As Tom from TomsTechBlog has pointed out, a major incident that should have incited many bloggers to question Google’s modus operandi occurred with hardly a peep from the normally boisterous blogosphere.

To recap, FeedBurner’s traffic reporting service went down last weekend - no blogs were able to receive any of their normal traffic information from the service, and yet the blogosphere remained silent. Tom and Michael Krigsman are the only two people who said “hey, shouldn’t we be worried about the total lack of Google’s customer service?”

Google’s entire business model revolves around giving advertisers exposure to massive numbers of potential customers, whether it’s through paid search or through the world’s largest contextual advertising network - they don’t give a shit about people who consume Google’s free services; they’re not Google’s customers!

I’ve had a few discussions with my boss regarding whether or not we should continue syndicating Working Smarter’s readers to a FeedBurner-controlled URL; the idea of questioning FeedBurner/Google’s benignancy must seem insane to many members of the blogosphere, but here’s why we’re considering it:

• Google has no reason to respond to you during service outages; all of your readers are entirely dependent on FeedBurner and Google. What the hell are you going to do if the quality of the service degrades? Plead and beg with your users to switch all of their feeds to a new URL? Good luck!
• Google has all of the control; you control the content, but when you use FeedBurner you’ve ceded control of your readership to Google. This means that you have to accept whatever Google does if it changes the terms of FeedBurner’s service in the future. Even if you can get most of your loyal readers to switch you’re still going to lose a large chunk of your audience (and your blog’s value) in the transition.
• Worst of all, what if Google decides to start a per-subscriber fee to all blogs; this may be a bit radical, but let’s suppose that Google decides to charge any blogger who uses FeedBurner $1/year for all of their subscribers. Big, popular blogs run by private individuals, like 25 Hours a Day, will become too expensive to maintain; I doubt that Dare has an extra $80,000k a year in disposable income that he’d be willing to donate just to keep his blog running.

I don’t buy the notion that Google is a benign company just trying to fight for the common good on the Internet; the fact is that it’s a multi-billion dollar goliath with one concern: it’s bottom line. If Google decides that it’s in its best financial interest to rob bloggers at gunpoint then I don’t think that it will hesitate to do so. Do I think it’s likely to happen? No, but can it happen? Absolutely.

In my previous post I speculated as to whether or not most customers would prefer to be sold on a product through a blog or a static office document, like a PDF or a Microsoft Word document.

We’ve executed some email campaigns over the past month to test this theory. Here are the details that I can discuss:

• Our sample size was significant (I won’t say how large exactly so don’t ask;)
• We conducted four trials with the same audience;
• Each trial had its own unique subject and content;
• We sent the email at regularly scheduled intervals;
• We used a blog entry and a PDF alternative;
• The blog and the PDFs that we used contained the same information but with two different presentation philosophies, like the ones I outlined in my earlier post.

Given all this, here are the results:

These numbers are all click through rates (CTR) of people who opened the emails sent during each one of our trials.

I haven’t provided enough information about our audience to make this test an official scientific marketing study for the general public; think of these findings as a weathervane indicator - this test only tells you what direction the wind is blowing, not it’s magnitude.

I performed another calculation which resulted in the headline for this article; here’s the formula:

AVERAGE(PDF CTR)/AVERAGE(Blog CTR) = 8.31

This means that for every person who clicked through to the blog first roughly 8 people preferred to click through to a PDF document with the same information on average.

What are the implications of this finding?

• It tells me that the people on this mailing list are not comfortable with the concept of a “blog” as an information delivery mechanism.
• It tells me that given the choice between an online blog and a PDF download, many customers feel more comfortable with a PDF or other static document.
• It tells me that perhaps marketers like me, who recognize the obvious advantages of blogs as an information distribution mechanism, need to find ways to make blogs more appealing to older, more affluent audiences in general.

If you’d like to discuss this in more detail with me feel free to hit me up with questions on Twitter or on the comments here. I won’t be able to disclose many of the details but I might be able to answer other questions.

I’ve always wanted an excuse to use a fisticuffs image on my blog - I guess all of that Yahoo/MSFT drama would have been a good time, but this will suffice.

I’ve tried three times to write a good, anecdotal lead-in for this post. I’m going to have to say “to hell with it” at this point and get to the point of the matter: “are most customers too old school to be sold products or services through a blog?”

The question stems from an ongoing discussion that I’m having with a few of my peers; we were asked the following question:

If you were to start a new marketing campaign with the objective of educating small business owners, executives, and managers on the benefits of your product, whatever it is, what medium would the better delivery medium:

• Professional, polished,  office documents that read like micro-brochures or
• A product weblog written in a personal, informal style that contained the same information as the brochures.

Naturally, I’m arguing for the blog, but I’m interested in hearing what all of you have to say on the subject.

Here are my thoughts on why a blog is the better of the two mechanisms:

• Blogs are easier to distribute electronically than static documents;
• Blogs are easier to update than static documents (you can’t update the documents to people who’ve already received distributions;)
• Blogs give articles give readers more opportunities to explore “your product”-centric content than static documents (more links in blogs;) and
• Blogs have built-in feedback-collection mechanisms, static documents do not.

Here are the arguments that I’ve heard in favor of static documents:

• Blogs are too sketchy for most potential customers who have the authority to buy;
• Many customers would prefer to print out a document and read it in their hands later;
• Most potential customers feel more comfortable downloading a document to their desktop and sharing it with their associates via email attachment than they do with sending links; and
• Most potential customers are more receptive to the professional, formal look-and-feel than they are to the informal style of the blog.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Please weigh in at your leisure.

I was reading up on DotNetKicks when I came across the most interesting headline I have ever seen on the site, “How YOUR tech blog posts are RIPPED OFF while you sleep!”

The post comes from Mike Duncan, a C# blogger, who discovered that a piece of his hard work was more or less stolen by InfoQ (rel=no follow; no PageRank+1 for you,) a developer-oriented news site.

To give you a quick summary of what the issue is in this instance:

TWO DAYS after my post[, "SQLite on .NET - Get up and Running in 3 Minutes"] was out in the wild, I started seeing some interesting inbound links coming in from InfoQ, a tech news - paid story aggregator type site. While not somewhere I go often, their site is indeed large, thriving, and as it turns out, morally bankrupt. It seems that one Robert Bazinet has a story on the front page of the 250,000 unique visitors per month, page rank 7, mega-site that is InfoQ.com cleverly titled “Up and Running with SQLite on .NET in 3 Minutes.”

So what do you do if you’re Mike Duncan? Someone else is profiting from your own content and you’re not getting adequate credit or compensation?

