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Through a series of events and circumstances that I am not going to pretend to understand, I was contacted by Rena requesting an interview with moi… she specifically wanted to interview me about my experiences and involvement with Blogcatalog. I found this rather curious,as I am not what you might call a BC power user. In fact, though I had signed up sometime last year, I had only really started to be active on the site a couple of weeks prior to her request… But who am I to turn down a chance to talk to people? And so I emailed her and said that I would be happy to do the interview.

As it happens, Rena had been contracted to write a guide to BlogCatalog for members of Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking – Web 2.0 marketing and Strategies program. In other words, my name, with links to my blogs, would be going out to several thousand people, just for answering a few questions in an email. Questions about something that I am no expert in, I might add. All of a sudden I was really happy to do the interview! Puzzled, but happy.

The report/guide will be going out to the Social Power Linking members in a day or two, but the whole experience really turned me on to the whole concept of giving interviews as a way of getting my name and blog out there in front of a wider audience. As for the “not an expert” thing? She was actually looking for someone to interview who was specifically not a power user. She wanted someone who could tell the story from a beginners point of view, because the SPL members would be mostly beginners to BC. I certainly could do that!

Now the obvious reasons for giving interviews are all about exposure and traffic. You know, building authority and credibility, inbound links and all that stuff. There are, however, some secondary benefits that might be even more valuable over the long term. After the interview was done, I received a complimentary copy of the report, even though I was not an SPL member. (It turned out very well, by the way. Rena did an awesome job, even without my input ) Second I made not one, but two new friends. If you’re guessing that Rena is one of them, you’re right. The other is TonyB, one of the owners of BC, and a pretty cool guy all around.

He very kindly upgraded my BC membership to a premium membership for 6 months, for free! Now that is cool! Some of the premium benefits include no ads and increased exposure to the BC community (read more traffic). Being a good interviewee now opens me up to the possibility of more interviews in the future, exposing me and my blogs to even more people. This is free advertising, and I get to help people to boot!

But the one thing that really stands out for me, is the idea that you don’t have to be an expert to get interviewed. It’s all well and good to listen to an expert expound on a topic you’re interested in, but the downside is that these experts are all too often distanced from the days that they were still learning. What is easy for them now, wasn’t always. Beginners, while benefiting from the experience of the expert, also need someone to talk to who is right there beside them, in the trenches, figuring it out for the first time.

The third thing that came out of all of this is some new article topics for techne-eikon. First on the list is a review of BlogCatalog. The second is to try out the Social Power Linking program. While I had heard Jack Humphrey’s name floating around before, I had never really looked at his offerings prior to this. Now, having taken a look, I am signed up for the three days for a dollar trial offer, just to get an inside look. The regular membership goes for $30 a month, and my preliminary glance seems to indicate that it could be worth the price. Especially when you consider that other memberships in this industry go for thousands of dollars.

I’ll report on my experiences with SPL in a future article. In the meantimes I will be looking out for more interview opportunities (hint, hint), because more than anything else, doing the interview for Jack and Rena was fun! And who doesn’t like having fun?

I recently joined the Clickbooth Advertising Network. Clickbooth is an affiliate/advertising network that features some pretty big name brands with advertising programs available for publishers Now just let me start this off by saying that my initial impressions of the Clickbooth website involved the word “help”, repeated often. This has less to do with Clickbooth’s site, and more to do with my utter newbie-ness with affiliate marketing. My prior experience with affiliate networks is of the self serve type, and even that was minimal. Suffice to say that I am no super affiliate by any stretch of the imagnation. So, in typical Marc style, I had once again jumped into the deep end of the pool. After a quick look around, I rapidly determined that this was not your standard affiliate marketing network.

Next stop: the help pages.

Unfortunately, the help pages didn’t have the kind of help that I was looking for, ie: “How to be an affiliate” and “How to evaluate an affiliate program”. Missing were the usual CPC type stats, or reports on a campaign’s network performance. I wasn’t going to learn how to be an effective affiliate marketer from these pages.

