Blogware

Introducing the Heat Map (Blogging for Dollars, Part 3)

Joey deVilla — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:32:01 -0400

Hello, and welcome to the third installment of Blogging for Dollars, in which I'll cover how to make money with your blog using Google's AdSense! In case you missed the previous two installments, they are:

Part One: In this article, I introduced the idea of using Google AdSense to harness your blog to make a little extra money.

Part Two: In this article, I covered how to sign up for Google AdSense and how to put AdSense into your Blogware-powered blog.

Where to Place Your AdSense Ads

In the previous article, I showed you how to create a component that held a Google AdSense ad unit. The Google AdSense term and conditions allow you to put up to three AdSense ad units per page. You should create a separate component for each ad unit -- create each one as I showed you, and give each one its own name.

Once you've created the components, you might be wondering where the best places for your ads are. In this case, by "best places", I mean the locations for your ads which make it more likely that they will be clicked on. Remember, more clicks on those ads means more money for you!

Google also makes money on those clicks, so this is a case where your interests and Google's interests are aligned. Simply put: money money for you also means more money for them. That's probably why they publish many useful articles for Google AdSense users that show how to maximize clicks on their ads.

One of the first articles on Google ad placement that you should read is Where Should I Place Google Ads on My Pages?. The main feature of this article is the "Google Heat Map", shown below:

The heat map corresponds to the layout of a web page and is color-coded with red being the hottest, orange being the second-most-hot, yellow being third-most-hot and white being cold. The hotter an area, the better a location it is for ads.

The Hottest Spots in the Sidebars, Header and Footer

Left Sidebar, Upper Portion

In this article, we'll consider the header, sidebars and footer as possible locations for ads. For these locations, the hottest part is the upper portion of the left sidebar. In the example from the previous article, this is the location where I placed the ad.

This makes sense for blogs written in languages where you read from left to right and from the top to the bottom of the page (such as English and European languages). For readers of these languages, their eyes typically start at the upper left-hand corner of the page.

To place an ad in the upper portion of the left sidebar, make sure you're on the Look & Feel section, Layout page, with the Columns tab selected:

Drag one of your ad unit components from the Inactive column to the top of the left column, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. You'll now have an ad in the upper part of the left sidebar.

Left Sidebar, Lower Portion and Right Sidebar, Upper Portion

The next-best locations are the lower part of the left sidebar and the upper part of the right sidebar:

Header, Left and Center Portions

The left and center portions of the header are considered to be as hot as the lower part of the left column and the upper part of the right column.

To place an ad in the header, make sure you're on the Look & Feel section, Layout page, with the Header tab selected:

You can one of your ad unit components from the Inactive column to either the left or center column, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. You'll now have an ad in the header.

Forget the Footer

As you can see, the bottom of the page is a bad location to place ads. Don't bother dragging one of your ad components into the footer.

But What About the Hottest Spot?

All these are good locations for ads, but none of them are as good as the spot just above the primary content. It's the reddest part of the heat map.

The problem is that Blogware doesn't let put components in the center column; it's strictly for blog content.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible to place ads above the primary content; it just means that there's more work involved. I'll cover it in the next article.

Blogging for Dollars, Part 2

Joey deVilla — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 19:02:51 -0400

Welcome to the second part of Blogging for Dollars, a series of articles that cover how to make money with your Blogware-powered blog and Google's Adsense.

In the previous article, I wrote about the opportunities that AdSense provides to someone with a blog. With a few hundred pageviews a month, it's possible to cover the monthly charges for your blog and make it pay for itself. With a few thousand pageviews a month, you can harness your blogging and make it generate some decent spending money. With the right topics or themes, you might even be able to seriously supplement your income.

In this article, I say "enough with the theory, it's time to make some money!" I'll cover the process of getting an Adsense account and then inserting AdSense into your Blogware-powered blog.

Getting an AdSense Account

The first step is to get an AdSense account from Google. To do this, go to:

http://google.com/adsense

You'll be taken to a page that will look something like this:

To enter the sign-up process, click the Click Here to Apply button. You'll be taken to the sign-up form. It's divided into a number of sections, each one requiring a different type of information about you or your blog. We'll go through them one by one.

Website Information

The first section is pretty simple: you simply tell them where to find your blog and what language it's written in.

When you enter the URL (some people like to call it the "web address") of your blog into the field marked Website URL, don't add the "http://" part. For example, when I signed up for AdSense for my personal blog, I entered accordionguy.blogware.com there.

Contact Information

The second section is for contact information, so that Google know to whom they should address and send the check.

