There’s a few interesting stories and posts out there for your Monday morning elevenses, here they are in no particular order. If you have tips or links for performancing you can send them to [email protected]
Chitika on “Curiosity Clicks”
After Chitika’s ad unit tweaks to address “curiosity clicks”, they’re making an attempt to explain things on their blog. Interestingly, this opening paragraph just strikes a wrong chord with me:
So called “curiosity clicks†are those clicks generated by users more interested in checking out the eMiniMalls interface, or just curious about the products being promoted, etc., as opposed to clicks on merchant links leading to the respective merchant sites where users can directly purchase the product if they choose to.
Possibly that’s just bad wording, as i’d have thought that customers interested in checking out products was a pretty worthwhile click no? We have an interview scheduled to go out with the Chitika CEO Venkat Kolluri shortly, so watch out for that.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging
And they are?
- Using Free Blog Hosting Services
- Ignoring the Basic Principles of Good Web Site Design and Usability
- Being the Jack Of All Trades
- Not Posting Regularly
- Publishing Badly Written Posts
- Spamming and Stealing
- Failing to Establish a Personality
That post is an absolute gem, plenty of good advice in there — im particularly in agreement with #1 and #3
13 Tips on Asking other Bloggers for Links
Darren’s 13 tips are good, for me the trick is simple: Stop thinking about it from your point of view, and what you want, and picture it from the other persons perspective. Focus on what they want, and what you can give them. And sheesh, he’s so right (quoting Scoble) with this one: “Never beg a blogger for links. Say, instead, “here’s something you might find interesting.” That one absolutely nails it as far as drawing other bloggers attention to your posts goes.
Note the language “drawing other bloggers attention to your posts” — it’s soooooo much better than “asking for links” don’t you think?
W3C Feed Validator
Via Niall comes news that the W3C finally have a feed validator. It’s about bloody time!
Tehnorati Improvements
And finally, Dave Sifry posts on the recent improvements to Technorati. Now if they could only respond promptly to advertiser concerns, they’d have something…