Counting

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
-Albert Einstein

Empowerment With Technology

"The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential."
Steve Ballmer

Top Technorati Searches in the Political Arena. Today.

american
politics
army
arnold schwarzenegger
cia
congress
democracy
election
energy policy
federal
foreign affairs
george bush
iraq
latin america
liberalism
mccain
military
nation
insurance
national security
parliament
presidential election
racismr
egulatory
schwarzenegger
the middle east
vote
stock quotes

New Stuff, New Tweaks

As you can see, I've decided to change to a different template.

I hope that it is agreeable with my readers.

The reasoning behind the change is my disappointment with the inability of the previous template's flexibility with regards to widget size and placement. Additionally, the previous template caused my blog archive list to stretch extremely far down the sidebar, as well as any other text that I added to that area of the template.

I'm not sure that I love this template because there is not as clear a division between posts, however, I do feel it is an improvement from the past template.

I may change my template at Issues On Call as well, as I am not extremely pleased with its appearance. However, I have been working with the colors and layout over the past week, as well as the ad layout.

I feel that learning, based on the option of these templates, gives me a greater understanding of the details I will desire to develop on my own web domain, when the time comes.

I hope that viewing my learning process helps others in their blogging journey and that it doesn't annoy those who subscribe to my blog.

Thank you for your patience.

With regard to Feedburner...I have been able to integrate AdSense with Feedburner and that allows for additional ads to appear at the end of each "newest" post. This location is supposedly a prime location for readers to view and curiously click, however, my results have still been minimal, which is frustrating.

If you look at my Issues On Call site, at the end of each post, Feedburner has placed the ads there as well, however, with the FeedFlare option (where the ad option was first located), there is an option to include things such as, technorati, sphere, digg, etc. This shows up on my Issues On Call site but somehow doesn't show up on my Max Your Ping site. So, this will be something that I'll need to troubleshoot...Ahhh the frustration of inconsistency...probably something I did or didn't do correctly.

Additionally, my Headline Animator from Feedburner continues to circulate the titles and dates of my posts, which in turn interests my viewers in clicking on the widget. From clicking on the widget the viewer can subscribe to my post...an additional subscription option. Within the Headline Animator section, you can choose to advertise your site through Headline Animator, however, the budgets begin at $25 per month...something most bloggers are not in the blogging business for. Certainly, right now, I'd love to see my $25.00 in a check to me...lol

I have added my name to another location as well...Newsvine.com. I'm just getting the hang of it, but it seems to be a pretty serious site...not one made for match-making, but for serious article writing...right up my alley (not that you can tell from the tidbits I write here).

Here is my link so that you can see what it begins to look like
Click Here

I am still getting to know the ropes. They are pretty strict. I'm trying to find out if I can actually add any ads to my articles through Google Analytics or Feedburner, as Newsvine uses different rules which include the longevity of the user and the amount and quality of your articles and interaction.

It is an interesting site. I suggest reading up on it as another option in networking, however...let me tell you that these are serious WORK, serious ARTICLE, serious EVERYTHING networking groups and it isn't like Digg. You really have to work hard to get people into your networking group.

My StumbleUpon Tool Bar doesn't seem to work half the time, so I have a hard time integrating with that site. Plus, it seems that it is not quite the serious networking site that I'd like to be involved with, however, from time to time I still visit it and check on my friends there and network a bit. It is somewhat between Digg and MySpace. You can have some people that want you to see their work and others that want you to SEE their work...if you know what I mean. So...just an FYI.

The Yahoo networking site is one that I have not figured out AT ALL yet. It is still in Beta and I think it has a long way to go. However, I have to say that I have given the others a better try so I will cut it some slack...for now.

Digg seems to be good sometimes, and then sometimes it seems to be too much work. I get Digg burn out. I feel that there is a lot of junk that gets "shouts" to my login, mixed in with some selectively "real" news, tech, interest, etc. type stuff. However, the catch is that if you don't respond to most of the people sending you shouts in some way, you may not get the response that you want when you want something publicized. Kind of crazy. I guess it is representative of the globe, however, and I take the interesting ideas that come over as, just that...interesting.

I had one day following the writing of an article Issues On Call - Article
where I suddenly earned $13.00 on adsense from a bunch of clicks and have no idea how they came about, since I have been doing the same procedure of sending out my pings and promoting my articles this whole time. That is the most I have earned.

The earning is becoming a great deal of frustration, as I am sure it is for many bloggers. I ask myself what I am doing wrong, what I am doing right, if my articles are good enough, if my articles are the right topic, if my production is sufficient, etc.

