Buzz #7: Strategist.org.uk - or how NOT to run a blog
April 24, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read this comment
In 2007, I started doing a few BlogBuzzes for people, and in 2008 I am still doing my BlogBuzzes for websites! This is a great way to get your blog seen around the Net, and I get my blog seen on your blog… We all win!
We’ve already had a bunch of Buzzes handed out to great bloggers… If you’re still interested, drop me a line in the contact form. Do complete the opp first. The buzzes can be short or long, but at least a minimum of 50 words, please!
Unfortunately, for number 6, Strategist takes a bow on this blog! Strategist has been churning out a lot of posts over the four months since it started! I tried to find the first post to get an idea about the writer but no luck. The topics this blog covers are somewhat similar to this one but the blogger covers in much more depth and very high frequency.
There’s no about page at all. Nor is there a contact page! So I was unable to find out much about the author. In fact, I only found the review to my blog when I was checking SocialSpark’s update page.
strategist.org.uk. Then I went onto search for the first post, which I didn’t find. What I did note was more alarming, there was no way a blogger could turn out this number of articles on a daily basis. So then I chose several articles, and searched on Google for duplicate articles. A look at the results will show you what I mean:
This article is supposedly published on this blog but …
a quick search from Google highlighted the article in its search engine as being from another blog:
A second search produced results from Google here. A third and fourth search produced similar results. So I stopped at that point. This may fit the definition of a “splog”, or more accurately, a scraper blog, which Wikipedia cites:
“Blog scraping, is the process where automated software scans hundreds of thousands of blogs per day, searching for and copying content. The process is sometimes referenced by the name given the software or individuals responsible for the action, “blog scrapers.—
It is likely that this blog is breaking the law (though I’m no lawyer), and I would encourage the owner of the blog to stop this practice immediately, delete the entries (or at the very least limit entries to a few basic words, ie. a teaser and a link to the original blog), and create something worth reading with his or her own unique input. At the very least, the blogger runs the risk of having the Adsense account pulled, his SocialSpark status revoked, and losing all the money earned so far. At the very least.
To anyone who submits a request for a Blogbuzz, the quality of your blog determines whether you will be blogged about on this blog. I reserve the right at all times to monitor the quality of submissions. Editorial decisions are final. Sometimes other people leave me with no choice.
On a final note, I’d just like to say 90% of the submissions for Blogbuzzes have been outstanding, but this is the first and last time I will ever blog about a Scraper Blog.
Buzz: Michael Turton’s - The View From Taiwan
February 13, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 5 comments
The winner from last week’s competition about TaiChung is Michael Turton who guessed correctly that I was taking the picture from the 25th floor of the Splendor Hotel in Taichung. We actually stayed in the more affordable rooms on the other side of the main entrance, but we both like the hotel and the rooms quite a lot, especially for its location.
The competition itself attracted a bunch of entries, with floors ranging from 25th to 70th and even 80th floor! One of the nice points about Taichung though is that it isn’t really a high-rise city yet, so many of the guesses were overly ambitious! Sorry, guys! When we came back from Taichung, the north of the island was plunged into the Taiwanese equivalent of the Big Freeze, the BIG CHILL. Temperatures in Tamsui where we live have plunged from pleasant mid-teens to 6~8C in the last few days.
Oh, well. I just hope that Michael forgives any splling mstakes as my frozen finggers strugggle over the keyboarrd.
The View From Taiwan
The blog is simply the view of one Michael Turton who has lived in Taiwan for many years. It was difficult to find much biographical information about Michael himself. But I did find a picture of him! So, if you see him on the streets of Taichung, say hello from Kenneth!
The primary blog that he runs is The View From Taiwan supplemented by other HTML pages that can be found on his own website, named www.michaelturton.com. The View Blog is full of posts that explore life in Taiwan: Politics, Society, History, Economics, etc. His posts are always well informed, well-written, and interesting reading for those of you interested in Taiwan in many ways. I also love the way his posts always contain large numbers of photos: he has quite an eye for catching simple things and focusing on them in such a way that they becoming interesting - his blog, Flickr, and HTML sites are all replete with photos taken with one of his three cameras. Also, the sidebar is a tremendous resource of blogs and photoblogs, most of which are related to Taiwan. It’s quite a wonderful resource.
