Blog News Watch

So, now that you know that the guy who coined the Term “weblog” never made a cent out of it, yet should have been a billionaire, is not what he should’ve been. So, I guess this is just a idea to keep in mind that when you blog for money (whether it be passionately or not) expecting your blog to make more money than professional blogs such as Engadget, is a ridiculous thought, and you should eradicate it out of your mind as soon as possible.

The context of this video dates back a couple years when blogging was the “new” thing to do. (A little bit before myspace or facebook.) In 1997, blogs emerged, but everyday, there are people creating new blogs. I haven’t checked recently, but right now there are so many blogs that each blog is getting less of the pageviews that it should be getting.

As a writer, and blogger, it is easy to think ” Why didn’t blogging just stay as one of those underground things that no one liked to do, except for a few exceptions?” or maybe something like, ” If every body wasn’t making blogs all the time, people would take their time to look a the actual blogging company sites out there.”

Again, that is just the blogger inside me speaking. Mind you, he comes out very little often, so its been hard trying to get him to come out. Laugh.

Anyways, I’ll try to open up the little blogger inside me more, but as for now, look at the next post if you would like to see some porn, please check out the next post which will be posted in less than 2 hours.

Since Facebook removed the word is from their status updates I have been a little worried.

Flicking through my RSS feeds, it seems several publications I enjoy and respect have written about this “development” and in some cases the posts are embarrassingly long.

I recently wrote an article entitled 5 Ways to Avoid Blogger Blindness and I think that it may just be time for the blogosphere as a whole to read that particular article. It seems they may have become a little blind as to what’s worth writing about.

And then, of course, when everyone’s refreshed and ready to get back to writing, they might find the News Values for Bloggers articles here useful.

Come on guys, is the presence of a two-letter verb on a website really that important? Is its removal really making so much of a difference in your lives that you have to write long posts about it?

If the answer to that is yes then this is not the blog for you to be reading. This is.

Some bloggers got particularly excited about the fact that Twitter was rendered obsolete by this move, which really made me laugh. For starters, Twitter was never such a crucial service to anyone for any purpose that it could be rendered obsolete. And secondly, you have to be logged in to Facebook to see your friend’s status message. Sounds like too much hassle to find out some pathetically unproductive and useless piece of information about your friend’s nosepicking adventures.

I looked really hard to find something profound in my Facebook friend’s status messages, yet I’m still here quite uninspired on that deep philosophical level.

I realize that this post has ranted on quite long enough about people who rant about insignificant things. It’s a countermeasure, you know. You’ve got to counter every opinion with its opposite in equal force and length.

And with that bullshit theory of blogging, good night.

Boing Boing is one of those sites.

One of those sites that pump out ridiculously great content at ridiculously fast rates and constantly make you wonder, how the hell do these guys monitor so much fantastic material on the web and get the time to post about it too?

Well, the writers don’t do all of the news gathering. They do turn it in into a palatable, intriguing lead that quickly helps you determine if you want to check it out or not.

If you look at any given list of Boing Boing posts, you’ll find that most of them came about thanks to a process similar to the Digg process, given away by the little “Thanks, (person’s name)” at the bottom of most posts. Sites are submitted to the team through a form by loyal readers who have found something interesting, and the writers serve as gatekeepers, only allowing the best stuff through.

This is different from the Digg system, where users submit links and everyone with an account can potentially be a gatekeeper. In reality it’s more complicated than this and isn’t such a representative social news system. I think sites like Boing Boing push through a much higher quality of links and news than those that end up on the Digg front page.

Of course, the authors do find and post a lot of material on their own - I’m not discrediting their work, after all, I’m a big fan. You’ll find a familiar name in this post, though that’s not my reason for loving the site I got into Boing Boing after I read Eastern Standard Tribe by contributor Cory Doctorow, who has some of the best sci-fi I’ve read yet.

During my daily perusal of Boing Boing’s articles a few days ago, I read this post on Dvorak by Cory. It links to the Dvorak Zine, which explains the system using a comic.

Hours later, the site was down - reason? Out of bandwidth, as I mentioned here.

Lately I’ve noticed two things:

• The Digg effect is getting less and less terrifying for site owners as click-throughs and page views diminish
• Boing Boing at the point where it can push a site over the bandwidth limit pretty fast

Now, my music site was featured on Boing Boing earlier this year, and bear in mind, one of the first things a person will see after clicking through to the post on my site in question is a link to download a free mp3 file.

As we all know, it takes a lot less mp3 downloads to overload bandwidth than comic downloads.

My site didn’t suffer or slow down at all; it took it rather admirably, and while music downloads skyrocketed for twelve hours, my bandwidth didn’t expire.

On the flip side, at this end of the year, Boing Boing is getting a reputation for knocking servers down and bandwidth through the roof.

