RSS Feeds: Catching Up on Reading After a Holiday
Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Information Marketing, Search Engine Marketing |
I just got back from two weeks holidays and as anyone who has ever taken a temporary break from their job will know, the feeling of coming back refreshed and relaxed can quickly evaporate when faced with the mountains of email that quietly build up. Realising you have about 300 emails you need to sort through, prioritize and action can be quite daunting. Something else to consider is if you, like me, read or track a large number of blogs, taking two weeks out from checking your RSS Feeds can also provide you with another massive list of interesting (though not necessarily productive) articles to peruse.
Information overload combined with the utter irrelevance of many blog posts suggests that it’s not practical to read everything and anything a given blogger writes about, and the cost to productivity of reading, thinking and planning your next move instead of actually making a move can leave you feeling like you’re wasting a bunch of time and leaving yourself mentally and emotionally drained.
So what is one to do? Certainly trimming back the less-than-stellar quality blogs from your RSS reader will free up some of your time. Unless you’re actually getting something out of the research you do, however, you will still feel like you’re wasting time. My goal today (apart from catching up with my pressing workload) is to scan (not read) the 30, 40 or 50 odd articles I just loaded and write here the gist of the article and what I’m going to do with this new information. I’ll also be making brutal decisions on whether or not to remain subscribed to the various blogs on my RSS list. EDIT: That was the intention, I’m not sure I succeeded. Brace yourself for disconnectivity.
Have at you, blogosphere, this is what I got:
Shoemoney
Google Maps User Feedback on Shoemoney
Jeremy is talking about Google allowing users to contribute feedback/reviews relating to businesses listed on Google Maps. I’ve noticed that Google has already been pulling reviews from other websites such as TrueLocal and TotalTravel and I’d be interested to know how they run content partnerships like this. I’ll have to look further into this GMaps functionality and figure out what sort of marketing and traffic implications it may have for my current and future projects. It may be beneficial to submit some reviews of my own but such activity could appear biased and manipulative if I’m not careful.
Other articles from Shoemoney include:
- A video of Rand Fishkin talking about manipulating Wikipedia for SEO purposes.
- I don’t really have time to watch this just now so I’ll skip over it
- Next Internet Millionaire Reality TV
- Hmmm… sounds interesting but think I’ll save this for leisure time - if I come back to it at all.
- Dealing with Content Thieves
- The headline alone is enough to draw me in, having recently tried out some linkbait style articles and wondering whether it was a good or bad thing that within hours of release my article had been rewritten and posted on at least two onine video sites. I could consider it a good thing because the content was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (considerably more than my reach) and there was an attribution to my website. The bad things include:
- The attribution was plain text with no link - The only increase in traffic I noticed was a handful of extra direct visitors.
- Given the scale of the other sites, having my url in plain text on their pages actually meant they were outranking my site when searching Google for my domain name. I know a lot of people use Google as a browser and the danger here is that I lose direct/branded traffic to content thieves.
- The jerks who rewrote my content added some stupid extra details and if people did assume that came from my site then it gives a bad impession of my writing style (I don’t need any extra help writing badly).
- I think I’ll bitch about the lack of a backlink again… I haven’t measured links to the offending pages but needless to say every additional link my content brought to their sites is a link that could have been pointing at my page. Of course, I do lack the reach these guys have so I can’t argue that a thousands links to their version of my content would have equated to a thousand links to my version if it hadn’t been ripped off. The original version has not attracted many links at all but I’m putting that down to my own lack of experience syndicating linkbait contents.
- The headline alone is enough to draw me in, having recently tried out some linkbait style articles and wondering whether it was a good or bad thing that within hours of release my article had been rewritten and posted on at least two onine video sites. I could consider it a good thing because the content was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (considerably more than my reach) and there was an attribution to my website. The bad things include:
Ok, so without even reading Shoe’s article I’ve gone off on a tangent. My plan for efficiently digesting other blogs is not proving so efficient. Oh well, let’s see if I can’t pull it back on track.
Jeremy says
In my legal experience its always been about “intent”. If someone gets caught ripping off your RSS and you have ZERO instructions on how your rss can and cant be used then you are going to have a hard time going after someone ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU STILL DON’T HAVE ANY INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW YOUR FEED SHOULD BE USED.
If you really have a case its very easy to file a DMCA request to there provider and the content will be removed within a few days (google blogspot and wordpress are very fast in this). Also worst case scenario is that someone ranks over you for your own content in Google and you can send Google a DMCA and they will get nuked out of the search engine…
So there’s something I can action.
- Write a disclaimer and be vigilant,
- Consider whether it would actually be worthwhile to pursue content thieves, and
- Think about whether there is some way of using their distribution of my content as a positive.
Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneurs Journey
Yaro has pumped out some more well written content, this time he’s putting the concept of “Treading Water, Swimming and Drowning” into his own words and relating it to his own experiences. Yaro likes to write long articles and while they’re well structured for scanning I like to take my time with his material so I may defer this one til later on.
Starak is one of the most consistent bloggers I can think of and lately he’s been putting in a great deal of effort creating materials for his Blog Mastermind mentoring program which is a guide to creating a successful blog from scratch. It is aimed fairly and squarely at beginner bloggers but you can be sure that someone with Yaro’s knowledge, experience and dedication to blogging can’t help but bleed universally appreciable quality into his content. To promote his blog mentoring program, Yaro produced a fantastic free report known as the Blog Traffic Blueprint which is obligatory reading for anybody interested in blogs, blogging or even creating and promoting your own information products online.
Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com gives some examples of how wave theory applies to search, publishing, and monetization
Rand from SEOMoz.org has some tips for networking at conferences as well as how to buy links “under the radar”
Copyblogger is piquing my curiosity with typically well written headlines such as Time Is Not on Your Side: Time Management Tips for Writer and The Dangers of Humor
It looks like Tom Thumb from Road Junky spent $180 (and gave away a few books) on a Gonzo Travel Writing Competition and got no less than six fresh 1000-1500 word articles penned by guest writers, including three ‘honourable mentions’ that may or may not have received any form of monetary reimbursement for their efforts.
Sounds like a long tail of content production kinda deal… Imagine the possibilities:
- First Place receives $100
- Second Place gets $50
- Third Place gets $30
- Places Four through to Infinity get bugger all other than a mention.
By this logic, could you potentially spend a couple hundred dollars in prize money and have an army of aspiring writers produce enough content to keep your blog updates on drip feed for years?
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land advises that I must read all these articles on link building. I may or may not do just that.
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