VIDEO: Social media “dorks” get Jay-Z parody anthem —

Although as a rabid Jay-Z fan who finds “Empire State of Mind” to be the hottest rap track in the past 12 months, I should love this social media parody, I have to admit I kind of dug the Foursquare version of “Swagga Like Us” (“Badges Like Us”) harder.

However, the video below, namechecking sites like Mashable and Geekologie, does do a clever parody of what it calls “new dorks”- entrepreneurs who are attempting to take over the internet with an army of one (or a few) via YouTube, Twitter and blogs. What do you think? Would Hova be tickled by this homage, or not amused?

The Redesign, Ctd —

A reader writes:

There's one remaining major redesign layout issue that's driving me batty. When I click the "continue reading" link on a post, the text on the page I'm taken to is in a slightly larger font and, more importantly, the line spacing is increased. I find this incredibly visually jarring. If I can read it on the main blog page, why is it presented in a larger size on the stand-alone page? The spacing issue is completely baffling to me. Why is there so much blank space between the lines? Am I expected to talk out my red pen and edit the post onscreen? This appears to be true on all of the Atlantic blogs, not just yours.

It's driving me batty too.

It also makes it really hard to remember where you stopped reading, and find your place again, and provides a huge disincentive to click on the rest of any post.

Mercifully, the designers and editors of the Atlantic.com tell me they're trying to find a fix. They have been enormously responsive in undoing some of the obvious errors of the past week. Please give them a little more time to fix the rest. They had a hell of a week last week and have been working under intense pressure for a long time. They're good people doing their best. My personal thanks to Bob, Betsy and everyone who reacted to the problems so swiftly and reversed the biggest blunders almost immediately. They had just finished a marathon and had to start a sprint. But we'll fix this stuff. And bring the Dish back soon.

Because I won't stop giving them hell until they do.

One of my favorite sites that I read daily is Business Insider, a site which meshes together technology news with business and finance news, combining all of my favorite topics. On occasion we are fortunate to be included in Business Insider’s site, however more recently there have been a number of instances where we weren’t so grateful. On Friday we became the victim of Business Insider’s dirty SEO tactics.

Business Insider As An Aggregator

Before jumping into the technical tricks being used by the Business Insider team, I think it’s important to highlight the company’s overall strategy. Rather than just posting articles that were created internally, the company “links” to other sites that they believe have relevant content to their readers. The result is that the site becomes a news aggregator for their target market.

It’s an interesting tactic and one that I’ve regularly considered here at Social Times. The reason is that it can actually add value to the reader, while simultaneously increasing your site’s search engine traffic. Even if reposting an article only gets you a few hits, it only takes a couple seconds to repost someone else’s content.

While I haven’t seen Business Insider’s internal system, I can only assume that they have a list of blogs which they follow regularly (this one of which they also follow, something I’m personally flattered by). If they want to repost the article they can click a few links and they’re good to go. Makes sense.

Where Things Get Dirty

On Friday I found out that the company plays a dirtier trick in which they don’t even publicly link to you, but instead index the title, first couple sentences, and link back to your RSS feed (not your actual website). It’s the exact same trick that splogs use, except splogs take your entire content, whereas Business Insider is “polite enough” to limit their citation to a few sentences.

Did I give them permission to do this? Nope. In fact, I actually rejected a second opportunity to have one of my articles reposted on their site after a previous incident. Business Insider republished one of my articles (under my permission) and now shows up in Google for one of my target keywords. While I would have imagined that Google would be smart enough to realize that I was the original source, for the time being, Business Insider is the site which will get most of the traffic from my content.

After learning my lesson I decided that I would no longer let them republish articles in full. In part, I am partially fine with them posting shorter snippets because I hope it will drive some new traffic. On Friday one of my articles about installing Cassandra on a Media Temple server was republished on their site. However the article isn’t listed anywhere in their main article index.

Instead, it’s buried in the site but placed in a place that Google can find it. The result is that their article now shows up just under mine in Google for any relevant search and it only took them 5 seconds to republish it. As mentioned earlier though, often times their article will rise to the top spot in Google over time.

