There are different strategies you can follow when you are becoming increasingly popular. Which path you take depends on your goals and whether your blog is a hobby or a (potential) business. Do you keep on doing what you are doing or are you going to deliver more content. Most importantly, are you continuing on your own or are you going to expand?

Becoming more popular also means a changing audience that may be more demanding. Can you maintain the same quality as before? And how do you manage a growing team of (guest) bloggers that you will very likely do not know personally? These are just some of the problems a growing blog may face and that you should take into account before taking it to the next level.

If your blog is your hobby I think your main goal is that both you and your readers should be satisfied. Listen to your commenters and their (constructive) criticism and be open and transparent in the process you are going through. Transparency is what mainly seems to be lacking on the (wannabe) professional blogs that are picking up their posting pace or expanding their editorial team.

One of my favorite design blogs/magazines PSDtuts recently experienced first hand what it is like to go big and ran into a major problem. One of the contributing editors duplicated a Photoshop tutorial. PSDtuts handled the situation in possibly the best way they could with total transparency:

Today we’ve had to unfortunately remove a tutorial due to copyright issues. As all creatives should, we take copyright very seriously here at PSDTUTS. The tutorial in question has been removed, the author has not been paid and I’ll personally be investigating further to get in touch with the original author to apologize and ensure everything is sorted.

The reaction of most of their readers? Respect.

What to do when your readers are complaining you are growing big and bad? Be honest and transparent. Admit you are going through a transfer phase and trying to adjust to the new situation. If you can’t get your new big blogging act together don’t be afraid to radically change your approach. Do you want to be big and bad or rather small and good?

1. Writing
   While writing new blog posts seems like the primary function of the blog at first it is not the only thing that counts. On top of that it depends on what kind of blog you run. Is it a personal blog, a professional blog or a news blog? The type of blog will determine your daily blogging schedule of either publishing several posts a day or just once a week.
2. Reading
   The feedreader is a blogger’s best friend and worst enemy. The pitfall of keeping up with too many other blogs is that you don’t get into the act of writing anymore. Are you suffering from being overwhelmed by the amount of unread blog posts in your feedreader? I notice that I have a tendency of being sucked into my feedreader, unable to get out of it to actually write a new post. Try to unsubscribe from some blogs you hardly read or make a schedule with strict reading and writing hours.
3. Commenting
   Engaging in conversations by commenting is often considered an important aspect of blogging. Not only replying to your own readers’ comments but also on other blog posts. Lorelle VanFossen recently realized that she needed to comment more as “I haven’t been commenting as much as I’d like to on other blogs. I’m so wrapped up in my own little bloggy world, I forget to open the door and see what others are doing out there and give my feedback out there.” I find that I often try to keep up with all my feeds leaving me no time to leave a comment. Instead of trying to read tons of blog posts a day I am going to aim on trying to comment more.
4. Networking
   I have a Technorati profile, a MyBlogLog profile and probably many more profiles on different blog networks yet I don’t ever do anything with these profiles. These services either exist to gather stats on your blog or to manage your blog community. I plan to visit my services and communities more often in order to socialize and network.
5. Statistics
   I am addicted to statistics. Technorati, Feedburner stats, I don’t care as long as it contains numbers. I spend a lot of time just staring at my blog’s statistics instead of focusing on the content or upgrading my plugins.
   

I think how you divide your time between different blogging activities determines what kind of blogger you are. Can we categorize bloggers by the time they spend on each aspect? Can we distinguish the reflective blogger, who mainly reads other blogs and writes a few long contemplative posts a month? Does it make sense to speak of the social blogger who writes regular posts with a fair amount of links and spends a great deal of time engaging in conversations and networking on blog networks.

I wish it was that easy. It is hard to put people in restricted categories and in the case of blogging bloggers it may be even more different because all these activities are part of the blogging experience. The key lies in dividing your (precious) time between all the aspects so that you feel happy about your blogging time. I am currently in the process of rethinking my blogging practices and how to spend my time.

Have you found your blogging balance yet?

Twitter

Twitter is a useful tool to stay in touch with both conference organizers and attendees. Stay up-to-date with schedule changes, keynote transcriptions and videos and people in the room. Twitter is used more and more often by speakers to answer questions from the audience or from people who are not attending the conference. The downside of such interaction is that there are always people out there to get their 140 characters of fame and add a lot of noise to the signal.

One of my favorite uses of Twitter during conferences is a backchannel people can send their posts to. During the Next Web conference in Amsterdam a few weeks ago a backchannel was created where all posts that included #nextweb were posted. By following the backchannel you can get information from everyone actively participating in providing content from the conference.

Live blogging

CoverIt Live is one of the most popular tools used for live blogging. It provides an easy and instant way to provide your blog readers with the latest news without having to refresh the page:

Your commentary publishes in real time like an instant message. Our ‘one-click’ publishing lets you drop polls, videos, pictures, ads and audio clips as soon as they come to mind. Comments and questions from your readers instantly appear but you control what gets published.

It is an excellent solution for blog visitors if you are “live reading” the blog. However, for archival (and SEO) purposes I am not too fond of using such tools. For example, I wanted to check out Mashable’s post on Matt Mullenweg Announces Related Posts and Themes for Photo Bloggers. If you use an external service such as CoverIt Live the content is not actually a part of your blog but it is embedded into your blog from their server. The fact that your content is embedded has consequences for indexing and finding the content. Be aware when using such tools that your live coverage will not be indexed nor be part of your blog’s archive.

Fast publishing

This is my personal preferred method of blogging conferences and keeping up with conferences. At the Next Web Conference we covered the whole conference with only two people and took turns in covering the keynotes. After a thirty minute keynote we would have another thirty minutes to turn our notes into a blog post and publish it online. While thirty minutes to edit your notes is not much it provides you with just enough time to turn them into a coherent blog post.

Why do I prefer fast publishing over Twitter or live blogging? Your blog is not as good as its latest post, it is the archive that counts. Which is your preferred method?

