Blogging

I don’t know about you, but I’ve begun to notice a trend. Some of us who are familiar with the term “blog” and who consider ourselves to be internet savvy are starting to claim that the term “blog” is old fashioned. However, if we take a look around, mass media is still on the cusp of embracing this wonderful thing called blogs. Part of the problem (if you want to call it that) lies in the fact that the early adopter crowd who went crazy with blogs has now moved on to something else. Blogs appear stale as if they were no big deal to this crowd. Meanwhile, there is a large section of people who are just now jumping on board the blogging bandwagon and having a great time doing so. To them, this is brand new.

Are you noticing the same trend? Do you think blogging has reached its peak and is now on the other side of the bell curve?

According to an entry within Wikipedia, the term was first coined by Brad L. Graham on September 10, 1999 as a joke. It was then later coined by William Quick in 2002. The term was then quickly adopted and its use today describes the large number of blogs who pack an influential punch. Here is a little more history in regards to the word. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.

This article will highlight various events which have taken place online and off where the blogosphere has played a major role in the outcome. Although a single blogger such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com can wield a significant amount of influence, no one thus far has been able to stand up to the enormous amount of influence the blogosphere can have as a single entity.

1. Dunkin Donuts Pulls Ad – After Dunkin donuts aired a television commercial featuring Rachel Ray wearing a black and white fringed scarf, bloggers took offense as the scarf was commonly known to be worn by Muslim extremists. After thousands of bloggers made their thoughts known and hundreds of comments posted on the Dunkin Donuts website condemning the ad, it was pulled off the air.
2. Sony Labeled Epic Fail – On Oct. 31, 2005 Mark Russinovich broke the story on his blog, describing how Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. Afterwards, the story spread like wildfire to what seemed like every tech blog on the net. The outcry from the blogosphere was so great, Sony stopped producing the copy-protection scheme and then recalled all of the cds which contained the copy protection. Lawsuits were then filed against the company. Sony’s reputation will never be able to clean itself of this stain.
3. The A.P. thinks they can charge for quotations – After word got out about how the A.P. sent a letter to The Drudge Retort website claiming that they were excerpting too much of their articles, the blogosphere blew up and gave the A.P. a lesson on Fair Use. With heavy hitting blogs going against the A.P. along with many other bloggers following suit, the A.P. eventually settled the claim and drew back it’s proposal to penalize those who quote their content in a meaningful way.
4. Snakes On A Plane – Before this movie was even released, it gained a huge following with fan sites emerging all over the web. After Josh Friedman’s blog entry the movie was then discussed on a number of other internet portals which then lead to bloggers creating songs, apparel, post art, pages of fan fiction, parody films, and mock movie trailers. In fact, the response from the blogosphere prompted New Line Cinema to go back and add five days of reshooting.
5. Dan Rather urged into retirement – After Dan Rather reported on a phony memo on CBS purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty 30 years prior, the blogosphere erupted into a CSI like investigation. Blogs like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Line raised questions about the documents’ authenticity. This caused other conservative blogs to also investigate the matter. In the end, the blogosphere played a major role in showing how CBS had been duped and how Dan Rather had reported on a phony story. This lead to Dan Rather being urged into retirement by CBS

These five events are proof that the blogosphere as a single entity can play a significant role.  The web is filled with noise, but when a large number of people tune into the same frequency, the noise becomes overwhelming to the point where an action needs to be taken. This action is usually in favor of the blogosphere.

In writing this post, a few questions crossed my mind. Can the blogosphere in general be considered a democracy? Is it a play on Majority rules Minority rights? Do you think it’s a good or bad thing that the blogosphere can influence anything, whether it be a critical decision, a law or an action made by a company?

I’m also interested in any other events which the blogosphere may have played a role in, minus things within a political nature.

Special thanks to those who helped me come up with this list via Twitter.
geoffmanning
arickmann
OnkelSchark

Monika Mundell of EasyWordPress.com has published an excellent article ( A Snapshot of several blog editors ) that briefly highlights the cream of the crop in terms of free blog editors. External blog editors are perfect to use if you are a mobile blogger or are having serious issues with TinyMCE. What ever the case may be, Monika has provided the information you’ll need to know to choose a blog editor that suits your tastes. Also, if you feel like paying some coin, the article also highlights a few different PAID FOR solutions.

