Admit it. No matter how experienced a blogger you are, there’s still this stat whore inside of you. True, if you’ve been getting tons of hits and referrals, you probably don’t have to treat each visitor as if he’s your most important audience. However, even as you move up the blogging food chain, you would also move up in terms of the statistics you look for. Beginning bloggers tend to look for any traffic that could come their way. Intermediate ones try to optimize for the popular search queries and keywords. More advanced ones would try to optimize for monetization (if this is your goal).

Whichever of these you are, I believe Performancing has just the thing for you with pMetrics. The analytics package, licensed from GetClicky, is geared towards bloggers and offers an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that lets you see important information at a glance. I think this is key here—it’s pretty straightforward enough to use from the point of registration up to the actual analyzing of stats.

If you’re already registered with Performancing, you simply have to log in at http://pmetrics.performancing.com with your username and password. Otherwise, registration takes only a few steps. Likewise, registration of your site takes only one step—that is, to enter the basic details like URL, time zone and the like.

After that, pMetrics gives you the code to include on your site’s theme (anywhere within the tags). You have an option of using the javascript version, which gives you more detailed statistics. If your blog software doesn’t support this, then you also have the option of using an image-based stats monitoring, but statistics monitoring is more limited this way.

The stats monitoring panel is straightforward because of the tabbed (or so it seems to me) interface. I like the way I don’t have to dig deep down hierarchical menu interfaces just to see how many visitors my site has had, or what they’ve been searching for, or what they’ve been clicking.

DIGG Spy feature that DIGG introduced, which let people watch what entries other users are DIGGing, entering and commenting on. I noticed, though that there are a few minutes’ lag from user access to the actual record on spy (I tried spying on my stats while accessing the site from a different computer.

pMetrics also lets you monitor your stats via RSS. This lets you get regular updates on your stats through your feed reader of choice.

One gripe, though. Even if pMetrics lets you add multiple sites to your account, I find it difficult to find the “add site” function. Actually, it’s on the account profile page (accessible via pmetrics.performancing.com/user). I hope it would also be located somewhere on the individual site dashboard itself. There is actually a site switcher, where you can switch across the sites you’re monitoring. Perhaps the “add” button or link can be located somewhere near.

pMetrics is free for sites that get less than 1,000 page views per day on average. Otherwise, users can subscribe for $14.99 per year or $2 per month, which is quite affordable, IMHO. pMetrics can satisfy the cravings of that stat whore in you.

But wait, pMetrics will give a free one-year subscription to anyone who reviews the service on their blog (the first 100, actually). And users also get the opportunity to earn from the affiliates program—20% from direct referrals, and 5% from referrals of referrals. It may not be much, but if you have a lot of friends who subscribe, it can more than cover for the subscription fees.

(Thanks to Jangelo’s flickr for the screencaps. Looks like I beat you to a review!)

Right on the heels of the nofollow issue we discover that one of the more popular sites lately that have the best link juice has learned to become picky with the sites it links to. Sure, Wikipedia is quite generous in linking to external sites—especially since the user-contributed encyclopedia relies on verifiable external sources. However, it turns out that Wikipedia has been favoring some sites and giving them the full strength of their linklove, while others get only a link with the nofollow tag attached.

Techcrunch has the skinny.

The links to Wikia that don’t have the nofollow tag are created using a special Wikipedia tag wikiasite:. The tag for linking to Wikia pages isn’t mentioned in the help pages for Wikipedia, but there are many references to it throughout Wikipedia and the talk pages on various topics. It is a special type of link known as an Interwiki link, which means that you can use special shortcut tags when linking to other Wiki’s (such as Wikia). The question is, why wouldn’t the nofollow policy apply to inter-wiki links? Specifically since there is an apparent conflict of interest with Wikia, something that you would think that the Wikia team would want to avoid.

For those not in the know, Wikia is a for-profit spinoff of Wikipedia, co-founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales. Wikia mostly targets communities, and is considered a wiki farm, being a wiki-hosting service.

Sure, it’s all right to profit from content and other information you serve up to your users. We have no problem with that. But if the playing field is not level, if you take advantage of your position and power to get ahead, then I think there’s something wrong with how you do business.

