2005 April : @ProBlogger

Written on 4/30/2005 at 3:58 pm by Darren Rowse

A Blogging Perspective OS X Tiger

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services

Last night I was in town and treated myself to the new OSX – Tiger. This afternoon I’ve installed it and have been playing around with it – asking myself how it will improve my blogging.

Here are a few initial reflections:

Dashboard – one of the main things that Apple have been selling this upgrade with is the new Dashboard feature which allows users to download desktop widgets. At the click of a button these widgets appear on your screen giving you up to date information on a variety of topics – ranging from stock prices, weather, world time, dictionary, calculator, wikipedia look up, mini rss reader. I’m going to enjoy this – I’ve already got an array of world time clocks which are going to be very handy as I think about posting times and talking with my many international blogging friends. Another useful widget that I’m going to enjoy is the ‘Translator’ that converts words and phrases between English and 10 languages (including Dutch and Germany – which I always am trying to translate as this blog is read by and linked to by many bloggers of writing in these languages). If there are any widget developers out there – I challenge/beg/suggest to you to please develop a widget for Adsense statistics (like the firefox plug in). Please?!?!

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Written on 4/30/2005 at 9:39 am by Darren Rowse

Weblog Empire Network to Launch

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Word on the Street is that Duncan (from Blog Herald) new Blog network (mentioned previously here) will be called Weblog Empire – domain name is registered but not live yet.

Written on 4/30/2005 at 3:19 am by Darren Rowse

Evergreen versus Time Related Posts

Filed Under: Writing Content

I finally got around to listening to the last third of the Business Blog Roundtable and was struck with one of the comments that Stephan Spencer (I think it was his voice) said about evergreen versus time related posts.

I’d not actually thought of my blogs and the posts in them in these terms before but on reflection find the classification very helpful.

Evergreen posts are ones that don’t lose their relevancy over time. You write them today and they will be as helpful to readers in a few months (or even years) time – for example my Adsense for Bloggers series is one of these – the first incarnation of these posts was over 12 months ago but they remain among the most popular posts on this site.

Time related posts tend to be more news related – or are often tied to an event in time. For example a couple of days ago I posted that Weblogs Inc. are testing Google’s RSS ads in their feeds. This post was relevant the day I wrote it and generated a little traffic, however in a week it will be ‘old news’.

So which is best? The obvious answer to this question is that it depends upon the topic or strategy of your blog. Both types of posts (and a combination of them) can be very powerful (and profitable) in different contexts and there are different pros and cons of each one.

Let’s tease this out a little more and make a few observations about each type of post:

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Written on 4/30/2005 at 1:59 am by Darren Rowse

Wanted: Gadget/ tech geek blogger

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Duncan over at The Blog Herald has just posted that he’s looking for a Gadget/ tech geek blogger to work with him on a new gadget oriented blog. He’s offering a 60/40 split (with the author taking 60%). He’s also going to cover hosting fees out of his 40%. This is a pretty bold move as he’s taking on the big boys who already inhabit the ‘gadget pond’. I suspect there is room for one more however as the market is pretty big.

Also exciting is that this new blog is going to be the first blog on his new network of blogs.

Written on 4/30/2005 at 1:16 am by Darren Rowse

April – Record Blogging Earnings

Filed Under: ProBlogger Site News

April has been a rather good month for my blogging business.

This graph plots my Adsense earnings (from all my blogs) since 1 January to today (without specific figures). As you’ll see, the last two days have been record breaking days. I’m not sure how long this growth can last – but April’s daily average is 40% higher than last month – for the first time I’ve broken into the five figures for a month zone from Adsense.

The amazing thing is that when you get to these sorts of figures a rise in earnings of something like 40% can be a pretty significant thing on overall earnings.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not in some virtual blogging dream. Its quite staggering to think that 2.5 years ago I started my first blog with absolutely no idea of what was ahead. The idea of sustaining even that blog would have been laughable for me back then – let alone the thought that blogging would be my full time job.

Today someone asked me ‘how does it feel to be a full time blogger?’ – to be honest its starting to all feel a little bit surreal and a touch frightening. What is this thing I’ve created and where is it all headed?

Written on 4/29/2005 at 5:45 pm by Darren Rowse

Pajamas Media – New Blog Advertising Network

Filed Under: Advertising

Roger L. Simon has just posted anOpen Letter to All Bloggers announcing that he and a couple of others are going to start a corporate advertising service which will sell ads to advertisers ‘en masse’ . There are not too many details but it sounds like an interesting project. He’s doing the project with Charles Johnson (of LGF) and Marc Danziger (of Winds of Change). If the email for more information is anything to go by the new projects come under the name of Pajamas Media. He writes:

‘Charles Johnson, Marc Danziger and I have been sneaking around over the last few months, trying to turn blogs into a business. We have enlisted some others with names familiar to you with the intention of working in two areas – aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.

With respect to advertising, we do not wish to go into competition with Henry Copeland’s BlogAds, which we fully support. (Some of us even have them!) We are working on another model that will sell ads en masse, not blog-by-blog. We expect this model to go live within a few weeks.’

It will be interesting to see what they come up with – as these are some guys who have some serious reach within blogging (two of them were in the top 30 I reviewed a few days ago).

Written on 4/29/2005 at 4:58 pm by Darren Rowse

Fun Money Blog Interview

Filed Under: Pro Blogging News

Jacob, the author of Fun Money Blog and owner of numerous other online projects like cssvault has just posted an Interview with me (update: link removed as the interview is no longer there). In it he asks all kinds of questions including about:

how many people I think can make a living from blogging
what my daily goals are as a blogger
how my blogging has changed since I first started

Its a normal style Darren interview – where I ramble on for a fair bit on each of these (and other questions) – stop over there for a look if you want another glimpse at my bizarre little brain’s workings.

Written on 4/29/2005 at 1:29 pm by Darren Rowse

Yahoo! testing Dynamic Image Ads

Filed Under: Advertising

In a big week of changes to contextual advertising Jen posts that Yahoo! are now adding dynamic image ads to their contextual advertising line (original source of information). Things are certainly hotting up in terms of competition between Yahoo and Google in advertising – hopefully publishers will be the winners).