OK....I am going to jump in and be the first naysayer.

1 I have been doing this.

2 It is time consuming.

3 I find it boring.

4 And it basically feels wrong...I don't know - deceptive... wrong.

5 Plus...I have never ever clicked on a google ad and I use gmail and igoogle etc. I just don't even see the ads even though they are there.

Linda Nowakowski said:

OK....I am going to jump in and be the first naysayer.

Sorry you feel that way Linda. I was enjoying your contributions. Totally ok if it's not your cuppa. We'll continue to pilot the idea as long as there are at least 5 in the game. Meanwhile, ideas for improvements are most welcome.

I never said I was quitting. I just voiced my concerns. I was hoping others might have replies or solutions to my problems.

I'm a little slow which is why I often avoid games. Not necessarily directly to Linda's misgivings, but with them in mind here are some of my takes on all this.

First of all I'm really quite impressed with the game as a learning tool. In the back of my mind I've thought often about how to introduce blogging, and blogging as a revenue generator to my friends in Uganda. This introduces many advanced blogging ideas. These ideas are probably too advanced for me.

As far as ads go, I generally think that I ignore them. I didn't notice them at all at Facebook until one about Prostrate Cancer caught my eye. That's a good thing to know about, except I kind of recent that the ads are targeted me as an old person. I'm not going to click on ads that don't interest me--what use am I? That said from Linda's blog I clicked on a Moveon link for a free bumper sticker.

The main thing about the blogs for me was to see what you all were saying ;-)

I almost cried when I read something Grace said about Obmama. The thing about blogs is listening to what people think and sometimes the way we think is different. Well, that's also the great thing. And there are some people who's views are hardly ever listened to.

One of my favorite blogs is Daisy's Dead Air. I mention it because She's about my age, interested in lots of things I am and lives in a town I grew up in when I was a boy. She's about my age. And she wonders where all the old women bloggers are. She's not old really, she's my age ;-) But I know what she's talking about. So I was eager to go to Evvy's blog and Linda's blog. Yes, I hear what you both have to say here. But I'm also interested in what you'd say to everybody--the public.

That's the scary part, all the strangers, and being open. What will people say?

This is an experiment and we can help. But after the experiment you can have your blogs. This is a pretty good thing, both for the African bloggers an others.

Part of getting over the scary part is finding out that more than as a revenue stream--which is important--there is fun in blogging. Fun because you'll meet some nice people that way. I love Kelly's blog where she asks: "What do you think?" She's ready for the conversations. Just delete the jerks and forget them. The rest are a gift.

It has been hard to get to my feet with the digg thing, The first time I tried it , it all looked very easy and straight forward, then time came when I read the first comment on my post and thought I was completely lost,it was so hard to begin again, because initially I thought I had followed the instructions very well, but it was all a mess, anyway seems I am somehow on the right truck now,not sure yet though.

I also have a feeling that all these things needs someone's popularity online, because the more people that are close to you the more attention you get whatever you are doing.I do very much agree with John Powers when he said

And there are some people who's views are hardly ever listened to.

This really is very scary, because for example sometimes people only give feedbacks to the ones whom they know well and would kind of like to promote. I am not being negative here, but it happens and maybe there are ways of solving this that I haven't yet grasp well. You know we(new on the online world) are still like babies who are only getting to know relatives and friends and as we grow up, we shall have to be outgoing to them and thus become friends with them too, in that way one can also become popular, otherwise there's still a lot that we need to discover.

Sorry it's taken me longer than I'd hoped to get back here. (I've been standing on the edge of a cliff at http://christinaswwworld.com getting my courage up to start things flying there. There's an official invitation for y'all here. Take another look when you have the chance.)

Linda, Grace and John, thanks for your comments. I have a few of my own to add. I'm going to break this up into a couple of separate comments.

First, YOU ALL are doing just great. I am really pleased at how quickly you've managed to master the technical basics. Like John mentioned, there are some advanced blogging skills in the mix of steps you are following, and you've all managed to master them. As far as I'm concerned, we're right where we need to be on that front.

