Doing More With Less Since 1972
And he didn’t give attribution. And he hated irony!
Suggestion for The Tennessean — put as many of your internets as will fit into the trunk of your Prius, drive them over to Al Gore’s house (the lights are on), and leave them on a porch with a note telling him you don’t really know how they work.
BTW–Feel free to copy this post in its entirety and post it on your own blog. Just give me a link and it’s all good.
Homes: About to get much cheaper? – Hmmm….time to sit in an apartment and wait?
MediaMonkey – Looking for the best way to sync an Android phone for music. Nothing out there like iTunes yet, but this is good.
Remember Why We Have a Department of Energy? – Oh, but it will be different with banking and health care. Right?
The Most Inappropriate Halloween Costumes Possible – Two of my favorite things–inappropriateness and Halloween.
Newscoma Sums UP BarCamp Nashville and Blogging – "Blogging is one of those things that folks either get or they don’t, but it has been a gift to me since the first time I opened up one of these silly things and realized that it was a lot of fun."
Free Trigonometry Tutorials and Problems – You got that? FREE PROBLEMS!!!! One of the many things on my nerd checklist is that I did ALL the problems in the trig book…not just the ones that were assigned. I would do them in all my other classes. I even had a set of colored pencils I used to draw the vectors in different shades. Yeah, you wish YOU'D thought of that.
Clean Your Computer Screen From The Inside – It really works!!!
Paranormal Activity –Don’t Need To See It – I'm a scary-movie-wimp. I hate them. I'd rather just read spoilers (like this one) and know that it would scare me if I saw it.
We Learned Good From The Romans
We look back at the Roman epoch with a sense of relief. We’ve learned so much since then. No longer do we consider our leaders to be gods among men. No longer do we hand them unearned and meretricious awards and prizes. We don’t turn on and destroy members of previous administrations. We don’t tolerate incompetent and corrupt sycophants in high office. We’ve learned to recognize disorders such as pathological narcissism and assure that the victims do not gain high office. Any president who placed his prestige on the line with an athletic contest would be laughed to scorn.
The Wrong Way To Pass A Class – Unfortunately, I think it may still work in many cases. This guy can probably pull on his own and doesn’t need any help from a strumpet like her. Good for him.
Business School For Free On iTunes – You even get a voice recording of someone reading a diploma at the end.
Death by Spork Would Be Torture in Deleware – The best outcome for this kid would be to NOT have to return to this band of idiots to be “educated”.
Pitfalls and Perils of Blogging – Some stuff to think about.
Willie Nelson’s Got a New Broadband Plan – It looks like a box full of networking equipment, but really you just put your weed in there.
Sifting Mountains of Data – When I retire, I’m going to sit on my back porch and whittle on data. All. Day. Long.
Digital Passive-Aggressive Communication – This articulates something I’ve been saying much better than I can articulate it myself. Wave combines the rapid fire communication of Twitter with the give and take (or “ignore”) of email. It just needs to be beefier at this point, and we need to train our brains to use it.
XKCD Strikes Again – While you’re at it, can I get a drink holder attached to the end of each arm?
Rich People Fleeing High Tax States – What? Unbelievable! The gov’ment should do something about this! 😛
Rowland Burris Blames Bush For Olympic FAIL – And I thought it was just because the IOC member are all racists.
Dell uses social media to gather employee ideas – This is going to be happening more and more as management becomes comfortable with the tools.
What Google Wave Can Do – I will be checking all of this out as soon as the people I invited get their invites. Right now, there’s no one for me to collaborate with.
10 Things Every Kumbaya Blogger Should Know | Copyblogger – When you solve actual problems, even if you (yikes) make a buck on it, you’re doing good work.
The Cocoa Beach Air Show | Metromix Brevard – If you aren’t able to get tickets to the Brevard/Miami rugby match this weekend, here’s another option.
Knoxville Rugby at Heart of Dixie Tournament – Look for Okie and Colonel Kurtz to make return appearances. We cannot guaranteed gravel slinging pickup trucks or soiled sofas.
Indian farmer’s daughter is most bad-ass woman in the world – Boing Boing – In a phenomenally bad-ass series of moves worthy of a Tarantino screenplay, 21-year-old Rukhsana Kausar attacked him with an axe, then shot him dead with his own gun.
Kids leave mother passed out drunk in minivan FLORIDA TODAY – So sad.
How appropriate that I would wait a day to link to a post about RSS cloud.
Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences.
Not the Security and Exchange Commission–I’ll straighten them out next week. I’m talking about the Southeastern Conference.
Now, these are just the simple-minded observations from someone with absolutely no formal training in marketing:
Michael Silence has been diligent in covering their decision to threaten bloggers, Tweeple, people with phones, and YouTubers, and you can get a ton of information on this from him and others.
When I started reading this, I was sure I’d fall into one of the seven categories presented–click over for the lengthy descriptions. Turns out I’ve been most of them at one time or another.
I could add a few more to that list, but I can’t risk being long-winded to do so.
Read Trace’s post on theBasic Rules Of Citizen Journalism at NewsTechzilla.
SVD is documenting his forays into these mediums (where else) on his blog. All of these things mean so many different things to different people. Here’s how I like to describe them…
When I send you an email, it’s the equivalent of me inviting you over to the house for a cup of coffee. We’re sitting at the kitchen table having a conversation. This has a few implications. For instance, “thanks” is not acceptable for an email in its entirety. I wouldn’t invite you over to my house to say “Thanks” and then slam the door in your face would I? Don’t be surprised, however, if I come banging on your door to borrow an egg or some milk though. These are the emails where I ask stupid questions.
When I write something on my blog and people comment, it’s the equivalent of me standing out in my yard and talking to whatever neighbors happen to drop by to talk. I’m lazy, so I’m probably sitting in a chair instead of standing, but you get the idea. Anyone is free to drop by and discuss, even if they don’t live in my ‘hood. This has implications too. For instance, driving by and yelling “F You!” or walking up and trying to sell me Viagra means you’re going to be ignored. Also, my “yard” isn’t as nice or visited by as many passers by as some. See, my yard isn’t near an interstate–it’s more like a gravel road–so there usually aren’t as many people stopping by. On some days, I just sit out there whittling and taking naps all by myself. Other days I just stay inside and nap. If you stop by, it helps to bring beer.
And Twitter? Twitter is like all of us are piled into a bunch of eighteen wheelers and talking on CBs with antennas so big that the whole world can tune in. Anytime something important happens, it will hit Twitter as fast as news of a Smoky seen setting up a speed trap. Anyone with their ears on will definitely know about it.
Wait, I have a better description for Twitter…
Twitter is like ham radio for people who can get a date.
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.
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.
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.
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!
© 2024 Scott Adcox
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