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The One Message No One Wants To Hear

I was talking to my friend on AIM. We were brainstorming article ideas and I was thinking about doing a series of articles on “How To Build An Authority Blog” – and then it occurred to me (by way of my friend):

The one message that no one wants to hear is this: success takes time.

You can accurately identify who’s going to be successful on the net by simply checking to see whether they have a proper grasp on the amount of hard work and long-term commitment it takes to succeed.

The sad thing is that no one wants to hear this message and it gets tuned out. So it’s very tempting for those of us with advice blogs to hone our content to appeal to the “get rich quick” crowd.

But most people don’t get rich quick, they get rich slowly. So if you want to drastically increase your chance of getting rich on the Internet, take the slow and steady approach. Form a long term, 3-5 year plan, and start taking those steps today that you can acheive today to prepare you for the steps you’re going to take tomorrow so that ultimately you will get where you want to be in 3 years.

That’s the best advice I can give you. (Well, besides getting to know the right people;-)

Why Should Bloggers Use Yahoo Pipes?

With Microsoft recently making a bid of nearly US$46B to buy rival Yahoo, I was hesitant to start a new series for Performancing that I’ve been planning around Yahoo Pipes. Hopefully Microsoft will not “bury” Pipes – which is about a year old now – like they have with other useful software I’ve used in the past and which they bought up. With that in mind, here’s a quick “why use it” introduction to Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes is essentially a handy way to take data in various formats (XML, RSS/XML, CSV, etc.) from the web and filter and manipulate it. It’s really that simple, in terms of functionality. But even that in itself is what makes Pipes so powerful. Here is a very short list of what Pipes can be used for:

  1. Custom search engines for collecting information related to a set of keywords.
  2. RSS filters for customizing web feeds.
  3. RSS radars for researchers or online bargain-hunting shoppers.
  4. Dynamic web maps.
  5. Custom multimedia content streams (images, video, audio).
  6. Producing source data for custom HTML badges, even a “recent posts” badge for a blog network.
  7. Monitor for top blogs in a niche.

This hardly begins to describe what you can do with Yahoo Pipes on its own. If you marry Pipes with custom code and/or other web services that are RSS-based, you have the raw building blocks for creating a new generation of web application prototypes. What’s more, the interface is visually-based, so you do not need to know how to write code to use Pipes.

The drawback is that Yahoo Pipes is still in beta and as such, modules are often deprecated and replaced with new ones that are not 100% identical in functionality. Nevertheless, learning the basic functionality of Pipes modules and how to integrate a Pipe with other web services can lead you to add custom features to your blog – without having to hire someone to code. You become more of a conductor than a musician.

So that’s what the rest of this series will do: teach you how to use Yahoo Pipes with hard examples. While I do have a fairly lengthy list of examples coming up, if there’s anything you really want to see done with RSS/XML data, please feel free to comment here. I’m taking requests, and I will build a working Pipe for what you need, if it’s possible and reasonable. If there’s custom code needed, I’ll do what I can on the Pipe side and offer an algorithm for the rest of the code.

Give Me a Break… A Blogging Break

Anna Goldsmith has some fine tips at Copyblogger for a successful freelance writing career, but they apply to any stay-at-home web worker, especially bloggers.

  1. Create a division between work and home.
  2. Take off your pajamas.
  3. Get to work on time.
  4. Don’t watch TV in the middle of the day.
  5. Go out to lunch.

In reading this, I realized that I violate all these rules often. My desk is in my bedroom, I sometimes wake up and blog in my “pajamas” (looks like a sarong), I get up anywhere between 8 am and 11 am (but usually before 9), I never go out to lunch, and I often watch TV all day and all night.

I know that when I “dress for work”, I’m always more productive. But I have to watch TV because I get a huge source of my “pop culture” knowledge from doing so. And watch a lot of classic movies on TCM and AMC as part of my film studies. It’s a necessity, but I do try to spend at least 3-5 hours straight without the TV on.

As for work time, I’ve always had a sleeping disorder and have lost/quit more jobs because of it than I care to remember. But to me, working at home now, it doesn’t matter, because quality creative output cannot run on a clock. While you can pick a fixed writing schedule and just write whatever you want to, to fill daily word count quotas, it’s not as easy to control what time of day your “useful” content is produced. Though I do find that if I write at least 500 words of non-fiction or 1000 words of fiction before 11 am, I usually have a really good day, even if I take off for several hours in the afternoon or evening. I can usually bank on this “rule” of productivity.

Of course, if you’re blocked and just not generating ideas, you should change your writing perspective. In fact, that’s often a good time to go have lunch to socialize. Otherwise you run the risk of unwittingly becoming a hermit like I did for nearly a year. I’m doing something about that now, but it’s amazing how easy it is to fall into it.