The question is not so much if spam or the Pingback killed the Trackback but rather if the medium has rendered it obsolete. The medium and practice of blogging are entangled in the blog software and with the introduction of Pingback the inter-blog notification system became automatic instead of manual. When I described the difference between the manual Trackback and the automatic Pingback in On Using Manual and/or Automatic Link Notification Systems I also described how I mainly relied on Pingbacks.

Gathered from the discussion in the comments (and the slowly disappearing Trackback URI on blogs) it seems that especially the newer generation of bloggers, including myself, is not aware of the Trackback feature let alone use it. Does that mean that WordPress, or any other blog software for that matter, should remove the feature? If Trackback is only being used by spammers should we keep that little Trackback box that hardly anyone uses?

I am sure users would raise hell if WordPress would remove the Trackback feature because as Martin Emmerich comments: “Trackbacks and pingbacks are the threads of the blog web and part of the blogging culture.” Trackbacks play(ed) an important part in our blogging culture and they have helped to shape the blogosphere as we now know it.

So what should we do with the Trackback? Should we do anything at all? Anil Dash from Movable Type, who developed the trackback, replied to a first wave of “trackback is dead” declarations in 2005 that we should fix its problems:

Finally, the familiarity and utility of TrackBack, especially now that current-generation tools reduce the likelihood and reward value of spamming, means that there can be a base for a new generation of TrackBack, featuring necessities like authentication and richer content payloads. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater in regards to TrackBack would be as silly as throwing out email because it’s been abused.

Mend it, don’t end it! :)

Did Pingback fix TrackBack sufficiently to render it obsolete? Should we remove obsolete features from the already abundant options in the blog software interface? Troy Duncan shares my wish of further developing conversational techniques: “Instead of removing choices, I would like blogging platforms to develop more ways to extend the conversation.”

When bloggers are quoting other bloggers and you want to comment on the issue, where do you leave your comment?

There are three different options:

1. Comment on the the original post
2. Comment on the post that quoted the original post
3. Start a new post and use trackback/pingback to notify the other two posts

However, we are increasingly using other services and social networking sites to engage in the conversation. The feature to auto-post your latest blog post on Twitter is a very popular way to promote your blog post. It also means that you may receive comments on your blog post in the form of a Twitter reply.

I notice that I reply differently on blog posts when I comment on Twitter than on the actual blog post itself. When commenting on a blog post I feel the need to sit down, reflect and spend some time on formulating a valuable comment. However, when I comment in the form of a Twitter reply I am not only limited to 140 characters but I also feel my comment is part of a time sensitive flow. This means that my comments are not only shorter but that it also lowers my personal barrier of commenting, I can write a quick and short reply.

I recently commented on a blog post with a Twitter reply suggesting some corresponding literature. The author then asked me if I could comment on the blog post also which I then did. This is the problem we are currently dealing with. Should we care where our comments are, that the conversation is increasingly scattering around the blogosphere? Should we cling onto our blog as the central aggregation point of our conversation?

Friendfeed suggests that the issues of distributing commenting in the blogosphere seems to have moved beyond control. It is the perfect tool to keep up with your friends’ feeds but it also allows you to bring the conversation to Friendfeed. The situation is getting more and more dispersed. We use centralizing features such as CoComments to keep track of where we leave our comments but the conversation is only visible to us and not to others who would like to participate.

I don’t care where my comments are, as long as I am aware of them. This is the issue that we need to address which is an infrastructural issue as Matthew Hurst from the Data Mining Blog points out:

What is being lost in the conversation is the fact that the infrastructure of the blogosphere, due to its somewhat amateur evolution process, has not managed to fix some of the serious issues that have troubled it from the past. Commenting is exactly one of those things. As the value and use of comments evolved, and as the distribution mechanisms of content evolved, little effort has been made to bring commenting along with it. What has happened, is the appearance of a number of hacks on top of the base infrastructure to get around this issue. Perhaps the exception to this is the RSS 2.0 commenting mechanism.

Do we need an infrastructural fix or should we just “give up control” and focus on the conversation taking place? Robert Scoble doesn’t care where his comments are, do you?

Lorelle VanFossen recently addressed the issue of spam in blog search engines and keeping their index spam free is one of the main objectives of Twingly. On top of that they focus on conversational search in the blogosphere by partnering with traditional media. They have closed several deals with major newspapers in Europe which provide links to the blogs that reference them. This is another step in showing the two-way links between blogs and online newspapers. Their main competitor in this area is of course Sphere but Twingly focuses on different markets. Read all about their ideas to start another blog search engine in the following interview and grab a special Blog Herald beta invite code while you can!

AH: What are your motivations to start another blog search engine and how do you compete with Google Blog Search and Technorati?

When Google launched a couple of years ago, the blog search engine they launched was really good. What happened though is that the major blog search engines such as Technorati started to move away from search into a more portal-like concept because of the influence of Google. Since then Google hasn’t enhanced its blog search in any way, at least not apparent from the outside.

I think that is really sad because they have killed innovation in blog search and that is something we would like to remedy. We want to start up innovation and get the competition going. Right now I don’t see any competition in blog search and that is something we would like to do.

We will move into conversational search and other kinds of media conversations too. That is the opportunity we saw two years ago when we started that. The future of media is conversation and there is a huge need to make these searchable as well.

AH: How does Twingly then relate to CoComment for example which focuses on that part of the blogosphere where all the conversation is happening?

We will also aggregate comments and we will work with CoComment to make it searchable. There is a need for companies and people to get the overview of the bloggers and the conversations to be able to find the quality content and that is something that is really hard to do today.

AH: Where CoComments is more of a centralizing system for your distributed contents you want to make it better searchable and more social?

Yes, CoComment is really focused on the commenting part of the blogosphere and we work a lot with businesses connecting to the blogosphere. Our main mission is for every reader to find the appropriate blog to read and for the bloggers to find the appropriate readers no matter how small or big you are.

AH: Right now you are focusing on the European market and signed a few deals with a major European newspapers, is Europe just the first step?

