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In the past week I had two drastically different articles make the front page of Digg, with drastically different results.

The first one resulted in authority link snowballing, the second one did not.

Why?

Well, the first article was amazing, the second article was mediocre. The first article was written to attract attention, the second one wasn’t even written to get on Digg (it happened accidentally because a Digg poweruser just decided to submit some random opinion article).

What is authority link snowballing

I’m assuming that everyone knows the concept of snowballing. It’s the idea that a snowball gets bigger and faster the longer it rolls down a hill.

Well, if you’ve ever written a really good article, and it’s gotten a bit of exposure on a really popular blog, then you know what I’m talking about.

First, a major blog or website links to your article. Then, all the smaller blogs who use the bigger blog as a reference, link to both your article and the bigger blog’s article about your article (usually in the form of a Hat Tip or a Via).

If you monitor this dynamic in real-time with pMetrics you’ll see a cascading effect develop. First the major blogs, then some medium sized blogs who reference the major blogs, then the smaller blogs who reference both the medium sized blogs and the major blogs. Pretty soon you’ve got this sweet set of authority level backlinks.

But getting on the front page of Digg is not enough. Your article has to be good and interesting. And you have to be lucky enough to get picked up by a major news source. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does happen, it can be massively rewarding.

Want help developing an article that will receive the snowballing effect? Let Performancing Services help.

In the previous post of this series, Mashing Up Multiple Feeds, Ryan asked in the comments section for a customization of the Yahoo Pipe I presented. The basic Pipe took two hard-coded RSS feeds, mashed them together, sorted reverse chronologically, and truncated the resulting mashed feed at 20 items.

Ryan had either of two customization requests:

1. Last 10 articles in “temporal” order, from the set of all feeds in a list X.
2. Max of one story per feed in “temporal” order, from the set of all feeds in a list X.

List X is an external list that contains a set of RSS feed URLs that can be changed at will. I’m assuming “temporal” order means oldest first, which is the opposite of “reverse chronological.” (If I’m wrong, it’s easy to fix.)

Process and Modules For Option #1

Process:
The Pipe preparation and building process for option #1 is as follows:

1. Create a list of feed URLs to be processed. I suggest .CSV format, for the simplest effort. (Basically, one field per line, where a field is the full URL of an RSS feed.) You can use OPML, I believe, but I haven’t explored this option, and it’s not the simplest one either.
2. The Pipe will prompt the end user for the URL of the feed list.
3. In a loop, fetch the items of each feed and mash them all into one feed stream.
4. Sort the stream temporally.
5. Truncate the stream to 10 items. (Or we can add a user input field and let the them decide.)
6. Output the stream results.

Modules:
The modules to use for this Pipe are as follows:

1. Fetch CSV.
2. Loop.
3. Fetch Feed. (Or if the external list contains the URL of the blog instead of the feed, then use the Fetch Site Feed module.)
4. Sort.
5. Truncate.
6. Output.

Process and Modules For Option #2

Process:
The Pipe preparation and building process for option #2 is as follows:

1. Create a list of feed URLs to be processed. (As above, I suggest .CSV format.)
2. In a loop, fetch the items of each feed but only grab the first item (i.e., truncate to 1 item), and mash everything together.
3. Sort the mashed stream temporarily.
4. Output the stream results.

Modules:
There actually a few ways to build this Pipe. I’m presenting just one combination of modules, which involves building two Pipes.

Slave: Pipe 2a: This Pipe grabs the most recent post of a single RSS feed, whose URL is supplied from the loop in Pipe 2.

1. URL Input.
2. Fetch Feed.
3. Sort.
4. Truncate.
5. Output.

Master: Pipe 2b: This Pipe grabs the feed list, sends each URL to Pipe 2a, and mashes up the returned items.

1. Fetch CSV.
2. Loop.
3. Pipe 1.
4. Sort.
5. Output.

Pipe 2b is the master Pipe, and loops through the list of feeds, calling upon Pipe 2a to do some of the work. (This embedding of Pipes as modules gives Yahoo Pipes tremendous power for feed mashups.)

We do have to use Sort in both Pipes to ensure that the mashed feed is sorted properly.

Sample Pipes

As in the last post, I am not going to provide indepth commentary on each Pipe or module because this series is “by example”. Instead, you can access both sample Pipes, clone them and explore them, as well as me questions here.

Where are the sample Pipes? At the time of this writing, I’m running late. I’ll add links in the comments once they’re completed.

A while back, I discussed determining the top blogs in your chosen niche. Once you’ve decided what these blogs are, you have a few choices in terms of monitoring new content:

1. Feed reader.
2. Personal dashboard via a web 2.0 portal.
3. Custom dashboard via a web 2.0 application builder or some other means.

This article focuses on the last two choices and covers the following:

1. Netvibes customizable web portal.
2. Sprout Builder Flash-based rich media content creation.
3. Popurls-like clone using a free custom WordPress solution.

Below, each section discusses the pros and cons of a given solution.

