Help Me Blog

Looks like famous food blogger Julie Powell talked a little too much about other recipe blogs out there and what she “really thought about them”…

Great blog post by B.L Ochman´s on whatsnextblog. Check it out. Good read.

Negative blogging can be devastating for any company. A single blog post can be circulated around the Blogosphere in hours. For corporations that have spent millions of dollars buiding their brands (think of Coke, Nike, General Motors) over the years, negative blog buzz can potentially severely damage a corporate image in a very short period of time. One post..

Great post by George Simpson on iMedia Connection about how weary corporations still are of blogging and what the consequences can be.

Tessa Wegert of Clickz.com writes about blogs..

“They connect potential customers with products and brands. They’re a breeding ground for consumer feedback and a market research source. From a marketer’s perspective, blogs pretty much have it all.

Now, if only we could infiltrate them.”

BlogExplosion saw the potential problem of splogs or “keyword blogs” the first day we opened the site. Splogs are mass-produced fake blogs designed to attract the attention of search engines by clustering high-paying advertising keywords on their blogs. Search engines like Technorati and IceRocket are having a hard time of separating the good blogs from the bad blogs where these splogs are thriving in blog search engine results because of the way keywords are optimized. Something has to change…

That was the reason since day one we practiced the policy of manually approving each blog before it is listed on BlogExplosion. Without manual approvals the quality level would diminish to the point where we would lose the majority of our good members. We spend hours a day approving incoming blogs (100-300 per day) but that is the only way to maintain a quality base of blogs on BE.

On that note we deny 30-45% of new blogs added to BlogExplosion each day largely due to blog spammers trying to increase traffic to these fake blogs in search for clicks. Splog accounts are automatically deleted without notice. We really need blog hosts like BlogSpot to help do their part as we do our part to help keep the progression of blogging a positive one.

Nobody has been more vocal specifically about Blogspot “splogs” than Mark Cuban (owner of the NBA Mavericks and behind IceRocket.com) in his post Get Your Blogspot Sh$t Together Google.

On CNET News they refer to splogs as “spam re-invented”

The scourge of e-mail–spam–has reinvented itself for the world of blogs, in a phenomenon experts have dubbed “splog.” And Google is in the hot seat.

.. and of course there is a new search engine for splogs called Splogspot launched by our friend Kailash over at Pingoat (our Ping Partner on BlogExplosion)… Search Engine Journal has a good article about Splogspot here.

Looks like this blog helpmeblog.com is on their list. Better notify someone there and get that cleared up

Pajamas Media confirms “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Michael Barone, David Corn, and Claudia Rosett among Editorial Board Members

There has been plenty of talk about blog networks lately and asks many questions about how people will receive their media in the future.

Looks like it debuts in November.. Should be interesting.

Everyone is talking about this Web 2.0 or “internet version 2”

All of the big players like Microsoft, Google, AOL and Yahoo are all at war with each other trying to build next-generation web applications to capture your online attention. How these companies handle blogs in general will have a huge impact on the future of BlogExplosion and the entire blog industry at large.

So what will the net look like down the round? Great article here Innovation 2.0: Why Web 2.0 companies might have to flip to avoid being flopped that talks about Web2.0 and what that means to how the future internet will be delivered to us and the companies trying to bring you those services.

Welcome to “Help Me Blog” the official blog of BlogExplosion!

We need your help! We are holding a contest for creative BE members to help design this blog.

BlogExplosion will donate $250 to the Red Cross on behalf of BlogExplosion members and we will then donate $250 to the charity of choice to the designer who produces the winning creative. That is a total of $500 to help support charities working on helping people involved in some of the global disasters happening in the world right now.

The winner gets a designed by logo at the bottom of the BlogExplosion blog which is very valuable real estate and a great way to get bloggers to your site.

Looking for entries to be posted here by the end of October and the winner will be selected early November.

You can read all about it in the BlogExplosion Forums

Just finished reading David Sifry of Technorati.com recently updated the State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth on his blog. Some very interesting stats and encouraging trends emerging around the current state of blogging. 

There is a complete powerpoint presentation you can download there with again very interesting numbers about the growth of the blog industry.

Summary of the Presentation:

- As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs

- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about

every 5 months

- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth

- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day

- About a new weblog is created each second

- 2% – 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs

- Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day

- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second

- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

Most people seem to be making a fuss about the low number of “spam” blogs in the report. Will be interesting to hear how the blog industry reacts to Technorati´s latest claims.

With the decision to have helpmeblog.com as a separate domain name from BlogExplosion we found this post by legendary marketer Seth Godin an interesting one.

Should we have named the BE blog blogexplosion.com slash blog something or was keeping the BlogExplosion service separate from the BE blog a good move?

I think it really depends on the situation, the nature of the brand and what you are trying to do with it.