One month with Akismet

Last month while attending BlogWorld I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, at the WordPress Meet-Up. One of the topics we spoke about was Akismet, the spam blocking plugin. I had used Akismet a few years back, but had run in to some issues with it. At that time I found Spam Karma and started using it exclusively. A few drinks, a little dinner and some great conversations later, I headed home to give Akismet another shot.

I downloaded and installed the latest copy of Akismet on 2 blogs; geeeek.com and austinsink.com. While this blog has been around for several years, austinsink.com is relatively new and I was curious how it would handle the two. Would I seed any differences between a blog that receives a TON of spam and a blog that receives hardly any.

geeeek.com results
Total Comments: 10,724
Real Comments: 33 (0.30 %)
Spam Comments: 10,691 (99.7 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

austinsink.com results
Total Comments: 73
Real Comments: 14 (23.72 %)
Spam Comments: 59 (76.28 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

Overall I have to say I’m really pleased with Akismet. In the 2 months leading up to the switch, Spam Karma had been doing a great job of keeping the spam out of my blog and had zero false positives, but I was receiving a hefty amount of spam pingbacks that were all going uncaught.

I did have a bit of “user error” the first few days I was running Akismet. In the Options -> Discussion settings on WordPress, I had left the following box checked:

WordPress Settings 

This setting was being overruled by Spam Karma. When I switched to Akismet, all comments needed to be approved prior to showing up on the blog. I was under the impression that all my comments were being held up as spam and I was counting these as false positives. I unchecked the box and the comments were flowing freely to the blog without my intervention. All is right in the world again, yeah.

So for now, I’m going to stick with Akismet. It seems to be doing the job fantastically.

Tubemogul.com; continual time saver

So many tools that you run across on the Internet claim to save you time. When you try them out you find that they save you time initially, but as you use them more and more they have other aspects that end up costing you time. You can get blinded by the initial time savings. When I first heard about tubemogul.com, the first thing I was told was that it’s a huge time saver. When this is the lead-in, I’ve become jaded and immediately look for the catch.

tubemogul Logo  If you are unfamiliar, tubemogul.com is a free service that lets you upload a video to their site and then from their control panel you can have your video posted to several popular video sites, like: youtube, google, yahoo, revver, metacafe, myspace and several others.

Sounds great, right? So far, so good. The upload process is simple. You title, tag and categorize your video one time through a very simple interface. You select the video sites you want to post to, enter your username/password for each site and click the post button. Your video gets pushed out to several sites at once.

With most services, this is where the time savings would stop. Not with tubemogul. Here’s the part that really sold me on the service. Starting the day after you upload your video, tubemogul starts collecting stats for your videos across all the sites where you’ve published your video. You don’t need to log in to each of your video site accounts to see how many viewers you have had. You can check them all from one centralized location.

If you use video as part of your marketing or advertising and you aren’t using tubemogul, you are crazy. Did you miss the part where I said the service is free?

Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.

BlogWorldExpo: Expo Hall Review

For being a first year conference, the expo hall had a pretty decent turn out with regards to exhibitors. Here’s a completely random list of some of the booths I visited and a bit about their product:

I, of course, didn’t mention everybody. There were quite a few others at the show and even more I met who didn’t have a booth. Be sure and check out these forward thinking companies. They are going to be the ones who help drive the development of new and more exciting/productive/useful tools that we will all benefit from. I hope you all had a successful show and look forward to meeting up with you next year to see what’s new!

BlogWorldExpo: Day 2 Sessions

It’s quite possible that day 1 of BlogWorld was so good that it set my expectations too high for day 2. After such a great day Thursday, I had really high hopes for Friday’s sessions. Though, after looking back at the schedule, be the titles alone I should have realized the content wasn’t going to be as strong. Nevertheless, here’s a report on the sessions I attended today.

The opening keynote speech was given by Anil Dash from (Live Journal, MovableType and Six Apart) followed by Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech).

Anil spoke mostly about openID and Google’s new Open Social, both of which I had heard of but didn’t know much about. The concept for Open Social being that apps written for use on social network sites should be able to be used across multiple sites and not tied to a specific site. With the growing number of social networking sites available, this should make life easier for both developers and users. I’m quite interested to see where this goes.

