The Blogisphere

A new way to network and promote your sites

August 1, 2008 by Tricia

Yesterday I read a blog post about keeping your Twitter and Plurk accounts functional and it caused me to revisit a site that I’d been to in the past, but dismissed as not being what I needed at the time.

The site that I visited and subsequently signed up for was Ping.Fm. Perhaps you’ve heard of this site?

Ping.Fm allows you to update your social networks quickly and virtually from anywhere. Best of all, you can update all of your social networks at once!

In my last post I talked about how I think Twitter might be a waste of time for people because some of the bloggers I follow seem to always be sending out Tweets. Now add other social networks like Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Friendfeed and a multitude of other social network sites and you could literally spend your whole day posting messages on these sites just to network and keep in touch with your friends. There are so many social networks popping out of the woodwork these days that it’s becoming overwhelming! So you can see why the idea of being able to post one message to one site and then have that message delivered to all of your social networks at once might be beneficial.

I think I originally dismissed Ping.Fm when I first came across it because I wasn’t yet a member of Twitter or Plurk or some of the other sites that Ping.Fm interacted with at the time. However now that I’m a member of at least half of the sites that work with Ping.Fm I can really see the advantage!

Ping.Fm is very easy to use. Just sign up and activate your social service. You can post your Ping.Fm messages directly to Blogger and WordPress.com blogs, Social sites such as Bebo, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, kwippy, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Xanga. You can also use Ping.Fm to post message to the following services – AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk (GTalk), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, iGoogle Gadget, Facebook, iPhone Web App, and Mobile App (WAP).

BTW all the links in the paragraph above are to my social network profile pages if you’d like to visit them and add me as a friend.

Imagine how much time you’ll save by being able to post message to your friends and contacts on several of those sites all at once?

Now, if you happen to have a WordPress blog on it’s own domain there’s a WP Plugin called PingPressFm that will allow you to notify your social network sites about a new blog post. The WP plugin only works with WP 2.5 and higher so if you are a Ping.Fm member and want to use the plugin on your blog make sure your installation is at least WP 2.5 or higher.

Unlike some I don’t post a lot of messages to my social networks, but I do like the idea of being able to notify all of these services of new blog posts. Up until now I’d only been using Twitterfox to post blog post updates to Twitter. If the PingPressFm plugin works well I’ll use that instead.

Ping.Fm is in Beta right now and you need an invite before you can become a member. So consider this your invitation. The invite code is currently pingscompany. Oh and speaking of invites if anyone has an invite for Jaiku I’d love to get one so I can explore that site.

If you know of any other handy services that make it easier to network I’d love to hear about them.

I don’t get twitter?

July 31, 2008 by Tricia

I like Twitter and I can see the benefits of using Twitter both socially and as a way to promote blog posts, websites or special events but I’m puzzled by the people that I see constantly using twitter.

I follow quite a few people on Twitter and I use the TwitterFox extension in my Firefox browser so that I can see all of the most recent tweets as they happen. Some people barely tweet (me), others only tweet a few times a day at most and then there are the constant Tweeters.

I see some people posting Tweets from 5 in the morning until late at night – sometimes as late as 2 or 3 in the morning. Some of these people must do one hundred or more tweets a day.

I just see it as a time waster.

Perhaps that stems from me having so many blogs, websites, blogrolls and mailing lists to manage that I barely have time to answer emails or reply to comments (bad bad blogger!), but I think it also stems from my past experiences with Chat.

Back in the late 90’s when I only had websites and ran mailing lists I got involved with a group of friends. We spent several hours each day chatting online. I’d work all day, getting up at 5:30 in the morning, come home from work and check my email, perhaps check the chat room and try to make dinner as I multitasked. Then when my husband would get home from work we’d have dinner and perhaps watch a TV show or two, but by 9:30 or 10 pm I was back online chatting with my friends as we had a standing talk time. I’d stay online sometimes until 4 in the morning falling into bed to sleep for only an hour and a half.

