So I went ahead and joined Twitter, and I am currently quite twitterpated with it. I’m always a late adopter of social media and online social network sites, as I am with this 140 character restricted micro-blogging sensation. This is mostly because I don’t always assume the latest cool thing is actually going to be of any use to me. After plenty of waiting through, Twitter seemed like a mature enough idea to join in on the fun. Not that I’m saying Twitter is used for anything mature, but at least it has all grown up as a platform for fun.

Twitterpated

I know there are few of you who are just jumping up and down there in the back dying to ask the most important question: What does twitterpated mean? And most of you in the front are just too shy to ask, so I will try to define twitterpated for you. The Urban Dictionary does a very comprehensive job at a definition, but in case you’re more in the mood for the dummies version which makes just as much sense here goes. To be Twitterpated is to be aroused, intensely attracted, enamoured, smitten, practically in heat! That last version gives a clue to the origins of the term, and it is a very strange origin. Bambi introduced us to the word and it has since taken on a life of its own; Yes, I mean the cute forest creature Bambi. To see Bambi twitterpated, or at least in denial of the possibility of future twitterpation (did I just invent a new part of speech for a made-up word?), watch the video.

Now that the mandatory educational segment is out of the way let’s move on to the gratuitous linking.

Know Twits

Part of the attraction of Twitter was that the cool crowd were all there. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always where the cool people are *cough*, so joining up was just a matter of course. Now I could put in whole directory of Twitter links here and name drop like there’s no tomorrow, but that would just be excessive, so I’ll stick to the important few.

Pearl is on Twitter. She’s as regular a visitor on this site as I can probably get, and always provides an interesting read. Her Twitter page is worth a look and very worth following because she links to a lot of useful, topical or just plain fascinating pages that I would never come across otherwise.

The illustrious Luciano has not spared Twitter his wisdom and it is a better place for it. Whether it’s thoughtful quotes, a friendly pointer towards a new book worth devouring, or just a heads up about the latest on his excellent site, if you have a brain and like to use it occasionally, follow his tweets to keep sharp.

Vishal‘s twittering makes this list to prove that nepotism is still alive and well, and because he posts very interesting snippets about hot tea . That and all those strange things he finds to link to which I can’t be bothered to track down myself. To nepotism and laziness!

Twittered Upon

My sojourn into Twitter land has already borne fruit. In my short time as part of the noisy flock I have already discovered some treasures.

SmashingMagazine is a great resource on design and all things web that I have known about for a long time. But, I have never added it to my feed reader for fear of information overload. On Twitter though, I find them a joy, even though they point to both their own articles and others. The medium of tweets makes it somehow more manageable, and I’m discovering some excellent sites through their recommendations.

O’Reilly Publishing has a new blog and it’s all sorts of geek cool! Firstly it’s called O’Reilly Radar … Radar Oreilly, get it? It covers a good spectrum of topics from technology to business, the environment, education, and everything in between and beyond. Thought provoking stuff.

And if that makes you think Twitter is all serious and stuffy you might be right, because the most serious man in Galactic history is also there Darth Vader seems to like it on Twitter. When he’s not making threatening gestures towards his storm troopers, he’s musing about the everyday banalities of being the most evil despot in the known universe. Don’t you love a man in a black uniform?

Twittering Tools

The web was practically useless until someone invented a search engine, so you’ll be glad to know Twitter already has its own. The advanced Twitter search page is especially worth exploring. Not only will it let you do straight-forward text searches, but also restrict searches by various detailed criteria including geography. Learn to use this well because like all search tools it is a powerful weapon for both work and play, and considering the real time nature of Twitter, even more so.

Keeping within the 140 character restriction and the simple technology behind Twitter, there have been many attempts at organising it more using categorization and meta-tagging. On of the most successful attempts has been Hashtags which uses an old IRC convention(#) to add appropriate keywords to tweets to help collate similarly themed status updates. A very useful tool, and one I’m still learning about.

No site is an island, and certainly no social site. This is why something like Twitter needs to interface with regular people’s desktops on their computer if it wants to really become a lasting phenomenon. Twitter doesn’t disappoint in this area, with a growing list of Twitter clients, tools and miscellaneous applications to choose from. Most of these were created by people trying to fill a personal need so they vary greatly in technology and function. A wondrous box of toys to play with.

Twittering WordPress

In the new world of social networks and user generated content, very few can afford to ignore the WordPress juggernaut. As you would expect there are a whole slew of ways to get your twitter account talking to your WordPress blog and for your WordPress site to talk to your Twitter account. I’ll stick to the few that I thought were the best as I consider what to use on my own site.

