Category Archives: Blogging

New Year’s Web2.0 in China

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The China Web 2.0 Review is an interesting blog to keep up with, but one of the best ways to take a peek into the Chinese Web2.0 blogosphere is to read one of their week-in-review posts. This week’s includes links to blog posts elsewhere concerning:

  • OPML
  • Word Press hosting in Chinese
  • The best of 2005 and likely trends for 2006 in the Chinese Web2.0 space.

This is a feed I know I would like to watch more carefully!

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Feedburner and Del.icio.us: Pulling Threads Together? Maybe Someday

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Just a note on something I found interesting, if a bit obscure. Yesterday I listened to this interview with Feedburner’s Rick Klau and he said that one of the things their super-RSS management service is striving for is to pull together data threads from various sources into one viewable location. Just came across one place that isn’t happening yet.

Please forgive any navel gazing here, but I just noticed from my traffic stats that some one had visited my site about an hour ago from Sonny Cloward’s Vermont Non-Profit IT blog. It wasn’t the most exciting post I’d written that they came in through, so I went to the linking blog to see why that post was linked to. It turns out that Cloward had tagged the post via del.icio.us, and he runs his recently tagged posts as links in his sidebar. That’s a common practice and it’s nice to see it in effect.

But I noticed that it wasn’t the post’s permalink URL that he tagged and thus was linked to on his site, it was the URL of the post in my FeedBurner feed. Then, unsurprising perhaps, when I went to the post’s permalink URL and clicked my beloved del.lookup bookmarklet to see who had tagged the post in del.icio.us – it said no one had. And no one has tagged that URL, but apparently Cloward subscribes to my RSS feed (thanks!) and tagged the post directly from his feed reader. So if any of my subscribers tag my posts, that won’t show up in the same (far more accessible) data set as tags from casual readers.

That’s a real shame, and it complicates the new inclusion in Feedburner feeds of “tag this item in del.icio.us” links after every post in your feed. That option is something feed publishers must chose to activate and I think it’s one of several great features they’ve added in the last week. But the fact that it effectively facilitates a fork in my readship data is a real shame.

I just point this out because I think it’s an interesting example of the kinds of things Klau might mean when he says Feedburner aims to bring data streams together in the future.

If, by the way, you are interested in listening to the Klau interview – here’s a few tips. If you are uninterested in hearing about advertising in feeds, skip to about 10 minutes into the hour long interview. If you want to hear about cool stuff Klau believes is coming in the RSS world, skip to about 30 minutes in. It’s quite a good interview and if you follow that link there’s really good show notes. It also includes some basic info about RSS. If it’s intro info on FeedBurner that you’re looking for, though, you should check out Madge Weinstein’s awesome interview with Klau about how Feedburner works in the first place.

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Blogging and RSS are great for Search Engine Optimization and Discoverability

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A few weeks ago for a client I was looking at a large number of web sites for non-profit groups around Oregon and Washington and noticed that not only were they rarely updated and seldom offered RSS feeds, their link structure was utterly unusable. At the very least I wanted to scrape RSS feeds from their sites (using Feedfire.com) so that I could subscribe to updates. Unfortunately, even this was difficult as most of their links were tied to text like dates of events (as opposed to event titled) or to text that had no meaning out of the site’s immediate context (like “for more info click here). I was thinking about that experience this morning when I wrote an article for RSSApplied titled Blogging and RSS Foster Better Link Structure, Search Engine Optimization. It was originally written with a business context in mind, but I think that the basic ideas here could be helpful talking points in explaining why blogging and RSS are important in any context.

All too often, web sites contain links with no title but the word “here.” As in, for more information click here. Though this might make sense to the writer when the web site in question is a series of static, interlocking pages and documents that are navigated simply by taking one step at a time – those days are in fact gone.

Web sites today change frequently, and when they don’t many people become frustrated. Blogging and RSS are the perfect cure for this, as blogging makes changing a web site easy and RSS makes subscription to future changes on a site require almost no investment of time or energy.

Advantages of using blogging and RSS for your web site include:

  • Resources of any type entered as a blog post are created with a descriptive title as the post’s link. This structure lends to maximimum search engine visibility as the text inside links is more heavily weighted when a web page is indexed by search engines. If the first text on your page that is found by search engines is the linked word “here”, you have lost a major opportunity for yourself and others to be able to find that item high in any search results. A descriptive blog post title and link, in conjunction with the well designed metadata called “tags”, will make any item easier to find.
  • RSS subscribers will receive your headline links via their subscriptions. A non-descriptive link is unlikely to be clicked through.
  • A well designed blogging and RSS system will automatically “ping” relevant search engines, RSS feel delivery systems and other services of interest. To ping these services is to send them a message that changes have been made to your site and they should come and index the site anew. Content frequently updated and pinged for will appear much higher in search engine results than static content submitted to search engines just once.

All of these technologies working together (blogging, RSS, pinging, etc.) will help make your site’s content much more visible to the outside public and for your own later retrieval – thus saving time when you need to find something on your own site for later reuse.

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I’ll be Connecting and Blogging for Net Squared

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I am excited to report that I’ve been contracted by the wonderful folks at Net Squared to do work as a Blogger/Connector regarding non-profit groups using the web in interesting ways. Here’s what I wrote over there to describe what I’ll be doing.

I’ve been brought on board to act as a connector between different members of the community that could be of assistance to each others’ work and to blog about the kinds of work people are doing around the world.

I’ll be writing and posting some multi-media about the good news and the bad in the movement to make emerging technology a powerful part of the non-profit world.

