Internet News Evolution Continues Apace . . .

Mike Fourcher, writing at his blog Vouchification on Jan. 11, posts “21 Things [He] Learned Running Hyperlocal News Sites,” with some interesting bits of wisdom for anyone in the business of trying to attract and retain eyeballs on the Web. 

Full article is here. I’ll go over a few things I found interesting, from my few years’ experience working at Uncharted (and for whom I no longer work, due to time constraints). 

(Fourcher, by the way, runs some successful hyperlocal news sites in the Chicago area, and has had his share of hyperlocal bombs, also in the Chicago area. He knows from whence he speaks.) 

This one seems the most important to me:

Building an audience is getting harder. 

Competition, direct and indirect [is responsible for difficult audience-building]. Readers in 2013 have thousands of news sites to choose from, as well as social media, electronic books, and so much more. Launching a new brand and gaining mind share is getting logarithmically more difficult to do. 

Want to support yourself at least partly with ads? Get a big audience. Fast. 

20% of your consumers consume 80% of your product. Make sure that 20% is big enough.

Ultimately, there is a limited demand for the kind of news you provide. Only so many people live and work in the neighborhood. No matter how much reader development we did, those baseline numbers would not go up. 

Then, we knew that about 30% of your readers checked our site every day. Another 50% checked at least once a week. Even though we had some really dedicated readers, the pool wasn’t big enough to generate lots of ad click-throughs. 

And one more important one, but not really a mind-bending one, for anyone familiar with Clay Shirky and his work: 

The barriers to entry are virtually non-existant in news now. 

With a  free WordPress template and a sense of what’s interesting to readers, you can create a news site that attracts thousands of readers. It may not be any good, but it will attract readers. Regardless of whether they are making money – or even selling ads – these sites are competitors for local news eyeballs. They make it necessary for other local news sites to adopt their methods, because without readers there’s no advertising. 

That’s something that wouldn’t surprise any Clay Shirky fan – he was saying that years ago. 

Most interesting thing Fourcher said, however, is that he believes evolution of the news online into something resembling viability is going to be a slow process, and that what we see now will probably be what it’s like in that distant future, as he predicts no great innovations, but many iterations of the same old thing.

Well, I Guess You Can Call it the End of an Era

Astute readers of this blog will note I have not written much about Uncharted lately.

First, it was because we'd moved and that, for a while, our Internet access was spotty at best. But life kept getting in the way, and for some reason or other -- some good, such as I've taken on a part-time job of teaching English classes at a local university; and some not so good, such as I flat out got used to not checking my Uncharted email.

So as of this weekend, I'm no longer working for Uncharted.

This isn't a bridges burned, friendships-be-damned parting, however. Just a shift in priorities and where I can put the free time I've got. In many ways, I'll still be involved in Uncharted, through doing some on-call writing, consulting, and other such work fro the very good friends I still have at the company. I just won't be involved in day-to-day operations, or be in charge of editorial content any more.

Why the departure?

See the reasons above. Taking on a part-time job in addition to my full-tme job was rather time consuming, but at the same time was getting some short shrift as I tried to balance Uncahrted win with teaching and working full time and also being a full-time husband. There are those at Uncharted who have lives as busy as this, and I am in awe that they can keep it all together as well as they do. The challenge simply proved, over time, to be too great for me.

Add to that there's a little part of me that has always preferred inertia to action, like Petey here encountering his stink bug, and that makes for a heavenly mix of conundrums mixed in enigmas wrapped in Twinkies.

Oh. I'm also back on writing novels, another significant time-taker.

Lest any rumors be spread, let it be known that I enjoyed my time at Uncharted, as did my wife Michelle. We made some good, lasting friendships that I'm confident will last as we move in a different direction. And you'll still see me on Uncharted as an Explorer, though not one doing the double-duty of pulling strings behind the scenes. You're not rid of my Uncharted babblings yet.

Social Networked-Out

I think it was when I got the invitation to the BYU-Idaho online instructors’ social networky thingy that I finally snapped.

Snapped is probably a bad word for it. Felt a teense overwhelmed, perhaps.

Social networks are, of course, de rigeur nowadays, and everyone has them. From knitters – you bet your perled little booties that there’s a social network exclusively for knitters – to, yes, the multiple, and I mean multiple, social networks to which BYU-Idaho has invited me, there are plenty of social networks to go around.

And that’s great news. I, myself, am involved on a foundational level with Uncharted, a social network of its own standing (more on that in just a little bit). That the Internet can provide venues for like-minded people to gather and share information and comeradeship is a wonderful thing, if they’re managed properly. BYU-Idaho’s networks, right now, are giving me fits but that’s likely because I’m new to navigating the whole system. (Surely, somewhere, there must be a Facebook-like option for me to see everything that’s going on in the multitude of little BYU-Idaho networks I’m tied to at the moment.)

Many moons ago – I might have a copy of it somewhere – I wrote a short story outlining the life of a man so dependent on computer technology for his work and social interaction that he rarely left his home, instead focusing on his work which came to him via email and in a cloud-sorta thing (this was just at the advent of email and before anyone had heard of The Cloud, so I was a bit prescient there) to the exclusion of all else. When the power went out and he had to go outside to see what was going on, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of nature, the multiplicity of marigolds that had spilled out of their flower beds and overrun his disused driveway, and by the death of his next-door neighbor, dead at her computer in a room with the shades drawn at the exclusion of all else.

No nevermind on that. Just brought it up as an example of why maybe the BYU-Idaho social network pushed me over the brink. I’m social networked-out.