Netvibes Dashboard

Netvibes is a web 2.0 portal that offers “tiles” containing a variety of information, including weather, email inbox summaries, Facebook integration, predefined news feeds, top videos, web search and more. You can also create a fresh “tab” and add other tiles. That means you can create a Niche Dashboard by creating a tab and adding several news feed tiles. That is, each tile would contain items from the RSS feed of the top blogs in your niche.

Example:
The diagram below provides an example Netvibes dashboard that uses a variety of feeds from Blogging and SEO blogs. (I monitor this niche for my articles here at Performancing.) My real Netvibes dashboard actually has three columns and many more rows, but I’m only showing a partial screen capture.

Pros:

• Relatively fast to build
• Easy to move feed “tiles” around (each tile contains items from one feed).
• Each tile tells you how many items that you have unread.

Cons:

• The positioning of a block lower down the page is at the mercy of the height of the block above. That is, there’s no absolute positioning of blocks, making a Netvibes dashboard potential looking like a big mess of unmatched feed tiles.
• The feed tiles appear to be updated quite frequently, which is unnecessary and a drain on the web server resources of each site/blog.

This solution is good for monitoring small numbers of blogs.

Sprout Builder Dashboard

Sprout Builder is an in-beta web 2.0 application that lets you quickly build rich Flash-based content with a variety of choices for presentation.

Example:
The Sprout below shows only six feed tiles, though it could be reconfigured with smaller tiles and a wider/taller presentation. (Note: This is a functioning Sprout, and you can use the scrollbars to browse through the items in each feed tile. You can also click on item headlines and a new browser tab/ window will appear with the source page in question.)

Pros:

• Relatively easy to build Flash interface (provided you are in the beta program).
• Feed tiles are adjustable the size you want, producing a more appealing dashboard than for Netvibes.
• Feed tiles can be positioned however you like.

Cons:

• Not a lot of room to work in, in the Sprout Builder interface, unless you have a large computer screen.
• The larger your Sprout (height, width), the longer it potentially takes to load the components.
• Feeds are updated either “never” or “every five minutes”.

Sprout Builder is still in beta, but this solution might be good if you want to combine feed tiles with multimedia content.

Popurls-Style Dashboard

If you’re familiar with Popurls, you know that that their interface allows for very easy viewing of the titles of items in the news feeds of numerous sites. Ericulous offers a free Popurls clone based on WordPress. The package includes a custom WP theme and the necessary plugins.

Example:
I’ve previously used the Ericulous package to create blogspinnr.com (picture in a partial screen snap below). It does not have any SEO blog feeds added to it because of how tedious it is to update the dashboard. This is primarily because this solution is code-based, whereas the two solutions above offer a visual interface.

Pros:

• More control over how many items appear in each feed block.
• Offers more than just feed tiles, including YouTube videos, Flickr mini-gallery, and space for advertising.
• With a bit of effort, the dashboard can be combined with a WordPress blog.

Cons:

• Very tedious to move feed tiles around.
• The code is not yet robust, and flaky feeds will sometimes show an error in one or more tiles, depending on the file format a feed uses. (Atom and other non-RSS feed formats seem to cause the most trouble.)

I liked the Popurls clone solution a great deal at first, and used it to monitor multiple niches and my own batch of blogs. But because it’s such a pain to update a dashboard, I’m working on a more robust version. It’ll also be WP-based, and it’ll incorporate an area for blog posts and other features. An external list will supply the necesary feed URLs, and to reorder a feed block, just reorder the list. (Once this solution is done, it’ll be available free for Hive members only.)

Which of these solutions you pick for a niche monitor depends on your requirements and your patience for maintenance.

One of the really cool things about Performancing Hive is the cooperative social media experiments that we get to do together. In just a few weeks, Hive has grown to over 40 members and we can do things together that we can’t do alone. That’s what Hive is all about.

And right now, we’re doing something really cool. Something that will benefit everyone, especially those with smaller blogs. So I encourage you to join Hive. Yes, it does cost $10 per month. But the help you’ll get from others makes it worth so much more.

Again, if you join right now, you’ll be coming into the middle of a fun social experiment that’s already seeing really nice results.

Come in. The water’s nice.

I am writing a special report for Hive subscribers and I have come to a realization. I need deadlines. I hate them but I need them. Sound familiar?

Without a deadline I don’t know where to stop. I scope-bloat, I gold plate and ultimately I don’t finish. With a deadline I stress but I do complete my work and get it out of the door.

So my solution is to create an artificial deadline. This will not work without pressure so I have told Ryan I will finish by end of today. If I do complete the report then my deadline is met. If I do not finish on time then I have let Ryan down and I have broken my promise.

I didn’t say it was fun, but it is working to focus my efforts and stop me getting distracted. Well, other than telling you guys about it 😉

If you want to read the report you will need to sign up to the Hive and look out for it this week …

One of the most common uses of Yahoo Pipes is to mashup several RSS feeds and perform a few operations on them, such as sorting by date or filtering for keywords. This is a relatively easy Pipe to build, and you have many options for filtering and/or sorting, depending on your needs. Before you continue reading this tutorial, please read up on basic Yahoo Pipes functionality.

