ePay It Forward?
You’ve no doubt watched or at least heard of the movie Pay It Forward, with Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and the incomparable Haley Joel Osment, who sees dead people. The title of the movie is a phrase that means, essentially, that you can make the world a better place by making the lives of a few people better. They don’t pay you back but when they’re able, they pay it forward by doing the same for a few other people.

Well website eKudoz wants to do something similar using messages. Send a nice message, congrats, kudos, to two people who will hopefully do the same to two more. This is a great social experiment and seems to have a grounding in the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. A story related to Six Degrees involves an experiment where people had to send out two letters addressed to someone they didn’t know by sending them to someone they did, who would in turn repeat the process.

More Streaming Video Sites: Pyro TV, UStream TV
The latest entries in the streaming video website wars are Pyro TV and UStream TV.

Pyro’s interface is clean, with video playing on the top half of your browser screen and tabbed listings on the bottom half. But I don’t see anything all that different about Pyro.TV compared to any other video sharing site, other than an abundance of content from specific TV channels such as Cartoon Network. Am I missing something?

UStream has nothing visually outstanding. They do push the social aspect by highlighting members, offering a link to their profiles and allowing several types of communication: message, 1-on-1 text chat and 1-on-1 video chat.

Now, given that you can search for various types of people (single, swinger, married, etc.) who are looking for various types of meetups (dating casual and serious, networking, etc.), you’d figure they’ve for some reason combined a dating site with a video sharing site. Speed dating, anyone? There’s a section for it.

Not saying that it can’t work, just that I don’t judge my potential partners only by what video content they watch. Just strikes me as odd.

NY Times: Top Newspaper Website
According to the Neilsen/NetRatings, the NY Times website was the top newspaper website for February, followed closely by USA Today and the Washington Post. Editor and Publisher has the full top 30 list.

Blame Canada. For Being Boring?
Apparently, the Washington Post is the last American newspaper to have a Canadian bureau. Or was, now that they’re closing their Toronto office. Ah well. Just wait until both countries merge, maybe 20 years down the road. Or sooner, if the Prime Minister sells the country over.

Have Blogs Jumped The Shark?
Last week, while flipping channels, I came across Friday night’s WWE wrestling. The ringside announcers blabbered on about how the two lead female wrestlers were having a blog battle. Does this actually interest anyone other than twelve year olds who think wrestling is real?  It’s one thing to follow an athlete’s thoughts, and yet another to follow a fake battle - i.e., fiction - in blog form.

Off With Her Head?
Danny Bonaduce, radio host and talentless ex-Partridge Family child star, calls for the execution of Rosie O’Donnell, the loudmouth, opinionated TV host and Tom Cruise-salivator. That’s right, execution. Last I heard, there was something called free speech in the United States. Whether you like O’Donnell or not, a rational human being must realize that what Bonaduce is saying could be construed as counselling to commit a murder - which IS a crime. I’m not sure if the US applies the death penalty for sedition, but maybe they can get Bonaduce at the same time on a dope charge. Dope as in utterly stupid. Then again, this could be one of those stupid April Fool’s jokes conducted days early.

London Calling
If you’ve never believed in Big Brother, you might reconsider, at least in the UK. (It’s been said that George Orwell knew what was coming because he had insider sources in the British government.) The UK has been described as an endemic surveillance society because of all the public cameras, watching your every move.

Now things get even better. Whether you’re a blogger or a journalist, if you are out in the field covering a story and have a camera, press credentials are not going to be enough to not get searched. It seems, every citizen has become a threat, and police officers can stop you for any reason at any time. [A UK source tells me that this is in fact the way life is there now.]

What Are You Paid For Your Writing?
London Freelance has an interesting collection of rate tables for online, print, broadcasting, and photographic content. These are actual rates collected together from numerous publications from around the world, ordered by publication, not date of collection.

Now if you’re a blogger/writer looking at these tables, before you go screaming for more money, consider the ad revenue of the publications you write for, as well as your own experience. These have always been a factor for print rates and are no doubt the case online. You might want to check out their fees guide, which gives suggestions for what to charge for different types of content.

While the rates are in British Pounds, even the same numbers in US$ mean promising returns for those of us that are “pro” bloggers.

Would You Watch Ads On Your Cell Phone?
Some people seem to think that you and I would be willing to watch ads on our cell phones in return for free calling minutes. A Harris Interactive survey suggests, however, that more people would prefer cash before minutes, and fewer people would accept free ringtones or discount coupons. I don’t know. Would you want to watch ads on your cell phone? I’d think the incentive would have to be high.

