a1-fan-fun

I know some great Mixx enthusiasts (most notably Tad from SEO 2.0) and I can relate to their enthusiasm. Mixx does look like a refreshing alternative to Digg. At least its community is still not polluted by radical types.

I prefer its design over Digg’s one. It appears “friendlier,” although I can’t really explain why I have this sensation. Maybe it has something to do with their colour scheme. The tags right below their search box are very convenient for the casual bored visitor who just wants some quick suggestions on what to look for. And I really must highlight one of the coolest features available to their users: the ability to organise and join groups. It helps you find and compile links to stuff you are truly interested in.

With all that being said, I have never become an active Mixx user. I visit the site from time to time and occasionally vote for some stuff. But I never got to develop a true passion for it. Why?

I guess it is a sort of “Digg fatigue.” I’ve seen so many annoying and even disgusting things taking place at Digg, that I simply can’t feel that enthusiastic about similar sites. In fact, I’m a bit pessimistic when it comes to the future of Mixx’s community. I’m not sure it’ll remain as welcoming as it currently is. It may sound silly, but that’s how I feel. I know I may be missing some nice experiences by not embracing Mixx as I could. And perhaps things won’t go as wrong as I think they will. Anyway, for the time being I won’t change my behaviour.

This post is my entry for Pearl’s group writing project on Mixx, Propeller and Squidoo.

Hello everyone! After a long time, Karen Zara is back to business.

I’ll resume my blogging by going on my very own social media marathon. What is it? Well, over the next hours I’ll be posting articles containing my views and brief accounts of my experiences on various social media websites. It’s really that simple. And it’s a nice way not to miss the Social Media Mega Project’s new deadline.

*I only hope that my connection won’t abandon me now that I most need it*

Do you remember the Social Media Mega Project? Have you chosen the social media sites you’re going to blog about?

If Twitter is among your choices but you aren’t too familiar with it, here are a few links that will help you:

* Simon’s Twitter Mini Series: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

* 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: by Maki from Dosh Dosh.

The Twitter Group Writing Project is hosted at Change Therapy. Publish your article on your blog, send its link to Isabella and get a free backlink plus some promotion in return.

I am proud to announce the official launch of the Social Media Mega Project, a huge group writing project for social media enthusiasts. Credits and applauses go to Vivien, who had the idea and organised everything.

Several bloggers are hosting group writing projects on specific social media sites. Visit their blogs, read the instructions and submit your articles.

Which social media sites can I write about?

* Twitter (Hosted by Isabella Mori)

* LinkedIn (Hosted by Isabella Mori)

* Mixx / Propeller / Squidoo (Hosted by Pearl)

* Sphinn (Hosted by Simonne)

* del.icio.us (Hosted by Aaron Stroud)

* Flickr / Zooomer / other photo-related sites (Hosted by Brian Auer)

* Technorati (Hosted by Monica)

* Facebook (Hosted by Ina)

* Second Life (Hosted by Dandellion)

* Sk*rt / BVibes / Blogging Zoom (Hosted by JHS)

* Digg / Reddit (Hosted by Vivien)

* StumbleUpon / YouTube / MySpace (Hosted by yours truly)

What are the rules?

1. Write a post on your blog and tell us: how you integrate StumbleUpon or YouTube or MySpace into your blogging; your good or bad experiences; how you would compare those social networking sites to others; what you like or don’t like about them; how you benefited from becoming a frequent user of those sites; what secrets you have learned about them; what tips or warnings you would like to inform others about.

2. Contact me with your name, email and a permalink to your post. If you don’t have your own blog, you can always write a guest post on my blog.

3. Once I collect the links from all participants and publish them on my blog, you can write another post and link to either all or only your favourite articles by other bloggers. I strongly recommend that you don’t limit yourself to simply posting a link list; write short reviews instead. Your readers — and fellow bloggers — will thank you for this.

