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The New York Times published an article that analyzes why bloggers get into the business. More bloggers are using their sites to earn revenue from advertising links, promote their products and services, and gain authority in their fields of interest. As the economy stumbles, bloggers face a variety of choices. Should they concentrate on their regular jobs and abandon their blogs? Should they leap full-time into the blogosphere and try to make a living from the web?

One thing’s for sure: few bloggers really do a reasonable income from their blogs. It is possible to make a living from blogging, although it can take years to build enough readers and advertisers to generate sustainable revenue streams. I mentioned Perez Hilton on 20 March 2008. His income has increased quite a bit over the last year, although keeps getting sued in court over his blog’s content, according to this Wikipedia article.

BoingBoing grows

BoingBoing’s four co-editors each have paying writing jobs that they promote heavily on BoingBoing. For years, the web site has posted weird news items focused on technology and the Internet. Over time, the blog became one of the most popular sites of its kind on the Internet. According to an article on Wikipedia, BoingBoing added a business manager in 2004 to administer the site’s operations.

Advertising was added to the site and its RSS feeds soon afterwards, to defray the site’s bandwidth charges. Popular web sites can rack up a large bill for their Internet connection. Adding ads to the site’s pages and overall design is a key success factor.

In the last few months, BoingBoing’s web site has been redesigned to include discussion threads and a subsidiary blog focused on electronic gadgets. The core writers still post articles every day, but they have brought in more people to administer the site and run the site’s discussion forums. Honda has signed on as a sponsor. There’s also a video site, although BoingBoing’s writers seem stiff and uncomfortable in front of the camera. Perhaps they will get better over time, as they build an independent media empire from their quirky web site.

A uniform approach

Paul Lukas’ Uni Watch is a good example of how to build income from a blog. Paul is a freelance journalist who has appeared in the New York times. His blog is an obsessive study of sports uniforms. Paul posts one article each day, with a long trail of links and miscellaneous items. By the end of the day, users have posted at least a hundred comments as they debate the topics of the day.

The blog had been funded by advertising links and user memberships. A basic membership included a uniform-themed wallet card, while more expensive packages included a custom designed logo and an interview posted to the blog.

A few days ago, Paul announced that ESPN had picked him up as a regular contributor. Paul had been writing freelance articles for ESPN’s Page 2 web site. He had already hired an intern a few months ago to manage the discussion boards and post articles on the weekends. Paul has decided he can scale back the blog membership program to the basic level, now that ESPN is supporting him. After almost 2 years of blogging, he can take a vacation or two without shutting down the blog completely.

From Gizmodo via BoingBoing comes a discussion of electronic book ownership. Electronic books or e-books are digital versions of a book. Users read the e-book on a computer, PDA, or a special e-book reader.

Amazon has its Kindle e-book reader, but I’m not willing to pay US$400 for it. I read enough books every year that Amazon could just give me the reader, and let me buy the e-books. The same goes for Sony’s reader, but at least the Kindle can download books and content through Sprint’s mobile phone network. Sony’s reader has to be loaded from a computer.

Both the Gizmodo and BoingBoing posts are based upon an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions, and written by Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert. The article wasn’t available on the Review’s web site, so I’m relying on portions that were posted to the Gizmodo post.

The used paper book

In the United States, paper books may be resold according the first sale doctrine. This rule helps support the used textbook market, by allowing book purchasers to transfer their ownership of a book to another party without violating the copyright holders’ rights. A key point of this rule is that no copies can be made of the book. The book’s owner cannot run down to the copy shop, make a backup or archival copy of the book, and then resell or return the original copy.

As I pointed out on 4 February 2008 in my discussion of this Kevin Kelly post, electronic media are a copy of an original source file. The Internet is a massive digital copy machine, after all. Web users are looking at copies of files their web browser has retrieved from other servers. Batra and his three co-authors address the implications of e-books upon the first sale doctrine. Could a used e-book market exist? Probably not, because e-book purchases don’t have their own physical copy of the book. They might have a license to use an electronic copy of the book.

As the four law students point out, it is up to the courts to determine if purchasing an e-book license is comparable to purchasing a paper book. The authors then discuss the restrictive DRM that Sony and Amazon have added to their electronic book hardware.

Selecting a textbook

It’s enough to give me a wee headache, especially as I evaluate new textbooks for my courses. Instructors use textbooks so students have a ready resource and reference in the course. Textbooks are expensive and heavy, especially in graduate courses. E-books are a nice option, but electronic gadgets are heavy and expensive, too. Many users have problems reading an e-book, and sometimes its difficult or impossible to make notes in an e-book. Paper books don’t need electricity, either.

I really like paper books, but I fear that their days are numbered. Textbook publishers are more sensitive to student complaints about textbook costs these days. The textbook industry has seen what’s happened to the music publishers. It’s not hard to find scanned electronic copies of popular textbooks on file-sharing services. When a significant number of university students stop buying textbooks, we may enter a runaway change scenario. Some academic authors already self-publish their textbooks, so they can offer paper and digital copies at a low price and keep more of the revenue. At some point, the major textbook publishers have to decide what business they are in: the paper book publishing business, or the content distribution business.

Textbooks unbound

I have spoken with two publishers who offer shrink-wrapped versions of their textbooks. These are unbound versions of textbooks. The pages are three-hole punched, so students can slip the book into a binder, or carry the chapters they need for a specific day. This business model sounds more reasonable than an e-book.

