Blogging

As written down in Development snapshots of LifeType 1.1 on 27. Apr. 2006 a new feature complete version of the  pretty nice multi-blog solution LifeType is available. Nightly snapshots are offered for testing purposes. In the article you will find more explanations and links. If somebody is looking for a multi-blog solution or an easy to setup blog-network using sub-domains on one server this is a solution I would recommend to look at.

If you don’t know LifeType (formerly known as Plog) … there are at least two big mediahouses in Germany realizing their attached blogs with LifeType: Financial Times Germany (ftd.de/blog/) and Burda/Freundin (http://blog.freundin.de/). But they for sure did some changes …

Basic info:

LifeType supports multiple blogs and users, media management,
generation of standard content, clean URLs and support for subdomains.
LifeType is released under the GPL license, and requires PHP and MySQL to work.

Basic links:

• lifetype.net
• lifetype.de

I have also installed it on/attached it to my site and it was pretty easy to start. The available templates are medium quality and the summary page for all blogs must be customized. It’s a good and stable multi-blog solution (speaking of 1.0.3).

Installation / Upgrade (don’t forget the backup :-):

In order to install this release, please use wizard.php as with
any release so far. If upgrading from LifeType 1.0.x to LifeType 1.1,
wizard.php will also take care of adding all new tables as well as of
making changes to currently existing tables. In order to upgrade from
an older development snapshot of 1.1 to a newer one, just upload the
newest files to the server and overwrite the old ones except your own
version of the configuration file (config/config.properties.php)

For your comfort … some of the LifeType 1.1 links:

• new features in LifeType 1.1
• keeping track of which template sets have been already updated
• which plugins have already been updated to work with LifeType 1.1 can also be tracked in the wiki

That’s the newest info on LifeType.

PS: If you are running a  1.0.3 … there is an update to 1.0.4 available.

Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, LifeType, multi, blog multi-blog, Plog, update

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Many people when I tell them about Performancing.com are interested in making an income from blogging. The idea of sitting in your underpants writing about something you enjoy and making money at it certainly is an attractive one. Inevitably though people ask me if anyone can do it. My answer is a qualified ‘yes’ …

Such a strange thing to say from someone who spends their days promoting the idea of Professional Blogging right? Why not “absolutely yes”, why the caveats?

While anyone has the potential to make money out of blogging a great many people never will. Just like any business, most bloggers don’t last out their first year. There are many reasons for this, primary factors being

• It’s hard work – Most people are ready to put the hard work in at the start, give it a couple of months, especially now the sun is starting to make an appearance and the lure of spending time doing anything but blogging can defeat them. You have to put the hours in. Yes, *hours*. This can be particularly difficult if you have to hold down a job and family life at the same time.
• You don’t get instant rewards – I hope we have never given the impression blogging is a way to instant riches, it isn’t. The rewards come months down the line after building traffic, reputation and reader involvement steadily day by day. When the rewards do start coming they appear as a trickle not a torrent. You need to keep your eye on the goal.
• There is more to it than just writing – but blogging is all about writing, right? Blogging is indeed about writing but a professional blogger, or any blogger who wants readers, has to do more than just write. You have to put your blog and yourself out there, communicate with people where they are and not expect them to magically know about you. You need to get links. There is also a large aspect of the salesman in a pro blogger. If you do just want to write, consider joining a blog network where they do all the sales and promotion stuff for you.
  
  
• Sometimes you have to act out of character – many of you will have read that “sales” word and shuddered. I feel the same way, while some people like Nick have a personality or motivation where they can do sales, many of us struggle with it.  If you are going to have access to money streams other than the passive Adsense et al you will need to brace yourself and get selling. That means sponsorships, advertiser relationships, affiliate schemes and your own products. Selling and self promotion is not something every writer is comfortable with but you have to do it or you are limiting your income potential.
• Money doesn’t come easily – yes many people make a good deal of money out of adsense, and good luck to you if your adsense income is enough. A lot of bloggers get disheartened when they don’t see big amounts coming from adsense so give up. After optimising your adsense you need to start going out and getting the cash in yourself. You need something on offer over and above your blog posts. The most natural progression from content to product for many bloggers is to package up your content and sell ebooks, courses and audio. Then there are things like merchandise through companies like cafepress. Think of what your readers might be interested in buying and find a way to provide it.

Anyone could make money from blogging but only a percentage of people actually go all the way and succeed. Critical to success is having staying power, not being defeated by minor setbacks, being willing to put yourself out there and put in the hard work. If you stick to it and can do all those things then yes, I am sure anyone can do it.

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Suppose that you have a personal blog (like many of us starting out in blogging do or did at a time) and that you learn blog marketing by promoting your own blog (site optimization, link building, etc). Then sooner or later you move on to professional blogging, where there’s a need to be more formal and impersonal (you can’t talk about your problems or swear on your business blogs).

