Archive for the 'Recommendation' Category

Aussie Bloggers Forum is born!

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 30 December, 2007 in Recommendation. 4 Comments

The secret can now be revealed: Snoskred, Meg and I (and a team of very helpful moderators) have been working on the Aussie Bloggers Forum over the last couple of weeks. It has been an exciting time, with a lot of community-in-action networking (and a lot of hard work, including a sterling effort by Snoskred’s partner as forum administrator).

So what is the Aussie Bloggers Forum about? Here is what the front page says:

Aussies, and bloggers, can be really nice people :) Put the two together and you have the potential for a wonderful community.

At Aussie Bloggers, we are passionate about blogging and helping other Aussies do the same. But you don’t have to be an Aussie to join the forums, all nationalities are welcome here. If you are interested in blogging at all then join us in the forums today.

Unlike other forums out there on the web, questions are welcome and you will find lots of friendly Aussies willing to help. Helping out mates is part of the Aussie way, after all.

One aim we have for this forum is to gather a range of Aussie bloggers who have skills over different blogging platforms and social media sites to help provide information and advice to other Aussies who are not as experienced.

Let’s face it, the blogosphere is a really big place! We’ve enjoyed connecting with other Aussie bloggers and the friendships we’ve formed. We hope these forums will make meeting other Aussie bloggers much easier.

We want this to be a happy, helpful place where advice and networking occurs in an non threatening and collaborative environment. Nastiness won’t be tolerated.

If you are a ridgy didge, fair dinkum, true blue, dinky die Aussie who is already blogging, or thinking about it - then you’ve found the right place.

I encourage you to register today - it is free, fun, and a great way of sharing what you know about blogging and life in general.

If you need more convincing, watch the slideshow.

The Business of Blogging in Australia

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 5 August, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 0 Comments

Meg over at BlogPond has a good article on the business of blogging from an Australian perspective. It discusses:

  • when a business is a business rather than a hobby,
  • registering a business name,
  • applying for an Australian Business Name for taxation purposes, and
  • setting up accounts for the business.

If you live and blog in Australia, and you are in any danger of making money from your blog, you need to think about staying on the right side of the corporate regulation and taxation authorities.

Share the link love without expectation or hesitation

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 26 June, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 8 Comments

Wikipedia defines enlightened self interest as follows:

Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serve their own self-interest. [1] It has often been simply expressed by the belief that an individual, group, or even a commercial entity will “do well by doing good”. [2][3]

Doing well by doing good sounds like win-win to me. I like win-win because it is practical and sustainable.

What does this mean to bloggers? I believe that it means sharing the link love without expectation of return, or any hesitation. Inbound links from real people are one of our key success criteria, and their importance cannot be overstated. More inbound links means higher visibility, more RSS readers, higher technorati rank, better Google PageRank, peace in the Middle East, winning the lottery, finding your One True Love, and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (OK, so it can be overstated - inbound links alone are not the answer, but they are certainly an important part of the answer).

You can share the link love by:

If I’ve missed any different ways to share the link love, please let me know :)

Love widely and love often. It is an easy way to build your own inbound links - at least some people will reciprocate. And at a bare minimum, you will generally get the people you link to reading your blog - in the past, my MyBlogLog sidebar widget has been graced by a lot of people that I’ve linked to - among them Wendy Piersall, Yaro Starak and John Chow. I have to admit to getting a buzz out of seeing fresh faces in the sidebar every day :)

Oh, and lest we forget - if someone gives you an inbound link, thank them by adding a comment. I’ve found it makes them more likely to reference your blog again, and can make them a friend. And friends make good readers!

Sharing link love will get you many blogger friends, but will it help you find a real-life love? Dating services can certainly fit the bill to help you find your one and only blogger love. You use the Internet for all other aspects of your life, why not try looking for love?

Advice I can recommend from Solomon Rothman

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 18 June, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 0 Comments

I’m looking back through Facibus Reviews at the blogs and bloggers who influenced me the most when I got started in blogging seriously - looking at the advice that I’ve recommended to others is part of my effort to eat my own blogfood.

Solomon Rothman from socialmediasystems.com wrote two articles that helped me a lot:

Since then, Solomon has written some other interesting articles:

  • a three part series on Web 3.0: some of the things that Solomon talks about in this series have already come to pass, but are not yet ubiquitous (available and used everywhere) - others are deep future developments that are awaiting the true semantic web.
  • Recently, a trek through WordPress mailing list plugins - I don’t use self-hosted mailing lists for business currently, but I have in the past, and no doubt will do again - and I will reread this post when that day comes.

I’m not as interested in search engine strategies as I might be - and this is the main business of socialmediasystems - but I enjoy reading their blog. Thanks for your help, Solomon :)

Blogging eBook Comparison: Yaro Starak vs John Chow

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 12 June, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 2 Comments

Two blogging eBooks have appeared over the last week and a half: Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint and John Chow’s Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com.

I prefer Yaro’s book for two reasons:

  • It converted neatly to MobiPocket - I read ebooks on my Nokia e61 smartphone, and Blog Profits Blueprint was easily readable in the portable MobiPocket format - Yaro liked the MobiPocket version and he is now distributing it.
  • It made me think about my own goals and getting my act together, so much so that I am now doing something about it. It has quite literally been an inspiration.

Don’t get me wrong - John’s book is excellent and is required reading if you’re serious about blogging - I think that the fair thing to say is that Yaro’s win-win approach fits better with my own goals - not who I am so much as who I aspire to be.

