So, I decided to sort of conform to the new RSS button - the new "icon standard" for representing RSS.

I actually really agree with the shape and use of the icon. I think visually it captures far more than text and its size is far more appropriate. I was never a big fan of buttons that said "RSS" since it is a passing term and visually not so attractive or easy to use.

Well, like I said, I only sort of conform to the standard now. I have the button on Blogaholics, but I’m not so fond of the Orange on my particular design. I prefer blue, so blue it is.

What do you think? Blue is just so much less geeky. Feel free to use it if you want.

I will put it up on Blogging Help soon. Sometimes editing this blog annoys me because I SO want to change the design. Even pretty much know what I want it to look like. But, with many jobs on the go, a wedding and Ianiv working insane hours, we just don’t have the time to do it ourselves. I’m tempted to hire out for it, but it seems like such a waste. Anyway, little side rant ;)

Tags: rss, rss button, rss standard, orange, blue, chicklet, icon

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Here’s a funny story about how we took a piece of garbage and made something nice, and profitable, from it.

1. We took a used lightbulb, and I made it into a Christmas ornament.
2. I decided to share it on Blogaholics
3. On a whim, I submitted it to Make since they were doing some Christmas stuff
4. I got a link back from Make, Lifehacker and Treehugger - including all the accompanying traffic

That’s one easy way to turn trash into something profitable!

Christmas time is very enjoyable for me. I love my crafts, and wanted to share that. And, people were generous in return.

Tags: christmas, ornaments, linking, make, diy, links, blogging

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As I previously posted, Google has started a referral program for AdSense and Firefox. Chitika also has a referral program with pretty much the exact same banner format.

Well, I decided to try it out on Blogaholics. First, low on the sidebar, then higher up.

My results after a couple of weeks… nothing. Absolutely nothing. About 2 clicks total. But, since you make money only when someone signs up and/or uses the product, clicks are worth nothing.

Here’s the problem as I see it:

1) relevancy - they were fairly relevant on Blogaholics, but would be perhaps more on Blogging Help. Would that mean more clicks? Maybe a couple more, but I don’t expect them because….

2) format - they are not "text ads" - they are banners. Graphical banners. And, as well all know, people tune out graphic banners. Hence why AdSense does so well with text ads over image ones. Surprise surprise.

I think after one more week I’ll dump all referrals. I’ll leave up Firefox, since I love Firefox, but that’ll be it.

How have your experiences been with the referral program?

Tags: google, google referral, referral program, google adsense, adsense, firefox, chitika, banner ads, ad formats, making money with blogs

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Technorati knows who I am, and this is my new tag cloud:

Scary. That’s really what I blog about? Well, it is fairly accurate in a scary sort of way.

Great service, and may introduce me to some more feed choices. Will have to dig around. It also shows me where I am perhaps tagging too much - or too little - and how I should change my keyword choices for things like AdGenta.

I’ve just taken the time to add more info to my profile - my bio and my pic - go to my profile to check it out. Also check out Ianiv’s profile.

All new to Technorati:

- charts

- better extracts

- related tag suggestions to narrow via tabs

- profile goodies (as above)

- new widgets

What I want from Technorati

Ok now Technorati - you know who I am and what I write about. Now, how are you going to flip that back around to me in more customized services - such as this one?

Via Niall

Tags: Technorati, tags, tag+cloud

When it comes to blogs like this one, the cartoon is completely accurate. For the rest of my blogging life, I feel truly lucky to share and learn each day as a part of the blogosphere. But, I do know too much about things I’m not interested in. ;)

From gapingvoid

I have a challenge. It’s directed primarily to Technorati, but it’s an open challenge. I want a personalized Watch List - personalized feeds that filter out information I don’t want.

I write on 16 blogs, but subscribe to simply dozens of things to get my news and my tracking information. Most of my tracking has its home with Technorati, although I back that up with other feeds. Now, here’s the thing. It’s simply getting overwhelming to read my tracking information - to scan for phrases to gather news or watch for mentions of my name. More blogs equals more feeds. I write around 40 things a day, and tag most of them, so you see the problem.

So, here’s what I want…

I want Technorati to build my Watch List information with an option to parse out those items that I have tagged, or that are written by me. They have all that information. The blogs are in my account - they know who I am and what I write for.