Why Their Articles Show Up Above Ours

In addition to having a number of incoming links, which makes their site a Page Rank 7 (one above AllFacebook and Social Times which both have a Page Rank of 6), the company also uses an interesting URL structure. Rather than posting the month and date at the beginning of their URL like most people do (including us) (e.g. http://www.socialtimes.com/2009/02/sample-article), Business Insider places the month and day at the end (e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/sample-article-2009-02).

From what I can tell, this simple change is dramatically boosting their search engine placement. Since the words in your URL are an important factor in ranking your page, it appears that this structure works more efficiently. The reason that they keep the numbers in their URL is that Google News requires publishers to include unique numbers for each article, in order to be indexed.

Questionable Practices Lead Us In An Interesting Direction

Ultimately one has to wonder whether or not this strategy is a good one in the long-run. While I support the journalistic work of Business Insider, I don’t support their strategy of essentially lifting my content for search traffic. While Huffington Post and other companies have used this strategy successfully in the past, I’m not sure this is the best direction for online publishing.

New aggregators are infamous for using snippets of content. I’m fine with being indexed by Google News, Digg, Delicious, and other aggregators because they drive us significant traffic. However, for publishers to mix original content and other publishers’ content from around the web becomes a questionable practice. While this may be the direction that things are going, I’m not quite sure I’m a supporter of the tactic.

Do you think online publishers should be able to lift segments of your content just for SEO purposes? What do you think of the practice of linking back to your RSS feed rather than the actual article?

Are you ignoring one of the most important rules of blogging? —
The most agonizing and frustrating blog post I ever wrote, was my first one.

It took me FOUR days to write that post. Actually it only took about an hour to write, but it took me four days to have the courage to hit 'Publish Post'.

And it wasn't because I was insecure about the post itself, it was because according to what I had read on other blogs, it was a 'bad' post. In preparing for the start of my blog-writing, I read a LOT of blogs in an effort to discover the 'tips' for writing a great blog. And one of the 'rules' for blogging I read over and over again was 'Make sure the post is only a couple of paragraphs long, otherwise it will be too long and readers will lose interest.'

My post was at least two pages long. So I stared intently at the screen trying to figure out a way to shorten the post to 2 paragraphs, and still tell the story I wanted to tell. After 4 days I realized that it couldn't be done, and hit 'Publish Post'.

Just like that, my blogging 'career' began by breaking the blogging rules. And I have to admit, it felt damn good!

I've been thinking about this recently because I'm really struggling to find 'new' blogs that get and maintain my interest. And I wonder if part of the reason why is because so many new bloggers are following the 'rules' of blogging. In 2005 and 2006, we didn't have Copy Blogger and ProBlogger to tell us the what the 'best' way to blog was. We all had to make our own rules, to a great extent.

But now, there's a zillion blogs giving you 'Ten Steps to Creating the Perfect Blog". Hell I've written those posts myself. And on the one hand these do definitely improve your blogging, but at the same time if everyone is following the same format, then it becomes MUCH harder for a blog to stand out.

Another example of purposely not following the blogging rules was the Z-List. This was the thing that first got me on a lot of people's radars. The premise was absurd to some; Take a list of blogs you think are under-appreciated, then invite everyone else to add their own favorite blogs and share the list. With one BIG caveat; You can't add your OWN blog to the list. Even though my blog wasn't on the original Z-List, I ended up gaining a few hundred links from the Z-list, and a few other blogs got several hundred.

So while you are following the 'rules' for better blogging, don't forget that you can always make and ADD your own rules. That might be the most important blogging rule of all.

Pic via Flickr user atibens

No More Social Media For American Idol Contestants —

Wordpress Comments Notifier —

Notifiers can improve the workflow of a computer user. They are usually desktop applications or web browser plugins that display a notification if the service that they monitor is updated. This can be a new email in the Gmail account, a Facebook status message, a new Buzz in Google Buzz or a new comment in a Wordpress blog.

Wordpress Comment Notifier is a desktop application for the Windows operating system that can – currently – monitor one Wordpress blog for new comments.

The program displays a notification to the computer user whenever a new comment is posted on the blog. The comments are sorted automatically in the three categories approved, pending and spam which makes it easier for the Wordpress user to manage them.

A double-click on the notifier window opens a bigger window that displays all approved, pending and spam comments of the Wordpress blog. All comments can be edited, deleted, replied to, set as spam or no spam, unapproved and opened right from within the notifiers interface.