During the first couple of weeks of any new endeavor online, it's liberating to remember that nobody's really watching. Well, we are because we're working as a team, but just because you've put something online doesn't mean that the whole world is going to see it. It takes some effort and time for your new blog to get indexed and found in the search engines. So what we've done so far is use that time when nobody's watching anyway to get the technical part down.

And what's been really exciting to me is the diversity of perspectives in the content. I personally think it's fascinating to see what's jumping out at each of you in that list of 100 terms, and how you're spinning it. All of the east africans are seeing the end of the world. All of the americans are zooming in on politics.

I have spent some time bookmarking some of my personal favorite posts you've each made at about 15 social bookmarking sites in addition to digg. You can do that to. I will post links to the sites I've been exploring at the ourwwworld game blog. While your blogs are still so young, social bookmarking is about all we can do to begin promoting them (making them more popular) immediately. Many of the blog directories won't list your blog until you've got 10-12 posts up. I did find a free tool that will list each of your blogs in several search engines in addition to google, and will be working on doing that in the coming days. I've also tried to set up some traffic flow from christinaswwworld to your blogs. Once I get the invitation link out to my networks (over the next one week) it will hopefully mean some more eyeballs for you.

Feel free, whenever YOU are ready, to try posting something to your blog that is NOT an ourwwworld game play. You need to submit 2 ourwwworld plays to digg.com per week to remain in the game, but let that not be all you're allowed to post. Once more people are actually looking at your blog, what is it that you'd like them to see? Use this time among friends to start finding your voice if you'd like to, or wait a while, and just keep posting game plays until it becomes easier and/or you actually have something else to say.

Congrats to all on a job well done so far.

on income earning blogs

When I personally look around the web specifically at blogs that bring in income, there are 2 basic camps that I've been looking at. There are the better world building bloggers, who are using blogs as a begging platform for donations and votes in contests. There is also the home based business sector, who are using blogs to generate personal income via affiliate product sales, advertising revenues and participation in contests as well. These two groups generally follow very different strategies, to win in the race for eyeballs and clicks.

The better world building bloggers put repeated time and effort into hugely energetic campaigns to win $500 from razoo or facebook...

The personal income bloggers are working a couple of hours a week to set up passive residual income sources that keep generating income even when the blogger takes a break to do more meaningful things.

One of the things I am suggesting with this game is that we in the better world building arena might reduce our dependency on the begging approach and increase the social capital value of our blogging efforts by exploring some of the tactics that successful private income earning bloggers are using.

If the participants in a social blogging team can earn at least a minimum wage equivalent for their efforts to raise social capital through their blogs, that would be a tremendous bonus (so that then we would also be less dependent on successfully mobilizing people to give of their time for our online endeavors to pay off.)

So to summarize this point: raising social capital and sharing revenues with the bloggers (hopefully in meaningful amounts by the end of 3 months) is what I'm aiming to achieve. The strategic innovation lies in merging the tactics of better world building bloggers and home-based income earning bloggers. I've chosen to try a game-like setting for teaching strategic habits.

(edit - added the last sentence)

Grace Ayaa said:

seems I am somehow on the right truck now,not sure yet though.

You are doing fine :)

I also have a feeling that all these things needs someone's popularity online,

On the internet, content and traffic are the two keys to popularity. One without the other doesn't work well. So when starting out, those are the first two things to think about. You can't get any traffic at all if you have no content. You have just started creating content, so now traffic can begin to come.

But right now, you are like a shopfront in the middle of the Namibian desert. You have your basic shop running and a few items to sell to passers by, but nobody know you are there!

Of course, one of the very best ways to get more people visiting is to tell your friends and networks about it. You can do that whenever you feel ready.

Meanwhile, while you continue filling your "shop in the desert" with stuff for people to enjoy when they get there, we also need to put up a few signposts in strategic places that let people know you exist. That's where the social bookmarking, search engine listings and blog directories become useful.