There are four options:

• Do Nothing
• Do Little
• Send in the Lawyers
• Raise Hell

Option 1 - Don’t Do Anything

If your content has been totally stolen, 100% stolen with 0% credit given to you in any way, shape, or form then please don’t bother reading this; you need to get SOME credit before you even consider doing this. However, in the case of Mike Duncan, he did get a link back, some referral traffic, and a little bit of name recognition, even though he still wasn’t given the appropriate amount of credit.

Are you happy seeing your words get out there, regardless of whom they are attributed to? Enjoying some of the minor referral traffic? Then don’t do anything.

Option 2 - Do Little

Pretty self-explanatory. Do it yourself and contact the author and ask that they respect your original work and give you the proper level of credit.

Option 3 - Send in the Lawyers

Sending in the lawyers simply isn’t an option for most bloggers or small organizations.

Here’s a quick decision tree which will help you decide whether or not it’s worth calling up some intellectual property lawyers:

This decision tree may be a little hard to read so I’ve included a full-sized version of this image here. Basically if the costs of pursuing legal actions are greater than the benefits, don’t do it.

Another thing to consider, though, is will legal action nip plagiarism from your site in the bud entirely or does it do nothing to prevent it from happening again in the future?

Option 4 - Raise Hell

This is the option I recommend for content owners who have already tried the “Do Little” option and don’t have the means to pursue the “Send in the Lawyers” option.

The objective of this option is to create enough noise and ill will towards the plagiarizer that the cost of not responding becomes greater than the value created by plagiarizing your content.

That being said, here are a few ways that you can go about “raising hell” when someone steals your content:

Again, this Mind Map is probably pretty hard to read, thus I’ve attached a full-sized version of the image here.

Does this “raise hell” option seem a little immature, pedantic perhaps? Yes, but it’s effective.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism,Field Guide to Social Marketing

Apparently, the 80-20 principle applies to our blogging audience also:

“Heavy bloggers” - the 20% of US blog visitors who account for 84% of all the time spent on blogging sites - are significantly more likely than the average internet user to consume news and entertainment content online, according to a comScore study.

I got a chuckle out of this as my management class discussed the 80/20 rule as it applies to management yesterday: 80% of the work in any given organization is done by 20% of the people. In this case, 80% (84%, actually) of the time spent on blogs comes from 20% of the audience.

What are the implications for this finding?

• If you’re a blogger, your “most-engaging readers” are everyone else’s “most-engaging readers;”
• Blogging hasn’t penetrated the mainstream just yet;
• There is a lot of room for growth; and
• There is an opportunity for smart bloggers to develop a unique audience that no one else can claim ownership of - the audience that resides somewhere in that 80% of readers who produce 20% of traffic. There is no reason to believe that this audience can’t be converted.

The most interesting question that this study presents is “how do corporate bloggers respond to this information?”

Google, Yahoo, and other techie blogs are fortunate in that their core customers are “heavy bloggers” - but what about companies that want to target businessmen, consultants, marketers, salesmen, and other professionals who aren’t traditionally considered “heavy bloggers?” Are they screwed? Are corporate blogs a waste of time for organizations whose core customers aren’t part of the heavy blogger segment?

My answer to that question would be “no; rather than try to build your audience out of the heavy blogger segment, why not use your existing customers as the target audience for your blog?” This is a good idea for two reasons:

• Some of your existing customers might already be heavy bloggers in terms of the amount of time they spend on blogs, but they may not share the same topical interests as most heavy bloggers. (LINK: Heavy Blogger Areas of Interest)
• Your customers are already familiar with your product and might be willing to engage your company via your blog; in addition, a blog gives your most passionate customers a stronger medium to refer your product to their associates.

Technorati Tags: Corporate Blogs,Market Analysis

Here are some of the basic linkbait archetypes:

• Resource Lists - Gather large lists of links pertaining to a popular topic.
• Numbered Headlines - “50+ Resources for Utilizing StumbleUpon Effectively” and “30+ Social Media Sites for Promoting Your Blog” are both good examples of linkbait that I’ve written myself.
• Share Someone’s Success - Share the success of a famous person or perhaps your own.

ProBlogger has an article called “7 Ways to Get to the Top of the del.icio.us Popular Page,” and all of these tips correspond exactly to the sorts of linkbait practices that I’m talking about.

I’m going to focus on the “meta-blogging” (blogging about blogging) community as an example for my rant.

Many meta-blogs deliver valuable content to beginning bloggers; I used to read them religiously. However, I’ve unsubscribed to all of them because I can’t stand reading their articles any longer. The only thing stopping me from unsubscribing from ProBlogger is the recent shift in wind on that blog - Darren and Skellie have started writing content beyond simple linkbait and it’s raised my level of interest.

Linkbait works well at drawing in new readers, because linkbait posts have efficient headlines and readily digestible content, like lists. However, they get old, and some readers like myself, find that linkbait posts have little to offer after a while. Here’s why:

• Formulaic Headlines - X Ways You Can Do Z, A Resources for B, I’ve seen it all, and it’s old.
• Unoriginal Content - How many times can I read “content is king,” “engage your readers,” “use humor,” and so on before I get bored? The answer is once. Darren Rowse says the same things over and over again when it comes to his basic “how-to” posts, but he at least manages to say it in a way that’s different and interesting compared to all of the other meta-bloggers. Most other meta-bloggers haplessly shovel the same stuff without adding anything new or different; I, myself, am guilty of this on a couple of occasions.
• Spammy Copy - A lot of the copy writing on some of these meta-blogs reads like the vocations of a carnie at the county fair - it makes you wonder if the author leaves a trail of slime behind him. “Make Money Blogging” blogs have the worst trouble with this since the authors have obvious conflicts of interest - they want traffic and a higher conversion rate; a regular, engaged audience is optional.
• No Personality - I try to give my readers an idea of who I am in each post I write; linkbait has no personality - a resource list and a snappy title don’t tell you anything about me or about my blog.

Linkbait is great for drawing in new readers, but doing it constantly does so at the expense of regular readership. Not all traffic is created equal - regular readers are the most important, and I’d take them over any social media traffic surge any day.

Technorati Tags: Linkbait,Blogging

New Theme: Modified ProSense

The first major change I made was taking Dosh Dosh’s AdSense-ready "ProSense" WordPress theme and modifying it to suit AjaxNinja’s needs. I didn’t want the theme to look EXACTLY like ProSense, plus the sidebar and inline AdSense units cheapened the overall feel of the blog.

