Dot Com Note

Writing quality articles for your blog and article marketing campaign is essential to establish yourself as an authority in your chosen niche. Every day, people post tens of thousands of articles in blogs and article directories. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start producing authoritative and resourceful articles that others will read, bookmark, and promote using social media sites.

A quality article provides benefits to its readers. Neither it should be detailed and lengthy to put readers to sleep, nor it should be a laundry list of items for others to scan and forget. It should have enough information to put the written words into actions, but not more.

 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/1510017912/

Before you start writing an article, make a list of all the non-textual contents that you will include in the articles. Non-textual contents may be images, videos, sketches, links to other resources, etc. Collect all the non-textual resources in one place, preferably in a folder in your laptop.

So, where do you go to find all the resources you need before you start writing your article? People who churn out low quality articles rely on Google search engine and article directories. While Google search engine may be a source, you should never use an article directory as a resource for your article-writing project. Finding a good article in an article directory is like finding a needle in the haystack.

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Image credit: engadget

Amazon has launched an ebook reader called Kindle. Here is a Newsweek article about this latest gizmo that Amazon is positioning as a service rather than a device.

Unlike Sony’s eReader, Amazon’s Kindle will have wireless Interent connectivity using the cell phone data transmission technology.

Kindle has a six-inch screen and it uses e-ink for sharp readable pages. The battery lasts for 30 hours and you can fully recharge it in two hours. With a weight of around 10.3 ounces, it will be easy to carry it around in your backpack.

You will be able to go to Amazon site and download ebooks and reviews from there. You can also subscribe to newspapers and magazines and download them to the reader.

One interesting thing mentioned in the Newsweek article is about blog subscriptions. For $1.99 a month, you will be able to subscribe to one blog from some type of Amazon’s blog subscription service.

Back in September, Engadget had posted two pictures of this device. To me, it really looks ugly. I don’t know if it has a color screen or not. Without a color screen, I am sorry, I can’t use it.

And who is going to pay $1.99 a month for a blog subscription? I will not be paying $1.99 a month to read a blog.

A blog should be available for free. However, if Amazon bundles unlimited blog subscriptions via full RSS feeds for $1.99, it may be an attractive deal for me.

Image credit: PageRank

After punishing the text link advertisers with a reduction in their page ranks (PR), Google is going after the PayPerPost bloggers and dropping their PRs to zero from whatever PR they had before. An IZEA blog post by CEO Ted Murphy has this to say:

Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

Murphy also went after TechCrunch for their sponsored posts and suggested that Google did not punish them because they were silicon valley insiders. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has posted a rebuttal to Murphy’s claims.

Every business wants to increase their market share to achieve monopolistic strongholds. No business person will say, “Gee, you know, I have too much market share. I will decrease my market share so others can compete.“

The question is, does Google misuses their monopolistic stronghold? And the answer is we don’t have any evidence so far.

PayPerPost (or any such service provider) should not charge the review rate based on a site’s PR. The review rate should be based on the actual traffic the site receives and PayPerPost should provide that information to their advertisers (people who are seeking reviews).

When Google reduces the PR of a site, another site gets a fair chance of ranking high in the SERP. So in a sense, Google is helping sites who don’t participate in PayPerPost. And what is wrong with that?

When a site reaches a higher PR and a higher ranking in the SERP, Google expects it to show some responsibilities. Just because the site has a higher PR, it does not mean that the site has a higher quality than hundreds of other sites that are slightly lower in PRs. And Google knows this fact.

Google’s actions will help sites, that don’t participate in PayPerPost, improve their rankings in the SERP.

Create a list of top 10 science fiction bloggers, top 10 celebrity bloggers, top ten humor bloggers, etc. That is what NxE has done with their top 50 most influential bloggers.

Topping the list is Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media that owns popular blogs like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. He also owns the porn blog Fleshbot. Fleshbot’s Alexa ranking stands at 5,000.

The most popular political blog in the list is Zuniga’s Dailykos, a progressive blog under attacks by conservatives. Ariana Huffington and Michelle Malkin also sit on the top 20 list. But they are better known as columnists and commentators rather bloggers.

Listed on the 20th position is one of the oldest blogger on the Net, Jason Kottke. Jason writes about anything and everything and he is doing it almost daily since 1998.

The list includes authoratative Google voices by Matt Cutts. Webmasters analyze Matt’s writings to glean information about Google and search engine optimization.

I was glad to see one of my favorite blogger Steve Pavlina in the list. He is a personal development blogger but his 2006 article “How to make money from your blog” has inspired thousands to try out their writing skills.

I like the list and some of the blogs I subscribe to are mentioned in the last.  The list is a good one in the sense that it covers bloggers of a wide variety of topics. It is a kind of Who’s Who of the blogging world.

Technorati, the internet search engine for blogs, added a new feature called Topics. The homepage shows a frequently refreshing list of new blogs. A tabbed view shows blogs categorized into six topics: Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. You can tab to a different category of your choice on the homepage and review blogs in that particular topic

It is a kind of annoying. By the time you zero on a headline, the page is refreshed and you have to look for it again. A better idea would be to use a digg like feature for the homepage.