Blog News Watch

Just a few nights ago, Australia’s prime minister of 11.5 years, John Howard, was voted out and Kevin Rudd of the Labor party was voted in.

One of the key differences in the way the election campaigns were run was the use of the web and social networking quite heavily.

Howard used the traditional television-and-newspapers campaign in his attempt to win the public’s continued support. He lost.

Rudd used the Web 2.0 gamut (including a MySpace profile) in his bid pretty extensively. He won.

Was the election’s result simply because everyone is likely to get sick of any politician after nearly twelve years? Was it because the Labor party offered better policies? And how much did the social networking campaign really impact on the result?

It’s almost impossible to quantify, but I believe that it certainly would’ve had an impact on many of those in the younger age bracket who are new to politics, and perhaps taking an interest for the first time now that they are old enough to vote. In Australia, that’s 18 years and over.

I voted Rudd, but was never involved in his online campaigns at all - the first time I heard about them was when the press covered it because they thought it was way too strange. Truth is, as my American readers would know, American politicians are all doing this now and have been for some time.

However, the “Kevin 07″ catchphrase spread like wildfire through the net and really made a difference in the online component of the campaign.

We can never say for certain how many votes are to be attributed to social networking or blogging.

But we do know that he won, and that he was the only major candidate to use this tactic. What do you think?

Blogged with Flock

I think Google’s site ranking system is broken.

In fact, I think they broke it a very long time ago.

The Internet is meant to be inclusive, to level the playing field a bit in a competitive world, and to give newcomers a chance. Of course it’s still possible to build a new site up to popularity, but the world’s biggest search engine isn’t helping matters.

Since Google’s search is the average internet user’s portal to almost all the information they access, breaking Google means breaking the Internet.

Problem: Google’s most important ranking measurement is inbound links.

This means that in order to ever be seen in a Google search result that doesn’t contain your name or your blog’s name, you have to be popular. You know how in the real world people complain that governments and corporations keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor?

It’s the same with the holy ruling class of the interwebs, Almighty Google, who will give you priority only if you’re already a popular blog. Keep the popular sites popular, and the unknown sites unknown.

I know that it’s an easy way to determine good quality sites versus spam sites, but it’s the easy way out that takes the magic out of what the world thought the Internet was when the hordes began to adopt it.

How do you win today? The two most important things I believe you can do are:

1. Create value. If you don’t offer value to readers, you’re not going to become valuable.
2. Forge relationships. Enter the discussion. Don’t segregate yourself or stand on the sidelines. Use the full potential of the Internet to reach out to other bloggers and form networks of good writers giving the gift of good content.

Relationships are the key to success in an Internet where search and indexing have been broken.

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

From Bloggers Blog comes this review of Feedjit’s new stats widget which sits quietly in your sidebar and tracks your readers. The interesting thing is that it also creates a list of the geographic locations of your readers, and with the addition of another widget, can even create a little map of your last 100 readers based on their location.

You can get the Feedjit traffic widget here, and read more about Feedjit the startup here at Startup Squad.

If you’re a fan of Mashable’s many helpful lists (as I am), you really ought to head over and checkout the mother of all such lists - 5000+ Resources To Do Just About Anything Online. It would have been awesome to have been downloadable, or exportable as XML to feed readers, but I’m good with what we get. One page, all those lists. Very convenient.

StumbleUpon is one of my favorite website discovery tools. I use it not just for browsing but also for inspiration; I’ve included it in “The Well,” an inspiration-on-demand page I created for my solo practice blog, The Inspired Solo. I find that there’s often a serendipitous effect in clicking that little blue and green button - I’m often led to just the site I need to see for whatever mood I’m then in, or whatever problem I’m then facing. Plus, it’s the thrill of the random, and the fun of discovery.

Now, Mashable tells us there’s a blackhat op calling itself SubvertandProfit (and just like Mashable, I’m not linking to it) which is paying users cash for promoting its advertisers’ sites via the SU button. It goes live today:

“The new StumbleUpon service will go live on July 16th, with the site presumably charging the same $1/vote rate to advertisers, while only giving social media users $.50 for voting on an entire list of sites.”

Like Michael Martine, I think this (to be blunt) sucks. Says Michael:

I hope StumbleUpon plans to fight this. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, legally, but because StumbleUpon is only worth the value of its links to its users, it would be in Stumbl[e]Upon’s best interest (that
being the best interests of its users) to fight any attempts to game their system with cash.

Instead of looking for cash this way, why not add something of value - real value - to the web community? I found a new way to do just that this weekend - well, new to me - in HubPages, a site that allows you to create webpages and monetize them easily and quickly using tools such as eBay and Amazon affiliate programs and Google’s AdSense. I created this page, my first “hub,” in less than 30 minutes. It’s free to use; the tradeoff is that you split your profits with HubPages. I’m actually OK with that, given how easy the site makes it to get going and add content (absolutely zero technical skills required). Go give it a whirl and tell me what you think in the comments!

Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon, blackhat social media

Streakr’s looking for a few good beta testers for its new test phase. The bookmarking/networking/website discovery tool, according to its “about” page, is “both technology and community,” with a free downloadable discovery tool bar that “allows you to rate the web as you travel and then guides you to more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t.” The community part? “A network of people looking to share their discovery and share in what you have found as well.”

Sort of an interactive collective Amazon.com-esque “if you liked that, you might also like …” function.

Via 9:01AM.

Technorati Tags: streakr, social networking