C'mon people! Link to your sources!

I spoke of how backlinks are better than trackbacks, and somewhere in the discussion that followed (and from a link I posted), the topic turned towards how trackbacks are as good as dead today.

I won’t go as extreme as to say that trackbacks are dead. But I will say that they are surely being underutilised, which is why their existence seems to be fading away. This is because more and more bloggers are either becoming too competitive and not linking to the source of their stories, or they are just being plain ‘ol lazy. In either case, it is not good for the blogosphere, because links are what keep things rolling and moving. A non–linked topic is as good as a dead topic. And we don’t like that too much, do we?

How to kill a post

Trackbacks aside, a simple link to the post by putting a ‘Quote from so–so’ is enough. Linking provides a wider viewpoint on the topic you’re discussing. Different opinions lead to discussions, discussions lead to comments. It all forms a wonderful chain. CopyBlogger writes:

…the most relevant bloggers in your field will be your competition.

And that is the most correct thing anyone ever said. Also, by not linking to other posts, you’re practically isolating yourself and becoming an outcast in the blogosphere. What goes around, comes around, and you might end up with no blogs linking to you as well.

Even something as small as a blog roll can be enough to get in the good books of bloggersI’ve seen it happen! My blog, not listed on certain blogs for a long time, miraculously showing up a few days after I add them to my blogroll., and should be one taken as a ‘must–have’ for your sidebars. This is pretty much what folksonomy is about, to guide your viewers to relevant content. In the process, you’ll get them to like what you write and how you write since you give them complete info and more content to read and increase their knowledge on the topic you talk about.

It’s mine I say!

If you think that by denying links to other blogs, you’re keeping viewers to your posts, then you couldn’t be more wrong than the mouse in front of me who thinks it can take me on in a fist fight. What you are effectively doing is reducing interaction and keeping the viewer unsure of the ‘truth’ and ‘tangibility’ of what you just said. Links turn statements into facts, since something said by four people means more than the same thing said by one. If your blog is visited by many people who don’t say anything, then the purpose of sharing your opinion is defeated.

You don’t dictate the blogosphere, and if you don’t link, doesn’t mean someone else (most of the time more successful) won’t. You’ll just end up marooning yourself on some remote island in the blogosphere, and getting out of the rut will just become harder everyday.

The best indicator of visibility

As The Last Word heads to become more popular with readers, I can't help but question whether a link to a certain post is better, or comments on that post are a better indication of it's visibility. There are posts which have a high number of comments and links, so it's quite obvious that people have liked them. However, what about the one which has the scale tipping towards either?

Either argument

Links surely have huge benefits, because that's how Google has trained the Internet to function. The more links incoming to your page, the higher that page rises in search results. Even Technorati decides the rank of a blog based on the inbound links to it's posts. This sure does show that the post is being read (since links are from other posts by people) and it ensures the post remains visible (by raising it in ranking). So this 'should' be the perfect indicator!

Comments, on the other hand mean that people are actually taking interest in the post, and have something to add to the content. That means they find the content useful to them. It also gives an idea of how many people viewed the page on the 'page', and not glimpsed through it in their reader.

Comparing the two, links seem to have the upper hand when it comes to indicating how visible the post has been, and how much it'll be so in the future. Atleast to me it does. But how many people are there out there who might take a subject from one of my posts, and write about it themselves, without a link coming back here? I don't know, since there is no way of tracking posts like that. And my heart still wrenches when there are no comments on any one of my posts :(

Your verdict

I still like to follow my statistics to get an idea about popular posts and pages on the blog, since there doesn't seem to be any other accurate way to get that little but vital piece of information.

How do 'you' judge the same regarding posts on your blog? Or do you think I've missed some points in either argument?

Backlinks are better than trackbacks

I know I am someone who has actively asked Blogger for trackbacks since the new version came out. Trackbacks are a great way to get some traffic back to your blog, if you're someone who links a lot to other stories and your blog serves as a way of commentary on news broken on well known blogs. A simple link can do wonderful things. But the current system is inherently flawed.

As things stand now, a trackback is essentially a simple post to the target blog's platform's trackback RDF with the necessary details about the new post. If all goes well, a link back to that post is displayed in the trackbacks listing of the target/old post. The post can be manual or automatic, depending on what Blogging platformWordpress and Movable Type can essentially recognise links to send trackbacks to based on the links in a post. This solves the problem of trackback spamming a bit, but still isn't foolproof you use. Can you see the problem that arises? The post itself doesn't need to have anything to do with the target post, and trackbacks can be sent to all kinds of unrelated posts just to get links back. This is called Trackback spamming.

