Written on February 26th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 12:02 pm by Darren Rowse
One Dimensional Blogging
I’ve been watching a number of blogs recently that seem to have become a little obsessed with one of two things - Memes and attempting to get to the top of social bookmarking site’s like digg.com and del.icio.us.
Now I’ve got nothing against a good meme from time to time and have been known to write posts that have done well with social bookmarking sites - but I wonder if perhaps if every every second or third post you write has this type of focus whether a blog can end up looking a little one dimensional.
You see as I reflect tonight upon the niche topics that I’m covering on different blogs I realize that to cover them comprehensively generally means a need for a variety of types of posts. For example on a gadget site a blogger could just write reviews and have a half decent blog, but if they added in a ‘how to’ or ‘tip’ post every now and again they’d add a second dimension and if they wrote a post every now and again that gave the latest news in the industry they’d add a third dimension. Add in some ‘rumor posts’, ‘rants’ and a post or two that are questions for readers to discuss and you could end up with quite a dynamic blog (see this post for 20 different types of posts).
Of course you don’t want to use every type of post all the time as it’s important to establish some consistency in your voice and style - but I do find myself getting a little bored with some blogs that just seem a little too one dimensional.
Am I the only one?
Written on February 26th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 09:02 am by Darren Rowse
enternetusers has left the Building
Just a short note to let you know that as this goes live on the blog I’ll be on a flight to sunny (or rainy as I’m told it is this week) Queensland (the most north eastern state of Australia). I’ll be away until late Tuesday night on a conference called ‘Kickstart 06′ (a conference for PR people and technology writers, largely from mainstream media). I’m taking part in a panel later today on blogging. I’m not sure what else to expect, although am told that it’ll be a great networking opportunity.
While I’m gone the Blogging for Beginners Series will continue with a few posts that I’ve written and some that a few guest posters have submitted. I’m not sure if I’ll have a net connection while I’m away but if I do I’ll blog what I learn at KickStart.
Have a good few days.
Written on February 26th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse
Introduction to Trackbacks
The following post has been submitted by Andy Wibbels - a guy who is a good friend and associate. He and I run Six Figure Blogging together (something I enjoy because I think our skill sets complement each other very well - ie he knows what he’s talking about technically and I have no idea). I’ve asked Andy to write an introduction to Trackbacks - a topic I’m constantly asked for information about.
Summary: TrackBacks automate the interlinking of blog posts, but often don’t contribute to search engine ranking.
TrackBacks are notoriously difficult to explain and is an exercise that makes a great judge of the skill of any self-described ‘blogging expert.’ So here I go!
You get comments right? Easy enough. You write a post on your blog. Someone reads it and thinks you’re either sliced bread or vile ooze and comments accordingly. Just like having a mini-guestbook for each post.
What if I want to leave a comment about your blog post on my blog? That’s where TrackBacks come in.
Let’s say I read something pretty fantastic on your blog and so I write up a post about on my blog: “Hey you gotta check this out, here’s a quote from it and here’s the link to it.” And I link to that particular post on your blog. And I click publish.
Unbeknownst to most, your blog platform - whether it is WordPress or Movable Type or TypePad, scans all the links in a post each time a post is published. It finds my link to your post and then goes out to your blog and checks to see if your post is accepting TrackBacks. If so, my blog sends a little ping! to your blog as if to say, ‘Hey! Andy’s talking about you over on his blog.’ and your blog answers the ping and says ‘Alright, I’ll make a note of it.’ And then your blog makes a little note on that particular post that in effect says, “Besides all these comments under this post, here’s someone talking about this post on their own site - and here’s the link to it.”
So readers of your blog can see not just what the commenters are saying about it on your blog - but what other bloggers are saying about. I’ve seen a post’s list of TrackBacks described as ‘Other blogs linking to this post.’ Many blog tools, like WordPress, lump comments and TrackBacks into the same list.
You don’t have to know how TrackBacks work in order to use them, you can simply set a post to be able to receive trackbacks and set your blog to send them when you publish new posts. Your blog platform should do all the heavy lifting and email you when there are new TrackBacks - just like it does when there are new comments to a post.
TrackBack was first created by Ben and Mena Trott during the early days of Movable Type and has gradually been integrated into the features of most popular blog platforms. A similar technology is pingbacks which has the added security of checking to see if the pinging site actually exists.
