Author Archive
Theme feedback
If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.
We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.
If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!
Immedi.at offers IM alerts for new RSS content
I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.
immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.
Problogger Clean Theme for Wordpress
This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.
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Monetised
This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.
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Featurised
Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.
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Corporatised
It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.
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Search engine optimised
Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.
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Promotion optimised
There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.
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Stickitised
Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.
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Prioritised
The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.
And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.
Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.
Openomy launches
I just received an email telling me that Openomy.com has launched. Openonomy gives its users the ability to store files of up to 1 gig total on its servers. (There’s no copyright policy on the site that I found so I assume it can be used to store all kinds of video and audio files.) You can add tags to them to describe each file.
But Openonomy isn’t just a file system with tags. If it was, it would just serve as your own private online file catalog. Openonomy also allows its Ruby-savvy users to write applications to manipulate and present the tag data from your file system as well as the file systems of other users. It’s kind of like Ning.com in that sense, but only with the ability to manipulate file tag data.
New Wordpress theme coming
Watch this space. On Wednesday, Ozh and I are releasing a new Wordpress theme. But this one is made for bloggers who are interested in having a monetised blog — the theme has Adsense ad positions and colours built into it (I think it’s a historical first, but I could be wrong). It also has numerous functions built into it too. It comes out on Wednesday.
Free Christmas present delivery
Research shows that most online retailers are expected to offer free delivery this Christmas. So if your online shop isn’t giving free deliver, try shopping elsewhere.
A survey by Shop.org and BizRate Research suggests 79% of online retailers will offer free shipping with conditions such as a minimum order.
Google user research by industry
In order to help advertisers make up their mind about using Adwords to promote their products, Google has provided some very useful consumer data for the usage of search engines according to industry. I was particularly interested in the search engine usage for travellers because I have a mate who is setting up a travel portal and I’ve been advising her to use Google Adwords to get to the top SERP.
PhpBMS - Invoice, scheduling software
This week, I’m testing out the new PhpBMS software. It’s an online system into which you enter all kinds of client details, including meeting schedules, deadlines and invoicing. It’s not bad for something which you want to use for viewing important client details at a glance. And it uses AJAX too.
http://kreotek.com/products/phpbms/
New blog: adblog.wordpress.com
Back in 1998, there was a very popular website called Adcritic.com that tapped into the idea that people actually like seeing TV commercials. They showcased new commercials, mostly from the US. The site became so popular that when it closed down, it became the poster child for Popularity Meltdown. Bandwidth costs money and video takes up a lot of bandwidth. Adcritic later rose again, but in a paid subscription model and never regained its earlier popularity.
The next generation of video content sites like iFilm.com learned from the Adcritic case and created partnerships with bandwidth providers. But video content sites became anathema to venture capitalists. Until this year.
With the increasing popularity of high quality digital video recorders and the rise of the mobile phone video recorders, video blogging started becoming the in-thing. The year of the video bloggers began in 2004 (or arguably somewhat earlier) as people began making their own video content and posting them on their blogs. Then sites like Youtube.com and Video.google.com burst onto the scene earlier this year and things never looked better for video blogging.
Now that I’m in the advertising industry, I wanted to re-look into TV commercial blogs. There were none. Advertising blogs up till now focused on posters and press ads and photos of ambient media — cheap low-bandwidth-sucking images. One of the issues was that there was no reliable video hosting that was cheap enough for the lone enthusiast to afford. But with user-submission sites like Youtube and Google Video, fans of TV commercials now have free and reliable hosting resources to make highlight their favourite commercials.
So I made adblog.wordpress.com, a brand new TV commercial blog. It showcases the commercials that I like, culled from sites like thespecspot.com, viralx.com and adforum.com. The videos are hosted on these sites and I blog links to them. Or else, if I find the video on other sites, I upload them to Youtube. (Nice thing about Youtube and Google Video is that they generate thumbnails of the video from screenshots.)
There is so much TV commercial content floating all over the internet right now that I can post about four commercials a day and still have left over content for the following day. I hope you enjoy the commercials as much as I enjoy blogging about them.
RSS consultant needed
A friend and IM-collaborator, Eric Thom of RSSapplied.com, needs an RSS consultant and blogger immediately.
RSS Applied has been focused on the business opportunities presented by RSS and Weblogs for years, and we’re ready to bring another person onboard. This position will involve intense daily research focused on the latest RSS technology news, business blogging strategies, corporate communications, podcasting applications, as well as blog design and navigation.
