When everybody is talking and blogging about something I usually don’t overpost on the matter. It is not worth it as if you are reading more than five blogs you will inevitably get the news.

So everybody is going crazy over Seth Godin’s latest move – an ebook about blogs – but this time it is too good to pass. You have to download the thing (it is free) and read. Don’t get scared by the falsely high number of pages, it is packed with unforgettable quotes and must read advices.

The third kind of blog is the kind most people imagine when they talk about blogs. […] These are the blogs that are changing the face of marketing, journalism and the spread of ideas. I want to call these VIRAL BLOGS.

They’re viral blogs because the goal of the blog is to spread ideas. Why? Lots of reasons—to get consulting work, to change the outcome of an election, to find new customers for a business or to make it easier for existing customers to feel good about staying.

The math behind viral blogs is astonishing. One person, $20 a month and an audience of several hundred thousand people! Even better, a viral blog stuffed with good ideas is going to influence millions of people who never even read the original.

Seth comes up with a set of laws:

FIRST LAW: It’s not who you are, it’s what you say
Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact, an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of spreading.

SECOND LAW: Actually, it doesn’t matter what you say, it matters who you are
And so the bloggers who have earned the asset of a following are more likely to spread spreadable ideas, which of course further reinforces their position at the top of the pyramid.
For a while.
Because if those bloggers get lazy or stupid or selfish, their audience will flee.

I could copy paste quotes and quotes. It’s not worth it. Go read the book. Now!

After wondering how I should be doing links I am now brainstorming on what is the optimal pace of publication on a blog. Here are observations after 5 years of reading blogs:

With RSS, dilettante bloggers are not penalized anymore
It does not bother me that John Udell or Euan Semple only post once in a while as I am warned by my RSS reader every time they publish. I don’t end up going to their site just to find that nothing has changed since my last visit.

You read 5 posts, you scan 20
When my reader announces more than a certain number of elements I have some internal alarm going on. I have a certain time I can dedicate to reading blogs, and if I fear a particuar site is going to take me over my limit I enter scan mode. Scan mode is very different from read mode. You check the headers, rarely go into the post itself. A very thin part of the information actually gets to you. I could not tell you where exactly that limit is, but it is probably around 7 or 8 posts a day from the same person.

Breaks are no problem
I don’t mind bloggers that stop writing for a while. Actually I sometimes enjoy a break as most of my readings are work related. If Robert Scoble could take more vacations I wouldn’t mind because I would feel less guilt when, coming back from four days off work, I discard the certainly interesting 80+ posts he wrote during that time span. Maybe Bill G. can help on this.

One 10 lines post is better than five 2 lines posts
On a blog every post is a different story, so when you switch from one to another you have to do some “mental rebooting” (that would do a nice conference name for sure). You get out of the previous story and into the next one. This particular task is indeed an effort for readers, so grouping your says as much as you can is a good thing. Interestingly journalists that blog seem to do that better than anyone else, as you can see with Emmanuelle or Paul Mason.

After considering all this I think that the perfect rhythm is probably around 1-3 posts par days, 5 days a week. So people can follow you, read all your posts, and don’t come monday morning at the office with 30 posts to catch up with. What do you think?

Après mes questions sur la meilleure façon de faire des liens me voici face à une autre interrogation de taille : quel est le bon rythme d’écriture sur un blog?

En cinq ans de lecture j’ai fais les constats suivants:

On lit 5 billets, on en scanne 20
Les bloggeurs qui produisent plus de 10 entrées par jour me forcent à les lire en diagonale. Je ne lis pas vraiment, je scanne et c’est une façon totalement différente d’aborder l’information. N’est-ce pas monsieur Nova et ses journées à 30 posts? J’ai du mal à définir une limite au delà de laquelle je me dis il y a trop d’informations, je n’ai pas le temps mais ça doit être autour des 8 ou 9 éléments.

Poster très rarement n’est plus un problème depuis le RSS
Maintenant que j’utilise bloglines ça ne me dérange pas que Jean-Pierre Cloutier, John Udell ou Euan Semple ne postent que tous les trois ou quatre jours car je n’ai plus à aller sur leur site pour savoir s’ils ont publié de nouveaux billets. Mon lecteur RSS m’avertit quand les choses changent. La frustration de retourner sur un site qui n’a pas changé depuis la dernière visite n’existe plus.

