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Buzz: Michael Turton’s – The View From Taiwan

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splendor

The winner from last week’s competition about TaiChung is Michael Turton who guessed correctly that I was taking the picture from the 25th floor of the Splendor Hotel in Taichung. We actually stayed in the more affordable rooms on the other side of the main entrance, but we both like the hotel and the rooms quite a lot, especially for its location.

The competition itself attracted a bunch of entries, with floors ranging from 25th to 70th and even 80th floor! One of the nice points about Taichung though is that it isn’t really a high-rise city yet, so many of the guesses were overly ambitious! Sorry, guys! When we came back from Taichung, the north of the island was plunged into the Taiwanese equivalent of the Big Freeze, the BIG CHILL. Temperatures in Tamsui where we live have plunged from pleasant mid-teens to 6~8C in the last few days.

Oh, well. I just hope that Michael forgives any splling mstakes as my frozen finggers strugggle over the keyboarrd.

The View From Taiwan

michael-turton

The blog is simply the view of one Michael Turton who has lived in Taiwan for many years. It was difficult to find much biographical information about Michael himself. But I did find a picture of him! So, if you see him on the streets of Taichung, say hello from Kenneth!

michaelturton

The primary blog that he runs is The View From Taiwan supplemented by other HTML pages that can be found on his own website, named www.michaelturton.com. The View Blog is full of posts that explore life in Taiwan: Politics, Society, History, Economics, etc. His posts are always well informed, well-written, and interesting reading for those of you interested in Taiwan in many ways. I also love the way his posts always contain large numbers of photos: he has quite an eye for catching simple things and focusing on them in such a way that they becoming interesting – his blog, Flickr, and HTML sites are all replete with photos taken with one of his three cameras. Also, the sidebar is a tremendous resource of blogs and photoblogs, most of which are related to Taiwan. It’s quite a wonderful resource.

The Challenge: Blogger’s limitations

The challenge that Michael faces is mostly Blogger itself. Blogger’s interface, presentation and theme limitations all impede the appearance of an otherwise excellent blog. While the themes aren’t particularly ugly in Blogger/Blogspot, out in the world of self-hosted blogs the options for improving presentation are just THAT much greater. There are plugins and themes that can turn his blog into a full CMS system or even simply the unruly first page. But given the size and depth of his blog, migration to a non-Blogger system would likely prove to be a HUGE headache in itself.

I will instead offer three suggestions that Michael can use if he wishes:

total space1. Usability: Trim the length and size of your first page on your blog. I saved the page to my desktop and was shocked by the size: it’s 8MB of files. Cut it down by at least 90% so that pages load for people who don’t have such speedy connections. Can you imagine how long the page would take to load on DialUp? So, you need to cut the number of posts to five longish posts or ten medium size posts (a rule of thumb!). I’ll lay odds that your page views are VERY limited possibly only 1.x or similar. In other words, the length of text of the first page is a huge turn off, and you provide little or no means by which people can click through to other pages.

2. Navigation: With so many posts on the front page, navigation, focus and depth become serious issues. Users can’t click on a single post title entry easily or obviously to read a post (I had to click on comments or links to get to a specific post). Navigation by mouse is clumsy even at the best of times, but today I have frozen fingers; and I find it really a burden to have to click and drag, or use the roller in the middle of the mouse, even clicking on the sidebar in the window means that scrolling isn’t smooth particularly and at times you miss important stuff as you skip quickly down the page. With so many posts on one page (is it 25?), it’s difficult for the reader to find the most important posts, the most popular posts, or the posts with most comments. In fact, it’s difficult to find out what the blogger thinks is important. In many ways, it resembles a street market in Taiwan – it takes time to wander through as you search for the fresh, the most delicious, the best value or the newest produce. But it doesn’t make shopping easy. There is a full-archive date by date; as well the archive is topically (and manually) organized. One of the archive links doesn’t seem to work. But a CMS or Wordpress platform would make such management much simpler and more effective to the archive problem and help keep the archive uptodate.

3. Sidebar: The sidebar displays the same problem as the main posts column: too much, too disorganized (from a navigation point of view), and clicking on the shortcuts at the top (it works well) takes you to the sidebar area you want to go, but (BUT) there is no way to go back except by scrolling or hitting the back button. It would be much better to offer a separate page or pages with the same information and extract random sites for posting on the front page. With so much information on the sidebar, should he shorten his frontpage to five posts or even ten, then using a double sidebar on the right might be a good solution to the overhang!

Wonderful resource: needs an overhaul

Overall, Michael’s blog is a rip-roaring success with wonderful photos, detailed posts, and good writing. He’s cracked the hard part of blogging: the content. But his blog is in need of an overhaul: one that will improve the design, making his blogging easier and help his readers tremendously. At the very least, he should consider a new blogger theme, even if he doesn’t want to change the CMS he is using (Blogger), especially one that makes navigation easier for readers. And it’s been a privilege to write a review of his blog. Thanks, Michael. And when I’m in Taichung next time, I will look you up!

