I’ve elected to step down as the Editor of the BlogHerald today after some professional differences in opinion about how this blog ought to be run. Sometimes there are differences that you just have to agree to disagree about, and I believe that this is one of those circumstances.

I’ve had a tremendous time taking on this role, and its given me a fantastic opportunity to meet people and learn a few things about growing a flagship blog. I’d like to thank Mark Saunders for giving me the opportunity, and I’d like to thank every blogger that works here personally for all of their efforts and hard work. It has been an honour and pleasure to work with all of you.

Lastly, I’d like to thank all of the old readers who stuck around after the transition to a Splashpress ownership, and I’d like extend an outgoing hand to all of our new readers. I hope that under my stewardship we gained your trust, and I’d like to thank you for your ongoing patronage.

Thanks to everyone for all the memories, as the past year with the BlogHerald is one that I will never forget.

Cheers,
Tony Hung MD.
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com

The post Thanks for all the memories appeared first on The Blog Herald.

What made it such a great piece of work was how legitimate it sounded. Oh, they had sent their lawyers after him. He had dropped his “FSJ” persona and was largely talking with that mask off. He was concerned and worried about having the pants sued off of him. And so on.

Which made it all the more poignant when a great majority of tech bloggers got suckered into these posts as they were all, in fact, fake. What’s the lesson here?

Only that bloggers are pathetically easy targets for hoax bait.

What is hoax bait, you might ask? Well, let’s revisit what link bait is.

My definition of link bait being is content that is deliberately put together that has is often quick, digestible, and relevant to a target audience, often co-opting a list type format (10 greatest bloggers of all time!) with a bizarre (… that have travelled to Greenland!) or funny (… and have handlebar mustaches!) twist, with the purpose, of course, generating links — often through social promotional means (… Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Propeller etc).

Hoax bait is a specific kind of content that is put together which is outrageous and attention-getting in its intentions. However, where most content is thoughtfully put together with careful attention to facts, hoax bait is often the oopposite. It is a form of link bait where there is often careful attention to the facts BUT with an emphasis on the subsequent creation of fake facts.

The FSJ story which had many bloggers (and fans) frothing at the mouth with Apple’s legal indignity and achieved its goal: satirization of the often-ham-fisted legal efforts of Apple, the recent takedown of Think Secret (an Apple focused blog on upcoming Apple Technology), and lastly, the Apple Faithful/tech-blogosphere itself which is so eager to leap upon any insult involving its technology/ drama involving its A-list cast.

So, the larger question is should *you* get involved with Hoax Bait?

Like many questions in life, the answer is that it “depends”.

Nobody like’s being made a fool out of, least of all your core audience, or the potential audience that you’re looking to create your blog around. On the other hand, some people are of the opinion that no publicity is bad publicity, and when you’re starved for traffic anything looks like good publicity, right?

So what’s a blogger to do? I think that it could work for you under the right circumstances

1. Its good hoax bait: You first have to have something that people are going to take notice of. In many ways I find that its like an urban legend: its often something that’s rooted in truth and plays upon people’s (or bloggers) own insecurities, prejudices, wishes or fantasies. Unlike an urban legend, however, there is often a timeliness component to it if its related to something in the news. FSJ being pursued for legal issues wouldn’t be as poignant if, for example, it wasn’t already highlighted by another Apple-related blog already (and legitimately) being shuttered.

2. When bloggers expect that things might already be fake: As in, a fake blog, or a blog that “does” comedy, or parody, or any one of a number of topics where people don’t expect you to be serious all the time. Or, say, April Fool’s day. Lots of fake content there. Its all about expectations — if bloggers aren’t expecting you to be upright and forthcoming all the time (and with good reason — to entertain) they’ll be less fussed when you pull the gotcha moment. Look to FSJ for inspiration if need be, or the Onion if you like.

3. You’re not too A$$hole-ish about it: That is to say, a general catch all term for “not being too mean in its fake content” and “being genuinely conciliatory” after you revealed what you just wrote is all fake, and meant for other reasons than bald-faced attention getting content. Earlier this year, for example, one tech blogger/podcaster wrote that he was going to replace Don Imus on his nationally syndicated talk show after Mr. Imus was fired for making racist remarks.

It got a lot of traction in the tech blogosphere, but it didn’t last too long and ultimately was revealed as a bit of a hoax by the author. He was conciliatory about it, and it was a pretty gentle hoax to begin with — but a good one, as it preyed on many a blogger / podcaster’s secret fantasy about making it big. Furthermore it was within the context of April Fool’s, so it was a good legitimate reason to put it together (as opposed to, for instance, admitting it was a traffic grab).

Now, if you’re not concerned about growing a core audience and don’t mind having your own integrity called into question, you could ignore #2 or #3. Or, if you’re thinking of creating a legendary prankster status, you could similarly ignore #2 or #3. On the other hand, you could risk running into the Punk’d syndrome (AKA the “Cry Wolf” phenomenon) where if people know its you, they might think what you’re writing about is just another hoax / prank.

