- Hello
world.
BBS: Building Traffic: Posting Isn’t Enough
Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble are arguing about feeds. Full feeds vs. partial feeds, connectors and readers, ads vs no ads. Bob Wyman is saying partial feeds don’t matter, because you should be putting as much effort into your partial feed as into your full feed, don’t auto-generate excerpts. (Like most blog software does automatically. WordPress allows custom excerpts.)
They’re recommending going to geek dinners and networking events. Robert goes home with a stack of business cards and visits each site to see if anything is worth talking about.
Robert: Another thing I do is link to everything in the industry. The more inclusive you are the more authoritative you are.
An Idea
Matt Marshall’s idea: rank auto-suggested categories by popularity.
Comments back
Comments were missing because I had accidentally deactivated the option that tells me when a comment is held for moderation. They’re all approved now so go crazy. I thought it was odd that this entry didn’t get any comments before. 🙂
Whoops
I have a meeting at CNET I have to head to so I’m actually going to miss the parts of Dave’s session where he talks about Blogger and Typepad and “Smart Blogging Techniques.” I’ll update this post with links to people who did blog it when they surface on the search engines.
BBS: Definitions and Explanations
Dave Taylor is doing a fairly good talk, though I disagree with much of what he’s saying. (But most of the points he’s getting at are good.) However some human error I lost my first 20 minutes of notes, so I’m going to restart in the middle.
“Home pages don’t matter.”
“The design of my site doesn’t matter because more people read my site through RSS than coming to my site.” Design obviously matters, you need to get people to subscribe first!
Pings and Trackbacks. Pings are something that blogs do that make it worth blogging. Search engines tend to be slower, 2-4 weeks. It’s a fundamental problem with search engines. Sometimes content that used to be there isn’t anymore. Pinging is when your blog tool notifies certain other index sites. “Technorati and Feedster and others will all be crushed when Google and MSN and Yahoo release their RSS search engines.” Instead of you having to wait passively for search engine spiders to come to you, you now actively have a tool that let’s your content get out into what’s called the “blog oh sphere”. (No mention of Ping-O-Matic?)
How many know about what Meetup is? “I blogged about that.” About how the CEO notified all the members. 75 minutes later the CEO of the company was on my site responding to it.
Trackbacks, “interesting concept, very poorly implemented, but a lot of people talk about it.” Trackbacks are spammed to death. “I turned off trackbacks 9 months ago.” (He really should talk about Pingback, I get the impression he may not be up to date on blog technology.) He’s showing a comment spam email, looks like he’s running Version 2.63 of MT.
(Problem. Earlier he said he preferred partial feeds, but most of the search engines won’t index his content if it’s not in his feed.)
We’re taking a break now, I’ll publish so I don’t delete everything again. 🙂
Blogging the Blog Business Summit
I’m here at the Blog Business Summit and since the WYSIWYG has gotten pretty nice in WP I’m going to blog what I can from my spot in the back. We’ll see if it helps me follow things or just ends up being distracting.
A Million Tabs?
I just opened up every single blog on WordPress.com in a tab, and checked on each one.
I’m not going to be able to do that for much longer.
New Servers
New servers are so yummy. We just got started but we already have some new ones on the way to replace the 3 that WordPress.com is currently running on. The details aren’t too interesting, unless you get excited by terabytes of storage, but let’s just say that Dell and Textdrive are my favorite companies right now.
Invites
One thing we’re doing different around here, at least for now, is that each person invited only gets 1 invite to pass along. The idea is for people to use their “golden ticket” for the person who is most likely to really take advantage of the service, rather than spraying invites willy-nilly across the internets. It may be a good idea to chat with the person before sending them the invite, too.
Oh, and welcome to WordPress.com. 🙂
Update: There’s an invite giveaway here. There is also an invite on eBay.