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Technorati Baseball Cards – Uber Linkbait

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I caught Steve linking to Technorati’s new “baseball cards” feature this morning, and as im a nut for “keepng score” I just HAD to put in the Performancing Card. #26 eh? Pretty neat…

We don’t show up in the top 100 though,does that mean that i misread and we’re really #26,000 or is it because I’ve not ‘claimed’ this site? (it wont let me claim it either, weird…)

I’ve admired Technorati’s linkbaiting for a long time, ever since they bought out tags and started showing in all the engines for cool keywords — I mean, sheesh! How genius is that? Get half the entire blogosphere to link to you in every single post using exact anchor text. Marvellous.

Likewise with this new feature.

We have some similar things lurking in Performancing actually, but they’ve never been officially announced as we’re still tweaking them. Dont think most have spotted them…

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Techcrunch & Flipping Burgers

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BusinessLogs has a great take on the Techcrunch redesign.

A fair amount of digging and surmising comes to this:

What this says to me is that Michael gave her specific instructions on what he wanted it to look like (“newspaper-ish” comes to mind as a common client request), and although Rachel had her thoughts and ideas about what a new TechCrunch should look like, they were pre-empted by what Mike gave her as an instruction set. This happens a lot in client work, which I’m sure Rachel knows very well, and that’s the idea that no matter what vision you have in your head for a client’s site, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match their vision for the site.

To me, this is all to painful a memory. Designers are often treated like their skills are akin to flipping burgers at the local fast food chain. Why even hire a designer if you’re just going to dictate what you want them to do?

Most kids can build an html template, it’s easy. The skills you hire a designer for should be anything but the basic ability to piece html together.

Having said all that, I think he did a fairly good job on the ads, though some would clearly disagree.

Arrington could put 5 more ads on the site and I doubt he would notice a dropoff in traffic. The redesign would have to be a black background with black text before people finally gave up. You wonder why gas prices continue to go up? Probably becasue we keep on buying it no matter what.

A final thought from me: I HATE centered, fixed width designs. They suck to absolute high heaven and i always feel shortchanged by them. I would have expected better from such a site, and bearing in mind that Arrington appears to have designed this site and gotten some casual labour to implement it, I’d really of thought he’d have had a better grip on how to do such things.

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When is a Blog Not a Blog?

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In Chris’ post Can Anyone Make Money From Blogging?, Kim Krause, who runs the excellent Cre8asite Forums says “I don’t consider many blogs to be actual blogs. They are just web sites whose owners found free software and free templates to do their bidding.” which is pretty much spot on I think.

There seems to be an alarming, but probably not entirely surprising rise in junk blogs recently. Not spam blogs, the entirely automated type, but the ones where real people are simply cutting and pasting press releases, parts of other bloggers content and general junk just for the Adsense clicks. The funny thing, if you can find amusement in such stuff, is that these folks think that the fact that they use blogging software like WordPress, means they’re bloggers, and so naturally get a free pass to do whatever the hell they please, ‘cos as we all know, bloggers can do no wrong right?

What’s worse, is that for the most part, they DO get a free pass — We’re all still to enamoured with the whole blog thing to see the woods for the trees I think, but here’s how the landscape looks to me right now:

  • Blogging continues to cross over to mainstream. With that move comes a dillution of “blogging” as many of us think of it.
  • The “Search economy” (publishing for adsense, obsession with Search rankings) continues to drive people to producing shit content for clicks
  • Those people use blog software, call themselves bloggers
  • Real bloggers, if indeed such a beast still exists, start to get tarred with the same brush

It’s not a pretty picture, but it does mean that blogging is maturing, and even outgrowing its boundaries now. I tend to think of blogs less as “blogs” as time goes by, and more as sites with comments and trackback — as web2.0 becomes the norm. With that mainstreaming comes the darker side of the web. Funded by Google, Yahoo and a bunch of others, the Search Economy pushes people to produce crap, and this is nothing new, we’re just seeing it more in blogs these days.

I dont have a solution to this, Im not even sure it’s actually a problem (well, not a huge one..), but think its worthy of a little discussion here dont you?

So,

  • Is blogging for adsense a problem?
  • Are junk blogs a problem in your niche? (please do not post examples)
  • Is Google to blame?
  • Has blogging really gone mainstream?

Tell us what you think…..

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Firefox, the Social Browser

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Since we launched Performancing Firefox last year, the app has just gone from strength to strength. With the lastest 1.2 release and the integration of Metrics, I think we’re finally getting close to the blogging app nirvana we envisioned when Jed and I first talked about it.

