A bunch of great ideas in this post.
2012 is the year where social media oversaturation hits hard. We will scale back on our participation in social networks, and we will most certainly scale back who we choose to follow as sources. This won’t be because someone is bad or good. It will be based on whether the connection with that person adds value to the stream of information we’re cultivating or not.
Matt Gemmell says,
"One month after switching comments off, I'm a happier blogger and writer."
Short story shorter, about a month ago Matt turned off comments on his popular blog. His argument was basically that blog comments serve a very small number of visitors (less than 1% in his opinion) and cost much more in time and angst than they're worth. The people who do comment are either spammers or motivated by disagreement and are never in their best frame of mind. Also, the anonymity of blog comments can bring out the worst in people.
There are enough alternatives to on-site comments, that this move was feasible to him. People can comment on Twitter, through their own blog posts (like I'm doing here, I suppose) and via email.
His update today, here it is again, validates and affirms his decision with little to no downside, and lots of benefits such as faster loading sites, more distributed content being created on other blogs and twitter, no moderation of spam, and whiter whites.
There are many times that I've also questioned the value and benefits of blog comments. They tend to be a flash in the pan, and depending on the platform the blog is hosted on, it can be difficult to keep tabs on posts that you've commented on in various places.
But there are also some blogs that are a pleasure to read, due in no small part to the comments.
So while this move may not be for everyone, it's one that some bloggers can certainly afford to try, and perhaps they'll come out better for it.
RSS isn't quite dead yet. If you're relying on the browser to provide access to your RSS feed, you're leaving a bit too much to chance.
Understandably, we've all become very used to our browsers auto-detecting a blog's RSS feeds and providing a link somewhere up in the browser interface.
Like in Firefox we have a convenient RSS button in
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Do you feel like your participation on blogs and social media can be wasted effort?
I love blogging and social media, but much of it feels like I'm dropping content into a well to never be seen again (like delicious), or a fast moving river that sweeps it away (like Twitter and FriendFeed).
We've got all these great tools and social networks
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To complete the third leg of the comment system triathalon, I must test out JS-Kit. If you've been with me for a while, you've been through Disqus, Intense Debate, and of course regular Wordpress comments.
And now, I'm finally testing out JS-Kit's comment system since they just launched their new ECHO product.
I also thought I'd go
...I've resurrected an old feature here on jangro.com, the "Ask Jangro" tab.
I previously removed it because I was getting a ton of questions from visitors with DLP TV repair questions, when I was really hoping for affiliate marketing questions.
But now, I want to write more here and I just don't have enough topics that come to my mind as
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I love the idea of blog comment systems. I used to love disqus and intensedebate, but I cannot say that any longer.
Whether it's out of control spam, incompatibilities with themes, poor comment management, lost comments, and now duplicate comments, they've pushed me away.
I'm like a beaten spouse that keeps going back for more.
I just got
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At Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas, I was honored with their Annual Pinnacle Award for Best Blogger.
A few people who joked with me that now I've got to keep blogging.
But it is really no joke. I do feel some pressure, not only as an "award winner" and whatever spotlight that provides, but to seize the opportunity as Gary Vaynerchuk
...I announced this yesterday in a long rambling post about gaining clarity, why social media spreads us out too much, yada yada yada. In case I bored you with it before you could get to the point, let me make it more quickly.
We all come up with stuff every day that we want to remember or share. that may be an interesting link, a salient
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I've figured it out.
A few days ago, I publicly declared that I want to start a second blog, one that is for the stuff that I don't want to write about here on jangro.com.
I got a ton of great suggestions and feedback on how that should be named, but the best feedback was that I should just write about whatever I want on this blog.
That was
...For 2009, I'm planning to launch a second blog. This blog, jangro.com (you know the one you're reading) has a pretty well set purpose. At least in my mind it does. I frequently find myself wanting to write more personal stuff, about gadgets and tech, and other random things that deviate strongly from the core purpose of this blog, which is
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Many noticed that I removed the Disqus comment service last week. I did that primarily because I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and wanted to get a feel for what Wordpress was doing with comments recently.