WordPress Twitter Tools is plugin suite by the ever active Alex King who has brought us many ubiquitous plugins before including such gems as Share This. What can it do? I lot, too much to itemise here in fact. If you want to connect up your blog and Twitter account, consider this as a serious contender for a solution.

The same goes for Lifestream, which is probably what I might end up using on my site in the future for it’s superior flexibility. It creates a lifestream page where various feeds from your external sites like Twitter or other blogs and social sites can be aggregated into a single listing. It also backs up all your past tweets to your local database which is a great solution for those who don’t like to completely rely on the immortality of free services.

When I started, a big bold subscribe to RSS icon was enough, but as all these social accounts grow, I also wanted a way to link to them prominently on this site so people can find their way there. One ready made solution for WordPress is the Follow Me plugin. It sets up a widget with tiny icons and text links to your various social accounts in your side bar.

That’s exactly what I had in mind, but for one, it’s not very pretty, and it doesn’t include a facility for a Xing account, which I do have. The only solution seems to be to spin your own text widget with manual links and custom icons. There are thousands of free social bookmark icon sets out there that you can download but none that excited me with a fitting style. The Vikiworks iconset came very close, but once again Xing wasn’t included, so perhaps I’m going to have to do this the hard way and make my own.

I’m still finding my way around the twitterverse and I like what I see so far. I’ve included what I think are useful resources above but I know there’s plenty more out there. If there are any Twitter-related links and resources you would like to recommend or share please leave a comment below.

To end I will leave you with a deep through from the wise owl. What do you mean what wise owl? You did see the video didn’t you? You must! It’s the greatest thing in sex education tapes since erotic Indian temple sculpture! There if that doesn’t get you lot to see it, nothing will.

Where was I? Ahh yes, the wise owl. The wise owl said, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the spring time.” This can only mean I’m an early bloomer, because it’s not even Februaray yet and I’m twitterpated plenty.

Samir

FeedBurner, now part of the Google universe, is a service to enhance and manage RSS feeds that is used by many bloggers. Not being comfortable with hosted services myself, I had written a guide to using some WordPress plugins as FeedBurner alternatives which continues to be one of the most visited articles on this site.

Edward de Leau found his way to that article, and being the proud owner of one of the longest running blogs out there, he brought up an interesting question: What if you not only want to use FeedBurner RSS feeds for your blog, but you want to use FeedBurner for all of the feeds your blog/CMS spits out?

He said:

I’m still interested in going back to feedburner. I like to outsource as much as possible (with the benefits of new features and updates which I dont have to maintain myself).

However, I have 1 front page feed, 9000 posts feeds, 1000 tag feeds, etc… how in asimovs name can I get each one of them tied to a unique feedburner feed?

Do you have any clue?

No queries asked in Asimov’s name shall go unanswered! So I did a bit of digging around.

Obviously, FeedBurner has its uses, and while I am ever curious about finding ways to replace its functionality, I can understand the reasoning for using it. However, like all outsourced services, especially free ones, I think you are going to find several limations with this service for hardcore usage. I think the need to add 9000 post feeds and 1000 tag feeds to FeedBurner can safely be considered hardcore usage.

I have no recent familiarity with the inner workings of a FeedBurner account, but I do know you need to add each feed or “burn” it into your account one at a time. In the interest of automation, the original FeedBurner team introduced a Feed Management API all the way back in 2005 [see Feed Management API Reference]. Even in the original announcement on the FeedBurner blog though, they had clearly indicated the limitations:

What can’t you do with the API? Nothing, with one exception. The API has a built-in limit of 20 burned feeds per user id. We will ratchet this down even lower if it’s abused, but that seems like a reasonable number to get started. If you want to burn and manage more than 20 feeds via the API for a single user, you should email our business development group: newbiz at feedburner dot com. Also, you will need to have a valid FeedBurner user account created from the Web site to play.

Customers and partners are granted special powers and the twenty feed limitation is removed. …

Far from ratcheting this limit down, if this Drupal discussion is anything to go by, it was at 30 feeds per account when Google took over. But, it would seem Google has disabled access to the management API all together, at least to the masses.

From the FeedBurner API Developer Guide:

Currently, the Feed Management API is offered only to Google partners who were previously under contract with FeedBurner. We are in the process of updating these APIs to be current with the features we provide, documenting the API better so that publishers can be self sufficient, and making sure the APIs are secure and cannot be abused. We are also looking at how to best support bulk management of feeds through our UIs and APIs in a future release.

… which translates to: Ha! Ha! You can’t play! … or something close.

