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Archives for April 2009

Keep On Top Of Trends With TrendPedia

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With everything that takes place on the web, keeping track of trends can be a tough process. Although Google provides a Trend search of their own, TrendPedia looks to have its place in the trend search market. The front page of TrendPedia showcases the hottest trends from the previous month as well as popular trends from the previous week.

At the top of the site, you are provided three text fields which will add combine all three trend searches into a comparable graph chart. In my test drive, I compared MovableType, WordPress, and LiveJournal.

For whatever reason, I could not get any trend results for MovableType. For LiveJournal and WordPress, the chart showcases WordPress in the lead with 68% of articles around WordPress with 32% dedicated to LiveJournal. Search results for each trend are shown in their own tab at the bottom of the site and consists mostly of blog posts. This means you can use TrendPedia to get a grasp on blogs staying abreast of the latest trends.

I think Google Trends has a nicer interface and a cleaner way of presenting the information but I find TrendPedia cool because of the mentions of blog post in the search results. At any rate, it’s nice to have more than one site in this market.

Is your blog authentic?

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Hi, happy weekend! I’d like to share with you a little thought that borders on being a devil’s advocate when it comes to the new media industry. I wanted to zero in on the talk about “authenticity” — and ask you to reflect on these questions:

Is your money making blog authentic, or is it a fake Problogger.net?

Is your entertainment blog authentic, or is it just a fake Perez Hilton?

Is your tech blog authentic, or is it a fake Engadget?

With thousands of blogs created everyday, what makes yours authentic? In the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, authors James Gilmore and Joe Pine expressed how at times we create products that try too hard to emulate the good practices of something superior, it ends up becoming an inferior copycat.

When we were young, we were brought up to think that we were the unique child that filled mom and dad with love and joy. As we grew older we realized that we needed to fit in a social group lest we suffer the social consequences of being called an outcast. The same applies to when we worked for a company and the attitudes, values and business acumen were passed down enabling us to behave in a certain way. When we entered the blogging industry, we learned that there were certain rules to finding great keywords. We learned how the big sites accumulated traffic. We learned link baiting, keyword research, template design optimization and many more.

Do the hundreds of thousands of blog templates truly emanate who we are? Do we sacrifice our writing style for optimizing our blog post for keyword search? Do we write about topics that contextually yield more money than our true passions?

These are general questions, and wise guys can easily contest most of these. But I must drive my point down — in today’s blogs, how do we know that something is authentic?

How many Twitter accounts do you have, and how do you manage them?

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I’ve realised that the number of Twitter accounts I own is rising to compete quite happily with the number of active email addresses and domain names I own.

Not surprising, really, for as well as my personal Twitter account I have a number of identities tied to the various blogs I run. Admittedly, many of those function on autopilot, thanks to services like Twitterfeed. However, I do like to inject my own personality into them from time to time by manually tweeting.

Herein lies the problem.

My desktop Twitter client of choice at present is Tweetdeck, but (unless I’m missing something really obvious) there’s no easy way to switch accounts.

I know some desktop clients do allow this, but I’ve not found a reliable way of doing so. A couple of weeks ago I accidentally tweeted a reply to someone from the wrong account (via the web) because I’d forgotten who I was logged in as. Fortunately it didn’t really matter as it was strangely on-topic, but it could have been embarrassing or just off-topic.

If you’re a single account Twitter user, this won’t be a problem to you. My question is to those of you with two or more accounts. How many do you have, and how do you best manage them at your desktop and when mobile?

75 Twitter Icons All In One Pack

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There are a large number of different icon sets available dedicated to the Twitter bird but Timothy Blake of CreativeNerds.co.uk has stepped it up a notch by compiling a myriad of Twitter icon sets into one very large icon pack containing over 75 images of the famed Twitter bird. One cool thing about this post is that you can easily see how many different interpretations people have of the bird. For the most part, it’s fat with a big head. There are a few variations of the bird, one I especially like is the chiseled, tough looking bird which is more aqua colored than blue. At any rate, have fun showcasing your twitter love with these icons.

All About Google Authority

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Chris Garret who has been a long time contributor here to Performancing.com has published a great writeup covering just about all aspects of what it takes to gain authority on Google. In his white paper approach, Chris covers trust, influences, good behaviour, traffic, and much more as all of it relates to your authority on Google. He even includes a visual aid at the end of the article which is a Google authority mind map.

People look at Wikipedia and think they rank so highly and so often because of pagerank, or perhaps because they have a gajillion links, but there is another powerful element we can overlook if we are not careful.

Once relevance, links and keywords are taken into account, the true engines of search engine success are now believed to be “Trust” and “Authority”. But what do those phrases mean in this context, and how do you get more of the good stuff?

How to build Google Authority.

How To Breathe Life Into an Inactive Forum?

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In my opinion, a forum is one of the best ways to build and manage communities online. Truth be told, I’ve actually found myself to have been addicted to forums at certain points in my life. I’ve actually made real life friends and business contacts from the various forums I’ve been a member of. These days, though, while I don’t feel compelled to checking for new posts every half hour, I still visit my favorite forums at least once a day to check on new conversations and reply to ones I feel I can contribute to.

I find that niche-based forums bring together people of like interest. But sometimes, this extends past interests. Long after i’ve given up on some hobbies, for instance, I still visit the forums I’ve been part of just for the conversations. Even if the technologies and software being discussed in certain forums had been long obsolete, some might still be active because of the virtual friendships formed.

Sadly, however, not all forums can survive the test of time. For one, members might move on to other interests. Or in the case of forums that mostly involve professionals and enthusiasts in certain fields, people can become busy with their own concerns.

I wonder what could help breathe back life into forums that have slowed down. Should the forum give incentives for new members (such as freebies like ebooks and other downloads)? Or maybe great content can be dug up and re-posted as fresh. Should the moderators get in touch with each individual member to check how they are? Or in the case of exclusive, closed forums, will being open to the general public help in revitalizing discussions?

I think netizens these days have grown to have very short attention spans, especially with character limitations like those imposed by certain microblogging services. Will forums survive in the long run?

Help Test Out This Plugin

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In the WordPress Tavern forum, I mentioned how I would like to see a plugin that would allow me to set a minimum amount of words a comment must be in order for it to be published. I’m sick and tired of the comments that have no meaning such as ‘Hi, Great Site‘ or ‘I’ve Subscribed To This blog‘. I’d rather have a way to simply discard these comments before they even reach my moderation queue.

Will Anderson stepped up the plate after some conversation as to what to create and he has since released the first beta of the plugin here. With this plugin, you can configure a minimum character or word limit before a comment is published. You can also enable client side javascript so when the end user tries to publish a comment not matching the required criteria, they’ll receive a popup saying so.

So far on my site, the plugin appears to be working just fine but give it a shot and let Will know what you think.

EarnersTalk – New Community To Discuss Monetization

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David Peralty who has a few guest posts under his belt here at Performancing.com has launched a new community of his called EarnersTalk. EarnersTalk.com is a community forum focused on you guessed it, earning money. The first thing you’ll notice upon visiting the forum is how great the design looks. I don’t think you can go wrong with a vanilla, blue and green color scheme. Everything from Display Advertising to Pay Per Click to SEO is covered on the forum.

There is even a marketplace where you can sell websites, domain names, or offer services to the community. I’ve recently become a member of the forum and I know that with Davids experience, I’m betting I’ll learn a thing a to concerning monetization as I don’t want to make the same mistakes he did.

David has told me that he has big plans for the site so if you get the chance, head on over and register your account. Lets help each other make some coin in this bootstrap economy.