Search Results for: blogging

More ways to QuakeQuake in the socialscape

· Martin Kelley

For any bleed­ing edge Web 2.0 Quak­ers out there, there’s now a Quak­erQuak­er Friend­Feed account to go along with its Twit­ter account. Both accounts sim­ply spit out the Quak­erQuak­er RSS feed but there might be some prac­ti­cal uses. I actu­al­ly fol­low QQ pri­ma­ry by Twit­ter these days and those who don’t mind annoy­ing IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 every­where man Robert Scoble recent­ly post­ed that many of his con­ver­sa­tions and com­ments have moved away from his blog and over to Friend­Feed. I don’t see that occur­ring any­time soon with QQ but I’ll set the accounts up and see what hap­pens. I’ve hooked my own Twit­ter and Friend­Feed accounts up with Quak­erQuak­er, so that’s one way I’m cross-linking with this pos­si­ble over­lay of QQ.

For what it’s worth I’ve always assumed that QQ is rel­a­tive­ly tem­po­rary, an ini­tial meet­ing ground for a net­work of online Friends that will con­tin­ue to expand into dif­fer­ent forms. I’m hop­ing we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the lat­est trends. As far as the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is con­cerned, I’d say the two most impor­tant tests of a new media is it’s abil­i­ty to out­reach to new peo­ple and its util­i­ty in help­ing to con­struct a shared vision of spir­i­tu­al renewal.

On these test, Face­book has been a com­plete fail­ure. So many promis­ing blog­gers have dis­ap­peared and seem to spend their online time swap­ping sug­ges­tive mes­sages on Face­book (find a hotel room folks) or share ani­mat­ed gifs with 257 of their closed “friends.” Quak­er Friends tend to be a clan­nish bunch and Face­book has real­ly fed into that (unfor­tu­nate) part of our per­sona. Blog­ging seemed to be resus­ci­tat­ing the idea of the “Pub­lic Friend,” some­one who was will­ing to share their Quak­er iden­ti­ty with the gen­er­al pub­lic. That’s still hap­pen­ing but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I’m not ready to close my own Face­book account but I would like to see Friends real­ly think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapt­ing – rail­roads, news­pa­pers, fre­quent­ly fli­er miles have all affect­ed how we com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and the out­side world. Com­put­er net­work­ing is just the lat­est wrinkle.

As a per­son­al aside, the worst thing to hap­pen to my Quak­er blog­ging has been the lack of a com­mute (except for a short hop to do some Had­don­field web design a few times a week). I’m no longer strand­ed on a train for hours a week with noth­ing to do but read the jour­nal of Samuel Bow­nas or throw open my lap­top to write about the lat­est idea that flits through my head. Ah the tra­vails of telecommuting!

Shuttering up Non​vi​o​lence​.org

· Martin Kelley

In a move sure to be a sur­prise no one, I’m shut­ter­ing up my Non​vi​o​lence​.org site. Sure it’s a great domain, sure it still gets more traf­fic than all of my oth­er sites com­bined, but I just don’t have the time to keep it going in any kind of coher­ent way. It’s always sur­prised me that I could nev­er get sub­stan­tive finan­cial sup­port for a project that has reached mil­lions. It seems par­tic­u­lar­ly iron­ic to shut it down in the midst of one of the longest wars in U.S. history.

For those want­i­ng good activist news, the Dave the Quak­er Agi­ta­tor is always on top of cur­rent events and the Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion’s new’ish group blog at FOR​Peace​.net is a great addi­tion to the peace blog­ging scene. Archive posts from Non​vi​o​lence​.org have been migrat­ed here to the Ranter.

Focused blogs and side trips

· Martin Kelley

Over on Eileen Flana­gan’s Imper­fect Seren­i­ty, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­i­ty, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“ ‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­ni­ty build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and my search­es are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I had­n’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many peo­ple’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuak​er​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tal­ly out­ed a few begin­ning blog­gers who had­n’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sion­al blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­son­al blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ev­er I like. Most reg­u­lar­ly read­ers would say it focus­es on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­al­ly. Quak­er plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfair­ly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on search­es to them.

