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Fark Killed My Blog

Yesterday my photography blog got “farked“. This ought to have been a day for celebrating but in actual fact the first I knew about it was when someone emailed to say my site was down.

It turns out my web host has a policy where they disable a site that uses more than 20% of processor. It seems that my (pretty much default other than template) Drupal install was gobbling up resources. According to Metrics I received an additional ~8000 visitors before my blog died (or was killed, either or).

Lessons learned

Use traffic management settings before things like this happen – in Drupal that means switch caching and throttling on and be careful what frivolous modules you have running
Check your blog every day at least, don’t wait for a visitor to tell you that your blog is down
You get what you pay for where hosting companies are concerned
Read the terms and conditions before signing up
Take regular backups of all important files and databases
Host critical domains outside of your hosting agreement (if things get nasty you don’t want your domain held to ransom)
It might be a hobby blog to you but people miss your stuff when it isn’t there

Luckily my photography blog is a labour of love rather than something I rely on for income. Just imagine if it was critical and I had been away on business or vacation, I might have been looking at a hole in my bank balance a week from now.

The thing that will be most interest to you guys that have been following the social bookmarking threads is out of those ~8000 additional visitors I gained one new user, 10 additional adsense clicks and zero RSS subscribers.

Just goes to show, I would much rather receive steady traffic than a flood!

Added: A couple of Metrics charts to see a little better what happened. Notice the cut-off of traffic when my blog was pulled!

Added: 23rd August, the party is over. Fun while it lasted!

MySpace Blog Editor Released!

After a huge effort on our lead Firefox dev, Jed’s part, and a great deal of discussion with some fantastic MySpace folks, we’re proud to finally announce the release of The MySpace Blog Editor, which you can download and install from Mozilla. There’s even a a great screencast to walk you through the install process.

As far as I’m aware, Performancing is the only blog editor to support MySpace.

The MySpace Editor REQUIRES Performancing Firefox 1.3, our open source, multi platform blog editor for Firefox.

Using the New Addons API in PFF

The new MySpace editor was built using the new addons api, and makes for a powerful demonstration of the extensibility of PFF in version 1.3

Let Us Know What You Think…

We hope you like this first public version of the MySpace addon for PFF, please let us know what you think so that we can continue to improve it!

Launch Rule #1: Make Sure it Works

So, you have all the web2.0 ingredients: Silly name: check, Hosted service: check, Big blog arses kissed: check, working website: doh!

It’s a bit of a shame for poor CrazyEgg because it sounds like a pretty fun service, and certainly Brian Benzinger thinks it’s cool. Let’s hope they get their hosting problems sorted out ASAP as it’s almost certainly something a lot of the Performancing community would be interested in aswell. Keep an eye on it, and tell us what you think when it’s back up.

Note: If the link above works for you, at the time of writing it was giving either a blank page or a 500 server error.

Search Engine Redundancy Coming Soon?

Part II – I Seek You, and your meta-data, too…

The story until now:
Part I was a quick review into understanding Traditional Search Engines and their methods and relating them to human conversation – since the Web 2.0 is all about ‘conversations in the marketplace’. On to the second part.

What does making sense out of data mean?

In Search Engine terms, it would refer to contextualizing the huge chunk of uncontextual data that is the World Wide Web into information and eventually knowledge. To me, as a human, it simply means tagging certain keywords to any given chunk of data (e.g. a lecture, a passage, a book, a chapter, a conversation) in order to be able to recall it at any time – especially, when one of these keywords is mentioned.

For instance, the conversation in the previous post was about a traveller, (an out-of-towner) looking for directions to a tobbacconist. As I keep reminding myself, Web 2.0 is not a product, it is a process. The process has a lot of conversational threads that keep getting picked and dropped as newer and more interesting threads or new participants appear in their place.

So what would a contemporary Search engine have to consider in Web 2.0?

‘Weight’ing for Information.

From being a static display of items-for-sale behind elegant window panes, the Internet slowly transformed into a bazaar of sorts, with hawkers all around the place plying their wares. The markets grew to accomodate the new and the old. With the advent of Web 2.0, contextualization of information became the norm and not an option.

It all began with a nifty bookmarking site called del.icio.us that allowed you to access your favorite sites across the web. Technorati extended the concept to Blogs and induced bloggers to ‘tag’ their posts with their choice of keywords/tags.

With the Web evolving like a democracy, the obvious question of authority in the Web-democracy arose. Which voice among the loud babble was to be trusted? As the web evolved, so did the concept of it’s franchise. Only, in this virtual reality, links were deemed votes and tags were your campaign ads. Let’s take a quick look at the foru weights that influence your vote.

Tags – Powerful Keywords

Each tag is a keyword that associates a particular context, a topic, with a given chunk of data.

Time – The ‘other’ Long Tail

All topics & data have a peak presence time. The freshness of a particular keyword is of prime importance in its influence.
Consider this simple example: When Iraq was attacked, almost all of the Search Engines across the world were buzzing with Search queries consisting of corresponding keywords, viz., “Iraq” “attack”. The “hotness” of the Search cooled down as the days progressed, as the world got other topics to discuss about.

Trust & Authority

Even in flat hierarchies like the Internet there are obvious postitions of Trust and Authority. People who blog well, and blog often gain a large following, and effectively, the crucial element of Trust.

Authenticity

A news on a Microsoft blog would obviously be rated higher in all terms than a news quoting a “trusted Source at Microsoft”. The only exceptions to this rule are:

The news is a really good bit of juicy gossip – like a rant or a ‘leaked’ secret
The blogger has high levels of Trust & Authority

There’s a common thread that binds all of these.. Do you see it yet?

