Written on March 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 09:03 am by Darren Rowse
Commonwealth Games Free Medal Table
Regan over at the Commonwealth Games Review blog (while I have some blogs at that domain I’m not involved in this one) has developed a Free Medal Table for the Games for bloggers to put on their websites. The top 10 medal winning countries will be updated automatically (expect to see Australia at the top soon!)
This is a smart move on his part and is something he’s done before with real success. It’s a useful tool that some bloggers will be really interested in using (not everyone as not everyone is in the Commonwealth or into sport - but quite a few) and it benefits Regan with all the incoming links back to his blog. It’s a good example of a meme tool that can be quite viral.
Written on March 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 08:03 am by Darren Rowse
Interview with Matt Jones of Random Shapes
There’s a great interview with teen blog network owner Matt Jones from Random Shapes over at The Blog Herald.
I love reading the stories of (and meeting) young technological entrepreneurs. There’s something about the freshness of their ideas and ‘can do’ attitude that is so amazing. I think Matt’s one to watch.
Written on March 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 03:03 am by Darren Rowse
Why You Shouldn’t Join a Blog Network
Having looked at some of the advantages of joining a blog network it’s only fair that we look at the flip side. Blog networks will not suit every blogger’s personality, style and goals and you should take into account the following before signing up for one:
1. Revenue Split - While I argued in my previously post that a positive of joining a network is that it can potentially bring in a higher revenue to your blog - the downside is that with most blog networks you will be sharing this revenue with the owners of it in some way. In the larger more established networks you are likely to be paid a flat rate per month for posting a certain amount of posts and might be paid incentives based upon factors like traffic and revenue. In smaller and newer networks the revenue is generally shared between network and blogger in some way (usually some sort of percentage split). The methods of payment are varied but at the heart of all of them is that you don’t get every cent your blog owns. If you’re not willing to share a blog network might not be for you.
2. Ownership/Rights - Once again there are variations between networks when it comes to who retains ownership of content - but this is a key question that you’ll want to explore with the network before signing up. In many networks the content that you produce as a blogger is fully owned by the blog network and in a sense you are just contracted to write for them. This means that if you leave the network you leave with nothing but the earnings you earned during your stay. Other networks allow you to retain ownership but ask for some sort of exclusive rights to user your content in different forums. Other networks use a joint ownership system where both you and the network owns the content. There is no wrong or right way for content ownership to be viewed in my opinion - but it’s definitely something to think through before you join a network. Questions to ask a network might include:
- who owns the content?
- who owns the URL?
- what happens to the blog if/when I leave?
3. Reputation - One of the pluses of joining a network is that they have the potential to bring a certain level of prestige or credibility to you as a blogger and just by being involved you can build your own profile and levels of traffic. On the flip side of this is the fact that a network also has the potential to impact your reputation (and that of your blog) in a negative sense. This is particularly true in relation to the decisions and actions of the network owners. Some blog networks have quite high profile 9 (and outspoken) people heading them up and while this can be a definite advantage to your blog in terms of the buzz they can create it can also hurt you to be tied to them if they fall from grace in the eyes of the wider blogging community.
4. Loss of Control - One of the reasons I see that many bloggers have decided to stay out of blog networks is that they do not wish to lose control of their blog on a number of levels ranging from design, branding, advertising, promotion etc. Some networks are more flexible than others and allow bloggers to have input in these areas if they wish - but others are quite structured and take on making all the decisions. Of course this is the very thing that attracts some bloggers who don’t feel able or willing to run these aspects of a blog - but if you’re the type who wants complete control of your blog then you might want to stay independent.
5. Risk - Out of some of the above factors comes the risk that things could go pear-shaped across the network and impact you personally. I guess I’m thinking here again of the impact that a network’s owners can have upon their bloggers in terms of their decisions. For instance I’ve seen a number of bloggers over the years log onto their blogs only to find themselves locked out, or even worse to find their blogs have just disappeared as a result of the decision of someone else. While these stories are rare (the ones I’m thinking of are over a year ago) I guess you need to remember that when you join a network that you’re entering into a relationship with individuals and that at times individuals let others down. There is risk with every blog (or business) - but in a network you’re putting yourself into the hands of others to some extent and you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure they know what they’re doing, have a good track record and are in it for the long haul.
6. Legalities and Responsibilities - While I’m not privy to most blog networks agreements with bloggers I do know that many are legal entities and use contracts in their interactions with bloggers. In signing one of these you’re entering into a legal agreement that governs a variety of aspects of your blogging activities that might include agreements to post a certain level of posts, keep certain information confidential, not blogging on similar topics outside of the network’s blog, not participating in other networks, participate in network activities etc. The consequences of entering into such an agreement and not holding up your end of the bargain are worth considering before signing.
