Tag: blogging

Who was that? Blog Comments

If someone has been spamming you with dumb comments here is a method to find who they are without even having advanced analytics knowledge.

This assumes you use WordPress Blogs.

See the screenshot of comment to get the IP Address.

It appears below each comment as a number like 89.99.139.67 or see below- the place for the Mouse Pointer

From Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

“A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.”

Take the number and search it here

http://ws.arin.net/whois/

Thats the American Registry for Internet Numbers.

or Search it here.

http://www.db.ripe.net/whois

Now that you know your friendly spammer is what do you do next

Forgive them

Tis the season of Joy.



How to be a BAD blogger?

Here are some tips to being a BAD blogger. This assumes that –

[tweetmeme source=”decisionstats”]

  • you are intelligent enough to know what you speak ( NO- STUPID CLAUSE),
  • are otherwise an interesting person in your offline life,
  • have a good story to tell about yourself, your product or your company ( NO BORING CLAUSES),
  • can spell-check (mostly) (NOT LAZY CLAUSE),
  • can create a free account on wordpress.com or have access to a website where you can post material (NOT LAZY AND STUPID CLAUSES)
  • AND otherwise have a desire to try and be a good blogger.
BAD

Step 1

Credibility

On the Internet everyone is an experienced expert in something.

Ways to wreck credibility-

  1. Offer ads from Adsense before your blog traffic crosses 100 average a day and maximum 200 visitors a day( not views).
  2. Take offers like free travel, books, software from people, products and companies- dont disclose that- and pump them up by flattering reviews.
  3. Scratch the back of a fellow blog monkey- Also known as you praise me in my blog- I will praise you in mine and we think we fooled everyone that we are just networking.
  4. Use shock words and images to differentiate.
  5. Offer ads from Non Adsense advertisers before your traffic crosses 500 average a day and maximum 1000 visitors a day( not views)
  6. Have only ONE advertiser and offer PRIME placement to news of it AND IGNORE corporate rivals completely.
  7. Claim to know people intimately whom you only know via Facebook Mafia Wars.
  8. Offer stuff to guest blogger and forget to follow up on the promise.
  9. Spam people on email and tell them how you are spamming them to HELP them with NEW stuff.
  10. Take money from sponsors, and free content from people. Call it aggregation and community. Pocket all the money
  11. Accept advertising from pornography. Claim you did not know what it was.
  12. Give tips on hacking websites. What goes around will never come around, right?

That should wreck your credibility completely. To build up your credibility ,  do the reverse of the above.

Hard Work

Hard work never killed anyone, but try to blog on boring stuff. Or on politics ,guns, gays and religion (preferably at the same time)

  1. Post a stupid  picture of yourself in the about page  and tell yourself people don’t care on photos anyway.
  2. Touch up your photo image by ADOBE Photoshop or Post an image 10 years younger (or 10 pounds thinner).
  3. Choose a bad theme. Like Violet background and yellow font.
  4. Post images of your kids or your vacation in a professional blog OR /AND post images of your computer or conferences in a personal blog.
  5. DO NOT SPELL CHECK.
  6. Use HTM4.0 . Pretend that CSS is a hit TV show.
  7. Pretend SEO , Tags and Categories is for others. DO NOT make it easy to search your blog.

WRITING

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer – and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf ( from http://koti.mbnet.fi/pasenka/quotes/q-writ.htm#Writing%20is%20hell

  1. Write on politics and guns on a tech blog, or technology on a politics blog.
  2. Write dis jointed sentences in a hurry and claim it’s okay people wont notice anyways.
  3. Write only in text without ANY Images.
  4. Write 5 posts a day. or Write once in 5 weeks.
  5. Never explore VIDEO or AUDIO in your blog. Podcasts are for frozen peas.
  6. Have an ego bigger than your talent. Write about it.
  7. Be an expert in social media without crossing 1.5 years of blogging, or 25000 unique visitors. or 100,000 views on Internet. Twitter followers and Linkedin connections doesn’t count. Facebook  Fans don’ count either.
  8. Generally make an ass of yourself by not editing or not proof reading your posts.

This should generally make sure that you become a BAD blogger, your blog traffic never crosses into two digits a day and you get back to work on your day job which you are probably good at.

If you do that, tell everyone blogs don’t matter in the 2010’s just as websites never mattered in the 1990’s, or Novels in the 1980’s, or TV in the 1950’s or Talking Pictures in the 1930’s.

Yup.

DecisionStats :Lies , True Lies and Statistics

In keeping with a promise-

here are transparent Decisionstats.com stats-

I now have 5898 views in October (

I moved from a self hosted WordPress site to a WordPress.com site that I regularly backup the export file- because of repeated hacking attempts)

Thanks to bad health- I can no longer travel to conferences- I recommend that you do a live streaming of the videos and all sessions. Saves the environment lots of carbon debt. Expands your potential audience by a factor of 10. Saves you money, too.

