Ken McGuire

Category: Blogging

Blogging information!

  • NBA 2.0 : Hats Off To Mark Cuban

    I’m a big fan of american sports. Of course, by that I just mean American Football, so its rare that basketball would take my interest, but when you consider a team owner taking time out during a game to throw a few entries onto his personal blog to let the world know what he’s thinking during the game and warmups, you have to take interest!

    Mark Cuban is the team owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and on the night when his team played in the NBA Finals for the very first time, he took a step in firing some interesting entries onto his blog ranging from his ‘vitamin rush’, to walking the floor of the finals, a call to make the blogosphere part of NBA 2.0, thoughts at half time and full time.

    You think you’d see Steve Staunton nicking off at half time during the Euro 2008 qualifiers to let us know whats going on behind the scenes?

    Mark Cuban, fair play for taking the initiative.

  • Rules For Blogging

    While I continue to educate a few people in the real world about blogging, I’m covering some old and new ground by publishing a few more finds. Novice bloggers or new readers might find this article useful, an awful lot like the ten commandments of blogging…

    In summary:

    1. Have a theme – stick to it
    2. Blogging obligates you to keep blogging
    3. Respond to your comments
    4. Blogging takes time – schedule it
    5. Be legal
    6. Keep track of your blog ideas
    7. Provide links from your blog
    8. Only start if you like to write
    9. Be authentic
    10. Above all – Be patient

    Just simple rules to stick to, even as mere guidelines to getting you started into blogging, but useful material all the same.

  • World Cup Fever Begins

    The 2006 FIFA World Cup kicks off in just over an hours time, and while I won’t be breaking my blogging habits for kenmc.com, you can follow all the action and my own thoughts at World Cup Access, running to the end of the World Cup in Germany.

  • Blogging The World Cup

    //Off-topic

    While the tech world gets around the idea of Yahoo jumping into bed with eBay and Google getting all close with Dell, I’ll be adding to the blog collection for the next couple of weeks, keeping track of the world cup.

    With the NFL in its off season since February and the draft come and gone I’ve a need to keep going with sport and have just launched World Cup Access, tracking the latest news and events in the run up to and throughout the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.

    It’s WordPress with my own conventional twist and theme, which I may release once the 9th of July closes… or at least port it to another of my blogs 😉 Anyway, if you’re interested, don’t be afraid to check it out. Maybe its just that 24, Prison Break, Scrubs, The Sopranos (this weekend), Lost and Desperate Housewives have all finished…. or maybe its just for the love of the game.

    //End Off-topic

  • Beginning Your Business Blog

    If you’ve decided that blogging for your business is just for you… or you’re STILL debating whether or not to do it, then try a read of this article. I’m in the throws of starting blogs for a few different groups in my spare time (what little of it I have) and they’re all seeing the upsides of it.

    All things said, its always useful to have something to refer to….

  • Because Charity Feels Good

    Update – the ball has started rolling and long may it continue… seems like he’s managed to rope in a few extra jumpers as well!

    —

    Off the topic today and for a good reason too -  John is doing some fund raising for a most tremendous cause to help raise finance for a course of treatment for his girlfriend who suffers from a rare degenerative disease called Freidreichs Ataxia.

    Anyway, Mr. Butler is going to throw himself out of a plane (with a parachute) to start the proceedings and has set up a website, CharityFeelsGood.com to take donations. If you’re interested, and I hope that you are, you can contribute $2 via PayPal or sponsor more if you wish.

    There’s a long road to go in trying to raise the total amount given a complete lack of funding by the HSE or Irish Government so hopefully this will set things on its way.

    You can read John’s own post here, or visit CharityFeelsGood.com

  • Blogging – LAPD Style

    So the LAPD have started blogging, (via), think there’s any future in it for the good folks behind Garda.ie?

    Our online journal is an interactive tool that we use to deliver real-time, unfiltered information.  We invite you to take a look inside the Department to learn more about the men and women in blue who have sworn to protect and to serve you.

    They’ve already missed out on a Typepad and Blogspot address…. Garda.blogs.ie is up for grabs mind you….

  • State Of The Blogosphere

    Blogosphere splogosphere… David Sifry is at it again and has announced that the State Of The Blogosphere… is strong! Praise be to God and all that. The statistics are interesting, keeping in mind that they are primarily based on what Technorati is tracking – which is quite a lot (over 35 million blogs at this stage).

    The stats in brief…

    • Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
    • The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
    • It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
    • On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
    • 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
    • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

    Read the whole of the article right here at Sifry’s Alerts

  • Photoblogging

    I’ve been driving myself towards it for an age, slowly trying to ween myself off DeviantART and out into the world of photoblogging and so I’ve set up yet another blog. Not only that, but I’ve got two more to launch within the next week, who the hell needs free time anyway!

    For anyone who is interested in the photographic side of life, I will be publishing selected works and prints via http://photo.kenmc.com. Nice way to spend a Sunday evening 😉

  • Blogger – Mobile Edition

    Via The Mobile Herald this morning I see that Google have launched yet another service (I refused to comment on the launch of Google Payments as I think its pointless – why don’t they just share!) and have teamed up with Sony Ericsson to launch two blog-friendly phones.

    Blog-friendly you ask? I’ve got an SE P900 for personal use, at this stage its a little bit battered, but the large screen (which people have a habit of picking up and poking) means that I can browse the net via GPRS or whatever other means, hit my blog or some forums and make posts for the day relatively hassle free.

      The first time the user selects ‘blog’, Google’s servers automatically create a unique address on its blogspot for that particular handset/SIM card combination.Better still it will be entirely feasible for the user to customize his or her blogspot address from the handset – no need to access a PC.

    The idea now is that you take a picture or text message and as opposed to ‘send via MMS’ you simply choose ‘send via blog’ and it picks up on your Blogger acount where it couldn’t be easier (seemingly) for novices to post to their Google blog.

    I’m just wondering how good a mobile blogging service it will be? What will happen to our lovely flickr interactions and technorati tagging and social bookmarking and on and on…. If you run a blog on blogger (which I don’t, as far as I know anyway) could you see yourself rushing out to get one of these phones? Hell, how long anyway before we see a Google mobile phone service be launched to rival O2? Sure they may as well….

    I’m not bitter – I swear! Just think its a bit on the silly side…

  • Where art thou Zoomtags?

    So some of you have heard of zoomtags and some of you have not. Basically, while currently in beta, zoomtags works in two ways and anyone familiar with del.icio.us tagging will be comfortable with the service; you get a tag cloud to place on your blog which works in a similar fashion to AdSense generating you a small revenue on a per-click basis, or you can bid for tags in their billboard model.

    This has some interesting points. If you signed up pre-launch, you get 65% of the revenue generated per-click for life. So if I advertised my business at 10c a click, you would make 6.5c on every click, if you registered after the “pre-activation period” you make 50% of the revenue.

    So far so good. But there’s still no sign of them, unless of course you’re in Spain where they’ve geo-targetted the service and started pumping out ads straight away. After all the hype building up to the February 6th launch (where nothing happened), we’re now told that we wait 2-3 weeks…

    Originally we had planned to launch the service on February 6th, 2006, and in a way we’ve done it (we’ll explain it later), however as we explain in our blog we have engaged in several deals with major advertisers, and we feel that it will be best for all affiliates – and consequently with the advertisers as well – to wait until these deals are closed, so that when we activate the service, affiliates will have a much larger variety of tags and ads in their clouds right from the very first day, so as to form appealing tag clouds.

    When are we expecting to activate the service for both, affiliates and advertisers? We believe that within two weeks (three the most) we should be able to close these deals, and the moment it happens, we will activate the service without further delay

    With no action on their blog for almost 3 weeks I’m wondering where’s the service, if you tell people that it will be ready in that same 2-3 weeks? Anyone else heard anything on the matter?

  • Blogging For Beginners

    I set up kenmc.com as a blog based site back in October last year and in fairness, didn’t really do a whole lot with it. Since shortly before Christmas and moreso since the new year I’ve definitely taken my blogging more serious and continue to blog across 3-4 different sites on a daily/bi-daily basis – all the while, I still consider myself a beginner, and I think its nice to do so. Always learning, always adapting, always beginning.

    So, while I’m in that frame of mind, I might point out that Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net has started a Blogging For Beginners series of posts, rehashing some of his older material and exploring new areas. If you’ve never ventured into blogging and you’re considering it, it’s worth a look.

  • Pixel Robbery

    A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post on David O’Neill’s blog concerning ‘missing the boat’ on the pixelad business. Still subscribed to the comments, I was amazed to read the case of one reply this morning.

    “I purchased a “large ad” at an agreed rental of $5 per month. It was stated that the site, and ad’, would be maintained for at least 2 years.

    My ad was recently removed and when I asked why I was informed I would have to pay $47 a month to have it put pack due to the fact that the owners had spend so much money marketing the sites.”

    The site in question is Pixellance, which recently joined forces with RentPixelAds.com… Looks like a con job (no offence intended to the owner of the site – just my opinion). Take a read of the comment for yourself but its highly disappointing to see something like that in any service. As soon as the site gets any attention at all they jack up the prices? Supply and demand at work or just a ripoff?

    Note : made a little edit to the original post, didn’t want to be offending anyone in general terms 🙂

  • Tagvertising on new levels

    So we got another form of advertising, along the lines of 1000tags. I took a look at ZoomTags in the office this morning, bit of a shaky start as I couldn’t get registered for the program to start out with due to an error on the registration form (a matter which was later fixed in the day), alas now that code won’t start displaying on my blog until February 6th… but its a start.

    The gist of it being that you set up a tag cloud, with predetermined keywords if you prefer on your website, not at all unlike del.icio.us, and thats about it for your part. Advertisers in turn bid on the keywords and it works off a pay-per-click system.

    If you blog, and you like your tags, then this might be just for you….

  • Bloggers Be Banned!

    The Japanese team taking part in the Winter Olympics in Italy have been pretty much warned ‘blog – and you’re on the next plane home‘. Bad news for the Japanese, but good news for bloggers in a sense. The JOC are instructed their teams not to start blogging the Winter Games as the Olympic Charter bans athletes’ journalist activities when the games are on, and violators will be disqualified. Of course, this would suggest that bloggers are now journalists?

    If thats the case then I’d like my free press pass to a few certain places this year, thank you very much… 😉

    Seriously though, it is a little outlandish. Some of the sporting committee’s are even going as far as telling their members, who have personal homepages, to stay away from the internet and not update their sites while they participate in the games.

    Anyone ever heard of the freedom of speech and all that?

  • BlogBeat Followup

    I have to commend Jeff at BlogBeat for his quick turnaround in answering my few questions on the service, namely about installing blocking cookies on your machine in order to prevent tracking your own visits from your own computer. He has thankfully allowed me to make the trick public as well, with announcement to follow at BlogBeat early next week.

    “From the browser you’d like to block, browse to your blog’s URL with this querystring “?bbnyah”… So for you, it would be “http://www.kenmc.com/?bbnyah” (w/o the quotes).”

    If you want to count your visits again, look through your cookies for the one labelled ‘bbnyah’ and remove it. This should be itegrated to BlogBeat screens on Monday but its another cute trick that I’m fond of, and thanks again to Jeff for the quick turnaround.

  • The Power Of Blogs

    Forbes.com have an interesting article on the power of blogs and bloggers in helping a company drive a product to the masses.

    One interesting point that was raised…

    To get noticed by bloggers, companies should appoint internal bloggers and start them blogging,” said Wyman. “Of course, the blogs must be authentic. Also, companies can sponsor blogging events and meet the bloggers themselves to see what makes them tick.“

    Take a read of Tapping Into The Blogosphere, pretty good stuff.

  • Blogbeat Your Blog

    BlogBeat has launched recently enough and is offering 30 day trials to users to help you track statistics across both your blog and RSS feed. I’m already tracking with StatCounter which is throwing up some useful statistics, Google Analytics is in there too in the background so whats the harm in trying a third one?

    “Bogbeat provides all of the basic statistics including visitors, referrers, search engines, browsers, etc.., but also has great post detail stats, RSS statistics (for Feedburner), comment tracking, outgoing links, and more…”

    It’s going to cost $6 a month for blogs that are under a half million page views monthly, which I sit into just about right 😉 so what harm… The trial is up on February 27th so I’ll report back before then with the findings! In the meantime, SolutionWatch have a great review of the service, or you can try it for yourself at BlogBeat.

    —
    Update: Emailed a friendly guy at BlogBeat who also informed me that the tracking has the same blocking cookie function as StatCounter, just not seen yet when you login, but kindly sent me the link – and it works. Snappy response, I like it!

  • Keeping an eye on your website

    Myself and John have been keeping an eye on various web statistics over the past seven days. With my blog averaging around 100 hits a day for the week, it was interesting to note, via Statcounter, the high percentage of visitors who stick around for 10 seconds or less, whether its not what they’re looking for, or not what they want to look at.

    The latter raises a point covered by CNN.com where users/browsers/surfers etc can judge your website in the blink of an eye, actually quicker than that.

    In just a brief one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.

    The study was published in the latest issue of the Behaviour and Information Technology journal. The author said the findings had powerful implications for the field of Web site design.

    Very interesting stuff indeed. My NFLView.com blog (which, coincidentally is being redesigned this weekend) seems to get visitors to stick around a little longer, different audience, different country, different topic, different blog design. The next week of stat-tracking should be interesting as I notice my own content starting to build.

    My question – you arrive at two websites that have the same content you’re looking for. Why do you choose one over the other, if the content remains the same?

  • Blogs : 2 for a euro…

    If you’ve got about 70k to spare you might be interested to know that the Blog Herald (which I read) is up for sale. The blog itself makes about 2,000 US$ a month which isn’t bad. The price is being touted as a little steep, but then how do you set a price on a blog?

    It raises a good question though. The blog is normally built around the content. It’s the person that drives the content, provides their views and opinions. So if you take that person out of the equation you had better be ready to fill their shoes, I reckon anyway. Marketing Loop has the Alexa graphs of the traffic and you can’t doubt the potential when the figures speak for themselves.

    If you were to sell your blog in the morning, realisticly, what do you think you’d get for it? I can imagine Moore Street some Saturday… “Get your Techcrunch, get your Techcrunch, 2 for a eeeeeeeuro….” 😉