Trackbacks are almost like the taxi's of the blogosphere, which helps you jump from post to post of related content, that being the essential purpose of blogs. A glitch such as this can cause for a minor setback, but setback nonetheless, in a truly wonderful system.

How are Backlinks better

Backlinks rely on Google's indexing of your new post to display snippets of other posts which link to your post, which Google's crawlers have indexed. The only good thing about this is that bogus links don't show up. I believe Google filters pages from it's index (even blog posts) and hence, the blogs which are marked in Google's index as spam blogs, won't show up in your backlinks list. It becomes sort of an AkismetDeveloped by Automattic originally for Wordpress. Akismet is considered the best protection against spam comments and trackbacks. Via a public API, it has been extended to other platforms as well. for Blogger, albeit a less effective one.

New Blogger's storing of post content in a central repository (for faster serving), should also improve the speeds with which your link is caught and displayed by Google for the simple reason that it's easier for them to now keep a track of links (it's easier to crawl just the post content rather than a whole page). This also means that links in people's sidebars (like mine) shouldn't be counted as backlinks.

With new spam blogs coming up everyday, each one innovating on what we today know spam as, it will only become hard to filter them out. But we do trust Google, don't we? :P I can now see why Google has stuck with backlinks for displaying incoming links despite people requesting trackbacks. As a good alternative, Stephen's Blogger Trackback user-script does the job fantastically. But I'd still like a trackback 'sending' system for platforms which still rely on a manual post to their RDF, natively from Blogger.

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Another point to discuss, which I didn't throw in initially (goodness knows why) is how Google tackles (or should tackle) the problem of spammy links. I think it is safe to assume now that Blogger serves all post content from a central repository, or what we can call a 'database' for ease. Now, since Google itself is storing all the data, they can easily check for links, and add the required backlink to the respective post. Hence, I don't think they do so much as a reverse-blog search, but rather just look at the new posts being added to the database.

So in effect, not only did the page serving become faster, but essentially all data coming from Blogger's side became faster, including backlinks. And this is ideal to keep spam links away, because just content is much easier to analyse for spam rather than a whole page. So this is a good alternative to Akismet which, as Avatar points out in the comments, is not available to many platforms, and is almost Wordpress exclusive.

So these should sum up why backlinks are actually better than trackbacks, but keep track of the comments as discussions say more than a one man's view. :)

Further Reading

Trackback is dead - Tom Coates bids adieu to an old friend
Trackback Technical Specification
What is RDF - Building a more semantic web
Akismet

My name is Aditya, and I'm a blog addict

No! I'm kidding :P I am obsessed, but not addicted, yet! I personally don't believe there is anything such as blog 'addiction', but there sure are people like me who are constantly thinking about blogs, feeds, posts, articles, news, reviews, and of-course, their trusty ol' blog! I am constantly writing up drafts, saving up for a rainy day, and to avoid a flurry of posts altogether only to have nothing to put up for the next one week. Thank goodness for online drafts :P

The simple addiction

Blogging can get obsessive! More particularly, 'Blogger' blogs can get obsessive. Something so personal, with so much customisability. The ability to add or remove little widgets that add something new and cool, then to post about it. Or to write what you think about your neighbour's dog. Knowing that someone out there will read what you've put up, and a countless other reasons make blogging one of the endless ways to happily pass time that I've come across in a long time. It's not a 'waste' of time, since we all gain somewhere down the line. But blogging can sure 'take' a lot of your time!

It is not just you blogging, but reading other blogs regularly. Waiting for the next update. Feeling a little disappointed when it isn't updated when you expected it to be, and so on are all a part of this mock disorder that we probably should analyse a little more seriously than we do at the moment.

Micro Persuasion has a good eight step rule to tackle this obession:

• Post consistently
• Post in the morning
• Post frequently
• Write about what interests you--within reason
• Share and give credit
• Have a point of view
• Listen to everything--and everyone
• Have fun

Seems something most power bloggers are likely to do. They treat their blogs as 'their' domain, and take it seriously. I do most of those 8 things myself, and do face a strange empty feeling whenever I haven't put up something for a long time. 24 hours seem too long to wait for the next post to go up, and yet I know I must keep a steady pace instead of creating irregular posting schedules.

Bloggers Anonymous calls it by a few names which make it sound really bad, but I think it is just being addicted to the 'freedom' of speech, and control over some form of communication. Just like writing in your diary, or reading a book can get you hooked, blogging is no different. This was also the initial reasons people began blogging, apart from it being the 'it' thing to do. People even today think blogging is something that is not their cup of tea, only to start and get hooked. It's like having your own newspaper. Having something to say, and people to listen to is the best feeling in the world, isn't it?