When you enter the information for Country or Territory and Payee Name (that's the person who should get the checks), make sure you don't make any mistakes. Those can't be changed once the application process has begun.

Product Selection

The third section is for choosing which AdSense products you'd like to have on your blog.

Check both. Right now, we're focusing solely on AdSense for Content, which are the context-sensitive ads. I'll cover AdSense for Search -- which puts on "Search" function on your site for which you get paid when it's used -- in a later article.

Policies

The fourth and final section is where you promise that you'll adhere to the terms and conditions of being an AdSense member.

You have to agree to all the terms to become a member, which means you have to check all those boxes. By checking all of them, you're making many promises, some of which are:

That you won't click on the AdSense ads on your own blog.
That you won't tell people to click on your ads.
That you won't put porn (and other content forbidden by the terms and conditions -- see here) on your blog.
That you won't disclose how much your blog makes via Adsense.

Once You've Filled Out the Form...

Click the Submit Information button. Then it's time to play the waiting game.

(Cue that line from The Simpsons: "The waiting game sucks. Let's play 'Hungry Hungry Hippos'.")

You won't have to wait too long. I've read on several sites that most acceptance/rejection emails from the AdSense screening people arrive within 1 or 2 days of your clicking the Submit Information button.

Once you've been accepted, you can proceed to the next step: inserting AdSense ads in your blog!

(If you've been rejected, cheer up, and I'll cover what to do in a later article.)

Putting AdSense on Your Blog

Now that you've been accepted, the next step is to put AdSense into your blog. Although there's going to be a lot of Blogware-specific material in this section, a lot of this is applicable to other blogging software or web pages in general.

Logging In

The first step is to go to the AdSense main page (http://google.com/adsense) and log in using the email address you provided when you signed up and the password emailed to you by AdSense.

Once You're In

Once you've logged in, you'll see that the site is divided into three major sections:

Reports: This section provides reports of your earnings. Since you haven't installed AdSense on your blog yet, this won't be useful to you right now.

AdSense Setup: This section generates you the code that you need to place in your blog in order for AdSense to work. We'll be working in this section today.

My Account: This section lets you review and change your account information, such as deatils about your blog, contact information and payment information.

Make sure that you're in the AdSense Setup section, which is shown below:

The page displays a number of AdSense services. Right now, we're only interested in the ads, so click on AdSense for Content.

The AdSense for Content page provides two choices of AdSense unit: as units and link units. For the time being, let's concentrate solely on ad units. I'll cover link units and the difference between them and ad units in a later article.

Select the Ad unit option and click the Continue button at the bottom of the page. You'll get taken to a page that looks like this:

This page lets you select a format and a color set for your AdSense ads. Once you've selected a color and a format, you'll be given a piece of JavaScript code that you insert into your blog's layout.

Now it's time to create an ad unit.

Making an Ad Unit

At its simplest, creating an ad unit requires only two sets of selections. The first is to select a format, which is done from the drop-down menu shown below:

If you need to see examples of the various formats available, click on the Ad Formats link.

For this example, I'm going to choose 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper. A number of sites that cover AdSense suggest that ads in sidebars get more clicks than banner ads, and the Wide Skyscraper is the largest ads that will fit in a sidebar. Here's what the Wide Skyscraper looks like:

Once you've selected the format, the next step is to choose a color scheme. You do this in the Colors section, which is shown below:

There are two ways you can choose a color scheme. The simplest way is to choose one of the pre-defined color schemes from the drop-down menu:

The other way is to define your own color scheme using these controls. You can either type in the color code of the colors you want to use...

...or, if you're a more visual sort, you can click on the color boxes and choose from the palette that pops up:

No matter which way you choose your ad unit's colors, you can see a sample showing the color you chose. The sample appears near the bottom left of the Colors section and updates whenever you choose a new pre-defined color scheme or change a color yourself:

Feel free to pick whatever color scheme or colors for your ad. As a general rule, you should choose a color scheme or select colors that match those of your blog. In a later article, I'll write about effective color choices.

Once you've chosen the color scheme or colors, click the Continue button at the bottom of the page. You'll be taken to the final page, which contains the AdSense code:

This AdSense code needs to be inserted into the layout of your blog. If you click anywhere inside the textbox marked Your AdSense Code, you'll select all the code. Copy it (control-C on Windows and Linux, command-C on the Mac). If you like, you can open a text editor or word processor and paste the code there.

Now that we have the code, it's time for the final step: putting it into your blog's layout.

Putting AdSense into Your Blog's Layout

(Note that this section is specific to Blogware and Blogware-powered blogs.)

