Archive for April, 2007

Meet Tim Ziegler, Our New BlogBurst Account Manager

Published by Beth on April 26, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

Tell us a little about yourself and your background.

I grew up in New York City but discovered both journalism and the Internet on the West Coast as a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in the early 1990s. After J-school, I worked as a newspaper reporter for a year before moving to the Web. In the intervening years, I’ve held many Web jobs at many companies, from startups to established corporations. Highlights include being editor of Wired Digital’s Webmonkey, having a front-row seat at Excite from before the site launched to its stratospheric rise, sitting on the South By Southwest Interactive conference’s advisory board and building several community content publishing systems from scratch.

I have written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune and the Austin-American Statesman, as well as many Web sites including CNET, and have aired stories on public radio. I’m a self-avowed news junkie who is ever fascinated by how information technology continues to change and change our world.

You are joining the BlogBurst team as things are really starting to pick up steam. What are your impressions about the product/service and what interested you about working for BlogBurst?

BlogBurst is a terrific product and I couldn’t be happier about joining the team. This is a fascinating time to be in this business as media outlets and bloggers (not to mention the general public) accept the blogosphere as a legitimate part of the discussion and we all get to invent where it goes from here.

What experience from your previous jobs/positions and talents are you hoping to share and/or use for BlogBurst?

I’ve seen trends come and go, but experience tells me that content is always king. Focusing on the quality of the content, and the context that it is placed in, will always be a winner.

As a member of the editorial services team working to integrate a New Media product into traditional media sites, what do you see as your biggest challenges? Or, how do you think traditional publishers can best benefit from a content source like BlogBurst?

Technology is changing all media so quickly that it is always a challenge to keep perspective and see the big picture: how is our industry changing and where do we fit in? Who is doing something new that we should look at? Has the competition changed?

What blogs do you read? Or, what are your favorite blogs?

I try to find new blogs all the time, but I regularly read the Becker-Posner Blog, Tree Hugger (I’m interested in new vehicle technologies), Junk Charts and a collection of political blogs from all parts of the spectrum.

Extreme Blog Makeover: RSS Feeds

Published by Beth on April 19, 2007 in General. 2 Comments

Hi, I’m J. Dock Myrick II and I’m the tech dude over here in the BlogBurst editorial star chamber. I thought it might be instructive to go over a few things about RSS feeds - since RSS is the main technology that allows BlogBurst to work. Also, since it’s important to have a full feed submitted to BlogBurst, I’ll cover a couple of things relevant to that.

Blogs and RSS

Most bloggers use a ready-made platform like Wordpress or Blogger, and the good news is that if you use a ready-made blog platform, your blog platform automatically creates RSS feeds for you. In broad terms, you’ll usually have an Atom feed and an RSS feed available to choose from, and in some cases even more. When you submit your blog to BlogBurst, you’ll see these choices in the drop-down menu during the sign-up process.

I recommend that you choose the latest version of your RSS feed, which will usually be RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0. You probably do not want to choose RSS .092 or Atom 0.3, as these older standard feeds increasingly do not work as blogging platforms and browser standards continue to be upgraded over time.

(For more on RSS in general, I direct you to our friends at Wikipedia for more insight.)

Feedburner

Feedburner is a separate free service that allows you to channel an already existing feed, creating a new RSS feed. It’s easy, it’s free, and if you are having trouble with your feed doing odd things, Feedburner is a good choice for you. I would note that Feedburner can turn full feeds into partial feeds, but it cannot turn partial feeds into full feeds.

Controlling feed length

Every blog platform is different, but with very few exceptions (MySpace comes to mind); every blog’s RSS feed is capable of generating full feeds in the blog settings. Occasionally, after making the necessary changes to get a full feed, it takes posting a new post for the changes to actually take effect. Sometimes it even takes 24 hours, and in some cases you need to republish your feed. There are too many platforms to list all the instructions, but here are a few examples:

Wordpress - full feeds

Go into your Wordpress template and click the ‘Options’ menu tab. Under that click the ‘Reading’ subtab and you should see a place to change your settings for each article to show “full text” as opposed to “summary.” Click on Update Options to save.

