PureBlogging

Here I go again rehashing something I’ve already written about, but so be it…it’s relevant

As I talked about recently, many blog platforms seem to be making a bigger jump into social media, and today Google (who already owns Blogger by the way) has acquired another blogging platform – TNC. TNC claims that they’ve been doing the social media thing longer than most of the other blogging services.

TNC is out of Korea, and many are speculating that this will be the beginning of Google trying to capture more market share in Asia where it is not nearly as dominant as it is here in the U.S.  This might be the case, but I have to wonder if TNC has some back-end things going on that Google is interested in as well. Perhaps things that it will incorporate with Blogger.

Admittedly, I am not really familiar with TNC’s product(s).  I know they have a social tool called TextCube. Usually when Google makes an acquisition, it is something interesting, so we’ll have to see what becomes of this one.

For more on TNC from the horse’s mouth…

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Lately there seems to be a lot of efforts being made to make blogging even more social than it already is. I have written several times on sites like WebProNews and SmallBusinessNewz about some of the things different platforms like Movable Type, WordPress, and Blogger are doing to make their services more social, and why blogs are really kind of like social networks anyway.

Rather than rewrite these articles here, I will just provide you with a few links. I don’t intend for posts on this blog to just be collections of links in the future, but since I am new to the blog, maybe it will give you a little taste of where I’m coming from.

- The Social Part of Blogging

- Google’s New Blogger Features

- Movable Type: Blogs Not Social Enough

- Facebook Connect Plugin for WordPress Glimpsed

Anyhow, I just thought the topic of blogs as social tools seemed like a good topic for me to start with here, so I thought I’d throw these at you.

As far as this blog itself, you can start expecting at least one new post usually about 5 days a week. So those who don’t subscribe to the feed, please come back frequently!

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Happy beginning-of-the-week, everyone. As promised, I saw The Dark Knight over the weekend and, unsurprisingly, nearly pooped my pants with glee. A little plot-heavy, a little crazy at times… but good gravy, what a Joker. And that Aaron Eckhart was pretty damned unbelievable as Two-Face as well. I still haven’t seen Mamma Mia (nor have I heard good things about it, sadly), but that’s why the good lord made weekday matinees. I’m pretty sure they got made on the fourth day, somewhere between naked mole rats and Tejano music.

So, let’s see what’s going on in the world this week…

(opens newspaper, shakes creases out)

Freelance Writing Gigs asks: Is a Blogger a Writer? My answer: Sure! Every blogger is a writer! Not every blogger is a good writer, mind you…

Two good Twitter-related posts over at friend-of-the-site Crenk: Steven Finch points out ten great tools for using Twitter, and Luis Sandoval offers the top ten Twitter add-ons for Firefox. I’m about the world’s worst Twitter user; I tweet about once per week. Or I won’t tweet for five days, then make between six and eight updates in two hours. Then I’ll neglect it all over again. You know where I belong? 1850, that’s where.

Speaking of Luis Sandoval, he’s got a great post that asks one of the purest and most important questions every writer should ask his- or herself: Are you writing intentionally?

The folks over at SEOmoz are in the midst of a great discussion: What part of the SEO process is hardest for you? For me, it’s pretending I know what I’m talking about. Kidding, kidding. Or… am I?

At the Writer’s Bag, there’s a brand-new post about semicolons which does two things: Settles a discussion I had with commenter PS3 after my comma post, and makes completely obsolete the post I had planned on semicolons.

Cracked offers up its holiest of holies in two articles: The Top Seven Secrets for Writing a Cracked.com Top Seven List, and Seven Cheats for Hitting the Front Page of Digg. My prediction is that they won’t work for you. But then, I’m a depressive, pessimistic bastard who likes seeing other people fail, so I may not be the best source of advice. Again, I’m kidding. We all know by now how awesome I am.

Now: Stop reading websites and start writing something that excites you.

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I mentioned last week that I’m a fan (and a user) of MetaFilter, the community website. MetaFilter predates the entire concept of “Web 2.0,” but manages to maintain all the things we like best about large communities on the web, while avoiding the possibility of a bunch of crappy Ron Paul posts or questionably relevant links to stories about how some programmer is really upset about… well, whatever it is programmers get upset about.

