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Archives for August 2006
Social Bookmarking Sites: A Breakdown
I read a recent post on Performancing.com that a number of bloggers weren’t using the social bookmarking sites available and since I have been active on a few and a lurker on the rest I thought I would give a breakdown of the sites I have linked to from this blog.
First of all, in WordPress I use WP-Notables to make the system – its easy and takes little to no thought. Just activate the plug-in and add the 1 line of PHP into your comments.php for your theme (or anywhere else you want to drop the links).
1) del.icio.us – strangely enough this is the site I am the least familiar with. It is pretty straight forward but until recently was mainly focused on technology and technological issues– apparently they have expanded beyond that now. The system is fairly strict– don’t try setting up 10 account on the same IP and voting yourself to the top– they will be on it rather quickly. Also, the frontpage is controlled. (If by editors or by friend groups has never really been determined but the top posted contribute the majority of the posts on the front page.)
2) Digg.com — Digg also amazingly started as a tech geek site as it still primarily focused at that group. Digg’s user base seems to be about the same people that you will find on myspace– a young somewhat savvy audience– again something like 60% of the posts on the front page are from the top 10 users– so the system is rather difficult to break into.
3) Spurl.net – While it isn’t my intention to “rip on” any one site it seems to me that Spurl is completely over run with spam– the things that make it to the top “hot sites” seem to be garbage. I may be wrong about this but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of commenting system which makes other sites so appealing. .Commenting is a major part of social networking.
4) Wists.com is a social shopping bookmark site– it allows you to simply and easily create adds– so easy in fact that the entire page is flooded with ebay ads. I don’t know if real people even use this site.
5) Simpy.com — while the site is pretty basic looking it lacks a major feature that seems to have eluded this social bookmarking sits and their quest for stickiness: comments. Also, from judging traffic stats it seems to be a site over-run by spam.
6) Newsvine.com – This is probably my second favorite social bookmarking site. The layout is professional and clean- it is probably the future of social bookmarking as it reaches mainstream audiences. They are very much again the self-promotion of your site and will flag you site fairly quickly if you submit yourself to it. It has pictures (which is rare on these sites) it also looks like a professional news site. Fairly popular with a older (and rather political crowd) I can see FoxNews purchasing this site for some reason.
7) BlinkList.com — fairly nice looking site. Again, I don’t know how many actual people use it– it is essentially a digg rip off stealing pretty much the entire layout.
8) Furl.net — the site is okay, you have to be a member to see what others are bookmarking. As best I can tell it has a very small active user base.
9) Reddit.com — (the reason I am writing this) If I had to guess I’d say eventually reddit (if it stays about where it is now and doesn’t draw too much of a crowd) will probably be the next “slash-dot” (*note: I don’t mean this in a replace slash-dot kind of way but the same sort of people will be attracted here) Very web savvy. They don’t click ads. Which is actually a strong discouragement for spammers. If a mod/editor votes your story down to a zero it disappears. They are after a very specific kind of news (and other fun stuff)
10) Blogmarks.net — Blog bookmarks mainly for developers (web 2.0ish developers at that)
11) myweb.yahoo.com — seems to be pretty much garbage. I’m shocked. I have gotten asked to fill out the same survey on how they could improve their service 100 times
12) Ma.Gnolia — uses a tag cloud– isn’t the easiest site to navigate, has a few “featured” writers but overall it just doesn’t have the same appeal or stickiness as the others. The Usability is a big factor in this.
13) Netscape.com — the front page is controlled by editors. They want to pay top diggers to dig on their site. The site has a huge volume of hits everyday but I would like to see the bounce rate and I am just not sure social bookmarking will appeal to the average person using netscape.com as the default homepage for at least 2 more years.
**Please Note: Do Not Spam these sites– it will completely remove the value from these services**
This is a basic overview and is up for editing if anyone has other sites or information add it to the comments.
Microsoft Live Writer Review
It’s pretty much well documented that I am a Microsoft fan. I owe a substantial portion of my career to their software. Got to say though I had mixed feelings about them developing a blogging tool. More and more of Microsoft is getting a clue about blogging but that doesn’t necessarily mean they get bloggers quite yet. Also for obvious reasons, we are known in part for our own (brilliant) blogging tool.
