Thursday, July 20, 2006

More amateur advice for other amateur bloggers Hi!  I've changed addresses.  To jump to the new blog, please click on this link. The Flatland Chronicles for Thursday, July 20 JOURNAL.  THE AMATEUR BLOGGER'S AMATEUR CORNER. 1.  Digg:  What it Is. Okay, so I went to Digg and joined up so I could see what it was all about.  I don't know what it could possibly have to do with generating website traffic---nothing at all, I should imagine---but it was still pretty cool.  It's called "a social bookmarking site" and I don't know what that means either. If you go there, it's similar to a giant online magazine, except that the USERS find and link the content.  I admit that I found some very cool things to read there that I'd never have found on my own.  It's too the usual online news sources what a giant corporate bookstore is to a small independent bookstore.  If you go into a corporate bookstore, you'll see everything that mainstream publishers think you want to read.  To find the books that you want to read, you have to turn to independent booksellers (God help them).    Same with news services and so forth.  All of them give you the news, but a lot of the really choice tidbits and intriguing oddities and absorbing specialty stuff and choice bits are spread right across the internet and  there is so much net.  Whatever else it does, Digg (meaning each individual user who wants to participate) gather these together by posting links to them.  Other users can then read the articles and vote on whether they found them useful, informative, etc.  Eventually this has consequences that I don't quite understand yet; the articles get moved to the head of the queue or something.  (I don't want to make a complete fool of myself here, but I was too busy reading and bookmarking to spend much time wondering about the significance of the votes they were asking for.) It doesn't matter to me anyway.  Because whoever the Digg 'power users' are who find all of these goodies, I click my mouse to them.  I planned just to glance briefly at the site and come back to it whenever, but I was there for a couple of hours.  In addition to the intrinsic fascination of the material I found there, there was the considerable satisfaction of 'voting' for articles I really liked and seeing the vote count number going up.  And---in case you're thinking you've spotted a loophole---you can only vote ONCE.  I clicked twice (an accident) and a little screen tip appeared that said "You have already dugg this article." The internet, eh?  To paraphrase an ancient (1960's) song by the Turtles, "The more you see, the more there is to see."  For all practical purposes, the world wide web = infinity.   2.  Some advice for other amateur website builders. Speaking of Digg, I found this article from The Guardian Unlimited there and bookmarked it for future reference.  It's by Charles Arthur and is called "What is the 1% Rule?"  It doesn't have any real application to me, but it interested me because it tracked the way I use websites. [quote from The Guardian begins] It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.... Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by. [quote from The Guardian Unlimited ends] I'm definitely among that portion of the population that is inclined just to read.  I've posted on message boards at a couple of sites, but only after reading them for a VERY long time and not on any sort of regular basis. I sent that article to a friend of mine who is despairing over the failure of her message boards to come to life.  From this article, I took away the lesson that if you want to set up an internet forum, you need to generate plenty of content to pull readers to it and to which they can respond. I'm assuming that only a small number of Digg users are regularly posting links to articles (and they don't have to 'author' the content and that this is the way it's going to be at any 'interactive' site.  Most of them are like me; they come there to read, not to participate.  (Though I can certainly imagine that there is significant satisfaction in selecting articles etc that you think are interesting and finding that other people like them too).   9:08:55 PM    So you say!  [] Chronicles for July 20 part deux Hi!  I've changed addresses.  To jump to the new blog, click on this link.   The Flatland Chronicles for Thursday, July 20 JOURNAL.  THE AMATEUR BLOGGER'S AMATEUR CORNER. 1.  Useful Information for Bloggers as Un-Savvy as I Am about Google Page Rankings So, the subject was blogging and the culture of blogging and things I've learned (or "learned" really; I am not sure I understand all of it) from my recent spate of despair-at-the-state-of the-world-dulling google research.  I've provided links to some useful blogging tools that even an amateur (especially if not an idiot about HTML like me) can use, plus some things I learned about google page rankings and other things that might have an influence on how many people pass through your site on the way to the place they were really looking for....   