Blogging
Problogger: The Book (Review)
Recently while browsing my local Chapters book store I came across a small soft cover book, among all the ‘big bad books’ on programming, with a strangely familiar name:”ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
For those of you who are unaware, Problogger is one of the leading (if not the leading) blogs about blogging tips. The site is maintained by Darren Rowse, who is likely one of the best educated people on what needs to be done to get a blog off the ground and keep it there. With he updates daily, you can bet I’ve been a subscriber to his RSS for some time.
In this book, Darren (and co-writer Chris Garrett) go through the process of explaining how to set up a blog and make it work. They do a great job of setting forth introductory steps of choosing a topic (Niche), available platforms and how to write to your audience. Some of the more in depth topics that they go into are different kinds of advertising, networking and community building.
Though short (210 pages I believe) they pack it full of tons of information in an easy to read tone. I throughly enjoyed it and recommend it anybody looking to start out blogging, or even those just looking to do it better.
RSSHugger
While working on some of the syncing stuff I’ve got going I came across a HUGE list of sites of RSS feed readers. One of which is RSSHugger. At first glance, it has a nice, ad-free layout that is easy to navigate so it’s friendly to look at. Because of this, I have no hesitation to sign up.
The catch here is though that they are holding a gun to my head to write a review about it before they’ll throw my blog into the list of sites they search. This logic seems a little bit backwards to me. That’s like asking me to review a movie based on how cool the poster looks. Until They actually put me in and let me get a feel for it, I’m not going to lie and say they’re SUPER AWESOME. I’ll write good (hopefully) info once they actually let me try it.
No Blolgathon?!
It’s true and it’s completely blown my mind. True, I haven’t been blogging quite as much as I hoped due to work, but Blogathon is still always going to be a day worth booking off to do. Unfortunately the Admins of Blogathon decided that they weren’t going to be able to do it this year. Horrible, right?
However, Jen has stepped up to provide an alternative titled Day of Blogs. She hasn’t put together too much info yet, but I’ve contacted her and thrown my hat in the ring to help out any way possible. A year without Blogathon is a summer without air conditioning: Possible but it just ain’t gonna happen.
So I’ll start blogging again here with details of it, and we’ll see where that idea goes. And yes, the other posts are still coming stay tuned.
Can’t write?
It annoys me when people say “Oh I can’t write”. I can understand if you’re a complete idiot or something, but for the most part I think people are just lazy. If you have a topic, you can write about it. There are key factors to doing this (especially with blogging, since it doesn’t have to be a novel).
- State the name of your topic. If you’re reproducing something you read, include a mention/link such as ‘that I read on whatever.
- What is it? What does it do? Why did it happen? Who made it happen?
- What use is it? To whom would it be a use? What can happen now that it has been made/done?
- Personal views on it.
- Where can you get more info on it? (in the age of blogging, links make you look smarter)
Of course you’re not going to put it in list form, and those questions have to be modified a bit depending on your topic but for the most part you can fit them into anything you’re talking about. If need be, write it as a list and then turn the facts into sentences to make pretty paragraphs. Honestly, writing isn’t hard if you break it down and put in what is needed.
Bloggers gain some protection
Some good news came yesterday for American bloggers, In an amended version of the “Free Flow of Information Act“, supported by the US Senate, it was decided that bloggers could potentially be covered by the “reporter’s privilege” section of the act. This would mean that bloggers are no longer required to reveal confidential source information, a right with until now has been denied to bloggers for quite some time now.
For more information on this, check out the article on Mashable HERE.
BloggerWave breaks out
The big news on ‘the street’ the past few days has been Bloggerwave. Bloggers are paid to simply talk about something. Now from what I’m able to tell here, they pay for simply reviewing/talking about a product or service. 
I haven’t seen anywhere that it says the review of every product has to be good. That was my selling point.
I’m completely for living up to the saying “bad publicity is still publicity” if that’s what the companies want. I’m assuming it’s not though. In either case, I’ll gladly focus some attention on a given product or service and give it my opinions (especially if they’re paying for what I thinking about it) as long as they’re not telling me exactly what to say like PayPerPost services. So no need to ’sell out’.
Bloggerwave looks like an awesome way for bloggers to get some cash. And from what I can tell they let you check out interesting products. I’m sure I would have checked out Bloggerwave even if I wasn’t getting paid to do it, and I saw that Coke Zero’s new social site was on the list as well. Contrary to my previous statements about bad reviews, that might not be needed if they give us good stuff like this to review.
It’s also super-easy to set up and get started. If you check out the image with this post, you can see that with this program you can earn a good amount of money for just blogging. I think this Bloggerwave service can be really good and I recommend other bloggers to try it out and see how well it works.
BlogRush Madness!
The past 3 days have been brutal as far as my subscribed RSS feeds are concerned, nearly all 37 of my ‘tech related’ feeds had a post in about BlogRush. This service requires you to put a widget (using javascript) somewhere on your blog. This widget displays posts from another BlogRush member’s blog. Every time that widget is loaded, you gain a ‘credit’. This credit entitles one of your posts to be displayed on somebody else’s site (within the widget).
What makes this appealing (aside from the hideously ugly widget and inability to customize it) is that they claim to display your links on blogs with similar content as well as they’ll only display similar content to your blog in your widget (like AdSense). If this works, it would be a great way to get more readers that might actually be interested in the content that I’m publishing.
The only thing I can see being a problem is repeating links. For example: Every time I go back and edit a blog post, I reload the page to make sure it looks OK (formatting-wise). I’ve had the BlogRush on my site for over 24 hours and have seen 4 of the links over 7 times already, all from the same source. That said, this is either being abused on a high scale but some users or there are next to no users at all in the “Computers and Internet” category. I’m going to go with the first answer.
I’m also noticing that there are posts about buying TVs, which would be technology, not Computers and Internet. Though this program is still in Beta, I don’t think it’s nearly qualified to have been launched to the public if they’re going to streamline everything through without checking. I do understand that they can’t manually check every site that signs up, but it would be better if they at least checked some. Or simply had a “report” feature which I’m not finding either.
I think I’m going to leave it there for two weeks or so to see how it works out. If it increases my traffic, wonderful. If not, well then I’m going to remove it. I’ll let you know two weeks from now if it’s really worth keeping or not.