Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

New Jersey Marketing Consultants Offer Real Support for Webmasters

Let’s face it: It’s extremely difficult to build your website’s brand in a sea of websites that make-up the Internet. As your website grows, there will probably come a time when you’ll need to engage the services of a professional offering consulting Internet marketing services.

The problem with that is, most of the so-called SEO/Internet marketing pros online often turn-out to be some guy who lives in his grandmother’s basement who maybe read a book, took a seminar, or perused Google’s own support page. In other words, they don’t have the bone fides to back-up their rhetoric when it comes to navigating Web 2.0. Thankfully, there is one company (that happens to be located in my own neck of the woods) — Reciprocal Consulting. Reciprocal Consulting, formerly Foreman & Pike Consulting, is a company made-up of serious IT professionals with solid track record for success. With over twenty years experience in Information Technology and with employees who bring with them knowledge from many areas including webdesign, telecommunications, Internet and traditional marketing, webmasters will find that both their brand and their reputations are in good hands. They offer services ranging from pay-per-click management and search-engine-optimization to social networking optimization and competative marketing intelligence.

Sometimes Online Fiction is the Pits

I recently received review requests from a couple fiction sites — one is a blog (well . . . 3 blogs, actually, but we’ll get to that in a bit), and the other is a new writing community site.

The idea of using hypertext as a tool for storytelling is nothing new. In the pre-blog era, lots of literary ezines tried it in both fiction and poetry. For a few years, it was quite a fad — that is, until the editors figured out that it was a useless gimmick that didn’t really add value to work they were presenting to the public. Don’t get me wrong, hypertext has it’s uses and can be quite an asset when presenting certain kinds of information online, but for the fiction genre, it’s rather impractical.

It was probably inevitable that once blogs caught-on, bloggers would start to use the blog platform for purposes other than what the blog was initially intended for. Lately, there has been an explosion of online novels on blogs all over the place. I pass no judgement on whether or not this is a good thing or not. Other than acknowledging that blogs will continue to be showcases for budding novelists on into the future, I cannot honestly say whether or not this is the best way to publish fiction. I suppose if authors use it as a promotional tool with an eye towards achieving print publication in book form and cultivating a built-in market for that book, it could be a good thing. If it’s peddled as a new “thing-in-and-of-itself” genre, it will probably be written-off as a fad and go the way of the Edsel much like the hypertext ezines of Web 1.0 did in the 90’s.

Lethe Bashar: A Novel of Life
Which brings us to Chris Al Aswad’s Lethe Bashar: A Novel of Life. The novel is presented in a serialized format with the beginning, middle and end on three separate websites. First, let me say that I think Mr. Al Aswad isn’t a bad writer — probably young and certainly not all that experienced, but not without potential. With some sound editing (and some running blog commentary that didn’t smack of asshole-licking) his novel might even be publishable beyond the posting of his blogs. But, whether or not he’s the second coming of Charles Dickens is neither here nor there for the purpose of this discussion. The real question is, does Mr. Al Aswad present his novel in a consistent, useable format that can appeal to a wide audience. Does he understand the Internet and how people access information? Honestly, there are things he does well and things he doesn’t do so well.

The biggest problem I had with this thing is the fact that the novel is posted on three separate blogs (and yet another, fourth site, which introduces and links to the 3 blogs — Jesus fucking Christ, man. Enough already!). Why? What’s the point? It makes no sense to do this. It’s an interesting experiment, I suppose, if your purpose is to artificially generate page views, but if the point is to engage readers in your story, why frustrate them by forcing them to jump around so much? I’m betting that for every unique visitor he attracts he’s losing a 100 potential readers. Afterall, the story is not being told out of sequence, so why present it as if it were? This strategy can force a lot of page views between the 3 blogs, sure . . . but in the long run it does little to grow the number of unique visitors and build a real market for your novel. Here’s a thought: serialize the story on a weekly basis on a single blog. Update the page the same day of the week and use social networking and an email newsletter to promote new posts. Use those 2 other blogs to blog about something else if you must maintain them at all. You can still use hypertext to link readers to older posts, but within a single blog those links would serve a practical purpose rather than merely being a gimmick to force page views.

