Feedburner Need to Stop Hijackings

This morning, like a few others I would imagine, I was duped into unsubscribing from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It wasn’t untill I got to my friend Graywolfs post that I even realized I’d been had. This is a problem Feedburner need to sort out immediately.

I’ll refrain from saying “it’s an easy fix”, as running a couple of large tools/services has taught me that things are rarely as simple as most users imagine, but the idea of just not letting someone resuse a feed url is fairly simple, so hopefully they’ll be able to sort it out sooner rather than later.

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Performancing Partners Ad Network Beta Gears Up

We’re getting close to signing in a few trusted folks to help us beta test the development of the new blogs ad network Performancing Partners and have now got the sign up page for beta invites in place and are gearing up to begin tests. It’s an exciting time for us, and we hope you’ll enjoy being a valued part of the networks development.

The new Partners Blog – [feed] is up, and is open to beta testers to blog about their experiences with the network, and it’s where we’ll be publishing our progress, and soliciting feedback. Later this afternoon the forums will also go up.

A Few Key Facts

Here’s a few key facts about Performancing Partners to whet your appetite:

• Partners mixes images and text in a smart way to give both publishers and advertisers the best of both wolds
• Partners has a unique revenue sharing model which we will be blogging about shortly. For now, rest assured that we’re working toward passive income for publishers aswell as direct income from ads
• Partners works on two different revenue building fronts for advertisers and publishers; Direct advertising on a monthly flat fee basis based on recommended CPM for category type, and CPA (cost per aquisition). More details to follow
• Like all of Performancing’s tools and services, the key ingredient is community, (that means YOU). Our publishers, and advertisers are invited to join open discussion on the site or anywhere else they choose with the goal of bringing the two groups closer together and building a better conversation around the topic of revenue generation

If you have specific questions, feel free to ask, but mostly we’ll be blogging the answers in future posts.

Sign up for Beta

The beta signup page is open, so do sign up. The partners newsletter is the first port of call for coming announcements, and there will be other benefits to being in the beta dev group that will become apparent shortly.

Thanks everyone…

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Google Checkout, Too Little, Too Late?

Not for the first time I am confused what all the fuss is about with a Google service. This time it is Google Checkout.

What I was hoping for was a real alternative to paypal, preferably with the ability to use Adsense income to pay for Adwords without conversion into local currency. Maybe even micropayments. If I could be paid and buy with “Google money” that Adsense income might stretch a bit further.

The actual service is nothing like this, it is a desperate attempt to get more Adwords dollars through their door by targeting small merchants with a cut-down merchant service and the lure of free credit card transactions. For the consumer it is a circa 1998 “e-wallet”. So why are people saying this is a “paypal killer”?

Just putting the Google name to it seems to be enough for people to overlook the highly “web 1″ whiff of this and for people to write-off the mighty eBay. That is just ludicrous. There are no person to person features in this at all yet, and there isn’t even a great deal in this for ecommerce transaction competitors such as Worldpay to be worried. Had any other company announced it, even Microsoft I think it would have been met with yawns.

If you want to sell digital products off your blog and you participate in Adwords advertising it will be worth giving the service a look over, transaction fees can take a bite out of your profits. Anyone else, well, this is not the service we were looking for.

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HOWTO: Get BlogRank Via the API

To go along with our new BlogRank Top 100 List and our BlogRank widget, here is a new getperformancingrank Metrics API function to allow you to programmatically retrieve the BlogRank for a domain.

Using this API call is simple, just provide it with the domain you want BlogRank for (ensuring you correctly match the domain to what was entered into metrics, eg. performancing.com NOT www.performancing.com). If the blog has public stats set you do not need to use an Auth key, otherwise you will need to supply an auth for your own non-public blogs.