Of course like anything fun or cool online, the evil bastard spammers got busy funneling their sewage into automated TrackBacks pingbots that left everyone’s blogs with dainty messages about mortgages, online poker and Viagra. Most comment spam blockers are now configured to also scan TrackBacks to help stem the tide of spammy TrackBacks.
One of the best parts about TrackBack is that it helped to increase your blog’s linked-ness and search engine ranking. With the introduction of the ‘no follow’ attribute, links in comments and TrackBacks are usually often not included in the calculation of your blog’s Google PageRank. I presume this applies to the other search engines as well. Still, the findability may not be in the search ranking - but links from other blogs is always a Good Thing.
In TypePad:
To enable TrackBacks by default in TypePad, go to Weblogs > (Your Blog) > Configure > Preferences > Comment and TrackBack Preferences: Check the checkbox ‘Hold comments and TrackBacks for approval.’ And set Default TrackBack Status set to ‘New posts accept TrackBacks.’ (for receiving TrackBacks)
In WordPress:
To enable TrackBacks by default in WordPress ,go to Options > Discussion: Check the checkbox ‘Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article.’ (for sending TrackBacks) Check the check box ‘Allow link notifications from other Weblogs. (for receiving TrackBacks)
In Movable Type:
To enable TrackBacks by default in Movable Type, go to (Your Blog) > Configuration > Preferences > Publicity/Remote Interfaces/TrackBack: Check the checkbox ‘Allow TrackBack Pings On by Default.’ (for sending TrackBacks) Check the checkbox ‘Email New TrackBack Pings.’ Check the checkbox ‘Enable TrackBack Auto-Discovery.’ (for receiving TrackBacks)
Andy Wibbels is an award-winning blogger and author of Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging. He has helped companies all over the world use blogs to market their businesses through seminars like Blog Your Way to a Bestseller, Easy Bake Weblogs, RSS Essentials, Podcasting Bootcamp and Business Blog Basics (co-creator). Andy is co-creator of the Six Figure Blogging seminar, with Darren Rowse.
Written on February 25th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 08:02 pm by Darren Rowse
Google testing video AdSense ads
GoogleRumors have just noticed a video version of AdSense over at The Superficial (screen capture below).
AdSense have mentioned different formats were coming but this is the first version I’ve ever seen that is video also. It’ll be interesting to see if they catch on with advertisers and how publishers find them.
Do you think you’d want video ads on your blog or do you think they’d interfere too much with your design?
Written on February 25th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 01:02 pm by Darren Rowse
Taking things for Granted
This week has illustrated to me that there are many aspects of my blogging workflow and tools that I take for granted.
Firstly I’ve been taking my broadband internet connection at home for granted. You see this week we’ve actually been house sitting a friend’s house while ours gets painted. We move back today. Our friends are on a DSL connection but it can’t be much faster than 256 and I think in the last two days it might have been shaped back to dial up speeds (probably because I used up their monthly bandwidth allowance in the three days preceding that. I can’t wait to get back home to my fast connection.
Secondly I’ve been taking blog’s RSS feeds for granted. Many of you who use Bloglines would have been unable to read this blog’s feed for the last three or so days (at least the last 20 or so posts). There was some sort of glitch with Feedburner and Bloglines (I don’t really understand it but apparently there was a change at Feedburner that meant Bloglines were unable to get my feed right). It seems to be working again now (if you were affected by this, my apologies - I missed you!) but it’s made me realize just how reliant enternetusers.net is upon RSS because this blog felt a little like a ghost town with RSS readership down by 2000 daily readers and overall visitor and comments down significantly. In fact it wasn’t just me who noticed it, I’ve had a few readers email to see why there have been so few comments lately.
I’m sure there are other technologies that I’m taking for granted every day to run my little business but as they say, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. I think I’ll appreciate things a little more from now on (for a few days til I get too busy to again.
Update: I just found two other things I take for granted -
1. Electricity - Just after getting home and unpacking a freak storm hit our suburb. We escaped the flooding that got our neighbourhood but lost power. It’s still out now 6 hours later - so we’ve gone back to our house sitters house (and the dial up) for a little powered entertainment (and light).