I did appreciate how the author used digital photography and artwork to highlight his story, however. It is both timely and appropriate with respect to the story he’s telling. I’m certain that combining the visuals with some judicious copyediting and a single blog strategy would greatly improve the presentation of this thing.

StoryPit.com
And that brings us to StoryPit.com — apparently a writing community site. I say, “apparently” because this thing is still in beta, doesn’t appear to have any members actually posting stories and it’s design is, shall we say, skeletal at best. And in looking at it’s style and presentation it does look like a throwback to Web 1.0. It’s just an ugly and incomplete site. It’s akin to being invited to a big, lavish casino and promised unlimited chips only to find a big fucking crater in the middle of a desert where the casino was supposed to be. My question is, even if this site were in a more finished state of development, is it really a necessary site for writers? When there are so many community sites and blogs to post one’s writing, what’s the big draw of a site like StoryPit.com? Honestly, if you happen to be a good writer, you’d do yourself more good in the long run going through the process of submitting your scribblings to legitimate publications where there’s an editor and an editorial process. Barring that, you could sign-up for a free blog account and post your stuff to your heart’s content. And with a community site like, say, Helium.com, you at least get a small cut of the ad revenues. Why StoryPit.com? Until the creators can really answer that question to my satisfaction, I couldn’t possibly recommend it.

The Twit Who Sat On My Face

Over at Twittip.com there’s a post that’s stirring-up a lively discussion: “The Misunderstood Uses of Twitter and Facebook: Are you a friend, follower or a fool?” The post’s author’s premise is this:

— Facebook’s main purpose centers on furthering and cultivating relationships with already established friends

— Twitter’s main purpose centers on social networking (meeting people across the world with similar interests)

This blogger further says that “when [he thinks] of Facebook and Twitter, [he thinks] of Preparation-H and toothpaste. Both are quality products. Both have their uses; but Preparation-H, like Twitter, is only needed at a certain point in life.”

On the surface, the analogy makes sense. It seems fairly obvious that Facebook and Twitter go about the business of “friend-building” differently. I think the analogy misses something important, however. It’s an apple ‘n’ oranges comparison and, while apples and oranges are both kinds of fruit, they are fruit of a different tree. But those two trees do share a common root. If you look at social networking generically as a form of communication, then the only thing separating one form from another is the speed with which one is able to communicate and process that information. On one end of the spectrum you’d have human thought and on the slowest end, you’d have a handwritten letter. It would probably look something like this:

Letter-email-blog-Facebook-Twitter-IM/chat-cellphone-conversation-thought
<<--slowest/highly organized/more intimate -------fast/less organized/less intimate-------fastest/least organized/more intimate)-->>

As such, if you are looking at “social networking” as a means for “making friends,” the whole argument becomes absurd because the very nature of the technology is that you are trading coherent organization and real intimacy for speed and efficiency of communication. Now, this is not to say you can’t make real friends online — it’s just more accurate to acknowledge that friendship building, to the extent that it does occur, is an added benefit of social networking and not the primary function of using tools like Twitter or Facebook. No, social networking is all about self-promotion: yourself, your business, your ideas, your blog, delivering your point-of-view to individuals in short bursts of information — individuals who hopefully share an interest in what you’re selling. It might actually be more accurate to call this process “information trafficking” rather than “social networking,” because meaningful person-to-person networking is still primarily face-to-face spoken communication, whereas ideas and information are still primarily distributed through written communication, psuedo-conversational mediums such as Twitter or blogs notwithstanding.

While it’s certainly nice to connect with or reconnect with an old friend and it’s nice also to make new friends, I have no illusions as to why I belong to social networking communities or the “need” for Twitter. Twitter isn’t so much a community unto itself as it is a tool to traverse the space between other communities. For example, I have accounts with both MySpace and Facebook. While I’ve found some overlap between the two sites, for the most part, my friends on MySpace don’t go on Facebook and vica versa. What I’ve discovered is that there is more overlap between Twitter and every community I am involved with than with MySpace and Facebook alone, so Twitter is like a bridge between them. And while I’ve only recently started tweeting, I do see a time when I will get much more use out of it than I do presently because the funny thing about technology is that when it ceases to be a mere tool and becomes a “lifestyle,” it trends toward becoming absolutely necessary.