Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging, blogs, and companies involved with blogging.

Make Your Blog Standout In The Crowd

November 26, 2005 12:18 pm / Leave a Comment /

Chris Anderson of The Long Tail writes about the blogs he subscribes to standing out in a commodity crowd. He also relates blogs to magazines, and how the magazines we subscribe to also must stand out to earn our subscription. It’s a good analogy, and provides some good advice for anyone looking to succeed in blogging or with a magazine or content site.

Anderson uses a list of three things the blogs he subscribes to do, and I’d agree that the blogs I read fit the same requirements:

1. Add value with a unique perspective or analysis.

2. Add value with unique information.

3. Add value by providing a unique filter/lens on content available elsewhere.

What stands out about that is the word unique shows up in each requirement.

People value things they can’t get elsewhere. What kind of unique perspective can you provide on your favorite subjects?

Posted in: Blogging

A Great Use of OPML and the Yahoo API

November 26, 2005 12:55 am / Leave a Comment /

J Wynia from the Web 2.0 Workgroup has used OPML to create a dynamic “best of” list for the Web 2.0 Workgroup blogs. See his full detailed explanation here.

It’s a simple but powerful use of OPML and a search engine to gauge popularity, if not a real-time method of gauging it.

There are going to be some amazing things done with data and feeds, this is just one of those uses.

How could this be extended?

One idea that immediately hits me is that a lot of people get overwhelmed with the amount of RSS feeds they subscribe to, and there is simply too much to read. Personally, I subscribe to over 100 feeds, so there is often an overwhelming amount of posts if I don’t keep up with my feed reading.

I’d love if my feedreader had this ability to quickly see the top one or two feed items from every feed I subscribe to. How handy would that be?

Posted in: Blogging, Random, Yahoo

Xooglers Could Be Interesting

November 25, 2005 9:07 pm / 1 Comment /

A blog by Doug Edwards, former Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google has been launched.

It already looks like a good inside look at what’s happened over the past six years at Google while Edwards worked there. If you’re at all curious about the darling and giant of the search/advertising world, it should be a good read.

Posted in: Blogging, Google

SSE Will Be Big

November 24, 2005 4:59 pm / Leave a Comment /

Ray Ozzie from Microsoft explains how SSE came about in his post Really Simple Sharing on his blog.

This is big for two reasons:

1. Bi-directional RSS feeds opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

2. Microsoft is behind it, and releasing it to the Creative Commons. Meaning essentially it can be used for whatever. That’s a change from how Microsoft has behaved in the past.

The ride is just beginning.

Posted in: Blogging, Random

Newsvine: del.icio.us-like co-op news blogger

November 24, 2005 1:34 am / 1 Comment /

There’s been buzz about Newsvine, a startup news site being started by four former Disney/ESPN employees.

CEO Mike Davidson unveils what Newsvine is all about.

It sounds like a very promising concept. It takes the bookmarking/tagging of del.icio.us for news articles, then allows people to add comments to the news stories like on a blog, while also allowing people to chat on the page. Very cool.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there, when you tag articles and add content to Newsvine, it adds it to your own page where you can also basically blog and write your own column. You also share ad revenue on this page with Newsvine, making it a co-op along the lines of recent Seth Godin startup Squidoo.

I signed up for the private beta list and I’m anxious to try it out.

Posted in: Blogging, Random, Startups

What the heck do they do?

November 19, 2005 1:54 am / Leave a Comment /

There has been recent discussion of Pajamas Media Open Source Media due to their VC funding for a blog startup, group of well-known bloggers, name change snafu, and just the fact that nobody really knows what the heck they are.

Jim Kurkal now comments at Revenews.

Posted in: Blogging