This went on for months, perhaps even as long as a year. In the end I was exhausted all the time and not very productive at work. Considering that I’m a nurse that’s probably not the greatest thing right?

I realized that spending so much time on line was affecting pretty much all aspects of my life so I shut it all down and stopped chatting. I still ran my website and mailing lists and continued to answer something like 400 emails a day, but I also got my life back – well mostly.

These days I have accounts at all the main I.M. sites – Yahoo, MSN, AIM and so on, but I don’t use my accounts. I never chat. I guess I’m afraid I’ll get hooked on it again and waste too much time – time that I just don’t have anymore.

So as I watch these people Tweet all day I wonder if they are falling into the same trap that I did. I know some of these people have multiple blogs as well as children and jobs. Are they neglecting important aspects of their lives as they send out all those tweets?

So … Do you have a tweet account? If you do, how do you use it? Are you becoming a tweetaholic or do you only tweet occasionally when you have something important to pass on or to promote a new blog post? ( Same question could apply to Plurk I guess.)

Sick of Spammers!

July 11, 2008 by Tricia

I’m so sick of spammers. Over the last month or so I’ve had a steady increase of comment spammers on all my sites, however this blog seems to be getting hit the worst.

Over a year ago I added the WordPress Bad Behavior plugin to my anti-spam arsenal and the amount of spam I was getting on this blog (in comment moderation of course) immediately went down from 400 to 500 comment spam per day to only one to ten. I use Akismet as well to protect my blog from spammers.

Bad Behavior has a fairly recent update so I’ll update the plugin in a little while and hope that that helps combat some of the spam. I’m sure some of the new spam is coming from bots.

If that doesn’t work I might start closing comments on all my old posts. I don’t really want to do that as sometimes I do get real comments on my old posts, but I will if I must. Perhaps I’ll add Spam Karma to my arsenal however I’ve never really liked that plugin and what I’ve been using up until now has done the job.

Notice to any human comment spammers – particularly those getting paid to post comments. Don’t bother stopping here and leaving comments that don’t make sense and links to competing niche websites or questionable websites as I’ll just delete your comment.

I’m a do follow blogger so this blog tends to get more comment spam than ones that remain nofollow. As a result I’ve always heavily moderated my comments. I don’t care for lots of extra links in comments, nor do I like urls to business websites in comments that are gushing about a product or service. Those comments BTW are usually written quite poorly, but not all of them are – either way, if I think you are just leaving a comment to get a do follow link I’m apt to delete the url or the whole comment.

I hope that this post doesn’t discourage visitors leaving real comments. Like most bloggers I love getting comments on my posts (and yes I should reply to the comments more often!). Please don’t stop commenting just because I said I moderate heavily.

It’s to the spammers or those just seeking do follow links that I’m directing this rant.

People that leave three to five comments with the same IP yet each comment links to a different website, different pages of a website or uses a different SEO term as the link text on multiple.
Comments that don’t make a whole lot of sense or add anything at all to the post or the comment discussion that’s already been started by visitors who were interested in leaving real comments and input on my post.
Commentors that leave the same comment on a post on each of my blogs or perhaps different comments (usually spammy) on almost all of my blogs within an hour or so. It’s very obvious that they’re following a do follow list when they do this.

I’m sure I make mistakes sometimes and delete a real comment or remove an url that perhaps was on a real comment that I mistook as coming from a spammer or dofollow link seeker. Please forgive me if I have removed a comment that was not from a spammer.

It’s just that I get well over 100 comments on most days across my various blogs that I must approve, moderate or delete as spam (not counting the ones that are listed in the Akismet section as already being spam). A high percentage of these comments are from paid commenters, spammers and those who are not really interested in my posts but are just seeking links. I have to be a tough moderator.

Spam comments are something that all bloggers have to deal with, perhaps new blogs and bloggers haven’t experienced it yet, but as your blog ages and hopefully becomes more popular you will encounter spam comments.

