Blogging

Metro on UK blogging

The ‘Metro’ is a free, lightweight, disposable newspaper, aimed at commuters, which is solely funded by advertising revenues. So lightweight, you can finish it by the time you reach Waterloo but at least it saves you the embarrassment of staring at your neighbour for 27 minutes.

Last month, The Metro reported the exciting news that a quarter of all UK internet users maintain a blog. Hurrah !

However, the veracity of this claim is immediately subverted by the statement that ‘59% of bloggers choose to make it public.’ So, this implies that 41% of UK bloggers are blogging in private, by invitation only, to friends and family or in complete isolation. I know the British are reserved but that is simply ridiculous.

the state of the UK blogosphere

It really is in a right old state. I have a Netvibes tab called ‘UK’. It has a solitary, uninspiring, dry news feed from the BBC.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a lot of blogs from UK authors. Some are (Scottish) technical types in the Oracle blogging community with a sense of humour while others are Brits who have moved to foreign shores or very talented and dedicated WordPress techies.

Clearly, this is highly unsatisfactory and slightly underwhelming. I am certain there must be a wealth of witty, interesting, fascinating blogs out there written by British people but I just can’t find them.

AOL search data released

Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog.

Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms.

spot the hyperlink

I was enjoying a scan through the archives of Andrew Sherman’s incisive, witty (and occasionally downright scary) blog when I suddenly thought ‘Hey Andrew - where are the links ?’

Then I realised. The hyperlinks are actually embedded in the title which is exactly where they should be.

At last. After 7 months, I have finally discovered something useful you can do in Blogger which is not (currently) supported in WordPress.

breaking through

Finally. All that painstaking effort creating multiple splogs, scribbling my blog URL on whiteboards at every client I visit, commenting twice daily on the ‘A’ listers, spamming the newsgroups and bribing people for inbound links has paid off.

This humble blog has finally broken through the 100,000 barrier. > Day 324. Technorati Rank: 96,498 (56 links from 32 sites)

Poor old Doug (a lowly 1,389,569) needs to pull his finger out. My life is complete. Almost.

latent tendencies

Sshh. Please don’t tell my therapist but BlogPulse matches the tone, content and links of this blog with ' Laura’s Playground' which is dedicated to ‘Transsexual and Transgendered News’.

I think I need to put my favourite pink panties on and sit down with a cold drink.

38th fastest growing WP blog

One of the things I like about WordPress is the sense of community. Wordpress users (and developers) willingly help each other out on the support forums. There is also a FAQ with useful information for newcomers and experienced users alike.

You can find similar, related WordPress blogs of interest usings tags and you can also discover new material by examining the league tables of the most popular WordPress blogs, individual articles and the fastest growing blogs over on botd.wordpress.com.

the curious case of the missing 'About' page

Collin from that esteemed, well respected publication ‘The Blog Review’ was kind enough to review this humble blog and raised the thorny question of an ‘About’ page. The absence of an ‘About’ page is one of Collin’s pet hates and Lorelle also thinks they are very important.

While I agree that background information about the author may be interesting and contact details may be useful for establishing dialog that isn’t suited for comments, I don’t think that the lack of an ‘About’ page is necessarily a habit of an ineffectual blogger.

7 habits of highly ineffectual bloggers

1. Describing your state of mind. I really don’t care whether you are happy, sad, somewhere in between or suicidal because your girlfriend dumped you.

2. Describing your state of health. I really don’t want to read about your flu like symptoms, your hangover, your runny nose or your migraine headache. Otherwise you will give me one.

3. Telling me what music you are listening to. You like your music. I like my music. We may share some common interests but it really doesn’t matter.

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Blogger down

Apologies to all you Oracle Bloggers.

Excessive traffic levels to my new Web journal on Blogger appears to have breached the ’tipping point’ and tipped it right over the edge.

Blogger is unavailable (again). Two nights running. Hmm.