Day: May 7, 2005

Traffic patterns verify the benefit of posting early and often again and again, but interesting to see how Nick Denton quantifies it for his Gawker employees in the course of this NYTimes story where Denton once again tries to de-bunk the hype circle he’s earned (created?).

Each editor is under contract to post 12 times a day for a flat fee, Mr. Steele said. (Gawker has two editors and now posts 24 times a day.) It is best to have eight posts up before noon, if possible, to keep readers coming back, he said.

There a few other cites worth noting, like this one:

[Denton] seems to recognize that he is not up to anything particularly trailblazing, and that it’s only a matter of time before others catch on.

And Kinja will get more attention, it seems.

He also plans to reintroduce Gawker’s “blog of blogs,” called Kinja – a service that even Mr. Denton says was rather badly deployed and even more awkwardly explained in its original form. A team of programmers has been working for the last two years to revamp the service, which allows users to explore and scan their favorite blogs in one place. The new version will be ready in about a month.

On the details side… maybe I haven’t been reading NYTimes.com often enough recently, but do all their articles now have lots of in-body links? This article did, and I thought that was remarkably rare, even now. Was there a shift some time ago and I missed it, or is this just (astutely) employed for a few specific stories where the lack of links would be especially noticeable? I don’t have comments or trackback enabled right now (boring story), so e-mail me if you know more. I also notice that the NYTimes now has (I think) better next/previous links for their multi-page stories. Relatively small changes, but an improvement nonetheless.

Seth Godin identifies a new digital divide, between the digerati and those who follow. Based on his criteria I qualify… should I be proud? More important question: are the digerati as influential as those of us in the echochamber all like to imagine?

As a result, your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion’s new policies. Because the Net is now a broadcast (and a narrowcast) medium, the digerati can spread ideas.

Does this ideavirus (to use Godin’s term) truly spread beyond the echochamber? There is evidence aplenty that the media is paying attention, whether they are part of the mix or not, so the ideas probably do get more than their fair share of ink/pixels/decibels. But how much transfer really goes on? It’s a critical question when you’re designing services right now. Aim for the leaders, or just a bit behind them? The former is more fun, but getting to the right place too early doesn’t work, necessarily — though being there too late serves no purpose whatsoever. Anyway, answering the question of which customers matter fascinates me.