901am » Blogging

How to Monetize Your Blog

Mike Abundo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:29:05 +0000

Despite the uncertainty of the economy and the convenience of microblogging, blogging is hot again, baby — and during a gold rush, it’s the shovel salesmen who make the most money. The Joy of Tech shares the real secret to monetizing your blog. Time to polish those event management skills.

Say What? iPhone app offers multi social network searching

Andy Merrett — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:20:31 +0000

A recently launched iPhone application called Say What? allows integrated searching of Twitter, Digg, plus thousands of forums and blogs, from one interface.

iCrossing’s application has actually been freely available for about a month now, but I’ve only just discovered it.

While I personally don’t search in Digg much, the ability to search across both a significant section of the web (blogs and forums) as well as Twitter sounds appealing.

The app works by simply accepting a search term, after which the latest conversations are returned. It’s possible to dig deeper into responses from a particular source, and save a search history for quick recall later.

App page on iTunes

9rules Blog Network Open for Submissions

Mike Abundo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:46:26 +0000

The 9rules blog network just opened its doors for a new round of submissions. If you think your blog’s got what it takes to join their network, submit your blog here. Hurry: submissions close at 11:59 PM EST.

What are the 9rules people looking for? They’re looking for blogs that abide by their nine rules. Yes, they’re clever like that.

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning.
3. Form works with function.
4. Simple is beautiful.
5. Work hard, play hard.
6. You get what you pay for.
7. When you talk, we listen.
8. Must constantly improve.
9. Respect your inspiration.

If you can do these nine things, click here right now.

(Disclosure: 9rules and 901am are both part of Splashpress Media.)

Disqus 3 Coming Next Week

Mike Abundo — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:18:32 +0000

Intense Debate may have been acquired by Automattic (the people behind WordPress), but Disqus remains the blogosphere’s favorite comment networking service. Not content to rest on their laurels, they’re rolling out a slew of new features with Disqus 3 next week.

Now all I need is a white label version of Disqus, and I just might use it on my blogs.

Review: Contextual Partnership Plugin

David — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:38:46 +0000

The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…

If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.

According to the developers the plugin is designed to;

Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/

Browser Inventor Invests in Another Blog

Mike Abundo — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:31:03 +0000

Blogs are hot again, baby. Right after Web browser inventor Marc Andreessen announces a $300 million venture capital fund for tech startups, he personally raises a $500,000 to $1,000,000 round for the profitable political blog Talking Points Memo.

The investment comes barely a month after the tech legend put an undisclosed sum of money into a blog network tackling another topic, The Business Insider. This guy says print media is doomed, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is.

You hear a lot of talk nowadays about microblogging killing blogging. Such chatter should be silenced by the fact that Andreessen is also an investor in the world’s largest microblogging service, Twitter. Like WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg says, blogging and microblogging are complementary. Hey Marc, care to invest in our blog network, Splashpress Media? ;)

Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday

Franky Branckaute — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:07:52 +0000

As Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday the Blogger team has published some interesting data:

Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
Almost two thirds of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside North America (What’s the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that’s football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball

While the team at Techcrunch a comparison with other blog platforms and Twitter published (see graphic below), the real question to ask here is in how far Facebook a blogging platform has become for many people.

Like many people I started blogging on Blogger and moved then to a self-hosted WordPress setup but would not set up a personal blog anymore in 2009. Facebook and Twitter certainly have filled in the need for a personal blog for me. Like Paul Boutin says:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

There is no doubt that Google made a great decision purchasing Blogger, especially considered the amount of Adsense ads the Blogger platform runs, but the biggest question is if blogs will continue to grow perpetuously or if there will be a new shift towards bigger CMS platforms now new media companies such as B5Media Inc. are integrating forums as well on their main blogs.

What is a blog? The line is blurred and we have seen many sites evolve from ‘blog’ to multi-authored magazines. I, for one, am looking forward to read the next State of the Blogosphere at Technorati. You can read the 2008 State of the Blogosphere here.

Hooked on Phonics blog to help build confident readers

Dennis Bouchand — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:19:49 +0000

A new blog from Hooked on Phonics focuses on the needs of families helping their children become confident readers.

“We’re members of a huge community preparing children for kindergarten with basic reading skills and nurturing that love of reading until they master it,” said Judy L. Harris, CEO of Smarterville, maker of Hooked on Phonics. “Our blog is a platform for teachers, reading specialists, physicians, children’s book authors and literacy advocates to share resources and expertise with parents, caregivers and educators who are helping children become confident readers.”

The blog will also feature a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Hooked of Phonics new learning program as told by the team of authors, illustrators, educators, animators and musicians involved in the year-long, multi-million dollar overhaul (due out in August 2009).

Fashion model wants to unmask anonymous blogger

Cristina Ledesma — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:57:24 +0000

A pending application to the New York Supreme Court seeks to force Google to divulge the identity of an anonymous blogger because of a few comments made on the Internet on one single day.

A hearing on the motion to reveal the anonymous blogger’s identity is scheduled for tomorrow. The petitioner, fashion model Liskula Cohen, alleges that references to her as a “skank” and “ho” on the website “Skanks in NYC” constitutes actionable libel under New York law and on that ground seeks to unmask the anonymous blogger.

“Despite its seemingly petty underpinnings, this case carries serious implications,” says Debra J. Guzov, co-founder of Guzov Ofsink, LLC, which is defending the anonymous blogger. “We strongly believe that if the plaintiff were to succeed in her efforts, it would move toward the erosion of our basic constitutional right to anonymous free speech.”

“Ideas are exchanged freely on the Internet in large part because participants can speak using assumed names or no name at all,” Guzov added.

How about you? What is your take on this arguments?

Tweetback Plugins for Blogging Applications

J. Angelo Racoma — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:45:39 +0000

Twitter is lauded as today’s microblogging and lifestreaming application of choice for top bloggers and new media users. Some users also use Twitter to share links to articles or blog posts of interest. The linkage usually goes one way only, though, with the tweet linking to the blog post. However, with two “tweetback” plugins launched recently, this would no longer be the case.

Dan Zarella and Joost de Valk have both released their respective plugins, both of which are called Tweetback. The concept is simple. It works much like a trackback or a pingback, in which excerpts from a tweet (or its entirety) will be echoed as a comment on the original blog that is being linked.

They work kind of like trackbacks, but instead of listing blogs linking to a specific post, it lists Tweets about a specific post. You can see it in action on my blog, just above the comments. It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.

People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.

While both plugins have the same goal, they don’t necessarily do things the same way, and so it’s up to the user to determine which is best to implement on their sites.

Jonathan Bailey, who rights on intellectual property on the Blog Herald, has recently lauded these efforts but raised concerns about the copyright implications of Tweetbacks. For one, the question of whether tweets are copyrightable at all is raised. But then the main issue in this case is whether a Twitter user would find it to his advantage if his tweets were cited and linked from other blogs and websites.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, as copyright is beginning to be a big issue among bloggers (incidentally, Splashpress Media and Performancing are offering copyright management services to bloggers). Twitter has its nuances, particualrly with the 140-character post limit. But if Haikus can be copyrighted–short as they are–can the same hold true for Twitter tweets?