Les pauses ne sont pas un problème
Les pauses de quelques jours ne me dérangent pas. Vous ne postez rien pendant quelques jours ou deux semaines de vacances? Aucun problème, je ne vais pas écrire à votre maman pour savoir ce qu’il se passe comme c’est arrivé à Loic Le Meur. De nouveau, le RSS fait que ça ne me pose pas de problèmes.

1 billet de 10 lignes vaut mieux que 5 billets de 2 lignes
Sur un blog chaque billet est une histoire différente. Il faut en quelques sortes se vider la tête de ce qu’on a lu précédemment et entrer dans un nouvel univers. Ce n’est pas difficile du tout, mais ça demande un petit peu d’énergie et c’est pourquoi il est à mon avis bien plus simple de lire un long billet que dix billets courts. Il faut essayer de regrouper ses dires. Les bloggeurs issus du journalisme comme Manue, Paul Mason ou Jean-Pierre Cloutier ont tendance à fonctionner comme ça, en concevant leurs interventions comme des longs métrages plutôt qu’un zapping de minis sujets.

Pour moi le rythme idéal se situe autour des 1 à 3 posts par jour, 5 jours par semaine. Comme ça les gens peuvent lire plutôt que scanner. Et c’est pas mal de faire une pause de temps en temps, histoire d’éviter que les lecteurs se retrouvent le lundi matin avec 30 billets de retard. Qu’en pensez-vous?

Puisqu’on parle de Dean Allen, il vient de lancer la nouvelle version de TextPattern (une application php/mySql de blogging très légère et rapide) que vous pouvez télécharger par ici.

Today is the Dean Allen festival on ballpark (no I don’t get paid for that). Just a quick note to link to the latest version of textpattern – v4.0 – offering some security improvements among other things. Download it here.

Personne ne va jamais remplacer le New York Times ou le Washington Post car ces institutions ont à disposition des ressources qu’aucun bloggeur ou groupe de bloggeurs n’aura jamais.

Une réflexion intéressante sur l’avenir des grands médias. Mais je ne partage pas du tout ce point de vue. De quelles ressources parle-t-il? D’argent pour voyager? Mais pourquoi voyager quand on peut avoir des dizaines de blogger qui collaborent sur la même histoire d’endroits différents? De temps? Mais les millions de bloggers auront toujours plus de temps que les milliers de journalistes.

Les grands médias ne sont certainement pas morts, mais il est grand temps qu’ils descendent de leur pied d’estal et commencent à intégrer le contenu de leur audience.

No one will ever, despite the popular hemming and hawing to the contrary, replace the New York Times or Washington Post […] for the simple fact that those institutions have funding and resources no single blog, or even a unified voice of blogs, could ever provide

Interesting opinion. I don’t agree with it. What kind of resources are we talking about? Money to travel? But with hundreds of bloggers in every city contributing to the same story, why would you have to travel? Time? Millions of bloggers have more time than a thousand journalists.

Traditional media will certainly survive but not because they have more resources: they will eventually integrate readers’ content and get off their gilded towers.

Dave Sifry comes up once every 6 months with the most interesting serie of the web: the state of the blogosphere (part 1 | part 2 | part3). This time he discusses the 5.5 months rule, the 10.4 blog posts per second pace and the 33% of tagged posts.

80’000 new blogs are created everyday. What is the word for “beyond hype”?

En regardant le log des visites j’ai vu que quelques personnes arrivaient sur ballpark via talkdigger.com. “Check who’s talking”, tel est le slogan de ce meta moteur de recherche qui se spécialise dans les blogs en allant pomper ses résultats sur technorati, bloglines, blogpulse, icerocket, et les autres. Le tout en un clic.

Ca va économiser beaucoup de temps à Scoble pour ce genre de post.

I found some people came to this blog via talkdigger.com. “Check who’s talking” is the mantra of this meta search engine focusing on blogs and querying in one click services like technorati, bloglines, blogpulse, icerocket, etc…
Would save a lot of Scoble time for that kind of post.