2009 August | Tribeswell

Well folks, it’s been a long (and I mean long!) wait, but I’ve just received confirmation that AT&T customers in the Bloomington, Indiana region are now blessed with the gift of 3G service.

This means that my iPhone will finally perform as it was intended to in my home city. Thank goodness.

AT&T, I thank you sincerely.

SproutBox Offers Entrepreneurs a New Form of Venture Capital (mashable.com)

Those who have been following my transition from my old blog (indyawesome.com), which is no longer active, to this new format, will know that it has really been a work in progress. One of the things I wanted to do is to not just copy all my old favorite plugins and settings from indyawesome to this new site.

I decided to add a few plugins recently that I think are really great additions to any site that strives to be socially functional. Plugins are a great way to set your site apart from others, but in the case of these two, I’m really following the lead of other bloggers that I respect (namely Kyle Lacy, Doug Karr, Kevin Hood, and Mashable to all of whom I throw mad props).

Intense Debate – Comments on steroids

I’ve been looking at this plugin for a while now. It basically adds some cool functionality to the comments area of each blog post. Its competitor, Disqus, is also cool (it’s what Mashable uses), but I chose Intense debate, because a lot of other local bloggers here in indiana are using it (Doug, Kyle, and Kevin all use it so it must be good).

TweetMeme Button

I’ve seen this plugin in action on Mashable and Kyle’s blog. It’s the button that allows you to easily retweet a blog post, and it also has a counter to tell people how popular the post has been already.

I know it’s not life changing, but it’s cool.

Does anyone have any other plugin recommendations?

Disqus V3 Launches: Publishers and Commenters Get Their Own Services (mashable.com)
You’ve Got Comments in My Search Results! (lijit.com)
Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System (techcrunch.com)
Does social media need to be personal? | Corporate blogging news digest (socialmediatoday.com)

It’s been a pretty fast-paced week in Tribeswell-land, and my blogging has suffered. This is only my second post for the week. I’m don’t stress about this, because my hope is that the people who really appreciate what I write will miss me (hopefully) and enjoy my posts even more.

This lack of production gets me thinking about the #1 question that my clients ask me about blogging…

How often should I blog?

The interesting thing about starting something new is that often you don’t know the right questions to ask. Better questions are, What should I blog about? Who will read it? How will I find new topics that are relevant to my audience?

So how often should you blog? It really all depends. If you are blogging so that you will win lots of Google searches, I would say that you absolutely cannot blog enough. I would get a minimum of 5 people in my organization blogging and I would have them post new material at least once daily.

Let’s say you’re blogging for your existing customers to give them relevant information that applies to their world. In this case (if you’re actually successful in getting them to buy into this), I would blog no more than once a week, especially if they’re getting alerts via email. As you can imagine, I don’t recommend this as a primary strategy for blogging. Often success by this metric is a by-product of another strategy.

My favorite approach is a combination of strategies. I try to get as many links out into the social web (twitter, facebook, etc) so that I can generate immediate traffic, as well as residual search traffic on these sites. Secondarily, I also get more juice from Google with each post I write. This involves blogging as close to daily as possible. Every other day is acceptable.

FriendFeed: Still Great At Social Search (philbaumann.com)
Some Thoughts on Blogging Etiquette (bloggingministry.com)
Managing the Online Reputation of Your Practice (casesblog.blogspot.com)

I was reading an interesting article today on Techcrunch which sounded the death of RSS.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

I still get at least half of my information from my RSS reader, although I definitely end up clicking on lots of articles from Twitter. Here’s my point though…

The fact that RSS is becoming less widespread means that your loyal RSS readers really want what you have. There might be fewer subscribers, but the value of each subscriber increases substantially.

The same is true of comments. Often I’ll tweet a link and get more comments on twitter than I do here on the site. I’ve noticed that there are fewer comments on lots of the blogs that I go to. Where you used to see 20-40 comments on a post, now you might only see 10.

It takes more effort to leave a thoughtful comment on a blog than it does to leave a 140 character Tweet. Comments are more scarce, and therefore more valuable.

Rest in Peace, RSS (Steve Gillmor/TechCrunchIT) (techmeme.com)
RSS Is Not Dead, It Has A Usability Problem (regulargeek.com)
Twitter and RSS – Peas in a Pod (saunderslog.com)
RSS, Human Filters And Real Time Streams (regulargeek.com)

I’ve been using Godday for all my domain management and most of my (and my clients) hosting needs. Often when I talk to other web professionals they bring up all kinds of other hosting solutions that they believe are supperior for one reason or another. Here are the main reasons why I really like using Godaddy.

Support – Whenever I’m approached by some boutique hosting comany, they always give out the benefit that they have great support. Here’s the thing, whenever I relent to using one of these services I end up NEEDING to call support to get everything going. With Godaddy, I can still get through to a customer service rep if there is a problem (usually in under 5 minutes), but the biggest benefit is that I rarely need to use their customer service line because things typically work the way they’re supposed to.
Price – Godaddy is cheap! Hosting for under 5 bucks a month. You can’t beat that.
My clients get their own account. I’m not in the hosting business. I give my clients control over their godaddy info.

Now this isn’t to say that everything with godaddy is all smiles and roses. Here are my top pet peaves about the service that I’ve chosen to live with, but I still complain about them from time to time.

I hate their website! Seriously, if anyone from Godaddy reads this PLEASE FIX YOUR SITE. It’s so hard to find anything that you don’t do regularly. I know I’m not alone on this one.
They’re so slow! Way does it take so long to set up new mySQL databases and new hosting accounts. Not cool. I’ve used cPanel systems that generate new databases instantly. What’s the deal?
I’m going to repeat #1. I must have wasted hours looking for random controls that I don’t use that often. It’s rediculous that I should have to call support for something that I should be able to figure out on my own just because their website is laid out poorly.