Blogging is good for your health!
The therapeutic value of blogging is being keenly studied by scientists, reports Scientific American. Since blogging is more about dwelling on personal experiences, thoughts and feelings, it gives a feeling of wellness which is a natural outcome of giving vent to those lurking thoughts in the recesses of one’s mind.
It is reported that such “expressive writing” of journals as blogs actually improves memory and sleep. Human beings being social creatures, the urge to communicate is a predominant feeling. This has been highlighted in the movie, “Cast Away” in which the man who was stranded alone in a desert island after a plane crash, paints a face on a coconut shell and continuously keeps talking to it to keep him from turning the bend.
Read the rest of the report here.
Good news for Blogsloths!
Pundits always advocate writing unique, original and creative content on your blog to be magnetic. But isn’t it a lot of work? Plus you have to rack your brains to dish out some bytes that are readable! Why bother when there is a better alternative!
Lazy bloggers of the world have a saviour in Wayne Liew who has come up with a novel list of “5 advantages of blogging about what others are blogging about” in his blog. Vote for him if he stands for US president’s office or buy him a cup of decaf (or, at least post a comment on his blog. Good man, this Wayne!). We netsloths have very few champions to our cause!
Now to the real advantages:
- Free yourself from pressure
Unique contents need time, effort and also your own flair in writing to make the whole articles up. But just quoting some catchy content of other blogs (like what I am doing right now!) saves time and energy, which can be more gainfully wasted! - Pitching traffic from source articles
Linking with others’ blogs will have a cascading effect of pingback and backlink thus enabling your blog, which lies at the blogosphere’s dark corners, have a few eyeballs at last! - You have different base of readers
Regular readers of Wayne Liew may have the exposure to the world’s best blog, that is mine. This is an example of what kind immense contribution you can make to the blog universe by quoting from others’ blogs. - Your opinion is precious
Ha, look at this. You can enhance the original blog entry by supplementing it with your own original thoughts. Two heads are better than one!
Wayne adds: Some readers are your fans. (Izzt!) They don’t listen to others and they only want your opinion on certain doubts. This is why even you blog about something hot, people will not leave. You have your own opinions on that particular matter and only even your writing style is the one wanted by your readers. - Networking with fellow bloggers
This is the pièce de résistance!You enter into a discussion or flame war (whichever is your wont!) and create more visitors who join the chorus, both for and against. By the law of averages you are sure to end up with more virtual acquaintances, thus enhancing your network! Clever, eh!
Read more in the original blog entry. Look, I am not plagiarizing, nor usurping all the credit for this highly innovative blogging tip. How noble of me!!
Viral linking meme
There is an interesting debate doing rounds in Blogosphere on the pros and cons of viral linking. Elliott J. Cross has started a viral link chain in which my blog too has been “tagged”! I was also enthused by DCR Blogs “Drunken Virals” lyrics!
Generally when someone starts a viral link campaign, the purpose is to get coveted back links from other blogs pointed to them. Back links help to promote your blog’s page rank, Technorati score and improve readership by promoting your site to other readers that might not know of your blog’s existance.
But before I could jump right into the viral linking bandwagon, I was jerked back by a solemn warning from a concerned blogger that Viral links are bad for your blog’s health!
Now you have a blogger in a terrible dilemma. Primarily, I am not much obsessed with pageviews, comment counts, Technorati ranking, Google pagerank and all such parameters of blog-popularity since I blog as a pastime and for fun. But human nature being what it is, I am unable to resist a temptation to try a few teensy-weensy tricks to get a few more eyeballs on my blog!! But such moves hurt my ego too, since it is like badgering someone, “Roll up, roll up, here is my bloggie!”
But is there a better way?