That said, my loyalty to Disqus is waning because of how they handle my few posts with a large number of comments. I have one post with more
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For like two years now, I've wanted to add a forum to jangro.com. The primary motivation to do that is this single blog post:
How To Replace the Color Wheel in Your Samsung DLP Television and Save $400
I can't even begin to tell you the pain that post has caused me, not to mention the guys at Disqus who had to swallow (and choke on) all
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My long love affair with Disqus came to an abrupt halt several weeks ago after they introduced their new API plugin and the comment import functionality.
I was a little concerned about using it because I have a post here with over 1000 comments, and pulling all those via API on the back end with each page load would put some serious strain
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Since the new 2.0 version of the iPhone OS has been out, I've picked up a number of apps. Many have been games and otherwise a few productivity tools and web 2.0 app companions. But nothing has really hit me as being such a great tool as the Wordpress application.
In fact I'm in a hospital room waiting for things to progress with my wife's
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Daniel Ha announced via twitter this evening that a new version of their API plugin is available.
I quickly dropped it into the dev version of my blog and the only noticeable changes were support for video comments via seesmic (cool) and the look and feel is now the same as their JS version of the plugin. The tell-tale that someone was using
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I figured it was about time for a change around here, so I had a new template done up.
I wanted to keep the action stream on the homepage, but I got a lot of complaints that it took up way too much space. So now it takes up a little tiny spot on the homepage.
There was some trickery involved to get disqus to play nice with the fancy display
...There was a pretty major outage this morning at Disqus. Those of us who are using their Javascript plugin, comments simply disappeared from our blogs. Those of us who are using the beta plugin that puts the comments into the page on the back-end had some ugly PHP warnings.
Disabling the plugin will bring back the old school wordpress
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Today, Sam over at CostPerNews scooped the world on the news that the Seesmic/Disqus integration is finally complete. Sam, are you following Loren as Loic's most recent houseguest?
The guys over at Disqus have been delivering some steady improvements to the Disqus platform, and video comments are by far the most significant. Previously,
...As I mentioned in the podcast I did on friday, the Geekcast.fm crew, as well as myself and a few others acquired a new "fan" last week.
A person acting anonymously under the pseudonym of "Marky Zarc" posted a blog on blogspot, entitled lorenfeldman.blogspot.com including posts that not only made fun of us, but said some pretty hurtful...
No video for this post today. It's just pure geekery that just cannot be made any less geeky or any more interesting by staring at my talking head.
Have I mentioned before that I <3 Disqus? I think maybe I have.
And a big thanks to the disqus guys for adding in a quick feature request I had that allowed me to pull my own disqus comments
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Continuing on my everquest to reach blog comment nirvana, I've been evaluating some of the blog comment systems out there.
I really think that there's a sea-change coming in the way bloggers and readers interact. The lines will blur between the authors and the readers, and even between blogs. That's what needs to happen anyway, IMO.
In
...My favorite part of blogging has always been the comments. I enjoy participating in discussions on other blogs and I love when lively discussions happen on my own blog posts. It's what keeps me going. I love comments!
It totally blows my mind when bloggers have comments disabled on their website, or even when people require accounts to
...I've been thinking a lot about this recently. Currently my comment links are set to Dofollow. I've always thought that it is the least I can do to thank people who take the time to comment on my posts and contribute.
But I'm getting slammed by spammers. Until a few days ago, this blog was PR6. A PR6 Dofollow blog? Spammer heaven!
I
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Due to my long-time use of do-follow, this blog has become identified as a high pagerank do-follow blog. I do believe that the use of dofollow has had positive impact on this blog, but I'm heavily targeted by what must be cheap-labor outsourced blog comment farms.
These are real people posting pseudo-real comments on my old posts. Some of
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If you know me well, you know I talk like a truck driver. I do only talk like that among my close friends whom I'm totally comfortable with, or a bunch of other guys tailgating. Lucky you if you're one of them.
A few weeks ago I was at a good friend's wedding. The morning of the wedding we played golf, about eight of us. I'm sure there
...I posted recently about the dofollow effort and I actually think the number of manual comment spammers has increased since then. I haven't counted so it's just a gut feeling.
Are spammers searching for blogs that mention dofollow as a method of targeting sites that are worth getting links on?
It wouldn't be easy to locate blogs that don't
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I am in complete agreement with the no-nofollow/dofollow movement in the blogger community. I've had the dofollow plugin on this blog a few years now. I love getting comments, and I think that an outbound link is the least I can do for someone who has spent time on a meaningful reply to one of my posts.
There's a growing trend, however,
...© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