4. You are allowed to contribute only one article per project/site. You are more than welcome to visit other participating blogs that host projects dedicated to different social media sites and take part in those projects by submitting your articles about other social networking sites.

5. No profanity, no insults, no plagiarism. Be nice.

What about the deadlines?

All group writing projects start today, January 21st, 2008 and end on February 22nd, 2008. Results will be published on February 25th, 2008. Final collaborative results will be available at Inspiration Bit on February 29th, 2008.

Any additional instructions or suggestions?

Yes, I’d like to add some comments and tiny bits of information.

First of all, you don’t need to be a specialist in any of those sites. You’ll have a whole month to open accounts, start using them, build relationships and get used to their communities. Of course, if you’re already an experienced user I’d love to hear from you. But if you’re a beginner, I’d love to hear from you too. All points of view are welcome, as long as the rules are respected.

Secondly, I should let you know that I’m going to publish my own articles on StumbleUpon, YouTube and MySpace on this blog before February 22nd, 2008.

Finally, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment on this post and I’ll do my best to help you.

Happy networking and happy writing!

Do you remember my previous post? Have you actually read it? Although this blog has received several unique visitors since I posted it, only one person cared to leave a comment. Mariam hasn’t explicitly requested a stumble, but I never said it was required (unless a blogger wanted to have a specific post reviewed). What matters to me is the fact that she took the time to comment on that post. As a result, all my stumble love goes to her!

I chose to stumble the first part of a very helpful series she published on her blog. In fact I planned to stumble all five parts, but I was afraid that too many thumbs up in a row could harm her blog, instead of helping it. What if StumbleUpon’s algorithms interpreted it as spam?

As several days have gone by since my first stumble, I’ve just given thumbs up to the second part of her series. The remaining parts will be stumbled in the future. Meanwhile, I’ll post all the links here, so you can appreciate Mariam’s good job:

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 1

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 2

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 3

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 4

* Interest, dividends, capital gains - an all-in-one investment strategy, Part 5

Analysing my own offer — Suppositions and conclusions

The post where I offered stumbles as Christmas gifts remained at the top of my blog’s homepage until today. And as I said above, several unique visitors came here in the meantime (10 days), not to mention my dear subscribers. So I suppose my offer has had enough exposure.

I considered promoting that post in a few forums, but I didn’t want to do that because I hoped for spontaneous reactions from readers. Besides, I wasn’t convinced that such kind of promotion would really attract more bloggers.

If you read that post you know that I didn’t ask anything complicated; just a comment. So what happened? What should I conclude from this experience?

Possibility 1: Readers were somehow intimidated by my rules and/or gave up reading the whole post when they realised there were rules to follow.

If that was the case, I might assume that I haven’t expressed myself in a friendly enough manner. I could also conclude that most readers don’t like rules. Well, sorry folks, but I do like them. Not all of them, of course, but they are necessary anyway.

Possibility 2: Since I’m not a famous blogger, readers may have thought that my stumbles wouldn’t bring them any benefit.

Being a obscure blogger isn’t a sin and doesn’t make you “inferior” to well-known fellows. Besides, my lack of fame in the blogosphere doesn’t matter for StumbleUpon. I’ve sent some decent SU traffic to various articles. How do I know this? Their authors let me know.

Possibility 3: Bloggers just don’t need and/or aren’t interested in StumbleUpon traffic.

Really? Well, I’m still very interested in it. And from what I read in many blogs, sites and forums, I’m definitely not the only one. Perhaps my offer only reached those who don’t care much. It could have been an unfortunate coincidence… although I don’t believe in coincidences.

Possibility 4: Bloggers do want to have their articles stumbled, but some are a bit too shy — or proud — to ask.

Jane Smith reads the post, likes the idea but doesn’t leave any comments because she fears that she’d sound like a begger if she did. She won’t let anyone suppose she’s the desperate owner of a blog without visitors. John Brown also reads about the Christmas offer, but he thinks he doesn’t need social media votes to help him achieve blogging success. “Gaming Google is so much better,” he says to himself.