All inquires should be addressed to manage@rssapplied.com
Zohoplanner.com
I’ve been playing around with Zohoplanner and I think I’m going to be using it more often to get things organised. It is an online interface that lets you create todo lists and make notes. There are a few things that I hope they will add later like a wiki like Schtuff.com has. (I love wikis. They’re just so easy to use and my MoinX desktop wiki has taken over as my favourite desktop publishing interface.) Zohoplanner also allows people to view your lists and notes, but it doesn’t have RSS feeds for updates.
What do you write for a small business blog
Particletree has an article on small business blogging making arguments for it. The article brings up the point that small businesses think that blogging is too time consuming. But I think they’d change their minds if they knew of the interesting and wide range of things they could blog about. For most people, blogging is synonymous with ranting and political monologues. Having a list of small-business-related topics (and examples of their execution) could fire up the imagination of small businesses and their motivation to blog. The Particletree article lists a few:
- Issues the company itself is dealing with
- New product ideas
- Marketing ideas
- Small business issues
- Practical tips
- References and links to other articles
But a blog is an interactive channel. So to this list I would add a few feedback ideas, thought sharing ideas and more. A blog is also not just a marketing channel, but also a channel to assert your expertise, a public relations channel and a relationship/trust building channel. So I could add a few more ideas to the list:
- Letters from readers/customers
- Solicitations for feedback on product issues
- Solicitations for feedback on marketing issues (RevenueRoundtable)
- Consumer/Customer meetups
- Reviews of related books/websites/articles (RevenueRoundtable)
- Industry/ethics issues (RevenueRoundtable)
- Social issues (SkyeCreative)
- Consumer issues (RevenueRoundtable)
- New products (DenaliFlavors)
- New press coverage (DenaliFlavors)
- Announcements of new clients
- Announcements of new locations/outlets
- Announcements of new employees
- Announcements of new partners or suppliers (SkyeCreative)
- Conferences and other upcoming events that business representatives will attend
- Customer/Service policy changes or new policy issues
- Case studies
Sorry I didn’t have time to find examples of all of the list. I’ll add more, but please feel free to suggest some. Links via PowerBlog Review.
The real top ten tips for blogging anonymously
As many of you know, Reporters without Borders released a PDF handbook about blogging for dissident bloggers. Actually a lot of it also deals with making a good blog, like the section about blogging ethics and search engine optimisation. Completely irrelevant. If I was blogging at risk, I think I would have more pressing concerns than getting my blog spidered by Google. My chief concern was the section about Blogging Anonymously by Ethan Zuckerman which contains a lot of shockingly bad (and sometimes unnecessary) advice for blogging anonymously. So, here’s the real top ten tips for blogging anonymously.
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Get a new email address from a free email host.
As anonymous as you think your own email address is, it is imperative to get a new one. Keep your real identity and your fake identity completely separate. Use your fake email address to open a new blogging account, don’t use a blogging account that was opened with your real email address. I recommend a service like Hotmail.com that does not require your real email to make an email confirmation for opening a new account. One thing Zuckerman did not mention is that you need to choose an email name that has nothing to do with your name or anything to do with you. No funny play on words or use of acronyms. Enough coincidences like that and you’ll be scuppered.
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Get a blogging account from a popular blog host.
Zuckerman made recommendations such as weblogs.us and seo-blog.org. Let’s get serious here. No disrespect to the guys who run those two hosting services, but I doubt they have the legal team like Yahoo, MSN or Google’s to back them up. You have to go for blog hosts that won’t crap their pants at the sight of a lawyer’s letter or the FBI at their door. Go for blogspot.com or livejournal.com or MSN Spaces. Accept no imitations.
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Blog from cybercafes
Library computers are public, but some libraries require a lending identity card to use their computers. Anything that suggests your identity is bad. Go for a crowded cybercafe always. Zuckerman’s advice on switching your cybercafes often is a good one. Never choose any that are near your place of work or place of residence. Never choose one in which you have membership privileges because they will have notes on you. Always choose one that’s crowded and popular at all times. And always choose a seat in the cafe with your back to the wall! If you can be observed posting to your blog, you’re scuppered. As far as any security expert is concerned, the key to figuring out who you are is figuring out which computer you use.
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Forget about anonymous proxies
Anonymous proxies don’t hide your identity. Even those that say they are “high anonymity” often are not. Do you want to trust a sysop to state the truth about his service when that service is for clandestine purposes? Anonymous proxies only make it difficult to make a direct trace to your computer, not impossible. And if the authorities already suspect which computer is being used to make blog posts, anonymous proxies won’t help. If you have to use an anonymous proxy, it means you are using the wrong computer. Always blog from popular public computers. Zuckerman’s suggestion that it can be safe to blog from your home with an anonymous proxy will earn you a knock at the door at midnight.