My expectations going in were that it would be
- slick
- easy to install
- huge
- filled with proprietary “stuff”, from markup to interpretation of feeds
- possibly slow
Well it is easy to install, not particularly huge (5mb?) though on a slow connection you might not agree. Standards aren’t stretched so as I would notice, someone with more XHTML knowledge will have to correct me if I am way off mark here. Seemed fairly nippy on my machine, nothing too taxing. The experience overall is quite familiar to Office users which I am sure was the intent.
It’s not politically correct but I don’t care that they don’t support Macs. I really don’t get the whining about that. Microsoft isn’t a charity, they don’t have to support a platform if they don’t want to, especially one that takes away custom from their own products. They don’t support Linux, Beos, Amiga, Vic20 or my toaster either funnily enough.
PFF has established a basic feature list now that any blogging tool has to have, natively or through extension. Even with the ever-growing list of features our users keep coming back with some great ideas for new ones. It is not enough now to release a tool that only has wysiwyg blogging capability, it needs to do a fair amount more. This package meets those criteria without getting carried away. The only feature I have found so far that had me shaking my head was the ability to add maps – a niche feature I imagine!
Installation consists of downloading and running the install package, it sets up an icon in your programs list and you are ready for business. I already have more blogs than I know what to do with so I elected to setup the program with one of my test blogs. The good news is the detection process works smoothly, even my Drupal test blog, unfortunately not to the extent of being able to retrieve my categories or loading my old posts.
Image handling is particularly nicely done, allowing alignment, resizing, drag and drop insert and upload using the newMediaObject API. If your blog doesn’t support image uploads you can also add FTP accounts. Wierd thing is, although it did upload my picture it added a link rather than an img tag – strange! I’m not sure if that is down to my blog or the software.
The important consideration is would I swap PFF for this? Unsurprisingly the answer is no, but not out of bias; I find the ability to blog the current page too valuable, I like having my blog editing right in my browser. Until Microsoft integrates their new tool with IE (which I am sure they have thought about) I will keep using Firefox and Performancing for my posting needs.
Freelancers: Never Rely On A Single Income Source
So. You’re a serious blogger now because you secured your first blogging client. Seasoned freelancers know about the 80/20 rule: the bulk (80%) of your revenue will come from the least number (20%) of your clients. It’s sometimes called the 70/30 rule.
However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of the Long Tail book and website, says that the Internet turns the rule on its head for some types of digital media, in specific situations, thus giving certain content more sales life. Or at least, that’s my interpretation.
But the fact is, in any business, it’s generally easier to secure repeat clients than get new ones. But unless you (1) are a very disciplined saver, (2) have great faith in your biggest clients, or (3) have a partial stake in a venture, you probably do not want to rely on a single blogging client.
The Internet, and services like this new bloggers-for-hire/ Exchange community that Nick and the P-boys have set up, will give you a a better chance at finding more clients. But in practice, at least initially in your blogging career, you may not have a lot of choice about the number of clients. That’s mainly because blogging for pay is a relatively new phenomenon. So you have to consider alternate income sources.
Blogging/ writing monetizing options include running affiliate programs on your own sites or writing your own articles on the topics you are writing for clients. (With contextual or CPA/ CPM ads.)
Finally, take it from me. If you’ve never been a freelancer before, and are planning on relying entirely on your blogging skills to earn a living, learn how to budget. Save your extra money in an interest-bearing bank account – say an online savings account. If you have a banner year, and have the wherewithal to invest in stocks or mutual funds, you might consider that as well. Because pools do dry up sometimes, here are some important freelancing tips. [via MediaBistro]
P.S. MediaBistro, a great resource site for freelance writers, has a short article about negotiating your way to greater pay. The rates apply to print articles, but the advice applies to blog writers as well. Just keep in mind that at this stage, blogs and websites, on average, do not generate enough ad revenue to pay the same kind of rates. There is an immense difference, unless you’re copyblogging, which will require crack writing skills.
Revenge of the Bloggers
What would you do if someone wronged you in a blatant way? You would probably have words and if that didn’t produce an apology would more than likely as a next step blog about it, right? And probably invite your blogger friends to also blog about it? Of course a lot of them will anyway, particularly if what the dude did was dumb, damaging or both. And of course their readers might well pick up the story. Then what if the guy, instead of getting the point threatens you with lawyers and all kinds of legal threats?
