Month: April 2006

Blogging: A Personal Touch

These days, everyone is blogging we hardly realize we have crossed all possible definitions of the term. Back in the days, we would even argue if a site is indeed a blog, or not. The past year or two has definitely changed the way we see blogs, as they have been used now for almost every conceivable purpose: music, photos, even porn.

We need to be reminded that blogging used to be synonymous with personal journals. This is exactly how they are used in livejournal, multiply, myspace, and friendster blogs.

I found two recent articles relevant to this discussion: “Why Emotion Matters” and “Being Three-Dimensional.”

The first one puts emphasis on the difference the storytelling makes. It’s not always how successful or how lucky you are, but sometimes it’s just about the journey you are taking. Tell a better story.

The second article on being three–dimensional is a discussion of how blogs are written. Many of us blogging for profit have forgotten the personal side of the practice, churning out lifeless and impersonal articles every single day. We paraphrase and comment on what others have written, or are selling, or whatever they have on their blogs, but we fail in relating it to our daily lives. Blogging should not take away the fun, and expectedly it also means including a little bit of you, the writer, in the stories that you tell. After all, it’s supposed to be your story.

Visual PageRank

Google’s PageRank has always been dependent on the inter–relation of sites, pages, and links. To summarize it bluntly, links to a page determine its level of authority, in an ideal world wide web.

Checking changes in your PageRank would generally show very little variation across several weeks. You need to manage links to and from your site’s pages, and know their PR values as well. Using this visual pagerank tool, the PR of your outgoing links are displayed right in your pages — very useful for seeing how valuable are the pages you’re linking to.

Links Optimization PageRank Problogging Tools

Monitor Your PageRank

Post author By markku
Post date April 20, 2006

Your site’s pagerank directly affects the relevance and readership statistics, an important metric that separates your pages from the rest of the other pages competing for the same keywords.

There are several things you can do to optimize your site for better pagerank, but you need to have an idea what your PR is across all Google data centers. With PageRank Watch, you can check for PR growth or decline from a simple form. This is an essential problogger tool.

Links Writing

The write time

Post author By markku
Post date April 14, 2006

No, that’s not a grammatical error. Some of the better entries in the blogosphere have been written without getting noticed just because of one thing — bad timing.

You cannot write a movie review a year after the movie was shown, unless maybe a sequel is upcoming or interest has been revived for some other magical reason. Write and then publish when your readers can notice what you’ve said. Publish at the right time.

Links Problogging Tools

Google Sitemaps

Post author By markku
Post date April 11, 2006

Google Sitemaps is one of the latest innovations by search leader Google to allow publishers to clearly designate parts of their site for indexing. By giving publishers the power to guide search engine bots what content they should be looking at, information is organized in a much better way, at least for a given site. The benefits are definitely worth it.

Commentary

Problogging is not for everyone

Post author By markku
Post date April 4, 2006
2 Comments on Problogging is not for everyone

Yes, you got that right, problogging is not for everyone. Despite the enticing benefits made even more inviting by numerous success stories around the web, this newly established career will never be a viable primary source of livelihood for the greater majority of those who try it.

Blogging made it into the mainstream because it enables everyone to communicate almost instantaneously. The promise of getting your message across to your target audience at the soonest possible time empowers every person who can write well enough to be understood. Unfortunately, not everyone has something worthwhile to say.

So how could you take advantage of blogging, professionally? Use it to drive interest towards your competencies. Use your blog to showcase your level of expertise in your field, and rise above the competition. Most web designers keep weblogs to write about recent projects and techniques they’ve developed, and doing so allows them to be noticed by their peers and more importantly, their clients.

Strive to stick to your weblog’s primary goals. Do not not be drawn by the promise of profits from blogging itself, but rather use it to increase your stock and excel in your field of interest.

Links Writing

Writing for the web

Post author By markku
Post date April 2, 2006

You’re a stream of creative thoughts and ideas, but it’s not not enough for effective writing on the web. Writing for the web need not be complicated, get straight to the point. Great offline writers can master writing for the web by following some simple guidelines. In addition, the articles “How to Write a Better Weblog” and “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web” from A List Apart can further mold your writing and content for the living web.