If you know of other Hoax Bait that “worked”, or ones that bombed I’d love to hear it. Alternatively, if you have any hoax escapades of your own that you can share, you may do so right here. ;)

The post Hoax Bait — A Special Kind Of Link Bait. appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But there is a split in terms of the sexes.  35% of all online teenage girls were blogging compared to 20% of online teenage boys.  Furthermore, nearly all of the growth since 2004 in blogging amongst teenager has really been due to interest amongst girls: older girls blog more than boys of the same age (38% vs 18%), but younger girls are also blogging more than older boys as well (32% vs. 18%).

Unfortunately, there isn’t too much insight as to what’s driving this split, other than the report commenting in a later section that girls as a group are more frequent communicators than boys; whether or not this group-related differences are enough to explain differences in the expression of media is hard to know, as boys tend to post online videos more than girls.

What might be fueling the over all interest in blogging?  The report postulates that there is a greater integration of blogging as an educational tool amongst schools; some classes in some schools even report that they were asked to post papers to their blog before submission so that their classmates could comment and provide feedback — both for online and offline conversations in class.

Other interesting blogging-related tidbits include:

Demographics matter: A significant proportion of teen bloggers come from low income families, designated as families with a combined income of less than $50k per year; furthermore, teens were more likely to blog if they came from single-parent households (42%) as opposed to dual-parent households (25%).

Teens who blogs also tend to be well adjusted: teens who were the most active with respect to social networking and blogging activities were also the teens who were most likely to be engaged in extra-curricular activities, such as sports, music or part-time employment.

Lots of them are reading blogs: If 38% of teens are creating blog content, fully half are actively reading blogs, and that percentage goes up to 59% for those who read blogs daily.

The post Blogging Continues To Grow Amongst Teens, With Girls Leading The Way appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But was it The First? 

Well, it wasn’t.

And therein lies the debate we may always end up having, as Jorn Barger may have coined the term “blog”, but in fact was not the very first individual posting to what is currently known as a blog.

Dave Winer, AKA “the Godfather of Blogging”, created a reverse-chronological series of postings a year earlier, chronicling the 24 Hours Of Democracy Project, while he was a contributing editor at Wired.  A year later, Scripting News was born, which he continues to author until this very day.

But was there anyone before that?

Duncan Riley, the original editor (and author) of this blog put together an interesting post a couple of years ago that goes into the history of blogging, and states that there was a Justin Hall, who created a website in 1994 eventually evolving into an online diary in January of 1996, the form of which could easily be argued is a blog.

Or how about Jason D. O’Grady?  This gent writes a blog on Apple called “The Apple Core” at ZDNet, and states that *he* authored an online journal about Powerbooks since 1995, called PowerPage, and still carries on to this day (although the original URL was ogrady.org, where the original entries can indeed be found through the WayBackMachine)

We may never actually know who wrote the very first online digital “diary”, written in reverse chronological format, only the people who have actually written one and have actually stepped forward to provide evidence for it.  For instance, I remember putting together some journal like entries in a Geocities page in 1994, but I’m surely not going to be able to find evidence for it now, and I’m certainly not going to claim that I am the father of anything.

As a recent article in Ars Technica comments, perhaps the bigger issue today isn’t so much when blogging started but where its going, and how we are going to continue to define it as it was coined at least 10 years ago now.  Blogs may have started out as “online diaries”, but they’ve clearly evolved into much more than that.  And of course there are the old chestnuts about blogs necessarily having to have comments to be a blog?  How about trackbacks?  And are the big multi-authored blogs like TechCrunch *really* blogs anymore?

2008 is right around the corner, and I think many of these kinds of issues are still up for debate — even as blogging matures as a means for self-expression, a vehicle for marketing and branding, and an efficient tool to bring news and have conversations with the masses.

The post Happy 10th Birthday, Blogging! (Or, is it … ?) appeared first on The Blog Herald.

You may be wondering how a blogging company will do a Russian company like SUP at its helm.

Well, earlier this year, I had written about how prolific — and important — blogging had become in Russia, where I had linked to an article which detailed the birth of Russian blogging via the LiveJournal counterpart, called Zhivoi Zhurnal.

In a place where the political and journalistic organs are not as transparent as other places in the world, coupled with a sophisticated and technologically savvy audience, it seemed like blogging had an important role to play both inside and outside politics, as a legitimate “alternative” form of journalism and media.

Whether its to organize rallies, flashmobs, or providing first hand eye-witness accounts of things, it seems like blogging has found a real purpose there, unlike the angst that some bloggers feel about its existence as a medium, here in the west.

With that kind of background, I suspect that LiveJournal is in better hands than most bloggers might be concerned about.  But time will really tell, I suppose.

The post LiveJournal Gets By Sold By Six Apart To Russian SUP appeared first on The Blog Herald.

To no one’s surprise, Google has worked within the boundaries of local laws, and has in fact, given up the IP of the blogger in question.  Further details over at TechCrunch have emerged that confirmed my own suspicions in the matter, in that Google did work through a process, but did give the IP over according to their own Terms of Service.

They read, specifically “Google may investigate any violations to “comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request” ”

I think there are some legitimate reasons for wanting to blog anonymously.  However, if you’re going to do it and you want to avoid persecution for whatever reason, clearly you may want to avoid doing it with a service such as Google.  They will do their best to work through local laws, but have long ago decided to work *within* those local boundaries in almost *all* of its services.