The simplest way to place an AdSense ad unit into your blog is to place it in a custom component. As a component, it will be easy to move to different places in your layout once you've defined it. The ability to easily move ad units about is important because one of the keys to success with AdSense is experimenting with ad placement.

Log into your blog's control panel and go to the Look & Feel section by clicking the Look & Feel tab.

The page for editing components is in the Layout section, so click on the Layout below the Look & Feel tab:

Now click on the Components tab:

Here's the part of the resulting page that's most important to us at the moment: the Add Custom Component section. This is where we can create a new component, which is a piece of code that we can easily move around the blog's layout. The Add Custom Component section is shown below:

Give your component a name so that it's easy to identify. In this example, we'll give it the name "Skyscraper Ad" by entering it into the Name textbox:

Now the slightly harder part: to enter the code that defines the component. Enter the following into the Content textbox:

<div class="component"></div>

Which looks like this in the control panel:

Note that those two lines are separated by a blank line. The blank line doesn't really do anything except make the next step easier. The next step is to paste the AdSense code into that blank line:

Now that we've defined the component, it's time to save it. Click the Add Component button to save it. The page will reload and the component should appear in the Custom Components list:

With a component defined and saved, there's only one step remaining: it's time to add it to the layout. For this example, we'll add it to the top of the blog's left sidebar. To add components to sidebars, we need to click the Columns tab:

This will give you a view of the components as they are laid out in the blog's left and right columns. Since our new "Skyscraper Ad" component (in the page it appears as "Custom: Skyscraper Ad") isn't in use yet, it's in the Inactive column:

To place our skyscraper ad at the top of the left sidebar, drag it from the Inactive column to the top of the Left column. Here's what the page looks like while you're dragging the component to its destination:

And here's what the page looks like when you've dropped it:

Now click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Once you've done that, the ad unit will be in your layout at the top of the left sidebar. Take a look at your blog now: the Skyscraper ad unit should now be at the top of the left sidebar:

Congratulations!

You've just placed an AdSense ad on your blog. Now it's a matter and waiting to see how much money comes in.

To keep an eye on the action that your AdSense ad is getting, log into to the AdSense site (http://google.com/adsense) and click the Reports tab. You'll be take to a page that candisplay all sorts of reports showing how much money your AdSense ads have earned.

Next time: I'll talk about AdSense reports and ad placement.

Blogging for Dollars, Part 1

Joey deVilla — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:36:55 -0400

Welcome to the return of The Blogware Mechanic, a regular series of articles in which I'll show you all sorts of tips and tricks to get the most out of your Blogware-based blog.

Since this is a return after a long hiatus, I thought I'd start with a fairly splashy topic; something nice and attention-getting. How 'bout this?:

That's right: what I'm going to do is show you how to make a little money off your blog.

But first, let me tell you a story...

The Cocktail Party Pitch (A True Story)

It all started at a cocktail party for nerds (yes, such things exist). I won't go into the details of the party, other than the fact that a large software corporation had hired a boutique PR company to throw the shindig. This meant that the snacks -- and more importantly, the drinks -- were free. This probably explains why my friend was a mite tipsy when he approached me.

"How come you're not blogging full-time?" he asked. "Your blog's good. You get lots of hits. You could make a killing!"

Oh wow, is he drunk, I thought. I figured it was the bloggy equivalent those druken moments when a buddy comes up to you and says "I love you, man." At least I was dealing with a happy drunk.

"I don't think so," I said. "Boing Boing -- I can see that making a lot of money, but not my blog."

"How many pageviews d'you get on your blog?"

"I average about 3,500, maybe 4,000 a day," I replied, "with the occasional spike on a good day."

"You can make money, then."

"Why? How much do you make off your blogs?"

"I make my living off my blogs, dude."

A living?

I should make it clear at this point that my friend does not live in a single-room apartment in a nearly-condemned tenement building, nor does he subsist on ramen noodles (the starving student's best friend). He's got a house, a wife and kids, a car and all the other stuff that you'd associate with suburban living.

"Just off the ads?" I asked. His were regular blogs; none of his pages were behind any kind of for-pay "firewall". I didn't remember seeing any kind of "tip jar" either, which left advertising as the most likely possibility.

"Yup, just off the ads," he replied.

I tried to think of how often I clicked on an ad on a web page. Maybe once a week, maybe once a month. Not often anyway. I couldn't imagine making more than a few pennies a month off ad clicks.

We talked for a little bit longer, and my friend gave me a few extra suggestions on how to go about making money from my blog. After I left, I decided that I'd give it a try.