The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one top­ic. Being a part of a real com­mu­ni­ty means know­ing each oth­er in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of oth­er Quak­er blog­gers when I know more of their sto­ry: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tain­ly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sion­al blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they start­ed post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­son­al, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus. 

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­i­ty is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­est­ed in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quak­er posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­al­ly get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Read­er after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.

Yummy eats en route to Ohio

· Martin Kelley

Yummy eats en route to Ohio
More back blog­ging from our Ohio trip, this pho­to from a veg­an eatery a few miles off a rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia turn­pike exit. Prices were steep and the home­made non-dairy ice cream serv­ings small but we ate every­thing from our plates.

Pho­to: Veg­an food & messy boy at Mag­gie’s Mer­can­tile off exit 91 of the Pen­na Turn­pike, an hour or so east of Pitts­burgh. Enlarged pho­to.

Steady​Foot​steps​.org

· Martin Kelley

Steady Footsteps

Blog by an Amer­i­can cou­ple liv­ing in Viet­nam and advo­cat­ing for greater motor­bike safe­ty. The tech­ni­cal aspects are pret­ty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watch­ing the client learn about blog­ging and online photo
shar­ing as we worked on the site: I intro­duced her to Fli­crk, Picasa
and Gmail! She took to it like a fish to water and the site is full of great
pho­tos tak­en by her hus­band David. Read more about their
work doing phys­i­cal ther­a­py in Viet­nam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Tech­nol­o­gy: Mov­able Type, Flickr. Vis­it Site.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

· Martin Kelley

When­ev­er
I talk with fel­low web design­ers, the issue of “SEO” invari­ably comes
up. That’s techie slang for “search engine opti­miza­tion,” of course,
that black sci­ence of mak­ing sure Google lists your site high­er than
your com­peti­tors. Over the years a small army of shady char­ac­ters have
tried to game the search engine results.

I’ve always thought such tricks were pathet­ic and bound to lose over
the long term. Search engines want to fea­ture good sites. It’s in their
best inter­est to make sure the sites list­ed are the ones peo­ple want to
see. A search engine that returns unsat­is­fac­to­ry results quickly
becomes a has-been in the search engine com­pe­ti­tion. So as soon as a
site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skew­ing the rank­ings they tweak their secret search algo­rithm to fix the SEO loop­hole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In the­o­ry it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the oth­er big search engines hap­py: give poten­tial vis­i­tors site
they’ll want to vis­it. For­get the tricks and spend your time putting
togeth­er an amaz­ing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write. 

I’m look­ing to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
inter­view­ing with slick web devel­op­ers late­ly and when­ev­er they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolute­ly true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure con­tent. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web sys­tem can achieve many
of the same results – blogs are just the eas­i­est way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to peo­ple about start­ing a cor­po­rate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Hum­bug – your
com­pa­ny’s life is prob­a­bly already filled with blog­gable material! 

I used to work in a book­store where I did most of the customer
ser­vice, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing query and would spend a lit­tle time researching
an answer (most­ly by look­ing through the index­es of our books and
search­ing the arcane sites of our niche). This research did­n’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our book­store as a place to get
answers and gave us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over Ama­zon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have eas­i­ly been refor­mat­ted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the vol­ume com­ing from these
obscure search­es would be quite high (see yes­ter­day’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the Hit­Tail blog for an account of how atten­tion to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a wide­spread key­word dominance).

When­ev­er some­thing new hap­pens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s blog­gable. At the book­store, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten min­utes talk­ing about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen peo­ple at most. In that same ten min­utes we could
have writ­ten up a blog post say­ing much the same thing.

Last Spring a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle appeared in the local newspaper
that tan­gen­tial­ly involved my employ­er. That morn­ing my workmates
gath­ered togeth­er in the recep­tion area for the bet­ter part of an hour
trad­ing opin­ions and wise­cracks. After about five min­utes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opin­ions and wise­cracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the recep­tion area – to find my
work­mates still blath­er­ing on, natch. My post reached hun­dreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the recep­tion pontifications.

