Category Archives: Web 2.0 Blogging

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

Connect with your readers

Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

Building an RSS Templating System

Hacking RSS with Yahoo Pipes

Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes

Blogging Tips and Tricks

In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.

Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes.

FeedBurner Tip: Create a private area for your RSS subscribers only

When it comes to blogging the most important people are the ones who take the time to read your RSS feed. They’re your long term readers who are in it for the long haul, much more so than the people who stop by your blog because they found it through a search engine or a social bookmarking site. They’re the ones who promote your articles, and the ones who’ll let you know when you’re falling off your blog game.

It’s important to build a rapport with them, and one of the ways to do that is by giving them special offers that aren’t available to regular readers of the website.

Opting Out of Technorati - The Break-up

Breaking up is hard to do, but it’s over between me and Technorati.

I’ve spent far too many lonely nights wondering why you never link me anymore… it’s time for a fresh start.

Are Bloggers Being Gamed? - Fixing the Technorati Favorites Feature

If you don’t blog, you probably want to skip this post as it is a hardcore geek out.

Technorati Program - Automatically Favorite Anyone Who Favorites You

What is Technorati Favorite Your Fans?

This is a program that connects to the Technorati.com service, finds everyone who has favorited your blog and automatically favorites them back.

But Why Use This?

If someone has gone to the trouble of adding you to their favorites, this program will return the favor, without requiring you to go through all of the people who have favorited you and trying to find the ones you haven’t favorited back. This is something people already do, and this program is intended to save them time by automating the process.

Technorati Favoritism - Trading Favours

There are Technorati favorites link exchange programs like the one proposed by Dosh Dosh. He wants to get into the Technorati Top 10 most favorited and track if there are any really benefits in increased traffic. His blog focuses on traffic building so this is a very valuable experiment to get some real numbers on whether or not Technorati is worth all the fuss. I’m proud of being in the Technorati Top 2000, but I feel it is more work than it is worth.

Add to Technorati Favorites

Hack - Display Your Technorati Rank in a Sidebar RSS Widget (Dapper + Yahoo Pipes)

Wordpress.com bloggers can’t use nifty Wordpress plugins or Javascript to doing something as simple as displaying their Technorati rank in their sidebar.

But you can use it in your sidebar thanks to the nifty widget I created for displaying your Technorati rank as an RSS feed.

I display my FeedBurner subscribers count because I don’t have a choice…

The FeedBurner subscriber count is also a badge of reliability.

In defense of 2000 bloggers

A conversation has been brewing about the 2000 Bloggers project. It has been called a link farm and an attempt to game Technorati. I won’t speak for the intentions of the guy who created it, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea to see a montage of all the various faces of blogging.

More thoughts on the subject, and how they could improve it to remove the issues.

Does Technorati Matter? (Searching for Violent Acres)

Technorati is a very useful site for navel gazing and seeing who is linking to you. But how many people use it for searching blogs?

The traffic from being on the number one search term indicates “not very many”.

Hey Bloggers, PayPerPost is Illegal

Matthew Ingram and Tony Hung go into it in more detail, but the FCC FTC has made a ruling on schemes (like PayPerPost) where bloggers get paid to review products without having to disclose the agreement. Quote: “such marketing could be deceptive if consumers were more likely to trust the product’s endorser “based on their [...]

Reviewme.com Reviewed - A Look at the Algorithm from a Bloggers Point of View

There’s a new blog advertising network: reviewme.com

Their goal is to bring advertisers and bloggers together and make it easier for companies who are trying to start Word-of-Mouth marketing campaigns to find bloggers who are willing to shillwrite about them. (See TechCrunch’s take on it.)
They are avoiding most of the controversy that has surrounded other “cash-for-blogging” [...]

Technorati Top 10,000

(More boring blog rank crap that is of interest to no one but me)
Technorati is a blog search engine that also ranks blogs. Getting onto the Technorati Top 100 (or the Top 100 Favorited) is a pretty big accomplishment (if ironic because the only people who seem to know about it are other bloggers). Over [...]

Feedburner and Sage

Colour my face red. I’d been wondering about how to subscribe to Feedburner feeds using Sage, the Firefox RSS Reader extension. With the plethora of subscription options I was wondering “How do I get an XML feed I can bookmark!?”.
It turns this Feedburner page is formatted XML that you can bookmark for Sage. Just ignore [...]