Curious Cat Comments: blogs

Showing posts with label blogs. Show all posts

Thursday, January 03, 2019

Most Popular posts on the Curious Cat Comments blog in 2018

The most popular posts on our blog (by page views in 2018):

* new on the most popular list this year (for the 2016 list we only listed the top 10)

The publication year of our most read posts this year:

2018: 1 post
2017: 2
2016: 1
2015: 4
2014: 2
2013: 3

2011: 2
2010: 4
2009: 1

Related: Most Popular Post on the Curious Cat Comments Blog (2016) - Most Popular Post on the Curious Cat Comments Blog (2011) - Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Comments Blog (2015) - Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Comments Blog (2014)

Friday, May 25, 2018

More Bad Ux by Google and the Value of RSS Feeds to Avoid Bad UX Practices

These are my slighted edited comments on the Vlogbrothers video by Hank Green on the very bad User Experience of YouTube Subscriptions that Google made even worse recently (I take it that is what happened, I avoid that by using RSS feeds to access the content I want to view).

Google has been really bad at UX (user experience) for a long time. I use RSS feeds to manage the content I want to enjoy and it works great (for blogs and You Tube and podcasts). Thankfully Google hasn't broken this yet (though given their track record in the last 10 years it would not surprise me if they do at some point).

Of course it will be easy for creators to generate their own RSS feed for their videos if Google does break it. I created several feeds on my personal site for (selected blog posts by John Hunter and a time travel feed for my blog posts*).

By the way Hank, it would be great if you would create RSS feeds that let me do things like subscribe to specific courses in crash course. Frankly, I have long thought it is pretty lame that this doesn't exist. This link to Crash Course literature videos for example should have an RSS feed of all the videos. Given Google's lame Ux it isn't so amazing that it is missing an RSS feed. But it is super easy to create a RSS feed from some [whatever your corporate overload name is - nerdfighters or ?] that let people easily have feeds that have good Ux and give them the granularity to pick what they want to add to an RSS reader.

As you mentioned in your video, while many users may have failed to take advantage of RSS readers, many power users have. So cater to them. Also encourage others to use this extremely useful tool which does many great things including shielding your from the extremely bad Ux practices of many of the huge internet giants.

* the Curious Cat time travel feed adds a new post each day using posts from my blogging history (which stretches back 14 years now).

Related: Curious Cat Travel YouTube channel - Filter Out Links to Lame Websites on Reddit - Getting Around Bad Web Page Layouts - Poor Web Site User Experience (Ux) for Investing Data

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Subscribe to blog posts by John Hunter

I have added an RSS feed to the blog posts I add to JohnHunter.com. I add items there for some, but not all of my posts, from my various blogs.

There is a list of blogs I author on my Curious Cat blog site. I write on several topics including

Management and Leadership
Money, Investing, Lifestyle and Personal Finance
Travel
Technology, Computer Programming, Engineering and Science
Society

I am currently in the process of adding items for the past few years (as I stopped updating this part of the JohnHunter.com website for awhile).

I believe RSS feed readers are one of the most valuable tools for those learning online. I wrote about what RSS feed readers are and how to use them previously.

Saturday, February 07, 2015

Travel Blogger Interview - John Hunter

I was interviewed on the Travel Blogger Interview site: Interview With Travel Blogger John Hunter of Curious Cat Travels

John Hunter at Zion National Park, Utah

I mention the first trip I remember was through Europe to East Africa (game safari) then to Nigeria for a year and then Europe on our way back to the USA. Before that, we spend a year and a half in Singapore. While I am too young to remember it, I believe even that influenced me (as did looking at all the photos of travels growing up). My brother has the same bug and has lived in Hong Kong and London and spent a year traveling with his family (South America, Africa, Turkey, India, Indonesia and Australia). We were infected with the travel bug by our parents.
...

Do you have any advice or tips for aspiring travellers?

Start with short trips that don’t stretch you to far from your comfort zone. Once you have some experience then take longer trips and try things that are a bit tougher. My Dad gave me some good advice – at the beginning of a trip expect to be ripped off in some way for $50, when it happens don’t let that stop you from enjoying your trip. You don’t always get ripped off but I think that is good advice to realize some problems are going to crop up and don’t let that ruin your day.

Read the entire interview.

Related: Interviews with John Hunter related to blogging, digital nomad life - Meet the Bloggers Series: Meet John Hunter of CuriousCat.com - Travel photos by John Hunter

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Publishing Your Own Book

Comments on How To Write And Sell Your Own Book.

