I’m honestly excited when I came back to find an email from Eric Scalf of FyrePlace.com. Eric wrote a very pleasant piece about AmBlogger and also the new upstart SmackDash.com! One amateur site maybe a fluke. Two amateur Bloggers maybe a coincidence. Three amateurs Bloggers is a phenomenon!

Forgive me if I don’t contain my hopeless optimism. I think each of us is bringing a little bit of flavour into the Amateur Blogging scene. This is how Eric described us:

Where Amblogger is concentrating on the passion of blogging (and blogging, in and of itsself), SmackDash is covering the amateur monetization niche.

And it seems like FyrePlace will be some spectrum in between us?? [Sorry Eric, you didn't elaborate!]. The talks of an Amateur Blogging network sounds interesting. However, I feel that such organization is still too soon as we each have to learn to carve out our own voice in the Blogosphere. Though I will openly invite any AmBlogger with a good idea to approach myself and contribute to AmBlogger!

Finally, I’m more stoked than ever that there is a phenomenon brewing. Increasing number of people are tired of those Chitika ads, talks about heat maps, and generic 3-column templates optimized filled to the brim with monetization techniques. Networks like 9Rules with their beautiful Blogs will experience more and more interest from AmBloggers disenchanted with monetized layouts, all the professional talk going on, the Blogger cruises/conventions and talking about their AdSense Christmas gifts. I’ve got much more to say on this, but I’ll target and focus the discussion in future Blogs individually. Stay tuned!

P.S. I’ve added a Proud AmBloggers section to my side bar! If you are a proud Amateur Blogger, why don’t you let everybody know!

That sounds like an introduction to a pRon site! Though if I were in that industry, I have the potential to make more money! I used to have a friend in University that was a huge operator in the Taiwanese pRon website industry. He’d make very good income, much more than many of the graduates who found great jobs. But again.. I digress.

Getting back on topic now! Seems like I can’t tear myself away from Blogging even if it were the Lunar New Year. I just wanted to point out a curious site that popped up on my radar. The site is called SmackDash, and Justin, the site operator explains its purpose here. It’s only in its infancy but the funny thing is that it also uses the Squible WordPress theme, much like my own personal Blog. SmackDash’s purpose seems to be a resource for Amateur Bloggers as well!

I hear the crowd crying, “the tables have turned!” Well, it’s not even close. I don’t place any personal importance on site design. Squible is a wonderful open theme and many people have used it for their own sites. I welcome Justin to the AmBlogger community and hope that one day his path and mine will cross to help Amateurs out there looking for their voice!

Will some of you kind folks give him a bit of copypublicity? I just want to help him promote! I can see the headlines now, “AmBlogger getting copied?” But I suggest that you don’t use that since Justin IS NOT copying.

January 1st is for the children of the sun. Today is the day for those who celebrate the moon’s glory! The Lunar New Year is not only celebrated by myself but by many other Asian ethnics as well, so to simply say Chinese New Year is a little bit of an inaccurate statement in this political correct world.

To celebrate, AmBlogger will be going on hiatus for the next 48 hours. Blogging was always meant to be fun, I don’t know how much fun it will be if I ever took it as my work (go pro). Here, I wish for every Amateur Blogger out there to be able to inspire and get inspired through their Blogging, help someone discover and also help themselves rekindle their passion, in the Year of the Dog.

Speaking of Dog, I love that Google has changed their logo for the Lunar New Year. They’ve always cared about the little things, the little details and included every one in their celebrations. That’s why they can differentiate themselves from other search engines, and built a community following.

Many other Blogs have also reported on Google’s Holiday AdSense themes for the Lunar New Year. I won’t repeat or repost what they’ve all said. My view about Google slowly moving towards using images in their contextual text ads is that they seem to be on the right track! It’s a no-brainer that images draw your attention, and attention is always welcomed where advertising is concerned! The point is not to be annoying with those images. A cute dog faded into the background can only help, not hurt these. If your site has been showing these ads, what were the clickthrough results? Do Share!

I loaded up the site today and was surprised to see my Feedburner circulation stats at 0 readers. So I quickly logged into Feedburner and was confused to see Live Circulation stats at 23 readers.

A quick hunt for the definition of circulation on Feedburner reveals this:

An approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours.

I don’t think 24 hours is a long enough timeframe to decide if a user has decided to unsubscribe from your feed right? It may work for the big boys, but again the amateurs who don’t post frequently, or who don’t garner enough traffic are left out in the cold?

I also see wild fluctuations with other sites that use the Feedburner button (the one to the right of my profile picture). Most prominently, I’ve been noticing that Darren’s Feedburner stats have been fluctuating from the 1000s to 3000s and back down to the 2000s. Darren clued me in to a WordPress Plugin for Feedburner that helps to reflect more accurate stats for reader circulation, but now I wonder. Hmmm…

Update: Within 15 minutes of posting, my Feedburner button is back up to 25 readers! And my Feedburner feed is not displaying this post. Am I reading too much into this? Does Feedburner act like a Big Brother?

