If you want me to link to your site, here are your options:

1. Create a HTML (no Javascript, Flash, or anything like that please. WordPress.com doesn’t allow it.) badge (like the Buzzerhut one in the sidebar) and email it to me.
EXAMPLE OF A HTML BADGE:

2. Send me your blog’s URL, I’ll review your site, then if it’s good, it’ll go into my blogroll. (Right now, there are no sites in the blogroll, so I haven’t put the blogroll in the sidebar yet.)

3. Comment on one of my posts (sincere comments please. If you just put down “Good!” or, “interesting!”, it will be marked as spam and I will delete it.

If I think your site is very interesting and has content or something else similar to my blog, I might ask for a link to my blog in return.

Ryan

I’m not asking for links to this blog. I’m saying that I will not randomly link to other sites just for a link back. The point of a blogroll is to put down related or interesting sites for a visitor to go to. If I put down random sites, then the point of a blogroll is defeated. So, if you comment on any of my posts like this: Good post!, or if you email me asking for a link to a site that is un-related to anything I write about on ryan(s)pace, then no. Ok, now that I’ve pretty much made all the posts I need to set down the ground rules, let’s officially launch ryan(s)pace now!

Ryan

A Business can be so…well…business-like!  Do you want to walk into a place where everything is static, unfriendly,  and exactly the same, or do you prefer dealing with real people?  If you are like me, I like to know that I am dealing with real people that have a personality and can work well with me.  That is a big point of blogging.  Especially business blogging!  You are letting people know that they are dealing with people, not just bricks and mortar.

At Marketing For Gurus, we add all of the shell of your Blog. What does that mean?

• Custom Header
• RSS Feeds
• Pingbacks
• Linkbacks
• Tag Words Built
• Categories Built
• Instructions on how to make it all work

At Marketing For Gurus, we care that you have exactly what you need to bring you the web presence you desire.

Some interesting reads from the Blogosphere

Interesting reads from the blogosphere

1.) How to get a cut in your Amazon S3 Bill and also lower the page load time for your website: Amit has an interesting story here on How you can cut your Amazon S3 Bill and also lower the time in which your website loads. Amit introduces the importance of cache-control response headers. Must read for all those of you who have their own websites, irrespective of whether you have content on S3 or not.

2.) jQuery Cheat sheet: If you are also one of those who uses jQuery, this post should be of great use to you. The post contains a printable jQuery Cheat sheet pdf.

3.) Are you in need of Eye Glasses? Lifepal has an interesting post which talks about a few basic steps which can help you conclude if its time you visit your Optometrist or not.

Read other interesting reads from the blogosphere covered in the past here.

Also read: Google Mistakes Own Blog for Spam, Deletes it

I though these were some pretty good tips for all the bloggers out there.

Why Trackbacks are Useful For Blogs

By Terry Detty

This week we’re going to look at trackbacks – what they are, how they work, why they’re important to blog traffic and how to get more. After you’ve read this article you’ll know just about everything you need to know about the subject.

What are trackbacks?

The concept of trackbacks is a bit hard to explain so we’ll use an example. Let’s say you see a great blog post on another person’s blog and want to link to it on your blog. You could do this the old-fashioned way by manually putting a link on your site to that blog, but if you do that, the person whose blog post you’re linking to won’t know that unless you tell them.

This is where trackbacks come in. A trackback is a program which will notify the owner of a blog when one of their posts has been linked to at another blog.

How do they work?

A blog that has a trackback system set up will have a link at the bottom of every blog post. This link will say something like “Blog This!” Anyone who clicks the link can then put a link to that blog post on their site. The person who posted the original blog will then be notified via email that another site has linked to their blog posting. Additionally, the link that was clicked (“Blog This!”) will change to “Trackbacks.” From that point forward, the “Trackbacks” link will keep track of how many people have chosen to blog about that particular post. So after the first trackback, it will say “Trackbacks: 1.” The number of trackbacks recorded will be updated as they occur.

Why are trackbacks important to blog traffic?

The easy answer is that trackbacks are important because they increase awareness of your blog. Trackbacks also make a blog seem more credible.

Anytime a person makes a trackback on your blog, they make a post on their own blog about your blog. This, in turn, lets their readers know about your blog. Chances are, their readers will want to visit your blog. If they see something they like, they”ll keep coming back for more, which means you”ll have a whole new fan base of readers. That means more traffic for your blog.

Can you imagine what would happen if 5 different bloggers trackbacked a post on your blog? Depending on the popularity of their blog, that could genrate hundreds of new readers for your blog! Pretty incredible, right?

Also, every trackback made, assuming it’s a legitimate one (some trackbacks are spam), adds credibility to your blog. Blogs with high amounts of trackbacks look credible because lots of people like the posts enough to trackback them.

How can I increase my trackbacks?

