The news doesn’t reflect the world

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With this title I’m not referring to “fake news” or political leanings (though those are important topics), but more to the fact that what you see in the news is based on what draws eyeballs, not what’s really going on.

As I’ve shared before from Darrell Huff’s excellent book How To Lie With Statistics:

It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of crime rate.

I think the best example of this can be found in our causes of death. You have three completely different sets of data:

  • What the media talks most about
  • What we’re most worried about, and
  • What actually is most likely to kill us

This chart from OurWorldInData shows numbers of 2016, but it’s striking (click to enlarge):

It’s easy to be worried about things like terrorism and homicide, and while they’re certainly real problems, they account for less than 1% of our deaths while taking well over 50% of the spotlight on news sites.

People get upset about what “the media” covers (or fails to cover), but their business is about getting people to watch. You are now the media, and it’s your job to dig past the filter bubble that sites put you in.

Read the news and stay informed, certainly, but don’t expect that what you’re reading is an accurate look at the world around you.

If you want to improve, keep the comments open

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One of the big questions new bloggers face is whether or not to allow readers to leave comments. In almost every case, I think the answer is a solid yes. Here’s a bit about why:

Take back your content

As I shared late last year, I think more people need to be blogging in order to take back their content. If you want your blog to be the hub of your content, it only makes sense to allow people to talk to you about it there.

Comments are rare

Related, though, comments are pretty rare on most sites. Using this blog as an example, at the time of this writing I have 707 posts and 853 comments — that’s barely more than one per post.

You may get into a situation where dealing with a ton of comments is an issue, and I hope we get back into that world with a lot of blogs, but it’s unlikely to happen.

Related, though, make sure you have some kind of anti-spam system in place. Human comments are fairly rare, but spammers continue to go nuts. I still use Akismet (which I first talked about 13 years ago) and it does a great job.

Who is it for?

The main question is asking who the content is for. If you’re writing about the latest video games or politics, I could see turning the comments off. Personally I like to see them on posts like that, but they often turn into arguments about silly things and can be more trouble than they’re worth.

This blog, for the most part, is a way for me to unpack my own thoughts. If someone reads a post of mine and has another angle to consider, I absolutely want to hear about it.

As Anne Roche recently mentioned to me, gaining more insight into your own writing is awesome, and I think comments can be a great way to see that.

As part of taking the altMBA, there are two pieces that really apply here:

  1. Leaving good comments can be a bit of an art, and receiving them can be as well.
  2. More importantly, the “revision script” that we wrote for each post, based on the comments we received, was one of the best parts of the altMBA process.

How that translates into a blog post could go a few different ways. Maybe you edit your old posts with your new insights? Maybe write an new update about an old post later? Either way, the insights that you gain from great comments can be an amazing thing, and you can’t get that if you don’t have comments.

“I keep them turned off”

I know folks that intentionally disable comments on their blog, and some have very good reasons for doing so. Keeping them turned on isn’t for everyone. However, for the sake of those of us that like to dig a little deeper in conversations, consider keeping them open on your site and leaving comments of your own a bit more often on other sites.

300 posts gone

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I’ve been doing quite a lot of clean-up, organization, and optimization on this blog, and a few days ago I deleted 297 old posts! I still have hundreds on here, going back to early 2004.

Why delete?

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The posts I deleted were quite useless at this point, to be honest. My recent posts I’ve tried to make a bit more timeless, but the old posts I deleted were in two main groups:

  • Google Earth imagery updates. There’s essentially no value today in knowing that Chicago got fresh imagery in Google Earth 12 years ago.
  • WordPress updates. Those were a bit more interesting, but still of little value to see those from years ago.

New categories

While going through and cleaning up the posts, I added a few new categories to help organize things. I got rid of the “general” bucket, at least for now, and added these:

  • Accessibility: Related to website accessibility thoughts and issues for impaired users.
  • Coaching: I’m not sure this is the right name for it, but it’s essentially my “go do it today!” kinds of posts.
  • Entertainment: I talk about games and toys a bit, and they go in here now.
  • Health: A fairly weak category for now, but growing.
  • Learning: Kind of a meta category, my thoughts on learning about learning.
  • Sonder: A category for posts about sonder, empathy, bias, arguments, and things like that.
  • Trust: Thoughts about ways to gain trust, and examples of how companies have lost trust.