Humans are social ani­mals. We’re always blog­ging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it ver­bal­ly around the water cool­er with
three oth­er peo­ple. Learn to type it in and you’ve got your­self a
high-volume blog that will add invalu­able con­tent and SEO mag­ic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Last­ly, a point to web­mas­ters: it usu­al­ly pays to think about ways
to re-package your con­tent. My most recent­ly expe­ri­ence of this was
tag­i­fy­ing my per­son­al blog over at “Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org.” Every time I
post there a Mov­able Type plu­g­in fish­es out the key words in the
arti­cle and lists them after­wards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like cat­e­gories except they pick up every­thing we talk
about (when we use them aggres­sive­ly at least, and espe­cial­ly when we
auto­mate them). We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know the cat­e­gories that our
poten­tial audi­ence might be search­ing for and tag­i­fy­ing our sites
increas­es our key­word out­reach expo­nen­tial­ly. My per­son­al blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages accord­ing to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged con­tent that accounts for all of
this extra vol­ume. This does­n’t increase traf­fic by that near­ly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google vis­its came from these tag
index­es. More on the mechan­ics of this on my post about the tag­ging.

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

· Martin Kelley

Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

  • AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
    This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
    There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
    It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.

  • Hit­Tail
    This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

  • Reeferss​.com
    This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
    The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

  • Tech­no­rati
    This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.

  • Google Blog Search
    Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

  • Feed­burn­er
    The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

  • Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

  • When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

· Martin Kelley

Inter­est­ing arti­cle over the Move­able­type blog. Anil Dash inter­views George John­son Jr of Hyper­local Media, who’s using MT as a con­tent sys­tem to build hyper­local com­mu­ni­ty sites that can com­pete against local news­pa­pers (see their very-cool look­ing Buf­faloRis­ing site). 

Here’s some of what John­son has to say:

Dis­tri­b­u­tion, con­tent cre­ation, and the abil­i­ty to more
eas­i­ly com­pete with estab­lished local play­ers online… blog­ging is
per­fect for that. I mean a blog is chrono­log­i­cal­ly arranged, in
columns, divid­ed by cat­e­gories and changes (in many cas­es) everyday.
That’s the broad def­i­n­i­tion of a news­pa­per, right? A blog is so much
more than that, but the basic struc­ture lends itself very well to
devel­op­ing an online com­peti­tor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I fol­lowed Brad Choate’s instruc­tions for using Move­able Type as a whole-site con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.
What start­ed as an exper­i­ment became a way of life for me. The MT
inter­face lends itself so well to con­tent man­age­ment that I’m now using
it for my non-techie clients: Quak​er​song​.org and Quak​ery​outh​.org
are both put togeth­er by MT and I’ve been sur­prised that there’s been
almost no learn­ing curve for the clien­t’s adop­tion of this software. 

Giv­en this, it seems odd that the kids at Move­able Type haven’t
tak­en MT in this direc­tion (even more sur­pris­ing since they hired Brad
him­self a few years ago!). I see a big mar­ket in my niche sites for
this sort of func­tion­al­i­ty and three years lat­er I’m still hav­ing to
tweak tem­plates to get this to work. Anil, what’s up? If Dru­pal had bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion and smoother instal­la­tion it would have been the brawn behind Mar​tinKel​ley​.com.

It would be fun to fol­low Until Mon­day’s exam­ple and cre­ate a
hyper­local site (hint hint to VW if she’s read­ing this). Of course,
local­i­ty is not just geographically-based any­more. Quak​erquak​er​.org is a local por­tal of a dif­fer­ent kind. I’m a big believ­er that the hyper­local­i­ty of niche and geo­graph­ic sites are the cut­ting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There’s a lot of pio­neer­ing to be done in this regards. The net has
a lot of pow­er to take down cul­ture monop­o­lies by con­fronting old boy
net­works and business-as-usual think­ing with inno­v­a­tive social networks
that har­ness the tal­ents of the out­siders. The smart newspapers,
mag­a­zines, church­es and cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tions will come on board and
leap-frog them­selves to twenty-first cen­tu­ry rel­e­vance. Too many of the
Philadel­phia (and/or) Quak­er insti­tu­tions I know respond to change by
shuf­fling job titles and putting blind­ers up against rec­og­niz­ing the
ever-narrower demo­graph­ic they serve.