Month: March 2008

Why I Give Full Articles in My Feed

March 31, 2008 / Scott / 0 Comments

With apologies to those who come here only for the ranting…

I have a plan to do a whole series of articles on search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers. While the topic of full vs. partial feeds may not be directly related to SEO at first glance, I feel that it is in a round about way. After all, the goal of SEO and is to get more visitors to your site, and that is probably one of the goals you’d like to accomplish with your feed as well. I’m by no means saying that partial feeds are bad, and I think they definitely have their place. But for me (and probably most other bloggers) I believe full feeds are a more effective way to drive traffic. While much of what I’m about to say is based on experience, I believe I can back it up with logic and human blogger nature.

So first off, what’s the argument for partial feeds? It’s actually not a bad argument, and I used to subscribe to it myself. When I first set up my feed, I was sure that partial feeds were the way to go. I thought I had to do everything I could to force entice people to visit my site. There was no way I was going to give away all my content through the feed. Only after they loaded up the entire site, ads and all, would I give away my content.

But then it hit me–I’m giving it away no matter what. It didn’t take me long to realize that full posts in my feed were better than partial feeds, not only for my subscribers, but ultimately for me as well.

Good For My Subscribers

Anyone who uses an RSS reader is probably addicted to it. One of the first things we do after we read an article we like on a new site (especially a blog) is to look for the feed subscription button. And as a blogger, one of the first things I check every day is my FeedBurner stats, mostly out of vanity, because I’m truly flattered that people care enough about what I have to say to choose to subscribe to my feed. I feel like the least I can do for the folks who’ve paid me such a big compliment is to say “thanks” by making my site as easy as possible for them to read in the way they choose, and that means no ads in the feed as well.

But that means subscribers aren’t going to see any of the ads on my site in their reader, so they won’t ever click on these ads, right? Well…I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.

Good For Me

Think about it…the people who are subscribed to my feed are people who already may be interested in what I have to say. They are also likely to engage me in conversation by leaving comments on my blog. By giving them full posts in the feed, I increase the chances they will read everything I wrote. That increases the chances that they’ll want to comment on something I wrote, and that means they will visit my site. By contrast, a partial feed means that I have three or four sentences to entice them into visiting the site. Frankly, I don’t have enough faith in myself as a writer to accomplish that with every post.

An even more compelling reason–I think it’s pretty safe to assume that many of the people reading my feed are other bloggers. And while comments are great and encouraged, an even bigger compliment from another blogger is a link back from their blog. In fact, I’d much rather have a single link than ten comments. Again, providing the full feed increases the chances that someone will read something they’d like to write about on their own blog.

How do links back to my blog help me so much? Obviously, exposure to the the other blogger’s readers has a lot of value, but there’s another reason, and this is where the SEO part comes in. Search engines (especially Google) see a link as a “vote” for a site. So a link increases my “clout” with search engines, which means that I can greatly increase search engine rankings, which greatly increases my traffic. And I have to believe that the random visitor from a search engine is less familiar with my site layout and less likely to be wise to blog ad placement in general. This means that they are more likely to click on an ad than a regular subscriber who visits my site every day (because I don’t provide full posts in my feed) would be. More search engine traffic also increases the chances that I’ll get even more subscribers–rinse and repeat.

It’s win, win, win.

Full feeds reward loyal subscribers with the ability to read your site with ease. In my case, this includes keeping the feed ad free.

Full feeds reward you directly by increasing the chances your subscribers will visit your site and leave comments. One way conversations are fine, but I have those in my head all day, and sometimes I get tired of hearing only myself.

Full feeds increase your chances of getting back links, which increase your search engine rankings, and ultimately your traffic. Back links increase your exposure to other bloggers’ readers, and search engines are an excellent source of readers who would never find you otherwise.

I hope this helps those of you are trying to decide whether to use full or partial links, and I really hope I’ve convinced those of you who to whom I subscribe and are currently using partial feeds to give me the whole thing in my reader!

5 Reasons Bret Michaels is the Lamest “Rock Star” Ever

March 23, 2008 / Scott / 2 Comments

I remember when Poison was really popular and I thought they were stupid. Mostly it was because I was a music snob back then, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that they just sucked.

Now we have Rock Of Love, and honestly, I can think of 5 people I know right now who are happily married with kids and regular ol’ jobs who act more like rock stars than Bret Michaels. I had Easter dinner with one of them (and our wives and kids) today, after he got out of church of course. I think we drank enough beer between the two of us–it had to have been 2/3 of a six pack–to put Bret Michaels under the table.

I wouldn’t let this guy be a roadie for a boy band–that’s how NOT Rock Star he is. I submit these five facts for your consideration.

