ch-ch-changes* (toward authorial transparency) | btrandolph.com

image: dictionary.com

I have had my posterous blog up for a few years. I have used it mostly as an enhanced bookmarking tool to capture web sites (sometimes) and blog articles (mostly) I thought were interesting. posterous provides a very cool toolbar button that lets users re-blog content from anywhere to their own posterous blog. posterous will pull selected text into the new post, or, if no text is selected, all the content.

posterous provides a link back to the source content and uses the source subject line and name as the subject line for the new post: for example, "My Post About Cats | UnhealthyObsessions.com"). however, the unwitting and unscrupulous can simply delete the references and presto! newly birthed content, squirmy and a bit slimy. I wrote about one of these characters and the tension between social sharing and theft way back in 2009.

in researching for an update to that post in the last few weeks, I've discovered something. by and large, smart people do not like it when their admirers (or competitors) take entire posts and slap them up on their own site, even when the borrower gives proper credit to the source. this has something to do with changes in how search engine rankings are calculated. link juice, that mysterious elixir produced a link to one's website. ain't what it used to be.

a bigger factor is the whole reason for producing valuable content - getting traffic to one's site. write enough good stuff, create a steady flow of visitors, and you can charge for ads on the pages. you become known as a source for good information and traffic swells even more. google pricks up its robotic ears and pushes up the site that is getting all the likes and shares. but if some percentage of prospective new visitors are finding your good stuff on some other site, it reduces the value of your site!

so - I will no longer reblog whole posts on my posterous site. it will continue to serve as a curatorial site. but I will excerpt a section of the source article that i find especially interesting and post that, along with my riveting insights (that's a joke) and a prominent invitation to read the original article at the original site. that's link love, how it oughta be!

* song credit: david bowie

I went off on a bit of a tangent earlier and wrote a post over on my "serious" blog. hackles were raised. I do not believe that marketingprofs is ripping off hubspot content for fun and profit. or vice versa. just asking for a little more due diligence is all.

Posterous Upgrades Post Editor for Simple Multimedia Sharing (via mashable)

Until today, the Achilles heel of Posterous’s super simple blogging service has been its less-than-stellar online post editor. Today, however, the startup is ready to unveil its completely overhauled Post Editor 2.0.

Post Editor 2.0 is designed for supremely easy content management. You can now upload and arrange any combination of photos, music, videos and documents in your posts via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. The interface is intelligent, the experience is smooth and the blogging platform is now incredibly flexible.

The new post editor is available now to all Posterous users, and you can try it out for yourself with the “Post by web” option in your dashboard. You’ll notice that the redesigned editor now includes a dedicated media section on the right where you can batch upload any and all media for your post. If you upload multiple images, they can be grouped in galleries, reordered via drag-and-drop, rotated, deleted and interspersed with text as you choose.

What’s interesting is that Posterous — which we like to call the e-mail-to-blog-to-anywhere platform — has strayed from its original e-mail-centric focus with this update. The service now offers a sophisticated web editor for more advanced blogging needs, and could be seen as competitive to most other blogging platforms. The best part is that the new features don’t sacrifice the service’s trademark simplicity, which means it’s still 100% mom-friendly.

via mashable.com

Blogging Continues to Rumble Along | Mark Evans Tech

here's an excerpt from a blog post by mark evans about blogworld expo, going on this week:

blogTwitter is sexy and Facebook now has more than 300 million registered users. But what about blogging? Blogging isn’t sexy anymore and it is being assailed as a passing fancy, especially by the mainstream media.

The truth, however, is the blogosphere is doing just fine: the number of blogs, blog posts and people reading blogs continues to grow. Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to launch blogs as part of its mad scramble to embrace the social Web.

What became obvious during BlogWorld Expo is that blogging is the solid citizen of the social Web, while Twitter and Facebook are the wild children. Another reality is that Twitter and Facebook are, in many cases, complementary tools used by bloggers rather than tools that replace blogging.

Before anyone writes off blogs, think again.

More: Here’s an audio clip from social media maven Robert Scoble on whether blogging during tech conferences such as BlogWorld Expo is dead.

via markevanstech.com

not sure about the claimed attacks on blogging by "the mainstream media" that mark assails here. maybe the canadian press has a secret vendetta not shared by their american counterparts?

in addition, is it really surprising that a meeting called "blogworld" would put blogs at the center of the social media universe (talking pre-galilean here of course)? blogs are content repositories and as such, are essential to any inbound marketing strategy. but facebook is the public face of the social web - to call it a "wild child" seems disingenuous.

M.I.T. Lets Student Bloggers Post Without Censoring - NYTimes.com

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

But so far, none of the blogs match the interactivity and creativity of those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they are posted prominently on the admissions homepage, along with hundreds of responses from prospective applicants — all unedited.

via nytimes.com

a lesson for membership organizations?

Dairy Queen Launched Blog With A Sweet Deal For Readers | Pierson Grant News

[MARCH 2009] MINNEAPOLIS – It’s a typical sight at local Dairy Queen® locations where people are sharing smiles and stories over delicious food and cravable treats. For nearly 70 years, the all-American favorite and treat category leader has been a trendsetter, such as with the often imitated but never duplicated signature Blizzard® Treat. Now, after more than 200,000 mentions of the brand in the blogosphere, the DQ® system is joining the conversation by initiating the official Dairy Queen blog, which makes sense for a brand that is social by nature.

...

To kick off the blog, Dairy Queen offered bloggers a deal they couldn’t refuse. The first 250 bloggers who answered the question “What deal would you make with us to try our new Sweet Deals value menu?” received a Sweet Deals gift card. The most creative answer won Sweet Deals every week for a year. Sweet Deals offers more than 20,000 combinations of food, beverages and treats at value prices where the more you eat, the more you save.

via piersongrant.com

dq recognized that getting attention from other bloggers was the fastest way to gain traction for their own blog...part of an effective, grass-rootsy SM presence