SF Venture

Blogs Are Not A Business

Since the 1990s, there have been very few successful attempts to make money providing content online. Direct commerce online has proven profitable, with eBay enabling a new marketplace. Google has helped buyers find products. Amazon has even reached a viable scale. Underneath this infrastructure, individuals and small businesses have been able to create profitable businesses.

A few content sites are generating enough advertising revenues to be viable. The original thesis was that traditional media companies and individuals could create an infinite number of content sites. Self-publishing tools proliferated from GeoCities and others. I wondered how many people had time to continually dedicate time to creating content that anybody, even family and friends, would want to read. The reality is that amateur publishing is hard to maintain. While some smaller publishers survived, most failed.

Is there anything different about Blogs that could enable significant, new advertising-supported or other business? I don’t see it yet. Google and Yahoo should be able to create some incremental advertising inventory providing tools. Companies that create those tools could make modestly attractive acquisition candidates for the major services.

I do see blogs as an intriguing way to communicate to friends, family, and professional constituents. Compared to the first generation of publishing tools, blogging is easier to start and maintain. It's easy to see blogs providing value to small groups.

As more people seek honest advice before purchasing products and services, can blogs provide a forum for influencers to reach larger groups?  Opinions posted on ecommerce sites have become somewhat tainted.  Blogs may seem more independent and trustworthy.  Unfortunately, fake blogs have become major news.  Given how rapidly these were oncovered, there seems hope for creating constructive opinion platforms with blogs. 

For delivery of media content to large groups, RSS could prove a key enabling technology.  There may even be application of RSS to enterprise content delivery.

I still expect the vast majority of communication will still be email.

However, part of the reason I started this blog is to find how how the medium evolves. 

Subscribe Help

What is Syndicate this site (XML)?

You can can subscribe to the syndicated site feed (or RSS feed) in a desktop or web-based news aggregator.  This allows you to automatically know when there is an update to SF Venture and to read the blog content in a variety of different applications.

Many popular portals can read and display the RSS information provided by SF Venture.  In most cases you will need to:

1. Right-click on the Syndicate this site (XML) link and click copy shortcut.
2. Go to your portal and follow its instructions to add content.
3. When asked for the RSS URL, press CTRL+V to paste the Web address for the SF Venture RSS feed.
4. When you see the SF Venture item on your page, edit the options to organize content from your new feed, e.g., select how many headlines to display, how far back to view, etc.

If you use My Yahoo!, you can accomplish the above steps automatically by selecting this button:  (You may be asked to log into Yahoo.)

If you would like to receive email notification when new content is added to SF Venture, you can subscribe to the service provided by Bloglet.  Simply enter your email address in the box provided to the left and select the Subscribe button.

More On Weblogs and Aggregators

An aggregator or news reader is an application (desktop, web-based, plugin) that allows you to subscribe to “feeds” of weblogs and news sites.  Usually, these applications are scheduled to check and see if any of the sites you have subscribed to have been updated and if they have, the new version of the site (usually a post) will appear for you to read.  Aggregators are great because they bring weblog updates to you, instead of you having to actively look to see if your favorite reads have been updated.

There are a number of popular aggregator clients that run as desktop applications.  On Windows, one of the more popular desktop clients is FeedDemon, which makes it easy to add feeds and view them in a newspaper-style view or as individual entries.  A similar view that can be integrated directly into Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) is available with the NewsGator plug-in.

On the Macintosh, most users prefer NetNewsWire as their desktop aggregator.

In general, any desktop or web-based aggregator which reads RSS feeds is appropriate for use.  Try a few to find out which aggregator client best complements the way you work.