Concluding thoughts
My own experience of blog networks has largely been worthwhile. I’ve enjoyed the relationships I’ve found in them and have found them to be increasingly profitable for many of those that involve themselves in them.
As with any blogging the traffic and revenue doesn’t just appear overnight and blogging in a network needs to be a long term commitment.
I quite often suggest to bloggers that if they give blogging in a network a go that it might also be worth blogging as an independent as well. Most of the bloggers in the network I’m involved with do this and I find that it works well both for the sake of the network but also bloggers.
Don’t rush into a blog network deal. A lot of the negatives that I’ve written above come out of situations that I’ve seen with bloggers that have rushed into networks without considering the implications before they sign up. Networks are not THE answer to every blogger’s goals and objectives. They can enhance your blogging in many ways but if you take your time in getting into them you could save yourself considerable pain later on.
Written on March 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 11:03 pm by Aaron Brazell
WordPress 2.0.2 Revealed
Back at the end of December, I wrote an article for enternetusers entitled 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0. Three(ish) months and 2 security/bugfix releases laters, I think WordPress 2.x deserves another look - a follow up, if you will.
Importers
In December, I raved about the rewriting and re-implementation of a number of import paths from other blog systems Personally, I have worked with four of the six standard importers now available for Moveable Type, Live Journal, Blogger, Textpattern, Dotclear and RSS. I personally wrote the Textpattern script and I hope to have a Nucleus importer available for the next major release of WordPress. Contact me if you need it.
Anyway you look at, it’s great to see more availability for bringing content in from other systems. It still seems kind of boneheaded that there are no import paths from other WordPress or WordPress.com blogs but I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
Image Uploading
Image handling was one of my biggest pet peeves about WordPress 2.0. It was horrible when it was released but Andy Skelton did due diligence brilliantly on getting this feature to not only work appropriately but work phenomenally. Back in December, image uploading did not handle thumbnails/original size images well at all. If one used the Rich Text Editor included in WordPress, even when attempting to use the Original Size feature, it would insert as a thumbnail and scaling would create pixelated images.
There were inconsistencies between how image files were handled in the Rich Text Editor and how they were handled in the standard editor. There were inconsistencies that would prevent older WordPress users from using the same kind of file structure as they were familiar with (the new image uploader would upload to wp-content/YYYY/MM by default thus having to make sure folder permissions were set, etc.
I am happy to say that this piece of functionality is incredibly useful to me now and that the bugs have been ironed out. Way to go, Andy!
Rich Text Editor
The Rich Text Editor, while useful to a great many users, still is of no use to me. I still dislike it and I still advise bloggers to avoid its use. One of the biggest problems we have had at b5 is with bloggers who copy/paste directly from the internet and paste into the RTE. The RTE captures all the formatting of the copied text, including bad markup. In one case, the RTE caputed an unclosed <div> which needless to say, broke the entire layout of the blog.
The code behind the RTE has improved tremendously. Used in its basic form, without copying and pasting or adding/deleting/re-adding images, etc, it creates relatively clean and unproblematic markup and can be considered for basic blogging. However, advanced bloggers and bloggers who use a lot of images, I recommend the standard editor.
Additional Standard Templates
One enhancement that has come since WordPress 2.0 is a functions.php file. This is not a required template file but can be included in a theme to provide additional theme-specific PHP functionality or tags. Developers should be cautious when using this file and it is still recommended to provide add-on functionality via a plugin if possible.
Bugfixes and Changesets
You can see the full and exhaustive list of commits since the WordPress 2.0 launch here.
Written on March 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 09:03 pm by Darren Rowse
Speed Linking - 15 March 2006
- Lee Odden Interviews Aaron Wall of SEOBook and Threadwatch
- Jim Kukral has started the A-List Blogging Death Pool - who’s your tip?
- Eric Giguere says that the new AdSense wizard sucks
- Phil Sims tells us why he hates RSS Readers
- Barry Bell writes about Offline Blog Marketing
Also ‘The 360′ just published a short Instant Message interview with me on some aspects of the future of web publishing, AdSense and other miscellaneous things. It’s my first IM interview - a little different from doing them via email where you have a lot of time to think and craft your answers - but fun.
Written on March 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 11:03 am by Darren Rowse
The Manolo, he is looking for the Men’s Fashion Blogger
One of my favorite Pro Bloggers is Manolo of Manolo’s Shoe Blog (I interviewed him here).
Manolo just emailed me to let me know that he’s looking for a blogger to help out with some blogging on Men’s fashion which will release him to start working his new blog on Food and Drink (he’s got quite the little empire developing over there).
