It’s been about four weeks since we first covered U.S. Republican vice-presidential nominee  Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who vaulted from relative obscurity into international prominence overnight when her nomination took America by surprise a little more than two months before the November 4 elections.

Since then, the blogosphere and mainstream media have continued to buzz about Palin more than Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president; more than Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate; and even more than John McCain, the GOP pick for prez. read more

Save us from the out-of-control blogrolls, lists of links that run on and on and on and on and on and on and on…listing everyone who ever started a blog on the whole planet - well, it feels like it.

Your blogroll links are important in the minds of Google, and they can add or subtract points in your PageRank scores. You better take your blogroll links seriously, ensuring you are linking to blogs that will complement yours as well as complement theirs.

As part of this ongoing series on WTF Blog Design Clutter, let’s take a look at how we are abusing and misusing our blog’s blogrolls. read more

Since Google slammed bought links, more and more webmasters have been scrambling around for a solution. Maybe not to replace their paid links, but to make their linking more natural in appearance, and definitely more scalable and sustainable. As an online marketing consultant I get paid well when called on to help out with this, but I am going to give you one solution for free. read more

Remember BlogRush, that cool little widget that snatched related stories from the blogosphere, and served them to your readers, giving you credits to get similar exposure yourself? In theory it should work, but in practice it might be lacking. John Chow certainly doesn’t get what he’s due at least:

A check of my BlogRush control panel showed I have a credit balance of 30,911,614 views. If BlogRush can serve all those impressions, and assuming a 0.25% click rate, it would result in over 77,000 visitors. Since BlogRush started, they have served less 800,000 impressions for me.

This seems to be the case for a lot of the larger blogs/networks using BlogRush. Seems like a good idea gone wrong, but then again, it is still in beta…

I’m a fan of Groklaw, but like any long-running soap opera, I tune out for weeks - okay, months - at a time and then check back in. I love the copyright news and litigation insider bits, but sometimes, unlike an ongoing soap opera, I don’t know what is being talked about. I can’t catch up.

Lately, there have been a lot of coverage dealing with SCO, IBM, and Novell. Two of the three I know, but the fourth I don’t recognize. Even if I knew all three of the acronyms, I don’t know enough of the story to follow the current blog posts.

In the legal world of who did what to whom and why, I’m trying to catch up. Why?

That’s what I keep asking myself.

A blog is a chronological vehicle of expression as well as communication. The most recent post may be the latest in a long back story that can go back for days, weeks, months, even years. However, I just landed here. I need to get caught up fast!

Which begs the question:

Is it my responsibility, as the reader, to keep up with the story, or should the blogger play a role in helping bring me up to speed? read more