Let’s go over the roll-call: Facebook. Twitter. Google+. Uncharted. BYU-Idaho. GoodReads. LinkedIn. Did I miss any? Plenty. And these are only the ones I’m involved in to any degree. Plus the family of blogs I run, including this one. They don’t necessarily count as social networking because it’s not social networking when you’re yelling into an empty room, but I’ll include them here for argument’s sake.

There are plenty more out there I could join. Obviously doing so would drive me insane.

I’m not dissing any of the social networks I’m involved in. or those I’m not involved in. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve reached a saturation point. I’ve reached the point where I need a social networking website that collects all the information from my other social networks and presents it in one convenient package.

Not likely, per Jeff Tinsley, one of the original brains behind mylife.com, a website aiming to be the “one social network to rule them all.” Says Tinsley:

The fact is, no matter how great, no one network is able to deliver on every front. For instance, can any platform match Twitter when it comes to short, instant global communication? Or will any network ever equal Facebook when it comes to making and sustaining connections the world over? Users will embrace a variety of sites, each of which excels at its unique method of connecting, sharing and more.

For the future of social networking, that means tolerance is key, and integration and management tools will have essential roles to play. Those that succeed will offer users simple, comprehensive solutions to maintain their connections and make new ones.

Sure, users recognize that a definitive, end-all platform to communicate may be ideal. But it isn’t essential. People will share, friend, link, circle, pin, like, tweet and post — and they’ll do it happily. They know that when it comes to making quality connections, “more” is always better. Social networking, it turns out, isn’t a zero sum game after all.

I guess I’m getting old. Don’t have the attention span any more.

Nerdlings, What is Uncharted's Job?

Dan and Chip Heath, two young nerdlings writing a piece at Slate.com on the demise of Second Life, say things.

They say things like this:

But what “job” did Second Life perform? It was like a job candidate with a fascinating résumé—fluent in Finnish, with stints in spelunking and trapeze—but no actual labor skills. The same was true with the Segway. No one was interested in employing a $5,000 walk-accelerator. (Though, to be fair, Segway eventually got a part-time job saving tourists from exercise.)

What about the Apple Newton, the first widely hyped PDA back in the 1990s? It was clearly applying for the right job—to give us mobile access to our calendars and to-do lists and such. But it was a lousy employee, with notoriously poor handwriting recognition and a limited attention span (from low battery life). PalmPilot got the job a few years later.

So, as a former Second Life devotee (I took a semester-long masters degree course that was pretty much held in Second Life; my conclusion: There are more efficient ways in both time spent preparing and bandwidth hogged to hold meetings) and as vice president of Uncharted.com, I have to ask:

What is Uncharted’s job?

I’m afraid my conclusion is thus: Doesn’t matter. Right now, that job is being taken by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, and even my own humble blog, thank you very much.

And, just as importantly, what first impressions are we making? Given a faulty photo-uploading module and a consistently flaky story-upload module, that first impression can’t be good. And that’s bad, according to Farhad Manjoo, Slate.com’s in-house nerdling. Here, he speaks of the decline and fall of Google+, another, much bigger social network that is looking for a job but really hasn’t found one yet (it’s comforting to see the big boys stumbling at this just as we are, by the way).

Why am I so sure that Google+ can’t be saved? Because there’s no way to correct Google’s central failure. Back when companies were clamoring to create brand pages on the network—or users were looking to create profiles with pseudonyms, another phenomenon that Google shut down—the company ought to have acceded to its users’ wishes and accommodated them. If Google wasn’t ready for brand pages in the summer, it shouldn’t have launched Google+ until it was. And this advice goes more generally—by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.

And yet another Slate.com nerdling – Erik Sofge – reminds us all that while one thing may do a job – and do it well – when that thing is moved to another job, often it fails.

I’ve long whined that my iPod Touch is a less handy music-listening device than an ordinary iPod, because with the iPod, I don’t even have to take the thing out of my pocket or bag to make musical adjustments (OK, some I do, such as changing albums, but for the simple task of skipping a song or shutting the thing down altogether, I can do it by feel.) Not so the iPod Touch – it’s a series of three or four steps to shut that thing down, and it requires all my attention. Enter Sofge:

An outstanding interface separates the products you love from the ones you simply use. In the Nano’s case, the touchscreen works. There’s nothing broken about it. But it’s clumsy and ill-conceived, given the uses for which it's supposedly designed. To put a touchscreen on a Nano presumes that a touchscreen can be a universal interface, and that all devices aspire to do all things. But people don’t buy a Nano because they want a mini-iPhone or a micro-iPad. They want something they can shove in their pocket or clip to their shorts when they take a walk or go for a run, a device for playing music on the move. In those scenarios, a touchscreen doesn't help at all.

So back to Uncharted. Does all of this mean Uncharted is dead in the water? Not necessarily. We just have to figure out what job Uncharted should apply for, and in what way it can fit the users’ needs in a way that nothing else fits. Social networking, I’m afraid, is not open to entry-level groups like Uncharted. Unless we find a job that’s vacant somewhere, waiting to be filled.

One thing I thought of: Uncharted could become a haven for writers looking for a space to share their unpublished stuff privately in a community where people would give them good feedback. Probably services like that out there somewhere, but it’s worth a thought.

Another thought: Stellar writing and photography on travel. But you know what, there are others doing that just as well on Facebook and Flickr. Not a good thought at all.

Other ideas: I don’t know. This is why I’m not an entrepreneur.

That Lonely Road

Photo borrowed from here.

NOTE: Until the Uncharted story uploader is working again, I'll be posting stories here, then directing my readers to Uncharted for photos. Hopefully, this will be a short-lived solution.