To my readers, if you are interested in knowing about Taiwan, reading about its culture or politics or you would like to come here to live or travel around the island, Michael’s website and blog both will provide you a lot of what you will need to know. And if he can’t, one of the blogs, forums, websites or resources he has linked to WILL likely have the answer you need! Now, my fingers are frozen. …

Addenda: I will add any missing information here.

The 80/20 Principle: It’s just a rule of thumb

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not one of the ten commandments… Read on.

Ade’s blog just recently posted about the 80/20 rule and how it applies to bloggers. In this post, I would like to point out some of the reasons why I think the 80/20 rule may be flawed, and you’d be wise to consider NOT applying it to your blog’s readers.

An introduction: What is 80/20?

Wikipedia has a great article on the 80/20 otherwise known as Pareto’s principle. The principle was greatly popularized by a recent book called: The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. Good book, good reading. In summary, 80/20 states that the majority of results will come from the minority of inputs. In particular, 80% of sales in a bookstore will come from 20% of customers. There are many examples that you can find. While the numbers 80/20 are approximate, other variations have been seen, too, including 90/10, 70/30, etc. It is now being treated as a rule of thumb in many industries, and being applied in a number of diverse situations.

It’s a rule of thumb, not a rule!

The recording companies, principally the big 4, have been adopting this principle over the last few years with their back catalogues which have shrunk somewhat as artists have been eliminated who don’t reach certain mass market metrics. Now I was thinking about the 80/20 rule and it may or may not be true in some circumstances, but I would argue that in some situations, esp. like the CD industry, it’s a bad idea for a number of reasons.

Let’s examine CD purchases: logic dictates that you should only stock the top 20% of CDs. In some situations this may be fine if there’s limited stock space or some other important limitation. BUT a significant number of purchasers would probably buy a top 20% CD AND another CD of a lesser known artist. You then lose the CD sale for BOTH CDs not just one. Why? Well, as the CD companies are discovering: shoppers tend to buy multiple CDs at one time, and may shop frequently. With the top 20% of CDs on sale, such frequent shoppers would quickly buy the top 20% and then not have any more to buy. Result: they begin to shop elsewhere, where they buy the CDs that they can’t get in the bigger shop, and at the same time they’ll buy the popular CDs too.

For the shop, this is bad business: they lose the top quality purchasers who buy multiple CDs at a time. They therefore have to start increasing their advertising to attract those shoppers who only buy the top 20% of CDs, and those shoppers may only shop occasionally, may be more price sensitive, and may not be loyal to any particular CD store or chain of stores. Worse comes when even the marginally popular CDs are dropped as the store further refines its stock of CDs. Previously when third-tier CDs were dropped, sales may have risen incrementally, as some customers bought more second- and first-tier CDs. This effect would have been temporary as regular purchasers would soon find not much new to buy as most new artists would start out as third-tier or lower before being ‘discovered’ by shoppers.

So the store decides that with deteriorating sales in its CDs it has to boost its margins by shifting more copies of the top tier artists. It increases promotions, cuts second-tier CDs, and lo and behold, the sales and margins rise magically again. But worse is to come: customers begin buying fewer CDs (they either already have the ones they want or they don’t care for some of the artists) and regular customers become scarce. After the promotions are over, it’s difficult to get regular customers to come back, and the top spenders are now going elsewhere for their CDs.

So, it looks like the CDs/music market is declining, and the management is left with little choice but to scale back the CDs even more or close the store.

Of course, downloading (legal and otherwise) came along at a time when the CD industry was already in bad shape. Downloading and alternative mediums for music (online radio, ringtones, etc.), not to mention alternative sources for entertainment, all coincided to make things really difficult for CD companies. But to cut your catalogues and reduce your roster of artists is now looking to be one of the ways in which the big four cut their own throats.

The 80/20 principle sounds like a logical way of thinking until you realize that if you start to pursue the top 20, you will quickly lose a lot more incidental sales. And some of the incidental sales MAY just turn out to be the top 20% of purchasers in the future…

And for bloggers: should you follow the lead?

While the principle may be in principle correct, ignoring the 80% of your readers may lead to erosion of your blog income. Why? Because when readers click away from your blog, it’s usually through an advertisement. Hence, to maximize your blog’s income, you need to encourage your readers to love it, enjoy it (briefly) then click away to a Google Ad, affiliate link or other advertising. It’s likely that if you just focus on the 20% of your readers, your expenses will rise as a result of increasing usage your server’s power power, and your income will go down as regular readers become ad/affiliate link blind.

