The first one wasn’t overly flash, but they are getting a lot better, and Cowboy deserves credit, despite what others my chuck at him…give it a couple of more weeks and I’m thinking Bridgette has star qualities:
Archives For Web 2.0
I’ve long been an advocate of keeping your feed subscriptions to a minimum, I know when I’ve read about ppl like Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble in the past where they’ve talked about having 500 feeds in their RSS reader accounts I’ve publicly said this is nuts (and 500, BTW, still is)…but I’ve discovered a nice new way of keeping your blogging fresh…and it’s so simple I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner:
Add new blogs to your feed reader.
Yep, simple as that, and while you’re at it, have a reorganisation of them as well. I recently purged a few feeds I wasn’t reading that much (mainly Topix/ Yahoo/ Google News style feeds), reorganised my folders…adding new folder topics such as SEO and Web 2.0, and then off I went. I’d say I’ve probably added 30 blogs to Bloglines in the last 2 weeks, and I’m still adding more now (BTW, I’m always open to pitches as to why I should sub to your blog…leave a comment, it won’t have no follow), and I’ve got to say I’m now enjoying my reading a whole lot more, and as a consequence, my general blogging endevours as well. Some of the additions are blogs I read fairly regularly anyway but didn’t subscribe to, some are people I knew from my time at the Blog Herald, and through contacts via b5media, and some are just sites I totally stumbled across (for example, I added about half a dozen SEO related blogs..some of which I’d read in passing before, some of which I’d never seen).
It’s well worth the effort, blogging, and the whole blogging business can become stale and boring after at times…, it never hurts to try something new, and in this case some new sites, and I’ve got to say at least 50% of the sites I’ve added are bloody good reads.
I’ve just signed up for a weekly gig at another blog (outside of b5..I’ll name it on another day..but it will be a weekly column working with some really cool ppl) but I’m a bit stumped if I know exactly at this stage what to write about (although I’ve got a few ideas)..it’s got to be about blogging or related to blogging (so Web 2.0 counts). There are of course two matters I can’t talk about, 9rules (I’m already on Jeremy’s bad side on this one 🙂 ), or the fact that b5media is about to surpass 100 million page views since we launched (proper page views as well, not spiders and feedreaders and what not)…suggestions anyone?
PS: if they are good suggestions and used, credit will be given + of course this blog doesn’t have no follow used so your comments count in the search engines as well…but I will delete spam naturally 🙂
Bizarre post from Marshall Kirkpatrick over at Techcrunch suggesting that Bloglines needs to look out because…wait for it…Newsgator has launched a toolbar.
To quote:
While Bloglines has long been the favorite feed reader for people looking for a simple but powerful tool, the new Newsgator toolbar means that users seeking many of these features now have options. Newsgator provides a river of news feature that Bloglines does not and handles OPML files much more gracefully
I couldn’t river a rats arse about River of News Layout, I like my Bloglines exactly how it is, and aside from maybe, very, very, rarely using a Bloglines button found on a blog to subscribe to it, I always add stuff to Bloglines by cutting and pasting the RSS feed URL into it using the Add feature.
Put simply, Bloglines is the market leader because it works the way people want it to, and no amount of bells and whistles from Newsgator is going to change this….and yes, I’ve tried Newsgator and a pile of other RSS readers out as well, still always end up back at Bloglines…to paraphrase Apple: It just works for me (most of the time).
Tags: Bloglines, Newsgator, Techcrunch
I need to vent!
I’m sick and tired of visiting blogs which have 1 post on their main page. I won’t name names, particularly given I’m being (fairly) good today, but I’m seeing this on blogs more and more lately…and I hate it.
Why?
Because if I’m visiting a blog for the first time, and I like the post I’m reading, I want to be able to (easily) read other posts on that blog. I don’t want to have to click through some crappy navigation options at the bottom to find other posts.
It’s about attention!
If someone is visiting your blog for the first time you’ve only got a very short time frame in which to convert them to regular readers. Making it hard for them to get a feel for your blog by not providing multiple posts on the main page of the blog means the likelihood of that person becoming a regular reader (or in my case, adding your blog to my Bloglines account) is greatly reduced.
I even visited one blog recently with this format, and upon trying to find some of the more recent posts (these style of blogs usually have their options at the bottom of the page), I was taken to a page that consisted of a motherf*cking Tag Cloud!!!: yep, a mf tag cloud!!!. Great!, all I wanted was to read a couple of recent posts because the post I’d read sounded interesting….and this is what I got. Suffice to say, I didn’t add that blog to my Bloglines account.
It’s all very well and good to have pretty and trendy blogs, but for attention, functionality is a much better thing for your blog.
I feel better now 🙂
Now 9rules has a lot more revenue options than it did when we first launched simply because of the new avenues we have opened up and that is something that I don?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t think could?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve been done if we solely focused on advertising and monetizing things. Same can be said with Myspace. Instead of worrying what?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s the best place to put an ad they have the enviable task of figuring out how to monetize a site with 60 million people involved
Congrats again to Dave Sifry from Technorati on another excellent state of the blogosphere report, however, as usual, most reporting on it get the reporting WRONG again, even b5media’s own Darren Rowse: these are numbers they are TRACKING PPL! not the sum total of the entire blogosphere! There aren’t 50 million blogs out there, there are probably something closer to 300 million now (I haven’t counted them for a while).
Sifry also asks whether this growth can continue…I’d suggest from recent anecdotal evidence that it’s actually slowing down, MSN/ Windows Live Spaces added less than 1 million blogs last month and Google (with Blogger) even fewer (apologies, don’t recall the exact page I read this on at the moment)…what is growing though is Technorati’s ability to track all these blogs…although I’d note that although their ability to track Chinese and Japanese blogs seems to be improving, there’s a big chunk missing where South Korea should be.
Interesting study from McKinsey & Co at the Advertising Age, my favourite quote:
“Should everybody shift 30% of their dollars to the web?” asked Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, senior practice knowledge specialist in McKinsey’s San Francisco office. “No. There wouldn’t be room today if everybody wanted to shift online. Last year [online media] was $12.5 billion, by end of 2007 digital advertising will be $18 to $25 billion. … So we’re seeing a lot of growth, but if you want to match up share of attention and share of dollars it couldn’t happen for that reason.” The TV ad industry is a $68 billion one.
Internet advertising will double to nearly $25 billion next year over 2005. That’s a pile of money, and a pile of ad inventory that’s going to have to be filled.
AOL says that only around 2000 people accessed their “user data” before the site was shut down….but the very same data is now available on bittorrent right now with Mininova showing 3,971 downloads!
Update: noticed at Threadwatch that the data has already been mirrored online as well here.
Feld Thoughts reports that Feedburner is going to topic specific “networks” (what we’d call channels at b5media) with the aim of better offering advertisers verticals in particular topic areas, as well as giving bloggers the ability to drive traffic to their sites via Feedburner itself (as opposed to just getting extra feed stuff and ads)….interesting move, sort of FM or 9rulesish…..well 9rulesish if 9rules either gets it’s act together and offers advertising options…
