I'm Just Sharing

Is Social Bookmarking Still Worth It?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 6, 2011

Last week I received an email from Delicious announcing that they’d been bought out by the people who originally created YouTube and that things were going to be changing over within 30 days. If I wanted to keep my account and bookmarks I’d have to go in and change things on my own before that time, otherwise I was going to lose it all.

For me, that was pretty much the last straw, of sorts. I wasn’t angry by any of it; not even close. Instead, I was bored and tired because this seems to be a common occurrence lately. These social bookmarking sites change things around, don’t give much of an explanation of the changes, and we’re supposed to roll with it and be happy and on our way.

I was also irritated 18 months ago when Technorati made its drastic change and suddenly no one had any idea what the numbers meant. I think I’ve been back twice since I learned of it, and I had never used the site to bookmark any posts at all as far as I can remember.

I’m wondering if the heyday of bookmarking sites like these has passed or is about to go away in its present condition. I read where people have major gripes about sites like Digg and StumbleUpon all the time, and it seems to be more prevalent and easier to do to just retweet posts to Twitter, something we’ve talked about a lot here lately. Indeed, it’s even easier to click on the “like” button at the bottom of some posts and share in Facebook because you don’t have to go anywhere else to do it. And let’s face it, Facebook is much bigger than all these other sites at this time.

I had a brief conversation with someone on Twitter about sites like Amplify and FriendFeed as well. I asked why it’s not just as good to post a link to one’s own site directly everywhere instead of going through one of these other sites. His belief was that these sites were much larger and could help get the word out easier. My gripe was that one clicks on a link in Twitter thinking it’s taking you one place, instead it takes you to one of these sites, and then you have to click on another link to actually take you to the article you want to read. I can’t be the only one that thinks that’s irritating. If it’s a news aggregator you happen to be visiting, like Alltop, that’s one thing; but sending out links to another site instead of directly to your own content just seems silly.

But maybe I’m fighting the new way because I’m older; I can’t believe that but it’s possible. What thoughts do you have on this topic?

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Why Aren’t You Linking Your Posts To Your Blog?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 28, 2011

There’s something going on these days that I really don’t understand. I’ll be on Twitter and I’ll see someone linking to a post or an article that they want to share. Since I know them, I click on the link to see what I’m going to be reading. However, instead of taking me directly to the article, it takes me someplace else where I now have to click on the link to read the article.

Sharing Dogs by Richard Stine

I must be missing the point about blog directories or social sharing sites. Sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg or Amplify or Ping.FM or any of the others allow people to post links to them, kind of like Delicious. Then those sites help them build up readership or visits or traffic in some way, supposedly, because people are visiting those sites and reading one’s material through them.

Okay, I get that… kind of. I only use Delicious to post some of my articles, but I’ve never gone through a single article I’ve ever seen there. I have a Technorati account more for the tracking of blog performance than anything else, even though I’ve pretty much decided it’s a joke since their numbers don’t make any sense to me anymore. I’ve never known if I get any bounce through those sites or not. According to Google Analytics, almost nothing comes from those sites now, though I can’t say whether it’s always been the case.

However, what I don’t get is why someone would send a post to Twitter through those sites instead of just sending people to their blogs. Maybe for articles that they’ve posted that belong to someone else that aren’t on blogs it makes sense, but otherwise… someone will have to explain this one to me.

It works differently in a few other places. For instance, on both Facebook and LinkedIn you can post a link to your blog post but you’d be irritating everyone is you posted your entire post into either of those sites. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t want to do it anyway because suddenly you’d have duplicate content; that’s never good. Even so, what good would it do me to post a link to a blog post of mine on Facebook, then go to Twitter or wherever and post the link to my Facebook account so people can only see the headlines there and click on the post so they can come here?

Nope, I’m missing it; I don’t get it. And I know some of you are doing this. So, if you’re not afraid to “out” yourself, can you explain to me how this benefits you?

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Blog Abandonment Mini-Research

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 2, 2011

Something I’ve said to potentially new bloggers over and over is that if you don’t think you’ll be able to sustain a blog, don’t even start. Technorati estimates that only 5.5% of all blogs that have been created still have new content, that criteria being within 4 months of the current date for the last post. That’s a horrible statistic; then again, it is only an estimate, right?

Well, overall I’m not sure Technorati is the best arbiter of deciding what’s what; after all, their new algorithm makes absolutely no sense, and that thing about only counting the last 6 months of recommendations for them to rank you higher makes no sense either. I decided to do my own little survey, as I hadn’t had a research post in awhile.

Here’s what I did. I went through all the comments on this blog from 2008; yeah, I did that just for you. I eliminated people who I knew were still blogging because they still comment now. So, this little test only concerned those people I hadn’t heard from in a long time or whose names I didn’t recognize. If they had a blog or website I decided to take a look. The numbers might seem a bit low, but as I said, there were some people I eliminated, and of course I didn’t count anything I wrote. I counted any blog that hasn’t had a new post within a year as being dead. And there are some blogs that haven’t written a post in a long time, and I capture those as well. Here’s what I came up with:

So, if I look at only the working and current, that comes to an abandonment rate of 60%. That’s obviously a much different figure than what Technorati gives, but it’s still a terrible number. Based on my figure and the estimated number of blogs coming in around 133 million (that’s the last figure I’ve seen) that’s almost 80 million blogs that have been abandoned; ugh!