If I could really be demanding here, I would have advanced filtering options such as an ability to block sites or domains from entering my feed, like blocking “livejournal” for my celebrity blogs, so I don’t get all the obsessive teen chit chat.

The resulting feed would be clear of anything I’ve written. If they can build me this feed, I would never get things with “author” arieanna or from blogs in My Account. I would only get the information I want.

Make sense? Technorati - possible?

Tags: technorati

Hacking Google - getting your ad out there for free. Possible? Chris Anderson believes so, and he’s done it.

But I chose a bunch of very obscure terms to advertise against. And my ad sucks (see above) and nobody ever clicks on it. The result is that I get hundreds (sometimes thousands) of impressions a day for free. Every now and then Google notices that my ad isn’t performing, so I have to raise the price I’ll pay for each click (I’m now at $0.40). But since I get no clicks it doesn’t matter.

I have to admit to a slight rush of pride that I’ve managed to outsmart Google in some tiny way and get free impressions. Granted, the value of those impressions is at most a couple bucks a day. And because my ad, as mentioned, sucks, the actual benefit to me is probably close to zero. Furthermore, if anyone were to actually click on the ads, I’d quickly lose whatever gains I’ve made (if you do happen to see my ad out in the wild, please don’t click on it). But still! I’ve hacked Google! Woot!

Ok, so you get “impressions” on your ad. Probably some awareness building. But your ad is so bad that nobody really cares to click on it. So Google let’s you keep “trying”, and you keep getting free advertising. Bid price makes no difference, since you’re not paying for it anyway. Interesting. Good one Chris.

Yesterday Feedburner came out with FeedFlare. And, you bet I wanted to jump all over that. Such a great idea for building more interactivity into your posts.

FeedFlare is initially launching today with seven simple options, including:

* most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us

* tag this item at del.icio.us

* Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post

* Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickr photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.

* number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by Wordpress)

* email this item

* email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or repurposed on a site).

Plus, the API for FeedFlare will soon be open, meaning many more things will soon be possible such as integrated tags and more. It’s very exciting news.

Well, I immediately activated in on Blogaholics. Then walked away. Not too long later I was alerted that it was not reading right everywhere.

Here’s the deal: we use Atom for our feeds and there is a slight difference to the feed with FeedFlare on than with it off. Now, both are valid ways to display the XML information, but one way, the way used when FeedFlare is on, does not get displayed properly in all readers or search engines. It’s technical, and I’m not a technical person, but that’s the best I can explain it.

Yes, even over at Alexa, where you’d think it would be ok. So, I am torn. To use it means gaining interactivity, but potentially losing search traffic or more, depending on where else it may not be supported yet.

So, for right now it’s off again until I can make up my mind on this matter. Which do you think is more important? Supporting current traffic or potential new traffic?

Thanks to Tris, I know that an interview I took part in some time ago is now published. The interview centered around blogging, of course, but was in particular angled towards high school students and job options.

Obviously I think there is room for pro bloggers as a career. It’s kinda what I do for a living. But, more than that, I think there is ample opportunity for high school students now and in the future to use blogging to leverage career options. Imagine making blogging your part time job, instead of working in fast food? Which one, do you think, would help you in future writing-based careers? Which one teaches writing, research, and communication skills? Now, I’m all for fast food careers - I worked at McDonald’s when I was a teen - but blogging would have been far more useful to me when I hit University!

Here is the start of the article:

If you’re something of a cyber-junkie, you’ve discovered blogging. Maybe you’ve even given it a shot yourself — after all, anyone can do it. But did it occur to you that a few bloggers earn healthy incomes from their online journals?

Blogging is big. “It’s growing by leaps and bounds,” says Paul Chaney. Chaney is president of an Internet marketing and business blog consulting agency based in Tupelo, Mississippi.

“Many companies are asking existing employees to set up their own blog and use it as vehicle to talk about the company. Microsoft, for example, has over 1,800 employee bloggers, though none of those are paid to blog,” says Chaney.

Great news for hobby bloggers. But if you’re going to make a career out of blogging, you’ve got to earn money — enough to live on — doing it. There are a few ways to do this.

Read on for more of the interviews of myself, Tris and others…

In what I assume would be a push to Christmas, Google announces Themed Ad Units

So, I investigated, and here is the description page:

What are themed ad units?

