As I travel around the blogosphere, I’ve come across numerous tips and advice on how to successfully blog and develop a strong readership. Some of it involves developing a community of friends on social networks that could potentially bring an onslaught of massive traffic to your site. This can be done once you establish a mini-network of friends who can collectively Digg, Stumble or Reddit your blogging content, with you of course agreeing to do the same for them in return (sort of a you scratch my back, I’ll shave yours arrangement).

Some people can be really good at this for whatever reason. Me on the other hand… I can’t make friends in real life, I’m supposed to do it on here? My ass. I begged just ONE acquaintance of mine to stumble my blog so I could get a boost in traffic and of course I got blown off. Obviously this isn’t going to be a winning strategy for me right now. Ahhhhh, if only I were a hot babe, how easier this would all be…..

But anyway…

A few of the blogging experts I’ve encountered also recommended getting an outside web designer to develop the look of your blog for you (and also assist in optimizing it for search engines). Look, I don’t want no designer touching my private goomie gammies, capice? The thought of a third party having access to my code like that just doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts, ya know?

But I can understand the rationale behind it. Blogging, or rather, professional blogging is HARD work. You’re basically doing the work of three people largely because it’s a three pronged process: promotion, maintenance and content building, all of which can be full time jobs unto themselves. And because I spent so much time on the former two for the past couple of weeks, I left myself little time for the latter.

Obviously, that will have to change as I try to find a way to balance these three aspects to blogging. But now I’m sorely tempted to just say “You know what? Screw it, it’s time I started BLOGGING, PERIOD.” It doesn’t matter that I still don’t really know who I am as a person, much less what the hell my niche should be. I think I need to just get up and go, and let the words flo’. Maybe this way I’ll somehow be able to create something coherent and interesting enough to attract a readership larger than the 5 people who regularly visit the NPR website.

Tags: acquaintance, blog, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, content building, friends, full time, hot babe, little time, maintenance, networking, onslaught, problogging, promotion, rationale, screw, search engines, social networks, success, third party, three aspects, traffic, web design, web designer
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

Tags: album, assimilation, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, content, facebook, fervor, flickr, garageband, God, good grief, monetization, monetizing, network, Photos, platform, plugins, resources, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, stealing, stumbleupon, third party, time, traffic, trends, tumblr, twitter, Vox, web 2.0, whole lotta, widgets, YouTube
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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A writer at MSNBC recently took a look at the Twitter phenomenon and concluded that Twitter was ultimately boring and stupid. Maybe instead of spending her time clapping her hands and gleefully exclaiming, “Oooooh look at me, look at me! I actually get paid to write the crap I do!” she might see there’s more to it than just announcing to the world when you recently hit the john.

Twitter brings back to life the concept of microblogging, where instead of sifting through long winded blogging entries, we can read a snippet that’s 140 characters or less. For those gifted in the “less is more” approach to blogging, such “tweets” can provide the reader remarkable insight and helpful information without forcing him to sacrifice precious time, a commodity that is becoming even more precious as the inane, white noise of the Internet continues to expand (thanks MySpace!) Check out my latest Twitter friend for an example. Most of her tweets are links to articles she’s been reading, which have proven to be very informative to me and I’m sure a few others as well. The rest are usually witty insights that either makes me snicker or break out laughing.

But besides that, Twitter gives people an opportunity to CARE. It may be vain in some respects, but there’s another part of the equation telling us that when we tweet, people sometimes actually listen. And when they listen, it shows they care. I know with my friends, I’d actually would want to know what they were doing, what they’ve recently been thinking of, how their day’s been going, and so on. If one tweets out a message, “Not feeling well today,” I might be inclined to give them a call and make sure they’re ok. I have an online buddy who recently took an extended road trip halfway across the U.S. She’s not a Tweethead, but had she been one, I would have LOVED to see the kind of tweets she likely would have made during that trip. Her writing has a hilarious and engaging style to it, so there’s no doubt any tweets send to my Twitterbox from her would have been equally as engaging and fun to read. But because I also consider her a friend, anything I read of hers through Twitter would never be considered stupid or boring. And that I think is really the point: Twitter is a tool that can not only enable people to “blog in the moment,” it also helps bring friends and family together. And yes, as with any new technology that comes along, people will always find ways to abuse it or use it to gratify their already bloated egos. Too bad the MSNBC crank who wrote that piece couldn’t get past that to see the value Twitter could truly provide. But then again, this is MSNBC we’re talking about. One can understand why Twitter might seem less than alluring to use should Chris Matthews ever discover it.

