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Going Once…Going Twice…

Business Logs has been SOLD! Mike has previously talked about putting it up on the auction block, and in mid-March this hot property was snapped up by blog entrepreneur Mark Saunders of Splashpress Media. Business Logs now joins a family that includes such sites as Performancing, The Blog Herald, Jack of All Blogs, Tubetorial, Cutline, and many blog-related sites. Suffice it to say that it’s in good hands.

Two of the biggest concerns with the sale were (1) keeping the high-quality blog going, and (2) continuing to offer awesome blog design services for clients.

To resolve those concerns, Mark brought in the company I work for, Forty, a well-known web design and development firm based (proudly) in Phoenix, Arizona. We’ve been designing and blogging since the old days, and have worked quite a bit with Mike in the past.

From here on out, we’re going to be managing the site, as well as overseeing the blog design work for Business Logs clients. We’ll also be working with Mike to give the site a fresh new look, and port it over from Movable Type (old and busted) to WordPress (new hotness!).

For blog audiences, change sucks. Right now, you’re probably thinking, “Aw, crap, B-Logs is going to go right down the tubes.” We totally understand and respect that. We’d probably be thinking the same thing if we didn’t already know how awesome it’s going to be!

We really believe this will be a good thing for everyone involved. Mike will get to spend more time with 9rules, his biggest crush apart from his fiancee. You, the reader, will continue to receive awesome blog-related content from the guys here at Forty, as well as several guest bloggers (including Mike from time to time). And, for our part, we’ll get to know you guys, which is a reward unto itself.

So, that’s the news from here at Business Logs headquarters. We’re still in the middle of getting everything sorted out, so please forgive any minor hiccups over the next week or two. In the meantime, please feel free to tear us apart in the comments. 🙂

John Dvorak Should Pull The Plug On His Brain

The almost-famous John Dvorak has written an article titled Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone which is almost as insightful as the guy on the corner screaming the world will end. His argument is this:

  • The iPhone hype is so intense that there is no way Apple could possibly deliver on what fanboys and fangirls are hoping for.
  • The cellphone marketplace is so saturated that it’s impossible for a company to come out with one device that redefines the entire industry.

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Spivot Hijacking Your Content?

Spivot is yet another content aggregation site in a long line of content aggregation sites like 9rules, Newsvine, Topix, Daylife, etc., only Spivot might be a few months late to the party.

From the email I received, Spivot is an “all-purpose media reader… [that] brings together the functionality of news aggregation (Google News), with social news (Digg), with the capabilities of a feed aggregation tool (Bloglines).” A better description would be, “combines feed aggregation (like Bloglines, but less intuitive) with social news features (that Newsvine and a million other sites already have) with blog suggestion/aggregation (like 9rules, but Spivot doesn’t ask before they take your content) and mashes it together.

The Lock-In

When you bring in content from independent, outside sources (like bloggers) then you better be giving them something in return. After all, they’re doing the hard work of researching and writing articles on interesting topics, so if you have their content syndicated on your site, there has to be some benefit to the blogger or else you’re in the same bucket as those damn splogs we all hate so much.

If you visit the Art & Design blog section on Spivot, here’s what you’ll see:

  • A list of blogs in the sidebar that produce the content that section is displaying. Click on one of those links on the left and guess what? It doesn’t go to the actual site.
  • A list of articles in the center column from their sources in this category. Click on one of the article titles and you head to a page straight out of 1998 with a frameset and a “spivot toolbar” on the bottom so the actual article URL is hijacked. Most blogs have a “email this article” feature built into the site, but just in case that was too complicated, Spivot provides an email service, except the emails it sends out do not include 1) the author’s name or 2) the actual story URL. In fact, no links in the email land you at the real article at all, they all stick you back at the Spivot site. Oh, and if you don’t have JavaScript turned on, there’s no way to kill the annoying bottom frame nor use 90% of the website.
  • The only direct link to a source blog on the entire Spivot.com website can be found by clicking on the favicon next to a story. Think it’s going to take you to the blog? Think again, the link takes you to the RSS feed of the blog so you’re staring at code.

It seems like Spivot takes your content without asking, republishes it on their site, and then doesn’t mention your name as the author, doesn’t link to your site, and doesn’t link to your article anywhere. The only thing that could make this worse is if they shoved AdSense blocks next to blog author’s content.

