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Back on episode 3 of Perfcast, we went over our blogging challenge entries for the week. The previous weeks blogging challenge had been to create linkbait. I was successful with my challenge entry however, David was in the process of putting his entry together for the launch of CollegeCrunch.org. We had an idea as to what the linkbait was going to be about and from the sounds of it, the post had an excellent chance of being successful.

Fast forward to today and it looks like Davids linkbait post didn’t do so well. (Before Posting: Think Like A Common Person) The result of his linkbait post is interesting to me because I had brought the issue up during the show. There are times when you can spend hours on a blog post and think it is going to be a hot ticket item right out of the gate, only to publish the article and see it fall flat on its face. How depressing these times of blogging can be.

However, David has done a good job in his post reflecting back on why the post was a failure. He states that he didn’t review the post from a common place perspective. That is, readers couldn’t emphasize with the article. David gives us three things we should think about before publishing what you believe to be a pillar article, but you’ll have to visit his blog to read those tips.

What I would like to know from you is, have you ever worked really hard on an article only to see it go nowhere? What have you learned from such experiences? Share your experiences and your knowledge in the comments.

Image taken by Melissa Segal under Creative Commons.

It is always good to learn from experience. The Online Journalism Blog has put together 100, (I know it says 1,000) things they have learned since starting out with post number 1. I think I’m on the same track as OJB as I’ve learned pretty much the same things they have.

One thing to note about this post is that it makes for great link bait. Although it hooked me in, check out how almost every post links back to an article within the archive which delves into the subject matter in more detail. This is a great example of not only producing great link bait, but it is also a good example of a list post that taps into their valuable archive of content.

What are some of the things you have learned thus far in your blogging ventures?

Our own Ryan Caldwell in the Performancing Hive introduced an interesting question. Should he continue to display date information on his blog posts or should it be removed?

For the most part, users have responded that date information is important in determining if the information presented within the post is relevant or old. In my own experience, articles which don’t have a date published end up frustrating me as I can’t determine how old the information is. Also, I look pretty foolish when I come across an article and end up sharing it to everyone I know, only to find out that the post or subject matter is three years old.

I think the argument between which one bloggers should do is pretty simple. If the information you publish is not time sensitive, then you can probably do away with the timestamp. However, if you are a blog which publishes news or discusses recent events, the time stamp can serve as an important tool for not only your readers, but for search engines as well.

Let me know what you think in the comments. With regards to your feedback, I’d like to know your point of view from both sides. First as a reader, then as a blogger.

Fantastico De Luxe, the popular script installer has been upgraded to version 2.10.4. This means that you should keep an eye out on your cPanel to look for upgrade scripts if you are using any of the following:

Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.18 -> 1.4.19

dotProject: 2.1.1 -> 2.1.2

Drupal: 6.3 -> 6.4

Joomla 1.5: 1.5.4 -> 1.5.6

Open-Realty: 2.4.4 -> 2.5.2

TikiWiki: 1.9.11 -> 2.0

WordPress: 2.6 -> 2.6.1

As I was reading a post written by Lorelle over at the BlogHerald discussing how to help readers keep up with your blog, I came across a tip which I thought I would illustrate here as well. It has to do with defining acronyms within your post in case your readers don’t understand the lingo of your niche.

I’ve been wondering for quite awhile now if there was a way to illustrate what an acronym means without having to place the definition next to the word. I’ve seen many people comment that they become annoyed when an acronym is used and right next to it, is the full sized set of terms. Thanks to Lorelle’s post, I came across the <acronym> tag. When you use the acronym tag, the definition appears as a tooltip when a user hovers their mouse cursor over the word. Place your mouse cursor over the word HTML and see what happens.

The use of the tag is as follows:
<acronym title=”HyperText Markup Language”>HTML</acronym>

You can even add a CSS class to your themes Stylesheet so that each time you use the tag in your content, it has a unique look. To add the class to your stylesheet, copy and paste the following code into your CSS file and style it to your hearts content.

acronym { border-bottom: 1px dotted black; }

For more information and a bonus CSS class that spells out acronyms when users print your web pages from Opera or FireFox, read this article, Defining acronyms on DiveIntoAccessibility.

That Buzz you hear is not coming from The Hive but instead, is the sound of Yahoo! Buzz opening up to the public. Yahoo! Buzz is a social news site like Digg where users can vote or in this case, Buzz items. Yahoo determines which topics people are searching for on their search engine and then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics on the buzz page where users can vote up or down.

The way in which Yahoo! Buzz used to work is that, you needed to be a select publisher in order to submit your articles to the Buzz voting system. With Buzz now open to the public, anyone can submit a story. However, the question that remains to be answered is, will links that show up on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? According to Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, they don’t believe they will.

At the time of this writing, the Buzz front page showcased 5 out of 15 articles on the Top Buzz list which were stories that were produced on Yahoo powered sites. As Marshall points out, there has been no evidence which links highly voted stories on Buzz to their actual display on the front page. Unlike Digg, Buzz appears to have editorial control over what is displayed on the front page which may be one of the reasons behind the sites success. Just about everyone I’ve talked to agrees that having editorial control on a social news voting site not only cuts down on spam, but also slims down the chance of gaming the system which is still readily apparent on Digg.

With Buzz now open to the public, those of you who use WordPress can install a plugin called WPBuzz which will add a BuzzThis! button to your posts. The plugin was created by Travis Johnson. Installation instructions can be found for the plugin here.

Will you be ditching Digg in favor of Buzz? What are your thoughts on Buzz becoming a Digg killer? What do you think is the recipe for success when it comes to appearing on the front page of Buzz?

Recently I came across search engine called scour, which claims that users will get paid to search on their search engine. I was bit of confused about this idea of getting paid to search so i decided to give it shot.

What’s new in scour?
Scour combines search results of google, yahoo, msn and display it when you do the search query. It asks you to comment on the search result. It asks you to vote as “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” for the search results you get. This way they improve their search quality & users get better results for the popular keywords.

How it works?
You’ll get point for every search query you do in the search box, and the points are reflected in the top-right navbar.You’ll get points when you vote either positive or negative against the search result. You can maximum vote 4 times on given search queries to get your points counted. If you voted more than 4 times to help the scour search engine then that system will not count your points. Also whenever you write comment for the search query you’ll be rewarded with the point.

How scour makes money?
Your voting & commenting on search results work like Digg for scour. This filtered search result is valuable for any search engine as it saves their time to index the whole internet. Such data can be used to improve existing algorithm as well as for commercial use it is good as well. Any searh engine company will make lot of money with such a data. Because, they get better filtered search results, this filtered results are much more valueable as they can sell this resultset at much higher costs than they pay to their users for using their service. Search engine like cuil, google or any other search engine will definitely be interested in scours data.

How good it is for the users to earn money?
If you refer others you’ll get 250 points or so, by referring your friends you can earn 25$ when you reach 6500 points. The level of 6500 points looks impossible for the casual surfers, but when it comes savvy users it is the level that they can achieve in short period. So this is definitely not suitable if you search for the 20-30 terms a day.Even though you vote or comment with your 20-30 queries ,reaching to the 6500 points looks hard in month or it again depends on your free time. One point to watch out for is it uses javascript & ajax effects with search results so it also slows your browser down.Which makes it harder to get more points while your working or surfing multiple sites as browser will hogg for more memory with scour on.

Where’s the referral link?
I could have given the referral link and can earn worthy points but No, sorry i don’t want to direct others to such a service. You can check it out for yourself at scour.com for more information.

Do let me know what you think about scour?