Blog Hopping.
InternetOsphere February 24th, 2008
As you know, I started my blog on blogger.com and then moved it over to a Wordpress system. When I was blogging on Blogger I sometimes used to click on their top toolbar to jump to a random blog to find something interesting to read. Through this method I never really found anything interesting enough to add to my RSS aggregator (at that time Bloglines, now Google Reader). In fact, I found many splogs that wasted my time.
I ended up mostly reading blogs that I fell into via Google’s Blogsearch or via comments to my blog. The novelty of facebook led to a decline in the quantity of posts to my blog for some time. However, as the facebook help page (shown above) says, I am a Blogger…
Through facebook, I found a university friend of mine and discovered his blog. Through his blog I found EntreCard. Through EntreCard I have found a repository of quality, well-maintained blogs.
EntreCard’s website has more information for you if you’re interested. You should be interested in EntreCard if you’re a blogger who is on the lookout for other interesting blogs to read and you want to increase your blog’s exposure to others that are also looking for interesting blogs to read. It’s really that simple.
Most people using the EntreCard system use it to try to increase visitors to their blog in order to expose their in-blog advertisements to a larger audience. This is definitely a legitimate use of EntreCard but has been the source of debate about its effectiveness for monetization.
I see EntreCard as the most effective blogging social network system out there right now. Thanks for the recommentation Rudy!
With all of the blogs that I was now subscribed to, keeping track of conversational threads in posts’ comments started becoming problematic for me. If the blog had no option to email me future comments related to the post, I would have to subscribe to the comment feed of the blog. All of this required a few steps that ended up being time consuming. Maintaining these comment feed subscriptions started to become unwieldly in my reader because there were so many of them and they wouldn’t be relevant after a certain amount of time.
Thanks to Lin, another EntreCard user, I found a more elegant solution. Although still in testing, CoComment is a comment aggregator that itself has a feed that my feed aggregator can read. Now I can keep up with comment threads easily.
Because all of this blog hopping has drawn my blog into more of a social blog network than it used to be, I’m tending to spend more time these days in the blogosphere than in facebook. I wanted to find a way to put facebook’s status update system on my blog so that I could still keep track of my fb friends. In order to try to maintain some level of protection of my super-secret identity on my blog, I had to use Feedburner to massage my facebook friends’ RSS status update feed before it could be posted on the blog (so that the feed doesn’t show my real name). Really, really, industrious and motivated individuals will likely still be able to discover my real identity, but you deserve to know it if you go to all that trouble.
Because my blogroll is now so long, it made more sense for me to find a way to show recent posts from the blogroll rather than links to the blogs themselves. So now recent blogroll posts are shown on my blog via a script courtesy of Google Reader. Blogs that show on here are just a handful of the total number of blogs that I’m subscribed to. I choose which ones get to show up based on a number of factors: Frequency of posting (blogs that post tons of material a day don’t go on here because I want to try to have a fair distribution of posts from other blogs), if you comment on my blog there’s a good chance your blog will get added to the list, and most importantly, blogs that represent topics I find most interesting show up on here. Oh, and obviously your blog needs to have a valid syndication feed.
Finally, there’s the “Current Context” headline at the top of the blog. This is from a Wordpress plugin that reads the status from Twitter. My Twitter updates get picked up on the blog and also by a facebook app that then updates my facebook status and keeps the two in sync. As far as I know, there are 2 facebook apps related to Twitter. Rudy uses the “official” one and I use the second which I like better because it doesn’t automatically prepend stuff to my update.
Now if anyone finds a plugin that will vacuum the house, wash the dishes, cook dinner, and shovel the driveway please let me know. The Girl is on a continuing education course all weekend and is just home at night so I have a good-sized TODO list to work on.
Blogging isn’t on the list.
February 24th, 2008 at 10:44 am
CoComment definitely has many advantages, I’m glad you found good value with it. I really think that once you’ve had the time to test it out for awhile, you’ll be glad you have cocomment.