While posed as a hypothetical question, this has actually a basis in a real story that is playing out. Kris Krug first blogged about his problem in February. He had been contacted that some of his photographs (quite noticeable because of his style is quite distinctive) turning up on another guys portfolio. Kris blogged about it, the pictures disappeared, everyone wondered at the cheek of the guy (often on their blogs) then got on with their lives.
End of story right?
Turns out the alleged photo thief didn’t like the fact that his name was now turning up for a unsavoury Google result; Kris’ blog. So what did he do? Called his lawyer …
Now, this being the blogosphere what didn’t happen is Kris roll over and take the content down and say “please mr don’t sue me”. Actually, he posted the legal letter up on Flickr. And, this being the blogosphere, lots of people thought “no way!” and posted to their own blogs, of course using the lawyer-using-alleged-photo-thief’s name (as you do).
Rather than a small problem that might have been resolved amicably he now has a much bigger problem that might never be cleared up. If you wanted to get professional photography gigs you probably wouldn’t want potential clients seeing these sorts of search results.
So, interesting story, justice prevails, etc. End of. Right?
Well in this case it seems from where I am sitting things played out much as you would expect and the guy got something amounting to what he deserved. (Perhaps a bit more than really necessary but it does look like he acted like a twit then escalated the whole thing way more than he needed to).
What concerns me is the scale and ease that this man’s professional reputation has been shredded. Even if he deserved it, how much chance has he of ever showing his face as a professional photographer? People forget, Google less so. Take out the scenario and personalities involved in this particular case and just look at the cause and effect, that is a pretty big scary stick bloggers wield isn’t it?
How about next time someone is set up? Or falsely accused. What happens then? Searches for some innocent persons name show all sorts of sensational lies. You could say there are laws to protect the innocent in those cases, but that is assuming you have the time and money, but also that the sites and authors are in geographies where you can even go after them.
My worry is with bloggers as judge, jury and executioner, rule of the lynch mob will become the norm with very little anyone can do about it.
Back That Thing Up: Have A Secondary Internet Access
Your blogging clients may or may not have a mission-critical posting schedule, but if they do, consider what you have to do to not let them down. As I learned the hard way recently, having a second or third way to access the Internet is often a necessity.
My blogging activities are back into the 12-16 hours/day territory again because of new projects. But while writing an article may take me only 15-30 minutes, it’s all the research and the hyperlinking that increases total overall time spent per blog post. So I surf the net a lot, scanning and mentally filtering over 800 web feeds (some weeks) and countless articles, as part of my regular weekly research.
Recently, my regular Internet access was down for a few days. My alumni account at the local university had run out, as well. Fortunately, my father offered me use of his broadband access for a couple of days, or I would definitely have been letting down a big client.
So when posting articles daily is mission-critical to a client, make sure that you have back-up online access.
Back That Thing Up: Keep A Private Article Bank
If you are writing for a number of clients, or even just one, you’re likely to want to keep track of your work. Why not create a private article bank, in the form of a password-protected weblog?
Depending on your uses, this article bank could be on your laptop/ desktop computer’s local web server, or a hidden subdomain somewhere. I prefer the latter, so that you can give access to a client if they need a back up copy. Either form is a backup copy for you.
Having a private article bank gives you a quick way to search older posts without skewing the pageviews of your client’s website. As well, if you post to your live article bank on the same day as to your client’s website, you have a record of your work.
For example, one site I write for asks for exclusive rights for one year. I can easily check my bank for articles in a given month and see if any are about to be “freed up”. Depending on your blogging platform, it might also be easy to keep track of which articles you’ve been paid for. (WordPress, for example, allows you to add custom variables to each post. You could a “paid status” field.)
In general, an article bank will come in hand either when you have a lot of clients, or when you have long-term projects with a few clients. It’s a supplement to the article log I mentioned previously. And you can easily see what your productivity has been in a given month.
Back That Thing Up: Keep A Simple Log of All Your Posts
Most of the time, when writing for a client, I have occasion in future posts to link back to older posts. To facilitate that, it’s a good idea to record post titles and URLs for every blog post or webpage that you write, whether for yourself or a client.
Use a simple Excel spreadsheet on your computer. In addition to a column each for post “title” and “URL”, keep a column containing either a short description of the post or keywords, for reference. It’ll help you quickly decide whether or not you want to link to it.
I don’t recommend a web-based spreadsheet such as ZohoSheet, in case you temporarily don’t have Internet access but need link info for an blog post you’re working on.