Facebook Bounces Back

If you’re seeking proof that a few months is an eternity in social media land, check this out.

Back in January, I reported that Facebook’s share of referrals to this here blog had dwindled dramatically, compared to Twitter and the still baby-fresh Google+. Here’s a snapshot of a week’s traffic from back then:

Now, a week from April shows a dramatically different story:

Overall traffic was the same then as now. It’s the shares that have shifted. Google+’s share has slipped only three points from January. At the same time, referrals from non social media sources, chiefly Google searches, have popped up by exactly that much.

Facebook’s gain is Twitter’s pain. It’s up by 15 points, and Twitter is down by 16.

Given the symmetry, I’m assuming that the same people who used to be coming here from Twitter are now back to doing it from Facebook. My guess is that Facebook’s alterations to its news feed algorithm has restored links to their former prominence and allure. If so, it shows how much difference the constant tweaking of the Facebook interface can make from one adjustment to the next. What seems like a force to write off in January can bounce back to its old self by April.

DoubleGoogle+Good

Last summer, Internet-shaking events of cataclysmic import took place within weeks of one another. One, Google launched its social networking site, Google+. Two, in a long overdue move prompted by repeated denial of service attacks at LiveJournal, I switched this blog’s main venue to Blogger.

Had I anticipated the benefit of Blogger’s better analytics, I might have switched way earlier. Given the timing, those beautifully formatted traffic stats have mapped the incredible progress of links placed on Google+ as a driver of traffic to the site.

Social media links now bring the vast majority of readers to this site. The days of following a blog, either by RSS feed or repeated visits to an aggregator like the LJ friends page, are gone, at least for this virtual clubhouse.

At first, the three sites drove traffic to the site in roughly equal measures. This itself is amazing when you consider the brand-newness of G+ at the time. Since then Facebook’s share of that pie has shriveled to nearly nothing. Last week’s referring sites tally (as of Tuesday evening) ranks Twitter at 47%, G+ at 37%, and Facebook at a mere 6%.

Twitter’s share goes up when a post gets a lot of play, as The D&DNext post did last week. Retweets evidently carry more weight than shares on Google.

By contrast, here’s the pie for the Blogger site to date:

Here Twitter and G+ are nearly equal, with the newer platform actually squeaking out ahead of its blue-feathered elder. Facebook’s slice is bigger than in the weekly chart, reflecting its greater pull during the site’s first months. LiveJournal links are from the old site to the new; these have tapered off as readers have adjusted to the shift. The Google slice represents search results. I’m not sure whether the Bit.ly links are strays from my own social network links or were created by others.

What I conclude from this is that Facebook has fallen away as a mechanism for people like me to communicate with a broader audience. This is unsurprising; Twitter and G+ were designed for this purpose, where Facebook’s focus has always been on assembling, decompartmentalizing, and cross-pollinating your personal contacts. The surprise is how quickly the change effected itself.

What you might conclude from this is that if you are also trying to maintain contact with an audience and are not on Google+, you probably ought to be. I might enjoy some first mover advantage for having dived in right away, but it’s still early days for the new platform and there still appears to be mindshare to spare.

Sleigh Bell Sign-Off

The presents are wrapped, the Christmas pudding cooked, and it’s time once again for my holiday sign-off. As visions of sugar plums dance in my head, I’d like to thank everyone for hanging out here, or dropping in from your redoubts at Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. I’ve been grateful for your attention as I launched Ashen Stars and The Worldwound Gambit. Hamlet's Hit Points, released in 2010, continues to find new readers, which pleases me to no end, proving that a labor of love can make good in our long tail world.

The big news here on the blog was my pre-Gen Con flight from Livejournal to Blogger. The latter’s better analytics and the immediate success of Google+, have helped me to keep the joint alive as eyeballs shift from blogs to social networks. Highlights of the year in blogging include the wrap-up of the Korad world-building experiment, a Kovalic-led encounter with a classic Wisconsin smelt fry and its requisite brandy old-fashioneds, a two-pronged assault on creative paralysis, and a Cthulhoid victory in the annual Gen Con buzzword competition, and the traditional TIFF Capsule Reviews. Together we hated on haters, reconsidered secrecy, and feared the rising of the dread mascots.

I’ll be back in the new year to keep you updated on Hillfolk and The Gaean Reach, to share the scoop on new fiction projects, and to kick off the impending “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” podcast. With a US election cycle fully swinging, I may dare to disturb the dusty padlock on the Politics Hut. How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way will resume, as will the usual talk about movies, narrative, writing and the gun-toting despond of deadpan avians.

Until then, enjoy or survive, as the case may be, your holiday time with friends and family. Imbibe judiciously and beware of road hazards, whether they consist of black ice, drunk guys, or Heat Misers.

Merry Christmas, Internet!