Blogging platforms make it easy for everyone these days, with Blogger's catch line being 'Push button blogging'. All you need to do is make a few clicks, type in a few names (and a weird looking captcha word) and presto! Your bright and shiny new blog is ready for you to start posting. All this ease, all the time ... how could we not? :P

Just can't help it

The compulsion is proportional to the number of readers you have. As they increase, so does the 'want' to constantly put up more and better posts than a previous time. As long as one knows one is being read by people, they will continue to put up posts. Rare is the case when a well read blog is taken down. It's true that good blogs aren't in plenty As compared to the 'total' number of blogs today. I don't have accurate statistics, but I seriously doubt that the percentage goes above 25, or even 20. It's not because of lack of good bloggers, but because of lack of 'serious' bloggers. For many it is a pass time, but for few it is a dear and loved hobby!, and that is the reason why blogging networks exist, to drive traffic to good quality blogs. Once one is part of a network, the blog surely becomes important. Any kind of reaffirmation of good work always makes the work important.

There is no real way of coming out of blogging. As I said before, the freedom can get pretty addictive, and blogging rehab isn't that popular. The solution would be spread the word, get more readers and continue blogging with new vigour and passion. After all, we all can gain from each other's perceptions and knowledge!

What are you waiting for?

Misconceptions about Blogger #

Going through 9rules, I bumped into this discussion (note?), with one fella' asking which one of Wordpress and Blogger (for goodness sakes it's not Blogspot!) is better. The replies to this seemingly innocent question over there are absolutely crazy. But worst of all, it shows us the ugly side of how Blogger is looked at from Wordpress using bloggers, which (gulp) might get conveyed over to first time bloggers.

I will not take the immature route and shout 'Wordpress fanboys' and turn this into a rant post, but I sure am glad teeming cleared the things up, leaving no one to come back with rebuttals. It sure was painful to see people's ignorance.

Ignorance and a bad past

Blogger hasn't had a very illustrious past. We are all very aware of that. The update came in 'very' late, and with not too much fanfare (except for within Blogger). Hence, the outsideI really do sometimes feel Blogger users are cocooned in their own little niche. Maximum people who visit Blogspot blogs, are Blogger users themselves. I've yet to hear of a large number of other platform users coming to Blogspot blogs, or the other way around. world doesn't really know what these updates are, what they add and how much better it has made Blogger. And when Google tries to promote their product, we try to bash it down as Google going back down on it's own principles. How does one get out of such a rut? We as long time users of Blogger can help out, but alas, our words stand for only so much.

It's not like after the upgrade, Blogger is being all whiz-bang about it, with server issues still plaguing the platform. But at least it is not as bad as the old Blogger, which would go down for days.

Anadgouda's comment shows how people have a rather incomplete knowledge of the new features. OniTony takes the initial cake though, thinking Blogger doesn't allow non-members to comment. Alvinz says Wordpress is just easier to use. I don't see how from any point of view this can be correct. Blogger sold themselves with the 'Push-button blogging' line. It'll take the skill level of a hamster to not be able to set up a blog on Blogger and get blogging. I have a blog on Wordpress, and personally, though it does offer a lot of features out of the box, it is not any simpler than Blogger.

These are just three people. There are more on that page, and I am sure there are millions of people walking around reading these kind of comments, and carrying away a very wrong notion of Blogger blogs. This is something similar to the case of Windows or Macintosh. There is no winner or loser in the debate, or better or worse. It completely depends on use and need.

It has also been reported that Blogger hosts the most number of spam blogs on the Internet today. Ofcourse they would, since the sign-up is so simple. Apparently their initial captcha isn't working like it's supposed to. Wordpress can't get so many spam blogs because of the amazing Akismet, and just the fact that their main population and user base comes from self hosted blogs using their platform. It's the best strategy if you see.

9rules network doesn't like to add Blogger blogs too much, and this it the reason they give:

In all honesty I don’t like adding sites that are hosted by blogger or blogspot since there are so many other parts of the design of those sites which don’t really distinguish them from the rest, but if your site is worth it we will add it.

I don't know exactly what they mean by that, but if it's a preconceived notion about Blogger that keeps them away, then it's wrong anyway. I am guessing it's not 'just' the design, but the 'assumed' fact that Blogger blogs lack quality because they're free and anyone can have one. There are so many aspects to a prejudice, it's hard to figure out which reason triggers what.