I agree with this advice. I published my own book, Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability, with leanpub (I found them to be very good), I did a podcast on my book and using leanpub.

Leanpub allows you to import your blog to get started, which is very useful. I needed to do heavy editing but it was a nice way to start.

I can't believe how little control you have when you go through a traditional publisher; the book publishing process is broken . I didn't even consider doing that. For most people publishing using online services is so much better. Marketing is a big challenge, but the same issue holds for using a traditional publisher. Those that the traditional publisher will do a good job publicizing are mainly people that would do fine without it.

There is a small slice of people that don't have much name recognition but a publisher decides to try to make into a big success that are helped enormously by traditional publishers. But that number is TINY. There is a bigger (though still small) group that it is arguable whether traditional publishers help or not.

Also, just remember, no matter how you publish a book most sell nearly no copies. There are still plenty of good reasons to do it, even if you are not going to get rich off the book. A good book that gains you credibility in your field is likely worth many times more than the revenue directly from the book.

Related: Problems with Management and Business Books - Management Improvement Books: Where to Start - Podcast Discussion on Management Matters

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Comments Blog

The most popular posts on our blog (by page views):

Thursday, January 08, 2015

Most Popular Post for the Curious Cat Comments Blog in 2015

The most popular posts on our blog (by page views in 2015):

The publication year of our most popular posts:

2015: 2 posts
2014: 3
2013: 3

2011: 1
2010: 3

2007: 1

5 of these posts also made the top posts list on this blog last year.

Related: Most Popular Post on the Curious Cat Comments Blog (2011) - Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Comments Blog - The Most Popular Photos on the Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog in 2015

Thursday, April 10, 2014

What I Would Include in a Redesigned Twitter Profile

Twitter has rolled out a new profile design with heavy emphasis on photos. It is being rolled out over the next few weeks, my account doesn't have it yet. Follow me on Twitter: curiouscat_com.

The new large banner image is good and the positioning of the Twitter user's avatar in that is good. The old design had the Twitter user's avatar in the middle of the larger photo which wasn't a great design.

The changes are not that large it doesn't seem to me, just some layout tweaking for more image space and a tiny bit of change (the list of followers is not "card" like instead of old tweet stream like) but still minor.

I would provide more space for the user to explain themselves and link to their other web sites, interests etc. I would have a new profile page (in addition to the current tweet stream page) that let the user write few paragraphs about themselves. I would let them add several web links (maybe force it into specific patterns but probably not). If it was forced into a specific pattern you could say let them add, for example):

web site
blog
other Twitter profile (a reasonable number of people have for example, their work Twitter and a personal one)
YouTube
Reddit

I would provide interesting view of data that can be gleaned from the Twitter universe on the profile page. I would have a "tag" cloud based on their use of # in their tweet stream (I would also put this tag cloud on their tweet stream page). How about a tag cloud based on those they follow? A tag cloud based on their favorited tweets.

Provide a link to their top 20 retweeted tweets (and such like things top 20 favorites). Provide another view with a decaying over time variable (so new stuff would rise and older stuff drop - like Reddit but much more slowly).

I would let them select tags they are interested in (and based on tags selected suggest other tags and users to follow). I would show links to popular users on specific tags. I would likely and some Klout like ratings (including doing so based on topics).

I would provide interesting data mining information based on users. For example, take the list of people following me, show a list of the top 20 people followed by everyone following me. Show a list like that but tweaked to compensate for overall popularity (so lets say Bill Murray is followed by millions of people and Justin Hunter isn't 5 of my followers following Justin would put Justin ahead of the 15 following Bill). I think there are probably all sorts of cool ways to show interesting stuff based on the data Twitter has.

I would also turn off nofollow on some links (I am not that tied to how this was done, personally I would do it for all links, in tweets, profile etc.) based on algorithms determining the user was popular and should be "trusted" as not spammy. It might make sense to have a couple levels based on how good the algorithm detrained the user to be.

Twitter is stuck in this outdated model based on fear of Google penalizing sites that annoy Google and so Twitter marks all non-Twitter links as "untrusted" (nofollow).

Maybe Twitter is also using nofollow because based on the poor way Google is using nofollow Twitter's pages itself are pushed high by telling Google not to trust any links on Twitter. Google+ started off not telling its Google search people all their links were untrusted. I am not sure, but when I look now it seems like Google+ has started untrusting all links that don't directly aid Google (so internal links to a Google page - like the users Google+ profile are trusted and all other links are said to be untrustworthy). We really need the other search engines to step of their game as Google gets worse and worse about finding good content and instead is focused on finding content that don't run afoul of any Google dictate.