For now it would seem any dreams of mass automated FeedBurner action are but dreams, and considering Google made many of the paid FeedBurner services free when they took over, a route into Google FeedBurner partnership also seems uncertain. We will just have to wait for Google to unveil their master plan on this front. The only people who know anything more about this are Google themselves, and perhaps a polite query dropped to somone in the right department might get you some educated replies on where this matter stands.

We must keep in mind though, that while applications like Feedburner and Google Reader are now addept at keeping track of specified feeds, a free-for-all feed adding API feature seems unlikely. If that were allowed, it would only be a matter of hours before someone created a WordPress plugin or a Drupal module to auto burn every comment, post, category, and tag feed as it was created. With thousands of new blogs being created everyday, and tens or hundreds of millions of blog posts published every day, the number of feeds that the FeedBurner servers would have to manage and keep track of every day would increse exponentially. It’s safe to say that this sort of near geometric progression would soon reach the limits of all computing power known to humanity, and would make any bandwidth problems brought on by online video distribution seem like a minor hiccup.

So, while we can wait for Google to come to a decision on this matter, infinite FeedBurner feed nirvana is an unlikely scenario without serious science fiction repurcussions. But, feel free to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about below.

Samir

Trying out direct advertising has always been on the cards, but I’ve never gotten around to it. One of main stumbling blocks with blog ads is the fact that, unlike contextual advertising like AdSense, you need to do all the hard work of finding the advertisers and getting them to pay your asking price for a lucrative spot on your (hopefully) much viewed sidebar — or where ever else you wish to stick those ads. That’s where ad networks often come in, and for those of us wanting to try our hand at banner advertising on our blogs and web sites, PerfomancingAds might have just come to our rescue.

What is PerfomancingAds?

PerformancingAds is an ad network, displaying ads in the now popular 125×125 pixel format. You sign up for an account, add your site as a possible advertising platform, set a price per week and the number of ads available, and people can then pay to have their ad displayed on your site. An elegant solution to a usually cumbersome process. You the publisher get 60% of the price and PerformancingAds keeps 40% as their service charge.

Whose idea is PerfomancingAds?

PerformancingAds is brought to us by Performancing.com, a well respected site for all things web and geek. I myself have benefitted with a decent amount of traffic when some of my articles on this site have been mentioned or linked on Performancing. That was one of the main resons I was immediately interested when I came across news of their new service.

I believe they had a similar ad network running before but it was stopped a while ago. Perhaps they learnt a lot from the shortcomings of the previous platform, and hopefully this one is smoother and more functional.

Why are blog ads of interest?

If you wish to make money online, break even on your blog hosting costs, or monetize your blog traffic in any way, blog ads are a lucrative alternative to automated contextual advertising like AdSense. While AdSense and similar programmes rely on users clicking on the ads for you to generate revenue, banners and blog ads are usually a renting of the space for a particular time period (1 week increments in the case of PerformancingAds). So as long as you have a decent amount of traffic, your advertisers pay you a fixed sum for being able to show their ads on your site. As long as you maintain the activity levels on your site, this can be a much more steady source of income than other methods. Targetted eyeballs are generally more easy to come by than clicks.

How do I join PerformancingAds and set it up?

1. Go to the PerformancingAds site at www.PerformancingAds.com
2. Click on Register under the Member Login box at the top right to sign up for a new account.
3. Fill in the details in the form. Note that you will need a PayPal account. At the moment Paypal seems to be the only way to recieve payment for ads.
4. Once logged in you can Add a Site into their system. And Add a region to define a specific instance/location where the ads will appear. This includes settings for how many ads you wish to allow.
5. You can then download the PerfomancingAds plugin by clicking on Download Publisher Software Now at the bottom of your account page.
6. The plugin comes ready to be used in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and also as a standalone PHP script if required. That’s a great amount of flexibity to have at your disposal, and a route more advertising networks should be taking.
7. The included installation instructions are detailed and clear, and the ads can be inserted by using some code that references the region that you setup in the PerformancingAds administration system.

What are the Pros and Cons of PerfomancingAds?

Pros

• Takes the marketing and administration part of blog ads out of your busy hands.
• A single standard size ad simplifies things and allows you to better integrate them into your blog layout.
• A publicly accesible marketplace means a lot of advertisers who would not have otherwise known about you can now be exposed to your site.
• Easy to implement in most blogs and sites with the PerformancingAds plugin.
• You can also fill your ad inventoy with your own ads for other sites, affiliate links, or even just important parts of your own site without incurring any charges from PerfomancingAds. This is a great way to utilise the ad space until more lucrative commercial advertisers come along. It’s also a great way to be very selective about accepting external advertisers while still reaping the benfit of being included in the PerformancingAds marketplace.