The post A Quick Reminder For Bloggers At Blogger.com appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Read/Write/Web has the details, but it seems like through a service called PicApps, blogs will be able to post images for their posts from Corbis’s vast stock library without any legal consequence.  The catch is that all of the images that are shown via PicApps this way will have a tiny bit of Javascript embeded in them, which creates a “roll-over” effect with advertising (see R/W/W for an example).

This will allow bloggers to avoid the potential copyright pitfalls with grabbing and posting images they have no rights to, and at the same time, allow them to earn a bit of the action as well.

No details at this time with respect to what the payout will be like, how they plan to roll it out and so on (will there be a limit to the number of pictures per post?), but it certainly looks like one extra way that bloggers can monetize their efforts.

Of course, for the purists who want to avoid the distractions of having a little bit of advertising on their blogs there have always been royalty-free alternatives, providing one knows where to look.

The post Bloggers To Get Another Source Of Revenue: Posting Pictures appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The problem is that in my own blogging success, I have found trackbacks to be instrumental.

Here’s how.

Back when I was starting outas a blogger I really only did a couple things to grow my blog.  I wrote consistently.  And I linked aggressively out to other blogs in my community … consistently.  What ended up happening was that people noticed my blog (and started linking to Deep Jive Interests) as a result.  Water, prune, and grow said relationships and here I am.

In fact, one of my own strategies was to use the del.icio.us auto-post thingy, where every night it would auto-post to my blog about my favourite blogs / posts / news that day, with — obviously — a link to those blogs.

So, where am I getting at?

I think that trackbacks made it a _lot_ easier for those blogs to *know* that I was writing about them.  And more importantly, it made _other_ people who read that blog know that I was participating in the conversation.

And getting people to know about _your_ blog … well, isn’t that one of the cardinal things about marketing your blog should be about?

There’s a lot to be said for “comment marketing”, and that’s valid (you know, where you leave comments consistently on other authority-blogs to achieve a certain mindshare of your own).  However, I would argue is that if you have the time, use this rule of thumb:If you spend more than 5 minutes writing a comment — and particularly if its even marginally astute — take the same 5 minutes to write that into a pithy post.  It creates *easy* content for your blog.  It creates a sense that your blog *is* one of “those” blogs who are are participating in your niche in the blogosphere.  And lastly, it makes your blog stand out on the  hosting blog if they are publishing trackbacks.

Why?

Many people have set up trackbacks so it actually publishes your blog’s title.  People can see the name of your blog *on* the original blog.  If you’re just commenting they’ll just see your first name (unless you’re using your blog’s name — but that’s just not cool … I mean its asking for your name, right?).  Secondly, the number of trackbacks to *actual* comments is usually very low.  On highly commented blogs, you _may_ find they separate trackbacks first (before comments), and secondly, the actual number of published trackbacks is usually low compared to the number of comments.

More chance for you to stand out to get noticed.  Or, it will if you do it consistently.

Which is all the more sad that trackbacks are getting overloaded from a signal-to-noise ratio from spam.  I think they potentially provide a very valuable toehold into a blogging community for beginning bloggers.  And I would suggest that although they are a huge nuisance to the blogger and blog that is hosting the conversation because of the inbound spam, it is still worthwhile to the blogger who wants to participate in the conversation.

And that’s the point. 

Its still worthwhile for *you* to use your blog to participate in the blogging conversation.

The post Have Trackbacks Become Too Spammy To Be Worthwhile? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

More as it comes in.

Update: Ionut from Google Operating System has chimed in below — what we see on the toolbar is probably the official pagerank. Perhaps the PageRank zeroes have more to do with datacenter updates than anything else.

Update: In hand checking some of IP for data centers at http://www.digpagerank.com/, it seems like many data centers are not in fact down; the conflicting results, coupled with the persistent zero level at the tool-bar level of previously “zeroed” blogs suggests that this is likely, in fact a data center issue.  Thank goodness there’s a question mark at the end of that title. ;)

The post Breaking: Google Drops EVERYONE’S PageRank To ZERO? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

That’s right — although Google has created the perception that it is actively punishing those blogs which are doing things to pollute organic listings, Google itself may also be an unwitting participant in said “pollution” by selling links … at almost $2k a pop.

How is this?

Well, Google sells some enterprise hardware, known as Google Mini.  This combination hardware/software solution allows companies to search their own intranets, starting at $1995 for 50,000 documents.

How does selling links come into play?  Well, according to one source, if you purchase a Google Mini, you can submit a testimonial to Google which Google will happily put up.   Or, perhaps not.  There are a lot of “testimonials” which are nothing more than names and links.

Links, specifically, that are very real and do not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute. 

So, how much would you pay for an inbound link from Google (specifically, a PR7 site as the testimonial site is PR7)?  If your answer is somewhere in the range of $2000USD, you might just be in luck.

The post Google Selling Links For $1995? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

While the scope if this most recent “correction” has still yet to be fully completed, it seems that the target of Google’s ire are those who are doing paid postings from PayPerPost Izea. Andy Beard, of course is keeping an active track of things, and Ted Murphy, CEO of PayPerPost Izea has gone on record on his own blog, by claiming Google is actually targeting small time bloggers who are using his service to make a humble income. Furthermore, he tries to make the case that larger players are no different, such as TechCrunch, as advertising usually brings a free in-post link at the end of every month.