Who Reads More? Print or Online Readers?
You’ve probably read or heard that online readers only browse, have short attention spans, and probably don’t finish anything they start reading. That’s probably true of those that subscribe to hundreds of feeds, but a Poynter Institute study, Eyetrack, suggests that online readers actually complete more stories than print readers.

Twitter From the Founders’ Viewpoint
Alexandra Berzon at Red Herring gives a nice explanation of the success of Twitter from the founders’ point of view, and how the blogging of influential people such as Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble contributed significantly to that success.

More Print Mags Go Bye-Bye
Life Magazine, which was revived some time in the 1980s, will be publishing one last print issue. After that, their only presence will be online. Child Magazine is also ending print life but will have an online presence as part of a portal.

Newspapers may not be dead yet, but magazines sure are dropping. Though it’s good to hear that many are maintaining online presences.

The Money’s In Social Networks
Print mags might be finding focusing on online editions more profitable, but in the meantime, MySpace is pulling in about US$30M in revenue. Per month, that is.

Minority Journalists Increasing Or Decreasing?
Editor and Publisher magazine reports that the percentage of minority journalists in the US decreased since last year, according to an annual survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. E&P also points out that the actual number of minority journalists actually increased by 200. Furthermore, of the 2,000 full-time journalists only working online for a newspaper, 16% were minorities.

I would think, though, that the percentage of full-time “minority” bloggers online is much higher. Of course, online, how do you define “minority”?

It’s been a busy week for me in wrapping my brain around some client projects including Performancing. I’m proud to uncloak Performancing Metrics, a state of the art web analytics program geared towards the blogger who wants as much data as I do.

Performancing Metrics is a new and unique web analyzer that gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. Many analyzers give good summaries, and Performancing Metrics is no different - but the similarities stop there. Performancing Metrics stands out with its refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like Spy and RSS feeds, and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail. You also get real time stats, outbound link tracking, download tracking, and much much more. More →

Over the weekend I pondered the real world a lot. You know what I don’t like most people. Not just online but in the real world too. And you know what that is ok. I used to think you had to please everyone. But a business partner told me recently its ok to just please the 2%. The 2% that really care about your business and what you are doing.

If you spend 98% of your time trying to please everyone than you are wasting your time. But if you spend 100% of your time trying to please the 2% of people who are passionate about what you are doing you find success beyond your wildest dreams.

So who cares if you 98% of the universe and/or blogosphere doesn’t know you. That’s ok. But be passionate about the 2% that does. Or in the real numbers the .0002%. ( I have no factual data to backup my claims. )

Mequoda’s Daily newsletter has a report on how Computerworld magazine’s online websites are generating 1.5-2M unique users per month and a pre-tax profit margin of about 40-50%. Few print magazines or newspapers likely pull that kind of margin. Their online revenue has apparently nearly

…tripled from about 11 percent of the magazine’s total in 2000 to about 30 percent today.

And they’re doing it with a site that could be considered hard on the eyes. Now, it helps considerably that they’ve been around in print since 1967 and publish in over 60 countries. With that kind of offline visibility over so many years, they are very likely to have site visitors from all over the world. For print media with more local markets, is the potential for online profit still there? According to the Mequoda report, very likely, yes, but the transition over to the online world has to be effective (obviously).

My advice? Start heavily promoting your website offline, while you’re still in print, and market the website aggressively in print and online. Provide enough starter content online to build traffic, and post non-print content daily. Don’t hide away front page stories behind a subscription wall after a few days like the New York Times does. Why not? Because any blogger that links to you will peeve off their readers, and bloggers are likely to stop linking as a result.

I haven’t scanned the Computerworld site enough nor looked at the magazine recently, but there’s likely content unique to both mediums. And that’s okay. Keep one important thing in mind: in the 1990s at least, most magazine publishers would tell you that neither the cover price nor subscription fees ever cover the cost of print for a given issue. It’s always been advertising that keeps a mag afloat. So with information so free online, anyone that charges for theirs (beyond, say, ebooks, whitepapers, tutorials, reports, etc., and maybe not then) is likely to get a very unpleasant slap in the face when visitors don’t return.

The fact that you can find some awesome singers who write their own music encourages me. And while Mark Cuban and Viacom can sue the pants off of Google, what are the Viacoms and the Mark Cubans of the world doing to help the little people achieve their dreams?

Umm. Yeah. No comment. Thanks Google for empowering the dreamers.

Here’s Ana Free, I Listen.

Brian Gardner over at Performancing has unveiled Nightlife for WordPress.

Feel free to download this sucker, and head on over to the forums if you need any help installing it our any support in customizing it.

I’m still a huge believer that WordPress is the killerest CMS and Blogging Engine on the planet. And what better way to support that than by releasing killer themes.