2. Little Toes - Ok, so this hasn’t obscured my blogging that much, but it’s made me appreciate my little toe. As I was moving things back around our house this afternoon I dropped a full bottle of wine (a merlot) on my little toe. It’s now a very deep purple and almost three times it’s normal size - quite probably broken.
Doh!
It’s been quite the 24 hours or so. I’m glad I’m off to Coolum tomorrow for a few days in a 5 star hotel!
Written on February 25th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse
Kick Your RSS: Jumping on the Syndication Bandwagon
The following post was submitted by for the Blogging for Beginners Series by Aaron Brazell. Aaron is a major contributer over at b5 (he is a major player in keeping our servers in order) and writes on numerous blogs including Emerging Earth and Technosailor.com. I asked Aaron to write an introduction to RSS. Here’s what he has to say on the topic:
Catchy title, no? Thanks! I’m proud of it.
RSS. You’ve heard about it. You’ve read about it. Bloggers encourage the use of RSS. But what is it? What does it give you in terms of benefits and promotion? How can you use it to aggregate the vast amounts of information out there? These are all valid questions.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, was a concept introduced in the late 1990s to present data in a open format for data exchange. In other words, much like the meaning of its name, it was a way to syndicate data for other services, computers or tools to understand. Because RSS is a special XML-based format, it is intended for computers to understand and not for human consumption.
There are about a dozen varieties of syndication formats, most of which are versions of RSS, but some, such as Atom and RDF which also provide a syndication format. A more advanced article could be written about the nuances, benefits and drawbacks for each of these but, for this article, they all have the same basic features and present challenges as well.
How do I Start Publishing RSS on my Blog?
If you use one of the major blog platforms such as WordPress or Moveable Type, you don’t have to do anything. You may not even realize it, but your blog is already publishing an RSS feed and most modern browsers will alert your readers to this fact
Figure 1: Firefox alerts the reader to the presence of feeds by placing an RSS icon on the extreme right side of the address bar.
Figure 2: Internet Explorer 7 has a grayed out RSS icon on one of its toolbars. The icon becomes orange when an RSS feed is available on the site.
Instantly, that means opportunity for you. I describe this concept in You Can Blog in this way: if you envision a piece of paper with a square drawn on it, that’s blogging without RSS. However, if you place two squares together, one directly above the other and connect the respective corners of the two squares, you will have a cube. This is blogging with RSS. RSS provides a new dimension to your blogging.
Two dimensional blogging requires readers to visit your site to read your material. It requires that interaction be confined to the browser and the website, whereas three dimensional blogging gives the reader the chance to read your entries through an email client, web based news aggregator or other similar central location.
The benefits of RSS for your readers are (to name a few):
- Central location that they can subscribe or unsubscribe to the blogs that they want to read and not have to remember to visit the site. For instance, I subscribe to over 150 different blogs through a feed reader. If I had to remember to go visit each of those sites every day I’d get completely flustered.
- Another benefit is near real-time access to your most current content. When you publish, the RSS feed is republished and available for your subscribers to view. That means that you can take a vacation and they will pick up on your blog content as soon as you start publishing again
The benefits of RSS for bloggers are:
- A wider audience. Bloggers can rest confidently knowing that their content is being automatically fed out to interested subscribers who want to be the first to see anything new that you write.
- A Reader for Life. Once you have convinced a reader, through quality content and a positive reading experience, that they should subscribe to your blog it is awful hard to lose them. Most of the time, blogs that go into feed readers just stay there. There’s no harm done to the reader in having a subscribed blog that doesn’t update often.
Using RSS to Find New Content
RSS provides another benefit than providing a syndicated format for your content. It also serves you on the other end - receiving relevant content from other publishers and bloggers. If you are a blogger and do not use a feed reader like Bloglines or Feed Demon (or one of the many other options out there), then shame on you!
Most of the feed readers provide a way to group feeds according to topic. Bloglines provides category groupings while Feed Lounge takes an approach similar to Gmail’s “Label” feature. “Tags”, as Feed Lounge calls them, provide groupings of blogs together.
As a blogger, this is a great way to get the flow of information on a regular routine. No longer do you have to go Googling for things pertaining to your niche, now you can get them coming to you. This is especially important for bloggers who make a living out of cranking out content on, perhaps, more than one blog.
RSS Services
As you become more involved with RSS and understand how it can help your blog grow from a handful to readers to upwards of thousands without much effort, you may benefit from some of these services.