Blogger vs. Wordpress for power

Wordpress has a solid backing of PHP. There is not a single person on Earth who will deny that Wordpress is the way to go if you want 'real' power. I have played around with Wordpress^μ a little, and have been toying with the idea of having a blog on a standalone hosting with Wordpress 2.1. It truly is the stuff power platforms are made of. But that really doesn't mean you can't do any of that with Blogger. The best thing being you don't need your own hosting for Blogger, while getting the same customizability of a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Sure, Blogger doesn't give you everything Wordpress does, but you don't get everything with Wordpress that you get with Blogger.

Wordpress' brilliant usability and functioning comes from it being open source. Someone who knows what he's doing, can change the little aspects of the platform's coding to suit his own needs. This offers a lot of potential, and it the easiest way to come up with a custom platform to blog on, one suited to your needs and wants. Blogger doesn't allow this, even on self-hosted blogs, and I think this is solely where it loses out. There are so many things you wish you could change in Blogger, but you can't because the code is closed to you. You have to wait for the update to come from Blogger, and all you can do is suggest, suggest, and then suggest some more.

But all is not bad, because you have the bleet here trying to bridge the gap, and plug the holes that Blogger leaves open. We came up with categories when Blogger had none. An effective searching technique to show you search results without leaving the page. We still continue to innovate new hacks on the new Blogger, and we shall continue to do so. The same happens on Wordpress. That just proves that no platform is perfect, and they're both made popular only by their respective communities. We make do with what we can, and we've done quite a bit considering we don't have so much to work withI really don't mean to get all defensive, but we sure are reeling as the minority here. We don't have too many solid arguments to back our beloved Blogger, for the simple fact that we ourselves don't know what's happening behind the scenes, and what the future is..

The common user

Power users make for a rather small fraction of the total number of bloggers. The average user doesn't care for fancy script, killer hacks or any of that moolah. All they care about is getting their content out to the people in the best way possible, with a decent way of getting reader's comment back to them, and a good way to manage everything. A good look is always popular, but scripts and hacks? Not that much I'm guessing. People think only Wordpress blogs can look good. We can prove them wrong now, can't we? ;)

Here's a survey result from a ProBlogger poll:

The poll shows Wordpress with the tallest skyscraper. That is pretty expected, considering how people view the platform. But not very far away is Blogger. Considering it is a relatively 'closed' community, we have quite a lot of users! So, short of going 'Hah!', this is a good sign. And this poll is from January of last year, when Blogger wasn't even that good. Blogging really caught on by storm, and the number of bloggers would have shot up. What would be interesting to see is figures, and to know how many went which way (if you have any credible numbers, send them my way).

As a few closing words, I'd like to say that there is no need to try and rank platforms. They're both different, and for different people. Yes, given a proper opportunity I'd love to try my hand at Wordpress. I've heard a lot about it, and my brief stint with it was rather exciting. But I never have and never will undermine the power of Blogger, and what can be accomplished with it. That said, nothing should stop us from getting word out for Blogger to others, and let them know that it's not as bad as they think. I think every one deserves a Blogger blog! :)

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Alright! Thanks to Avatar's comment, I went looking for the latest numbers and reviews/ratings of Blogging platforms, and guess what I found! :D PC World had done a review and rating of the blogging platforms existing today a few weeks back, and Blogger is right on top! It's followed by Wordpress (down 3 points) and TypePad (-7 points). This is fantastic news! You can see their review for Blogger here.

Feature requests for the new Blogger

Living with the new Blogger for about a month and a half now, I want to make my own 'Please include these Blogger' feature requests post to Blogger. As I noted here, I can't find the feature request page from Blogger, and hence am lead to believe that once again they have removed it to avoid tons of feature suggestions pouring in from people. Although when they 'did' launch the new Blogger, they said that labels was the 'most requested' feature. I wonder how those requests reached them :P So here is my list of requests from Blogger.

The more immediate concerns

• Trackbacks: This is one thing that Blogger has lacked right since the beginning, many people complaining and trying to find a workaround. Stephen came up with the Blogger Trackback pinging userscript, but why not have it natively in the post editor? How hard would it be to take all details and send 'one' XMLHTTPRequest to a 'user' specified URL? Not very, especially since Blogger can provide all the data it needs to work with. We need to hack our way to get the data to make our workarounds. Do the math! Also, that is only outgoing. What about incoming trackbacks? I know Google is proud of their search (which is used to track the backlinks), but why not stick to the standard everyone else seems to follow?

