Technorati Top Favorited Buzz

Lately, we have seen lots of movement in the Technorati Popular Blogs list. Notably, the anchor of the red hot Technorati Favorited trains, "Dosh Dosh" has jumped to the #8 spot in the most favorited blog list.

It all started with Dosh Dosh's favorite exchange experiment, where bloggers exchange links and technorati favorites with each others' blogs. This quickly became a big hit and helps lots of unknown blogs getting some attentions.

This doesn't take too long before the big boys like the Mashable and Problogger caught up the gaming. Darren blogged about this issue and received lots of nasty comments from other bloggers. This quickly becomes one of the hottest topic in the blogosphere.

It would be interesting to see if Technorati is going to do anything about it. My guess is that they won't. The Most Linked Blog list already served the purpose of representing the "TOP" blogs, why would they need an extra one that was 90% similar?

After all, some blogs really benefited from the favorite exchange and some gained nothing but a few "favorite" in technorati. You just have to decide what you want to do and have fun doing it.

TrackBacks with Google's Blogger

It seems like many blogs have turned off TrackBacks because of spams. Many actually thinks that TrackBacks are dying. However, I still see many popular blogs keeping their TrackBacks on for legit linkbacks.

Using TrackBacks with Wordpress and TypePad is easy. The blog would automatically send out or receive requests if it is enabled.

If you are using Google's Blogger and you would like to send out a TrackBack request after you have linked to a post, you can use Wizbang or HaloScan to do it. There are two pieces of information that you need to know for any pingback; the TrackBack URL that you would like to ping and the permalink of your blog post. WordPress or TypePad usually have the TrackBack URL labeled as "trackback" and it can be found at the bottom of the post. The permalink of your post is the actual URL of your particular blog post (not the blog home page).

Things We Don't know about Technorati

Technorati, one of the most heavily used data in the blogosphere. Bloggers usually use Technorati to measure how many links point to their blogs. I am not sure how many of us lose sleep on seeing the number not increasing. We understand that there is no way we can get it perfect but do we know how accurate they are?

David Dalka from Chicago points out that Consumerist.com cannot be found in Technorati, arguably one of the most popular and heavily weighted blog directory. They have written to Technorati and,

They’ve in fact added his blog - but Technorati has some programming glitch that keeps dropping his blog out of their index shortly thereafter no matter how many times they add it back. Based on that brief glimpse that Ben and I saw, The Consumerist was on the verge of becoming a Technorati 100 blog.

If Technorati cannot get one of the most popular blog to work, do we know how many millions small blogs are getting correct results shown? The short answer is No. People have found that there are many links that didn't reported by Technorati and many times they manually pinging the links to them.

Technorati is still the best of its kind out there but it is far from perfect. Seth Godin doesn't check his rank, but maybe he will start doing so when it is fixed and show that it is meaningful to him.

How to Add a Search Box in New Blogger Template

Thanks to Antonio, I have added a search box in Mathpoints. You can just copy and paste the following code to a new "page element" to get a search box on the page.

<form action="/search" id="searchthis" method="get">
<input id="search-box" name="q" onclick="this.select()" value="Search..." type="text">
<input id="search-btn" value="Find" type="submit">
</form>

You can also change the Bold text to the words you like to display in the search box and the submit button.

Blogger Custom Domain

On Sunday, Spinchange has dugg one of my post here and it was made to Digg home page. After that, the site got a big spike of traffic and got 3,000 visits.

It was perfectly timed because I have switched over to Blogger's Custom Domain Hosting the week before that,

"If you don't care to have blogspot.com in your blog's address, though, you can
get a domain of your own. We'll continue to host all your content as before, but it will be displayed at your new address. You can register domain names from any of a number of different registrars, and you can use .com, .org, .net or any other valid addresses. Remember: you only need to get the domain name; you don't have to pay extra for hosting service."

As I still had the extreme basic hosting plan before, I think the bandwidth would have been over the limit already. The advantages of using custom domain in Blogger included:

1. You own your blog's domain name, so you can sell it or do whatever you want with the domain later.
2. Give your blog it own custom domain identity.
3. You don't have to pay for hosting. You got unlimited web space and bandwidth with Google Hosting without paying anything.
4. It makes life easier if you are switching to Wordpress from *.blogspot, because you won't be losing that many links.

For everyone out there who would like to make a switch to custom domain or using Wordpress, it is recommended to do it early. It is definitely a must for any *.blogspot users who would like to take a step forward.

Paris & Britney Joined MyBlogLog, Who's Next?

As fellow bloggers Parislemon and Webomatica pointed out, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears have joined the MyBlogLog community. Both contacts and official sites are run by their PR and both celebrities probably have no idea that their official sites have joined a new cyber community (I don't think they would mind though). Not that it will do anything for me, by I think it is still cool to have Britney and Paris in my contact list.

Anyway, now that Paris and Britney have joined, Who are the next celebrities/famous persons you want to see in MyBlogLog?

1) Steve Job (Apple CEO)
Could you imagine how many people would sign up for MyBlogLog if Steve Job has joined? All the Apple fanboys would be bombarding him with any iPod, Mac related questions. People would be leaving him messages asking for free iPod and free iPhone. There is little doubt that his blog would become the biggest community.

2) George Bush (United States President)
The most influential man on Earth probably never searches online or reads blogs after he became the US president. He should have all the assistants he needs that can help him found what he wants and listen to the filtered news. If he ever came to the community and spent sometimes reading stuff that people wrote about him, that would probably changed lots of things (I think he would learned what a Google Bomb is at the very least). Of course, his community would have the most flamed messages in the world that would probably bring down the server down.

3) Lindsay Lohan (US Celebrity)
Hey Britney and Paris are here, so she should be here too! All three of them will get all the paparazzi here and make this place like a tabloid. At the end, they would probably be trying to fight against each other on the title of Celebrities With the Most "fans".

Laws of Persuasive Blogging

CopyBlogger has listed five rules in blogging, which has became a heavily dugg story. These pointers are definitely something that could help everyone in copywriting and blogging.

1. The Law of Value
Your blog must provide value to the reader by addressing a problem, concern, desire, or need that the reader already has. Fresh, original content is critical.
2. The Law of Headlines and Hooks
Your post titles must stand out in a crowded, noisy blogosphere, and you must quickly communicate the value of reading further with your opening.
3. The Law of “How To”
People don’t want to know “what” you can do, they want to know “how” it’s done. If you think you’re giving away too much information, you’re on the right track.
4. The Law of the List
Love them or hate them, informational posts presented in list format are easily digestable, and allow for an efficient transfer of your value proposition to the reader.
5. The Law of the Story
Stories are the most persuasive blogging element of all, as they allow you to present a problem, the solution, and the results, all while the connotation of the story allows readers to sell themselves on what you have to offer.