The page ranking thing is going to matter a lot more (obviously) to a business or a search engine than to a blogger, I imagine, but it's still interesting to know. In the course of my glazed ramblings in the wee small hours, I found two articles (here and here) by Stas Beckman at Stason.org of some interest to bloggers, if only to point up the significance of Google's page rankings to your site traffic. [quote from Stason.Org begins]  In theory, if your site contains good quality content, you shouldn't spend any time trying to comply with search engine requirements. After all, why should you waste time on something totally irrelevant to what you do. Ideally, you should spend all your time writing great material and thus contribute more to the global community. However the reality is very different from the theory. Mainly due to the search engine system abuse, you now have to play by the search engine rules, if you want your site to show up in the top results of the searches. Certainly, you don't need to rely on search engines to bring traffic to your site, but for many this is a major source of traffic.... Content is the king.  Search engines love fresh and quality content, since that's what the users want - more new things to read every day and every hour.  When your site changes often - search engine crawlers come back more often as well.  Of course by generating new content you raise the chance that more of your pages will be found. [quote from Stason.Org ends] So the big thing, I guess, is frequent updates (?)  That's not a problem for me during vacations, but it will be once work resumes.  As I said, Blogflux is designed FOR bloggers, so you might want to give it a try.  It gets the word out to OTHER sites that can will track updates, and which will help people who are looking for you find you.  2.  Amateur Blogger's Corner:  Finding Blogs to Read for Fun and Enlightenment. Salon provides ways to find Salon blogs of interest, but with millions of non-Salon blogs out there, it's hard to sort through the others  Blogflux has a tool that I've found useful and fun to use.  Their directory has a function called "Suggest" that lets you pick topics (or key words) that interest you.  Blogflux will provide a list of matching blogs.  They obviously aren't all 100% on point and you may have to sort through some chaff to get to the wheat, but it was fun.   I personally just want to find people who can write.  I found one blog by a gay Republican living in Atlanta that I intend to explore.  I couldn't agree with him LESS about politics, naturally, but if he presents a point of view different from mine and does it with panache and finesse and all that good stuff, I'll read it.  [I used to love reading that curmudgeonly ol' Republican Party Reptile, P.J. O'Rourke, back in his and my salad days, even though I didn't actually agree with him.  I don't mind getting my hackles raised if it's done with style and verve (and panache and finesse....)  As my hero Bill Maher has said several times, one cause of the country's current malaise and worrying polarization is that people on different sides of the Right/Left divide don't listen to each other anymore.] RELATED POSTINGS: Blogging;  why? The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #1 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #2 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #3 My Brief Stint at the Top of the Pops. Searching for Employment in the Too Much Information Age.     Images © 2006 Jupiterimages Corporation.  Used pursuant to license from Animation Factory.com. 2:57:37 PM    So you say!  [] Chonicle July 20 site promotion + other blogs Hi!  I've moved to a new address.  To jump to the updated version of this blog, click here.    The Flatland Chronicles for Thursday, July 20 JOURNAL.  THE AMATEUR BLOGGER'S AMATEUR CORNER. To distract myself from my distress over recent events, I spent a lot of time last night reading up on blogging, searching for new blogs to read, and just generally educating myself.  1. Advice on Promoting Your Blog (someone else's advice, not mine) I am such an amateur that I really don't understand a lot of the advice I've received and am acting on faith.  For example, a friend who doesn't blog but who seems to know a lot about it directed me to Blogflux.com.  I don't think I fully appreciated what a good tool Blogflux is, but I like it so much that I've listed it on my big page o' links here (where I not only provide the link, but also a brief description of it).  At Blogflux, you can do something called 'pinging'---i.e., notifying various services that you are updating your blog---to a number of important sites.  I'm not sure what these sites do, exactly; pI guess they are directories.  Anyway, pinging them by pinging BlogFlux (ping ping ping)  apparently gets the word out into the void that you exist or something; I'm not really sure actually, except that it's a sort of cyber EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT.  Actually, the more I try to explain it the less I'm sure how it works.  It's supposed to 'promote' the website, and I am not even sure yet I want my site promoted, but I always ping Blogflux now when I update my blog.  I really don't know why.  