A plea for integration rather than separation, from Google Blogoscoped:

Yahoo’s new Site Explorer shows which pages are indexed from a specific domain, and which backlinks point to the domain. I’m a bit underwhelmed by what I see – couldn’t they just allow [site:] and [link:] operators in their web search?

See Yahoo Site Explorer

Filed in: search, yahoo, webtech

Adam Hertz has posted an update that may explain the crazy ranking flip that's happened here (and elsewhere, in a less crazy way...) Apparently the service will now focus on recent activity & current buzz,... so those 500 links from that election rant you wrote in 2000 won't guarantee you an exalted place in the rankings any more.....

Looks like ranking will be based on 6 month's worth of buzz, while a complete list of inbounds will still be available from the URL search.

My (almost exactly) 6 month's worth of buzz seems to have been worth a good deal...., so a tip of the hat to readers, subscribers, & most especially to linkers!!

Technorati Weblog: :

For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.

The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.

Filed in: technorati, search, blogsearch

Wow... there's really ninety-three? Ouch. Here's the scoop from ProBlogger:

Steve Rubel points to a useful resource over at seomoz on Search Engine Ranking Factors which is one of the better descriptions of how Search Engines rank pages that I’ve seen recently. It lists 93 factors to keep in mind. Sounds like a lot to remember - so luckily they’ve arranged them into different levels of importance....

A 93-point site makeover? We'd be working all week!!

Filed in: search, blogtech, webtech, blogsearch

This strikes me as very cool indeed. Rollyo is a search engine that lets you "roll your own" searches. Each searchroll will index 25 sites of your choice & you can have an unlimited number of searchrolls. What a great tool for focussed and reliable results. It will only look at sites that you've already decided are relevant & useful to you.

Want to break out your blogroll by topic & see what's new easily & quickly?
Want to check in with a topic that you don't keep on top of 24/7?

Browse the lists that are already on Rollyo, or roll your own search today.

via BoingBoing

Filed in: search webtech

GahooYoogle, a simultaneous search of two of the major engines. Interesting both for the differences in results & for the pace of the feedback.

Via Feedblog.

Philipp at Google Blogoscoped points up the "snake eating it's own tail" flaws in the system that make it hard to take Google's anti-splog battle seriously. The system digests itself, & we're simply the reflux.

Maybe Google Inc is or was* merely naive when it comes to splogs. They allow one-click publishing (Blogger.com), one-click content aggregation (Google News alerts), and easy, context-sensitive advertising on top (AdSense). Some blogs even use Google Alerts hooked up to Blogger’s blog-by-email functionality to let Google be the author (you’ll recognize one of those blogs when you see them because they contain “unsubscribe” links within posts – that’s right, you can help destroy such blog by unsubscribing its alerts).

Somehow this circle has to be broken, or is splog generation the optimum use of google blogger? Has the system found its perfect expression in the blogs that Philipp links to?

Randy reports that it's all about finding new links. That sounds about right. Let's see how long it takes the various engines to find this link.

When Google blog search was released, I was amazed how much better it was then the other engines. Since then, Technorati has improved, IceRocket has improved and maybe now we have a four-way challenge with Bloglines (the best last month) and Google (the newcomer). Let's start it again.

gets a first-hand positive review at Blogger Templates.

Blogger is quick to say "This feature is not guaranteed to work every time you lose a post, but it's always worth a shot."

Beyond that, you can read more about Blogger's Recover Post feature.

Good to hear that it works & is a useful addition....

So for once I'm not going to complain at Technorati's comedy results. Instead, for the few moments 'til they fix it, I'm going to experience the rush that comes when you're the lord high king of the bloggers...

* Last updated 3 minutes ago
* By John
* Technorati Rank: 8,530 (377 links from 139 sites)

So in some crazy parallel universe where every inbound gets counted 3 times, I broke the top 10,000. Spectacular!!

(maybe in this parallel universe I should get some adsense!!)

Update 9/28: Maybe this is permanent? Other blogs are definitely affected....