Bye Bye MyBlogLog

I was supposed to be conducting an email interview with the founders of MyBlogLog a few months back, thanks to some help from Dave McClure. The founders never really got back to me, but one of the questions that I wanted to ask them was:

Question 2: In February Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net questioned what value MyBlogLog adds to blogs who use its sidebar widgets , specifically he said:

I guess I’m also still a little confused about what MyBlogLog offers bloggers (as I was last time I wrote about MyBlogLog). While there’s definitely potential there (they do seem to have a large number of enthusiastic users) I’m worried that in it’s current form their communities could actually hurt the reputation of the blogs that they form around.

I’ve already had complaints from a number of readers about the nature of some pictures appearing in the widgets and some of the content in comments left on the community pages. Unless there is added levels of moderation, tighter controls over authorship and some sort of features that adds to community around a blog I’m not sure it’s something I’ll continue much further with.

I know that since that post you’ve addressed some of the issues Darren was concerned with, such as co-author spam, but what would you say to bloggers who are concerned that adding a recent MyBlogLog users sidebar widget might detract from their blog’s professional image?

After several months of using MyBlogLog, I’ve decided that all the service does is

• Slow down the total load time for AjaxNinja;
• Add visual clutter to the blog;
• Fill up my inbox with spam; and
• Overall, detract from the professional look at feel that I want to establish for AjaxNinja.

I guess stripping out MyBlogLog from AjaxNinja is a late Christmas present for all of the AjaxNinja readers who don’t have megabit connections.

Some bloggers question whether or not Google’s PageRank algorithm is capable of handling a maturing blogosphere, and in the light of some of the problems with Technorati, things are looking a bit troublesome for bloggers, especially up-and-coming commercial bloggers at the moment.

AjaxNinja is a young blog and its first PageRank was published this weekend; 4/10.

I am, by no means, an SEO expert, although I am enjoying Search Engine Optimization for ASP.NET immensely (it’s a great read so far), but I’m not freaking out about getting a 4/10. In fact, I’m actually pretty happy with that score.

However, I’m not going to run out and come up with an action plan to salvage my PageRank score, nor am I going freak out and send nasty email to Matt Cutt’s or anyone else at Google. Want to know why? Because PageRank scores don’t determine my regular readership.

AjaxNinja is a young blog and it’s still building up external links organically. I don’t sell links nor do I buy them, so this “update” doesn’t even affect me. I’m not a sleazy get-rich-quick/BUY MY EBOOK ON BLACKHAT SEO marketing blogger; I’m a college student who blogs about experimentation with social media, website development, and basic promotional methods. AjaxNinja isn’t a commercial blog, and ad revenue is something I collect just to try and pay the bills for running the site. I blog because I enjoy it.

Bottom line, if you’re not a commercial blogger, focus on building a better audience, rather than worrying about SEO techniques and PageRank.

On Monday I answered a question from a reader regarding how to locate relevant blogs within your domain, and today I’m going to cover a second question from that same reader.

Again, I’m going to share my insight as well as ask my readers for theirs.

Speaking of time consuming, what sort of presence do we need to have on other blogs before we begin requesting guest writers, etc? Should I go out and register for as many sites as possible and begin systematically commenting on anything I find interesting?

Only add comments that contribute value to the conversation

I’d recommend that you start establishing a presence on other, established blogs in your domain as soon as possible, but only comment if you’re able to provide additional value to the conversation. Commenting on other blogs can potentially hurt your blog’s brand if done incorrectly, so make sure you’re adding value whenever you post a comment.

Spending money on guest writers

As far as the sort of presence you need to ask for guest writers, it depends on if you’re willing to spend any money or not. Many bloggers routinely earn revenue through paid postings or through paid blogging gigs so it’s not an unusual request to ask bloggers if they’d be interested in writing about X for $Y. PayPerPost is a company that specializes in acting as a middleman between corporations looking to promote their products through bloggers and bloggers looking to earn a dime or two, but I have to warn you that PPP is a highly controversial organization and utilizing it may have adverse effects on your blog’s brand.

That being said, if you are willing to pay authoritative bloggers to guest write for your blog, the best approach is to look for a page with contact information and contact them privately. You’ll find that most bloggers work for cheap, so this can save you a lot of money.

Developing relationships with potential guest writers

However if you’re looking to develop your blog organically, which is probably the best way to establish a credible brand, then establishing your presence on existing, authoritative blogs is a good way to go about building up a natural relationship with those bloggers. Once you’ve established a good relationship with another blogger then it would not be out of line to ask if they’d be interested in writing a guest post on your site.

Again, if you’re not interested in spending money on recruiting guest bloggers, I’d recommend building up your blog to a decent size (a few hundred unique visitors a day, medium size) and then try contacting experts who work in vertical niches and don’t typically receive that kind of traffic; the allure of getting their name exposed to a larger audience and having their name affiliated with a higher credibility blog is very enticing. Another approach is seeking out aggressive, up-and-coming bloggers who are trying to develop their audience; these people may not be the strongest vertical experts, but they are people who may be willing to add value to your blog and lend credibility to your blog if asked.

I apologize for not updating AjaxNinja in the past week. I’ve been on vacation and I neglected to write automated entries beforehand, so I suppose I failed to follow some of my own blogging advice. Oh well

I received the following question from an AjaxNinja reader this past weekend and I thought I’d share my insight as well as ask my readers for theirs.

Finding the related blogs. I already have a large list of related blogs in fields such as presentations, marketing, business, productivity, etc but who’s to say that the list is any good? I just surfed around on Technorati and Google trying to find these sites. Do you have any good methods for this? One of our problems is that we want to cover a broad area and this becomes a time consuming task.

Finding authoritative and reliable blogs in your domain can be tricky but the two best resources are Google Blog search and Technorati, as you mentioned. Commenting and pinging authoritative, relevant blogs is a good way to increase your authority as an up-and-coming blogger.

Stick with the most authoritative blogs

One thing I recommend doing is going through your blog list on Technorati and picking out the ones with the highest authority out of the large list of blogs you’ve discovered. Although there are some simple ways to game Technorati to boost authority, you’ll be able to tell by looking at the “reactions to this blog” page if the blog has any legitimate authority. Blogs with legitimate authority will have “reactions” from a number of diverse blogs, whereas ones with gamed authority will usually have only one additional blog feed that pings back to itself.

Use Blog Catalog or other blog directories
You can use blog directories like Blog Catalog, where blogs are already categorized by DOMAINS rather than by search engine keywords. Given that you’re looking to cover a broad area, this may be a better place to look than using Technorati and Google searches.

Put yourself in the reader’s seat; use Google to search for specific problems within a domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself

Most of the blogs that I link back to from AjaxNinja are blogs that I’ve come across as a result of specific Google keyword searches when I’m looking for answers to technical questions, so I’ve accrued a number of resources to link to over time.