As part of our ongoing effort to provide ad designs that will improve results for both advertisers and publishers, we now offer themed ad units - ad units that display themed colors and graphics during holidays and special events. You can view examples of themed ad units by visiting our Ad Formats page.

Whenever themed ad units are available, we’ll display them only to users in the appropriate locations, as determined by user IP address. For example, Fourth of July-themed ads would be visible only to users located in the U.S., while users throughout the world might see ads with a New Year’s Eve theme.

You can enable or disable themed ad units by following these steps:

1. Log in to your account at www.google.com/adsense.

2. Go to the My Account tab.

3. On the Account Settings page, scroll down to the ‘Ad Type Preferences’ section and click ‘Edit.’

4. Depending on your preference, check or uncheck the box next to ‘Enable themed ad units when available.’

5. Click ‘Save changes.’ Your selection will apply to all your AdSense ad units.

Well, when I took a look at ad formats available, this is what I saw. No Christmas theme? I am not really going to enable them, since it might drop my CTR at this time when it’s going up for the holiday, so I won’t know for sure. My question: is there a Christmas theme?

Out of curiosity, I decided to implement FeedBlitz onto a few of my blogs.

FeedBlitz is a service provided by FeedBurner. Basically, it gives you a way to gather email subscribers to your feed. You just enter your info and out pops some code you dump into your sidebar, or wherever. It comes with a field, and a button to subscribe. Easy, hey?

Well, my first impression was that it was easy. Next it was that it was maybe not clear. Too easily confused with the search box? No data to support that, but it’s a thought.

Now, after about a week, my overall impression is kinda weak. Why? Because I’m picking up subscribers from spam. I don’t know if it’s the bots, or people using fake emails, but I am getting a lot of trash. And there is no easy way to drop them except to do it manually. No “spam” filter to drop invalid emails automatically.

Plus, since it’s not “inside” the FeedBurner management, I have to go to another site, which does not remember my login, to manage the email feed.

So, we’ll see. I want to leave it and see where it goes. In concept, it would allow me to tap readers who don’t necessarily read many blogs or have an RSS reader. It’s a very advantageous thing to have. But I do think it needs improvement.

Paul Kedrosky put out a survey to address domain ownership. The results were interesting, although quite expected.

Out of 110 respondents, 80% own at least one domain name. The data is, of course, skewed towards techies and business savvy individuals, so we’d expect this market to be domain owners. We just like to have them.

Of course, there are many reasons to own your own domain. To have your own brand. Your own control. To establish a continued web presence. To resell later. Sometimes buying up misspells of their own URL even.

One thing I would like to see from the survey, as it relates to blogging, is whether or not businesses formed a “site” and a “blog” on the same, or different, URLs. From my experience working with businesses, and in talking about blogs, this is a common thread. When it comes to a blog, the debate arises about whether it should be a new domain or the same as /blog or blog.site.com… how does it affect branding? SEO? Customer attraction & retention? Confusion?

So, I’d personally be more interested in this data - in how blogs fit into the ownership of domains and the choices made in where a blog should go. Input?

I decided today to start testing the Google AdSense Referral program. What got me was that not only can you refer people to AdSense, but now you can refer people to Firefox. Since I’m a big Firefox user, this was enough of a push for me to start testing.

The message on my landing page, that Firefox referrals are now live internationally, definitely worked. Cause here I am.

So, it’s really easy to set up and get going. Under the “Referrals” tab, simply select either AdSense or Firefox to promote. Then, choose which size and message you want. It will produce some code you can then stick on your site.

Until I redo BloggingHelp, I’m just starting with Blogaholics. I might make a whole new section for it, like ‘Blogging Tips’ or something, but for now it’s at the bottom of a column. Not the best place, but a day or two will tell me if it’s worth shifting around.

About the Referral Program:

Referrals offer you a new revenue opportunity while increasing your users’ awareness of useful products and services. Adding a referral button to your website enables you to generate additional earnings by directing users to download or sign up for products such as AdSense.

Your earnings for referrals will vary depending on the product you’re referring.

When a user you’ve referred to AdSense first earns US $100, we’ll credit your AdSense account with US $100. When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to $1 in your account, depending on the user’s location.