Fine Fools Community

The first week of Fine Fools is almost up and we finish off with a bang. It’s Useless got linked up by TotalFark.com today. TotalFark is the members area of Fark so the traffic isn’t as immense as it would have been if it was posted on Fark’s homepage, but exciting nonetheless.

So we have links from Joystiq and TotalFark in the first week of this community’s existence. Not bad and we aren’t even rolling yet.

Gardgy should pickup next week as writers start moving there and that means every site, besides Work Boxers and Movable Phone, will have writers on them besides me.

All writers in the community only have a couple hours left to get their entries out for this week because as stated in the Writing Standards writers can not publish on the weekends.

The Fine Fools Forums.

I made the majority of the forums open to everyone who registers with one section being reserved solely for Writers. Why open up so much for the eyes to see? Well since this whole thing is an experiment/project I think it would be interesting to see how much the involvement of our readership helps in developing and shaping the Community.

Could this get out of hand? Possibly if the forums are not well-taken care of, but I think we have a good enough readership that this won’t be a problem. I don’t expect the forums to flourish anytime soon because these things take time. This however should provide a better means for the writers to collaborate.

It took a little more than 48 hours, but the Fine Fools community has received its first link from one of the big dawgs. Bryan Veloso’s article Dancing Disturbances Revealed was such a good read that I thought I would submit it to Joystiq and Kotaku. Brian Ashcraft from Kotaku emailed me soon after with:

This is amazing. Will post.

Still waiting on the entry, but I thought that was cool. Then I checked the logs for Insert25 and saw a lot of hits coming from Joystiq and discovered that they wrote a bit on Bryan’s article. Very, very cool because Joystiq has recently made their stats public and they are pushing over 90,000 visitors daily.

People wonder why I place such heavy emphasis on original, quality content. I’m not saying that these sites won’t have entries offering blurbs and linkouts, but it’s these entries that bring the people back.

Well done Bryan. Now who’s next?

More useful is I Like Cameras, the sort of specialized gadget blog that will rise once generic gadget blogs saturate the market.

– Nick Douglas

I Like Cameras was to my surprise the site that has so far received the most applications. There are already four people writing on the site, but that’s not what is so cool about it. Every single one of the writers asked me before they started what type of content I was looking for and I admitted to being pretty open about it. They expressed an interest to go a bit beyond just press releases and product announcements and I certainly wasn’t one to argue against them.

However, I have heard this song and dance before from other writers. Everyone who starts a blog wants to take blogging “to the next level” because they feel they can bring something different. I know I have said the same thing many times myself, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Yesterday when I left the office (first time all week) I never expected anything significant to happen. Upon my return I found that Paul Watson, a writer for I Like Cameras, had taken the initiative to email the other writers to see what directions they wanted to take the site. To say this was unexpected would be an understatement, but it shows how passionate they are about what they are doing and how powerful the group dynamic can be if used properly.

Will this group dynamic happen with every site in the community? It would be awesome if it did, but I don’t see that happening. What the ILC team has done though has set the standard for the other writers in the community. If they continue in the direction they have talked about then that site will become very successful. What I like about the Fine Fools model is that as more writers join a site it puts less of a burden on the existing writers to feel the need to pump out content.

What if you partnered with a group of like-minded individuals on a site? Do you think that would make your job as a writer just a little bit easier because now you would be able to focus on the quality that you believed you could offer in the first place? What is also interesting though is that even though you have less of a burden, you might have just a little bit more pressure as well. Let me explain.

In this model (the team concept I suppose) the site is only as good as it’s “weakest” writer. I don’t like to use the term “weakest” simply because every writer is more than likely going to be strong, so I use it just to get the point across. If you aren’t doing your part in providing quality content you are not only letting yourself down, but the rest of the writers as well who are looking to make the site a success.

This also puts pressure on me (pressure can be a good thing) to make sure traffic is reaching the site because they are putting the effort in on their side and I know they expect me to put in the same amount of effort on my side and that’s the way it should be.

My buddy and inspirational source Darren Rowse has posted very thought-provoking read on model being offered by the Fine Fools Community. I’m intentionally staying out of this one because I would rather see what other people’s thoughts are without me ruining the conversation so make sure to voice your opinion.

As is the case with Darren’s latest venture, b5media, there is money to be made by everyone. How much? Hell if I know, because I can’t say I have done this on this kind of scale before, but I guarantee we will find out.

I have received more than a few requests to write for the sites in the Community along with some ideas for new ones. Since all of this is new I thought it would be best to start a list of the writing standards that I expect from everyone involved (including myself).

Writing Standards v0.1

1. Writers will proofread and correct any spelling and grammatical errors in their entries before publishing to the best of their ability and will immediately provide corrections if an error is detected or reported.
2. Writers will not plagiarize someone else’s work.
3. Writers will cite every source from which they garner information or content for their entries/articles.
4. Writers will offer insightful commentary and opinions on every single one of their entries.
5. Writers will add their personality to their entries.
6. Writers will never sacrifice quality for quantity.
7. Writers are responsible for comments on their entries and maintaining a conversation with their readers.
8. Writers will never publish on weekends or holidays.

