BackType.com – The ‘twitter’ for comments
Ajith | | 19 Comments
BackType.com is a comment aggregator web service or even known as the twitter for comments. It came in to existence only a couple of months back and in my effort to find newer traffic generation mechanisms, I thought of taking a look at it and write about the same (Those who are experienced with BackType may find this post boring but please provide your experiences with the same)
What exactly is BackType?
As I mentioned, BackType aggregates all your blog comments – not just the ones on your blog, but other places as well – and keeps them indexed based on tags and in chronological order. Then they present it in a nice way that people can see this comment catalogue and can even follow comments, subscribe to alerts, reply to comments right there etc. They can even see on how many blogs you have been commenting on lately.
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Recent Blogging Trends
Ajith | | 29 Comments
In fact, today I wanted to talk about emerging blogging trends in a bigger post but due to lack of time, I am just sharing my (draft) thoughts on the trends as well as certain facts about blogs. I would leave these bullet points to you to ponder over and I guess they are more or less self explanatory.
Facts and Trends in Blogging
#1 Most bloggers start new blogging ventures
#2 Blog flipping – Resulting from #1 and otherwise
#3 Multiple blogger blogs for more professionalism and to maintain frequency
#4 Micro blogging though at a low pace of growth
#5 Media blogging/commenting – Video blogs, podcasts, video commenting etc.
#6 20-80 principle – 20% effort on writing and 80% on talking about it (marketing)
#7 Magazine themes regardless of whether it is naturally good for reading
#8 Bloggers are insomniacs who spend 16-20 hours online
#9 If you don’t post daily, you are branded incompetent and not leading the great DotCom lifestyle! Continue Reading →
Ten Unethical Blog Visitor Behaviors
Ajith | | 22 Comments
Sometime back I had written a post about Unethical Blogging Practices and it dealt with bloggers’ unacceptable behaviors. Today’s topic is a little more controversial in nature and might sound negative as well but I request my honorable readers not to get offended because I am not talking about serious and genuine readers here!
The following are my list of blog visitor (or user) behaviors that I find really frustrating:
#1 Comment or Email Spamming
Nobody particularly likes spamming – whether it is email spamming or comment spaming. I am not talking about those spam comments that gets caught by Akismet but there are also more genuine readers who spams as well – Probably very short comments when delivered in batches of three or four fall into this category?
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Will Microsoft Oxite Blogging Platform become another WordPress?
Ajith | | 27 Comments
A couple of days ago Microsoft released an Alpha or test version of its first open source blogging engine Oxite! As one can expect this complete blogging system landscape is built on top of Microsoft’s bread-winning technologies such as MS SQL Server and ASP .NET (ASP .NET MVC, in fact).
It seems Oxite was originally developed to power one of Microsoft’s own tech portal Mix website that looks funky enough. But is the Oxite blogging engine good enough to take on popular blogging (if not CMS) platforms like WordPress? I seriously doubt that.
Reasons why Oxite may not become an immediate hit
The following are my arguments against Oxite and Microsoft’s proprietary technologies in the blogging space:
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How To Blend your AdSense Block within the WordPress Post Content?
Ajith | | 44 Comments
A few weeks ago, when I (neatly) blended my Google AdSense 336×280 block a couple of paragraphs down the post content I thought I did a smart job! As a matter of fact, this was really resulting in an increased CTR (Click-Through-Rate) as well and a few readers like Hussein were interested in knowing how I went about doing it? (comment)
However, a few other regular readers like Kim, Lax and Mitch had altogether different views on this topic. Out of their conversation in my last post it was obvious that the regulars who read your blogs on a daily basis (fresh posts that is) should not be presented with the ad block in between though it’s okay for the older posts (seen mostly by search & referral visitors). Now, the following code sample(s) explains how this was achieved.
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