The Challenge: Blogger’s limitations
The challenge that Michael faces is mostly Blogger itself. Blogger’s interface, presentation and theme limitations all impede the appearance of an otherwise excellent blog. While the themes aren’t particularly ugly in Blogger/Blogspot, out in the world of self-hosted blogs the options for improving presentation are just THAT much greater. There are plugins and themes that can turn his blog into a full CMS system or even simply the unruly first page. But given the size and depth of his blog, migration to a non-Blogger system would likely prove to be a HUGE headache in itself.
I will instead offer three suggestions that Michael can use if he wishes:
1. Usability: Trim the length and size of your first page on your blog. I saved the page to my desktop and was shocked by the size: it’s 8MB of files. Cut it down by at least 90% so that pages load for people who don’t have such speedy connections. Can you imagine how long the page would take to load on DialUp? So, you need to cut the number of posts to five longish posts or ten medium size posts (a rule of thumb!). I’ll lay odds that your page views are VERY limited possibly only 1.x or similar. In other words, the length of text of the first page is a huge turn off, and you provide little or no means by which people can click through to other pages.
2. Navigation: With so many posts on the front page, navigation, focus and depth become serious issues. Users can’t click on a single post title entry easily or obviously to read a post (I had to click on comments or links to get to a specific post). Navigation by mouse is clumsy even at the best of times, but today I have frozen fingers; and I find it really a burden to have to click and drag, or use the roller in the middle of the mouse, even clicking on the sidebar in the window means that scrolling isn’t smooth particularly and at times you miss important stuff as you skip quickly down the page. With so many posts on one page (is it 25?), it’s difficult for the reader to find the most important posts, the most popular posts, or the posts with most comments. In fact, it’s difficult to find out what the blogger thinks is important. In many ways, it resembles a street market in Taiwan - it takes time to wander through as you search for the fresh, the most delicious, the best value or the newest produce. But it doesn’t make shopping easy. There is a full-archive date by date; as well the archive is topically (and manually) organized. One of the archive links doesn’t seem to work. But a CMS or Wordpress platform would make such management much simpler and more effective to the archive problem and help keep the archive uptodate.
3. Sidebar: The sidebar displays the same problem as the main posts column: too much, too disorganized (from a navigation point of view), and clicking on the shortcuts at the top (it works well) takes you to the sidebar area you want to go, but (BUT) there is no way to go back except by scrolling or hitting the back button. It would be much better to offer a separate page or pages with the same information and extract random sites for posting on the front page. With so much information on the sidebar, should he shorten his frontpage to five posts or even ten, then using a double sidebar on the right might be a good solution to the overhang!
Wonderful resource: needs an overhaul
Overall, Michael’s blog is a rip-roaring success with wonderful photos, detailed posts, and good writing. He’s cracked the hard part of blogging: the content. But his blog is in need of an overhaul: one that will improve the design, making his blogging easier and help his readers tremendously. At the very least, he should consider a new blogger theme, even if he doesn’t want to change the CMS he is using (Blogger), especially one that makes navigation easier for readers. And it’s been a privilege to write a review of his blog. Thanks, Michael. And when I’m in Taichung next time, I will look you up!
To my readers, if you are interested in knowing about Taiwan, reading about its culture or politics or you would like to come here to live or travel around the island, Michael’s website and blog both will provide you a lot of what you will need to know. And if he can’t, one of the blogs, forums, websites or resources he has linked to WILL likely have the answer you need! Now, my fingers are frozen. …
Addenda: I will add any missing information here.
Newsbytes: Blog Announcement, WordPress Problems, Money Manager Ex, and Goog Stock Price
January 22, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
Well, this Tuesday’s newbytes brings updates on the latest ongoings on InvestorBlogger dot com.
But first some recent stories that you may have missed:
- Panasonic, Prada and Perspectives: Change isn’t that hard, is it?
- E-commerce: Why are some sites so unfriendly to customers?
- Carnival of Making Real Money 9th Edition - January 20th, 2008
- Is Alexa a REALRANK? Well, it tracks traffic but…
- What should you do when you strike it rich? - 7 ways to benefit from windfalls, bonuses, and other ‘found’ money!