It was a huge site before. Has it really grown that quickly and to that point?

People are getting tired of social news. First, they wanted to get away from editors with a bias in the mainstream media. Now, they’re realizing that too many gatekeepers means only mediocre, middle-ground content reaches the top.

Digg has a very specific audience. Young white nerds, to put it simply.

The contention is that as social news sites grow, they either become overrun with the Internet’s single largest demographic (young white nerds) or they are designed from the start to cater to that demographic.

They form the primary gatekeepers for news while surfers, people who are less likely to get involved and traverse the Internet so much and so widely that they become frequent submitters, find they’re not satisfied with the more specific demographic’s choices.

Social news, to be truly social, needs people from all areas of life to share equal prevalence in submissions and the same from those who vote and surf. Maybe it’ll work in the next generation or the one after, but the world isn’t quite that Internet media centric just yet and wider demographics not as deeply involved in internet culture yet. Most won’t become internet gatekeepers.

But Boing Boing’s gatekeepers are multifaceted:

• Mark Frauenfelder, a writer and illustrator who co-founded Boing Boing when it was still a paper zine
• Cory Doctorow (as mentioned), who is a sci-fi writer and anti-DRM-and-other-things activist
• David Pescovitz, research director, engineering writer and Editor-in-Chief of MAKE
• Xeni Jardin, a tech culture journalist who is always on TV somewhere or writing for Wired

Most of them are intimately involved with technology, but they’re educated professionals who make much better judgments than your average Digg teen.

Is it really any surprise that Digg may be giving way to more controlled inclusive media like the Boing Boing blog?

I just posted the list of 26 blogs that I read on a daily basis, but I left one of the list, and that’s Chris Garrett’s excellent blog. The previous post was a straight up list from the Daily folder in my news reader (though only the ones about blogging itself), and I don’t subscribe to the RSS feed for Mr. Garrett’s blog - I get it straight in my inbox. Why did I choose to fill in my email address instead of clicking the little RSS button? I really don’t know, but what I do know is that it’s also a damn excellent blog.

Only a minute or two after posting the first did I receive today’s update from Chris in my inbox. Shame on me. Go check it out!

Blogged with Flock

It’s time to share the love and link to some of the best blog posts from the last couple of days. Enjoy the following great reads:

• Check out Skellie’s guest blog at Copyblogger on writing with clarity.
• A similar post by Khoi Vinh on brevity.
• 6 Podcast Checks To Keep Your Show On Track by Anna Farmery
• On marketing your blog by Valeria Maltoni
• Can you complete Lorelle’s latest blogging challenge?
• Darren Rowse knows where you can get cheaper blog logos - for now
• The Blogtrepeneur talks about planning for your blog
• Something many bloggers struggle with - jealousy - is discussed on Dosh Dosh

Darren Rowse has a great post discussing the many Reasons to Have a Vanity Folder in Your News Aggregator. It’s important to keep track of the conversation, and just as important from a PR point of view, to keep track of public opinion on your writing - if other bloggers don’t like you, that’s going to taint the blogosphere’s readership, too. It’s also important to ensure that nobody is defaming you. If somebody is making defamatory imputations about you that destroy your reputation and could affect your chances of forging a career you need to know so you can take action (so long as what’s being said is untrue).

It’s always nice to reward someone who has linked back to several of your posts, too, and a vanity folder lets you keep track of your biggest fans. I’d only do this if the writing on the other end is high quality, but so long as it meets that criteria, it’s a great way to build relationships.

Defamation and rewarding others aside, I think the most important and useful utility a vanity folder has to your blogging efforts is as a measurement and evaluation tool. Are your efforts to promote and market a blog actually working? If so, how much? Since blogging is about the conversation, tracking the reach of your articles is absolutely essential. I still remember the line my old public relations lecturer used during the introductory lecture:

“Public relations efforts without measurement and evaluation are not public relations efforts.”

Why? Because without careful monitoring, you don’t know whether your plan is working or not, and whether to adjust a broken method or lock down a working method.

That, dear reader, is the best reason I can give you for starting a vanity folder.

Tags: problogger, darren rowse, vanity folder, public relations, measurement, evaluation, marketing, promotion

For readers who run product-centric blogs where making sales is your highest priority, Brian Clark has some as-always fantastic advice for you over at Copyblogger. He talks about the differences between providing value and awareness to your readers, and relentlessly pitching them only to alienate the readership.

“The problem bloggers face from a selling standpoint is that various readers are at different awareness levels, depending on how long they’ve been reading and how much exposure you’ve provided to your offer.”

Click here to continue on to Brian’s article.

Tags: copyblogger, brian clark

My name is Joel Falconer, and I’ve never posted a word here. Not one article, not even a comment. I’ve been a part of 451 Press for a while, though - I’m a musician, and I talk to other musicians at Musician’s Notebook.

