Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

What Inspires Your Readers to Interact With Your Blog?

By Rachelle Chase Static content that talks to readers is not enough today, especially with the meteoric rise in popularity of online communities and social networking. Good content is still the key to attract and compel people to return to your site, however giving them more than static content and blog comments for interaction gives […]

Reader Appreciation Project: Putting Readers First

Ronald Huereca writes for the Reader Appreciation Project blog and recently caught my attention with My Thoughts on Being Paid to Post. When one starts blogging for money, there are new considerations. Who am I really writing for? Am I writing for my new boss that will pay me per post? Am I writing for […]

Live Up To The Expectations of Your Readers

In The Perils of Problogging, Stellify makes some very good points in the issue of having ads on your blog and the business of blogging. However, I want to point out a beautiful statement: If you call yourself a writer because you are a blogger, then live up to the expectations of your readers. More […]

Aggcompare – Comparison Directory of Feed Aggregators and Readers

I had no idea there were so many different feed readers and aggregators available. Aggcompare.com is the Directory of RSS Aggregators, listing dozens of feed readers and aggregators with their features. It’s not pretty, but it’s an amazing list. The features list is huge for each feed aggregator and includes information on which browser it […]

How Are You Communicating Online With Your Blog Readers?

Blog Herald’s Amit Agarwal reports on “More Ways to Interact With Blog Readers” offering an interesting selection of online communication options that integrate with your blog. The list includes Skypecasts, Gabbly, and Odeo. Are you using any of these on your WordPress or WordPress.com blog? How is it working for you? How are you using […]

Testing Readers: Survey, Polling, Rating, Testing, and Reviewing WordPress Plugins

Polls, surveys, ratings, tests, exams, and reviews expand the native interactive nature of blogs with collaboration between the reader and the blogger. They help the blogger to ask specific questions and get a measurable response. Ratings WordPress Plugins come in two formats. One which allows the reader to rate a post or its content and […]

Blogging Rants: Tangential Blogging Can Lose Readers

Over the past couple months in my travels, I’ve been interviewing a lot of old and newly found family members on their life and family history for my own needs and my new family history blog I’ll be starting soon. Today, I heard an interesting family story that I want to share with you. When […]

TechCrunch: Review of Online, Web-based Feed Readers

Techcrunch offers “The State of Online Feed Readers”, a look and review at what is available for reading feeds, the features available, and which ones score best. Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines. Google Reader […]

What Do Young Readers Want?

Poynter Online recently brought my attention to Readers Don’t Want Gimmicks, We Want News by Taylor Somerville, an article written by a young person on a panel recently exploring how to bring young people’s attention to reading newspapers. Young newspaper readers are no different than older people who enjoy newspapers (aside from being better-looking). We […]

Writing a Blog and Engaging Readers

By Special Guest Greg Balanko-Dickson – Remote Control CEO I have been writing online since 1998 I can tell you that blogging transformed the way people interact with a website. But there is far more to it than just technology, it is about: Solving a Problem, Your Readers Do Not Care About You Know Who […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Missing?

Frogs redefine my thoughts about amphibians annually. As a child, spring was for tadpoles and summers were for frogs in the swamps, ponds, and ditches around my country ranch in the Pacific Northwest. Moving to Oregon’s Coastal Mountain range west of Portland, my winters are spent driving up the foothills like a crazy person, avoiding […]

Blog Exercise: Inspired by Photography

We are all inspired by photography, a picture that motivates and inspires, that moves us, sometimes to the point of changing our perspective on a subject or on our life. With all of the power found in photography, over the next few weeks I will be offering Blog Exercises with the emphasis on getting you […]

Blog Exercises: How to Write about Something Someone Else Wrote

In the early development of the web, blogs were classified as echo chambers, vessels of redundant content as every original idea was shared, reshared, quoted, and spread across the web at rapid speed. Some estimates state that less than 2% of all the content on the web is original. It’s mostly regurgitation of the same […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]