Example Code

// your domain
$domain = "performancing.com";

/*
** Open and read returned API xml
*/
$file = "http://performancing.com/perfstats/api.php?blog_domain=$domain&action=getperformancingrank";

if (!($fp = fopen($file, "r"))) {
die("could not open XML input");
}
while ($getline = fread($fp, 4096)) {
$data = $data . $getline;
}

/*
** Get our value from the XML and generate image
*/
$text = GetElementByName($data, "“, ““);
print “Your BlogRank is: $text”;

/*
** function to return a specific XML element contents by name
*/
function GetElementByName(&$xml, $start, $end) {
global $pos;
$startpos = strpos($xml, $start);
if ($startpos === FALSE) {
return FALSE;
}
$endpos = strpos($xml, $end);
$endpos = $endpos + strlen($end);
$pos = $endpos;
$endpos = $endpos – $startpos;
$endpos = $endpos – strlen($end);
$tag = substr($xml, $startpos, $endpos);
$tag = substr($tag, strlen($start));
return $tag;
}

?>

The above PHP code will go to the API and grab the XML response then using the GetElementByName function looks for and pulls out anything between “<rank>” and “</rank>”.

Metrics API

As a reminder you can find all the other API functions in our Metrics Handbook. If you do produce something cool do let us know so we can tell people about it and include it on our Community Plugins and Apps page.

Markets are *noisy* conversations.

Strange, isn’t it?

All of us hailed the coming of a shareable, collaborative web and ‘lovingly’ named it Web 2.0. But along with it came announcements and offerings, options and varieties; faster than anything else. So much, that the low murmur of the internet rose to a harsh, loud, incoherent noise. So much, that we are beginning to denounce it like no other.

Hypocrisy? Nope, I think “Familiarity breeds Contempt” is more like it…

Web 2.0 was a concept. Each one of us interpreted the concept and put forth ideas of their own. As a result, there was a rush of ideas and hence a flood of communication. People started ’socializing’ on the web. Social networks boomed and people came ‘closer’.

IMHO, it all started with the advent of broadband connectivity. Being ‘always-on’ had a direct implication, that of being connected with all your near and dear ones. Web 2.0 looked upon the internet as one huge community, with local groups of people inhabiting it. This concept was publicized and then, taken too literally. Thus, were born the social networks of today.

The community is a market and markets have alternatives. Working on the same lines, social networks began to sprout, each claiming to offer something different from the other. But, the basic objective of these networks was the same – connecting people and conducting conversations across the globe.

The market analogy gives us yet another insight. Every product has competition. And every competitive product has a seller who is willing to canvass for it. The greater the competition, the larger the canvassing and the noisier the market. In the end the market become a large noisy mass of voices and nothing audible or coherent.

Get the drift?

The web as a marketplace has been inundated with offerings. The noise in the marketplace will remain until the day the sellers give up or the stocks dry up. Since, there is little chance of the latter happening, we will have to wait for the former to happen and pray that it happens sooner, rather than later.

The noise of the eMails and IMs that have been flying back and forth has overwhelmed us to the extent that we now want out. But without them, how would we communicate, let alone converse?

Or, are we wrong in assuming that eMails & IMs are the only methods of communication? What if there IS an alternative?

Will things be different?

Technorati Tags: web2.0, conversation, market, cluetrain

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How to start a Blog Carnival

Blog Carnivals are great blog community and traffic builders and all they cost is your time. What are they, how do you start one up and more importantly how do you keep it going? Here is my How To guide.

What is a Blog Carnival?
A blog carnival is loosely defined as a weekly roving digest of a specific blogosphere. Roving in that it shows up at a different blog each week. This is a guide to starting and running a blog carnival.

The blog I run, CityHippy.net founded, along with Nick Aster of Triple Pundit) of the Carnival of the Green which aims to provide a roving digest of the Green Blogosphere.

A host blog volunteers to put a specific week’s Carnival together and host it on their blog and anyone can submit a post (url, title and summary only though) for inclusion. The host gets to decide what to include and what not to include. Our carnival tends towards being inclusive and I think we have only ever left out two posts since Oct 05.

How to start a Blog Carnival or Have blog will carnival
Why bother? Why go to the hassle of starting a Blog Carnival? Well for me it was because a) it knitted together a group of people talking about similar things and b) because it is nice to see in a single glance what other people are talking about that is likely to be of interest to you.

Before you even start a Blog Carnival you need to understand it will require some effort. The reward comes in many forms but facilitating such a widespread conversation gives me a great warm feeling every time a new Carnival of the Green gets posted.

