Not more than two days ago a friend lost his 5 year young son in a pool accident.
Today, after I was at the funeral of a friend and colleague yesterday, my feed reader was full of supportive entries for Dawg and his family.

Within 2 hours after NYCWatchdog had blogged about the cruel event, a friend, Avitable, had set up a donation entry and pledges started to roll in. As I am writing this 114 bloggers have already donated in little more than 24 hours.
Technorati lists 64 links to that post. I have followed the evolution of the donation entry with interest and wondered if a personal blog could make it into the popular news section at Technorati.

64 Links would be a Top 10 ranking at this moment, but obviously TC doesn’t care about blogs, blogs written by non-paid bloggers. Bloggers who love to share their life.

Does Technorati really care about blogs or rather only about it’s own pagerank?
Where would Technorati have been today if no blogger was narcissistic enough to check his/her own link popularity?

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At least that’s what the Blog Herald teaches you. The past few weeks have been a flurry of posts about how blogs affect relationships, and how blogs themselves are all about relationships. There’s how to build blog relationships by making good first impressions. Then there’s building blog relationships by showcasing your popular posts (what I personally call link baiting). Then what about building personal relationships first before visiting another person’s blog? Then there’s linking and relationships.

Isn’t blogging just about what you have to say anymore? Do you really have to build relationships by blogging?

Now blogging is becoming just like social networking. Only this time, it’s not a closed system, but a more open system wherein you can become friends with the rest of the blogosphere, and the only requirement is that you link to other people, you blogroll them, or leave comments on their blogs.

This makes the definition of blogging even more complicated than it already is, methinks.

I didn’t notice this until I checked out the Blogging Times just recently. It seems the Times is sporting an even newer look. And pretty much everything else has changed, too.

Scandalicious headlines? Check. Scandalicious images? Check. Looks like everything’s in place. What used to be the Blogging Times has turned itself into an online tabloid of sorts. Gone is the newsy, level-headed analysis by its former writers. Now it’s all just talk and less sense.

But then again, the copyright statement says it all:

The Blogging Times is a news blog. Copyright © The Blogging Times, All Rights Reserved.

A news blog, eh? Seriously?

Oh, who am I to nitpick? Maybe the Blogging Times has become too strong for my taste. JOAB is getting softer as the days go by, and pretty soon we’d probably be the same boring old stuff, just like 99% of the blogs out there. Count on the Blogging Times to try to grab attention while it still can.

I wonder what erstwhile TBT owner and editor Minic Rivera is thinking.

The team over at Performancing gave a fantastic offer last week: that they would help you “reboot” your blog, pooling the resources of all their individual skills and experiences as probloggers-:

Do you have a blog sitting around that you want help with? Want to take it to the next level but don’t know how? Well youre in luck. We are a panel of experts that’s right all of us in someway whether design is your flaw, content creation, or no inbound links or marketing. We have all the tricks up our sleeves.

And we are sitting here waiting to help.

~ Ok that sounded way to much like a late night psychic hotline commercial. But seriously. I’m itching to help someone even if it’s my own blog become successful or profitable. So toss me a blog below in the comments if you want some free advice and a simple makeover tour.

We will take one a week and spend one week giving you tips and sharing that with the community. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to really launch your site into the next level of authority.

And they followed through, choosing as their first reboot-: ThroughBall.com.

There were some 50 comments left in response to this post at Performancing, and the blog owner seemed really pleased with the feedback he received.

So for all you suffering bloggers, whose blog might be sinking and needing a “jack up”, head over to Performancing and get in line for a future reboot.

Heck…I think JOAB needs one. What the hell has happened to this blog?

[tags]performancing, David Krug, splashpress, reboot blog, probloggers[/tags]

Last week, Technosailor Aaron Brazell announced that he was selling his Blog via public auction on Sitepoint. The buy it now price: $30,000. One week (and much flaming around) after, the sale was called off.

Much has been learned from this experience–both by Aaron himself and outsiders who are interested in how this whole thing would go. There were a lot of questions raised, such as how the sale would affect the site’s being a member of b5media, and how this affiliation with the network exactly worked, and whether the asking price was appropriate, considering a $250 monthly revenue. Most of all, the question was about whether Technosailor would still be Technosailor if Aaron were to cede creative control to a new owner.