Now, what’s interesting, of course, is that many bloggers (and blogs) have noticed that after their pagerank drop — indeed, after their pagerank went to zero — their hasn’t been much change, if any, in their traffic levels. In light of this, EatonWeb is recalibrating is algorithm so that it now takes PageRank out of the equation (indeed, it devalues it).

But if there’s been no change in traffic levels, one does wonder what the purpose of this recent action is?

I think that this kind of effort — human or algorithmic (or a combination thereof) — demonstrates that there is something *about* paid links that Google clearly believes are important. That is, I don’t think Google would ever do something unless it made a difference; my assumption is that it wouldn’t do anything that actively penalized anyone without any particular reason why (i.e. spite).

Perhaps its because they’ve shown internally that paid links *do* disrupt the “organic” nature of search results; and that, either now, or in the future (if they’ve done projections), that such a disruption, even if on a small scale, has, or will reach, a level they’ve demonstrated as intolerable.

We already know that since this past June, they’ve actively been on the hunt for paid links. You can see there’s a reporting station in every dashboard of the Google Webmaster web page.

My take on things is that Google wants to make an example out of PayPerPost Izea. Yes, Google knows that there’s full disclosure. Some blogs reviews even do the no-follow thing. Both are immaterial, however.

What Google wants to do is create the perception that doing paid reviews as a subtext to sell PageRank as a huge violation of its algorithm, as a means to subvert Google — even though most posties, I’m sure, do reviews with the intention of … well, doing a review.

Because by penalizing blogs to a pagerank of *zero* (not just lowering them), that is exactly what the perception of things will be; you can expect that many blogs will flee PayPerPost Izea and their ilk, as Google spreads FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about how Google perceives paid postings in general.

And from Google’s position, it will be mission accomplished — even though PageRank looks like it has no obvious effects on traffic — as it will cool _everyone’s_ perception of paid links. And furthermore, it will cool a possibly-rising trajectory of how paid postings and paid links are having in the web-o-sphere.

The post Is Google Making An Example Out Of PayPerPost (… er, Izea)? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The reason is simple. Facebook pages, first of all, only show the summary information for a page, such as the name of the site, and some background information of the site. It also includes a full URL, of which you can’t change the anchor text (it remains your URL name), which is tempting to think that — “Hey, Facebook, a Pagerank 8 site, is now linking to my humble blog!”

Well, that may be, but if you look extra close, its a link that uses the (dreaded) “rel=nofollow” qualifier. Which means that although Google *does* see the site, and does see the link, its not going to “credit” your site with all of that linky-goodness.

… which really is entirely consistent with its recent theme of trying to maintain “real” or “authentic” or “organic” link patterns (and its subsequent penalization of sites which are selling links, such as this site).

So, there might be other reasons why setting up a page for your blog on Facebook is something you might do, but don’t do it for the links, as its not something Google will recognize in earnest anyway.

The post Getting Link Love From Facebook? Hold Yer Horses, Kids appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Has the same thing happened again?   Many commenters on the same post at Feedburner are wondering the same thing as the numbers seem to be down around 50% again.  More importantly, with these kind of reliability issues the second time in as many days, it does one reflexively wonder what is going on at Feedburner/Google HQ, whether it be security issues, upgrades, or hardware failures or what have you.

The post Feedburner Drops Google Subscribers *Again*? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

In my ongoing fascination with sploggers, I’ve found out that there’s a new kind of “autoblogging” software that has been sending out trackbacks. But I presume you know the usual kind of thing I’m talking about: the offenders are blogs that end in .info, scrape your posts and then reproduce the first few paragraphs that end with an ellipsis and “you should read more over here”, or “<insert author name> has the details”, or some such dreck.

Well, in examining the latest splogging garbage to cross my desk, I have found that some new autoblogging software is doing something pretty sneaky to get past *your* defenses.

I know that when I look back at such blogs to verify that they’re in fact auto-generated (to create adsense income), so that I can add their IP and domain to my blacklist, I usually check “by hand” to see that they’ve scraped a post.

Well, much to my surprise I found that there were some *very* interesting posts that were “tracking back” to the BlogHerald that had very familiar posts — but not quite identical or literal ripoffs of our content.

But it was really close.

And then I had another look at things sideways and realized that the grammar was bad. Really bad. Almost comically so. Almost as if someone had run it through a translator *twice*. Once out of English, and again into English. Or maybe *four* times, even, as I can’t quite replicate it.

Consider the following passage:

In the time I’ve been blogging personally in the new media side of the blogosphere, there have been some unwritten rules that I’ve taken notice of that some bloggers seem to follow religiously.

And then consider the mimicked one:

In the instance I’ve been blogging personally in the newborn media lateral of the blogosphere, there hit been whatever spoken rules that I’ve condemned attending of that whatever bloggers seem to study religiously.

… yes, “WTF” indeed.

Now, in a cursory Google check for autoblogging software that double translates, I’ve found nothing yet; but certainly auto-translating software *does* exist for sploggers to plug into their autoblogging software, with the intention of grabbing more time with Google, as differently translated auto-scraped content will translate into more unique content, which translates into more pages, which translates, perhaps into more income.