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Tell no one
Zuckerman’s advice to seek the aid of a computer expert is his second worst piece of advice. That computer expert is yet another person who can finger you. Tell no one. (And do I have to mention here that you shouldn’t keep any notes related to your blogging topics? Notes = evidence that can be used against you.)
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Onion-router schmonion-router
If you’re reading a handbook from Reporters without Borders on internet anonymity, you obviously don’t know anything about internet anonymity. Setting up an onion router compounds the problems of having to ask for help to set it up and putting too much trust in technology to hide yourself. If the authorities are going high-tech to find you, then go low-tech for protection. Tell no one and use popular public computers.
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Encryption: Are we still talking about that old hat?
Sure, you can follow Zuckerman’s advice and set up PGP encryption and post via email to a remailer to a blogging service like Blogger.com that allows posting via email. Does that promote your anonymity? Hell no. It only means that someone intercepting your email will have a hard time discovering its content. If they’re already intercepting your email, you’re living on borrowed time. This technique also gives you the false sense of security that you’re safe while blogging from your own computer. You’re most certainly not. Furthermore, the shadow of the email you sent can be used as evidence against you.
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Post via email
I am not saying that blogging via email is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a very very good idea. If you are being observed, a tell-tale sign of blogging is when you open up an obviously recognisable interface like Blogger.com’s. Blogging via email does not look like blogging at all. It looks like you are sending a supposedly harmless email. If you are using a blogging service that allows posting via email, set that up and don’t open the regular blogging interface. And make sure your email software keeps no traces in the “Sent” folder.
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Flush your cache
If you are using a web interface for blogging, flush your cache before you leave your seat as an added precaution. Caches are logs of the sites you visited and can remain in a public computer for several days. Flushing the cache removes traces of what sites you were at. Go to the Preferences of your browser, find the Security tab and click on Empty Cache. This is a good practice to have when using a public computer, even if you are not blogging at risk. This is not a fool-proof technique since deleted log files can sometimes be recovered. But used in conjunction with other precautions, the authorities will have a harder time finding stuff about you, especially when the authorities don’t have the special expertise needed to recover deleted caches.
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Don’t panic!
Be mindful of the force (and the authorities), but do not get paranoid or panic. The authorities are waiting for you to make a mistake and the chances of making one rise hundred-fold when you are out of your mind. If you think the authorities are close, test that assumption by changing your habits (like switching to a new cybercafe temporarily). In the movie Hunt for Red October, they called it a Crazy Ivan. Zig when they think you will zag.
The EFF has more real world tips on blogging anonymously.
Google blog search
Hot news this week: Google has launched a blog search tool. I think we were always expecting a blog: operator for the regular Google search site, which I think I would have liked better. But Google decided to come up with a separate engine. If they had decided on a new operator, then (given Google.com’s ubiquity) Technorati.com would have had something to worry about. So far all the other contenders like IceRocket.com and Blogpulse.com have nothing on Technorati because of either a lack of results, lateness or too many duplicates. For Google, it appears that their problem is too much spam and not quite as many results as Technorati. And one strange thing I noted was that Google blog search is getting a lot of results from RSS feeds. This means that if you are publishing only a partial content feed instead of a full content feed, you won’t be getting as many references as you should.
Google Blog search looks like a decent companion (I’m subscribing to both Technorati and Google RSS feeds of myself), but I wouldn’t be declaring the death of Technorati yet. What we need right now is a Google and Technorati side-by-side blog search comparison tool ala Yagoohoogle.
Tell me about your blog
If you read my blog and if you have a blog, tell me about it. I already have a short list of other bloggers who read my blog, but I got them mostly from comments and from blog-search tools like Technorati. I have a list called “Readers” in my RSS feed reader, but it’s still very thin and I’d like to boost it. So leave me a comment or write me an email. Thanks!
Techcrunch on how to pitch your dotcom
This is a great article from Techcruch on ten things that tech companies can do to get blogged. It’s Techcrunch’s wishlist directed at all the PR reps who keep sending them stuff. But it makes a lot of sense. Most tech entrepreneurs already get most of the points. The ones that they keep missing are points 7 and 8.
7. Be descriptive. Tell me what your product does immediately in crisp and interesting prose that is FOA (Free Of Acronyms). FaceBook is a social networking site for college students. Pandora is a music recommendation engine. See? I need more details down the road, but give me something to hold on to before you jump into the cool way you’ve implemented ajax into the FAQs, or whatever.
8. Tell a Story. Bloggers want to tell a story. Help them. Pandora is different because they break down music technically – interesting! 60% of FaceBook’s users log in daily – wow! Writely is allowing people to visualize a world without thick clients – big story!
