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chrislake

Listed below are comments made by chrislake between Friday, 22nd August 2008 and Monday, 24th November 2008.

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Magpie - touting your Tweets 2:35pm on 24 Nov 2008 As Michael Arrington says, it is Pay-Per-Post for Twitter, and it sucks. Unlabelled product placement might be fine for low-rent US TV but this just feels like selling out, and cheap selling out at that.

Kudos to the Magpie team for having an idea and executing it, but I think Twitter will axe this just as soon as it starts to roll out its own revenue model, much as Apple nixes certain iPhone apps that compete with proprietary apps / features.

PS - I used to be pretty much anti-Twitter but hook up with like-minded folks in your industry and it becomes invaluable. It's now the first website I open in the morning. An excellent filter, and communication tool.

www.twitter.com/lakey
Knowing When To "Go" 1:08pm on 05 Nov 2008 Hey John,

Kudos for listening, and for responding quickly and openly.

It would be great to see more in-page links within the BBC's articles, just like there are in this blog post. What's the latest on the trial you started to roll out in August?

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/366180/bbc-finally-experiments-with-in–text-links.html
Can Brits make bucks from blogging? 12:29pm on 22 Aug 2008 Apologies - my apostrophes are showing up as question marks.
Can Brits make bucks from blogging? 12:28pm on 22 Aug 2008 I live in London and run a blog called Hecklerspray, which makes money, employs full time staff and wants a spangly office with a pool table but doesn’t yet have one. We’ve never sought out any VC funding, mainly because we believe in bootstrapping.

A few points:

- We launched three and a bit years ago, have accumulated 26m+ page impressions since then. Last month we were visited by 800,000 unique users.

- Up to 70% of our readers live in the US. In this respect we are no different to the major UK publishers. It’s just about timing and targeting. We target US ads to US readers, and likewise for the UK. We publish UK stories in the morning (GMT) and US ones in the afternoon / evening, to coincide with spikes.

- Digg doesn’t hate UK blogs! Around half a million Digg users have visited Hecklerspray since the beginning of last month. Yahoo Buzz and StumbleUpon can also deliver quality traffic.

- Fact: media buyers are lazy and stuck in their ways. So are we. Let’s do lunch.

- Ashley Norris’ post has been blown out of all proportion. He makes some valid points about the differences between the US and UK. Shiny Media took VC money and is going for scale – these things take time, and surely it is still a work in progress?

- Patrick Altoft says you need to break exclusives, which isn’t necessary. It may help, but really you just need a clear voice and some subject focus.

- To sum up: it IS possible to make money from blogging, and it doesn’t much matter where you are based. It's just about focus, timing, targeting and having a voice.
Can Brits make bucks from blogging? 12:10pm on 22 Aug 2008 .

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