What else can I do? If someone who is reading this has suggestions and has seen my other sites, please let me know. I am in this for the long-haul and would love some tidbits of advice on earning.

I did receive some emails tonight from affiliate groups who I sent applications to showing that I am approved, however, it may take me a couple of days to go through all of their information to make sure they are legit. I will update you and let you know the sources once I find out the results.

I find myself staying up until all hours of the night (actually into the morning) working on this investment into mine and my family's future and so, since it is now close to 1am I must sign off, hoping that this is good feedback, based on my recent experiences and frustrations.

Let me tell you something about the frustrations...they only drive me more, knowing that I can succeed because I have the drive, ambition, and best of all the TECHNOLOGY :-)

Happy Blogging!

Affiliate Directories & Interesting Articles

Well, it seems that my networking is taking much of my time these days. The more contacts I have and the more time I spend on my blog articles, the more I find that I spend on networking.

Working on my latest articles from my two blogs that I've submitted to my networking sites, I find that I am making great contacts by following-up with people (who have left their information, instead of anonymous) who have left comments.

Regardless of the comment, unless there was something extremely offensive involved, I give a simple thank you and try to look at their interests or submitted articles to see if I may add them to one of my networks to help them out. I like this more personal contact and it seems to be creating some great relationships where I have obtained regular subscribers and have subscribed to some of their blogs.

With networking, there always needs to be give and take. If you expect it all to come your direction without giving any back, expect to fail.

Additionally, I was wondering if any of you have tried Amazon.com and their "Partners" affiliate program? I have been giving it a good long try on both my sites and seem to be having zero success. Over twenty-thousand impressions on one of ad widgets, and thousands on others, but no orders, no referral fees paid, etc. I was looking over their discussion board and others seem to be complaining about the same thing, with others commenting that Amazon is just using bloggers to gather their customers for them without paying them.

I don't know if that is true. However, I am looking into other programs to try. I have found two great directories for affiliate-type companies. Be careful, however, because they will seem to be free and then you will be required to pay them to build a web-page and give you a domain, or you'll be required to purchase their tracking/reporting software, etc. Just a word of caution because it seems that every Tom-Dick-and-Harry want to offer an affiliate program.

Here are the two directories. I can't say much about them yet, since I am still exploring them myself. I will give my results once I've played around with it a bit.

Affiliate Scout

Commission Junction


Here are some interesting articles that I found that I thought I'd share regarding blogging, technology, etc. as it is important to always stay on top of the latest news if you want your blog to succeed...which you do, or you wouldn't be putting in the work in the first place.

The Next Social Network: WordPress
"Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation."

SEO Spammers: Leave Social Media Sites Alone!
"They always submit. They never vote/Digg/upmod anyone else’s submissions. Their submissions get 1 or fewer votes (unless they are a MASS - a Multi-Account-SEO-Spammer, in which case they will have more than one, but it will always be the same amount and always voted by the same “people”)."

Increase Earnings By Upto 30% With Google Coop & Adsense
"Here is a way that would allow you to earn higher and even turn a portion of first time visitors who come from search engine and after reading the content just close your site up."

I hope, as always, that this information is helpful and contributes to your blog's success.

Happy Blogging.

New Social Media Submitter Tool, YouTube Partner Program

New SEO - Social Media Submitter Tool Doesn't Perform...

Submit Your Site To Social Media!
This tool is supposed to link you to the following sites.
Blinklist
Del.icio.us
Digg
Furl
Mixx
Newsvine
Reddit
You fill in the URL of the Site/Story, Title, Description, etc. and Submit and it is supposed to just get it out to all of them.

Unfortunately, this tool does not work. It would be great if it did, so that we all didn't have to take so much time networking and could use more time writing our blogs. Not so.

However, this does enable you to have a link to each of these sites to try them out for networking, if you wish. Let's look on the positive.

----------------------

On the positive side of news and news of opportunity...

YouTube is offering an expanded YouTube Partner Program.

Earlier in the year they launched a pilot to enable some of the most popular creators in their YouTube community a way to receive a portion of the revenue generated from the ads that run next to their videos.

Since it was so successful, they have expanded it to anyone living in the U.S. or Canada. To apply to become a partner, click on the following link and read the information and click to apply.

YouTube Partner Program Expands

Have a great Tuesday!

Optimize Your Ping Time

Optimize Your Ping Time...

Here are the sites that Ping-O-Matic will "ping" for you each time you post.