Greg, who blogs at both Vent & Speccy, has upgraded the category drop-down form with a javascript that adds a post-count for each category, showing the relative importance of each & giving the reader some idea of what they're getting into. He's also using a great footer that shows the number of posts in categories next to each del.icio.us tag. Pretty cool. He promises a how-to soon, (to which I promise to link, if that's any incentive...) but in the meantime suggests a view-source & crib approach. This may be harder than it looks.....

Jeremy at SEOMix confirms that the page title hack that flips the order of post title & site name will be beneficial for post-pages trying to bubble up in search results. His ultimate implementation involves the dropping of the site name from post-page titles altogether. So that's the next question. How important is the brand? (not very important if no-one can find it, I guess....)

Thanks for the input, Jeremy, & for copying me on the conversation.

Want to edit the comments on your blog? There's a Greasemonkey Script that can help. Dunpanic's script is hosted at Userscripts.org & "adds a comment edit link beside the trash can icon in the comment view for the author." This, we like. I have yet to test it, but it certainly promises to add a significant & missing function....

...& oh, BTW, Choongyong's blog looks v. interesting too.

Update: Edited for accuracy in response to Dunpanic's comment. Thanks for the feedback, & sorry for the error!!

For those of you who are artistically / buttonally inclined, here's the code for linking in with the new spiffy button:


<a href="http://blogfresh.blogspot.com"><img src="http://www.geocities.com/jrfj44/freshblogbutton_red.php.png"></a>

so maybe I should offer one? See The RSS Blog for the scoop.

Update: Have added R|Mail subscription service to this blog. Thanks to Randy @ KBCafe.

Hosting the sites and placing the ads.... right hand needs to watch the left hand a little more?

Business Week:

Google sits at the center of the spam-blog universe, and with its new search engine, this could get worse. Here's why. Google already runs the biggest free blogging service in the world, Blogger. Since it's free, easy and popular, Blogger unwittingly hosts loads of the spam blogs. Google also operates the largest automatic ad-placement service, AdSense. That provides much of the revenue for spam blogs. And you can bet that the spammers are already gaming their blogs to climb toward the top of Google's new blog search.

The good news: Now that Google is in the middle of the spamosphere, perhaps it will focus its prodigious brainpower into vanquishing the spam bots and their pollution. For now, though, Google's entrée into blog search doesn't change much. I'll be using the engine from time to time, especially its useful tool to find relevant blogs. But even with Google in the mix, blog search is still very much a work in progress.

via Micropersuasion

Jason Calacanis wonders whether there's a way to add a one-click "add-to-google" link to your sidebar. I'd like that too, so if you know how to make it happen & are willing to share your solution, that would be great!!

Is it Google or is it Blogger Templates?

Thanks, blogger templates, for the link & for the boost in incoming traffic for my blogger hacks post. Much appreciated. Have a subscription for your trouble!!

As a follow up to last week's rant about page titles, many thanks to Fritz at Cycle.icio.us for the best hack yet (I hope...)

Use that multi-purpose <$blogpagetitle> smart tag in your template? Have you ever wanted to mess with your page titles? Turns out that main & archive page conditional tags are valid in the head of your template as well as in the body. This means that you can replace the smart tag with a string that might work a little harder for you in the world o' the search engines. For instance... I read a couple of posts the other week about site name decreasing keyword relevance in page titles, & went off on a "how do you mess with that" rant. With Fritz's hack, you can omit the site name from your post pages completely or flip it to the back of the line. You can also expand the main page title with a bit of juicy content description.

How, I hear you cry?

Simply switch the existing page title string (probably <title><$blogpagetitle$></title> ) for this wonderful block of artfully combined blogger tags:

<head>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<title>Sitename: Site Description</title>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<BlogItemTitle>
<title>
<$BlogItemTitle$> - Sitename Optional
</title>
</BlogItemTitle>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>

then edit the plain text to suit your site. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that the conditional tags might be valid in the head as well as the body... I'm certainly glad that it occurred to Fritz!! Many Thanks!!

See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series
Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging blogger-hacks SEO

After letting us get in free for their 10th birthday, Opera decided that the buzz from giving stuff away was just so great that from now on they're free every day. More browsers...