They Could Definitely Have Done Better

Spivot is brought to you by the folks at Involution Studios, a digital product firm founded by two guys (Dirk Knemeyer & Andrei Herasimchuk) for whom I have great respect. Andrei was the first user interface designer hired by Adobe and designed most of the Photoshop interface we’re all used to today, and Dirk is an internationally-known champion of usability and product design with presentations all around the world. Too bad they took all that experience and knowledge and left it behind while they developed Spivot or else maybe it could have done well.

Oh, and before I forget. This whole concept was cooler when it was called Kinja, that site from another era that Gawker let slip into oblivion. Some of the design reminds me of Kinja too, weird.

Earth To USAToday: Adding Social Features Does Not Fix The Ugly

It seems to me that in a meeting at USAToday‘s offices, someone told them that making the site look and feel better was somewhat mutually exclusive from offering social features, so they chose “social and really ugly” over “not social but more visually appealing”.

As a designer and someone who visits many news sites each day (New York Magazine, NY Times, Newsvine, Daylife, etc.) I can honestly say this is the most appalling visual redesign I’ve seen in awhile. There are huge gaps of whitespace randomly strewn through the interface, major news article headlines are in the smallest font possible, images are not integrated thoughtfully within each article’s masthead box, they do not explain what the random small colored blocks mean throughout the interface, the bottom half of each page looks like someone just gave up and never designed it, etc., etc.

Scott Karp had this to say about the redesign:

“What are we to conclude from stark contrast between the (sometimes breathless) praise of USA Today’s “social media” redesign among tech/media bloggers and commentators, and the near universal rejection of the redesign among USA Today readers who commented on it? Could it be that it’s really the social media revolutionaries who “don’t get it” when they assume that what the people want is to rise up against the media autocracy and take control, when in fact what most people want is to get high quality information from a reliable source?”

So are “the people” right or the bloggers on TechMeme? Notice that everyone who is praising the social features on this site is praising *the technology* first and not even mentioning the shotty, haphazard user experience, but isn’t that what Web 2.0 is all about? Fawning over Ajax technical implementations and programming libraries before noting that nothing is actually *designed*? Seems like all the technical or social media prowess on the planet can’t buy you happy users, and USAToday is learning that firsthand.

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Selling Business Logs

Update 3/16: Hey everybody, the site has been purchased for an agreed upon amount (higher than the initial bid, closer to the BIN) so the auction is officially closed. Thank you for all the interest and support! I’m staying on to write a bit for the next 3 months plus the redesign is coming soon. Stay tuned 🙂

Since the inception of 9rules back a few SXSW festivals ago, my goal was to work on it full-time or nearly full-time as soon as it was possible. Over the past several months I’ve been slowly transitioning out of client work and doing more 9rules-related activities, and now I feel that selling Business Logs is the last piece of the puzzle that will allow me to do what I’ve always wanted.

To be honest, there’s another reason I’m selling the site and it’s that I’m burnt out with the Web 2.0 industry, or more specifically, writing about the Web 2.0 industry. For awhile I’ve felt that a lot of companies lack that “oomph” that will push them over the top, and instead of constantly being the devil’s advocate and harping on them, I want to spend more time putting my money where my mouth is and making sure that 9rules is a success. Talking through a new section of 9rules with Paul and Tyme is 100x more rewarding than writing a blog entry on venture capital, so that’s where my focus is going to go.

Traffic

As mentioned in the Sitepoint auction, this site gets more traffic when I write vs. when I don’t write (just like most blogs) and based on the last 12 months of pageview statistics, the average per month is 50k pageviews but will surpass 100k for this month easily. I’ve never been obsessed with traffic coming to this site, but considering I’ve only been writing a few times each month recently, I don’t think it’s too bad and could get a lot higher with some additional articles.

Free Redesign

Upon completion of the sale, I will be working with the new owner on a redesign that will most likely be more content-centric and less one-author-personal-portfolio style. I think it’ll be surreal to be redesigning this site for someone else, but I’m sure it’ll be fun 🙂

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What’s Next

Lots of fun 9rules stuff. Oh yeah, and a wedding to pay for. Did I not mention that at the beginning? 🙂