So far, I’ve really enjoyed using the Scribefire Firefox Extension. This is one of the blog editors that Monika talks about in her post and it’s been a real time saver for me, especially when it’s tied directly into my WordPress powered blog through the awesome XML-RPC feature.

Do you use a third party blog editor? If so, which one is it and why do you prefer to use that program over the built in publisher?

Let’s say you spent all this time writing an excellent post a few weeks ago, but now some new information has come out that makes this post seem old. It was a lot of work, and the post is still quality. Still, you don’t know what to do about it. Should you create a new post with the new content or update an old post with the new content?

Update the Old

First off let me explain why anyone would bother updating a post. You would update an older post that brings in a lot of traffic so that it can still be thought of as useful by the users. You certainly can’t argue an old post receiving more stumbles, can you? This is one of the primary reasons to keep older quality content up-to-date. However, frequent changes can change SEO rankings.

Make Anew

A new post with the updated content (which, preferably, links to the old) could be a great way to handle this situation. A new page is better for SEO purposes, and it also gives readers something new to look at. Both of these results are reasons enough to hit the “new post” button on your content management system.

Why Not Do Both?

The solution, in my opinion, would be to write a new post now and update the old post later. Obviously, you want to create the new post to give readers something to read, and people could simply go back to the old article via links if they wished. Afterwards, you update your old post with some of the new information, and then link to your newer post. This gives people that come from search engines and social sites a reason to go to another page on your site, and if that happens, they are much more likely to subscribe.

I make a habit to update older posts on my blogs, and while many of my readers will never notice these changes, I have seen the impacts it can have with driving new visitors to updated content.

Essentially, you get the best of both worlds using this method, and I think you should give it a try. I think the potential for more stumbles, diggs, reddits, and traffic far outweighs any SEO penalties an article might receive. I also really appreciate an author who takes the time to keep older content up-to-date—it shows that he or she cares about what was written.

It is a pretty simple question: how long should your typical blog post be? Well, the answer relies on several factors, but the question itself is almost irrelevant—but many still ask it.

Before going any further, you must look to your audience. So, to keep things simple, let’s say there are two types of people reading blogs: the impatient and the intricate. The former wants to get in and get out as quickly as possible. The latter wants the content to be full and informative. It is essentially a coin-flip.

So, which is it—long or short? Ironically, I feel that this is the wrong question to ask entirely. It is not a question of length, but, instead, a question of detail. The detail you put into an article should determine the length. Some bloggers, unfortunately, do not understand this.

Attempting to “bulk up” an article with unnecessary words accomplishes little but annoys many. There is nothing worse than re-reading the same sentence multiple times, and I have seen many bloggers pull this off. Unless you are an all-star blogger trying to be creative or cute, there is no point in wasting a reader’s time.

If an article ends up being more than just a few paragraphs, it should be a result of taking the time to cover all the details which will be of interest to the reader.

I tend to get quite detailed with my articles, but this comes with the cost of having some readers shy away from the lengthier ones, but most seem to appreciate them.

Knowing your audience also helps. It is obvious that the details are appreciated by Performancing readers; however, every case is different. Using an analytics package like pMetrics is a great way to see what your audience appreciates, and you should build from that.

Some blogs that load on the details:

• ArsTechnica
• A List Apart
• Strobist
• Noupe

Some blogs that keep it short and sweet:

• Joystiq
• gHacks
• Hack A Day
• TechCrunch

To wrap things up, do not judge an article by its length. Use a measure of facts and details to determine its worth. There is an incorrect trend with bloggers asking for 1,000 word posts, but why write a 1,000 word post when it can be done just as effectively with half the words?

To answer the initial question: your posts should be as long or short as required by the details you want to provide with the content. I made the mistake of juicing up my articles with unnecessary words when I started, but I have learned that it is not worth it.

Favicons, those 16X16 ico files which represent a particular URL have been known to be pretty, but there are some favicons out on the web that are just plain awful. Despite their size, a good favicon helps out your readers in a number of ways. For instance, if you use FireFox and have a number of tabs opened, each tab displays the favicon of the website that tab has loaded. Also, a favicon that has been aesthetically designed will give your site a better chance of being seen when mixed in with a ton of other websites. Not to mention, a great favicon would inspire other designers as well as possibly having your site featured in a post which discussed the best designed icons.

However, this post will contain seven examples of poorly designed favicons that you should avoid creating yourself. Afterwards, I give you a list of hints, tips and resources to create your own special icon.