Update #2: I was so stupid. This post was set on PRIVATE while I was drafting it. That’s why Feedburner did not display it in the feed!

[Note: RFC stands for "Request For Comment". I would like to solicit opinions. If you think this is a link bait, you have the right to refrain from linking to this Blog]

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion provided an interesting morning read while I was sipping my coffee. The short post covers the fact that Ed Kohler is publicizing a “hack” to boost your Technorati profile. The hack works by proactively pinging Technorati about sites that link to you who may not have pinged Technorati themselves. Steve is of the opinion that its unethical to ping for other people. While Ed believes you deserve the recognition should they choose to link to you.

My RFC is whether AmBlogger should go ahead and optimize for Technorati? I am pretty sure that AmBlogger will be elevated to the top 100,000 Blogs on my Technorati profile if I choose to do such an optimization? To me, it’s very weird because that would mean AmBlogger would trump my own personal site VinceChan.net, which holds sentimental and personal value for me.

What is the debate?
There are quite a few sites that have linked to AmBlogger due to the “Copyright Wars” recently that have not shown up in Technorati. There are also many sites that refuse to link to AmBlogger. I believe its the right of the Blogger to link to whomever he/she pleases. But if you link, is there also an implicit release of permission for the linkee? Can we link to anyone we want to without any moral issues? What are the rights of the linkee versus the linker? The arguments seem to center on this because Steve is fighting for the linker while Ed is fighting for the linkee.

To modify an old saying, “Mob me once, shame on you. Mob me twice, shame on me…”. This RFC is to prevent me from making another bad decision. What do you think?

Nicolas Garr has a fascinating read on his Blog titled The Amorality of Web 2.0. He displays his perspective of the new World Wide Web, criticising its rampant Amateurism and citing a few examples from Wikipedia in the section called The Cult Of The Amateur.

Though the post has a negative connotation throughout, I’m actually very happy about it because it shows that Amateurs are alive and well. Let’s take back the web! We won’t have it any other way!

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid.”

Maybe my mind IS going, the long hours of toiling has been getting to me lately, but I still reserve my night time to read my daily Blog feeds. Today, a few mentioning of the topic of “Writing For Humans, or Writing For Computers” popped up in a couple of high profile Blogs.

Steve Pavlina has a long post filled with tips about How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog). Point # 4 on the post was Write for human beings first, computers second. Darren Rowse also asks the question “Should Bloggers Write for Humans or Computers?” on ProBlogger.

After reading the two posts, I’m left perplexed. The thought of writing for computers has never occured to me. Of course, AmBloggers are not immune to SEO desires. There are many who’d like to publicize their writings. Though like Darren said, it can become a huge distraction; one that most AmBloggers would not undertake.

I regularly read and occasionally engage in SEO practices, but only to the extent of optimizing permalinks, meta tags, and other non-content related activities. Seems like writing a post for computers means that you would target keywords. I’ve never done that and wouldn’t know where to start. The furthest I would go is to make sure I highlight technorati tags on my Blogs. Does that count?

When I put my fingers to the keyboard, I’m concerned with how my posts will sound, whether “human” readers will like it. Web crawling robots won’t give writers the recognition and feedback that they deserve. In the end, even if you have many computers liking you, if humans don’t like it… I don’t think AmBloggers will consider it a success.

One of the things I like to do is open any external links (links that travel to other domains) on my Blogs with a new window. For Browsers that are capable of tabbed-browsing, it presents an extremely convenient way to organize your web surfing by domains. Of course, if you are still using the archaic Microsoft Internet Explorer, check out what you’ve been missing and download FireFox!

The reason to open external links in a new window is to retain the old window so that the users can come back to surfing your site, viewing more of your Blog! I blog using the WordPress 2.0 platform as its easily the most convenient platform to customize your Blog and plugins are plentiful to be found. I easily found some WordPress plugins that did the job

Zap_NewWindow plugin for WordPress - opens external domain links in a new window automatically!
Link Indication plugin for WordPress - adds an outgoing link icon to every external link; very customizable and configurable! (I’ve installed this plugin and you can see the difference on this post!)

However, I wanted to strike a balance between annoyance and usability. I wanted to be able to customize even further; to pick and choose which links I want to open in a new window. For example, I don’t mind if users are going to my other Blogs from AmBlogger and don’t wish to subject them to a new open window. The majority of web surfers are still using IE and I know it certainly annoys me if new windows open up without my trusty tab interface.

The solution was simple. Since I don’t use the WordPress visual rich editor to (more…)