The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase.

2) CommentLuv: This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors.  CommentLuv will give a title and link to the latest blog post of the commentator.  This deep link will help them in the Google rankings.  It also makes you a popular destination spot.  Once again you can get some comment spam, but that is trivial as having a link directly to their website paints them as an asshole should you choose to publish it.  The same rules for moderation apply with CommentLuv.  This plugin also adds “Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post” which is another popular Google search phrase.

3) Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin requires a little bit of work.  You have to replace your themes comments.php with the provided comments.php before activating the plugin.  This is a simple matter and you will likely want to edit the plugin itself through the WordPress Plugin Editor.  I find the default border color and width too light to really stand out and show the threads, but it is an easy fix.  This plugin also moves the trackbacks and pings to the bottom of the post rather than intermingling them with actual comments.

4) Quoter:  With Quoter you and your readers have the ability to both quote article text, but other comments.  If you run a hotly contested blog like politics or other charged subjects you almost certainly will want to use this with some sort of comment moderation.  It is powerful, and like the others has the power to be misused.  This is just one more instance where you need to actually work your blog rather than thinking you can sit back and do nothing.  Quoter is another plugin that will require you to add a bit of code to the comments.php.

5) Subscribe To Comments: This plugin makes it easy for people to track new comments by email of posts they care enough to comment on.  “Subscribe to comments via email” is another Google search phrase popular with people looking for blogs to post on.

All in all you have to ask yourself do you want people who are searching for places to comment?  My answer is most definitely.  There will be some assholes who leave spam, but most people are going to read the article and post something relevant to avoid linking their name and blog with spam activity.  Not everyone who searches for these terms will comment on your blog if it isn’t interesting so you must have good content.  in the end you really have to decide what level of commitment you your blog and its readers you want to have.  If the answer is very little you probably should just quit blogging.

BlogBoy doesn’t often make political stands when it comes to the online world, but this is one that can’t be ignored. There isn’t a blogger alive who doesn’t need to consider freedom of speech issues in fact. In Yahoo news this morning they write about public online spaces not having the same freedom of speech rights as say your public park.

‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
“Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content
that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their
own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they
cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.”

That might sound ominous and horrible, just like everything that the Bush administration has done for the last seven years, and in a way it is all of that. On the other hand that is the nature of doing business. Suffice it to say blogging is a business or at least you should be thinking of it as such if you ever plan to make money.

These companies be they MySpace, Yahoo, Google or even your own hosting company all have an image to maintain. If you associate yourselves with them and threaten that image they have every right and not to mention a responsibility to their stock holders to maintain that image even if it means pissing off a paying subscriber. That is called risk management, the world revolves around it. Yes, sometimes it seems unfair, but life isn’t fair. If you think life should be fair take your candy ass somewhere else because I can almost bet I won’t like you or really care what you have to say.

Do you see how that works or get the subtle of what I have just told you? This space is mine and there is very little you can do to stop me from saying what I want. if this was MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal I could could still get away with telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’, however there are plenty of places I couldn’t and keep my account very long. Just as i could get away with saying what I would like to do to Cat Deeley or Kourtni Lind on those same places, I couldn’t tell you the same thing about the teenage girl who lives across the street. Not that she interests me in the least, I could tell you what I would like to do to her on my my own blog if I had such an interest. While I don’t have an unlimited ability to say those things because of the agreement I have with my hosting company, it certainly lets me go a lot farther than any community blog will.

Now if I wanted to write twisted perverse stories about the girl, i am pretty sure I couldn’t get away with that very long with Host Gator, especially if I used any sort of details. More precisely, I could until someone told on me and my account just disappeared. I am not willing to run that risk, even if I do get daily backups of all my databases and have every post stored locally for all of my blogs. I like the price I pay for hosting and get good service, so my risk management assessment says no to cute blond mid teenage girl meets thirty something blogboy who turns out to be the sperm donor that gave her life porn stories. There are hosting companies that would let me host that and wouldn’t even bat an eye because it is tame compared to some of what people post. Those companies have made risk assessments too, and charge you accordingly.

When it comes right down to it if you are a blogger and want to say what ever the hell you want, there are some rules you need to pay attention to. First unless your speech and ideas are very tame, you risk losing an account almost anywhere you go. If you want to say what is on your mind pretty much unfettered then you need to get yourself a domain account with a good hosting company, click the Host Gator ad to your right for a really good deal. Lastly if you are going to publish what amounts to porn, get a hosting company that specializes in and allows it.

Before you say you shouldn’t have to put up with a company interfering with your right to say what ever you want while using there service it is time to ask yourself if you want to be called a hypocrite. If you blog and use any sort of spam filter or moderate comments you are censoring another person’s speech. Know the game, know the rules and know that you will always be playing by someone else’s rules…

Digg is probably one of the best tools you can use for driving Traffic right to your sight, but it is not for the timid. Getting Diggs is like selling cars. When I started selling cars I was on the used lot and my Sales Team Manager told me something the first day which has held true any time I have sold things. Bill told me, “Brad selling cars is like getting pussy. If you don’t ask them to do it you aren’t getting it.” Getting a Dugg is a lot like getting pussy too.

I have been following a couple of posts elsewhere. There seems to be a lot of bloggers that want the traffic Digg can bring but aren’t willing to ask for it. Instead of getting pussy, most of them are pussies. If you aren’t willing to promote yourselves, then why the fuck should anyone else waste their time promoting your worthless ass? If you want to be popular do your own part in making it happen.

If you are worried about looking like some self promoting ass with no more manners than you have guts, then join a Digg team. Hell if you are willing shout to your entire friends list a dozen times a day for the team I might even let you join mine. It will never matter how good your content is if you are the only one stroking yourself. If you want to be noticed in the ever expanding blogosphere then you need to be proactive and quit waiting to be sexy on Digg.

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/social-networking/digg-this/feed/ 1 http://bradtheblogboy.com/feeds/rss-what-the-hell-is-it/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/feeds/rss-what-the-hell-is-it/#comments Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:00:06 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=37 Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this:

Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on.

So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web based readers like Google or into your favorite reader program. I personally like MS Outlook for this since it is what I read my email from several a dozen different sources, have my daily calendar and so on and so forth. So the question is why would you want to subscribe to a feed when I could just go to the website. The answer is pretty simple time. You are already opening a program or going to a single site for your email, so adding one more thing to check saves you time. If you are a voracious feed reader like me, I can quickly check to see if over a hundred blogs I read have new posts in just a few minutes. I can decide if I want to go and comment read the full article if it wasn’t posted in the feed, or just skip on by. I literally save several hours a day by using a feed reader.

So which is the best method to use a program or a website? That is really a personal things. For me it is a program, because that is how I check my email and it is open all the time. If you are on the go and want to check it from any number of computers or cell phones, then a website reader is probably better. Can you use both? Sure, though if you check as many as I do regularly you would probably only want a small list in for going mobile.

That is the long and short of it. Syndicated feeds are good for people who surf blogs, which means as bloggers you should learn to make the most use of them. Secondly you can get a feed of comments posted to your blog which is extremely helpful for bloggers who want to respond to comments on their blogs.

A new feature for me is a link to another great blog post about blogging. Today’s goes to, Sara at the Pajama Professional with How to Develop Mad Skills and Market Insight