The other possibility is an auto-synonomizer piece of software which already exists, as something which automatically substitutes synonyms for given words in scraped content. One kind is advertised over here , costs $45, and was released near the end of October.

Since I can’t actually find software to doubly-translate scraped text it may be that its synonymizer software that’s doing it, although the grammar doesn’t quite fit.

Have you noticed this kind of trackback spam? If you have, leave a message and let’s have a vote: synonymized or translated?

The post Sploggers Get Craftier. Or Should I Say “Sploggers son cada vez más complicado!” appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Which would make the recipient in question the most distinguished blogger in the world.

Who is this blogger? Gary Beck, an economist who, incidentally, has also won the Nobel Prize back in 1992.

Mr. Beck was honored with a number of others, including C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, former Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, imprisoned Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, scientist Francis Collins and former NAACP President Benjamin Hooks.

It turns out that Mr. Beck had won the Medal of Freedom for his works in economics — not, sadly, in blogging; however, he has been blogging since 2004 with a partner, Richard Posner, who is no slouch himself, being a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Together they write regularly at www.becker-posner-blog.com, which is a blog that focuses on economic theory and world events. At least that’s what I think its on, as it looks to be fairly hard core — from an economics point of view. To me, any post which begins with “Malthus and the many neo-Malthusians of modern times assume that the threat from world overpopulation would show up first in rising food prices … ”

On the other hand, what else would you expect from a pair of dueling minds, both of whom are Professors, and both of whom have published stacks of books on their respective interests.

If economic theory floats your boat, check their blog out; otherwise, you can add “Blogger as Presidential Medal of Freedom Winner” to your list of blogger-related trivia when your friends and family ask you “… but who really blogs?”

The post Presidential Medal of Freedom Goes To … A Blogger?! appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Would you be interested in getting to know fellow Stumblers, particularly by their Stumble ranking?

If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then it may interest you to know of a new service called StumbleRank, which is a new service put together by Muhammad Saleem, uber-social-media maven (and former BlogHerald author, I might add).

StumbleRank can pull in data through StumbleUpon to rank any given profile, and put them in order.

“But, which order?” You might wonder — as the StumbleUpon algorithm hasn’t yet (or probably ever will be) published.

Well, based on statistics that are publicly available for every single profile, StumbleRank allows you to make those decisions for yourself. Based on categories such as the number of pages, photos, and videos that any given Stumbler has Stumbled, and (perhaps more importantly) based on the number of fans and user reviews that a Stumble has acquired, it is now possible to sort your favourite profiles — perhaps yourself — against a list of other StumbleUpon profiles.

At this time StumbleRank isn’t able to pull in profiles automatically from StumbleUpon, so you’ll have to add a profile yourself to a growing list of profiles that can be found on the main page.

I had a chance to interview Muhammad Saleem to ask a few specific questions, and what follows are some paraphrased answers.

1. Why did you put StumbleRank together?

– The StumbleUpon “Top Stumblers” page is inaccurate given the publicly available statistics. Sometimes there are stumblers with very few pages, photos and videos stumbled that have inexplicably ended up there. It’s also not very complete, as there are some very potent stumblers, which a very high number of pages, photos and videos stumbled which are noticeably absent.

– I thought that StumbleRank would be a nice way to fix things, as I thought that it would take too long to get StumbleUpon to actually fix the Top Stumblers page.

2. Do you think the “power” of a Stumbler has much to do with how easily a page they Stumble ends up getting StumbledUpon by the masses?

– StumbleUpon used to have an ‘audience’ number for each user, i.e. larger audience meant a page you stumble gets shown to more people. There’s been speculation that the more fans+friends and positive reviews you have, the better your stumbles will fare
because your friends (especially when stumbling in friend mode) will get shown your stumbles. If *they* like them, then their friends get shown those numbers.

– They’ve since then they removed it and now they have friends+fans, which I believe accomplishes the same thing.

3. Do you people who want to game StumbleUpon using StumbleRank to find top Stumblers to “influence”?

– What I see happening is that people see who’s on the list, and people will try to friend them and learn from them what kinds of pages to stumble, how to generate positive reviews and make friends/network through StumbleUpon.

– Basically the ranking highlights the users that are, well, let’s say the gatekeepers of stumble activity? (if “gatekeepers” are the right term). I know I certainly go to the profiles of the top users to see what they’re sharing, how they maintain their profiles, and so on.

– For example, with the Digg top users list have people adding me to IM daily to ask me how to better Stumble, what sources to read/pick from, who to make friends with, what’s good and bad, and so on nd even if they don’t have these questions, I make friends with new diggers because of the list, daily

{side note: Muhammad Saleem is one of the top 3 Diggers, whose username is msaleem}

4. Any worries of future legal repercussions from StumbleUpon, given the terms of service and how StumbleRank might be construed as a ‘derivative service’?

– I don’t imagine they will be taking the site down and if they, do, well that’s too bad then. I haven’t received any emails from StumbleUpon yet and StumbleRank has been live for a few days already.

– Besides if they shut it down because they fix their own site, and add something similar or better, then my goal is accomplished anyway.

