The Next Wave of Bloggers

Word is starting to spread about Zoundry, and we're getting interest from people who don't currently have a blog but want to start one in order to use our service. We point new bloggers to our Getting Started with Blogging Guide that helps them think through the process of starting a blog. If you know of other good resources for new bloggers, I invite you to add them as a comment. Here's a prediction: Our new bloggers will not identify themselves as "bloggers." Given mainstream media's coverage of blogging, many people think of bloggers as fanatics or exhibitionists generally on the fringes of society. I don't think that's the reality at all. I've always thought of blogs as an easier way of creating a web site, and bloggers as the next generation of web site publishers. When web sites first became popular in the 90's, I don't recall the mainstream media labeling people who created web sites as fringe extremists. In fact, I remember a very populist vision that web sites would one day give a voice to everyone. That vision wasn't realized because web site publishing wasn't as easy as people thought. But the simplicity of blogs give this new medium the ability to succeed where web sites did not. We're excited to motivate a new wave of people to start publishing with blogging tools, especially those without any knowledge of HTML or other web technologies. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 7% of U.S. Internet users, or roughly 8 million people, have created blogs and 32 million people read blogs. We want to get those numbers higher. Our approach is two-fold: 1) make it easier for people to write and edit blogs through our Blog Writer software, and 2) allow friends and family to make money through blogs by sharing their product knowledge and pooling their purchasing power.

Money, Blogs, Trust, and Reward

Now that we've put out a new release and updated our web site, I have a short breather to blog. I was talking with a friend recently about our company and he asked a question that I get often, "Will readers trust a blogger who's making money from his product recommendations?" We discuss this briefly in our FAQ at our web site but I wanted to address it more fully here. It's a question that goes to the core of our business. My answer is, "Yes, under certain conditions." Here are my top three conditions that determine whether a reader will trust a blogger enough to purchase through his affiliate links: 1. Pre-existing relationship. If I'm reading the blog of a friend whom I trust already, I will trust her recommendations. Makes sense, right? In fact, I want to give her a commission in return for her advice. I compare this to the offline example of the local shopkeeper. When I want to buy a book as a gift for someone, I'd rather give my business to a local independent bookstore that can give me personal service versus a chain store that can't. Applying this to the online example, I want to buy through my friend's blog and reward her for giving me a recommendation - like the bookstore owner. And I still get the benefit of an online superstore's selection and prices. 2. Virtual relationship. I would also trust a blogger that I've been following for a while and have grown to trust - even if I have never met the person. I believe people have an innate capability to judge whether someone is being truthful or full of b.s., especially if there is a history of repeated interactions, in this case a series of blog posts. Taking it one step further, the question may not even be about trust as much as reward. The reader in essence rewards the blogger by purchasing through his link. Each person makes that decision differently - the reward could be based on honesty, or expertise, or how funny the blogger is. 3. Third-party beneficiary. Given the absence of any relationship, I would tend to trust a blogger that has decided to give his commissions to a charity that I support (or at least I'm not against.) Sure, the blogger could still be trying to bamboozle commissions but I don't care as much since the money is going to a good cause and it's not coming out of my pocket. The merchant pays the commission as a cost of getting the sale. My partners and I started Zoundry with the basic idea that 1) people are generally honest and 2) if we can encourage more people to share their product knowledge so that others can make more informed purchases, then it's a good thing. To do my part, I'm asking all my friends to start blogs so I can buy stuff through them. I hope you will do the same. For more background reading on this subject, read this related article, The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere. It's the best article I've read on the subject of blogger ethics.

New Release!

I'm happy to announce that we have just released the next version of our beta Zoundry Blog Writer. It's available for free download at our web site. As I mentioned in my last post, we made a lot of changes based on user input - thanks again to our early testers. We also added some slick new features. The first I want to highlight is drag and drop. You can now drag and drop image files from your desktop, image tags from the Web, hyperlinks, address bar URLs, and text. It works especially well with Mozilla Firefox - you can drag and drop pretty much anything from a page within Firefox. With IE, you have to select it first and then drag and drop, or copy and paste into the Blog Writer. The second new feature of interest is our link conversion operation. If you already have Amazon links (regular product page links, not affiliate links) in your blog , then you can easily convert them into Zoundry product links. You can also use this feature to move your wishlist into your blog and convert them into product links. Lastly, I want to mention our new Sidebar UI in the Blog Writer. It's a convenient pullout window that displays your user settings or your saved drafts and posts. We also have a new Check for Updates sidebar where you can check if there are any new versions of the Blog Writer available. With this new feature, we may release new builds more often with fewer incremental changes. I encourage you to download and try out our new Blog Writer - we're very proud of it. For those of you with previous versions, the installer will do an update for you and keep all your settings. For those of you new to blogging, check out our new Getting Started guide (link from our home page). It will walk you through the thinking process of starting a blog with some helpful examples.