Category Archives: Blogging

Blogger is Down Right Now

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After trying to load a blog hosted on blogspot and failing, I noticed in my RSS reader that Blogger is having database problems today. They say that some sites are unavailable and the service in general is slow. You can check out the Blogger Status site for updates. If you use blogger, you should subscribe to the RSS feed for that page. I subscribe to the company feeds for all the vendors that I know any of my clients use, and I put them in a seperate folder. So I get pretty fast information on service problems – automatically. At least I do from companies that are communicating with their customers.

For other advice on getting your RSS feeds organized, check out “Getting RSS Organized.” For an in-depth introduction and list of RSS resources, check out RSS Syndication: What, How and Why.

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Teens and Blogs: Huge Adoption

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Notorious for small sample sizes, but interesting none the less, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released another study. This one is about teens and online content creation/sharing. Based on 1,100 families, findings included:

  • Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage;
    create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation.
  • 19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog. That is approximately four million people.
  • 38% of all online teens, or about 8 million young people, say they read blogs.
  • 7% of adult internet users say they have created their own blog and 27% of online adults say they read blogs. (Note: Data for adult blog readers comes from the May- June 2005 Pew Internet Project Tracking Survey.)

Say what you will about what most teenagers use their blogs for, but what this study says to me is this: blogs are going to only get bigger in the very near future. Young adults will increasingly demand communication that is open, frequent and two-way. What percentage of these young people will grow to read and write blogs about serious subjects as a primary means of communicating with the world around them? What’s your strategy for maximizing relevance?

Thanks to Ruby Sinreich for pointing to this Pew study.

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Adding “del.icio.us this” and “furl this” links to your blog

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Tip of the day: you can add one click links to the end of each blog post for readers to archive that post in their del.icio.us or Furl archives. I think this makes it all the easier for people to save, return to and effectively promote your post and your site. If reading posts all in a row on the front page of a blog, you can bookmark a particular post without having to click through to it’s unique permalink pagel. Here’s how you add that option…

Inside your blog’s HTML template there should be a template for each post. In Blogger you can find the end of the post because that’s where the “leave a comment” link will be (you can add this code right after that link) and in WordPress you will have a post template file findable via presentation-template editor, or the post template will be in your main template.

In Blogger, you can add:

<em>Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a> or <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a>. (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br /></em>

In WordPress you can add:

Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<?php the_title(); ?>&u=<?php the_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a> or <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a><br/> (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br />

As you can see perhaps, the basic code here is the same for both, what differs is how your blogging software identifies the permalink of whatever post you are on. So if you are using something other than Blogger or WordPress, you can adjust that part accordingly. And of course you can remove, replace or tweak the link to my definition of social bookmarking however you like.

Please note that Furling links this way will not save you a cached copy of the post the way Furl likes to do (thus you will get an error-ish mssg) but don’t worry, the URL and all other info you enter into the Furl box will be saved!

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you and I’ll see if I can help. Adding things like this is an example of what I do as part of my blog optimization services. If you are interested in having me set your blog up with the best in new tools for maximum impact and awesomeness, let me know. I offer blog optimization services at a very reasonable cost – your increase in traffic and sophistication will be more than worth it.

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Technorati Tips

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I had the pleasure to talk to Ryan King of Technorati at Tag Camp this weekend and our conversation included a couple of things I thought I’d share with readers here.

  • Spam Blogs I saw Alex personally zapping splogs by hand from Technorati search results while we were talking! Apparently they have a variety of algorithms to do this automatically as well, but it was nice to see him care enough to clean things up when he had a minute. He also told me about having conversations with some of the big search engines about how to deal with this problem. So contrary to Dave Winer’s bizarre statement in conversation this weekend that RSS feeds for search were worthless because of the spam – I have faith that the problem is being mitigated as we speak. One way or the other, the last thing I’m going to do is give up on search-to-RSS! It’s absolutely invaluable, even if I have to take some extra time to construct less spammy queries. Unfortunately Winer was just one of several older men who were so full of themselves they had a hard time communicating with anyone around them. They didn’t contribute much either. To step back from that, I found several people who agreed with me that results are amongst the most filled with spam.
  • Indexing I’ve been conversing with several people who are having trouble getting their Typepad sites indexed by Technorati, and thus are not seeing their tags show up in tag searches there. Alex showed me the header tag that could be changed to reflect the Feedburner RSS feeds people are using. I’ll work on that and hopefully the problem will be solved.
  • Tagging Turns out that when they say they are indexing everything with rel=”tag” in the link code, they mean it. I asked what sorts of things this made possible and Kevin showed me how instead of just putting his Technorati Tags at the end of blog posts, he sometimes adds the rel=”tag” after the a href=”” in links mid-post. For example, when he linked to a definition in Wikipedia he made that link a tag as well. Try it out, I’m going to with this post.
  • Satire A side project Kevin is doing is Supr.c.ilio.us and the Supr.c.ilio.us blog. Mea Culpa: Kevin is collaborating on these projects with Eran Globen. It seems to be all about mocking the most absurd tendencies of the Web2.0 inner circle and related hype. It’s pretty funny, sometimes. If you’re looking for stuff like that, check it out.
  • Vertical Search If you go to Technorati proper (not tag search) you’ll see that they are not offering vertical search, or search within a subject. The categories don’t seem very differentiated and the results appear limited, but it looks like a good idea and one I’m sure they will improve. I used it just a minute ago to search for blog posts about Looksmart’s product Furl without getting results filled with random blogs that happen to use Furl for archiving. I liked that I could search inside blogs about the Web, about the Internet and about Technology (?). Unfortunately, I didn’t get many results. So we’ll see. It does seem like a helpful step towards improving blog search results. And that’s important.

So that’s one conversation I had at Tag Camp, I’ll be discussing more over the next few days. For now I have to finish up here in S.F. and get back home.

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RSS Syndication: What, Why and How?

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RSS Syndication is a key element of the emerging Web 2.0 world. Once you start using it to keep up with your favorite organizations, news sources, current events issues and other online phenomena – you will never want to go back to the old habits of “surfing” the web. Neither will the people who visit your organization’s site. Thus it is very important to make RSS feeds available for your news updates and other updated matierial. This will keep users up to date and coming back to your site, helping focus them on you despite the huge number of options available to them online at any time.

If you have never seen what the inside of an RSS aggregator loooks like, I’ve set up a seeded demonstration account over at Newsgator.com that you can view. Username is “marshalldemo” and pass word is “welcome”
Check out some of the feeds coming into that account to get an idea what sorts of things are consumable via RSS.

Various Concept Intros

Introduction to RSS (my intro)

Alexandra Samuel’s RSSTocracy (A general resource site, with introductions)

Why You Should Use an RSS Reader (Another intro)

Examples of RSS in Use

Order From Chaos Via RSS

More Enterprise RSS Examples (how a variety of organizations are using RSS, plus this site is a great resource in general. The podcasts are super interesting.)

Update on the NPTech Attention Stream MetaFeed
Check out an RSS feed that’s collaboratively created by and for non-profit technologists! I’m the publisher of this MetaFeed.

Tips on Using RSS

Getting Your Feed Reader Organized My article on info-overload and how RSS can help.

Adding One-Click Subscribe to RSS Buttons to Your Site (One example)

RSS Tools You’ll Want to Use

Feedburner
The best RSS feed hosting service, also has lots of great supporting features like automatic pinging and subscribe by email.
http://feedburner.com

Feed Digest (for splicing multiple RSS feeds into one, turning a feed into an automatic HTML display for you site, and lots more)
http://feeddigest.com

FeedFire creates scraped headline feeds of sites that don’t have their own RSS feeds. A little clumsy, but works way better than nothing.
http://feedfire.com

Ok, I hope this is helpful and interesting. I do hope you’ll check out the world of RSS, it’s really revolutionary and will dramatically increase your effectiveness if you use it well.

What Are Trackbacks?

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I was just sent an email asking “what’s up with trackbacks?” I thought the info might be of use to many readers here.

Trackbacks are a way to say “I posted a blog post about this post of yours, so I’m going to leave a trackback to connect the 2 posts.” It’s like a citation for a particular post. It solidifies the conversation by allowing readers to follow links to other places online where any given topic is being discussed.

Trackbacks usually have to be created by hand. Your blogging or commenting program may have an option to send a trackback to some one else’s blog. Many blogs include URLs in each post for you to send a trackback if you want to. (Mine here for example.) Some blogs will automatically detect trackbacks elsewhere (links to your post).

When you post a trackback, you usually select a snippet from your article linking to the one you’re making a trackback to. I think this is an important chance to show what unique perspective you offer in the discussion, not just to say “I’m some random person linking to your blog.” In other words, it’s cool to offer some value in your trackbacks.

Your text snippet and the trackback URL of the post you are what you need to make a trackback.

Some people have turned off trackbacks on their sites because of trackback spam. This is an even bigger problem than comment spam for some people. That’s true probably in part because there’s not generally an expectation that trackbacks are going to clearly be valuable, relevant contributions to the discussion. People often put no thought into writing them, so when we read them we often don’t read them closely and realize they are spam. It’s probably easier to send out trackback spam than it is to send comment spam too.

All of this is likely to change in the near to mid term future as people figure out how to maximize connectedness and conversation while minimizing technical barriers and spam. But for now, that’s what I know about trackbacks. Let me know if you need help sending them to sites you are citing.

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Blogger Sentenced to Prison, Lashings

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Protect Freedom of Speech - protect Omid Sheikhan
Sign the petition to keep Iranian blogger Omid Sheikhan out of prison

From the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Omid Sheikhan has been sentenced by the Iranian court to one year in prison and 124 lashes.

Omid was first arrested last year, confined for two months, including one in solitary confinement, and tortured, due to his blog which featured satire on the Iranian situation.

When he was brought to court on October 8 he faced different charges, due to the fact that even in the Iran judicial system it would have been difficult to convict him on charges relating to his blog. Instead, he faced, and was convicted on, charges stemming from “morals” violations, including “having unlawful relations, drinking wine, corruption of morals (for having a birthday party) and possessing satirical pictures of Iranian politicians.”

Now this blogger in his early twenties will be beaten half to death and join Mojtaba Saminejad as a felon in the general prison population. The Iranian government should be as ashamed as the Iranian people no doubt already are. Please sign the petition for Omid.

Omid now faces a second trial, presumably an appeal, not unlike Arash Sigarchi’s.

In addition to signing the online petition, please consider visiting the Committee to Protect Bloggers website. There you will find the code to put this graphic and link to the petition on your own site. The Committee also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to so as to keep up to date on issues like this.

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