I’ve experimented with basically all of these buttons and the results have never been impressive.  The TweetMeme button didn’t increase traffic from Twitter, the Facebook share button didn’t boost traffic from Facebook, and the dynamic StumbleUpon button didn’t alter traffic from StumbleUpon.  The thing that matters most is content.

Nobody reads something boring, sees the a big button, then decides, “Oh, maybe I should share this.”  They make the decision to share independently; the size of the button doesn’t matter.  And even if the button is so awesome it converts your readers to Twitter users, so what?  A tweet from a Twitter newb is worthless.  You need tweets from people with followers.  You need Ashton Kutcher.  And @aplusk is only going to find you if you have good content … or pics of his wife.

photo credit: magerleagues

What do these buttons add to your page?  Well, they add to the load time.  Combined, the Facebook Share button along with the big TweetMeme button appear to add 0.8-1.1 seconds to page load times.  That’s terrible.  This blog has used the great SexyBookmarks plugin for nearly a year now.  It’s been great — and fast.  Consolidating your share buttons to one provider (like AddThis or ShareThis) will improve performance too, because you’ll cut down on your third-party requests (pinging just AddThis instead of AddThis, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.).

So skip the big buttons and focus on good content.  If you have something to say and it resonates with your readers, they’ll share it regardless of your social media button strategy.

photo credit: Phil Oakley

I put a dirty fix in place Sunday evening — I tracked down the PHP function that inserted the unnecessary class and removed that part of the code.  No class name, no issues.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t in the theme’s code — it was in the guts of WordPress (making future upgrades a little more difficult).  I knew there was a better way to do it, but it was late and my brain was fried.

When I woke up the next day, I realized the fix while laying in bed listening to my alarm.  I added new styles for the body tag with !important declarations — something another Arras user had mentioned, but something I had issues with Sunday.  Instead of trying to track down where each of the body tag style properties were conditionally injected based on the page type, I just added new body tag styling into the CSS that would be applied to every page type.  We wanted this style to be applied everywhere anyway, so it didn’t need to be conditionally smart.  A good night of sleep made me realize that nuance.   The fix was now simple.

Here’s what fixes the Arras / WordPress 3.0 issue:

body {background-color: #070A1D !important; padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important; border: 0 !important; }

Web usage with bandwidth included.

Oh, the web is alive, gents.  Enjoy your iPads.

UPDATE: Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing had the same reaction, and his graph is cooler: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.html

1) Zero technology costs

FlyoverGeeks.com, like recently launched sites Mediaite.com and TheSmokingJacket.com, uses WordPress.  It’s a smart CMS for online publishers and allows for a lot of flexibility and power.  Online publishing is a crowded market, and sites shouldn’t handicap themselves with high technological overhead.  The competition is using free tools to effectively compete with big sites like CNN and NYTimes.com.  Newcomers need to utilize these tools too.  Sure the costs aren’t truly zero, but they’re pretty damn close.  Excess technological overhead cannot be tolerated if you expect to compete with sites that spend nearly nothing.

2) Targeted content and audience

Like Mediaite.com and TheSmokingJacket.com, FlyoverGeeks.com addresses a specific need.  Founder Edward Domain noticed the vacuum of coverage for non-New York and non-California tech news and is attempting to fill the void with FlyoverGeeks.com.  And he’s got a good point — tech companies like Groupon, Interactive Mediums, and 37signals are just a few of the flyover state superstars that should be getting more press.

3) Social and mobile integration

Twitter, Facebook, and user-generated traffic are the current big sources of readers.  FlyoverGeeks.com is smartly linked into those channels.  And thanks to the WPTouch WordPress plugin, mobile traffic doesn’t get screwed — it gets embraced.  Smartphone users spend tons of times on social sites, and when these socially savvy visitors read FlyoverGeeks.com, they’ll have a great, mobile-optimized experience.

Cheers, Flyover Geeks!  You’ve got a smart setup and clever plan, now it’s just a matter of keeping the content flowing.  Best of luck.

Responding To A Need & Exploiting A Byproduct

With no market, a user-generated site can’t succeed. A ghost-town community is not a path to success. However, Boing Boing reports that they were already receiving HUNDREDS of submissions a day using their old submission process. Making these submissions public makes a lot of sense. Rework, my favorite business book, preaches openness. Every process has a byproduct, and exploiting your byproducts is savvy business.

photo credit: eutrophication&hypoxia

Serving An Established Community

There’s a saying in the wine business that if you want to make a small fortune making wine, it’s best to start with a large one. That’s true here too. Boing Boing is a very successful blog. They have a great site and a lot of people read it daily. Compete pegs them around 2M monthly uniques. Impressive. By leveraging this large user base, they may be able to make the thing fly.  Build it without this, and nobody might come.