The world is our Mandelbrot set; infinitely revealing, yet always concealing the wonders that lie within unless we’re willing to follow our noses and plunge into whatever seahorse valley we may find.

Seahorse Valley is a popular destination for those who explore the mathematical Mandelbrot. I don’t pretend to understand the mathematics, but I do understand the set’s beauty: Hidden within this graphical representation of numbers plugged into a simple mathematical formula lie endless swirls and whorls of detail that never stop no matter how close you get to them.

I felt the same as we drove US Highway 14 and 14A through Wyoming’s lonely Big Horn Mountains where, at any time, I could have stopped the car, left kith and kin behind, and wandered off into those mountains peppered with rock and pine, never to emerge again until I had explored it to the sand grain and pine needle.

There is simplicity in sand grain and pine needle. There is simplicity, too, in what’s called the Laramide orogeny, a period of time 70 to 80 million years in the past, when great plates of the earth’s crust slipping beneath the North American plate caused layer upon layer of sedimentary rock to uplift, forcing what is now the Rocky Mountains to rise. As those layers rose, they tilted, then broke, with their more jagged edges thrusting ever further into the sky if the rock were hard enough (think the granite of the Teton range) or tumbling to the earth in great landslides as the softer rock, exposed to weather, time, and gravity, succumbed.

That part of the Rocky Mountain Mandelbrot is the Big Horn Range, where jagged rocks tumble from the tops, where layers of rock lie exposed where man and nature have cut, and where bold outcroppings of rock thrust through the greenery, taking on the fantastical shapes of layered cakes and Muppets.

The Big Horns are a spur branch of the Rockies, broken off from the main thrust of mountains by the Big Horn basin. We drove through the mountains from east to west, climbing a spaghetti noodle road as our in-car GPS went through general distress as the road has been realigned since it was last programmed. The mountains thrust thousands of feet up from the surrounding basin, so the road necessarily curves and bends as we climb. Our passage, from one side of the mountains to the other, took three hours. Ideally, we should have spent a day there, exploring. Well, next time. We know where the mountains are now.

It’s a lonely road. In full summer, we saw a total of two other vehicles. There are easier ways around the mountains to Yellowstone National Park on the one side, the plains of Wyoming and the distant Black Hills of South Dakota on the other. You can take the interstate north into Montana, or state and US highways south in Wyoming. But something about that red squiggle on the map – and the small writing next to it (“Closed in Winter”) called out to us in the July heat. So climb we did. And it’s no gradual climb. From valley floor to tallest peak is over 8,000 feet, and we drove about half of that, swiftly – in less than twenty miles. So once in the mountains, you are in the mountains, following glacial valleys to the north and west as you go.

Glacier activity is evident everywhere, from the erratic boulders tumbled down the hillside to the scars scraped on the sides of the range’s many U-shaped valleys. What mountain bones lie exposed here not in the road cut are exposed by ice and water.

Fresh water. About halfway through the mountains, right to the side of the road, is a mountain spring someone has fitted with a pipe. The water is clear, cold, and mineral refreshing. We stopped at the spring for a few moments, drinking the water and reveling in the quiet of the surroundings. Not a car roared. A few birds whispered from the distant trees. Cool breezes blew off the still-present snow banks further up the mountains. Even our kids, normally a rowdy bunch, noted the quiet and added to it, whispering as they scampered around the spring.

We’ll come hiking here, when the kids are older. They love to hike, once they know what lies at the end of the trail. And I like the solitude of that lonely road, where the mountain man that lies deep within can fantasize about heading off into the wild to carve a life, until the softy without reminds him that winter isn’t all that far off. My inner mountain man doesn’t much like snow either.

Descending the other side of the mountain toward Lowell is as close to automobile rappelling as I want to be. The road hugs the mountainside, occasionally hiding in the folds so the distant basin floor below is invisible. But the road is long and near the cliffs and steep mountain slopes, urging caution. Belay is on as I drive cautiously down. Seahorse Valley lies somewhere below, waiting for me to come examine every gully, every break, every grain, every atom.

 More photos at www.uncharted.net here.

Trying to Get "Le Grille" Working Again

You may have noticed (in fact, we hope you have; that means you’re a regular Uncharted visitor) that we’re having a little difficulty at Uncharted.net.

Our photo uploader works, well, kinda, and you have to treat it like an old pickup, whapping it here and turning up the radio to drown out the noises there. The story uploader, well, that isn’t working at all.

We’re sorry.

We’re working on a solution that includes rewriting some of the programming that lies behind Uncharted.net, and doing so on a shoestring budget. We’ll try to do a better job of keeping you up to date on our progress so your visits to Uncharted.net are fun, not frustrating. Although sometimes it’s fun to watch someone be frustrated, as Homer Simpson here:

Rest assured that the experts we have working on Uncharted.net’s woes are much better at their jobs than Homer is at masonry.

In the meantime, we’re working on a few solutions that’ll keep us all sharing our photos and adventures until we’ve got the site working as we’d like.

1) The photo uploader is still working, but you just have to be patient with it. If you get an error message, just reload the page, or open up Uncharted.net in a new browser and try again. Most of the time (and trust me, I’ve done a lot of trial and error on this ) your photos will be there, waiting for more to join them or for your muse to help you write captions.

2) If you’ve got an itch to write a story, simply post it to your blog, on Facebook, Google+ or whatever space you’ve got and send us a link at Uncharted’s Facebook page, which you can find here.

3) If you’d rather leave the hosting to us, contact us via our Facebook page and we’ll work things out.