You can always see the full list of categories on the right side of the site.

I don’t expect many people browse using the categories, but they’ll help me frame my thoughts a bit better. Plus, if you do ever browse by category you should find them to be a bit more valuable.

Thinking through “A Brighter Web”

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We’ve been running various aspect of A Brighter Web, an educational arm of our agency, for quite a while now. We’ve hosted our Meetup every month (sometimes more) for about nine years now, we have a reasonably active Facebook group, and we’ve played with podcasting and other media.

So what’s next?

To be honest, I’m not sure. We’ll likely be streamlining the website in the coming months — hosting less content on there, and pushing more to the outlets that we use (like Meetup and Facebook).

We’ve had a Slack team going for a while, but we’ve not really invested in it and it’s essentially dead. That’s likely for the best.

We may be firing up the podcast again in the next few months, but we’re still undecided on that.

I’ve been playing with the new TogetherLetters app for the past few months with some small groups, and I’ll likely open it up to the main users of A Brighter Web once they start allowing larger groups to join. If you’ve not seen it yet, it’s a neat concept. Check out the “see how it works” video on their home page.

We have a lot of options in front of us, and it’s fun to start plotting out a path for the future. If nothing else, we’ll keep hosting the monthly Meetups for the foreseeable future, so come check them out and join us!

Why do I care if your company is 50 years old?

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Why do I care if your company is 50 years old? I don’t, really. At least not yet. Yet many websites continue to lead with something like that at the front of their site.

When a users visits your site for the first time, they don’t care about you — they just want to know how you can help them. That’s it. Ideally, your site will tell them three things, very quickly and clearly:

  1. What problem they’re having (that you’ve likely gone through yourself)
  2. How you can make things better
  3. What their life will look like after working with you

As I shared before, don’t propose on the first date. Let people understand what you can do to make their life better, and then they’ll be more likely to want to know more about you.

In fact, once a potential customer can understand how you might be able to solve their problem, then telling them that you’ve been around for 50 years (with the benefits that go with it — experience, processes, etc) can be quite valuable.

Who are you?

Looking at the data for the GreenMellen site for the past five years, the page about our team is the 18th most popular page that people first arrive to our site on. The home page is first, and various other pages and blog posts (generally ones that rank well in Google) come after it.

However, in terms of total views on the site, our about page is third! This means that people don’t land immediately on that page, but arrive on a page that speaks more directly to them. Then, once they think that we might be a good fit, they head over to read more about how we work.

If you look at your website stats (we can help you unpack them if you’re not sure how), you’ll likely see very similar results.

Take the stuff about you off of your home page. It’s not about you — it’s about your clients. Focus on how you can serve them, and they’ll come learn more about you when they’re ready.

Joe Rogan doesn’t have a podcast

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Joe Rogan used to have one of the most popular podcasts on the internet, but in mid-2020 he signed an exclusive deal with Spotify, reportedly for $100M.

Therein lies the problem.

I don’t fault Joe for taking the deal. If Spotify offered me $100M for almost anything, I’d do it. However, I love the open nature of the internet, and this is another little thing that is making the internet crumble a bit more.

As it’s core, a podcast is just another type of RSS feed. By design, RSS feeds are completely free to create and consume, and they’re part of what make the internet great.

With a traditional podcast, anyone can make a show, and anyone can sign up to listen to any show they want. It’s perfect. With Joe Rogan, though, that’s no longer the case. His show is still free, but you need to be on Spotify to listen to it. There is no more RSS feed, so there is no more podcast. Call it a “web show” or whatever you want, but it’s no longer a “podcast”.

You can’t listen to it on Apple podcasts, or Google, or Pocket Casts, or any of the hundreds of other applications that can pull literally any other podcast. Your only choice is to use Spotify for it.

I don’t fault Spotify — they’re trying to gain a bigger audience.

I don’t fault Joe — it’s $100M, after all.

I don’t listen to his show anyhow (quite a huge time commitment), but that’s not really the point. I just don’t like the precedent, as it’s yet another small blow to the open nature of the internet.