Initially there was a lot of talk about it being a “Flock killer” (for those that dont know, Flock is a browser forked off of the core Firefox code with some good developers and some eager investors behind it). And in a way, though it was never intended to be, it is. I’ve done a lot of interviews and had a lot of conversations where people have bought it up, but i’ve never posted about it. Untill today that is.

Why People Hate Flock

I think part of the success of PFF was due to backlash aimed at Flock. Don’t get me wrong, PFF is an awesome app, I use it every day and Jed does a terrific job of continually developing it, it’s just that I dont think it would have taken off in quite such a large way initially if there wasn’t a lot of resentment out there already for Flock. Firefox users are an extremely passionate, loyal group (i know, i am one..), and they saw Flock as an insult.

When we launched, one of the Flock devs described PFF as “Firefox and ductape”, but at the end of the day, what could be more “web2.0″” than extending an already fantastic platform? I don’t want to switch browsers, I just want to be able to build my OWN browser, which is exactly what Firefox allows me to do.

Firefox is a social browser. Flock is a mistake.

What’s Next for Performancing Firefox?

I’ve been chatting to Jed and Chris, and there are a few things on the horizon, but we’ve not nailed anything down tight just yet except localizatoin. Bust so you get an idea of what we’re thinking, and so that I can start the ball rolling and get some feedback, here’s the list:

  • Localization – we’re looking for major language blog services to team up on versions of performancing for their languages
  • Going truly open source – it was always the intention to have others work on this, and now i think it might be the right time to start looking at the code, and options available to us to invite others in to work on PFF
  • Plugin architecture – PFF should be a platform not a plugin 🙂
  • General code improvements and bug fixes, naturally

Give us your thoughts, what do you want to see from PFF?

Bug reports and support requests will be nuked, there’s a forum for that. Thanks!

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What’s Wrong with Yahoo Tech?

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Is it just me, or is there nothing that makes you want to click on this newly launched tech site from Yahoo?

I don’t think they could have got it any more wrong if they’d tried.

It looks like it’s entirely made out of ads. On close inspection i can see that some of the ads are actually links to content (they appear to be, im not clicking on general principle heh..) but if this is supposed to be Y!’s entry into the lucrative tech content space then I’d say all you gadget bloggers out there lucked out.

Cos that’s just shite.

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Low Traffic Blogs and Adsense

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In case you miss it, there is a terrific discussion on low traffic blogs and how to monetize them going on in the Performancing Forums. The upshot is that Adsense is a poor choice at this stage, but that doesnt mean it can’t be done, and if you’re looking for advice on what to do with low traffic blogs then head on over and join the discussion…

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The Real Blogosphere

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I was talking to a friend this week about who I consider to be the core target audience of Performancing, the people that really matter to us, and the people that define who we are. I like to think of this group as “the real blogosphere”.

It’s not about a small group of noisey people in palo alto that think they’re at the center of the universe. It’s not about big media houses jumping on bandwagons. It’s about real people, quietly getting on with the business of blogging. It’s about people from all over the world striving to write about subjects they’re passionate about, using tools that help make their lives easier and wanting to earn money from their weblogs.

It’s about you, and it’s about me.

It’s about real people.

One thing that came up is how quickly Performancing has grown. With well over 12,000 members now, our combined influence is not inconsiderable right? We got there by ignoring (mostly) the blog snobs and the pretenders, and focusing on the real blogosphere, by promoting our members and their interests and by listening to the community.

Now though, it’s time for some more direction.

With work on the upcoming ad network going well, I wanted to find out what more we might do to help the community. What features, services or products we should look at developing.

One thing that came up a little while ago, suggested by Ahmed I think, was a forum for commercial exchanges. People looking to buy/sell service and start/join blog networks for example.

Let us know what you think, and what you’d like to see eh?

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Best Advice for Combating Comment Spam

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There’s a ton of advice out there for dealing with comment spam, but when it comes right down to it, the best advice is pretty simple. Darren has an outstanding post on spam this morning that talks about the cost of ignoring trash on your blogs. In it, he says this:

My main piece of advice for bloggers is to use up to date blogging software and to use the built in spamming solutions that many of them have built in or available with plugins.

And there you have it, it’s not foolproof, far from it, but it IS good advice. So, if for no other reason at all, make sure your software is up to date, and that you subscribe to whatever update mechanisms your software/plugins have for keeping you current.

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