4) If you have any suggestions, want to make a donation so our site upgrade goes faster, absolutely let us know.

Thanks for your patience. We love seeing your photos and reading your stories. We hope this interim solution in keeping your enthusiasm alive will, well, keep that enthusiasm alive. Let us know what we can do to do better.

Do We Need the Web (Site)

I'm pretty sure I've written on this concept before: Given the unlimited free storage space offered by the likes of YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites, does an up-and-coming, ahem, social media "website" like Uncharted really need a website?

I ask this because, at the moment, our website is behaving as coherently as HAL does right before he sends that pod crashing into Frank Poole. Our photo uploader works only sporadically and you have to take its workings on faith, as it'll say it hasn't saved your photos when indeed it has. The story module isn't working at all.

So, enter the message I sent to fellow Uncharted folks tonight:

Hello Folks of Uncharted.

Alan and I had a good conversation the other night about keeping things going with Uncharted as we're dealing with certain site instabilities and other technical challenges that is making updating the site difficult or downright impossible at the moment. Going dark, without other options for our Explorers or more information to them seems to be the wrong way to go.

I've been thinking about this situation (photo uploader working sporadically, story uploader not working at all (which Alan tells me is due to our slice on the server being reduced as we're funneling money elsewhere)) and think we can use our social media options to publish content and keep our Explorers happy and informed. Here's what I'd like to do:

On the blog, we need ASAP a post explaining in brief, non-technical terms, why the site is having difficulties and what we're doing to fix it. I can write it, but, Sarge, I'd like to hear from you your opinion on, as Alan put it, "how pathetic should we sound" as we explain our difficulties. Once the post is ready, I'd like to see it on the blog, on our Facebook page and linked via a slide or banner on the main site, so people visiting will know what's going on. Linking blog posts in this manner is something I'd like to start doing on the main site anyway.

Facebook/Twitter. Here, we take advantage of our follower base to publish and/or promote content that for some reason or other we're not able to upload to our site. I know this isn't optimal in driving traffic to our main site, but as it is now with the story module out of commission, we're limited on what the main site can do for us anyway.

As an example, Jen Skoy has published a blog post about an upcoming Oktoberfest celebration in Oregon. She's got good information and photos on her blog. We can easily link to that information via Facebook, promote it on our various social media outlets, and keep the momentum going with our Explorers. John has got a great piece on learning Kung Fu while in China, and Michelle and I have got some stuff cooking and also ready to go. As we can still (most of the time) publish photos on the main site, we keep doing that, while moving stories to the blog for the moment until we can get the story module working again. All of that can be promoted via social media as well.

I'd like to hear other thoughts and input on this. Jen Skoy's story is timely as the festival begins in early September, so moving quickly on this aspect of it is of interest to us.

I think for a stopgap measure, this'll work just fine. But part of me still wonders if we couldn't get away with this the whole time, saving ourselves lots of time and money. Yeah, these sites aren't customizable, and we can't claim eyeballs for advertising, but do we really need to claim eyeballs for advertising? Let Facebook get the paltry clicks from our folks as we're building a community and making money in other ways . . .

That Home Page Thing . . .

I’ve been doing a little thinking about Uncharted, trying to figure out how we can streamline things and get our mojo working a little better than it has over the past few months. Site problems, including a continual string of error messages when we try to upload photos and stories aren’t helping matters much, so here goes.

Does Uncharted need a home page any more?

I know that’s breaking serious Web 1.0 rules, and probably a few Web 2.0 rules, but we’re onto at least Web 4.0 now, and the rules are changing.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

We can’t guarantee any more that many people are coming into our site through the home page. I haven’t seen statistics, but I’d bet we get more hits from Google searches, Facebook links, and direct links that we or our Explorers may establish. I’d have to look at our stats to be sure, but I’m fairly confident this is right.

We’re spending a lot of money on web hosting, and, if we’re reading the error messages correctly, we need to be spending more. John tried to get the site to accept some photo uploads but couldn’t get anything to work until he deleted some photos from the site. That seems counterproductive to me.

We can embed YouTube videos on our site, but as far as I can tell it only works if that’s the only bit of text or code we have in the story we’re uploading. Try to combine a story and an embedded video and the world blows up around you. That seems counterproductive.

Back to that homepage thing. We’ve run into a few problems:

1) Updating the homepage is a bit labor-intensive, from working to get the story uploaded and edited, the photoset toned and fixed and tweaked and then the entire package built on the site. That’s fine – we want our stuff to look good. But then we run into the difficulty of our staff not having those stories or photosets appearing on their individual profiles, so if a user wants to look up a staff member and browse his or her stories, those stories don’t appear under their name.

2) The process isn’t as organic as I’d like it – we’re going through too many filters (myself included) to get Explorer content from obscurity on their home page to notoriety for everyone else to see. So we need fewer human filters, and more of a rating system to get people’s stories noticed.

I don’t see that we have to spend any money doing this – we can just use Facebook for that, right? Yeah, I know we end up making money for them by using their site for our stuff, but at the same time, we end up using their servers and such for free – for storing photos, linking to videos and such. And if we don’t want to do that, well then we spend money to revamp how we do things on the site so it’s a lot easier to get content noticed. I’ve talked about this before, and the more I think about it, the more I think we need to go this way.

An Epic Journey

View Larger Map

Just over 3,000 miles, mostly on interstates but a lot – notably in Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa – on more minor roads. That’s an oil change’s worth of traveling.