The easiest and best way to increase trackbacks is to post frequently . If you post 2-3 times a week, people will have quite a few posts that they can trackback, but it’s imporant that these posts contain good content, which is easy to relate to and entertaining to read. If you post a long, boring rant, people probably won”t want to trackback that. In contrast, if your rant is entertaining (and one that people are likely to agree with), you”ll get trackbacked.

The number of trackbacks you get is totally dependent on the number of visitors your blog receives and how frequently you’re able to make quality posts. If you”ve got a good amount of visitors and write good blog posts, you”ll get trackbacks. It”s a win-win situation for you!

I just tried Popuri and it’s really a terrific and free tool. You can enter any web address and see who is linking to it. Popuri also connects you to other free tools from Yahoo!, Google, and others, instantly providing you with metrics on any website. It’s enough to make a blogger feel empowered .

From today I’ll be blogging parts of a book chapter on ‘Blogs and Investigative Journalism’ which will form part of the next edition of ‘Investigative Journalism‘. The following is the first part, which introduces blogging in general and its relationship with journalism. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Blogging and journalism

To ask “Is blogging journalism” is to mistake form for content. Blogs – like websites, paper, television or radio – can contain journalism, but may not. They are a platform, albeit – like other media platforms – one with certain generic conventions. Like all conventions, these have advantages and disadvantages for journalism, which this chapter aims to address.

As a platform, blogs are a type of website built (normally) using content management software to a template where entries are dated and arranged with the most recent entry uppermost. Despite their extraordinary range and number, the technology and history of blogs has lent the medium some generic qualities. These include: a most-recent-post-top structure, a ‘blogroll’ of related sites, an often personal or subjective writing style, brevity, and – related to brevity – a tendency to link to any source mentioned (which the user can click to find out more).

When they first began to spread in the late 1990s, blogs tended to be lists of links to similar sites (this ‘blogroll’ element still remains in many blog systems and templates today). Blog posts, meanwhile, often hinged around a single link, where:

“An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link … Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand” (Blood, 2000)

Although the first blogs were programmed by their authors, it was the launch of free content management systems such as Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup (all in 1999) which facilitated an explosion in blogger numbers as the barriers to entry were lowered to those without HTML coding skills. Rebecca Blood (2000) argues that this change, and Blogger’s interface and culture in particular, resulted in a change in the medium itself, in favour of more diary-like blogs, with accompanying cults of personality. It was during this time that blogs received much of their initial exposure in the mainstream media.

The years since, however, have seen a number of supplementary technologies develop that have brought the blog further into the orbit of journalistic enterprises. One is the rise of RSS as a distribution method. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) – now routinely included in blog services such as Blogger and WordPress – is a technology which allows readers to subscribe to a blog through an ‘RSS reader’. This removes the requirement for readers to check the blog itself for any new postings, and means they can instead include the blog feed as one among a number to form their personal news service. It also means feeds can be aggregated by publishers or journalists.

A second factor is the rise of linkbacks (also known as trackbacks, refbacks or pingbacks). These ‘ping’ a blogger to notify them when another blogger has linked to their post, while a brief extract of the referring website and a link is often included as part of the comments on a particular post, enabling the blogger to address any response or debate, as well as allowing readers to follow disussion that took place on other blogs after the original post was written. This combination of reverse referencing and notification adds to blogging’s conversational nature, making bloggers aware of their readers’ identities and opinions, and allowing them to correct errors or clarify and refine arguments. Notably, articles which are not written on a platform using trackback technology – i.e. most traditional news websites – do not get included in this discussion.

Thirdly, because of the tendency for blogs to link frequently, and because of the importance of incoming links to a webpage’s ranking on search engines such as Google, blogs have become a major factor in the profile of particular stories. A story that is heavily blogged benefits from a high visibility on search engines – particularly blog-specific search engines which monitor popular terms and sites. Economically, the advent of services such as AdSense and BlogAds meant some journalistic bloggers who began as amateurs were able to commercialise their operations and employ full time staff, as popular blogs such as Boing Boing and the Daily Kos enjoyed visitor numbers higher than most mainstream news organisations.

Perhaps partly as a result of the significance of blogs to search engine ranking – and therefore readers and online advertising revenue – and partly because of the threat that blogs pose in taking away their audiences, the blog format has been increasingly adopted by news organisations, who have either coopted the technology for their own journalists, employed bloggers on their staff, or teamed up with blogging and citizen journalism operations (Gant, 2007). With this shift into the mainstream media, the preexisting generic qualities of blogs have, in many cases, been diluted, with some journalists writing blog entries in the same way as a column, disabling comments or linkbacks, or failing to link to their sources. The blog, in these cases, simply becomes a new platform for traditional print content – or, put another way, ’shovelware’. In other cases, however, “They are now achieving what Gans called for in an ‘indirect sharing of responsibilities’ with journalists [and] represent the multi-perspectival news that will end up setting more and different agendas as desired by Gans” (Robinson, 2006: 80).

Part two of this chapter – The Amateur-Professional Debate – is here.