• Custom fields: This is my 'personal' request to Blogger, and something I will be genuinely very thankful for if they add it. It would be the ultimate addition to the post details, as it'll be a way to hold data 'associated' with the post, but doesn't have to be a part of the post. Maybe you'd like to share a little anecdote about the post you made? A summary? You can display these on the main page with a 'Read More' type link, and show the whole post without this part on the post page. Throw in a special keyword in there to distinguish for something. Ofcourse, I have much more powerful uses in mind, but this is one of the basic ones which could be used by everyone!

• Documentation: I know Avatar will agree with me on this. The new Blogger though boasts a powerful new template language, it lacks the one thing that will allow us to effectively use it. We know what variables are there, but don't know the exact tree it is held in. Which is why I ran into trouble when I tried to recode the Archives widget to show it in a drop down box. I got it workingLook at the sidebar at my test blog. It works, but I still have to use Javascript to make every option work, don't know why standard HTML attribute doesn't work., but after some playing around with different possibilities. We can all avoid that if we just had the proper explicit documentations.

Not dire, but not unimportant

• Comment Editing: How many times have you seen a comment which is perfectly fine except for that 'one' thing which you wish you could remove? Phydeaux3 had found a way of doing so for the old Blogger, but that is broken now, and no method seems to be that obvious at the moment. But again, why try to play cat and mouse, and not have it straight from Blogger itself? Giving the blog author complete control over all 'posts' on his blog (whether it be his posts, or others postsI don't know if the method has changed in the new Blogger, but Jasper's script in the old Blogger worked by loading up the comments ID with Blogger's native post editor.
  
  This showed that comments were also treated as a type of 'post' by Blogger. Probably they've changed this, which is why this method is broken now.) is something Blogger does for team blogs, so why not add comments into the 'editable' list?

• XHTML Strictness: Most of us don't adhere to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards (I have covered this topic in-depth this post), and code incoming from Blogger is not even close to adhering to HTML standards. Only they can fix that, but they aren't. It has remained straight through the old Blogger and the update. The first step would be to put rules in the template editor, which would cause atleast some retribution. Then extend that to the post editor. We can't follow strict XHTML in the post editor, because most of the time we end up adding elements with in-line styles, or scripts and codes. Whenever you upload an image to Blogger, the code inserted follows absolutely 'no' XHTML specification. Hence, the first move would be to convert everything to CSS classes, insert them by default in the template with all the other paraphernalia Blogger inserts automatically, and then use references to them in the codes they generate.

• Search feed: We have most the feeds that almost every mainstream platform offers todayFeeded to the teeth. Ironically however, the one feed we don't have is the 'search' feed for the blog specific search. This might be a little server intensive, I don't know. But it sure is a requirement, since it can be used to keep track of keywords appearing in posts. It can also be used to power hacksI think Google might be trying to cut down these 'search' hacks, and want people to use their Google AJAX Search API more to get things done. The cause could be anything from not wanting to load up their servers, to unifying data generation for searches. Personally I think Google should give 'us' the choice of how we want our data.. But only if it exists in the first place.

I am not undermining the update! It has been some solid work from Blogger. But the release definitely seems hurried, especially now that it is out of Beta. That generally means all the nitty gritties should be fixed, and people should get all the stuff they want without too much trouble. I won't go to the extreme Avatar did, but I will say that Blogger has some loose ends to tie up before 'I' begin to call this version a truly 'power' platform.

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Phydeaux3 has posted up a request for a way to get native stats from Blogger. Personally I had thought that the new Blogger would also mark the re-launch of one of Google's most highly awaited acquisitions, Measuremap. This didn't happen, but I believe that it will be integrated into Blogger, and it is meant for Blogger.

Let's hope it happens... We could surely do with the fantastic stats!

Also, Google has integrated Blogger with their Documents and spreadsheets (you can see the link on the page after you publish a post), so you can straightaway post from there! I don't know what's the use though. They could just improve the post editor now, couldn't they? :P

Blogger Beta no more!

Yep! That's right ... Google has officially taken Blogger out of Beta (the quickest of any application to face so). You will see the announcement as a small link at the top of your dashboard, like this:

The list of new features have been finally round up on a nice old Blogger style tour page. I'll list them here for anyone, and the tour page is here.

• Customise your templates in two ways. First is to use the new Layouts manager, which allows you to create, drag and drop, and remove page elements. The second is the old Blogger way, to get your hands dirty and go to the heart of the code itself in the new HTML Editor.


• Create a private blog, only for a few selected people. You can now specify who can see your blog, by simply adding their e-mail addresses!


• Many more feeding options for advanced users, with feeds for posts, comments (whole blog or per post) and labels! :)


• An updated Dashboard which gives you links to your most used parts right on the front page. Also shows you any unmoderated comments, all for one-click blog management!