The notifier will check for new comments every five minutes. This interval can be changed in the options.

Configuration of the Wordpress blog in the notifier is pretty straightforward. All that it takes is to enter the main url of the blog and a username and password of a user that is able to moderate comments. Those are by default either administrators or editors.

We would recommend to create a new user and use the login credentials of that user to moderate the comments.

Wordpress comment Notifier can be downloaded from its Google Code project website. The program runs solid even and without problems. It would be great if the developer would add support for running multiple blogs in the notifier as it is currently only possible to configure and maintain one blog. (via Blogs DNA)

The Value of Lists —

List-making: Friend or Foe?

I make lists. I’ve already talked about the value of goal-setting and of tracking things via lists, so don’t worry. I won’t bore you with more of that. Yesterday, I sat down to make the ultimate type of list: the Pro-Con List. It’s the type of list that you make when you’re feeling unsure.

Some people use it to figure out a job move; a break-up decision; one city versus another. I think that the more I make these lists, the more they confuse me. How are we supposed to even KNOW what a pro or a con is in relation to our lists?

What I found in my experience yesterday was that the Pro-Con list is the MOST subjective way to list things. I was struggling to find objectivity, but it was just out of reach. It was really difficult to even decide whether I was happy with the list when I was finished.

I told a friend that I was making the list, to basically decide what I felt about a potential life-changing decision to go into effect next year. “How did it go?” she wanted to know. I had no idea what to tell her. “It went.” was all I came up with. It didn’t really lead me to a decision, because our human brains can ALWAYS find a way to make the columns even.

I struggle a TON with decision making. Taking risks and grabbing life by the balls has never been my strong suit – only when pushed up against a wall do I tend to recognize that a decision MUST BE MADE NOW. I know. A New Yorker–and I still make decisions like this.

I have read tons and tons of really good blogs lately about picking up things and just DOING. Not making the list, and weighing the pro’s and cons. Who cares about that, right?

Sigh. The list making only gets me so far, I suppose. We are creatures of a lot of thought, and hopefully just as much action. I hope that I can learn to get better at taking leaps. Even without a list first.

Time To Take the Internet Seriously — santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he's also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious. "6. We know that the Internet creates 'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. ... 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like many of you, for the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader to subscribe to blogs and news feeds. Instead of having to go out and scan each and every one of my favorite blogs for new and interesting content, I can read; share; tag; favorite and organize my favorite posts directly in Google Reader. It saves me a valuable abundance of time.

Google Reader is not only one of the best RSS feed aggregators out there, but it can also be used as a powerful system to archive rss feed data you may want to access in the future. Anything that has an RSS feed can be backed up and archived with Google Reader for access long after the feed is gone. Here are just a few ideas on the types of data you can archive this way.

How do you know if an RSS feed is available for the site you’re browsing? Just keep an eye out for the RSS icon. Those little orange “RSS” icons are littered all over the web, and they are so common that sometimes we don’t even notice they are there. Well…start noticing them!

Archive Your Tweets

One of the primary ways I use Google Reader as an archive is for backing up my Twitter stream. If you’ve ever tried to go back and find something you tweeted last year, you’ll realize it is a slow and painful process using the Twitter interface. However, by adding it to Google Reader you’ll be able to load and browse through your timeline much quicker since the data is actually stored by Google, not by Twitter.

You can tag, search, organize, and share past Tweets exactly the same way you can with all of your other items in Google Reader. This in itself is extremely powerful. For example, maybe you’ve recently conversed with a potential customer on Twitter and you’d like to keep your statements on record and easily accessible. Simple enough: tag those Tweets with something like “prospect.” Later in time if you wish to re-visit that conversation, just go to the “prospect” tag in Reader.

Keeping with the Twitter theme, you can also archive Twitter searches. If you recently participated in a Twitter-based chat around a specific hash-tag, simply grab the RSS link from a search query for that hash-tag on search.twitter.com and you’ll be able to read the details of that chat months down the road. Anything that is search-able can be archived by Reader, not just hash-tags. You can keep a backlog of results for any search query and just archive the RSS feed of the results.

Archive the RSS Feed of Your Blog Content

Since most of what folks read in Google Reader are blog posts, it’s no surprise that it can function as an archive for your own blog. While you should always be backing up your blog database itself anyways, Reader can act as a backup to your backup. You’ll still be able to browse the content of each and every blog post you’ve written in the event of a crash.