However, this is precisely how casual readers discover blogs. I’d suggest putting yourself in the driver’s seat of one of your potential customers/readers and rattle off a number of precise queries that target specific problems within your domain, rather than broad keywords that target the domain itself.

A blog that addresses an array of specific problems or issues within your domain is going to have a more authoritative writer (a stronger vertical/niche expert) than popular blogs that fail to cover domain-specific issues in any depth below the surface.

• ASP.NET (Data layers, Facebook.NET, Phalanger),
• general blogging concepts (headlines, saving articles),
• blogging specifically for businesses,
• Facebook Applications & Social Media concepts,
• general website management issues (hosting), or
• business concepts and entrepreneurship?

Every time I write a post I think “am I going to lose a ton of my readers who are just here for the ASP.NET articles if I write about blogging concepts?” While I’m still not absolutely certain, the answer appears to be “no.“

If anything, I find that the diverse nature of my content helps AjaxNinja convert more readers into subscribers, but that’s namely because all of the subjects I blog about are related.

Who’s my target audience and how does AjaxNinja’s diversity help reach them?

While I appreciate the patronage of all of my subscribers equally, I started AjaxNinja with the intention of reaching people just like me: self-starting technological people who want to start a website, a blog, or an online business.

Thus all of my content, in one way or another, relates to my target audience.

• I write about ASP.NET, AJAX, CSS, SQL, and sometimes PHP to cover some of the technological facets behind website development.
• I write about blogging concepts, ethics, and etiquette as they are necessary components to operating a blog.
• I conduct interviews with entrepreneurs or I give my 2 cents about some market trend because they are directly relevant to running an online business and online marketing.
• And so on.

There probably not a whole lot of ASP.NET programmers/bloggers who are in college and looking to create or join their first startup; so if I were looking to target only people like myself then my audience would grow much more slowly.

But what’s the point?

By expanding AjaxNinja’s mission statement and content to broader themes I ultimately expand my target audience; instead of just targeting entrepreneurial ASP.NET programmers, I now have a blog that can target virtually any person who wants to learn how to start a blog, website, or online business. I can now cut a slice from a much larger pie.

A quick homework assignment: write a mission statement for your blog or website and make it visible somewhere on your site. In addition, define your target audience.

But how do you stop readers who are interested in only a dimension or two from unsubscribing?

If there are readers out there who are so fickle that they will unsubscribe from AjaxNinja after I write single post on something that isn’t of crucial importance to them, then I probably won’t miss them. I guess I don’t love all of my readers equally :p

The trick to making this multi-faceted blog work, however, is to do your best to try and cover all subjects equally.

I use a round-robin system where I’ll try and cover my bread-and-potatoes subjects each week and add in some special stuff in the variable days.

Here’s how a typical breakdown might look for any given week:

The meat and potatoes:

• 2 posts on ASP.NET/Facebook.NET (my ASP.NET niche) and
• 1 post on blogging concepts or blogging for business.

Extra days: (any two from the following list)

• 1 post on social media
• 1 interview / entrepreneurship post
• 1 business concept post
• 1 code sample
• 1 book / product review
• 1 resource list
• 1 hot news item coverage (like my coverage of the .NET 3.5 source release)

I make an honest effort to try and cover all of the concepts equally in terms of what I deem important and what I think my audience wants the most.

I know there are some SEO/Social Media/Blogging types who read AjaxNinja in addition to a lot of the good folks from DotNetKicks who want to read about ASP.NET, so I have to make an effort to leverage the wants of all demographics of my audience.

Final Answer

Diversifying your content will enable you to reach a broader audience, IF:

• all of your content is unified thematically or by the shared interests of your audience,
• your content is unified under your blog’s mission statement,
• you make an honest effort to service all areas of your mission statement equally, and
• you make an honest effort to service the wants of your audience proportionately equal to their level of interest.

If you’re struggling to build an audience in a niche subject, try broadening out your blog’s mission statement and relate your experience within your niche to more universal lessons. It’s worked for me and it can work for you.

A couple of weeks ago I took the GRE (that’s the Graduate Record Exam) and had one hell of a busy week leading up for it. Did any of AjaxNinja’s readers notice? I sure hope not, given that I still managed to pump out a week’s worth of content during that stretch, even though I wrote very little of it during the week of the GRE.

A lot of bloggers are addicted to instant gratification, that is writing our post and slamming that publish button as soon as possible. Instant gratification is great, but some situations simply call for planning ahead and resisting the temptation to jab that publish button. Instead, save those articles for a rainy day or save a whole batch of them when you anticipate a busy week.

What makes for a good rainy day article?

The most popular article on AjaxNinja, 10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers was a rainy day article. It took me about 10 minutes to write and ended up being really popular. Who would have guessed?

Here’s some guidelines for a great rainy day article:

• Timeless content - The content should be relevant regardless of when it’s published; saving a news article for a rainy day would be an exercise in pointlessness. Would anyone want to read in December about how Google’s stock hit $600 a share on October 8th, 2007? No. It’d be old news.

• Easy to produce - Don’t spend hours upon hours trying to build some blogging masterpiece for a rainy day article; that’d be a damn shame if you had to wait months to publish a real work of art. Instead, write something simple, yet helpful. Check out this post that Frank from VBNotebookfor.NET wrote about how sacred cows can inhibit creativity in production teams; it dispenses some timeless knowledge (check), gives some advice, and is very concise. This constitutes a perfect rainy day article.

• Not a “hot” subject - Again, the notion of timelessness rears its head. If you write a great article on a popular subject, publish it immediately. That’s a great way to surf a traffic wave. In addition if you write an article on a subject which becomes popular some time after you wrote it, then you’re already set to ride that wave. Thus it’s best to write and save articles which don’t diminish in value over time.

Leave your comments below.

Originally I was going to break up this article into several smaller parts, but I think my readers would appreciate getting to the good stuff right away. On Friday I mentioned the immediate impact that the Lifehacker traffic tsunami had on AjaxNinja and today I’m going to talk about how you can surf a traffic wave to generate a larger splash and retain more permanent readership.

You need to know that one is hitting you in order to surf it

If you sleep through a traffic wave, then sure you’ll still retain some long term benefits, but you’ll have really missed out on an opportunity to increase the size of your readership permanently. My traffic post-tsunami has been 800-900% of what it was prior to the Lifehacker article, and my RSS subscriber ship has been about 400% higher than what it was.

