So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton!

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I want to be able to segment RSS readers, to be able to see the different browsing behavior of new visitors versus my loyal visitors.

Getting to the point where I actually can acquire that data has been a pretty long ride. I first had to create a way to change the URL’s used in RSS feeds, so I could detect this different URL, 301 redirect it to the right URL, and set a cookie while doing that. To do that I filed a bug in WordPress’ Trac, which I wrote a fix for as well, someone else improved on it, and it was committed into the WordPress core. As of WordPress 2.3, you can apply a filter to the_permalink_rss, which allows me to add ?source=rss to any URL (or &source=rss when the blog uses the default ?p= permalinks).

The next step is detecting that parameter in the URL, and 301 redirecting to the original post URL. Before doing that 301 redirect however, I drop a cookie, which lasts for 30 days, identifying the user as an RSS reader. This allows me to, in the last step, add the following code to the Google Analytics script tag when the user has that cookie:

__utmSetVar("RSS");

I will know if this works tomorrow, and if it does, I’ll release a new version of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin with this possibility in it. Since I can imagine other people want to identify RSS readers for other purposes, I’ll release that small bit of code as a single plugin as well.

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Finking On Paid Linking?

The reason that speculation has arisen is that though there was a seeming spate of directories hit, the number of them – up to 60 or so that we know of – is relatively small compared to the number of directories out there, hundreds or thousands passing on PageRank.

One theory suggests that people are using Google’s controversial paid links report form, implemented last spring to a furious response. However, shortly after Matt Cutts’ invitation to report instances of paid links, Cutts clarified that he and Google’s webspam team weren’t interested in reports on directories, only instances similar to what he cited on his blog.

Nevertheless, Cutts followed up that question with some rules of thumb for evaluating a directory’s value:

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.

- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.

- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Webmaster Takeaways

Paid link reports are not     automatic Mind your link neighborhoods Don’t sell links that pass     PageRank Google doesn’t like being     gamed Penalized directories may be     a message » Give our readers your take

That may or may not be a lot to consider, and given that a select few directories have been affected, it may be a cue that Google is considering it more than before. It may be just a strong message being sent, a warning to clean things up.

Rand Fishkin ups the considerations with a lengthy post at SEOMoz entitled "What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones." The most interesting suggestion is that Google is manually taking down directories that violate its guidelines, and not necessarily with a strategy that involves spam reports, but rather by taking what might be obvious cues:

Banner Ads [for paid links] from Your Directory on SEO Sites – It’s like waving a flag with a voice-activated, wind powered speaker that yells "ban me! ban me!" Sure, you might get clicks and money and submissions, but you’ve gotta know that search quality team members read SEO blogs, too – so if you do this, make sure your directory is ready to be manually reviewed by search engineers.

Marketing to Webmasters – If your forum signature at Digitalpoint (sorry to stereotype, but it’s just so true) contains links to three directories you own, you’re probably in possession of three obviously manipulative directories. I’m sure there’s a couple exceptions, but if I were Matt Cutts, I’d just tell one of my quality control guys to go spend a few days trawling DP for directory domains.

Speaking of DigitalPoint, some there seem to agree that they’re being targeted, and are smelling "rats." One such forum member says:

I have been in touch with a lot of directory owners, free and paid.

Also blog network owners and many have lost PR and SERPs ranking.

I think it is simply from Googles new ‘Report Paid Listings’

For those who report paid listings, DP is a gold mine for these rats.

It’s important to note also that Cutts says the reports, if used, are not fed automatically into the webspam algorithm, but are only starting points for review, suggesting a report is not automatic guilt.

Until Google speaks up though, we may not know whether people are finking on paid linking, or if Google just sent the directory world a message via some notorious suspects, but webmasters will be free to speculate until they do. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, the old saying goes. But boredom and the desire to experiment are powerful forces too, says Canadian author Michael Winter. That’s how he came up with the idea to “serialize” his latest novel on Facebook, the hot social-networking site.

“I look at the whole book-publishing and promotion-of-books process as pretty boring,” the British-born author says with a laugh from his home in Newfoundland. “And I’m always game to do anything different to promote the book.”

Over drinks one night, Winter and Penguin Canada publicist Stephen Myers came up with the idea of using Facebook to create an online community around Winter’s new novel, The Architects Are Here. For the past several weeks, the author has been posting a short synopsis of each chapter every few days on his Facebook page and will continue doing so until the book is officially published later this week.