Cons

• You only get 60% of the money.
• Their marketplace tags each site with its Alexa rank, which is recognised by one and all to be an extremely unreliable measure of a site’s popularity or activity level. But, guess what, your potential advertisers are going to be judging you by this anyway.
• Other metrics appear on the details page for each site. These include Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank, Yahoo! inbound links, and Bloglines subscribers. Except perhaps the Yahoo! inbound links, all the rest are extremely subjective and inacurate measures of a site’s worth to an advertiser or the traffic it receives. For example, this site has a healthy and growing number of RSS subscribers and email update subscribers (over a hundred at this writing), but how many subscribers do I have through Bloglines? Two.

Are there any alternatives to PerformancingAds?

Sure there are. MANY! Many more than I could possibly list here, but here are some which are either particularly good or similar in spirit:

• Entrecard — An online business card exchange system of sorts, which also deals in similar 125 pixel wide images. Their system involves the accumulation of credits which can then be bought, sold, and traded.
• WP Text Ads — A plugin and service that lets you sell text ads on your blog directly without a middle man taking a cut. The free edition of the plugin is fully featured but limits the number of ads you can sell, while the paid edition gets rid of those limits.
• BlogRush — A traffic exchange widget that is quite popular.
• Kontera — Mostly unobtrusive in-text advertising that acts as a good complement or replacement to other contextual systems like Google AdSense.
• Google AdSense — The undisputed king of blog monetization resources. It’s the simplest way to start and there are enough professional bloggers who make a good income from this alone.

Hope you found this little guide to the new Performancing blog ads useful. If you are interested in trying this out for yourself, sign up at PerformancingAds. Let me know of your thoughts and experiences with blog advertising below, and best of luck with your blogging adventures.

Samir

There were enough good reasons to not upgrade software, even beyond laziness, of course.

With every new software patch or upgrade there come the inevitable new issues and problems along with the improvements. This is especially true when you are working with a modular system like a blog script or a content management system. Your site depends not only on the main software but also numerous plugins and modules that create the user experience you want. Often, changes in code render old plugins obsolete and broken, and there aren’t always easy alternatives to switch to.

Familiarity and comfort with a particular version of code can be a strong reason to stick to it. This is the reason people were still using COBOL code in the last decade and we had the Y2K scare. Even with WordPress, the new version was a drastic change from the one I was using, and perhaps I was delaying the inevitable a bit.

Last, but certainly not the least, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Old systems sometimes reach a certain level of stability which cannot be bettered. If a piece of software does everything you want it to do, and it has no major bugs or security flaws, there really is no logical reason to change.

I can’t claim that to be the case in my story. WordPress was well overdue for an update both for the better functionality and security of my site. Of course, this now means that many things are not working like they used to, and it might take me a few days to get things back in order and replace lost functionality with new plugins.

So, I appreciate your patience with my growing pains, and if you come across something specific that doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, feel free to use the comments below as a bug-report thread. I would appreciate the help, and I would also love to hear about some of your software upgrade experiences.

Samir

• Diana Bajenaru of 134u.com linked to it in the 1st edition of the Resource for Bloggers Carnival.
• Sandra of Free Cash Quest linked to it in the 11th edition of the Free Cash & Making Money Online Carnival.
• Satish Talim of Blog Me Cash linked to it in the 11th edition of the Blog Me Cash Carnival.
• Tommy Smith of Online Income Project linked to it in the November 19, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Online Income.
• Liz Fuller of More Than We Know linked to it in the edition #27 of the Carnival of Small Business Issues.
• Anthony of The Lives and Times… of Anthony McCune linked to it in the the first Surfer’s Paradise HULLABALOO! Carnival.
• Butanido of Butanido-Autoblog linked to it in the November 27, 2007 edition of the Blog to Earn Carnival.
• John W. Furst of E-biz Booster Blog linked to it in the December 03, 2007 edition of the Webmaster Articles Carnival.

Thank you all!

Samir

Now it’s voting time, and as I have done before on similar projects, I decided to look though all 66 entries and list those that stood out and those I would like to recommend to my readers:

