LocateTV, the TV Guide like service that I reviewed here, LocateTV – TV Guide On Steroids has announced that they will be opening to the public on Monday, October 1st. The closed beta will be disabled and users from all over the world will now be able to give this service a try. Considering LocateTV Redesigned Their Embeddable Widgets, it will be interesting to see how many of them appear on various blogs within the blogosphere once LocateTV goes public.
Chris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.
I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.
A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.
The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.
Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.
BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?
Kontactr, the service that gives users an very easy way to provide a contact form on your site for readers to contact you and in which I covered here, Easy To Use Contact Forms Via Kontactr has added a new feature called Kontactr Pop Up or KPU. KPU trys to make it easier for your readers to contact you by opening up a contact form without having to load another page.
KPU comes in three flavors, text link, small button or a larger contact button. Whenever a user clicks on one of these new links, the background of the webpage turns dark and a contact form appears on your screen. This means that, users won’t be required to load a separate web page to view your contact form. This should decrease the load on your server as that is one less page that has to be processed.
The popup contains everything that the original form has with the exception of the an additional command to close the popup window which can be initiated by pressing ESC on your keyboard.
What’s nice about this new option is that, bloggers that use Kontactr now have an option to provide a contact link directly within a post. This means that readers will be able to click on a link within an article to contact you without having to perform any extra steps, such as browsing to the static location of your form which in my case, is found at the top of this site.
As with the majority of things on the web these days, this popup will not work if you have Javascript disabled in your browser. So keep that in mind if it does not work.
Netscape has officialy announced the winner of their NetScape Navigator 9 Splash Screen Logo Constest. The winner is Mario Herbert who designed the following graphic.
This winning entry will end up being the default splash screen for Netscape Navigator 9. I can’t believe people still use Navigator as their browser. Someone explain that one to me.
If you ask me, the text on this splash green design is just a bit too blurry. I would of preferred to see a sharper looking design although the ships wheel and the logo do have a nice touch to them.
The What’s Hot In My Communities section of your MyBlogLog Profile is an easy way to track buzz worthy info but, how does MBL decide what’s hot and what’s not?
Simply put, the links you see within this area of your user profile represent the most popular links within YOUR MYBLOGLOG COMMUNITIES. If you are seeing links to porn sites or sites you deem unacceptable, the only way to remove them, is to find out which community your apart of that is posting that link, or information related to that link and leave that community.
If your thinking that tracking down the culprits within your large number of communities would be nothing more than a hassle, your in for some great news. MyBlogLog has added an interesting feature to their buzz tracker in the form of a question mark. This question mark will finally give MyBlogLog users the ability to figure out where those buzzworthy links are coming from.
For instance, let’s say you don’t want links such as Fox.com to show up in your list. You would simply click on the (?) and figure out which sites are posting this link and leave their community.
According to the question mark, the site Casual Keystrokes, is the culprit behind this link. As an MBL user, you would look for that community within your list of favorites and click on the LEAVE COMMUNITY button.
It’s really neat to see how this all works and it’s nice that Robyn Tippins has finally published an article that easily explains the process. I have to agree that, clicking on these questions marks is half the fun in trying to figure out why they are creating so much buzz. Give it a shot and let me know what you’ve discovered.
Migratr, the software program which I covered in this article, Migratr – Backup And Migrate Your Online Photos has released a new version which adds support for Phanfare. The newest version contains three bug fixes as well as three new features. One of those features includes the resume download/upload option which is now functional.
The three bug fixes worth noting are listed below.
If you’ve been waiting for support for Phanfare, or want to backup your online photos, be sure to download Migratr 0.9.0
Those of you who have recently logged out of MyBlogLog may have noticed that logging back in requires a few more steps than normal. This is because MyBlogLog has finalized their implantation of their Yahoo ID login system. Back in early January of this year, it was Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog for $10 Million and only now are we starting to experience the implementations between the two company offerings.
After logging into your Yahoo ID, MBL is going to ask you to login to your account. MyBlogLog will detect if you currently have an account based on the email address you used to create your Yahoo ID. Simply type in that same email address and password into the provided fields to begin step 2.