Making RSS about people

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I’ve been talking about RSS feeds for about 13 years now, and have been using them much longer than that. I recently suggested that most everyone should be using them, and you can see how they fit into my larger system here.

That said, I’m constantly adjusting how I use them, which is part of the benefit of them. You can control exactly which sources reach you and which don’t, with no filters or algorithms in the way, so I frequently tweak who I follow and who I don’t.

To that end, I recently made two big changes.

Cut out some noisemakers

The first thing I did was cut out some of the sources that publish a lot of content, specifically TechCrunch and Lifehacker. Both sites put out great content, but just SO much of it. Any big story that I might pick up from them I’ll likely see elsewhere, so I’ve removed them both for now. So far I’m very pleased with that decision.

Added more humans

At the same time, I’ve started adding more humans to my feeds — people that I respect and follow. I’m enjoying their content, but this is where the beauty of RSS really kicks in.

If they post something, I see it.

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If they stop posting, it doesn’t affect me. It’s not like I have to go to their sites periodically to see what’s new; they simply have nothing in my reader.

Some good folks to follow

That said, here are a few people you should consider adding to your reader. If they keep posting regularly, you’ll get great content. If they don’t, no worries.

I still follow quite a few larger companies so I can stay current on my various interests, but I’m really enjoying seeing more solo bloggers popping up again.

What other blogs do you think are must-follow?

Don’t wait for inspiration to strike

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There are times when I find it difficult to come up with a subject to write about on here, but the solution isn’t too difficult — just dive in.

In the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he shares a great example:

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

As I mentioned in my tips for consistent blogging, I find it helpful to always be looking for ideas and jotting them down. However, having some ideas jotted down is not the same as having a fully written post. For that, I just need to do it.

Sometimes I feel inspired to sit down and dig through those ideas, and sometimes I don’t. Even if I don’t feel particularly inspired, I find that if I just sit down and get writing anyhow, it all tends to work out.

Social media is vapor

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If you’re reading this post in 2021, there is a good chance you found this post via social media. If you’re reading this at some point later, you probably didn’t — at least not from a social post of mine. My posts about it have come and gone, just like millions of other posts every day.

I wrote my first post on this blog nearly 17 years ago, and moved to WordPress on May 24, 2004. There’s no reason to think it won’t exist for at least 20 years more. There are no guarantees, of course, but it seems feasible.

Social media posts, as you know, have a very short life span. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but something you always need to consider. When I first started this blog, Friendster, XING and Myspace were the top social channels. Any content I had published on any of them is long gone by now.

What will the landscape look like 20 years from now? It’s hard to know. Even so, while sites like Facebook and Twitter keep most of your posts forever, finding old posts can be very difficult. Even if they still exist, your older content will be difficult to find.

Still, be social

Social media can be great. While this blog has comments, interactions are fairly rare, and are served much better on a social media platform. If you want to share ideas or news with your friends, social media is excellent.

The problem, as I’ve expressed before, is that social media posts come and go. If you have something worthwhile to say, publish it on your own blog and share that post with the world. This is likely one reason why Seth Godin doesn’t tweet — rather than share quick insights that come and go, he turns his quick thoughts into deeper insights that can stand the test of time.

Beyond that, it’s fairly difficult to back up your social media posts in a way that can be republished. With a blog, you can create a quick, full backup of everything, and move it elsewhere. This blog has been on a number of hosts over the years, but moved without a change in address or even a tiny hiccup. That alone is powerful.

The river

Enjoy social media, but don’t let your insights drift away. Social media is often compared to a river; take a dip when you can, but the content will keep sailing away whether you’re there or not. Those dips are fun, and I’ll continue to pop in frequently, but take the time to set up your own platform that will exist far longer than your social media platform of choice will.

Or current resident

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You’ve seen it before; probably nearly every day. An important looking envelope in the mail, but with a dead simple giveaway — it’s addressed to you “or current resident”.

If it was important, and meant for you, they wouldn’t say “or current resident”. The same goes with any message that you put out to the world. It can be written to:

  • a specific someone
  • a specific type of person
  • or anyone who happens to stumbles across it

The first two will always be more valuable. Don’t worry about the current resident that might happen to see your message — talk to those that want to hear from you, and your message will carry infinitely more weight.