The idea of harnessing a hobby to make a little extra spending money isn't new to me. I play rock and pop tunes on the accordion as a hobby, and from time to time, I play on the street. With a hat tossed down for tips, many passers-by don't mind tossing me one- and two-dollar coins (I'm in Canada), and those coins add up. On a good night, I can make enough money to buy dinner for two at a decent steakhouse. Maybe I could do something similar with my blog.

I decided that to follow the tried-and-true business strategy of taking a look at my friend's blogs and doing exactly what he did. I visited his blogs -- has has about a half dozen -- and they all relied exclusively on Google AdSense ads.

AdSense

Chances are that you're already familiar with Google AdSense ads. They're those ads that seems to be on every other other website and are marked with a text link that reads "Ads by Goooooooogle". They take on a number of forms, like the ones shown below.

Here's the "468 by 60" banner:

...here's the "120 by 240" vertical banner:

...and here's the "250 by 250" image ad:

How Adsense Works (The Quick and Dirty Version)

I used to work with at a company founded by an advertising executive, and I remember him always saying "It's not that people hate ads; it's that they hate ads that aren't relevant to them".

AdSense tries to provide relevant advertising by displaying ads that are related to the content of the page they are on. This is possible because AdSense, being owned by Google, has access to Google's data store, which has data on most of the publicly-accessible web pages in existence. AdSense uses the data that Google has on that page to determine what sort of ad to show. Here are a couple of quick examples: When I blogged about accordions, AdSense started displaying ads for accordion stores, accordion repair shops and accordion lessons. When I blogged about how silly people look on pocket bikes, AdSense showed advertisements for motorbikes (of both the regular and pocket variety) and helmets.

When you put AdSense on your blog, you make money based on the number of clicks the AdSense ads get and the number of people that visit your site. I'll go into the details in a later article, but in the meantime, it boils down to these rules:

If people visit your site, you make some money.
If people click on the ads on your site, you make more money.

Google will send you a check (or alternately, direct-deposits money into your bank account) at the end of the current month whenever you accumulate $100 or more.

How Much Money Can You Make?

It's hard to say. There are so many factors that enter into the equation.

I could cite my own earnings from the very short time I've used AdSense, but the terms and conditions of joining the AdSense program specifically prohibit you from announcing how much you've earned.

Luckily, there are a few people on the net who have provided examples without mentioning specific blog names. Darren Rowse at problogger.net has written about the AdSense earnings of three unnamed blogs with which he is involved:

Blog	Pageviews per month	Earnings from AdSense
Blog A	20,000	$790.91
Blog B	40,000	$99.08
Blog C	160,000	$515.12

As you can see, there isn't a direct correlation between pageviews and revenues from AdSense. Pageviews help, but clicks on ads are where the money's at.

A Washington Post article titled A New Model For Getting Rich Online cites several examples:

PodcastDirectory.com grew from a site from 100 hits a month in 2004 to getting a million per month -- it earns about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, "the equivalent of an entry-level government worker's salary".

Two 20-year-olds cashed in on the MySpace phenomenon by creating FreeWebLayouts.net, where people can download designs to customize their MySpace pages. Their AdSense revenues: $100,000 a month. Not bad for a year-old site.

A guy who flies often created SeatGuru, a site provides information on various airlines' seats, such as which ones have the most legroom and recline, which ones provide audio and video in-flight entertainment, which ones have laptop power, and so on. He makes about $10,000 to $20,000 a month from AdSense.

While these stories are of exceptional cases, these people didn't do anything that most people couldn't do: create a list of podcast sites, create a bunch of templates for web pages and collect information about airline seats. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most successful.

At the very least, a blog that gets a few hundred hits a month should be able to cover its own hosting expenses; a blog that gets a few thousand hits a month should be able to meet the threshold to get a Google check at the end of each month, which is enough to give yourself a new computer or plane tickets for a decent-haul trip every year for your birthday.

If at this point you're salivating at the thought of making a little extra money by harnessing your existing blog or starting one, tune in tomorrow for the second part in this series!

Blood, Sweat and Tea

Joey deVilla — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:01:28 -0400

Here's something I'd been meaning to blog for a while now: Tom Reynolds, a Blogware user whom I met through blogging, has got a book coming out titled Blood, Sweat and Tea. It's based on his blog, Random Acts of Reality, which chronicles his experiences as an ambluance driver in the London Ambulance Service.

Tom's a sweet guy -- it comes through in his writing, and even more so when you meet him in person (he flew from London to Toronto to attend my birthday/engagement party in November 2004). Do youself a favour and go check out his blog and buy his book!

