Feedburner heads-up

Published by Dock on January 22, 2009 in Blog Industry News and Blog Tools & Technology. 10 Comments

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has some words for our friends at Feedburner.

Complaints about Feedburner, a service that helps websites manage their RSS feeds, have been around as long as the company itself. But you’d think that when Google spent $100 million to buy the company, they’d get it together.

But things haven’t gotten better. Instead, the service is becoming unreliable. Feedburner problems plague website owners far more than they should. And while Google is notoriously slow in absorbing its acquisitions, it’s far past time for them to get their act together and turn Feedburner into a grown up service.

Now, as it happens, we here at Blogburst have noticed recently that Feedburner feeds haven’t quite had the rock-solid stability and reliability that we have come to appreciate from them. Feedburner offers a lot of flexibility and features to bloggers and it is a great service. Hopefully the current issues they’re facing are only temporary, and they’ll get back to the level of service and reliability that, honestly, we’d all taken for granted over here.

If you are currently using Feedburner for your feed, it would be a good idea to check your feed’s output in a feed reader (at a bare minimum) and if you’re finding problems, to see if you can fix them in feedburner, or revert back to your native feed (the one that your blog generates automatically, without Feedburner) if you can’t address the problem.

Happy New Year, BlogBurst Bloggers!

Published by Daysha on December 31, 2008 in BlogBurst Success Stories. 3 Comments

2008 was an incredible year for BlogBurst! Our member network grew to record highs, headline impressions from publisher placements soared up to  20,000,000 on some days, and we celebrated the launch of our sister product Pluck On Demand to offer extended syndication to our BlogBurst network members.

BlogBurst network members weighed in on some pretty sticky subjects during 2008, and mainstream publishers picked up the posts to offer additional coverage to their readers. Check out some of the hot topics that were featured this year:

Alberto Gonzales Resigns 2008 Academy Awards
Bhutto Assassinations
Fidel Castro Resignation
Gas Prices Skyrocket
Global Markets Tumble
Eliot Spitzer
Hurricane Ike
2008 March Madness
NBA Finals		 Super Bowl XLII
O.J. Simpson (Again!)
The “R” Word: Recession
Remembering Paul Newman
Remembering William F. Buckley Jr.
2008 Sundance Film Festival
Toy Recall
TV Writers’ Strike
Wall Street Bailout
Blagojevich Arrested

You blogged through wild fires, hurricanes, snow storms, and election cycles, all while keeping your feeds clean and the f-bombs down to a minimum (with a special kudos to those of you that covered the Blagojevich scandal.)

The editors at BlogBurst would like to wish you a Happy New Year! For everything that you do, we thank you.

Blago Play on USAToday

Published by Daysha on December 10, 2008 in BlogBurst Success Stories. 1 Comment

Oh my! Blagojevich has been a very bad boy. While the Illinois governor makes headlines after being busted for trying to sell Obama’s vacant seat in the Senate, BlogBurst bloggers weigh in on the topic and achieve featured placement on USAToday’s Blogojevich section. Take a look:

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30 Posts in 30 Days: NaBloPoMo

Published by Daysha on November 13, 2008 in Blog Industry News. 5 Comments

NaBloPoMo BadgeIt’s day thirteen of a posting fever for bloggers taking part in the NaBloPoMo challenge. For those of you wondering about what type of tongue-twisted soirée you have stumbled upon, the program’s slogan says it all. “Post until the Internet explodes.” It’s not too late to create a blog and contribute to the spirit of National Blog Posting Month.

Organized by avid blogger Eden Marriot Kennedy and inspired by the National Novel Writing Month contest, NaBloPoMo challenges the bloggers to author one post per day for the entire month of November. According to NaBloPoMo’s website, the roster of bloggers has more than double to an estimated 10,000 members since 2007.

The Silent K, City Mama, My Thermos, Not Calm, Mom to the Screaming Masses, Pinch My Salt, Blogfabulous, and The Secret Government EGGO Project are among the many BlogBurst members contributing to the NaBloPoMo challenge.

Are you blogging for NaBloPoMo? Leave us a note in the comments section to let us know.

Something New Under the Sun

Published by Eric on November 6, 2008 in Blog Industry News, BlogBurst, General, Making Money Blogging and Promoting Your Blog. 9 Comments

Hello World! It’s a very exciting day here at BlogBurst, as we have launched a brand new sister product, Pluck On Demand. Pluck On Demand fuses together most of the technology we at Pluck and our parent company Demand Media have been perfecting over the years and delivers it to publishers websites with a simple javascript widget.