• Instant publishing (Blogspot hosting only). You won't see the publishing spinner anymore, because the changes will be made to a central repository, and all pages will be dynamically generated when called. So no more republishing hassles!

Three cheers for Google and Blogger! :D

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Update (31/12): It seems as though Blogger has removed the page to suggest/request new features. I had found this page some time back to request custom variable fields, but since then I can't find it.

Blogging networks

It is always a nice feeling to be among people who share the passions, interests and likes as you. It's human tendency to be in similar minded company. Blogging is a hobby, a profession and a way of life. Not surprisingly, Blogging networks are beginning to gain exposure, interest, members, and respect. In the past, I have received invitations to join a few networks, but I never did because I really didn't see the point. But with time, I have realised that being part of one, gives you exposure, and helps you improve in the blogging world, just as you'd improve as a human depending on the social circle you hang around in. It seems the future of the web's content lies in group creation and development. What do I mean by those?

Groupeees!

Group creation and development is effectively the creation of groups, networks, communities, and their development to make sure each group generates quality content, in fixed quantities. Being part of a well known group automatically puts you above the others around you, because now your content is certified (by your 'well-known' group) to be quality content. Ofcourse, the content should be good enough for you to become a part of the group in the first place! :P For example, one of my favourite communities is 9rules which is not that different from other networks. The difference lies in the reputation. You know when you see a blog with the 9rules logo, that you can expect regular updates, stimulating content, and justice to the blogs topic. These are the rules that 9Rules stands for, and based on which inducts members. It filters down to all the members, and that immediately promotes them! See how it works?

Groups, ofcourse do more than create exposure. It helps you learn as well. Being among people who have same interests, can help you learn from their perspective and knowledge. You'll gain experience, and gradually understand what to look for, how to present it, how to make it more interesting, etc. in your field of interest. Everything, at the end of the day is a learning experience, and being in a community just helps speed up the process! :)

There are quite a few groups out there, some of which are listed at the end ↓ of this article. You could apply for any one of them. But you should take care to understand what your network asks of you. 9rules has some simple but (seemingly) strict rules These rules involve regular posting habits, generate quality content, not deviating too much from the theme of the blog, and so on. Such are rules are common to practically all the networks. How strictly they are followed is what makes the difference.

Some networks will begin to slack off the rules so that more people join in, and that's where the quality begins to wane. You should watch out for such networks. they follow to induct members and keep them in. You should join a network which suits your style and topic of interest, as well as by your idea of how seriously you'll incorporate the ideology and demands of the network.

Why? Why Martha why!?

If you're wondering exactly why you need join a network or community in the first place, the simple answer is you don't! If you see, there are tons (literally) of blogs out there that are not a part of any group, and are doing just fine on their own. There is no real need to be part of a group, because you can gain exposure and be well known in your circles by other ways as well. You also don't need a group to certify that you generate quality articles and content. That is decided by the number of regular viewers and people who comment on your blog. Yes, it can be done individually.

But! If you see all the great blogs out there, which you like to visit pretty regularly, chances are they are part of a well known network. The network might not have drawn you to the blog, but it does many others. And this is the basic advantage of a network. Everything you do individually, a network gives you more of the same things. More exposure, more experience, more knowledge... Little more of good things never hurt anyone, did they? :P

Looks dandy!

Here are a few Blog networks that I got off The Blog HeraldThe Blog Herald was the very first blog dedicated to blog related news and information. It is still considered to be one of the most reliable sources of information regarding the blogosphere by many. , ranked in order of popularity and quality (according to them).It's a good list to start with, to get your head around them and see which one works for you! I personally prefer 9rules, which has many really nice looking blogs, with decent content. You can start from wherever you want! :)

Weblogs Inc. : The No.1 blog network from Jason Calacanis

Gawker Media : Nick Denton’s gossip, tabloid and soft pawn empire

9rules : Collaborative network which I still think wins the award for nicest looking blogs

Blog Logic : Paul Short’s multi-blog network

Darren Rowse : Technically Darren hasn’t got a network in name, but he certainly has a network of blogs, some that are also part of the Breaking News Blog Network.

Maxira : Brad Jasper’s network of blog and webmaster related blogs, tools and forums

(The Blog Herald)

Blurring the line

Weblogging, or blogging, as we call it today, has existed since the creation of the Internet. As Blockstar chronicles it, the first ever blog was probably Tim Berners Lee's (sometimes called the father of the Internet) list of list of new and upcoming sites. Blogs are basically web journals which are used to chronicle one's thoughts, ideas, activities etc.. But, it is a chronicle. Or is it?

