The blog is back

No excuses - the blog is back.   I've been immersing myself in social media over the last year, figuring out how I wanted to re-launch.

My test project has been CThings, a site Dan Pallotta and I put together before I left for Thailand.  The idea was to create an aggregate news site that focused on truly transformational and world-changing news, rather than the "if it bleeds it leads" sensational news that most of the internet spins around.  I tried a couple different ways to add voting functionality to stories, and ended up using digg as the back-end with myself as the sole contributor.   This was an easy but temporary solution for quickly adding stories to the feed, but it didn't provide the right user experience in terms of interaction.  As I watched Twitter explode over the last year, I began testing a CThings Twitter feed, and realized that the Twitter feed just made a lot more sense for the kinds of news we were reporting.  It's easier to subscribe to, the messages are short and sweet, and they link directly to the article.   CThings readership increased 1000% in the first month of the Twitter feed, so I'm transitioning the whole idea from CThings.com to Twitter.com/cthings -- and that's where it will primarily live for now.  There is no user voting function on the Twitter feed, but I've become an expert at surfing digg for transformational news stories, and this is a quick and dirty way to get these stories out into the world while building a loyal community of followers. 

However, proving once again that compelling content has more legs than social media chops, the two videos I made for my YouTube channel that deal with Thai hookers have more than 65,000 views with no promotion on my part.  

It's all about knowing your audience (extreme eye roll).