Month: July 2003

Conversant and the Interconnected Weblog

Apparently there are quite a few people like me wanting to organize isolated weblog-style posts into more meaningful collections of information. One proposed solution is to use a weblog front-end for a Wiki (with “biki” and “bliki” being the proposed terms for such said convergence).

This is, of course, exactly what I’ve been working on producing over the past couple years with Conversant . It’s been an amazing process, especially watching the feedback back and forth between the developers and users of Conversant which have helped make it an outstanding tool for the sort of personal knowledge management that the biki folks are looking for.

On this site alone, for example, the weblog posts are filtered into almost 220 different categories or subcategories in a process that just adds a few seconds to the posting process. Once a new entry is posted it is automatically added to the respective category page(s). In addition, there is an enormous amount of cross-linking going on, so articles show links to the category pages that they are relevant to, and the category pages also link to other relevant category pages. So, for example, the category page about the 2000 election links automatically to the Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Ralph Nader topical pages (which, in turn, link automatically to the 2000 election page).

Every single category page also has its own RSS feed which is linked to via the little orange XML icon (and also included in the header of the page for autodiscovery). For example, here is the 2000 Election RSS feed.

At the moment across the six web sites I run, I have almost 1,400 separate categories into which posts are sorted, each with an accompanying category page and RSS feed. My animal rights site currently has 524 separate categories, and adds about one a day.

Everything I do is strictly just a one man show, but the system has the capability to create groups and give permissions to such groups to edit, add, etc. categories and category pages.

Update: the title of this essay was originally “Weblogs+Wiki=Conversant.” This was changed to avoid confusion — Conversant has the features to make an interconnected weblog built in, but it has a different featureset than a Wiki.

Google AdSense

In late June, I started running ads from Google AdSense on most of my web sites. So far it’s turned out to be a pretty good deal.

Back at the height of the dot.com nonsense, I was making about $600 to $700 a month or so running ads on my sites. Fortunately I never made the mistake of building up based on that figure being very steady — a lot of people I saw who had small to medium sites making even more than I was on ad revenue really wound up in a world of hurt when that revenue suddenly dried up.

With AdSense it looks like I will be making about roughly half that. During June, July and August my site traffic always takes a dive, usually being well under 50% of peak traffic. Still even with relatively low traffic I am pulling in $5-$7 per day from AdSense. Not enough to get rich and quit my day job, but enough to help offset the cost of running and maintaining the sites.

The interesting thing for me is that nothing has changed from back in the dot.com era in one respect — I still cannot figure out why these folks are running these ad campaigns. AdSense pays me entirely on a per-click basis, and the revenue per click is all over the place from as low as 10 cents to as high as 75 cents (I’m guessing a little bit here based on daily totals — AdSense doesn’t show me how much each particular advertiser is actually paying).

So there is someone who is buying textads from Google and when I click through her ad on my site it turns out she is selling t-shirts relevant to an issue that I write about. But she is just wasted her 50 cents or whatever because the odds of me or any other given user going “hey, I want to buy a t-shirt right now” are exceedingly low.

This might be okay if she was getting some exposure to people who do not click through but might come back to her site later, but the text ads are formatted as generic “Buy T-Shirts”-style come ons. If these people were smart they would put abbreviated URLs as the link text with the short description describing the service they offer. When I experimented with running Google ads for my sites, for example, I always used “AnimalRights.Net” or “LeftWatch.Com” as the link text, so even if people did not click on the ad, maybe they might remember the URL. This would be especially effective if they are only paying per click and an ad is going to run repeatedly on sites related to what the person or organization is selling.

India Moves Forward with First “Functional Food”

India is looking to be the first country to approve a “functional food” — a genetically modified crop designed to enhance its nutritional value — with efforts kicking into high gear for a high-protein potato.

Potatoes have very little protein to begin with — about two percent by mass — and the enhanced potato only increases that by 30 to 50 percent. But the potato is also rich in amino acids lysine and methionine. The changes are caused by inserting a gene from the South American amaranth plant.

Although India has yet to approve any GM foods for human consumption (it returned 10,000 tons of GM corn donated by a charity last year), the head of India’s biotechnology program is talking about including the new potato in school children’s lunches within a year.

The potato has been undergoing field trials for the last three years, and media accounts suggested the potato could get final approval by the end of 2003.

Sources:

‘Protato’ Leaves Bad Taste in Critics’ Mouth. Ranjit Devraj, June 13, 2003.

Scientists develop GM ‘protato’ to feed India’s poorest children. John Vidal, The Guardian, June 12, 2003.

India’s search for enhanced food. Pallab Ghosh, The BBC, June 11, 2003.