I’d love to get your input as to how you feel about spammers:

Anyone else being hit with a lot of extra spam these days?
How do you handle the situation?
What plugins or add ons do you use on your site(s) to combat spam?
Do you moderate your comments heavily as well? Or do you just delete anything questionable?

I’m looking forward to reading your replies.

Technorati widget acting up

May 30, 2008 by Tricia

Has anyone else noticed that their Technorati widget is acting up?

Early yesterday morning I noticed that the Technorati widget on a few of my blogs was showing a huge list of websites within it.

I don’t have my Technorati widget set up to show tags or anything other than my profile link, the sites authority and a Technorati search box. However my widget appears to be showing a list of sites that either I’ve faved or that have faved my blog. There isn’t even an option for the widget to show anything like that, so this is very strange.

I went to Technorati and search the discussions in the help section and their weblog to see if anyone else had mentioned that their widget looked odd, but I haven’t found any mention of it.

Yet, as I’ve surfed the net I’ve seen the widget acting up on other peoples blogs.

Luckily I’ve only got the widget set up to show on the main page of my blog. It looks ugly! I hope they fix this problem.

If you’re using the Technorati widget on your blog go and take a look and see if yours looks odd too.

I wonder if you have to have the widget on your site to continue to stay listed in Technorati or not?

Best Google Adsense day so far!

May 24, 2008 by Tricia

In an earlier post I mentioned that I’d been working on my main website for the last couple of days. Well … it’s a pure HTML based website and it’s huge so any time I want to make a change to the site I have to go through each and every page (if it’s a site wide change, that is). It takes forever, but I think the work that I just spent a couple of days doing is going to pay off big time.

Along with adding a new Privacy policy page as per the new Google Adsense TOS, I decided to implement some of the things I learned through the Adsense Secrets e-book that I purchased in late April.

I wrote a post about getting the Adsense Secrets 4.0 ebook on April 25th – I guess you can consider this an update almost exactly a month later.

I can now tell you that the e-book that I purchased for the low price of $9.95 has paid for itself several times over in the last two weeks or so.

If you are a regular reader of this site or any of my other blogs you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been playing with my Adsense placements as well as trying out a few other affiliate programs like Chitika.

Well my tinkering has paid off!

In the last two weeks I’ve doubled the income I was earning on my blogs through Adsense and by adding Chitika to some of my sites I’ve added a new great source of income.

Now for the big news.

Yesterday evening I started uploaded the pages of my HTML website that I’d been working on. I’d updated the Google Adsense code, changed the colors of the ads slightly and added two more Adsense blocks to each page of that site. I guess you could say that the new ad code and the updated Adsense placements have been up and running on that site for about 24 hours now.

Just those few little changes to the site – things I learned by reading the Adsense Secrets e-book – have more than tripled my income on that one website. In one day!

I can’t wait to see how much I earn on that site next week. I mean, it’s a long weekend in the US so I’m sure site visits and ad impressions are down a little bit …

I’m so excited. Doubled my income on my blogs and at least tripled my income on my very large website. What’s next? I can’t wait to find out.

If you use Adsense on your website or if you’ve been thinking of using it I strongly recommend that you get the Adsense Secrets E-book. Look what I was able to do in just a month (would have been earlier if I’d started tinkering right away).

I would also look into Chitika as well. They’ve just implemented a new premium ad system that higher eCPM than any of their other products. Actually I believe they are implementing some of the premium features into their other products as well so it’s possible that all of their products will have an increase in eCPM now.

I’ve been with Chitika for a couple of years but I never really earned much so I took it off my blogs about a year ago. At the beginning of the month I decided to give it another try and I can tell you that it’s already my third highest affiliate earner. Kontera and Glam are pretty much tied for second place.

Unless your totally opposed to ads on your blogs or websites it’s worth trying some of these programs. Tinker with ad placement and the colors of the ads themselves and see what works best. Oh and check out that ebook that made all the difference for me!

I don’t get twitter?

Sick of Spammers!

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