Now let me backtrack a bit here to the beginning of my story before I continue on. I signed up, filled in a bunch of information, and had to wait to become approved for the network. This is where it gets interesting to me. Within a couple of hours of getting approved, I received a friendly email from Dean, a ClickBooth employee.

Everybody, say “Hi, Dean!” Dean is my account manager. Huh? I have an account manager? That’s cool! What’s an account manager?

Fortunately, Dean gave a brief explanation of his role and duties in his email, so I wasn’t completely clueless. He also provided me with contact information so that I could ask him anything that I needed to. Now, it’s only been a day, but I like this guy. I fired off an email with a couple of comments and a question explaining my particular concerns, and he once again answered promptly. At no time did he make feel like a newbie, or stupid, or not important because I’m essentially clueless, or my little site isn’t going to pull in tens of thousands of dollars a month for his company.

Actually, I’m downplaying the numbers here a bit: CB’s biggest campaigns do millions per month, and the company as a whole does 25 million a month. Just so’s you know…

It turns out that Dean and his fellow account managers are the help system. They handle everything from raw newbies like me to 30 year veterans of the affiliate business. They are as hands on or hands off as you need them to be. Their job is to help me choose the right campaigns for my demographics for maximum return, essentially acting as matchmakers between advertisers and publishers. They are experts in the ClickBooth catalogue, and their expertise is available to assist affiliates wanting to match up offerings to their audience.

On the other hand, if you’re the type who prefers to go it alone the CB website is well equipped to help you do that (my previous comments notwithstanding). Once you log into your account, there are links immediately apparent on the left of your screen that will lead you to various useful areas such as “New Campaigns this Week”, “Category Listing”, and various account and stats related links.

To select a campaign, all you do is click on the “Programs & Links” tab, and there you are. You can search by category, keyword, or campaign type. The information presented is clear and easy to understand, and had me up and running in no time at all. I found the rest of the site just as clear and easy to navigate and understand.

Comparing my experience with ClickBooth and some of the other affiliate networks, I have to say that I am a fan of CB. I don’t feel like I’m going it alone in a highly competitive industry, and besides, it’s kinda cool to be able to tell my friends, “Hang on, I’m talking to my Account Manager.” Thanks to Dean’s help, I am now much more comfortable proceeding with affiliate marketing as a revenue source. Maybe I’ll even try an email campaign… of course, I’ll need an email list first… but that’s another article.

Cheers, Marc

Intense Debate promises to revolutionize blog commenting, but will it live up to the promise, or will devilish details derail an otherwise fine idea?

Intense Debate is a commenting system that strives to bring a little more structure and usability to the traditional blog’s comments. Even though it is currently in beta, most of the advertised functionality seems to be in place, with several features that not only make commenting better, but integrate social web 2.0 aspects into them. I recently took Intense Debate for a test run. These are my results.

One of the things about ID is that your comments are hosted on their server, rather than yours. This had me a trifle concerned, as I didn’t want to either get locked in to their product, or lose my comments when I signed up for the service, or alternatively, lose my comments should I decide to leave the service. It turns out I was worried about nothing, for the Wordpress plugin has a handy import and exprt feature that allows yuo to bring your existing comments into their system, and then back into your native WP system should you choose to later (including any new comments made while using ID).
The fundamental premise of the system could be best expressed as one of bringing order to chaos. Traditional commenting systems are listed in date/time order, which means that if I am responding to someone else’s comment, it won’t be threaded. Intense Debate allows you to respond to a comment in a threaded fashion, that is, the response gets listed directly below, and as part of, that comment’s thread. There are other WP plugins that provide this funcionality (one of which I will be taking for a test run soon), but to have it bundled in with the rest of the features is something that I quite like.

The last thing that I really like about Intense Debate is the built in social functionality. If your commentor is also an ID user, you can rate their comment, give them props, and follow their activities on other ID enabled blogs. Your ID profile allows you to upload an avatar that shows up beside any comments you make, with a menu button that provides links to your site, profile, and rss comment stream. It helps to build community, and keep up with your friends activities around the net.