The organization is largely focused on building participation for a conference in S.F. next May, but along the way the Net Squared site is a great place to learn about new tools for use in social change campaigns. I hope readers here will check it out and get involved. Here’s some highlights from the site that you might find of interest:

  • The conference page is all about the event, which you should consider attending.
  • The case studies page is a great place to learn about what exciting work is being done by many groups around the world.
  • The Community Blogs page is where you can find all the staff blog posts aggregated in one place.

I am beside myself with joy to get to work with this group and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me to create useful, interesting connections and writing.

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Podcast Interview with Norris McDonald over Gizmo Project

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The above link is an interview I did yesterday with Norris McDonald, President of the African American Environmentalist Association (AAEA). We talked for about 18 minutes about a variety of topics including:

  • The AAEA Blog and the AAEA Hollywood Blog and Norris’s experiences with his constituents on these blogs.
  • Will podcasting take off or do most people prefer their talk on the radio and music on their iPods?
  • Nuclear power. The AAEA supports it as the solution to all the problems of fossil fuel dependency. Norris also argues that advocating for decreased consumption in the US is unrealistic. He recommends the site GreenSpirit for more info.

The interview was done via the Gizmo Project a VOIP program very much like Skype. Gizmo was every bit as easy to use and has a one-click record function, something that is a real nightmare in Skype. To read more about Gizmo Project check out this reviews on the bottom of the Gizmo page. Gizmo saved the call onto my desktop in .WAV format with a filename based on my caller’s username. Much thanks to my sound engineer brother who cleaned up the background info and um’s. I think it sounds great. Hopefully this is the first of many interview podcasts we’ll be doing.

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Four Visitor Mapping Services Compared

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Visitors to this and many other blogs may have noticed the proliferation of maps used to visualize the geographic location of a site’s readers. I use Clustrmaps myself and recommend it to others in most situations. But there are alternatives, and each service probably makes sense in different circumstances. Here’s an overview of 4 of the most popular visitor map services I’ve come across online. People love maps on blogs. Love them.

  • Clustrmaps.com shows a nice looking map on your site’s front page, with red circles of varying size to indicate how many visitors have come from each location. You can click on the map to get a full page view. Paid subscribers can focus in one particular continents and have the Adsense removed from the top of the full page maps. Subscription is aprox. $10 per year. The maps can also be set to go blank and begin anew at intervals of your choice. These folks also have awesome customer service. I believe this map is good for sites wishing to demonstrate world-wide readership, but for which networking is less important than it is for business type sites. I’ve set one up, for example, at The Committee to Protect Bloggers. Much of the blogging there concerns the Middle East and Asia, so it’s interesting to compare subject matter and location of readership. Their map shows that there are many readers living in the areas written about.
  • Frappr is a very full featured service. In addition to a scrollable Google mini-map on your site, there’s a click through full screen with extensive fields for community networking. In addition to posting photos, messages and links to the Google Maps used by Frappr, visitors can also send private messages to the site admin. Frappr asks visitors for their zip code and posts flags on the map accordingly. Users (“members”) can subscribe to email updates of new items posted to a map, admin can set up a slide-show of recently added photos, and who knows what else can be done with this amazing service. It appears to be supported by AdSense and AdBright. We’ll see how this service holds up under heavy adoption. You can browse a list of maps in use at the homepage of Frappr. This is a very impressive service, but may be too complex and over-featured for many blogs. There also doesn’t appear to be any support for RSS here.
  • GVisit is like a way pared down Frappr. The interface is very dull, Google Map on grey background, and there’s no mini-map for your front page so you have to just put in a link. There are, however, some desirable features. A list of recent cities visiting, the time of visit shown when flags are clicked on. You can also display the cities of recent visitors on the front page of your site via RSS to HTML. The RSS feed of visitor locations is also subscribable. This service is free, but with a donation of any amount they will track your most recent 100 visitors (up from 20) and remove all advertising from your map (lately there’s been some pretty obnoxious AdSense). I think this service would make sense for people interested in displaying the text of an RSS feed of recent visitors’ locations on the front page of their site, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
  • Geo-Loc is a very cool French service. Past visitor locations are in red, visitors currently on the site are in green, and the countries where the current visitors online live are scrolled along the bottom of the map. I think this is rad! You can see the service in action over at the hilarious Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog, about halfway down the right sidebar. (For those who don’t know, a Barking Moonbat is a raving leftist.) Or you can visit the Geo-Loc home page and view it there with more visitors. I can’t describe the service in depth as i haven’t done French since the 7th grade, and for now it’s beside the point anyway. I’m sad to report that according to the Subscribe page (and Google Translations)

    The significant number of inscriptions requires a maintenance. The inscriptions will be available soon. Thank you for your comprehension.

    That’s a shame, as this looks like a very cool tool for busy sites with global readership! I set up an email alert with Changedetection.com to let me know when the subscription page changes and new accounts are available again. I’d recommend this service to people who can read French, or who have a large number of readers who can. Just kidding, the map itself has only the words “now online” in English and the country names scrolling. Totally usable once you’ve got it installed.

Well, those are my little reviews. I’d love to read thoughts, horror stories, good experiences, interesting applications and alternative services if you’d like to leave a comment.

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I’m Joining the Corante Network!

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I couldn’t be much more excited, starting tomorow morning my writing here is going to be syndicated by the Corante network in their new “web hub.” Looking at the bios of the other contributors, I’m super honored to have gotten the gig. Huge thanks to Pete Cashmore at Mashable blog, whose blog roll got me the intro to the Corante editors. Now I have to get back to writing the good stuff that got me the gig in the first place!