BlogSpot / Blogger - full feeds

 How to turn on full feeds:

1) Go to Blogger.com and sign into your blog to see the dashboard.

Click on the Settings tab and then on Site Feed in the sub menu underneath that tab.

4) Make sure to click on the Save Settings button at the bottom of that page to save the changes.

5) Sometimes, a useful next step is to go ahead and republish the blog.

6) ALSO, as a workaround - If you’re using an atom feed as your feed URL (http://blahblah/atom.xml) I’d change it to RSS 2.0 (http://blahblah/rss.xml) as these seem to work a lot better within the framework of Blogger.

Changing your BlogBurst feed in our system

If you find that you really just need to change the feed altogether (for instance, moving to a newer version of your feed) you should be able to do so in BlogBurst by choosing “Edit Blog Profile” under the “My Blogs” camp, then choose “Update URL” and change the feed URL.

Well, that’s it for now - I hope you found this instructive. Happy blogging!

- J. Dock, Editorial Tech Specialist

Virginia Tech Tragedy

Published by Beth on April 18, 2007 in General. 6 Comments

Following the tragic shootings Monday at Virginia Tech University, the BlogBurst editorial team put together a newswire of blog posts which focused on the event. The wire will be updated through this week. Our publishers which picked up the posts were Reuters, the Austin-American Statesman and the Internet Broadcast System, which owns several broadcasting sites across the country. We’d like to sincerely thank everyone who shared their views on this terrible day.

A sampling of the VA Tech posts:

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

Published by Beth on April 13, 2007 in General. 1 Comment

A number of blogs in the network wrote posts about the death this week of acclaimed author Kurt Vonnegut. The BlogBurst editorial team put together a news wire of these posts, and the wire was picked up by USA Today and Reuters (screen shot shown below). Thanks for the thoughtful posts.

The Blogosphere Turns 10

Published by Beth on April 12, 2007 in Blog Industry News. 0 Comments

One of the professional blogs in the BlogBurst network is Britannica.com. Recently, Britannica’s technology section posted two timely and in-depth articles concerning the state of the blogosphere, which is marking its 10th anniversary this week, and the citizen media revolution that came along with it.

The Blogosphere at Ten describes the growth of blogs over the past decade - 70 million - and the fact that the great majority of these blogs are seldom maintained and seldom visited.

I would venture to guess that 69.75 million of those 70 million blogs have an assembled base of 139.5 million readers: the author and his or her mom (or the moral equivalent thereof). This is hardly the makings of a revolution that will find the barbarians behind the gates once and for all.

Of course, the author is being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it is a reminder that a blog with a distinct voice and personality that is updated often with original content is much more likely to develop and grow its audience.

Next, The Dark Side of the “Citizen Media” Revolution discusses the pros and cons of the ability for anyone with a computer and Internet access to become a multimedia presence.

In place of expertise and authority, the Web 2.0 crowd offers us interactivity and “conversation.” But the real consequence – unintended or otherwise – of… the “participatory” media revolution is a culture of digital narcissism in which our most meaningful cultural reference is ourself. Today, on the tenth anniversary of the blog, media is turning into a mirror.

Extreme Blog Makeover: Image is Everything

Published by Beth on April 10, 2007 in General. 0 Comments

When BlogBurst bloggers create their profiles, they are prompted to upload an avatar or image for their blog. A blog image can make your blog more attractive to publishers (and readers), increasing your chances of being picked up.

If you don’t have an avatar (photo/logo) associated with your blog, we provide a generic default image - but we’re sure you can come up with something much more creative that accurately represents your blog. (Remember - the blog image is different than your blogger image, although you can certainly use the same one.)

You can add a personal image for your blog in a few easy steps:

1) Save the .jpg or .gif picture (that you want to use for your blog) onto your desktop in Windows, so that you’ll know where it is for a later step.