Linda Nowakowski said:

5 Plus...I have never ever clicked on a google ad and I use gmail and igoogle etc. I just don't even see the ads even though they are there.

I heard from Mark last month that aboutus.org is currently breaking $120,000/mo from google adsense. So while not everyone clicks on ads, enough people do to result in meaningful amounts of income for site publishers all over the web.

I have wrestled with all sorts of psychological hangups about "who I am supporting" when I click on an ad. But when it comes to small blog publishers, I've adopted a habit of clicking on at least one ad if they are running them, as sort of a thank you in the tip jar for the information they've shared. If they are running ads on their site, then I can assume they need the money those ads are earning - and the ads only earn them money when people like me click. If my 1-2 simple clicks can put a few cents in their tip jar, I'm actually more willing to do that than to donate to support this site like some blogs ask for.

BTW

I bet it would be really good for ned if more of us were to visit the ned sponsors

Coincidentally, while visiting one of the ned sponsors I found a very relevant article at http://www.anvilmediainc.com/soc ial-media-marketing-optimization -article.html

The article is targeted at corporate website owners, explaining what they need to learn to do to make a social media marketing strategy work. A blog is a form of social media.

It's particularly interesting to me to see that much of what's recommended for social media success is stuff that each of you already has in place to work with in developing your blog's eventual popularity. The article says a lot about the multi-layered science of getting people to visit your blog. Among other tips:

For general networking, consider profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. For images, look at FlickR, Picasa and WebShots. For Video, consider YouTube and Revver... For all content, review, tag and rate with sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

>>On the internet, content and traffic are the two keys to popularity.<<

One thing to keep in mind, that 100K+ in ad revenue came after three years of building the business, and currently over 60,000,000 page views monthly.

It's also really very important to note that when it comes to online advertising that quality of content is important too. So I'm not sure how building sentences and paragraphs using common top keywords is going to play out, it's worth a try. I do know that the ad servers (Google in particular) have sensitive enough algorithms that they will stop counting the impressions with regards to advertising revenue from certain IP addresses if they see too much activity from a certain cluster of those IP addresses. I know some ad networks stopped "click farms" that were growing in developing country internet cafes years ago. Another thing to note is 95% of online ad revenue comes from 8 countries that target traffic from those same 8 countries.

That being said, if the entire world economy doesn’t collapse due to American company greed and malfeasance it is estimated online ad revenue is growing from 20 to 60 billion over the next 3-5 years...so there is a load of money there.

Linda, I do know what you mean about it feeling "wrong", it is feeling a bit like we are gaming the system, but for now I am just going to trust Christina that it isn't. I still don't really understand exactly how this game works, but I am enjoying the discovery process and am going to continue just to see what happens. This is totally unexplored territory for me. I love reading blogs, and yes mine aren't very interesting to read yet, but maybe someday they will be.

I am going to have to either resign or get a couple of week dispensation as finals week is coming up on me and my work load with everything right now is overwhelming.

May I come back in 2 weeks?

Better be late than never, commenting about blog, I have been trying blogs but this one of digg is a bit different with some technicalities. I tried it up Grace for the first time but things did not come well but in most cases don't go well for the first time as one has to go through new things.

Am happy that so far the comment reads that the technical part we going :) The next step is perfection of contents of the post and learning to digg as many as time allows.

Wow, as always I seem to go off track. I'm interested in this experiment because I think that blogs do have potential for revenue. I know that the small revenue from blogs can sometimes be very hard for people in Africa to actually cash in the money. There are lots of things I don't understand about blogs but very much want to understand better.

I also am interested in blogs being used as a way for people to get and share information. Like making money with blogs "there's more than one way to skin a cat."

One blog I like very much is African Agriculture. I'm not sure exactly how it's done, but I suspect it's done using tools like Google News and then making an RSS feed of the search terms around African agriculture. In any case I think the search for news items is somewhat automated. And every week the blog posts a page of articles and a page of links that is like a table of contents. Another great thing about the blog is then the articles are archived according to categories. So the blog is really a great source for information whether you keep up with it weekly like I do or only visit it occasionally.