Today, we seem to be slowly blurring the line between the concept of a blog, a forum, message board and community board. The only difference that seems to have remained blogs and the remaining list is the fact that with a blog, only one person has posting rights and he is also the moderator. Otherwise, do you see any difference in the concepts? Thoughts, if that's what they are (I'll come to that later) are let out into the open for people to see and comment on. I will not go into the aesthetics of allowing people to judge and comment on one's thoughts, but the idea just seems absurd. It's probably this reason that most often the blogs we come across (even the personal ones) are usually general and don't delve too much into the person him/her-self but their daily activities and doings. Very few actually coin down what they are actually thinking of, and let it out to the public to view and comment.

Present blogging has become more of a pseudo journalism type activity. Almost all the blogs that I see fit into this category. True, you might say that I don't see the proper blogs, but you must admit that these are also classified as blogs, and hence should meet the requirements before they can be called blogs. These sites find news, and put them up with a few words on what they think about it. Is that what the idea of a weblog is? No! I can't take specific examples here to show you how what most blogs contain doesn't qualify as blog material, but if you look around yourself, you'll see how blogs have just become commentaries, not thoughts. They are not that different, but if you read between the lines, you'll see the difference. A commentary is always based off something which someone else has thought of. A thought, is usually something original. Why am I going into incoherent blabbering? :P Because instead of keeping things simple and true to its purpose, we are mixing them up and the result is a weird mash of low quality content.

How many blogs out there are there with truly quality stuff? How many of them do you know of? Why do you frequent blogs more than forums and message boards? Because you rather read text which makes sense and is from someone who knows that they are talking about! And that is what is reducing with time. Chances are only 3-4/10 blogs that you come across will be worth reading, and only one time reading. Out of them, only 1 might be worth actually subscribing to. Why is this the situation of something that caused so many people to rush to the nearest computer with an Internet connection and set up a blog?

I was trying to classify my blog under something today, since I just couldn't put it under one topic. My blog deals with a number of things, but all related to the Internet. I would call it thoughts and commentary on what goes around and what's new on the Internet. Thoughts and commentary both, because even I sometimes take stories and put up my thoughts on it. And thoughts, because quite a few of my posts are original thinking processes gone overboard. (Like this one! :P) What would you call it?

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Edit: Techcrunch seems to be asking the same question! Well, somewhat...

CoComment just became useless for Blogger

As Chris points out in the comments, this has been fixed now. coComment is working now with Blogger Beta popup comment forms! :D

There were things which changed when the new Beta hit, especially how third party applications worked with Blogger. I noticed this a few days back, but I thought it was just a glitch. But now, I think I can confirm that it's actually a problem, probably due to the way Blogger handles comments now (through encrypted pages).

CoComment now puts all comments made on the Beta under a Blogger: Post a comment topic, which unfortunately contains all posts made by anyone on the Beta with CoComment on. That means posts are no longer being recognised, and it's putting everything in one basket. There is the brute force way, where you have to enter all the details about the blog and the post yourself, but CoComment should be able to automatically do that. This is not good! Almost everyone used Singpolyma's excellent Comment Form and CoComment integated very nicely with it. But now, it just seems to be broken pretty badly.

I haven't tried other ways (such as the bookmarklet, or the userscript) to make CoComment catch comments and other nitty gritties posted on Blogger, but I think if this is broken, the others would be too. Do tell me if it's working for you, or behaving in a different matter than what I've seen!

C'mon CoCo! Get crackin, we need those comments chronicled!

Feeded to the teeth

With the new Blogger came tons of new features. Ok, not tons, but many! And I'm glad to say that along with the features, came something that Avatar and I (and a lot of other people) had predicted. The rise of the feeds! Yep! If you've been following Bloggeratto well enough, by now you should be able to define what they are in your sleep. Avatar's obsession with them has made him chronicle every little change in the Blogger (and the Internet's) feed management system. That's a good thing, because Blogger Buzz hasn't, and with all the new feeds that have been added, it can get a little hard to know exactly what is available and what is not.

What the feed?

