Robert Scoble, Hugh McLeod and Stowe Boyd during the B5 Advisory Board Q&A

One day before the official Blog Word Expo started, B5 Media – one of the largest blog networks in the world – was running a training day for their bloggers, titled B5 Blogger Summit, that was opened up to any BWE registrants that wanted to attend.  Needless to say that I did not want to miss this great opportunity to get blogging tips from the pros and get to know the people behind this rapidly expanding blog network in person.

In the hindsight I have to say that it was totally worth to take this additional day off and travel to Las Vegas already on Thursday night in order to be fresh and ready for the first session on Friday at 9 AM. Here’s why:

Not only did l learn how big B5 Media has become (300+ blogs, 200 bloggers and 10 million unique visitors per month) during the workshop, but I also got great tips (sometimes new, sometimes familiar) about a wide range of blogging topics, such as Search Engine Optimization, interview techniques, increase readership, image and social media use.

One of my personal highlights of the day was the Q&A with three members of the advisory board of B5 Media, Robert Scoble, Hugh McLeod and Stowe Boyd (Doc Searls and Renee Blodgett were missing). Their chat about how the internet has changed and affected their lives, blogging, Twitter, Friendfeed and other internet trends was both very informative and highly entertaining.

Another personal highlight for me was to listen to Darren Rowse’s fantastic session titled “how to finder readers for your blog”, but also to personally meet him and do a little interview with him. I will cover his presentation and publish the 5 minute video of my conversation with him in two separate posts.

Stay tuned!

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]]> http://www.blogonomist.com/links-for-2008-07-03/feed/ 0 http://www.blogonomist.com/the-top-10-media-properties-in-the-usa/ http://www.blogonomist.com/the-top-10-media-properties-in-the-usa/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:53:40 +0000 Marc Baumann http://www.blogonomist.com/?p=256 Well, I always liked Top 10 list about the media industry. According to Silicon Insider, these are the 10 biggest media properties in the USA:

1. 1. Google: 128 million unique visitors
2. 2. Microsoft: 123 million
3. 3. Yahoo: 116 million
4. 4. Time Warner: 108 million
5. 5. News Corp.: 79 million
6. 6. eBay: 66 million
7. 7. InterActiveCorp.: 65 million
8. 8. Wikimedia Foundation: 57 million
9. 9. Amazon: 55 million
10. 10. NBC Universal: 51.2 million (estimated unduplicated audience after Weather.com acquisition)

Mmmh.. very interesting. In the ‘old days’ there were only traditional conglomerates like Time Warner and Disney on this list. Now you’ll notice online retailers like Amazon, auction platform eBay and open source encyclopedia Wikipedia. By the way: Where is Disney? Also noteworthy: With the acquisition of Weather.com, NBC will push the New York Times, the largest newspaper company on the Web, off the list…

I usually ask back: Well, doesn’t your marketing department promote your newspaper in ads, TV commercials and on billboards? Are you sure that’s well spent money in the digital age? And why shouldn’t you spend your advertising money where the eyeballs of your readers are – the world wide web?

Conversations like these remind me of what Marshall Simmonds, Vice President of Search Engine Marketing at the New York Times, told the audience at the “Search Engine Conference” in San Jose in 2006. A great article on Search Engine Watch summarized his experience to teach the (old-fashioned) journalists at the Times SEO as follows:

The newsroom, however, is an uphill battle. A prime example is the evolution of headlines, which itself earned a dedicated New York Times article ‘This Boring Headline is Written for Google.’ For Simmonds, this means explaining consumer speak and search patterns on a daily basis. “It isn’t ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven’, but a ‘Treo 700,” he said. The newsroom doesn’t always take such advice kindly. “They will be damned if you will teach them how to write. They see the writing on the wall and they see where it is going,” he concluded.<

The New York Times is not only the best newspaper in the world, but it also understood the importance of Search Engine Optimization way before their competitors. Thanks to Simmonds.

According to Search Engine Watch, “the audience quickly learned that Simmonds is not only a search expert, but something of a change management guru. His ability to overcome ego and cut through old school turf wars has become one of the greatest case studies in search engine marketing.”

The changes have been indeed significant: In order to be indexed by the search engines with its entire content, the NYT opened the archives, got rid of a online subscription model and also made the op-eds of their ’star’ commentators Friedman, Dowd, Rich etc. accessible to everybody, improved the internal linking structure and added bottoms for social bookmarking (Digg, Facebook, Mixx, Yahoo Buzz), among others.

The result is evident: The New York Times (as well as About) has experienced an impressing increase in visitors from search – a stunning 108% growth in the last 12 months alone (see chart above).

With its early adoption and these improvement – does it mean NYT is the SEO king among the newspaper in the U.S.?

Answer: It depends. A quick keyword research I did shows that the paper is number one in the Google SERPs for search terms like “breakings news New York”, “find newspaper article online” and article newspaper technology”, but only ranks in the Top 10 for (crucial, I think) keywords like his home turfin

If I would would just search for “news” (search volume: 637319, according to Keyword Discovery) – which of the major news companies outperform their competitors.