5. Where do you see StumbleRank going in the future?

– Right now the site is very primitive, mostly because its hard to get data without an API. If an API is launched then that’s great. But in the meantime, I plan on adding more options to the mix.

– For example, the ability to rank users within different niches based on tags, ranking based on average votes/reviews on their discovered links, and so on. But this is all going to take time, which I don’t have a lot of right now

~

If you like StumbleUpon try StumbleRank, as it adds another dimension to StumbleUpon — and of course, if you love StumbleRank, don’t hesitate to Stumble it. ;)

The post What’s Your StumbleUpon Rank? Introducing StumbleRank appeared first on The Blog Herald.

If you happened to remember that everyone’s subscriber stats *doubled* about a year ago thanks to Feedburner recognizing Google feeds, you might have wondered if the opposite happened — and you would have been right.

Turns out that Feedburner has had difficulty in recognizing the subscribers from Google’s feedfetcher over the past 24 hours or so, and luckily this has been remedied.

So, for everyone who has enjoyed the extra hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings, you may rest assured that your numbers will return back to normal, and all has not been a result of over- (or, perhaps, under-) sleeping.

tip: the very-awake-Ryan Coleman 

The post Feedburner Glitch Nixes Google Reader Stats … Temporarily appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Of course, there’s the usual “best practice rules” that you’ll find written about here (such as writing with passion, finding your own voice, participating in community, investing time in marketing your blog, and so on, and so on, and so on) — but there are a few others, some tongue in cheek, and some not that are applicable to bloggers in any blogging niche.

If you want to get your egomaniacal gasbaggery on in earnest, that is. :)

So it was with much surprise that Michael Kanellos over at CNet has pretty much hit on all of them in a recent post, that I’ve paraphrased below:

1. Be Insane Or Obvious (But Not Both): That is, trumpet something crazy and out of left-field to “wow” them with how insanely broad your assertions can be, or try and confirm what people already believe. Trying to do both can be difficult, however.

2. Watch The Nielsens: In other words, stick to what people are already talking about, irrespective of whether or not its actually important. Who cares if there’s state-of-emergency drought in the South East that is the worst in decades? Stephen Colbert got denied a spot on the Presidential Ballot!

3. Find a Good Enemy: One that everyone loves or hates. Again, preferably not both. If you’re in tech, pick your perennials: Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Google, or Jason Calacanis.

4. Never Be Afraid to One Up Someone: “Yeah, I heard Google just brought on Oracle for its OpenSocial API — but *I* heard they’ve also got Pepsi and McDonald’s too!” Ah, ones-upmanship. The bastion of any good pundit.

5. Be Vague: That is create a topic that is intentionally vague and let everyone else do the talking. Makes you look smart *and* wise without having to explain yourself.

I’ve found the same rules above also apply if you’re looking for a job as an afternoon talkshow host for any given political stripe as well.

The post Become A Blogging Pundit In 5 Easy Steps appeared first on The Blog Herald.

I have noticed two particularly interesting kinds of spam, as I have been hand deleting comments of late.

1. Worthless Identical Comments: We’ve been hit recently with a lot of spam that comes from a few select IP’s, but they almost always have the same content. Its some variation of

“This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title *insert <title> of your post here*. Thanks for informative article”

or

“Hey! Nice blog posting about *insert <title> of your post here* I would have to agree with you on this one. I am going to look more into . This Thursday I have time.”

or the frequent favourite

“Superb write up talking about *insert <title> of your post here*. Thoroughly love your blog.”

Now the apparently puzzling phenomenon here is that quite often none of these comments have a URL attached to it; the traditional thinking has been that comment spam serves to artificially inflate the number of trackbacks to a particular URL, even if the rel=nofollow is on. What purpose does a non-URL’d piece of blogspam serve? Well, one theory that’s popular (and one that I subscribe to), is that there is still an IP that is attached to each comment; by allowing these seemingly benign comments through, you’re almost ‘white-listing’ these IP’s, so that when “real” blogspam comes, they aren’t automatically flagged.

Bottom line is that no matter what the reason why blogspammers are doing what they’re doing, the current practice I’ve adopted is that if it looks like blogspam, smells like blogspam, and acts like blogspam, then it gets deleted like blogspam. In this particular case, the current practice here is that if I see a whole bunch of comments that look the same, they get put in the same bin.

A few IP’s that keep on propagating the above non-sense have been blacklisted by me (through SK2), and you might want to keep a watch out for them as well:

72.232.123.175
72.52.145.58
70.86.43.130
64.22.110.34
64.22.107.90

2. High Granular Spam: Now, by this, I’m referring to how Spam Karma 2 recognizes past commenters through the “Snowball Effect”. That is, it tends to give commenters points based on how ‘valid’ their past posts have been, with the thinking that commenters who have always given ‘valid’ posts aren’t likely to post spammy ones in the future. Unfortunately, one way that it SK2 recognizes ‘valid’ posts is through the IP and URL of the commenter. We’ve been getting a lot of traditional spam recently that gets through SK2 precisely because the URL comes from Blogspot.com, where it gets a ton of points (granularity).