• Six Savvy Reasons Why You Should Travel Light by Sheila Beal
  I happen to be a whole-hearted believer in travelling light, and Sheila builds a very clean and convincing case for it filled with many practical insights.
• List Of Why Blogs Are A Female Gender by Domtan
  In a single blow, Domtan produces a list that is at once deep, depraved, and utterly hilarious!
• Best 101 Lists by Pearl
  This is a list of 40-something lists of 101 things. One even leads to a list of 1001 lists, and I’m sure many of the others also have links as part of their 101 listing. Pearl deserves a round of applause for just giving me a happy information-overload high as I try to contemplate the geometrical exponential explosion of it all!
• 100 Resources To Improve Your Career, Relationships And Money by Lawrence Cheok
  A monster list of useful links. Good work Lawrence!
• 100 Sites I Seek Inspiration From by Iain Hamp
  Like all grab bag-deals, this list of 100 inspirational websites is bound to have its fair share of duds that just don’t do anything for some of us, but the rest is pure gold and Iain deserves a pat on the back for putting this together.
• 40 ways to make your mind your playground by Fier
  This article is the result of three hours well spent by Fier. It is a listing of fun games and intellectual challenges, all designed to enhance your mind in some way. There’s something here for everyone, everyone who likes using their mental equipment on occasion, that is.
• Ten things I didn’t know until last week by Blaiq
  Blaiq proves once again that you can never know too many pieces of interesting trivia. Educational.
• 8 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople by Daniel Sitter
  Simple and useful are by buzzwords when judging any content praise-worthy. This post by Daniel is both.
• 21 Punching Tips On Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization by Etienne Teo
  A great collection of links on the topic of social media that together form a very comprehensive tome on the subject. Excellent stuff by Etienne, and close to my heart because my old post on taking photos and even my Litemind entry on overcoming procrastination have greatly benefited from social media traffic.
• 10 Ways to Survive the Writers’ Strike by Cynthia Boris
  Cynthia obviously loves her subject matter, and it shows. I love geeks … and I use the word in the most complementary way, of course.
• 15 Tips to Prevent Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by CSS
  A simple and straight-forward post of tips on a truly useful subject, with enough appropriate links for further reading. Perfect.
• 12 WordPress Editors you can choose by Karthik
  I’m a big fan of comprehensive resource posts. They take a great deal of effort and research to put together, but the end result, if done well, is always worth the trouble. This roundup of editors for WordPress blogs from Karthik is a prime example.

Enjoy these wonderful entries, and I wish all the participanats the best of luck with the competition.

Samir

A friend of mine wants to setup a complex survey on her WordPress blog. The idea is to ask some questions on a topic, study the reader response, gather some statistics and arrive at some conclusions — your bog standard survey stuff, really. The challenge and boon of doing an online survey is that a more complex system can be setup to get more out of the process. Ideally, the software tools should be able to gather data, compile statistics, provide some immediate feedback to the participant, and possibly interface with a mailing list or auto-response sequence to allow further contact with the reader. With these lofty goals in mind I set off on my own survey of the available tools.

• WbExam and WbQuiz plugins
  I first stumbled upon the WbExam and WbQuiz plugins which do exactly what their names indicate. While similar in functionality, they each allow for a specialised type of online form setup. Unfortunately, the focus here is on the immediate evaluation of the answers and reader response rather than on data collection and study. After a quick look, I couldn’t find any mention or evidence that these plugins contained any data storage components at all. They are, however, very well suited for quiz and exam content that is aimed solely at the user experience, rather than statistical research.

  The other stumbling block for most might be that the questions need to be setup by editing code in a template file rather than in the WordPress administrative backend. If the functionality these provide is what you’re looking for, however, I think it’s well worth the effort.

• Survey Gizmo
  Survey Gizmo looked like a very promising plugin, and the feature list was extensive and impressive. On further study I realised that this was not stand-alone, but instead it was a bridge plugin that connected to some sort of survey API hosted on that site as a service. As a rule I like to avoid these external services, so I passed on this one. But if you’re looking to set up feature rich surveys on your WordPress blog, and you’re not to bothered about having your site be functionally self-sufficient, this might be an interesting option.

• WP Survey Creator
  While not blessed with tons of documentation, WP Survey Creator was closer to the kind of solution I was looking for — a native WordPress administration page to create the question sets, a default field to collect email addresses etc. Unfortunately its straight-forward simplicity, while refreshing, didn’t quite cover all the options I was looking for. This plugin only allows for questions that will be answered by a multi-choice 1-5 scale. This is a perfect system to study user feedback and ratings, but it would be crippling if any more detailed answers were required for your research. So, a good basic option for certain uses, but I moved on.

• Survey Fly
  [UPDATE 05 Dec 2009 : The Survey Fly site linked above seems to be down for a while now. Thanks to David Esrati for the warning in the comments and also for pointing me towards Survey Fly's spiritual successor: wp-surveys.]
  I wasn’t expecting much when I found yet another survey plugin, but I was pleasantly surprised by Survey Fly. It is a very feature complete plugin for its intended purpose. You can add a new survey in the admin area and specify the questions and possible answers for your survey. Responses are stored and statistics can be accessed as simple figures or exported to a CSV file for more complex study and analysis.