In addition to the synopsis, Winter has also been posting his thoughts and commentary about how the chapter developed, including debates he had with himself over how to handle a particular situation, or the local landmarks and people that became part of the novel.

“At first it was just going to be an excerpt from each chapter, but I thought that was just as boring as doing a reading,” says Winter. “So I thought what I could do was talk about where I was when I wrote a certain passage … and kind of annotate the book in a way.”

Winter is just one of a growing number of authors who are trying to drag the book into the 21st century by using the Internet to supplement the traditional process of writing, publishing and distribution, and by using blogs and other Web tools to build relationships with readers.

While Winter’s group isn’t likely to set any world records for Facebook membership, he has about 230 “friends,” many of whom return for each chapter and post their own comments about the events in the book, or the process of writing it. Some are clearly would-be authors.

This two-way connection isn’t something that novelists often get, Winter says, and it is nice to have. “There are so few readers in the end for a Canadian literary novel,” he says, that the chance to connect with some of them online is a treat.

Myers and Penguin Canada have also been involved in other publicity stunts involving young Canadian authors, including a boxing match last year with Craig Davidson, author of The Fighter, and a drinking game to help promote Noel Boivin’s and Christopher Lombardo’s The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery.

But Myers says the Facebook idea is more than just a stunt. Looking at the readers who have come together around Winter’s book, he says, “I see community there. I see 200 or however many have signed up for it, and I see them on there discussing each of his posts as they come out.”

Winter is not the only author using Facebook to promote or serialize a novel. Halifax author Dr. Brad Kelln – a forensic psychologist who has published two thrillers – has been posting chapters of a new book as he writes them, and has even been using the names of group members from Facebook in the novel.

Another recent experiment with online interactive fiction – something authors have been experimenting with since the early days of the computer – comes from Canadian author Josh Martin, whose latest project is called Plot Party. Readers suggest different outcomes for each chapter and then vote on which they prefer. Martin is also planning something called Pocket-Change Parade to coincide with World Literacy Day this Saturday.

One recent attempt at online interactive fiction didn’t come to a happy end, however. In February, Penguin USA launched a fiction-writing project called A Million Penguins, loosely based on the concept of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written and edited by users. But the project shut down a month later and was widely viewed as a failure.

According to Penguin, about 1,500 people contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, making it what Penguin’s CEO reportedly called “not the most-read, but possibly the most-written novel in history.”

On the Penguin blog, one executive at the publishing house summed it up in this way: “So what of the experiment – can a collective really write a novel? I guess the answer has to be a qualified maybe.”

Meanwhile, some authors have even taken to publishing their entire works online, although that is still relatively rare.

The most recent high-profile example is Austrian writer and 2004 Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, who is posting chapters of her new novel as she writes them, on her website, for free.

Jelinek isn’t interested in publicity. Described in a recent Associated Press news story as a recluse who rarely ventures outside her house, she has apparently chosen to publish her book online because she wants to avoid the usual book-launch interviews and readings.

The new novel will not be protected by any digital-rights management or copy protection. Jelinek says “anyone who wants to can download it,” and calls publishing on the Internet “wonderfully democratic.”

Other authors have experimented with online sales of books in various forms. Technology publisher O’Reilly sells “e-books” as PDF files, and so have marketing guru Seth Godin, Toronto-born science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, and digital-rights advocate Lawrence Lessig.

Fittingly enough, an early employee at Facebook — engineer Karel Baloun — has written an e-book called Inside Facebook that can be downloaded from his website as a PDF file. Readers can choose to pay $9, $12 or $18, and the author says he has sold more than 700 copies.

Stephen King wrote and published parts of a book called The Plant online in 2000, allowing readers to download each chapter and pay $1 for it using the honour system. Although a majority of people paid, by the sixth instalment interest had waned and King shelved the idea.

Another recent trend is the blog that becomes a book. There is even a prize for the best “blook,” called the Lulu Blooker Prize. The winner this year was Colby Buzzell, whose blog about his time fighting in Iraq became the book My War: Killing Time in Iraq, published by Berkeley/Penguin.

One of the most famous blog-book deals came in 2004, when the author of the pseudonymous Washington sex blog Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler, got a reported $300,000 book offer from Hyperion.

Blogger Zoe Margolis recently became a sensation in Britain writing the pseudonymous blog Girl With a One-Track Mind, and won a lucrative book deal, and so did Salaam Pax, the pseudonym of a Baghdad resident who became famous for blogging during the invasion of Iraq.