2) Log into your Blogburst account by going to and clicking on the ‘Workbench’ tab at the top right corner of the screen.

3) When you log in, you’ll see your blog listed under Summary. Click Edit Blog Profile for the blog in question. Then you’ll be taken to the Edit Blog page.

4) On the Edit Blog page, you will see a Blog Image section with a Browse button beside it. Click the Browse button.

5) Next, you’ll be taken to a File Upload pop-up window that has an icon for Desktop somewhere, probably in a column on the left-hand side. Click the Desktop icon.

6) You should now be able to see everything on your desktop, including the picture you want to use. (if not, make sure ‘files of type’ says ‘all files.’) Click on the name of the image you want to use, then click Open in the lower right.

7) This will send you back to the Edit Blog page. Scroll down the page and click Save, and you’ll be in your Blog Profile.

8) If you don’t see the image you selected beside your blog, hit the F5 button on the top row of your keyboard to refresh the page, and it should display.

Some of our favorite BlogBurst images:

The Final Sprint

Earth & Sky

/Film - Blogging the Reel World

Hedonia

Darla Mack

Vagablogging

The Blogosphere Is Slowing Down?

Published by Beth on April 5, 2007 in Blog Industry News. 2 Comments

According to the search engine Technorati, the number of blogs grew from eight million in March 2005 to over 72 million last month worldwide. The number of daily blog posts increased from 500,000 in March 2005 to 1.4 million in March 2006 - meaning 58,000 posts an hour. Talk about posting frequency! But the Technorati report also showed that the overall rate of blogosphere growth has slowed down. (And we didn’t feel a thing.)

[Source: Yahoo]

Verifying Your Blog When You Join

Published by Dock on April 3, 2007 in BlogBurst Nuts & Bolts. 0 Comments

When you add your blog into the BlogBurst network, you will to “verify” it to claim it as your own. We require this step to ensure that blogs submitted to the network are being added by their real owners.

When you reach this step during the set-up process, you will see two or three options, depending on the blogging platform you use:

Option 1 - Claim Your Blog - This option will only show if you have a blog platform that supports this option. If you choose to claim your blog this way, simply enter in your ID and password to access your blog platform (to make a post, for instance). We will not keep this ID and password. We only use it one time during this step to remotely touch your blogging platform and verify that the ID and password work as you entered them. This is a similar method to the one Technorati and some other sites use to verify your blog certification.

Option 2 - You can copy and paste a small BlogBurst network badge (containing an ID) into your blog somewhere, both to show your excitement for this new service and to identify this blog as your own. Once you have this badge in place, return to the BlogBurst blogger workbench and hit the Verify button. Our system will go back to your blog and look for the embedded ID to verify your blog’s ownership.

Option 3 - You can copy and paste a small, invisible BlogBurst JavaScript into a post or elsewhere on your blog. You can find this code in the workbench when your blog’s status is “pending,” just click on “verify this blog” and it will greet you there. Once you do this, follow the same process as above by returning to the blogger workbench and hitting the Verify button. You can remove this JavaScript from your blog once your blog is successfully verified by BlogBurst.

DO NOT FORGET TO HIT THE VERIFY BUTTON AFTER YOU COMPLETE THE OPTIONS ABOVE

Verification Q and A

Q: I put the verification script in the sidebar/header/main page but it says I’m not verified. Why?

A: There are lots of potential problems with this approach. Put the code in a blog entry instead, and if that doesn’t work, let us know.

Q: My site has frames — will this affect verification?

A: First the bad news: if your blog contains frames, you will not be able to verify a BlogBurst badge the normal way. The good news, however, is that you can contact our editorial team for guidance, OR try Option 3 above.

Add an Avatar to your Blog

Published by Dock on April 3, 2007 in BlogBurst Nuts & Bolts. 0 Comments

When you create your user profile after being accepted into our network, you’ll be prompted to upload an avatar or image for your blog. An avatar can make your blog more attractive to publishers (and readers), increasing your chances of being picked up. A good avatar may also increase the chances that readers will click back to your originating blog.