Are you sold yet? Itching to pop over to Intense Debate and install it on your blog? I might suggest that you hold up for a moment, because the system isn’t perfect (yet). Let me just preface the rest of this with the gentle reminder that ID is still under development, and as such, there will be issues. Here are a couple that I ran afoul of…

Intense Debate integrates almost seamlessly into most WP themes. This is a good thing, unless you are a particularly clever designer, or just don’t share their design sensibilities. The plugin integrates via use of transparent or semi-transparent graphics. Most of the time, this works well, unless you’re me. You may have noticed that I use a fixed gradient for my background, yes? Light on the bottom, and dark on the top. ID applies no background to the comments area, and black text. This means that the comments were only readable on the bottom third of the screen. As you scrolled up, the black text, including the comment titles, vanished against the black background. That’s not good.

ID uses it’s own css sheet that loads after yours. At the time of this writing, there is no documentation for the sheet, so it’s a bit of a guessing game as to which classes and id’s pertain to which part of the presentation. If you can figure out which bits you need to change, you can specify your own sheet to load after theirs, making it look the way you want. If you can figure it out. In all honesty, I found their css code to be a small nightmare, with far more classes and id’s than I thought would be necessary for something as straight forward as the comments section. But then what do I know, I couldn’t figure out which bits went to what.

I did leave a support ticket, and got a response that essentially said “email me, and I’ll help you out”. I did that, and waited a week with no answer. I’m still waiting….

But… if your blog uses a light background that supports black text easily, all of the above doesn’t apply. What might apply a bit more is this: as admin of my blog, I would expect a means of responding to comments from the same interface that I use to approve them. Now I am willing to admit that I sometimes miss the obvious, but if there was a button there that would allow me to reply to a recent comment, I couldn’t find it. In order to answer, I had to come back to techne-eikon, and comment directly on the page the comment was made on.

If you don’t get a lot of comments on your blog, this might be ok, or at worst a trivial annoyance. If, on the other hand, your blog is a vital hub of activity, with dozens of comments made daily on various posts, this could rapidly become a maintenance nightmare. In short, even if I had received some timely help on my (admittedly not critical) support ticket, this problem would still have been the deal breaker for me. It’s no secret that t-e is a low traffic, low activity blog. Not all of my online efforts can make the same claim.

If I were to install ID on my most recent startup, which averages 3 comments a day, I would be spending too much time just managing comments. And it’s just getting started! What happens when I’m getting 10-20-30 or more comments a day? Pass the sedatives, please

Overall, I really like Intense Debate. I like their philosophy and approach to refining blog commenting, but I can’t honestly say that it’s ready for the prime time yet. I would want to see better user level control of the graphical presentation, and require that I be able to administer and respond to comments “in house”, that is, all from the same control panel. Without that, I will have to pass on Intense Debate, as wonderful as the concept and feature set is otherwise. I will be keeping an eye on the development of this tool, in the hopes that these issues get resolved, because if they are, then I have no doubt that ID can, and will change the way we comment on blogs for the better.

The Random Forest is a personal blog that covers bits of randomness in a fashoin similar to that of our own techne-eikon. There isn’t a lot of content there yet, but what is there struck me as well written, and worth reading and/or keeping an eye on. A especially like his report on his AdWords experiment, it’s honest and detailed, always a good thing for those wishing to learn from other’s experiences.

On the design side, the blog needs a little work. The basic design is clean and easy to use. Unfortunately, there are two gotchas that should be addressed. The first is that the blog is wider than 1024 px. This could be simply a whupsie in the css, as has happened to me on occasion, or it could be something else. Either way, it doesn’t work, and spoils the professionalism of the design. The other is the link color in the side bar. Bright blue on another blue, and in a smallish font size, does not make for easy browsing. Either change the link color to something that will contrast better with the background, change the background.

My other beef is the use of Google Adsense ads. I have no objection to ads on a blog, in fact I heartily endorse it! I do, however, object to the very large ad spots placed between the top three posts on the front page. They are, IMHO, too intrusive, obscuring the content, at least on a psychological level. But that’s just a personal peeve of mine. If they are working, and making him a bit of $$, who am I to nay-say it?