So if you’re into Men’s fashion you might want to head over and apply for the position.
Written on March 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 09:03 am by Darren Rowse
How Often Should a Blogger Post?
Seth writes a good post on what he calls The noisy tragedy of the blog commons. He observes the high posting frequency of the top blogs going around and writes:
Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter. RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers.
I think posting frequency is a question that bloggers need to consider very carefully on a number of fronts. Here are some of the factors to consider:
1. Writer Burnout - Every year I do a 24 hour blogathon to raise money for a charity (this year’s will be soon - so get your paypal account stocked up with cash ;-) ). While I enjoy the process a lot I also find that it generally leaves me quite burnt out - both physically, as you’d expect, as well as in my ability to write. This is an extreme example but is what happens if you overload your blog for a sustained period with loads of posts (unless you have a team of bloggers to help you - as do many of the larger blogs). The constant drive for high quality and relevant content is something that takes it’s toll on a blogger. Post too often and the quality of your writing could suffer.
2. Reader Burnout - I’ve noticed that on some of my blogs that a high number of posts in too short a period can also leaving readers burnt out. This is only the case with loyal readers who either come to your blog via a bookmark each day or who follow you via RSS. I know from personal experience of reading blogs that if my news aggregator shows that there are over 20 unread posts on a blog that I’m less likely to read each post in full (unless it’s one of those blogs that I’m a massive fan of). If a blog consistently posts at too high a rate I’ve even been known to unsubscribe from it simply because I can’t keep up.
3. Reader Participation - This probably relates to reader burn out but I’ve noticed that while traffic at enternetusers tends to go down if I post less frequently here at enternetusers that the amount of comments left per post tends to go up. Conversations in comments also tend to be more productive as readers actually interact with each other more instead of just commenting upon the post itself. I guess this is partially related to the length of time that the post is on the front page of the blog - but is also related to the amount of different threads of conversation that a person can follow at once. Write too many posts on too many topics and they’ll begin to disengage and only enter into what you’re writing to a certain level.
4. Search Engine and RSS Referrals - I’ve written previously on this blog about how one of the reasons to consider upping your posting frequency is that the larger the quantities of quality content that you produce the more open doors you have into your blog via both search engines and your RSS feed. I know that on those days that I post 10 posts here at enternetusers that I generally have more traffic, largely via RSS. My Feedburner button’s number goes up a little and a higher percentage of referring URLs are from bloglines.
5. Blog Topic - I’m a firm believer that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to posting frequency on blogs. One of the main reasons for this is that different topics tend to lend themselves to different styles of blogging. For instance a blog like Engadget has a very very wide topic (consumer electronics/gadgets). This topic covers a lot of sub categories and to do it justice it needs to post a high number of posts. It’s readership knows this and I suspect a lot of them want it as they are attempting to keep up with a wider industry. Gadget lovers are also quite often information junkies who have are usually tech savy and able to consume larger amounts of information. Other blogs with tighter topics would not be able to sustain such a large number of posts because there is only so much to write about on any given day.
6. Visitor type - I’ve already touched on this a little (in saying gadget fans are often information junkies) but another way that your visitor type can impact posting frequency is the source of the visitor. For example here at enternetusers I have a much higher readership that comes via RSS and bookmarks than on my digital camera blog which is largely visited by Search Engine users and those coming from my email newsletter. As a result it is not as crucial that I keep my posting level down to a reasonable level on my digicam blog because it’s not likely to impact many people. In fact having more posts can be helpful as it means there are more landing points for SE traffic.
7. Post Length - Another observation that many people make about some of the most highly visited blogs is that they tend to write shorter posts than the average blog. This is both a reason that they can post a lot (you can write multiple short posts in the time of 1 larger one) and also one of the reasons that their readership is less likely to burn out (readers can read a post in 15 seconds and then move onto the next one). A blog like enternetusers on the other hand does have some shorter posts - but many (like this one) are medium to longer ones which means I need to be aware of how much I’m giving readers to read each day.
8. Rhythm and Consistency - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - find your blogging rhythm and stick to it. While readers don’t want you to be monotonous in terms of what you write - I’ve found they do quite often want it in terms of how you write - and more specifically in how often you write. People want to know what to expect - they buy into things that they know fits in with their own rhythm of life so if you start out writing daily but then increase the frequency to hourly you’ll probably find people reacting against it (and the same goes the other way around).
Interested to hear how often others post to their blogs and how they’ve come to that rhythm of posting.
Written on March 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 02:03 am by Darren Rowse
Why Should you Join a Blog Network?