We just signed our first deal in South Africa and we believe their will be a major IT boom in Africa in a couple of years. It just started in Rwanda so that will be a very interesting market. Other than that, North America and Asia are continents we are looking at as well.

AH: Does this mean you are trying to tap into new markets?

Since we are just a very small startup with nine people we approach one market at the time and fortunately Internet penetration is social media uptake is very different in different parts of the world. We started out in Scandinavia and we are lucky to be there because the media are very progressive and now the same progress is being made in Europe. There is a lot going on in Asia and we want to be there as well.

AH: You made an amazing screensaver, a real-time visualization of the blogosphere, which currently only runs on Windows. Are you going to make it available for Mac users too?

Yes, it is definitely high on our wishlist. We are not porting the version ourselves but we are putting a lot of money of making it into a Mac version so it will be here.

CEO Martin Källström

Are you interested in trying out Twingly and participating in the beta? The Twingly beta is currently limited to 2000 people but they reserved 30 beta invitations for Blog Herald readers! So go to Twingly and use the invitation code “blogherald”

Technorati seems to allow anything that publishes a site feed to be claimed, including your Twitter account. So how do you claim your Twitter feed on Technorati? It is just as easy as claiming any other blog, just read Twitter everywhere it says “blogs” or “blog software” or follow these steps:

1. Go to the blogs tab in your account
2. Claim a blog/Twitter account by providing the blog URL, for example: http://www.twitter.com/blogherald and begin claim.
   You may encounter an error stating that the Technorati Monster has escaped again, ignore it and simply try again. Technorati’s infrastructure does not seem to be build for the amount of requests it receives.
3. Activate your claim by pasting the provided HTML code in your Twitter update field and press update.
4. Done!

By claiming your Twitter profile on Technorati your tweets will be indexed. Yes, all of them, including the ones that say “brb, need coffee.” This means that there is a need to separate the wheat from the chaff as a lot of “breaking news” in the blogosphere is moving to Twitter.

With a potentially massive amount of indexable tweets the question arises if Google and Technorati can handle the maturing blogosphere? This question has become even more relevant now that Technorati is indexing Twitter. Joery Bruijntjes wonders why is Technorati is indexing Twitter? because

As you all know, Technorati’s main function is to map what’s being talked about on the web. To do that accurately, you need to gather a lot of information. Aside from the main article, blogs contain a lot of useful metadata like tags, outbound links, categories and trackbacks.

This kind of data -especially trackbacks and outbound links- is great for tracking conversation across media. You can see this in action on their homepage. They use all this great metadata to try and track what’s being said about news stories in the blogosphere.

Conversations are all about links and the amount of metadata in Twitter is limited to only 140 characters, or is it? Andy Beard describes how Twitter “also has a blogroll of sorts” in the form of “links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.” The blogosphere thrives on links but Beard describes how Technorati may not be able to cope with this new situation if “Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers” start claiming their feed and Joery Bruijntjes also points to Technorati’s vulnerability:

Last year news spread that Technorati “temporarily” dropped all content older than six month. To me this says they can’t cope with the enormous amount of data being generated by bloggers. Twitter has far less content to process, but still needs a dozen servers to keep things running.

Knowing that, why would Technorati take on all this extra burden? Surely it can’t be a content-driven desire, as the updates on Twitter contains too little metadata to be of help for linking news stories to the blogosphere. I could understand if they chose to build a separate search engine specifically for Twitter, or simply gave it a unique representation on their site. But they didn’t.

So why would Technorati index Twitter? Andy Beard provides at least one good reason:

Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Are you providing interesting, informative or legitimate on Twitter? Have you claimed your profile yet?

The longlist consisted of hundreds and hundreds of blogs I had never ever read or even heard about. Going through the list and deciding which blogs should make it to the short list was a really interesting process.

If you have to evaluate hundreds of blog how long do you take to judge one blog? If you are not familiar with a blog you should dig into it, read some new posts, read some old posts and evaluate the overall structure. However, it is impossible to spend, let’s say, thirty minutes per blog, so how do you quickly evaluate a blog and give it a fair chance.

This was one of the hardest things while evaluation blogs. However, I think general points apply when you come across a new blog: do you like the tone of voice, the style, the design and the topic? What criteria do you use to judge a blog? And most importantly, do these criteria change per category? What happens if different jury members use different criteria? The whole judging process was as interesting as choosing the winners itself.

Two days before the final award show I received a phonecall from a major Dutch public broadcasting station. They asked me some questions regarding blogging and the blog awards but after answering unclear random questions for almost twenty minutes it finally became clear to me what they were aiming for. So I asked him: You are asking me what the status of the Dutch blogosphere is?

That is one intriguing question, what is the status of the blogosphere? Do you determine it by quality or by quantity or a mixture of both? The overall quality of newspapers is often determined by the amount of papers available and the diversity. The trick is, even the biggest countries have less than a few thousand newspapers. So how can you use criteria such as quality, quantity and diversity in the blogosphere?

The question has stuck with me ever since.

However, the web seems obsessed with updates, it seems to be in an endless beta state fed by a perceived freshness fetish where updating quickly and instantly is the norm. Blogging may be seen as a medium where the freshness norm is illustrated in the daily update. New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin recently stated that

Much of the power of the Web lies in speed and reach. But those same properties are the source of its greatest failing as well: the tendency to spread faulty assertions instantly and widely. Maybe it’s time for a “slow blog” movement, just as there’s now a slow food movement — and even a slow life movement, as described in The Times this week.

While blogs thrive on the update , the quick update in order to break the news first may also lead to the “fast-motion flow of misinformation.” A recent example is the Robert Scoble’s quick but inaccurate Twitter message stating that “revision3 just sold to cnet for $58 mil” which was humorously covered by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.

While freshness is still the norm on the web there are also a few trends that propose to slow down. We are dealing with an increasing amount and speed of information which gave birth to the Getting Things Done hype. Dutch problogger Ernst-Jan Pfauth for example applies GTD to blogging in ‘how to process blog-related email Getting Things Done-style‘.