Overall, The Random Forest strikes me as a nice read, especially if you’re tired of the never ending stream of “Authority” blogs. It’s nice to know that there are normal people around, people who aren’t trying to continually upsell you on their latest authority ebook, etc. etc. ad naseum…

As you may be aware, Walmart sells PC’s with Linux as the operating system through their online store. The specific distro is called gOS, or Good OS. When I first heard of this, I didn’t think much of it, expecting that they would just use one of the many fine Linux distributions available. Then I ran across a mention by Cybernet that made mention of how Mac-like it was. Having spent some time drooling over various Macs on assorted store shelves, I suddenly intrigued. Mac cool without the Mac price tag? I like that idea!

I downloaded the live DVD from the website, and ran it on my PC. But before I get into my personal experience with it, let me just throw a couple of technical specs at you. gOS is supposed to be able to run very well on a system with the following minimum hardware requirements:

• 700 MHz x86 processor
• 384 MB of system memory (RAM)
• 8 GB of disk space
• Graphics card capable of 1024×768 resolution
• Sound card
• A network or Internet connection

Given that I am running a 2.4Ghz dual-core Athlon, with way more memory than is strictly required, I should have been good. It also bears noting that live CD or DVD distibutions will always run slowly, just because they run off of the media, not your hard drive. Unfortunately, the live DVD did not work well for me. In fact it ran so poorly that I was out of there, and back to my regular Mandriva inside of 20 minutes.

gOS took the expected time to load, but after that, everything else was sub standard. The animations were jerky, apps were way to slow to load, even for a live distro. If I had a system that I didn’t mind trashing, I would do a proper install to hard drive, just to see if that is the problem. But if my experience is any indicator, I don’t see too many people adopting gOS based on the live DVD experience.

I wish I could tell you more about it, but the overall experience was so frustrating that I couldn’t stand to stay there long enough to actually test anything. Sorry ’bout that… if anybody has done an install of gOS, please feel free to let us know of your experience in the comments.

As I mentioned a little while ago, the wife and I are on a smoking reduction plan. So far, we are more or less on track, having reduced our habit to one every hour and a half, a huge improvement. Our end goal is to be completely quit by the end of summer, which is reasonable.

One of the keys is to do this in a guilt free way, which is to say that if we have an off day (like yesterday) where our smoking goes up, we don’t beat ourselves up about it. If we were to do thta, the stress would simply go up, we would feel like we had failed efore we had even started, and that would be that. Instead, the secret is to acknowledge that it took us many years to ge tto where we are now, so a few months is reasonable to expect.

Three or four weeks at this schedule, then we will probably push it over again to an hour and 45 minutes, or maybe even two hours between smokes. Day by day, that’s the way. The quest continues.

Social networking has really taken off in a big way, with new sites cropping up in every market and niche imaginable, and established companies incorporating Web 2.0 strategies into their existing sites. For example, suppose you wanted to search for Nantucket vacation rentals. You might choose to go to WeNeedAVacation.com to find that perfect vacation rental. This site has been around for about 10 years, but in keeping with the times, is adding social networking to their service.

They have added several new features. including video of various properties. Because these features are new, there isn’t much to see yet, and some of the features are not readily apparent, but exciting none the less. For vacationers, the site has added the ability to invite friends and family to join you on your holidays, rate and rank various properties, and add comments to the listings. For property owners, they have added the ability to upload video listings of their rental properties, allowing vacationers to do a virtual “try before you buy” on the house or condo that they will be spending their holidays in.

I think that the addition of video will be a huge selling point for both the site and property owners, as it allows prospective vacationers to see what they will be getting before they actually go there. This is, in my humble opinion, an intelligent use of Web 2.0 and social networking/marketing in a very focused niche. By employing these strategies, properties will be leveraging concepts of social proof, and ideally making their customers their most effective sales force.

The deed is done, and Wordpress is upgraded to version 2.5. All in all, it was mostly painless, though there seems to be an issue with the plugin upgrade script, as a couple of my plugins vanished after the one click plugin upgrade. Fortunately, nothing that I would call “mission critical”, so I’ll mess with them later. For now, It’s time to play!