- FeedBurner is an excellent service that offers feed replacement. In other words, it monitors your existing RSS feed and says, “I can do that better”… and does! It has a number of monetization features such as adding Adsense to your feed. It also tracks how many subscriptions your feed has and offers a host of other options to help you get the most out of your feed.
- Email Services such as Gmail, the soon to be released new Yahoo Mail give the users of these services the ability to keep track of websites of interest in an unobtrusive way.
- RSS-to-IM services such as that of immedi.at provide a means to get new news delivered to the instant messenger of your choice. Useful for those who forget to check a feed reader but want to know as soon as Kevin hits the publish button.
Stop and Think
RSS is not the be all and end all of blogging. It is certainly possible to blog without using RSS either to collect your content or to publish it to the masses. However, the sheer benefit in terms of traffic opportunity and exposure should be enough to make any future enternetusers stop and examine the technology.
Written on February 24th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 12:02 pm by Darren Rowse
Duncan’s Blog Herald Reflections
Duncan is wrapping things up over at Blog Herald before it’s transferred to it’s new owner on the weekend. As part of his last few days he’s written an interesting post on 3 years of The Blog Herald: the good, the bad and the ugly. The post gives a real insight into some of the highs and lows of blogging as well as a few lessons learnt from a guy who has been at it for quite some time.
I personally will be sad to see BH change hands. It’s one of the first blogs I check each day to see what’s going on in blog-land and I regularly am linking up to what Duncan has to say.
I’m unaware of who is taking over the blog on the weekend at this stage but I hope they will continue to move the blog forward in the spirit of Duncan.
update: John Evans has just posted an interview with Duncan which makes a good companion piece to Duncan’s post.
Written on February 24th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 10:02 am by Darren Rowse
AdSense to Target by Coordinates
A German publication has apparently reported in the last day or so that AdSense are planning on releasing the ability for advertisers to target ads not just by keywords but but coordinates or location. See a translation of the article here.
I know that there is already Geo-Targeting with AdSense but this seems to go a little further.
I can see this will be very popular with smaller/local advertisers when introduced.
Found via Ogle Earth
Written on February 24th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 09:02 am by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Visits Google Tokyo
Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker has just sent me a picture of him wearing a enternetusers T-Shirt on his recent visit to Google Japan’s offices.
Very cool!
I always said if a reader sent me a picture of them wearing one I’d link up so here’s a link to a blog called Kent Island News that Loren has asked me to link to.
PS: these PB T-Shirts are no longer available and so Loren has the distinction of wearing a one of a kind (actually there are probably only about 5 of them in the world). He could probably sell it on e-bay for at least a quarter of what he paid for it!
Read about Loren’s trip to Google Japan at Hanging Out With Google Japan
Written on February 24th, surf Active Apparel website active apparel zone.at 08:02 am by Darren Rowse
Is Bloglines having Issues
My apologies once again to readers who use Bloglines to follow enternetusers but unfortunately it seems my feed has been out of action for the last day or two - again. As I look down my own list of blogs that I follow using Bloglines I notice that the little red exclamation mark that signifies an error is on almost 1 in 10 of the feeds I’m following. Looks like they have some ‘issues’.
Yesterday I asked them to restart my feed (again) but no word yet on what they’re up to.
If you have missed my last few days posting you can get most of the main articles I’ve written from the Blogging for Beginners page.
update: a comment below from a representative from Feeburner claims that the issue is at there end. They write:
‘Bloglines has experienced errors while attempting to retrieve recent posts from FeedBurner feeds. These errors take 24 hours to automatically clear. FeedBurner knows about the problem and is working to resolve the issue. Thank you for your patience.’
I’m a bit perplexed by it all to be honest. Last week when this happened I had emails and comments from both Feedburner and Bloglines claiming that the other was at fault and I ended up not knowing what to do about it except hope that one of them could work it out.
I guess if the problem persists then unfortunately I’ll have to move on from Feedburner. I could change my news aggregator but that might only solve my reading problems and not help any enternetusers readers.
All I know is that my RSS readership has dropped by 2000 readers in the last couple of day , that comment levels are down under half normal and that I’m getting a lot of emails from readers who are frustrated. Not a very pleasing thing when I’m putting so many hours into my current series of posts and am finding that so many readers don’t even know it’s on.
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