Entries Tagged 'Weblogging' ↓

Utterly unqualified to do so I poked fun at some seriously meant advice on boosting Google Page Rank in an entry – Mr. Google, won’t you please be my friend?.

When I got home I found a comment on the entry:

can you please help me find information aboout about social isolation with the status asthmaticus i know this is short notice but i do need the information for 10/14/03

Asthmaticus is a nastily serious condition. If you suffer from it you should talk to your doctor. Not me, I know nothing about it. But if you are a student wanting to get someone else to do research for your homework why not ask an weblogger, clearly he has too much time on his hands.

Originally posted 2003-10-13 15:31:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

From a recent email:

Hi…i’m not sure what this site is all about. i see it is a blog, so that must mean conservative point of view, right?

Well, I’m sort of a left-wing libertarion faggot, by no stretch conservative. Interesting to see how the visibility of conservative political weblogs (often called ‘war blogs’) has fostered the notion that those of us with weblogs are mostly right-wing.

Originally posted 2003-03-15 06:33:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Used to be that if Charles as asleep and I was restless I’d write about sex. Now I’m writing about weblogs. With luck aside from the stuff that I post in Computer Toaster this will be my last entry on weblogging for a long time. Sex is much more entertaining.

Now to descend into sounding like a self-help writer for webloggers. (Already sound as though I know whereof I speak. Few people can produce half-readable sentences without that pretension.)

You have an online journal and want people to visit it. What do you do? Write something. Write it regularly. It doesn’t matter what you write about other than it interest or involve you. It need not be compelling but it should be coherent. You don’t even have to capitalize (a few of my favorite personal journals are written by people who seem to have thrown their Caps Lock key in a ditch).

There are lots and lots of weblogs that are about what passes as politics in this country. Warmongers cursing the otherwise inclined, lefties damning Republicans. You can add your two cents. Or write about vegetarian cuisine, speedboats or reading science fiction paperbacks. You can actually write about your life: work, weekends, boyfriends. If you are young you can bitch about your parents, teachers and boyfriends. There’s such a large surplus of interest in the last you don’t need to write well. Whiners have their own audience.

How to get people to find you? Most people’s goal is to get high ranking in Google. I get hundreds of Google referrals a day. The bulk of them are careless or desperate searchers who won’t be finding what they are looking for. Not something that’ll bother a stats fetishist. Google indexes Edifying Spectacle every day. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. My guess: there is unique content buried in the site. The site is updated regularly. I used to write lots about sex. Every second people all over the world are searching for nude, naked, penis, tits often with a name, not always a famous name so sticking something in like Madonna’s vagina isn’t necessarily going to get you visitors.

You can use the old fashioned approach: join webrings. Go to WebRing and RingSurf and look for rings focused on your own interests.

Get yourself listed on Eaton Web, BlogHop and the like.

If you do the above you should skim through the listed sites yourself. Don’t be naïve and expect them to come searching for you. If you read a post by someone who seems likeminded, leave a comment. People always come to look at the sites of people who comment on theirs. (If you find groups of weblogs you’d like to read regularly you might create a blogroll. Smaller sites often reciprocate blogroll listings. The issues of reciprocation and hurt feelings when people drop people from their blogroll are reasons I don’t have one.)

If you read something you think interesting and your software offers the option post a comment about it and create a trackback from the original post to your comment. Trackbacks provide topical and thematic linkage among weblogs. Some folks have big hopes pinned on them. The passage of weeks will tell. Since trackbacks are created by a conscious act they should be more pertinent than automatically generated linkage like Daypop and Popdex. Unsurprisingly enough some people are already using them to create spam. Or the spam equivalent of unwarranted links.

Realistically if you are hoping your online writings will lead you to meet others you may be better off with a Live Journal. I give out Live Journal membership codes regularly and still have plenty left if you need one.

Originally posted 2003-01-22 07:25:15. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Here’s an easy test for over devotion to your weblog:

You notice a typo just after saving the weblog entry. Badly, terribly you need to go to the bathroom and get rid of the beer accumulated in your bladder. Writhing in your chair you hold it in until your weblog pings six RPC servers so you can emend the entry.

Then you let yourself run for relief.

Originally posted 2004-01-28 14:58:55. Republished by Old Post Promoter

This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.

[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.

Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.

Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.

Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.

If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.

Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.

Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Andrew Orlowski in The Register writes about weblogs influence and the almost instant redefinition of a phrase.

Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a “Second Superpower”, it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days

Originally posted 2003-04-03 09:58:01. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Oh boo hoo, Ronnie said something mean about me on his blog!

The students came under fire after administrators at the exclusive Hunting Valley preparatory school found they had made nasty comments about a fellow student on a “blog” – a Web page that functions as a publicly accessible journal. ..

Internet-related taunting and bullying is a growing concern because children spend more and more time online and parents often don’t see what they’re doing there. Most estimates say 78 percent of youngsters 12 to 17 use the Internet for homework, entertainment or communication. …

They included an online vote on whether a Toledo-area junior high student should kill himself and a poll on whether a girl was gay.

Web page comments have students in jam

High school can be hell – blog or no blog.

Originally posted 2003-09-20 19:34:06. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Bob gets about 25,000 hits a month on his Web site, www.sourbob.com. And so many of his fans are women thinking that he’s just the kind of sensitive, thoughtful man they’d like to have in their lives that he says he doesn’t want to reveal his true identity for fear that the more devoted groupies will track him down.

And he’s negotiating a contract for his first book.

Blogs can make anyone an author

Originally posted 2004-03-08 16:44:30. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Brian Montopoli writes in Slate about webloggers who create alternative city guides.

The premise behind a blog map is simple: Some industrious blogger posts a subway map of his or her city (if you live in a city without a subway, well, that’s your problem) and then organizes the city’s blogs by the stop to which they are closest. If residents want to explore their neighborhood blogosphere, they simply click the section of the city that strikes their fancy. The result: Local bloggers find each other, exchange e-mails, meet up for drinks, and then generally do the same things as neighbors who stumble upon each other in the real world.

City “blog maps” enable point-and-click sightseeing

Originally posted 2003-07-01 06:43:52. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Before going to bed I thought I’d look at my most recent referrers. Don’t you?

Aside from the guy coming in from Google wanting to know “why can’t guys wear dresses?” (A: the world is run by tedious conventional people) there were two referrals from Popdex, the website popularity index. Actually a little more than that since you can search on topics and phrases. One teeny design flaw: when you perform a search you have to go back to the home page to do another search.

I expected putting a search phrase in quotes to limit the search to the specific wording. It doesn’t. Too easy to get irrelevant results. But the site appears to have been born on the 7th so basic maintenance and tweaking has to come before the niceties.

Popdex’s creator, Shanti Braford, explains his goals with Popdex in an interview.

If you don’t already have enough weblog metasearch tools you can add Popdex.

Originally posted 2002-12-15 00:04:43. Republished by Old Post Promoter