  Survey Fly supports almost any kind of HTML form based question you can imagine. This allows for a great amount of flexibility in the collected information. The only drawback (for some) will be that only one survey can be active at a time. Every time a new survey is added the older one becomes inactive and inaccessible. Other than that one shortcoming, and the lack of any ability to provide the survey participant with an immediate individual response based on their answers, this is as good as WordPress survey plugins get.

• phpMyAdahas
  My aim is to find a WordPress integrated solution to this problem, but I am not completely averse to an external solution if it has many functional advantages in its favour. phpMyAdahas is a fully customizable online survey application using XHTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. It seems to be very capable, supports multi-page questionnaires, various answering options, and it is even compliant with various web accessibility standards. If your looking for a solution to some heavy duty online surveying needs, this might be the right system for you.

• POST data manipulation using php and CURL
  I would have loved to find a survey solution that would somehow auto-magically plug into my email newsletter or autoresponder system of choice. But, considering my disappointment with the free tools available in that area, I was not surprised to see that my ideal solution didn’t exist.

  This meant that I would need to create the connection myself if these integrated data submissions for both survey and signup had to be accomplished. After a bit of searching I found this nice article on manipulating form data that is passed to PHP scripts. Not being well versed in PHP at the moment, most of this goes over my head, but I do realise that the solutions I seek are explained in this page, if I only I take the time to understand and implement.

At the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool, although Survey Fly comes close. From my limited study of the available tools, my ideal solution would be something that had Survey Fly at its base, with the immediate evaluation capabilities of WbQuiz/WbExam, and a co-submission of data to a newsletter script using PHP and CURL as described in the last link. Perhaps I will eventually get around to implementing this Frankenstein monster of free online survey tools myself, at least for my own use, by putting together the same ingredients I mentioned. Sometimes if you want something very specific, you simply have to do it yourself. I am thankful that at least the building blocks exist, and now it is a simple matter of learning some more PHP.

Samir

Refactoring

I have nothing drastic in mind, but I know of a lot of things that aren’t working well on this site, and many things that could be working better. In the coming months the plan is to do a comprehensive rethinking and refactoring of this site and blog, mainly on a coding and technical level. There are browser compatibility issues to be ironed out and cleaner SEO techniques to be employed. All of these things will make this site better, faster and more effective in the long run.

Not only will this process give me immense personal pleasure and satisfaction, but it will make for a better browsing experience for my readers, which is always a goal to aspire to. In addition, I think a series of articles that describe all the changes I make and the techniques I implement will make for some educational reading, and it should be fun to put together once this is all done. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch out for those updates.

Environment Series

Blog Action Day, 2007 is done, and my series on The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working also came to a close this last month. But not before leading me in a new direction in my interest in the environmental movement. As elaborated in my final post and announcement on Blog Action Day, I will be working on a new site on the environment soon, one that should bring a new and refreshing twist to the subject matter.

Blog Carnivals

I wasn’t very active on the blog carnival scene this past month. So much so that I might have lost track of one or two carnivals that did link to my posts during this phase. Sorry folks, I usually link back to all you kind people who include me in your listings but I’ve slipped up a bit on this occasion. I will make it up to you in the future.

ToDo

Rethink, redo, and reengineer — that is what is in store for this site in the near future. The (hopefully) interesting content and the look isn’t going to change, but the inner workings should be changing for the better

Keep visiting, keep commenting and keep the conversation going.

Samir

I think it’s a good idea, but I wonder how many people are a little attached to their online anonimity. On the other hand, someone like me doesn’t have any problems with it. In fact, my stunningly un-remarkable mug has always graced my about page. Not wanting to simply copy and paste the existing photo into this post, I decided to present a deep photographic insight into Samir Bharadwaj, with never before seen scenes, and up close and personal sights.

We begin with me in my element … Aah! The great out doors. Of course, like all big stars of my stature, I let my lowly body double do this sort of thing. My time is precious, after all. I also have it on good authority that he’s much sexier than I am in that light. We all need a dramatically lit serene portrait of ourselves to show our distinguished side, so there’s that. And since I wanted to really open up to my readers more than most bloggers ever do, you also get a exclusive shot of my thumb. Really, it is very important to me. What would I vever do without my opposable thumb? It’s my favourite finger.

That’s my bit, and what follows is all the general meme stuff. Feel free to add yourself to the line of crazy faces by joining in on your blog.

This is me: >>

Blogging can become unpersonalized as we rarely see the author, so the idea of this meme is to let us all have a little peak at the person behind the blog.