Situational awareness is key, both in life and in blogging; you need to be able to determine at any given time if you are being hit with abnormally high levels of traffic. Here are a few things you can do to detect a traffic wave early on:

• Have an email client open that provides auditory notifications whenever an email arrives - this is how I knew that AjaxNinja was getting hit; I was in the room away from my computer, watching TV, when I heard my email client going off like crazy. I came in to see what was the matter, and sure enough, I was receiving a flood of user comments on my article.
• Use Google Analytics or FeedBurner Stats - I actually use both of these services; the first thing I did was start checking my referrer stats, and sure enough I saw a ton of visits from Lifehacker. Not only is it important to be able to tell when you are being hit with a traffic wave but it is equally important to know where the visitors are coming from.
• Check your email & stats frequently

Social media can produce secondary and tertiary traffic waves, but to truly capitalize them you need a high volume of votes in a small period of time

The social media effect of a traffic wave is an excellent demonstration of the temporal nature of traffic bursts. One property of social media that many bloggers don’t take into account is that the rate of votes acquired is crucial for placing high on social media outlets like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

Therefore the absolute first thing you should do is make it very, very easy for social media users to add the high-traffic page to social media engines. All of my pages have buttons for stumbling, digging, and del.icio.us tagging. I recieved in the neighborhood of 350 del.icio.us tags and 20 stumbles on September 8th as a result, so take a look at the traffic results from that day.

I’ve highlighted all social-media traffic in red. 486 visits; that’s pretty significant considering that I usually recieved about 100 visits a day prior to that!

Popurls lists the “hottest” items in all popular social media services, and the high rate of del.icio.us tags that my article acquired landed it onto the front page of del.icio.us. Let’s go ahead and compare the traffic results from day 1, September 8th, to the result from day 2, September 9th.

Again I’ve highlighted all social-media traffic in red. 854 visits, not including the 291 from Dzone which I received due to my traffic surfing, which I will explain in a minute. The payout for simply making it easy to add your content to a social media service is huge.

Despite the fact that many of the visitors to your site will bounce (which explains the low pages/visit metric), you can still capture enough of them to boost your permanent traffic levels and readership if you act quickly.

Surfing the Traffic Tsunami - Step 1: determine the demographic of the incoming audience

My popular article was called 10+ Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers, thus I made the following assumptions about the kinds of people who were visiting AjaxNinja as a result of the Lifehacker traffic wave:

• Based on the volume of comments clamoring for FireBug and Web Developer Toolbar, I assumed that the audience constituted vastly more web developers than bloggers.
• Based on the categories that my article was being tagged under on del.icio.us, I verified that my first assumption was correct.

I knew that I had a ton of web developers landing on my site every hour, thus it would be in my best interest to roll out some new content immediately which would get their attention.

Surfing the Traffic Tsunami - Step 2: roll out new content relevant to your incoming audience or the popular article

One of my regular readers, vjeran, tipped me off to a piece of technology called Phalanger, a PHP compiler for the .NET platform. I had been doing some research on the subject in the days prior to the traffic wave and I had even started putting together some notes for an article.

When I noticed the traffic wave hitting, I quickly determined the make up of the audience and subsequently scrambled to dispatch that Phalanger article as fast as I could without detrimenting the quality of the article.

So then I rolled out the article, submitted it to Dzone and DotNetKicks in the afternoon of September 8th. I successfully caught the traffic tsunami and surfed it on the morning of September 9th, and on September 10th I received even more traffic to my Phalanger article. The comments started pouring in, an intense argument raged on, and ultimately I captured a ton of subscribers.

Here are a few things you can do to catch a traffic wave:

• While you will never be able to predict which articles are going to be subject to a traffic tsunami, try and queue up some good “rainy day articles.” Regardless of what the popular article is about, it’s always a good idea to roll out something new when a traffic wave is hitting.
• If you don’t have any appropriate rainy day articles, try and write something new and get it out while the wave is still hitting your blog.
• NEVER, NEVER write something that is too similar to your original article; if I had written an article along the lines of “10 MORE Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers” it would not have worked I suspect. Other bloggers may disagree with this, but my personal experience with my Rea Maor micro-traffic wave (500% increase rather than 3000%) was that my traffic-surfing attempt failed utterly in that instance because the article I rolled out was simply too similar to my popular article.
• Optimize your popular page for retaining readers; add RSS subscriber buttons in highly visible areas and make sure readers can get a look at some of your similar posts. The readers you are most likely to capture are the ones who explore your site down to its depths.

How did AjaxNinja get noticed?

I wish I knew! I suspect that DZone had something to do with my Firefox article getting noticed, but to be honest I can’t really say how the Lifehacker editors found my site and let alone why they liked that Firefox article. The article took almost no time to write and was a rainy day article I had cooked up between major blog posts. It wasn’t even on my front page when the traffic tsunami hit.

The only advice I can give you in that regard is to write good headlines, use social media, and be an honest blogger.

One day when I was perusing Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger I came across a post titled How to Surf Blog Traffic Tsunamis; in the post Darren describes the experience of striking gold in social media outlets and other high-traffic blogs:

This morning I wake up to find that it’s one of the most popular posts on delicious, digg and has been linked to from lifehacker and gizmodo (among others). An hour ago it had 7000 visitors (peak) and now as the US heads towards sleep its tracking at around half of that per hour (and still rising on delicious and digg).

This is every bloggers dream: to get noticed and publicized by some gigantic traffic source.

Darren went onto describe the various techniques he employed to help capture that traffic wave and convert some of the visitors into regular readers. I read Darren’s post and daydreamed about how great it would be to have a traffic wave to surf. I didn’t have to wait long.

Two weeks ago, on Saturday September 8th, my article on 10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers was run on the front page of Lifehacker, one of the highest trafficked blogs worldwide.

I’m going to be writing a multi-part series on surfing traffic waves, but in this article I want to describe the impact that the traffic wave had and has had on AjaxNinja since it occurred.

Before we go any further, let me expressly define what a traffic wave or tsunami is:

A traffic wave or tsunami is an abnormally large surge in traffic occurring as a result of instant publicity; such waves can occur as the result of large-scale exposure in the mainstream media, link placement on the front of much higher trafficked websites, or high temporal placement on social media outlets.

Without any anaylsis from yours truly, here’s AjaxNinja’s traffic graph for the month of August. At which point did Lifehacker run my article on their front page?

AjaxNinja’s Traffic Curve for the Month of August

If you guessed something along the lines of “at the start of the gigantic spike” then you’re correct. Let me throw a couple of figures at you to demonstrate the scale of the traffic surge:

Average Visits/Day before traffic wave: 167*

This period covers from August 7th until September 7th, and the only reason that number is above 100 visits/day is because my Rea Maor response article got picked up by Bink.nu and my Firefox article got a burst of traffic from DZone.

Average Visits/Day during traffic wave: 4540.5

This period covers from September 8th until September 12th. I picked up a ton of traffic on September 13th as a result of a StumbleUpon surge to my 7 Reasons Why Niche Social Media Outlets are Better Than Digg article, which is totally unrelated to the Lifehacker article’s initial traffic wave.