Technorati is at the top of its game. If you’re searching for buzz in blogs, what’s the first site you go to? Google blogsearch? Probably not. It’s likely technorati. Technorati has refined blog searching and linking relationships to a T (T for technorati?). And what’s even better, it seems to be ranking high in Google searches for certain keywords. Here’s the scoop from Valleywag.

Suddenly, it’s all clear: Technorati’s pages, on subjects such as Wikipedia, get plenty of links from the blogs it indexes; they have strong “Google juice”, and so score highly in searches, particularly for technical words; no wonder, as embattled founder Dave Sifry recently boasted, the traffic to these “tag” pages is growing at a “torrid” pace. Google is Technorati’s number one source of traffic.

Aha! so all those links to http://www.technorati.com/tag/(insert tag here) are causing Technorati’s Google juice to skyrocket. I’ve always been wary of inserting the default technorati link in my blogs, instead choosing to use internal tag links. I believe here on JOAB, we use the ultimate tag warrior plugin, which generates internal links for tag archives, instead of technorati links. No, we’re not giving technorati link juice not because we don’t like it, but because we’d rather keep our readers within our own site. We still get indexed by Technorati, anyway!

But then it’s not all that easy. Pretty soon, Technorati might just feel Google pulling the rug from under their feet.

These themed pages are akin to search results; there is no original content, merely an aggregation of excerpts from the blogs that Technorati indexes, no more effectively than Google. And Google is a jealous search engine.

Yes, Google is a jealous search engine. So Technorati had better watch out. Or at least they can re-format their tag archive pages, so these won’t be seen as just aggregation of excerpts.

[Via 901am]

One of my fellow editors here at JOAB is quite fond of Twitter. Frankly, I don’t quite give a damn about Twitter. It’s just one of those new annoying nuisances that have become a craze in the online community. I once signed up for the service, added friends, and activated IM notifications, and I was blasted with all sorts of junk a dozen times a minute. I turned it off, since then, not seeing the point why I’d like to be updated whenever a friend of mine passes gas at 3 in the morning, or when someone eats chocolate cake (like what I’m actually doing right now).

Of course, I thought this about blogging too, when it first came into popular use. So does this mean Twitter will fly like blogging did? We have yet to see.

But I’ve always thought that Twitter, like any other “personal publishing” platform will soon claim its casualties, in particular when it comes to the foot-in-mouth syndrome everyone is vulnerable to. First to fall was Steve Rubel (or at least first known person), in that dreadful I-probably-shouldn’t-have-said-that moment. And here’s what he said.

PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash,

Thing is, Steve is a top exec at top PR firm Edelman (the same Edelman of the Windows Vista/Acer Ferrari Notebook infamy). He handles lots of accounts in the tech industry, and these mostly benefit from advertisements, product placements, and reviews on PC Magazine and its affiliate publications. PC Mag, in turn, thought of boycotting all of Edelman’s clients.

Damn, that must have caused Steve to resort to a lot of forehead slapping. Here’s his letter of apology, which I think is quite sincere (yeah, basically saying it was easy to take things out of context and all that).

In a world where it’s already easy enough to steal your identity or personal information via online means, and where social engineering is key to this being successfully perpetrated, why the heck would I actively give out this stalkee information to potential evildoers? I also risk divulging too much in those fits of carelessness, drunkenness, or simple loose-lippedness.

I just finished eating chocolate cake. Moving on to blueberry cheesecake.

(Is that 140 characters already?)

By the way, my copy of PC Mag came in the mail today—it just went straight to the trash.

Oh, NY Times has an article on Twitter due out tomorrow. Got that link from Steve Rubel’s twitter. And no, I didn’t get it via IM (I actually went to his status page).

Matt Cutts, de facto spokesperson of Google in the blogosphere, posts here how to report paid links to Google. The meat of the discussion (although quite implied) is that Google wants to downgrade sites that sell links. Now I’m not one to question Google’s methods, but this sounds like discrimination to me. And it sounds like Google is admitting that their algorithm still cannot match human intelligence when it comes to filtering content.