See also: Ibt4Im, Zoli's Blog, Google Blogoscoped

& use a keyword search in Bloogle to substitute for categories: orangewise has the scoop:

Check my categories on the right to see what I've done. Search your own URL any other keyword(s). No need for tagging your blog or re-tagging.

Of course, in a desperate attempt to retain my audience as my workarounds become irrelevant, I would continue to argue that the increased traffic & exposure from tagging makes it worth the extra effort to use del.icio.us ;-)

Filed In: , categories, blogger, blogspot, google, search, blogsearch

Another great category method from Virtual Scratchpad: :

I decided to rely on Blogger's built-in search engine to create the categories. That way, if people can read your blog, they can use your categories. Plus, you can have as many as you like without worrying about organization.

**Update: These keywords do have the rel="tag" attribute & will be detected by technorati tags search. I mistakenly suggested otherwise**

Downside: Your posts won't be listed on Del.icio.us.

Upside: You don't have to bookmark your posts anywhere.... Just write them, paste in the code, and publish.

Great work!! More straightforward than the other methods explored here. Interesting!! Anyone want to Greasemonkey this up so that we have a script that generates bloogle keywords? (I'll look into it.....)

Filed In: categories, blogger, blogspot, google, search, blogsearch

already?

Fritz at RedMountain is of the opinion that Google BlogSearch is already able to execute a tag search, using the tag: modifier. As he points out, they'll have a hard time finding tags at the end of posts from any blog that publishes a partial feed, since the feed will snip the tags. Another incentive for bloggers to publish full feeds!!

On a related matter: I have not been able to properly duplicate this experiment since I found that this blog was set to publish a partial feed in atom, which probably means that the feedburner feed that is set for full publication was only pulling a partial feed as it's source & so wasn't doing what I thought it was doing. I switched it up to full feed & hopefully you'll see more Freshblog goodies in your feedreaders, & google blogsearch will see my tags, & I will be able to duplicate this discovery as soon as Freshblog's been crawled.

While we wait, anyone who would care to re-create Fritz's experiment, & thusly expose one of the surprises that we have coming when blogsearch gets out of beta, should please post their experiences & results in the comments!!

Oh, and hey, publish a full feed already, would you? ;-)

Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging tags tagging

Hey... I'm blogger of the day at I Blog Therefore I Am. Thanks, Randy!! Cool idea for a series.

Have been thinking of starting my own series for a while, & here it is: What's the best blog I'm not reading?

Some reasons that I could be persuaded to read another blog:

1. content
2. theme / topic
   
3. style
4. timeliness / relevance
5. connection to the blogosphere (links / responses / conversations)
   

So what's the best blog I'm not reading? Could be your blog, could be a blog you never miss. Use my hopelessly dated contact form to e-mail me with a tip, & I'll post responses here with a link to both the nominator & nominated blogs.

according to Jonah Chanticleer.

I'm using Safari, and it appears to work, but it might not be . . . wait a sec. (laughing) Okay, it was forcing me to type the text in this tiny, single line text box-- and then after a long period (Downloaded 14 of 15 items, etc.) it suddenly expanded the text box to match the space of the dialog box. In other words, it's a blogger/safari issue, not an XBlogThis issue.

By extension (no pun intended) I guess that means that categorytagblogthis and delicioustagblogthis will work in Safari too. I downloaded Opera the other day (when they were giving it away for free on their birthday...) Maybe I should try it in there too.

Filed in: delicious blogtech tags tagging blogger blogthis firefox safari

Accessing the google cache to find the missing blog maverick post this morning reminded me of last week's 365 tomorrows entry, the 9 billion names of god.

It started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?”

“It’s still a part of the internet, though.”

“No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.”

The man had a point.

How big is the cache? Is it big enough that the "live" internet is only a part of it? Hmmmm.

While we're asking for stuff from Blogger / Google.... My posts are very hard to find using regular search engines unless I include the title of this blog. Am I correct in thinking that the blog name in the post-page title decreases the relevance of the post title / keyword itself? Would I be better placed if the site name didn't appear in post page titles?

Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging

Have been thinking about rankings since I commented that their absence from Google did not seem too critical to me, & I've changed my mind.... I don't care so much whether or not this blog has a ranking, but the other way I use rankings on Technorati is to determine the significance of my new inbound links & their potential for bringing me new traffic.... so sure, Google, add a ranking system & help me to get a sense of my inbounds.....

Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging blogtech inbounds icerocket technorati

Darren has put up a survey in the sidebar at Problogger to ask his readers what sort of information they'd like to see there....

I’ve chosen 9 of the topics that I regularly get questions on from readers. While the result of the poll may be that all are selected equally (you can choose as many as you like but can only vote once), I’d love to get a sense of what the felt needs of readers are at present.

Check out the results. I'm pleased to see that currently there are more votes for building readership & writing content than for making money / optimising ads. Let's face it.... a blog should be about content, & 'til there are regular & committed readers (audience) there's no-one to sell anything to with the ads.

Yesterday (Icerocket responds to Google, below...) I linked to Mark Cuban's Blog Maverick post welcoming Google to the blogsearch world. I linked from a bookmark that I made when I read the post in my feedreader... then I had dinner, combed my hair....

Anyway... long story short... the post isn't there any more. I don't know whether Mr Cuban decided to pursue another PR strategy, thought the post wasn't the best way to go, or took exception to the comments. 'tis gone, though.

Except (oh, the irony) that Google has a cache of the page. Please accept this as evidence that I am not going barking mad and did not imagine this post, & do not routinely slap broken links up on Freshblog.

As I implied yesterday, the spirit of the post ("we don't need to be #1, we just need to be in the game") is what has me hooked on this conversation, as does the notion that in order to stay in the game, existing blogsearch services will have to continue to innovate, perhaps even at an accellerated pace. This is all v. interesting.... all the more so when parts of the conversation disappear!!

Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging blogtech inbounds icerocket technorati

Micropersuasion points to Lifehacker, where there's a discussion of ways to find quality podcasts.

While iTunes works on getting its act together, here are a few resources for you to use. My favorite has to be the Technorati “podcast review” watchlist. It’s exactly what you expect—a list of recent blog updates that include podcast reviews. Lots of content from many providers, and a great way to find something fun to listen to.

I also stopped by PodCastReviews.net and was pleased to find a lot of throughtful podcast reviews. Unfortunately, their XML seems to be broken (at least it was on Safari) and I couldn’t access their archives or their RSS feed. (If you can figure it out, let me know. Send me an email at Erica at Lifehacker.com.)

Finally, Yahoo hosts a Podcast Review e-mail group.

All good stuff. I imagine that a number of other sites & services will emerge to allow listeners to rank & search....

Cuban a la Sifry, with a "hey look what we do that they don't, welcome to the marketplace" sort of a thing.... I'm not sure what I think of this as a marketing strategy / response to Google's launch. I guess time will tell how the market shapes up & whether a single engine emerges as the preferred tool of blog readers. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that existing services will need to innovate / distinguish themselves with unique tools in order to maintain interest. Tags / focussed topic searches are unique right now, but the rel="tag" attribute isn't a secret...

Update: Mark Cuban's post has vanished.

Filed In: google blogger search blogsearch blogging blogtech inbounds icerocket technorati

A reader sent Darren at Problogger a favicon for his site.

Today I had a nice surprise waiting for me in my inbox - an email from Tiago who had kindly taken it upon himself to design me a favicon for my blog in thanks for the advice I’d given him and others through this blog.

Check out his post & the comments for the scoop on favicons. See also Freshblog: Graphics.

Filed in: blogger blogging blogtech blogger-hacks how-to design images favicon webtech

Technoogle: "I think that Google has doubled the usual number of hits per day and the day hasn’t even finished yet, it certainly directed more visitors to my blog than Technorati normally do in whole week.

So thank you Google, for creating blog search engine, and I add my voice to Jason in asking you to put blog search on the main page next to Web and before Images."

Agreed!! Google was always the #1 main page referrer here, but I think the numbers are going up. We'll see what this week's stats report looks like....