Percent Change: 2718.86% increase in traffic.

When you get into the neighborhood of a 3000% increase in traffic over the span of a few days, that absolutely constitutes a traffic wave. I know the 20,000 visits I received over that span may not impress bloggers with large audiences, but for young blogs like AjaxNinja, that’s a HUGE opportunity.

What you can expect from the traffic surfing series:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks collecting data and performing research to study the impact the traffic wave has had on AjaxNinja. As you can tell from the graph, the stabilized traffic level (that is, the post-wave traffic level) is drastically higher than what it was prior to the Lifehacker article, approximately 7-8 times greater than what my traffic was before. The effects on my RSS subscribership reflect even more interesting trends.

Here are the articles that I will roll out over the coming days:

• The Chain Reaction of Traffic Waves - How secondary and tertiary waves of traffic result from an initial traffic wave
• Traffic Wave Trends - Simple statistical breakdown of RSS/Visitor trends
• How to Surf Traffic Waves - How to maneuver your blog to capture readers during a surge

The one thing I will absolutely not write about is how I got noticed by Lifehacker, because I honestly have no idea. The Firefox extension article was a back-burner article I had saved for a rainy day and it took me all of 15 minutes to write. It wasn’t even on AjaxNinja’s front page when Lifehacker picked it up.

Attracting a traffic wave is simply a matter of producing content that a large audience can relate to, has a catchy headline, and a matter of promoting that content in a variety of places where a big fish might find it. There’s no magic behind it.

If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see appear in the articles, please let me know, as I have yet to write them; I just have the data thus far.

The first thing that my new headlines did was make it remarkably easy for AjaxNinja to make it to the front pages of DZone, DotNetKicks. Want to know why it was so easy? Take a look at some of the headlines on DZone as of writing this.

sample of DZone’s most recent headlines:

• The Death of “synchronized”? (79 click-throughs)
• Douglas Crockford: The Elements of JavaScript Style (65 click-throughs)
• Type-safe Scala sequence comprehensions (25 click-throughs)

DZone measures the articles on the front page using votes and how recently they were published, but it also displays how many people viewed the story on DZone and subsequently how many clicked through to the source, which is what I have displayed next to each title.

The “synchronized” article actually had a very effective title; it just wasn’t trying to reach me as an audience member but rather JAVA programmers who’ve used the “synchronized” keyword, and it reached them very effectively.

The average poster for DZone is a much, much better engineer than I am and they cover material well and at a fantastic level of depth, but they suck at writing headlines. That’s why it’s been so easy for me to make it to the front page: my headlines are simply more magnetic.

I read a post called Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk at Copyblogger recently and I have tried to utilize those formulas in my posts since. I believe that my improved headlines are what has resulted in a big boost in traffic in the past week.

Here are 5 things I have been doing to improve my headlines:

1. Don’t describe what you’re writing about; describe how it can help your readers!

   My Phalanger article is a good example; it’s title is Attention: PHP executes twice as fast when it’s run on ASP.NET. If I had named it Phalanger - Now you can integrate ASP and PHP my title would still be accurate and interesting, but it doesn’t hint as to why anyone would want to check out Phalanger; underscoring some of the performance benefits of Phalanger gives PHP users an incentive to read on.

2. Let the reader know that your article’s solutions are simple/easy

   Take a look at the title of this article; How 5 Simple Headline Improvements Increased my Traffic by 1000%. If you write a lot of how-to articles then this tip is especially pertinent to your blog. Readers love articles that present simple or easy solutions; underscoring the helpful nature of your suggestions with descriptors like “simple,” “quick,” and “easy” in the headline is an easy way to draw attention from readers.

3. Relate your article to a problem that your readers face

   Let’s say I wrote an article about using StumbleUpon and how it sends traffic; what would be the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How to Use StumbleUpon to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

   It’s obvious that the second choice is the better of the two headlines. The first headline will draw readers with a casual interest in StumbleUpon, but the second headline will draw anyone who wants to know how to get people to read their site; which audience is bigger? The second one.

   Just make sure that your content reflects the title; if you don’t even mention using StumbleUpon as a promotional tool in your article then you probably won’t get very many return readers, if any at all.

4. Relate your article to a success story

   Everyone loves success, so why not take your article and relate it to an anecdote or a success story? Let’s return to my StumbleUpon example; which of the two is the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How StumbleUpon Doubled my Traffic in August

   The second headline is again, more powerful, because it gives the readers an order of magnitude by which they can judge the effectiveness or your article’s solution. Readers want effective advice and the best way to demonstrate effectiveness is by positive example. This post serves a good example of such a technique; everyone wants to learn how to increase their traffic by 1000%.

5. Let the reader know how short your article is

   List posts are considered one of the greatest ways to draw readers; the reason is simple: list posts are simple, short, and easy for readers to digest. Readers do not have to do a lot of work; by explicitly bounding your article with a definitive number, like 5 in the case of this article, then they know they won’t have to dig through a mountain of an article in order to get to the good stuff.

   Which of the two headlines is better?

   • Some Tips for Improving Your Headlines
   • 5 Tips for Improving Your Headlines

   The second headline is better because it lets your readers know exactly how much they have to digest! I don’t know if readers prefer larger or shorter lists and I don’t know what the blogging convention is, but personally, I think keeping the advice lists like this one under 10 items and link lists under 20 items is a good convention.

Try improving your headlines with these tips and you’ll see a huge difference!

What is “Social Media?”

For those of you who have not heard of social media, it’s simply a technology on the Internet that allows people to explicitly share content and experiences with other online users. YouTube is a great example of a video-sharing social media website.

We’re going to run down a categorized list of social media sites for promoting your blog or website.

A word of caution: there are hundreds of social media websites out there; if I don’t mention one, it’s probably because I’ve never used it or heard of it. Leave a comment on this entry if you feel that I’ve made a critical error.

The Big Players

If you land on the front page of one of these sites, even for a few hours, you’ll be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of traffic. The best part is, once your of your pages makes it big on just one of these sites, you’ll probably end up getting highly ranked on another.

1. Digg - Digg is the ultimate social media site; it’s become notorious for producing traffic waves so massive that they can have a DOS-style impact on smaller hosts. Digg is scrutinized routinely for being an intensely negative community, and it has become difficult to make the front page.

2. Reddit - A popular Digg clone. It has less traffic than Digg does but it may be easier to make the front page; I’ve never used it but I’m going to begin experimenting with it.