There are many people who do not seek to make any money out of their blogs at all. Power to them! Well done! There are bloggers like me who started before making money on a blog was possible, but have found the dollar signs an additional benefit. However, for both kinds, increasing readers is a great benefit, if the blogger can afford to pay for the hosting costs. If you cut into your revenue streams, then you’ll find that you will be paying the costs for your regular readers. If you are doing it as a hobby, perhaps that is appropriate for you. But perhaps not.

Overall, I am becoming a very anti-80/20 activist. I think focusing on such goals really doesn’t help much. I can cite several examples in Taiwan, where such short-term thinking led to very poor short-term results, muddied business plans, and withdrawal from the local market with a sullied reputation.

So I believe that the principle as a business principle is flawed, in many instances. I do recognize instances where it is a valuable ‘rule of thumb’ but it should not be treated as a law or rule in the absolute sense of the word. For the business world, which seems to be focused on the next quarter or next business year, it may seem to be a ‘golden rule’. In reality, it’s likely to prove to be fool’s gold. Unfortunately the 80/20 principle is fast becoming one of the canons of western business principles.

InvestorBlogger: A Year in Review

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Today is the last day in 2007, and in Taipei, we’re already approaching the end of the year with the usual fireworks at 101! If you haven’t seen them, they’re quite spectacular. I’ve added a video. After the video we’ll look at 2007 in review.

It has been an amazing year on InvestorBlogger… As I start to recap what’s happened in my blog since December 31st, 2006… let’s just see how it has played out.

Blog Audience

On the upside, the profile of the blog is now much higher than it was last year at the same time. In fact, my blog has gone from an Alexa of millions to 113K. On Technorati, it’s moved up to under 50K at the moment. We currently have a readership that’s now a little under 80 or so on our RSS feeds.

Traffic wise, InvestorBlogger has now reached about 1500 Unique Visitors per month on average, with traffic doubling just in the last few months alone. Page views are running at about 3000, too. This has helped with additional traffic from links, advertising and so on.

Blog Content

In addition, we’ve added nearly 800 posts this year alone! That’s incredible. We’ve already published a best of 2007 with posts that generated the most traffic. But there’s a ton of good posts amongst those 220,000 words on the blog! The reorganization of the categories helped me to think much more clearly about the nature of the blog. We currently have 13 categories. Unfortunately, some of the posts are wrongly categorized from the early part of the year. I don’t have a tool to help reorganize them… Any plugins?

Online Income

In early September, I passed the $5,000 mark in total online income. Since then, I’ve been moving in on earning $7,000. Offline income hasn’t been so successful, but the active/passive ratio of the income has been quite surprising, approximately 40% of the income is automatic – I don’t have to do anything! Obviously the paid posting that I have been doing is quite active, but there are a number of other sources of income that need little or no intervention on my part.

Challenges

Offline: 2006/7 was a difficult year for my business: faced with declining admissions, and rising costs. We set out to tackle both. And we have succeeded. But running a business as we are is certainly not a passive thing.

Online: The blog has moved from regular hosting to a virtual server. I was getting frustrated at the slower response times, then the blog was unavailable for part of August (not good!). Eventually, I took the plunge and opted for faster hosting. For a while, things were fine; but then in November problems returned.

Finally, I took a carving knife and began going through the hosted files to pare down what was not being used. Eventually, I found one plugin that might have been the reason for ALL the problems in the first place. It was duly removed. But the benefit was that a lot of junk, some of it insecure or old was either passworded, moved to inside the root folder or deleted. The result has been a better performing server overall. I’m still experiencing mild spikes in activity, but that may be due to other junk in old user accounts. I’ll be cleaning them out during the year.

The biggest challenge that is still playing out is the recent decision by Google to penalize websites that don’t use nofollow on paid links by removing their PR ranking. In fact, this blog suffered a reverse going from 3 to 0 in a matter of a few days, when predictions were that it would be a 4, and early indications confirmed that 4.

Publicity

The Carnival of Making Real Money is helping to drive traffic to the blog because it is hosted right here on the blog. The current entry has generated so many submissions that I’m having a problem dealing with them all. Still, we’re looking forward to the next issue.

We’ve run several promotions throughout the year, none of which really has taken hold. But that’s okay. The first was the BlogBuzz that ran in June and in November. I’ve had the opportunity to review a number of websites and provide additional exposure to our traffic.

The Kiva Competition in the summer was a disaster. As was the most recent competition that attracted no entries, nothing! I guess people don’t want $25! I’ll probably hold off on competitions for the foreseeable future.

We’ve also run advertising in three fronts: a review on Michael Kwan’s Blog (which really helped to coalesce my thoughts on design), a text link on CashQuests (which generated about 65 visitors), and a link on John Cow’s Blog (which has brought 90 visitors).

Well, I’m really looking forward to 2008, and whatever happens, it will be an interesting year! I hope you enjoyed these posts in 2007 as much as I have in writing them.