Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Zemanta has long been a favorite addition to my blogging processes. This interesting little addition to the browser builds in the ability include photos, links, and tags for all of your media inserts. By installing Zemanta, I have reduced the time it takes to track down information to include, and by setting up some personal settings I’m sure to find what I need when I need it.
The New
Zemanta has always offered what it thinks you will need in terms of photos and links, but today Zemanta is launching their public API which will now allow users to build a “user suggestion engine.”
Funding for the company has come from Union Square Ventures, Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group, along with its win at the fist SeedCamp, this announcement has come out of LeWeb in Paris, France. This announcement is sure to increase not only the number of users, but also the dependency that online writers will have on this dynamic tool.
The Future
Zemanta has now opened itself to a huge reception in the world of online content creators. By opening their API, they can approach content creators to leverage their unorganized with the system, and the users are able to access the content for various needs.
In an article by TechCrunch, they state that “usage of the API is free for up to 10.000 API calls per month, and for a subscription fee above that.” So not only has Zemanta found a way to integrate user input, but they also find a way to monetize their efforts for content creators to get organized.
Zemanta has a bright future ahead of it. I have just recently connected with one of the Founders for Zemanta on Twitter @andraz. He’s easily approachable and seems to be keen on connecting with users around the world.
During these turbulent times there has been a lot of change across the economic landscape. Companies from big to small, brick and mortar to online sites have all experienced the crunch. Many are comparing these times to the dotcom bust years ago, if history is cyclical this was a short rotation.
Recently BlogRush has decided to close it’s “doors” and fade away. In an announcement by John Reese, BlogRush was suffering from lack of clicks, and users who no longer wanted to be advertised to. While that may come as a no brainer to the typical user, BlogRush prided itself on being unobtrusive and focusing on the needs and wants of the users.
Was this truly what BlogRush stood for? The site definitely had its fair share of critics. For example, Seopedia sticks out in my mind after they were so amazingly rejected by the site. You can read their entire ordeal here. Basically it appear that BlogRush depended on random people to be the judges of whether a site fit the criteria or not. The advertisement that was sent out by owner John Reese seems to focus less on quality judges, and more on mass quantity.
Mashable has a more scathing post from late 2007 where they say BlogRush was a throwback to the Web 1.0 era. They explain the process of earning credits by using their widget on your site, and sharing traffic with other sites increasing exposure and ranking within the network. He compares the concept to that of a pyramid scheme.
Despite the critics, John Reese stands by his product and claims that he is a risk taker. He admits that as an entrepreneur he has had some ideas succeed and some fail, but his success stems from not being afraid to try. He goes on to say that BlogRush was offered a “small fortune” but that he reluctantly turned it down to keep the purity of the idea. Not sure if I necessarily agree with the decision, but regardless, the site is down for the count.
It’s advised that users remove the BlogRush widgets from their pages because they are no inactive. So while click rates dropped, and BlogRush has come to an end, John Reese promises that he will continue to strive with new online ideas, and look to continue his innovative streak.
You can read the entire letter to users here.
I got a very interesting email yesterday from Izea, announcing the winners of their Bloggers Choice Awards for 2008.
The usual sites were in the mix with the best Geek blog being taken out by BoingBoing yet again.
I think that these blog awards are so predictable and mundain, as they dont really prove anything or even give awards for that matter.
The surprising result was that Perez Hilton got the worst blog
of all time award. Don’t get me wrong PerezHilton doesn’t have the best blog in the world, but what he has built around it is amazing. That blog has built up and entire empire for him and he has to be one of the most visible bloggers in the world, probably leading the way for many other bloggers to take the jump into mass media. PerezHilton.com is definitely not the worst blog of all time!
Crenk has been rated as one of the UK’s premier sites for technology and media news. Ranking 23rd of all UK sites, and having a world wide prescence online, it takes people truly connected to the pulse of the industry to keep this site alive.
Currently the site is looking at expanding it’s current writing staff in order to diversify and establish more timely posts in this current boom in the media business. With social networks taking hold at a global level, mobile apps becoming the wave of the future on all major mobile platforms, start-ups making their mark at high level conferences like TechCrunch 50, it’s almost impossible to capture the scope of the industry what what we have.
So this is YOUR chance to come on board and help Crenk out. Not only do you join a team of experienced writers, but you also have the chance to have your articles seen by a large audience. Come share your analysis, your insight, and open up conversation with our readers and let’s take Crenk to another level!
For more information please email info@crenk.com and let us you’re interested.
Photo Credit this is your brain on lithium
Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites. Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have. Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.
There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens. The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins. Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.
A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress. It is almost totally what I was looking for. As described on their site,
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.
Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.
Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.
Perfect! The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file. Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server. Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it. I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are. Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress. The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.
Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password. Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog. Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.
Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content. I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.
The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site. While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source. For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.
Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information. The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.
Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing. This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.
With Google re-launching their Blog Search service will this finally kill off Techmeme. Gabe over at Techmeme hasn’t made any real aesthetic changes to the site in a few years, and it seems as though that lack of imagination is slowly killing his business.
In the last six months or so no one has been talking about Techmeme, and I just wanted to see if anyone actually still uses their service, and if Gabe has any changes or additions he is going to implement in the next six months to a year?
Daniel over at DailyBlogTips always provides some great insights into what bloggers should be doing to increase their presence online. Yesterday he talked about re-activating inactive email subscriptions. I have know before about this specific plugin and how it all works, but I havent dont it for a very long time and thought all of the Crenk readers might be interested in doing the same for their sites.
