10e20 Blog

The awards season has been a bust due to the writer’s strike and has left many people searching for a fun alternative. In direct response to this void in the marketplace, Matt McGee has created The SEMMYS:

The SEMMYS are an annual awards event honoring the great content produced across the search and online marketing industry. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has grown to include a variety of disciplines, including blogging, social media, reputation management, and more. The SEMMYS attempt to include all these elements into one awards event. We hope the SEMMYS serve as a complement to the excellent existing awards which honor blogs and bloggers.

I am judging two categories Google (along with Lisa Barone and Rand Fishkin) and LOL Funny! (along with Vanessa Fox). There are a ton of great nominees in both of these categories which will make it a tough job to be sure.

Keeping with the theme of the creative process and linkbait graphics it seems like a good time to see whats going on with blogs and some good uses of graphics and photography. Some bloggers don’t even use images, and this is fine because not everything needs it, but some do and here’s to the ones who do it really well!

There are lots of great resources being created everyday by bloggers in our industry and others. Aside from the obvious entertainment and Hollywood people watching sites like Perez and the like that have specific photos that are the pull, other bloggers, if they use images, have to get creative to a degree to give their content that edge.

This is sometimes supported by eye catching graphics or cool looking photography that draws the reader in further if they weren’t already sold by the title, idea or creator of the content alone.

What is RSS?
An RSS Reader is a simple and easy way to read your favorite news site or blogs. Instead of going out to these site to read the most recent stories or posts, the newest stuff comes to you, all in one simple page. Even more convenient is having a Reader which is online, reaching it from any place in the world.

In my eyes Google Reader is one of the best online RSS Readers on the web. For the first time user, just getting used to the whole RSS thing, this post will talk about: a) How to subscribe to a feed b) view your feeds c) the cool features built into Google Reader and d) just some nifty little tricks you can use while you’re at it. Remember, being a master of your RSS feeds is also a very important way to build up and maintain powerful social media accounts

If you’re blog is running on WordPress 2.1, there is a cool little trick that you can do to completely upgrade the built-in WYSIWYG editor.

This expanded WYSIWYG editor will give you the ability to easily control:

• Text styles
• Underlining
• Full paragraph alignment
• The color of your text
• Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
• Formatting removal
• Code cleanup
• Insert custom characters
• Undo/redo

The nice part if that there isn’t anything you need to install to get it. The next time you are writing a post in your WordPress blog - simply use one of these shortcuts (based on what browser you use);

Alt+Shift+V

Alt+V

Ctrl+V

via Just Some dot com

On the Internet, information gets outdated pretty darn quickly. Months pass and old blog owners consider pruning old posts that seem outdated. However, there’s one piece of information that has remained true and current for over a span of nearly a decade. The message comes from the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was written in 1999. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written well before its time; it is a precursor to social media of today. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s message is simple yet extremely powerful: markets converse with each other and the Internet facilitates that communication.

Here’s the opening paragraph to their key 95 theses:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

As presidential hopefuls are looking to strategize their political campaign, new media outlets are being explored as novel ways for these candidates to reach out to a different demographic. Candidates are looking at blogs, search engines, and other popular social networks to reach out to the tech-savvy and the youth that embraces the online social sphere.

Last month, John Edwards announced his candidacy on YouTube. When Barack Obama announced that he was joining the race this weekend, his website was launched with a social network, My.BarackObama.com, which is displayed prominently on his website. Hillary Clinton has a MySpace page, and as of this writing, has 22,310 friends.

While some things may change, others always remain the same. The recurring debate of whether you should use partial or full RSS feeds has been revisited time and time again, because if you have a blog (and it’s successful, usually), you’re also probably a victim of scraping.

Because it’s so easy to grab data from an RSS feed, blogs will arise and people will always try to make a quick buck off of your hard work and effort. This is why many bloggers provide partial feeds, though people who subscribe to hundreds of feeds (like myself) find this very inconvenient.

A lot of bloggers don’t realize that there are options to prevent scrapers from stealing the content off your site even when you have full-feeds enabled.

Here are a few things you can do that are relatively easy:

The benefit of blogging has been consistently questioned by people I encounter everyday. Within my social circle, new blogs emerge that are more personal in nature, and often resemble online diaries. The question often arises if there’s any value to blogs beyond personal ramblings and thoughts.

In a word, yes. Blogging is worth it for businesses.

A study from Forrester was recently released that discussed whether there really is ROI from blogging. Charlene Li discusses these findings with its application to a very well corporate blog. She writes:

…the most common benefits are; increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency.

Further, the report as summarized by Charlene goes on to say that the blog’s success involved community involvement (”about 100 people commenting on the blog each month”) as well as media exposure (”the number of press mentions it received”) as it relates to bringing new users to the attention of the blog.

One of the most refreshing and insightful blogs is Speaking Freely from long-time SEO Dean Bloomfield (aka DigitalGhost from ThreadWatch & WebmasterWorld fame). Dean’s blog is straight-forward and dead-on which makes it a must read each day for me. Dean also has introduced one of the coolest features on an SEO blog in awhile - straight talk from a teenager.

In December, Dean introduced Jessica L to his readers:

I wanted a different perspective on the Social Web, Myspace, Digg, etc. I also wanted some fresh input on what is driving the young adopters of technology. So, I’m proud to announce that Jessica L. will be writing for this blog. She’s the 15 year-old junior editor of her school newspaper and one of my daughter’s best friends. She’ll be speaking freely at least once a week, every Wednesday evening.

Yesterday, I installed the MyBlogLog widget on this blog. The response on this blog itself has been overwhelming and after looking into it further on other blogs and how it’s currently being used across the board, I’m quite impressed by the potential of the service offerings. Even though the service is pretty much in its infancy, it is doing quite well right now, and I expect the popularity to increase into 2007.

So what exactly does the MyBlogLog widget do, and why use it?

MyBlogLog is service whose core resides in little graphical widget that you can customize and put on your site to show you who reads your blog(s). Your blog may already have that personal touch from an author’s perspective, but that graphical designation from a reader’s perspective lets you get to know the kinds of visitors your blog (or another blog) gets. Essentially, it creates a community, and that’s exactly what it is.