Leo spoke mainly about the differences between Main Stream Media and New Media and how we are moving away from being an audience and instead being a community. Moving away from the monologue and moving towards dialog. He also talked about how podcasting (though, he hates the term Podcasting) is currently a wide open medium in that there are no set rules for engagement. You don’t have to be sitting behind a desk wearing a suit to report the news any more.

The first breakout session I went to on Friday was “Blogworld Workshop - Producing Fun and Engaging Content“. This was supposed to be hosted by Brian Clark (copyblogger.com), but he was unable to attend. Instead it was hosted by Liz Strause (successful-blog.com). When I first walked away from this session, I was feeling pretty negative about it. But, after sleeping on it, I realize that it wasn’t bad, just different than I was expecting. I ended up taking away some very interesting tid-bits of information. For example:
- successful blogging is 20% writing and 80% connecting
- Don’t lecture - talk
- Every blog post doesn’t need to be completely flushed out. Let your readers add to it through the comments.
- In corporate blogging, be helpful, not hypeful.
- To make a post sticky it must have a head, a heart and let the reader know how it will fit in their life

The next session was “Leveraging Social Media for Your Company” hosted by Tom Gerace (gather.com) and Don Crowther (Affiliate Marketer). This turned out to be a great session. Tom and Don each spoke for a minute or two at the beginning and then asked the audience for some questions. They got 6 or 7 questions written down and then started going through them and providing answers in general terms that would apply to most everybody.

I could write an entire post just on the content from this session, but instead I’ll leave you with just a few things to think about:
- Two keys to success: Participation and Add Value to the Conversation
- If you aren’t talking about your products, others can be (both positively and negatively)
- Don’t pitch, constantly give and be transparent
- Provide access to information or even to resources not normally available

Next was “The Lazy Guide to Producing Great Podcasts” hosted by Glenn Reynolds (glennandhelenshow.com). Glenn hosts a popular political podcast where he conducts interviews. He pointed out immediately that he had nothing to do with the title of the session. He went on to discuss the equipment he uses (both software and hardware) along with the process he goes through to produce the show. He gave several low-cost tips on how to make your podcast sound as good as possible. While I normally steer clear of anything and everything dealing with politics, Glenn’s speech was informative and entertaining.

To close out the expo, the final keynote was given by Mark Cuban (blogmaverick.com). You may know Mark as being the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Or, you may know him from one of the other myriad of projects he’s involved with. For me, this was the first time I had ever heard him speak for longer than a sound-byte on Sports Center. I admit I knew very little about his background, but I did know that he had been writing a blog for several years (though, I’ve never read it). After listening to Mark’s speech, I’m going to have to give his blog a read.

Mark told several quick stories, but the one that stood out to me most was about how blogging and other new media outlets are going to change the way people get their news. A few years ago Mark had done a 6 or 7 question interview with the Dallas Morning News via email. A few days later when the article was printed in the paper, it looked nothing like the interview that had taken place. So Mark took all the back-and-forth emails that had gone on for the interview and posted them on his blog letting the readers know exactly what was said originally. If you think about it, that’s really, REALLY powerful and should give major news outlets reason to look over their shoulder.

For a first year expo, I’d have to say BlogWorldExpo did a great job! Every session I went to started on time (give or take 3 minutes), none of the sessions felt over crowded, the registration price was quite reasonable and the information gathered was invaluable. Not to mention the amazing amount of networking that gets done on the expo hall floor, at lunch and dinner and in the halls between sessions. I’m already looking forward to next year’s expo. I hope to see you there!

I have but one request for next year’s expo. In every session, there needs to be power strips available for the mass amount of laptops. Cheers!

BlogWorldExpo: Day 1 Sessions

When I first sat down to write a post about my day at BlogWorld I had planned to write about the sessions and all the great vendors I met up with in the expo hall. I realize that’s going to be far too much for one post. So instead, this post is going to just cover the Day 1 sessions I attended. A post about the expo hall will follow later.

The day started with the BlogWold Opening Keynote Presentation. The keynote was a bit of a Q&A between Ed Sussman from FastCompany.com (also Inc.com) and Matt Mullenweg who is the founding developer of WordPress. Ed asked the questions and Matt provided the answers which he deftly weaved in to a “state of the union” of where the blogging industry (both content & software) are at now and where things are heading.

While he had a lot of interesting things two say, the two points that brought me the most joy were:
- WordPress will ALWAYS be an open source project.
- WordPress is working towards an “auto-update” feature (ala Firefox) that will let you update your blog through a single button click when you log in to your admin section.