Along with your actual blog posts, you can usually also grab an RSS feed for the comments that people leave on your blog. Once again, you’ll be able to utilize all of Reader’s features to organize, tag, search, and share past comments.

Archive Your To-Do List

In the past I’ve tried several different free “to-do” apps and recently found that Ta-Da List by 37Signals (also free) allows me to collaborate with my clients on prioritizing and completing small updates for them. This app conveniently offers an RSS feed that is updated every time a task gets added or marked as completed. Adding that feed to Reader, I am able to go back and view each and every task we’ve worked on together through time, whether it’s still listed in Ta-Da List or not.

If It’s Available In RSS, Feed It To Reader

Google Reader is free and will most likely always be free. So far there’s no limit on how many feeds you can add to it. Take advantage of that. Any RSS-enabled data that you may want to archive for future retrieval should go into Google Reader. It’s definitely an app that is useful for more than just reading blogs.

Are you using Google Reader to archive any other types of RSS-enabled data? Share your tips!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

Related posts

• (12)Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds
• (19)Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird
• (3)Readefine – Newspaper-ize Web Content With Newspaper Formatting
• (12)Read Your RSS Feeds in a Whole New Light with Feedly
• (10)Read your Gmail in a web-based RSS reader with FreeMyFeed

Craig Crawford: Bunker-Busting Hawks —

So, the Pentagon is looking into what bunker-busting bombs might do to Iran's underground nuclear sites. Even if it works (a doubtful proposition at best), wouldn't that just boost Iran's hardliners to crack down harder on the growing insurgency they face?

Signs point to the Obama Administration wanting to prove its toughness, which might fortify Democrats in the coming congressional elections.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, Secretary of State Clinton upped the ante, issuing ominous threats against Iran.

Oddly, while President Obama parts ways with Republicans on domestic issues, he seems more than eager to bind with them on foreign policy.

Craig blogs daily for CQ-Roll Call

Keep up with the latest Windows Phone news, tweets (all on LiveSide!) —

The news around Windows Phone 7 Series is really starting to heat up: today Sunshine pointed to a video coming from TechEd Middle East, where Eric Rudder showed a game played on a PC, then a Windows Phone, then on Xbox, all without missing a beat, and all developed in a single Visual Studio solution.  Rudder even showed a bit of code, too. 

Next up is #GDC, the Game Developer Conference, held in San Francisco this upcoming week.  Many of the Windows Phone guys are heading there, with promises of more sneak peeks at game development on Windows Phones.  How do we know?  Well a new Windows blog just launched today, The Windows Phone Developer Blog, and Charlie Kindel listed all their Twitter accounts.  So we gathered them together in a Twitter list, added them to our Tweets! section, and added in the new blog  to our MS Product Teams list (umm, thanks Live Sync blog for refreshing all of your content, we’re thinking of you, too!) to our Blogs We Like section.  Now you can follow all the latest Windows Phone news (and everything else pertaining to Windows Live and Microsoft’s online services) all in one place, on LiveSide!

Of course we’ll be monitoring all the news, too, and keeping you up to date, but (and especially since My.Live.com is set to close next week) if you’re like us and want a quick overview on the latest tweets and the latest news, don’t forget our Tweets! and Blogs We Like sections!

Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s — Several readers have mentioned the strange goods that some customers received from Newegg in place of the Intel Core i7 920 processor they ordered. Word on the problem first surfaced on TribalWar on Thursday evening. Newegg still hasn't commented on this. It's not known whether it happened as a result fraud by another Newegg customer, in shipping, or where. The "processors" are made of aluminum, and the "fans" are some kind of synthetic molded material. The "factory seal" was printed onto the box; the holographic stickers on the boxes were also faked. The first part of this video shows the bogus goods. At this writing Google News lists a handful of blogs mentioning the fakes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s — Several readers have mentioned the strange goods that some customers received from Newegg in place of the Intel Core i7 920 processor they ordered. Word on the problem first surfaced on TribalWar on Thursday evening. Newegg still hasn't commented on this. It's not known whether it happened as a result fraud by another Newegg customer, in shipping, or where. The "processors" are made of aluminum, and the "fans" are some kind of synthetic molded material. The "factory seal" was printed onto the box; the holographic stickers on the boxes were also faked. The first part of this video shows the bogus goods. At this writing Google News lists a handful of blogs mentioning the fakes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Research Blogging Awards, 2010 —

ResearchBlogging.org is a website whose mission is to “identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research with an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net.”

