Michi Knows

Ken Kutaragi has finally been demoted out of Sony. Kazuo Hirai is taking his responsibilities. Kutaragi is now an “honorary chairman and senior technology adviser.” His role as an official mouthpiece of the PS3 and Sony is finally over. This follows up recent news when he lost his title as CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment (a sub-division of Sony Corp). The current CEO of Sony Corp., Stringer, might have seriously demoted him, but Kutaragi, was seriously an idiot:

According to an interview with Stringer in the Wall Street Journal, Kutaragi surprised his boss by exceeding production budgets. In one particularly illustrative moment, Kutaragi startled management with an impromptu 20% price cut for the Japanese 20GB PlayStation 3 model.

Wow? I would have fired him right there! Anybody who takes a brand from loved #1 to a loathed #3 overnight should be fired.

Kutaragi was long known for his emphasis on hardware. But Stringer has been pushing for a software reform. If executed properly, this could significantly threaten Microsoft in everything but the OS – from digital media, home entertainment, to gaming. This is because Stringer wants to integrate the many isolated divisions in the company into one cohesive operation. I mean, you have no idea how much time my roommate wasted trying to get a DVD to play in his PS3 on his Sony flat screen — apparently they weren’t fully compatible!

Finally, someone who understands the value of software. Hardware is nothing without great software, and it was Kutaragi’s thinking that made IBM overlook an opportunity to buy out Microsoft.

Now Sony has to clean up Kutaragi’s mess. With all of the piss-poor decisions Kutaragi made, let’s hope Sony can recover their gaming division before it’s too late. Right now they are #3 and it doesn’t look to be changing any time soon.

While Internet users have been rising rapidly over the past few years, it seems blogs have not kept up. Sure, there’s been tons of new blogs, but it seems for every new blog that started up, another one died. Thus, in the same one year period, the number of blogs tracked by Technorati (such as this one) have stayed nearly the same.

I’m going to guess this is due to the:

• Emergence of spam blogs, and the subsequent realization that spam blogging isn’t really worth it (abandoned)
• Darwinian nature of blogging (see next paragraph)

Blogging is all about visibility. People blog because they want to be heard. If nobody is hearing you, then you might feel less inclined to update, which in turn would cause your blog to go inactive. Thus, I’d speculate that a small sliver of blogs out there have virtually all of the traffic, making it highly discouraging for new-comers. That, and most people are shitty writers, so they automatically get weeded out.

The number is staying constant because it represents X + Y, where X is the constant “elite” bloggers who are around month after month, and Y are all of the people who try and fail to get market share. Y is the revolving door of bloggers. At least, that’s my take on this.

This also tells me that people who blog aren’t in it for the right reasons. After a year, they give up if they aren’t gaining readers.

Here’s my advice for bloggers who aren’t doing it just to vent steam:

1. Pick a niche
2. Blog about it, a lot
3. Write original content; as in, don’t just link other blogs because then you’re bleeding visitors to the places you link without gaining any readers yourself.
4. You will eventually get search traffic
5. Figure out which posts get the most hits, and blog about related topics more
6. Critically assess your writing to improve it and make it more eye-catching
7. Don’t write about things that a stranger can’t follow (like, say, your relationships)
8. Promote your RSS feed ;)

My niche is not just tech news; I also try to cater to programmers. My most popular posts are an even split between my predictions (such as about Google or Apple) and JavaScript tips. Most of my search traffic relates to JavaScript, but most of my subscribers seem to be interested more in the news posts.

What’s your niche?