The only issue is, thanks to your efforts in building links and trying to rank your personal blog for your name, you end up in a situation where a potential client comes across your business blog, sees your name and decides to Google you. He finds your personal blog, reads your latest rant on dog poop (or whatever), forms a negative impression of you immediately and decides not to do business with you.

The same thing can happen with potential partners and competitors – if the search engines know you because of your personal blog, then that’s what people will find – and that can be, in this case, a hurdle in building your professional reputation online.

My specific situation – I’m starting a business consultancy blog very soon. Only problem is that in this field people often do a background check on you to find out who you are and what you’ve done. If my personal blog comes up on top of the results (full with a rant on some obscure issue), how will that look? I would have (probably) been judged by a potential client negatively for something that is totally unrelated to what I’m providing, but because at this point the search engines know me through my personal blog, that’s what the people get.

My question is – how do you “hide” your personal blog from the eyes of your readers? I shudder at the thought of sanitizing my blog, but then again I wouldn’t want most of my readers from my business blogs to go over to my personal blog and read about what I did today (or whatever).

The obvious answer here is to not post anything that you wouldn’t want other people to read online, but that’s not a solution anymore. You can try to get yourself de-listed from the search engines, but that takes away a lot of your traffic (and if no one’s reading, why are you writing?).

How do I deal with this? Any suggestions?

Note: I know this has been discussed by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger and Nick here at Performancing, but I want to talk about this from a blogger who is just starting to gain ‘traction’ in the pro blogging field.

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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In what can only be seen as a “tip of the iceberg” move, AOL have finally made their next play in the blogosphere. Tipped off byHeather Green posting for BusinessWeek I see AOL’s new BloggingStocks.com, a weblog about, yes you guessed it, stocks.

Heather has the details:

Bloggingstocks.com is a unique idea. AOL hired bloggers to write about product announcements, earnings releases, and commentary on 8 stocks initially. On its first day, the network will do live blogging of the Microsoft earnings call, for instance. (Good luck!)

So, what about the $64,000 question? Can the bloggers hold the stocks they are writing about?

Indeed. In fact, AOL encourages them to be stockholders, if not necessarily in the companies they’re writing about.

It’s the first big move since they bought AOL and like Heather, I’d expect to see a lot more. The fact that the “big boys” are starting to move into lucrative keyword areas in the blogosphere means that it’s probably only a matter of time before regular commercial bloggers start to really feel the pinch. And that IS interesting. What’s more interesting right now though, is if those “sponsored links” they have on the right (currently empty) are going to be straight, or condomed?

Afterall, GOOG now own 5% of AOL right? So we wouldn’t want anyone doing anything as dreadful as shoing text links for other sites now would we?

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How would it feel if after all the time you’ve put in on your blog, it suddenly disappeared from google altogether? And loaded at a crawl if someone actually did know where to find you and wanted to read your posts?

How would you like to pay more money for slower internet?

If that sounds good to you, say, $60 a month for dial-up speed access then DON’T click the link below and sign the petition. If you liked TV better when there were only 2 or 3 channels, DON’T click the link. DON’T sign the petition. If you wish that the only businesses you could shop at were big box stores, DO NOTHING. Because it’s easier to ignore stuff and wait for it to go away. A smaller internet will certainly be easier to keep track of. We won’t need to worry about googlejuice, technorati rankings or SEO if Congress passes this bill.

On the other hand, if you ever buy from small businesses, like to find
new music or video online, sometimes read stories or news from sources
other than the networks, or have ever wanted something unusual that you
just couldn’t find nearby, the Please Do sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Network Neutrality.

To be honest, I don’t believe in petitions and have lost most faith in
our political process, but if this bill is signed into law I could very
well go out of business. And so will a lot of the other people and
websites that you may currently enjoy. I don’t know if we can make a
difference, but I would feel foolish for not at least trying.

Several telecom and media companies have decided that they would like
you to pay more for the internet than you already do. More importantly,
they would like to achieve this in part by auctioning off what you can
see online to the highest bidder. For instance, if you go online to buy
a fire pit right now, you’ll find a link to my Great Bowl O Fire pretty
near the top of google. But if AT&T or Time Warner are able to get
this bill through congress they’ll be able to sell control of search
results to companies like Target or Walmart. I’ll still be online, but
good luck finding me.

These companies are also lobbying for the right to slow access speeds
to sites that don’t pay them off. So, the high speed internet access
that you pay a premium for will only load sites quickly if they are big
enough to pay the extortion fee. All the other sites you visit will
load as though you’d decided to switch back to dial up modems. Are you
okay with that? Because I’m not. Same with news… Do you want all Fox
all the time, or would you rather choose which sites you use to find
out what’s going on in the world?

