I work hard at not writing about blogging these days, but something always turns up and I’m forced to relent. This one is irresistible for a number of reasons.

Keith Waterhouse is a British National Treasure. He’s incredibly old, being the author of that 1950s smash hit novel and film, Billy Liar. He claimed to be one of the “Angry Young Men” — all the rage in those days — but his sense of humour prevented him ever being angry enough.

He went on to become a very good journalist and playwright, defender of the apostrophe (everyone’s entitled to some eccentricity), and author of a long-running column in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.

And it’s to the latter we turn for his views on blogging. Yesterday, he published a piece titled, “Blogging our way to the true story”.

He begins characteristically : “And a happy blogging New Year to bloggers everywhere. I don’t think.” That’s Keith for you. Sharp and to the point.

He continues, “Meaning I cannot be doing with blogging, bloggers or blogs.” He quotes an example of a typical Christmas blog : “Tarquin, as well as being Head Boy, is now First Triangle in the school orchestra, which gives him a place in next year’s Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Bowl all-schools production of Peter and the Wolf.”

But even worse, he says, is the rise of the grandiosely termed Citizen Journalism. “They print hearsay as hard fact. They lift news items from orthodox sources and embellish them in their own wild words. They twist the newspaper writer’s motto, which is Get It First, Get It Right, to read : Get It Second, Get It Wrong.”

Blimey, someone’s rattled his cage. I hope it wasn’t me.

But he has a solution to this morass of unseemly garbage into which he despatches all bloggers : “To all pejorative references to the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ please add : ‘– unless they have a camera’. … I make an exception in the case of photographs.”

Here he goes on at length about the Saddam Hussein execution : “The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage … was grisly enough. The bloggers’ contribution — grabbed at the gallows … shocked all right thinking people. … the sheer brutality of the scene takes[s] us back to the public hanging of felons at Tyburn in the 18th century.”

In other words, blogging is OK so long as it tells us a truth that mainstream media is locked out from. Bloggers are forever condemned to be bandits and outlaws, stealing banned information and news of private events that the law and other agencies try to conceal from us.

Well, it’s a tidy gap in the market, if a bit hard to live up to on a daily basis. If this is the view of an old-time journalist and general good egg, blogging does suffer from an image problem. But then, we’ve been saying that here for a long time.

I can’t help feeling that if Waterhouse rewrote Billy Liar for our times, Billy would be a blogger.

Come Saturday mornings and one of my first ports of call is Bob Cringely’s column over at PBS.org. This week he makes his communications predictions for 2007.

When you look at how close he came last year (despite getting only 60pc absolutely correct), you’ll be forced to take this new batch seriously.

Three out of the 15 caught my sparrowhawk eye.

10) The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.

This follows on from some highly technical discussions he posted last year on various aspects of bandwidth and internet provision across the U.S. All that bit haulage stuff is way above my knowledge-basin, so I’ll just comment that it sounded pretty plausible to me, as does this. Video is clearly getting out of hand, with BitTorrent taking 30pc of current bandwidth, mostly for anything but HD viewing. This must explode at some point, and 2007 is as good a guess as any.

13) Sand Hill Road [VC-land in Silicon Valley] goes into a panic when it becomes clear that there is more money available than good opportunities for investing it, shades of 1999. No bubble this time, though, because the reasons behind the effect are different — there is a decided lack of IPO activity — but VCs will still be excessively crashing their MacLaren F1s as they see their era fading.

Well, at least they don’t drive Ferraris — British F1s are always preferable and much more James Bond. Back to the point : so Cringe expects a series of selective crashes rather than one Big Bang, like in 2000/1.

You’ve got to go with that given that entrepreneurs are oh so careful nowadays, many bootstrapping their businesses with clever cash-flow techniques, or using Angel finance. Our very own Syntagma Media has avoided the debt-trap like the pox. And while venture capital is nominally money-debt free, there’s still a debt of expectation clinging to the exit strategy.

But an excess of money has a simpler solution than just backing anything that grunts. They could always return the money to their investors and drive vintage Cadillacs instead of MacLarens. But that would destroy the complex infrastructure of sandcastles that VCs build to define their businesses.