I’d love to comment on how stuff like this gets through Akismet, but since there are no FAQs on exactly how it works (or, provides a cookie trail for the stuff it moderates and stuff it doesn’t), I’m not able to. If anyone has any insights on this please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

For future reference, however, we will simply through into the moderation queue any comments that contain the word phentermine, viagra, cialis, ambien, meridia and combinations thereof, and we will likely be turning *off* the Snowball effect for the time being, as a function for SK2.

If anyone has any other experiences with the rise of Blogspam, I’d love to hear about it (and commiserate) as well — do you find that more is slipping through? Has the quality of blogspam changed? And more importantly, does anyone know why this might be?

The post Are You Noticing An Increase In Blogspam Too? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

At a WordPress Conference in Argentina, its been revealed that WordPress will soon be releasing a WordPress Premium Theme Marketplace, which will allow WordPress Designers to promote their premium themes through a common site — which is in turn promoted throughout the WordPress-o-sphere.

This is something that I’m sure all WordPress Designers will want to keep in mind as the reported revenue share will be –gulp — 50% of the gross revenue per premium WordPress Design. For new designers, this will be an excellent opportunity for free exposure, but for more experienced designers who have made a substantial name for themselves, it may be something they’ll want to mull over; 50% is a lot to hand over, but on the other hand the kind of exposure that you might get through such a marketplace is something that is hard to put a dollar figure on, particularly if it does well (as I’m sure you’ll be able to sort through “most popular” themes).

One issue that still remains to be seen if the premium themes marketplace is strictly for WordPress.com hosted blogs, or, whether or not you’ll be able to download themes for independently hosted blogs. More on all of this as details come from the horse’s mouth in the upcoming days and weeks, I’m sure.

Update: In fact, the Themes Marketplace is only for blogs hosted at WordPress.com; because they will be forced to be GPL-licensed, they will be “free to .org users”.  More details at Matt’s site, but I’m reading this to mean that .org users will be able to download these themes gratis.  Which, he acknowledges could encourage people to leap to a self-hosted site.  If anyone else can figure out these economics let me know.

The post WordPress To Host Premium Themes Marketplace appeared first on The Blog Herald.

If you’ve missed out, you still have time as Problogger is having a bunch of rotating contests every 8 hours. He’s given away a whole bunch of art / photography swag, followed by some great parenting-related prizes, to some fantastic holiday packages (3 night stay in Walt Disney World?). And that’s not to mention a great prize that allows you to give away $1000 to your charity of choice (and its still going on).

At the time of this writing, there’s a computer and gaming related prize give-away, and there are three more 8 hour prize related give aways planned (including a 24h one).

If you’re looking to score some free swag this weekend, all it takes is for you to leave a comment (although you should read the instructions, because sometimes they need to you to comment on something specifically). Since there are around 100 comments per post (I suspect the computer and gaming one is going to be a lot more though) and there are usually 4-6 prizes per give-away, you can predict your chances.

Good luck!

The post $54K Of Prizes Wraps Up — Courtesy Of ProBlogger appeared first on The Blog Herald.

And it so happens that in addition to his notoriety as an “involved” owner of a professional basketball team, Mark Cuban is *also* using his very public blog to rally votes towards his continued survival.

As I told every entertainment and news show that interviewed us after the show and this morning, the support of people who read this blog, the support of the many bloggers who got behind Kym and I and the Facebook and Myspace nations and networks that rallied behind us are what kept us alive on the show.

The Nerd Herd was in full effect. This was truly an internet showing and I cant thank everyone enough and I truly hope we earn the same level of support next week.

While every contestant on your favourite public-can-vote reality show probably does round up their own niche of fans, I think this is probably the first time a blogging “personality” has used the power of blogging and social media to boost his efforts.

We may never know how much of a contribution his blogging / Facebook / MySpace fans have made to his continued success on the show, but if his ongoing dancing skills are any indication, it will need to be momentous.

The post Mark Cuban’s Blog Powering “Dancing With Stars” Success? appeared first on The Blog Herald.

No, I recently discovered that there is an even *more* senior blogger living in Australia by the name of Olive Riley, who probably should be crowned as the world’s oldest blogger.  Mrs Riley, who is 108 years old, doesn’t quite write herself, but blogs with the help of a friend, Mike Rubbo.  And has been doing so for several months now.

In fact, its an awesome example of “elderblogging”, where she reminisces about things she did in her younger days, coupled with pictures *and* video.  One example is of her going to a bar that is actually older than her with Mike, talking about how they enjoyed a plate of oysters, how some local Australian mainstream media types don’t consider her a real blogger because she doesn’t actually type, and fielding a call from Jay Leno to appear on the tonight show.

Blogging doesn’t get any better more honest and fresh than this.  I got a kick out of it and I think you might too, so check out Mrs. Riley and ask yourself — does she *look* like she’s 108?

The post The World’s Oldest Blogger Is Actually … appeared first on The Blog Herald.

But other than doing the obvious, such as becoming a member of StumbleUpon, finding “friends”, and otherwise rating sites and being a good Stumbler, what else can be done — and understood — about StumbleUpon to maximize your efforts?

Turns out one Stumbler, Tim Nash, has tried to break down the mechanics of the StumbleUpon algorithm based on his own observations. While it has yet to be fully vetted by any of the StumbleUpon community it does provide some interesting variables to chew on.