Other recent blog book deals include one for the website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, and one for the creator of Petite Anglaise, who was fired from her job in France when her employer found out she was writing a blog. And Anya Peters, a homeless woman who wrote a blog about living in her car, was signed to a book deal last year by HarperCollins.

Bloggers who want to become published authors don’t have to wait for a book deal, however: software from a San Francisco-based company called Blurb will download the contents of your blog and format it for publication, and then print glossy hardcover copies for you for prices ranging from $30 to $80 (U.S.) each, depending on the number of pages.

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But one important distinction: readers hate them. They want the full Monty.

So we have a rather classic debate between publishers ensuring their business model and content consumers who neither care nor appreciate the cost of the content they are consuming. The consumer, knowing they have a certain amount of power over the providers, are naturally, unabashedly, justifiably selfish,

And why not? So’s the other side, right? You sell it, I buy it, that’s the way it works.

It’s not an indictment, then, of how the model works, or of media-consumer relationships, that we need to examine. Instead, web content producers, as usual, have to consider the consumer and their business model with a rather precarious sense of balance – after all, the consumer is not responsible for it, nor should she be. The consumer is only responsible for judging and responding, and she is a temperamental mistress.

This relationship was most recently explored when the New York Times acquired the popular Freakonomics blog, an extension of the popular book of the same title. The Freakonomics reader has been a loyal one and has enjoyed, up until the big sale, full RSS feeds.

The NYT promptly switched to partial feeds in an effort to increase page views. Assumedly, unlike traditional print, subscriber numbers just weren’t cutting it (or perhaps are more difficult to manipulate, but that’s a whole other topic).

And now, as might be expected, Freakonomics subscribers are upset and are threatening to unsubscribe if the NYT is going to destroy what made RSS feeds beneficial to the end-user in the first place.

Globe and Mail tech writer Matthew Ingram, writes, "The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place."

He points to a commentator on the Freakonomics blog that argues the defeats-the-purpose point, while noting that partial feeds come off as "rude" and "greedy." In addition, it means fewer readers in the long run, as subscribers judge two lines of text and decide on whether it is worth their time to gamble with the "click-and-wait" game.

TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick takes the argument to the next level at the TechDirt blog, saying that though it sounds counterintuitive, full feeds actually increase page views:

It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

As you would imagine, once that’s determined, it opens up the recipient to a flood of new spam.

Martin Thorburg, cofounder of SPAMfighter, says the practice of piggybacking on popular culture is standard among spammers.

"It is common that spammers will use large events, such as film premiers, wide scale media stories, or holidays to coerce e-mail users into a scam. We are hoping to avoid having our users fall victim to these scams by filtering away these e-mails," he said.

SPAMfighter is a third-party downloadable spam filter and certified Microsoft partner. The company says there is also a prize promised in the Simpsons spam to entice recipients into taking the survey.

“Major spamming events such as The Simpsons Movie provide us with an opportunity to educate  all computer users for the need to protect their data and privacy from spammers," said Alix Aranza, Managing Director, SPAMfighter, North America.  

And of course, the information comes with a pitch. Aranza informs us, "SPAMfighter offers all computer users the opportunity to download SPAMfighter Standard for a free 30-day trial.”

Newspaper Readers Do It Online

The readership for online papers has grown so fast, it has nearly doubled the growth rate of the overall Internet audience.

Nielsen//NetRatings found more than 59 million people read newspaper websites each month during the first quarter of the year, according to paidContent. That representated a 5.3 percent increase from the same period last year.

In comparison, the overall Internet audience increased by 2.7 percent. The Newspaper Association of America hopes this information can spur advertisers to spend more with newspaper websites.

PaidContent noted the research touted the potential for the newspaper audience for marketers. Online paper readers make purchases online at a greater rate than the general Internet audience. Also, newspaper readers have a slightly higher percentage of professional and managerial workers in their audiences compared to the broader Net.

The really big figure comes in the form of household income. Roughly 12 percent of online newspaper readers said their incomes were in the $150,000 or higher range. Only about nine percent of the general Internet audience has that level of income or better.

Admittedly, I’m biased. I’m a content producer. I call myself a writer and an artist. Take what I say with the appropriate amount salt, but it’s always nice to have your qualitative biases reinforced through quantitative means, especially in an age where it seems the language is under assault, where grammar, spelling and skill are deemphasized.

