Freelance Unbound

Here’s a sign of the times from Jason Preston’s Eat, Sleep, Publish blog.
He writes:

It’s increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to run a profitable content company on the internet if you’re paying for your content to be produced.

Well, we kind of knew that, given how difficult it is to find paying freelance writing gigs right now.
The solution? Put together a site that relies on specialist user-generated content that offers contributers revenue from any advertising their pages attract.
This is a direction that a lot of online content publishers are starting to follow – judged by the proliferation of journalism-job-ads-that-aren’t-exactly-job-ads. But this one at least seems less biased against its contributors.
The site is L33tsauce – which, as you can probably guess given its incomprehensible name, is aimed at computer gamers.
Contributers share their expertise on pages they create using the site’s page building tool. (For some reason, these are called “Dojos” – just calling it a “page” doesn’t seem cool enough.)
Then any advertising revenue generated by the pages is split evenly between the contributor and the site owner.
It’s a neat idea. I have no idea if it’ll work, mind you, but it does sidestep a lot of the problems of traditional media thinking in this area.

1. It recognises that the site will only work if gamers want to use it and visit in sufficient numbers to attract advertisers.
2. It puts up no money upfront to contributors, thus keeping costs down.
3. But it doesn’t stiff its contributors by not paying them. If they are popular, they earn money. If not, they don’t.

For my money, it’s a better deal and an interesting model. But for this to work, it’ll have to ensure that half the proceeds of the advertising revenue doesn’t add up to half of nothing.

I am, for one, as I’ve finally got my act together to sign up.
There’s a list of registered delegates (so far) here.
I’m looking forward to it. There are some interesting names, both speaking and attending, plus I get the chance to meet some folk who I know via Freelance Unbound, but have never seen in real life.

I’ve been posting a bit about dithering between WordPress and Drupal for a web development project, and also which one to use for a student learning environment.
Fellow blogger Soilman is in a similar position – though he’s dithering between Drupal and Expression Engine for bigger, corporate sites. Here’s how he compares the two:
Drupal
Pro:

• Out-of-the-box functionality. You really can create a video/ecommerce/whatever site FOR FREE with bolt-on modules. Amazing.

Con:

• Horrifying theming. If you want to put your own design into Drupal, you need not only to know PHP, but to be fluent in it. I’m not kidding. After extensive dicking around, it’s become clear to me that this is a pro developer’s tool only… unless you’re happy to stick with provided themes (or bought ones) and confine yourself to playing with the CSS and tweaking image files etc.



Expression Engine
Pro:

• You don’t need to know a syllable of PHP. Honestly. It’s amazing. You can input ANY HTML/CSS design into it; you simply break up the various divs and assign CMS tags to them… Expression Engine does the rest, creating the PHP behind the scenes for you. You can delve into it if you like but you don’t have to. It’s like Views in Drupal, but for theming. Very clever, and VERY easy.


Con:

• Limits on functionality. Expression Engine couldn’t render a full-blown ecommerce site, for instance. You’d have to use Magento (or similar) for that. BUT for creating your basic, non-specialist site with a minimum of aggro and quite a lot of functionality and useability, it’s great. If you can afford it.

I don’t know Expression Engine – and the fact that it’s not open source puts me off.
It’s not just the money – I am actually prepared to pay real money for software – but the fact that you’re tying yourself into a proprietary system.
But Drupal has been a nightmare.
I realised that creating database queries to manage content using Drupal’s Views module is easier than programming WordPress PHP directly. You can create your own sidebar widgets, much as you would use in WordPress, and never touch code. There also seems to be more control over sidebars.
It seemed ideal – a CMS with a very flexible and powerful architecture (that is, the scaffolding that holds it all up and lets you manipulate the content in different and useful ways).
But Drupal has some serious problems – mainly in theming. As Soilman says:

One disappointment is how few themes are available. If you want it to look really bespoke, and unlike a typical Drupal site, it seems you have to get your hands dirty and design one yourself. My mate who makes websites for a living gave up in despair with theming Drupal. He tells me that unless you’re pretty much fluent in PHP and HTML, Drupal will break your heart.