Lots of Uncharted stories to come, obviously. Not necessarily stuff off the beaten track, but some stuff, I believe, well worthwhile to future explorers who want a little advice on whether or not to take the road less traveled. And we certainly did hit some less-traveled roads. If it hadn’t been for that one slow truck we got behind while winding down out of the Big Horn Mountains on US 14 through central Wyoming, for instance, we wouldn’t have seen another soul on that trip. Well worth it, by the way – spectacular views of the mountains, the valleys, lots of snow still on the ground and, at the top in that odd little alpine valley, a roadside spring for refreshment.

And more to see. Now that we’ve traveled those roads, we’ve got more reasons to go back when we have the time and the inclination. Maybe that’s the magic of Uncharted: Knowing where you’re going to go next.

Mesa Falls Hiking Bliss

Had a ball a few weeks ago hiking the canyon around Mesa Falls up in Fremont County, listening to the marmots whistle at us as we walked past and listening to the kids complain about all the hiking. Finally got to writing about it for Uncharted. Go read it.

Real Signal

I’m thinking about social networks still – as always. How can we build Uncharted up? How can we find the people with the passion for what we do, as the makers of the Revelry social network have discovered for those who knit and crochet? As Facebook expands to 740 million users, as Google+ begins to tear it up among techies, what chances do we have, as microblips on the social networking radar, of becoming a force to be reckoned with?

Maybe Clay Shirky has the answer.

Part of what we want to do at Uncharted is to unite our users to do good, to do humanitarian things as our reach expands. And if we can develop the passionate user base that we hope to develop, we can accomplish great humanitarian things with thousands, not with the tens of thousands or millions that the behemoth social networks possess.

Shirky, in this short presentation, says that he’d like to see “more effort put into helping groups send real signal, rather than continuing to engage in competition in increasingly meaningless political noise.” What he means is that he’d rather see change wrought by a thousand letter-writers than spam coming from 2.5 million people whose most active political engagement comes from sending a form email. This goes back to what Michelle and I have talked about – in this day and age, what you’ve got to do to get attention is not to flood the mailboxes with stuff people won’t read, but show a much smaller, but much more committed group ready for action. Shirky talks about this in the guise of representation and voting, but I’m sure the same easily translates into other forms of social action.

Mesa Falls Teaser

Another teaser while we wait, patiently, for the story module at Uncharted to be repaired. Goofy geotagging feature is giving us fits and the moment and just won't let us go past that point.

I did upload some photos to Uncharted last night and met with success, so the site does have some functionality at the moment. Just wish I could bring it all together, you know?

Unraveling Uncharted

Farhad Manjoo, Slate.com’s geek columnist, writes an interesting exploration of Ravelry, a social networking site for knitters and crocheters, touting it as a maybe-kinda-sortofa model for niche social networks. (He and I include these caveats because the success of a social networking group depends wholly on its participants and their passion for the subject at hand, not merely that someone creates a niche social networking site hoping that the Shoeless Joe Jacksons of that niche will flock to it and make it come alive.)

Here’s the meat of what Manjoo has to say about Ravelry:

Social sites work better when they're smaller and bespoke, created to cater to a specific group. What makes Ravelry work so well is that, in addition to being a place to catch up with friends, it is also a boon to its users' favorite hobby—it helps people catalog their yarn, their favorite patterns, and the stuff they've made or plan on making. In other words, there is something to do there. And having something to do turns out to make an enormous difference in the way people interact with one another on the Web.

And yes, this is going to segue into a discussion on Uncharted. You knew that reading the title of this post.

What I find interesting about Ravelry is how they’re able to monetize their efforts – something we’re struggling to do at Uncharted. Here’s what they’re doing, per Manjoo:

• Advertising. Targeted directly at their audience. Only knitting and yarn-related advertisers need apply.
• Donations. They raised $71,000 from their fans.
• They sell bric-a-brac like t-shirts.
• They sell original knitting designs via PDFs and PayPal.

Also interesting what they do: They have discussion boards that give their audience free reign to discuss whatever they want, knitting-related or not. That gets people going to the site time and again, keeping that hit count high. They have about 400,000 active users a month.

They’re also doing this:

Ravelry's second function is to chart everything that exists in the knitting world—it is an enormous library of patterns, yarns, and designers. An army of volunteers works hard to keep the site comprehensive and organized (as soon as a new issue of a knitting magazine is out, all of its patterns are catalogued), and, amazingly, everything is cross-referenced with everything else. You can click on a certain yarn and see all the stuff people have knitted with it. You can click on a pattern and see thousands of finished versions. People use the site to look for patterns—search for "necktie," for instance, and you'll see hundreds of varieties.

Uncharted can do all of that, right? We can find ways to monetize our content, to encourage our contributors to make money with their stuff, and to cross reference everything so that when readers find one story, they get a list of similar things they might also find interesting, right?

Maybe.

Here’s the part that we’re missing:

The way Ravelry took off from there is a gripping yarn. Jessica sent out invitations to a few hundred of her knitting friends. They all loved it, and soon all of their friends wanted in, too. To conserve server space, the couple kept the site closed to newcomers in its early days, and soon they had a waiting list of a few thousand people wanting to join—and then 10,000 people, and then 30,000. Casey quit his day job to maintain the site. The couple ran through their savings, they ran up their credit cards.

Where’s our passion?

I don’t know.

I don’t have the passion to be an entrepreneur, unfortunately for Uncharted. I’m not willing to make these kinds of financial risks. No one on the team seems willing as of yet to do this, either. That caution is understandable. But lamentable, from a certain point of view.

