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Archives for February 2009

Blog Marketing Idea: Hire a Rockstar Blogger (Or At Least Get One to Guest Post for You)

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I came across a 2007 interview on TIME about the film Lions for Lambs. The movie starred Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who were all part of the interview. The interviewer noted that 2007 was perhaps a year of franchise films, which were mostly not star-driven, and asked if this marked the first non-star era of Hollywood. I found Tom’s quick response quite profound and interesting, and particularly relevant to the business that I’m in today.

I don’t agree with that, because it’s the stars who are promoting those pictures, that get people interested to see those pictures. You’re neglecting the value of that talent.

I would agree that the value of actors and actresses is not just in the on-screen presence, but is also evident in their marketing pull. Sure, you can find a lot of actors out there who are more of actors rather than stars. These guys could probably provide even more depth of experience and passion in acting than many of the superstars we know. But to the mind of a moviegoer, star value still matters, or at least it helps win a potential viewer’s initial impression of a movie.

Perhaps it’s the same with blogs.

If a rockstar blogger were to announce that he’s launching a new blog, then his reputation would be one big factor in helping tip the scales toward some success in terms of traffic and readership (and even money, if that is the goal). Or if a rockstar blogger were to guest post on a relatively unknown blog, then he might be able to pull up readership there, both for the duration of guest-posting and in the longer run.

I would even go further to say this also applies in other aspects of blogging. How about design? Rockstar designers do have their own following, and people would not miss the chance to download the latest, greatest, themes from their favorite designers, even if it involved paying money for subscription or purchase. How about blog software and plugins? Rockstar developers do have their own following, and people would gladly download new software releases, as if these little pieces of code were sent from heaven.

I’m not much for the rockstar mentaliy. A bit conservative, I usually go for a more modest approach, talking to people, building relationships, and trying to find value in the ordinary.

This probably makes me a movie director who only films for oneself. Or an indie producer who doesn’t care what the world says–or the box office for that matter–just as long as he or she cuts that masterpiece fit only for the eyes of a worthy few. But hey, maybe one day I’ll get to win that coveted golden statuette.

Mr. Cruise, if you’re reading this, how’d you like to guest post on Performancing?

What To Expect With WordPress 2.8

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Development for WordPress 2.8 is well under way. With a tentative date scheduled for March 9th (I highly believe a release won’t happen on this day) let’s take a look at what we can expect in this new version.

  • Improved Widget Interface
  • Improved Performance
  • New Theme Browser/Installer
  • One Click Theme Upgrades
  • Use Of Simple Pie Instead Of MagPie RSS To Parse Feeds In The Dashboard
  • Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
  • Press This Bookmarklet Improvements
  • Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
  • Add Sticky to list of post states
  • Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors

You can check out the entire slate of features lined up for the next version of WordPress here. Anything you’ve seen that your excited for?

Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r27 Pushed Out

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Just wanted to pass along another update related to Fantastico Deluxe which is the software bundled with cPanel on most webhosting accounts which enables users to easily install popular PHP based scripts. Here are the updates this time around.

Updates:

– Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.19 -> 1.4.20

– Moodle: 1.9.3 -> 1.9.4

– Noahs Classifieds: V8 (2.4.1) -> V8 (3.2.0)

– PHPlist: 2.10.8 -> 2.10.9

– WordPress: 2.7 -> 2.7.1

If you used Fantastico to install any of these scripts, be sure to keep an eye out for upgrades.

Blogger Appreciation Contest – Call For Nominations

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Bloggers pour their heart and soul into their blogs and often get very little in return. As a whole, I think it’s safe to say that we’re an under-appreciated group who work very hard and what we do. Most of us blog for free and the only thing that keeps us going is the thrill of interacting with our readers or the rare time when we break a big news story or get recognized by other blogs for an insightful commentary.

But the fact is that even the most popular bloggers barely make enough money to scrape by. There are really only a handful of people who actually make a full wage off blogging.

