Blog Relations

We don’t normally write about “hot babes” here – not my turn of phrase – but this is the most unusual suggestion I’ve ever heard for the art of Link Baiting (gettng other people to link to your blog). It comes from John Chow, and I’m sure he’s getting lots of links and diggs just for writing this up. I’m not sure these days how legit link baiting is. A good blog should network with others per se – but this is an interesting approach.

The Trade Show Photo Trick

I meet many fellow webmasters during my party at the Consumer Electronics Show. During the party, I get a few hot babes to take pictures with the other webmasters. They love this because it’s the few occasions when they can get a picture taken with a real girl. The picture gets posted at The TechZone’s photo gallery. An email is fired off to the webmasters, and they’re instantly linking it on their sites to show all their readers what a stud they are.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to try that one out, so I don’t have a pic to go with this post.

My colleague Matthew Lynn has been writing in the Spectator how Google has peaked and it’s only downhill from here on.

Matthew may be right about the stock market valuation – it’s rated on the basis that it’s going to keep on growing exponentially – but as far as my own online life is concerned, I use Google more and more.

Google documents (which Matthew and I use all the time to collaborate) has replaced Word for me, and is starting to edge Excel out of my life. It means I can easily switch computers – for instance borrow a laptop – and still have all my work to hand.

I was probably the last blogger on the planet to start using Google Mail, but I can’t imagine how I got on without it. It has the best spam filter of any emailer that I’ve ever used, and organises correspondence brilliantly.

And now the latest version of Google Reader might well tempt me away from my beloved Bloglines. It has a temptingly clean interface. I won’t rave about it yet, as I’ve only just started using it – but it’s certainly worth a try.

I thought I would share my favourite del.iciou.us hack with you.  If you use del.icio.us you probably know that it’s great for spotting webpages and blogs with buzz , as its popular function tells you what’s being bookmarked in large quantities now.  If you are regularly hunting for a particular topic, you can set up an rss feed to keep you up-to-date.

I’m starting to blog more about kids stuff for our other site (sorry to bore you with Storynory but it gives my every day practical experience).  So I went to http://del.icio.us/popular/kids to see what people are book-marking with that tag.  But because it’s a pain to return to that page every day,  I have taken the RSS feed off that page and put it into my Bloglines feed reader.  I’ve done this with some other popular tags and it’s a great way to keep up to speed.  It throws up goodies all the time.  I recommend it.

A nice introduction to OPML here as a screencast by Alex Barnett. Among other things, he points to OPML Manager which makes creating an outline easy.