A Look Back at Korad I: The Process

Since June 2010 this blog has hosted the Korad experiment, an exercise in group world-building. The final fact we learned about Korad concerns its nominal future. We selected the three candidates for a future ideology which will one day supersede the empire's dominant worldview. As determined by you, they are:
Candlism, a stoic blend of religion and philosophy.
Satirism: a working-class magical movement subverting official opposition to frivolity
Symbotomism: a movement determined to eradicate Aesigil influence, at the cost of also destroying written language
My original intention was to use the world creation as a prelude to another play-by-blog exercise, along the lines of Angels and Operators. As you may guess from the opening clause of the previous sentence, I’ve reconsidered and will no longer be going ahead with that.
It used to be that an ongoing feature, like Korad or Angels and Operators, offered me an acceptable trade-off on the time versus inspiration scale. They took more time to write than the average blog post, but they reliably provided a guaranteed topic for one slot a week. The Hamlet analysis proved even more fruitful, leading as it did to a gratifyingly successful book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and acting as inspiration for my upcoming new game engine, DramaSystem.
Even more so than a year ago, a blog designed to attract an audience thrives on one-time clicks from social media platforms. Ongoing features did well back when LiveJournal was still a growing concern, and users reloaded their friends page on a habitual basis. Readership for LJ has been slowly deflating over the past year, in part prompting my exodus to the new blog. In the social-click driven environment, which I can now measure with a reasonable degree of accuracy, repeat features lose attention after a while. Those with a play-by-blog format suffer doubly, from what might be called the Babylon 5 effect. They require a high degree of investment and are hard to catch up with if you don’t jump on board from the outset. Given the challenges of LJ’s decline and timing of the move to the new blog, we still had great participation on the world-building end. However, in the new environment or paradigm or whatever it is, I don’t see a play-by-blog series as the best use of my limited outreach time in future.
What I was going to do was have commenters play, to whatever extent they wanted, influential members of the chosen ideology. I’m betting the collective would have chosen Satirism, with few participants rooting to play either stoics or destroyers of literacy. Each play session would present a turning point, where the group would have to decide how to handle a crisis affecting the movement from within and without. Each turn would jump forward in time, allowing for multi-generational play as the ideology adapted itself to changing historical circumstances.
If I had the time to do this, which I’m sure I don’t, I might attempt to do the play over on Google+. It’s new and shiny; its circle feature and discussion orientation might prove more amenable to play-by-blog than a standard comments arrangement.
I’ll do one more blog post, looking at what we’ve learned about world-building from this collective process. In the meantime, though, it’s time to throw Korad’s fate open to you. My final version of the resulting world bible, has now been uploaded to Scribd. The document and its underlying intellectual property are, as always, public domain. You are free to do what you want with it. Peruse it. Change it. Use it as a setting for fiction, your home game, or a published RPG. If you do choose to do something with it, be sure to check in with a report.

Classic Posts: A Meta Note

Efforts to fully port the entire LiveJournal over to this here new blog mothership have proven fraught. I’m declaring this an official disguised blessing. Much of the 7+ years of material on the LJ is ephemera and doesn't need to be preserved forever. I won’t be deleting the LJ, so if you still want all my backdated tomfoolery, you can still find it there. Until such time, that is, as the platform deletes itself and sails forlornly to its post-digital Valinor.

However, I will be reposting key entries from the LJ here, as I need to refer to them.

These “classic posts” will be called out as such in the post titles for easy skipping by those reading from an RSS feed. Nor will you have to worry about my link-announcing from Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, as I do the fresh posts.

Korad: Voting Palth

For the last year or so I’ve been running an exercise in group world-building as a regular feature on the blog. We’ve now defined all but one of the regions of a fantasy empire called Korad.

Although this newly adopted Blogspot platform outshines LiveJournal in almost every way, its poll feature does lack versatility compared to LJ’s. So please hop on over to the former mothership one last time to vote on the defining traits of the final province, the arid and depopulated land of Palth.

Lashing Together a Digital Life Raft

 

When I first started blogging in March of 2004, I chose LiveJournal for three reasons.

One, its very short learning curve allowed me to jump in and go without burning precious writing time on career maintenance.

Two, its social networking element allowed me to build quickly readership.

Three, it was cheap. Also important to a working freelancer, who must watch expenses carefully.

It wasn’t the shiniest or coolest looking platform on the block. In recognition of this, I stuck for many years with the most brutalist of the available templates.

Over the years of creeping uncoolness, I’ve kept it up, even as the network started to fade. In recent months I’ve maintained its once-reliable hit rate by driving people to LJ from Facebook and Twitter. Google+ has, in a few short weeks, already shown itself to be a powerful feeder as well.

With this week’s crippling denial of service attacks, the tipping point has been reached, the rats are leaving the sinking ship, and, man, the week before Gen Con is the exact wrong time for this to happen.

I won’t be shutting down the account, for those who still use it as a regular platform. It’s the number one item you get when you Google “Robin Laws”, and there’s a big value in that. But it’s high time I deprecated it in favor of another virtual headquarters on the web.

It will be annoying to spread comments across yet another platform. That was another factor keeping me on LJ all this ti me. But now comments already fragment between LJ, FB, Twitter and G+, so I might as well embrace that reality. Maybe someone brilliant will come up with a grant comment unification tool and make a zillion bucks off it.

So, here I am over on the Blogger. I’ll chip away at it in the months ahead and see if I can get it to do everything I want. If not I’ll pursue a more customized, costlier solution with a longer learning curve.

As you can see, I’m still tipping the hat to LJ, manually replicating the themed user icon thing I had going on over there.

So the question I have for you is: what do I need that I don’t know I need?