Third World Geek » Blog Apps

What Would You Trade 10 Of Your Blogcatalog Friends For?

3WG — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:50:13 +0000

Here’s a really funny one (I think): There’s a new Facebook application that would would give you a Burger King Whopper (yep, the store that sells, uh, the Whopper) in exchange for 10 of your Facebook friends. All you have to do is delete 10 of your friends. The application is called the Whopper Sacrifice.

So far around 50,000 Facebook friends have been deleted. That translates to around 5,000 whoppers probably being digested in people’s stomachs. That’s a lot of calories right there.

It is a pretty ingenious marketing ploy for Burger King I must admit. I bet right now, Facebook fanatics (millions of them) are talking about the Whopper. The marketing folks at Burger King deserve a raise for this.
Now this got me thinking, I don’t have a Facebook account. If I have, I must have forgotten about it already. Anyway, instead of deleting 10 Facebook accounts, what possible trade-offs would I insist should somebody send out a survey and ask what I would want in exchange for removing 10 Blogcatalog friends? Hmmm… I’d probably ask for a one-way backlink from a PR3 blog. Yeah, I’m cheap.

How about deleting 10 links in my Blogroll? Now this is gonna be a wee bit more expensive, after all I’m forsaking backlinks (I’m sure there’ll be retaliations from the owners of the links I removed) I’d probably ask for a 6 month 125×125 ad on the front page of a PR4 blog. Make that a PR6 if the sponsor selects the links I should delete.

How about deleting 10 posts, or 10 blogs, or 10 hosting accounts? Oh I don’t know, a gazillion dollars?

Backtype

3WG — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:37:16 +0000

Backtype is a very good service for those who would like to keep track of their comments. In an age when blog hopping seems to be the only excercise some folks get and leaving a comment is considered a social undertaking, a site that monitors all those places you’ve left a comment on comes very handy.

I have written about comment monitoring via Commented On a while back here. Backtype however is even more easy to use. It does not involve any sort of download or installation on the blogger’s part. All one has to do is register and fill in the username and url you use when you comment. Backtype will then track your tracks all over the internet and when it finds your comment, it checks with you whether the comment made under your name is really yours.

This service is now very popular with big bloggers that the big names are already in there. Another good feature about Backtype is that you can follow your favorite bloggers and see where they have been leaving their comments. I have followed Darren Rowse of Problogger for example and have been to some of the posts that he found interesting enough to leave a comment. It may be encouraging stalking but hey, for those making their living on the internet, you can never have enough stalkers.

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Free Automatic Blog Content Aggregators

3WG — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:46:45 +0000

So far, I’ve tried the following free automatic blog content aggregators:

Blogoverdrive

RSS2Anywhere

WP-O-Matic
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Blogoverdrive showed a lot of promise initially. Hey, 2 feeds a day is not bad at all. It also allows for multiple accounts which is also cool. However as I started monitoring the incoming supposedly automated feeds, a lot of those I set up for some free blogger accounts weren’t loading. Of course I may have done something wrong but if it loaded initially, then why the failure now? Blogoverdrive may not be that robust after all.

RSS2Anywhere on the other hand was very easy to set-up and has very clear and easy to follow directions for setting up your auto feeds. Unfortunately it doesn’t profess much love for Blogger. Choosing Wordpress over it which is a bummer. But the real downside with this one is it’s sitting on top of an adult site. Of course unless you write adult material, you may not want to touch this one with a 10 foot pole. Not worth the hassle I think.

Then I tried the famous Wordpress plug-in WP-o-matic. A brilliant plug-in that requires brilliance as well if you want to make it work. If you’re a regular Joe like me, your head will be spinning at the first mention of a ‘cron job’. What in the world is a cron job? Still we’re in the information age and all things are just a google away. I did a little background research, followed the not-so-helpful instructions, and was able to set-up my campaigns. I had to go to Webcron.org(part of the instructions) though, a quite exasperating site that prefers French over English. You’ll learn about this if you decide to use this plug-in in your WP blog. Caveat–> self-hosted WP installations only. Sorry folks.

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Skating On Thin Google Adsense Ice

3WG — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:28:26 +0000

You’ve heard about Google Adsense right? In fact some of you folks may be deriving your livelihood from that little thing. You’ve read about a whole lot of literature on how to optimize your adsense revenues through one thing or another. More often than not the things that you’ve read are very likely internet legit. But what if you come across something that, although not entirely illegal, borders on the unethical– would you follow it?

