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Reader Blog Critique : Pysih.com

Posted: 08 Oct 2008 05:00 AM PDT

Welcome to the 7th Reader Blog Critique. Last weeks critique was of Rarst. Rarst has won the best comment for 3 critiques so it was good to see his blog being reviewed.

This weeks review is of People You’ll See In Hell, an interesting blog which looks at the weird, crazy and downright evil people in the world today.

I asked the owner J.D. his thoughts about the blog. Here is his reply

Monetization Ideas

I recently decided to take out the majority of the advertisements on the blog. I felt that I was becoming too engrossed with the income the site was making (or the lack thereof) and that it was hurting the focus of the site.

Unfortunately, this also means that the income for the site has dropped, much like a rock that was already very close to the ground. This prevents PYSIH.com from expanding by hiring good writers, or paying the good writers that write for us out of the goodness of their own heart. 95 percent of the content is from one person, which is tiring when that one person has websites that do make money and demand attention, along with a full-time job.

Monetization is difficult for the site. I have tried virtually everything I can think of. The only thing that converted well (for a while) was a background check service. Those conversions started going south a few months ago. Banners get clicked often, but there are very, very few conversions - even with freebie offers.

I’d be open to monetization ideas that were not intrusive.

Promotion ideas.

Ideas related to the general usability of the site. PYSIH.com was recently hacked and some files were deleted. They were recovered, but restored from a variety of backups, so things aren’t quite the way they were before the incident. Now would be a good time to get opinions on how things are presented visually and how easy it is for the users to get around.

Any ideas, really.

I love the site, but hate it. It’s my baby, but it takes up a lot of time. Last month was our best yet, with over 70k uniques and 300k+ pageviews, so even with our frequent “CPU overage suspensions” from Bluehost, it’s still nice to see that people like to come and read what we have to say. Keeps us going.

In addition I welcome commenters to talk about the blogs content and design and any suggestions you have for promoting the blog.

People You'll See In Hell

The most helpful and constructive commenter will get $10. Alternatively, if you prefer, I can register a domain for you at eNom and push it to your account J.D. will decide who the best commenter was.

As usual, I remind everyone that positive or negative, all feedback should be constructive.

If you have any questions about any of this please let me know in this thread

Blog to be Reviewed : People You’ll See In Hell

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Should you publish emails on your blog without the senders consent?

Posted: 07 Oct 2008 08:00 AM PDT

Last week Michael Arrington posted about the new pay structure at the blog network b5Media. One of the first commenters questioned TechCrunch’s decision to publish an email without b5Media’s consen. His comment simply said :

Pretty unethical to re-post an entire private email publicly

Erick Schonfeld replied to the comment saying :

No, it is not unethical. We post internal memos, letters, and documents from businesses we get all the time. So does the New York Times. So does every news organization in the world.

As long as we didn't obtain the information unethically (which we didn't, it was sent to us unasked for), it is fair game.

It's called news. And the reason we post things like this is to give you, our readers, a deeper insight into the businesses and industries we cover.

Joseph Raymond added :

Internal memos still hold their copyright unless the author has released it to the public. The addressee of a physical letter becomes of the owner of the physical letter only, i.e., the addressee is not conferred reproduction or publication rights over the letter received. Those are still held by the author. I suggest you get a legal opinion Eric. Copying an entire letter is difficult to defend as fair use.

Is publishing emails on your blog unethical?

In this instance I don’t think that TechCrunch acted unethically. The email was sent to hundreds of people, including TechCrunch, therefore I believe that it’s ok to publish a press release type email like this. However, I was a bit surprised by Erick Schonfeld’s statement :

As long as we didn't obtain the information unethically (which we didn't, it was sent to us unasked for), it is fair game.

Am I to assume that any emails I send to a news website maybe published without my consent? I certainly hope not.

The reason this subject interests me is because this happened to me many times in the past year. Mostly I wasn’t concerned with the parts which were published but on a few occasions I had to email the blogger and ask if they could remove it from their post. Regardless, on every occasion the blogger published parts of my email to them without even asking.

Here is what I used to think :

If you get sent a press release type email which has been sent to hundreds of other bloggers, you don’t need permission to post it unless the email specifies that it shouldn’t be posted. If you are publishing a full email, you should ask the sender if it is ok to republish it in full. If you are publishing a very small part of the email which isn’t private, it should be ok to post it.

To clarify my third point, I think that if you are just publishing a small part of an email which you don’t believe the sender will have a problem with, then you should just go ahead and post it. For example, if someone emailed me and asking me for help with a CSS problem then I wouldn’t have any problems with them publishing the response on their blog.

However, it isn’t always obvious if the sender will have a problem with a certain part of an email being published. This is why I now think that you should always check with the sender before publishing any part of it on your blog (except press release & mass emails).

What do you think : Should you publish emails on your blog without the senders consent?

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