Instructions:
- Copy this post and amend the text above ‘This is me’.
- Replace the image with a nice smiley, silly, serious picture of yourself.
- Make sure your name and link is added to the participant list.
- Tag and link some fellow bloggers in the ‘Show us yourself’ area
- Let them know they have been tagged.

See us here:
Forest Parks from The Random Forest
Samir Bharadwaj

Show us Yourself:
I was going to name a few people but then I realised that they all either had their faces prominently plastered on their About pages, or they were fairly generous with sharing shots of themselves in their posts. So, I leave this one open to all. If you read this, consider this an open invitation and a personal tag from me to join this mass face-pulling competition. And do leave a comment with a link here if you could, I would love to see what new faces join the blogosphere.

Samir

At long last it is here, and the waiting is over. Blog Action Day has been on the cards for a while now, and it has grown from strength to strength since it was first introduced to the world. This site has also grown from strength to strength through this event, because I chose to take on the daunting task of writing an entire series of articles on, what I felt were, the failings of the environmental movement, and more specifically, the communications that it engages in. Now I am finally at the end of my journey with this discussion, and I thought it was simply not right to critique without suggesting solutions to the issues I have brought up over the past eight articles. Considering this blog is meant to be a record of my activities in online enterprise, it was only fitting that I tackle what kind of online presence would solve some of the communication shortcomings that are facing the ecological movement.

These are general traits which could very easily be used in any medium, online or off, but the elements that would make for an effective ecological website are:

1. Originality
2. Irreverence
3. Entertainment
4. Recurrence

1] Originality

For a movement that is supposed to be inspired by nature and the life on Earth in its infinite variety, the content and approach found in material about the ecology is devoid of originality. The same set of dry facts or sensational ultimatums are presented in the same way by almost everyone who tackles the communication of these issues. The tone is a studied, intellectual, and factual, all of which would be perfectly valid ways of dealing with the issue if they were not the only ways they were always dealt with. The same lack of variety can be seen in the content as well. Everything is academic non-fiction with a smattering of casual tips and friendly advice thrown in for good measure. Why is every environmental site about the latest news? I’m not saying that is a bad thing, but it can’t be the only thing all of us have to talk about on this vast and complex topic.

The ecological message needs a diversification of genres. Just imagine if every thing the human race ever produced on the subject of love was in the form of a bodice-ripping romance novel — there would be no romantic comedies in the cinema, there wouldn’t be any literary fiction about people in love, Jane Austen would have never been born, no Japanese animation about young love, no Russian epics about tragic romances, no fairytales, no documentaries, no research papers about pheromones, no sitcoms, no news, nothing. In a situation like this, would any one of us like to pick up a pulp romantic novel to read about love? Absolutely not! We would be so bored, and put off by the monotony of the subject matter that we might very well avoid anything to do with love altogether. Now answer me this. Why is everything about the environment green and white with the picture of a tree/leaf?

2] Irreverence

Part of the “green and white” dilemma is the religious and utterly reverent side of the environmental movement. Like every organised religion, the ecological initiative seems to have picked up certain norms and standards of appearance and behaviour which we all follow blindly. Also, like the more traditional religions, any material about the ecology and the environment automatically assumes a very reverent tone of voice about the subject. This de facto veneration is not a healthy sign, especially when it masquerades as understanding. The word reverence comes from a Latin base that means “to fear”. Respect can be a positive emotion, but fear never is. Nothing good ever came out of fear. Fear leads to stagnation of thought and narrowness of vision, and those are exactly what we don’t need when we are all supposed to be coming up with solutions to planet-wide issues such as pollution and climate change.

The green movement could use a good dose of irreverence. We need to respect nature but not fear it, because it is precisely this blind fear that has resulted in many of our misadventures against the planet. When I talk of irreverence, I do not mean a false bravado, because that is simply fear in disguise. What I mean is a truly open and free-flowing thought process about the subject of the environment, unfettered by such crippling restraints as political correctness or deification. If there is to be a new originality in discourse about the ecology, we must lose our fear and habitual reverence. Once we do that, new thoughts will flow, and new people will understand. It was thoughtless behaviour that landed us where we are, and thoughtless reverence will not solve the problem or win over any cynical hearts.

3] Entertainment

You have to make them laugh. Or cry, or shout, or whatever — anything that will engage the mind of the reader and prevent them from sinking into a state of indifferent disinterest. That’s entertainment. Entertainment is possibly the most effective means of communication when it comes to changing people’s minds and leaving a lasting impression. This doesn’t mean all entertainment needs to be propaganda, but positive messages that need to be disseminated into the public consciousness need to have a certain level of entertainment-value mixed in for them to be accepted and remembered by the majority. How much do you remember from your history lesson in school? And how much do you remember of your favourite historical movie? That is the difference which worthy messages like those about the ecology need to be making use of.

