visnum » Web 2.0

Do we expect comments or affection? How do comments affect your blogging?

Osman S Borutecene — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:49:25 +0000

Many bloggers pay great attention to the amount of comments they receive, in fact more than necessary. I have seen many novice bloggers who are upset just because of the scarcity of comments they receive under their posts. On the other hand, very successful bloggers like Steve Pavlina are not interested in comments at all.

We also see many, many successful bloggers like Robert Scoble or like Dooce.com, where comments reach at hundreds. For people who see the amount of comments would think that as a criteria of successful blogging. When they think like that, they would see only a little or no comments as an indicator of failure.

But it is not. Comment amount is not an indicator of your success. If you ask questions on your blog post and nobody comes up with an answer, then you may conclude that nobody cares but apart from such exceptions, it really doesn’t matter whether people comment on your blog or not. Recently, I met a couple of new readers from Facebook and they told me how helpful my posts on moodr are. Most of them pointed to one or two posts to be most successful and helpful. Those posts didn’t received any comments. Yet, people were very satisfied with them.

When a blog goes popular, other bloggers just go and comment there in order to gain visibility for themselves. When Darren posts something new or Tina posts something new, most of the time, people are there to comment for their own visibility. I don’t mean that all of those comments are not useful. There are very useful conversations on many blogs through commenting for all of us to benefit. I just try to add to my argument that amount of comments on a blog post is not an indicator of that post’s success.

So, bloggers usually expect affection in the name of comments and that’s pretty understandable. They put great effort in a post and tens of comments under that post is an instant gratification for many of them. However, know that this is not a criteria and don’t get upset when you don’t see any comments. Look at your statistics instead. How many people read that post, and what is the bounce rate of this post? If the bounce rate is low then you can surely conclude that your post has been successful.

The same is valid for pingbacks and trackbacks but not as much as comments. For backlinks, gaining visibility is again a primary motivation for linking. Don’t get upset by that either. But they are more important than comments because they built long term traffic into your blog. The only way you can get them is the usefulness of your post.

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Wordpress’ default theme and template are a complete mess

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:00:53 +0000

I am very upset about this sad realization. For the last couple of days, I was working on the design & development of a new blog. I will not name it now, it is still full of test posts and therefore it would be really meaningless to link to it right now. Anyway, I had a couple of options. To look for a nice wp-theme and fiddle it, to play with the default or classic themes and create a new look and functionality out of them or, finally, write one from scratch. The last option is the wisest option however it has been nearly 1 year that I haven’t been interested in any piece of wordpress code. So, I was also not familiar with versions newer than 2.0.x. Therefore I first opted for the second solution and started tweaking the default theme.

The default wordpress theme is a great failure. It is of course very famous because it is the default wordpress theme. First off all, it is not standards compliant. Especially the order and usage of CSS selectors are catastrophic. I will only name one for now. There is this header part, then there is this blog name section which correctly marked as h1. But then there is this description section marked as a div. This is the most common failure among amateur “web masters” who are just introduced to web standards. The description section should have been coded as a p class=”description” or p id=”description”. There is no need for a div. This is a big error but this is maybe the smallest semantic error in the whole wordpress default theme.

The CSS file is exactly a turmoil. There are many classes identified more than once and that makes it very confusing to work with them. The use of ems are a complete failure. So much that when you change an h2’s em value, it shows up in different sizes gradually. No, of course I am talking about the same class of h2! It is in the commentlist section. Go see it for yourself. Change the em value there, for instance change the em of h2 from 1.2em into 1.6em, it ends up showing growing sizes as comments continue.

And no, I am not using Internet Explorer. I am testing everything on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Konqueror (Safari), Internet Explorer 6, respectively. I can’t waste my time to tell all the errors in this default themes CSS file. I want to go into some other catastrophe that the web suffers because of those default and classic wordpress themes.

Many advanced wordpress themes are built by tweaking the default one or the classic one. And that’s a good thing, because once they put those two templates into wordpress core and ship them together, there is no reason as not to be sure about they are the right thing to go from. However, unless you strip all the CSS at once and start writing CSS from scratch by using selectors and classes from the template source, it is impossible to produce a coherent design. It’s awful. Look at the CSS file of the theme “White as Milk”. The author clearly state it in the CSS file as a comment:

THE FOLLOWING CODE IS DERIVED FROM THE DEFAULT “KUBRICK” THEME.

