Blogging Sueblimely

My Scoutle scout is busy strolling round blogs that match my interest areas. You can see her in action in my footer. She is meeting up with other scouts who share my interests. Hopefully their creators will then come and visit my blog, be fascinated with its content, subscribe, comment regularly and become blogging contacts – time will tell.

Scoutle considers itself to be “Automated Social Networking” where there is no need for communication in order to connect and no real life obligations. I think they must be talking only about the initial method of connection here as, once you have connected with someone, there must be communication for a blogging relationship to develop and establish.The novelty of Scoutle is that you do not have to search for people to connect with, Scoutle’s search does that for you, filtering out sites that it considers not worthy – eg outdated sites or those just that only exist for advertising purposes. As well as finding contacts via the widget you can discover other members on the Scoutle website itself, – via contacts of contacts and through networks based on interest areas.

Scoutle is premised on the idea that it is the quality of connections that is important not the quantity. This appeals to me considering the masses of people I do not know that connect to me on sites such as MyBlogLog; many who have likely never visited this blog. Scoutle allows your Scout to walk twice for every time you have a visitor to your site – the more your Scout gets to walk the more it will appear on the sites of other Scoutle members. You make contact with other users by requesting to make a “Connection” with them via the Scoutle website. You score points based on your site visitor numbers and the number of Connections you make. The higher your point value the higher your place in the Scoutle Guide, which in turn should lead to more visitors.

This service has been available for a good few months now and, although as usual I joined as soon as I heard about it, I felt that I already took part in too many social networking activities and these were beginning to take time away from blogging: becoming counterproductive. I have since narrowed these down to networks I find the most use and enjoy using the most so I have some leeway to explore others.

I will report on Scoutle once I have had more opportunity to find out if it is working for me, although I suspect it is not attracting as many members as it deserves because of general social networking fatigue as well as the desire not to have too many widgets. I have already discovered a few very informative blogs that I had not come across before – one you may be interested in is Social Web Tools by ChaCha Fance – it sent me off in discovery of various new, interesting applications.

If you are a Scoutle member please leave a comment letting us know what you think of it.

(I placed the Scoutle widget in my footer because this reduces the impact of any increase in page load time it causes – the footer loads last so the rest of the page is visible even though the social networking widgets may not have fully loaded)

Popularity: 12% [?]

You have likely heard of Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, as it is now in its third year, but if you are not in the business of making money from your blog you may not have taken too much notice. I suggest you do consider joining in even if you are not interested in the money making aspects of blogging; because of the resources and tools you will learn about which are useful to all bloggers. Over 30 days Ed presents a series of video tutorials (with transcripts) with the aim of showing how to make money from blogging. Easy to understand step by step instructions are given for participants to follow. To accompany the videos there are forums to answer questions and provide support. Joining in a Challenge group is a good idea to develop a closer support network with a smaller group of fellow participants. Each group has its own forum. There is even a browser toolbar available to make it easier to follow the challenge.

Although I have not ventured into online money making I have joined the 30 Day Challenge for the second time. I was newer to blogging the first time round and learned a lot about blog promotion, social networking, blogging tools and search engine optimization. Knowing that new content is produced for each Challenge and that the tools available to us rapidly increase and change, I felt that I would again benefit from participating. There is no pressure to follow each step rigidly and if you cannot find time to view the daily offerings you can catch up another time.

The Challenge actually starts/started on 1st August but it is not too late to join in. There are some recommended “pre-season” preparation activities which are useful in their own right. Not being patient enough to watch videos I read the transcripts of these so that I could pick out areas that I thought may be new to me. This time round the use of the Flock browser is being recommended and there are guides to help you get started with it. I am close to moving over to Flock from Firefox and will do so once I have configured it with my favorite extensions. At present, I always have it open alongside Firefox for its social networking, Flickr and YouTube tools.

I followed Ed’s example by creating a Google Subscribe Link for Sueblimely. You can subscribe via the “Add my expertise to your Google web searches” in my sidebar. Here are the FAQs for Google Subscribe Links if you are interested in creating your own.

You can join up by via my 30 Day Challenge Refferal Link or via the 30 Day Challenge site directly and find me in Team Lightening There are prizes to be won for those with the most referrals. I don’t expect to be anywhere in the running for these but it would be good not to have a referral point value of zero

Popularity: 9% [?]

Feeling particularly generous I recently offered some prizes for inclusion in the Life is Colorful Anniversary Contest.

My contribution is a 125×125 ad on my site and 2,000 entrecard credits. I would be delighted if they were won by one of you. There are various ways to enter the contest, the simplest being to subscribe to Life is Colorful. Visit the contest post for more details of entry requirements and the long list of prizes available.

I decided to follow the Life is Colorful blog after I read the post “Earnings Crossed $10,000 this year on May 7th” as I would love to learn some of the secrets to making that much money online!

Good luck if you enter

Popularity: 8% [?]

Cross a bored geek from Sydney (called Stuart), with a dream (of an interesting concept) and a bottle of Diet Coke (no explanation needed) and the result is MissionToTrade.com.

» »$?

Stuart started on 7th May by offering a $3 Diet Coke for trade. He traded this with a workmate for a $13.99 Pack of Golf Balls, which was in turn traded for a $39.95 Microsoft Keyboard and Mouse set.

This is all within the first week of starting. Where will it lead I wonder – will it end up with trades for valuable items? I am going to following the progress closely.

All I have to trade right now is an old queen size bed base with one leg broken and a single mattress which has seen far better days (even The Brotherhood would not take them). A trip to the tip is in order very soon as they are sitting in my hallway and not adding anything to the decor.

Popularity: 6% [?]

It seems appropriate after my last post to take part in this Entrecard meme. It is likely an indication of Entrecard’s current popularity that I get tagged twice for this. I find the concept fascinating and will be following the trends closely. I will be also be looking out for its Entry into Wikipedia.

Andrew Boyd and Guera have tagged me for an Entrecard meme – "Chain Drop 8 above the fold". Andrew explains what "above the fold" means and why it matters- Entrecard (and other ads) above the fold…

Rules-

• Create a post on your blog that links back to this post.
• Tag 8 bloggers not mentioned in this post who display their Entrecard widget above the fold and have great content.
• Leave a comment on this post and share the link to the post you made.

I would like to tag the following who have their Entrecard Widget ‘above the fold’:

• Photos from Northern Norway: A photo blog
• Tim Christie Photography, Life And The Blogosphere
• Mother’s Got A Dot Com
• Social Networking Rocks – she has an interesting article on the Zion5 Network
  Website Promotion on Zion5 which I have joined for learning purposes.
• Schwoit – You can read about his strategies on dropping and thanking on My Entrecard Strategy
  
• Interesting Observations
  
• Fun, Crafts and Recipes
  
• HiTech Dads
  – say hello to Jack while you are there, the beautiful new son of a hitech dad.

Please do not feel obliged to take part in this if you would rather not – just accept the link-love as a gift .

An afterthought – the comments in my last post are probably more interesting than my post itself. It would be good to keep that conversation going so feel free to add your own opinions of Entrecard to the comments there. Are you finding it useful, do you think it a flash in a pan, will the novelty wear off? Are too many people taking advantage of it and will this put others off using it? Will the Entrecard ‘Wombats’ get hungry and look for juicier leaves?

Popularity: 8% [?]