If you don’t have an avatar (a photo or logo) associated with your blog, we provide a generic default image - but we’re sure you can come up with something much more creative that accurately represents your blog. (Remember - the blog image is different than your blogger image, although you can certainly use the same one.)

bb-avatars.gif

The second avatar above is generic, for a blogger who didn’t have their own

You can add a personal image for your blog in a few easy steps. BlogBurst avatars are 60×60 pixels, so it’s best to create an image that looks best at that size (and that looks good square).

Here’s how to add one:

1) Save the .jpg, .gif or .png picture (that you want to use for your blog) onto your desktop so that you’ll know where it is for a later step.

2) Log into your BlogBurst account by going to http://www.blogburst.com and clicking on the ‘Workbench’ tab at the top right corner of the screen.

3) When you log in, you’ll see your blog listed under Summary. Click Edit Blog Profile for the blog in question. Then you’ll be taken to the Edit Blog page.

4) On the Edit Blog page, you will see a Blog Image section with a Browse button beside it. Click the Browse button.

5) Next, you’ll be taken to a File Upload pop-up window that has an icon for Desktop somewhere, probably in a column on the left-hand side. Click the Desktop icon.

6) You should now be able to see everything on your desktop, including the picture you want to use. (if not, make sure ‘files of type’ says ‘all files.’) Click on the name of the image you want to use, then click Open in the lower right.

7) This will send you back to the Edit Blog page. Scroll down the page and click Save, and you’ll be in your Blog Profile.

8) If you don’t see the image you selected beside your blog, hit the F5 button on the top row of your keyboard to refresh the page, and it should display.

Some of our favorite BlogBurst images:

The Final Sprint

Earth & Sky

/Film - Blogging the Reel World

Hedonia

Darla Mack

Vagablogging

Understanding Who’s Reading Your Blog

Published by Dock on April 3, 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Now that your blog is being syndicated through the BlogBurst network, you want to know where your posts are showing up, don’t you? (We thought so!)

Here’s how to see where you’re getting play:

Log into your account on BlogBurst and look for the “Reports” link at the left of your workbench. The default “All BlogBurst Activity” report shows you headline impressions collected from all BlogBurst publisher sites.

The “My Activity” report allows you to slice and dice your headline impressions, post views and unique visitor counts from across the network (more on what those terms mean at bottom).

  • If you click on “My Activity” you can see the headline impressions your blog has generated.

    • burstblog1.gif

    The drop-down menu on the right allows you to change the time span

    burstblog3.gif

  • The “Posts and Publishers” link identifies your top ten posts by headline, date posted, the number of times the post was viewed, and how many people clicked through to your blogburstblog4.gif
  • The “Post Placement” link allows you to sort by publisher your post placement. You can also view how the post looked on an individual publisher’s site
    burstblog2.gif

Blog Placement Reports Q&A

Q: What the heck is a Headline Impression?

A: Headline impressions represent the number of times one of your blog’s headlines display on any publisher site. See the SFGate.com travel section as an example of how BlogBurst blog headlines are displayed. In this case, SFGate.com shows 4 headlines from a collection of selected blogs in their BlogBurst travel channel. Any time your blog’s headline(s) shows up on a publisher page like this, we capture every pageview and count it as a headline impression for the post and roll up all headline impressions for your My Activity report.

Q: So then what is a Post View?

A: Post views represent that number of times someone clicked on a headline displayed on a publisher site to read the entire blog post.

Q: Why don’t I see any reporting data?

A: For many BlogBurst bloggers in the network, your “My Activity” report will be blank. This simply means that your blog has not been picked up yet.

One final note: If you change the parameters of the “My Activity” report (headlines vs post views for example) in the pull down menus, don’t forget to click on the “Draw!” button to re-render the report with these new settings.