We can all learn a lot from looking at the things MeFi does right:

A Negligible Membership Fee. MetaFilter charges a one-time, five-dollar fee to join.   The fee was implemented in 2004 as a result of overwhelming membership requests. It’s a brilliant idea; Five bucks isn’t much, but it is enough to ward off trolls, and to encourage people to join only if they really want to. The hassle of dealing with PayPal is by itself enough to keep out the riff-raff.

Compartmentalization. One of the big no-nos on MetaFilter is self-linking; the strict policy against it can get you banned if you try. But founder Matt Haughey appreciated his users’ need for a forum for their own projects, so he created MetaFilter Projects, where self-linking is not just encouraged, but pretty much necessary. It’s yet another in a list of sub-pages designed to relieve the front page of non-essential posts and too-specific minutae, along with Ask MetaFilter (sort of a community advice column) and MetaTalk (for discussion of MeFi itself… a sort of MetaFilter Meta).

Design. MeFi’s design is so distinctive that its members often only refer to it as “The Blue.” (They also call AskMeFi “The Green” and, occasionally, MetaTalk “The Grey.”) There’s nothing striking about MetaFilter’s design, but with its cool blue concept and serifless font, it’s definitely memorable.

Self-Policing. Because the blog is subtitled “The Best of the Web,” and early users fostered a community based on quality, courtesy and a strong adherence to that subtitle, MetaFilter has a powerful reputation for self-policing. A system of tagging and “favoriting” posts allows users to both alert mods to bad posts and reward good ones.

Quality Posts. All of the above factors result in a series of immersive, readable posts every day. It’s not like Reddit or Mixx or Digg or Stumbleupon; at MetaFilter, the users strive to contextualize their posts, often providing multiple links to related material, so that each post is like a reading list on some specific topic. And even when the posts are just single links to things like YouTube videos (ahem), they’re still pretty good.

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Be honest with yourself, how many times have you skipped reading a link love post by your favorite blogger? You’re not alone; many others, including myself, do the same thing. Why? Because we read blogs looking for content that will engage us not lead us to a bunch of links. I understand bloggers create link love posts to show their commenters they appreciate their interaction, but do we really have to show our appreciation with a list of links? No, we don’t! And with the following creative link building ideas we can show commenters our appreciation without disappointing our readers, while still keeping our content appealing.

Show link love with a resource link. Write your posts as usual, but somewhere in that post provide a resource link. You’ll link to a post on the commenter’s blog that’s related to your post. For example, if you’re blogging about writing engaging content and your commenter wrote a past post about how to find blog post ideas, then you could link a related phrase in your post to that commenters past post about finding blog ideas. The phrase in your content could be discovering blog post ideas or something similar that doesn’t take you off topic. This keeps your content the way it should be — interesting and informative — while still showing your appreciation to those who interact with you by leaving comments on your posts. In addition, it could bring your commenter more traffic than just placing their link in a list with other links. I’m sure your commenters will appreciate this link building idea more than the usual way of creating a link love post.

Show your appreciation with an Attribution. Choose a post written by your top commenters from their blog, and then add to their post (mention ideas or advice they may have left out) or write your take on it as a post on your own blog. Be sure you give each of them proper attribution. After all, the attribution is where the link love comes into play.

Write a profile on your top commenter. On a monthly or weekly basis, choose your top commenter and offer to write a profile on him or her. In your profile, link to his or her blog, and make sure their blog is related to yours so you don’t veer off topic.

Interview your top commenter. This is basically the same as writing a short profile on your top commenter, which can also be done on a weekly or monthly basis. Furthermore, you can let the top commenter know you’ll publicize the interview through social bookmarking, press releases, and etc. Also encourage your readers to share the interview post through social bookmarking. Not only will you be helping your commenters by promoting the interview post you did with them, but you’ll also bring traffic to your blog, and odds are the interviewee will publicize it as well, which will send even more traffic to the both of you.

Review their blog. Offer to write reviews of your commenters’ blogs. Again, make sure their blog is related to yours.

All the aforementioned link building ideas is much more interesting than a link love list, wouldn’t you agree?

To get started, create a blog post letting your readers know how you’ll show your appreciation to all of them who are top commenters each week and/or month. To keep this notice at the top of your blog, make it a header instead of a blog post. However, once you begin utilizing your creative link love building ideas on a consistent basis, you’re readers will catch on, and they just may begin commenting more, so they can earn themselves a link on your blog. After all, they’ll soon discover that your creative link love brings more traffic than making it onto a link love list.

