Christopher Wink

Advertising with @TechnicallyPHL and what other Web startups can learn

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Earlier this week, I launched the first profit-end of a business in my entire life — assuming the tax-status gray area of cutting hair and writing term papers for friends doesn’t count.

Technically Philly, a news site covering technology and innovation in Philadelphia that I launched with two friends, began soliciting advertising, the first in a series of monetization strategies — because advertising can’t be king anymore.

In the first four months, we’ve been introducing members of this region’s Web 2.0 and co-working communities, but we have so much ground yet to cover. We’re only now making friends with the bubbling venture capital scene in Philadelphia, and the innovation and technology that is being employed in this region’s rich life sciences and biotech sectors would blow you away. We want to report appropriately and effectively with wisdom and justice, chronicling the heights and depths and direction of this scene and its creative economies.

And that’s just it, for a Web startup, you have to be patient. By most accounts, four months is likely early to launch monetization, but, simply put, the fiscal standing of my two co-founders and I makes it necessary to get the profit structure squared away.

See our media kit for Technically Philly — designed by Brian James Kirk.

There are a host of issues we’re eager to take on, if only just to learn about the real practicalities of entrepreneurial journalism.

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How good are your links?

I do my fair share of complaining about links, and I’m not alone in suggesting there are good links and there are bad ones.

I have, I’ll admit, done all four — from great to bad — but it’s important to learn the differences.

Great link — Include a publication and/or author name, important keywords and give your reader a reason to go there, instead of summarizing all the content.
Good link — At least two of the three stipulations above: author, keywords and reason fo your readers to go there.
OK link — Linked from a phrase of less than three word or one like “More,” “here” or “this.” Context can vary these from acceptable to crummy. If it’s for additional information (i.e. “My opinion on this matter. For more information, see here.”) or in addition to a previous, stronger link, it doesn’t much matter. If you’re trying to lessen the chance of a reader following the link or using another’s content to get clicks and offering a throwaway link to cover your tracks, that’s probably into the realm of a bad link.
Bad link — Maliciously linking on negative keywords or somehow obscuring the link. Yes, while I have fallen victim to it, hotlinking images is certainly a bad link — though I do sometimes (wrongly) justify it to myself if I am promoting the product or image host in my story or post.

Now, the better read and more powerful your site, the better your links are, but the general rules of link ethics remain the same, even though an OK link from a high-traffic site is probably just as influential as a great link from a site of middling traffic.

We still need to establish a common understanding for good linking practices.

What am I missing?

The reasons to link and what they say about your Web integrity

Why do you use links?

By my count, there are four reasons why you put a link in your online story, post or article, and I think figuring out which of them describes your motivation says a great deal about your Web integrity.

The reasons for linking that come to mind for me:

Link Share — You actually want your readers to follow the link; as I’ve written, the word “blog” started as Web log which was meant to mean a “logging of the Web.” So, a fundamental blog style is to collect good links and share them with your readers, with the intent for them to follow them. Like here.
Value Link — You are adding value through commentary, analysis or aggregation of similar or related stories or ideas. You’re referencing a story or another post and adding your own opinion or aggregation to it. Like this.
Source Link — This transparency allows readers to follow where you got your information or how you made whatever claim is linked out. This is also a way of referencing the past and following a fundamental rule of the Web: never let your reader go through a story and not have somewhere else to go. This should be the most common use of links, so you should see it all over the place.
Content-use Link — The link is casual payment for someone else’s content, where you’re using that content to get your own clicks and page views. This can be a simple swiping of text or accepting you’ve been beaten on a story you should have had yourself and giving a bad link. This is often dirty, as I’ve written before. So, to do it right, you have to either add value or give a good link — including publication name, keywords and a reason for your readers to go that way.

In my mind, the first three are legitimate and the fourth can be, but rarely is.

Are there others?

Love for and lessons from a newspaper's 180th anniversary

A screeenshot of the multimedia presentation from the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrating its 180th anniversary.

Go look at the online multimedia presentation on Philly.com celebrating the 180th anniversary of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

If your interest in newspapers or Philadelphia or freelancing or new media or designing or anything else. Go there.

Packaged with a keepsake insert in yesterday’s Sunday print edition, it shows depth and breadth, intellectual and historical stimulation with engaging and beautiful design. I was excited to get my print edition and played online, as part of the preview Technically Philly was granted.

I’m an engaged young reader who clicked and played and more. Although my interest level is hardly representative of most my age; I have been calling for and eagerly awaiting such an historical promotion for months, if not a year or longer still.