What am I going to do about it all?

Nothing.

I wrote this post more for (self-) entertainment purposes than for anything else. People are free to take or reject my offers; I can live with this. I don’t plan to find a way to control blog readers’ behaviour.

(Granted, I’d love to be able to do that. I know some bloggers who do it very successfully. So I’m going to study their dirty tricks and apply them all here, ohohohoho! <— You didn’t read that paragraph.)

Christmas is here and I thought it was time to offer my readers a little gift. Here it is: I’m open to StumbleUpon requests. Leave a comment and I’ll visit your blog, spot some good posts and stumble them. Alternatively, you may ask me to stumble specific articles, but in this case I reserve the right to say “no.” So it’s safer to just let me browse through your site and pick posts myself.

Please note that this offer is NOT open to sites containing any of the following: hate speech, racism, pro-violence and pro-war stuff, stolen content, warez, hacking, personal attacks, trolling, stalking and anything else that is illegal or otherwise highly objectionable. Since I keep my StumbleUpon profile as work-safe as possible, I won’t be stumbling adult-oriented stuff either. Finally, I’ll only stumble written content. No photos and no videos for the time being.

If I feel inspired enough, I may blog about this experience later and link to all stumbled posts. This is not a formal promise though, just a possibility.

Of course I’m not the only blogger offering gifts this week. Take a look at this post published on Retired Pay World and you may be pleasantly surprised. All I can say is that it’s something that could help you in your blogging efforts.

Happy holidays!

P.S.: I originally intended to thank my visitors for everything, but I’ll save this message for a future post. Meanwhile, consider yourselves thanked.

Most bloggers — if not all of them — have some (or many) goals in mind for 2008. In order to participate of Daily Blog Tips’ latest group writing project, I am supposed to write about my own goals here.

This is my problem: I’m very reserved, hence I’d rather keep my blogging goals to myself. On the other hand, if I do it I won’t be able to take part in the writing project. It seems I’ll have to open my mouth this time… (Damn! They shouldn’t do this to a shy woman like me! *whines*)

Let me see if I can find a way to reveal my aims without exposing myself too much. Hmmm…

All right, this is what I have for you: after much pondering, I could only conclude that all of my blogging goals for 2008 are directly or indirectly related to my wish — and need — to become a better writer.

I could spend weeks and weeks working on a thousand ways to drive more traffic to my blogs, get more backlinks for them, increase their Alexa Rank, find them some advertisers and so on. But the truth is that I already know how to achieve it all. So there are really two things that hinder me from starting a more aggressive promotional campaign: persistent lack of time and a rather limited ability to produce compelling content. The former depends on things that I don’t have total control over, thus being out of this post’s scope. The latter, on the other hand, is my fault and no one else’s.

I have devised a little (perhaps not that little, now that I think of it) plan to improve my writing skills. Putting said plan into practice is the most important step that I must take to accomplish my blogging goal. If nothing goes wrong, by the end of 2008 I’ll have learned how to write that kind of content that makes blog readers come back for more. Then I’ll open the traffic hunt season.

This year I learned that I’m definitely not the worst blogger on Earth. Next year I’ll do my best to reach a higher blogging quality level. But I don’t want to do that alone. I want you, my dear readers, to follow me during this journey. So be nice to me and click here to subscribe to a1-fan-fun’s RSS feed. *grin* Oh, and don’t forget that your supportive comments are welcome. *double grin*

John Chow has recently asked the following question on his blog:

How many posts do you show on your blog’s front page and what is your reasoning behind it?

Much to my shame, I’ve realised that:

a) I’ve never paid too much attention to the number of posts displayed on my blogs’ homepages.

b) There’s no reasoning at all behind it.

I had already spent some time thinking about the subject, but I hadn’t come to any conclusions. Besides, I thought I had more important blogging decisions to make, so I kept on neglecting this matter.

