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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Here’s an interesting approach to marketing. I wrote a post on my other blog last Friday for a telemarketing lists broker called Martin Worldwide, and talked about their huge data base of some 290 million customers that they could mix and match into all sorts of niche groups. It was one of those posts you get paid for writing that some people object to. Ce la vie. I don’t have any ethical problems with this.
But the follow-up to this was that I got a comment to the post. Someone was keeping their eyes open!
It came from a crowd called Lead General, who are also into list brokering, and the comment turns out to be identical to the only post that’s on their blog – a post that was written about a month ago. So they got themselves some free publicity on my blog. A little cheeky, but I’m not going to get upset about it.
Lead General do have their own website, but presumably the blog is to add a bit of extra visibility on the Net. Their prices seem pretty reasonable (this isn’t an ad for them by the way, just a note to say I was intrigued by their approach) and what I also liked about them was that the lists you pay for are yours to keep; you’re not hiring them, in other words. That means you can build on them, and make those customers repeat customers, rather than just giving them a one-off shot.
By the way, I loved this line on their site: ‘Our expertise creates outstanding marketing results for a plethora of industries.' Ain’t ‘plethora’ a much underused word?
Via a challenge from the Link and Blog Challenge crew called Technorati Tuesday, I came across a blog that lives some strange life of its own. The Ordinary Folk blog, which is
subtitled, Music, an alien named Gummy, and a boatload of rambling, is the rambling part of Mike (who apparently has no surname) as opposed to his creative side. That appears on another blog altogether, where his cartoons mostly reside. The cartoons focus on two creatures in a rather bare landscape who do minimal things in vivid colour.
What Mike has done is take the typical vertically-slanted eyes of aliens from any number of Hollywood movies and added them to pudgy bodies, one green (the male) and one pink (the female, obviously – plus she’s got a little blue ribbon tied in a bow). Thank goodness, for once, they don’t have those long stick bodies that Hollywood has given many aliens, and which seem to be potentially useless in any real world situation.
The male is called Gummy, and he’s a lovesick alien who’s wandered the Universe in search of love (well, duh!). Eventually he meets up with Bella (the pink one) and the cartoons are about their ongoing relationship and…other things. Minimal things, but apparently plenty of people keep coming back to check out what those minimal things are.
If you’re interested in Mike’s cartoons, click here. Otherwise check out his boatload of rambling first, where you can still find your way back to the cartoons.
Sometimes I read about stuff on the Net and wonder if I’m speaking the same language as everyone else. Another blogger alerted me to an article by Matt Cutts from Google, and a follow-up by Graywolf, from a blog called seoclass.com.
By the time I’d read through Matt’s article on hidden links, and what Google was thinking about doing in regard to them, and the comments that followed, and then Graywolf’s even more involved article - and the even more involved comments that followed – and then the later piece on jimimorrisonshead.com,(along with more comments) I was quite confused. Sure I get the general picture, but people keep using language in ways I just don’t always understand, and it’s not just technical language either.
I don’t enjoy reading stuff on the computer at the best of times, particularly stuff that’s involved and technical. It maybe that I’m an anti-geek, but it’s probably more than my mind starts to slide over these sorts of things after a very short time. My concentration span when it comes to reading on the computer compared to reading a book or an article is very short.
I’ve been accused in the past of being a skimmer: someone who skims the text rather than taking it in carefully. I admit to this. With the enormous amount of information that’s available to me every day on the Net – as well as in books, newspapers, magazines and so forth – I have to skim just to keep up with things.
Anyway, I’m not everybody, and there are thousands of people out there who will understand entirely what the argument is all about. Take a look at the links I’ve provided and check it out.
Ginene at FlavaOfBlog just alerted me to a utility called Copyscape. Here you can put your blog address in a box and Copyscape will check for you if you’ve been copied anywhere on the Net.
Always willing to give things a try, I entered the address of my blogspot blog, and lo and behold, one of my posts was copied to Ice Rocket.com just 17 hours ago. I’ve come across IceRocket before. It seems to be some sort of search engine that focuses on searching blogs rather than the Net in its entirety. (Someone may be able to enlighten me further on its purpose.)
It’s a sort of a compliment to find you’ve been picked up in this way. Seems someone was searching on the word ‘memory’ and my post on HitTails and Memory came up. So I’m not sure if I’d class this as ‘copying’. Certainly no one’s going to do much with it on IceRocket, as far as I can make out
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To my amazement when I checked out the linkpopularity site last night (I’ve written about it before) it told me that my normal everyday blog on Blogspot has somehow jumped from being the last kid on the block to PR 2 on Google. This, for me, is an extraordinary achievement. Mainly because I’m not sure how it’s happened!