Tags: blog, blogging, caring, commodity, community, friends, microblogging, msnbc, myspace, no doubt, phenomenon, precious time, road trip, snippet, social networking, social networks, tweet, twitter, web 2.0, web tools, white noise
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

Tags: 30 minutes, advertisements, aggregation, articles, backflip, blinkbits, blinklist, blinks, blog, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogging community, blogosphere, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, cell phone, chaos, clones, convoluted, cyclical, del.icio.us, demographic, digg, discussion threads, diversity, dodgeball, doostang, downside, einstein, evils, facebook, fashion, favorites, flame wars, flickr, friends, geeks, get togethers, gold, good grief, hooo, individuality, information, innovation, inspiration, instant messaging, interests, items, journey, kay, last.fm, lenses, list of social networking sites, livejournal, ma.gnolia, manna from heaven, meetings, meetup, Meshly, mobile networking, money, movabletype, mybloglog, myspace, nerds, netvibes, news, newsvine, nothing new under the sun, pastime, people, politics, prodigal, quality, quantity, rating, readers, reddit, scandals, shortcomings, sites, slashdot, slums, social bookmarking, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, spam, squidoo, start page, stumbleupon, submission, surfing, tags, tailrank, tendencies, themes, thumbnail, timeless content, toolbar, traffic, universe, usernames, viagra, voting, Vox, web, web 2.0, white house, wiki, xanga, YouTube
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either.

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, boring, butt, clones, crime and punishment, crowds, dating, digg, direction, experiment, exploring, handful, law school, life, movabletype, myspace, niche, offbeat news, people oriented, personal, politics, post, publicize, reddit, religion, sites, social networking sites, social networks, spirituality, stalkers, stalking, stumble, stumbler, stumbleupon, stumbling, technology, traffic, travels, vanity, visitors, Vox, writing, xanga
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I woke up late this morning, and not being in any hurry to get to work, I lazily surfed the Daily Blog Tips site, looking for advice and suggestions that I could apply to my own blog. I came across one post that linked to this article on how bloggers can use social networking sites like StumbleUpon to boost their traffic. So with nothing better to do 10 minutes before I had to head on to work, I submitted my blog post about women emulating men, yawned, then went to get dressed. My jaw unhinged and dropped when I went back to check my stats one last time.

The result of that seemingly innocuous submittal was the biggest traffic count I’ve ever seen since I started this blog. I generated over 50 visits in just under 15 minutes, and it was still going strong by the time I left for work.

I think I may have stumbled onto something here (uhhh, no pun intended). To be honest though, I wasn’t able to wrap my head around the appeal of social networking sites, partly because I couldn’t understand exactly how some of them worked. Sites like StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube and Last.FM (all of which I belong to) were easy enough to figure out, but places like Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit made less sense to me. I think part of it might be because I wasn’t interested in what the most “digged” articles or highest ranked posts of the day happened to be. That perspective might change though as I give these sites a harder look. But one thing that will never, ever change is my utter disdain for places like MySpace, and other social networks that emulate them. The ilk you find at these online ghettos is something I just can’t abide by.

After thinking about what I wrote earlier about being set apart, I realized it isn’t people I don’t want to associate myself with: it’s ugly people. Not physically ugly mind you, but people who just don’t know how to be civilized. You see it all the time on MySpace and YouTube sites. People who drop f-bombs in comments for YouTube videos that show nothing more than a harmless clip of Big Bird singing on Sesame Street. People who feel the compelling need to take snapshots of their hairy buttingtocks and moon me on MySpace. Why? Why do they do this? Why must people always be so utterly depraved and tasteless? All I want is a little civility, to be able to enjoy surfing to a Peter Cetera’s MySpace page without seeing disgusting, lewd (and illegal) photos in the comments, or enjoy a YouTube video without some schmuck cluttering up the comments with mindless f-bombs. Crikey mate, get a grip you psychotic blokes.

Fortunately, though, I may have stumbled (again, no pun intended) onto a way to draw some of the better quality Internet surfers out there to my home on the web, all by making legitimate use of the social networking tools. I have to figure by doing so, eventually a few gems will end up at my doorstep and become regular readers, even if it means they had to ride a wave of sewage to get here.

Paradoxically, the kind of people I’d like visit to my blog would actually be those who are unfamiliar with Internet usage. I know it’s strange, but I think I’d enjoy the perspective of folks who rarely use computers (much less the Internet) more than those who basically spend their entire lives online (like I do). My hearing loss precludes me from being able to enjoy a healthy and active social life, so to compensate I do a lot of my talking through the keyboard. Still, I think it’d be nice to meet people (specifically a hot babe), who could pull me into the real world, and help me enjoy all that it has to offer there.

But until then, gotta keep on surfing.

Tags: 15 minutes, advice, blog, blogging, bombs, del icio us, depraved, digg, digged, disability, f bombs, flickr, gems, ghettos, hearing loss, hurry, ilk, innocuous, internet, last.fm, myspace, one last time, one thing, online, pun, reddit, schmucks, sewage, sites, social life, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, soul, stumbled, stumbleupon, submittal, suggestions, surfers, surfing, tips, traffic, traffic count, ugly people, visits, YouTube
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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