I’ve tried really hard to ignore this issue. But the more I learn about
it the more I realize that it affects us all. The internet is something
that we have recently learned to take for granted, but believe me, if
the web becomes as limited as TV was before satellite and cable, we’ll
all miss the freedom we allowed Congress to take away. The fact that
it’s all about greed just makes it worse.

Below is a message from Moveon.org with more info and a link to an
online petition that will be read before congress when they convene to
vote on this bill. Please go sign the petition. It really does matter.

Do you buy books online, use Google, or download to an Ipod? These
activities will be hurt if Congress passes a radical law that gives
giant corporations more control over the Internet.

Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard
to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Net
Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most
easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. Amazon.com
doesn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more
properly on your computer.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Many of
them take campaign checks from big telecom companies and are on the
verge of selling out to people like AT&T’s CEO, who openly says,
"The internet can’t be free."

The free and open Internet is under seige—can you sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Network Neutrality? Click here.

A list of all the ways you might be affected by Net Neutrality is available here.

To learn more, and get involved, you can do several things:

1. Educate yourself about the issues.  Read Doc Searls article from last year
   on the topic (this is what first alerted me to the issue, and allowed
   me to spread the word a bit, most notably to Liz Strauss, who took the ball and ran with it).
2. Visit the Save the Internet website and blog to learn more, and to send a quick and easy letter to Congress voicing your opposition.
3. Spread the word.  There’s a huge viral marketing campaign

   going on right now to spread awareness and galvanize support. Help
   spread the word with your blog, by email, or come up with a viral video concept.
   I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that if the big telcos and cable
   companies get their way, grass roots viral marketing will be a thing of
   the past.

   (list cribbed from Brian Clark at CoppyBlogger. You should be reading his posts on how to write copy. I know because I’ve seen about 400 articles on the net neutrality issue and his was the one that finally kicked me into gear!)

They WILL win if we are apathetic.  Do something, or find a way to earn a living that doesn’t involve the Internet.

The WebOS Market Review by Richard MacManus delves into the WebOS market, which is currently being played by small-timers like YouOS, eyeOS, XIN, etc. A WebOS is an OS on the Web that allows you to browse, eMail, chat, etc. Basically, the online counterpart of your desktop OS.

Ok. Stop. Let’ go back to that last one. Online counterpart of an OS? uhh, erm…

Hmm. Let’s try Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines WebOS as:

More generally, WebOS refers to a software platform that interacts with the user
through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local
operating system.

What? Let’s go through this one more time, step-by-step:

I boot my desktop OS. I fire my desktop browser. I connect to the World Wide Web. I access the WebOS. I see my WebDesktop. Now what? I fire up my WebBrowser and access the Internet again?

Er, excuse me, but isn’t that where I am already? So, which one is my, ‘true’, definitive OS? The one I booted to fire the (desktop) Browser, or the one that I accessed on the web? Moreover, how would you access such an OS in the future, given this logical inconsistency?

When I put forth this question, AutomanG replied with the following:

One solution would be to have something, say…, linux embedded into a box that’s sole purpose is to fire up a browser and initiate a tunnel to a remote server (where your webOS of choice is located.) It would be a borderless browser so to you, it would look just like you booted a computer arriving at a desktop.

This sounds really weird! No offense meant, but I just want to explore this a bit further:

Currently, looking at the larger picture, we have three OSes in the Desktop Market. Windows, Linux and MacOS. With this proposal the intention to make Linux a standard (irrespective of whether all people want it or not). Or Windows or MacOS. Some OS which can be universally accepted and moulded as and when need be. Which inevitably brings us back to Linux.

Agree though, the argument that Automan provides makes some sense on some level. Okay, it doesn’t matter what boots the embedded browser as long as what they see on their screens is the same all throughout. Interesting point, I admit.

But again, then there are many options for WebOSes now. There will come a time when we will have to choose one of them as a standard, or maybe, define some standard specs for a WebOS. How do you do that, then?

And if you were to do it later, why not do it now for the desktop OSes? And if you intend to write embedded software to run the necessary hardware, it still is an OS!

I still can’t fathom the need for a WebOS. The ability to store data online, more than makes up for the inability to access my personal desktop everywhere. After all the applications that you intend to put on the Web will be run by their desktop counterparts. What is the point?

Ok, I guess, I oughtta stop. I sound almost desparate now!

Technorati Tags: WebOS, ZDNet, OS

Well, there isn’t for most bloggers with commercial intent anyway. See Brians The Two Most Important Words in Blogging:

It’s certainly ironic that a medium often used as a self-absorbed journaling platform would now need to be overwhelmingly focused on the reader in order to be effective. But if you’re blogging for marketing or public relations purposes, your every post should be purposefully aimed at the needs and wants of others.

Once you realize that deep down we’re all just selfish bastards, it all becomes so much clearer 🙂