Filed In: google, blogger, search, blogsearch, blogging, blogtech, inbounds

Graham & Clint have written and edited a script to output tags that are valid keywords within the "life with christ" blogging system as well as generating valid technorati tags. The process of fine-tuning is visible in the comments, & they'd like to tune even more finely to have one bookmarklet output their blog-service specific category keywords with a rel="tag" attribute, but the LWC search URL won't let them. See Kernel of a Journal for the construction & launch of the bookmarklet.

Filed in: tags, tagging, categories, technorati, blogging, blogtech

There's talk that the key component missing from Google Blog Search is Rankings. I use technorati ranking as a measure of how much buzz there's been here this week relative to the whole (how many points have I gone up / down?) but the whole ranking thing isn't too helpful, especially when the cosmos search shows the new links but the ranking doesn't update.... In fact Technorati's "tag your whole blog" service (& the resulting micro-spheres) could be used to illustrate the irrelevance of the macro-sphere for navigation purposes. I don't want to find blog 14, 562 (no offense, whoever you are...) but I do want to find other bloggers who write about the stuff I write about. In fact, I found Alexandra Samuel (recently subscribed) through a technorati blog tag search for del.icio.us.

pause....breathe....sip.....

What has this got to do with Google Search? Rob Cottingham's article views the absence of tags, crucial to creating micro-spheres of interest, as the most critical gap in the new service. Not surprisingly, I agree!! I hope that supported tags are coming, though, both for google blog search and for blogspot blogs. How great would that be? The addition of tag search capacity could be a further huge step forward in traffic & interest.

via alexandrasamuel.com

Filed in: google, blogger, search, blogsearch, blogging, blogtech, inbounds

This week's round up (who am I kidding... it's been a while since I ran the list.) Here, anyway, are the recent converts:

• Open Switch
• Mountains of Kaf
• A Wilshirite's Tale
• The Best Damn Tech Stock Blog
• Little Hand on the 8
• Wilson's Blogmanac
• Sprittibee

There are also some categorised posts at Postcards from the Mothership.
I wonder how many of us there are now? Hang on, & I'll count....

... I have linked back to 32 blogs that are using the categories for del.icio.us hack since May 27 '05.

Filed in: inbounds categories

Google's new blog search service, (apparently now to be called Bloogle for evermore) is pushing bloggers to clarify their thinking, make decisions and articulate thoughts on the blogosphere that go beyond simple searching. There's a welcome glut of good stuff out there today. Examples:

Zoli's blog: "Unless your blog is all about ad-revenue generation, in which case you need to attract readers to your site, there is no reason to not serve up the entire post in your feed. It’s really simple: in this world of infoglut either you make reading your blog convenient, or expect to lose subscribers who are fed up with clicking and waiting. Submitting a ‘bait’ in your feed defeats the purpose of RSS Readers."

Bloogle reads feeds to build your search results, so do you lose out with a snipped feed?

Micropersuasion: Testblogging without a full feed (and with a mighty creative unique keyword) to see which engines see the post & whether the snipped feed is a problem for bloogle.

A Welsh View: Finds a few splogs, but appreciates the simplicity. (Are you listening, Blogpulse?)

The RSS Blog: Randy compares technorati & google search for responsiveness, timeliness & coverage, & decides that the new service "kicks ass!" Seems like a reasonable conclusion. Think about how cool it'll be when they iron out the beta & dress it up in a fancy new suit in 6 weeks....

Scripting News: Links to a blogger who caught the google crawler in the act, questions the page-ranking / relevance results of the new service, wonders how good the engine is at finding posts without titles.... (How good is a reader at finding posts without titles...)

Dave Sifry (cross posted on Technorati) welcomes the competition while pointing up all the things that Technorati can do that the new Google Search can't. Of course, this now becomes a "to-do-list" for the bloogle dev. team, & is probably pinned on the inside of someone's cubby right now. "Check, check, check..."

Jason Calacanis sees the big picture, & blogs on the potential increase in traffic that will come when this gets out of beta:

When Google puts blog search on the home page traffic to blogs—all blogs—will double or triple. In the case of smaller blogs it might grow 100x. We’re half way there folks… all we need now is for Google to put it on the homepage and blogs will take their seat at the big table: right between the web search and news search. Normal folks will be on the same level as MSM. That is what this about when it comes down to it: equality.

This last struck me the most. We've all posted about our blog-world comparisons between this & that, & whether to have full feeds or partial feeds. These are all valid questions, but the idea that this service might herald a broader horizon for blogs suggests new & expansive possibilities....

Filed In: google, blogger, search, blogsearch, blogging, blogtech, inbounds

Blogger Buzz unveils "the new Blog Search (which searches more than just Blogger). Type in a word or phrase to see people talk about it, or type in a URL to see people link to it. We’ve moved Blogs of Note from the depths of the dashboard to front-and-center, so you can see our selection of the most interesting Blogger blogs in zippy, side-scrolling goodness."

So some of the "zippy, side-scrolling goodness" wasn't working too well for me in Firefox this morning, but that's OK. Here's another search tool for us to enjoy.

There's a pretty darn groovy feature I wanted to highlight. When your search results (for a keyword, say) display a post that has inbound links, you'll see a "references" link next to the name of the author, & you can jump straight to the cosmos for that post.

How long 'til supported tagging? Soon, I think?.....

Update: The RSS Blog has a round-up of this morning's reaction, & concludes that "everybody else is dead." There is, at the very least, a new sheriff in town... and his badge is very shiny!!

Here also is the FAQ for the new service.

Filed In: google, blogger, search, blogsearch, blogging, blogtech, inbounds

for the new feedburner feed....

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:3edef2d7105f6f2e61b9efe874b2b229

Hey... do you think blogger could set up a one-time "insert this link into your blog" anti-splog device (too much work for the average multi-blog owning splogger?)

Hey, again... do you think that google sitemaps could have verification that operates this way?

GTD Wannabe deserves a medal, lauds and general good-buzz for this very cool word macro that adds technorati tags without having to open a browser.

When I was creating offline posts, I was actually opening my browser in order to use the first bookmarklet. It was inconvenient, but was a reasonably quick way to create the appropriate html snippet, which I then pasted back into my Word document. However, I decided that I could duplicate the functionality of this tag by creating a Word macro. How hard could it be? I would just have to parse a string input by the user (me), massage it a bit, and then spit it back out.

What this doesn't do (yet) is allow for one-click posting to del.icio.us, so the browser still has to be opened and the bookmarklet on the toolbar made use of. A challenge, gentle reader. Can we crack the posting to del.icio.us in word too?

Filed in: delicious folksonomy blogtech categories technorati tags tagging blogger blogger-for-word how-to blogger-hacks

I'm blacklisted for being objectionable! Hmmmm!!

Hold it right there!! You have been blacklisted ! This is not because of the frequency of the pings, but due to the possible objectionable nature of the blog. If you believe this is an error, please quickly post on the forum or drop me a mail to get it resolved. And before you get mad at pingoat, please read this!

I'm not mad, pingoat, I'm just using kingping!!

Here's my request to be returned to the land of the kosher blogs. Let's see if there's a good reply in a reasonable time..

Update: Resolved in 12 hrs. No sense of why the blacklist in the first place. What makes freshblog look like a splog? (other than the URL, of course... ha-ha!!)

Chicago Sun-Times: "Nearly 70,000 publishers use FeedBurner, ranging from Chicago-based Coudal Partners, an advertising, design and interactive firm, to VNU Business Media in Europe, a global media company and parent of ACNielsen, Billboard and other major brands...." A history of Feedburner & the state of the service. via the RSS Blog.

Filed in: blogging blogger feeds feedburner blogtech webtech

BlogHerald explores the ettiquette of membership in the blogosphere.

“Treat others as you would like to be treated in terms of referencing and links, we all love links and sure, I tend to be generous with them, but I’m generous with links because I want to be linked back, and its certainly doing ok for me so far. Be stingy with links and you’ll find that you won’t get as many links in return. ”

A commenter draws a useful distinction between references and links.... References suggesting a certain quality in the original material.... Either way: Be generous with your attributions and you shall be rewarded...

See also Duncan's expanded guide to blog referencing.

Piaras Kelly with 12 annotated tips for quality blog content. Here's the brief versions:

1. Use catchy titles
2. Be unique
3. Make sure to credit your sources
4. Think before you post
5. Stay on topic
6. Link, it’s polite
7. Be conversational in tone
8. Respond to comments
9. When to post
10. Be controversial
11. Blogging is not email
12. Assuming makes an ass out of u and me

Check out the expanded versions for the scoop. via RSS Blog & Micropersuasion.

Mo's Musings:

England Won! The cricket that is. The Ashes to be more precise. England have regained the Ashes after 18 years. There are a lot of very happy Englishmen (and women) tonight. And a lot of very disappointed Australians.

The English victory will be celebrated tomorrow with an open-top bus procession from Mansion House in the City of London to Trafalgar Square.

See also BBC Sport, where I particularly like the reference to Andrew Flintoff "soaking up the atmosphere"... I think if he soaked up any more atmosphere he'd fall over.....

Filed in: sports, cricket, ashes, australia

If you're into blogs & sci-fi, and new ways of making the medium work for you, check out 365 tomorrows, which comes to Freshblog via Boing Boing:

365 Tomorrows is a groupblog of sci-fi writers who are uploading an original piece of short speculative fiction every day from August 1st '05 until the end of July '06

Filed in: sci-fi, webtech, fiction, entertainment

Thanks for the feedback... positive, negative and anti-crosshair!! I'm still tweaking. The crosshair is gone, as are a few of the scripts that I think I can live without (time will tell.....) although some of the slow ones (blogroll especially) have benefits that outweigh the downside of the load time. Am looking at the width of the columns too. I thought I had made it all relative w/ percent values instead of pixel values, but there must be a pixel in there somewhere that's setting the tone & popping the scrollbar for some of us....

In "that's plain wierd" territory, it seems that the last bit of the sidebar loads with a white font on post pages only.... making it sort of hard to read against the white background. Why only the post pages is something I'm checking in to... (like I have the first clue....) Otherwise, I like it, and it seems that you do too!!

Thanks again.

Filed in: freshblog blogtech webtech template blogger

So guess how I spent the weekend? I wanted something brighter, cleaner-looking, and I wanted a single sidebar, because the two-sidebar scenario was becoming disorganised and if I didn't know where to find stuff, why should I expect any readers to?

There may be minor design changes to come (font sizes etc.) If you find anything that doesn't work or looks funny, let me know, and if anyone can tell me how to get the text in the sidebar header-boxes to turn white, that would be great!! I tried, and it wasn't working for me....

Update your bookmarks to get the new cool favicon!!

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it. Now back to the content.....

Alright... not sure what I think of this concentrated rush at the splogs. The flag button's just the public face of a back-room clean-up, after all, and there's going to be a lot of sweaty folks with soda-can filled basements & cramping mouse-fingers at the end of whatever Saturday they choose for this...

Blog Herald: Ever wanted to try and knock out or damage your competition who use Google’s Blogger? Then Saturdays your day because thanks to a brainwave from Matt Haughey the mob is decending onto Blogspot blogs on a Saturday to be decided and flagging their hearts away at blogs they think might be spam blogs. If your writing on political topics or anything contentious as well watch out because the mob doesn’t care about collateral damage!

Ah, the mob and the collateral damage. This tool was poorly packaged from day one and has been resisted and rejected because of the potential for abuse. As I have said before, and as Michael says in the comments on Flag Day, the button should be about flagging splogs and not "objectionable content." This would present it as an objective tool to resolve a technical problem, rather than a subjective tool for tagging the opinions of your political opponents.

Flag Day is a noble effort, fellow soda-drinking click-happy basement dwellers, but the truth is that there's a limit to the contribution that users like us can make. The bulk of the work to kill these sites and their revenue-streaming ways has to come from Google & Blogger. As the previous post shows, they're making a start.

Duncan at BlogHerald closes his post by advising blogspot users to head for the hills. I'm not there yet, but I'm watching the horizon....

....through the tiny window in my basement.....

Looks like the next blog button has been fixified. (I haven't experimented myself, but Philipp at Google Blogoscoped has.)

Island Dave follows up on [the] analysis of the blog to splog (spam blog) ratio on Google’s Blogspot, and – as he now finds zero splogs upon checking 140 seemingly random blogs.

