September 2007

A while ago we announced our sweet and useful BlogTips application for Facebook, which we decided to make into a contest for a free pass to the Blog Business Summit.

A few days ago we zeroed in on Mark Krupinski, who submitted a rather large number of extremely good tips. Things like, for example:

Participation: In addition to writing posts for your blog, you should spend a fair amount of time reading and commenting on other blogs. These can be your competitors or simply the thoughts of others in similar fields.

• This is very important for: understanding what’s going on right now in the blogosphere in relation to your topic, how others are using their blog to communicate and this will help you establish “link love” when you comment on other sites.
• Find other blogs via engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Then start subscribing to RSS feeds to the ones that interest you. As time goes on, you’ll realize the ones that are important to you and you keep those and start identifying the blogs that influence them.
• Remember to use blogrolls as a valuable resource for finding what the author subscribes to and follow the same path as above. It’s a simple meandering through the blogosphere.
• When you do comment, make sure you add to the conversation. Comments are like a cocktail party - You don’t just walk up to a conversation about the business potential of Twitter.com and start talking about what ate for dinner last night. Make it relevant.

For some very obvious reasons, we’ve offered him a free seat to the Web Community Forum 2007: Community Building in the age of Facebook instead, and he plans to be there.

Congratulations Mark on winning the contest, and we look forward to seeing you in Seattle this December!

I just went through our frighteningly huge queue of comments awaiting moderation (85% of which was spam, of course), but the other 15% were definitely real comments from real people.

I know that I, at least, rarely check back in places where I leave a comment unless something reminds me to do so—which is why I like follow up e-mails so much—but if any of you left a comment on one of our posts over the past, I don’t know, month maybe, and it didn’t show up, it’s probably there now.

Sorry for the delay!

I’m a big fan of WordPress and have yet to really dig into the nitty gritty of building sites in Drupal. But from what I’ve seen, it’s a hell of an application.

Here’s Todd Zeigler’s take from the Bivings Report.

Back when there was a Gillmor Gang to regularly listen to, I remember being halfway confused about Steve’s obsession with “gestures,” in the internet.

I have, of course, spent the required five minutes of thinking time to get my head wrapped around it, and I now think he’s got the right idea (or at least, the idea I got from his idea is the right idea…you with me?). When you have tons of people on the internet trying to form communities, everything is linked by “gestures” - mostly those are links.

When you leave a comment in someone else’s blog, that’s a gesture (my definition). So is subscribing to feeds, mentioning people or sites in podcasts or videos - if Scoble wears a Wordpress shirt, that’s a gesture.

We’ve recently discovered a neat little Wordpress plugin that can help you enable these gestures in your blog: it’s called Link Love. (Now on this site as well as our Web Community Forum blog).

The idea is that Wordpress automatically inserts a “nofollow” tag in all links that people add to their comments. This tells Google, essentially, to ignore the link. That means that people can’t bump their search rankings just by leaving comments with links to their sites (and yet spammers try it anyway…)

This plugin sets it so that anyone who comments regularly (default is 10 comments, but you may set the number as you like) gets those pesky “nofollow” properties removed. Now their comment links actually count for something in Google.

I think this is an awesome way to reward regular commenters, and also encourage people to leave comments. It’s also (wait for it)…a gesture. See? I told you it was everywhere.

Darren Rowse posted today about an odd little result he got from blogging “off-topic:”

The second wave of responses was very interesting and a little unexpected. About 24 to 36 hours after publishing the post I noticed a second wave of incoming links to the site - from real estate blogs and other related topics (for example this one from Decorating Diva). What interested me about these secondary linkups was that they picked up the ‘off topic’ components of the article as their primary focus.

(And here’s his third wave - the people who are interested in the people who are interested in his off-topic stuff, right? )

I think it might be a little strong that going off topic can help you find new readers. That implies that these “new readers” are likely to become regular readers, which I don’t think is true.

Writing off-topic posts will certainly send your blog in new directions and I’ve always advocated a good mix of posting - a little personal, a little about, I don’t know, Martians, and a majority about what you’re actually supposed to be posting about.

The thing is that you still have an editorial focus. And for Pro-Blogger, that means that he’s got some Real-Estate bloggers interested in a post that is largely tangential to what he writes about. They’ll probably come back a few times, but unless their interests also line up with blogging tips, they’re unlikely to become regular, active readers like his core group is.

That’s fine. And I’d still say go for the occasional off-topic post. But just…don’t go nuts, that’s all.