We also don’t have – yet – that committed community. Here’s what the Ravelry folks said about their fund-raising efforts:

Not only did we receive an amazing financial boost, we also received a flood of love. About 800 people wrote up really wonderful and amazing notes in the 10 Lousy Bucks group’s “Why I gave” thread. Jess and I are still reading all of the kind words – it feels so good to know that people are really happy about Ravelry. The stories are all different! We never imagined that so many people would come to our site and get so much out of it.

Passion. Passion. That’s what we need.

But how to get it?

Don’t know.

Fools Following the Marmots and Deer

COMING SOON TO AN UNCHARTED NEAR YOU:

The thing about following game trails is this:

Deer will go anywhere and climb up pretty much anything without giving a hoot or holler for who might follow them.

It might not be deer. The trails we follow as we walk our way to and around Upper and Lower Mesa Falls on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River may very well have been carved by generations of marmots, which are even more mobile and more loco than the deer.

Then there’s the wife factor. Not that she minds following the trails at random, wandering through the scrub under the canopy of pines and quaken aspen. It’s just that she jogs. She’s in better shape than I am. So when I get to the top of a rather steep slope, wheezing and looking for a place to park my sorry carcass, she’s pacing to and fro, fretting in her own kind way: “Come on, I’ve got to keep my heart rate up. That’s the deal!”

Here’s the other deal: If you travel along Idaho’s Mesa Falls Scenic Byway and only stop long enough to see the Upper Mesa Falls, you’re missing a lot of awesome stuff that you can only see when you park your car and follow one of the many trails that lead to and from the two waterfalls in the area and then in random directions, depending on where the deer or marmot wanted to head that day.

We start with a fairly basic trail from our camping spot at Grandview Campground (so called, I suppose, for the fact that from anywhere in the campsite you can hear Lower Mesa Falls tumbling 85 feet through a tight U-bend in the rock to the river below but you can’t really see it unless you head to the lookout north of camp). The trail winds through forests, meadows filled with bluebells and wild daisies, brief stretches of fragrant sagebrush flats and near and far from the canyon rim for about a mile before it merges with the road that snakes down the canyon to Upper Mesa Falls.

My advice: Go visit now. An unusually wet winter coupled with an extremely soggy spring has brought out the green in full force along the trail. I literally have never seen this area so green, and so varied in its greens – the blue-green of sagebrush filling the air with that odd, nostrummy tang of sage and pepper; the bright, eager green of the quaken aspen leaves, the dark, barky green of snake grass and the green of the pine needles, alternating between the spiky green of the old needles to the downy green of spring’s new growth.

Walk slowly through all that green. As you do you’ll see the wild birds the populate the area – Cooper’s hawks, robins, yellow finches and, occasionally, the mountain bluebird. You’ll hear the sharp barky cries of the marmots, calling out to each other as they watch you through the undergrowth. We saw several of them, including a young ‘un, perched on the side of the road watching as we descended to Upper Mesa Falls, watching from a fallen log as we walked the trail back to camp. They probably wanted to know what we were doing on their private highway.

Then there’s the other trail – wilder, steeper, more mysterious. We found it leading from the corner of a tiny parking lot just south of Grandview, where boaters park to prepare their light craft for a strenuous journey down the skid trail to the river. We wanted to find the river so the boys could throw rocks. We never found it. Instead, wandering down that trail that sometimes brought us close to the roar of the falls through the trees and sometimes brought us to spots where the trees swallowed up the roar of the falls completely, we came to a spot where the deer or marmot decided walking along the canyon rim would be a good idea. Mountainous trees to the right, a rocky stumble of volcanic basalt blocks descending fifty or sixty feet to the right.

We opted to turn around. Next time, though, I’m going further.

Next time, too, we’re finding that trail that leads exclusively from the upper falls to the lower falls so we can stand on the butte overlooking that tight U-bend where the water tumbles, living again the axiom science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke put in the mouth of space explorer Robert Kleinman in “Imperial Earth”:

Space is small; only the planets are big.

Our planet is big. We know this as we wander the tiny trails off the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway. We only traveled along those trails for five miles or so and saw not even the tiniest fraction of the entire canyon, where the Henry’s Fork punches through the southern wall of the Island Park caldera to the Snake River Plain below.

Space is small; only the planets are big. And we’re only beginning our explorations.

Getting there: The Lower Mesa Falls overlook off State Highway 47, about ten miles northeast of Ashton, Idaho, is an excellent place to leave your vehicle behind and begin exploring the Mesa Falls area. From the overlook, you can either walk north to the Upper Mesa Falls, about two miles away, or south along the canyon rim past the Lower Mesa Falls lookout, Grandview Campground and on towards Bear Gulch, where other trails, including a rails-to-trails that links Ashton, Idaho, to West Yellowstone, Montana, branch off.

Parking at the Lower Mesa Falls overlook is free. Parking at Upper Mesa Falls isn’t – that costs $10 per carload. Nothing stops you from making the walk to Upper Mesa Falls from the lower falls to avoid paying the fee, however. Potable water and bathrooms are also available at the Grandview campground.

The campground itself costs $13 per night. If you have a second vehicle, the price goes up $6. There aren’t many spots at the campsite, so plan on getting there early – it’s first come, first served.

By George, I Think He's Got It

Well, it appears that Alan is prepared for his stint – starting next week – at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s summer workshop.

The whole Uncharted team has worked pretty hard over the last month helping him get ready, and I think we’ve got a pretty comprehensive program put together. His students ought to leave the week-long conference with a lot of valuable information and I’ll be surprised if the Columbia folks don’t ask Alan to come back and teach again.

Our crown jewel this week is a completely fleshed-out schedule, with much of the lecturing ready to go. Not that he’s going to do lots of lecturing – there’s going to be lots of hands-on stuff for his students to do.