After the keynote, the first session I went to was titled: Blogworld Workshop - Smart Ways to Monetize Your Blog. The first speaker was Jeremy Schoemaker (shoemoney.com). My only complaint about Jeremy’s session was that it wasn’t long enough. He’s a “Been-There-Done-That” guy who doesn’t pull punches. He comes right out and says “Adsense sucks for blogs” (which isn’t Earth shattering news, but you sorta expect people to not throw stones at Goliath). He went on to talk about leveraging ad networks and direct ad sales in order to boost your income. Since he only had 15-20 minutes, the information wasn’t overly in-depth, but would definitely provide a springboard to get you headed in the right direction. Hey Jeremy, next year I want a full hour from ya!

Another unfortunate part of this first session was that Brian Clark (copyblogger.com) came down with the flu and was unable to make it.

There were two other speakers during this first session - Asaaf Henkin (kontera.com) and Rebecca Weeks (DevineCaroline.com). While both individuals were certainly good speakers, their content didn’t thrill me. Asaaf spoke for 20 minutes about his company and their product (which is a revenue generator for bloggers, I’ll agree) and Rebecca spoke for 20 minutes about her company’s website and it’s growth this year. To me, both presentations felt like a long-form commercial for a product/site rather than giving me information about how I, as a part-time blogger, can earn money with my blog. I would have rather ran in to both of these people on the exhibit room floor.

After lunch I went to the Good to Great: Blogging & Profit Potential session hosted by Jim Kukral (jimkukral.com). Jim’s session is lean and mean. I can sum it for you with the content of one of his slides called “The Super Secret Sauce”. It says: Targeted Niche + High Quality Content That Solves Problems + Good Ad Placement = Profit.

Yeah, I over-simplified it just a touch, but I’m sure Jim would agree, master that and the rest will fall in place.

Jim also talked about how to use YouTube video content as the springboard for great profits. He had some fascinating info about how Tim Carter over at AskTheBuilder.com is blowing away the competition (or lack of) by creating video “How-Tos” for his site.

Then, in taking a break from the marketing track, I sat in on the Yamaha Motor Corporate Blogging Case Study hosted by Maggie Smith (SocialMediaGroup.ca). One of my key reasons for attending the BlogWorldExpo was to come up with ideas on how to help my company (the one I work for during the day) leverage the power of a blog and/or social media outlets to strengthen our relationships with people and companies we do business with. When I saw the case study was on a company the size of Yamaha, I quickly realized that they would have many of the same problems I expect we are going to face. Legal departments and marketing departments who both want to control the messages being put out are just two of the key hurdles I see in front of me.

Maggie provided a ton of information in under 45 minutes and had me taking notes like a madman. We were left with enough time for a decent amount of Q&A. The audience, though smaller than the “Make Money” sessions, pumped out some in-depth questions. Maggie was equal to the task with more great information.

I’m looking forward to writing up a proposal for my company in the next couple weeks. I’ll definitely be bringing a bunch of information from this session.

For my final session of the day, I was originally scheduled for Making Money with Affiliate Programs but, at the last minute saw New Media Revenue Opportunities with YouTube, Second Life, Podcasting and more!, which sounded quite interesting. The show has a kiosk that lets you change your session registration in the matter of a few seconds (literally), so I did.

After a quick technical issue, we were informed that the original speaker had to cancel and we would now be lead by Jason Van Orden (jasonvanorden.com). This was, by far, my favorite session of the day. I must have taken 3 full pages of notes. To try and give you an idea of the information Jason had to share, here are some of the notes I took that I think sum it up:

- Your audience wants: to be informed, to be entertained, and, to belong (i.e. opportunity to associate with other like-minded individuals)
- By producing good content you gain Thought Leadership
- Repurpose your content as merchandise (i.e. subscriptions, CDs, DVDs)

Again, I’ve oversimplified for the sake of creating some brevity (too late, I know), but one thing was clear, the battle will be won and lost with the quality of your content. Those who produce crappy content are going to fail in the long run.