Blogging with the Whales

Joey deVilla — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 10:59:58 -0400

Over at the internet marketing blog One Degree, Toronto-based online business guru Bill Sweetman writes about how a non-computer, non-tech, non-internet business is making use of a corporate blog. The article, titled Blogging with the Whales, covers the blog run by a New Brunswick company that offers whale-watching cruises. Bill writes:

The blog is maintained by Danielle, a marine biology graduate in charge of photographing, identifying and recording the whales and sharing that information with various marine research organizations. Danielle’s blog chronicles through words and photos (by Danielle) the recent whale sightings and had been updated earlier the day I first looked at the blog with photos of whales that had been spotted that morning.
I was immediately captivated by the near-immediacy of this information and the fact it chronicled the spontaneous nature of whale watching. The “Sightings and Updates” blog also demonstrated to me that Quoddy Link Marine really cared about whales and the environment, not just selling whale tour tickets. Thanks to their blog, I also felt one degree closer to the people behind this tour company than with those from any of their competitors.

If you're wondering if having a corporate blog can help your company attract new business, you might want to read the article.

New Report Says There are 12 Million U.S. Bloggers, 57 Million U.S. Blog Readers

Joey deVilla — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 15:15:46 -0400

According to a report on blogging released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project titled Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers [260K PDF], 8 percent of internet users -- that's about 12 million American adults -- keep a blog. An even larger segment of internet users, 39 percent, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

Among the report's findings:

Here's what bloggers blog about:
- 37% of bloggers use them as personal journals
- 11% blog about government and politics
- 7% blog about entertainment
- 6% blog about sports
- 5% blog about general news and current events.
54% of bloggers are under 30, evenly split between men and women.
Where bloggers live:
- More than half live in the suburbs
- One-third live in urban areas
- 13% live in rural areas.
Bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population, which is 74% white. Of bloggers:
- 60% are white
- 19% are Hispanic
- 11% are African-American
- 10% identified themselves as members of some other race.
52% of bloggers said that they are blogging for themselves.
52% of bloggers said that their major reason for blogging was to express themselves creatively.
50% of bloggers said that their major reason for blogging was to document and share personal experiences.

If you'd like to read the report itself, you can download both the report and the questionnaire used to make the report from this page.

If you'd like to read some of the reportage on the report, check out these links:

Blogging Like it's 1799

Joey deVilla — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 11:32:39 -0400

Tedra Osell, a professor of English Literature at the University of Guelph, says that blogging began back in the 1700s, when people published their own writing and circulated them around the coffee houses and homes of England. In a Montreal Gazette article titled Blogs a hit in the cafes of the 1700s, she says that these self-published works, "often just a single sheet, brought about social change by highlighting debates over politics, women's roles, fashions and behaviour".

The phenomenon was not limited to one side of the Atlantic. In the colonial U.S., the Pamphleteers did the same as the self-publishers in England. The most famous of them, Thomas Paine, wrote what were essentially blog entries on why the colonies should seek independence. According to the blog Eric's Grumbles before the Grave:

His pamphlet was printed enough times that virtually every adult man and woman in the Colonies potentially owned a copy, and very likely 80% of them did. He laid the case so well that, by the time the Continental Congress met in June to take up the case of What To Do™, popular support had shifted from reconciliation to independence. He did all this without being a major publisher, having the support of a major newspaper, being backed by any government or other organization or even being particularly wealthy. Indeed, he did such a good job that John Adams is known to have said, after the Declaration of Independence, "History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine."

The idea of bloggers-as-pamphleteers isn't a new one. Here are some other articles that put forth this idea:

Bloggers: The Pamphleteers of Today
Attack of the Printing Press! A good comeback to Daniel Lyons' poorly-reasoned Forbes attack piece on blogs in which the blogging/pamphleteer parallel is used well.
400 years of Blogging

Sex, Drugs and Finance at Blogs Lampooning Wall Street

Joey deVilla — Mon, 29 May 2006 11:54:06 -0400

You've probably heard of celebrity blogs -- Defamer is a prime example -- which give you an inside look at the sordid details of the lives of your favourite stars. They're pretty old hat, though; gossip writing and tabloids go back well before the age of blogging.

What aren't as common are blogs that purport to tell all about the details of the lives of those in high finance. They too lead "rock and roll lifestyles" and according to this article in the International Herald Tribune, they're covered in blogs like Leveraged Sell-Out and Dealbreaker.

