Category: Blogging

Blogging, blogs, RSS, Web 2.0

Google Reader quick comments

I have now completely moved over to using Google Reader as my primary RSS reader. And it appears I am in good company!

I started using it regularly while on holidays on my phone and I grew to like it – particularly the ability to Star and Share posts.

Now I’m using it full-time, not only for these features, but also because I can use it on my Vaio, my MacBook Pro and my mobile phone (I still read and Share many items on the phone at home).

There is really cool trending software in Google Reader as well to help you figure out which blogs update regularly (with a one-click option to unsubscribe from ones which don’t), which blogs you Star and/or Share and it charts your reading activity by day (and by time of day).

The only thing which annoys me about it is that the list of unread items my phone displays differs from the list my computers display. I don’t know why this is, they are running from the same account, reading the same subscription list. Has anyone else noticed this?

If you’d like to follow the items I’m Sharing from my subscription list (i.e. follow what I am recommending) you can:

Blogging, blogs, RSS

Full feeds lead to more page views

TechDirt has an article explaining why full feeds lead to more page views on your site than partial feeds.

From the article:

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

I have long had full feeds on this site and have written numerous times about the merit of full feeds.

Further, I don’t subscribe to any sites which only publish partial feeds – it is a waste of my time having to click through to read the full article on the original site.

You can be sure I am not the only one who thinks this way!

Blogging

Sky Handling Partners engage in fraud and libel against blogger? – contd

Sky Handling Partners have a shitstorm on their hands.

Yesterday someone in their organisation committed computer fraud (a criminal offense)  and libel against Damien Mulley – seemingly in revenge for a post he published where he outlined how poorly they treated him after losing his luggage!

Now, instead of trying to engage with Damien. Instead of contacting him and saying, “Look Damien, we’re really sorry about this – what can we do to make it right?” Or “Look Damien, we dropped the ball and you had a bad customer experience, we know we have issues and are working to address them. Would you like to be a member of our Customer Service Improvement Committee and work with us to create a better experience for all our clients?”

No.

Instead of that, what do they do? They set their lawyers on him, demanding that he take down his posts about them!

Good God, just who advises these people?

First they piss off one of the more influential people in the country. And then they try to gag him when he complains! Clueless personified.

This is likely to be a real Man bites Dog. We are used to hearing stories of Blogger sued by Large Corporation but this looks increasingly likely to be the first Large Corporation sued by Blogger story.

Go for it Damien.

Blogging, Web 2.0

How to increase traffic to your blog

One of the questions which comes up often when I am giving talks about blogs is how to increase traffic to your blog.

Well, Trent Hamm has written a 10-step program which he followed to take his blog  from 0 to 12,000 subscribers in six months.

There are some great tips in there – I especially like the ‘Listen to Del.icio.us’ point:

The most valuable content that a blogger can create is the type of content that readers want to come back to time and time again and also that they want to share with others. These pieces will continually provide value to you, and the surest way to identify such content is to know how many people have saved a particular post at del.icio.us. I keep track of this by using Feedburner’s site statistics package and enabling the “flare” that shows this information. Posts that have del.icio.us bookmarks are usually the ones I use as guidelines for what works on my blog – if I try something different and no one bookmarks it, I usually realize that it’s a bad idea. I’ve found that time and time again, del.icio.us is the best barometer of good content.

Absolutely agree, Del.icio.us is a phenomenally powerful filter for quality material. It is another Mechanical Turk in action.

Blogging, customer service

Sky Handling Partners engage in fraud and libel against blogger?

Sky Handling Partners lost Damien Mulley’s bag recently.

When Damien called to complain, they lied to him on the phone and showed a level of customer contempt which begs the question of how they are still in business.

Damien blogged about his treatment by them and their poor customer relations.

What do they do in return?

They sign him up for a load of gay dating websites with, as Damien put it in his own post, “rather interesting profile descriptions” – I can only imagine.

Damien phoned them to ask them about this. When he was getting nowhere he reminded them that:

signing up to dating websites using my details was fraud and I could happily call the Gardai and let them sort it out. Quoting from Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act,. 2001 to the lady seemed to make her take the matter seriously. I also pointed out I felt that posting untrue details about me on at least 3 websites was not on, especially what was written and I said I felt I was libeled

Fraud is a criminal offense so Damien would be well within his rights to call the Gardaí and have them investigate. The fact that he feels he was libeled means that he can sue as well.

Sky Handling Partners have exposed themselves to being sued for libel and a criminal investigation for fraud.

Why didn’t they just apologise?

Blogging

Google now controls more of my info!

Google has agreed to purchase Feedburner – the rss feed management company for $100m according to Mike Arrington in a post over on TechCrunch.

According to Mike:

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Great news for the guys in FeedBurner but now that Google owns another digital slice of my life I can’t help wondering what other feed management companies are out there (eggs, baskets, etc.) and can I integrate their services into my blogs as easily as FeedBurner?

Blogging, Search Engines, Technology

Technorati resurrects the Marquee tag…

Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!

The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.

The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.

On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top – make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!

New Technorati homepage

Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.

Blogging, IT@Cork

Blog training course discussion area

Paul O’Mahony is one of the people sitting in on the Blog Training Course I am running for it@cork. Paul has been blogging for a while now and I first met him at the Irish Blog Awards earlier this year.

Paul made a suggestion in the comments on his own blog that I put up:

something up on your blog about the course, so that people on the course can have a place where they could comment. I’m thinking that I may not be the only person on the course who would like to keep track of how I’m getting on with loading RSS for example. If there was one central place where we could put reports on progress, we could thereby learn from each other. I don’t mean set you up in a Q&A situation – that would be outside the remit of the course – but give everyone an opportunity to experience social networking

Initially I thought a wiki might be more suitable for this purpose but as this is a blog training course, let’s do it through the comments of this post. So, as Paul suggests, if you are on the course and want to share thoughts, suggestions, criticisms, whatever about the course, use the comments of this post to do so.