Just open up a word processor and type – that ain’t writing anymore than throwing a line in the water is fishing. No bait, no bites; nothing good to read, no reason to come back.

Rand Fishkin was bragging on Monday about how SEOMoz scored a million links. His explanation, in a nutshell, include originality, timeliness, usability, aesthetics, and writing quality. That last one, you can image, got my attention. I assumed that good writing was important, but now I’ve got numbers, courtesy of Vizu Corp.’s Blog Readership Report, and I’m not above obnoxious victory dances.

Quality of writing was the number one response to three survey questions:

How do you choose the blogs you read regularly? 43.9%

What factors convey blog quality to you? 56.3%

How do you assess the credibility of the blogs you read? 51.5% 

"Quality of writing" counts for a lot – driving readers’ choices of which blogs they will read as well as helping them to determine which blogs are credible and high quality.

So yes, with an air of smugness, I still say content is king.

Some of Vizu’s other findings:

2/3 of blog readers read more than three blogs regularly

Community rules: Blog links and recommendations are used more than search engines to find blogs.

Personal interest and entertainment are more popular than business or education.

Niche information and rumors/gossip are the most sought-out material.

An interesting move – a first by a national UK newspaper? – which is a good example of how a mainstream medium can use social media as a means of connecting its readership with the paper and vice versa. Maybe it will even develop where reader blogs become news sources for the paper. Look at Le Monde in France as an example.

I’ve signed up. I’ve not done that from any political leaning (the Telegraph traditionally is a Conservative paper) but to see how it works, and because it was dead easy to do. I’d do the same if The Guardian (traditionally a Labour newspaper) had such an offering.

More to come soon, according to Shane Richmond, the online Telegraph’s communities editor:

[…] The finished My Telegraph is just a piece of a larger site but I can’t tell you any more about that at the moment.

My Telegraph is just in time for plenty of political chit-chat in the coming months following today’s hot news across all media about Tony Blair’s resignation next month.

I bet we see a similar offering from another national newspaper soon.

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Tag:

That is gaming the system purely for their own benefit.

They might also frequently suggest you Digg their content, or add them to your bookmarks, or we could also add to that list "Add Me To Your Technorati Favorites", or "Subscribe to my feed".

What Benefit Do You Get From Taking That Action?

• Digg – You get very little benefit at all for taking that action, because most A-list bloggers really aren’t interested in reciprocating the favor – if you do it enough to get noticed, you might gain the occasional link which can help you gain readers
• Other Bookmarking – Again, don’t expect any reciprocity even if you write a good post
• Technorati Favorites – The A-Listers in general can’t see any value in the Technorati Favorite System, haven’t reviewed it in depth, and don’t use it extensively themselves, yet they frequently ask you to favorite them
• Subscribing To Feeds – Subscribe to their feed and you are guaranteed success – I am sure many bloggers only subscribe to the blogs of A-listers, because they are the only blogs they can trust to get the best information. The information might be good, but that isn’t going to bring you blogging success

I need to be very clear about a few things

• I still read A-list blogs (in my feed reader)
• I still link to A-list blogs
• I still Digg and bookmark posts from A-list blogs that I think are good

Reciprocity and Benefits in Marketing

In internet marketing some of the most powerful tactics are:-

1. Providing valuable information and benefits upfront, and at a later date converting your warm audience
2. Offering an incentive or bonus for taking an action such as joining a mailing list
3. Joint ventures such as free giveaways where lots of people send their traffic to a particular site, and in exchange have a chance to increase the size of their mailing lists and possibly earn some money form one-time offers
4. Polls and questionnaires to help you respond to the needs of your audience

Unless you have something amazingly unique to offer in the way of information, or something potentially extremely profitable, you are not going to have access to people on the top rung of the ladder.

Reciprocity and Benefits in Blogging

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz often refers to the "Linkerati", which are those people who can provide links to your site, thus giving your content and overall site lots of Google Juice, to help you rise in the search engines, and also give you some traffic to maybe increase your audience.

Note:I am linking to Rand/SEOmoz simply because he coined the phrase, not because I ever expect Rand to link to me

As a blogger, I am going to suggest that you forget about A-list linkerati, and concentrate as much attention as you can on B-list linkerati and your own readers.

Target your content to your readers or the ones you potentially want to gain, because they are the ones who need to benefit from your content. Don’t alienate your core readership by watering down your content to please the A-list.

