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It’s Kinda Like Regular Blogging, But It’s Live

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Live blogging is the new thing for bloggers to do. It isn’t particularly useful unless you are actually blogging a live event, but if you are, it is an excellent way to generate some buzz around your blog. It is also an excellent way to draw new readers to your blog, and this is especially true if the event is very popular within your niche. The point is, live blogging is a really interesting concept if done correctly.

Most recently, blogs like CNET have dedicated resources to cover the WorldWide Developer’s Conference live. Other places like Engadget, Gizmodo, and Wired also participated by live blogging the conference.

There are several tools you can utilize to start live blogging today. That is what I will be discussing now.

Cover It Live

Cover It Live is a service which allows you to take any existing page and make it into a creative and unique live blogging experience for you and your readers. You sign up for an account (for free), and after filling in some information, you are able to setup a live blogging session.

It requires about a minute to setup your live blogging session—requiring a title, date, time, and time zone—and then you are provided with a small amount of code that can be placed where you want the viewer to see the live blogging take place. It can be placed pretty much anywhere that any normal content can be placed, but this area must support IFrames.

Additional features include the ability to add panelists and producers, allow people to be notified of when the live blogging session begins, have readers leave comments, insert polls, display advertisements, and share other forms of media like images, videos, and audio.

When all is said and done, you are left with a window which represents a chat room. This area is the place where you can, essentially, do your live blogging. There is no refreshing required by the readers, and this is one of the most important features of Cover It Live.

This is certainly one of the more simpler and effective ways to put on a live blogging event.

Check the bottom of this page to see what Cover It Live looks like.

SubEthaEdit

SubEthaEdit, a tool I recently discussed here at Performancing, allows you to edit any document in real-time with collaborators. While, in itself, not being a complete solution for live blogging, it is an excellent tool to collaborate in a live blogging event.

Multiple users could join an editing session and write/edit the document together with ease. The process is easier than you would imagine, but once you see it in action, you quickly realize the true potential. However, as far as live blogging, this is where the tool ends on its usefulness. You could take the document and paste it to a server, and, truth be told, it is better than nothing at all.

SubEthaEdit is only useful for those of you working in a group of people covering the same event. It only solves part of the problem though, and, in many aspects, if you are willing to sacrifice control, Cover It Live might be the better solution.

WordPress, Drupal, and most other CMSs

For most of us, WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, Movable Type, and other various content management systems will be what we have to work with. While each of these systems should support Cover It Live, it might be in your best interest to cover an event by constantly editing a dedicated page/post within the CMS. It certainly isn’t the prettiest or most efficient way to handle this—it makes collaboration fairly difficult—but you work with what you are given; no one can doubt you for that.

Live Blogging on Performancing

I decided to create a live blogging session for Performancing with Cover It Live. Check back here around 1:00 PM EST. I don’t really have a topic, but I’ll try to make it somewhat interesting!

If you have any experience with live blogging, please let everyone know how it went. Any problems? Did it help drive traffic to your blog?

Research Resources and Tips for Truly Unique Articles

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If you want to create original content, you are going to have to do some old fashioned original research. It is a time consuming work, but if you want to write a great article, it must be done. It also helps to prepare for writing lengthy articles—you don’t want to continually break away from the creative process.

There are three phases to how I do research. Each phase has a different purpose, and I do it this way because it is very effective. This is not rocket science, but it helps to develop a rhythm for your work process.

Gathering

The gathering phase, for lack of a better name, is the time spent gathering content. The sources I use will heavily affect the contents of my article. Here are a few places to begin your search for your next great article:

Search engines:

Books:

Videos:

Newspapers:

News Agencies:

Encyclopedias:

Along with those, you could also use a blog as a source—shocking, right?

Regardless, your sources should be legitimate. This is also true if you are making bold claims against a person or company. You want to get praise—not lawsuits—for your hard work. Bloggers are not immune to the judicial system.

Evaluation

After I have gathered my content, it is time to evaluate it. I will quickly evaluate content to see if it is of any use to me. I’m a fast reader, and I can tell if an article is going to be any good pretty fast. I will discard any content that isn’t useful, and, if needed, I’ll go back to find additional content.

In-Depth Research

With all the preparation (which, as always, is very important) out of the way, it is time to study everything I have gathered. Thus begins the most time consuming process of writing a truly unique and original article. Using an application that allows me to keep notes (or even a simple notepad) is always ideal (this topic is for another article entirely), but every person is unique.

Regardless, this article is aimed at those who really put in a lot of effort into their research. These types of articles are the ones that receive notice and respect.