But they did it bigger and better than I could have imagined. I’m thrilled to see an institution I respect and admire tell the world just why it matters so much.

Big credit goes to the staff and administration of Philly.com and the Inquirer for doing a bold and forward-thinking package and doing it well. Other newspaper executives should take notice of the work done by Inquirer online editor Chris Krewson and those he credited — Frank Wiese, the Online Projects Editor, and Cynthia Greer, an artist in the Inqy’s graphics department.

And did you hear the big news that came out of it?

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Technically Philly: Interview with adult film star Stoya on technology and Philadelphia

I profiled the feisty and strong-willed adult film star Stoya for Technically Philly.

It could be her, standing in the low light of a trendy South Philadelphia coffee shop.

There are maybe 10 people — drinking tea and working on laptops — most of whom are cute, pale-faced women with dark hair and a look. One arrived promptly at 4 p.m. and happened to be the biggest young thing in the entirety of mainstream adult film.

She was introduced as South Philly’s Stoya by CityPaper last November, but with more than six years of this city behind her and the heart of a profitable and exhausting porn career ahead of her, Stoya is leaving Philadelphia. Read the rest here.

A friend kindly submitted it to Digg, where it has more than any other story I’ve been a part of has gotten. Someone else pushed it on ReddIT. Combining porn and tech, I suppose, were bound to get interest online, though I maintain that the story has real merit for TP.

Below see what got left on the cutting room floor.

Many thanks to photographer Neal Santos who took some shots of Stoya where we interviewed, including the photo we used. I also want to thank Stoya for her time and patience.

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Changing ways in which society collects information

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The way we have gained information has apparently changed in the past 200 years, according to a really interesting and insightful graphical analysis of those trends by online magazine Baekdal.com.

The graphic analysis, as depicted above, aims to give some sense of the how the sources of information developed in common society. It suggests that in the next 10 years, we’ll find more and more news and information via social networks, with declines in TV, general Web sites and blogs.

After a few hundred years of newsletters, pamphlets and other written news sources known of in Europe and perhaps present elsewhere, the idea of a regularly published, verifiable collection of news source was developed in the United States in Boston, New York and Philadelphia in the mid-18th century. Leading to that turn of the century, more than 50 newspapers of varying stripe were bubbling in the colonies, leading to the idea of “freedom of the press” when the 1791 Bill of Rights were ratified.

This graphic and its explanation — well worth your time — gets the history down, if briefly, but I can’t say I agree with all its prognosticating about the future of news gathering.

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Why not every blog is written by a blogger

bald_blogger I’ve come to believe there’s a very real difference between a blogger and a blog.

The person updating a blog isn’t necessarily a blogger. Though I blog on and maintain this professional site and have certainly blogged elsewhere, I don’t consider myself a blogger.

For one, I’m a professional writer, so I’d need to be making money at the blogging game for me to get that title. Instead, I use the format to connect with readers and colleagues, discuss issues and share the content I create for newspapers, magazines and trade publications.

It’s a tool of social media, not a livelihood.

Of course, there are certainly bloggers who don’t do so as a living, so I thought it prudent to throw down some guidelines as to who I figure a blogger is and what I suppose makes a blog.

See my list, and let me know whatcha think, after the jump.

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April uwishunu posts: Hysteria, author appearances and BarCamp

It’s Memorial Day, so no one’s reading this anyway, right?

In February I announced that I was blogging for uwishunu.com, a popular, award-winning arts and entertainment blog for Philadelphia. Some months I write more for them than others, not all run as expected and some are of only middling interest to casual readers, so I’ve decided I’d like to do a monthly digest of my work there — if only just for record-keeping.

I’ll post them as I file them, not as they run. See all of my posts here, and my profile here.

Below — later than I’ll do this in the future — see my April posts.

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Pointing to free online ways to train journalists

I received some degree of criticism recently on a post about journalism classes I wish were more readily available in college J-schools.

I openly admit some forms of them already are and that many colleges have wonderful professors looking forward and doing great work with them. Still, I stand by the conversation being an important one — needling great institutions further.

That’s perhaps why I thought it funny that someone e-mailed me soon after that post and directed me to a collection of 50 open courses that could offer many of the basics of j-school.

They point to a variety online resources, including a great many of them from MIT’s open coursewares — part of a phenomenon on which I’ve written before. It seemed like another swing at j-schools. It’s far away from the name recognition, networking and other assets of a traditional school, but it’s certainly good for the dialogue.

See some of the best and some thoughts below.

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