Blogs Changing Political Discourse

Joey deVilla — Fri, 26 May 2006 16:27:07 -0400

The Daily Advertiser, which is based in Lafayette, Louisiana, has an article on how blogs are changing political discourse:

Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration intern who launched the conservative RedState.com, was dumped in late March as a blogger at Washingtonpost.com after liberal rivals unearthed plagiarism in his work, triggering a flurry of Internet commentary, known as a "swarm."
Then late last month, the Los Angeles Times suspended columnist Michael Hiltzik's blog after a conservative critic exposed Hiltzik's practice of using pseudonyms to post provocative comments on other blogs.

It's probably a combination of these polticially-charged times coupled with blogs' ability to act as an amplifier for word-of-mouth, which was traditionally had the same limits as your ability to physically travel. Your blog speaks for you even when you're asleep, and thanks to the fact that search engines rank them highly (since search engines "feed" off links and blogs are an excellent source of them), it's considerably more "findable" than you are.

The article has a list of politcal and news events in which blogs have played an important role:

Recent episodes dramatize how swiftly and powerfully they may react, sometimes rivaling mainstream media in their ability to track events and connect the dots in real time, and influencing traditional news coverage. Consider:
Blogs applied the pressure that led to Trent Lott's 2002 resignation from the U.S. Senate after making what some construed as racist remarks.

It was a blogger dubbed "Buckhead" who in 2004 exposed forged documents used by CBS News and Dan Rather in stories about President Bush's National Guard service.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was unseated two years ago after conservative bloggers attacked him and forced the state's largest newspaper to modify its coverage of the race.

Blogs raised early questions about the Bush administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina crisis. A study by Loyola University Chicago sociologist Lauren Langman concludes that the blogs forced critical mainstream news coverage that weakened support for the president.

Last year's U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers was withdrawn after conservative blogs derided her qualifications. Bush took the unprecedented step of holding a conference call with the bloggers in an unsuccessful attempt to quell criticism.

Alive, Kicking and Undergoing a Little Renovation

Joey deVilla — Thu, 25 May 2006 15:54:20 -0400

As the entry (and the layout) of this blog will suggest, it's actually alive, kicking and undergoing a little renovation. Expect more stuff shortly.

Blogware Mechanic: Translating the Calendar Component

Joey deVilla — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:21:14 -0500

We're working hard on making Blogware available in a number of languages. In the meantime, for those of you who want the Calendar component to be in a language other than English, here's a quick fix that changes it language. So if the fifth month of 2005 displays on your blog like so:

...I'll show you how you can customize the component so it displays like this:

How to make your blog more usable...

Kim Phelan — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 12:33:57 -0500

Weblogs are different than webpages, we are all aware of that. But there are some basic usability improvements that can be made to blogs in order to make the visitor experience much more pleasant. Over at useit.com they have created a great article outlining some of the biggest issues with blogs today and what can be done to easily improve the usability of a blog. Please take a read!

Blogware Mechanic: Using an Image as the Title for Your Blog

Joey deVilla — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 15:07:24 -0500

Suppose you've got a blog with your standard text title, like the one below:

Now let's suppose that you've got an image file that you'd love to use in the place of your blog title, say this one:

...so that your blog looks like this:

This article will show you how.

Newest Age bracket to blog: Senior Citizens!

Kim Phelan — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:56:02 -0500

They say that you can learn many a thing at the foot of your grandparents. They have been through many an event, and had a lifetime of experiences. CNN would also agree. There is a new bracket of blogger out there: The Seniors.

They blog like the rest of us, about life, politics, religion, and interests. Proves again that blogging is for everyone, with every interest. Take a read!

Blogs and Business from E-marketer

Kim Phelan — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 11:47:29 -0500

E-marketer presents some good data related to why people blog, how often, and how they are viewed by their readers, take a look!

A key finding of the survey is that the blogger respondents are, to a large degree, seeking to position themselves as authorities in their field. That was the number one reason they gave for blogging.

You can read more about this article at; emarketer

(article will be available until December 4th)

Blog Couture

Joey deVilla — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:26:57 -0400

There's a guy who goes by the moniker of Manolo the Shoeblogger who comments on all sorts of fashion in various blogs:

If you're the type who wears jeans and t-shirts seven days a week, you might not enjoy Manolo's blogs. However, if you like to dress up every now and again (and especially if you dress up every day), you'll find it, as Manolo would put it, "the interesting and the entertaining".

Blogware Mechanic #4: Customizing the Look and Feel of Your Blog With CSS, Part One

Joey deVilla — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:00:39 -0400

Blogware comes with a number of built-in "themes" which define the font and color scheme of your blog. Some of them are quite nice. Others don't really appeal to me.

