This caught me a little by surprise. I was not expecting an upgrade this week. This blog has already been upgraded to WordPress 2.2. One great advantage of using something other than the default WordPress theme is that you don’t have to worry about the upgrade overwriting any of your edits.
Being the first to comment on a blog can bring you more traffic from that blog’s visitors as compared to being the 37th person to comment.
If you are like me, then you probably do not visit the blogs of every single commenter after reading a blog post, especially if there are already dozens of comments. So how can you beat others to the punch and comment early on blogs where the blogger has never posted on a subject that you are passionate about?
Answer: Custom Feeds from Search Results
I subscribe to the feeds from custom blog search results on Google Blog Search and Technorati using my RSS feed reader. For instance, I might generate a Technorati search “in blog posts” for the string “burnlounge“. That will return me a list of every blogger that is pinging Technorati who has recently posted with the string “burnlounge” found anywhere in the post. I then use the handy little “Subscribe” icon with the traditional feed symbol off to the right side of the search results. This will often allow for me to be the first to comment on blogs where a person posts on a subject that I have expertise or current interest.
I was approached by a friend to sign on to BurnLounge as a retailer. After tracking feeds from some custom search results, I would now define BurnLounge as a multi level marketing version of iTunes. Being able to read about the experiences that many other people were having with BurnLounge helped me decide to pass on this business opportunity.
The iGoogle thing is not a movement to raise feathers on the folks over at Apple who sometimes give me the impression that they think they patented the letter “i” by placing it in front of just about everything. I almost went out and registered ihoei.com today so I could join the movement, but I didn’t. I did check to see if the domain was available. It still is available if you are interested.
The Google Personalized Homepages simply have a new name. The Google Personalized Homepage, now called iGoogle is a blogger’s best friend in my opinion. There are certainly alternatives to the concept seen at iGoogle, like NetVibes and even MyYahoo! to some degree. The iGoogle pages can be filled with little gadgets to help track stuff all over the Internet. For instance, many people like myself, use feed readers to track activity on a number of different blogs and websites. I am a huge fan of the iGoogle’s Google Reader plug in for getting this job done. I use other gadgets, but the reader is by far the most used tool on my homepage next to a few embedded custom RSS feeds built from search results.
I am a little disappointed to cind out that this is not a movement against the MAC cult(ure). Can you tell that I use an iRiver to play my MP3s? Yes, I do get a tiny bit of satisfaction from owning a portable digital media player whose name begins with a small “i”, but is not manufactured by Apple.
