DISQUS

Considering their first response was to lie to us about why they did it, I have no doubt they don't plan to reinstate it and never did.

You can't stop piracy, so they might as well learn to accept it as a reality. Every time they win a court case and claim moral high ground by virtue of winning, they come off looking like fascists standing on the bodies of everyone who got in their way. If media companies spent as much time and money producing material people felt was worth the money as they do fighting the piracy of crappy materials there would be far less piracy to start with.

The real question is how many of CNN's twitter followers actually use twitter on a regular basis. They were one of the first follows I made in the first week I joined twitter way back when. Then after a week or so i didn't log into twitter for several more months, then only rarely. It has only been since December that I have even cared what is going on in the twitterverse again.

Before anyone can or should get excited about their twitter numbers they need to think about the kind of people they have following them. I was sort of dismayed when I hit 2k follower the first time and then did a twitter karma. Only half of the people following had posted within the last year, and most of them I found had auto follow/auto unfollow. When it comes right down to it if you don't engage people on twitter or only a tiny amount of your followers follow your links your follower number is meaningless.

Every time I see Safety Dance, I want to scream out "Play Stonehenge!"

Tweetdeck is great I have been using it for a couple of months now and am very pleased at how well it lets me connect with others.

Another nice twitter addition for me has been the inclusion of the automatic twitter profile plugin for wordpress. Not only does it link comments to a persons twitter account it adds another searchable marker to your blog much the way CommentLuv and KeywordLuv do. Check out that nifty plugin and a few others on the page I linked too.

<abbr>Brads last blog post..Science Fiction And The Emmy’s</abbr>

I think the trends we see with #FollowFriday #tweepletuesday, and #unfollowsaturday make twitter out to be one the best social net. I find more interesting stuff via twitter than I ever did digg. In fanct if you go to any of the what's popular on twitter sites you will see what is really popular rather than what a few big name people are forcing down your throats.

my preferences is for http://twitturls.com/ as it separates out links, images and videos.

<abbr>brad hart’s last blog post..Idol Gets Down and Dirty</abbr>

I am highly disappointed in every Harry potter Movie since Chamber of Secrets. The acting and characters are fine but the scripts and story all suck. The only reason I bothered to see the last two was they were the second feature at the drive in and I could drink beer, stretch out, and fall asleep if the notion came to me while stretched out in the back of the truck.

In my mind Digg is a doomed netowrk that maybe has 2 years at best before they are are bought out or forced to close. They have allowed their good 'ol boy network of power users and bury brigade to run amok and hamper smaller users. The power diggers use the bury brigade to keep smaller users from ever becoming popular submit their own version of the same exact links and run up the digg count for their own personal glorification and gratification. The problem here is after a while smaller users who are the ones Digg needs to target with relevant advertising traffic just give up. They may digg something once in a while or follow a link they find interesting, but they stop submitting anything new. It isn't that they stop submitting from popular sites which is what effectively gets stolen from them, they stop submitting anything from anywhere meaning not only are they unlikely to click on an ad there is less diversity in the cointent Digg has to offer ads on. Simply put Digg needs to fix its social policies before it can start working on its economic policies.

Julie if your comment is not picked up automatically it is one of two things. First It can be the blog you you leave a comment on. There are half a dozen things things than can stop it from communicating with your blog. This happens a small percentage of the time, but it almost always happens to every comment left over a long period of time. The more likely scenario is it is your blog that is the problem. commentLuv goes looking for your feed. if you direct your feeds away with feedburner and other such services and don't leave traditional rss/atom feeds in place it can affect your blogs ability to communicate with commentLuv. There are also a number of plugins that interfere with commentLuv getting your feed. Last but not least there are a lot of servers that are too slow to feed commentLuv. If you don't see a comment instantly then you won't get see one ever.

Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blog's last blog post..Brad's Social Status for 2008-12-28

Thankfully you aren't pushing All in one SEO pack, as I have said more than once it is a set it and forget it flop that hurts more bloggers than it helps. It has become about as useful as spray on hair or the pocket fisherman.

I have used a lot of these in the past and some of them I still do. Despite using on average more than 60 plugins per blog, I am not a fan of duplication. I include as many functions as I can built into the theme where they tend to take up less cpu time. I use headspace 2 which eleminates the need for a great many other SEO plugins. You still have to do the work of writing a title tag, cleaning up your post slug, write your own page description, etc, but in the end this takes up about 2 extra minutes and you know it is done right.

Continuing on without duplication I like using sociable for my social media links but I have dropped other email and print plugins and just added them to the list of options from sociable. Another thing I recommend is adding the sociable css to your theme so you don't have to edit out the opacity level every time it is updated with new social networks.

I use a couple of related post plugins, but I only use them occassionally. I like to turn them on see what comes up and then hard code anchor texts for the links. I am really looking for a one I like that can be widgetized for some my blogs with older blogs with lots of content.

Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blog's last blog post..Free Wordpress Theme: Greenback

Amen to it being a long term commitment and requiring work. I find the best strategy is find a single place you can work easily be it twitter, facebook, or any other outlet. Pick one and stay at it.