If you're a do-it-yourself type of person who also has a Blogware blog, you'll eventually want to create your own custom "look" for your blog. That's what the next few Blogware Mechanic articles will be about. By the end of this series, you should be quite comfortable with making changes to the look and feel of your blog by making changes to the style template.

Blogging in Katrina's Wake

Joey deVilla — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:05:19 -0400

Some more Katrina-related blogging stories:

Washington Post: Blogs Provide Storm Evacuees with Neighborhood-Specific News
eWeek: An article about Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett (whom we covered earlier): Former Green Beret Stays Online in Katrina's Wake
San Diego's North County Times: Web Sites Come of Age in Times of Trouble
Ernie the Attorney is the blog of a New Orleans-based lawyer. Ernie has evacuated to Houston, where he's been posting a number of Hurrican Katrina-related entries.

The Donald Trump Blog

Joey deVilla — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 21:07:52 -0400

He's been at it for a month, but just in case you hadn't heard, The Donald has his own blog, called -- as one might expect -- The Trump Blog. Its subtitle: "Ideas and opinions from Donald Trump and his circle of experts". As Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg says, this means that blogging is pretty mainstream now.

"Blogs Help Students Think For Themselves"

Joey deVilla — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:20:33 -0400

From an article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's site:

Blogging is helping students to think and write more critically, says an Australian researcher, and can help draw out people who would otherwise not engage in debate.

These are the preliminary findings of PhD research by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been using weblogs or blogs in her own teaching since 2001.

"[The students] are thinking more critically," she says. "They are learning to be responsible and they're communicating outside the boundaries of the classroom and the institution, and they like that."

The "Weather Nerd" and His Blog

Joey deVilla — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:21:22 -0400

Brendan Loy, a second-year law student at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in his blog, The Irish Trojan's Blog (which I linked to earlier) on August 26 at 1:57 p.m.:

At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans. Such a scenario is unlikely -- the conditions would have be just right (or rather, just wrong) -- but IMHO, it's not nearly unlikely enough to feel good about things. If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of dodge right now, just in case. Once the evacuation orders are issued, if it comes to that, it'll inevitably be an absolute madhouse, despite officials' best efforts. (More here.)

Later, at 11:22 p.m., he wrote:

"I'm not a meteorologist. I'm just an amateur weather enthusiast, a law-student blogger who happens to be a hurricane buff. But if I lived in New Orleans, I would definitely leave at this point. Tonight. Barring a major change in the forecast, I expect the evacuation orders to come tomorrow. That will produce massive traffic jams and general confusion. My advice? Beat the rush; get out now. For it is imperative to get out. Katrina probably won't destroy New Orleans -- but it could. So if anyone in New Orleans is reading this, I'd personally advise you to get the hell out of dodge."

Over the past few days, Loy's blog has been one of the best non-news-media sources of meteorological information on Hurricane Katrina. It's become one of the most popular blogs over the past week, having been linked to by blogosphere heavyweights like Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and Mickey "Kausfiles" Kaus. The past few days' entries on his blog are a fascinating transcript of Katrina's progress.

The New York Times has run a story on Loy and his blog: "Weather Nerd" in Indiana Warned New Orleans Mayor.

Don't Mess with the Interdictor!

Joey deVilla — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:30:24 -0400

The most fascinating blog to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is Michael "The Interdictor" Barnett's blog, in which he documents what's happening in New Orleans from the 10th floor of a downtown New Orleans building. Barnett is the "crisis manager" at the domain name registrar DirectNIC, which shares its space with its sister company, Zipa, and in a prior life, he was a soldier in the U.S. Army Special Forces seem to have served him well. He's been helping keep the company's servers up and running since the start of the storm last week and blogging about his experience. It's a fascinating read, and I suggest you read it from his first Katrina entry, which simply reads:

Hmm. This could actually be a nasty storm.

Wired has a short piece on Barnett.

How Journalists Use Blogs

Joey deVilla — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:58:13 -0400

MediaChannel.org points to an interview with Wall Street Journal tech reporter Nick Wingfield who talks about how journalists use blogs in their jobs. It boils down to these four points:

Journalists use blogs as tickler files when researching stories.
Journalists use blogs as sounding boards.
Journalists use blogs as digests of the day's news.
Journalists don't "flog the blog" - they see blogs as useful websites.

Digital Camera Giveaway Contest Almost Over!

Tanja — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:39:33 -0400

There is no better companion for your blog than a digital camera. Take your pictures then save, store and share them on your blog!