Weblogs.com
Weblogalot.com
Technorati.com
Feedburner.com
PubSub.com
Blogdigger.com
Moreover.com
Icerocket.com
Blogrolling.com
Bloglines.com (just added)

You can also choose to "ping" specialized services (see list on link)
Ping-O-Matic...Click Here

The advantage to this is your site gets more coverage faster than going to each of these locations separately. It helps to have an account set-up (free) at each of these locations to maximize your "ping" coverage potential.

Other "ping" coverage options are as follows.

Google Ping Service
"What is the Google Blog Search Pinging Service?

The Google Blog Search Pinging Service is a way to inform Google Blog Search of weblog updates. These updates are then published and shared with other search engines to allow them to discover the changes to your weblogs. In addition, Google Blog Search will add submitted weblogs to the list of blogs it needs to crawl and index."

Google Ping Service...Click Here

Pingoat
Pinging Services
A back-up to use in the case Ping-o-Matic is not available.
Click Here For Link
They "ping" the following, as well as special services listed on the link.

technorati.com
icerocket.com
weblogs.com
newsgator.com
blo.gs
feedburner.com
blogstreet.com
my.yahoo.com
moreover.com
newsisfree.com
syndic8.com
topicexchange.com
blogdigger.com
pubsub.com
coreblog.org
blogpeople.net
blogrolling.com
catapings.com
effbot.org
holycowdude.com
octora.com
veneblogs.com
bitacoras.com
technorati.jp
bakeinu.jp
blog-search.net
cocolog-nifty.com
bloggers.jp
blogoon.net
blogstyle.jp
amagle.com
gpost.info

Note: Some of the above list include foreign blog pings (not a bad thing). Additionally, I did not include in the list those pings which have been showing up as connection incomplete or error in connection.

The more exposure your blog receives, the more your advertising will pay-off.

You must remember that you need to sign up with each of the sites listed above that you would like to see yourself actually "pinged" at. They need to verify that you are, indeed, a true blog site. It is time consuming, but well worth the time.

Happy blogging.

Manage Your Networking Time For Your Blog

Please visit natashacall.blogspot.com for this article.

Thanks for visiting!

Networking Sites, Ping Sites, What is a "Ping"?

Things learned...

I added the StumbleUpon toolbar today, which makes it easy for me to submit articles and add to my profile (to keep articles on-file) that I have interest in. I found that to be a cool feature. However, word-to-the-wise when you're adding the toolbar...be sure that you don't have any tabs up that you are in need of keeping track of because you'll lose those as your internet will "reboot" (not your complete computer system...just the internet, i.e., Internet Explorer).

Additionally, I've added del.icio.us to my networking group. Their site seems, thus far, to be fairly easy to use. I've not yet had much interaction with my del.icio.us network, as that seems to be the hardest part. However, I have just begun using them and I discover new things as I go and will continue to update you. Posting items on their site is fairly easy. Adding people to your network is fairly easy.

My message regarding these sites is that networking is a necessity in marketing your blog, increasing its traffic and attractiveness to advertisers. Additionally, just because one networking site doesn't work for my blogs does not mean it will not work for your blogs.

A sight for adding "Pings" to your blog is called Weblogs.com. I signed up there to start adding "Pings" each time I add changes/articles to my sight, hoping it will drive traffic in my direction. Here is what they say about their sight...

"Weblogs.com, a VeriSign service, is a ping server that automatically notifies subscribers when new content is posted to a website or blog.

Weblogs.com is the original ping service and receives millions of pings every day from blogs that configure their publishing software to notify Weblogs.com the moment content is published.

The VeriSign-operated Weblogs.com ping server will continue to operate as an openly available service. This benefits the entire blogosphere because:
...Blog publishers can immediately notify the community when new posts are available
...Anyone can openly monitor the updated posts, enabling a wide range of intelligent blog monitoring tools and applications. "

That is the "dish" from them. I'll let you know how this experiment goes.

What is the definition of "Ping (Blogging)"? This comes from Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_blog

"Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.) That is, the tool sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.
Open ping servers, like VeriSign's Weblogs.com and Yahoo!'s blo.gs, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them.

Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material. A few of the blog aggregators that can be pinged directly include: BulkFeeds, FeedBurner, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Technorati, and Yahoo

In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.

There is a conflict of interest here between the blogger--who wants his new post to get the widest possible publicity as fast as possible--and the web-service owner--who wants his search engine or aggregator to have new blog posts long before anyone else. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers. As the blogosphere has grown, other ping "services" have cropped up, such as Pingoat and BlogFlux Pinger."