After the show was over for the day, I headed over to the Hard Rock Casino for a WordPress Meet-up. There were roughly 20 people there including some of of the developers of WordPress and Matt Mullenweg. I got a chance to chat with Matt for a few minutes so I asked him the question that I knew was on the tips of everybody’s tounge… “What’s in the future for BBPress? As it turns out, the answer is “quite a lot”. They have hired a genius programmer to work on it full time. It will be moving more towards a simplified theme/plugin model like WordPress itself. The core of BBPress, he says, is actually better than that of WordPress. He called it a “Slow cooked meal”, referring to the fact that it’s been around almost as long as WordPress but hasn’t gained nearly the attention or cult-like following that WordPress has.

I’m glad I thought twice before deciding to skip the WordPress Meet-up. It’s not often you get to sit down and have the attention of both the founding developer and one of the current lead developers of a software program that currently has 1.7 million installs. I’d be understating it quite a bit to just say that I had an enjoyable time…

I didn’t take a lot of photos at the show today, but here are a few I snapped off:

BlogWorldExpo: What’s your purpose for going?

Tomorrow morning is the start of Blog World Expo. I’m excited that the day is finally here. I’ve been waiting (not-so) patiently for months. I’m schedule for two full days of conference sessions and am also looking forward to walking the exhibit hall and checking out all the vendors and the new blogging/podcasting gadgetry they’ve got on display. My excitement got a big boost at the end of September when I attended the Podcasting Expo in Ontario, CA. Given the fact that Blog World is being held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I’m expecting this to be several times as big as the previous expo.

As I was driving home from work today I was thinking about how lucky I am not to have to take extra time off work, pay for a hotel or plane ticket to come to Las Vegas in order to attend the conference. That thought was quickly followed by, if I wasn’t here in Las Vegas, could I justify the trip? Yes, it’s going to be a great show. Yes, I’m excited to go. But, I currently don’t make enough money from my blogging efforts to pay for any portion of the trip, so would I learn enough at BlogWorld to make the expense worth my time and more importantly, worth my money? For me, it all boiled down to one all encompassing question:

WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE FOR ATTENDING BLOG WORLD EXPO?

One of my main purposes for attending has to do with my full time job. The company I work for could really benefit from a healthy dose of corporate blogging. We have so much information that needs to be shared with our advertisers and publishers that a little bit of less formal communication would benefit everybody involved. So, I’m heading to the expo in search of guidance with moving my company in to the corporate blogging arena with a vengeance.

Other than that, I’m also interested in finding like-minded people who may want to work on blogging/podcasting projects with a group. As much as I like being in charge of all the content that hits my site, it sure would be nice to have some other people involved who have a vested interest.

If you plan on attending (or if you read this after you get back, already attended) Blog World, what is/was your purpose for going?

The Blog for a year competition

Through a contact on Facebook,I was introduced to a site with an interesting idea. The site is called Blog for a Year. The idea is that they will pay somebody $80,000 to allow them to quit their job (not required) and work on their blog for an entire year.

Just exactly how are they going to do that, you might ask… I know, because that’s what I asked. First, you need some bloggers. The bloggers get nominated (I don’t think there is any rule against nominating yourself). Then, they go and tell all their friends, family, co-workers and anybody who will listen to go to the site and vote for them (up to once per day). At the same time, the site is taking donations. As soon as the donation pool reaches $160,000 the blogger with the most votes is offered the job.

Collecting $160,000 to pay out $80,000??? may be your next question (yes, it was also mine). The about page says that the extra money goes to pay for hosting, taxes, legal fees, etc, etc. Any money left over will go towards future competitions. OK, fair enough. I can live with that. But, what if you never reach the $160,000 mark? They have that angle covered as well. If the donation fund doesn’t reach it’s goal, on January 1st, 2008 they will offer the top vote getter half the amount of the donation fund. With 3 months to go, I’d say they have their work cut out for them. The donation fund is currently sitting at $1,958.

If you are thinking about winning the competition, unless you have a relentless and large fan base that will vote for you on a daily basis, or unless you have the be-all-end-all of hard luck stories, I’d say you probably don’t have much of a chance.

I like the concept, though I don’t expect they are going to get anywhere near their goal of 160K unless they find some corporate advertisers to foot the bill. If I were running the site I would throw affiliate links to the bigger online shopping stores (amazon, ebay, etc…) and then suggest to the bloggers to request that their voters also use those links when planning to shop online. Heck, with nearly 200 bloggers already signed up, they could cast a fairly sizable net for online shoppers.

BlogRush threatens cheaters. Is this wise?

