Weblog Tools Collection

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15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.

This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.

• GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
• WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
• Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
• Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
• SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
• StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
• Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
• Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
• Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
• Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
• Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
• Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.

What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

Vulnerable WordPress Blogs Not Being Indexed: Technorati has decided to not index vulnerable and exploited WordPress blogs. This comes after the recent spat of hacks that were discovered on various high profile blogs and websites. What was even more interesting was the fact that some of these hacks and exploitations might have come from covert and encrypted code hidden in various themes available for free over the web. The moral of this story is that you need to upgrade your WordPress blog now to WordPress 2.5.

Just so that everyone is aware, WordPress 2.5 is the latest stable version and this should be the version that everyone should upgrade to. Any older versions leaves you vulnerable. [EDIT] As mentioned on the legacy 2.0 page, WordPress 2.0.11 is the latest stable download with all the latest security fixes for the 2.0 branch. However, WordPress 2.5 is still the latest and the greatest and should be everyones upgrade target.

As for themes, if you feel that the theme you are using might be suspect of something strange, just disable it and get something else. I suggest you download themes from the original author’s website/blog and stay away from any theme that has an encrypted footer (though that would be hard to determine without looking at the code). At weblogtoolscollection.com we try our darnest to link directly to theme authors for the download.

Technorati is just the beginning. If your blog has spammy links, has covert hidden pages or links, is used for nefarious purposes, even without your knowledge, you are being penalized by the search engines. We are going to put together a post on how to figure out if your blog is hacked/exploited, clean up your blog if it is hacked, get your blog back to order, find spammy pages if they do exist and how to get your blog re-indexed. In the meantime, if you know of a good resource, please let us know and we will add it to the post.

Today is a good day to upgrade to WordPress 2.5

Social Media Marketing at SeaWorld They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out. This article is based on a video podcast by Shel Israel of FastCompany.tv. On one of the panels at WordCamp, we were asked a question that roughly translated to the same one that Shel is trying to get answers for. “How do you measure a conversation?” SeaWorld simply put together a blog and some pictures and videos using tools that are feely available, to generate buzz and conversation amongst ethusiasts they might have normally overlooked. The question in my mind is not how we measure but what we measure as the outcome of a social media marketing strategy and how we know that it is time to measure a particular set of results.

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs: At first I thought this was linkbait but a read through the article and the other content on the blog changed my mind. There is some analysis of each blog/blogging company with details about the company, guesses on revenues and page views, future prospects, operating margins and employees, advertising statistics and finally a comment on property valuation as multiples of revenue or multiples of operating profits. From my quick glance I would say that the revenue numbers are not perfectly on the money but since these figures are almost never publicly discussed (except on make money online blogs) I guess there is some error built into the valuation. Daniel’s excellent Daily Blog Tips($1.8M) makes it into the list at number 18. The Gawker properties tops the list at a value of $150 million and other big names include TechCrunch($36M), Mashable($10M), GigaOm($8.4M) and RWW($5M).

A few things surprised me about the entry. I try to keep a very short list of reads and trim and add to them all the time. The fact that the top twenty blogs were on my reading list was a strange surprise. Another surprise was that there was not a single link on the original linked post. (Not one link. I wonder if that was done by choice since their other articles contain links.) I was also surprised by the detailed reasoning for the valuations and the stream of numbers that were presented. Considering that the blog in question is on Wall Street and finance, I should not be surprised but I am not used to seeing this level of financial proficiency on blog valuations.

All in all it was a pleasure to read and compare.

Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?: I realize there is a selection problem here: anyone who responds to my question about why commenters comment is, alas, a commenter. Which means that regular commenters will be overrepresented in the comments — unless, of course, a whole bunch of you who never comment decide to go ahead and log in and, in the comments section, tell us why you never comment. Or why other people do. I love the topic of this post on Freakonomics at the New York Times Blog. There is a lot of food for thought.

There are many reasons to leave a comment on a blog and the ability of readers to leave comments on a blog and the instant interaction and conversation that develops, is what attracted me to b2 and consequently WordPress. I tend to not comment on blogs where the comment form is hard to find or where I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to leave a comment (which is why I like extremely simple comment forms and dislike indiscriminate moderation). I also leave comments on interesting topics in the form of trackbacks and links. I gauge the success of a post and a topic by the number of comments left on it and actively try to encourage my readers to express their thoughts. I try to join in on the conversation in the comments and I consciously keep myself from modifying or censoring comments.

So do you comment on blogs? Why do you comment? If you have never left a comment on WeblogToolsCollection.com and I request you to comment on this post, would you do it?

