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1. DBT keeps me from eating normally every night

   Oh lord! It can be 3 am, and when no other e-mail is coming in, I hope that some DBT subscription e-mail comes in. It is very interesting to read the tips that Daniel has to share with the rest of the planet. I like getting daily DBT subscription e-mails.

   If I had to choose between eating cheesecake in the middle of the night and reading an e-mail, I would prefer eating cheesecakes and talking to a very good friend [ ]. However, if my good friend is not online, DBT e-mails are so interesting, I will usually put off my eating and read the latest DBT posts and any related comments. By the time I get done with DBT posts and comments, I forget about eating. Not good. Really not good. DBT should start writing boring posts on a daily basis, so that I can get bored easily and resume eating my food.

2. Daniel from DBT makes me wonder if I am chatting with him, or if I am dreaming

   Daniel, the owner of DBT, is usually online around the same times. “Why is he so accessible?” I wonder. Daniel is considered one of the finest A-list bloggers by many people, and yet he is always online, ready to interact when he has to. I sometimes wonder “Am I dreaming?” when I find it so easy to chat with Daniel compared to other A-list bloggers. Not nice, Daniel and DBT, for making Bes wonder every other night whether or not he is dreaming.

   “Hey Bes!” He usually says. “Am I still dreaming? He still remembers me?” I think to myself, wondering if forces of blogosphere nature and lack of sleep are playing with my mind. DBT sucks because it spoils me into thinking that all “A-list bloggers can still think about other people and not act too stuck up after getting their blogs famous.” Other A-list bloggers, take note: Daniel sets a few good examples to follow on how to communicate with others based on the topic at hand, and not based on how rich or elite one feels.

3. DBT discriminates, but less than most other A-list blogs

   Wow. I remember getting together with an A-list blogger last year who told me that he only wanted to write for advertisors, so that the readers could click on more sponsored links. DBT, on the other hand, does not care if you look at ads or not. DBT also does not discriminate based on whether or not you link back to it. DBT does have one criteria on which it wants to discriminate: you having a blog. If you do not have a blog and you do not want a blog, you will probably have a hard time realizing the potential of DBT. Other DBT lovers will probably hate you for not having a blog. You will not be able to show your face in the DBT world, for you do not have a blog, while everyone else does, and everyone else learns from DBT about ways to improve their blogs.

   That is bad, since such a discrimination forces all of us bloggers to force ourselves to keep having blogs, whether we like it or not, just because we want to keep DBT happy and we want to keep reading DBT posts. DBT’s business model discriminates against people who do not have blogs, because it does not cater to them. Will I ever be able to free myself from the chains of blogging, considering the fact than if I stop having a blog, I will be looked down upon by other DBT lovers who are not being discriminated against because of having blogs? It sounds highly unlikely. Boohooo!

So there you have it. That is my list of 3 random reasons why Daily Blog Tips sucks so much, that I like reading it everyday via e-mail to learn about different tips and techniques, or to see what Daniel thinks of different ideas and concepts that I am already familiar with.

What do you think? Can you think of some more reasons? Did you find anything interesting in this list, or does TR [The Reasoner] suck for not being able to make you smile even a little bit? Now if you must excuse me, I must do something which I have been saying and doing recently in many of my posts: eating, I have to go eat now.

Thank you for reading.

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Copyright Laws are not supposed to be confusing

One thing I like about Daniel’s simple list is that it is a simple list. Copyright laws are usually written and explained in complicated ways. Such complication confuses people. One thing you may get a sense of, while reading the list, is that Copyright Laws have nothing to do with morality. When you deal with the law, your point of view or your ethical beliefs usually do not matter. That is why when you use someone else’s work or you see someone else using your work, you should not focus on your intentions or emotions. You should focus on what rights others have, and the legal steps you can take to ensure the legal protection of your content.

If you have good intentions and copy something, will you be held accountable?

I think we should think about one important dilemma: what if your intentions were good, but you still did something that the Copyright Law prohibits? What if you used someone’s pictures on your MySpace profile without knowing that you need permission? What if you tell someone via email that they “can quote an article” from your site, and in response that person quoted your entire article and added a simple line or two to make it a bit more unique. How can you defend yourself in such cases, even though your intentions may have been good?

I guess, because of such things, we have to take precautions and make sure on a regular basis that no one is stealing our work. Having good intentions is good, but actions are sometimes more powerful than thoughts. Legally, Copyright Laws are only powerful when you are willing to legally enforce them. You should sometimes treat your work as if you were writing essays at a University. You can show your work to others, but you also have to make sure that other people who are also writing essays do not copy something from you. You also want to make sure you do not copy from others without following proper quoting procedures, as the person reading your essay will also read all the other essays from where you copied something from.

What is your opinion on this?