Tony Hung, over at Deep Jive Interests, wonders whether this is Google’s Achilles’ heel.

Personally, I’m beginning to wonder whether or not if Google will EVER be able to meaningfully track paid links if they’re not overtly notified as such on your blog. Google’s worries are valid: paid links are fine for traffic, but not when it comes to alerting search engine results — or page rank. The problem is that links can be paid for and sold without any notification on your blog, and there would be impossible to tell. For example, not that I would do it (or AM doing it for that matter), but there is no way of knowing whether or not reviews of anything, including web2.0 properties, have been discretely paid for behind Google’s back. The presumption is that the link is “organic” and that its ranking in Google is based on the worth I’m placing towards the link destination.

Wait a minute. So does this mean each and every blog that sells links—yes, even through Text Link Ads and other similar link programs—run the chance of getting downgraded in their pagerank/trustrank? We are opening a very big can of worms here, so to speak. It’s not only the ethical issues (i.e., what constitutes link spamming? How many paid links is too much?). It’s also the business issues I’m concerned with.

Is this the end of TLA, ReviewMe, and even other paid link/review programs? Is this the end of private link sales on sites and blogs? A lot of blogs and sites thrive on paid links and affiliate marketing. And I don’t think all sites that sell links and ad space are bad. Yes, some sites live solely for the purpose of selling links. But this doesn’t mean all sites that sell links are like that.

Then there’s the question of abuse. It’s like DIGG users ganging on certain other DIGG users, burying stories en masse. What if a group of no-gooders decides to gang up on sites they don’t like, and report to Google as link sellers? What if competitors report each other? What if I decide to report sites out of the blue?

This might make people who write PayPerPost or ReviewMe articles choose not to disclose their writing for compensation.

Traffic is one of the measures of a blog’s success. At least that’s what many will tell you. The more readers you get, the more accomplished a blogger you are (and you feel better, too). For starting bloggers, this could mean having to go through a lot of gimmickry and linkbaiting just so your blog can get a wider readership. After all, there are gazillions of blogs out there, and competition is stiff!

According to Performancing, one of the ways to boost readership is by signing up for automatic blogrolls, such as using the Autoroll widget.

AutoRoll is a blog widget that displays links to blogs that your readers should like. Based on each unique reader’s affinity for each specific blog, the Criteo Recommendation Engine will compute on a real-time basis the relative affinity of all blogs, and it automatically displays the Top 10 unique links on each blog.

How does AutoRoll work?

We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on every blog that has installed AutoRoll. This is achieved through a cookie and requires no action from the reader.
This information is then fed to the Criteo Recommendation Engine, which computes blog affinities in real-time. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with that blog. The exact affinity formula is kept secret to prevent any form of abuse. Using the Criteo Predictive Engine, we determine and display for any given blog its instant relative affinity with all other blogs that have installed AutoRoll.

But then, some would avoid automatically-generated blogrolls like the plague. After all, blogrolls are considered personal recommendations too, so you might be personally recommending something that is crappy just beause the widget automatically published a link it thought might be relevant.

It’s like asking a computer to make personal recommendations to a friend. So where’s the human factor in that?

Personally I wouldn’t entrust my blogroll to a machine. I’d rather hand-pick my recommendations.

At least that’s what the Blog Herald teaches you. The past few weeks have been a flurry of posts about how blogs affect relationships, and how blogs themselves are all about relationships. There’s how to build blog relationships by making good first impressions. Then there’s building blog relationships by showcasing your popular posts (what I personally call link baiting). Then what about building personal relationships first before visiting another person’s blog? Then there’s linking and relationships.

Isn’t blogging just about what you have to say anymore? Do you really have to build relationships by blogging?

Now blogging is becoming just like social networking. Only this time, it’s not a closed system, but a more open system wherein you can become friends with the rest of the blogosphere, and the only requirement is that you link to other people, you blogroll them, or leave comments on their blogs.

This makes the definition of blogging even more complicated than it already is, methinks.

