Closing up Epiblogger

January 11, 2009 – 9:11 pm

Just over a year ago Lee and I launched Epiblogger and now we are calling it quits. I am done with this blog, I says. What are you supposed to say when you close a blog.

I woke up this morning and thought—there are at least 3 posts I have in my head that I need to write for Epi. I have the time. But I am not making the time. What’s wrong? I got to work and Lee IM’d me and said we need to talk about Epi…

It’s me, not you

I think I’ve started to understand that I am not a teacher. I am a do’er. Though I like to think a lot about theory and ideas, I don’t know that I have successfully been able to communicate them or I have communicated them to death. I haven’t been able to connect universally. One-on-one I have had great success. While I wrote about organic blogging, I found that I spent most of my time wishing that I could just be organic blogging. I don’t know how to write about writing, but I do know how to write.

I have had the oppurtunity to make some great relationships over the last year and that’s what I’ll take with me. Thanks to everyone who commented and started some really great and meaningful conversations. As Lee is about to talk about, I will be moving my posts over to my blog and Lee to his.

This was a great experiment, but I have come to understand that my passion lays in other directions. Feel free to stop by either of my blogs.

Changes, Changes

Life is full of changes. When Rhett approached me with the idea of Epiblogger little did I know that in the next year of launching Epiblogger that my wife and I would move to Regina, my blog would require more time, and that my family would need more time from me. I think Rhett and I both knew the writing was on the wall for Epiblogger back in August, but change is hard for me and I don’t like to give up easily. Now in January 2009 though I have to focus more on my business and my family. My business has been growing steadily over the last year and is requiring more of my time. My family also needs their Dad, especially my little girl, who has a speech development delay. Add it all up and 2009 meant changes, and that change had to be Epiblogger.

There is some great content that Rhett and I have written here and to keep it alive, Rhett and I will be moving our posts over to our blogs. You will be able to find Rhett’s posts over at Rhett Soveran - Web and Blog Consulting and Communications, and my posts will be available at the LGR Internet Solutions Blog. I have created a post already highlighting the Epiblogger content and tagged all the posts from Epiblogger so they are easy to find. I have also created redirects for my posts to their new locations on the LGR Internet Solutions blog, so you should be redirected to the new location.

For all of our great RSS subscribers, I would encourage you to check out both my RSS feed and Rhett’s RSS feed and subscribe. We both blog regularly on our sites and you might see me guest posting on Rhett’s blog or Rhett on mine.

While Epiblogger is closing, this site will remain online for awhile. The hosting is paid for, the domain name is paid for and there are some posts here that will remain. It has been a great experience working with Rhett on Epiblogger and I know that Rhett and I will keep in contact and will partner up again at some point. Thanks to everyone that has been a regular reader here, commented and been a part of Epiblogger. It has been fun.

By Lee Robertson / Rhett Soveran Posted in Writing Comments (2)

Personal Blog Prejudice

December 6, 2008 – 4:32 pm

Hulk road rage

I am so f—ing tired of the prejudice against personal bloggers. Leading the charge today, I quote the great Guy Kawasaki:

I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool—specifically as a marketing tool—for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

Humanities biggest problem is entitlement. Entitlement is a bit of a double-edged sword, if you ask me. I hope it’s appropriate that I believe I am entitled to life, rights and (if I am fortunate) happiness. It gets a little dicey when I start to believe I am entitled to own a hummer (I don’t own a hummer), destroy communities and so on.

Rhett has road rage and blog rage

One of the easiest areas to see our sense of entitlement is when we drive and I am a perfect example. If you want to hear the most foul, evil and vindictive things, just spend an afternoon driving with me. Most of the time it just spews out of me. I can own that. Usually, I shock myself and tell myself I need to cool out. I am entitled to be where I want to be, when I want to be and you better get out of my damn way. This is the bad side of entitlement.

I also have, little known, pedestrian rage. When I worked downtown I walked everywhere and I have almost been hit by a car more times than I would have liked. But there’s a difference between being on time and being hit by a 3/4 ton truck. I am entitled to my life. I am going out on a limb to believe this.

So where’s the line?

I feel entitled to the right to be a personal blogger without chastising comments from the would-be peanut gallery. It makes me angry when people think that I blog about my cat all day. Or that I let everyone know I am about to brush my teeth. Because I don’t do that. And let’s just be clear—Guy’s not the only one saying this stuff. He’s just the one who crossed my path today.

Finding value

I really don’t think Guy is so much further ahead. He’s just in a different line. So he uses Twitter as a “tool” to create “value”. In truth, that’s just some marketing spin. He’s just selling—undercoat not included. This assumption of value might be the most annoying part about all this. It’s like he almost runs you over and then gives you the finger on top.

The numbers are skewed

For work, I was reading up on CTR (clickthrough rates). One person mentioned that depending on clickthrough rates to find value can lead to error because heavy clickers are not necessarily heavy buyers. And generally, they aren’t. It can be relatively easy to get a large following on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that they buy whatever it is your selling and in fact, I have found that they don’t. Everyone’s just sending links all the time. On Epi’s twitter I do have a lot of friends, but there are also a lot of people I don’t know. When I check that feed it’s usually someone hocking some link to a bullshit list that I’m not interested in.

If you compare that to my personal Twitter feed, it’s a different story. In Calgary, we have developed quite a community and I have developed quite a few new real life friendships because of it. Because we are friends on and offline, we respect one another, and we view Twitter as a conversation between us, when we share something—we are really sharing it.

