Carnival of Internet Pros #2

Welcome to edition #2 of the Carnival of Internet Pros (CoIP #2). In the last edition, absolutely no one actually joined the conversation (besides a thank you), so let’s take a different approach to this one. The intention of this carnival is to share our knowledge of working online for a living. I’m going to apply my copyediting and editorial experience and constructively point out one flaw in each post, if any. Essentially, if you were to send these articles to me for publication, these would be my constructive comments. Anyone can feel free to join in and say whether they agree or not.

Critiqued Entries

Keep in mind that I’ve intentionally glanced at these posts superficially and not read thoroughly. This is in fact what editors do for print articles, no matter how unfair it may seem. Only the first 10 items have comments. Articles are listed approximately in order of receipt.

1. Strategic Internet Marketing & Web Site Optimization by Jason Koeppe of Strategic Internet Marketing. There’s no explanation of where the data actually came from. What service? Or is this from a report? I’m not too inclined to trust this data without a bit more clarity about the source of data. If it’s there, I didn’t see it (no hyperlinks).
2. Writing with Inspiration by Marc Berry of Techne-eikon.com. A bit too many “I” occurrences. It’s possible to talk about yourself while reducing the use of “I”. Unless you have a large following, it’s very hard to get away with using “I” excessively.
3. How to Write Posts That People Will Actually Read by Sterling Camden of Geeks are Sexy. Well done. Strong title, great intro, thoughtful scannable formatting.
4. Get More Traffic with the Right Image Tags by Taylor of Super Blogging. Short and to the point, with a reference if you want to learn more.
5. 3 Ways to Increase your Blog Stats by Ant of The Beef Jerky Blog. My only superficial complaint is that some “Technorati experiment” is mentioned, but there’s no indication of whether this is or is not WTF (Where’s the Fire). You have to click through to an older article to find it’s a chain-letter type of meme.
6. How to Assemble a Feedburner Alternative Using WordPress Plugins by Samir of Samir Bharadwaj. The site is attractive, as is the statue icon down the middle, but the fact that it moves while you scroll the page is infinitely irritating, distracting and ultimately unnecessary. I find it difficult to scan your page because of that.
7. The Truth About the Firefox “Pipelining” Trick by Egon of Egonitron. Being a geek, I like posts like this, though I’m not sure non-techies will know what Pipelining is. In fact, I hadn’t heard that term used for speeding up Firefox. But with technical tutorials, it’s never easy to choose a knowledge level to target. At some point, you just have to hope that interested readers will stick to it and read the entire post. At any rate, this is a well-formatted post, making it easy to scan, to determine whether I might read it later.
8. Ode To The Google PageRank Obsession by Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Humor Blog. Given that the Google PageRank is supposed to be updated this weekend (not last weekend like many of us thought), this is timely. Only two complaints. Firstly, the limerick’s title should have been in bold, to set it off from the intro paragraphs. Else it looks as if there’s a big weird gap of whitespace for no reason. Secondly, there’s this massively unreadable blob of hyperlinks that follows the post. While it’s topically relevant, the mass of blue links makes me want to run away.
9. The Ups and Downs of Amateur Blogging by ispf of Grad Money Matters. Almost the right balance of “I”, but maybe a few too many. Otherwise easily formatted for scanning. Consider putting in two headings, one for the “ups” and one for the “downs”. By heading, I mean use the HTML h2 or h3 tags.
10. Amazon Wish Lists with SimpleXML by Ramiro Gomez of SEO Expert Blog. This post is weakened by starting off with “I recently upgraded my server”. You want to tell both the returning and new visitor why they want to read this post. Unless the reader is technically-inclined, they won’t care about the first two paragraphs, and may not even bother reading further.

Remaining Entries

These are the remaining entries for this edition.

11. Blog Startup: Choosing a Domain by Ian Fernando of Ian Fernando.
12. The Key to Online Business: Do Something Small by Praveen of My Simple Trading System.
13. A Few Writing Tips For Your Internet Business Opportunity by Cade Krueger of Write To Right.
14. How to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog – Part 1 by Edith Yeung of EdithYeung.Com.
15. 10 Reasons Why I Love Google  by Jimson Lee of Speedendurance.com.
16. The Right Time To Show Your Blog’s Stats by Ramkarthik of Blogging And Make Money Online.
17. How to Influence Others by Terry Dean of Integrity Business Blog.
18. Top 10 Link Building Sites by Jack Humphrey of Blog Marketing.
19. Free Speech Hosting: 11 Web Hosts That Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy by Jimmy Atkinson of Dedicated Hosting Guide.
20. 26 Steps to Blogging Success by Vandelay Design of Vandelay Website Design.
21. Do You Know Who Your Visitors Are? by Leo Dimilo of Idiot Affilate.
22. Golden Mantras of Effective Email communication Part 2  by Rajesh Shakya of Rajesh Shakya.
23. Effectively Get Things Done, Set Business Hours  by James Mitchell of FocusMinded.com.
24. Blog Monetization: So You Want To Monetize Your Website? by Kevin of NicheSiteDomination.
25. The Story So Far by Yehuda Berlinger of Blogging Without a Wire.

That’s it for this edition. If you’re not here and you submitted before July 29th, then it’s likely your article does not relate to the topics covered in this carnival, or you’re trying to pimp your services/ products.

Pissed off at my comments? Agree? Disagree? Tell me so. Don’t forget to link back. And if you’ve emailed me to be a future host, rest assured that I’ll try to get back to you shortly. If you don’t hear from me within another week, feel free to send another message.

Remember to submit your blog article to the next edition of the Carnival of Internet Pros using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.