Both the slow movement and Getting Things Done are a philosopy and a lifestyle. Slow blogging proposes to take a step back, reflect and think. Carl Honore gave an interesting talk on ‘Slowing down in a world for speed’ at Ted 2007 (see video). Of course the Slow Blog Manifesto does not apply to all blogs and bloggers. Slow Blogging is a style and mindset that rejects immediacy:

It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament.

News blogs depend on quick and fast updates but depending on what kind of blog you run you have to balance between the speed of information and depth of information:

The best internet experiences balance the tension between speed and ease of access and depth of information. The superficial quality of speed is inherent to the net (just like water is wet) but that doesn’t mean it has to be accepted unquestioningly. The proliferation of information and our consumption and creation of it isn’t something that should be taken for granted. (Jesse)

Mari then distinguishes between two types of blogging:

There is and should be fast and slow blogging. Someone a while back made the point that the real issue is lazy blogging. I think that’s right. Fast blogging has its place in conveying news and starting conversation. Meanwhile, slow blogging is for thoughtful, considered analysis; for weighing all of the news that’s already been reported in fast blogging and by other media outlets. Both are good. Lazy blogging has no place. (Mari)

What kind of blogger are you? A fast blogger or a slow blogger?

Point in case is: WordPress.com and Blogger.com are big but national blog hosting services may be even bigger.

If we translate the Long Tail concept to blog hosting services they may serve a huge niche market.

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article ^[1] to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of those business allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail. (Wikipedia)

Blog hosting services such as WordPress and Blogger are big worldwide but national blog services are very popular in non-English countries. The French Skyrock for example hosts almost 15 million blogs and with an Alexa ranking of 16 it is right behind Blogger.com (12) and receives even more traffic than WordPress.com (50). Only 2.2% of all WordPress.com and 2.5% of Blogger.com visitors come from France. While pageviews are no longer considered to be the ultimate measurement tool for traffic and popularity Skyrock’s numbers are nonetheless impressive.

Skyrock started in 2002 as Skyblog, a social networking site for the popular youth-oriented radiostation Skyrock with a free blogging service. It is the major blog hosting service in France and Europe and is an important communication platform:

Due to Skyrock Blog’s reach to the young society in France, it has been utilized as a common source of online rallying and communication during the Paris Riots of 2005 [6]. It has also been used in the organization of underground political demonstrations and movements, similar to the 2006 U.S. immigration reform protests. (Wikipedia)

The size, reach and impact of the Skyrock shows that there is definitely room for national blog services. An important factor in the success of those services is obviously the fact that they provide a service in the native language. English is no longer the dominant language in the blogosphere and these services acknowledge that.

A second reason is that they provide a major audience because you are where your network is. If all your friends are on Skyrock you will very likely join them as well. This power law does not only apply to social networking sites (I am on Twitter because all my friends are on Twitter and not on Jaiku) but also to blog services.

Do you blog on a national blog hosting service and why? What role do these services play in the blogosphere?

I use the WordPress ShortStat plugin for my daily dose of statistics but any other blog plugin or Google Analytics will provide you with the same ‘keywords-used’ information. ShortStat divides these into recently used keywords and overall most used keywords. The latter shows that most people drop by my blog to check out articles on WordPress photoblog themes.

Popular keywords overview:

1. wordpress photoblog theme
2. wordpress photoblog themes
3. anne helmond
4. photoblog wordpress theme
5. photoblog wordpress themes

About a year ago I wrote an article series on WordPress and photoblogs and this series is by far my most popular content. The list of most recently used keywords shows that while the general focus of my blog is not on photoblogs it is still the main reason why people visit my blog.

Last keywords used:

• wordpress themes photoblog 09:35
• rietveld academie, txt blog 07:47
• integrate zenpress and wordpress 07:21
• wordpress now reading templates 04:53
• wordpress photoblog theme 04:06
• wordpress now reading style 04:04
• gallery2 multi files upload 02:37
• visual basic code for TinyMCE 01:57
• photoblog creative commons 01:26

These last used keywords could fill up a whole new article series on photoblogs. You could use your used keywords list as an inspiration source for new posts.

The used keywords cover topics you have not written about yet. I have no articles covering the subject of ‘photoblog creative commons.’ This in its turn could be interpreted in several ways: A post on photoblogs with a Creative Commons licenses or how to use the new and popular PhotoDropper to insert photos with a Creative Commons license into your photoblog theme.

The main point is that your readers can give you new insights, they may combine keywords you never matched together and look for things you never thought of before.

Have you ever used your visitor’s keywords as a source of inspiration?

The first important step in geotagging blog posts was made by cyberhobo who developed a plugin for WordPress that makes it very easy to annotate your blog posts and automatically puts them on a Google Map.

This is what a map with geotagged blog posts could look like:

A more customized example of a geotagged blog map can be found on Shifting Pixels.

In this way blog posts could be location based but especially location aware, or as JoeLencioni puts it:

I think that geotagging may be more for posts that are about a certain location, not necessarily posted from a certain location. At least that’s how I’m using it–I’m tagging posts of photos with the locations they were taken.

Plugins make it easier to geotag your posts and show them on a map. On top of that, the development of a specific geotag icon will very likely further develop the geoblogging trend by providing a clear and distinguishable icon. The icon and geotag information may be added to the end of the blog post:

Geotagged at 53.07509122405637, -0.8168667554855347 (View on map) – example from geoblogger publicenergy

The icon is still under construction and being made with the help and input from other geobloggers. The first draft resembles a brown pin in which the brown refers to the earth and the pin to the old habit of pinning down points on maps. The icon is designed to fit in with existing and established web icons. From left to right the proposed Geotag icon, the established Feed icon, the OPML icon, and the Share icon.

You can follow the development of the icon at Bruce’s blog and leave feedback or participate in the comments. Will the new standard icon further popularize the geotagging of blog posts?