Blogging on blogging swicki

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 15 May, 2007 in Blogging, Recommendation and Sidebar Widget. 0 Comments

I’ve added a blogging on blogging swicki to Eurekster. Cool, but what is a swicki? According to Eurekster:

Swickis are a cross between search engines and Wikipedia - the community can add, delete and improve the results.

First impressions are that it provides nothing that mediawiki (the platform used for wikipedia.org) can’t do - but it can do more: swickis search across a wide range of sites (including blogs). Not only that - and here is where it gets interesting - every reader can add their own links into the results, changing them. The swicki will still give results based on relevance, but user-voted popularity can also alter results. Not only that, but you can ask questions and provide answers to those of other people. I can’t pretend to understand the full implications of this concept but I am willing to play along to find out :)

I’ve put the blogging on blogging swicki tag cloud equivalent into my sidebar on this blog. If it sounds like you, I would encourage you to have a look. If you want to use the swicki tag cloud in your own blog, please follow this link.

Blogging on Full Auto: Hands-free RSS content population

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 11 May, 2007 in Blogging, Recommendation and Tips. 4 Comments

I came across an autoblog called WiiReign. I found it strangely unsettling that there was a blog out there that was populated almost entirely (5345 out of 5348) populated by RSS news items. I wondered why they bothered - they must not get a lot of repeat readers. I’ve heard about such things, but never come across one before.

I thought about what the “good” uses of autopopulated content might be. I have some autopopulated content over at MonsterWatch - Australian ABC and Google News forms part of the front page. The rest of it is all decently human-crafted :)

So I thought about how I might add a “Latest news about…” page to a WordPress blog. After a little fooling around I produced Wii in the News - it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a bunch of content supplied by Google News. News summary items are certainly not presented as blog posts.

This is how I did it.

  1. I got the FeedList plugin. FeedList presents a simple way to show the results of an RSS feed on a WordPress page.
  2. To execute the PHP in FeedList, I looked around for a better way than ExecPHP (this caused me some grief in the past by getting in the way of the smart editor). I came across a posting in the WordPress Support Forums that suggested the True and Proper way - create a template that includes the PHP code.
  3. I created the following template:

<?php
/*
Template Name: OnWii Google News
*/
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div class=”content”>

<div id=”primary”>
<div id=”current-content”>
<div id=”primarycontent” class=”hfeed”>

<?php

feedList(”http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=nintendo+wii&ie=UTF-8&output=rss”)

?>

</div> <!– #primarycontent .hfeed –>
</div> <!– #current-content –>

<div id=”dynamic-content”></div>
</div> <!– #primary –>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

</div> <!– .content –>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

…and uploaded it to the K2 theme directory. I then created a page (Wii in the News) that used my new template. No sweat :)

Would I ever create a whole blog out of other people’s content? I am not sure that I would. But it was fun to add a “Latest Google News” equivalent page to a blog. You might have a specialised topic area that would profit from such a page - if so, why not give it a shot?

Note: an unscrupulous operator might use this same method to create a blogfarm to boost their technorati authority rating by subscribing to RSS feeds from their own circle of blogs, such that one post was replicated several times to mirror-blogs. I’m not sure that this would be of any longterm use to them, as their googlerank would suffer as a result of the duplicated content. Interesting concept though :)

UPDATE: I thought about it for about 10 seconds and decided to extend the concept to Blogging in the News. Tell me what you think - is it wrong? Is it useful?

UPDATE 2: I’ve made the code for the template above available as a text file to stop it getting mangled - download it and change the name to onblogging_google_news.php - sorry about that :)

My Top 5 from day 2 of the Problogger writing competition

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 11 May, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 2 Comments

My Top 5 from day 2 of the Problogger writing competition are:

  • Top 5 glimpses into my secret nude diary: OK, I admit it, I looked at this one - and was surprised to find that the “nudes” were tastefully drawn pencil sketches from a visual diary. Really :)
  • Top 5 beach locations for the Australian IT commuter: Like myself, Vincent is an Aussie consultant - but he’s rated the top five beach-side locations within easy reach of IT client sites. I can’t say I haven’t considered it in the past, especially now that Canberra is just sliding into the cold of winter :)
  • Top 5 reasons not to get married: very funny, at least for those who have never been married :)
  • Top 5 reasons for multiple blogs under a single domain: I like this because it confirms a decision that I made a couple of weeks back. People like to hear information that confirms their choices. Thanks :) I’ve put Facibus Reviews, Facibus On Blogging, OnWii and Faux Cuisine under the one domain name with no regrets so far.
  • Top 5 ways to beat blogger’s block: I don’t agree with everything that this post says - for example, writing short posts frequently is a good way to get into the blogging habit, and it is good for google, but I know from personal experience that my longer posts are the ones that will get more traffic over time. I do write short posts too, but these are usually of the “have a look at this cool thing!” nature rather than anything weighty. All that said, it is excellent advice from a professional writing coach and well worth the read.

My Top 5 from day 1 of the Problogger writing competition

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 11 May, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 2 Comments

My Top 5 from day 1 of the Problogger writing competition are:

This is quite a good contest - I am glad I entered it, I’ve met a lot of other bloggers through it, and had lots of traffic through as a result.

Top 5 favourites from Day 3 of Problogger’s writing competition

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 10 May, 2007 in Blogging and Recommendation. 3 Comments

My Top 5 from day 3 of the Problogger writing competition are: