Blogger Beta issues

I came across BloggerBot today and thought wow, this could be cool! It promises easy and fast posting of images into a Blogger Blog. No issues having to resize images etc. So, I download the software and register for an account (yet another web 2.0 account).

I assume that this works with Blogger (beta or otherwise) because there is NOTHING on the site that says it doesn’t work with beta.

With the software installed and account set up I go ahead and begin this easy, seamless and “integrated” service experience and guess what?! I’m asked to login, within the “Hello” account to my blogger blog (this is my Marketing Superhero sibling blog) and no dice.

So, being the earlier adopter that I am (means that we like to find answers and give beta providers some grace while they work out the “bugs”) I go an hunt to see if I can fix this issue. I “FOLLOW” Google’s self-help steps and arrive at Google Groups on the topic….voila I find a post that identifies this issue and asks for help. The post was made Sept 2, 2006…pretty recent…great. Unfortunately there was no response and to make things a more frustrating … the topic has been closed by “a manager” (see above).

Google you owe me $250 for wasting an hour of my time. Shame on you. When you integrate services, accounts, tools or whatever…even at the beta stage make sure you either tell us that they won’t work or better yet get them working ahead of time. Blogger is not Beta ready in my opinion.

Zune ad on Technorati can’t be accessed using Firefox?

Interesting. The Zune MP3 player is being advertised on Technoratii. I decided to head over to the site but Firefox couldn’t take me there. There are many rules for web 2.0 (just web in general actually): Seemless, Easy, Always Works.

Hmm, this isn’t what I expected but an interesting idea nevertheless.

I was trolling around Technorati and came across this banner ad with the call to action to make a blog post. I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was an ideal lab experiment if I ever saw one! Since Technorati has both my blogs indexed would my post go on my blog? Well, I was wrong. Here’s what happened.

I filled out the fields in the web ad below

Which resulted in my post going on their official site. You’ll notice that the post makes reference to my one of my Web 2.0 lab experiments and not the actual movie. I may study this on my Markeitng Superhero blog.

Typepad vs WordPress Analytics

As a blogger I like to know how many folks are visiting my blogs, what posts are popular, how they got to my site etc.

Out of the box analytics is a KEY factor for non-technical folks. As far as I’m concerned it must be provided by Blog providers in order to be taken seriously. But more importantly, it must be provided out of the box with no configuration or add ons or extensions…etc.

So, here’s two examples of out of the box analytics from Typepad and WordPress. I pay $150 USD for Typepad and $0 for my WordPress account.

Typepad:

One word: Sucks

WordPress:

Note – to view this clearly click on the image, then click on it again and you’re good.

This shows number of visitors, page views, trends and search terms used by a person to get to my blog.

And there’s more!

This shows how many RSS feeds are being capture by RSS readers.

So, what am I getting for $150? Good question. Typepad, care to answer this question for us?

150,000 Blogs to go!

 My goal is to get into the top 100,000 blogs. Why? Because this graphic on Technorati is bugging the crap out of me. I am very competitive and goal oriented and the fact that this graphic continually reminds me that I’m not “qualified” to be measured burns my butt.  Analytics and measurement is a key differentiator the internet has over traditional marketing in that it can be measured.

The problem with blog tools/services is that some provide analytics (out of the box – simple and automatically provided) such as WordPress and others that don’t. In order to businesses to adopt blogs analytics must be offered “out of the box” and “self service”.

Technorati would incent more bloggers (especially corporate) if they provided additional value regarding analytics and bring the traffic history measuring “requirement” down to 0! This is “anti” long tail thinking in my view.

Some advice for Google re: Blogger Beta version

I/We all have very little -ve to say about Google. They truly “get it” in so many ways when it comes to the Internet experience for us customers.

Google embodies innovation and beta is good (unless you are Sony!). They release their experiments quickly and often. This is great. I don’t want them to change because things process can interfere with productivity and execution.

However.

Google has released a new Beta version of blogger which being an early adoption I’ve “signed up”! The blog itself is improved with labels (why not just call them tags?), and a tree menu approach for recent posts.

I was however surprised that my transition to this beta version hasn’t been smooth in two areas: 1) Using Windows Live Writer (I’m getting a error message and 2) I cannot cross link from other Blogger sites (this is odd because it’s simple an earlier version of Blogger – is Google capable of handling version compatability issues?)

Here’s the error notice when I tried to post a link from someone elses Blogger post:

As a customer I don’t give a rats ass that my account as moved, I simply want to enjoy the new features of Blogger without it impacting what worked for me in the past.

What exactly does “coming soon mean”?

Blogcast Network (TM=))

As some of you may know I use Windows Live Writer or Performancing which are sort of like desktop tools or interfaces that make it easier for me to post on my blogs on the fly. Windows Live Writer is cool, although since I upgraded my Blogger blog to the new beta version Live Writer is pooched and can’t publish to it (I’ll know in a minute if Performancing has the same issue). Any way, getting back to the relevancy of this post!

Performancing is interesting in that they provide you with an interface to post on your blog but this is more or less the gateway into the core services they offer bloggers and now advertisers. I’m still not familiar with these services but I got an email today announcing their partner offering to bloggers and advertisers.

Performancing is providing the blogging community with a tool to post, conduct analytics, and now a platform AND (blogcast?) network that will link advertisers with blogs and vica versa. I’ll set up an experiment on this and like Google Adsense on my Marketing Superhero blog I’ll keep you up to date on how this is going.

Take care and sorry for taking so long to put up a new post.

Chris.

CMA Blog – good and ?

I’m participating in the CMA Digital Marketing Conference and kudos for them offering wireless! I believe they will be updating their blog live while the conference is on. This is cool to. Here’s their conference blog. You’ll need to be approved before your comments are posted.

Traffic is Exploding! =)

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of things about this. I’ve broken the 50 views in a day plateau! Watch out. Thanks to you for reading my blog. It’s all about quality not quantity. I like having fun with this because quite honestly I’m flattered and humbled that some folks are getting value reading this stuff.

Second, I’m trying out WriteToMyBlog and while it is promising I cannot easily copy and paste images into a post. With LiveWriter it’s very simple.

WriteToBlog test

I’m trying WriteToMyBlog “out of the box” so to speak. Some initial observations:

 - it’s a free service, cool.

- it offers more functionality then blogger posting interfaces such as highlighting (how does one turn it off though?) Oh, I figured it out either select a white background or press the return key and backspace.  They should make it so that the you can select a default hi-lite so you can just select a word and it automatically renders the hi-lite though

- is the default font size 8 pt?  Can this be changed and stay changed or does it reset to 8pt?

• bullets  are cool, maybe sub-bullets in the future? Already there see below!
  • Here’s a sub bullet
    • Here’s a sub sub bullet

- Inserting pictures is a problem. There is no way to access, from what I can tell, an image from my local hard drive. 

- Superscripting^{Superscripting} and Subcriptiing_subscripting seems pretty cool. I’d take the subscription down a shade maybe.

- bolding works well as does italics. Just a heads up that you’ll know if the feature is active if it has an opaque blue shading around it.

- lets try some pictures:

 I dragged this Superman logo from Google images. The default setting is as you see this post. I imagine that I could tweak this but it would be better if the text wraps around the picture more eloquently. 

- Tags…this is a problem (maybe just for my first post?). I cannot access a menu of tags from my blog. Using LiveWriter I can. This means that I have to login to WordPress and select my categories (tags). This would not be an issue with Blogger because they don’t support tags. Or at least I’ve not figured this out yet. Tags are the key “index” of a blog. Tags are displayed for selection during the publishing process. Can they allow for adding tags at some point? 

- So let’s try to post this now!