Broadcasting Brain

Today, dear readers, we have Steve Spalding from How To Split An Atom participating in today’s Q&A session. Ready? Then catch the brainwaves!

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Let’s start with the heading at the top of your blog page:

How To Split An Atom is a blog about using, abusing, and surviving in the Web X.0 landscape.? It’s Internet culture, split open.

How would you restate those sentences for the tech-challenged? Why the emphasis on the word “split”?

I like to think of How To Split An Atom as a place where I generalize the web. All of the hype surrounding “Web 2.0″ can be broken down into much more general concepts, whether they have to do with Marketing, Branding, Privacy, Security, or Media they are still a lot more general than we often like to admit.

Real people are interested in how technology relates to their lives. I want How To Split An Atom to be a place where they can learn about that relationship.

I notice that you don’t seem to have an Archives section on the blog. Why is that?

There are two reasons. The first, is that during the changeover to my newest theme, I lost the Archive that I used from the beginning of the blog. When I was looking into replacing it I realized the fact that statistics show few people actually -look- at archives.

In general, people either come to the site to see a specific story (Google is a great archive in its own right) or they come to my site to look at the front page. Neither of these require a separate Archive.

Someone once told me that the beauty of blogging is that once a post falls below the fold it stops existing. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.

As of January 2008, what are the three top things that the Web has done to make the world a better place?

The web has given people access to information that they otherwise would be unable to see. Sites like Wikipedia have done great things, allowing everyone access to information that they might have otherwise needed extensive prior subject knowledge to get.

The web has made communication easier. Facebook, MySpace and the industries that have sprung up around them have allowed people to keep in touch in ways that would have been difficult or impossible only 2 years ago.

The web has created business opportunities. With blogging and the like becoming “real” businesses, it’s entirely possible for someone to start a media company from his or her garage. All you need is skill, presence and time. I think this Capitalism at its finest. You don’t have to have stellar luck or a rich Uncle anymore to get your start, just drive and a willingness to learn.

As per the previous question, what are the three top things that the Web has
done to make the world a worse place?

The web is causing information overload. There is just too much “stuff” to know. The web currently is not organized in a rational way. People waste lots of time just trying to parse information for meaning. I don’t see any real solutions for that problem in the works as of yet.

The web is insular. Because it’s so hard to “scan” the web like one would a newspaper, people who work online are forced to limit their focus to only information that is relevant to their field.

As a result, lots of web users have a very myopic view of what the world looks like outside of the Internet. For all the doors that the web has opened for us, it has closed many windows.

Is the value of face-to-face interaction diminishing in a Web 2.0 world? Put differently, is the value of non face-to-face interaction increasing?

Face to Face interaction will never die, but since it is no longer the only option for communication we are seeing people using “real world interaction” more for what it’s good at.

If you need to ask a question or make a quick request, there is no good reason not to use email. On the other hand, I still have yet to see a good dinner party or Wedding carried out online.

You have a wide variety of ads on your website. Do you use any particular criteria to determine who or what can advertise on your website?

I love experimenting with advertising. I find that understanding Media is really understanding what people want. Understanding what people want to buy and what will interest them enough to help them make that decision is one big facet of that.

My criteria for Sponsorship spots (the 125 x 125 buttons) is that I have to believe that the service has real value. I usual choose my Sponsors from a very small pool because I like working closely with them. I sell advertising in a fairly unique fashion, charging not only on CPM but on performance. In the long term, I think it’s a good decision not to try to squeeze every dime out of my ad partners but instead to build long term relationships with them.

As for my standard banner ads, my only caveat to the networks that sell my inventory is that I do not generally use “rich media” advertisements. Aggressive pop-ups and talking banners are frustrating to me. In almost all cases I avoid them, much to the detriment of my bank account.

Do your friends/neighbors/family understand what you do for a living? How do they feel about that or do they even have an opinion?

Technically, I don’t blog for a living. I wish I could though! I work as a Digital Marketing consultant, currently most of my time is being spent working at a peer to peer music company.

I find that people are surprised that I could make decent money just writing online. When I tell them my traffic numbers, that usually shocks them. People assume blogs are read by 10 or 20 people a day. They don’t really understand the scale that some blogs achieve.

As bloggers, few of us realize that our reader base is substantially larger than most other writing professionals. More than that, we have an international audience which is something few writers can credit to their names. Once people understand that, I think they see the whole blogging “thing” in a different light.

Is it too late to jump on the social media bandwagon?

It’s never too late! Social Media is still social. Becoming a strong player in the industry just takes work. For all those people lucky enough to get in during the early days, they just have to work a little less. For the rest of us, once we establish what we want to get out of Social Media, I think it’s more than possible for us to accomplish these goals.

The biggest lesson that anyone look to enter Social Media needs to learn is to understand the network you are trying to establish yourself in. People have a hard time with Social Media because they don’t take the time to understand it. They assume that once they submit their content they can just walk away from the entire thing. When it doesn’t work like that, they get frustrated and stop trying. I think if many these people took the time to understand what it was they were really doing, they would be much more successful.

Pretend that the Internet was destroyed one night. What would you do the next day?

Pretty much the same thing that I did the day before. The web is just a very specific example of very general business concepts. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, and almost every article that I have ever written about the “business of the web” could be ported over to the business of Engineering with only a few, minor changes. It would be harder to get published, but we do what we can.

The point is that people think of the Internet as a brave new world with brand new rules. I think that this ignores the fact that the web is principally just a distribution model. Everything that we do on the web is an effort to control a particular channel of distribution, the same thing that Pepsi or Boeing does within their own industries.

Why people like me still have jobs is because it’s really difficult to translate the rules from one channel to the next. Even though selling cars and selling planes are similar to one another, there are enough differences that a car salesman would likely fall flat on his face trying to sell a dozen 747s. A -great- car salesman, however, would recognize that selling cars is just Selling, and use extensions of the basic principals of Selling to help him tackle this new task.

Is there any one additional thing that you’d like to say to our readers? If so, broadcast it!

Take some time out every so often to see the web from a different perspective.

A lot of us spend so much time trying to piece our way through the blogosphere that we start believing that it represents the real world. Instead of trying to explain the flaws of reality in terms of the strengths of the blogosphere, try to recognize the fact that reality has been here longer. See if there are any lessons that blogging can learn from the real world and integrate them into everything that you do.

I bet that not only will this lesson help you in your career as a writer, reader or consumer of media but it will also help you in whatever else you set your mind to.

Thanks for the opportunity!

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• Another question and answer post coming up!