There’s a catch, of course. A shrink-wrapped book cannot be returned or sold back to a university bookstore in many cases. So a shrink-wrapped paper copy of a book is, in some ways, as restrictive as an e-book. Of course, students can sell or pass along their used binder books to other students. Unless a student examines that binder closely, they are trusting that the binder includes every page of the book. It’s much easier to pull pages from a binder than from a traditional bound book. That’s one reason that bookbinding helps maintain the value of a paper book.

It’s possible to copy a bound book, of course, but it’s a much faster process if the binding is removed. The scanned or copied pages look more consistent, too. The book’s resale value is destroyed when the binding is removed, but the electronic copies of that paper book can be redistributed.

The unbound paper textbook is a sign that textbook publishers are dealing with runaway change that may outpace their companies abilities to adapt and survive. I haven’t mentioned other tactics the textbook publishing industry uses to lock-in customers and enhance value, including custom publishing, digital and web-based content.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law

A post by WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg claims that 80 percent of the world’s blogs are actually spam blogs. Kevin Burton claims this number is as high as 90 percent, and that most of the spam blogs are hosted on Google’s free Blogger service.

I use a publicly-accessible blog to run my courses because it is easier for my students to access this site. I’ve tried hiding blog articles behind a password-protected walled garden like Moodle or WebCT in the past, and that was more trouble than the effort was worth.

I devote a couple of hours each day to this site, because it’s a great place to post the example, articles and links I discuss in my teaching and consulting engagements. Over the last year, I’ve learned a lot about how the splogosphere works.

The splog business model

Most of these splogs use a similar model: automated scripts search the Internet for keywords in legitimate blog posts and RSS feeds, such as my web site. There are between 8 and 14 million active blogs on the Internet, according to Matt’s estimates. The rest of the 100 million blogs are splogs that use software to scrape the first few lines of another blog’s articles, and then post an excerpt on the spam blog’s web site. Many spam blogs also try to leave trackbacks or spings on legitimate blogs, in an effort to draw visitors away from the real blogs.

Splog operators have thin profit margins, so they usually operate dozens or hundreds of sites. Sites earn revenue from keyword-based advertising links on their splog pages, as well as links to advertising-heavy web sites.

Not for human consumption

Most splog operators also try to get high rankings in search engines, so that Google users will see the splog articles before they find the original posts. Slogs are written for search engines, not real people, to read. Plagiarism Today ran one of the earliest articles about the splog business model, back in 2005. This Wired article came out a month earlier, and has some additional information.

Fighting the sploggers is easy

I’ve taken a few simple steps to keep sploggers from scraping my articles and leaving linkbacks to their sites, without wrecking my own web site in the process. It takes me about 10 minutes each week to manage these tools.

My comment forms require users to complete a reCAPTCHA verification form. This step eliminates almost all of the spam blogs that I’ve caught in my server logs. The only drawback with reCAPTCHA is that many mobile web users cannot leave comments.

I also run anti-splog software that uses an Internet-based list of known splogs to identify and quarantine spurious linkbacks.

Another piece of software searches for splog entries based on my articles. Occasionally, I leave comments on splog posts that are based on my articles, just to let them know I caught them.

My posts are also copyrighted under a Creative Commons license, as I discussed on 21 February 2008. I love it when real bloggers link back to my articles, as long as they give me credit for my writing.

From ZDnet: technology companies and restaurants are experimenting with electronic menus. These can be deployed as portable devices like electronic books, or built into a table-top display screen like Microsoft’s Surface technology. Customers could place an order with the electronic menu, play games, and monitor their order’s progress from the kitchen to their table.

Restaurateurs may see reduced error rates and lower expenses if order-taking becomes more automated. Electronic menus might be tied directly into kitchen, POS (point-of-sale) and inventory systems, allowing restaurant chains to develop more accurate real-time sales data.

Seasonal choices can easily be accommodate with an electronic menu. When the kitchen is running low of an item, the menu might indicate that there are only “x servings left” this evening. When the supply is exhausted, the menu suggests an alternative.

Electronic menus could also drive increased impulse sales of high-margin items like beverages and desserts.

The adoption curve for electronic restaurant menus resembles mobile phones in some respects. There may be several iterations of widely incompatible systems before consumers are interested enough to try the technology. Costs are likely to be high.

Waiters and other floor staff may reject the concept completely, especially in Europe. Someone still has to bring the food and beverages to the customer, and those employees may receive lower tips if they did not take the customer’s order.

Europe and Hawaii may be excellent regions to try a key feature of electronic menus. Just like e-books, an electronic menu could support any number of languages through Unicode and graphical displays. A tourist might order competently from an e-menu, instead of guessing at cognates and grumbling about the results. Happy customers are more likely to come back for more, and to tell their friends.

Internet search engine Ask.com is thtopwing in the towel, according to articles in CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle and Digital Trends:

Apparently, Ask.com believes its core demographic is women using the search engine to get answers to simple questions; the revamped version of the site will focus on married women as its core demographic, and try to answer questions about health, hobbies, family matters, childrens’ homework, recipes, and entertainment.

Ask.com had kept Google and Yahoo in its sights for years, but the company had problems expanding into new markets. Google and Yahoo continued to add web services and applications. Ask.com simply could not keep up with the pace of competition, and has settled for a narrow niche – married women in the southern and central USA – that has fewer key success factors and smaller revenue streams.

Current CEO Jim Safka used to be the CEO at Match.com, and he is now targeting a large chunk of his old audience with different questions.