3. StumbleUpon - I think StumbleUpon is by far the best service on this list; not only does it send more users over time than making the front page of Digg, but the bounce rate for an article that has been reviewed multiple times is ridiculously low. My average bounce rate is pretty high; my bounce rate on a page that’s doing well on StumbleUpon is usually 35-45%, with 85-95% of those users being first time readers to AjaxNinja.

StumbleUpon is doing a better job marketing my site than I could! StumbleUpon is basically channel surfing for the Internet, and it’s advertising campaigns are very effective in the right hands. By far the most worthwhile service.

4. del.icio.us - del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website; users can mark their favorites with del.icio.us and share them with each other; making it onto the front page of the “recently popular” section on del.icio.us will send a decent amount of traffic so long as the category you’re tagged into is popular. My article on Firefox extensions was tagged approximately 300 times within 24 hours and that was enough to slap it on the front page for a brief period. This is a great service for recurring traffic over time as well, but not as good as StumbleUpon in that regard. I guess del.icio.us’ traffic effects are a bit of a mix between Digg and StumbleUpon.

5. YouTube - I was going to stick this in my “video blogging” category, but honestly, if you do video blogging and you haven’t heard of YouTube then you’ve probably been living in a cave for the past few years.

General & Offbeat News

Here are sites that are similar to Digg and Reddit but aren’t as prominent as those two in the lexicon of the average user.

6. Netscape - Didn’t they used to make a web browser or something?

7. Fark - From Fark’s about page:

[Fark] is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.

8. Newsvine - A standard news aggregator complete with comments, voting, etc. Probably the best service if you’re interested in getting real news junkies to visit your site.

Blogosphere Pulse Detectors

While you cannot explicitly “submit” your entries to these services (they can be read automatically via RSS when you publish), you can register your blog and make it easy for your readers to add you as a favorite and make it easy for other bloggers to find you. Definitely register with these two services and publish Technorati Tags along with your entries in order to improve visibility.

Update: You actually can submit articles explicitly to Technorati as “favorites.” I overlooked this; my apologies.

9. Technorati - Every blogger knows about Technorati and the authority ranking it assigns to bloggers based upon how many other blogs link to them. Another prominent feature of Technorati is that it aggregates some of the latest blogosphere buzz on the front page; having never been anywhere near the front page I wouldn’t be able to tell you how much traffic it drives, but it has been alleged that Technorati’s system for determining what appears on the front page is fatally flawed.

10. TailRank - Another service similar to Technorati; TailRank’s front page serves as an indicator for what the blogosphere is talking about. Technorati and TailRank both have explicit voting/tagging systems for determining popularity, but the most important metric they measure is blog responses, i.e. how many blogs are linking to one of your entries.

Marketing and SEO Services

If you’re in the business of writing about marketing, search engine optimization, or some sort of promotional business, then these social media sites are for you.

11. PlugIM (Online Marketing) - Right now all of my blog entries are syndicated to PlugIM for voting, and I don’t think I have even received a single pageview from it. I’m not impressed, but hey, it’s effortless given that you can automatically syndicate your RSS feeds to PlugIM, so why not sign up for it?

12. Sphinn (SEO & Online Marketing) - I’ve never used it but apparently it has a pretty active user community. I can’t say the same for PlugIM!

13. DNHour (Domain Names) - I couldn’t think of an appropriate sub-category for domain names but I figured that domains are pretty pertinent to online marketing; anyways DNHour votes up and down on the latest domain name news.

Programming, Development, & Geek News

14. SlashDot (Technology of all kinds)- The grand daddy of them all; SlashDot was one of the earliest and most successful online communities, although it may be over-shadowed somewhat today by Digg. When you submit a story to SlashDot, it’s evaluated by the editors, and then pushed to the front page; it’s similar to Fark. SlashDot’s audience is primarily techie.

15. DZone (Developement and Programming) - Thus far every time I have used this service I have landed on the front page, and received a decent amount of visits (over 1000 unique visits). Writing a good headline that catches the eye of developers is key, but you don’t really need too many votes to make it to the front page; I also find that the people who comment on DZone are generally very positive and helpful. This is one of my favorite new social media websites.

16. DotNetKicks (.NET Technology) - I made it onto the front page of DotNetKicks today and received a nice wave of traffic (a couple hundred uniques); DotNetKicks is an absolute must for submissions if you blog about ASP.NET at all. In addition their site is all open-source so if you want to start your own social media portal you should check out their code.

17. Tweako (General Computing, Internet) - From Tweako’s about page:

Tweako.com is a place to learn and share information and knowledge about every computer and technology topic out there. We hope to create a website where users can find information and help for all their computing needs that accommodates all levels of skill and difficulty, from programming to cleaning spyware.

Please note that Tweako uses human editors to determine what appears on the front page.

18. Pixel Groovy (Web Design) - Covers a lot of different web development and web design aspects, but really the forte of Pixel Groovy are the slick CSS/AJAX tips, which usually populate the front page regardless. You can still try and submit articles about PHP/ASP.NET design as Pixel Groovy has categories supporting those.

Video

19. Game Diggity (Gaming Videos) - Video voting community for gamers.

20. Video Bomb (Videos) - Social Bookmarking for videos… Seems a bit sketchy to me.

21. Video Sift (Videos) - More social bookmarking for videos… Classier than Video Bomb.

Politics and Political Issues

22. Care2 (Social Action) - The tag line says “green living, health, human rights, and more.” If I ran a non-profit or an interest group this would be a stop in my story submission route.

23. Plant Change (Environmental Issues) - Most of the articles on the front page do not have a very high vote count; I honestly would not be able to tell you how much traffic runs through Plant Change.

24. News Heat (Politics) - Social media outlet for politics, mostly American. The vote counts aren’t very high here either so I’m not sure what the traffic levels are like.

25. Hugg (Environmental Issues) - Higher vote counts than Plant Change, but it’s the same idea.

Deals & Bargain Hunting

Honestly I think these sites are beyond boring, but then again I don’t find much interest in bargain hunting.

26. Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting

27. AgentB - More social bargain hunting.

28. Judy’s Book - Find what’s on sale near you.

Sports

29. ScoreGuru - Vote up and down on the most interesting sporting news.

30. Ballhype - a much more popular social media outlet for sporting news. Go Chargers.

WHY ISN’T COPYCAT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SERVICE [ABC] ON THIS LIST?

Because I’ve either never received traffic from it, or because I’ve never heard of it.

Credits to Tropical SEO for a great list of niche social media sites, most of which I put onto this list.

Firefox’s variety of useful extensions makes it the browser of choice for many website developers and blog operators. I’ve used Firefox for close to five years now and I’ve utilized a number of extremely helpful third party plug-ins and extensions to simplify development and website operation.

Today I’m going to run down my list of the 10 extensions that I’ve used and found to be the most helpful.