Over time, as your core readership expands, you can become noticed by the A-list linkerati in your own niche, but that connection is more likely to come via a 3rd party blogger or through a social media site.

Addressing The Needs of Your Audience

I have had a few people leave comments in the past that a lot of what I write is a little over their head currently, or that a particular post might be too long.

I made a concious decision 6 months ago not to write many "Top 10 tips" type articles on this blog. The core content isn’t intended to be a beginners guide or introduction to any particular topic, though I am always willing to answer questions in the comments, and lots of people take advantage of my contact form.

One of the things I have learned is that even your most fervent readers will miss posts, or skip them. They will also skip related posts links and avoid taking a look in categories or going tag browsing.

They will quite often suffer in silence.

One of the things I try hard to do is read or visit reader’s blogs. Sometimes it is hard to get too involved with the commenting, so it might end up being a drive by answer, but you can always follow up with further questions by email (and many do). I did however note in my post on blogging productivity that commenting on other people’s blogs is not productive, at least in many ways.
There comes a point where you can spread yourself too thin, and you would be better off answering questions on your own blog and possibly linking through.

But to answer those questions being raised you have to know about the discussions in the first place, and that requires at least trying to read as much as you can in the time allocated.

I recently went into quite some detail about all the methods I am looking at to help me read more of the blogs my readers write – as my subscriber base increases, it is becoming more and more of a problem, I have significantly slowed down my blog posts over the last 2 months due to the time it takes responding to comment threads on other blogs.

Some of that experimentation is coming under fire from many notable bloggers.

A few bloggers have already had a chance to respond to the criticism so I am going to link to them here.

On DoshDosh there is a very in depth post about the motivation in exchanging Technorati Favorites. and covering the potential effect. Maki doesn’t fully agree with the OPML import method I introduced because it isn’t as personal. If you have 1000 blogs being rotated through your Technorati for the next year, there is a good chance you are going to see something of interest on all of them… well maybe, but there are some bugs.

Kevin suggests some A-Listers might have had their feathers ruffled. I need to check out Favorite.me

Elaine goes back to her prom days, and also likes pushing the boundaries a bit. Suddenly a collection of 2000 bloggers can be used for other things.

You could probably pick up links to certain memes and find some really high quality blogs, and then convert the list into a high quality OPML file of blogs on a particular theme.

Gary Lee also related about his own experience in running the Technorati Train. Not quite so in-depth, but for me the most significant part was the conclusion:-

I will continue to use this feature on Technorati and believe that it will continue to give me access and exposure to some sites that I probably will never have found for myself. For those who question the intergrity of this practice, I would just suggest that you first closely take a look at what you have been doing before overly criticizing the marketing practices of your peers.

I also respect the decision of Kieron to only selectively reciprocate.

Technorati Gains From People (ab)Using The Favorite Feature

Engtech has saved me a lot of time, because one of the things I was going to write was desciption of all the geeky things you can do with Technorati Favorites. He has also written about a number of bugs or things that need fixing and I am going to add to that list.

• How hard it is to clean your favorites list – lots and lots of page reloading if you want to delete comments feeds, twitter, search results etc.
• My Favorites should have equal authority – this might seem obvious, but if you have selcted certain blogs as your favorites, you would expect them all to show up someime or other on your front page. This doesn’t happen. The blogs with the least authority are skipped, and you can end up with 4 copies of the same blog post plus comments on your front page, and all the content from other blogs never appearing.
  The same happens in the RSS feeds, and my sidebar syndication unfairly doesn’t include as many blogs as it should.
• Importing OPML – I want to pre-assign tags when I import, thus I could for instance grab a list of 400+ SEO blogs, and import it under an SEO tag immediately. Duplicate entries would just get a new tag
• The Searching of Favorites isn’t giving me any results

Based upon the bugs Engtech has found, and my own experience, it seems to me these features were never really put through their paces before, and certainly not by the people criticising the favorite exchanges (who still ask their readers to favorite without giving a benefit for doing it)

As far as I have seen, no mainstream tech blog has ever actually done an extensive review including the various ways Technorati Favorites can be used.

If They Saw a Value In Reciprocation  Or Using Technorati Favorites The Detractors Would Be Reciprocating Like Mad

Lets take Twitter as an example:-

This is a screenshot from Twitterholic, where I have highlighted all those accounts that are practicing reciprocation to a large extent, or have invited a massive amount of people as friends in the hope of them being reciprocated.