1. He has no game. None.

You would think that after having girls throw themselves at him for a few years in the 80s, he would at least have a little bit of game. This guy couldn’t close the deal with a drunk hooker if he had crapped crack and pissed liquid gold. Want to see a rock star with game? Give me (of course) David Lee Roth.

2. No famous chicks want to date him

Bret Michaels is was actually attractive and famous. And he has to go on TV to get a date? Yeah he dated Pam Anderson (briefly) a long time ago. But my guess is she quickly figured out how lame he is (see reason #1). Even the girl he picked in the first season of Rock of Love didn’t want to date him, presumably because she was already too famous for him. Let me have Rick Ocasek, Billie Joel, Adam Clayton, Kid Rock or instead of this Z-list supporter.

3. He took the girls’ exes to Dave and Busters.

Not a trip into and out of Vegas for a weekend on a private jet. Not a run to Tijuana to get tats and piercings. Not even a strip club. Dave and Freaking Busters. Give me a break. Nothing says ROCK STAR like sipping on a Zima and playing a few rounds of skee-ball and wak-a-mole, huh? Instead, I’d like to see Lemmy from Motorhead. Yeah, he’s not going to go anywhere uber-cool either, but he’ll show up with a cooler full of beer and keep you up all night telling funny stories and burning you with cigarettes when he catches you nodding off. That’s cool.

4. He’s never fought a member of Motley Crue

As far as I know, he hasn’t fought anybody. Not that I’m surprised by that–I’m sure he’d get his ass kicked. But he’s never even shown that he has a temper. I’ve never heard stories of dressing rooms being trashed. I’ve never heard of him being thrown out of a club for breaking a beer bottle across someone’s face. Nothing. I’d so much rather watch this show with Tommy Lee, who I bet has fought EVERY member of Motley Crue at one time or another.

5. He’s never been to rehab

That’s actually admirable for people like me and you. But this is America. We like our rock stars either troubled, violent, or toxic–preferably all three. He’s never even been drunk on his own “party like a rock star” TV show. I have a feeling that “Bret’s Brew” is actually 30% lemonade, 30% fruit punch, 30% Sprite and 10% soda water. Give me Bret’s old guitar player, C.C. DeVille in his place. At least there’s a chance he’ll go on a coke binge and freak out right in front of our eyes.

How Big Bird Creates Critical Thinkers

March 5, 2008 / Scott / 0 Comments

Earlier today I was reading a book to my friend’s little boy. In the book, Big Bird was asking the kids to pick objects that fell into certain categories. For instance, he would ask the child to pick out something that we eat from a page full of blue objects, and the child would pick the bowl of blueberries. A page of green objects may contain a coat, and Big Bird would ask the kids to choose the thing that we wear. We expanded this game a little by talking about the other objects on the page as well, not just doing what was in the book, but going further than Big Bird asked us to.

We both had a blast reading the book, and I was telling Ana all about it on our way home. She told me that what we were doing was called “categorizing and classifying”. I had no idea while we were reading we were actually working on developing this little boy’s critical thinking skills. I was giving him categories and he was classifying the objects into those categories. We were building up his classify and categorize foundation that will allow him as an adult to read op-eds in the newspaper (if those still exist by then) and determine the author’s political leanings and motivations as he is considering the points the author is making. Pretty cool, huh?

Now I’m thinking of other activities we could do with the same book. One of the ideas I had was to close the book and ask him to find an orange animal. This would exercise his mind by asking him to classify an object into two categories instead of just one. As a computer nerd, I’d be interested to see how he’d approach that problem. Would he take the most efficient search approach and flip through the book to find the orange page, then look for an animal? Or would he look at each page identifying all the animals and then classifying them by colors? My guess is that kids of different ages may take different approaches.

Digital ABCs — Lesson Idea #1

March 5, 2008 / Ana / 0 Comments

Over the weekend we were visiting some friends who have a three year old, and we were talking about activities parents can do with kids his age to prepare them to be successful readers. One of the ideas we came up with was to go on a walk or hike with a digital camera. The mission/game in this activity is to get the child to take as many photos as they can of things that begin with a certain sound (phoneme). The game can be played a different way for more advanced kids, who you can ask to take photos of things that begin with a certain letter.

In the first game we’re working on phonemic awareness, so if we’re trying to find things that start with the /f/ sound, a phone booth is a great photo. In the second game we’re working on phonics (connecting sounds with letters), so the phone booth becomes tricky. It would be a great photo if we’re looking for things that begin with the letter “p”, but not if we’re looking for things that begin with the letter “f”.

You can even make this a math activity by having the kids count the photos, add the correct and incorrect answers together, subtract incorrect from correct, etc.