Extending WordPress Beyond the Blog: A good article on extending WordPress beyond “just a blog” with examples and a developer’s trials and tribulations along the way. Custom Fields in WordPress are the bomb. I have worked extensively with this feature set and used it to my advantage many times. WordPress Jobs makes use of the custom fields to store and produce the job listings. Our recent post on WordPress as a contact manager also uses Custom Fields. Heck there was a Contest at one point that awarded prizes to the best new use of WordPress’ Custom Fields. Along those lines, Andrew asks a question at the end of the linked article that caught my fancy and I wanted to ask our readers the same question. We might find some new uses for old code and spark new ideas.

Which are your favorite non-traditional sites that use WordPress as their publishing platform?

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You:

You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

I could not have described this post (on Wired) better. It is a flash animation that follows a blog post as it makes its way through the Interweb. If you ever wondered how all these disparate peices fit into the blogosphere, this is the food for thought.

Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW!: An interesting bunch of reasons why you should have a Facebook page for your blog or website. Sadly, I get addicted easily and once I got into Facebook, I could not stop. I created a page for this blog, created my profile and then started looking at their API which is incredible. It is a lot of fun to dabble in Facebook apps. Also, while I am at it, I apologize to the people that received a friend request (and either did not want to add me or were surprised by the request). My address book import did not go so well. Please ignore the request if you like.

If you have a Facebook page and would like some exposure, please leave a comment here or on the Facebook page for Weblog Tools Collection. Do you have a Facebook page yet? Have you come across any WordPress related Facebook apps?

I have added a few plugins and tweaked a bit of the code on WeblogToolsCollection to keep things fresh and new. Here is the list.

WhoSeesAds: I have been meaning to wean out the Google AdSense ads for my regular visitors and Ozh’s plugin was the ticket. If you have not used it yet, you are missing out. It is one of the finest pieces of useful and well thought out code for WordPress bloggers. I have the ads set so they only show for posts older than 30 days or if you are not a regular visitor. I like the lack of distractive AdSense blocks. There is also a distinct benefit that I had not anticipated. The best paying AdSense block on this blog has also been the most obnoxious that regular readers have complained about. I can now display those ads to people that happen to stop by from search engines and on old posts. This has increased my click through rate almost five fold! (though that is not saying much, AdSense is pretty much useless on this blog and the revenue doesn’t even cover half my monthly server fees, let alone anything else). Thanks Ozh!

Easy Gravatars: Dougal released this plugin a few days ago and I was itching to install it. I muddled with his original code a little, played around with my own CSS, tweaked the next plugin to work with Gravatars and viola! Thanks Dougal! PS: If you do not know already, Gravatar is now owned by Automattic and response times for loading the Gravatars is minuscule. After I installed the plugin, I did not even have to check to see if I had a Gravatar. The system had already picked up my profile from WordPress.com. Do you have your own Gravatar yet?

Highlight Author Comment: I have always wanted a plugin that would somehow highlight comments from authors. When this plugin was in the daily list of updates, I knew I had to try it. I think it adds quite a bit to the conversation. I now have to tweak the CSS a little but that can wait (suggestions are welcome).

I decided to use Project Wonderful for a month before I would say anything about the service so that I could talk somewhat intelligently about it. Project Wonderful lets you sell ads on your blogs in a new way. They use something called an “infinite auction” model that allows you to continue to sell your ad even after it is sold one time. In other words, the ads are sold on a per day basis and the highest bidders’ ads are displayed on your blog. The system has its weaknesses but it does work. You sign up just like any other advertising service and wait for them to approve your blog. Then you decide what kind of ad blocks you would like to display, setup the code and then add the code to your blog. The process of setting up ads and displaying them is a learning experience, but more on that later.

Pros:

• Account setup is relatively easy.
• Once the ads are setup, there is little to be done, low maintenance
• Could be better money than AdSense for some blogs
• Google friendly
• Multiple types of ads
• Very, very versatile advertising system
• Infinite auction has its advantages

Cons:

• Setting up ads and generating the code is confusing and cumbersome. I am not sure why ad details such as size, colors and ad text are on the ad code that needs to be regenerated after the ad is tweaked. Ad code generation leaves a lot to be desired.
• Infinite auction, though “innovative”, is confusing to advertisers. Selling more ads on your blog when an ad is already being displayed becomes difficult. There is a high learning curve for both advertisers and publishers. Casual ad buyers are wary of the infinite auction model.
• The site is slow when logged in. It is a pain to allow a pending bid when it takes over 30 seconds for each page to load. The ads themselves are displayed without much of a lag, which is nice.
• There are few advertisers on the service at this time. Most of them are t shirt sales or “blooming tea” sales and a few web comic sales ads slip in from time to time. Once this cadre of advertisers grows, the services’ potential will also increase.
• You need to be patient with the ads and the advertisers. You do not sell your inventory on the first day you put up the ads.

I tried various different pricing models and various different prices (on various different blogs and pages). If you do sign up, start with a lowball number for the bidding. That helps to get the attention of the few advertisers on the service. My prices were a slippery slope. I sold very few ads on the higher end of the price range and most of my ads ran empty if I put the them for auction at a going price I thought was fair. The site has a lot of good help files to guide you on price and the number of ads that are worthwhile. One thing I can say for certain. If you have AdSense on your blog and are making very little money from them, Project Wonderful is worth a shot. Chances are that you will make more from them, however slight that increase might be. The service did not work well for me but you might have a different experience with them.

Have you used Project Wonderful in the past? Have you advertised with them?

The science of blog reading: Nick Carr gives us an executive summary of an article by a team from CMU (and Nielsen) and he explains their thesis with the following foreword: The problem of detecting contaminants in a public water system is analogous to the problem of figuring out what’s going on in the blogosphere. Any article that claims that the blogosphere is essentially a sewer, is worth the read. I whole heartedly disagree with the list of 100 blogs that “everyone should read” but the concept is amusing and the principles behind their claims might have some merits. But then again I disagree with any and all such lists because all blogs and their readers do not have the same interest in all subject matters. Also as an astute commenter on that post points out, some of the blogs on that list aren’t even updated anymore and thus their list should have been better researched or at least chronologically updated before publication. Some researchers (I have been guilty of this myself when I wrote my thesis) concentrate on the numbers so completely that they tend to forget the bigger picture and consequently lose some credibility in their folly. If you are interested in social behavior surrounding blogging, the article is called Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks.

BlogBackupOnline: I found out about this service while reading through Leo Laporte’s latest post in which he talks about how he used BlogBackupOnline to import all old VOX posts from his old blog and restore them onto Wordpress. From their help PDF, Techrigy’s BlogBackupOnline allows users to create a full blog backup, schedule automatic daily backups, and restore or export a blog. The service is free for the first 50 MB (while in Beta) and backups can be scheduled and restores can be incremental. This service can be used to import blogs, restore single posts, export blogs from one platform into another among other features. Supported platforms include Blogger, WordPress, Friendster, LiveJournal, TypePad, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Terapad, Vox and Multiply. A worthy tool indeed. Priced right, it could be a silent soldier that everyone depends upon.

The Art of Stress-free Blogging : This post on Web Worker Daily reminds me of why I should be reading that blog more often. If you have heard of or read the ever-popular productivity book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, you will enjoy this post by Leo Babuata. He goes through the steps to perform and outlines the common gotchas and missteps to avoid.

• I use the “email bookmarks, thoughts and lists” bit all the time but I use the draft feature in GMail instead of crowding my inbox. I also tend to have spurts of “processing times” when I do stuff related to blogging but since I am so pressed for time, their start and end times tend to vary wildly depending on the day.
• I “process to empty” twice a day and have schooled myself to do a brain dump every couple of hours either into my PDA (now my Treo) or into another email draft with a descriptive subject. My Treo’s Mobile email lets me do drafts much like GMail, which has been quite a boon. Then at process to empty time I clean things out.
• Instead of reviewing once a week, I review once a day right before I turn in, and make notes on needs for the recent future. I find that this works best for me.
• I find that my blogging habits also work well in my work life and since I have some serious attention problems, I try to focus as intensely as possible for short periods of time to get the most out of whatever I can get done. Of course, all of this results in me needing a few extra hours in the day but I am used to sleeping as little as possible. I also reward myself very often to keep the enthusiasm going. If I do not have something to look forward to, I tend to get bogged down with the task at hand and my productivity sinks completely. I have found that these rewards rarely ever need to be extravagant. That latte sounds good right about now.

I could go on forever, but I fear I am moving away from the actual context of blogging. What do you do to foster the Art of Stress Free Blogging?

Carnival Blog: Or I should have said “How to do a corporate blog, the right way”? The Carnival Blog, written by John and Heidi Heald (Carnival Cruise Director) is actually a lot of fun to read. It is very personal, very personable and reeks of the enthusiasm and the “fun times” that can be had aboard a Carnival Cruise Ship . The fun fact about this blog is that not only is it down to earth and chock full of John’s idiosyncrasies which make it a delicious read, it is also doing amazingly well in terms of traffic, readership and participation. The blog has attracted 600,000 visitors since its inception in March and continues to lead the Wordpress.com viewer charts. Now in all fairness, I cannot see Michael Dell write about his trip to the local Sonoma winery in broken English, but the $64,000 trick is to engage your clientèle and prospects into thinking more about your company and what you have to offer and keep them from thinking about the competition.

WeblogToolsCollection.com has vanished from the Technorati index. I have sent support emails and have received nothing more than the canned responses. This blog shows up fine in my watchlist and it is also displayed correctly under “My Blogs” on the homepage but that is where I lose it. The blog page says that it is not indexed and I have quit trying to fix it.
This is one company I have a hard time figuring out. They seem to yo yo between very useful, fully in control of their fortunes and their company to down in the doldrum dumps with very little direction within the blink of an eye. I imagine the people that work there must also go through similar vacillations in their work lives and it must be very difficult to endure. I have had contact with many of the folks at Technorati over the years and all of them have come across as highly intelligent, enterprising individuals. The recent kerfluffle with Sifry and the lost puppy sympathy that got passed around in the tech blogging community really gave the company a black eye in my book and could and should have been avoided at all costs. It was passed off as Web 2.0 growing pains but Technorati is a good company with solid technology and oodles of data. They should have little trouble in coming in second at the least and they are MIA from my list. The externalities of Silicon Valley, I am sure, do not help their case either.

People often criticize strong, controlling leadership but I believe that those are the qualities along with human chemistry, some luck and a little Karma that often produce the best results in startups irrespective of talent or technology. Though I am not writing Technorati off completely, I wish they would either go away forever or come back and stay a while.

[EDIT] Thursday, August 30th: Looks like things are back to normal but for how long? Also the index is not correct yet, things still look odd in places.

Are people more polite in virtual worlds?: Choice quote - IBM has 5,000 employees in Second Life, and according to Wladawsky-Berger, “virtual worlds are a godsend for meetings.” He said that IBM has a code of conduct for staff in Second Life that they need to “be nice” and dress their avatars “appropriately” in meetings. But when among friends in the virtual world, they can do whatever they like, he said. So, do you think you are more polite in the virtual world? Do you feel compelled to be more polite because the person you are dealing with might be a complete stranger? Or are you more polite because in the virtual world, everything is recorded and traceable and your heated diatribe might come back and bite you later?

Many other interesting questions might be asked on this subject and I find the answers quite fascinating. A few socio-political studies have tried to pinpoint the nature of behavioral transactions in the virtual world but most of them have been restricted to very narrow points of view (such as the recently released study on Armed Forces participation differences in Facebook and MySpace, which is a fascinating read). At my day job, I like to reply to questions on the phone or face to face as often as possible since I know a lot can be lost in the translation. We have also had a lot of managers and business pundits preach the effectiveness of face to face transactions in the past. Is the above revelation contradictory? Are we truly more polite online and in being more polite, are we better at communicating with our peers in virtual worlds?

Top 50k blogs had $500 million in 2006 Revenue: TechCrunch has an interesting link to a study performed by a couple University of Texas Ph.D students in association with Chitika. The study claims that the top 50,000 blogs made somewhere near the astronomical total of $500 million in revenue in the 2006 fiscal year. The linked PDF is very short and the double exponential model that was used to fit (model) the values looks sloppy enough in the short description that it would not stand up well to a peer review. Chitika’s presence and promotion via this study is also quite evident. Frankly, I am surprised that The University of Chicago has allowed their name to be publicly associated with this study considering their heritage and authority in the statistics and economics educational disciplines [EDIT] I stand corrected, the study is from the University of Texas. Thanks AJay in the comments for the catch.

However, I would be a fool to say that there is no money to be made in blogging. GigaOM, TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, ProBlogger and other blogging powerhouses are proof enough. I do agree with some of the comments on that post in that revenue generated through such vehicles as Chitika and other ad sales might not be a good representation of blogging revenue and the fact that they used Technorati to choose the top blogs also make the results suspect. For me the communication and the relationships that result from blogging bear the most fruit. An interesting look at the business of blogging nonetheless.

Six Apart & Automattic Compared: A comparison of two of the three blogging juggernauts on the web. Though the comparison is mildly interesting from a historical novice’s point of view, I think the article is missing a few things. Since it was written by a business professor, I would have expected more analysis and forecasts rather than a rehashing of the past events in a company history narrative. Furthermore, a story of MT and WP does not make sense without Blogger and it should have been included.

There are very interesting business model and structure type details of all three companies that I believe are instrumental in their success in each of their arenas and the underlying competitive tension amalgamated with a deep sense of respect and jealousy among each of the competitors would have made for very interesting business reading. In spite of my perceived shortcomings, Carthik is mentioned in the article (which made my day) and it is worth a quick read if you are new to either company.