So, I also wanted to take a few minutes today to rant about something that has been annoying me for a long time now: Twitter blogs. Basically, there are many ways to feed content from Twitter, a popular micro-blogging tool, into your WordPress blog. Unfortunately, people aren’t writing real content for their blogs anymore; instead, pushing their Twitters onto the world.

What you end up with as a reader are half a dozen or so one hundred and forty character messages, most of which have no meaning or relevance to you as a reader since they are responses or aimed at specific people.

It is really a shame to see so many blogs heading down this road, and that Twitter has captured their attention so much that they don’t continue to work on their real blogging efforts, a type of communication that can’t occur on a platform like Twitter.

Please, turn off whatever you use to feed your Twitter conversation into your blog, and put some kind of widget in the sidebar instead. Then, as your blog becomes decrepit, hopefully it will shame you so much that you come back and post something decent.

By the way, my Twitter information is www.twitter.com/davidcubed if you want to follow me.

Originally posted on February 6, 2008 @ 3:20 pm

So recently, John Cow decided to head off for a nice vacation, and opened up his blog for guest posts. I was really excited about the idea, since his blog has more traffic than my own.

I carefully constructed a post, that while outside his normal topic area, still would be of great interest to a wide variety of bloggers. I decided to talk about working for a blog network. This is something I know a little bit about having now worked for two relatively strong blog networks. Bloggy Network was smaller in personnel, but had some A-List sites in their stables. Splashpress Media is huge by comparison, both in number of sites and employees.

I assumed writing such a post would bring in a fair bit of traffic, and maybe some new subscribers, but what I quickly realized is that people read John Cow for its wit, and advice and I am a much more serious person. As such, his audience didn’t seem to latch on to the way I write, or the type of content I produce. The traffic increase wasn’t noticeable, nor was their any jump in my subscribers.

Does this mean I failed with my guest post? Well, not really. The post allowed me to increase my reach, my sphere of influence, and link back to this blog. All of which are great things for the long term development of this blog.

Would I do it again? Most likely, but not on John Cow’s blog. I would try to get a post on a blog that fit my own audience demographic a little better, which would hopefully create more of an interest in this blog and what I write here.

Originally posted on January 29, 2008 @ 7:54 am

Earlier this week, I decided I would try to break some news, and did two posts that have done amazing, one was a screencast of what the new WordPress Administration panel looks like for Tubetorial, and the other was a post on Blogging Pro about WordPress 2.4 being skipped/delayed. I didn’t really do any of my normal promotion techniques on these posts, as I wanted to see if I had really hit on something worth talking about. Both posts were very well received, and while Tubetorial hadn’t had any videos for a long while, the site sprang to life once it was linked to by some prominent bloggers.

It was interesting to see people write about my posts and not link back to them, but I was still very impressed to see how the news spread from site to site, and both posts have received many links. I don’t consider myself to be the “breaking news” type, but these posts both showed the raw power of talking about something first.

Originally posted on January 5, 2008 @ 12:59 am

I just finished recording a podcast with James Cogan of Dailypixel, and one thing that came up was blogging, and if it has “jumped the shark”. Basically, we both wonder if blogging is going to see a huge slow down in 2008 as many things align.

First, many bloggers are hitting their saturation point online with digital media. The new cool thing is to reduce the number of feeds you pour through every day, rather than bragging about the thousands of sites in your reader. The second thing that will happen is the continued success of microblogging platforms like Twitter, and social networking sites that allow users to post news posts like MySpace and Facebook.

Also, something I have noticed lately, in communities like Digg, and elsewhere is an anti-blog movement, where even the word “blog” has negative connotations. As though writing a blog isn’t worthwhile or prestigious. I don’t know where this shift has come from, but I have been noticing it more and more as I move around the Internet.

Put all this together, with the fact that the United States may be facing a recession, however minor, and you have a series of events that could pull back the reigns on the unfettered growth that the blogosphere has been experiencing over the last five or so years.

I, for one, am hoping that despite all of this, the blog networks and bloggers I have relationships will continue to do exceptionally well but it should definitely be an interesting year for all types of online publishing.

Originally posted on January 3, 2008 @ 6:06 pm