Check his thoughts out over here, but Tim basically tries to break things down into understanding an Audience Score, where he attempts to break down some variables that lead to a “power” stumbler; several models that might explain how any given site might get popular through StumbleUpon (taking into account, for example, the first stumbler); and finally some bonus factors that might influence things in ways that deserve a lot more working out.

Just like we’ll never know the Google algorithm, we’ll probably also never know the one for Digg, or *any* of these algorithm driven sites. With time, we’ll probably derive our own ideas of how they work, and Tim’s ideas are probably just the beginning with StumbleUpon.

Having said that, there are some experienced users who feel that breaking down the algorithms to boost your rank doesn’t really make a lot of sense after all. You can read a lengthy review of that over at DoshDosh.

The post Breaking Down The StumbleUpon Algorithm appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Which, of course, prompted me to start wondering what *your* price was as a blogger.

Marketing and advertising professionals recognize the power of blogging to communicate in all kinds of areas — and furthermore, recognize the power of some bloggers to promote real and honest dialogue about a given product or service. Some select bloggers, in particular, are media powerhouses in their own right, able to trigger massive amount of buzz.

And on the other hand, I think that its one thing to blog as part of a larger business, which is able to send you out to “cover” events, conferences, and the like; to have the benefit of a (small) per diem, and the ability to submit receipts to get reimbursed.

But what about the independent blogger? Because I think that most of us are not part of large media organizations with budgets to spend on, nor massively successful whose profits can easily cover the cost of

a) flying across the country / ocean

b) the price of a hotel

c) the cost of the conference

… not including other miscellaneous costs — like you know, eating.

I guess the main ethical dilemma is that by abstaining from any swag / goodies / free stuff, you’ll be able to maintain impartiality 100% of the time. Apparently that’s good reporters do, after all.

Furthermore, blogging is often regarded as a conduit for real emotions and real opinion unfettered by the usual marketing doublespeak.

So what’s a blogger to do?

Because — if you’d like to reduce the dilemma even further — its that bloggers are held in high regard by business and marketing folks, but many bloggers make such meager earnings to begin with. Temptation for fairly common “gifts” that would make many a jaded reporter’s eyes roll, might in fact, have a tremendous impact with bloggers.

I can tell you what one set of bloggers *have* done.

Earlier this past May, the Wall Street Journal had a fascinating write up on how the producers of a television show called “The New Adventures of Old Christine” decided to spend some marketing dollars. Rather than spend it all on the usual traditional areas, that actually allocated a sum to communicate with a segment of bloggers that some would call “mommy bloggers” (perhaps there are some in the audience right now).

It goes on to report that the producers of the show *flew* all of them to California for a taping, where they not only got to see how the show got put together, but also meet the cast of the show — in addition to some freebies to take home.

Now, far be it for *me* to criticize what another blogger does, but do you think that this experience — this overwhelmingly positive, “cool”, and paid-for experience — could change what a blogger *actually* says on their blog about the product in question (the television show?)

It might. In fact, it actually did, as the article reveals that in a thank-you email sent to the producers, one of the bloggers was happy to change what she wrote if the producers were unhappy.

I’m not sure there’s a real easy answer to this scenario, or the original one above.

And I think that the answer lies in the discrepancy between how important blogger are perceived to be, and what many of them actually take home at the end of the day. It might be a monetary sum, but for others, its a return that’s measured in different ways, whether it be public recognition, validation, or merely access in a particular industry that they’re blogging in.

The problem, as I mentioned above, is that the sum is very humble indeed.

Now, the marketing and PR folks might say that they spent no more than the bare minimum for what they would *usually* do for a “traditional” press junket.

But clearly that’s far and above what many bloggers have experienced (or have yet to experience).

Again, I’m not sure what the real answer here is, but I imagine a great deal of it has to do with two things.

1. disclosure: that you were given something in exchange for, or as a reason to write a post

2. audience: how much trust they have in you

3. nature of the freebie: is it a $1 pen, a $100 lobster lunch, or a $500 room at the Four Seasons?

Ultimately, I think all of these things will work together to either build, or take away, from your reputation — in either small or large amounts. And that’s really all that’s at stake.

For example, I think if you’re comfortable throwing away your reputation and integrity, you’d probably be happy taking as much as possible for re-writing press releases. On the other hand, if you’re large enough, your audience will probably notice and won’t be so forgiving.

On the other hand, the other end of the spectrum is to never take any gifts / swag / freebies so as to always honor your own sense of personal integrity. Your audience will love you for it, but it may diminish your own opportunities to actually go and see things, experience things, or even just try things for the benefit of your blog. And your blog might suffer for that.

So, where do you all fit in, and what would you do?

… Would you be happy taking a hotel room?

… Would that change what you ultimately write about the sponsor?

… Could you write something critical?

… Would you be worried that you’d get a negative reputation and never be offered any complementary stuff again?

This is an issue that deserves to be talked about, I think, because as blogging continues to mature — but the actual gains for many bloggers aren’t catching up with its perceived power — this is going to be one pickle that many of us will probably encounter sooner rather than later.

The post As A Blogger, What’s Your Price? appeared first on The Blog Herald.