We were close to turning a corner with Bluffton Today. The economy and an impatient corporate strategy did us in. In the end, we never embraced the kind of hustle and local pricing for advertising that could have endeared us to the community even more than the editorial product did.

Ad folks want to sell the full pages and call it a day. If we smothered the mom and pops with fair pricing, I still believe to this day that it would have 100 percent worked.

I’ve made the jump to the “dark side” working with Bleacher Report on a national level and loving it, but boy, I’m still itching to start an independent version of BT in Bluffton once Morris officially kills off the rotting carcass of what was once a thriving product (but I’m not bitter).

Print is supplemental at this point of the game. You have to develop the iPhone, Android and iPad apps and then think print.

Anyway, good to read your take on a topic near and dear to me. Hope all is well in Portland.

Tim

Key point is “now” – Smart companies will keep a close eye on their customers’ behavior, and potential customers’ behavior, and adjust accordingly. If Facebook starts going the way of MySpace or Prodigy, you should be able to see that coming, and/or avoid spending so much resource on FB integration that you can’t get untangled fast enough.

social network empires have fallen before (aol / prodigy / compuserve) and no company, no matter how attractive the value proposition exists without a vulnerability that can be exposed and unforseen by management ala netflix….if the moneys there, for how long?

I look at FB Comments as an alternative when a site is unwilling/unable to moderate comments. Some sites have stopped using comments because they just can’t deal with the crap.

As for the possible problems with FB down the road, I don’t see anything wrong with taking the immediate benefit and worrying about potential problems later. When FB Comments stop being worth the tradeoff, find something else.

The biggest benefit of FB Comments is exposing your content to the commenter’s friends.

I worry about using Facebook’s commenting system because it’s dangerous to outsource these functions to organizations such as Facebook. Basically you are forced to allow comments based upon their terms. They seem harmless enough now. But what happens when (not if) they change those terms?

Disqus seems a bit better only because they don’t have the same track record as Facebook.

If you look at my blog, you will see that I use Disqus for commenting. It rocks as a filter for comment spam. Why is it OK for me to outsource my commenting system? Because I don’t care about comments. I mean I care what people have to say. But the blog is built to advance my viewpoint and share my knowledge. Comments are welcome but not a vital part of why my blog exists.

It’s not like I’m running a community.

Which is an important distinction. I would argue many newspapers aren’t running communities either – even when they say they are. Their online versions aren’t real examples of discussion and interaction in many cases.

This deserves a separate manifesto but reader comments – which can be very valuable – on stories simply are not good examples of community and interaction. Using Facebook comments doesn’t help.

And I disagree with the assertion that “Trolls don’t like their friends to know that they’re trolls.” Trolls really don’t care. They don’t think they’re trolls. It’s the rest of us who are wrong.

The best reason to use FaceBook comments is that it’s easy and can save you a lot of work. It’s not going to solve any other problems or create community.

Thanks for letting me runoff at the keyboard. I gotta start that manifesto.

Indeed, I’ve heard it said that if you take a month or two off from running a web business, the whole world will have changed when you come back.

Well in this case, Deb and I have just taken the past four years off (but who’s counting?) since selling Oldhouseweb.com … and as I start to drop back into the workaday world, it seems to me as if Matt Cutts is still involved in the same whack-a-mole work that he was involved with four and five and six years ago.

Back when we ran Old House Web, search engines in general delivered about 80% of the 20,000 or so people who wandered through our site on any given day — and Google delivered about 80% of that. And so we paid close attention to what Matt and his team liked and disliked … what they considered quality content and what they considered spammy.

Ironically, the quotes you include in your column from Matt could have come out of his mouth (or off his fingers) in 2004 or 2006 or on any day since he joined Google.

So, does aggressive SEO have a future? Of course it does. The techniques change. The nuances shift. But as long as Google and its competitors continue to drive huge volumes of traffic, there will be spammers who know how to push sites to the boundaries — and who will discover new ways to game the system. And there will be whitehat SEO consultants who know how to advise clients how to be aggressive in presenting their sites to the search engines in the best possible light.