Taking a month off from reading a feed reader is a liberating thing…. until you come home and are confronted with tens of thousands of unread posts. Today I began the task of catching up – here’s some of the first pieces of news, tips and posts from the last month (more to come over the coming days):
- TLA have launched Post Level Text Link Ads – now you can not only sell text links on your sidebar on a site wide basis but can do it at the end of each post which gives potentially hundreds, if not thousands of text link sales per blog.
- Over at the Chitika Blog they’ve been running a 30 Day Blog Bash which features guest posts from 30 blogging experts.
- North x East wrote on 9 Essential posts that every blogger should know
- Rick from Feedburner has an interesting post reflecting upon Full Feeds. One interesting tidbit – he says that they’ve seen no evidence to back up the often cited reason for partial feeds – that it leads to more visitors to your actual site.
- PayPerPost is sponsoring the Bloggers Choice Awards. I like this ‘awards’ because it open for any blog to be nominated. While this leads to hundreds of blogs in each section it actually presents those looking for other blogs in their niche with a wealth of blogs to look at. For example in the Best Blog about Blogging category (thanks to those voting for ProBlogger) there are hundreds of blogs nominated. I spent the afternoon surfing them and found a heap to add to my RSS feed.
- Dave Sifry released another State of the Blogosphere Live Web – full of all kinds of juicy stats for those who are turned on by such things.
- A new magazine for bloggers and podcasters is being released – Blogger & Podcaster.
- Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion – yep, old news now but I had to include it, this is an update post after-all.
- Loren at Search Engine Journal does some useful analysis of AdSense placement on MySpace pages. This is worth a look because MySpace and Google have a partnership around ad placement so one would expect that these are well optimized ads. Interestingly the ads are very plainly designed, almost in default colors with a blended (no borders, plain backgrounds) approach.
The feedburner article is great. Just to give you my thought on full feeds, I provide a full feed on my blog because I believe that is the whole point of RSS. I want my content to be available freely, and be flexible for syndycation – my readers should have access to my blog in the form most comfortable to them.
That’s why my Cup Of Chai blog has full feeds. It’s not just about the number of visitors. It’s about taking good care of the readership you have by giving them a comfortable, “keep it simple, stupid”, blog experience without much mumbo-jumbo.
I don’t like making categories for my posts either, because I feel each of my posts is worth reading, unique and not a item to be put in the drawer. But that’s discussion amterial fora different day.
cool list of interesting reads!
I’ve been so focused on learning blogging and Web 2.0 functionalities, that I am starting to dream about all this at night…ha. Now you have a whole new list for me. But thank you very much. I think your site is great, and as time permits, I plan to read your books and learn everything I can from you.
Wow its great to have you back Darren! This is the sort of stuff I have been missing.