Linking, tagging, pinging etc

Fern is concerned about his technorati ranking - a comment which I think he posts with his tongue in his cheek, but raises some good issues.

We blog not for the stats, but at the same time we hope that some one out there is reading and interacting with what we're doing!

We blog because we enjoy the connectedness that this brings, but it can be hard to find who is good for us to connect to sometimes.

The good news is that there are lots of tools out there to help with all this stuff.

Use a RSS feed to keep up to date with your must read blogs.

at the end of your post put a technorati tag. This is easy to do with Typepad, and most blogging platforms allow this. Tags are important as they help link things together and alert those following a particular topic that someone else is part of the conversation.

Link to blogs that you read, blogs that others could benefit from, and if you see something elsewhere and reproduce it on your blog then you should acknowledge your source with a link. Linking with others is not name dropping nor is it pretentious! It is about good manners and about honoring those from whom we've learned or been inspired. It also helps you climb up rankings and increases visibility!

If your using technorati then remember to use their automatic ping - that way we all know when you've written something new!

There are loads of other cool widgets, but for me the above are the essential things to do.

Comments

[Guacamole Girl]

Thanks Brodie. As a new kid on the blog (ha!ha!), I'm not up to speed on tags & RSS etc, but I'll try.
By the way, got any recipes for vegetarian jambalaya??

[brodie]

Guacamole Girl - ahhh vegie jambalaya.....I'm sure it can be done but I don't know how!

[Duncan McFadzean]

helpful post. regular blogging always helps, as does writing about what people want to read about as you've found I'm sure. I tend to just write what I want to, which prob works to my disadvantage sometimes (as I used to find when I blogged about Hearts FC and church - people just got confused, made lots of sense to me!)

[talkrhubarb]

Only slightly off topic since you mention RSS in the post.
RSS is an over complicated techie term for the very simple concept of news feeds. In my mind it's the best thing for the internet since the invention of the search engine. It's not just great for blogs, but for any other source of news or info. BBC news for example has loads of feeds, and it saves you trawling round loads of websites. Just look for that funny orange icon.
If you have a my Yahoo! account you're already inadvertently using news feeds as that's how they serve up the mish mash of stuff you customise.

While there are a load of programs you can run from your desktop as a news reader, I use an online one. Bloglines, but if you have a Blogger or gmail account you can already get access to google reader without having to create another account:
Google reader. Google describe this as "Your inbox for the web" and I think that's a pretty good description of a news feed reader.

[brodie]

Duncan - like you I tend to just write what I want to, or what I happen to be thinking about at that moment. I like blogs that are a mix of serious thinking posts but also random insights into other people's lifes.

[brodie]

Mr Rhubarb - Thanks for your techie input here.

[fernando]

Yes it was a tongue firmly in cheek comment.

However, I was making a subtle point (in an obtuse way). My technorati "magic number" had dropped 20 odd points in a few weeks. Maybe I had suddenly become unpopular with other bloggers, maybe it was a technical adjustment as technorati dropped old links - who knows.

As much as I know the "quality" of what I blog is not connected to numbers and incoming links quirky jumps like that are hard to ignore.

So having a laugh at them seems like the best strategy.

[brodie]

Fernando - I doubt that you have suddenly become unpopular. Perhaps there's been a bunch of people all stopping blogging around the same time - would that cause links to drop?

Anyway glad you can laugh about it.