If you are up for it and think there is a blogosphere, or a topic that covers many blogospheres, that needs a Blog Carnival then these are the steps I think you need to take.

1) Find a friend
The best way to start a Blog Carnival is to partner up with someone else (or maybe a couple of people or even more if you like) in the same blogosphere to share the workload, promote the carnival and decide on carnival policy (see below).

Identify who the Blog Carnival is for and give it a name. Does one already exist? Check out the exhaustive list at Blog Carnival (you can also use them for submissions and archive linking if you like). You might want to register a domain and set up a dedicated site for the Blog Carnival itself to sit on but I didn’t and you do not need to do that. I run the Carnival of the Green from the launch post.

2) Get people signed up before it launches
You do not want to have to host the first few yourself. Speak to other bloggers who are likely to be interested and get them signed up in advance. Create a buzz about it so that when the first one launches everyone starts talking about it.

When Carnival of the Green started other green blogs quickly signed up to host. Now, here in June 06, we are booked up through Feb 07. Awesome!

3) Rules and regs
It is very important to have some sense of what and who the carnival is for and what content it will carry.

In the case of the Carnival of the Green we carry almost anything as long as it is to do with sustainability issues/products/tips/reviews etc. We are not about general green politics. And there is a difference. But we only worked that out after the Carnival of the Green started.

Basically the rule is that if a submission is from a green blog then it gets in. But even then if it is a relevant post from a non-green blog then why not include it?

Ultimately it is up to each host to decide for themselves and that is indeed the point of Blog Carnivals in my view. A roving digest of a blogosphere. Organised and structured yes but what goes into the carnival itself is not controlled and is left upto the host.

I have had a few hosts forward me submissions in the past asking whether it should be included or not. My answer always tends towards inclusion even if the host disagrees with the post, the post is offensive and even combative i.e. in our case is anti-fairtrade etc. Unless the post is way off topic, illegal or poorly written I personally would not want to see it excluded.

There is no black and white though and at the end of the day the Carnival belongs to the Blogosphere it serves so if a host does not want to include something then so be it.

4) Hosts
You need to ensure that all email submissions for the weeks carnival goes to the right host. What I do is use a gmail account and just flip the forwarding address to the hosts email address.

Incidentally I also automatically sign up all hosts to a weekly reminder email I mail out to ensure that when they are not hosting themselves that they support other hosts by submitting posts for inclusion. They do it anyway but sometimes we all get busy so a reminder might be useful.

Hosts are generally hosting for the first time so they need to know what to do. This is the email I send out to hosts the Saturday before their hosting week begins i.e. the week they start getting submissions culminating in their hosting the carnival at the end of their hosting week.

Hi there [host email]

So…[blog name] is hosting the carnival on [host date] and you should now receive emails from the carnivalofgreen@gmail.com account automatically at this email address – [hosts email address] – is that the right address? Let me know.

Feel free to test by emailing that address and let me know if there is problem. Watch out for any submissions that might look like spam as they are forwarded email, don’t forget, and may be treated like spam by your inbox.

You can ignore all emails sent to that account that are not carnival submissions – I will address them all.

Important Note
Please be aware that the carnival will be a large post on your site, depending on the number of submissions, with certain basic formatting ie links to various mechanical anchors (carnival info, last week and next week). If you wish to withdraw from hosting then speak now.

Inclusion of submissions
Unless a post is badly written, offensive or off topic we tend towards inclusion. We want to create a weekly digest and foster debate. If you disagree with something then that is no reason to exclude it. Again if this does not fit with your site then let me know now.

Mechanics
To link the carnivals all together and maintain some degree of consistency all carnival posts should ideally have the following:

1) Links back to the launch posts on City Hippy & Triple Pundit so people can get more info about hosting and posting.

City Hippy
Triple Pundit

2) Links to the previous and next carnivals:

[Date and Address of the previous carnival before you host]
[Date and Address of the next carnival after you host]

3) The title of the carnival post should be: [Carnival name] #[Carnival number].

Any questions…ask away.