Financed Through Advertising

And the genius continues. It sounds like Boing Boing financed much of the work through their ‘launch partner’ — Zinc from American Express. Smart! And they did it with a team of two – Dean Putney, a developer, and Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing’s managing editor. That’s some seriously low overhead — low enough where the AMEX deal may have covered the entire cost. User-generated content typically earns the industry’s lowest RPMs. Launching with AMEX as a partner surely helped mitigate this.

Still, it’s an uphill battle. Their introductory post has generated 4 Facebook shares. That’s pretty pathetic. Their follow-up post has done even worse. Meanwhile, at Google News, a search for ‘Boing Boing Submitterator’ generates 0 results (zero!) – that’s not a lot of media buzz. While it’ll be fun to watch what happens, it’s still a tough time to enter the user-generated content field. If only it was 2005 again.

photo credit: Nevada Tumbleweed

Enter: Pligg

Pligg is a very cool open-source social CMS.  Unlike WordPress that focuses mainly on original content and blog publishing, Pligg was designed to be much more social, much more like Digg.  There’s commenting, link submissions, and voting.  And it’s free.  They charge a fee for modules that add more complex layers of functionality.  I stumbled across it a few months ago and have been wanting to try it since.

How Long Does It Take To Copy Digg?

Well, I started around 8:30AM.  I removed everything from the current site directory — for a period of time, visitors would have issues.   DreamHost, my hosting provider, provides one-click installs, so I clicked and they installed Pligg.  At around 8:35, I had the site installed and looking very generic.  For the next hour or so, I modified the theme a bit, added an ad slot, tweaked the URLs to make them more SEO friendly, and added Google Analytics.  It went pretty smoothly because I had played around with a test install over the weekend.  I was 98% complete by 9:30AM — 1 hour later.  Check it out here.

Where Will I Get Content?  Where Will I Get Users?

Pligg allows you to feed RSS feeds automatically into the system.  I’m doing that with a number of feeds (note: you have to copy the module that does this from version 1.0.1, because it’s not included in the current install).  This creates SEO-friendly pages ready to be indexed by Google.  Hopefully, these search-friendly pages bring in more organic traffic than I was seeing before. And hopefully, Sarah Palin and political content continue to engage people on web.  We’ll see.

What’s next?

There are a few things I could do to tweak my Pligg site.  I’m not thrilled about the entire design.  I could add a few more ad slots.  There’s a bug in the URL rewriter that I could track down.  I’m not going to tackle any of those things … yet.  I’m going to see if this has any legs first before I invest additional time.  I’ll know more in a few days.

This is a tricky problem. Online realtime streams can only of course be downloaded as fast as your broadband connection and the content provider allows, so it’s impossible to fast forward beyond the latest downloaded (and transcoded) point in the media. It’s analogous to watching a live broadcast with a DVR — pausing and rewinding work fine, but fast forwarding can never go beyond “right now”. Additionally, many of the devices aren’t set up very well to handle when the intermediary end of the media stream is reached. In these cases, they may just give up, and exit playback with an obscure error, instead of waiting and buffering. In any case, we are working on solutions and improvements to this issue, but it’s technically very challenging.

And yeah, it’s a tricky problem, if you’re trying to make it work as fast forward.  But if you just make the progress bar work — a feature of every media player — you solve the problem.

photo credit: Newhaircut

Here’s what happens whenever I try to watch a Hell’s Kitchen episode on PlayOn: I watch the first 20 minutes on my TV, something happens and the image stalls, I monkey with my Wii and my laptop, PlayOn gives up so I restart the video, I can’t fast forward, and I end up watching the last 20 minutes on my laptop.  And I can watch the last 20 minutes on my laptop because I can click the damn progress bar.  I can start watching at minute 21.  Implement that, PlayOn.

photo credit: blmurch

User generated content was the web’s first big take on user generated traffic.  The Digg model harnessed its reader to bring traffic to the site and it was wildly popular … in 2005.  The web has evolved since then.  Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter took the successes of Digg and abstracted them further.  Discussion on the web could now happen in the reader’s own social sphere instead of the inside the greater Digg community.  This was a huge shift and is now a pain-point for sites like Digg.

Sites like Mashable, CollegeHumor.com, FunnyOrDie.com, and BuzzFeed are the new revolutionaries.  Mashable is very systematic and successful at covering socially-viral stories.  CollegeHumor.com and FunnyOrDie.com make a business of creating viral videos.  They’ve figured out what it takes to replicate viral content successes on the internet … and they don’t need small-time UGC sites to get exposure.  CollegeHumor.com’s CEO even went so far as to say that the myth of users generating good content is the biggest myth of the internet.  Meanwhile, BuzzFeed automates their viral coverage through their widgets — rendering the concept of pushing a button to ‘Digg’ something entirely useless and quaint.

So what’s going to happen to ispotastory.com?  If they can climb up the radar a bit, maybe they’ll get bought by Reddit, but I don’t think that’s likely.  Hopefully it’s a site built to serve a passion and the team has a wildly fun time giving it a go on the internet.  Best of luck.