Well – maybe that’s the point. In order to code web sites, maybe you do need to actually, you know, understand code. Anyway:

The good news is that apparently the commercial themes you can buy for Drupal do work (mostly) and are configured basically around Blocks so you can create database-driven pages in Views, then use the resulting content in Blocks around the various provided parts of the theme.

Which is nice – but expensive. And also undermines the control that you have over a site you develop yourself.
There are some other interesting potential solutions available that I want to explore.
Artisteer, for example, claims to be a simple visual web design tool that outputs theme code for CMS software, including Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
And I don’t know much about Joomla. Steve Hill at Solent University uses it as a student CMS, for instance, and by all accounts it’s easier to set up and use.
But life is short. Drupal seems powerful – and is nothing if not a challenge. I’ll see how I get on with it…

Here’s a teaser for those WordPress stats geeks who simply can’t wait until March to read the full-year update on this blog’s web analytics.
Moving to self-hosted WordPress away from the coziness of WordPress.com has caused a certain amount of stats upheaval. Primarily this is because I now have Google Analytics installed.
WP stats
Up until the move I was relying on WordPress’s own stats – which gave me a low readership number. I now realise this is because the WordPress stats only count visits to specific posts. Anyone visiting the home page and reading down the posts from there wasn’t counted.
Google Analytics
This meant that when I switched to the new site and started using Google Analytics my readership at least doubled, and sometimes tripled, depending on the day I was measuring. Which is nice.
The Google Analytics graph and the WordPress stats graph track each other nearly all the time. The only difference is that the Google results are higher.
Except on one day.
Damned lies and statistics
My WordPress stats for Saturday December 5 show 202 views, while Google seems to show fewer than 100.  Which makes no sense whatsoever – how can more people have clicked through to individual posts than actually visited the site as a whole?
Can anyone make sense of why WordPress stats recorded this bizarre traffic spike? If any WordPress geeks reading this have any suggestions I’d be more than happy to hear them…

The sad news that venerable journalism industry magazine Editor & Publisher is to close apparently reached fourth place in Twitter’s trending topics list yesterday.
Which seems to confirm my theory that it’s journalists who are all over Twitter like flies on a dead dog.
According to the E&P web site:

The name “Editor & Publisher” even reached No. 4 as a top “trending topic” on Twitter — beating out everyone from Tiger Woods to Santa — and remained in the top 10 much of the day, drawing wide commentary.

Given that, I suspect journalists and their ilk must make up a disproportionate number of active Twitter users.
Twitter’s growth rate also seems to be slowing down, according to this piece on microblogging versus blogging on TechCrunch.
That’s inevitable, really, given how fast it kicked off. But Malcolm Coles is one who keeps track of how the media uses Twitter, and it seems fewer readers are using Twitter to follow national newspapers.
What does this mean?
I’ll stick my neck out and predict that Twitter’s use among ordinary consumers and citizens will fall off. It’s a useful tool – but a lot of those who make the most noise about it are in the media and, loosely, PR.
It’s great for network-based research, and can be a good tool to interact with customers – particularly tech-savvy ones. But I do wonder whether it will end up with a very self-selecting user base of die-hard Twitter fans twittering to other die-hard Twitter fans.
It’s saving grace may be the fact that you can easily use your mobile phone to post updates.
But the arrival of cool new 3G tools such as the iPhone means it’s getting easier to use sites such as Facebook from a mobile. And as far as I can see, a wider cross section of users like to use Facebook than Twitter.

Just discovered via Taking Out The Trash – venerable “journal of parapolitics” Lobster has moved to online only distribution.
I subscribed to Lobster for several years back in the 1990s. I often found it hard going (there’s only so much I can ever want to know about the Bilderberg Group). But the whole microwaves and mind control issue is going to explode in the Government’s face, I tell you.
It’s been produced from Robin Ramsey’s house in Hull since 1983, but now it seems the web has finally caught up with it. Or maybe he’s finally caught up with the web.
Anyway – it’ll be the first time I’ve actually read a copy for quite a few years. So that says something…

Posting has been light on Freelance Unbound this week, mainly because I’ve been drowning in PHP in an attempt to code a web site.
So far, the process is:

• Tweak the code
• Break the site
• Undo
• Tweak again
• Refresh
• Repeat until something works