Sounds good. Maybe in tandem with the controversial flag button there's some changes being made? Have a bit of a click-through and let me know what you find!!

Update 9/9: Randy at the RSS Blog reports that the splog war has opened up on another front. As well as flagging & limiting the exposure of these suspect URL's, Google is pulling their adsense. No point in splogging if you can't get paid!!

Filed in: splogs spam blogspot blogger blogtech webtech

Pinging lets services that index blogs know that your site has been updated, and that they should take a fresh look at it. If you turn on the option, Blogger will automatically ping weblogs.com when you republish. There are many more indexes and engines trying to keep track of your prose now, though, and recently a number of ping tools have been created that let you increase the exposure of your site. These include:

• KingPing
• Pingoat
• Ping-o-Matic
• Ping my Blog

Pingoat seems to offer the widest range of destinations for your ping, and works quickly. Fred Giasson's KingPing is also worth a look. All these tools will let you bookmark the results page after you ping. For one-click repeat pinging, simply select the bookmark again.

Finally: I guess that when a few people were pinging, there was a comparative advantage in it for them, because their sites got crawled more often than the rest of us. I think the new advantage is in Google sitemaps. If you've set your site up to be crawled by the service, that's your new number one ping.

Filed in: pings webtech blogs blogging search

I have said previously that I am in no way to be confused with Mr Photoshop. I have the graphic-design abilities of a sleepy 2 year old. Here, then, are some tools that can help you to create unique graphics, and add those graphics to your blog even if you're artistically challenged.

Button Makers:

You may have noticed that there are two-tone buttons on every website in the entire world at this point, or so it appears. It's a good way to get a distinctive, uniform sized logo that other sites can use when they link back to you. For the largest collection of these I have yet encountered see Steal These Buttons, a repository for button-kind.

There are a number of sites that offer automatic button generation. They allow you to pick the color of each field, the color of the border, and the text to be displayed in each section.

• Adam Kalsey

• Brilliant Button Maker (allows the inclusion of images in your button)

• Yugatech.com (has a preview feature for looking up color hex codes)

When you've generated your button, you'll need to save it and upload it to the web, then link to it from your blogger account to show it on your template. If you're lucky enough to have your own server, you can of course store the image there.

Logo / Banner Makers:

Want more than the skinny button? Need an image that has real impact to introduce your blog? Check out these logo / banner makers. Limited design skills required, and quality output possible.

• Coolarchive logo generator (plenty of fonts, and the ability to preview & the go back to make changes)
• GRSites.com logo maker
• Logogle (make a google-style logo for your site. Probably not smart, copyright wise.)
  
• Iridescent Logo Maker
  

Favicon:

This is as close to hackery as this particular post is going to get. There's a bit of code for the head of your blog, but first you'll need an image. Check out these sites:

• Favicon from Pics (transforms an image into an icon)

• Favicon.co.uk (build an icon pixel-by-pixel, using their inline image builder)

Then see Wikipedia for the what / why / how.

Once you have an image, saved and uploaded to a webspace of your choice, the code for the head of your template is as follows:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />

Replace "example.com" with the URL of your webspace, & paste the code between the head tags of your blog. The favicon will appear in the address bar of the majority of browsers, and in the bookmark lists of people who bookmark your site. You'll be branded!!

I recommend picking a color scheme / font style &c, and then using these tools to develop a "house-style" for your blog. Try the tools out, & let me know how they work for you.

See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series

WSJ.com with a hard-copy comparison of some available blog search services:

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.

via Micropersuasion.

Filed in: search, blogs, blogging, blogtech

The blogger "flag" now has a blog all its own, a place for venting & discussion of the "objectionable content" button. I'll be interested to see how the conversation develops. As previously stated, I don't want my use of a blogspot URL to be something that limits the success of this blog.... (I've been limiting the success of this blog for years without any help from my URL!!) and so I'm pro the efforts to fight splog and to clean up the neighborhood. Al S. E. at bloggercensors, though, can see the potential for abuse of the button......

Filed in: splogs spam blogspot blogger blogtech webtech