Smoke and Mirrors

You’ve been warned | Small Business Trends

Anyone blogger who looks at their referer log would know this. My biggest referers that probably have no idea what RSS is are Google homepage and My Yahoo folks. That’s why you see links near the bottom right of my blog to add to these services.

My biggest referer by far is Google search.

For you Wordpress users, I use a plugin called SubscribeMe to list those there.

When you dread reading your blogroll. I got to the point about a week ago I dreaded reading blogs because I knew it would take over half an hour. That’s too long for me. Maybe Scoble can do this 3 hours a night, but I can’t.

About 40 blogs is the max for me. At this point if I add a blog, I have to unsubscribe from another.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a huge fan of this site. Subscribe to it.

In the interest of letting you e-mails others my drivel, I added the WP-Email plugin to my blog. Features like this highlight how different user types are, I think….

My boss uses “e-mail this to a friend” from sites all the time. I’ve never used those things in my life, convinced they are only they to harvest my e-mail address. We’re both extremely online savvy. Both young. So what’s the difference?

Different strokes and all that, I suppose…

Subscribed.

Usually I’m the last person to notice this type stuff. Is anyone else’s list of blogs they track getting too long for comfort?

Nothing I like more than blogging about blogging. Welcome to the echo chamber.

So far so good…

If everything looks the same, then that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t notice any changes.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Deactivated my plugins.
2. Copied my old Wordpress directory down to my machine.
3. Copied my old Wordpress directory into a new directory on the server.
4. Backed up my blog database to a SQL script.
5. Created a new database.
6. Updated wp-config.php in my new Wordpress directory to point to this new database.
7. Restored my old database over the new one I created in Step 4.
8. Downloaded Wordpress 2 and follow instructions to delete files and copy over files.
9. Run WordPress 2 upgrade script in new directory.
10. Renamed my original Wordpress directory (which my domain points at) to something else.
11. Renamed my new Wordpress directory to what my old Wordpress directory was called.
12. Reactivated my plugins.
13. Done.

Be sure to keep your backups!

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

Shows Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies blogging. These types of lists will seem quaint in a few years, much like in 1994 when Yahoo had that “What’s New and Hot on the Web” as a feature. At some point you just say, most of the top companies will be blogging, just as most companies have PR pages.

Huge uptick in traffic on Wednesday when one of my entries was picked up by BBSpot.com Mailbag.

Welcome all.

Blogging will be lighter next week while travelling. See you on the flip side.

Scoble doesn’t do Plaxo as it would be something that “takes him out of his e-mail client”. Personally, once you have over a couple of hundred contacts in your Blackberry, I found it hard not to use Plaxo.

Just keeps everything nice, updated, duplicate free, etc., etc. Sure it annoys some folks, but if it didn’t annoy some people then the product would have no evangelists (that would be me) now, would it?

Guy mentions don’t be afraid to polarize people. I agree.

Don’t be afraid to polarize people. Most companies want to create the holy grail of products that appeals to every demographic, social-economic background, and geographic location. To attempt to do so guarantees mediocrity. Instead, create great DICEE products that make segments of people very happy. And fear not if these products make other segments unhappy. The worst case is to incite no passionate reactions at all, and that happens when companies try to make everyone happy.

Plaxo might be polarizing, but like the Blackberry itself it has a loyal community as well….

and btw Robert, Plaxo keeps you in your e-mail client. That’s the idea.