On the one hand, blogging platforms like WordPress are growing more robust with increasing functionality. On the other hand, they are also becoming lighter, simpler and shorter (microblogging sites like Twitter didn’t even exist four years ago). In fact, it’s not even all that clear what a blog is these days. Here’s the history of the blog platform:
Source: whiteafrican at flickr CC 2.0
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Blog Action Day Unites Thousands of Bloggers to Fight Global Warming
Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Grinder.
The focus of this year’s Blog Action Day is climate change. And because we are at a critical juncture in the narrative of national and international climate policy, the timing couldn’t be better. Blog Action Day, a movement to get bloggers from across disciplines and around the world to focus on a single topic for a day has, in just two years, swelled to well over 8,000 bloggers writing for an estimated 11 million readers worldwide. [...]
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Want to Make Money With Your Blog? Be Like the Big Guys, But Charge More
Posted on 10. Nov, 2009 by Grinder.
What the ad rates of the most valuable blogs in the U.S. tell us about balancing advertising and content strategies.
The business and investing site 24/7 Wall St. today released its latest installment of the 25 most valuable blogs in the United States. Needless to say, the editors here at SpammyBlogger weren’t terribly surprised to learn that we had missed the cut (maybe if it was a top 26!), but we were surprised to learn that many of the highest valued blogs had surprisingly low advertising (CPM) rates. [...]
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Coffee-Blogging: Getting Off to an Efficient Start
Posted on 27. Jun, 2009 by Grinder.
There is no shortage of tasks every blogger — spammy or not — engages in throughout the course of the day. Because of the fluidity of the medium, however, spending too much time on those tasks can evolve into some serious time-wasting. This is especially true in the morning, when the tasks awaiting your attention are bursting with new bits of information.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger considers his morning blogging routine akin to performing triage:
“I liken most of what I do in the mornings to a Triage in the emergency room of a hospital. It’s about assessing what happened over night, identifying urgent things that need immediate attention and less urgent but important things that I need to prioritize and then mapping out how I’ll use my day.”
Getting bogged down in the morning is easy, and that is why it’s a great idea to set priorities and even have a checklist or schedule. Whatever system works best for you, check out the way ProBlogger gets going in the A.M., and perhaps you too can create some structure on those coffee-soaked, bleary-eyed mornings.
Image via Jeff Kubina
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New Report: 90% of All Emails Are Spam
Posted on 27. May, 2009 by Grinder.
According to a report released Tuesday, unsolicited e-mail made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks in April 2009. Commissioned by the security software maker Symantec, the report indicates a 5 percent increase over last month’s numbers. Historically, spam has made up somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all e-mail on the Internet. But with the emergence of powerful botnets running on auto-pilot, spamming is on the rise as well. [...]
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Spammers Wasted 33 Billion Kilowatt-Hours of Electricity in 2008
Posted on 26. May, 2009 by Grinder.
[Originally posted at CleanTechnica] Conservationists have long been uncomfortable with the environmental impact of the mountains of catalogs, credit card offers, coupons, and other direct mailings that accumulate daily in their mailbox, or on the floor near the front door.
Sure, we can recycle all that junk mail, but that process creates an additional layer of energy inputs from collection, sorting, processing and repurposing, to say nothing of the energy and resources needed to make the mail in the first place. Fortunately—in the United States at least—there are several new services that allow people to take back their mailboxes by blocking catalogs and other junk mail from being delivered.
But when it comes to junk mail in your email inbox, even the best “spam” filters will let a few slip by on occasion. But not everyone uses a spam filter and the environmental impact of all that virtual junk mail is now rivaling that of its papery cousin, according to a new study by McAfee (pdf). [...]
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10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
Posted on 22. May, 2009 by Grinder.
Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.
Editor’s note: This is a first guest post from Max Gladwell and was part of a one-day experiment in content distribution. The post was published at nearly 100 sites and pushed/shared via various social media networks, including digg, twitter and StumbleUpon.
Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.
What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.
For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list. [...]