While subscription fees may keep academic journals going it prevents interesting articles from circulating widely and circulation creates discussion. Fortunately there are also many great research articles out there in the open. I’d like to share three pieces that changed the way I think about blogs.

1. A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium - danah boyd
This article explains what makes it so difficult to study blogs. It starts with the question “how tool developers, media, researchers, and practitioners have conceptualized blogging” and how all these different people have created their own definition of blogs and blogging. A new ‘definition’ or rather framework is presented that invites scholars to conceptualize blogs as both a medium and a bi-product of practice. We blog with blogs.

2. Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control (PDF) – Jill Walker Rettberg
This paper looks at the history of hypertext and hyperlinks and how we are constantly trying to keep links under control. There used to be one author who decided which links were being made but in the light of blogs links have gone wild. Bloggers decide who they link to and whose trackbacks and pingbacks they accept (or delete) but what bloggers cannot control are links from other weblogs. All these links create a narrative surrounding the blog.

3. Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality – Clay Shirky
Ever wondered why it is so hard as a new comer in the blogosphere to gain attention and status? This article from 2003 on power law distributions aka the 80/20 Rule explains why the top 10 favorites on Technorati hardly ever changes.

Feel like reading more? Here’s a very extensive list to 189 (academic and non-academic) articles on blogging.

The question of how many blogs are out there is currently buzzing in my e-mail inbox and in my (Dutch) feed list. Why do we even care about the total number of blogs? Carl Bialik from the The Wall Street Journal explained it as follows in 2005:

First, let’s step back and consider why we’re counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are. But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot.

It’s been almost a year (April 2007) since David Sifry wrote his latest report on ‘State of the Blogosphere.’ Even though Sifry’s reports only include blogs that are indexed by Technorati, the numbers in the reports are often used to generally reflect upon blogs, blogging and the blogosphere. Sifry’s reports started out as a quarterly reports but are no longer published as frequently. Does this mean that we no longer need “numerical credibility” to account for the phenomenon of blogs? Sifry stated in his latest report that:

The state of the Blogosphere is strong, and is maturing as an influential and important part of the web.

For nearly four years, we’€™ve been tracking and enabling the growth of this phenomenon and theirs is much in our data to indicate that the medium is “€œgrowing up.”

Is the medium mature now? Is that why nobody seems to be counting blogs anymore? Do we no longer feel the need to count blogs because we have established their importance?

I don’t think the blogosphere is quite mature yet. Technorati currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. Blog statistics often concern the English language blogosphere but we should not forget about the millions of other blogs that are not always included in estimations.

Another important question we should ask ourselves is where these numbers come from. How do we even count blogs? Should we use numbers provided by software platform, by country or by indexing engine? Duncan Riley used to do frequent ‘manual’ blog counts on the Blog Herald based on software platform and country. An incredible initiative in an attempt to achieve a rough estimation on the total number of blogs. However, it would be nearly impossible to re-do such a count because it relies on many sources that unfortunately no longer count blogs.

The ‘easiest,’ most obvious and arguably the most accurate estimation on the total number of blogs could be given by the indexing engines and the ping services. Even though not all blogs send out pings to the ping services, all the major blog software platforms do. Unfortunately ping servers do not disclose the amount of blogs that ping their services. Technorati as a ping service and indexing engine does disclose the number of blogs they track but Google doesn’t. Am I the only one who is curious about the total amount of blogs Google is tracking?

Have we reached such a great amount of blogs that we no longer feel the need to count them? Should we count them? Does it matter how many blogs are out there?

There are three different options:

1. Comment on the the original post
2. Comment on the post that quoted the original post
3. Start a new post and use trackback/pingback to notify the other two posts

Which one do you choose?

This question was prompted by the following situation: Lorelle VanFossen recently quoted from a blog post from Liz Strauss who quoted from an e-mail conversation with Eric Eggertson. This is the original quote

When there’s a lot of discussion in the comments of a post, or if there’s some critical info added in the comments, create a short post quoting the most relevant info and pointing people to the contents of the prior post. This isn’t cheating. It actually really helps people who subscribe via e-mail or RSS, as they may not be aware of what’s being said in the comments.

This quote is now moving from one blog to the other, so where do I comment? While all the blogs quote the same paragraph, they all add their own opinion. While the quote does not change, the context of the quote does change.

Lorelle added to the conversation by making the great observation that

The post helped me understand that while comments are contents, feed readers are missing out on the conversation.

No matter if I comment on the original blog post or on the blog post that quotes, feed readers will most likely not be aware of this comment. Comments are indeed part of the content but most blog software separates comments from the blog post by supplying a separate comment feed.

While it depends on the context where it is most suitable to comment, writing a new blog post never hurts. Not only do you add to the conversation, you also point your feed readers to the ongoing conversation.

What is your preferred place and method to leave comments? Leave a comment, or link us with a new post.

It is the beginning of a more social and networked book.

Author Wardrip-Fruin enjoys the format of blogs as they can create communities and allow for interaction. While working on his manuscript he often turned to blogs and often cited blog posts. Blogs have changed how Wardrip-Fruin works as both a scholar and a creator of digital media thus creating a blog-based peer review seems like the logical next step. The project has been established in cooperation with Institute for the Future of the Book which developed the CommentPress theme:

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.

It aims to bring the characteristic features of the blog, such as comments, trackbacks and site feeds to the otherwise ‘fixed’ book. The Institute for the Future of the Book has developed the theme to enable the book to become a part of the network, the blogosphere. While this obviously does not work for every type of publication it will be interesting to see if this initiative will be followed in the (academic) blogosphere. CommentPress is a new type of structured blogging which is especially suitable for books, journal publications, papers and theses.

Edublogs, the free blog hosting service for students and educators, also offers the CommentPress theme to its users. It will be interesting to see how this initiative may change the future of publishing and what the impact will be on (academic and educational) blogging.