It is this fear of Google that results in sites marking all links not to their sites (or sites with which they have corporate allegiance - so large companies benefit greatly from the aim to provide very few links that are not marked untrusted, as they have large set of corporate sites and large corporate alliances).

There is so much more Twitter could do with profiles and customization they really should be doing much more by now.

Related: Google Falls Victim to Google’s Confusing Dictates, Punishment to Google and Google Users Likely - How Google Could Improve Results (2005, most are still needed) - posts on usability (management blog)

I would also let you delete direct messages. I have idiotic spam DMs and I can't see anyway to delete them.

Friday, August 02, 2013

Blog commenting options

I agree evolving the comments is good. I like the promise of disquss but it haven't gained enough traction. I don't trust a commenting system that exists outside my blog. The unreliability of services others provide isn't acceptable to me (look at how many services Google has abandoned - trusting that things will exist doesn't seem wise).

The ability to comment on a blog and have that comment shared (say via Google+ or Disqus or something) seems like it would be nice (but leave the comment in the blog itself so if Google pulls a Google and shutters their commenting everything isn't lost). It would also be great to be able to track comments for a specific person. I find it so annoying I post some of my comments on an old blogger blog I had so I can find them later, if I wanted.

Comments sparked by: How WordPress Comments are Evolving

Related: Your Online Presence and Social Networks for Managers - John Hunter online

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Blog Readers (for Reading RSS Feeds)

RSS feed readers are the best way to keep up with blogs you want to read, in my opinion. You subscribe to those blogs you want to follow and can group them into categories (management, engineering, travel, investing, funny, etc.). Google Reader become the most popular way to manage your subscriptions. But Google is closing down reader this week.

If you read blogs and are not using a RSS feed reader you really should try using a reader. It something I can't imagine doing without.

Thankfully one of the things Google does well is to let you retrieve the data you put into there various products. So you can download your subscriptions (which you should do). But now you are left to go find a replacement.

Last year I got Reeder to improve the experience of reading my feeds. But Reeder used Google Reader as the database for blogs you subscribe. I still like them, but they have done a pretty horrible job of providing details on what you are suppose to do given the imminent demise of Google Reader. I might just drop using Reeder.

The best option I found for me, is The Old Reader (which is super easy to setup and import your Google Reader setting from). I would make sure whatever option you chose has an export option (to get your subscriptions out). Some companies do not support good export options - I would pass on those companies products (for readers and other things).

Options include:

Update (2014): I now use inoreader.
NetNewsWire - [new addition] - free and open source RSS reader for Mac, iPhone, and iPad
The Old Reader - easy import, provides export, free, web based
Feedly - easy import, web based (and plugins), also has Android and iOS apps, can integrate with Reeder (and other front ends), $6/m (2022)
Feedbin - $5 a month (2022), integrates with numerous front ends Including Reeder)
NewsBlur - free version (then $3+ /month), web based and iOS and Android apps.
Reeder - iOS and Mac front end to access your feeds (looks like they are going to allow some backend options but the information is sparse (Feedly is one option)

Saturday, February 09, 2013

PageRank MozPageAuthority for Various Sites - February 2013

Google pagerank is a measure of the number and importance of pages that are linking to the page (with the public page rank lowered by Google if they don't like some things the site/page does). One measure obviously has huge limitations for capture the nature or value of any page (for more info see previous post). But it does tell you something. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-( Now I also track the similar Moz Page Authority and can take some solace if the MozPA goes up :-)

I didn't pay much attention at first to the SEO Moz ranking details. I tried to figure out what they were measuring then gave up because it wasn't clear and figured MozRank must be the equivalent of pagerank. Well MozRank isn't (I still can't figure out what it is a measure of - maybe primarily just measuring links without factoring in the "authority" the links) but anyway Moz Page Authority is the measure that is equivalent to Google PageRank. So in the chart below the MozRank is shown inside [ ] for October 2011, while Jan 2013 I updated to MozPA /10 (because SEO Moz also decided to scale MozPA up to 100 while Google PageRank caps out at ten).

