The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

How to Explain RSS to Normal People - 2008 Edition

As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if you’ve written something new.

For something so useful, it’s pretty hard to explain why people should use RSS. Lots of people try to do it. This is my take on it. It’s 2008 and explaining RSS should be much simpler because if you’ve used Facebook, then you’ve used RSS.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet

Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.

Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2

Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.

Community Starts with Communication: 5 Tips to Building Your Readership

When I first started commenting over at okdork.com, Noah Kogan would personally reply to me by email. I thought this was a little strange, even after a year of blogging this was the first time it had happened to me. I thought it was just that he was bored and killing time. It’s only now that I understand the genius of his technique: by going out of his way to contact me he went from “nameless stranger on the interweb” to a person I had one to one conversation with.

That’s really what this blogging thing is all about, isn’t it? Communicating with other people. Here are five tips to help you do it better.

FeedBurner Tip: Create a private area for your RSS subscribers only

When it comes to blogging the most important people are the ones who take the time to read your RSS feed. They’re your long term readers who are in it for the long haul, much more so than the people who stop by your blog because they found it through a search engine or a social bookmarking site. They’re the ones who promote your articles, and the ones who’ll let you know when you’re falling off your blog game.

It’s important to build a rapport with them, and one of the ways to do that is by giving them special offers that aren’t available to regular readers of the website.

3 Surefire Ways to Advertise Your Blog on a Shoe String

People always talk about how to sell ads on your blog, but it seems that no one talks about how to buy ads for your blog.

Technorati Favoritism - Trading Favours

There are Technorati favorites link exchange programs like the one proposed by Dosh Dosh. He wants to get into the Technorati Top 10 most favorited and track if there are any really benefits in increased traffic. His blog focuses on traffic building so this is a very valuable experiment to get some real numbers on whether or not Technorati is worth all the fuss. I’m proud of being in the Technorati Top 2000, but I feel it is more work than it is worth.

I display my FeedBurner subscribers count because I don’t have a choice…

The FeedBurner subscriber count is also a badge of reliability.

The Secret Behind Why Blog Readers Unsubscribe

Darren at ProBlogger leveraged his 20,000 RSS readers and polled them to find out why people unsubscribe from blog RSS feeds. They came up with a list of 34 reasons. The top three reasons people unsubscribe from RSS feeds is because there are too many posts, there are too few posts or because the blog uses partial feeds. Partial feeds are when the RSS feed only shows a snippet of post and you have to click through to the blog to read the entire thing.

Why do readers unsubscribe from rss feed subscriptions like feedburner?

That’s an interesting contradiction! Obviously, the solution is to have a consistent posting rhythm, but why is there such a schism between people unsubscribing because of too few or too many posts?

Building an Audience - DailyBlogTip’s Traffic Generation Tips Project

30 bloggers get together and list tips for increasing traffic to your blog. Some good, some bad, but all one hundred words or less.

I’ve listed them from best to worst.

It’s All About You — Reader Survey Results

Two weeks ago I participated in the International Delurking Week and asked my regular readers to fill out a survey and post some thoughts about where my site has been going, and where they’d like for it to go in the future. Here are the results. With pretty pictures.

Why Posting Your Email Address in Plain Text is Never a Good Idea

It takes less than a day for an email address that appears in a web page to start receiving spam. How do you display your email address online safely?

MyBlogLog widget for WordPress.com blogs — One of the best web widgets available

I was one of the people who was a little disappointed that WordPress.com supports Snap Preview Anywhere but not MyBlogLog. If you look at adoption of the Snap Preview Anywhere widget it was disabled by most major blogs after just a short trial because users hate it (problogger, johnchow, lorelle, digital inspiration, a VC, instigator, [...]

Cory Doctorow on Building an Audience

Cory Doctorow is a prolific author and runs the most popular blog on the planet: BoingBoing. He’s also been challenging the publishing industry traditions with his writing. I still haven’t read any of his books, but I should. Forbes as an interview with him where he talks about giving the milk away for free, but [...]

Building an Audience or “How I Learned to Stop Posting Inane Crap and Love the Blog”

I am a firm believer that blogging should be a personal activity and your primary goal should be writing about what *you* find interesting. But having an audience of more than one increases the motivation to write. Not to mention the fringe benefits from connecting to other individuals with shared interests. Belly button lint cataloguing is more fun as a group activity.

Here are several suggestions for how to build an audience from a variety of different sources.