Pluck on Demand brings together content from a variety of sources — BlogBurst (you should log in to the workbench and make sure you are opted in for “extended syndication opportunities”), Demand Media content from eHow and Expert Village, and third party sources like Tribune Media Services and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Pluck on Demand then scans any page it’s widgets are placed on, and compares the content of that page with the millions of articles in our network using the same contextual matching system we have been using in BlogBurst for our large publishers. The resulting articles are then teased in the widget you have placed on your site.

When people click on those headlines, they are taken to a full article view within the publishers website that also include social media applications (modified from Pluck’s Sitelife solution), and advertising from our third party advertising partners. The publisher gets 50% of the net revenue from the advertising, the content contributor gets 30%, and the balance goes to Pluck.

Yes - content contributors get paid for their content as it gets used. We are very excited about this.

This (awesome) movie describes how and why it works:


Add content and social media to any website — powered by Pluck On Demand

Blogging During Recess

Published by Eric on October 23, 2008 in Blog Writing and General. 0 Comments

Hi folks, Eric here. I saw this great post on Wired a couple of days ago, and I have been thinking about it a lot. It’s a summary of an interview with Chris Alden, the CEO of Six Apart who make that awesome Movable Type platform, and host Typepad and Vox and are generally on the forefront of new technology. My first blogging platform was Movable Type, and after 6 years of hand-coding even the smallest of changes, I couldn’t believe how much better my relationship with the internet had suddenly become. But I digress…

I will start with my least favorite part of the interview. Kevin Maney claims to have met up with Chris “…over a Belgian Beer….” This made me thirsty and confused, as I had no idea which Belgian beer - they are all so different and I didn’t know which specific beer I should obsess over until the workday was done. Now I will have to sample many to make certain I have the mood just right. But again, I digress…

The general thrust of the interview is that the sputtering economy will lead to a surge in quality and quantity in the blogosphere. Bloggers will certainly start cranking up the quality scale in an effort to assert their personal brand - to show current employers what a smart person they are, and to help potential future employers become more comfortable with hiring them. Also, more undirected time will lead to more time spent creating blog posts (and tweets, and flicks, and bulletins, and shoutcasts, and what we like to call “interactions” etc.).

Seems like a pretty good bet, and after the recent uptick in the corporatization of blogs, I for one look forward to a new potential golden age of blogging (and interactioning).

Then, today, I saw this tremendously encouraging post by Steve Rubel on Micropersuasion (a BlogBurst member, btw). Steve is one of the true pioneers of blogging and was really instrumental (imho) in making sure the mainstream ‘got’ blogging and social media in general. Lately his posts have been a little bleak for me - RSS peaking, blogs may start restricting full feeds - but this post was a nice companion to the thoughts seeded by the other article. As you approach recreating your personal brand for a struggling economy, I think these tenets are non-assailable: Find your core genius, simplify, and be premium.

As for me, I am giving myself two additional pieces of advice. First I think I should focus on listening. My uncle Byron always used to say “you can learn more from listening than you can from talking” (also he said “before you write a book, you should erase one”)(also “it’s easier to apologize than to ask permission”). Second, I’m going to dust off that old homebrewing kit and make me some Belgian beers.

We see what you did there

Published by Dock on October 23, 2008 in Blog Writing and BlogBurst Nuts & Bolts. 5 Comments

Hello from (mostly) sunny Central Texas, where we appear to have broken the back of summer while still maintaining perfectly reasonable temperatures.

I got an email from a Blogburst member recently that took me a bit by surprise. The blogger indicated that he felt like his blog had been ignored by Blogburst and that we had forgotten all about him. When I pulled the blog up I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, in fact, it was a very well regarded blog with a commendable amount of publisher interest. It generated one of those “huh? Are you serious?” kinds of moments until I realized something.

You really have no idea how things are going in Blogburst if you don’t log in every once in a while to check your reporting.

Not to be hideously self-referential, but our Blogger Resource Center does have information on checking out your reports.  This alone will let you know what kind of publisher love you’re getting. Be sure to change the timescales on the right-hand side of the report to get the bigger picture - the “last 7 days” is the default setting but it isn’t the whole enchilada.

