My Vision for Wordful

I’ve taken a major break from blogging here at Wordful, and it’s in large part to some serious shifts in my personal and professional life over the past year. To make a very long and (painful) story short—the down economy and a few other issues forced me to to shutter my office and consultancy and venture to San Francisco to find “a real job.”

On May 6 of last year, I kissed my wife and kids goodbye and left Kona for San Jose on a one-way ticket with $50 in my pocket. My sister picked me up and the next day my dad drove me up to the city, where I met up a good high school friend of mine who works at Google. I’m still sleeping on his floor.

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Is Great Content Finally Coming of Age?

What do you think: is the Internet more about content or more about technology?

So far, the answer is obvious. By taking a simplistic, macro view of the largest companies to dominate the computer and information age, you can easily conclude that it’s been about technology:

  1. Microsoft: make it easy to use computers
  2. Google: make it easy to use the Internet
  3. Facebook: make it easy to share things with people

This isn’t a bad thing, of course. It’s a necessary thing. This conversation we’re having now, this blog, your email, our tweets—none of it would exist without technology.

But if so much time, money and energy has been put into building the ultimate content delivery platform, why is the web still a cesspool of content? [Read more...]

The Internet is Begging for Curators: Are You In?

The amount of content on the web is now so abundant that it’s begging everyday users to jump in and start curating what they consume.

One such service is paper.li, an online “newspaper” that anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can plug in to. It gathers and sorts through the links shared in the past 24 hours and creates a webpage that looks like a WordPress news site with your chosen name across the top (like The Wordful Daily).

Across the top of your “newspaper” is a navigation bar with different categories, like Technology, Business, Travel, etc. —just like a real newspaper. Ads are served, as is a Google search box, social sharing and embed tools and an “editor’s note” area. [Read more...]

Going Surfing at the Affiliate Improv! Session at Affiliate Summit West

The idea of the Affiliate Improv! session was to choose one idea from the audience for an affiliate marketing brainstorming session among five expert panelists: Daniel Clark, Andrew Bennett, Mike Buechele, Jen Goode and Wade Tonkin.

As fate would have it, my topic of surfing got chosen to be featured. I’ve always wanted to start a niche surfing site but still haven’t gotten around to it—partly because Surfline seems to offer everything you’d ever want in a surfing website.

Well, almost everything. I feel the problem with Surfline is that they’re exclusively focused on the dreamy, sexy, professional surfer lifestyle that is—let’s face it—reserved for the most lucky and elite.

I’m more interested in a surfing site that caters to the average, everyday surfer like me or the local guys I surf with here in Hawaii.

So what did the experts say? [Read more...]

Scraping and Autoblogging: Why They Suck

Being such a lover of words and good writing, I thought I’d chime in on one of the filthier sides of blogging: scraper sites and autoblogging.

The two terms are basically the same thing, but with a slight twist in semantics:

  • Scraping refers to automatically copying full articles from other blogs (or RSS feeds) for publishing on your own site.
  • Autoblogging just snatches the headline and excerpt for your site, and supposedly links back to the original article.

Some of the more sophisticated methods involve some sort of “magic bullet” software that does everything with a push of a button: you type in your keyword and the software just starts adding content to your blog from other sources.  At this point it becomes a fully automated system.

Why Do This?

Scraping content is a quick and easy way to get free content into your website, [Read more...]