New Blog or Two: MakingREALMoneyBlog is the new home for the Carnival of Making Real Money. It will be hosted on a Wordpress install with all the usual plugins, that I like to use: BlogRoll Page, All-in-One SEO Pack, Feed Footer, XML Sitemaps, Lighter Admin Drop Menus, obsocialbookmarker, PXS Mailform, SRG Archives, Spam Karma II, and Related Posts. Plus one or two others that I haven’t activated yet. But…
BUGGY WordPress: … some new installs of WordPress are BU G G Y… Yep, the visual editor bar refuses to show up at all on some of my newer sites… Here’s a glimpse, I’m still trying to find out what is causing the problem, but it wasted a lot of time last night, so I’ll be using the code version for most posting until I can find the cause. I will also use BlogDesk.
Where did the WordPress Icons go…? It seems nobody knows. There are as many reasons and solutions as there are angels on the head of a pin. I can’t figure out what’s wrong at all. So I moved the whole domain from the original user to another that was okay, and hosted a WordPress Blog without these problems. And voila! It worked… so here goes… Problem finally solved. Now I’ve just got to move ALL those plugins. The technical explanation is: I think the original ‘user’ was jinxed somehow: I had problems setting up WordPress, with faulty permissions, etc.. so I’m just glad that it works now. 
Money Manager Ex: Here’s an interesting and open-source alternative to MS Money or Quicken: it’s called Money Manager Ex.
It seems to offer a lot of flexibility, features and charts. It may not be the level of MS Money, but then I never cared for that, it should allow users to begin or learn how to use a Money Managing Program. I have installed it on my PC at home, and I’m wondering about whether it can be used for a USB Key as well. Anything to make my life a little easier!
Clearing out Google: I’ve now removed the nice little screenshow from Picasa from the blog. It was quite an attractive element and added some visual punch, but I moved all the pictures to Flickr as part of my campaign against Google. I’m about to add a Flickr plugin soon, once I find one. Any suggestions?
Out of the nine original Google services I identified as using, I have already dropped three from InvestorBlogger: Picasa, Reader (except for the marketing of this blog!), and Adsense. I’m working on YouTube as a User, and still have to download seven of my nine movies. I definitely prefer to host the movies on my own websites, esp. as YouTube is a PR hole, it sucks links and users and never returns them.
Adsense: is it becoming Add-non-Sense
And last but not least, John Chow writes in his recent post about Google’s raft of changes to its Adsense program:
My gut feeling tells me that Google revenues are down and that they’re doing everything possible to post a good quarterly report, even if that means taking it from the affiliates who help them build their business.
This could be true for a number of reasons: the screws are much tighter on revenue and payouts to affiliates; Google is a PUBLIC company now and needs to march to Wall Street’s beat; the US economy is entering a Recession for many reasons (Oil, housing, inflation, interest rates, jobs, …); AND Google has been trampling on the very webmasters that made it is what it is today.
GOOG: Going down - Can you spell F A S T?
In the last six months, they have lost a ton of goodwill among webmasters for Adsense, PR, affiliates, etc., not to mention publishers, newspapers, mobile phone providers, writers, advertisers… I wouldn’t be buying Google stock at these prices. The stock is due for a huge fall even though it is down more than 20% from its highs just a few months ago. Hope you dumped your stock in the run up in early November.
Guest Bloggers? Interested? SIGN UP!
I’ve decided to open this blog to guest posting… so if you’d like to post something, drop by, register and write away. I can’t promise I’ll publish it, but if it’s a good fit, I will!
And last, apologies for not posting yesterday afternoon as usual, but I was exhausted in the evening… 
Guerrilla Marketing Your Blog with GMail, Reader And GTalk
January 16, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 5 comments
Guerrilla Marketing Your Blog
I discovered a wickedly easy way to use Google’s new sharing feature to attract readers… I shouldn’t reveal it all here. But it’s so obvious that I can’t figure out if anybody else thought about it. Here’s what you do:
- 1. Sign up for a Gmail Account and import your contacts;
- 2. Activate the Reader feature by clicking on the Reader function at the top of your Gmail account (in the drop down menu);
- 3. Subscribe to your target blog that you want to advertise;
- 4. Then just simply click on the share button on the posts from your blog that you want to share when you find them in the Reader Window - you’re looking for a button or icon that looks like this… Click to share; click again to unshare.
