ProBlogger has just launched a new Job Board (congrats Darren, it looks great!) and as part of that, I have listed some jobs in b5 that I’m hiring for.

• Performance Arts Blogger (www.fameorfamine.com)
• Medium Blogger (www.mediumdreams.com)
• The 4400 Co-blogger (TBD)

Check out the job board, check out my listings, and shoot me an email if interested.

To curtail the question before it gets asked - Does this mean b5 is hiring? Yes, sort of. You can tell I’m looking for a blogger for a new blog (to write with me, actually, on The 4400) and we will be looking for bloggers across other channels too. Not right now specifically - and, when we are, it will be with a fair amount more structure to how we go about it. When the time is right, b5′ll announce it on the blog.

If you have ideas you are just bursting to tell me about for my channels only, you can leave me a comment or drop me a line.

Tags: problogger, job board, blogging, blog, blogger, b5

After the whole YouTube fiasco we have now switched to blip.tv for our own personal videos.

We’ve been using blip for our last couple of videos. I find the service fairly easy to use. In comparison, the files seem to load as fast as with YouTube and the quality of the compression seems a fair bit higher. However, the conversion into flash is slower and the ease of embedding is not as user friendly - I love that on YouTube the embed code is right there. With blip, you have to click a couple of times to get there.

As far as the embed video player is concerned, they seem equally good. The YouTube one "feels" more web 2.0 - it’s all curvy and whatnot. But the blip one is much more seamless and unobtrusive. Just a preference choice there.

I will continue to use YouTube from a consumer perspective - I search and embed them all the time. But from a copyright perspective, we are moving our own personal content to an area that allows us to assign the license per video. I am sure there will be many more video services to come, but I am pleased so far with blip.

What other video services have you used?

Tags: youtube, blip, blip.tv, video

As bloggers, we do tend to live in a bubble. We assume that since we blog, we are the only ones who do ‘blog-related’ things as well. But the truth is that the tools we love help non-bloggers too.

For example, ego feeds. Most of us have them. Follow our name, our blog URL, etc. We want to know what other people think of us or our writings.

But ‘other people’ have egos too. Example, one of my b5 bloggers, Nikki, got an interview with an actor on Prison Break after he left a comment on her blog. And I have interviewed an actor for Bones, who openly admits to reading all show forums and blogs. So, actors are out there watching and listening to what’s being said about them. And RSS makes it so easy for them to do that.

Do you have an ego feed?

And if you are someone out there lurking and listening, the next step is interactivity. Leave a comment some time ;)

Tags: ego, ego feed, actors

Contests and polls are great ways to add that crucial "stickiness" to your blog - to get your readers to return, stay, and interact.

Polls are simple. Find a creative or controversial question, with good answers, and put it up. Democracy is a good Wordpress plugin for that, with the downside that it is not ‘within’ posts, only on the sidebar.

Contests can be tricky. Too complicated and people will defer to being lazy. I have found that the prize is only part of the factor in the success of contests. The entry has to be easy, requiring something interesting of the user, or somthing simple such as sending in an email address. You need to be aware of your target: age, time constraints, knowledge, resources.

I think audience is a larger factor in the number of entries than the prize itself. For example:

When I worked in advertising, we ran a campaign for retailers to win large screen televisions. But to enter they had to encourage their customers to enter with their specific code (predefined by tickets given) and thus needed to put up the sales materials. Too much work. There were entries, but fewer than we’d like. I’ve seen a similar result in the blogosphere.

I recently ran a contest on my Hilary Duff blog. The prize was intangible: ‘fan of the month’, but the entry was appropriate to the audience. They had to dress up a doll using a special website - very little skill required for the younger audience, but also fun. It had a very large number of entries.

So I have found that the match between contest and audience is absolutely crucial. If your contest is fun and easy, you should have a good time.

Combining polls with contests: If you can combine polling with contests, you have a bonus. I decided to take the best entries on my Hilary contest and post them to be ‘voted on’ using a poll - each entry was anonymous and Democracy prevents voting more than once per IP. In under a week, I had a couple of hundred votes. Overall, it was really fun for me and for my readers. They were very excited by it, and for me it created a new way to interact with them: announcing the contest, announcing the voting, announcing the winner, placing the winner as fan of the month. Lots of content.

If you have an audience that is very sticky on your blog already, they will take to the above approach. I think the more your audience enjoys being on your blog, the more they will enjoy contests. Start with lots of polls to gain the stickiness, then increase over time.

Tags: contests, polling, blogging, blogs, stickiness

Just a quick ‘how to’ for subscribing to YouTube video tag feeds.

1. Choose a tag to subscribe to, e.g. "Gilmore Girls"
2. Use this format to create your custom tag feed: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/your+tag.rss
   • use a + to combine words into a tag phrase
3. Add the feed (http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/gilmore+girls.rss) to your RSS reader

*Note that YouTube tags seem to also encapsulate user profile names, so you could end up getting lots of irrelevant material, especially if it’s a single word not a phrase

e.g. I cannot subscribe to the word "Bones" for a blog I cover because there is a user with "bones" in his/her profile name and they post a lot of videos cluttering up the tag feed.

Tags: youtube, subscribe, feed, tag, tags, tagging, rss