Blog-Mania 2009

Zeit zum Feiern! Dass die Amerikaner ja so einige Probleme mit den Mitarbeitern und Angestellten haben, wissen wir ja schon längst. Und weil sie gerade so freudig sich mit Weblogs auseinander setzen können, kann mittlerweile eine kühne Prognose die Zukunft der Menschheit vorausdeuten. Ja, wir werden alle Blogger sein! Ihr könnt euch nicht wehren! Denn laut den jüngsten Informationen von Pressetext Austria wird ab dem Jahr 2009 jeder Mensch ein Blogger sein!

Das Medium „Weblog“ verzeichnet laut der Blog-Suchmaschine Technorati insgesamt einen regen Zulauf. Diese findet weltweit aktuell 19,6 Mio. Blogs. Die Zahl hat sich in den vergangenen drei Jahren alle fünf Monate verdoppelt. Wenn dieser Trend anhält, dann sind bis zum Jahr 2009 alle 6,7 Mrd. Menschen im Besitz eines Weblogs.

Berechtigte Zweifel sind vor allen Dingen berechtigt, und ich zweifel ganz gewiss an solch einer den Haaren rausgerupften Idee. Warum? Na ganz einfach: Ich sprenge schon heute die Statistik! Ich bin stolzer Besitzer eines aktiven Blogs (diesem hier), eines inaktiven Blogs (natürlich irgendwo bei WordPress.com), eines verwaisten Blogs (beim alten Hostingprovider von Blogspirit) und einiger Clone-Blogs (irgend welche alten Adressen bei Bloghof, Blogspot, Blogsonstwas und Blog-Dir-Mal-Was-Gutes). Und wenn man es genau nimmt, sind sogar ein paar verschiedene Domains auf mein aktives Blog gelinkt, und die verwaisten und doppelte Blogs sind sogar mit follow Anweisungen zum aktiven Blog gelistet. Wenn wir nun alle „Multi-Blogger“ davon abziehen, brauchen wir wirklich bis 2010! [via Martin Röll und Moe]

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Buy me as Mr. Money Maker!


My blog is worth $22,581.60.
How much is your blog worth?

 There we go and see ourselves as the top of on the flow. Well not truely on the flow, but the MikeSchnoor.com has got quite a high value. Is anyone interested in special advertisement deals? ;)

I wonder who’d ever pay so much, but the idea behind combining the blog link ranking with the AOL prices is quite a nice gadget for every nerdy soul like me!
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Best of the Blogs Awards

I’m honestly dissatisfied with the selection of the nominated blogs for the Best of the Blogs Awards. Especially for the category of German Journalistic Blogs, I sense a disturbance in the force. Jörg-Olaf at Medienrauschen asked the right question: What qualifies these blogs as being journalistic? To be honest: What the hell?! Where’s the journalistic sense gone to? Who made that selection – and is that the best of the germanspeaking blogosphere?
And even one of the nominees Anke Gröner wondered about at the whole on her own!

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Can you be a ProBlogger?

Well, certainly the phenomenon created by (and around) Darren Rowse is certainly a prime example on how successful a blog author can become. However, many others who aren’t part of the blogging star network continuously try to become the same – and fail! The Workboxers have written a nice statement concerning this failure routine:

Darren just happened to be one of the first to realize the potential blogs had to stream content to the World Wide Web … and is extremely good at it.

If you want a successful blog, read the following advice. Everyone who is considering starting a blog should know the fundamental rule, blog about something you have a passion for! What they (Problogger and co) neglect to tell you is that you must pick a topic that will get attention! Something that will get linked to from all over the world! Something that blog networks will want to post about! Something that Darren himself will post about! Why? Because this is how a blog gets major traffic!

Clearly, this is true. And who would ever want to publish their secrets on earning money to the people who generate that money? In the end, many people do not realize they need niches. And without these niches, they won’t be in the center spot of any attention. I know this, I realized this, and live wonderful with it. The question seriously is: Do you want to be a professional blogger, or rather choose to find the newest niche for you to dig in and become the counter part to Darren? I’d follow that way.

[via Light Within, Workboxers]

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Weblog Top Ten Mistakes

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Jakob Nielsen published his list of the most common mistakes of weblog authors concerning the usability of their blogs: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

  1. No Author Biographies
  2. No Author Photo
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles
  4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
  5. Classic Hits are Buried
  6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
  7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
  8. Mixing Topics
  9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
  10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

So much about this list, and I am aware of the fact that the MikeSchnoor.com does not conform with the first two issues so far. I believe it is important to reveal a little bit about yourself as an author, and in order to meet that small and simple criteria, I’m going to post my biography and some fancy picture in the About section.