I grabbed the top 21, just so I could mention Stephen Colbert, not that he is actually doing any reciprocation.

Among the reciprocators are Robert Scoble, John Edwards, Jason Calacanis (though not 100%), Chris Pirillo, and the extremely smart social networking specialist Webtickle added maybe 5000 friends the day he setup a Twitter account.

These are people who want to communicate with others in the blogosphere or Twittersphere and Twitter encourage reciprocation because every time someone adds you as a friend you get an email.

Both Bumpzee and Blogcatalog also send emails notifying about new friends, and I expect both services will add lots of features to take advantage of this

Hang on a minute… MyBlogLog used to also send emails for everyone that friended you automatically, and people complained about that being abused, and I was among them.

What is the difference?

With Twitter it is like an invitation to enter 2 way communication

With Technorati, no emails are sent, and if you friend lots of people maybe using the OPML import you can use that to make your searching more relevant, and for creating useful shared feeds.

With Bumpzee and Blogcatalog I have generally reciprocated a fair amount, because everyone using the service so far has been quality with no spam – both services have blogs being vetted for inclusion, I am not sure how members are vetted these days. Most of the people I recognise as my readers, so of course I am going to reciprocate.

With MyBlogLog, currently there still is little use for having friends other than if you want to allow only certain people access to your contact information on various networks, and to segregate messages between friends and strangers. Hopefully they will start accelerating their development as I saw they are hiring 2 new developers.

Technorati Reciprocal Favoriting

I have always offered benefits for people to add me to their favorites. I reciprocate, because I truely want to read what my readers are writing, and whilst I started off just using the Technorati supplied widgets, I now have a Technorati Favorites RSS feed in my sidebar.

Unlike MyBlogLog Communities, I get to read my Technorati Favorites in a single stream of RSS or on the Technorati site using pagination and I have always had my Technorati Favorites in my Google Reader Account as well.
I can’t guarantee to read every post, but I definately skim them when I have time.

The other thing it guarantees is when I am researching new posts, I get to read what my readers have said about a particular subject, and respond to them, and not the A-Listers.

I do however reject the notion that services that provide an OPML import feature don’t want people to actually use it to import feeds.

Other Ways to Add Incentives

Andy Beal is offering a Wii for favorites, similar to his earlier MyBlogLog efforts.

Jordan seems to have the hots for data, so I am also going to offer some.

During the last month I have had 562 visitors from Technorati

80 of those visits came from the Technorati home page (as in from people who had favorited me)

26 visitors from the Technorati Top100 Favorites Page

51 Visitors for my andybeard.eu page on Technorati

In addition I show my favorites in my sidebar, which shows up as links in Technorati, just link blogroll links – so my favorites all get a nice link from me without losing too much Google Juice to a huge long blogroll.

That link however also gets seen in the WordPress console, so brings in a few visitors. I would attribute at least 50 uniques for that.

Also important, I have probably gained at least 50 subscribers to my RSS or email syndication that I can attribute and quite a few links, though I am also giving out a lot of links.

For an established blog, these numbers would not be looked on as significant.

I have also spent much more time writing about Technorati Favorites than taking part in the exchanges, but as one of my core topics for this blog is blog optimization and blog search, plus various blog social networks, that time invested was worthwhile.

Some Ideas for Technorati, and My Readers

If Technorati provide a way to tag OPML when you import, then users of the service could create packages of their favorite blogs around a certain subject. Other feed reader services have default subscription packages, why not allow Technorati users to create their own with the ability to import them under their own designated tag.

Web Designers
SEO
SEM
Knitting

Proactive Technorati users could then share these OPML distributions

Feed Link Chain?

Yep, another chain starting up, this time with RSS Feeds – seems to be a long list and I couldn’t find any mention on Google Blog Search, so maybe he is starting it.

The problem is with full feeds in your feed reader, there are only a certain number you can read. Sure again it is interesting OPML but there is no way to gauge reciprocation, and the list I have seen gives absolutely no details about the blogs to give an incentive to subscribe to a particular one.
Also why all the manual clicking to add people to a feed reader. Why not just distribute an OPML file if you really want to do it.

It has been mentioned that this will help boost monetization potential, but advertisers aren’t stupid, and nor are TLA / ReviewMe / Sponsored Reviews / TLB / PPP etc

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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