I’m enjoying it, in a strange kind of way. Though I’m finding it hard to resist finishing my sentences with “endwhile”.
I’ve also seesawed between putting the site together in Drupal and using lovely, cozy WordPress.
I started in WordPress, and then was put off by the PHP coding required (I’m not just tweaking someone else’s site – it’s more gutting and restoring than painting and decorating).
Then I realised you can achieve much the same results using Drupal’s Views module – using a menu-driven system to manage the content on the site. Fantastic, I thought – all my problems solved.
And then I realised that creating design themes in Drupal is a nightmare taken from one of the circles of hell.
Luckily, after all this, I’m back with WordPress – and suddenly it all makes much more sense. (It helps that I’ve been taking journalism students through a WordPress-based group magazine project at UCA in Farnham.)
Aside from the theming, another clear difference between Drupal and WordPress is in the Codex.
WordPress has a wealth of information on the PHP it uses, with an abundance of code snippets and advice on how to use them in your site.
But while Drupal has got extensive documentation, there seems to be nothing on the actual code it uses. In fact, all the code for a Drupal page seems to be summed up in “$content”, which is less than useful for a newbie like me.
[UPDATE: Thanks to Kevin O’Brien at web developer No Warning Label for the link to Drupal’s API development site. Which, frankly, looks scary as hell.]
Drupal has clear advantages over WordPress for a big, multi-user site, that needs highly customisable content. There’s just such a potential Drupal project on the cards early next year that I’ll report on as it gets going.
But for now I’m going to stick with WordPress. It has its limitations, but its ease-of-use and active and helpful user community more than make up for them.

Electronic newspapers and magazines are being touted by the media industry as a way of clinging on to readers and revenue.
Adobe spent a couple of days at last month’s MediaPro 09 publishing expo in London heavily pushing its Air publishing tool, which allows clients to publish a digital facsimile of their newspaper or magazine (complete with virtually turning pages!) direct to a user’s desktop. One high-profile user is the New York Times, which launched in May.
[youtube width=”495″ height=”393″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7q69PbQiv8[/youtube]
Part of the idea is that users are happier paying for content that is a product – ie that is an object (even if it’s virtual) on their computer – rather than simply access to web content.
The other advantage is that the digital edition is tied to a user’s computer and account – making it harder to pass around non-paying customers.
I’m not actually that keen on electronic magazines like this. I find them much clunkier to use than web sites, and less functional (even though the Air reader does do clever things to update individual stories from a database, for example).
But they do look good. In fact, if a journalism student went into a job interview with a link to a magazine they had produced and published electronically, rather than a sheaf of A4 printouts of their student project, I’d be quite impressed.
And of course they can.
Given that almost any digital publishing tool is available on the web at no cost, it’s hardly surprising to come across Issuu – a free service that lets anyone upload documents files such as PDFs to create an online magazine, complete with those all-important virtually turning pages.
I’m not sure that e-magazines are anything other than an evolutionary cul-de-sac in digital media terms. But I’d certainly recommend journalism students explore that kind of publishing as a calling card in the industry’s ferociously competitive jobs market.
(Even though the sheer number of them available on one site alone should give you an indication of just how tough it is to make any money at all in such a media-saturated market…)
[HT: Gareth Main via Paul Bradshaw]

After last week’s unmissable, $30 a month opportunity to write for a potential audience of 24 million, how about this ad for a “Home based internet researcher”?
For some reason, though the deadline hadn’t passed when I first grabbed the ad, the ad was dropped from Journalism.co.uk before the stated closing date. Maybe 63336 Limited has been inundated with eager, degree-level candidates who want to provide answers to questions for “an attractive, performance-based pay structure”.
The company’s web site does claim that:

63336 has very high standards – only 1 in 10 applications is successful

So that could be it.
AQA (originally “Any Question Answered”) is a mobile phone-based service that allows you to send questions by SMS while you’re getting hammered in the pub and receive witty and well-thought-out answers from a legion of home-based researchers.
I have no idea what “an attractive, performance-based pay structure” means. Not “a salary”, that’s for sure – which is why this ad qualifies for this strand of posts.
It does sound quite fun though. I was almost tempted to apply – but then it was removed early, so I couldn’t.
More job ads for jobs that aren’t actually jobs as they show up…

Spotted on Yahoo News:

Beyoné leads the way at the Grammys

Ouch…