Site	Feb 2013 [MozPA]	Oct 2011	April 2011	Dec 2010	Dec 2008	July 2008
PageRank 5 and MozPA > 5
Curious Cat Management Blog	5 [6.3]	5 [5.5]	5	4	3	3
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog	5 [6.1]	6 [5.3]	6	4	5	5
John Hunter	5 [5.3]	4 [5.4]	4	4	4	4
Management Dictionary*	5 [5.2]	5 [5.4]	5	4	3	3
PageRank 4 and MozPA > 5
Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog	4 [5.9]	4 [5.3]	4	3	4	4
Curiouscat.com	4 [5.4]	4 [5.6]	5	4	3	3
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections*	4 [5.4]	5 [5.5]	5	4	3	3
The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog	4 [5.2]	-	-	-	-	-
Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog	4 [5.1]	3 [4.9]	3	-
Six Sigma Management Resources*	4 [4.9]	4 [5.0]	4
Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site*	4 [5.1]	5 [5.0]	5	4
Investment Dictionary*	4 [5.0]	4 [5.2]	4
PageRank 4 and MozPA > 5
CSS 4 Free	4 [4.9]	4 [5.4]	4	4	4	5
PDSA Improvement Cycle*	4 [4.9]	4 [4.9]	4
Lean Management Resources*	4 [4.9]	4 [5.0]	4	4
Mortgage Rate Article*	4 [4.7]	4 [3.8]	4
The Future is Engineering*	4 [4.6]	4 [4.7]
The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer*	4 [4.4]	4 [4.7]	5	4	3
Curious Cat Code (programming)	4 [4.3]	4 [4.2]	0	0
Management Articles*	4 [4.3]
Curious Cat Gadgets	4 [4.3]	-	-
externs.com - internship directory	4 [4.4]	4 [5.2]	4	4	4	4
Living in Singapore	4 [4.3]	3 [4.0]	-
Architecture and home design inspiration	4 [4.2]	-	-
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father)	4 [4.1]	4 [4.5]	4	4	4
Living in Malaysia	4 [4.2]	3 [4.1]	-
Management and Leadership Quotes	4 [4.0]	2 [5.2]	2	2
Statistics for Experimenters	4 [3.9]	3 [4.5]	3	4	3	4
Curious Cat Web Directory	4 [3.6]	4 [4.7]	**	3	3	4
Management Matter (my book)*	4 [3.5]	-	-	-	-	-
Alumni Connections*	4 [2.6]	4 [5.0]	4	4	4	5
PageRank 3 and MozRank > 3
Deming's Management Method*	3 [5.0]	4 [4.5]	4	4
Credit Card Tips*	3 [4.8]	4 [4.6]	3
Curious Cat Management Comments	3 [4.5]
Rocky Mountain National Park photos*	3 [4.3]	4 [4.8]	4	3	-	2
Multi Site PageRank Checker	3 [4.1]	3 [4.7]	2	2	1	3
Good Process Improvement Practices*	3 [4.1]	3 [4.1]
Hexawise Software Testing Blog	3 [4.0]	-	-	-	-
Curious Cat Comments (this blog)	3 [4.0]	- [3.8]	-		3	3
Management Improvement Resources	3 [3.4]	3 [3.8]	3	3	3
Best Research University Rankings*	3 [3.4]	3 [3.8]	3	3	4
Curious Cat Travel Destinations	3 [3.2]	-	-	-	-	-
PageRank 2 and MozRank > 2
Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos	2 [3.6]	2 [3.8]	2	2	-
Johor Bahru Real Estate	2 [3.2]	-	-
Curious Cat Travel Destinations: Marina Bay Sands (Singapore)	2 [3.0]	-	-	-	-	-
Hexawise.tv	2 [2.9]	-	-	-	-	-
No PageRank
My Kiva page	u [6.2]	- [4.0]	-			3
Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership***	u [4.5]	4 [4.7]	5	4	4
CuriousCat Wordpress	u [3.6]	-	-	-	-	-
Justin Hunter (my brother)	u [3.4]	2 [2.9]	2	2	2
Curious Cat Travel Destinations: France	u [1.9]	-	-	-	-	-
Curious Cat Travel Destinations: Australia	u [1.8]	-	-	-	-	-

* internal pages
** new url, old url forwarded
- didn't exist yet
u unranked
[blank] I don't know what the pagerank was, sometimes the site didn't exist yet.

***I have noticed my high pagerank blog posts can be at PR of 4 for years and then have no page rank at all. Meanwhile MozPA doesn't seem to disappear the authority of those page. The PageRank can often reappear in another update (I even think they may come back in between updates but I might be mistaken).

