Overwhelmed by a long blog reading list

Adam Green brings up the point of whether there is such a thing as too long a reading list on blogs. I struggled with this when I put up my blog and ended up paring down my original favorite blog list to 6 blogs that I visit on a daily basis. I also have links to Michigan and the BIT 742 bloggers and I worry that I have so many blog links that the average visitor ends up ignoring all of them; as seems to be the case after looking at traffic heading out of my blog. Any comments from the visitors?

I have a much longer personal blog reading list at bloglines in case anyone is interested. Of these blogs, I read some on a daily basis but most on a weekly or sometimes even monthly basis.

Cocomment is now ready for its close-up

Just a quick note; Cocomment is now out of beta and at your disposal. Enjoy!

Beating the odds and becoming an A-list blogger: The 7 tips

Robert Scoble posts some tips on becoming an A-lister in a post here. Some of his tips were also covered by Prof. Gibson in class last week and I’ve slowly begun to adopt them. Here’s the crux:

1. Make the post headline colorful along with being informative.

2. Post pictures and videos.

3. Keep the layout clean and use graphics and screenshots. Sort of a corollary to #2.

4.  Make sure the blog tagline has personality and says something about you.

5. Use tons of tags for each post and tag with context.

6.  Engage other bloggers and link to them.

7. Post frequently and on topic.

Stanford Credibility Analysis

Following Greg’s lead, I’m posting the Stanford Web Credibility analysis of my blog:

1. Most of my posts are choc-a-bloc with links and so it’s easy to verify their accuracy. I also use a wide range of sources so as to balance out biases.

2. All conspiracy theories aside, there is no organization behind my blog. This is a personal blog and will resolutely remain so.

3. I don’t know if I can claim to be an expert in corporate strategy or marketing. I am however an expert in curiosity in these areas and hope to reflect the same through my blog. I don’t quite know where to rank myself on this metric.

4. It is fairly obvious that I am the real person behind this blog. Posting my mug in the ‘About’ section might help increase the score some more and I’ll think about it.

5.  I have contact information in the ‘About’ section and I’m quite content to keep it there.

6.  I’ve tried to keep the design as clean and professional as possible. The color scheme reflects my support for the Wolverines. The focus is on presenting useful information without overwhelming the visitor.

7. I have categories spelled out clearly on the left pane and I post a ton of links through my del.icio.us account feed.

8. I’ve been better about posting regularly in the last two weeks and plan to update the blog at least five times a week and that is without counting the daily posting of links.

9. No ads.

10. I spell-check my postings and fastidiously try avoid any spelling errors.

Newsmashing and a cool Greasemonkey script

I come across tons of interesting articles through the course of my day and often add links to many of these on del.icio.us. Often though in addition to bookmarking these articles, I also want to highlight and add annotations so I can remember specific portions, especially if I plan to blog about any of these articles. From an article on Slate, I discovered this phenomenon when conducted on the original article web page is called newsmashing. As you can imagine there are several technical and legal implications to this trend and I for one haven’t noticed it catching on in quite the fashion that the Slate article predicts. There is however an elegant bookmarklet and Greasemonkey script out there that allows you to see what other users on del.icio.us are saying about the article that you’re browsing. I’ve been using the greasemonkey script all day today and it’s pretty cool. You can find more details here.

Also, earlier today I got into the mag.nolia beta and I’m looking forward to playing around with it and posting a review over the next few weeks. I’ve also been using Cocomment some as you may have noticed from my sidebar and have a favorable first impression. Hats off!

Joining Co-Comment Beta

Waiting in my email inbox this afternoon was an invitation code for Co-comment. I posted about this yesterday and it seems like the Co-comment beta fairy was paying attention and granted my wish. I’ve added the Co-comment widget to the left sidebar and will be posting a review of this service in a week or two. Watch out fellow BIT742’ers, I’m about to become a commenting machine.

Blogs, comments and a new service

In class today, a cohort brought up the tedium of posting and then following comments on different sites. I was thinking about that when I came across this post on Robert Scoble’s blog about the new blog comments service Co-comment. Co-comment captures comments through a browser bookmarklet as you post them on individual blogs and then aggregates them to a portal. The service then lets you add comments that you’ve left on other blogs to your own blog and also provides an RSS feed for your to follow comments through a blog aggregator. Co-comment is in closed beta and I’m eagerly awaiting its open launch so I can play around with it. You can sign up for notification of its opening here.

The notion of a conversational index for gauging blog popularity

I came across this post by Stowe Boyd through tech.memeorandom. I think Steve makes an interesting point about the importance of blogs as devices of conversation and I like his idea of a conversational index (CI). CI is the ratio of posts to comments+trackbacks and is a metric of tracking blog popularity and the number of conversations it sparks. The lower the CI, the higher the popularity of the blog and seemingly the more relevant the posting. Of course, if you’re posting, you don’t need a ton of visitors to get a low CI, you just need a loyal cadre of visitors and posters.

There’s a business opportunity to extract the CI from a blog and augment search results in blog search engines or even make one from scratch. I bet the folks at Google and Technorati are evaluating this option as we speak.

Blog business objective

I’ve been thinking about what I want the business purpose of this blog to be and here’s what I have so far:

1. This blog will be about the application of corporate strategy and marketing to technology. I may stray every now and then into pop culture or current affairs but only for good reason (of course).

2. I’ve been forwarding articles with my comments to friends for a while now and it would be cool if I could transfer that process over to this blog and get a conversation going.

3. If I stick to it, just getting comfortable with the discipline of posting every day will be an achievement. I’ve always read frequency and relevance make a blog go places – I hope to have at least one of the two down.

4. To be determined – I’m still thinking of what else I want to do with this blog and a lot will depend on the direction my team decides to take with the group project. Stay tuned.

Power Blogging Tools

There are several tools out there that make the process of blogging easy and fun. I’ve been playing around with some of these tools and I like the following:

1. Bloglines.com : A blog feed aggregator that I’ve used for the last two years or so. It helps me follow my 60+ blog subscriptions easily in one location.
2. The del.icio.us Firefox extension: Makes the process of posting links on del.icio.us a breeze. Highly recommended!
3. The Performancing Firefox extension: I’ve been playing around with this a little bit. Once you have it set up, it eliminates the need to open Typepad in your browser to post. Seems promising.

If you do try these out, please let me know your thoughts. Happy blogging!