You may remember Gary Vaynerchuk, marketing blogger from his comments about AOL's use of blogs. Now in a recent video he talks about the value of being a content DJ with a blog. We have already kind of touched on this with the content of bloggers like Penelope Trunk and sites like Brazen Careerist. I think the content DJ philosophy is relevant to FIWK because it is half of the stated goal of the FIWK blog - the other half being conversation around the content we post.
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I'm glad that GV sees value in this idea. My favorite example of a great content DJ, by the way, is the blog Everything Warren Buffet. It basically just aggregates Warren Buffet articles as they appear and posts them to a Google Blog. Since Aaron and I both have a man-crush on Buffett as we discussed in the comments of the management blog a while back, the Everything Buffett blog is endless great reading for me.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't quite call us a "Content DJ" site since we are so widely focused; we literally have no boundaries for what we'll post/discuss outside of what we find interesting - which seems to be pretty large.
ReplyDeleteWe do however, aggregate a number of interesting topics (at least, to us), and then try to hold some discussion about the topic - this, is in line with CV's "Content DJ" site.
BTW - never really followed the management post, but did you read Snowball, the Buffet biography?
No, is it worth reading? Any lessons from it you wanted to share?
ReplyDeleteI found it very interesting - I knew of Buffet, but not much about him prior to the read. Some of the stories about his history are amazing - from the crazy little kid who loved to collect things (as he does with businesses today) to the near-disaster of his time at Solomon.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, what I took from it was the sheer craziness that his entire enterprise, and its growth, is based on insurance premiums, and being able to correctly assign risk to any number of entities.
I would definitely recommend it; just writing about it now makes me giddy.
Wow that is pretty high praise. I will add that to my reading list and pick it up from the library next time I need a book.
ReplyDeleteIn fact I am developing a pretty solid "to-read" list. We should compare book lists at some point on here.
Who is the author of Snowball?
Alice Schroeder
ReplyDeleteOk, I was all set to respond to this yesterday, but I accidentally clicked off the page and lost my epic comment. Epic as in long, not necessarily epic as in good. Second tangent, is there a phrase or term for accidentally clicking like ‘typo’? Can we create the word ‘clicko’? “Dude, why did you draft the Jaguars defense, when the Bears and Panthers defenses were both available?” “It was a clicko on my part.”
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I like this video a lot more than I like Royce’s strangers on a plane post, but after recollection I feel like the only value add from this video is the term “DJ”. I already visit a dozen or so websites each day, such as ESPN.com, SI.com, which provide the majority of my sports news and analysis Sports Illustrated’s Hot Clicks, which provides funny and interesting stories, pictures, and videos related to sports, and Yahoo!t and Google News, which provide a little bit of everything that happened in the day. Every website I go to is linked from one of my normal sites, or is linked to by a friend in an email.
I still feel there is opportunity for someone to develop a DJ site, but they would have to become globally niche (see I can make up new terms as well). For any such site to gather information from many blogs to be competitive over the many sites and blogs that already do this, they would have to be focused on such a small niche, it would normally not draw enough visitors to even matter. However, in the current globalization environment, there may be opportunity to draw enough visitors because while there may only be a dozen people in Napa who care about how the daily weather report may or may not be affecting the wins growing in Napa, there might be enough sommeliers around the world who would enjoy weather updates for all the vineyards in Napa.
PS. I typed this up in a Word document before copy/pasting into the comment box.
I am going to make a post about clickos because I like the term so much.
ReplyDeleteI think Vaynerchuk is talking about a content DJ doing something specific or "globally niche" as you say - kind of like the Warren Buffet blog I linked above.
One example that immediately comes to mind is the Business Week Exchange area of the BW site. They have all these topics that basically act as content aggregrators for various topics. The Green Cars section, for instance, is a good place to find stories that you'd otherwise have to dig for.
Now compare that to a site like GreenCar.com (they also publish the magazine Green Car Journal), which focuses on that same global niche and wants to DJ the same content. GCJ produces original content such as articles, car reviews, and editorials while also feeding in the news. What approach do you prefer? Would you read both? Neither?