THE STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT IS IN MY OPINION, NOT THE WAY CSS SHOULD

BE ORGANIZED, BUT FOR NOW I AM LEAVING IT THE WAY IT IS TO KEEP

IT CONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, since almost all themes are derived from the classic or default layouts, it is almost impossible to change and tweak them for the majority. It’s not sufficient to know CSS, you have to master it to a degree where you can find some other people’s errors in it and fix them.

The classic template is not as faulty as the default template but it is also very deceiving. For instance, it doesn’t have a real footer where stands below all the content and sidebar. Instead, the footer stands just under the content. It is not compatible with the widget functionality of a standard wordpress installation. Even not with the latest version shipped!

Briefly, this is a shame. Many wordpress users just think that they don’t know enough CSS. They are wrong. CSS is in fact quite easy but it depends on good mark-up on the template side, and clearly written CSS files. The beauty of CSS and web standards is in their usability, easiness, practicality.

I don’t think that those faulty history of the default and classic templates of wordpress is going to end here. They couldn’t fix it for years right now. It looks like they are even not aware of what is wrong. The turmoil still continues with K2.

I had to heavily tweak the default template files on a very detailed level. This was meaningless. This can be a whole lot better.

I hope somebody pays attention to work on a such important issue.

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Creating original content

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:27:16 +0000

Are you concentrated enough to create original content for your blog or website? Creating original content is difficult, not because people aren’t creative enough but because people are bombarded with a standard perception. Many talented people set up a blog and then go research “big blogs” and look for what they do. This usually leads to procrastination and prolongs the process of a new, creative blog. People look at famous blogs and say “yes, I should look similar to them”.

This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.

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Myths, truth and opinion on pay per click (PPC, CPC) advertising

Osman S Borutecene — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:18:04 +0000

Obviously, I use Google Adsense to monetize several of my blogs. I am not a person who committed himself to make money out of blogging. I just evaluate, appreciate and use it. It is useful. It can pay the cost of my web hosting services.

However, as a geek and a former marketing / advertising worker, I do some research on the web advertising market. I do that research virtually irregularly. You cannot have enough idea just by looking at what I say on the issue. I am going to share my opinion anyway.

When it comes to online marketing, advertiser’s part is fairly easy in comparison to the publisher’s. The online advertiser have reach to many tools and these tools can measure the return on investment (ROI) fairly well. On the other hand, there are many uncertainties on the side of the publisher.

Whatever the publisher does in order to get an idea about what keywords (thus, what topics) to deal with, there is always a great percentage of chance involved.

The publisher can get the hang of keyword value mathematically but what about the order and the timing when and how the ads are going to be published. If you do every work on your part and don’t relay on a third party advertising publisher like Google Adsense or Yahoo Advertising Network, then results would be more predictable. In that case, your business will not be feasible because you will need great marketing budget and effort to promote your ad spaces. Therefore, this is not a solution to a more predictable outcome.

Suppose that you did research in order select a topic for your new website from which you expect advertising revenue. Then imagine that you finally decide on a supposed to be profitable topic. Then you work on your articles or posts and you publish them. You do everything to provide a good placement in search engines and you start displaying related ads on your website.

This is the publisher’s part.

Now, the fact is, any advertiser on your topic has a budget and his budget declines with every click. Since you are not the sole content provider on that topic, there is a great chance that his budget reaches to zero before any advertising are clicked on your website.

The problem is clear. There are no gambling at the side of the advertiser but there is a great effect of chance on the side of the publisher.

All of this information can be gathered in the future, maybe. Moreover, you can mathematically have the information as possibilities or probabilities but never as exact predictions of the real result.

So, this is why traffic and targeted traffic is so important. You have two competition. One of them is the advertisers budget that day or that hour. The other is the possibility of websites publishing something on the same topic. The only way you can have your way out of this situation is working on traffic. Therefore there are still a lot of catch-all websites. If publishing vertically on a certain topic would be the only wise move to solve these problems then we would not see that much website with topics on anything that comes to your mind at the same time at the same page.

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How To Keep It Together In A Web 2.0 World

Osman S Borutecene — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:57:57 +0000

Day by day, it’s getting more difficult to surf the net without losing your sanity. I don’t even mention the risk of getting blind between highly different color palettes.

Well, the trouble is that there are too much source of news out there. You want to stay updated and you don’t want to see bs at the same time. You have to eliminate and decrease your sources of news. Here are some tips to do just that.