Here is the Top 10 list:

1. CNN
2. MSNBC
3. Google News
4. Fox News
5. ABC News
6. Yahoo News
7. Cnet News
8. CBS News
9. NEW YORK TIMES
10. USA Today

P.S. As the description of this blog indicates, I am very passionate about topics at the intersection of Journalism and Search Engine Optimization. I believe that it is crucial for “Old Media” to incorporate SEO into their online strategy in order to survive and be successful (again) in the digital age. To be continued…

I had to really laugh out loud when I found this great blog post on Daily Candor about the characteristics of all the different Europeans and what they think of each other – a “basic backgrounder for Americans”, as the author describes it. Here’s a little excerpt of some of Europe’s nationalities:

The French
Disliked by some Spanish (particularly the Catalonians), for being arrogant. One woman from Barcelona told me, “Come on, who really likes the French? Nobody!” The Swiss don’t like the fact that they have contempt for authority and are lazy.

The Belgians
Considered idiots by both the Dutch and the French. Belgians, in turn, consider the Dutch to be a bunch of cranky assholes, and French stuck-up.

I can only say – it’s all true! And being a native Swiss, there must be a reason why I relocated to the United States long time ago…

Yes, it’s true that young people are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are “expert searchers.” In fact, the report calls this “a dangerous myth.”But these are some truths about the “Google generation”, according to the report:

• They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
• They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
• They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”

Does that mean they don’t care about copyrights, get easily bored about lengthy investigative magazine articles and suffer from ADD big time?? Well, somehow I expected a little bit more. Good news: We, the “older people” (meaning over 30), still have some chances to compete in the digital age….

- With 20 billion to 35 billion worldwide searches in 2006/2007, search growth is as strong as ever. (Via ClickZ)

- Google remained in the top spot for search queries in the United States, accounted for 64.49 percent of all searches (Hitwise)

- More than $14 billion has been spent online during the holiday season-to-date – a 17 percent gain compared with the corresponding days last year. (via MarketingVox)

- Nearly 400 million Google search referrals are to its own multimedia properties. (via ClickZ)

- Local search is expected to grow from rougly $2.5 billion today to $5 billion in 2008. (via SearchEngineLand).

- In the third quarter of this year, more than one of four clicks on ads running on content networks like Google’s AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network was fraudulent. (via Mediapost)

- The caches of major search engines are still providing a safe hiding place for malicious code. (Computerworld)

- Google will very soon begin treating subdomains not as separate domains, but the same as subdirectories. (via Webmasterworld)

- Search Engines can help you to find a “dead” spouse. (via SearchEngineLand)

- And last, but not least: Larry Page, the world’s only remaining bachelor Google billionaire, is getting married today. (via ABC News)

Congratulations, Larry! Hope your first child will have cute googly eyes!

• Internet access across the EU is increasing, with 54 per cent of households having access of some sort, compared 49 per cent last year.
• The highest proportions of households with internet access were recorded in the nordic countries: Netherlands (83%), Sweden (79%) and Denmark (78%).
• The UK, usually know as internet savvy and technologically advanced, is trailing the Nordic leader with 67%.
• 57% of individuals had used internet search engines.
• 50% had sent e-mails with attachments.
• 30% said they kept viruses and spyware off their computers.
• 25% of individuals had taken part in chatrooms, newsgroups or online discussions.
• 15% had used the internet to make phone calls.
• Peer to peer file sharing for exchange of movies and music had been used by 13%.
• Only 10% had created a web page.

Despite the fact that most of these numbers are lower than the ones in the United States, this study proves that internet access is gradually extending across the 27 states of the European Union – especially broadband connections have risen sharply.

• Three quarters of U.S. Internet users, or about 120 million people, have used engines, searching an average of 38 times a month.
• As a business, search brought in $4 billion in sales last year, and will become a bigger cash cow as its power and influence grows.
• Microsoft found that people search an average of 11 minutes before they find what they are looking for.
• The first search engine was created in 1990 by a college student in Montreal and named “Archie” — a variation on the word archive. There wasn’t even much of a Web at that point, and Archie was mainly used to dig through public file-exchange sites.
• Google is the most popular engine today, home to 35 percent of Web searches. It receives hundreds of millions of requests every day.
• Google hit the $1 billion quarterly sales mark in 2004, just five years after its official launch.
• Search engines are going after more eyeballs by adding their own content, and now offer users street maps, phone numbers, weather forecasts and even answers to algebra problems. Many also offer separate search-based shopping and news services.
• Web users add more public information daily. A group of University of California researchers estimated the size of the public Web at least tripled from 2000 to 2003, when it contained 167 terabytes of data. That’s equal to about 560,000 sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Experts say the search technology will jump digital boundaries from the browser to other platforms. Its next stop is the cellphone; in the future, television.