Perhaps it’s time to think about it again. It may not be a major issue here, because most a1-fan-fun’s posts aren’t too long. But on Abaminds I tend to post longer articles. This habit may be affecting my visitors’ browsing experience somehow when they arrive to the frontpage. Hmmm…

Mohsin has recently published an article that all procrastinative bloggers should read: How To Kill Procrastination For Good - No Kidding!

I liked his tip so much that I’m putting it into practice, starting today.

Writing this post was the first thing I did after turning my computer on. In order to avoid distractions, I wrote it before connecting to the Internet. Then I logged on, copied his article’s link, inserted it above and published this post.

Now I must write a new article for Abaminds. As I’ll have to revisit over 60 blogs to write that, I won’t be able to perform this task off-line. I hope I won’t get (too) distracted. Let’s see if I’ll manage to keep focused on my new post or not.

I’ll try Mohsin’s anti-procrastination technique for some weeks. Then I’ll report the results here. Regardless of the outcome, I must make it clear that procrastination is only one of the several issues that affect my blogging efficiency (or lack thereof). Consequently, I don’t see this experiment as a “magical formula” that will turn me into a superproductive blogger. There are other things to be solved, and some of those are out of my reach and control. But every small step that I take will help me somehow.

I encourage you all to start taking small — or maybe not so small, depending on your possibilities — steps towards your blogging success right now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. Comment moderation is a very common practice around the blogosphere. But for some (obscure) reason I’m not totally sure that I should keep on moderating comments on my own blogs.

Comments on a1-fan-fun are all moderated. On Abaminds I took a different approach: only the first comment is moderated. Once it’s approved, the future comments left by the same reader should be displayed immediately. Two blogs, two systems. (This is one of the advantages of having more than one blog. I may write more about it someday.)

This blog gets much more comments than the other, for Abaminds is newer and I haven’t promoted it properly (yet). Therefore I still can’t make comparisons to base my decisions upon.

That being said, I came up with 2 short lists of pros and cons of comment moderation.

Why should a blogger moderate comments?

1. To control spammy messages not caught by anti-spam plugins: this is actually the main and best reason why anyone would want to read all comments before they are published.

2. To be able to edit comments before they go live: good if you suspect a certain comment to be spam but eventually decide to allow it. You may “punish” the supposed spammer by deleting, modifying or no-following the links he/she has left before they can be seen by other readers.

3. Because you want a chance to solve some delicated matters before they become public: if an usually friendly reader overreacts to a post of yours at first, he/she might need some time to calm down and realise his/her comment could have been toned down. With comment moderation turned on, you’ll have the chance to contact him/her privately and try to work things out. Or he/she might take the initiative.

I wonder how many bloggers actually put #3 into practice. I confess I don’t… There was an occasion when I could (perhaps should) have done it. But I had the feeling that trying to keep things “secret” would just make the commenter’s annoyance grow. Hence I chose to approve the comment as it was and respond it right away.

Why shouldn’t a blogger moderate comments?

1. Because some readers don’t like waiting: they want to be sure that their comments will actually be published. Just don’t ask me why. There must be a psychological mechanism that determines this behaviour. Maybe a need for reassurance? Who knows?

2. To show that you trust your readers: perhaps it’s a dangerous way to see things, with so many spammers out there. Nevertheless, it might not be a totally bad idea, if you know how to take advantage of it.

3. Because you may have to spend some time off-line: if that happens, you won’t be able to approve new comments and your blog will look too quiet.

After rereading my own lists, I still haven’t come to any conclusions. So here comes the part when I ask you to leave your comments on this post (you saw that coming! ).

What are your views on comment moderation? Have I forgotten to mention any good reasons why one should or shouldn’t have it turned on? As a blog reader and commenter, how do you feel when your comments are queued for moderation?

Your opinions are welcome and I appreciate any input you can give me.