The best prediction is left not only till last, but left dangling on a precipice.

15) Google’s Grand Plan is finally revealed, explaining all. Hey, wait, that’s next week’s column!

Apocalypse Now — or rather, next week. This will be all about shadowy shipping-container datacenters, personalized IP-TV advertising, and the buying up of all that hidden dark fiber in the bowels of the earth.

It could be a Dan Brown novel. Maybe Cringely is his agent!

Filed Under : Don’t give up the day job

According to Long-Tailist Chris Anderson, business guru, Guy Kawasaki, who started blogging just a year ago, makes around $280 a month from a site which attracts a readership of around 3,000 a day, plus lots of links from the A-list fraternity.

A best-selling author and genuine tech celebrity writing a thoughtful essay nearly every workday on a top-50 blog for an audience of around 30,000 [sic] people/day.

And the pay for that is about $280 a month. If Guy can get Google to write a check at all.

It’s an interesting benchmark for a year-old site. I would say that’s about average for a site which hasn’t been pushed aggressively into ads. I wouldn’t expect much joy out of Adsense in the the first year, whether they pay up or not.

We have sites that earn more than that on a fraction of the traffic. It’s not always traffic that determines these things, more often what niche it’s in and knowing where to get paid advertising. With a cpm (cost per thousand impressions) of $1.39, my guess is that Kawasaki’s niche should be doing better, but it’s not always the ones who should do better that do. Some sites do better with one type of ad — say, text links — than another type.

The whole of online advertising is a mish-mash of inconsistencies. Two of our lowest trafficked, PageRanked sites make over three times more each than our highest. Square that circle, if you can.

First Impressions

I’ve just taken a look at Daylife, the new, shiny, Ajax-crazy news aggregation service backed by Michael Arrington , Dave Winer and other starry names.

When I first opened it, a very large, black shutter dropped down my screen like an impolite suggestion to get lost. Well, I’m made of sterner stuff and hung on in there … and I’m glad I did. Apart from the soft-soapy Ajax slimyness, this is a very interesting concept, usefully presented.

I haven’t looked at it in depth yet, but it seems to be following the distinct trend back to human intervention, i.e. editors, first picked up by Jason Calacanis at Netscape, but also followed here at Syntagma in our network magazine portals — for example, Allusionz.

Now, Daylife is a big operation and likely to get bigger, especially with the strength of its founding backers. It brings together the traditional magazine news format with cascades of Web technology. It could be the first real internet news purveyor offering a credible alternative to the mainstream offline, especially as it utilizes technology better and offers an API for news presentation on other sites. I believe Huffington Post already takes it.

Once I made some inroads into the strange, but kinda intuitive, navigation, I began to enjoy myself. The stories are good — Egypt and Israel topped the bill when I looked — and there’s lots of backup stories to explore. You can even make a choice of topics that interest you to personalize the presentation.

I’ve yet to get to grips with all of it, so I’m not going to go into detail at this stage, but you can be sure we’ll keep an eye on it.

Investor Michael Arrington has a different point of view, though :

“After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer. … What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, … or comments … And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.”

This type of newsy site isn’t really suitable for RSS feeds, in my opinion — although they are coming. Try hooking up to the BBC feed and the threads come in batches of 30 or so at a time. Awesomely time-wasting. Feeds don’t always work on galloping aggregation sites unless there are lots of them for narrow niches. Then they become tiresomely complicated.

I think he’s wrong on the editing point too. Another machine-driven aggregation site is not what we need right now. I believe human choice will be a factor in the success of this type of operation in 2007. Online services need to get in touch with their human side if they are ever to match the print world for both quality and friendliness.

The most sensible comment comes from Steve Rubel : “Daylife may not be the most comprehensive news site on the web, but it’s a winner. It aggregates content in a compelling way that is easy to read. That’s something we sorely need in a world of limitless choices. ”

In the end, as ever, it’s not the pundits but the readers who will decide.

Update : There’s some very good discussion on this topic over at Techmeme.