Over 1,000 blogs are now registered with the site, so this year they are instituting a set of awards for the best blogs in each of twenty different categories, which include specific disciplines (biology, chemistry, psychology, health, etc) and blogs in different languages.

Voting will apparently be limited to registrants at the site, but Neatoramanauts with interests in academic science may want to browse the list of nominees for sites to add to their bookmark folder.

Link to list of award nominees, via Time To Eat The Dogs.

Wordpress Plugins We Are Using —

Wordpress plugins are in many regards just like Firefox add-ons. You got a few popular ones that most webmasters have installed and then a lot of differences when it comes to the rest. If you have ever looked at one of those “top x” posts about Wordpress plugins chance is that you already know the most popular plugins for the blogging platform. Another similarity is that some webmasters like to run a lot of plugins while others tend to concentrate on the core to optimize the performance of their blogs.

We here at Ghacks are currently running nine Wordpress plugins. That’s not a lot when compared to most other websites. Our sister site Windows 7 News for instance is using 17 plugins which is almost twice the number installed on Ghacks.

You will find some plugins that most Wordpress webmasters have installed and some that only a few are using. Here we go

Akismet

Wordpress blogs need an antispam plugin to protect the blog from spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Akismet is shipped with every Wordpress installation and it feels only natural to use this plugin. We are not very fond of it on the other hand but the lack of a solid alternative is what makes us use it.

All In One SEO

One of the SEO plugins that are available for Wordpress. Another highly popular plugin that optimizes some aspects of the blog to increase its search engine visibility. There are other plugins like SEO ultimate out there that we are testing on some of our other websites but we stick to All In One SEO here at Ghacks.[link]

Contact Form ][

One of the many contact form plugins that are available. It was very easy to setup (by simply integrating the command on a page or post) and has been reliable all those years.[link]

Google XML Sitemaps

It is not only compatible with Google but also with Yahoo and Bing. It creates a sitemap regularly and pings the search engines to notify them about the updates sitemap.[link]

Internal Link Building

This is the first plugin in this list that not many Wordpress webmasters are using. It makes use of a similar concept that can be seen at Wikipedia: Internal Linking. It allows the webmaster to define keywords and urls they point to. Blog posts are then automatically scanned for those keywords and if they exist they are made to link to the url defined in the plugin’s options. The main purpose of this is to improve the internal linking to push relevant keywords but it can also be used for other purposes like advertising.[link]

Subscribe To Comments

Provides the option to subscribe to the comments of a post so that a notification is received whenever a new comment is posted. It is an alternative to comment RSS feeds that are automatically enabled on the blog.[link]

W3 Total Cache

A few caching plugins fight for dominance. We have been using WP Super Cache for quite some time until we discovered W3 Total Cache. Back then we had to use other plugins like one for compressing CSS files to optimize the loading times of the blog. W3 Total Cache combines not only caching but also minifying of scripts (JavaScript and CSS) eliminating the need for the CSS Compress plugin. It also supports CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) and is more complete than the other caching plugins. Takes a bit longer to configure but is well worth the troubles.[link]

WP-PageNavi

This is the only plugin next to Akismet that we have been using since the creation of this blog. It allows the webmaster to display numbers at the end of each index page instead of the Next Last navigational elements. [link]

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This one supports caching and displays related posts beneath each article and also in the RSS feed if desired. We had some troubles with it because of the large number of tags but once we disabled tags from being included in the calculation it worked fine. [link]

The huge amount of traffic that we get every day has forced us to optimize the blog and get rid of some plugins that we would be using otherwise. We have for instance removed social bookmarking icon plugins which reduced the page loading time and did not prove to be as effective as we hoped they would be (meaning that not many visitors clicked on them).

Are you running similar plugins on your website? Let us hear about them in the comments.