Admittedly, it is hard work—it certainly isn’t the most exciting thing someone could be doing. You will only feel great to have put all that time and effort when your content is found and appreciated by readers. But that is a decision you have to make. If you are going to be the best, you better put in the hard work—otherwise you could just be like every other blogger within the blogosphere.

WordPress Disabling XML-RPC By Default With 2.6—Good or Bad?

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XML-RPC is a protocol that allows third-party applications like Windows Live Writer and Ecto to post to a system supporting it. In this case, WordPress is the application that supports XML-RPC, but the WordPress development team has decided that they will disable XML-RPC by default starting with WordPress 2.6.

Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software, LLC., believes that it might help with reducing security risks, but it might have adverse effects for those who use applications that depend on XML-RPC:

But in my opinion, there are also good arguments to be made for rejecting the change as a damaging and misguided solution.

First, and obviously near to my heart, is the fact that this marginalizes remote clients. For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way. Historically, the remote editor interface is already compromised such that remote editors do not have access to all the same functionality as the web interface. With this change in place, things get even worse. While a screen-scraping application will easily log in and authenticate a fragile WordPress session via the web interface, the well-behaved API clients will be refused access by default. All in the name of improving security.

Second, and probably most important, is that this is not a fundamental security improvement.

As a user who personally likes to make use of the XML-RPC system, I must say that I am disappointed with this decision. I am not exactly sure of the security implications, but I do agree that the system should be fixed, not simply disabled by default.

Daniel also brought up made an excellent point about the security of WordPress:

Also worth considering: if a service is disabled by default for security considerations, what message does that send to people who choose to, or who are encouraged to turn the service back on? It sets up a perception of insecurity which may not even be warranted. If the remote publishing interfaces are insecure, they should be fixed, not merely disabled!

Well, all that reflects my thoughts exactly.

Daniel does benefit from having the XML-RPC system enabled—he is the founder of the company that develops MarsEdit. It is in his company’s best interest for this feature to be enabled by default. So, there is a conflict of interest, but even though there is a conflict, I believe his points to be valid and his words to be truthful.

Of course, you could always just enable the XML-RPC option. It is fine for those who run their own blog, but in other instances, it could cause some serious issues and confusion.

What do you think about all this? Many of you who use desktop, browser, or any other third-party application to post content to WordPress will be affected. Voice your opinion!

The Weekly Buzz: What Is This Thing? Podcasting, Bad Commentators, and More

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The Hive, a Performancing project, was created to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog and network with the pros. The Hive still continues to grow, and there are many great things being discussed within.

What Is It?

Performancing Hive is a place where you can talk about blogging, advertising, writing, search engine optimizing, monetizing, and anything else related to this business we call blogging. It really is a place where professionals and those hopeful of going professional can bounce around ideas and talk about our passion.

If you have questions, we have the answers.

Newest Member

I’d like to welcome blabrmouth of Blabrmouth.com to the Hive. Thanks for being our newest member, and thanks for supporting the Hive!

Podcasting

Plenty of questions about podcasting have been arising. Questions about tools, plugins, hosts, and more. Podcasters, we got you covered in the Hive. Plenty of our members have podcasting experience, and a quite a few maintain weekly podcasts as well. If you need help with podcasting, join up and ask away.

The Know-It-All Commentator

One of our members had a problem with that usual I-am-gonna-screw-with-you-and-your-blog type person. We were able to help the person out.

If you have someone that is constantly disrupting your blog, try to reason with that person via email or by other means privately. It can sometimes be as simple as that. Do not provoke further action by insulting/annoying this person, but instead, ask politely for the situation to come to an end.

Also, be sure to modify or remove any content which is not true. I am of the opinion that comments should not be removed. There will always be those who are dissatisfied. However, there comes a time when something just does not belong. It is your blog—you run it, and you protect yourself.

Join Us Now

Joining Performancing Hive is a great investment. It is $10 a month, and that breaks down to little over 30 cents a day. If you are a serious blogger, it is seriously a worthwhile investment. Join the Hive.

Performancing’s Most Memorable—January 2008

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There is quite an impressive amount of quality content that has been written in the past for Performancing. Just like any great site, we want to make sure that our great content doesn’t get lost simply because new great content is written. It would almost be criminal to do otherwise. To ensure this doesn’t happen, I am proud to present “Performancing’s Most Memorable.”

Over the next few months, I am going to be linking to some of Performancing’s best articles for each month. To kick things off, logically, I will start with January of this year. Once we are all caught up, I will then do the same at the end of each following month until we reach the end of the year, and when that happens, I will have an impressive article to recap the entire year.