I recently read this ebook on Google Adsense. It’s an awesome book written by somebody who has clearly studied the ins and outs of adsense. I must say that it’s a blackhatter’s treasure which consequently becomes Google’s nightmare. The methods described in the book stretches the boundaries of ethics and should get the adventurer’s heart pounding. I could go on and on about it but I figured it would be better if you just download it and read it yourself.

Here’s the link–>Adsense Blackhat Edition

Is Adsense Right For Your Blog?

Me Linky Love You Long Time

3WG — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:25:17 +0000

I have followed my own advice. This blog is now DoFollow, which means as a reward for your untiring commenting you’ll feel the love of a Dofollow link. But not so fast, the link love plugin I’ve installed here is not your run of the mill plugin; this is Lucia’s Link Love plugin which means I can specify the number of comments you have to make first before your links becomes DoFollow. I won’t say the exact number but it’s greater than one and less than 5. Fair enough, yeah?

But again, according to my own advice, I have enabled comment moderation so that I will still have a say on whether you’re a spammer, or a hammer. Bad rhyme.

So comment away folks take advantage of the linky goodness of this dofollow blog’s juices. Don’t worry if you leave stupid comments. I’ll be the judge of that. I’m pretty tolerant though but those really obnoxious remarks will not see the light of day.

Cheers!

NoFollow, DoFollow, MarshMallow

3WG — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:28:28 +0000

Here’s me trying my hand at explaining the ramifications of these terms. First two words have something to do with comment links (you can argue that these two words may pertain to any link and you will be right, but in this case I am limiting my explanation to the links found in the comments area) while the last one goes well with hotdogs and bonfires and is generally considered delicious.

Ok, here we go.

Most blogging platforms are inherently NoFollow, which means that any link (usually author’s URL) included in a comment will not pass PageRank. I say most because I haven’t tried out all the blogging platforms out there. And even if I say “All” I could still be wrong. Either way I’m screwed. The relevance of not passing PageRank is that the link that you included in a comment that you made will not have any value as far as your PageRank is concerned.

We all know that backlinks are supposed to count as a vote of approval for your blog, however if that backlink is NoFollow, it’s like shooting blanks. Alright control your overactive imagination. Now what it doesn’t mean however is that search engines will not crawl these nofollow links, they will, and they’ll come a-knockin’ on your door, but that’s just it. Although these links are still counted as one of your backlinks, they’re just not that valuable.

DoFollow links on the other hand are the kind of links you want. Spiders crawl them and they’re considered an affirmative vote in your favor. So if you’re on a link building mission with the intent of skyrocketing your PageRank via a commenting strategy, you would be much better off seeking out those DoFollow blogs. Here’s a DoFollow community that you could join to get you started.

So You Want Your Blog To Be DoFollow Eh?

A bit of caution on this one. DoFollow blogs are easy target for spammers so I recommend that you enable comment moderation for you to sort out which ones to grant your precious Dofollow link. If you don’t have the stomach for this, better stick to nofollow. Still there’s a valid argument to be made for making your blog DoFollow. For one, it motivates your regular readers to comment which could result to a lovely discussion on your posts. Fair enough?

Now, if you use WordPress, you’re in luck. There are a lot of DoFollow plugins out there starting with this one. Or if you want to make things a bit more manageable(remember my note on spamming? this is a good tool to mitigate that), you can use this one– this is an interesting plugin that only activates DoFollow for commenters after they’ve posted a number of comments. Very nice huh?

Now if you’re on blogspot, go switch to Wordpress!

Kidding. Actually here’s this tutorial for blogger’s beta template that you can use. It’s actually very easy to follow. Again, better turn on that comment moderation thing before you do this.

But What About CommentLuv?

What about it? It parses the visitors last blog post and that’s it. Unless the DoFollow plugin is installed, it’s still NoFollow.

Taking On The Feedburner Big Boys

3WG — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:58:54 +0000

Or not. :)

The above image is a graphical comparison of the feedburner subscription numbers of four awesome websites;

Mashable
43Folders
SmashingMagazine
and erm., Third World Geek (hehehe)

There’s no competition really, I just want to share this cool little Feedburner comparison tool called Feed Compare. This baby does not just to show how you stack against your competitors, it can also be used to call the bluff of those shady sites who claim to have oodles of subscribers.

