Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, is working on blacklisting spammers. Well, they have been blacklisting spammers before but now I guess they are just more open about it.
What does this do for you?
Nothing, just twitt along and hope that the Twitter team will figure it out soon or later.
I don’t use twitter so often anymore due to the number of spam on my twitter. I hope this new blacklisting feature works out so I can use it more often.
Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.
We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.
To this I say, “wow, you guys ARE slow!”, simply because I have seen twitterpam about a year ago before it got popular among the top bloggers.
Alexa will never be as accurate as “real” stats but at the same time, I believe they should provide the most accurate statistics as possible.
Let’s see what happens over the next couple days.
If your Alexa ranking has “shot up” or “tanked”, please feel free to leave a comment with you website and your inputs on the new system.
Check out the new features this new ranking system will bring:
In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!
We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.
You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.
Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.
My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?
Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.
The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.
Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.
We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.
Will you change the rankings again?
We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don’t foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.
I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?
We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it’s done we like it even better. We hope you will too.
We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.
Do you want to know what I think about this?
Definitely. We’ve been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we’ve done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.
Well, I was over at AdTech 2008 today, an exhibit which shows off America’s best advertising/publishing companies. Today, I found many new ways to monetize our blogs and social networks through various different affiliate and publishing programs.
I did get a chance to run into John Chow and also ask my own questions about how to make money online and the secrets behind his success.
I figured to take a video and share it with the world so maybe it will help you make more money too:
There has been a lot of debate I have been seeing lately about quantity over quality in the amount of blogging and quality of our writing that we bloggers do.
I’ve been blogging for 1053 days so that’s an average of 11.2 11.6 posts per day. When I started out (for the first year) my posting rate was much lower than this - the past 12 months have been something of a posting frenzy.
I will say at this point - that apart from a few reposted articles and duplicate postings (plus of course my guest bloggers work last month) these have all been hand written posts. I don’t use any automated posting system (I’m pretty anti them).
If you look at a lot top blogs going around, they do break many of the reasons that were given for people unsubscribing. This particularly is so for ‘too many posts’. For example - if you look at Technorati’s top 100 list you’ll find that the top 10 post an average of 20+ times per day (I’m taking those averages on what they’ve done so far today - so it’s probably higher). So obviously there’s some disconnect between the reasons that ProBlogger give as a reason to unsubscribe and what’s going on in the blogosphere.
There is clearly advantages to both posting a lot daily or posting less with focus on quality. But do understand quality isn’t everything. Sometimes, people “like” to skim most of your blog posts until one headline catches their eyes.
As you’ve probably heard a hundred times “Content is King”! I personally believe that this is true. Yes you have to do marketing, but in the end, if you have really good content, your blog will be read because others will market it for you. Eventually, I settled at two posts a day, which allows me to write a good quantity of posts, but at the same time maintain my standard of quality for each post.
You go look at his blog and look at some of his stats and how quickly he grew his blog, you will know what I mean. Aseem claims he’s making $100 from AdSense these days and it only took him 6 months!
Quality over Quantity - if you’re a niche blogger, prioritizing quality over quantity is a must. It doesn’t matter how frequent you post (of course, must be a acceptable frequency! not once per year!!) if you post ‘em good. Remember, snipers don’t waste too many bullets to get something done. Accuracy of the shot and quality of the post is the key.
It’s true and I completely agree that blogging is the same. If you have lots of money to throw away, you can hire 30 bloggers to post 30+ daily “quality” posts, which is what the Top 100 bloggers in the world are doing.
But if you don’t have that money, you might be better off hiding in the bushes and sniping off your target one by one. The better the sniper you are, the better niche blogger you will be and blogged about.
In all, I think 3 to 5 blog posts per day is necessary in order for your blog to rise in popularity, crawled often by search engines like Google, and also provide enough information for people to browse through.
However, if you are blogging about something completely ‘niche’, some topics like “The Athlete’s Foot Blog”, then you might get away with 1 or 2 posts per day.
Above examples are simply for reference but in my experience, I have tried both gattling gun and the sniper method. The problems exists for both methods since the number of your daily posts increase, readers are less likely to comment and interact within the blog unless that readership is big like Engadget or ValleyWag.
On the other hand, sniping 1 post per day is not such a good idea since it only tells Google that your site is updated once per day. You need to let that Google robot crawler thingee that your blog is updated at least every couple hours, if not every hour.
So, the question is, how many posts per day do you blog and do you focus on quantity or quality?
I used to average 30+ blog posts over at Zedomax.com, which is what my blogger friend Phillip over at Makezine.com was doing. But I have settled down for less for quality, around 3 to5 posts, meaning I only try to post the “really funny or interesting” posts, not all the tech posts.
I hope this helps your blog get on the right track now. (or did I confuse you?)
Well, I’ve honestly ran out of ideas for writing posts on this new site. We really need to make some money making scheme such as advertising with all the traffic we get but maybe we don’t get enough traffic yET.
Anyways, here’s some cool informational posts on Niche Marketing with Blogs and Wordpress: (Yes, Wordpress rules!)
OptiNiche - A blog that will help you build a niche blog site using Wordpress
NicheBlogsNetwork - A Niche Blog Network that seems to be hibernating right now.