But that’s enough about me, and more about the blog news! The last post from this blog’s previous writer was on the BlogRush system, which was brand-spankin’ new at the time. Since phase two was just rolled out, I think that’s a great place to pick up.

Getting Traffic from BlogRush

Every time I see something written about BlogRush, I notice the question is:

“How much traffic is this thing going to get me?”

That’s a perfectly valid question, too, seeing as the purpose of this widget is to drive traffic. In fact, if you haven’t asked that question to yourself at least once, please proceed to slap yourself over the head and then ask. If you’re not asking those kind of questions and just signing up for every new service that comes out for bloggers, you lacking clear focus and direction in your plan for promoting and marketing your blog.

I checked my stats on Musician’s Notebook. BlogRush brought in 52 hits there throughout October, which is the same amount as Google Reader. It’s not a massive amount by any stretch, but if it’s bringing just as many people to my site as those who’ve subscribed and read it in the most popular RSS reader on Earth, I won’t complain. At those traffic levels, it’s worth keeping around while that blog finds its audience.

I checked the stats here, too. October yielded nothing, but since the previous writer left near the end of September, I checked that month’s stats too. Nothing. There were more referrals from sites with wonderful permalinks such as “free-pantie-hose-movie” - and that certainly didn’t seem like something that’d fit under the Computers & Internet category at BlogRush. Since the traffic at Blog News Watch is three times that of Musician’s Notebook, I’m going to assume it was never installed.

The only other blog I have with BlogRush on it is Alfadir’s Piercing, my band’s blog. It has had one referral from the service.

Obviously there are differences in results between blogs, and many factors that affect click-through. Crafting great headlines is just absolutely vital to having any success on BlogRush. If this blog were on BlogRush I’m also sure that there’d be very few referrals coming through, seeing as this kind of site would be the most common type of site in their database.

Bottom Line: the BlogRush service might help you, if you are just starting out and building an audience. If you do decide to use it, hone up on headline writing skills. Otherwise, it’s just slowing down your visitor’s loading times.

Basic Functions That Never Made It Into 1.0

There was one feature that was absolutely necessary in BlogRush 1.0. There was no way to delete any of your own blogs from the database. I didn’t want to delete my blogs because I was unhappy, but because there was an error in the system when I signed up. The Musician’s Notebook sign up page didn’t work properly and constantly refreshed, thereby sending the wrong information repeatedly to the service.

When I logged in to BlogRush for the first time, there was one listing for Alfadir’s Piercing and way too many for Musician’s Notebook. I randomly chose one and used it.

My list was disgustingly ugly with clones that should never have existed, but I had no way to get rid of them. Now, in 2.0, I do. Thank grok.

New Features - Shiny, like the blinding light that occurs when a blogger finally washes the dishes.

Everyone always starts with the new features because they aren’t as boring as everything else. It’s like journalism school in universities… “If it bleeds, it leads!” In this case, only if it bleeds on the edge of new technology.

It was about time.

BlogRush finally got better statistics reporting. Better yet, it also received a cool little at-a-glance feature that lets you find out quickly which of your posts are going well and which are being ignored by the masses.

Well, I always feel ignored. I have abandonment issues, from the time when I was two and my sister threw my teddy bear out the car window at 110km/h on the highway.

BlogRush 2.0’s fancy stats system allows me to recoup some small amount of self-esteem after that shattering event, by seeing how many people will click on a headline I write.

It also seems to depend what you’re writing about: my music blog gets very little BlogRush traffic, yet Musician’s Notebook gets a fair bit. It may be that the structure of titles on the other blog is very different.

But still, stats! Beautiful, beautiful stats. I’ve always been a stats whore. Better still are the custom reports with user-defined date ranges.

Fair’s fair; helping the poor is better than helping the rich

Those of you considering giving up your BlogRush widget may do well to give it a bit more time. Low traffic members are now getting most of the bonus traffic BlogRush awards, and the radio airplay that comes with it. If you want to use BlogRush to promote your small and unloved blog, you’ve got the right strategy.

OVERALL: I say bloggers who are starting out should keep the widget on for a few weeks or months until they start finding their own audience. Once that happens, BlogRush’s benefits will be negligible and you can save the space and processor energy for other things.

Enjoy BlogRush 2.0!

Tags: blogrush, blogrush phase two, john reese

Blogger’s problems continue to mount up with growing complaints of glitches and widespread outage resulting in a sitewide crash this morning. However, the problem seems to have been resolved now.

Outage Hits Google’s Blogs, PC World (Aug. 22, 2007)

For your blog design and all-’round-fun needs, Lifehacker’s got a list of what it considers the top 10 free wallpaper, fonts, and icon sources available. Last time I went in search of a particular font - admittedly, not something I do often - I was shocked by the prices. So free’s definitely a good thing in my book!

Check it out here.