Murdoch's NY Post Continues To Source Articles From Bloggers With No Credit — Rupert Murdoch and his minions at News Corp. have been going around banging the drum that Google and others are "stealing" from News Corp. newspapers by linking to their stories and sending them traffic. But at the same time, they seem to have no problem totally taking credit for stories that they source from elsewhere. Late last year, the Times (of London), which is a News Corp. paper was caught publishing someone's blog post without their permission at all. And then there's the News Corp.-owned NY Post, which last year had a reporter admit that it was the paper's "policy" not to credit bloggers as the sources for stories. After that story came out, the NY Post insisted that wasn't true, but it appears the paper has been caught doing it again.

Andrew Fine alerted us to the news that suggests the NY Post used one of his posts as inspiration for a story. Fine had written about the rather disconcerting sign in a Chuck E. Cheese in Harlem. That blog post got some attention on various other blogs... and then just a couple of days later, the NY Post had an article about the very same sign (apparently, it took two reporters to write that article), with nary a mention of Fine's original blog post (or even any of the other blog posts that promoted Fine's original story.

Now, to be clear, while I do think it's good manners to cite where you sourced a story, it's certainly not required (legally or otherwise) by any means. But where it gets hypocritical is for this to come from an organization that claims that other sites merely linking to its articles are somehow "stealing." But when the NY Post comes in and blatantly borrows an idea from someone else, and does so without credit, that's perfectly fine? It seems like Murdoch and News Corp. have quite the double standard going.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Williamsburg American Apparel Under Attack —

First the communists protested American Apparel in Manhattan, and now someone has gone and thrown rocks through the windows of the company's store on North 6th in Brooklyn. FreeWilliamsburg reports that flaming trash was also involved in last night's retail retaliation, and the attackers may currently be armed with blogs (according to employees at the store). A witness told them, "There were about 50 guys dressed all in black, wearing masks, and causing total mayhem all along North 6th St, dumping out trash dumpsters and setting everything on fire in the streets, and then smashing all the windows of the American Apparel."

Mental Health Break —

by Chris Bodenner

This beauty's been bouncing around the blogs all week:

Jason Snell — editorial director at Macworld — wrote an interesting piece on his personal site regarding full-text RSS feeds, prompted by Merlin Mann’s piece last week regarding The Atlantic.

Snell writes:

RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset by the fringe benefits? In the mind of some — presumably including Merlin Mann and John Gruber — you may lose a small percentage of tech-savvy people, but those people tend to be the ones who pass links around to friends and on their blogs and on Twitter, and a lot of those people will come to your web site from there, so in the end it’s a net benefit. Plus, more people will care about you and your brand and that’s a good thing.

I agree, that’s good. I wish someone could cite some studies that prove that giving away your full-text RSS doesn’t hurt traffic, but helps it.

It should go without saying that what works for me here at Daring Fireball, as a one-man show, may well not work (or work nearly as well) for a large operation with a full editorial staff such as Macworld. But: DF’s RSS feed, which contains the full content of the site, not only generates money directly, but has grown to become the single largest source of revenue on the site.

The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF’s RSS feed are neither. They’re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.

What is “traffic”? I suspect Snell is talking about page views. When someone loads a web page in their browser, that’s a page view. Most advertising on the web (but not all) is sold using page views as the metric — advertisers pay an agreed-upon amount for every thousand page views on which their ad appears.

When I switched DF’s free public RSS feed to full-content in August 2007, DF’s web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. After the switch, web page views were stagnant, with no growth, for about a year. (If anything, they went down in the first few months.) But readership clearly continued to grow: subscribers to the feed skyrocketed. And, about a year ago, even web page views started growing significantly once again — going from a little over one million per month to a little over two million per month.

If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

(I could go on, which is good, because my friend Jim Coudal and I are speaking together on this very topic — online advertising — at SXSW next week. Our session is at 3:30pm Sunday afternoon.)

Final CrackBerry Turns 3 Birthday Contest: Win One of Ten Cases from OtterBox! —

Last year when we turned two, OtterBox was nice enough to give us ten cases to give away. Well this year they're back again and are letting us give away ten cases of choice to some lucky winners. If you win, you'll be able to pick from the line of OtterBox cases for all devices, including the Commuter, Defender and Impact series cases. If you "rough it" with your device, you really can't beat the full protection of the OtterBox. They have been proven again and again, and anyone that owns one will tell you the same.

