the above and therefore would like you to participate! Just so we’re clear on the subject, ‘Cash!’ is not one of my motivators for this blog. For all the hours I’ve spent on trying to get it successful I most likely could have made a hell of a lot more money by simply having a job.

One Shot Wonder

So the post of the article on Slashdot was a one shot wonder. I’ve also found that posting some articles to social media gets a few visitors to the site. The underlying assumption from me is that ‘followers’ in Twitter’s case have some sort of an interest in the things I do. There’s only some 270 of them now and most of them are most likely lurkers who see tons of tweets sliding by all day long, picking at a few of them when they feel hungry for some news. I’m no recognized authority on anything yet but if you feel that I might once be an authority on anything, feel free to follow me. When you follow me on Twitter however, you could do me a greater favor:

• Retweet my tweets!

Every now and again you may see yet another tweet. You might read the article I’m tweeting and find out that it’s not for you. However, you have other friends! If the article I tweeted turned out not to be something you were very interested in but you have a lot of followers yourself, what are the odds that your other followers would also not find it interesting to read?

I’m curious to understand when people retweet articles:

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

That’s right, I have to admit that I hardly ever retweet any article myself! Personally I behave simply like the person having tweet scrolling by all day, only looking at them occasionally and always late so I often feel the news value is probably long gone. I don’t follow too many friends on Twitter and a vast majority of the tweets I see coming by seem to be marketing pitches by people I hardly know for articles that somewhat interest me but most often not too much.

This is somewhat different on Facebook. I feel facebook has a much higher social aspect to it as the ‘friending’ is based on mutual agreement. While sharing some articles on Facebook I’ve found a puzzling situation. Friends may click on the link to my article but there’s frequently very little feedback, nor is there a lot of sharing. To me this may mean a number of things:

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Interestingly enough my own answers included only ‘When I think it can make my friends laugh’ or ‘When it has news value’. So my own sharing behaviour is much like what I’m observing from other people. After all that’s what friends do I guess, sharing laughs and sharing news. Could it be that people are not eager to share knowledge? After all, for finding knowledge we have Google, right? Well that’s my personal method at least.

Sustained Wonders

So based on the above, reaching some further level of compensation in the way of getting more people to read my own and other authors articles, perhaps sharing articles through social media may not be the best way unless:

• I believe humans have a born-in desire to cooperate, to share and to help.

This does not only apply to friends but in it’s essence I believe this is one of the fundamental things that make us human. A certain born-in desire to show off may also have something to do with it, see above where I say that “it is fun to write articles many people like to read”. So what about you?

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Well let’s make sure that everybody understand this; sharing helps! I just realized this as I looked through the Google analytics data for the 3DN Technology Blog. In Google Analytics you can look at the ‘Traffic Sources Report’. It essentially keeps track of which websites people come from to your site. It then keeps track of how many pages people coming from a site view, how long they’re on your site on average, how often they return to your site etc. I’ve analyzed visitors coming from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google:

	Pages/visit	Avg. Time on Site	% New visits	Bounce Rate
Facebook	4.94	10:14	19.69%	37.80%
Twitter	1	00:00	72.7%	100%
Linkedin	2.17	01:19	89.36%	68.9%
Google	1.69	01:29	86.15%	76.92%
Slashdot	1.11	00:20	98.62%	85.5%

I’ve highlighted the most important numbers I wanted to share. The pages/visit and the average time on the site for facebook guests is by far the highest (and should be the most interesting to most webmasters I believe) for facebook friends. I could think of many reasons why facebook friends look at relatively many pages. Perhaps it is because they’re my friends after all and quite likely to have similar interests; this seems to fall a little flat given the linkedin statistics as some articles have been placed in linkedin forums that were really highly selective of the subject. Perhaps it’s because friends would like to figure out what I’m up to so they start clicking on some more articles to find out; This is quite possible as most of the articles on the 3DN Technology Blog at this point are written by me and sharing of my article by my friends to their friends may not result in a similar outcome.

Participation

One of the things that puzzle me is that so few people seem to have anything to say about the things I write. While this may be because I tend to write rather long and sometimes quite complex articles this isn’t always the case. Sometimes I share small news blurbs through facebook and people react on the link shared on facebook. Frequently people do not sign up as users on the 3DN Technology Blog, I am curious for the reason:

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

I’m also not sure whether people signing up and reacting on the articles on the blog would actually increase people’s attention span in a positive way. I would like to do an experiment though. If you are a facebook friend reading this article I will assume you’re one of those people that reads on average 5 pages per visit. Please sign up as it’s particularly easy for you to do (simply go to the login page and click on facebook login button). After you have signed up, click around on the site and see if there’s any article you would like to react to or if you see reactions from others you’d like to react to. I have noticed on facebook before that there is not a whole lot of reacting going on, frequently people simply read stuff their friends post but not a whole lot of interaction is going on. Obviously this has not changed Facebook’s success much (Previous research has shown that what people do most often on facebook is to look at each other’s pictures) so I’m wondering how several people participating in this experiment might change the above statistics.

Of course I hope you’ve been able to read this rather long post so far