Cell Phones .org thinks that bloggers don’t get enough appreciation and for that reason they are running a Bloggers Appreciation Contest. The contest will reward the three winners with some really cool prizes:

First Prize: a full year’s worth of your cell phone bill (up to $1000)
Second Prize: free cell phone (does not include plan)
Third Prize: $100 gift certificate to use at Cell Phones .org

Nominations for the contest will be accepted until February 28th 2009. Blogs that have been nominated will then ask their readers to show their appreciation by voting for them over the next few weeks. Voting will be held from March 1st until March 17th. Each visitor can vote once per day during the voting period.

To nominate your blog or any other blog, go to the Cell Phones.org nomination page.

Perfcast Episode 25 – Open Mic Night

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Episode 25 of Perfcast featured a wide ranging conversation from online advertising to the state of the economy. David Peralty was unable to join me as co-host but a few friends of the show decided to call in and so, I simply recorded our conversation. There is not a lot of talk about blogging in this episode but we did discuss a number of things that are affecting us in the real world such as the economy. We all discussed the various ways in which we are dealing with the situation in terms of jobs and generating revenue. Hopefully next week, we’ll be back on track to talk about blogging and related topics.

LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour 7 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – March 5th, 2009 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode25.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 25 OF PERFCAST:

SEOmoz On Canonical URL Tag

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Randfish over at SEOmoz.org has a great write up including a Q&A session about the ‘canonical‘ tag that is used to tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that a URL should be treated as though it were a copy of another URL and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL. Although similar to the way in which a 301 redirect works, there are some differences which Randfish explains:

  • Whereas a 301 redirect re-points all traffic (bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for engines, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions.
  • A 301 is a much stronger signal that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. While the engines are certainly planning to support this new tag and trust the intent of site owners, there will be limitations. Content analysis and other algorithmic metrics will be applied to ensure that a site owner hasn’t mistakenly or manipulatively applied the tag, and we certainly expect to see mistaken use of the tag, resulting in the engines maintaining those separate URLs in their indices (meaning site owners would experience the same problems noted below).
  • 301s carry cross-domain functionality, meaning you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This is NOT THE CASE with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it will carry over across subfolders and subdomains).

If you’re into SEO, you’ll definitely want to read up on the proper usage of this canonical tag.

What’s Your Favorite Twitter Client?

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When the world was younger, and so was Twitter, I became fascinated with selecting the best Twitter client for my several computers.

I first encountered Twitteriffic, which was a lightweight, visually appealing piece of software. It gave you tweeting sounds when you get new messages. You could customize the color scheme. You can even set transparency. It was free, at least for a while (then you could opt to either pay or get ads every few minutes or so).

But it was Mac-only. And in my wide array of computers in my so-called development lab (a.k.a. home office), I only had one Mac. And since it was one of my older machines, it was hardly my main work computer. It wasn’t my most portable computer, either; that honor went to my cutesy little Asus EeePC, the first generation of which ran Linux.

And so on my Windows-powered computers, I had to scour the web for a good client. There was Twitterlicious, Twhirl, and a host of others. They were cute and customizable, too. But in my opinion, none was as solid and lightweight as Twitteriffic. And I had to either install a certain iteration of .NET or Adobe Air to run these pieces of software. I didn’t want overhead bloat! Oh, wait, wasn’t Windows itself just that? At any rate, I just wanted something to run as light as possible.

And this still didn’t address my need to be multi-platform. On my linux machines, I wanted something as easy to install as apt-get, which was, to say, very optimistic on my part. And so I tried Twitterfox, which was an add-on for Firefox, which–you guessed it!–ran on Windows, OS X and even Linux (but of course!).

Twitterfox wasn’t as elegant, though. In hindsight, I wasn’t even sure if it notified you of new tweets. Not that I needed notifying, as the folks I follow post updates ever so often, anyway.

And then it hit me. What if I stuck to just using the Web interface? Twitter clients have this knack for taking over your life. The moment Twitteriffic’s birdies tweet, you get an impulse to open the notification window, if doesn’t pop up automatically already, with your friends’ and their cats’ trivial concerns.

So I’m sticking to the Web client. And when I’m mobile, I don’t bother to use standalone apps, as I also prefer m.twitter.com. I like life simple.

Will I still change my mind? Maybe. Send over some links to cool Twitter clients and I might try them out (and even review them here). But I’d like something that helps me get the most out of microblogging, not something that would take hold of my life. I like life simple.