I do seem to get a bit more traffic these days and my "Google page ranking" as shown at BlogFlux is 5 (and I don't know whether that's good or bad, really, but it's better than 0). That's another thing that Blogflux will do for you:  you can find out your Google page ranking and then, if you can get the little Blogflux HTML thingie to work in your template---naturally I couldn't---everyone ELSE can see your page ranking too.  That's assuming that you want them to, of course.  If it's 0, you probably don't.    Furthermore, it has a directory where you can list your Blog, a search engine that lets you find blogs that you might be interested in, and other interesting tools.  Someone who knows what he or she is doing could doubtless REALLY benefit from this site.    After reading everything at Blogflux and fixing a problem that kept this blog from appearing in their directory, I did some reading about google and google page rankings that I didn't understand at all during which I learned about something called a 'social bookmarking page.'  I still don't really understand what they are for, but I plan to register at one called  Digg because it sounds interesting.   Here's what the description says:  "Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!"  I was attracted to the site by the administrator's liberal use of the word "digg"---e.g., if you 'digg' an article and vote for it, it and other articles you have dugg are 'promoted' (whatever this means) to the front page of the site....I don't know.  Remember Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the ' two wild and ker-razy guys"?  As they used to say, "Learning all the time!" (2)  Blogrolling and Blog-reading. If I had regular blog traffic, say from members of the Salon community---and I don't----I might have to deal with the whole 'blogrolling' thing.  Some people have blogrolls as long as your arm; they list 20 or 30 blogs as well as other resources.  I can see the 'quid pro quo' aspect of it; even I can understand that if you give someone a link on your site and you give them one on yours, you're helping to direct traffic to their site, and if you are a really popular site, their blog will definitely benefit. But when I see a giant blogroll, I don't feel at all inclined to click; I just assume that the people listed are the blogger's posse and that their names are there because they returned the favor or because they are so-called "A-list bloggers" that the blogrolling blogger is hoping will notice him or her. I don't assume, because that's insane, that the blogger regularly reads 45 blogs, you know?  I am much more likely to click a blogger's links if there aren't too many of them and they appear to be related to the overall content of the site.  I've therefore limited my blogroll to the few blogs I started reading last year and pretty regularly looked at.  A couple of the bloggers have been pretty sporadic about updating them (or have been since I started reading them), but I don't mind; there's good stuff in the archives and I choose my blogs based on how much I like the blogger's voice.  I admit it:  I will read the blog of the biggest right wingnut on the planet if he or she (ah, my always enraged avenging angel Ann, why no blog to allow progressives like me their minimum RDA of mockery?*) has an engaging (or enraging) voice that pulls me in.  On the other hand, I definitely have found quite a few blogs that look interesting and as if they might qualify to be put into a "Still Deciding" list.  A lot of them aren't even Salon blogs, though naturally some of them are.  If I like the writing, the blogger can talk about just about anything and I'll be interested.   For example, I've nothing in the world against Mormons (or rather, only the same things I have against any other conservative religious group), but I have to admit that I enjoy the strident bad-assery of an ex-Mormon woman's blog, Trapped by the Mormons. She's a published writer, so the quality of the writing is high and some of the postings are very funny.  I know more than some about Mormons, having spent a certain amount of time educating myself about them when a Mormon friend was struggling with some issues; I mention this because I wonder if a non-Mormon would have enough context to enjoy Collins' adventures, but whether they do or not, I do.  Trapped by the Mormons is definitely a good blog for new and aspiring fiction writers.  Natalie Collins includes amusing interviews with new writers and a kick-ass list of agents.  But for me, the insight into Utah and Utah culture ("Behind the Zion Curtain") for self-styled Ex-Mos is the draw. It's not like leaving, say, the Episcopal Church. I'm looking at another by a young girl living in England; I'll talk about it when I've tracked the content a bit further.  The endless variety of human experience... Must.Go.To.Bed.    I haven't been too sleep at all.  Yeah. Yesterday?  Pretty upsetting.  RELATED POSTINGS: Blogging;  why? The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #1 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #2 The Amateur Blogger’s Amateur Corner #3 My Brief Stint at the Top of the Pops.   Images © 2006 Jupiterimages Corporation.  Used pursuant to license from Animation Factory.com. 8:14:07 AM    So you say!  []

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