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How people are misunderstanding some of the results

The survey ran from November 20th to December 4th, on around 40-50 English language blogs, and on 12 Spanish language blogs. The number of people responding to each survey question varied. You should realize that just because a survey was done consisting of many blogs does not mean the same rule will apply to you and your blog; that survey helps many blogs, but you have to find out if it helps your blog. It also means that you now have a conflict on your hands, since if you aim to do what the majority of the survey respondents wanted, you will not be pleasing the rest of the blog readers.

Following are some results from the report, and how people are jumping to conclusions based the results:

• 67.3% people surveyed follow links on other blogs in order to find new sites.

  This is an impressive number. 67.3% would be considered the majority in a democratic society. Online, such a survey percentage means that if you link to another blog, most of the people will click that link. I am noticing that many people online are assuming that such a result means having links in posts is guaranteed to work for majority of the readers. My question is simple: How can you assume something to work on the almost billion of online users or even millions of blog readers based on a survey question taken by 214 people? Are you too desperate to hold on to numbers in order to stick with what you stubbornly believe in?

  Also, what about the other 33.7% of the people who do not follow links on blogs? They find blogs through other methods. Should you try to please everyone, or should you only please the majority?

• 43.6% prefer a topical focus.

  It is funny how in other areas of the report, people focus on the majority numbers, whereas in this specific question, many people focused on the 43.6%. A topical focus means a specific topic. That means 43.6% people like to read a blog that has a specific topic that it talks about on a regular basis. While people are jumping and saying “Yes! I always knew having a focused blog was good!“, I would like to remind those people that they also jump for other parts of the survey when majority of the respondents agree to something, but in this case, they are not jumping to the majority 57.4% of the blog readers who read blogs that do not have a topical focus.

  Again, should you apply this very result to your site when it was taken by 263 people? We also do not know about all the topics involved, and we do not know if the topical blog readers were influenced because of finding topics based on language. Can you really go ahead and jump to conclusions based on this? In this case, having a topical blog actually makes you disappoint the majority 57.4%, the majority which you were trying to please in other questions.

• 76.9% of the readers do not post comments on blogs.

  76.9% of the people on the survey, which consisted of 281 people for this specific question, do not like to comment. Does that mean you have to get rid of comments from your blog? How come we all say we value commenting and we say we love pleasing the majority of the people, but we skip this very important result from this survey?

  Again, we should see whether or not the results are affected because of the language, and also because of the time frame when the survey was done, which was for most part a busy holiday season. Also, are the blog readers from the survey the same as the blog readers you have? That is an important question that you need to survey yourself to find out the answer to.

• Spanish speakers read more blogs than English speakers.

  This is also an interesting one that is making many people run around in circles with joy for unknown reasons. According to the survey, there are 2 major results:

  1. 30.8% of the 263 English speaking blog readers read 3-4 blogs regularly.
  2. 43.3% of the 300 Spanish speaking blog readers read more than 10 blogs regularly.

  These two results are making some believe that Spanish blogs are more fun, while some are saying that this means Spanish speaking blog readers are simply hop from one site to another without reading much. My question to such people who are happy with such results is: have you noticed the number of Spanish blogs surveyed compared to the English blogs?

  Comparing 300 people from 12 Spanish blogs with 263 people from more than 40 English speaking blogs is far from a balanced comparison. Such a result means that the 300 Spanish speaking people have more things in common because they hang around those 12 blogs, while the survey for English readers was done on more than 40 blogs meaning there will be more people who will have differences because of the large number of blogs involved for English readers compared to Spanish readers. How can such a result be applied to any blog out of the blue?

I hope the above examples show you that such a survey is extremely important in understanding human behavior on blogs. However, such a survey is also a very bad reason to use when implementing things on our sites or sticking to what we believe unless we know our blog and our blog readers are compatible with the survey. Of course, many blogs love claiming that they have always been right because of the survey results. I would like to claim that generalizing ideas about millions of blog readers who visit millions of blogs based on a study of around 200-300 people visiting a total of around 52-62 blogs is something that people would do in the offline world if they wanted to create stereotypes.

How should we report and react to such surveys then?

I like the way Daniel reported the Blog Readership Report on Daily Blog Tips; he mentioned some of the important facts, and left the analysis of those facts up to you. I think all facts should be mentioned that way without jumping to conclusions, instead of saying things that do not have any ground to stand on.

Learn from the survey and see how it applies to you. Instead of only promoting numbers that you find attractive, understand everything. If you do not read the report yourself and understand it correctly, why would your blog readers read your analysis of the report? Do not rush to conclusions simply because it makes for a good blog post. When studied carefully, the number of people and blogs in the survey shows who can use the information from the survey. It also shows who needs to do their own survey on their own blogs to confirm the existence of specific trends.

This survey gives us an idea of what happens on some blogs. It does not give us proof that the same will happen on our blog. I would recommend doing your own survey or even contacting Vizu to see how they did the survey as they already have experience doing a great job with this report.

If you wish, you can download the Blog Readership Report PDF file, which requires a free PDF viewing software like Foxit PDF Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Both are free to download and use.

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