Tech entrepreneurs always fall in love with their technology. I’ve been pitched ideas revolving around Ajax and Ruby before. But when I respond with “But how is it different from this-or-that dotcom? And why will this-or-that user segment prefer it?”, I always get blank stares and stammering. The things is, tech entrepreneurs almost never think about who will be using their software or how they will use them before they start building them. The key to success always lies with focusing on the users, not on the sexiness of the technology. It’s pure commonsense.
Display any Flickr photo collection on your website
This is a really nice script that displays photos from any Flickr.com RSS feed on your website.
Lifehacker.com went from Nice! to Sucks!
This is probably news of no importance, but I’ve decided to unsubscribe from Lifehacker.com’s RSS feed. It just got too intrusive for me with its “link optimisation”. I can’t stand that:
- It has a del.icio.us-type link post every day, not for one topic but for several. There’s “News”, “Ask Metafilter” and now “Ask Slashdot”. Listen, I’m here for lifehacks. Hello, that’s what your site is called. If I wanted that other stuff, I’d subscribe to their feeds. I don’t need it from you too.
- On top of those link posts, Lifehacker.com also does a link post on its own posts! What am I, a five year old child? I need to be reminded twice about everything?
- It’s even doing a weekly post about its advertisers. Talk about intrusive advertising! I don’t mind if they link to their advertisers within their own posts, especially if the advertisers have relevant products or services. But blatantly making a “Sponsor” post is just too much.
- I think it all started with a directive to cross-sell the other blogs in the Gawker Media empire. I can’t stand that either. If I was interested in cars or celebrities, don’t you think I’m smart enough to subscribe to those feeds. I mean, those blogs are popular and prominent enough that they’re all topic leaders in their fields. But the point is: they’re not relevant to lifehacks so why are they on Lifehacker.com?.
- I get ten posts from you and only five are actual lifehacks. What happened? I got bait-and-switched, that’s what happened.
It’s gotten to the point where nearly none of the posts on Lifehacker.com interests me. Half of them aren’t real posts — they’re meta-posts. In any case, if it does turn out that any of Lifehacker.com’s posts are of any real value, they end up on popu.li.cious and I still get to see them anyway. So long, Lifehacker.com!
Researching a client’s brands online
Yesterday I touched on the topic of studying a company to make it inscrutable. That’s just one of the reasons I always conduct secondary research (research through the internet and other publications) on all my clients. What I look out for is brand impressions — anything that people think is important enough about a company, its products or its employees to mention. Some of the other reasons include:
- Understanding their marketing history and promotion efforts — because their target audience might remember what messages they sent out before
- Finding out what other people make of the company, the people who work in it and their products
- Finding out who are the stakeholders — people who have interest in the company or its products — and why they have an interest in them
I have a basic checklist of things I do when I conduct secondary research. For dotcoms, I only do internet research and never bother with paper publications, although I do always ask clients if anyone has written anything about them. You might find this checklist of sites useful since I’m not the only one who uses these techniques. I run all the searches for the company’s name, its website, the brand names for its products and the main people behind the company and the people in the development team. (Incidentally, I also run the same searches for each one of the client’s most prominent competitors.)
- Google.com — I only scan up to 200 entries unless a lot as been written about the company.
- Bloglines.com and Technorati.com — I look out for references in user blogs as well as industry blogs and employee blogs. Regarding employee blogs, I’m not really interested in them except for getting their impressions of the products and the company they work for and how popular their blogs are.
- Findarticles.com — I scan for references in the more popular web versions of industry publications.
- Whois.sc — I look up whose name is on the domain registration. Sometimes its important to make it anonymous but have the contact details correct.
- Urltrends.com — I check the number of incoming links and website prominence to compare with their competitors.
I don’t build a dossier on everything or on everyone. But I do make notes. It’s not important for me to bring up everything I find. Sometimes they just aren’t relevant to my branding objectives. But I do need to know who is thinking what so that I can segment the market accurately into primary audiences and secondary audiences — groups of people to whom I need to allocate my branding budget. Everything is really all about the money and how I spend it. But that’s a topic for another day.
Skype robot that creates an underaged-girl “user” as a perv honeypot
This is brilliant. This programme makes a robot for Skype that looks like a girl — with automated responses and even an attractive photo. The software author also put up logs of a previous conversation that the robot had with an unsuspecting victim who propositioned the “user”.
A profile is put up with a girl’s name and picture, and put in “Skype me” mode. Within minutes some seedy guy will invariably try calling/chatting, and there’s a little program I made running the whole time which will partner up people 2 at a time, and send messages from the first person to the second, & vice versa. This way both people think they’re talking to a girl.