The issue with most current and past material about the ecology is that it strays towards the academic. That automatically exempts most of the population from the audience, because if they were all in the mood for so much thoughtful discourse they would already be, well, thoughtful. And then we wouldn’t be having this entire discussion. There have obviously been plenty of attempts at including “environmental messages” into popular entertainment. After all, considering the high social acceptance of all things green at the moment, it was a natural result. But these attempts have been shallow, simply retrofitting environmentalism into existing structures. Yesterday our intrepid hero was fighting “commies” and today he’s fighting polluters. That’s not really helping the ecological cause any, because it’s just an after thought. Not only does that sort of material provide zero information or education to the viewer, but it actually excuses them of all responsibility and blames the “bad guys” for all our problems.

Wake Up! We’re the bad guy! Not some smarmy suit-wearing corporate type in a lofty office, but each and every last one of us. Now bring this little fact to the notice of the general public and make it entertaining. That would be a real environmental message.

4] Recurrence

It is a well studied and researched fact that people need to see an advertisement or an offer from a company an average of 7-20 times before they decide to buy into whatever is being sold. It also takes about 20 days of doing something continuously before it becomes a habit. This sort of periodic repetition is a must if human minds are to be enlightened and human habits are to be changed. There is plenty of repetition in environmental messages, but when the messages themselves are often not reaching their audience or engaging them completely, the repetition is moot. There is plenty of repetition and periodicity in the average newsy environmental site, but the problem with news is that it is usually all over the place and never presents an consolidated idea of things to the reader. One day neon lighting could be good because of lower energy usage than incandescent bulbs; The next it could be bad because of heavy metals used in the tubing. Both these pieces of “new research” would appear side by side on a newsletter or blog and they would both be treated with journalistic equality, without any framework of what the reader should be doing about it. This sort of repetition is great for staying informed but not very good for convincing, because it leaves the average person confused.

There are some environmental messages and communications which succeed in bringing into the mix a strong dose of originality, irreverence, and entertainment. Unfortunately, there are often one-off things. They are memorable, just like some amusing commercials on TV are memorable, but did you actually buy what was being advertised? For that to happen, or for people to buy into eco-friendliness there needs to be a consistent and continuing periodic repetition of messages and material, which still qualify to be called original, irreverent, and entertaining. If we manage to bring all these elements into synergy in more of the mediums and messages that we put out about the environment, you can be sure that more people will sit up and notice, and more people will not notice as they gradually have a change of heart about their polluting and damaging daily behaviours. That is the sort of change that is required for real progress and that is the sort of effect that these elements can produce in the public consciousness if used well.

Action

It is called Blog Action Day, and I have no delusions about a lot of talk being anything close to action. That is precisely the reason I felt it was essential to take on this mammoth series of articles rather than posting a perfunctory short bullet-pointed post on the 15th of October. That doesn’t really say action to me, and as much as I am very pleased with the amount of effort that went into this series of articles and the illustrations, I don’t think I have done enough yet or followed all the advice I give above. There needs to be more.

So today, Blog Action Day, 2007, I announce the imminent launch of a new website on the environment: The Cows Made Me Do It.

I have not yet begun to build this site, but now that this article series is completed, that is what I move on to next. I do have a pretty clear idea of what I want to make of it — that should be quite obvious considering I registered a strange domain name like TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com. There is a plan, and I will execute it over the coming weeks, keeping in mind all I have talked about over the last month on the subject, and also the elements I mention above in this article.

Originality, irreverence, entertainment, and recurrence will be the cornerstones that I build this site on, and I invite you to join me on the journey. I will continue to post updates on this blog about my progress with the site, so I strongly recommend that you subscribe to my full RSS feed to get the latest news and teasers. I have also set up a basic page on TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com which includes a free newsletter signup form. If you liked this series of articles and would like to see a slightly new take on the environment grow with your help, please sign-up there with your email address. The newsletter will play a continuing part in the future site, and will currently give you exclusive sneak peaks into the content as I create and design it. You can be rest assured that there will be no spamming, and the list will not be used by anyone else but me.

The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working thus ends on this very positive and “action”-oriented note. I thank everyone for their support and their interest in this series. Please continue to read and browse whatever parts you missed. I would love to read your comments and feedback on the various articles and I encourage you to share this with your friends by bookmarking or emailing it using the Share This link below. The more the merrier.

Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed this series, and I hope you sign up to the TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com newsletter and subscribe to the RSS feed here for updates.

Take care and be green.

Samir