After posting yesterday a basic Introduction to Blog networks I now want to turn my attention to some of the positives about joining a blog network as a blogger (the negatives will come in the next post in the series). Please note that I’m not writing about the benefits of starting or owning a blog network but looking at the positives of joining an existing one as a blogger. Of course the following factors will apply more to some networks than others (each network has it’s own configuration).
1. Relationships - today I did an informal survey of 10 bloggers from a number of blog networks (not just my own) on the topic of what they like like about being in their network and the most common response was that they enjoyed being a part of something larger than themselves and that it was the relationships both with network owners and managers as well as other bloggers that made the network experience most worthwhile. Many blog networks have some sort of internal communication systems (forums, wikis, email lists or even blogs, chat and VOIP sessions) - all of which can take blogging out of a space that can be a little lonely into one that is much more relational.
2. Traffic - when I started my first blog 3 years ago I did so as a complete newcomer to the blogosphere and had absolutely no connections to other bloggers or sources of traffic. The result was that finding a readership was a long slow process that took a year before I even had more than a few hundred readers a day (except for an occasional fluke day when I had links from bigger blogs). In contrast to this many new network blogs gather a readership much quicker. Of course this varies a lot from network to network (ie Gawker’s blogs can debut in their first day with tens of thousands of visitors where as smaller networks might start with hundreds of visitors). This traffic comes as a result of incoming links from announcement posts, just from the prestige of being in the network and from other blogs in the network. Many networks also have ways of cross promoting blogs via highlighting top posts of the week or clustering related blogs together into channels that cross link within posts.
3. Expertise - very few bloggers have all the skills needed to run a successful blog and networks can offer a large range of skills and expertise to help grow a blog. Most blog networks will handle all of the behind the scenes aspects of getting a blog up and running including design, SEO optimization, paying for and setting up URLs and hosting, finding advertisers, choosing a blog platform (and administering upgrades and plugins), optimizing ads, promotion etc. This leaves the blogger to simply write. Similarly when you’re in a network with many other bloggers and you come across a problem with your blog it’s amazing how quickly it can be solved either by those managing the network or others in it.
4. Administration - similarly to having a lot of the technical aspects of setting up and running a blog handled - a blog network often handles a lot of the administrative tasks associated with blogging such as the management of advertisers (it can get out of control when you have to collect income from numerous sources), book keeping and even (I’ve heard in one case) the moderation of comment spam.
5. Revenue - this is perhaps one of the more obvious reasons that some bloggers choose to join networks (although fewer than you’d think have it as a primary reason as I found today). As I’ll mention in the next post in this series a downside is that in most networks you split the revenue your blog owns with the network (there are many methods of determining this) but on the upside due to the increased traffic, SEO prominence and expertise that a network brings the overall earnings can end up being higher than if you blogged independently (a generalization but true in most cases).
6. SEO - one of the big upsides of being in most blog networks is that on the day your blog launches you are guaranteed to be linked to from each other blog in the network. Networks do this in their own individual ways but it usually happens in a sidebar or footer. The benefits of this are twofold - firstly there is an element of cross promotion going on and some traffic will follow the links but secondly (and mainly) the benefits are that being linked to by other blogs on other domains is one of the best ways to climb the rankings in search engines - which of course leads to traffic.
7. Prestige - of course this one will vary considerably from network to network but if you can get a gig writing for one of the top networks you could use if to your advantage in the building of your own profile.
8. Learning - another answer that I got in my questioning of bloggers today was that some of them said that they joined the network to learn how to blog on a more professional level so that they could use the skills they learnt in their own ventures. One of the best ways of learning is to watch someone else do something and then to imitate - being in a network can expose you to all kinds of learning opportunities.
Of course this post is only one side of the equation - joining a blog network is not for everyone and in the next post in the series I’ll tackle some of the reasons NOT to join a blog network. In the mean time - please feel free to add your reasons for joining a blog network in comments below.
Written on March 14th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 11:03 pm by Darren Rowse
WeSmirch launched by Memeorandum
The team behind the popular memeorandum and tech.memeorandum have announced a new site ‘WeSmirch‘ which takes the format of their other popular sites and applies it to tracking gossip and celebrity blogs. I know lots of bloggers who will be doing their best to to get picked up by this one.
Written on March 14th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 10:03 pm by Darren Rowse
Performancing Metrics to go into Public Beta Shortly
I’m told that the Performaning Metrics blog statistics package that I reviewed earlier in the week will be going into a public beta test in the coming hours. Press Releases are circulating on the web and the invitation to officially give it a go is imminent from what I’m told.
Watch their site for the announcement shortly.
update: It just went live. You can read about it here.
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