Blogging

We are rapidly approaching the end of May—the point at which 365 consecutive Interesting Thing of the Day articles will have been published, as promised. And, as I’ve also indicated, that is the time when I anticipate making some pretty significant changes to the site. (See also the follow-up article here.) But even now, I’m discovering—to my shock and horror—that I’m running out of topics. Yes, it’s true. Although I have no doubt that the world is full of many thousands of interesting things that have not yet appeared on this site, my personal list is pretty well depleted.

Many of the topics discussed so far have come from reader suggestions, which I appreciate enormously. And I have a few more such articles I’m still planning to write. But the pickin’s are slim right now. I could really use a large infusion of new ideas! If there’s something interesting you’d like to read about on the site, please follow the instructions (including, especially, the request for reference sources) on the suggestion form. To help jog your creativity, here are the themes for the next few weeks (and remember, I interpret these themes as broadly and ambiguously as possible):

May 8–14: Missing in Action
May 15–21: Preconceived Motions
May 22–28: Odds and Ends
May 29–31: Less Is More

There will, by the way, be more new articles after that, but (a) not until I’ve had myself a nice long vacation; (b) not every single day, as they have been; and (c) probably without the weekly themes I’ve relied on over the last year. More information about the upcoming changes at ITotD, which I’m actually quite excited about, will appear at the end of May.

One small disclaimer: not every suggestion turns into an article (not even the ideas I’ve come up with on my own). For every article you read on ITotD, perhaps 8 or 10 ideas were considered and abandoned. This happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a suggested topic is too broad (“Write something about flowers!”); other times, I can’t dig up enough information to justify writing a whole article. (For example, trivia facts, while interesting, are not what the site is about.) Then there are times when a topic is too complex, too controversial, or in some ineffable way just “not right.” I can’t always say precisely why a particular topic doesn’t work, but I’ve developed a fairly good feel for what I can and can’t turn into an article. All that to say: if you’ve offered a suggestion that has not appeared as an article, please don’t feel bad. It may yet appear; and if not, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I routinely spend an hour or two researching a topic only to find, sadly, that it won’t work out for one reason or another.

So: do send in suggestions, but better yet—become a guest author! Over the past year, about a dozen articles have been contributed by five other authors. I’d be ecstatic if that number jumped to one or more guest articles every single week. If there’s something interesting that you’d like to write about from your own experience, that would be tremendous. Everything you need to know about writing for ITotD is on our Write for ITotD page (or in the style guide). Please do run your ideas by me before actually starting work on an article, and bear in mind that there are a few (easily navigable) hoops to jump through on the way to publication. But I’d deeply appreciate some help with the writing—both now and after May 31.

I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to all those who responded to my request for feedback on the future of Interesting Thing of the Day (see Pondering Changes to ITotD). Besides the comments posted online, many people wrote to me privately to express their opinions. The comments, to which I’ve replied individually where possible, have been extremely helpful. I wanted to follow up with a few words of summary and some observations.

The opinions covered the entire gamut from “don’t change a thing” to “just walk away,” with many variations in between. There were, however, some strong trends.

• Virtually everyone agreed that it’s unnecessary to publish ITotD on weekends and holidays, and that most readers probably don’t expect that in the first place.
• Surprisingly (to me, at least), most respondents were quite insistent that articles remain at their current length rather than shrinking to a size similar to what you see on most blogs. (One person specifically mentioned my little personal intros as being an important feature, and another person said those should go.)
• A frequently expressed suggestion was that we include more articles by guest authors. I am 100 percent in favor of this, and I know of at least one author who’s currently preparing some new articles. But although I’ve publicized our willingness to accept guest articles with at least two different links on every single article page, very few people have expressed an interest in writing. So let me just reiterate: if you have good writing skills and interesting things you’d like to share with the world, please let me know.
• Several people suggested moving to a subscription-based model of one kind or another; others said they’d rather see more advertising than fewer articles. In both cases, I have to face the numerical reality of our current reader base. Recently we’ve been getting, on average, about 1,600 visits per day (though a “visit” often includes multiple pages). Given the small percentage of readers willing to pay for content on the Web or click on ads, neither advertising nor subscriptions would yield interesting levels of income unless the overall number of visitors went way up—but then, if it did, income from our current (voluntary) subscription program and AdSense ads would probably make the site self-supporting. The moral of the story: one way or another, it’s all about getting more visitors. (And just for the sake of reference, here are the current subscription stats: After 9 months, we have 327 subscribers, of whom 63 purchased the ($5) article subscriptions and 14 purchased the ($20) audio subscriptions; the rest get the free “link” email every day.)
• A printed book (or books) of Interesting Things is, as a few people mentioned, almost a no-brainer. We have the technology, and I have every intention of making this happen. I somehow doubt I’ll get to it before June, and I wonder how many copies I’ll be able to sell, but it’s certainly worth trying. I could also put together a multi-CD or -DVD collection of all the audio recordings—enough to fill an iPod (hmmm…)—but there’s been so little interest in them thus far that it barely seems worth doing.
• In the past week, the site has received a surprising number of (mostly anonymous) donations. I deeply appreciate these, though I wish I knew who was sending the money so I could thank them personally. Still…please don’t feel obligated to contribute out of a sense of guilt or anything. When all is said and done, it will be the overall number of readers, rather than the donations or the paid subscriptions, that makes or breaks the site.