Related: Google Page Rank Updates for November 2012 - Google and Links - Using Twitter Data to Improve Search Results

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Make Your Blog Welcoming

Good tips to make your blog welcoming, for first time and new visitors:

1) have a design that is distinctive (readers judge credibility partially on design) - also for 2nd and 3rd time readers it helps to have something they remember visiting before.
2) A photo of you helps as people connect visually. Which also helps them remember site on future visits.
3) About page that tells them what this place is about.
4) Let them see a list of popular posts, favorite posts...
5) Categories or tags can help - they can see what you focus on and can find more on topics they are interested in
6) Make RSS subscription link easy to see Curious Cat Management blog - About us page Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog - about us page

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Wordpress Plugins: Super Cache and Bad Behavior

Wordpress is a great blog platform. I started with blogger but switched to using Wordpress for my blogs (other than this one) several years ago. One great advantage to Wordpress are the great Plugins that are available. I have continually had problems with Super Cache and Bad Behavior, however. Getting errors including:

Cannot modify header information

[function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php on line 49

They are great plugins but seem to have not played together too well. They have tried to work out the problems and searches find explanations that this problem has been fixed. However I continued to have the problems when I upgraded a blog today. I tried various things that didn't help. I deactivated both and if I reactive super cache after bad behavior the errors seem to persist. However if I activated Super Cache and then Bad Behavior things seem to work fine.

Related: Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - 50 Wordpress Tutorials - Wordpress Admin Page Not Found - The First Blogger

Thursday, February 26, 2009

50 Wordpress Tutorials

Glen Stansberry provides some nice links in Top 50 Wordpress Tutorials including: Multiple Wordpress Installations Using a Single Database, How to Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 Minutes, Dynamic Sticky Pages, How to Write a Simple Wordpress Plugin and How to Add Photo Captions.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Last Google Toolbar PageRank Update of 2008

Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google has again updated the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar. Looking at my blogs it seems to be effective approximately Dec 16th. I have some blog posts from the 15th and before with pagerank. On the 16th I have one post with a pagerank and several without. On the 17th none of my posts have pagerank. This means while the pagerank was displayed today, the data used is from about December 16th, I believe.

The displayed pagerank is more fun than a measure that can be relied on. But I still find it fun to look at the pagerank values - except when they go down for my sites :-(

Check the current pagerank on your sites using our related site: Multiple Site PageRank checker. Updates from our Google PageRank Update, July 2008:

Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - 4 (July 2008), 4 (December 2008)
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog - 5, 5
curiouscat.com - 3, 3
externs.com - internship directory - 4, 4
Statistics for Experimenters - 3, 4
CSS 4 Free - 4, 5
Wordpress Themes for Free (new site from November) already a 3 Google pagerank.
Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections (one of my most popular pages since 1997) - 3, 3
Multi Site PageRank Checker - 1, 3
John Hunter 4, 4
Life and Legacy of William Hunter (my father) ?, 4
Justin Hunter (my brother) ?, 2
Curious Cat Articles and Links (this blog) - 3, 3
Curious Cat Management Improvement (v.1) I started the blog on blogger and then moved it to my own domain using WordPress in 2006, still it retains a pagerank of 3
My Kiva page ?, 3
Reddit management (new in September) 0
Curious Cat Web Directory 3, 4
Rocky Mountain National Park photos ?, 2
Boston Museum of the Fine Arts, Glacier National Park Photos, Parfrey's Glen, Wisconsin Photos, The Cloisters Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky ? , 0 ( much of the Curious Cat Travels seems to be without pageranks - which seems odd to me but...)

The Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog has actually been a pagerank 6 before, but I think it is a high 5 (of course I may be biased and that is just wishful thinking). Many brand new posts for example have ranks of 4, likely because they were on the home page when the snapshot was taken - Bird Brain, Passion for Mechanical Engineering, High School Inventor Teams @ MIT...). Another thing this means is those pages are really not pagerank 4 even today. The toolbar snapshot from Dec 16th shows them that way but only because that was the value on Dec 16th.

Now, I would guess they are probably really pagerank 2 or so. If I just look back at say random posts in August 2008 (or really any month) they will be between 0 and 3. I really don't understand the differences between say 0 and 2. While there is some difference, most of those pages have 0 links from external sites. And then I will have a small number of posts that get significant external links that maybe be 3,4 and even 5 pageranks: The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer, Sep 2007, pr 3, Best Research University Rankings, Sep 2008, pr 4; Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership, Jul 2007, pr 4

In my experience it is often more telling how the pagerank of internal pages. I find it that there are many sites with say a pagerank of 3 or 4, or even 5, on the home page but almost no pagerank on internal pages. While other sites with a pagerank of 3 or 4 have many internal pages with pagranks of 1, 2, 3 and 4,

