slamboard

I try to do a reasonable amount of social networking in the blogosphere. This, obviously, involves reading what other bloggers post. Some bloggers make frequent posts of 500 words or less… sometimes much less. Occasionally, I find blogs with very long posts of 1500 to 2500 words. I have to be really engaged by the subject matter to read that many words. If it is a subject of which I have a strong opinion, I sometimes resort to skimming with the intention of finding a point on which to comment.

I think I will start drafting a very long blog post now, just to see if the practice is worthwhile. I am not going to write a really long blog post about really long blog posts, that would be silly.

I felt that it was important to come clean about the fact that I sometimes delete comments. Sometimes is is a pretty easy decision, like when I got this short comment about how to make my penis bigger…

There are times when it appears that a comment has been written by a real live human being who works for a competitor of the company that I reviewed in my post. If the comment makes a valid point, I am tempted to leave it on my blog. The trouble is that doing this would encourage the behavior. The behavior seems to involve cyber stalking the competition and commenting on review posts with links going to the site that they are promoting. I mostly delete them but sometimes I just remove the links.

Hi, thank you for coming here to read my blog. I appreciate every reader. I enjoy your feedback and I like to think that I am writing something that you will enjoy. I do not, at this time (January 15th, 2008), make any money as a direct consequence to your welcomed visit.

If I had Net Audio Ads on my blog, you would hear a 5 second audio advertisement from someone who had bid for placement in the network in much the same way that advertisers bid for Google ads. NetAudioAds™ Pay-Per-Play advertising has been up and running for a while and the HUGE difference with these ads is that a webmaster or blogger gets paid for everyone who visits.

I listened to the sales pitch for the affiliate program. This program is FREE, but they are only accepting signups until February 1st.

I am tempted… and I am going to think long and hard about the concept. I suggest that anyone reading this who has a blog or website check it out as well. If you start a discussion about it, I predict that someone will suggest that the ads will reduce your return readership. I remember a lot of complaining about Adsense ads in the beginning, too. There were lots of webmasters who rode their high horses around for years about it. I think the VAST majority of internet users accept them as a normal and ubiquitous part of the landscape now. Just like with TV and radio ads, some people take notice of them and some people ignore them. It is kind of sad that so many of us bloggers include contextual ads on our sites when they only generate pennies for most of us. I like the idea of being paid when an audio ad is played on my site regardless of whether or not the reader is listening. I am still apprehensive about the possibility of offending my readers. I know that I don’t like it when I accidentally run the cursor across those stupid smileys that scream Oh My GOD, No WAY?!?!?

If you have the same sort of opinions on this, you should go in as far as the long sales letter because there is a link to some actual ad clips there. They are actually pretty easy on the ears. Obviously, I was expecting to hear them, but I think they are carefully designed to be a moderate intrusion.

IZEARANKS.com is new. I took a quick visit to the ranking page for my blog and then I made this graph comparing it to a semi-random selection of blogs. These blogs belong to people that are on the periphery of my networking efforts. I don’t visit these blogs everyday, but I know that the authors take their blogging seriously.

I think that this graph illustrates what you can expect from a ranking system that tracks a relatively small number of blogs. There are several thousand blogs that contain the coding tools from IZEA, but it is small when you compare it to a ranking system like Alexa. A have a virtually abandoned blog that I looked at recently and its Alexa rank is in the tens of millions. Slamboard spent a few days this month in the top 100 with IZEA.

Here are the urls for the blogs that I included on my graph:

http://slamboard.com

http://simplekindoflife.com

http://www.macewan.org

http://www.u-g-h.com

I was checking out a contest at some random girl’s blog and I discovered an interesting web tool at Random.org.

If you have a list that you want to put in random order, you can just paste it into this box and click on randomize to have your items put in a truly random order. I think this would be a cool way to organize polls for your blog.

The creator of the website warns against entering sensitive, private information into this tool because there is no encryption. Third parties could intercept the data.

I just finished reading a lengthy and thought provoking post on the blog at WhyDoWork.com that highlights some of the flaws and limitations of blogs. The criticisms are from the point of view of someone who is looking for relevant information about making money online. John Chow is used an example of a popular blogger. If you go to JohnChow.com and spend a portion of your free time reading his advice and opinions, you may not be seeing the big picture on a given topic. If you find an active forum thread that relates to the same topic, you will find more opinions and you may find some information that is more useful. Another minus for blogs is the possibility that critical responses may be deleted.

I don’t delete critical comments, but I think the approval process itself discourages people from commenting. I went to full moderation during a critical period of the Kimkins stuff because people were making comments that started with ‘Please don’t post.’

I think that I will remove the moderation soon, allowing any post that is not caught by the spam catcher to be published immediately.[edit: I am presently not moderating comments, anyone who is not in Akismet’s bad books and does not have more than two outgoing links will have their comment instantly posted.]

I think one disadvantage with forums is the volume of information/chat that can eat up your free time while you wade through it looking for information that is of value. The best example that I can think of in this regard is the Why the fascination with Kimmer? thread(s) on the Low Carb Friends board. This forum has been a valuable source of information for the Kimkins story, but I do not read it. I wait for other people to read it and quote the interesting stuff in blogs. For the uninitiated who might want to read these threads, be warned, there are 12 threads totaling 42,675 replies and counting.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

I was a bit dismayed when I saw a blogger telling a bald faced lie on the official Google blog. If you read the official Google blog and you truly believe that NORAD tracks Santa with Google, I have some news for you. There is no Santa Claus. Your parent or legal guardian wrote that letter from Santa apologizing for not being able to get a Wii

An estimated 114 million internet users made purchases online last holiday season. I had pretty obvious motivation for making references to Christmas when I was reviewing products over the last few months. I was surprised to see a recent surge in people finding my blog through a Google search for tasers for women. Is this because I am one of a very small number of people who wrote about this product, or is it actually a popular Christmas gift this year?

I don’t know.

I took a look back at my post about the sleek and stylish Tasers for Women and I did not mention Christmas. I was also very critical of the product.

I have to apologize to all the old friends, dear relatives and tangential acquaintances that are on my list of friends on Facebook. I do not participate to any appreciable amount in this social website. I actually kinda HATE it. My hatred of Facebook is actually a profound enough reaction that I am looking for a way to channel it into something useful.

This blog is not my Facebook. I am thinking of formally proclaiming another blog as MyFacebook.