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Avoiding the “Me Too” Blogosphere

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I read with some amusement, and some small amount of guilt Ken Yarmosh, editor of the Corante Web Hub talking about snoozing in the blogosphere and the the whole “noise” thing this morning. He was talking about yesterdays tech blogosphere headlines:

  • FeedBurner acquiring Blogbeat
  • 100 Million Daily Videos served up by YouTube
  • New Yahoo! Homepage Launches

He asks: “Do bloggers really think their numbers are going to go down (or up) if they don’t cover these stories? Do they think they are reporters? There’s only a few blogs that truly offer “scoops” and news…the rest just become noise in my opinion.” and it’s a good point. Yesterday you couldn’t move for those 3 stories, and it was indeed repetitive, boring and somewhat time consuming to wade through the dozens of repeat posts in my reader.

Finding Unique Stories

Some news is indeed hard not to cover, particularly when your blog is focused in tech, but there are also ways to grab the smaller, possibly more valuable and definately more interesting stories.

Here’s a few off the top of my head. Do feel free to add to the list:

  1. Use del.icio.us to mine for links and sources
  2. use technorati, google blogs, yahoo news and other Search services where you can get to good blog posts to find the smaller, niche blogs to link to
  3. Use photobucket, flickr, youtube and other video/photo sites to find images and video to either link to, or just for inspiration
  4. Try yahoo answers to find out what people really want to know about your topic.
  5. Find forums on google with a query like this (just exchange “your topic” for keywords related to your subject) and see what less blog-centric folks are talking about within your niche

And there you have it, if you have other ways for finding less “me too” stories to post on your blogs, drop them in the comments….

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Content Syndication Legalities and Monetization

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Artem has a good question on the legalities of monetizing aggregated content in the Performancing forums. The post starts out by looking at bloglines, but soon comes down to how one might provide a quality aggregation service and still be able to make money from it whilst staying within the law, and hopefully being ethically sound.

It’s an interesting discussion, so read, and comment in the thread itself.

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New Ad Format – First Look

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Last week I sent out a note to our beta group for Performancing Partners, the new ad network we’re building with the help of the Performancing community, to tell them that the New Ad Format for Partners was ready to be viewed and tested.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, with great feedback both in general and technical. In fact, we’ve already managed to tweak the code and produce a better format based on the great feedback we got from the beta group.

Tell Us What You Think

Now we’d like to invite everyone in to see what we’re doing. So do visit the partners ad format testing doc and let me know what you think.

Keeping things Open

You’ll notice that the code is freely available and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, which means you’re welcome to grab the code, hack on it, share it, or use it in your own applications.

Beta’s Wanted

This was the first newsletter I’d put out to the beta group, and it was everything i’d hoped it would be: A great and truly valuable experience for us and one that has helped us make the end product better already. If you’d like to become part of the beta group, and be “in the loop” on the development of Performancing Partners, please drop your email on the beta signup page and I’ll make sure you’re first with new developments as we move forward.

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Killer Blog Titles

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I love titles. I love writing them, and love seeing truly great ones in my RSS reader, which is why i’ve been enjoying Brian Clarks Magnetic Headlines series, and thought I’d link a few and add a few more good resources for writing killer blog titles.

  1. Why You Should Always Write Your Headline First
  2. Using Titles Effectively on Blogs
  3. Blog Titles are Ads
  4. The Cheaters Guide to Great Headlines
  5. Blog Content Tip: Titles Are Everything
  6. Make Blog Titles RSS & Search Engine Friendly
  7. Do Keywords in Post Titles Really Matter?

Good titles go hand in hand with linkbait, the art of getting others to link to your content,

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Drupal in the Spotlight

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I’ve been developing websites with Drupal for nearly 3yrs now, and I’m still passionate about it. It’s a joy to work with as a programmer, and even straight out of the box you can build complex, or simple web2.0 enabled sites and applications with just a little investment of time and learning. So with that in mind, Im really pleased ot see Drupal getting more and more attention, and particularly happy to see the start of an IBM Developer Works Series focusing on the Open Source framework.

Really, if you’re contemplating building a community oriented site (aka web2.0), don’t reinvent the wheel….

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The Cesspool of User Generated Content

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Greg Linden of Findory has an interesting, funny, and nail hitting take on the future of user generated content. In it he says…

Now, many are building their own playgrounds for community-generated content, miniature versions of the World Wide Web. As the experience of the Web shows, we cannot expect the crowds to selflessly combine their skills and knowledge to deliver wisdom, not once the sites attract the mainstream. Profit motive combined with indifference will swamp the good under a pool of muck. To survive, the goal will have to shift from gathering content to uncovering good content.

The experience of the World Wide Web as a whole should serve as a lesson to those building the next generation of community-powered websites. At scale, it is no longer about aggregating knowledge, it is about filtering crap. We need seek the signal in the noise and pull the wisdom from the din.

How true. Even on a relatively small site like Performancing admins spend more time removing dross than writing themselves. Im quite fond of the Digg style of user votes, but ultimately im not certain if those models of content aggregation are sustainable.

A good candidate for quote of the day I think eh?

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BlogRank Gets All Tagged Up

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Two weeks ago we launched the BlogRank Top 100 List, and it’s been a fun way to track and discover blogs using Performancing Metrics, our Pro-grade analytics package for blogs. We wanted to extend that list though, and be able to discover new blogs by tag, so after a little late night coding, I’m pleased to introduce you to The BlogRank Tag Cloud.

Aswell as the cloud, you can now see the tags of each blog ranked by BlogRank just under the title of their listing both in the top 100 and any of the hundreds of tags pages. With around 12,000 blogs being tracked, there’s quite a lot to discover, and it’s a fun way to find new blogs and generally meander along the tag trail of links in the system.

Men In Aprons

By far the best discovery of the morning for me was finding a recipe for hot peanut sauce on the wonderful Men in Aprons blog under the cooking tag. Gotta love that name eh?

Hope everyone has fun with this, and it proves useful. Any suggestions, feedback or bugs can be posted here and will be gratefully received….

Enjoy

UPDATE: There was a minor glitch for an hour or so earlier, thanks to Markus that’s been fixed now.

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