The answer: probably not. Technosailor is Aaron is Technosailor, as we have learned. Way back when this blog was first purchased by Splashpress Media (back then the Bloggy-dash-Network-dot-com), I wrote that blogging is all about personality. But I realize today that it’s not just about the personality that a blogger demonstrates in his writings. It’s the whole persona of the blogger that matters.

That makes it difficult to justify selling and buying a blog without any long-term plans for developing it. The blog would essentially change its “brains” and its personality when a new writer replaces the old one. And it just won’t be the same thing. So it might be a good idea to retain the existing author as a contributor, or even just invest in the blog, while keeping the author on the payroll.

So if you’re planning to sell your blog, be sure that its inherent value is in its profitability from the content, and not the author. There is a difference between a content-based blog and an author-based blog. In most cases, a blogger becomes his blog, and this leads to an author-based blog.

It’s those blogs that focus on content rather than authors that can do good in sales and auctions.

That’s unless your site has a badass domain name, of course, like sex.com and the like (if that were a blog), which fetched $18 million for the domain alone when it was sold last year. But that’s another story.

First it was those gravatar-like icons peeking out of blog sidebars telling me that I was among a blog’s recent readers (a.k.a. “You!”). Then it apparently got so big that the service got gobbled up by Yahoo! For how many gazillion bucks again?

I’m talking about MyBlogLog, of course. Apparently it’s all about community. After all, you do want to know who reads your blog, do you?

But I’m not falling for it. To put it frankly, I don’t like MyBlogLog. Why? Let me count the ways.

# It’s somehow like malware, more particularly spyware. MyBlogLog supposedly tracks other members that read your blog and pastes their faces onto the MyBlogLog community badge you’ve displayed on your blog. If you have issues with privacy, do not sign up for MyBlogLog.
# It slows down your site. I’ve had experience with fast-loading sites suddenly loading a few seconds slower (which in my opinion is very noticeable) than when there was no MyBlogLog code.
# It borders on becoming eyesore. I hate gravatars and just about anything that clutters up otherwise clean blog layouts. MyBlogLog is just like your plain ol’ gravatars multiplied several times over. Not only does it slow down your site, it tends to uglify your site!
# It’s just not right. If I want a blog community, that’s what my comment threads are for!
# It doesn’t sound right, either. Somehow, my tongue gets stuck whenever I try to say “my blog log.” Is this a tongue-twister of some sort?

Sorry MyBlogLog. You have found a non-believer in me.

Together with a design overhaul TIME Magazine started a new concept today : TIME The AG

Get a concise summary of the day’s most important news stories on …

In other words, a link blog. TIME The Ag [the Aggregator] is an element of a much nicer site to spend time on and read. The alignment of the whole online edition (not every part has been overhauled yet) has become much better and the TIME user experience is not that claustrophobic anymore.

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I use WordPress, I really like WordPress, but sometimes I doubt. Not because of the WordPress platform (I have already decided that I will use other platforms in a near future), but because of what the WP core team publishes. Because of certain statements they make.
I will immediately counter you. I surely am not not controversial in times (I have been worse, lots worse), I have been there in my sector. I have reached the top in my area.

And when I was there, everyone had to listen to it, and to me.
Today I know better. I have learned my lesson.
More even, every time I have read or hear similar statements I automatically shake head. And reading the NeoSmart Files last night I thought this was the beginning of the end.

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Over the last weeks there have been some changes in the blog journal landscape. 2 Consolidated papers and a new comer. Positions haven’t changed yet, but the tone of the blogs has.
Lets have a look at the 3 blog papers I mentioned in my Follow The Blogosphere with only 20 Feeds.

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Bloggers are always good for any kind of controversy. Even if the controversy needs to be twisted and serve as an attention call. For Wired this time. Once more more conventional media invite bloggers to react and have a round of linkbait.

If bloggers know how to do one thing really well, it’s fight.

It is obviously we have to react. And we won’t put up a fight, no we won’t. Because that would only be what Michael Calore is looking for.

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