The other side of this coin is, well, “what if I’m not getting the publisher attention I used to get?” Yes, this does happen, but mainly it has to do with the news cycle, and your particular blogging topic area. It should be fairly predictable that the finance bloggers are having a field day right about now, as are the political bloggers. If you have a blog about (and I’m making this up, I don’t have anyone in mind) the wonderfulness of high-end SUVs, it is entirely possible that there is a decreased level of interest right now.

Keep in mind that the mainstream media in particular has a track record of focusing on one thing at a time, and you’ll see that they tend to switch to (and cycle through) topics based on the topical strength (or staleness) of a topic area. Chances are, you’ll get your turn in spades - and go through periods of decreased interest as well. Don’t let that change your commitment to topic areas that you find interesting though.

Finally, the best advice I can give regarding keeping publisher interest is this: blog regularly. The editors here really do know who they can count on when the publishers get hungry for a topic, and if you are a reliable source of information, you’ll be at the top of the heap when the news cycle casts its gaze into your area of expertise.

Blog Action Day 2008

Published by Tina on October 14, 2008 in General. 9 Comments

 On Wednesday, October 15th, the blogosphere takes on poverty.

Since 2007, coordinators for the non-profit event Blog Action Day choose a topic of global significance and challenged bloggers to dedicate one post to the subject on a particular day.

Blogburst network members participating in the 2008 Blog Action Day include Techcrunch, Mashable, Teeth Maestro, Dave Lucas’ Notes, White African, RotorBlog.com, Everything and Nothing, PROFY, Ari Herzog, Quick Online Times, Serge the Concierge, eHub, The Savvy Entrepreneur, Interactive Agency Malaysia, Gather Little By Little, Constitutionally Right and Urban Workbench. Did I leave you out? Let me know in the comments section below!

From the organizers:

In 2008, the Blog Action Day theme is Poverty. Bloggers are free to interpret this as they see fit. We invite bloggers to examine poverty from their own blog topics and perspectives, to look at it from the macro and micro, as a global condition and a local issue, and to bring their own ideas, views and opinions on the subject.

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Last year’s focus on the environment resulted in the creation of more than 23,327 articles authored by 20,603 blogs. Not only did the event attract support from organizations such as United Nations Environmental Programme, the European Union Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas,  but it also resulted in topic coverage on mainstream media sites like Reuters, Fox, BBC, and Star Tribune.

Interested in contributing? Visit www.BlogActionDay.org for more information.

So go on.  Blog about it!

Community Building Friday

Published by Tim on October 10, 2008 in Blog Writing. 2 Comments

Hat tip to Beth to sending us a link to Chris Brogan’s great post on 25 Ways to Build Your Community. Twenty-five is a lot of ways, but Chris is clearly passionate about the matter and the lessons in this list are ones we see paying off for people everyday here in BlogBurstLand.

While not everybody has the fortitude to read at least 100 blogs regularly (suggestion #1), one’s reach should exceed one’s grasp, and many of the suggestions here are very attainable.

I encourage you to read the original post, but if I had to boil down the principles espoused here I’d say they are:

  • care about what you write, take care to write well, don’t be snotty, and top it off with a good headline
  • link to other people and posts and promote other people’s work; trust the great karma boomerang
  • use the tools at your disposal: comments, Twitter, live meetups, whatever you got
  • think ahead, use strategy

Considering the fact that Chris has pages of comments on his post already, it seems to be working for him.

Gadgetopolis

Published by Eric on October 3, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Hello friends, Eric here. I recently inherited the gadget beat here at BlogBurst. It’s a good fit for me — I had an iPhone on Day 2, I have Wiis and Zooms and Cameras, Bluetooth is my buddy, WiFi is my friend. I’ve gone to CES twice. I went to the Gadgetopia that is Japan this summer (with my band!). Heck, I even have (and love) a Kindle.

Ah, but the gadget beat is cruel. I have a perfectly wonderful bicycle - strong enough to hop a curb, light enough to get me all over town. Why oh why should i suddenly be coveting a Mountain Bike made of Bamboo? I have fought and clawed to erase the last decade of questionable fiscal policy from my monthly credit card statement, only to start filling my delicious account with links to USB hollywood film kits and Wii Light sabres? My crock pot works just fine thank you, but this one is so much cooler.

Alas alack, there is nothing for me to do but do my best to not fall in love and continue plugging away through all of the excellent gadget reviews BlogBurst members generate every day. Of course I’m not sure if I can afford to not buy my very own indepenedent power station. I will save so much money!!!

What about you guys — has anyone noticed any great gadgets that I can’t live without?