Ads- Its almost Christmas- so here comes my Hat- 200$ per month for ads, $25 for newsletter ads ( goes to 450 people PER post) . 3months minimum.

Not accepting exclusive ads to maintain editorial integrity and neutral behavior. Not accepting Click per Conversion Ads ( Does this look like Britney Spears blog?) This means if I shout on the phone to certain Mr Smith , I can do so with a clear conscience ( and voice).

Money goes to supplement my research. I am currently working on HPC and parallel algorithms ( once I get off sick leave). I am trying out parallel R on MPP clusters ( but also studying my latest acquisition a book by SAS Enterprise Miner ( courtesy the lovely elegant SAS Publishing people )  and if it can be done on an Open MPI framework ( probably can’t).

Q- If God was a Blogger, What would HE say?

 

DecisionStats

 

A- God wouldnt say anything if HE was a blogger.

He would write it all down instead.

 

 

Experimental Ad AuDio-Video

As an experiment I will be putting Random Images /U Tube songs in the next 7 posts/ post this week. This would be viewable only by reaching my site and not the RSS ( now restored to full rather than summary).

Let me know if the server hangs ( sigh!!) or if you find them distracting.

or if you know a better song.

How NOT to ask Questions/ Comments

I got this great website from Joshua Reich of i2pi

Basically it tells newbies on how to get better effective help online while learning new tech stuff, by lucidly explaining basic community volunteer behaviour.

Citation:http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Rodin_TheThinker

hackers have a reputation for meeting simple questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes looks like we’re reflexively rude to newbies and the ignorant. But this isn’t really true.What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

We realize that there are many people who just want to use the software we write, and who have no interest in learning technical details. For most people, a computer is merely a tool, a means to an end; they have more important things to do and lives to live. We acknowledge that, and don’t expect everyone to take an interest in the technical matters that fascinate us. Nevertheless, our style of answering questions is tuned for people who do take such an interest and are willing to be active participants in problem-solving. That’s not going to change. Nor should it; if it did, we would become less effective at the things we do best.

We’re (largely) volunteers. We take time out of busy lives to answer questions, and at times we’re overwhelmed with them. So we filter ruthlessly. In particular, we throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners.

Kind of explains why Bloggers delete some comments on  blogs as well 😉

Image Source: wikimedia.org


Does Twitter reduce Blogging ?

One more post on Twitter you may sigh, but wait. I am examine Twitter as an economic complementary or substitute product to Blogging and trying to come up with a mathematical proving rule to dis prove the Null Hypothesis-

Twitter does not affect blogging of individuals or communities as a whole. or does it ?

Twitter reduces blogging because

  1. Twitter is easier to do. Creating a blog is different ball game.

  2. Tweeting is two way and interactive while Blogging is mostly a one way broadcast.

  3. People respond to Tweets and re tweet them much more than they comment or forward blog posts. This is due to the inherent design of the softwares.

  4. Twitter is chaotic, but so is real life in which human brain processes different information from people like collegues, family, friends and sorts them. Blogging has a structure which helps the reader more than the writer

  5. It is easier to tweet and faster to get your point across than in Blogging.

  6. People allocate a set amount of time for social media activities and personal branding. Now this may be elastic but not totally so. Hence the rise of twitter time in people’ lives would mean lesser time to read and write blogs.

Now to a more quantitative study.

We get statistics from Technocrati – State of the Blogosphere and add in WordPress Stats to boot.

(credit -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ )

A chart of total WordPress.com blogs since launch:

(credit- http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ )

Note new signups can be seen for WordPress.com at http://en.wordpress.com/stats/signups/

Fatigue could be a reason why Twitter is hotting up while Blogging sees steady state growth.

The following figure from Technocrati’s 2008 report sums it best.

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

But if I compare June 2008 numbers of Blogging Frequency with the 2007 report – I am not able to compare the numbers

(Source -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-how-of-blogging/ )

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

It seems that Blog posts did get a boost with the 2008 elections and the current low traffic may simply be due to a lack of issues in Blogosphere. The rise in Twitter traffic is also due to creation of applications by third party providers and this trend has led to Twitter being the number 3 social media site.

Based on the data, it does not seem Twitter reduces Blog posts to a significant degree. After all Twitter is also a great medium to disseminate or spread the word on good blog posts.

It is simply too early to say that Twitter is reducing blogging though there seem clear trends along that line.

What about you ? If you were a blogger, is your blog post frequency affected by your tweeting activities.

I Want My WebTV

So here it is.

Another Blog monetization method AND
adding great videos for free to your blog
AND not crashing your servers.
The content site is yourBusinessChannel.com.

They use distributed servers to counter the big Video Sites like You tube,this keeps server costs low, and content distribution high, nice idea for business video niche. The content is top class , with access to founders of lulu.com ,google’s strategy .It is more like a Internet Television Channel.

You are a blogger too eh, Sign up here pardner