While we are still struggling with blogging definitions Google has clearly defined for itself what a blog is, by the means of technology:

The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, which will be checked frequently for new content. This means that Blog Search results for a given blog will update with new content much faster than standard web searches. Also, because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy. (About Google Blog Search)

Google does not offer a definition of a blog but instead defines a blog through the means of technology: a blog is a site that publishes a site feed. If your blog does not send out a RSS or Atom feed it will not be listed in Google Blog Search.

Technorati does offer a definition of a blog namely “A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web.” Only three years ago Technorati answered the question of what a blog is with:

We don’t have an official definition,” says a spokesperson for Technorati, the blog tracking service. “It’s something that’s created with blog software. I don’t know how to answer that question. We don’t get that question. (Conniff)

Interestingly enough Technorati does not reveal which criteria they use to index blogs, except for ‘registering’ your blog:

Registering your site with Technorati can help you ensure that your updates, new entries, and content are indexed efficiently and with priority by Technorati’s search technology.  (Technorati Help: FAQ)

Blog search and indexing engines seem to define blogs by technology while bloggers prefer to define blogs by practice. What is particularly interesting is that the blogosphere is defined by technology. While bloggers ‘make’ and ‘shape’ the blogosphere through the social practice of writing, linking and commenting the blog engines define the blogosphere through technology.

I think this is one of the major problems that makes it so hard to define blogging.

Blog collaboratively

The obvious advantage of blogging a conference with a partner or group of people is that you can divide up the speakers. This leaves you with more time to do research on the subject you are covering and you can sit, relax and listen. If you run a one-(wo)man blog, find people in your niche who may also attend the conference and suggest to blog collaboratively. Not only is this a great way of networking and meeting new people it may also work wonders for your blog. If you decide to cover the conference with two fellow bloggers who link to your conference articles you may end up with new readers from their blogs and vice versa.

Prepare for offline blogging

I’ve been at conferences in such new-built places that they did not even have the time to get the network running. On top of that some conferences only have a protected network or a paid service network. While it never hurts to bring a credit card in case you want to pay for access for a day, prepare for offline blogging in case there is no network access at all. A weblog client such as BlogJet supports all the major blogging platforms and allows you to write your post offline, completely format it, save a draft version, add a category or tags and publish it to your blog when you have online access. You may also install a local version of WordPress on your computer or a USB stick and send your files to your server later.

Bring a power chord

Or even better, a power chord with multiple plugs. I’ve made many people happy with my juice-sharing power chord. Not all conferences are supplied with superior blog seating with tables and power chords like the blog plateau at the PICNIC07 conference:

I usually bring a 15 meter/50 feet power chord and a power chord with three plugs. This means I get can power from the other side of the room and share it with two people. I can assure you, it’s a great way to make new friends. It never hurts to pack an extra battery and to bring a (paper!) notebook in case there is no power supply at all.

Use a memo recorder

If you want to quote someone you either need to be a very fast typer or have a very good memory. I use my phone’s recording abilities to solve both these issues. I record the session so I can listen to it later when I sit down and transcribe it. This is most useful for extensive blog posts that don’t require to be online immediately.

Despite the fact that not all conferences and meetings support blogging facilities it is one of my favorite blogging activities. The feedback and discussion that arises from conference posts is absolutely great. Not everyone has the time, money or right geographical location to attend a conference so it is well-appreciated to cover a conference on your blog.

Have fun!

Trackback is an intentional way of notifying other blogs because WordPress requires you to manually enter the blog’s trackback link. It also allows you to send a notification to another blog even if you don’t explicitly link to them in the post. This may be done in an attempt to include the other blog in the conversation. On top of that trackbacks may be considered “the real letters of recommendation on the web.” However, with the increasing disappearing of a visible trackback link is it still a popular feature?

Only three years after the invention of trackback Tom Coates declared that it “has been killed by spam and by spammers.” Tony Hung recently posed the question if Trackbacks Become Too Spammy To Be Worthwhile? and addressed how, despite of the burdens of spam, trackbacks helped him to participate in the discussion and to get his blog noticed.

As a relatively new blogger I initially did not know the exact difference between trackback and pingback until I read the ‘WordPress Trackback Tutorial.’ After reading the article I discovered that I had never actually used the trackback feature and mainly relied on pingback. I have become so used to pingback that I have taken linking and linking notification methods for granted.

Pingback was designed to answer some of the flaws of trackback:

horrible internationization support, bad auto-discovery, proclivity for spamming, no verification, historical baggae of category junk, bad spec. Fix all these and you get… pingback. (Mullenweg)

In contrast to the manual trackback, pingback is fully automatic. WordPress is automatically enabled to send a ping notification to the links in my blogpost. If the other blog is enabled to receive pingbacks the link will usually be displayed in the comment section. While I consciously link to other blog posts I also unconsciously comment on them by sending a pingback.

That I do not use trackbacks is not a matter of being lazy. I don’t mind spending an extra few minutes to look up the trackback link and send the blog a manual notification. It was simply a matter of not knowing the difference between trackback and pingback. I have become so accustomed to the easy and automatic notification method of pingback that it is hard to incorporate a “new” and manual method in my blogging routine.

Do you send manual notifications in the form of trackbacks to other blogs? Or do you rely mainly on automatic pingbacks? Do you have a particular reason for not using one or the other?

Currently I mainly link to friends from university and some other people writing about new media. My blogroll is pretty coherent as it reflects the focus of my blog but what about the other people I want to link to?

I could categorize the blogs in my blogroll or use an external service to update and manage my blog. I could pay more attention to my blogroll and update it once in a while. Or I could remove it.

The blogroll is one of the canonical features of the blog. The term was presumably coined by Doc Searls on December 17, 2000 and is often refered to as

The section of a weblog that lists the sites that the blogger reads on a regular basis. This is usually located on the side of a blogger’s frontpage, or on a separate page linked off of the frontpage. (Winer, 2003)

An early attempt to list all blogs was made by Cameron Barrett on Camworld in November 1998. This original list is still available on his blog and is now published as his blogroll. “The original blogroll” resembles both a blogging community and an early blog index. With the growing popularity of blogs index and search engines such as Eatonweb came into existence.

