Too Many Choices, Too Much Content

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Sarah Perez, a Grand Effect founder, wrote an amazing post on ReadWriteWeb about the issue plaguing many bloggers and social media fans currently: there are too many choices.

Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you’re behind. Take an hour off and you just missed 300 more blog posts. In addition to the everyday struggles of information overload the average computer user deals with – like the overflowing inbox, for example – those in the internet/new media/technology space aren’t just overwhelmed with new content, but also with new applications and choices to manage that content. What’s a web-app loving person to do?

I have found this to be a huge issue in my time as a full time blogger, and it was only made worse by all of the new sites and services that have been added. Check out the article, and just by scanning down through it quickly looking at all of the links added to the post, you can see the issue as bright as day.

Currently, there is no real solution that has come to light, but I have always tried to reduce the number of sites and services I am actively following and look for certain ways to filter out the news, posts, and content so that I don’t get too overloaded. It has been hard, and I have been unsuccessful a few times, but fighting to remain relevant while not overloaded is a never ending battle.

Originally posted on May 17, 2010 @ 5:59 pm

Where do articles come from?

There is a poem that goes what are little girls made of and what are little boys made of. At least this is what I remember from a long time ago in my life when the word Internet had not yet become a word and Spam was a canned food. Anyway, I stumbled upon some old notes and dug a few scribblings up on where do articles come from ?

Personal Experience

You and I are the sum of all things that have directly or indirectly happened to us. Whether it happened a few seconds ago or whether it happened to our Grandfather when he was our age. These are interesting things and even more interesting when told skillfully.

Professional Experience

Different things happen to different people specially when one is in a different working environment. The tale of a movie star can be different from a heart surgeon but both are interesting and refreshing to reader. How the movie star tackled a role and how the surgeon interacted with a patient can be told. Heck! even a jobless man’s journey is a worthy tale to tell.

Observations taken: second-by-second; hour-ny-hour; day-to-day, week-by-week; month-by-month; and year-by-year.

Close your eyes. And concentrate on the sounds around you. I can hear the electric fan whirling like dervishes. The clock’s syncophated tic-toc. The carpenter hammering outside. And the train as passes the rail tracks. And then the drone of motorcycles passing by. Just to name a few.

What else if you were observing using your eyes?

Things that happen around you make good material.

Yes, there are a number of sources for an article or a post. The first three mentioned were up-close and personal. Something the observer had first-hand access to. The following are things that an observer can learn from or view from other sources – mostly second-hand but equally effective as basis for articles and posts.

Ideas from events in past,present and in the future
News from other blogs, media – both traditional and on-line

Ideas from books and periodicals

Originally posted on July 23, 2010 @ 3:05 am

Blog Advertising Audit

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Darren Rowse, of Problogger.net, has written a post as part of his 31 Days to a Better Blog project, in which he recommends that we all take some time and look over the advertising on our blog. You might find that you could be making much more money using a different advertiser or even just position advertisements differently.

A snippet from his post:

Pick one aspect of your blogā€™s ads to change and watch what happens to your ads performance once you have. I did this last week and increased the ad unit size of my AdSense ads on this blog from 300 x 250 to 336 x 280 and saw a jump in CTR without losing much in the way of readability. Itā€™d been a year since I tweaked those ad sizes – just think about how much money Iā€™ve lost in that time!

This is something that I try to do on all of my blogs every two or three months. People can quickly become blind to the advertisements on your blog, and so just changing the position, size or colours of those ads can increase their click through rate for a period of time.

Some people worry about moving things around and lowering the money they make, but as long as you make a backup of the files you are changing before you change them, you can always revert back to the way it was previously.

Advertising online is a tricky business, but with some time, experimentation, and research, there is no reason why any blog couldn’t make a bit more every month.

Originally posted on February 1, 2010 @ 10:27 pm

Google’s Acquisition of AdMob, Good for Mobile Publishers

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The big news today is Google’s acqusition of AdMob, a mobile advertising technology company, for a whooping $750 million. For a huge company such as Google that amount of money is nothing compared to the projected impact of AdMob’s integration to Google’s online advertising products. Ā But for ordinary netizens like us, what does this deal brings? Continue reading →

Originally posted on November 9, 2009 @ 8:16 pm

Bad Days Affecting Blogging

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So yesterday, wasn’t a great day for me. Things didn’t go my way, and that made me a little depressed and cranky. Even worse because my wife is gone to Belgium for her grandparents 50th wedding anniversary and that leaves me completely alone.

With everything that went on, my day was severely hampered in the blogging department, so much so that I really didn’t get much of anything done. Add to that, issues with Blogging Pro, and I was ready to drop everything, and go on a very long vacation. It was one of those days where I would have killed to be back in an office job environment. As a blogger, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to get back into a traditional workplace and even if I could find a job in the computer and networking field I used to be in. I am getting sidetracked though.

Usually, I am able to shake the issues I am having, and just refocus, but yesterday, that wasn’t possible for some reason. It made me wonder if blogging, as a job, is more effected by emotion than other career choices. I think of blogging sometimes as more of a creative endeavor. Like painting a picture or writing a masterful book, and I know that art is definitely influenced by blogging. What is your take? Is blogging more effected by emotion like art, or is it just a bad day like with any other career?

Originally posted on May 3, 2010 @ 3:13 am