Select a couple of technology evangelists and subscribe to their blog only. Keep the number of them at 10 max. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of Digg’s, del.icio.us’, slashdot’s frontpages and any sub sections that you feel it’s a must read for you.

The trick is that too many people blog about the same news and information but only a few people provide posts with valuable insight and credible information. You have to be selective.

Avoid getting distracted by news about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Myspace, and a couple more famous persons and web sites. You can be pretty much sure about that there is nothing new. If there is, you will always get informed by the blog posts of technology evangelsits that you have subscribed.

Don’t be deceived by top ten lists about best Photoshop tutorials, Youtube videos, hosting prices and alike. Those articles are usually made for making the front page on popular social bookmarking sites. If you will have the need, you can always make a search on those link sites and find them when you need them.

And finally, know that the web is for you and you are not here for the web. Web 2.0 is something that you will use. It is not there to use you.

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Robert Scoble Is One Clever Guy

Osman S Borutecene — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:53:28 +0000

Nowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.

I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.

His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.

Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.

For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.

Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.

There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.

My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.

Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.

By the way, among the ~~negative comments~~ blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.

update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.

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Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:28:24 +0000

I recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.

I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.

Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.

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Semantic Markup Is More Important Than Tableless Design

Osman S Borutecene — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:33:50 +0000

I appreciate tableless design and I am an eager advocate of a semantic web, divs instead of tables, content that form the shape, all the bells and whistles and the better accessibility it brings.

Unfortunately, there are still problems with tableless design. For instance, there is this firefox bug about two divs nested in one. Firefox does not recognize the width of the first div when you nest two divs inside a container div. More important than that, Internet Explorer still cannot handle divs properly.

Of course there are always workarounds to those problems. You can create tableless cross-browser design via css hacks, conditional internet explorer html interpretations, etc.

However, when it comes to everyday designer with deadlines and less time for the learning-curve of tableless design and css hacking, design without tables can become a nightmare just because of cross-browser compatibility issues.

The optimum solution to this might be using tables less than before and creating a design where tables are just used for main positioning. This can eliminate the time and effort until each and every designer have her/his time to develop skills enough to cover tableless cross-browser compatible design, or until Internet Explorer dies, or until each and every browser agrees upon a certain CSS specification especially on positioning of elements.

Good news is tableless design is not necessary for a valid XHTML design and making use of semantic markup. More important than tableless design is the semantic markup and the use of proper (x)html elements when organizing the data, the content that the page should serve to visitors.

You can still make use of h1, h2, h… header tags, li, ol, ul, dd, dt, dl, etc., tags that tells search engine robots what your page is about and how it can be indexed properly.

Tableless design is still necessary and should be a standard when we talk about a more accessible web. Making use of tables for positioning is not a good practice, I am not here to tell you that there is no harm in using tables. I just want to tell you that you can still create valid (x)html and semantic markup and be more accessible than the past, until you learn about CSS hacks and a cross-browser compatible tableless design.

Don’t give up on accessibility, valid and semantic markup just because you are not ready to do tableless design. Try to take your time and make progress in this transitional period. This is why we call certain DTD (Document Type Declaration) as transitional.

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WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:45:29 +0000

WordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.

WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.

I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.

Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?

Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.

Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?

It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.

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Weird Criticisms Over Web 2.0

Osman S Borutecene — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:22:42 +0000

It was a couple of months ago, I started to track criticisms of web 2.0, after having read something like “web 2.0 is all about fancy graphs and ajax” on the web.

Well, first of all, web 2.0 is a set of web applications and web sites which were not available with the technology and broadband internet connections a couple of years ago. Thus, first of all, web 2.0 is being able to watch a video of a breaking news over the net, without major interrupting of the video and and without being stuck in a low resolution and being able to watch it in a size that is bigger than a square-inch.

Now, I would like to say some more on “the fancy graphs”. It looks weird to me that when some people come across a design which is more usable and more readable than the past, their first reactions is really cheesy. I agree that there are very amateur designs that aim just being fancy only. However, there are lots of improvements in usability and readability of the web since web 2.0 is here. The reason it got more usable and more readable is that educated people on design and usability are hired more than the neighbor’s son as a web designer and developer.

Some people even criticize the use of big fonts, white space, etc. in a way as if they are not necessary for the presentation of information in a web site.

I just don’t understand why sometimes some people tend to get irritated by better design and better usability. This is why I call that a weird criticism.

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