All you have to do is tell us a little bit about yourself. (There's only 7 questions - so it won't take long!)

Click here for the entry form.

The contest closes soon - so don't forget to enter!
Good luck!

More Free Icons for Your Blog!

Joey deVilla — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:56:13 -0500

Here's a series of icons that I call "Dread Pirate Roberts". You can use them in your blog for decoration, as permalink icons or as favicons. They're completely license- and royalty-free -- feel free to use 'em in your personal or commercial blogs!

(There are also some free icons in this article.)

Here's the Dread Pirate Roberts icon at 128 by 128 pixels. You might not want to use this as a permalink icon, but it would look pretty pirate-keen at the top of your blog pages.

If the 128 by 128 size is a bit much, you can try a slightly smaller Dread Pirate Roberts at 100 by 100 pixels.

The 72 by 72 pixel Dread Priate Roberts should take up one square inch on most people's screens.

The 48 by 48 Dread Pirate Roberts is a nice compromise betweel detail and screen real estate-efficiency.

The 36 by 36, 24 by 24, 18 by 18 versions of the icon make handy permalink icons. See Blogware Mechanic #1, Customizing Your Permalink Icons, to see how it's done.

And finally, we have the 16 by 16 icon. It's teensy, but perfect for use as a favicon, which I cover in Blogware Mechanic #2, Favicons and Filesystems.

ARTICLE: Ages of the Blog

Tanja — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:04:06 -0500

Published: March 24, 2005

A new poll conducted by CNN, USA Today and Gallup uncovers some surprising data about blog readership in the US.

Few US adults are aware of blogs — just 7% say they are "very familiar" with them, compared to 56% who say they are "not at all familiar." Similarly, few read blogs regularly. In all age groups, most people say they never read blogs, although readership is higher among younger people.

As the survey's authors point out, news consumption is usually higher among older people than among younger people, suggesting that older people might be a receptive blog audience. And indeed, when the numbers are broken down by Internet usage, a different picture emerges. Just 33% of those age 65 and over use the Net, but of that online population, 28% read blogs. That figure is more in line with younger groups. For example, 91% of adults 18 to 29 years-old use the Net, and of those, 44% read blogs.

A major force behind the expansion of blogging in the past few years has been politics, and many of the most popular blogs are political in nature. But a Gallup poll conducted in December 2004 found that few Americans get their daily dose of news from blogs. Rather, 51% reported getting their daily news updates from local TV news, 44% said they got it from local newspapers, and 39% got it from cable news stations. In fact, just 3% got news from blogs every day, less than radio talk shows and broadcast network news.

But there is one group that flocks to blogs for daily updates — bloggers. As reported in Blog Readers Say Blogging Is Big, most bloggers read multiple blogs every day. And about three-fourths of bloggers read blogs because they feel the sites expose them to news they can't find elsewhere, and provide them with a better perspective.

Of course, blogs are for more than news — they are used for keeping track of personal lives, businesses, goings-on in a city, and more. Blogging is still a relatively new phenomenon, and as familiarity with it expands, blogs may become more widely used.

To keep informed about trends in the blogosphere, stayed tuned to the eNews page for more articles, and take a look in our eStat Database for more data on this topic.

ARTICLE: A Motor City Marketing Lesson

Tanja — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:55:53 -0500

Last October, General Motors (GM) tiptoed into the blogosphere, quietly launching a blog to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its small-block V-8 engine -- the high-performance roar behind decades of Corvettes, Camaros, and other muscle cars. The company's virgin blog has attracted a small, happy group of gearheads who write lovingly about power-train codes, horsepower modifications, and other riveting under-the-hood topics. "It was a safe group for us," admits Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media.

Read more...

ARTICLE: Podcasting is music to the ears

Tanja — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:29:48 -0500

WebProNews.com

Podcasts are making audio blogging a reality for many bloggers. By starting a podcast version of a blog, the blogger is adding independent radio to their already existing personal publishing.

Read more...

ARTICLE: CNET's Guide to Blogging Misses the Mark

Tanja — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:06:33 -0500

CNET News has published a guide to blogging in the workplace in frequently-asked questions (FAQ) style.

Unfortunately, this is not one of CNET's better efforts to address a topical issue (see this guide to RSS for an example of a really good CNET guide).

You decide. Read more here.

ARTICLE: Blogging and how to keep your job

Tanja — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:04:14 -0500

CNET News.com
March 09, 2005, 14:30 GMT

After several recent high-profile incidents involving people being fired for the content of their blogs, we take a look at what you should and should not do when it comes to avoiding your employer's wrath.

Read more...