EDIT: I’ve added Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar to this list, by popular demand.

1. FireBug - Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
2. Web Developer Toolbar - Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. I used this add-on for a long time prior to Firefox 2.0. I found its pixel measuring tool to be useful and back when I did table design I used its outlining/bordering tool to help me adjust that flow-based layouts. I’ll have to relearn how to use this sucker for the new methodologies I use for client-end design.
3. Seoquake - Seoquake is one of the most powerful tools available for analyzing your website’s Search Engine Optimization results. It will help you determine what your Google PageRank score is, how many pages on your site are indexed, how many external sites link to yours, similar statistics for Yahoo and Live.com, your Alexa ranking, your del.icio.us vote count (for specific pages), and mountains of other data. I’m still finding out more and more about this tool, but I think this is by far and large one of the most powerful extensions available to web developers.
4. ColorZilla - Have you ever seen a really interesting color on a website and try to find out what it is? ColorZilla gives you the ability to simple use a “color picker” to mouse over the desired color and capture it’s hex value. This extension has proved to a real time saver and I’ve used it longer than any of the other extensions or plug-ins on this list (since late 2004).
5. Alexa Sparky - Another traffic analysis tool, brought to you by Alexa, Amazon.com’s traffic ranking service. I like this plugin simply because of the trend graph that it places in the bottom right corner of your browser window, but it also has some helpful features, such as determining what sites are similar to yours.
6. Session Manager - I keep many tabs open on my Firefox sessions at all times, and if my computer has to restart or if something crashes I can lose potentially valuable information if I am unable to find those pages again. Session manager automatically saves your sessions and in the event of a crash or a reboot it can restore all of the tabs in the session for you.
7. IE View Lite - There are a lot of developers out there who wish Internet Explorer would either accept the W3C standards or just go away, but unfortunately a large portion of Internet users are Internet Explorer users. IE View Lite allows you to right click on any given page and gives you the option to view this page in a new Internet Explorer window. IE View Lite is a powerful tool for cross-browser testing and validation. I prefer using IE View over IE Tab, which runs Internet Explorer within a tab in Firefox, simply because IE tab has some quirks (i.e. it reverts back to Firefox if you press Firefox’s reload button while focused on an IE Tab) and you don’t get full access to all of IE’s options with IE Tab.
8. FireFTP - FireFTP is simply an FTP client built into the Firefox browser. It’s free, it’s simple, it’s reliable, and I can flip to FireFTP just like any other tab on the browser.
9. Greasemonkey - Greasemonkey is arguably the most powerful Firefox extension. Greasemonkey allows you to apply custom JavaScripts to pages within your browser; for instance there are scripts to declutter your Facebook homepage, hide Gmail lables, and hide Netflix reviews. I use Greasemonkey to make it easier to navigate social network sites when promoting my blog. You can view the directory of Greasemonkey scripts at Userscripts.org.
10. Download Status Bar - When I download Wordpress plug-ins for my blog, I usually do so in intervals of 3-5 plug-ins at a time. I use Download status bar to give me instant access to my completed downloads without having to hunt them down using Windows Explorer. I try to save time in every way possible.
11. StumbleUpon - While I don’t believe in spamming social tagging sites in everyway possible, I always make sure I am the first to submit my own articles to StumbleUpon. Why? Because the first StumbleUpon review is crucial to getting the correct demographic to view your site, since the categorization of the “stumble” occurs during the first review instance. It’s better that you, the author of the site, write the first review and categorize it accordingly, rather than put it in the hands of someone who may be viewing your site for the first time. In addition StumbleUpon sends more users to your site on average than Digg does, according to ProBlogger.
12. Extended Cookie Manager and Cache Status - I use the Extended Cookie Manager and the Extended Cache Manager to help me debug my site when I’m running into connectivity issues, such as the trouble I ran into with my MySQL connection bombing out in IIS.

Just to let you guys know that I’m not full of it, here’s a screenshot of the extensions list on my desktop after I reloaded it.

What are your favorite Firefox extensions or add-ons? I’ll check em out and release a new list down the stretch!

Earlier this week I wrote that we were testing a new open source .NET blogging platform called BlogEngine.NET at AjaxNinja Labs.

I’ve done a couple of detailed feature comparisons and I plan on doing a few more during the course of the next couple of weeks. All of my feature comparisons will be posted on our BlogEngine.NET test blog at AjaxNinja labs, although I will be posting collections of the results here periodically.

Here are our first couple of tests:

Wordpress vs. BlogEngine.NET: Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Wordpress vs. BlogEngine.NET: Vulnerability to Spam

Make sure you also read our initial post on BlogEngine.NET.

I’m a frequent reader and an occasional poster on Microsoft’s ASP.NET forums but when I logged in yesterday to see if there were any easy questions I could answer before I had to leave for a formal dinner (Microsoft awards points for being able to successfully answer technical questions) and I came across Microsoft’s ASP.NET community announcement for their new blogging tool, BlogEngine.NET.

I went ahead and installed BlogEngine.NET 1.1 into a new section of our AjaxNinja labs so you can view the product in it’s full AjaxNinja glory

Here’s a quick hitlist of some of the features of BlogEngine.NET copied directly from Microsoft’s starter kit page:

• Plug ’n’ Play
  BlogEngine.NET is very easy to setup and customize. To make it work, just upload the files to an ASP.NET 2.0 webserver and you’re ready to start writing. No database configuration, just plug’n’play.
• Full Featured
  BlogEngine.NET comes with all the features you would expect from a modern blog engine as well as new unique features such as AJAX comments and screenshot trackbacks.
• Web 2.0
  BlogEngine.NET features social bookmarks, OpenSearch support, XFN tags, AJAX, Microsummaries, Gravatars, coComments, tag cloud, Google sitemap and other so-called Web 2.0 features.
• Cool Themes
  BlogEngine.NET comes with some very cool themes for you to choose from. If you want to modify or create a new theme you can do so easily with just a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.
• XHTML Compliance
  All the controls in BlogEngine.NET are 100% XHTML 1.0 compliant. All posts you write automatically becomes compliant thanks to the tinyMCE text editor.
• Extendable
  BlogEngine.NET is built from the ground up using nothing but C# and ASP.NET 2.0 all with simplicity in mind. It means that you can write new controls and themes by using the skills you already have as a .NET developer.

The full list of all available blogging features is extensive; multi-author support, pingbacks and trackbacks, and so on.

I will be writing a couple of entries using the BlogEngine.NET software just to compare it to Wordpress, such as the first one I did today.

By the way, you should check out the Facebook tests there; you will need to be logged into Facebook to see them, however. The tests are ridiculously simple and I will be publishing the source code if there’s any interest.