If you have some of your own creative link building ideas for showing link love, please share them in the comments area below.

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Blogging as we know it is changing. Evolving. Are you ready? Do you feel confident that you know how blogging is changing so that you can best position yourself to take advantage? I’d like to share with you my personal perspective on the changes I see happening.

Blogging is becoming more than text

This first one should be pretty obvious to most of us by now. The advent of multimedia for blogs is astounding. I know the first thing you will think of is video. Without question, video blogging has officially arrived. But video isn’t all their is. Anything that can be embedded into a blog post extends the blog beyond text. And if there’s one thing programmers and creative people out there are really gunning for, it’s getting you to put their widget in your blog posts. Consider the following:

• SlideShare
• Animoto
• PollDaddy

As more and more tools like these become available, blog posts will continue to be much more than text. If you’re not shooting video or enhancing your posts with multimedia, it’s time to consider it for your blog. Don’t do it without reason, but give people something more than just text to read when it helps to make more of an impression or provide further information. It’s one thing that will help your blog stand out and look fresher than other blogs in your niche.

Blogging is growing bigger

When you look at blogs like TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Engadget, and The Huffington Post, you can see how blogging is now the big time. Can your blog grow that big? Yes, it can. I can remember when TechCrunch didn’t exist and in the early days it started out with very few readers just like any blog. Of course, that didn’t last long, but that’s what great content and good connections to an industry will get you. I remember when the TreeHugger blog really was just a little WordPress blog trying to make a difference. Well, now they’ve made a difference and a bundle of cash, having been sold to the Discovery Times Newsgroup for $10 million. It was the right niche at the right time, with the right mix of content.

Blogging is growing smaller

At the same time, blogging is also growing smaller. So small, at first glance they hardly seem to be blogs at all. I’m talking about micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter and Pownce, and I’m also talking about “tumblelogs,” which are often single-column stream-of-consciousness style blogs. Twitter in particular has exploded in popularity, and has aspects of a social media site, although it is described as a micro-blogging platform, due to its 140-character limit on post length.

The first tumblelog was created by Christian Neukirchen, and it’s called Anarchaia. Tumblelogging for everyone is made possible through the free, hosted service Tumblr or through single-column blog templates.

Blogging is becoming easier

Blogging is becoming easier in many ways:

• Free, hosted platforms like WordPress and Tumblr, plus social media blogging like Facebook and Twitter make blogging easier than ever for non-techies to just get going.
• More web hosting companies have one-click installs for WordPress self-hosted, giving you more freedom in some ways, but still requiring way more technical know-how than your average newbie possesses.
• The ability to share content with embed codes is getting to be more well-known and easier.
• Creating video and pictures and editing them online is getting easier.

Blogging is becoming more difficult

In some ways, blogging is becoming more difficult. The bar has been raised. The stakes are higher. The markers we look for that tell us a blog is professional and that give a blog the greatest chance for success are not easy to implement without technical knowledge. It takes more to start a professional blog now than it once did. Just getting started can be overwhelming to people, leaving room for people to make a living as blogging consultants to help people navigate blogging.

Creating original content that stands out from the sea of millions of other blogs is also becoming more difficult as the number of blogs continues to grow. Can it be done? Yes. Even the most over-saturated of niches can be dominated by a newcomer. Who ever heard of Dosh Dosh or Skelliewag a few years ago? Nobody. And yet now they are two of the most popular blogs in the make money online and meta-blogging niches.

Blogging is becoming one part of what is called social media

Finally, the big one. This is one that bothers some people who are hanging on to ideas about how blogging is writing in the older tradition of writing. Not only is blogging beyond text, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s also beyond content, period. This idea of content on a the web as static words–the pixel version on ink on paper–is evolving into something else. The intersection and synergy of blogging and social media really highlights this for me.

A big part of why some bloggers are wildly successful has less to do with the content they create on their blog than their networking activities. Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn (more for business), and others facilitate this. Twitter is probably the most pronounced example of this stage in blogging’s evolution. Honestly, I don’t know whether to think of Twitter as a micro-blogging platform or a social media platform. It’s both, really. And you can expect further changes in this direction from other blogging and social media platforms, including WordPress.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the ways in which blogging is changing, I hope that this leaves you with a better perspective on this, and will help you make decisions about where you’re taking your blogging. I’d love to hear from you about how you see blogging changing. Please leave a comment below and let’s discuss!

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