Well, there’s nothing we can do about it except lament the fact and move on. I wonder how many of you are thinking about bailing out on your blog some time in the near future. I’m sticking around; yup, you’re stuck with me for awhile longer.

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Blog Ranking Systems; Do They Mean Anything?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 5, 2010

Suffice it to say, I’ve been writing a lot lately about influence, especially influence online. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that there are ways of tracking how one’s blog is working online. Now that I think about it, I’m not so sure that most of these are all that effective.

I’m not sure if y’all remember my post talking about Technorati’s new ranking system some time ago. Before they made the change, you knew that if you could get your blog into the top 100,000 that you were doing pretty well. Then they changed it and, at least for me, it became impossible to know what was good. However, at the time they made the change, this blog was ranked at 491, and since the high was 993, I figured I was at least in the top half. It’s been awhile since I took a look at Technorati, and where am I now? I’m at 128; what the hey?

I don’t know how Technorati works, but I can’t believe this blog has fallen in influence that far. A look at my Analytics stats says my traffic has drastically increased over the last six months, and my ranking fell? My Alexa rank has improved and my ranking fell? Now, comments have stayed the same, but do comments actually drive Technorati that much?

It’s reminded me of other blog ranking systems that at one time or another I’ve belonged to, including Sire’s Cool Blog Links, where out of not so many sites I’m ranked down in 6th place. What’s even weirder is that his blog is ranked 10th on that site, and his Alexa ranking is 30,000 points better than mine. Strange, right?

There have been other blog ranking sites that I’ve joined and unjoined over the years, mainly because the rankings seemed, well, arbitrary. On one I was in the top 50 out of 250 while in another I was sitting around 315 out of 400, and one other I was around 275 out of 500. What did any of them mean? I didn’t have a clue.

There’s also always the question as to whether the measure of a blog is the amount of comments it gets. I even debated another blogger through my blog when he stated he believed that people’s content stank if they weren’t getting a lot of comments. I love comments, as I feel it means I’ve connected with someone on a particular post, but Seth Godin gets people quoting him all the time and he doesn’t even allow comments; I’m thinking that’s proof that comments aren’t a measure of influence at all.

I believe blog ranking systems are fairly arbitrary in what they mean to bloggers in general. If there was one standard that all the systems agreed with, then it might mean something. I get locked into Alexa because it’s not a blog ranking, but a website ranking, and at least it gives you a real tool of comparison to use. Don’t get caught up in blog ranking systems as a true measure; use them for entertainment purposes only, and you won’t get caught up trying to rank for things you can’t control.

Iron Man 2 (Blu-ray+DVD+Digital Copy)

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Technorati’s New Ranking System – How Do You Fare?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 28, 2009

Maybe not everyone knows this yet, but Technorati changed how they do their rankings. And the way they’ve gone, I’m not sure whether it’s better or not overall, but it’s certainly drastically different from what it used to be. And it’s a way to track our blogging proficiency, even if we don’t understand it.

Back at the end of December, I posted that I was hoping my Technorati rating would move up into the top 60,000. At that time I was sitting at 88,000 or so, which was great, and I actually knew that that number meant. Now my number is 491, and initially it meant nothing to me. Even now, I’m not totally sure what it means to me. With the original number, I knew that my blog was in the top 90,000 blogs in the world, which wasn’t bad. Now… 491?

Still, it’s a number to use for comparison, if nothing else. Here are 18 numbers for you. The first set of numbers are the numbers for my other blogs, some of the people who post comments here (check out their blogs), and a couple most of us know pretty well. The second set are some of the top ranked blogs on Technorati that you may have heard of, and I’ll give you their ratings also.

Top Finance Blog – 120

Mitch’s Blog – 415

Wassup Blog – 482

Kikolani.com – 453

HSH Associates – 134

Ramana’s Musings – 125

John Chow – 429

Problogger – 657

Huffington Post – 963, #1

Tech Crunch – 888, #3

Mashable – 883, #4

Gawker – 883, #12

Lifehacker – 817, #19

Official Google Blog – 806, #25

White House Blog – 792, #36

Perez Hilton – 771, #74

Freakonomics – 763, #85

NME News – 754, #99

Actually, that last one I’ve never heard of, but it’s last on the list of the top 100, and it’s tied with another one, but it’s last on the list and I wanted to show the number that, if we’re looking to be big time, we want to aim for.

As for how Technorati works? I have absolutely no idea. One thing they’ve supposedly changed is that they don’t only go off the 6 month rule anymore, which is something that irked a heck of a lot of people. Instead, it’s supposed to be a combination of both current activity and its historical strength. I figure that’s the only way that my blog Mitch’s Blog is so close to this blog in rank, since I have more than 65% more readers for this one than the other one. Oh yeah, it also seems that Technorati, when looking through the estimated 112 million blogs (ouch), also now ranks them in categories based on the tags we put on our blogs. I just started using tags without realizing this; talk about timing.

So, we take it for what it’s worth, another measuring tool of some fashion, and we aim for higher ground. Hey, at least we have numbers, right?

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