Birthday Contest: To enter to win one of ten OtterBox cases, just leave a single comment on this blog post. Contest ends this Sunday at midnight PST. Good luck! Note, this is the final CrackBerry Turns 3 Contest to go up on the blogs, so be sure to check them all out and get your entry in!

• More information on the line of OtterBox cases >>

CrackBerry.com's feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Final CrackBerry Turns 3 Birthday Contest: Win One of Ten Cases from OtterBox!

The Daily Show Reveals Chatroulette To Be Filled With Creepy Journalists —

If you’ve read about random video chat site Chatroulette lately, you’ll know that it is filled with naked people and journalists. And that’s exactly what The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart found in his exposé of the Web service. In between the random pervs, he actually found more journalists looking for pervs, or something.

The clip has cameos from Katie Couric and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who insisted he wasn’t cruising or anything. The parody is great linkbait (at least for tech blogs) and pretty funny to boot. But you will only find it on the Daily Show’s own site (where it can be grabbed and embedded).

It’s clips like these that make Hulu wish Comedy Central didn’t pull its videos and go it alone.

If you have a personal blog, or even a corporate one that you help write, you’ve undoubtedly run into it: the Wall. Also known as “writer’s block,” it’s the inability to come up with something to write about, or a lack of enthusiasm for doing so. Well, researchers at IBM think they may have come up with a way to get past the Wall, with what they’re calling the Blog Muse (PDF link) — a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about and then other users vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them.

Casey Dugan and Werner Geyer of IBM Research started working on the problem a couple of years ago, after finding “blogger’s block” or “blog fatigue” to be one of the leading problems for both internal social networks at IBM and some of the company’s clients. “We asked what they had trouble getting people to contribute content to, and they said blogs,” Dugan said. “They said that people would start them and then stop writing, or that there were a lot of blogs with not very much on them.” In fact, IBM research shows that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries.

Geyer said many companies see the value of blogs because they allow people to share information, but that “often people stop blogging because they don’t get any attention with what they’re writing, no one comments on their blogs, they don’t know what to write, and so on.” As the researchers describe in their paper:

In order to inspire bloggers, our system suggests topics they can write about. The audience is given a voice by letting blog readers share topics they would like to read about with the blogging community. Our system then suggests these topics to potential blog writers who can decide whether or not they would like to address the topic requested.

The system consists of two simple widgets added to BlogCentral, the internal blog network at IBM, which was launched in 2003 and has since seen a total of more than 145,000 blog posts written on 16,000 different blogs by over 14,000 users. One widget allows users to suggest topics they’d like to see written about, while the other allows them to vote on recommendations from others. In testing the system, using the profiles created by users in SocialBlue (IBM’s version of Facebook), it found up to 50 users who might be interested in writing about those topics and sent them the recommendations. When a post was written, it sent the post to anyone who voted for the topic.

And what did the research show? According to Geyer, in a study of 1,000 users who tried Blog Muse, “blog posts created from our system got twice as many comments and got more views as well, and they got 3 times as many stars (or likes).” Interestingly enough, Dugan writes that “we didn’t find an increase in the number of blog posts, so maybe there was some substitution going on there — maybe people didn’t write more, but the ones they wrote got more readers.” There was also some resistance from blog writers who wanted to follow their own muses, rather than playing to the crowd, As he put it:

Some described how they already have topics they write about, are without a shortage of ideas, and find blogging a “personal” activity that suggestions might infringe upon. One went as far as saying, “This would be similar to writing paid reviews for consumer products.”

Among bloggers who didn’t write as frequently, however, there was support for the system because it helped them come up with ideas. The researchers said in their report that their goal was “to inspire users to write more blog posts, and our approach is to involve readers by allowing them to share their topics of interest with the blogging community. Sharing and voting on topics adds a new communication channel to the blogging ecosystem.” IBM says it’s planning to roll out Blog Muse internally, and may look at commercializing it at some point in the future.

There are a number of blogosphere recommendation systems that do something similar to Blog Muse — arguably, topic filters such as Techmeme and Tweetmeme perform the same kind of function, by letting bloggers know what topics are getting the most attention from readers. But does this remove some of the serendipity that can make blogging so powerful? We don’t always know in advance what we want to read about or what will move us. What do you think?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why NewNet Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Kristina B.