Editing in A Social Media Context

Another Uncharted-themed post tonight, but it bears on something that Michelle and I have spoken about often: Fixing mistakes on the Uncharted web site.

Obviously, we want to put our best foot forward. As a team of writers both professional and amateur hoping to attract other writers of the same various veins, we have to be careful in our presentation. Staff stuff – and certainly promoted and promotional material – ought to be meticulously copy-edited. We want our staff photos to be tone-perfect, or as near as can be, and we want all of our words to be spelled correctly.

And we’ll go to great lengths to do so. Just a month ago, I spent nearly three hours one night scouring my own stuff for errors, and found plenty to fix.

But what about stuff from our contributors – do we go in and stealthily fix typos and such, or send e-mails to the greatest offenders, asking them to fix things up? No we do not. That detracts from the experience rather than helping our Explorers feel comfortable in submitting material that’s less than perfect.

We’re already seeing that as a problem – some of the feedback we get from our readers is that we’re “too good” for the likes of them, so they feel intimidated about submitting material. If we suddenly went all Grammar Nazi on them, we’d only make the situation worse.

Enter Michael Agger’s piece on Slate.com today, “Awsum Shoes!” in which he delves into the ethicality of Internet-based businesses correcting the grammar and composition – but not altering the meaning thereof – of product reviews in order to present a sharper image and thus earn more money. Here’s what he says:

When we read a review on Amazon, we have to administer our own version of the Turing test—was this really written by an innocent, human consumer like me? With the amount of money at stake, and the amount of PR energy brought to bear, it will become increasingly difficult to sort the genuine from the fake. One can imagine a future (perhaps it's already arrived) when companies deliberately insert bad grammar or regional slang to give reviews the appearance of authenticity—sort of like the distressed khakis of reviews.

For now, the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction. By cleaning up its reviews, Zappos is hurting shoppers as it helps its bottom line. The lowercase reviews, the all-caps reviews, the Internet speak, the subject-verb-agreement manglings, the sentence fragments, the pathetic attempts to spell chic—all of these are factors to weigh when considering someone's opinion of low-top Chuck Taylors. Or, to be more earnest about it, our mistakes are what make us human. On the Internet, it's important that other people can tell if you're an idiot.

In other words, or errors make us human. And believable. Even on this blog. I may be anal about fixing what errors I see, but I don’t lie awake at nights, scouring my blog posts for things to fix. That’s also why I gave up the “Grammar Nazi” segments of this blog – they merely attracted other grammar Nazis who found mistakes aplenty on my blog, and rubbed my nose in them.

We may arrive at the day when we want “crowdsourced” or automatic grammar fixes in our content at Uncharted – and why not, we already have something very similar to that in the word processors we use, with spell check and grammar check ready with red and green squiggles to tell us where we’ve gone astray. And we’ve also toyed with the idea of automatic language translation software to help our site become more accessible to our worldwide, non-English speaking audience.

But they never feel authentic, these derivations of computer-produced writing, even if aided and abetted by humans. So we’ll be content with errors at Uncharted.

Wanna Buy A Ghost (Town)?

I don't know what it is with me and ghost towns.

Back in the late 80s, a Dutch exchange student we were hosting wanted to go pan for gold. He'd gone to the local army surplus store and bought an authentic gold-panning pan -- they have everything at our surplus store, except the gold -- and wanted to try it out. I figured, why not go gold-panning where the prospectors had found gold years before?

So we headed to Stanley , Idaho.

Stanley itself is nto a ghost town, though it is almost. Nearby, however, is the ghost town of Bonanza, which sounded as a likely spot.

We camped, made a fire, monkeyed around as high school kids will do, then went panning for gold. Didn't find a single flake. But we had a ball poking through the old buildings at Bonanza, wondering who lived there, why they left, and why in the world they used such splintery wood for the seats in their outhouses.

Then on out, I was hooked.

I've been through ghost towns in extreme southern Idaho , where they built their homes out of stone because trees were scarce. I've been through several in central Idaho , where the roofs have crumbled and trees are growing up through the buildings.

And I've been to Gilmore , Idaho , time and again, hoping against hope that on the next journey, I can convince my wife to buy a lot there. They're for sale, you know. Owning part of a ghost town. How cool would that be? Read more about it here.

Gilmore, Idaho, from the surrounding hills. Photo by Michelle Davidson.

Pew Study Delves into Where and How People Get Their News

The folks over at the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism continue to put out interesting research that ought to influence how media companies on the web shape their web and social media strategies.

Their most recent study, “Navigating News Online” (full link here, or see below for a PDF of the study, which Pew, for some reason*, has spread over several web pages), comes up with some surprising – and not so surprising – conclusions, based on nine months’ worth of mining data from Nielsen research conducted in 2010. Pew focuses on the following areas, critical to anyone hoping to build monetizable traffic on the web:

• How users get to the top news sites
• How long they stay during each visit
• How deep they go into a site
• Where they go when they leave

Their findings ought to hearten media companies who have worked hard to build a Facebook presence, cause chagrin to those who have poured any amount of effort into Twitter and make them think again about who might be the bad boy – I did say bad boy, not bad girl – in the business of news aggregation.

Most telling, however, are these points, delivered in the study’s overview:

[T]he findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.
  
The findings also reveal that while search aggregators remain the most popular way users find news, the universe of referring sites is diverse. Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic. And far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites.