Step 2 is the beginning of the merging process. This is where your MyBlogLog account will be merged with your Yahoo account. An important thing to note here is that on this screen, your avatar will be changed to a default grey smiley face so make sure you change your avatar.
Once you take care of that, check mark the legal mumbo jumbo box and begin the account merger. Upon my first try, I was greeted with a big fat ERROR. The error was as follows: LOGIN TIMED OUT. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. I did try again, and again, and again. Each time, I was greeted with the same error. Pressing my browsers back button was ineffective, forcing me to start the entire process over from scratch. Talk about annoying.
15 minutes after sending in an email with no response, they apparently have fixed the issue. My account was successfully merged and I am free to roam about the MyBlogLog community again. I hope your account merger performs a bit more smoothly than mine did.
I’m writing this post within the new fancy WYSIWYG editor which is nothing more than the same editor with the exception of a new button. The new button shows me quite a few new formatting features but my favorite one is the UNDO button.
So far, my WordPress upgrade experience has been pretty good. I did encounter an upload problem in which a few folders were uploaded into other folders. In other words, some folders were not overwritten like they were supposed to be. I fixed this and re-uploaded the files which allowed the WordPress upgrade script to properly update my database.
I believe there is a bug that was created after my WordPress installation was upgraded. As you can see below, the area of my dashboard which would normally show incoming links to my site from outside sources, is now showing my own blog posts from my front page. I’m pretty sure this is not supposed to happen. This never occurred during any other WP upgrade I have performed. I have since created a forum post about it on the official WP forums to see if it’s a bug or not.
I knew about the tag importers being added to WordPress 2.3 but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where they were. I eventually located them within the MANAGE-IMPORT area of my WordPress admin panel. After clicking on the importer for my Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, all of my tags were imported into the native tagging features implemented into WP 2.3 I also experienced numerous wordpress.wp_post2cat does not exist errors which were being generated by the UTW plugin, so be sure to disable it once you complete your upgrade.
I want to give a very big thank you to everyone responsible for the automatic update notification feature. This is an invaluable time saver. After my upgrade was complete, I discovered 5 plugins which had an update available for download. The notification window provides a direct link to the plugin on the wordpress.org site where additional information along with the plugin files can be located.
Last but not least, if you are experiencing trouble with WordPress, the best place to find help is the WordPress.org forums. However, before creating a new post, be sure to perform a search to see if your question was already answered. There is nothing more annoying on a forum than seeing 50 different forum threads on the same topic which has already been answered.
You’ve read my experience, now it’s time to share yours by leaving a comment below.
WordPress 2.3 has finally been released to the public. This is a major release and users of WordPress are encouraged to update as soon as possible. Before you do anything, make sure you create a full backup in case things go bad. I’ll be updating this blog throughout the night and hopefully, I’ll still be around when you wake up. If not, you know what happened to this site.
Time to review the change log to find out why we should upgrade.
In addition to these new features, developers will have a host of new things to deal with such as Atom 1.0 support, jQuery, a new taxonomy system, new importers, hooks and filters and much more. The WordPress community has also helped contribute to over 351 trouble tickets that were closed in the Trac.
You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post.
Matt is hosting an upgrade party within the San Francisco area but I figured I would host one of my own on Skype. If you are awake and care to upgrade your WordPress installation along with me and a few other people, be sure to add me jeffr0e to your Skype contact list and let’s get this party started.
I was curious as to who was making the money via the sponsored ads that are displayed on the first tab and the web tab of this plugin.
As it turns out, the sponsored ads are for Google because the Ajax powered API is so new. Here is the 411 on the issue.
That is a really great question that I had to search awhile to find. The answer is because this Search API is still so cutting-edge new, Google is the only one making any money from these Ads. It is still pretty beta now, but in the future it will very likely have the features we want. It is against the TOS to remove the ads, and currently you cannot hook your own AdSense account into the Search API. You can however use css to re-position the sponsored links.. like:
.gsc-control .gsc-ad-box {padding-top:100px;}
Does the AJAX Search API contain advertising?
Yes. The Web Search results may include up to 2-4 clearly marked sponsored links. There are currently no ads displayed among the News, Video, Maps, or Blog Search results. If you’re interested in earning money for displaying relevant Google ads on your site, you can do so with Google AdSense.
Thanks to AskApache for clearing this up.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 