An appreciation of blogs by military wives. — I've written letters to my much-deployed husband, Scott, on monogrammed stationery, hotel letterhead, notebook paper, and even, once, in the margins of a menu from a restaurant in Switzerland. In Japan, I invested heavily in cards that featured cute animals of different species talking to one another; when I worked in an office, I scribbled on the back of recycled meeting agendas. But only the memory of these letters exists. Like most deployed service members, who are always on the move and have to travel light, my husband couldn't hold on to my notes. It's not a question of sentiment—I know he cherishes my missives—but of mobility and storage space.

[more ...]



Switzerland - Military - Letterhead - Japan - Hotel

The Internet marketing landscape is changing.

It's changing at a pace that nobody would have imagined just a year ago.

Networks that used to drive traffic simply aren't. 

The focus of the tech community over the past year (and more) has been real-time.

There's is a lot of good there ... and also some serious drawbacks.

Then there are those 'pipes'.  You know, those imported (and in some cases exported) posts you see in your Facebook, Twitter, and other feeds. 

Since the advent of Friendfeed, I've counted over 50 'significant' networks where you can pull and push your content, and content from others.

Note: Exercise a little caution here ... If you 'share' too much, there's a good chance people will block you, unfollow you or whatever YOUR network of choice calls it.

A few days ago, I was called out on Google Buzz for importing my Twitter feed.  The young lady that made the call was right.  For me, they're two separate worlds. It was a bad fit in my case ... and I promptly turned it off.

So what's with the headline about headlines Charlie?

We're living in a sea of blogs and websites, not to mention major portals and others, that want your pageviews.  Some want them pretty badly to remain economically viable.

Assuming you want people to read your stuff and you're not just creating a blog for technical or other reasons, it's important to recognize (and embrace) change.

Headlines (SEO aside for the moment) have always been important.  If you work hard (or just make sense?), aggregators will include you.  You may actually get a play on voting sites (Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, others) without asking someone to post your piece (which, in reality, is really what happens in MANY cases).

Regardless, you want those eyeballs. 

Not tomorrow .... today.
\
I've been sharing my Google Reader picks a few times daily for a long time, as many others do. 

In my case, there are two reasons: (1) If I don't have time to post here, you can always find some fresh stuff the the Google Shared feeds in the right column ... even subscribe to the whole thing if you wish .... (2) There  are a lot of hard working bloggers out there that deliver value.  They deserve to be read, recognized and watched. If my shares gets them a few page views, well, hopefully they'll keep on writing.

Enter Google Buzz.  With the wholesale adoption of Google Buzz because of it's launch within Gmail, it is already a platform.  That platform is tied directly to Google Reader, where I've seen a five-fold increase in followers since Buzz launched.

Now, I not only have some excellent, fun and interesting feeds to look at in the morning (and sometimes evening ...) but I also have many of yours.  Some say it's out of control.  It's not, and easily tweaked whenever you feel like it.

You don't have to sensationalize your headline.  While MANY in the mainstream (and not so mainstream) use this vehicle to gain viewers, it's just not my style. 

What you DO want is for people to click and read what you wrote. Simple premise right?

Whether it's an aggregator, a re-tweet, an import to Facebook (or wherever), your title makes it MUCH easier for people to find what they want to read, especially now that all of these networks are interlacing and even more so, with the 'here now, gone in a few minutes' world of real-time.

What prompted this post is that there are some really brilliant bloggers out there that don't write topical titles (or worse).  I don't know if they're simply jaded and assume everyone already knows who they are and read them every day or what.

Those days are over.

Most people have x amount of time in a day for the Internet and if you lose their interest, you'll have to gain it back.

As far as I'm concerned, there are probably hundreds of blogging rockstars out there that I'd love to be reading, and maybe sharing. 

Make my discovery easier.  Use a good, solid title in your next post.

I'm pretty sure someone will share it.

It just works.

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 6 —

Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging

Saturday, January 16 at 2 - 3:05pm

D. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging - Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette

Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television creators are finding new ways to connect with and market to their viewers. For some shows, this has meant tapping into the science featured in their content, ranging from an exploration of the roots of the science that has been fictionalized to the expansion of a scientific topic explored in a documentary. In this session, we'll look at how online video and social networking tools are playing a part in connecting science, Hollywood and its fans.

Read the comments on this post...