Ten Reasons Why I Couldn’t Come Up with 10 Reasons

Web application Second|Brain helps you organize your online life by providing all the content you choose to import in one place.

Said content can include (but is definitely not limited to) bookmarks from del.icio.us, microblogs on twitter, digg, your own posts at wordpress, your feeds in gReader, flickr… The list goes on.

Thus, here’s a list of ten reasons why you should use Second|Brain (I know, I’m very anti-linkbait):

1. It will save you massive amounts of time. You use an RSS feed reader for your blogs, right? Well, this is an RSS reader for things you liked when you read your RSS reader.
2. It’s in Beta. Hence, it’s buggy. The only way they’ll ever eliminate any bugs is if you report on them!
3. You can win a MacBook Air.
4. You can follow both me and Alex over at Blogsessive. Awesome, right?
5. Because I don’t think I can list ten reasons, but I’ve already given you three awesome ones and one linkwhoring one.
6. The community is still relatively small, and you have a chance to become an oldbie on a fantastic website. Imagine you were one of the first thousand people to sign up for StumbleUpon. Wouldn’t you feel entitled to some kind of ego?
7. Because it’s free (as in beer).
8. AAAAAAA A AAAA AAA!!!!
9. ?????
10. Profit!

Now, all this being said, there is some criticism of things like this, which I have wanted to say for a long time. And I think I said it rather well (don’t you agree?) over at Blogsessive (I think Alex may be a little frustrated as well):

I signed up for Twitter about two weeks(?) ago, and I think I used it for about two days to talk to a friend I have in Alabama. Think I’ve logged in once since.

It’s not that I don’t like these things; I think it’s more what all these webapps are suffering from, and that’s “done it before.” Even being able to mention three off the top of your head is a major problem, and that’s even leaving out Pownce.

I hear so many great things about these sites, and I put them on my “I’ll try it” list, try it, and then don’t really see anything particularly impressive. Maybe it’s just because I’m not a huge fan of “microblogging” (in case you haven’t noticed, I like to talk… a lot.).

But most likely it’s because I hear so many things about how great X is and how it’s better than Y and Z, but I don’t really want to take my foo over to yet another bar, if you know what I mean. It’s happened with digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon… I’m trying really hard to return to these things, but I just don’t have the patience.

I’m also not the biggest fan of this whole “Web 2.0″ buzzword thing we’ve got going on. It’s not that I’m not enjoying the buzz just as much as everybody else. It’s just that it requires a lot of effort to keep up with, and I’m lazy beyond reason.

Maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff, when I’m just now nearing the edge of 18? Is it possible to be jaded with the internet?

Now, all this being said, I still feel there’s room for more of these sites, with a little ingenuity and innovation. I feel Second|Brain has done this. Rather than just cloning Twitter, they seem to capitalize on all the clones, allowing all these clones to be fed into one concentrated area.

Thank you, SecondBrain, for not following the trend. I applaud you.

So that’s it. Head on over to Second|Brain and be welcomed to the rest of your 2008 life!

Seeds to Reap: A Ratio

I hear advice on a lot of blog success websites to cast a wide net.

Now, this is a pretty fantastic, but there are just a few things to consider.

Picture this scenario:

The crew of a fishing boat is in the ocean trawling for tuna. Similarly, bloggers are in the middle of the Internet: the largest ocean in existence. Bloggers who are doing this for a living are trying to garner page views, or, to keep it similar, viewers.

The crew casts a net that encompasses a square-kilometer of water. A blogger does everything he can imagine: Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, StumbleUpon, random guest postings whenever possible, and owns five blogs, all on a different niche, with adsense all around. He has no one particular topic he is thinking about for more than minutes at a time, and what he really cares about is writing fiction. He wants more than anything to write novels. However, and unfortunately for him, none of his blogs have anything to do with writing, save the action of actually posting.

For comparison, another blogger does very little: signs up for a couple forums concerning her niche (let’s say Linux. Even more specifically, Fedora), starts one or maybe two blogs (one professional and helpful, one mostly for personal reflection and musings). She uses adsense on her professional blog and spends a lot of time developing her content, with long, thought-out mini-essays. She also spends a lot of time on the Fedora forums helping new users, with a link to her main blog or other website in her signature. She cares a lot about making actual friends.

Who gets more fish? Well, the mile-wide net cast by blogger #1 is fantastic. In just a couple weeks of time, he has a following on Twitter of more than 20,000 people. But there’s a problem. He doesn’t know what to do now. His mind is so scattered from all the different topics that he’s even begun to mix up posts, and he only posts to all his websites on average once or twice a week.

Blogger #2 has not done as well on the surface, with a measly 1,000 followers on Twitter. However, many of them are the people she had helped with their problems on the forums, and a couple are even sending email and checking out her blog for other tips and tricks they wanted to know. Most likely, for quite a while, she’ll continue to get new viewers, and with a good reputation, she can silently and passively absorb all the new income she’ll get from random ad clicks and possibly affiliates.

Mind this won’t be so forever. Blogger #1 may not have many actual friends necessarily, but he has tons of opportunities to start. Similarly, Blogger #2 may stay this way for a while, or possibly cast a wider net in the future. It’s all up to them, and not everybody makes the same decisions.

My point of all this is consider your net. Is your net so wide that you’ll bring in many fish, but you have no idea how diseased they are, or if they’re even tuna, and not dolphins and kelp? Don’t cover such a great area that everything you do seems very spread out. Remember: If you have five blogs and want to post daily, you’re going to have to write five posts each day on various topics. That’s neglecting active participation in a million other Web 2.0 apps you attempted to catch. Don’t ever get so caught up in new things that you don’t remember your password to blogger.