– Stock Option Advisors
– HBSMC
– Touchofdeathgaming
– WeGiveYouCredit
– Favicon Found Within This Blog Post
– Havenworks Voted worst designed website by Digg and everywhere else.
– Google’s brand new favicon which has acclaimed quite a bit of negative press.

If you are in possession of a less than stellar favicon, use one of these services to easily create yourself a new one.

Favicon Generators

GenFavIcon – Three step icon generator

Convertico – Convert ICO to PNG files or vice versa. Favicons are in .ico format

Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator – Favicon Generator created by Dynamic Drive

FaviconGenerator – Upload a photo from your hard drive and generate a favicon out of it

Webscriptlab Favicon Generator – Favicon generator created by Web Script Lab

The Manual Way:

If you don’t want to use any of the services offered online for free to generate your icon, you can create one manually with Photoshop or another piece of graphic design software which supports the .ICO format. If you are going to use Photoshop, make sure you download the ICO file format plugin which can be found at Telegraphics. Then, read this tutorial called Mysteries Of The Favicon.ico written by Jennifer of Photoshopsupport. This guide will walk through all of the steps to manually create a favicon within Photoshop.

For the truly geeky people out their, you can use something like png2ico which is a command line like PNG to ICO converter.

Inspiration:

If you are looking for inspiration in creating a favicon, I highly recommend browsing through the MpP favicon galleries. These galleries are filled with high quality, awesome favicons which have been collected by Michael P. Pierce. After browsing through these galleries, you should have a good idea as to what quantifies as a good design within a 16X16 pixel package.

If that doesn’t suit your creative fancy, head on over to DeviantArt.com and perform a search query for Favicon and check out the designs that have been created by the DA community. DeviantArt is host to the largest collection of digital art work in the world.

Inspiration as well as design tips can be found on 1favicon.com within an article entitled, Favicon Inspiration.

Then you have Smashing Magazine who posted an article which contained 50 high quality favicons to stir up creativity.

Conclusion:

If you didn’t think Favicons were important, check out this site called Bring Back The Old Google Favicon. A website dedicated to bringing back the old familiar 16X16 little image that everyone seemed ok with.

As I’ve discovered on my own, fitting a good quality design into a package that is only 16X16 pixels is a difficult task. However, using the services listed above in combination with the resources of inspiration provided, the task of creating these difficult icons should now be much easier.

Here is what I’d like to know from you. First, which tactic have you used to create your own favicon? Secondly, I’d be interested in finding out if there are any other poorly designed favicons besides these seven. I looked high and low and couldn’t find many that were this bad.

One of the aspects of blogging which has a beauty and the beast aspect to it are guest posts. Guest blog posts are blog posts written by someone other than yourself, but are then published on your blog. Or, these are posts written by you and then submitted to a site relevant within your niche. These are typically one time deals.

The Beauty:

Guest blog posts give you the opportunity to expand your reach. Find other blogs that are relevant to your niche and ask the blog author if you can submit a guest blog post. In my experience, I’ve seen blog authors end up being more than happy to publish a post that is relevant to their site while happily placing a link back to the blog author’s website. Not only is this a great way to self promote yourself, but you get to expand your audience. One of the side benefits of writing guest blog posts is that, it could land you a paid position on a website you frequently submit posts to.

The Beast:

Perhaps I may be the only one who has experienced this, but I’ve noticed that some of my best work is produced when I am preparing a guest blog post for another site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wrestled with my mind on publishing the post on my personal blog versus the guest blog. The thoughts and feelings of a blog post going viral, or becoming popular on a social website are always the ones which make me stop and think twice before submitting the article to the guest blog author.

What I’ve Learned:

Based on my experience thus far, writing an awesome guest blog post and submitting it to a relevant site is better than publishing it on your own blog, just as long as the guest blog author places a link to your site within the post. This link is vital. If your guest post becomes popular, people will click on that link and you will receive follow through traffic. You will also open yourself up to a wider audience who may not have visited your site had you posted the article to your own blog. And again, if the guest blog posts you are writing are of high quality on a regular basis, there is a good chance that you could net a paying position.

What About You?

What experiences have you had in terms of guest blog posts? I’d like to know from those of you who have published these posts on your own blog as well as from those of you who submit guest posts to blogs other than your own on a regular basis.