Related: Google's Displayed PageRank - Web Page Authority

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Don't Forget Your About Page

The about page of a blog is often neglected. There are different options for what to emphasize, but I think it is wise to include an overview of the blog and links to some posts you would suggest for first time visitors. Think of it as a way of helping someone decide if they want to subscribe to the blog feed. Here are some of my blog about examples:

Curious Cat Engineering Blog - Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog - Free CSS Web Site Templates Blog

Related: Build Your Online Presence - Gallery of Free WordPress Themes - Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Gallery of Free WordPress Themes

WordPress Themes 4 Free is the newest curiouscat.com site. Find great, free, designs for your WordPress blog.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Build Your Online Presence

My comment on: Promoting Your Services (Link broken so I removed it, original post from PoeWar, very good site on writing and resource for writers)

I think another great way to promote your business is to write and post to your own site. I encourage management consultants (the people I most deal with - example: Peter Scholtes) to create an online presence that illustrates what value they offer. And for writers it should be an even better fit (you can show exactly what you offer - your writing). Setting up a blog is a very easy way to do this. You can use Wordpress to set up a free blog without any technical knowledge.

Then you can market by doing what you want to do: writing. You will have to take some other steps to market yourself also but a home on the web highlighting your writing is an excellent tool.

This next tip is probably most suited to someone getting started as a professional writer, or one just getting started online, but really can work for anyone. Basically unless you are so busy with paying work that you can't fit it in, I think it is a good idea (and at that point continue your blog by linking to the paying work).

I also think writing guest posts for other blogs could be a useful promotion strategy. You will increase those that know about you and gain links back to your site which will help your site grow. And, another benefit, for writers is you get to practice. You can experiment, and try new things. While I don't think of myself as a writer, I have written a great deal building my web sites. The sheer act of writing for different audiences as a guest blogger I think would be good experience for a writers.

I tend to favor thinking about marketing differently - especially for small businesses. Amazon spends very little advertising. Instead they see free shipping as marketing. They see paying referral fees to websites that provide them paying customers as marketing. Very smart, in my opinion. So for writers think of writing posts for your site and for some others as a form of advertising. Plenty of very successful people market using their free writing online: (example: Neil Gaiman, Joel Spolsky...). And some turn that free writing into a platform to sell ads and then make a living just doing that: Dooce.

Another good example of innovative marketing: Giving Away Your Service for Free on Weekends (from Joel Spolsky mentioned above).

Related: My web home - John Hunter - Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet - Your Online Identity - Innovative Marketing Podcast - Don't Lock Your Content Inside a Proprietary System

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Google PageRank Update

Google is again updating the published page ranks. PageRank changes daily (inside of Google). About four times a year Google updates the pagerank that is published in the toolbar. So for example, a new site for us that offers free CSS web site templates, shows a pagerank of 4. The fact that it showed no page rank last week and now shows a pagerank of 4 doesn't mean it increased in the last week. It has been obvious for some the site has been getting increasing traffic and likely had a reasonable pagerank. Now Google has just published it.

You can use another new site to the curiouscat.com family to check the pagerank for your sites: Multi PageRank Checker (pagerank 1 by the way). If past performance repeats with this update of pageranks the ranks can often move around for several days before settling down to the new rank that will be displayed for several months. Some of our sites:

Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog - 4
Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog - 5
curiouscat.com - 3
externs.com - internship directory - 4
Statistics for Experimenters - 3

Pagerank uses a logarithmic scale - so a pagerank of 5 is 10 times greater than one of 4 and 100 times greater than one of 3. Also say you have a 5.1 that would be 10 time greater than 5.0 - but Google only publishes 1 digit. So the real difference between pages shown as 4 and 5 theoretically could be anywhere from say some tiny percentage to nearly 100 times (if it were the lowest possible 4 and the highest possible 5). It seems very likely Google uses a logarithmic scale or something very similar but I don't think they have confirmed this publicly. Some people think perhaps there is a difference of say 6 times for each integer so a pagerank 5 is 36 (6*6) more than and pagerank 3. That is certainly possible.

Related: Google's Search Results (should factors other than user value be used?) - Google's Displayed PageRank - Web Page Authority - Are Paid Links 100% Untrustworthy? -

Sunday, January 27, 2008

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You

Somewhat interesting post. I find their crazy too small to see graphic that you are suppose to navigate with the mouse and holding the button down another example of gratuitous flash. Why do so many people seem to insist on fancy less usable interfaces over simple easy to use ones?