One Picture Upload

First up, the following is a first time try at the new picture upload feature. In the old versions, uploading and embedding a photo or other picture was a multi click process, and if you had several photos to upload, well, grab a cup of something nice, because you were doing them one at a time. So for my first rum, we will do one picture… here goes… wish me luck

Ok, that was reasonably painless, though it did take a minute to figure out. If you click the picture, it will take you to a larger version. Then click your back button to return here, and we shall continue. One thing, though: I did tell it to center the image in the post, and as you can see, that didn’t happen… I’ll have to check the code and see if there is something I can do in the style sheet.

Gallery Upload and Formatting

So on to the next thing: if I read it correctly, you can upload a folder’s worth of images, and have them automagically formatted into a gallery, so let’s give that a try, shall we?

Staring at my admin screen, the gallery just shows as a short piece of code, but clicking the preview button brings up the nicely formatted gallery you see above. Click one of the images, and you will be taken to an intermediate size, and clicking that will bring you to a full sized image. I just want to point out that I haven’t done any thing to my theme to make this happen. This is exactly as WP is set to do, out of the box.

All the images except for “8 Ball” came from flickr, and are reproduced here by way of a Creative Commons license. Make sure you check out the contributor’s pages: Jose Miguel Serrano, medium as muse, gimmeahug, wonderferret, ukslim, and Zara. Thanks guys, you rock!

One surprise feature: while crafting this post, firefox crashed on me. Restarting it, and telling it to reopen the crashed session brought me right back here, with everything I had already done still here! The whole process was very easy, and that is seriously cool!

I’ll keep playing with Wordpress 2.5 over the next few weeks, but for a first impression, I am very happy with the new features and improvements. Soon, I will try out some of the other media features, but for now, enjoy the pictures

Just a quick note: the much anticipated release of WordPress 2.5 just happened a few hours ago. That means that tomorrow is update day! Wheeee! So if t-e acts a little funky at points, just wait a few minutes, and try reloading the page.

The new WP has so many cool features that I am just itching to try out, I’m tempted to do it right now. But, alas, I have other things to take care of first, so it will have to wait till the morrow.

I was down at the mall today, doing a little household shopping. If you’ve ever been to a mall on a Saturday, you know how busy it is. Deciding that a little snack was in order, I wandered over to the food court, and grabbed something to munch on. Spying no empty tables, I asked a gentleman if the seat at his table was spoken for, then joined him.

Now at this juncture, I just want to add that the t-shirt I’m wearing today is actually my son’s, not mine. Once I was securely ensconced in the hard plastic seat, the gentleman commented on the t-shirt, asking me did I coached soccer? (I don”t) Over the next few minutes of conversation, it turns out that he coached at the Provincial level for 17 years, and finally quit to spend more time with his family, etc. I actually got a fairly detailed picture of his life, at least as it pertained to soccer.

All of this got me to thinking about the messages we send every waking moment of our lives, from the clothes we wear, to the way we carry ourselves, to the very words that come out of our mouths. We are broadcasting out, loud and clear to the people around us, a message, one that declares who we are, and if we might be someone worth talking to. In my case, t-shirts and baseball caps get me into a lot of sports related conversations, usually with strangers at the mall or bank or wherever in this wide world I might be.

When I let my hair grow out to shoulder length, you can add way too many offers to buy drugs to that list. Those are short conversations, beginning and ending with the word NO, but they do happen. So as I continue on my quest for business success, I find myself beginning to think that I need to change the way I look and dress, if only to make myself feel more like a businessman, and less like “one of the guys”. Because the truth of the matter is that however you present yourself, the odds are strong that you actually feel that way.

We choose our clothes and haircuts based on personal preference, ie: what we like. It’s a two way street, though. If I decide to put on a nice button down instead of a t-shirt, it will change the way I feel about myself, and therefore how I behave. It doesn’t matter that I work from home, and nobody ever sees me, if I dress in a professional manner, my professionalism should rise correspondingly. That’s the theory, anyway…

What do you think, do the clothes make the man?