In feedburner if you take a look at your email subscription section then you are able to see how many email subscribers you have already, plus the list of email address will let you know who is currently inactive in your system. Simply just email addresses and ask them to possible resubscribe to your service. Then woohoo more subscribers.
Over at BlogohBlog they have announced a new release wordpress theme. Its called the Portfolio Press and it is definitely worth a look. This theme is of course free and is totally compatible with Wordpress 2.6+.The comments are nicely designed with Gravatar functionality.
Blogs.com owned by Sixapart has launched a new blog directory. The blog directory is very similar to Blogged.com, providing news from the blogosphere for different sectors with an attached blog directory.
Blogs.com has been a great success from launch and has some great traffic already to the site. However, when I look closer at the site it seems they it is very basic and isn’t providing too much insights, so why such high traffic numbers. For one it is very hard to get your content shown on their, so doesn’t show true news from the blogosphere, just selected information. Additionally, I have submitted Crenk three times to their direct and I don’t even think they have referenced my site yet!
The design itself is very limiting and only allows them to show a certain amount of information on every page. Additionally, when it comes to finding more interesting sites in a particular niche, I think this just doesn’t happen at all. It is hard to find their directory and they don’t seem to want to show information from various blogs, just stick to the top blogs that everyone has already heard of.
TechCrunch is a self proclaimed “obsessive” site for everything technology, especially start-ups. Michael Arrington, co-founder of TechCrunch, has a well established career in doing what he loves best and, in my opinion, being damn good at it. But don’t take my word for, they have just recently hit a huge milestone for any site, over 1 million subscribers follow them via RSS Feeds. In less than 39 months they have achieved this goal and by the looks of it, will continue this trend.
Arrington reports that like any other site, their numbers fluctuate. Weekends are slow, but mid-week is their best time period. Still, even with the fluctuations, fans stay for the news and are even offered various ways to stay in touch with what is happening in the world of technology; Twitter, RSS Feed, FriendFeed, are just as few examples of how TechCrunch stays in touch with their readers.
Recentlly TechCrunch held their TechCrunch50 event which has been covered on Crenk here and here. Because of Arrington’s love for start-ups, he offers some of the best in the world a stage for them to highlight their products, network with VC’s and other interested high profile people, and in turn gives a little back with the success he’s achieved.
I highly recommend businesses to take a look at TechCrunch because as investors, you could be a part of the next big thing in the tech world!
Founded in 2005 in an unlikely city in Scotland, Pete Cashmore has turned his dream of up to the minute updates on everything tech, media, web, and social networks into one of the most profitable blogs in history, Mashable. With over 5 million monthly pageviews, anyone that makes it on the site either in an article or as a sponsor for the site is sure to be seen by the who’s who of the online media world.
Mashable has been highlighted in Technorati, the New York Times, Washington Post and Forbes, while being a fan favorite to interact and catch up on the latest events. Mashable’s contributing writers are all published and established writers that look to be a part of a much bigger blog. Just recently Pete and the Mashable team put on a Mashable Tour with their partners of Social Media Camp. This multi-city tour highlighted presentations from the best of web and media minds and afterwards offered an excellent opportunity for these minds to mingle.
Currently Pete Cashmore divides his time between San Francisco, New York, and the UK. He’s constantly staying abreast of the latest trends in social networks, and hosts monthly events to keep the conversation going.
I have personally met Pete during one of the Mashable tours here in Austin, and was amazed at how cool and approachable he was. He literally took photos with all the hundreds of people that attended the after party and was truly interested in talking to everyone.
Mashable is a definite site to subscribe to, and make sure to follow Mashable on Twitter as well for even more information then you think you can handle. Just watch out for the overload!
One of the popular web celebrities who blog about blogging and making money from blogging is John Chow. His personal site was launched for no other real reason other than to see how much money he could make from blogging about, well blogging and making money. He’s a very successful tech blogger and media network owner, so he knows the ins and outs, but a year or two ago, blogging about blogging really started to take off, so why not jump on board, share some tips and tricks and profit. He’s done well, real well, nearly $30,000 a month well and has a cult like following.
I was a daily reader of his site up until he switched to version 2.0 maybe a year ago. At that point, it was clear that the focus was on ad placement and started to make reading the content that much harder. John’s primary readers are bloggers and creative writers who are looking for ways to turn a profit on their own sites, they want information, not blatant advertising. The overall layout was clean though with good graphics, but I stopped reading daily.
Today, Version 3 launched and John has moved the index of the site to be similar to one of the other super popular bloggers, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net with respects to being more of a magazine style with snippets of current articles, more ads and some static information. Inside the site is supposed need less scrolling to read the articles and be cleaned up even more; I can agree to disagree with that. He did finally do away with having exotic cars in his header, but that only appears to be because others ripped the idea and so he could fit more advertiser space in. On my 1280×1034 screen I count 13 ads plus the top half of two more ads and one more ad promoting his e-book. It’s a bit much. The footer takes on the trends of other larger Web 2.0 sites with what must be close to 500 pixels high worth of information, sadly there is no button to take you back to the top of the page
With more than 30,000 RSS subscribers, 2,000 more following on Twitter people listen to what he says, but I think more is being emphasized on how it looks instead of better content. John is still posting up photos of food and other random things and shares his insight on how to run a blog for money, but getting to the content for me isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
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