5) Posts
Once you start your Blog Carnival hopefully lots of fellow blogosphere bloggers will want to submit posts for inclusion. They need to know what to do and what should (and should not) be submitted. So make sure your launch post has clear instructions for posters as well as hosters. This is what I say:

SUBMITTING POSTS
To submit a post for consideration to the Carnival of the Green (do not submit content – just a link to your post), please email carnivalofgreen@gmail.com (Subject: Carnival of the Green submission) with the following info:

Post URL
Post Author
Post Summary

This carnival is a summary, a digest, of the green blogosphere. When we say green we mean sustainability issues etc as opposed to plain old general Green Politics. Each host has the right to include whatever they wish, whatever they feel is worthy of being in the carnival.

6) The Launch
So now you have set it all up and got everything ready and it is time for the launch post where you kick things off and bring it all together. The launch post I posted offers all the info needed by hosters and posters.

Make sure you don’t forget that people will visit the launch post who are not involved with the Blog Carnival itself and so will want to know what it is and where the posts are.

7) The Archive
Hosts spend ages pulling Carnivals together and posts from all over the world are pulled into superb digests of blogospheres. You need to make sure there is a link archive to each hosted carnival somewhere that acts as a Carnival archive. I maintain the link archive on the launch post but I also add all the Carnival posts themselves in del.icio.us at del.icio.us/cityhippy/carnivalofthegreen

The Timetable
For the Carnival of the Green the timetable I follow is:

Saturday:
Carnival hosts switched on Saturdays (sometimes Sunday due to other committments) and host pointers (see above) email sent out along with submission testby founders. This is the point at which the next host starts getting the email submissions whilst the previous host who has been receiving the email submissions all week can now put the carnival together.

Monday:
Carnival published by Host on Mondays – this is their last duty at the end of their hosting week.

Carnival added to archives on Mondays by founders

Wednesday:
Carnival posters email reminder sent out on Wednesdays by founders

So that is pretty much my collected thoughts and wisdom on setting up and hosting a Blog Carnival. Any questions, thoughts or comments?

Namaste

Al

The Performancing BlogRank Top 100 List

We’re very proud to announce the Performancing BlogRank Top 100 List list today. After much messing with code, hair pulling and swearing, you can now see the top 100 blogs using Metrics to track their traffic.

BlogRank Widgets

We’ve even made a neat little widget for those of you who’d like to dynamically display their BlogRank on your blogs.

Isn’t it pretty?

It will update daily with your BlogRank as the ranks are calculated (at least for now) nightly.

Note: You must have your stats set to “public” in order to see the rank widget. (It only shows a very high level summary to public)

How BlogRank Is Calculated

Well, that would be telling now wouldnt it? heh..

At present it’s a very simple algorithm based on page views, but we are working on bringing other factors into play in order to create a really useful, interesting list. Keep an eye on it, and do let us know how we’re doing.

Enjoy, and do let us know what you think!

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Guide to Installing Wordpress Locally on XP

Not being a Win user I haven’t tried this, but Kiltak, aka geeksaresexy has written a 10 minute guide to installing WP on XP that should help you test your sites locally without the need for a lot of complex apache config’ing.

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Darrens A-Z of Pro Blogging

I doubt there are many Performancing readers who are not subscribed to Darrens Problogger.net, but regardless this list is well worth a link: A-Z of Professional Blogging. I’ve already discovered or been reminded of a few things I really should check out.

Thanks Darren!

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Pre Blog Launch Checklist

Over at the unfortunately named, though often pretty good read Wisdump, there’s a neat post about the steps you need to take before launching a blog.

I wrote an unsurprising similar checklist back in November that ranted a bit about launching “empty shells” and both Chris Garrett and Chris McLeod have also written on the subject here at Performancing. Ahmed Bilal also penned a great bootstrapping guide that’s worth a read if you missed it first time around.

It’s somewhat of a soul destroyer to launch a minger, but we still seem to have an awful lot of folks that think you just have to “build it and they will come”, which unfortunately for most, is just not the case.

Building, launching and then maintaining a blog is hard work, period.

If you have any insights, tips or anecdotes on the subject of launching a blog, please share!

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