Recently in blogging Category

Since I'm still in a bit of shock after the Net Visionary Awards the other evening, I'll keep this short..

On the awards themselves...

I am amazed, stunned and humbled that I actually won two awards on the night. I'm always delighted to be shortlisted for awards, but since I'd never actually won any winning two blew me away.

Being nominated for the Internet Marketer award came as a surprise to me and being shortlisted for it was a big surprise. But to actually win that award blew me away completely! I would never have imagined that I could win, so when they announced it the other evening I was left completely and utterly speechless. I wouldn't consider myself to be a marketer and I'd have expected a professional marketer to win - not me!

It was a fantastic night in a wonderful venue and a great chance to meet up with a bunch of people who I haven't seen in a long time (plus a chance to meet people I'd never actually met in person before)

Congratulations to all the other winners, especially Pat Phelan, who got the overall Net Visionary award.

A sincere thanks to everyone who has helped me and the company over the last few years and to those who voted for me this year - I really really appreciate it.

Now my only problem is where do I put those great big lumps of crystal... It's a nice problem to have!

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IIA and Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary awards Net Visionary Awards Tomorrow Night!

Getting your site listed in Google is one thing, getting traffic to your site is another.

What's the difference?

Well basically Google pretty much lists every single webpage on the planet, so getting listed or included isn't really that big a deal.

What you really want is people to go to your site and buy your product or service (or take whatever action you want / need).

Now this is where it gets interesting and complicated.

If someone does a search in Google for my name they'll probably end up here pretty quickly. This has very little to do with SEO. It's basically because I have an odd first name and a rather uncommon surname, so most of the results in Google will refer to me.

With me so far?

Ok, so that shows that searching for something very specific is probably going to take you to it. It might not, but it's more likely.

But what if you are running an online business?

Are people going to look for your business by name?

While that might happen eventually it's highly unlikely that it's going to happen when your site first goes live, or even after that.
What's a lot more likely to happen is that people are going to look for a solution to a problem.

For example, if I want to read a review of the Babylon AD (a film released this week) I have a couple of options.
I could go to a site such as entertainment.ie, filmreviews.ie or movies.ie to see if they've got any reviews OR I could simply do a search on Google for "babylon ad". Since I'm interested in a review of the film I might append that to my search query, so it becomes "babylon ad review".

This isn't rocket science.

However if you deal with small business owners on a regular basis you soon realise one thing. A lot of them don't really understand how to use search engines.
They don't understand the difference between their browser's navigation bar and Google.

What this means in practical terms is that people can get duped by promises of "rapid inclusion" or "top ranking" etc., etc.

If someone promises you "free traffic" how are you meant to understand that?

Will you know that the only traffic you can possibly get from Google from a new site is going to be a spider ie. a bit of computer software that isn't going to buy anything

The devil is in the details, though anyone dealing with small business should be very clear about what exactly they are offering.

Damien wrote up a nice piece covering some of this based on what was being discussed on the Enterprise Ireland Ebusiness mailing list. It's worth reading the comments by the way!

James took the entire fluffy link / Google rapid submission tool idea and threw a quick site together

It all gets quite inane yet amusing, doesn't it?

It really irks me to see organisations like the IIA (the Irish Internet Association) knowingly setting all links in comments on its blog to be "nofollow.

The "nofollow" attribute sucks. Sure, there are *some* circumstances where it can be useful eg. linking to a competitor for example, but if you moderate comments on a blog then nofollow is just inane and dumb.

This blog quite happily "follows" people who take the time to share their opinion via a comment. In fact all the blogs I run or post to use the normal link attributes.

So what the hell is up with the IIA?

They're supposed to be promoting the internet sector in Ireland etc., etc.,

IrishBlogs.info is currently offline, as it has developed a rather annoying bug ie. the main page won't load and just gives me an unhelpful MySQL error.

Hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running again soon, but I thought it best to take it offline for the moment...

Please don't ask me when it will be back online, as I honestly don't know. The best answer I can give you is a rather vague "as soon as I can fix it"

Its sister site, IrishBlogs.com, is still online, though it obviously doesn't do the same thing.

I really should not be allowed operate electronic equipment at the weekend!

I discovered a short time ago that I had managed to remove my RSS feed entirely!

Now that takes some doing.

I'm almost impressed with myself...

It's back again now, but I really do need to put aside some time to work out what I've managed to accidentally nuke.

On a side note, I have to say I am impressed with the widgets in MT. They're finally making sense to me, so I won't be editing the main templates as much moving forward - widgets are the way to go!

I've made a minor change to my comment policy.

As of today comments will remain open on posts for 300 days.

It was previously set at 180 days.

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Movable Type Upgraded Movable Type 4.2 is here! Movable Type Warm and Fuzzies

Penguin are giving away books - the only catch being you have to write a review of the book you get within 6 weeks of receiving it.

More info on their special holiday reading site

I have little or no patience for spammers, as most people know.

Since I run several sites that deal with domains and the internet industry in general I seem to have been targetted by TodayNic's comment and forum spammers. Over the past year or so I've had to remove multiple spam comment attacks from several sites.

It's annoying. Very annoying.

However it's even more annoying when they have the gall to demand that I remove a post I made last year about their spam.

Considering they're still spamming from what I've seen in the last few weeks I can think of no good reason to remove any posts where I've referred to Todaynic's spam.

Someone claiming to be "Chris" from Todaynic left  a comment on another one of my blogs at around 3am this morning.

I'm always amazed at the silly / insane / nonsensical junk that comes out of some companies and organisations.

Enterprise Ireland seem to be funding a Template Monster clone, which is linked into Digiweb. Why should tax payers be paying for another Eoin Costello project? If it's commercially viable shouldn't it be able to stand on its own two feet? And does the world really need another template monster?
Why would anyone in their right mind pay that kind of money for a such a horrific "design" when so many free site building tools would do as good a job if not better?

Ammado are a very odd business. Judging by what people have been saying this morning it looks like they spammed quite a few bloggers this morning (Justin Mason, Donncha O Caoimh and Damien Mulley that I know of). I have an account with them, so while I thought the email looked dodgy I wasn't going to complain to them formally.

Twitter has been down more than up over the last few days. If anyone wants an invite to jaiku I have a few.. If you want to see what people are blathering about check out Twit.ie (love the name!) which pulls in the latest posts from both jaiku and twitter from an ever growing list of Irish based users.

UPDATE: Justin has blogged about Ammado and also points out that they're signed up to Habeas!

UPDATE 2: Someone from Ammado has posted an "apology" in the comments on Justin's blog. I'm beginning to see a pattern emerging here..

UPDATE 3 - Looks like quite a few people weren't that impressed with being "targetted" by Ammado: Alexia, Maman Poulet, Damien,