The value is in the relationship

If you want to sell something or share anything, you need the relationships. I don’t have stats, but in this day and age of complete information saturation, I really believe that the relationships you build are what is going to get you ahead. If you think that Twitter is a blunt tool to hit users over the head with, I can’t imagine you finding success. It works for Guy because he is already a name and because—whether he admits it or not—he already has the relationships.

My hypothesis

I think you probably see where I am going with all of this. But it would be my hypothesis that those marketer-types or whoever they are that like to create this sense of dissonance and divide between them, in their tower, with their selling and money-making, value-creating lifestyle versus we lowly and humble personal bloggers is because we have the community that they want. We have a power that they don’t know how to achieve. We connect in a way that they never can, because they are always looking for an angle to work and we are just looking to have a conversation.

There is value in sharing minutae of my life and I hope you will share yours with me. My name is Rhett Soveran and I am a personal blogger.

Photo by Tony the Misfit

By Rhett Soveran Posted in Writing Comments (3)

The Great Personal Blogger Search

November 26, 2008 – 10:45 am


I noticed a great post by Seth Godin in my feedreader this morning entitled “Death of the personal blog?“. There are times when he nails it right.

The origin of what we call blogs started as personal diaries, but like everything they have changed, grown and been adapted by media, become larger and the personal part of blogs has been lost in the large blogs. The problem is that the big box blogs that we see on the top lists on sites like Technorati are no longer blogs. They might be run by blogging software but the personality and personal expression of blogs has been wrung out of them to the point where only the numbers of readers, dollars and page views matter.

We need a revolution in blogging; we need to be radical! Blogs need to return to their personal nature. Whether your blog is a personal blog, or a business blog can people see you in the blog or have you been wrung out and hung out to dry?

Seth Godin is right, we need a new list that is not just about the big box blogs. Time to create a list of the best blogs that have a personal touch. Let’s start it here. Leave a comment with your favourite blog that has a personality, where you can see the author, and why you think their blog should be on the list. I want to read your favourite blogs, share them with me and let’s revolutionize blogging again together.

Photo by stuttermonkey

By Lee Robertson Posted in Blogging Comments (3)

List Building vs. Valuing Readers

November 18, 2008 – 2:45 pm

Something is rotten in the state of the blogosphere. Perhaps you have noticed that there has been a trend with some popular bloggers lately, you visit their blog and instead of being greeted by their well written, compelling content you are greeted by a pop-over pushing the bloggers newsletter list. Every blogger is different. Some offer you a free reward for joining, some promise unique content that can only be found in the their newsletter or a free podcast. While I have no problem with newsletter lists or people subscribing to an RSS feed by email the latest trend to push newsletter lists has two major problems.

First is a usability issue. They use an annoying pop-over that blocks your access to the website. They are hard to block and are the most annoying form of advertising since popups. Why have these bloggers decided to put a good user experience behind building their newsletter list? Simple, they have discovered that the annoying pop-overs work and signup rates go up. Daily Blog Tips recently did a poll asking if people would stop visiting a website that has a pop-over. The results showed that 36% of people will stop visiting blogs that have a pop-over. These once interesting blogs have been turned into nothing more than a cheesy sales page. You know the ones where they promise you XYZ in return for entering your name and email address. If you want a cheesy sales page make a cheesy sales page, don’t call it a blog.

Second, lets be honest about why they want you to subscribe to their newsletter list. It has nothing to do with community or building trust, it has to do with one thing, MONEY! I have no problem with making money, but don’t bull*&%$ me and tell me it is about building community or building trust. Permission marketing is all about getting people’s permission to sell them something. Building a newsletter list is all about making money either by selling directly or through affiliate links, driving traffic back to the blog or advertising.

One of the unique things about pop-overs is that they are hard to block. Unlike traditional popups, pop-overs are part of the webpage itself and the only way to stop them from appearing on the page is to disable Javascript. This will disable the pop-over from appearing on the website in the middle of the screen, but it will usually still appear as part of the page. By disabling Javascript globally you also disable other features that you might want to function on a website. If you are using Firefox an option you can try is to install the NoScript addon to have more control over what Javascripts are allowed to run on what websites. I have it running and have successfully blocked the annoying pop-overs from Chrisg.com, Digital Photography School, Shoemoney.com, Remarkablogger, Caroline Middlebrook and John Chow dot Com while still being able to use other Javascript features on the sites.

It is unfortunate that readers need to take such drastic actions to be able to enjoy reading blogs without being annoyed by these pop-overs. We will probably have to continue to take such actions until the bloggers either realize that they are annoying more people than they are gaining, start actually getting hurt in their pocketbooks or until big brother Google comes out with a statement saying that websites should not have pop-overs that deter from user interaction similar to statements that they make on popups.

Photo by oddsock

By Lee Robertson Posted in Blogging Comments (0)

Blowin’ hot air

November 17, 2008 – 10:52 am

A while back, we used to use the Thoughts category to give a couple random suggestions on what you could post about. It was derived from a writing class I used to take in University, where everyone would suggest a topic and then we would pick one and write on it for 10 minutes. Just something to get us all writing. I really like the idea of the Thoughts post, but it never really had any traction. So, I am going to tweak it a bit and be more direct.

What is the point of blogging? I was reading about #motrinmoms on Twitter this morning. It seems to me that we all blog to listen to ourselves blow hot air around, but the best of us do it creatively. Even if we are trying to be helpful it all seems like nonsense to me. Therefore, blogging should be creatively talking about nothing. Like one big episode of Seinfeld. Yes/no? Discuss?

Leave a comment/trackback or email me and let me know if you write about it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

By Rhett Soveran Posted in Thoughts Comments (0)
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