» 2007 » April

If you are a tech blogger then you are likely to be a little bit geeky, you might even like to watch models develop and change and improve too, I certainly do. If you are into the whole social networking and blogging thing then you’ll probably love playing with the various tools and platforms who offer widgets and plugins and options for expanding the conversation.

A recent splash on the blog scene following in the footsteps of the now Y! acquired mybloglog is Blogcatalog.

QSP (quick short post)

New York SEO - Joe Whyte tagged me earlier on a ‘what magazine do you read’ meme. So in a spirit of yeah why notiness, I thought I’d take the time out and share.

I think its a good idea to keep up with what you say and where in the blogosphere, yet with so many different types of platforms and formats its pretty difficult to do at times.

Which is probably why I just got a little excited when visiting co.mments. I think co.mments is a great way of tracking your conversations. I vaguely recalling seeing this somewhere or other and thinking cool, that could be handy, so I just went along and signed up, great I thought this could be just the thing, and then my balloon went down. It would be great, if that is, I remembered to use the bookmark tools they provide.

Use these bookmarklets to quickly bookmark conversations you want to follow. One click and they’re added to your tracking list.

First, add the bookmarklet to your favorites (IE) or bookmarks (Firefox, Safari, other). When you read a post you want to follow, simply click on the co.mments favorite/bookmark. The co.mments server will then follow up and find new comments for you.

I was over Andy’s blog this morning and read a very interesting post about Technorati favouriting.

For those of you who get the whole social media metric thing, you’ll understand that some sites and algos prefer to use signals that indicate real world popularity. Most observers would say that Technorati use favouriting as a signal in determining blog popularity. Makes sense too. Who would favourite a blog if it were crap after all?

If you’d like to favourite my blog, then you can do this here. Or you can just right click and download my opml file here and favourite everyone that I have, then add them to your faves.

Brad over at wordsell wrote an interesting piece on being a failsperson. It has inspired me to write a quick and dirty 10 ways to become a crappy blogger.

Do feel free to add a POV or two at the bottom!

I’m looking for people who would be prepared to participate in a ranking experiment, with the specific aim of determining whether blog power can unshackle domains that have sat with ranking restraints over a prolonged period of time.

The minus 31 penalty is the phenomenum whereby a site doesn’t rank for its site name, url and cannot rank for any keywords before page 4 or position 31 in the Google SERPs. Sites affected by this cannot rank for their target keywords however obscure. Unless it has no competition whatsoever, sites affected by this just cannot rank, not even for a complete unique title string.

QSP (Quick Short Post)

Since installing the math comment plugin my spam levels have fallen off of the planet. Akismet hasn’t had a comment now for weeks, which is a prety good show I think.

I’d recommend installing it, its saved me from a chore of checking the mod queue daily, a chore that used to bore me silly.

Me been tagged. Becky (one of my favouritie bloggers) tagged me on this meme stuff. Its a funny old word ‘meme’, try saying it with scrunched nostrils. According to the define:meme thingy over at google its a cultural viral thing.

Anyhow, why do I blog?

In a recent thread, Andy talked about building a ‘posts you may have missed’ plugin.

5 recent posts you may have missed
# 5 Posts you may have missed plugin - 2007-04-18 10:45:07
# tumbleweed plugin - 2007-04-18 10:21:14
# Run a local business? Get directorified! - 2007-04-03 11:31:57
# Discontinuing MyBlogLog visitor tracking - 2007-03-25 18:05:17
# NOYDIR wordpress plugin - 2007-03-01 12:59:59

Whilst building my tumbleweed plugin, I found myself stumbling on the sql for the code required to pull the info, so decided to save Andy the trouble and anyone else for that matter and build the thing myself.