Blog of the week
This week's choice is Gizmodo, a blog about the world of gadgets, gizmos, and edgy electronics. Edited by Peter Rojas, a tech journalist who writes for The New York Times, Wired, Salon and the Guardian, and backed by ex-FT hack and now Manhattan resident Nick Denton, it's powered by Movable Type, the planet's best content management system. The blog's got a lovely look and feel: layout is clean, navigation is easy to use, text is snappy and informed, links are well chosen and the thumbnails of the PDAs, laptops, phones, digital cameras and peripherals make one want to do some serious credit card damage.
The business model? Simplicity itself. Purchasers of gadgets click on the accompanying Amazon link and when they buy Gizmodo collects a referral bonus. Denton calls this "nanopublishing" and he claims that it's got a big future because the overheads are absurdly low — a free content management system and one editor. He launched Gizmodo last August with a marketing blitz that consisted of an e-mail to a few bloggers and reporters. And the site's traffic has doubled every two months since then. For the week ending 25 August, Gizmodo had 180,947 page views from 8,747 visitors. By 13 October the pageviews had doubled to 397,306 as had the visitors, 20,930. In the middle of this month the blog had 1,264,268 pageviews from 53,953 visitors.
As we all know well, metrics such as pageviews and visitors are, in themselves, worthless. But, and this is important, at a time when print magazines have to live with an acquisition cost of 100 euros per subscriber, online publishing is starting to look incredibly attractive. What you do with your visitors is the great challenge, of course, but it's certainly never been cheaper to attract an audience.
Diarist of the day: Woodrow Wyatt, 31 January 1987"Eddie Brown [barber] and Mrs Wilson, manicurist, were amused in the morning when I told them a true story about Enoch Powell. There is a very chatty barber in the Commons who never stops telling MPs whose hair he cuts about politics and what his views are on the world. Enoch Powell went to have his hair cut by him one day, sat down and the barber said 'How would you like your hair cut, sir?' 'In silence,' Enoch replied. "