The home page thing, to me, is the most startling, and yet almost the most obvious thing to think of. Back when Web 1.0 was king, much was made of making the home page visible, dominant, and navigable. In the Google age, however, thought has poured into the philosophy that since traffic is coming to sites in droves through search engines that the home page is not necessarily as important as it was in the past. Not so, according to Pew, at least for the 25 major news sites they looked at:
For 21 of the 25 sites studied, the home page is the most viewed part of the site. This suggests a couple of likely behaviors. One is that some of the traffic coming from search is people typing in the name of the Website, not searching for specific topics. Second, it suggests that, for certain sites especially, going online to check the latest headlines is still an important dimension of news consumption.

This finding reinforces my belief that at Uncharted (you knew this was going to devolve into a discussion about Uncharted, right?) we need to do more to offer enticement and different places to go on the home page, including having links to our blog, our Facebook page, and perhaps a list of ten to fifteen of our most recently-updated stuff, in addition to the slide and banner updates we already do. Giving our readers a plethora of at-home places to go, tied in with Facebook, also matches nicely with what Pew concludes in its study.

First, Facebook. Here’s what Pew says:

With roughly 500 million users worldwide, Facebook’s audience is vastly larger than any single news organization. Its role has evolved from a network for friends to share personal information to a way for people to share, recommend and link together all kinds of information, including news. If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.

Google ought to be a little concerned here – which is why they tried to get Google Buzz going. Sharing news, I think, is going to become increasingly significant in the future. We’re doing that already, thank heaven, with our Facebook page, and with the AddThis widget we have on the tail end of every story we’ve got. Speaking of which:

If a large portion of users are going to Facebook after leaving a site, that may indicate the site’s content is easy to share and viewed as worth distributing to friends. On the other hand, if most users are leaving for Google or some other search engine, that could indicate that users either did not find what they were looking for on the site or got what they needed but were not drawn to any other content.

The addition of social networking “share” tools to the margins of nearly every news story seems to have paid off. Facebook shows up among the top destinations for every site studied. So do sharing tool widgets like Addthis.com, which allow users to share a story across a wide range of social network pages. And the share tools rank higher among the content producers on the list than aggregators, suggesting that people share actual news stories more than search results. While these are technically clicks away from the site, they are positive clicks away, likely multiplying additional traffic to that story. The extent of their use may even be under counted here as this figure measures when people click on a link or tool to share the story. It does not record instances when users copy and paste URL’s onto a share page.

So we’re at least doing the share thing right. I’d love to search Facebook to see whether or not the stuff on our site is being shared, however, as our users tend to be an inscrutable bunch.

There’s lots more from the study, of course. I’ve only scratched the surface here. Read it. It’s a good ‘un. It's getting a lot of press. Here's what TIME Magazine's Techland blog has to say about it.

*Which they explain in their own study, obtusely yet thusly: The largest sites that operate many subdomain properties also tend to succeed at keeping much of the “departing” traffic within the family.  On ChicagoTribune.com, for instance, the top seven destination sites are pages within Chicago Tribune itself, such as the ChicagoTribune.com sports page or breaking news section. On CNN.com, 13 of top fifteen destination sites are within the CNN family, including CNN subdomains like news.blogs.cnn.com and money.conn.com as, well as other Time Warner properties promoted on the site like sportsillustrated.com. Google and Facebook are the only external sites to make it in that mix.

Officially in at Columbia

Well, we're officially in at the CSPA. Here's what Alan says about our repeated invitation:

Here is the link to the workshop I will be teaching. The Columbia University people told me that the reasons they are having me come teach this summer are because I come well prepared and get really good reviews with class numbers increasing. The words they used to describe the sessions were things like innovative and attention-grabbing. They also like that we cross train and deal with small staffs. This invitation would not be possible if it were not for the team effort that goes into helping me prepare for these events. Each of you have played a key role in this and I appreciate it. When I go to these things and am successful it is only because of this team. You should all take credit for this. Thanks.

That makes us feel pretty good. Here's the link he mentions.

A Washed-Up Journalist Heads, in Spirit, to CSPA

Back in April 2005, I washed my hands of newspaper journalism.

Sick to death of it I was. And even with the prospect of underemployement as a hod carrier (to be followed up by stints at call centers and Target) I was glad to be out of the profession.

I’ve grown up a bit since then. Well, a lot.

I now realize I frittered away opportunities in the field. Still, I’m happy I left. I’m enjoying my career as a technical writer and have turned my desire to write into a handful of blogs, a strong presence at Uncharted and, at last count, a 114,000-word fantasy novel that I’m in the midst of editing. Also during that time I earned a Masters degree and, through Uncharted, have become associated with people who want my input on all sorts of things, writing being only one of many. I’m also teaching an online English class at Brigham Young University-Idaho, hopefully shaping students’ minds to become better writers, or at least not to regard writing with fear and loathing. I’ve also grown closer to my wife, with whom I collaborate at Uncharted, and who is going through the same masters program I finished in 2009.

And thanks to Uncharted – more specifically, to Alan Murray, our illustrious CEO and Sith Lord – I’m kinda in a back-doorsy way getting back into journalism.

For the past two years, Alan has traveled to Columbia University’s Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s spring and fall workshops, to teach high school students there everything he knows about writing for the web, collaborating with people dispersed across the globe, and other such stuff. Now this summer they’ve asked him to come back for a full week to teach a workshop on newspaper writing for the web.

He wants me to help.

All I can say is yikes. Two rubes like us working together to present something at Columbia. He’s feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overwhelmed. Yet excited and challenged at the same time.

I’m sure some of my compatriots in my former field of employment would raise their eyebrows at my participation in this. No matter. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’ve changed for the better, and don’t mind saying that, though I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

So here’s a rough draft of what we’re thinking: