I love The CommonCraft Show! I wish I had the time and equipment to produce such quality videos. If you still read blogs and new sites in a browser instead of a feed reader, let The CommonCraft help you with this video!
Category: Publishing
Need input from SEO/copyright experts
Hello world of Search Engine Optimization! The content thieves are frustrating. But does having someone reprint the first few sentences of a post and link back to you really hurt? What does it do for pagerank? Isn’t it simply a qualified link back to Reality Me? For example, hawaii-vacations.expert-travel-help.info has reprinted Darren’s prize list. Should I really care? Is it worth the fight?
Quote of the Day
This made me laugh hysterically.
“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.†Robert Wilensky
Thanks to JBB of Lumbering Through Life! As an aside, I disagree with stance that Twitter’s 140 character limit is in place as an etiquette and means of keeping thoughts concise. The 140 character limit is to enable Twitter to send message by SMS and keep the message within a single text message. I believe different people are finding different uses for Twitter. I have chosen not to follow a couple of people because of their topic choices and style. I think Twitter’s will fall into 3 groups: self-promoters and linkers (using Twitter to post URLs to blogs and websites), news/media alerts, and voyeurs/exhibitionists/chatters. The first group, the linkers, will use Twitter to promote traffic to their own sites or sites interest them. The news/media alerts will be a group sharing relevant information that is happening now. The chatters will use Twitter as a replacement or complement to IRC and the instant messengers. Not everyone will enjoy the style of all three groups.
Update: My wife agrees with jbb.
Twitter is killing my blog!
If you ask me about blogging, I will tell you to pay for your own hosting, buy a domain name, and use WordPress (.org)! My primary reason for this advice is so that you have maximum control and ownership of the content you produce. When you host with Blogger, or even at WordPress.com, you relinquish control of your content to a third party. They might close your account for a violation of terms of service and then you have lost your content or access to your drafts. They might close shop and you also lose your years of hard work.
Getting the balance of posts right for your readers is tough. Post too frequently and your readers will skim or skip (or worse, unsubscribe!) and miss your best posts. Post infrequently and your readers will go away. When Twitter first hit the scene, I didn’t get it. Frankly, I still take issue with Twitter because we are relying on a third party to manage our content but Twitter is addictive! I find myself making those short updates to Twitter while reserving my blog for longer commentary. I used to make one sentence posts to my blog and liter it with frequent updates. Twitter has changed the way I blog. And people have noticed!
Blog early and often! [Jack Lail]
That unpostable post
Every now and then then muse hits me and I wax eloquently, laughing aloud as Pulitzer prose and allegory flow forth from my fingertips. I declare, "this is the post that will bring me fame!" Then I read it. Blink. And think, "I can’t publish that!" And that is why I have 145 drafts that will never see the light of day!
People come here for rezoning, earthquakes, drivers and marijuana
I’ve been watching my stats after installing the WordPress.com Stats plugin. It would appear people come to Reality Me to read about Knox County School Rezoning, the New Madrid fault line, the Realtek 8201 CL driver, and the marijuana cave.
Ze’s Alive!
Ze Frank brings it home on social networking!
The Internet Can Shutdown Now
Best comment e’var!
Somewhere, a fat, nerdy kid with a broom stick in hand feels utterly vindicated. [Source by Jon]
The comment was a response to the The Most Amazing Video Of A Girl Playing Star Wars On The Trumpet… EVER video seen below.
Content Theft Worsens
If you follow my comment feed, then you may have noticed that I am getting huge amounts of trackback spam. Why not just turn off trackbacks? Because these people are stealing my content, and likely your content, for their own personal gain and the trackback is the easiest way to find them. Yes, they generate a link back to Reality Me which in theory should help my page rank but not when it is with duplicate content. I have installed the Antileech WordPress plugin but I am still figuring out how to use it without cutting off my feeds to legitimate readers. If you do end up getting a "this content is stolen" message instead of the actual post, please email juggler at gmail.com and I will fix it. That said, can you confirm which feedreader you use based upon the following:
- Blogdigger/2.0 (http://www.blogdigger.com/; contact@blogdigger.com) Referred by: http://www.zimbio.com/Jaycees/trackers/7/Blog+Search+Tracker
- Feedfetcher-Google; ( http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 6 subscribers; feed-id=3701543567382179734) Referred by: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
- Feedfetcher-Google; ( http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 9 subscribers; feed-id=8604077678671105327) Referred by: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my
- Feedster Crawler/3.0; Feedster, Inc. Referred by: http://ranchero.com/
- Gregarius/0.5.4 ( http://devlog.gregarius.net/docs/ua) Referred by: http://blognetwork.knoxnews.com/feed.php?channel=81
- Liferea/1.4.3b (Linux; en_US.UTF-8; http://liferea.sf.net/)
- NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http:/www.newsgator.com; 1 subscribers) Referred by: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx?fld=0
- NewzCrawler/1.8 (compatible; MSIE 6.00; Newz Crawler 1.8; http://www.newzcrawler.com/ )
- SharpReader/0.9.7.0 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.2407; WinNT 5.1.2600.0) Referred by: http://127.0.0.1:12108/sharpreader/page.html
- Wasabot/1.4 (+ http://www.wasalive.com ) Java/1.6.0_02
I am assuming that Blogdigger, Gregarius, and Wasabot are used by content thieves.
Is $1000 for someone else not worth YOUR time?
I am really enjoying participating in The Problogger Birthday Bash Darren Rowse and Lara Kulpa have put together. I do find it a little troubling that when they offered a prize of $1000 to your favorite charity it only generated 24 qualifying entries! Now turn it around. Instead of offering a decent sum of money for someone else, offer a $20 gift certificate for yourself and they got 724 comments! (not all of those would have been qualifying but I’m not going to count). Granted, there was a prize in that post which could have gotten you $500 for yourself but winning any other prize did not disqualify you from entering the charity giveaway. Every single Problogger reader should have entered the charity giveaway!
Ok. Let me get off my soap box and add in a little rationality.
- The money for self contest required no effort, just a comment under the post itself with as little as one word in it, so it makes sense that the number participants would be far greater.
- We assume that every reader of Problogger, due to its subject matter, has a blog BUT that could be a false assumption; ergo, the participation in the money for self would be higher.
- Not everyone is into charities. And that’s ok. So the participation in the money for self would be higher.
- The charity post required a little substance and effort. Unfortunately, effort and substance do knock a lot of people out of the game. Therefore, the money for self would be naturally higher.
All that said, it does make sense that some of the other contest posts would generate more comments. But only 24 valid entries for giving $1000 away to a meaningful cause?! Surely we should have done better than that! Karthik shares my sentiment.
Life is a participation sport. Get up! Participate! Be active in your community. Vote! Go to school board meetings. Pick up trash. Bring a shopping cart into the grocery with you instead of leaving it in the parking lot. Say hi to your neighbor. Hug someone daily! Volunteer your time. Leave a legacy. Make a difference!
Why do I blog?
Because now I don’t need to look up the torque settings. I’ll be in the driveway for the next hour or two.
My Entry to the Problogger iPod giveaway
My entry for Problogger’s 6th giveaway is:
iBlog for iMust
I met a guy from Oz
Tim Miller his name
Of SpyJournal fame
We have never met in person
But are friends all the sameSee I was trying out
This fad call blogging
Tim said its more than a game
Blogging is not a fad
It’s here to stayPeople make a living
In this digital world
Publishing their own word
Tim advise, “Check out problogger
A site by Darren Rowse.”Problogger showed the way
Follow these rules
And you can make your pay
In the comfort of pajamas
Sitting at your computer all dayI have yet to make a dime
But Darren must be doing ok
For it’s Problogger’s birthday
And good ol’ Darren
Is giving $54,000 away
Remember, they just needed a poem with the word "problogger" or "Darren" in it. The poem did not have to be a literary masterpiece although there are a couple of gems! At the time of this post, Darren Rowse and Lara Kulpa had 416 entries for their iPod giveaway which includes 4 iPods and 1 iPod makeover. You still have 4 hours to enter.
Today’s linkbait
How to tell your friends have quit reading your blog. Ahem. And Knoxville’s Youngest Blogger (personally I think he had a better time than his post implies).
I had a blast at the Orchestra!
Let me tell you. Maestro Lucas Richman is cool! I mean he’s just fun to be around. Stand beside him and you just feel better. Hug him and you won’t need your Prozac for a year! Top all that off with an energy on the stage that is captivating to watch. (I did joke with him that I thought there were a couple of times he was just plain having fun and perhaps channeling Jack Black.) Today’s featured performer was Jeffrey Biegel. He’s a pleasure also. He has personally worked with two of my heroes, Pete Fountain and Jerry Louis! To be in the same room with such talent as Maestro Lucas Richman and Jeffrey Biegel is very humbling. To banter with them almost felt like a breach of social protocol but we did get to share some laughs.
I have an official review of my evening at the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra to get from mind and paper to blog post but I think I am a bit too tired to be coherent tonight. If you don’t want to wait, in short, if you don’t make time to go see the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, you need to make the the time! I can come up with all sorts of reasons to not go-the kids, money, deadlines, blah blah (just excuses!)-, but honestly, what a great way to spend an evening! Details tomorrow (or maybe Saturday).
Bloggers I saw tonight included Frank Murphy (review), Lissa Kay (review), Rich Hailey, Doug and Faye McDaniel, Byron Chesney (his review), Tish, Craig Thomas and Noah Caldwell. Who did I miss? The bloggers had 50 tickets allocated!
WARNING ON BLOGRUSH!
I was reading 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free and liking the suggestions. Perhaps it would be fun to promote a little extra traffic to the site. I despise watching websites get overloaded with Javascript widgets and gizmos. However, I am guilty of doing that to Reality Me. It is bogged down with useless, behind the scenes Javascript. My list of round tuits includes cleaning up Reality Me and Domestic Psychology. Things like RobotReplay and PhpMyVisites are no longer of use to me but they remain behind the scenes slowing the site down. The Twitter widget and the MyBlogLog widget I find enhancing to the functionality of the site. I see Google Analytics as a necessary evil and I still debate the value of Adsense on a blog such as Reality Me (although apparent it protects – Can someone help me find that citation? I think Michael Silence carried it a while back. Some law was passed saying that if you run ads on your website you are protected the same was as traditional journalists.).
When I read 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free, BlogRush was in the number one or two position. I should have taken a warning when I noticed the author was not using a referral link. Today I noticed that the Javascript code I put in my sidebar to validate Reality Me with Blogrush had changed from a box of links to other sites to become a Google Adsense box. Now, I have Google ads that run on Reality Me (when the ad isn’t encouraging you to buy the shirt off Cathy’s back) so I think Blogrush put me in danger of being in violation of my TOS with Google. Granted, I was supposed to read the Blogrush TOS and I’m sure they revealed that putting ads on my site is part of the agreement. But I do not agree with that! So I will be parting company with Blogrush. I wonder what is in the #3 position on 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free?