Never publish on weekends or holidays? Yep. Those times are meant to be enjoyed so writers should get out of the house and spend time with loved ones. If they want to write they are more than welcome to, just don’t publish anything on the weekends or holidays. There are very, very few instances when something has to be pushed out on those days and traffic is higher during the week anyways.

Quantity of words in an entry is not a sign of quality so there are no word limits. However, you should be able to tell the difference between offering your opinion and simply rehashing what has already been said.

I have talked about Nick Douglas and his humorous site Blogebrity before over at the 9rules blog. Even though he probably doesn’t get the recognition he deserves (he really is all over the web and knows what’s going on) I have a great deal of respect for him so I am glad that he has offered up his opinions on the Fine Fools Community and they seem to be pretty good.

Highlights:

• It’s Useless is his favorite so far and I would probably admit to it being my favorite to write for. Something about a site where anything goes that just makes it so much fun to write for.
• I Like Cameras (wait till you see what some of the writers have in store for it) will be more useful than Gardgy due to the fact that there are enough generic gadget blogs around. However, he missed the conversation I had with my Grandmother in which I informed her of this community and she said you can’t have a blog anything without a generic gadget blog. Incidentally, I Like Cameras is the site that gets the most applications.
• Damn I’m Cute doesn’t need to exist because “Celebrity blogs aren’t crying for neighbors”. I am talking to a very smart and funny woman about this blog and I predict it will be the highest trafficked site in the initial eight after 6 months.
• Insert 25 is great because it “focuses less on the usual news and more (in the 3 posts so far) on gaming customs”. That’s the kind of stuff I like to hear. Although there will be newsbits here and there all of the writers know what is expected of them and I think you will see more original content than anything. I think this site will become either the #2 or #3 site from the initial 8 due to the anime features.

He finishes with:

All in all, a fun baby network, which we’ll watch for growth and variety. Lucky you, when these sites are all established A-listers with colorful chrome and user communities, you can recall their old-school plain-vanilla-layout days.

You never know…

Checked the logs for Damn, I’m Cute and found that someone had found the site with the search term “jenny mccarthy pees herself“. After doing the search myself I was surprised to see that DIC (don’t know if I can keep using that acronym) was ranked #25. I’m sure that won’t last too long and will quickly dropout of the rankings, but it’s nice to see which entry in the community got the first search engine hit.

I can’t remember ever having linked to the site before from my other sites, but it already has a PR of 5. I’m not complaining.

When I first brought up the Fine Fools Community last week at Work Boxers I mentioned that I was going to use the sites as case studies. I am going to try my best and chronicle the growth of the community and each site not only for the book, but to also make sure I am keeping up with my ability to follow my own lessons and hopefully provide a useful resource to all readers.

I can report on the earnings that I receive from the sites and I will ask the writers to share their numbers as well so we can gauge what topics work along with colors, positioning, etc. Along with financial statements I would like to track the growth of the Community through Technorati. Not the most reliable of services, but it allows me to see everything on one page.

I will be doing these reports every 2 weeks as one week reports not only become tedious, but it becomes harder to see the bigger picture at such a microlevel.

Technorati

Here are the starting stats for the Community sites.

• Gardgy - Rank 775,745 (0 links from 0 sites)
• I Like Cameras - Rank 775,745 (0 links from 0 sites)
• Movable Phone - Rank 775,745 (0 links from 0 sites)
• It’s Useless - Rank 775,745 (1 link from 1 site)
• Insert 25 - Rank 46389 (47 links from 40 sites)
• Damn I’m Cute - Rank 576,121 (2 links from 2 sites)
• Fine Fools Community - Rank 775,745 (0 links from 0 sites)
• Work Boxers - Rank 42,656 (62 links from 43 sites)

Obviously not the huge numbers one would expect from such an enormous launch (*chuckle*), but it’s good to start at ground zero.

Forums

When I place forums up for the writers I am considering opening up the forums to the public as well. This is a very open-ended project and I am hoping a lot can be learned from it. At the very least I believe the public (saying “public” is stupid) should be able to browse them.

Any other type of numbers you think I should be tracking?

Would you like to write on one of the sites in the Fine Fools Community? It’s really simple as long as you have a passion for the topic and a dedication to providing quality content. Rehashing information will do you no good around here and posting 50 times a day serves little purpose. You get what you put in. Simple as that.

If you are interested shoot an email to scrivs{AT}workboxers.com and make sure to answer these questions:

• What site(s) do you wish to write for?
• What type of content would you provide?
• How often do you think you could write without seeing a drop in the quality of your content?
• How tall am I?

Maybe you have an idea for a site that you think would work well within the community? Let me know. I’m pretty open to anything that doesn’t involve aardvarks. Seriously though, if you have an idea, no matter how unconventional it is toss it my way. We can have fun with it.