It’s common knowledge in the blogging industry that updating more frequently will net you more viewers and feed subscribers than writing fewer, perhaps higher-quality posts. Today, I wanted to address this topic and see if it is actually true.
This isn’t going to be just any run-of-the-mill review from me. Why? Because the application I am going to review is different in several substantial ways:
In my last post I asked the question, “how can I show how many comments my entries have in my feed?” I actually sent an email to TechDirt (since I read their feed and it has that feature) and Dennis Yang (who is on Twitter too!) wrote me a very nice explanatory email. Apparently, this isn’t as unusual a question as I supposed, because FeedBurner has already thought of it. Their support is built in to a feature called FeedFlare.
FeedFlare does many things, like allowing the feed owner to add subscribe and email this links to each entries, plus (obviously) number of comments. I think this cements my plans to move to using FeedBurner, there are just too many compelling reasons to not do it, and, it’s all free. That’s probably the best reason.
So how does this relate to Disqus and gReader, you are asking? Well, Disqus (pronounced discuss, I am guessing) is an online commentary-tracking system that “plugs in” to a number of different blogs and sites, allowing someone to sign up once (sort of like OpenID) but also keep track of all their comments across all the sites using Disqus.. where other Disqus users can follow their comments (like Twitter) and build a social network as well. I could write a whole review of Disqus and I think I will, but not today.
Moving on to gReader, I found out about this on the Disqus blog. What this cool Firefox extension does is enable active Disqus comment tracking and responding from within Google Reader! And if you use the bookmarklet, you can enable commenting on any page, even if that site doesn’t have explicit Disqus support! Very sweet.
I have a bunch of work to do actually, I am now itching on getting this extension installed, as well as switching this blog over to FeedBurner.
StumbleUpon isn’t very much like any social bookmarking site out there. And, in a way, that is good. If you are relatively new to web surfing, or even if you feel like you are going to the same 5 web sites every day, StumbleUpon is the perfect remedy.
As usual, I was messing around with a new WordPress plugin from Sphere (you can see the new link at the bottom of each post) and I decided to test it on my Twitter post. It did what it was designed to do and found a bunch of Twitter-related blog links, which, on a lark, I decided to open. What I found amazing was the variety of reactions that Twitter seems to be getting from different people.
Little did I realize that more and more people would use Twitter in ways that actually ignores the question “What are you doing?”
After starting to use twitter (a micro-blogging site that allows people to write small messages via phone, web and a number of applications), I am suddenly in the same situation where I am missing a prime social opportunity. Now that I a less awkward, more worldly (almost), it struck me how antisocial this all was.
Folks, you’re already Twittering and you don’t even know it! You’re just using the wrong tool do to it. Pick the red pill.
[Jeff] Pulver excitedly brought me over to meet an amazing guy named David Troy, who it turned out has 11,600 followers on Twitter. (That means they subscribe to and read the 140-character-or-less Twitter texts he sends out when he feels like it – some call it micro-blogging.)
When you are clicking around looking at different web sites, you are bound to visit one that you want to return to later. What do you do in that case? Simple, your web browser has a handy bookmark feature that allows you to save a link to the current site URL (otherwise known as a web address). Once you have a few bookmarks, you can organize them, get rid of the ones you don’t want any more, or even e-mail them to friends. However, web browser bookmarks are quirky — your web browser loves them, but if you want to edit already saved bookmarks, use a different web browser or even a different computer, bookmarks quickly become a pain.