Why StumbleUpon is Awesome

3WG — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:04:11 +0000

WARNING: SHAMELESS STUMBLEUPON PROFILE PROMOTION

My StumbleUpon profile is http://technojavi.stumbleupon.com. If you actually visit that site, you will notice that I have already stumbled loads of blogs/sites(7,210), videos(361), and photos(867). Big deal right? Well, it actually is if you happen to like traffic. You see over the past few days that I have experimented on Stumbleupon, I noted that just one SU thumbs up by me results in a significant jump in page visits/views.

Ok, so I may not be talking about thousands of page views here, but definitely in the hundreds. I’ve experimented on SU using my own blog posts. For someone who only gets an average of 50-60 hits a day, getting at least 200 hits in just a couple of hours is a thing of excitement. A couple of weeks ago, a blog post that I stumble would result to at least 80 SU visits. Earlier I stumbled a post I did the previous day and it got me 300+ hits in less than 2 hours. Awesome isn’t it?

There’s nothing really special in what I did, and this thing is applicable to all social networking sites out there. One doesn’t just register in a social site and then watch the numbers roll in. You have to do a little bit of legwork. With SU I stumbled like crazy and connected with a lot of SU users. I don’t have a lot of SU friends now but just consider the amount of traffic I can bring to a site as I grow bigger in the SU universe.

So if you’re into crazy numbers, I could be one of your best friends. And we could start our relationship with you befriending me in SU. lol. Of course it would help if you start stumbling any post here that you find interesting or useful. That should get you on my radar, and if you have a blog or a post that I think people would benefit from, I’d gladly stumble yours as well.

Just a quick caveat though, the SU traffic has a very high bounce rate. This means that although SU users will swarm your site, it doesn’t mean that they will stick around unless you have a very interesting site. So if you’re thinking of conversions and all that, you may focus your traffic building strategy somewhere else. But then again, numbers are numbers, and SU traffic, no matter how fickle or fleeting the visitors may be is still a welcome thing.

In case you’re interested my profile is http://technojavi.stumbleupon.com.

Online Blogging Resource Store

3WG — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:40:08 +0000

I was playing around with Amazon.com’s new concoction the aStore and I came up with my own online store. Since I am absolutely crazy about blogging these days, I can only come up with a store selling all kinds of blogging books. It’s amazing how many blogging books are out there.

Anyway check out the store I created and see if there’s any book there to your liking. You don’t really have to buy any of those books, it’s just for your reference should you wish to advance your blogging knowledge in the future. And if you decide to buy any of the books listed there, well, that’s money for me and thank you very much.

Scoutle – An Automated Social Networking Site

3WG — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:16:17 +0000

I just signed up at Scoutle, a very interesting social networking site.

I first read about this site at Techcrunch and while I thought it was a very novel idea then, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. As I am wont to do however, I just starred the article on my Google Reader for my weekend review. When I read the article again earlier I decided to give it a go.

Scoutle is very interesting in the sense that you don’t actually do the networking yourself. Once you register to their site, you will have to create your own scout. You select the category and subcategories that are relevant to your site. You then name your scout and place a tag line or a slogan to make it more interesting. After installing a code snippet on your site also known to Scoutle as a Stage, your scout is ready to go.

Your created scout will automatically crawl the internet for scouts of related interests. Your scout will then log all its meetings with other scouts in your Scoutle profile for your viewing at your convenience. You can then opt to connect with the other scouts that your created scout met depending on whether their sites appeal to you.

Scoutle also works based on a point system. This system is elaborated in their site but the general idea is that you get points based on the number of your visitors and the Scoutle connections you have. So far, I have already made two connections with 3 other requests pending confirmation. Like other social networks, a connection will be made once both parties agree.

I think Scoutle has the potential to grow big in the social networking business given the quality of its offering. Even the stage that I placed on my site is waay too cool. I’ll be very interested to see how this service will fare a few months down the road.

If you’re thinking of going or spreading your social networking wings, I would highly recommend Scoutle.

Help me spread the word by clicking here ==>> [SB stumble]