Do you work at home full-time? How many of Anna Goldsmith’s tips do you follow? How do you divide up your work day?

Using Google Trends To Track The Most Successful Super Bowl Commercials

This morning I’ve been having some fun with Google trends. It occurred to me last night while I was watching the Super Bowl that it would be cool if there were a clear way to identify the most successful Super Bowl ad in a manner other than voting (which is totally unscientific).

The cool thing about search is that it reflects people’s memories. People search on things they can recall. And a good advertisement will lodge itself in people’s memories.

The problem with Super Bowl ad voting is that it doesn’t take the phenomenon of memory or brand recall into consideration. If a person watches an ad, they might like it, but they might also forget it. The advertisers don’t care if people like the ad. They care if people remember the ad and then make purchases based on the ad.

So, this morning when I was looking at Google Trends it occurred to me that this might very well be the best indication of Super Bowl ad success. So according to Google trends, the most successful Super Bowl ads at this point have been:

The NFL itself (Chester Pitts)
cadillac escalade hybrid
GoDaddy.com
hyundai genesis
audi r8

When Google Consistently Misidentifies The Article Source…

It’s like your local government failing to tell you why they’ve set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless the customer climbs the fence.

On October 8th, 2007 Debng of Performancing wrote the following linkbait:
66 Celebrities that Blog.

On October 9th, 2007 the article went popular (front page) on Digg:
http://digg.com/celebrity/66_Celebrities_that_Blog

According to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, the article has 1,984 backlinks:
Page specific results from site explorer

A Google search for the title of that article (66 Celebrities that Blog) completely and utterly misidentifies the source:
http://www.google.com/search?q=66+celebrities+that+blog

In fact, if you follow the above link, you will see that the source is not listed on the front page (at least not at the time of this writing). The problem is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of sites on the first page of SERPs link to the source on Celebrity Cowboy.

This problem is not isolated. Time and again, I’ve seen Google misidentify the source for an extremely popular article.

So what can you do about it? Well, Google would have you believe that you can simply file a Dissatisfied? Help us improve quality report. But let me tell you, this does not work. I’ve been filing the report once each month since October when I first noticed the issue. And although the issue was temporarily resolved for about one week in November, it has since permanently returned.

So what’s the problem? Well, there are many possibilities. The problem is that Google’s words speak louder than their actions. There is clearly some penalty or buffer that’s being applied to the source article in this case, for whatever reason. The problem is that I have no recourse (other than the remote possibility that Matt Cutts takes notice and institutes an non-scalable solution).

I personally don’t want Matt Cutts to take action specific to my personal issues. I want Google to truly be committed to a policy of openness for webmasters who take the time to try to play by the book, even putting their sites into Webmaster Tools. I want Google to seriously work to clamp down on false positives in their penalty buffering algorithm, or to at least come up with a truly scalable solution for working with well-intentioned publishers to fix problems in a timely manner.

As it stands right now, there are thousands of good websites that are being unjustly damned to SERP hell, and publishers are left feeling helpless because, although they’ve completely cleaned up and consented to work on Google’s terms, Google continues to ignore them, not even acknowledging that there is an issue.

Quite honestly, it’s like your local government failing to tell you why they set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless they climb the fence. That’s what it feels like. I wish Google would realize the enormity of the issue.

A Simple Proposal For Drastically Improving Digg

The biggest problem with Digg is that it’s largely an all-or-nothing game. After spending a few days looking around Digg with the sole intention of understanding what is wrong, I’ve come up with this simple proposal:

Separate the logic of going popular in a category from the logic of going popular on the front page.

Ok. So what exactly do I mean and I why am I proposing it?

Right now, Digg sets a very high threshold for going “popular” – and it’s the same threshold for both the category pages and the Digg front page. Because of this high threshold for making the front page, there are many categories that are just ridiculously “stale” – I easily found a category where the top news story was from more than 6 days ago. I bet there are some categories with older news.

Because many of the categories are stale, or only have a few fresh stories per day, no one really monitors them as “breaking news” sources. Or even as a steady dose of interesting news. Most of the category pages are just plain dull and boring.

To fix this, Digg should have two levels of filtering. First, allow stories to go to the front page of a category more easily. This will create a steadier stream of new and interesting content on the category pages. Then, force a story that has gone popular on the category page to fight it’s way onto the “All” front page.

This kind of setup would create an environment where users votes on the category pages actually meant something. In other words, let the Digg users act as collective editors that play a critical role in deciding which “really good” stories deserve to be considered “great” – a 2-tier system of popularity would allow really good content the chance to exposure, it would freshen up the category pages with a steady stream of information, and it would put the average digg user back in control of what ultimately makes the front page.