However, the problem with having words linked like „here“ or „click“ as seen in the third issue doesn’t happen at all on this site. Usually it is quite easy for a reader to understand that links created by myself lead to that what they are targeted at.

The fourth issue of posting a list of the top articles in a blog is useful, and I might do this in the near future. Fortunately I don’t even use a calendar for its horrible usability. But I’m not sharing Nielsen’s opinion about mixing topics or posting irregularly. I do prefer to mix topics since I cover many issues on this blog. For this, the four major categories (shown on top of the site) combine the others which are seen as the „big list“ in the sidebar. And how can one expect to judge content by posting only if there’s time for blogging? If you have other things to do, this is more imperative than covering the show in your blog. Thus this is a problem which is aimed directly at corporate or professional bloggers who post once a week.

The question about your future boss is always important – never forget that one may like to hire you and become offended from your writing. But one may never forget that a flame war in your blog is different from a critical opinion and thought. If I have a problem with the fictional Company X, and I get hired from that company after two years, the company should accept that employees with critical opinions are more valuable than the simple digest that oyu can find on the street.

Last but not least, we do have a domain name here – or you wouldn’t read us at all, or not? ;)

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Flock me up!

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Earlier this morning I received my official invitation from the team around Flock – the newest toy for combining Webbrowsing, RSS Aggregating and Social Bookmarking! Unfortunately the firewall of the University of Flensburg is not allowing me to download the file, and I’m probably trying to get my hands on it once I’m back home. For now, you may review some photos already here at Factory Joe’s Flickr Set. Hopefully I will post a review in a few hours!

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Your Online Tracker

The article by „RSS Blogger“ Siegfried Hirsch describes an example of how to use social software to track your own footsteps on the web: Basically, Oliver uses the bookmarking service del.icio.us to maintain the mind map of his comments all over the web.

Apparently, most users at del.icio.us serve their database with their bookmarks and daily links. But social networking software is capable to do more than just the regular job – you can possibly imagine to expand it to any use. And since this social networking tool is able to generate its own RSS feeds, you can easily implement it to your own webblog or website. Further, the idea of tracking yourself on the internet is quite useful to review the conversations you’ve had in your past.

I already signed up at del.icio.us/sichelputzer and have begun to maintain the root for my own Comment Zeitgeist! In time I might add the numerous comments from the past, but I doubt this job to cover all past topics will become useful for anyone.

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Edelman/Technorati PR Survey

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The results of the previously mentioned Bloggerstudy have been published at Edelman’s Extranet. According to Richard Edelman himself, this Edelman/Technorati blog survey was conducted to:

  • Better understand bloggers’ attitudes towards corporations and PR firms
  • Help clients understand why and how they should engage the blogosphere

You may comment on either Richard’s or David’s blog about this survey.

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Wie ich blogge?

Kleinbloggersdorf bewegt Dr. Jan Schmidt, und der liebe Doktor befragt uns alle in einer Umfrage. Daher auf zur Weblog Umfrage 2005 – und wehe dem oder der, die nicht mitmachen wollen.

[via Lummaland]

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Test: BadBehavior turned off

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Earlier today I’ve had a small telephone chat with Robert and one of our topics was the increasing problem on how to fight off spam at best. With the term spam we’ve tied it down to both Comment-, Pingback- and Trackbackspam. WordPress usually defends itself against this nasty bunch by given the administrators the option to moderate their comments, but once the spam increases, the numbers of to-be-moderated spam can reach a few hundreds and thousands of database entries.

However, people have created some plug-ins to counter these spammers:

  • Spam Karma 2.0
    This plug-in is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters.
  • Bad Behavior 1.2.2
    Spambots are prevented from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots including user-agent and referer analyses.

So far I’ve experienced the most positive protection from Bad Behavior, but while working with some website optimization tools yesterday, I noticed they were being blocked off from my site. On top of this, Robert expressed on the phone and in a recent article that other people are often turned down from bad behavior due to natural problems with user-agents or their referers. Instead of pulling hard restrictions on a blog by disallowing any form of communication (comments and trackbacks), I’d prefer to keep the idea of a social network alive. To accomplish this, the elements of interactivity have to remain intact. How else can I ask a question in my blog and get answers and with them some useful solutions?

Now I turned the plug-in off to see how much spam will pass to my moderation queue, and on top of this I will install Spam Karma tomorrow and attempt to compare these plugins. Nevertheless, the never-ending problem with Spammers is simple: They know what your defenses are and they are working to undermine them.

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