| You Are 60% Extrovert, 40% Introvert |
 You are quite outgoing You are a social connector – you know a ton of people While you aren’t a wild extrovert, you are a great talker A fantastic storyteller, you keep everyone laughing |
Randy enticed me into posting one more before getting out of Dodge.
Posted in Out of Nowhere | 6 Comments » RSS 2.0
Heading for Ocean Shores, Washington for the weekend. Blogging will be zero to light.
Have a great weekend! See you (virtually) Monday.
Unless global warming has brought the Great Whites this far north…
Posted in Get a Grip | 4 Comments » RSS 2.0
In version 2.0.3 or 2.0.4 WordPress duplicated the “Delete all” button at the end of Akismet’s list of Caught Spam. So now three or four times a day I no longer have to scroll back to the top of a list of 100+ spam messages between reviewing and destroying them — no doubt postponing my inevitable future mouse-induced repetitive stress injury.
Sometimes, it’s the little things that mean a lot. Thanks, WordPress.
Posted in Geek Meditations | No Comments » RSS 2.0
Reality: not one A-lister has ever prevented any other blogger from posting.
But the disillusioned bloggers were expecting the A-listers to promote their content. That’s like starring in a high school play and then moping by the phone because Spielberg hasn’t called yet.
John Koetsier has some great reality-check material on this subject.
Shel Israel picked up my thoughts and connected them to some of the ideas in The Long Tail. If your only hope for success as a blogger is to be in the Technorati Top 100, then you’ve got to spend your blogging career humping the head of the tail, where there are few providers competing over a big, monocultural audience.
But the long tail of diverse audiences contains plenty of opportunity, if you can only connect to that part of it that wants to hear what you have to say. Kami Huyse shared some good insights on that part of the equation in the comments on Shel’s post. You can also read more about my self-promotion strategies here.
Shel’s post goes a good way towards defining the meaning of success for blogs. It’s about reaching your target audience, not about becoming a world-renowned rock star.
Unless, of course, your only measure of success is Adsense revenue.
Posted in Blog Blog, Get Real | 10 Comments » RSS 2.0
Posted in Share the Love | 10 Comments » RSS 2.0
To those who lament the supposedly undemocratic, even feudal nature of the blogosphere, I have one question: exactly how would you like to see things operate differently?
Did you really think, when you started blogging, that putting a few posts out on the web was going to lead to an audience of millions? Without the help of someone who has influence? There’s more self-delusion there than “innocent fraud”.
If you’ve got an Internet connection, you can post. If you work at it, you can get indexed by the search engines. Is this not more democratic than the old media system of submitting content to a publisher?
You don’t have to live in a shack outside the castle waiting to pander up to an A-lister. And if you’re there, nobody is forcing you to stay.
Sure, links from A-listers drive lots of traffic, but there are other methods that work. 51% of my traffic comes from Google. WordPress.org sends 10% for widgets I’ve written. Technorati provides 6%. Sure, a lot of the search engine rank comes from links from other blogs, but very few of my inbound links come from A-listers, and those are only from comments or trackbacks I left on their blogs. Most links are from bloggers like me who are in the Technorati 2,000 to 200,000 range. Build conversations with those people, and the search engines will notice.
So while you’re certainly welcome to wallow in your disillusionment, that’s not for me. When something disappoints me, I do one of three things:
Determine the value of N, where (readers > N) => still blogging. Or maybe it’s not the quantity, but the quality. The conversations you have with commenters and trackbackers, however few they may be. Or then again, maybe you’re just blogging to hear yourself talk. If that’s your gig, that’s OK too.
Time to ask yourself, “Why do I blog?” Then evaluate the likelihood of achieving your goals. Then get on it.
And no, you don’t need your feudal lord’s permission.
Posted in Blog Blog, Get Real, Wildly popular | 31 Comments » RSS 2.0
Posted in Share the Love | No Comments » RSS 2.0
OK, this is just ridiculous. Apple is laying legal claim to the word “pod”, because it is a prominent part of “iPod”. That would make “podcast” an infringement, among other things.
They might as well lay legal claim to the letter “A”, because it’s the first letter in “Apple”.
And “Asshole”.
Posted in Get Outta Here | No Comments » RSS 2.0
Let’s google ‘google as verb ‘:
Only about 6.39 million results — um, make that 6,390,001 now.
I understand that Google needs to protect its trademark.
Think of the stress they’re enduring, having to be the bad guys on this.
Need some kleenex, Eric?
Take a couple of bayer, Larry.
C’mon Sergey, have a coke and a smile.
I sure wish I could xerox that kind of brand success.
Posted in Search me | No Comments » RSS 2.0
Posted in Share the Love | No Comments » RSS 2.0
OPML
blogstrappingBlogstrapping is Chad Perrin's development blog, focusing on Lump development, software design, and the philosophy of programming.
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