After maintaining several blogs for a couple of years, learning about web publishing and observing different niches, I have come to the conclusion that success for web publishers mainly relies on how much passion you have for the topic you cover. Not exactly a ground-breaking insight, you might say. But let me explain how I personally came to realize this.
I’ve built quite a few sites throughout my life online and the only ones that remain or thrive are the ones covering topics, for which I have a very deep and strong interest. The other sites gradually slowed down and died because I only had a passing fancy for them.
Darren Rowse recently wrote a series of posts about increasing your Twitter presence, in which he mainly talks about how to use Twitter by adding value in order to increase your Twitter following. While Darren made several good points, I want to give you my perspective on it, which is somewhat different.
You’re interested in increasing your Twitter followers. You want more people reading your messages. It’s not difficult to build a prominent profile but I think it’s important to start with the right understanding. This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.
Microsoft is teaming up with a charity foundation to deliver Xbox 360 kiosks to children’s hospitals across America. Each of these kiosks will come with games, movies and access to a private nationwide network that’ll allow hospitalized children to play or chat with one another.
This is great news because I think it will really make a lot of kids happy, especially when some of them easily get bored or depressed within the dreary hospital environment. I can imagine the much-needed thrill of playing video games with new friends.
Information rarely organizes itself into something coherent, usable or enriching. It usually goes through a series of filters before it reaches you: for example an algorithm developed to automatically sort data or a writer who took the time to translate the complex into the actionable.
These filters are there to make information relevant, to allow you to utilize data into a different form, perhaps a blog post or a mental footnote to be retrieved when needed. However, sometimes there’s just too much information and too little time.
Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.
For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.
A comment left on a popular blog may be viewed by a few hundred people in one day. Multiply that by the lifespan of the blog and you’ll see that a simple comment may say a lot about you. Every blog comment is usually permanent. It’s not just a hyperlink but a long-term representation of your brand.
Too many webmasters view blog commenting as only a traffic or link building strategy. This rigid marketing emphasis has led to certain modes of behavior. For example, one might make the effort to comment exclusively on blogs with nofollow turned off, while using keyword names in order to increase the search engine ranking for one’s website.
Yes, it’s been long overdue but I finally changed the design for Dosh Dosh after more than a year. Because of the lack of time, I’ve been procrastinating but frankly, I’m just really glad its finished now. If you’re reading this from your feed reader or inbox, come over and check it out.
I haven’t prepared a detailed writeup about the design process but I thought I’ll give you all a short tour of the new look. First of all, the logo was designed by David Airey, who’s one of the most reliable graphic/logo designers I’ve worked with.
Social media aggregators are web sites which amass what you do on social networks or websites and centralize it all in one location.
These aggregators enable lifestreaming, which is a simply the publication and sharing of your daily activities in continuous sessions. These social lifestreams allow you to keep track of what your friends or other people are doing online.
In other words, they are tools you can use to observe the activity of others on various social sites or allow others to follow what you’re doing all around the web.