This morning I woke up to a lengthy email from the folks over at BlogRush talking about the changes that they are making to their system. Everything they were saying in the first half of the email sounds great and I was happy to hear that they are listening to their audience and making some needed changes. Though, I think they have everybody’s best interest in mind by doing a manual blog review for new registrants, I don’t think this is going to solve their issue. It would still be really simple to register using a real site (in English) only to bypass the manual review and then load up the BlogRush widget on an exit-pop from an off-shore porn site. (just an example)

The second half of the email gives me cause for concern. Many years ago, at a previous job, we had a problem with some people trying to cheat our system. We started putting some additional safeguards in place to stop them. When we stopped any traffic that came through that was fraudulent, we put up a simple notice that said, “Fraudulent data, your IP has been recorded.” Within a week our system received dozens of hack attempts and DOS attacks. It was as if the fraudsters took our message as a personal challenge and they were intent on bringing us down. The email from BlogRush is far more direct than our message was. They are not just suggesting they will shut down your account. They are guaranteeing prosecution.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun.  And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity…  quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened.  I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off.  We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you.   I GUARANTEE IT.   Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.

While I fully understand their frustration and I understand the point that they are trying to get across, I think the “attack” stance that they are taking is a dangerous line to be drawing in the sand. The number of script kiddies out there who have nothing better to do than figure out ways to mess with your app is immeasureable. While you may have the best of intentions, a direct threat like this may not be the best solution.

I’m very interested to see how things work out for BlogRush over the next couple weeks. It sounds like they are heading in the right direction. For everybody involved, I hope they haven’t kicked a sleeping bear.

SpeedLinking - September 25th

Blogging for a living isn’t something that I’m interested in doing. But, blogging my way to a decent supplemental income sure sounds like a lot of fun. In order to make money blogging, I think it’s important to keep up with “the industry”. Where better to get that info that from other blogs who talk about making money by blogging?

Here’s a list of some blogs I’ve been reading on a regular basis lately:

- ProBlogger.net
- CopyBlogger.com
- Bloggrrl.com
- 45n5.com
- BloggingTips.com
- AlisterCameron.com

I’m looking for other blogging related blogs that currently have an alexa rating under 100,000. If you know of some, please leave a comment and let me know about them.

Cheers.

Keys to success: blogging on schedule

This post is being written for completely selfish reasons. It’s meant to be a glaring reminder to listen to my own advise.

One characteristic of most successful blogs is that they post consistently. Many of the blogs I read post on a daily basis, and some post several times per day. This is an art that I haven’t yet mastered. I’m lucky if I post twice a week. But I am working on it!

Since I have a full time job and a family, my free time spent on the Internet in the evenings is fairly limited. This means that if I’m going to write a proper blog post, I need to sit down, focus and get to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way and I find myself aimlessly surfing websites that I’ve found from a link off a link off a link. 30 minutes later I’m left wondering how I ended up reading a page about the Heritage of Pet Grooming and where in the heck my evening has gone. I start out with the best of intentions, but sometimes end up going to bed after getting nothing done that I had set out to do.

A big part of my problem is that when I sit down at the computer, I don’t usually have a topic lined up that I plan to write about. That’s not to say that I don’t have topics. I have plenty of them. But, they are usually all swimming around in my head and in no real order. Today I have started working on two things that should help me combat this issue; I created a blog schedule for the next month, and I penciled in the topics for the next few posts.

First off, the schedule. This is an important one for me. I am currently writing on a few different blogs, and I find that there will be a week where I post on 1 blog 3 or 4 times and other blogs will go with 0 posts. To help with this issue I have written in each blogs name on the date where I plan to make a post. Some sites will be updated 5 times a week, some 3 and I have one that will be updated 1 time per week. With the new schedule in place, I now have a place where I can look and see immediately which site is due for a post. Having a schedule to go off of will save several minutes going through each site to figure out how long it’s been since it’s last post.

Penciling in the subjects is a way for me to also cut down on the amount of time it takes to get a post written. Once the topic is known to me (usually a day or two before post time), I will start brainstorming the topic and doing research in my spare time so when I sit down to write, I’ve already got a healthy portion of the post written in my head and it simply a matter of getting it on (digital) paper.

I’m confident that blogging on schedule is going to help me grow my readership and be an overall boost to the quality of the site.

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