A blog about Nothing talks about “Organic Traffic” thus:-
I am going to work on individual relationships. That’s part of what I mean by organic links. I’m throughly convinced that people are 100,000 times more likely to follow a link that is included as part of an actual meaningful post instead of simply lost amid a blob of other links. … I’ve come to the realization that simply getting your name mentioned in a valid article is thousands of times more valuable than getting linked in a mass produced list hundreds of times.
But people are bitten by the SEO bug and try to game the search engines by fair or questionable means. But it means nothing to a lone ranger like me! 
Run out of steam for blogging!
Yes. It happens to any one - be a writer or a blogger. You have been busy writing for quite a while, but suddenly found your mind hitting a blind alley. No inspiration! They call it a “Writers’ block” or, more appropriately, a “Blogger’s block”!
Pat B. Doyle has come up with a list of 23 “Great ideas” to help gird up your loins and start blogging with verve!
Here are the excerpts:-
- Write a book review.
- Review a product
- Review a popular blog or website about your topic.
- Make a list of available resources.
- Explain something about your subject that might be confusing to newbies.
- Tell why or how you first got interested in this topic.
- Do a review of a relatively unknown but good blog in your niche.
- Take a stand.
- Tell about some mistake that you made and what you learned from it.
- Do a case study.
- Conduct an experiment and tell the results.
- Do an analysis of something.
- Find some offbeat or weird website on your topic and link to it.
- Find a good video about your topic on YouTube, and embed it in your post.
- If you are a little more adventurous, create your own video post.
- Be different. Do something unexpected. State something which goes against popular opinion.
- Find a big topic and do a series of posts about it.
- Run a poll. After it is done, discuss the results.
- Interview someone and post the interview on your blog.
- Take something technical and explain it in a step-by-step way.
- Tell about a personal experience.
- Use humor.
- Make a list of something like this one!
I wish to add my own tip: if stuck with a block, start writing about it!
10 tips to buck up your Blog
There are zillions of resources for blogging on the net (why, there are pulp editions too!) - scripts, themes, ideas, links, hosts, dev-shops et al. But where to go for the contents? Ok, you can recycle what has been said before by someone, purely to give the content a bit more of eyeballs. Nothing wrong with it, so long as you link it back and the original writer (or, a recycler like you!) will get a pingback. Or, you can post about something that you saw, heard or read in another media, so as to wise up your viewers on what is happening around. It may be a personal journal where you merrily muse on anything under (and over) the sun - read it or GFY! 
Better still, you can have a niche blog, and dwell on a particular subject and have a regular clientele interested in that particular subject. Or, you may run a blog purely to spew ad-words, banners and other get-rich-quick links, in a rush to monetize your blog.
All this is ok. But you must have some visitors, in the first place!
Perhaps you simply don’t care since it is only for your mom to see or your sweetheart to say, Wow”! But there are scores of rookies who populate the blogosphere who blog and pray for recognition. For them, an answer to this million dollar question: “how to add a magnet to your blog”, will be of considerable interest!
This Washington Post article dwells on this subject based on real life experience of Washington DC-based bloggers. I have modified them with my own inputs, retaining the essence in tact and have listed them here. May be they’ll be useful to you:
Read more
Bots blot the dark paths of Wordpress!
“Whooami” has divined that Wordpress files (from the folders like “wp-admin”, “wp-includes” etc) that are not to be indexed are being indexed and shown on search results by Google.com. This will be throwing open may opportunities for the dark guys who are up to no good, to use the exploits.
But the good thing is that WhooamI is nice enough to provide a solution too to the problem.
You can read more about it in his blog.
Improve your blog content
WordCamp 2007 presentation of Lorelle VanFossen on Kicking Ass Content Connection, helping bloggers improve their content and build their blog connections and networking, focusing on the relationships on blogs:
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About Me
I am S.K!
Ok, what's the big deal, you may ask! But you may miss a good deal if you do not dwell deep into this web site, specially hand-crafted for you. But what about me, the person? Wait, I am not good at making things up. If you stumble upon a good-sounding résumé, please pass it on to me!
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