As far as I know, there are feeds for posts, comments, labels, and searches available to us to tap and hack. Each feed is available in the standard formats ATOM, RSS and JSON. You get them by appending a ?alt= at the end of the feed address and the name of the format you want it in. The basic path is http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/<data>/<default|summary|full>, which seems to be followed for all feeds almost to the T. This is a good thing, and a better thing being Blogger having the said feeds. They are actually letting people have all and any data that they want. Well, almost... One thing that I'd love to see Blogger do is offer post specific user set variablesBlogging platforms such as Expression Engine offer such custom fields. These can be individually configured to hold any kind of information the user wants. It's sometimes very handy to be able to add in 'extra' post info, and yet make it accessible 'with' the post. I hope Blogger adds something like this soon. and include it in their feeds. For example, you could have a variable set for particular posts which would have a summary (different from the actual post content), and you could check that value using a script in your template. If that variable exists with a value, make the post expandable, else show it as normal! This could be done by associating blogIDs and postIDs with a variable name using a little PHP coding, but it's too much effort when it could be done by Blogger very easily!

But let's not get sidetracked... the point is that finally you're getting data out of Blogger, from Blogger! No more scraping pages with PHP scripts or other paraphernalia to get content out of them! :D

What's the use?

The uses are limited by your creativity. The first thing that comes to your mind is recent comments, and scripters jumped the opportunity to come up with a widget for it! Next would be post summariesI have worked on and now developed an Asynchronous loading of expandable posts. It just needs to be tweaked so that it can be easily added to any kind of template alike. I hope to release it soon., but a way to do this won't be immediately clear. I use the JSON version of their feeds to write out posts in the left hand side panel below, but you can do whatever you feel comfortable with (including syndicating it through the in built Feed Syndication widget :)) There is nothing you can't do when you have the data to work with!

I am extremely happy with how things are looking as far as the feeds front goes, and the power it gives us. Let's see what we can come up with for the lovely gifts Blogger Clause has got us! :P

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As pointed out with a question by Deepak, a feed for the in-blog search has not been discovered / offered yet. I hope this changes in the future, because that will call for some neat stuff. In the meantime, you can use the feed from blogsearch.google/blogger.com (either/or) and convert it via Singpolyma's Outline Converter to JSON. That works brilliantly! :)

Update: It seems as though none of the known GData parameters work with Blogger feeds. No num, count, sort, nothing. Things aren't 'as' great as I thought! If you think this is a false negative, let me know!

Blogging for viewers

Trying to reason the existence of blogs, will yield many justifications. It seems like every person has their own unique reason for owning and maintaining a blog, and hence there exist almost as many reasons as there are number of people. What is interesting is that some of these reasons openly spell - 'I want more people to see my blog!'. Using any ploy, technique or resource available to them, to rope in as many people to view their blog and comment (to prove the viewership) is, though not common, but existent in the blogging community.

A few gooney birds

There are quite a few people out there who employ such methods, and are actually known for it. I won't go calling names here, but if you look around, you'll find them. Unfortunately for the preachers of content, these people actually do succeed in getting the viewers simply based off the hype and thrill of an argument the post beckons. "Fools rush in" as the phrase goes. Only difference, the people aren't fools. Some don't know the reality, and decide to do something about it. Some have a look just for the heck of it, and others, I really don't know what they are thinking....

But worse than the ones visiting, are the ones posting such rubbish. It's nothing but a public cry for attention. They are the ones who clog search engine results because people link to these pages while documenting their own arguments opposing the original. I'm not saying that search results are drastically affected by these. Let's face it, one in a hundred results will be a controversial rant post if you're having a bad day. But still, the number will rise exponentially if people continue to start up rant blogs and useless arguments. It's something like the news channel holding a poll, and asking for your vote via an SMS (for which you're charged premium rates). No one gains anything, the channel gives up a half an hour slot (very happily I must add) to hold a small discussion based on the result, and people are happy to see their names scroll by faster than you can blink. The news channel makes tons of money, and people are none the wiser. The same principle applies to these blogs. They get their SEO, their Adsense revenue, and the exposure. Bad publicity is actually good publicity. What more could a blogger ask for?

Clean up your act!

Just a simple request! Let's focus on proper, tangible and useful content. Let's not hoodwink viewers and be selfish enough to gain recognition for practically nothing. By doing that, you'll help make the blogosphere truly useful and usable by everyone for every facet of life. I was going through blogs which deal and help with education. Articles by students, journalists, college faculty, and what not ... they were all there! My own college batch has now made a blog of it's own, where plan to form our own proper community and get to know the batch better, while keeping it interesting with student submitted articles and content. And mine isn't the only one (as I found out). College departments keep blogs to update information and news about what's going on with the department and the members. A perfect solution to cheaply keep interested people updated.

There are numerous ways of making your blog interesting, all you need to be is a little creative! :) Even personal blogs get lot of viewership. Review blogs, preview blogs, journalism and creative writing. Topics just come if you look for them! How do you use your blog? :)