Jamdo Marketing Blog

I have been thinking a little about the Google Page Rank phenomenon this week and how it affects blogging.

Many people say that they ignore PR and that it is worthless (oddly enough this seems to be limited to people who already have good PR for their sites).

Others take it as an indicator of a blog’s popularity or prestige and some even base business models on selling links from high PR sites.

While PR certainly shouldn’t be the endgoal for a site or blog (unless your only monetization strategy is to sell links from your site), it is still something to keep an eye on - to a point.

Now, let me say that you do not need a high PR site to rank well for certain keywords. I have very low PR sites that rank at the top of the search engines for the terms for which I optimised them. On the other had, having high PR doesn’t hurt either and will certainly be necessary for the more competitive keywords.

But what about what other people think? I know when I come accross a site or blog that I haven’t seen before, I will generally steal a glance at my Google Toolbar to see what page rank they have. I suspect a lot of other webmasters are the same. And yes, it does have *some* effect on my decision to return to that blog, albeit a small effect.

But that’s just it. We are webmasters.

Most internet surfers are not webmasters and many can’t even tell when they are on a blog so are unlikely to even know what PR is! That should say something to you!

Now, if you are optimising you pages for visitors, then PR really shouldn’t really be a driving concern.

In the long run, it will obviously benefit you to have a higher PR, but you should be actively engaged in improving your site primarily for human visitors, rather than aiming at PR specifically. Create a lot of link bait with good content and PR will follow naturally anyway.

You can still adhere to the general rules of good SEO - it would be foolish not to, but in the scheme of promoting a site, attaining a good PR should be down the list, well behind developing good content and other human visitor focussed tasks.

Don’t ignore PR, but don’t let it dominate your efforts eaither.

Technorati Tags: Google, Page Rank, PR

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The latest in Web 2.0 is Publi.sh

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the latest - I just found it on a thread at SitePoint, but it’s cool nonetheless.

It’s a service that allows you to create your very own XML feed.

Usually a feed is attached to a site, but Publi.sh just lets you create one independently by posting the content.

There are a lot of different potential uses for this.

You could use and promote it as an alternative feed for your site or blog in which you include links to your own site. That way people could aggregate you feed on their own sites, without you having to worry about people using your site feed to take your site’s original content.

You could use it to update several different sites all aggregating combinations of several different Publi.sh feeds.

If you run a site that doesn’t have a feed, then this is an easy way to get one.

There are many uses that are limited only by your imagination.

Check it out!

Technorati Tags: publi.sh, xml, rss, feed

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Ok, so design isn’t really my strong point.

I can mess around with style sheets and colours and design basic little graphics, but I am not going to be winning any awards soon.

But for those of you who enjoy design, I just came accross a funky little colour wheel thingy that you might find useful.

These kind of tools are good if you are trying to figure out which colours look ok together on the web and what their codes are so you can mess with web pages.

It’s also good to find which colours are “web safe” and “web unsafe” so people can actually see what you have written on your screen without puking all over their keyboard (Hint - green writing on a black background is not cool).

Anyway, check it out at the 4096 Color Wheel.

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Web 2.0 has been a great thing for the internet.

In fact a lot of people have hailed it is the “democratisation of information” in the way that community oriented sites have allowed people to promote information based on popularity rather than any corporate or media agenda.

That’s great but the cracks have started to appear. Some of you have surely been following the latest Digg episode that has sparked a slight furore on the internet. It turned out that Digg was manually altering the results in response to somebody spamming their front page.

Then of course, there was the Tammy NYP saga over at Technorati - basically where a sex tape was dominating their search results to such an extent that they were forced to remove all references to it from their front page.

We also shouldn’t forget the problems that Wikipedia had with people altering other’s biographies.

I guess then we can stop referring to these sites as the “democratisation of information” in favour of something like the “benevolent dictatorisation of information” (something tells me the boys in marketing aren’t gonna go with that one).

These recent problems of course, begin to show us the weaknesses of the basic concepts behind Web 2.0. It will also show us where the next evolution has to come from.

Some of you might remember by article a while back on Web 3.0 and how I thought it would be driven by similar technology than Web 2.0, but with a vetted voting audience that was actually qualified to vote on certain topics. For example, scientists voting on scientific information etc.

To be honest, the latest problems with Digg and Technorati have simply cemented my opinion on that one.

The trick will then be to stop the “qualified” users from promoting themselves and the corporations they work for in the same way that the corporate media panders to their own sponsors. Ironically, that is why Web 2.0 basically became so popular in the first place.

Such a vicious circle.

Technorati Tags: technorati, digg, wikipedia, web 2.0

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I am an internet addict. It’s just the way I am. I would plug my head straight into broadband if the technology was available! I make my living on the internet and a lot of my leisure time goes there too.

And that is where my problem starts.

It is really very easy for me to get caught up doing fun stuff when I should be doing income generating stuff (which is also fun, but has an obvious serious element to it). In fact I use Firefox and usually have at least 10 tabs open at any one time. At least 5 of them will be sports, forums or games - ie. nothing that is immediately productive in a professional sense. Sometimes I’ll also throw in a computer game or two just for fun (at the moment I am becoming re-addicted to Sid Meier’s Colonization - an oldie but a goodie!).

This can obviously have a pretty bad impact on my productivity.

There are a few tools I use to try to keep the things I do on my computer reasonably focussed on work.

In fact there are a couple of options of organising yourself online - something I have started to do to fight my complete laziness.

For starters, I like MyYahoo! The diary tool is fantastic for planning things that you want to get done by certain times and dates. It has the capacity for you to input plans up to the quarter hour. That of course, is handy for obvious reasons, but I have been using pretty heavily to plan for a new blog I am going to be launching in the next couple of weeks.

MyYahoo! also has a “Notes” module which I use as a “to do” list. I just put one task per line and delete them as I get them done. This is a very handy thing to do at the beginning of the day. That way I don’t let myself do any fun stuff until my notes section has been cleared. There is also a “Briefcase” module that you can use to upload files - that is especially handy if you are going to be working from more than one computer (another trick is just to email the files to yourself, but hey!).

Of course, Yahoo! also has the email thing and as far as web based email goes, it’s pretty good.

The way I organise myself for projects that I am doing with other people is to use BaseCamp online project management software. That way we can all log in and get the “to do” list completed or assign tasks to certain people. It is very handy for this type of thing. Once again, I simply make sure I have completed all of the tasks that I have before I allow myself to open up the sports pages or start a computer game.

Of course, these little tips require a little bit of self discipline (which I sometimes lack) but in general they work for me. The beauty of the internet is that there are a lot of clever people on it creating tools that are very useful.

That is just one way I utilise a couple of them.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, bescamphq

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As I am sure you have noticed, Jamdo runs a little graphic in the left column from Blog Topsites.

They are a website that measures the popularity of various blogs to carry their little graphic and it has usually been a nice little tool to glance at if I am too lazy to check my stats.

But for the last 3 or 4 days Jamdo has been stuck at a rank of 31. Usually the ranking goes up and down like a yoyo from hour to hour so this must be some type of error on their end. Curious.

Now, usually I would advise against having little things like that on your site, if your site’s purpose is to make a little income. They are just one more way your visitors can leave your site without going through a potentially paying link. But, as Jamdo was never really set up to make money, I have left it there.

But then again, if I am going to put little ego buttons on my site, it would be nice if they worked (or at least got fixed promptly)

I hope they fix it soon, or I guess I’ll have to remove it. No use having tools that don’t work!

Technorati Tags: blogging, Blog Topsites, Topsites

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