I’ve even found several Wordpress blogs that don’t give the option to subscribe to comments at all, so that has made CoComment an invaluable tool.
You’re on Twitter? Darn, I was looking for your link, and that of Rudy as well, but nope. Guess I’ll have to try to go searching for ya.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Hi Lin, under the “Current Context” header, click on the blue date/time link. It’ll take you to my twitter page. I can’t help you with Rudy’s because I follow his status through facebook.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Took me a second to figure out where you meant, but I found ya!
Hey Ruuudy! Where are ya? haha
February 24th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I’m glad you found EntreCard useful.
coCommenter looks like a pretty neat app. It even has a social networking aspect behind it. Gonna have to test drive it for a while.
_
Lin, you can follow me on Twitter here: http://www.twitter.com/radix33
February 24th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
CoComment has some minor bugs, especially with blogger.com (from my experience), and just fixed their RSS feeder to show others’ comments properly. However, I really like it.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
This is the first time I’ve heard of CoComment, but it certainly sounds very useful.
Thanks for sharing the info.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Thanks to Lin! Hope it works out for you.
February 25th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Thanks for the tip on the Blogroll Activity. I’m working on implementing something similar now.
I’ll wait for another day to explore CoComment.
February 25th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
It just occurred to me, have you discovered the wonders of StumbleUpon yet?
Stumble Upon is simply…awesome! I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve been trying to do some searches for more dental related blogs (that aren’t just pushing products) where they actually want and enjoy communicating back and forth. It’s been verrrry tough to find many.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Hey Periapex — I’m new to the blogosphere at http://www.waittimes.blogspot.com I blogging on techniques for minimizing wait times in high utilization practices (both medical and dental) since medical wait times up here in Canada have been a problem. Any feedback you could provide would be appreciated and if there’s anyway you can mention or link to it on you’re website I’d appreciate it. Thanks Ian.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Haley: Thanks for dropping by! I’m not sure yet if I’ll keep the Friends’ status update feature. It sort of violates privacy policies. I’m debating about that though, because the updates are not private to facebook friends. What does everyone think?
Lin: I’ve read mixed reviews about StumbleUpon. Maybe I should check it out. You’ve found it useful to draw traffic? I am subscribed to a few dental blogs, but they’ve mostly stopped posting or post very rarely so it would be nice to find some others.
Ian: Good to see you in the blogosphere. What took you so long? Say Hi to Sarah for me (I’m assuming she’s still with you guys over there). I’ll be checking out your blog. A quick skim leaves me interested. Scheduling separate consultation and treatment appointments is a general policy for my office but can be a problem for patients in pain. Maybe I’ll do a post about our rationale for that if you’re interested.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:05 am
StumbleUpon is great! Draws traffic like crazy! Even a dental blog can get good traffic, especially with conversational posts like the one about your jailer patient.
There are some medical blogs as well that may want to hook up with you on Entrecard as well.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Ok, I’ll head over to Stumble and check it out. Thanks for the tip.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
StumbleUpon is wonderful. When two of my articles got “stumbled”, I got over 1200 hits in just a few days. I took a Google Analytics’ snapshot of those days. My daily average hits are usually about 50.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Oops… forgot the snapshot url should be: http://radix.warped.com/pics/a.....lytics.jpg
February 26th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Hmm. This template really doesn’t like long URLs. And you keep posting them…
I’m playing around with StumbleUpon and actually am having a good time with it.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Once you get used to StumbleUpon and really get using it often, or better yet….have a post stumbled by another SU user, the traffic bursts are amazing.
Even dental blogs can get great traffic bursts with SU, so don’t let that deter ya.
March 1st, 2008 at 12:57 am
I use the WP Chunk plugin that automatically shortens long URLs in comments. Give that a shot.
March 1st, 2008 at 7:08 am
Thanks man, looks useful…
March 7th, 2008 at 12:44 am
[...] I briefly posted about the benefits of EntreCard for a blogger attempting to promote their blog and who also might [...]