Perhaps more extraordinary, my Roving Report blog here on Orble has jumped from nothing to PR 3. How can this be, particularly as the blog with a domain name – Webitz (this very blog you're reading now) – remains at nought, in spite of being the most read blog
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Slashdot.com noted last month that "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch.
They quote: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'
It all sounds very good, but vast numbers of Slashdot.com readers were sceptical, not just as to whether the Internet could be rebuilt from scratch (could you rebuild any major city from scratch?), but also as to whether large corporations, governments, and the military might want to have a lot more to say about the way things were handled this time round
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I said I’d talk a bit more about the Link and Blog Challenge site in my last post, and so I’m going to. (How’s that for putting your mind to something and doing it?)
L&B is a relatively new site, I think, and I found a few teething troubles, but I suspect a number of them were related to my incompetence at using the site rather than the site being really difficult to work on.
The general idea is that you challenge another blogger – or in some cases, a group of bloggers – to post on a certain theme, or keyword. During the course of your post you should include this keyword at least once with a link back to the other blogger. You can use the keyword, or words related to it more than once in the post (in fact, the site owner, Tammara, recommends this
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I’ve come across a site called LinkandBlogChallenge.com which I’ll talk more about in a later post, when I’ve got to grips with it a bit more. It appears to have itself altogether, but I’ve struck a few problems finding my way around it. Maybe I’m just getting too old for the Net world.
Still the idea of Link and Blog is good, I think, and worthwhile pursuing. I am pursuing it, but it’s taking a bit of keeping up with it at this point!
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I wrote yesterday about encouraging readers to make more use of the comments section of blogs, but the question also arises: how can the blogger utilise the comments system too, since adding comments to blogs is a way of adding links back to your site.
You can do a random search of blogs related to your own blog, but you’ll probably find that many of the blogs are part of a larger system, such as Wordpress, and may not let you leave comments without registering – or even starting a blog of your own. Rather a long-winded way to leave a comment.
But there are thousands of blogs on any one system, and if you’re already part of something like Blogger.com, or WordPress itself, then you have the means to comment ready to hand
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I found a note about promoting your blog on Triond.com which mentioned that making comments on other people’s blogs (and presumably leaving your own blog address, like a kind of footprint) was a way to increase the links to your site. But one of the problems in trying to leave comments on many blogs is that you have to register, and by the time you’ve figured out how to register, and how complex that is, and discover that you have to have a blog on that particular system yourself, you’ve either forgotten the comment you were going to make, or lost the original post, or given up in disgust.
Thinking about this point led me (via circuitous ways) back to the Problogger.com site
– a site I should check out a lot more often than I do. Darren Rouse, who runs the site (and very effectively too), has a list of ten points regarding encouraging people to comment on your site. One of them is not to discourage them by making them register. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Orble; you don’t have to be registered to add a note to a post here. (At least I don’t think you do; I’ve always assumed that the comments I get from ‘anonymous’ are from people who aren’t registered
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A while ago, when I had a lot more free time (because I wasn't working in the day time) I investigated a number of online forums and sites where supposedly you could get paid for discussing all sorts of issues. One of these, Payposter, went down the tubes after someone started some sort of rumour that they weren't paying out the money owed. The thing collapsed in an unhappy heap, with the forum administrator complaining deeply that he'd been let down by the very people whom he tried to help. Payposter is no longer visible on the Net, unfortunately - though it's probably no loss in terms of the endless trivia that was discussed.
myLot (note that lack of a capital letter at the beginining) seems a much more successful set up. Certainly they have heaps of participants, endless discussions (keep an eye out on the 'new' discussions list and it will change every few seconds) and lots of ideas and arrangements for helping people to socialise on it while also discussing trivial, and deep, issues, from How Often Do You Wash Clothes? to the differing values of Islam and Christianity (often with great heat and passion).
I mention it partly to add my myLot User Profile to this site, so that the RSS feed can be picked up on myLot (something they've just begun) which means that all sorts of blogs can be discussed and caught up with by myLot users
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A few comments again on Popuri. I had
another look at it last night and wonder if it’s of any real value. I have three blogs. One of these is a Blogger.com job, (Mike Crowl's Random Notes), and two are on Orble – one, this one, of which has its own domain name.
Now according to my understanding, the one with the domain name ought to have the higher rating in Popuri’s statistics. Does it? Nope: it came out bottom of the three.
The Blogger.com came out next, and most curiously, the Orble blog without the domain name came out on top, with a decent Alexa figure, and even a Google ranking
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