Thus far, networking is the best tool for bringing traffic to my blog sites. I additionally tried Ping-o-matic this evening. Since I've only recently started utilizing tools for "Pinging" my blogs, I'll update you on the increase of traffice flow once I have accumulated enough data.

I continue to experiment with the different tools available to build and sustain great blogs and I will continue to give you the feedback from my experiences during these experiments, hoping that they help you have great success.

Happy Blogging!

The Daily Update..."Where's the Fire?"

I did my daily work on the networking sites and on research regarding marketing and such today. Here are some of my results.

On Technorati, their version of "hot topics" called "Where's the Fire?" has been down for well over a month. This makes the sight less attractive because there are virtually no new topics to vote on or ability to submit hot topics. Therefore, the only functions, as far as I can evaluate, are that of owning a profile, listing your blogs (having them "pinged" each time you post), and adding favorites. Posts from your favorites will flow through your home page and you can see news on the home page of Technorati. As far as favorites, thus far, I don't see that mine are networking on Technorati, due to lack of reciprocal response. I may not really know all of the ins and outs of this site exactly, however, I hope that the functionality of this site becomes more beneficial soon.

I started working in StumbleUpon today. Again, each site takes some getting used to and navigating. I haven't really figured out this one completely, or finished setting up my profile, however I did find an interesting post ( I haven't figured out how to post yet though). This post showed an interesting link

http://labs.google.com/

"Labs.google.com, Google's technology playground. Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time. Your feedback can help us improve them. Please play with these prototypes and send your comments directly to the Googlers who developed them."

It looks like a pretty cool link with items like...

...a whole section of great usable stuff that has "graduated from the lab"
...Google Mars (maps of Mars)
...Google Page Creator (Web Page Creator)
...Google Music Trends
...and more

Sounds like a fun playground! Have fun with that!

Until next time, happy blogging.

Introduction, Tools For Blogging

The following was a post I wrote on my blog at...

http://issuesoncall.blogspot.com/

I decided to start this site with it, giving a glimpse into why I decided to dedicate a blog to this type of information.

When starting a venture into weblogging, many bloggers wish to share their weblogs with the Internet Universe.

How do you get your blog past your immediate friends and family members?

Of course, Digg is a great site for networking. However, the following are other sites that have given me a plethora of additional information to add to my networking collection.First, here is a site with a ranking list of networking locations for your weblogs.

Blog Network Lists

http://www.blognetworklist.com/topnetworklist.php

Second, here are some more networking opportunities to maximize your blog coverage.

Technorati http://www.technorati.com/

Yahoo Publisher (Beta) http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Alexa http://www.alexa.com/

http://www.alexa.com/browse/general/?&CategoryID=1422529

Google http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=data+network&ie=utf-8

MSN Spaces http://home.services.spaces.live.com/

In addition to the sites listed above, articles from the following locations deal with maximizing weblog coverage and monetizing your blog.

If your like me, you really feel like your writing is an output of your reading (or other hobby or trade) and you're learning the weblog technology as an creative outlet.

The monetizing will be "icing-on-the-cake", so to speak.

My real goal, is to consistently improve my writing skills and to create a network of others with the same interests to gather writing material from and to present my writing material to. (This, in addition to my competitive nature of watching the numbers increase of those reading my materials on my site and constantly trying to maximize that number:)

Here are the articles of interest for maximizing your weblog.

I placed them on Digg when I first published this post. I hope they help someone who may have some of the same questions and/or curiosities as I have had.

Creating a New Blog Network - Hiring Bloggers
http://www.sohaibthiab.com/index.php/archives/129
Blogging Done Right
http://www.paolomendoza.com/2007/11/blogging-done-right.html
http://blog.icalvyn.com/freedomain
Many Titles from this location...
http://www.problogger.net/

Obviously, there is much information out there, and there are many different styles for each blogger.

The lessons I am learning are many, including some of these simple ones...

...pay attention to the quality and content of your writing
...pay attention to the comments from readers, as it is a signal of your writing content and quality needing improvement or change
...pay attention to your ads and their content, daily, along with the traffic they are bringing to see when you may need to adjust them to bring in more revenue
...pay attention to the traffic flow to your weblog and use daily time to network your site
...pay attention that you balance your investment in time that it does not take your passion away from your writing and/or from the topic(s) you wish to share.

I thank all of those who have been so brilliant in creating the technology so that I can meet a network of great and generous minds on a global scale.

Without the work of the technologically savvy, I would not be able to get to know such great people as I am now able to interact with.

Thank you for reading my articles and for being a part of this journey. I hope that this information is helping you as much as it is helping me.

Have a great evening!