I've wondered what other sorts of information could be organized in a similar way. African Agriculture has ads, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of money from them--that's hard to tell, just my guess. Just because a blog is useful to many doesn't mean it pays well. But being useful to many is a first step to paying well.

Today I read a great post by Chido Makunike. He was writing about how "African experts" in the West arguing all the time tends to hinder rather than help. I nodded in agreement with many of the instances he pointed out, because I read the Africa Agriculture blog. So I smiled an embarrassed smile when I noticed that Chido Makunike runs the blog Africa Agriculture. I was embarrassed because I've really liked the blog for a while and never thought to ask who makes this great thing? If people are silly like me then even a great blog isn't a way to be famous ;-) At least now I know Chido Makunike's name now and know he does a very good thing with his news service about agriculture.

Oh I should say as well that I got to the article I liked so much from a link from one of Emeka Okafor's great blogs Africa Unchained. His blog Timbuktu Chronicles is a masterpiece of conveying useful information with a blog. The article I liked was at The Cheetah Index and that's a great Website too. Getting way off track I'll say that I follow Benin Mwangi's Twitter feed. He's an editor at The Cheetah Index.

One of the great things about trying to build a blog that many people see and is useful is meeting all sorts of wonderful people. There are people doing blogs who want to connect and to help people to connect to useful information. So even while we all are doing our own things, there's real power and pleasure in linking to others. It kind of like a song where people have different parts that work together to make a lovely chorus.

Here's an article from yesterday's Techcrunch that might be of interest given some of the posts on this thread. (The comments section under the piece is quite interesting too)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/0 9/22/technorati-survey-says-the- average-blog-makes-6000-a-year/

Cheers, Gayle

Mark Grimes said:

>>On the internet, content and traffic are the two keys to popularity.<<

One thing to keep in mind, that 100K+ in ad revenue came after three years of building the business, and currently over 60,000,000 page views monthly.

Absolutely, and nobody is suggesting we would ever earn that much with a 3 month experiment, but I'd like to see what we can achieve by combining strategies in unconventional ways.

It's also really very important to note that when it comes to online advertising that quality of content is important too.

Where we begin is never where we end up. Patience, my dear, is a virtue :)

So I'm not sure how building sentences and paragraphs using common top keywords is going to play out, it's worth a try.

There's an entire online industry built on advising people how to build webpages that are optimized for the search engines. Using keyword density as a tool is a huge part of traffic generating science, and thousands of people are blogging the google trends (I learned about it from a guy in India), so I can hardly claim it as a new idea. The only new part is that I'm suggesting it might be useful to explore how this concept can be used in building blogs that raise social capital and make it financially feasible for African bloggers to enter that scene.

I do know that the ad servers (Google in particular) have sensitive enough algorithms that they will stop counting the impressions with regards to advertising revenue from certain IP addresses if they see too much activity from a certain cluster of those IP addresses. I know some ad networks stopped "click farms" that were growing in developing country internet cafes years ago.

Right. That's not what this is about. Right now, we are simply producing beginner blog content that's optimized to be seen right away by a global audience.

Another thing to note is 95% of online ad revenue comes from 8 countries that target traffic from those same 8 countries.

Right, so the issue is where the traffic comes from, not where the blogger comes from. If you are looking at Grace's blog, google is going to show you ads that are targeted at a visitor from your IP address, even though Grace is making those posts from Uganda. Unless grace writes about Uganda - in which case google will serve up public service ads matching uganda in the text, which she won't earn anything on even if someone clicks.

That being said, if the entire world economy doesn’t collapse due to American company greed and malfeasance it is estimated online ad revenue is growing from 20 to 60 billion over the next 3-5 years...so there is a load of money there.

Exactly, and I'd like to believe that we engaged in better world building activities online can learn to channel more and more of it toward making good things happen in the real world.

Linda Nowakowski said:

May I come back in 2 weeks?

Please do!