Darren Rowse has been my most influential twitter member this year. I had been really neglecting twitter until he put up twitip.com In a week I was back to using it regularly and went from 25 followers to 400+ and increased my blog traffic almost 15% by posting the feeds to twitter.

<abbr>Brad Hart´s last blog post..Judge Not</abbr>

It seems to me that it wasn't necessarily pounce that is in trouble, but Six Apart. First it was they had to sell LiveJournal now it is Pounce. Both sites had huge amounts of traffic, which to me sounds like poor management rather than unpopularity.

<abbr></abbr><abbr>Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blogs last blog post..Blogging in Black and White</abbr>

I guess when McCain mentioned a certain level of comfort he was talking about people like Bill Gates and not his Cindy...

Gave the post its props for reddit and stumbleupon and passing the message along to as many people as I can.

Ratatouille was one of my favorites of the year. Part of it was the delight my son got out of the movie, but most because it was just a good movie. I think however like most movies that have come out recently it is a much better DVD. Then again I could be biased since I have a good sized tv, great surround sound theater setup and a really comfortable chair.

Juno was another one of my favorites from the year, even if I didn't get around to watching it until I got it on DVD a couple of months ago. Ellen Page is a great young actress and one who I think will just keep getting better with age.

I wasn't impressed with No Country for Old Men. The acting was well done and the Coens as usual do their thing well. I mostly didn't like it, because I didn't like the book. It is hard to see someone put a book you like on the screen, it is usually painful to see them put a book you dislike on the screen I would much rather have seen what they could have done with one of his better novels like Blood Meridian.

It would have been much better had Hasselhoff been first chased by aztecs with a mind on sacrifice then by a trex with his mind on appetizers.

I gave up worrying about page rank. I switch the domains on one blog, just after the last update and for a month forwarded the old domain which was at PR 4. This update the old domain which has something new on it dropped to PR 2, the blogs new domain has six times the traffic about 70% from organic google searches not to mention it rates the top page in a lot of popular TV show keyword searches. This domain remained at zero. Google knows it is far mroe popular with several times the backlinks to it as well, but for some reason doesn't seem fit to give it a decent page rank.

Something else I noticed in some of the blogs I am tracking is people who removed their adsense or had it taken away also lost page rank. regardless of traffic or content. Conversely a number of blogs with lots of traffic using other ad networks didn't go up at all but a number of crappy blogs using adsense with next to no traffic went up. Something seems fishy to me over this little insight...

Brads last blog post..C Is For

Clive, it has been a while since I abandoned the do follow plugin for nofollow free, but I believe it does. In no follow free you have more control over what is and isn't nofollow. On the other hand it would be pointless to make the name link dofollow, but not the CommentLuv link.

Brad's last blog post..5 WordPress Plugins That Drive Comments

cool I hope can keep saying convincing things once in a while.

The decision to go nofollow free can be a controversial one and yes you can get spam. You get spam regardless of whether or not you are nofollow free or not though. Keeping a blog nofollow says to a lot of people, me included, that you don't want to work for your comments. If you moderate new commentators it only takes a few minutes to scan through hundreds of potential comments looking for spam.

Most reactionaries always say people are just using you for the link when they come in and post "this was great!" That may be true, but so what. They stopped by looked around long enough to make the comment and left. Maybe they read it and meant it, maybe they didn't, but so what. They are foot traffic through your blog business. Can you imagine walmart or krogers telling their customers "screw you go away we don't want you to come in and just buy a pack of gum"? That is essentially what being nofollow all the time does. You can set these plugins to reward repeat commentatos if you want and the bigger you are the better that idea that plan is. The point is never giving anyone the chance to profit from commenting on your blog, especially if you aren't hugely popular, means you will never turn the gum buyer in the person that buys thousands of dollars worth of crap when the mood strikes them.

There are blogs where they have no reason to reward commentators. Take Darren Rowse for a moment. What he is selling if you pay attention actually is so good that you will even profit from a nofollow link.as much as you will from the information in the post. Some of the comments I have left there are generating me hits more than a year later. That is a fair trade, but for every blog like that there five or ten thousand that still profit from mine and other peoples comments, and we get nothing and have no real reason to go back too them. That isn't to say some of the big name bloggers couldn't profit from nofollow free at some level. How much more traffic and profit could be derived from setting a limit of a hundred of five hundred responses to get your nofollow free removed.

It is a personal decision still, but it is one I don't think very many bloggers that want to be popular or make money will go wrong making.

Going nofollow free on all your permalink pages, using commentluv and keywordluv really helps, but it doesn't go far enough. You have to let other bloggers, the people who will not only be interested in what you say, but have something to gain by it know you have done it.

People always want something for nothing. We have been fighting the war of advertising between content providers and viewers since before I put of my first big website in '95. I don't expect it to end anytime soon.

Brad's last blog post..A Nation of Whiners

A Simple Theme for Simple Blogs. I tend not to be so simple though...

I have been promoting the plugin for a while now, but until recently hadn't really started using it for my own backlink purposes.

Brad's last blog post..WordPress 2.6 First Impressions