- 5. You can see my ’shared’ items in the feed that Google Reader provides. Then chat away on GTalk; and if any of the people are using Google Reader, they’ll be able to see your feed here. See my friends’ from Gtalk who have shared publicly in the way I described in step 4.
- 6. Now you can add even more friends, too. Look in the Manage friends tab, just below the list of friends. Click on that and you can invite even more.
- 7. You can hide these subscriptions, but Google has, in their infinite wisdom, allowed sharing as a default!
Have you tried this? I know it’s difficult to measure traffic this way, but I do know that I got my blog noticed by some readers who hadn’t dropped by in a LONG time!
PageRank: an intro, making money with PR, and recent controversy
January 14, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 8 comments
Since yesterday’s post on Alexa and whether it really works , today we’re turning our attention to PageRank, though I hardly need to introduce it here. I’ve already written about it in a number of posts this past few months. You can search the archives to find out more about it…
PageRank: Arbitrary but Worthy?
By now, if any bloggers or visitors to this blog don’t know what PageRank (PR) is, I’d be surprised. In brief, Page Rank is supposed to measure the value of a page’s content by examining the number and types of pages that link to that. Pages are then assigned a value between 0 and 10. The numbers represent a logarithmic scale so that it is easier to go from 0 to 1 than from 7 to 8.
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There has been a lot of discussion of the actual formulae which are used to calculate PageRank, but most of the actual discussion is hypothetical in nature as the formulae are trade secrets. Additionally, some flaws have been discovered in the calculation that have allowed website SEO experts, who specialize in improving the SEO of websites in search engines like Google, to inflate (both legitimately and illegitimately) the page rank of their customers. Naturally, Google is concerned to protect the system, and regularly tweaks or enhances the formulae.
What is my PageRank? What is my worth?
Page Rank is not immediately obvious (like all metrics) to visitors but there are a number of websites, tools, and plugins that enable users to access this information through Google’s API. I’ve been a fan of several such tools, including SmartPageRank (which collates information from a number of sources as well). Indeed, there are a bunch of websites that also provide metrics that try to predict the value of future page ranks, as well. While it’s not difficult to find out your website’s PageRank, the value that most people know of is the Toolbar PR, that is typically a historical weighting, and is only made available about every three months or in Google’s own time. Real PageRank is a dynamic system, that is continually being updated as Google crawls the web and updates its own database.
PR CAN be bought - at a price
And Google often tries to remind webmasters that PageRank is something that a good website has, but it can’t be acquired. In reality, though, it can. Despite the best efforts of Google, the war of skills that has taken shape between the PhDs in Google and the SEO experts proves that, if you have enough money and contacts, you can DEFINITELY influence your PR ranking. Google has warned that it will crack down on what it sees as deliberate manipulations of its proprietary rankings many times. But that has done almost nothing to stop the practices. Instead it simply raises the prices of such services and the rewards to those who keep or attain a higher PR.
Worse, many advertisers and intermediary companies rely to a greater or lesser extent on the Toolbar PR as a way to measure a site’s worth or value. Hence, for Text link Ads, for example, they typically are interested in website’s with a PR2+ and some traffic. Other companies require a PR3 or PR4 as a minimum.
And what about the bloggers?
Some companies that provide advertising services have recently started using blogs (and other types of websites) as a way to advertise for traffic and SEO benefits. So those companies have developed products that use text links, sponsored posts, and other advertising methods and they have adopted page rank as a metric in evaluating the pricing of advertising (including text links, paid posts, and so on) either solely as Payperpost used to, or in concert with several other metrics (as Text link Ads currently does).
The following is a list of some companies that have used PageRank at one time or another either as a sole metric or combined with one or several other metrics:
Payperpost&, ReviewME&, Sponsored Reviews&, Smorty*, Text link Ads#, LinkWorth#, Blogitive *, Blogsvertise&, PayU2Blog*, Loudlaunch*… (see disclaimer for more information).
I’ll highlight several of those companies with whom I have an ongoing relationship to show how PR is still being used: Text link Ads, Payperpost and LinkWorth.
#1 - Text link Ads
Text link Ads has a page that outlines the approximate values that different page rankings have and the earnings potential for those sites.