Sample Yahoo Pipe Details

In the sample Pipe for this tutorial, we’ll mash together the RSS feeds of two blogs, Performancing and Blog Herald, sort reverse chronologically by date, then truncate the resulting RSS “stream” at 20 items.

Basic Yahoo Pipe Building Process

Let’s go over a basic “feed mashup” example, then discuss variations. The most basic feed mashup is to simply supply two or more RSS feed URLs in a Yahoo Pipe. (For simplicity, let’s start with a static list of feeds.) But that’s not useful since you don’t know how items in the resulting “stream” are ordered. So let’s sort the mashed up feed in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest). The process is as follows:

1. Supply two or more RSS feed URLs.
2. Fetch the feeds.
3. Combine the feeds together.
4. Sort them in reverse chronological order.
5. Truncate the mashed feed to 20 items.
6. Output the resulting stream as an RSS feed

Yahoo Pipes Modules to Use

That is the most basic process, and to produce an actual Yahoo Pipe, we need to use only 4 modules, in the following order:

1. Fetch Feed. Specify one or more feeds, grab their items, and combine them into a single feed.

   Notes:

   • This Pipes module is found under the Sources sub-menu.
   • Assume resulting item ordering is undefined.
   • In our example, shown below, we’ll use the Performancing and Blog Herald RSS feeds.
2. Sort. Specify a sorting field and criteria. In this case, sort by Publication Date (item.pubDate) in descending order.

   Notes:

   • This module is found under the Operators sub-menu.
   • In the past, Pipes’ Sort module has not always worked consistently, but we are at its mercy.
3. Truncate. Take the mashed stream and truncate it after X items.

   Notes:

   • This module is found under the Operators sub-menu.
   • We’re limiting the result to 20 items.
4. Output. Output the mashed stream. This will be available from the standard Yahoo Pipes “run” interface. From there, you can retrieve the dynamic RSS feed URL for the output stream.

   Note:

   • This module is automatically displayed in a new Pipe, once you drag and drop any other module.

A screenshot of a sample Pipe is displayed below. Provided that you have a Yahoo Mail account, you can access the sample Pipe, clone a copy into your account, and tweak to your heart’s content.

Basic Pipe Variations

There are a number of simple variations that you can apply to the above sample Pipe that are relatively easy to do.

1. Sort in chronological order (oldest article first).
2. Filter by date. E.g., articles newer than a certain day.
3. User-supplied date filter. Pick the maximum
4. User-supplied truncation limit. So instead of hard-coding “20” as the number of items in the mashed feed, let the end user of the Pipe supply the value.
5. User-supplied URLs. You are limited to a fixed number of URLs that can be specified.

Advanced Pipe Variations

Here are some more advanced variations for our feed mashup Pipe.

1. Remove extraneous data fields in input streams. If you look at the results of the example Pipe, you’ll see more than just the item description and title. One of the input feeds has extra links thanks to its Feedburner settings. If you don’t want them appearing in the result, you have to filter these fields out before the two feeds are mashed together.
2. Truncate the number of items used on a per feed basis rather than on the entire mashed feed. E.g., the 5 most recent items for each feed.
3. Use a dynamic external list of feed URLs. The best way to do this is to build Pipe #1 to process a single feed: sort reverse chronologically and truncate to X items (hard-coded or user-supplied). Then build Pipe #2 to read an external list of feed URLs and loop through each, supplying each stream to Pipe #1, then mashing up the results of all streams.

Requests for Custom Pipe

Obviously, I cannot provide example Pipes for each variation listed above, but what I will do is two things:

1. Take suggestions for an advanced Pipe as described above, create it, then either share it in the comments here or cover it in the next Yahoo Pipes By Example post. So I’ll build a free custom Pipe, provided it’s not too complex, can be done in a few hours, and is generic enough that it’ll be useful to someone other than yourself. (I can only work on it on weekends.)
2. Progressively include other Pipes modules in hard exampes.

So if there’s a Pipe you need and something like it is described in the Advanced section above, feel free to ask. Be specific about the details. I’ll be doing the next Yahoo Pipes By Example post next weekend (one per week).

My friend Chris Garrett has written the ultimate guide for getting people to bookmark your content and link back to you.

The article is so good, that I want to encourage everyone who’s sees this to do three things:

1. Read it
2. Bookmark it
3. Blog about it

Detailed guides like this that are written in a clear and easy to understand manner are very rare, and when a topic as important as bookmarking and linkage is covered, you should really take notice. Keep coming back to it. Re-read it. Digest one bit at a time. And soon it will all be habit.

Here’s the link again.
http://www.chrisg.com/get-more-bookmarks-links/

…is to build a list of 50-100 strong contacts in your niche.

Start visiting the best blogs and websites in your niche. Find the contact info. If it’s a contact form, paste the URL into your Notepad document. If it’s an email, paste the email into your Notepad document.

The next time you write a truly amazing piece, don’t hesitate to contact each blog or site owner individually, telling them you think their readers would enjoy your article. If the article is *truly* good, then they will most likely link back.

Soon enough, you will become an authority in your niche…assuming, that is, that you are producing quality content.