Lorelle VanFossen writes on the Blog Herald that Links are recommendations and forms of referral. It’s like telling a friend about a great restaurant, or referring your family doctor, or showing someone that cool gadget you bought, hoping he’d also buy one.

Whether through intention or accident, the links from your blog to others are mini-letters of recommendation. When you link to an external site, you are inviting your readers, the ones you worked so hard to earn and keep, to click away. That link better be pretty special.

My thought here then would be: what about pay per post? What about paid reviews? What about paid links? And here’s the shocker: what about AdSense?

When you are paid to write about something, isn’t that like being a sell-out? Tony Hung believes that there’s nothing wrong with getting paid to blog or to review stuff, and it’s a fact that there are “blue collar” bloggers out there who don’t have other viable options in monetizing their blogs, unlike many so-called A-listers who enjoy their celebrity status, and the huge traffic, ad revenues, endorsements and other deals, that go with it.

But then the dynamics behind linking, selling links, getting paid to link or review, still escape me. If a toothpaste company paid me to recommend their product to my friends, would I feel bad about doing that? Or if a friend suggests a restaurant to me because he works there, would it be tantamount to his being a sell-out? But consider this: if an actor or a celebrity gets on TV to endorse a product, would that be a sell-out, then? We know he/she gets paid millions to do that.

But then bloggers are expected to be candid and honest with what we write about. So any sign of getting compensated financially for our posts or links might be taken in a bad light.

Strange world we live in, huh?

One thing I learned from blogging as a form of online entrepreneurship is the value of niche blogs. The more, the merrier, they say. Blog networks thrive on having blogs on just about anything. There is a multiplier effect—even if you run blogs about the obscure topics, with select readership, combine these under one basket, then you have immense traffic and revenues. Citing the long tail principle (sorry, folks), the sum of the benefits from many, small, obscure blogs, will be greater than running one big blog.

But another thing I learned in the blogging world is that you can’t beat great quality content. So no matter how many blogs you have on obscure topics, you’d better make sure these are well-written, too. And you better be sure you have a lot of time on your hands to manage these—and even micro-manage—if the need arises.

So what’s the solution? Run a fewer blogs, but this time bigger, and covering a more comprehensive scope of topics. Be sure your writer or writers give more passion to writing their content. A bigger blog would have better chances in making it big in the already-crowded blogosphere.

So is there still room for niche blogging? As I see it, in a problogging sense, maybe not.

Tim O’Reilly proposed a bloggers’ code of conduct, in the light of the recent death threats against popular blogger Kathy Sierra (of Creating Passionate Users fame). My say on this: it’s bollocks. I would agree with Tony Hung of the Blog Herald that as long as bloggers treat each other in a civil fashion, there’s no need to write a ten- or twelve- (or a hundred, for that matter) point “code” of conduct for bloggers. The blogosphere is supposed to be self-policing after all. That’s the beauty of it.

Again: should bloggers be civil to each other? Of course. But do I think a Blogger Code of Conduct is necssary? Not really. And I don’t think it would have helped Kathy Sierra even if there was an official one — principally because her “assailants” attacked her anonymously.

Now, should bloggers take responsibility for the comments section? I think there is certainly a moral obligation to do the best that you can. But that’s really a post about making sure you have a good comments policy.

If you impose something on bloggers, then that would be a bit stupid, won’t it? Why? If they violate your “code” then what can you do about it? Will they be banned from the blogosphere forever? Will the blogging code police come knocking on their doors in the middle of the night and arrest them for misconduct? I don’t think so.

Ahmed of Tech Soapbox sums it up neatly here. Such an imposition of a blogger’s code of conduct will just show a holier-than-thou attitude. What gives one person or one group the power to impose their own standards on a whole population of bloggers?

The imposition of beliefs on others that do not want it are getting exhausting. The death that I have already covered above. But other than that – bugger off. If what I say does not harm you, and you don’t like what I’m saying – get lost. Why do people have this craving to whine about anything and everything that may offend them. People will use any opening to push their (moral) agenda.

And in Kathy Sierra’s case, death threats were thrown her way. I agree that this should be a matter for police to handle, and not a band of vigilante bloggers who want to impose their own code on others.