So what now? Well, the next three months (March–May) are going to be outrageously busy for me, as I’ve got several new ebooks to finish, magazine articles I’ve agreed to write, and so on. It has always been, and continues to be, my intention to make good on my promise to deliver 365 consecutive daily articles before making any changes; that means 95 left to go! That, too, will keep me busy. I will continue to digest all the suggestions, though, and I hope to have made a decision about the site’s new direction by at least May 1, since whatever happens will require some coding and infrastructure changes before June 1.

And what if my health or sanity gives out before then? That’s a good question. I don’t know. It would be ethically problematic for me not to deliver something I’ve been paid to deliver, but I won’t kid you: it’s getting rough. I guess I’ll cross that bridge, if necessary, when the time comes.

When I re-launched Interesting Thing of the Day on June 1, 2004, I promised that there would be at least one full year of daily articles. Now that we’ve completed nearly 9 months of that year, I figure I have enough data to begin thinking about what happens next.

Originally, my hope (or perhaps fantasy) had been that by the end of that year, ITotD would produce enough income that I could make it my full-time job. But the site’s total revenue has averaged around $300 per month—a figure that has remained relatively consistent even though daily readership has increased markedly. Of that amount, the majority goes toward taxes and business expenses. What’s left is roughly enough to pay for the coffee that keeps me awake while I write the articles.

But it’s not really about money: ITotD has always been a labor of love. The real problem is one of time. The average article takes me about 3–4 hours to research and write. But since ITotD isn’t putting bread on the table, I have to spend my days doing work that does—writing books, ebooks, and articles about computing, and doing technical consulting. That means I usually end up working on ITotD in the evenings, when I’d rather be resting, spending time with my wife, reading, doing t’ai chi, or just having a normal life. To be candid, I’m getting burned out, and something’s got to give.

I think that if I could financially justify spending even half my normal business hours working on ITotD (scaling back my other work proportionately), it would make sense to continue the site in roughly its current form. Although there are undoubtedly some things I could do to increase the site’s readership and income, all these things would require even more of my nonexistent time or money to implement. So I’m not expecting to see such major financial improvements in the next few months that I can reasonably plan to keep spending so much time on this project. One way or another, I have to cut back the number of hours I spend on ITotD, which in turn means the site must change.

I see no point in turning it off altogether; if the content that’s already there is useful to readers, it might as well stay there. On the other hand, barring some miraculous occurrence in the near future, I’m equally certain I can’t continue doing what I’ve been doing, every single day. I’ve been thinking about options for changing the site.

Continue reading…

My standard morning ritual includes answering my email, reading a bunch of Web sites, and checking the statistics for things like the number of Take Control ebooks sold, visitors at Interesting Thing of the Day, AdSense revenues, sales from affiliate links, and that sort of thing. While going through my email this morning, I saw a message from an ITotD reader who had information pertaining to the article on Non-Human Farmers, which was written a couple of weeks ago by guest author Rajagopal Sukumar. The message basically said that in addition to the animals cited in the article, there was a type of jellyfish that also farms algae. Since I didn’t write the article, I said I’d forward the comment to the author in case he wanted to make any changes.

Moments later, when I checked today’s Web stats, my eyes popped out of their sockets when I saw how many visitors we’d had today. Even before noon we were just a few visits short of a record day. (Because of this increase, AdSense revenue is also way up for the day—always a nice bonus.) A quick glance at the referrers showed me that the spike was coming from BoingBoing, and all these folks were following a link to the article on Non-Human Farmers. I wrote the author a congratulatory note, but I couldn’t help being slightly chagrined that the site’s biggest day wasn’t due to one of the hundreds of articles I wrote myself!

Meanwhile, another faithful reader wrote to tell me she found today’s article on Cascading Style Sheets completely incomprehensible, and my Backups article on Macworld.com dropped down to a less prominent position on the page. So…good day for statistics, bad day for my ego. Ah well. As my mother would say whenever a minor misfortune befell me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”