Blogrolls are a personal index of blogs that need attention. I am currently neglecting my blogroll and have a hard time letting go of it because it seems such a standard feature of the blog.

Have you removed your blogroll? What was the reason? Do you consider the blogroll a canonical feature of the blog?

Freedom of speech is something I take for granted. Blogging is also something I take for granted.

The blogosphere doesn’t have any laws except for a few initiatives such as the Blogger’s Code of Conduct. I am not a big fan of these codes as I am a big supporter of Common Sense. What I love about blogging is that you can speak your mind. But can we all? Bloggers are bound by the rules and laws of the country they reside in. What if these laws restrict an individual from speaking their mind? Or even worse, what if these laws put bloggers such as Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman into jail?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation fights for bloggers rights and created the Legal Guide for Bloggers that provides bloggers with information on their legal rights. The guide covers a wide range of subjects, from the privacy rights of people you blog about to workplace blogging to legal liability issues. EFF also has an extensive piece on how to blog safely by blogging anonymously. Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices used this post to create a technical instruction guide on how to blog anonymously because

One of the great joys of working on Global Voices has been having the chance to work with people who are expressing themselves despite powerful forces working to keep them silent. I’ve worked with a number of authors who’ve wanted to write about political or personal matters online, but who felt they couldn’t write online unless they could ensure that their writing couldn’t be traced to their identity. These authors include human rights activists in dozens of nations, aid workers in repressive countries as well as whistleblowers within companies and governments. (Zuckerman)

The guide has detailed instructions on how to blog anonymously using WordPress.com and Tor. This guide is very useful and important for two reasons:

1. It shows bloggers who do not have the blessing of freedom of speech how they can minimize their risks.
2. It shows bloggers how to bypass banned services such as WordPress.com using a proxy server. WordPress.com is still banned in Turkey, China and Thailand and by using a proxy server you can still access the service.

Reading the guide on Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor made me aware of how much effort it takes to stay anonymous or to access banned services. It made me realize what a lucky blogger I am. It showed me how much I respect bloggers that speak their mind despite of the risks they might face.

The plugin allows bloggers to easily add Yahoo! content to their blog posts. It scans your post for related material from Yahoo’s Flickr Photos (with a Creative Commons License), Maps, Financial Information, Products, Autos, News and Web Search. You can decide which content you want to include and in what form, as a pop-up link or an integrated badge. This plugin may be useful for bloggers who are looking for an easy way to “enhance” their blog posts by adding a Flickr photo or a map to their post. I am all for enriching blog posts with pictures and other useful visual or textual information but not this way. I like creating my own content and even though it does not directly offer advertisements it feels like I am selling Yahoo!’s links and products.

It is interesting that Yahoo! decided to primarily develop this plugin for WordPress although it states that it will probably be available for other platforms as well. What other platforms will that be and what will Yahoo!’s own new platform look like?

Yahoo! currently offers a blogging service through it’s Yahoo! 360° portal. In October Yahoo! announced that the 360° portal will close down in favor of “a universal profile system” that offers “will include improved blogging capabilities” in early 2008. Yahoo! itself however seems to be using WordPress for a lot of its product blogs, including its official company blog and the Flickr blog. It makes you wonder what Yahoo!’s priorities in creating “improved blogging capabilities” are after shutting down their blogging service.

What will this new universal profile system look like? The recently released MyBlogLog About Me widget, which provides “pointers to your various profiles that exist across the web,” seems to be a first step. It wants to provide a single reference point for your scattered web presence. It currently offers 35 services that you can add to your widget but what if you want to add other services as well? It does not offer any flexibility in adding other services which prevents you from really creating your own personal widget.

Yahoo! has an impressive product list with a few interesting blog-related products but I feel that they are lacking a focus. If they really want to build this universal profile system then MyBlogLog is their strongest asset. But what about their 360° bloggers and nearly forgotten Yahoo! blog products such as the ping server blo.gs?

What do you think about Yahoo!’s role in the blogosphere? Should they just concentrate on the social networking side of blogging or do they have a chance at building new blogging services?

A blog is an evolving object which changes regularly. Not only is the blog itself a dynamic object, a blog post is too. People may leave a comment or send a trackback or a pingback. These interactions add to the blog post and in some cases might change the context of a blog post. Once a blog post is published doesn’t mean it shall never be touched again.

A recent discussion in the 9rules community showed that post-publishing editing is very common. In the discussion nearly everyone made changes in the spelling or grammar but “nothing that alters the context of the post though.” But what if you do want to change the context of your post or correct your statement?

It is a matter of personal preference whether you write a new blog post or edit your old one. A blog is not a wiki where you can see all the major and minor edits that have lead to the current post.

It is a common courtesy to show your readers what has changed. Of course you can change things in your blog post without informing your readers but this might hurt your reputation. On top of that your readers will probably know you have changed something. Your old post might still be in their feed reader and if they visit your blog they will notice changes.

There are several techniques to update your blog posts.

Strikethrough
Strikethrough can be achieved by using the deprecated <’strike’> element or the current <’del’> tag. The <’ins’> tag is sometimes used in combination with the <’del’> tag to specifically point out which parts have been deleted and which parts have been inserted. Some blog software will even add a timestap to your <’del’> tag that will display when the text has been deleted in Page Source view.

Strikethrough is usually meant to indicate a mistake or error when writing on paper. The piece of text in strikethrough is not meant to be read or included in the document. The use of strikethrough has changed on screen as it now indicates recently-deleted or recently-corrected information. Instead of deleting the old text strikethrough is used to show the reader what has been edited.

Instead of pointing to a correction, strikethrough may also indicate a joke or sarcasm.

Editor’s note
Place an editor’s note at the beginning or end of your post in either plain text, or in bold or italic to make it stand out. You can either point out your changes or point to the old context the post was written in.