If you are new to blogging, you’ll want to check out every single link within this post.

If you want to be a great blogger, you need to learn from the best. With our reader’s help, several bloggers were observed for their efforts. We begin with one of Performancing’s most memorable moments—the Performancing Blog Awards 2007.

Awards

Performancing Blog Awards 2007 Winners

Interviews

Performancing Interviews Jesse Nachtigal of Cigar Jack

Performancing Interviews Jon Phillips of FreelanceFolder

Monetization

7 Lessons From the Blogging Trenches: Cracking $200 per Month in Adsense

Blogging

A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers

Creating Better Page Titles, Post Titles, And Page Slugs On WordPress

6 Easy Ways To Get Eaten by the GOOG Monster

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 1: Determining the Top Blogs In Your Niche

Joining the Niche Conversation, Part 2: Idea Generating for Bloggers

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Edit Archived Blog Posts

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 4: Making Your Blog Stand Out

Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language?

Blog roll out: Developing a successful blog format

Helping Bloggers Become More Unique

Management

4 Tips to Help Manage Multiple Blogs

Other

7 Things I Want Google To Fix In 2008

I hope you enjoy seeing content from Performancing’s past. If you are new to Performancing, please subscribe to our content feed.

Update An Existing Post or Create A New Post?

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Let’s say you spent all this time writing an excellent post a few weeks ago, but now some new information has come out that makes this post seem old. It was a lot of work, and the post is still quality. Still, you don’t know what to do about it. Should you create a new post with the new content or update an old post with the new content?

Update the Old

First off let me explain why anyone would bother updating a post. You would update an older post that brings in a lot of traffic so that it can still be thought of as useful by the users. You certainly can’t argue an old post receiving more stumbles, can you? This is one of the primary reasons to keep older quality content up-to-date. However, frequent changes can change SEO rankings.

Make Anew

A new post with the updated content (which, preferably, links to the old) could be a great way to handle this situation. A new page is better for SEO purposes, and it also gives readers something new to look at. Both of these results are reasons enough to hit the “new post” button on your content management system.

Why Not Do Both?

The solution, in my opinion, would be to write a new post now and update the old post later. Obviously, you want to create the new post to give readers something to read, and people could simply go back to the old article via links if they wished. Afterwards, you update your old post with some of the new information, and then link to your newer post. This gives people that come from search engines and social sites a reason to go to another page on your site, and if that happens, they are much more likely to subscribe.

I make a habit to update older posts on my blogs, and while many of my readers will never notice these changes, I have seen the impacts it can have with driving new visitors to updated content.

Essentially, you get the best of both worlds using this method, and I think you should give it a try. I think the potential for more stumbles, diggs, reddits, and traffic far outweighs any SEO penalties an article might receive. I also really appreciate an author who takes the time to keep older content up-to-date—it shows that he or she cares about what was written.

How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?

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It is a pretty simple question: how long should your typical blog post be? Well, the answer relies on several factors, but the question itself is almost irrelevant—but many still ask it.

Before going any further, you must look to your audience. So, to keep things simple, let’s say there are two types of people reading blogs: the impatient and the intricate. The former wants to get in and get out as quickly as possible. The latter wants the content to be full and informative. It is essentially a coin-flip.

So, which is it—long or short? Ironically, I feel that this is the wrong question to ask entirely. It is not a question of length, but, instead, a question of detail. The detail you put into an article should determine the length. Some bloggers, unfortunately, do not understand this.

Attempting to “bulk up” an article with unnecessary words accomplishes little but annoys many. There is nothing worse than re-reading the same sentence multiple times, and I have seen many bloggers pull this off. Unless you are an all-star blogger trying to be creative or cute, there is no point in wasting a reader’s time.

If an article ends up being more than just a few paragraphs, it should be a result of taking the time to cover all the details which will be of interest to the reader.

I tend to get quite detailed with my articles, but this comes with the cost of having some readers shy away from the lengthier ones, but most seem to appreciate them.

Knowing your audience also helps. It is obvious that the details are appreciated by Performancing readers; however, every case is different. Using an analytics package like pMetrics is a great way to see what your audience appreciates, and you should build from that.

Some blogs that load on the details:

Some blogs that keep it short and sweet:

To wrap things up, do not judge an article by its length. Use a measure of facts and details to determine its worth. There is an incorrect trend with bloggers asking for 1,000 word posts, but why write a 1,000 word post when it can be done just as effectively with half the words?

To answer the initial question: your posts should be as long or short as required by the details you want to provide with the content. I made the mistake of juicing up my articles with unnecessary words when I started, but I have learned that it is not worth it.