The Text link Ads company also has a calculator page that can help to evaluate the monetary value of your blog by using PR and ad position. Unfortunately, it was not available at the time of this blog posting. But you can usually link to it at TLA Ads Calculator . But I have a screenshot that showed what it used to look like.
In fairness, Text link Ads also use several other factors, including Alexa to evaluate the worth of a page’s links in its marketplace.
#2 - Payperpost
Payperpost is more discrete, but once a blogger becomes a member, his or her blog(s) will be recorded as having a set PR value and posts (known as ‘opps’) in the system will be opened to him or her according to the PR requirements of the advertiser. Advertisers may or may not require a minimum level of PR, and prices will be ‘varied’ according to the PR required. PR0-2 blogs may find opps that pay from $5 to $10, while PR3-4 blogs may say more opps with prices as high as $20. PR5+ blogs can see significantly higher prices.
Once you are in the system, all the blog information is kept in the ‘my blogs’ page and the PageRank is displayed conspicuously. See…
There is a similar page in the advertiser’s area that allows advertisers to specify PageRank: Take a look.
Though Technorati ranking has now gone, other rankings and segmentation features have been added, including regions, continents, age, gender, REALRank, etc.. And many advertisers do not particularly care about PageRank or select it preferring to have as wide a range of blogs linking as possible.
#3 - LinkWorth
LinkWorth is a company that for me has been a dark horse, as business is picking up slowly with them. LinkWorth offer a variety of products, such a variety that it is difficult to compare them to any of the other companies: text links, posts, adverts, banners, to name but a few of their options .
When webmasters sign up for the program, they are required to enter their websites in the database. The websites are then displayed for customers and you can click on the ’stats’ to see the MOST complete set of stats of any of the three sites in this discussion. LinkWorth not only displays Google, Yahoo, and MSN stats, but also Alexa, DMOZ, AND their own LinkRank stat.
Recent Controversy
Of course, the past three months have seen the so-called Page Rank smackdown or bitchslap that somewhat arbitrarily (and unfairly) penalized the PageRank of many prominent bloggers and many not-so-well-known Payperpost Bloggers (et al.). This re-ranking is still going on at this time as Google is updating its results for January 2008. Of course, this has evoked a huge reaction in the Blogosphere and long discussions in Problogger and Matt Coutts blog that has included the ‘pros’, the ‘cons’ and the hypocrisies of all involved. It’s fascinating reading for those who have time. One thing is sure: PageRank is a proprietary formula, and Google is determined that it will succeed in protecting both the formula and the results it creates; in addition, it will seek to try to disrupt the markets that use the PageRank as a way to make money. Of course, that is Google’s right. But whether Google goes, will the market no follow?
On a personal note , in 2006 this site had a PR of 5, which was before I moved the site to a new location and refounded InvestorBlogger in August last year. Since then it lost its PR ranking moving from 5 to 4 to 3 as the links dried up. Then in one fell swoop, just as it was looking like it was going to be a PR4, it was manually dropped to a zero by Google. Oh,well.
In truth, I could litter this post with any of the hundreds of good discussions out there on PageRank and no-follow, but I will let you simply follow some of the good discussions by asking you to share any that you find in the comments section itself. Do you care about PageRank? What do you think about buying PageRank or selling PR? Share your reactions here.
Good Discussions: Pro, Cons and More…
Problogger Search Results
Google Goes After PPP
Turning a ‘-’ into a ‘+’
Getting PR back
How to report paid links
and more…
In the competitive Web-o-sphere, a competitor is a click away, and in the third in the series published on Tuesday, we’ll be looking at Technorati. Then on Wednesday, we’ll turn our attention to the newcomer on the block, IZEA’s REALRank .
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Originally published with the wrong date. Why does WordPress do that? It’s very annoying. Date and a few links added.
And now it’s time for a Disclaimer: I’ve joined all of these companies but those highlighted with a ‘*’ have never provided any useful work for me. Those highlighted with a ‘&’ have been more successful, but I’ve not done much work in the past three months for them for various reasons, including poor rates, insufficient opps and poor quality advertisements. While those with a ‘#’ mean that I’m still working with them on a regular basis.
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Get Started Blogging
Why not read this short series on blogging with Wordpress?
- Lesson 1: Get Started Blogging
- Lesson 2: Changing your theme!