Update
Write a new post on the topic and indicate that is an update of a previous post. You can do this by either stating Update in the blog post title or in the introduction of the post. Or just play with all the existing conventions and place your text in a non existing <’update’> tag.
Comment
Add a comment to your own blog post with the recent updates. Use it to reflect on your post and expand on it. By writing a comment you immediately engage in the conversation and you may even spice it up a little bit.

New Post
Write a new post and reference your old post with a trackback or pingback. This is a great way to deal with subjects that constantly change. You can build a whole series on the topic and connect them with the Inseries plugin (for WordPress).

Do you update your blog posts? Do you use one of the described methods or have you come up with a completely different solution?

As Rex Hammock points out there is no single history of blogs and argues that “everyone should write their own version of the history of blogging.” As blogging is a practice that has shaped itself over time it is nearly impossible to point to one single blog as “the first blog” in retrospect. Blogs evolved out of a practice that is still developing and shaping itself. The debate surrounding the article also showed how poorly the blogosphere is archived and how difficult it is to conduct research on the history of blogs.

As much as the blogosphere is focused on time, the web is oblivious to time.

The format of the blog revolves around time with timestamped entries displayed in a reverse chronological order. The front page shows the most recent posts and as the number of posts grows old entries might be moved to the blog’s archive. A blog archives itself but who is archiving the blogosphere?

An early attempt in indexing the blogosphere was made by Brigitte Eaton who started to compile a list of blogs she knew of on Eatonweb* in 1999. She manually kept the list up-to-date and manually judged inclusion requests based on her loose criterion of blogs as “something that’s organized chronologically and updated fairly regularly.” (Internet Archive)

Eaton also checked how long a blog had been around as to “weed out the one’s where people give up after a few weeks.” She saw blogging as a process and was aware of constant changes over time. Eatonweb created a graveyard for dead blogs by providing a “[dead?] link” which “is a way of notifying me that a weblog no longer exists or its url has changed. it won’t delete it from the database, it just gets flagged.” (Internet Archive)

Eatonweb became an established source and index of blogs and its archive provides a rich history. Indexing happens at a specific moment in time and by connecting these snapshot of time an archive is created. The Internet Archive provides a good resource for dead blogs and blogs with ever changing links as it provides snapshot in time. Blog indexes such as Eatonweb and Technorati are constantly updating their indexes but they don’t provide snapshots in time of their own index.

Popular blog indexes and search engines such as Technorati and Google Blog Search are very much focussed on time with the ability to sort by freshness. On the other hand they are completely oblivious to time as they don’t allow to search over time. As Dave Winer and Doc Searls noted it is impossible to search for a word in time ” Find me the first use of a word on the Web. It seems they could do that.” (Winer)

Google has been experimenting with the Timeline feature (view:timeline) for a while now but it looks at the date in the text instead of the date of creation. This would be a very useful feature in Google Blog Search: query + timestamp. As pretty much all blog posts are timestamped it should be possible to search for a query in time.

Not everyone seems to be convinced that time works both ways as Technorati recently dropped content from its index that is over six months old. Time is a very important aspect in blogs and the blogosphere and the focus should not only be on freshness but also on history. A blog is not only as good as its latest post but as good as its whole archive.

* Disclaimer: Eatonweb is currently owned and run by Splashpress Media (also the owner of the Blog Herald.)

I am still trying to find the perfect writing environment. I often use a no-nonsense simple text editor, or a program such as Dark Room (Windows) or WriteRoom (Mac) that provides me with a full-screen, semi-distraction free writing environment. But because these programs are so basic it means that I will have to manually insert all the links. Am I lazy? What about the oldskool bloggers that manually coded their whole blog?

Blog software spoiled me.

The software makes it feel easier to insert links and markup my blog post. On top of that it checks my spelling and automatically saves while I write. When working on a blog post in a text editor I often find myself switching back to the write area of my blog software because of these features. Blog software obviously supports blogging features that text editors don’t. Blogs are hypertext documents that revolve around links.

Early blogs were often a daily collection of links, such as Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom and Justin Halls’s Links.net. An early blogging service named Pitas made the link the prime object of the interface as it

[...] provided users two simple form boxes: one for a URL and one for the writer’s remarks. Hitting the “post” button generated a link followed by commentary. (Blood, 2004)

By providing users with just two fields, one for the link, and one for commentary, the software shaped the blog post. The link was the main feature of the blog. Rebecca Blood argues in her article on ‘How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community‘ that Blogger changed the weblog culture in 1999 with an important interface decision:

Blogger was simpler still, consisting of a single form box field into which the blogger typed whatever they wanted. I sometimes wonder whether the new bloggers knew enough HTML to construct a link. Whether they did or not, Blogger was so simple that many of them began posting linkless entries about whatever came to mind. (Blood, 2004)

Links were no longer a central object of the interface and a different type of blogs were constructed. The blogging interface enable and constrains certain practices. Embedding a YouTube video in WordPress for example can be quite tricky. You need to switch to code mode in order to insert the embed HTML code and not return to visual mode before publishing. Not only does blog software still privilege text it may also influence how (often) you write.

It is worth mentioning that a negative relationship exists between the efforts required to update a blog and the frequency of updating. Simply put, the easier it is for bloggers to post entries to blog, the more likely they will do it. (Dan Li, 2005, p. 28)

Blogger’s interface is really focused on the writing area and shows few other options. WordPress and Movable Type offer a much more complicated interface and have less screen space available for the write area. Tumblr uses a whole different approach as it revolves around the type of content you want to post (text, photo, quote, etc.)

In 2004 Tom Coates put up his whole blog archive in a text file for people to download and analyze. It contained five years of blog posts and people started making visualizations of his early posting behavior. There was a significant change in 2003 after Coates switched from Blogger to Movable Type and in response to that change he wrote:

Matt has suggested to me in the past that another equally convincing model might be to think of MT as having broken the paradigm of incredibly fast and easy informal peer-to-peer publishing that Blogger created and was initially its USP. (Coates, 2004)

Do you feel your blog software and interface influence how you blog?