(To be concluded)

Note:
I profusely apologise for disappearing from the Blogging scene, all of a sudden. I was forced into a short hiatus by unforeseen circumstances. We updated our website platform to a new version, recently. although the beta is pretty stable, we are still working on a better UI. As a result, I had to spend some sleepless nights and a few Blog-less weeks. 😉

Once again, my sincere apologies for the same…

Technorati Tags: search, search-engine, tags, web2.0

200,000 Downloads!

Performancing Firefox broke the 200,000 downloads mark over the weekend!

Congratulations to Jed, and everyone that helps us with suggestions, bug reports and feature requests in the PFF forums.

Should You Biz-Blog For (Sweat) Equity?

Brian Clark mentioned equityas one form of payment for corporate blogging. If I’ve interpreted correctly, I’m assuming that Brian means things like accepting options, shares, or a percentage of partial payment from a client company. (I’ll continue on the assumption that that’s what he’s saying.)

It’s a great idea, and if you choose that form of payment, either partially or completely, understand fully what you’re getting and giving. You still need to clearly define for both yourself and the client what your fee for the project is. How you choose to accept payment is secondary.

For example, my brother runs his own PR/ad agency with a biz partner. They’ve got an “angel” project whereby they do work for both cash and equity for select, carefully screened client companies (percentage of future revenue and/or shares and options). Sometimes the effort hasn’t been worth it. Other times it has. They also do a great deal of charity work for non-profits in return for the awards it wins them, as well as links from the resulting high-traffic sites.

So other bloggers want to go the equity-for-pay route, select your clients carefully. Big companies are more likely to offer shares/ options rather than a percentage of profits. Small businesses and startups may not make a profit for a while. In the latter case, you may want to stipulate partial payment in cash, payable under typical contract terms. The rest of the payment, if payable as a percentage of future revenues, should factor in the duration and a reasonable interest rate.

I.e., what would you lose in interest by not receiving a full cash payment at the end of the project. The payment difference and interest together should determine what the value of equity should be. So if you do a project worth $10,000 but accept $2000 cash and $8000 equity over four years, factor in four years of interest. Essentially, you are loaning the client $8000 for four years.

For the sake of argument, say that the client would have to pay $1000 in interest to a bank to borrow $8000 under similar terms. Then the value of equity to you should be $9000, payable under whatever schedule you agree to – weekly, monthly, yearly, options, shares, barter (products + services), etc.

Of course, all this gets complicated, especially in terms of declaring your income on your tax return. (Even services bartered are supposed to be declared under most conditions, so keep that in mind.) Having a discussion with a good accountant is highly recommended.

Have you blogged for equity? Please feel free to share your experiences here. We can all learn from them.

Performancing Exchange Week 1

I am pretty pleased with our progress so far on Exchange. Already if you really want to be a pro blogger there have been several opportunities, some paying gigs and others simply for link credit. We even in our first week have our first blog for sale. Exchange might even help do some good in the world.

For people who want to take up these offers, some tips to help you land your plum blogging gig

Make sure your profile is up to date and don’t just say “I can do this” or “I am good at that”, back up your statements with relevant supporting experience. “I wrote NNNN an article that brought $xxxxx sales” is a lot better than “I am good at writing sales copy” right?
Don’t be afraid to contact the people looking for bloggers, if they didn’t want submissions they wouldn’t ask and I am sure any one of them would be more than willing to answer questions if it helps them recruit who they are looking for.
Demonstrate that you understand what they want, anything that smells of “copy and paste” in a response is bound to be overlooked.

And if you are making an offer

Be clear about what work is involved.
Be as explicit as possible what the rewards will be.
Target who you really want/need, vague posts will not necessarily bring more submissions.
Spread the word, you will get more responses.

The biggest tip is probably just try it. Can’t hurt and even if it doesn’t work out first time you get a little more publicity.

The Secret Group-Digging Conspiracy

Apparently there is uproar about the “discovery” that people are getting their friends and cow-orkers to Digg their stories. Whoah, stop the press!

Even worse (!), Weblogs Inc, owner of Netscape, an alleged Digg-clone no less, has been accused of using this exact tactic to boost their own stories!

Even even worse (!!), there are secret cabal email lists with the aim to share links and get certain Diggers submissions pushed to the front page.

Oh my days what is the world coming to, people gaming Digg in an organised fashion. OMG, WTF, YMMV etc.

Urm, apparently this is new to some people. Really.

Personally, perhaps it’s just how my brain is wired up, but I connected the dots between “Digg popular = traffic”, “lots of friends = lots of diggs” pretty much right away. But is it worth the backlash doing it so blatantly? I know kids with 1000 friends on MySpace, how easy would it be for them to do?

It turns out the shock isn’t so much that people are doing this, which is a given in such a system, but that people are doing it to subvert the “editorial content” of Digg. The theory goes that it’s ok for people to do this to get spam out there and popular, but when people do it for political reasons then it really gets sleazy. I can see that. Seems when you step over the line from greed to a political agenda, that is when it gets nasty.

I think people are forgetting something though, Digg just suggests “stuff” you might want to go look at. The comments give you another level of filter “obvious spam” is a popular comment. So for someone to take a Digg seriously they are going to have to also game the comments too. A little bit extra work. But you know what? If you are not interested “Austrian Economics” it will take a heck of a lot more than “It’s really good, no really!” 200x to change your mind. Seems to me all they are succeeding in is taking over the front page and painting a big red target on the site and the digg user accounts for future filtering.

What do you think? Do you do this? Would you? Heh, are you going to now that I have alerted you to it? Share your thoughts in the comments …

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