Mac Blog Editors - Part 2

Flock - The Social Web Browser

Following on from my recent post on my continuing search for a Mac Blog Editor, I was reminded of one I hadn’t thought of’ Flock. If you are not familiar with it, Flock is a Web Browser based upon Mozilla Firefox. Flock’s creators call it a “social browser”, as it interact with popular social networking web services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Photobucket, as well as various popular blogging and news aggregation services.

Flock arrived on the scene about 2 years ago, and arrived with a bit of fanfare. Since then its popularity has wained; I myself had not installed it on my latest Mac, until today. I was reading a quick article about TechCrunch40 and saw that Flock had been there. I thought I’d check it out again, primarily to test its Blog editor.

Some things that grabbed me straight away, was its ‘Blog This’ feature. While not ground breaking, it works seamlessly.

There are however a couple of features lacking in the editor.

• You cannot add images from your computer until you have setup an online account with one of the image services such as Flickr or Photobucket.
• Categories are not imported. Categories are selected when you publish the post.

I will probably find more issues Flock once I have had more time with it.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, mac, blog editor

Would you Buy A Used Car From An A-list Blogger?

Like many other people, I read some articles from a lot of the A-list bloggers in this category. On the whole I find most of them pretty reputable. For many of them, their blogs are their primary source of income, and while they do not dwell on the fact, they also do not try and hide it. Of course they could be very talented writers, and write in such a style that the reader does not notice that the underlying motivation is to generate income for the blogger.

Now I am not casting aspersions on used car salesmen, but when I read some of these A-list bloggers sites, I can’t help having the feeling that the blogger is trying to con me in the manner of the worse used car salesman.

There is a standard pattern to their blogging, that begins with their posts; they write about some new service they have discovered that can make you money, such as the latest advertising widget. The article is normally quite long and well written, espousing the virtues of the service and how effective it will be as a source of revenue for your blog.

You will even find convenient links to the widget throughout the article, that make it so much easier for you to go to the site and find out more information, or better still sign up for yourself. What you will not see, or read however, is the fact that the blogger bringing you this latest information on the service has previously been contacted and already signed up for affiliate marketing or some other revenue sharing model.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing revues for services that you feel are of benefit to your readers, like I said, many bloggers do this. What is wrong with this type of blogger is that the service primarily serves them, or more importantly their bank account. For them, this seems to be the primary motivation for writing the post. I cannot distinguish between this form of blogging and the derided PayPerPost service, yet for these particular A-list bloggers, either their readers cannot see through them, or are simply caught up with the aura of the personality and feel that it is entirely acceptable, as the blogger makes a lot of money from their blog, and as we know, that is the goal.

Maybe these particular bloggers feel that they are really giving a service to their readers and imparting knowledge about possible revenue streams, maybe this helps ease their conscience about the way they hide their own mercenary interest in their posts. Then again, they may simply think that if they don’t do it, someone else will and it might as well be them making the money.

Personally, I prefer to read content that is not prostituted or has the primary motivation of screwing the reader for the betterment of the blogger writing the post. I totally agree with making money from your blog, that is after all one of the goals for myself with this blog, however, I do not intend to do this by misleading or deceiving the reader or without giving some value to the reader.

Let me know in the comments if you have felt conned by any bloggers.

Mac Blog Editors

I do all my blogging on a Mac. I have been blogging directly through the WordPress backend, which works ok, but is not totally ideal for all occasions. A lot of the time, I use a simple text editor and then copy this into WordPress. This is not overly efficient, so I thought it was time to take a look at the available blogging editors for Mac.

I have previously looked at Mac blog editors, but none of them functioned the way I liked and each one had some limitation that was frustrating to the point of making me scrap it. There are probably more out there, but I decided to limit my choice to 3; ecto, MarsEdit and the Firefox extension, ScribeFire. I will test each one and see which, if any I feel best meets my needs. Hopefully one of these will have the features and functionality I require.

I am writing this post in ecto; I’ll update my thoughts once I have evaluated each application.

Should You Use Google Adsense?

Probably one of the most asked questions by aspiring Blog Entrepreneurs and alike is:

“How can I make money with my blog?”

Most beginning Web entrepreneurs who have no tangible asset or service to sell are told to simply join Google Adsense and place ad blocks on their site, sit back and cross their fingers and hope they get lucky. Of course there can be much more to it then that, but essentially, that is often the kind of advice you will find.

Two articles I have read recently have made me think some more about the whole Google Adsense setup.

Chad Randall’s Advertisespace has an interesting post titled: Why Google is the World’s Biggest Pimp. I agree with most of what Chad has to say, and have similar views of my own (although perhaps not as extreme) about the whole adsense operation. I could elaborate further, but will leave that for another time.

The second article by John Chow, titled John Chow dot Com Income Report - August 2007 provides a roundup of John’s latest earnings from his site.

As John states, he started his blog about a year ago as a monetization case study to see if is was really possible to make money by blogging. Like many people, John started with Google AdSense as his sole means of monetizing his blog. In its first month the blog made $352.94. Now that is a pretty tidy sum for a startup blog.

His revenue has continued to rise since then, to the extent that in May 2007 he had a record $12,569.61 in total blog income. In July, this went backwards slightly but still earned a healthy $12,406.76.

In August, John’s total blog income was $17,828.61. Now that is nothing to be sneezed at for a blog income. The interesting thing is that of that income, Google Adsense accounted for only 3% of that income. While his blog income has increased massively, Google Adsense income has not increased anywhere near the same extent. John has now discontinued using Google Adsense on his blog.

Should you be using Google Adsense? If your blog is new, I would say yes in the early days. As you can see, I use it here on this blog. That is more to do with tracking stats then an expectation of earning any significant revenue from them. For this purpose, even on established blogs,using Google Adsense can be a good thing.

You can make money from Google Adsense, and many people reportedly make substantial amounts from their inclusion, but be aware that, there are other means of earning income from your blog then simply set and forget Adsense.

In a future article, I will take a closer look at the options to Google Adsense and other ways of monetizing your blog.

Do You Have Blog Motivation

According to Technorati, there are over 70 million weblogs, with the number growing by 120,000 created worldwide each day. This equates to about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. Of the 120,000 weblogs created each day, between 3,000 and 7,000 are splogs.

As you can see from the above graph, the curve is still significantly on the up. Obviously, something is motivating all these people to blog and more specifically, where do you fit in all this.

Do you have blog motivation?

You blog, therefore you must have right?

Can you name your motivation, or do you have more than one?

Does it really matter if you have a specific motivation or not?

What these questions are really asking, is, what is your purpose for blogging. There are numerous reasons why people blog, but some that come readily to mind are listed below. I have separated the list into two groups, personal and professional. The professional list does not mean that it is necessarily motivated by financial gain, but rather the focus is a little more committed.

Personal Motivation

• To keep an online diary of personal experiences
• To share news with family and friends
• For personal expression and the joy of writing
• To reach out and socialise with their readers

Professional Motivation

• To educate or provide information
• For promoting a specific cause
• To promote a business or product
• Reputation building and ego
• To make money

There are obviously many more reasons, but this list will suffice. When asked, only 18% or people claim money as a motivating factor for blogging. I would suggest that the figure is actually much higher, as some of the responses I have read said things like:

“I blog purely for the fun of it. If I can earn some money out of it as well, that is a bonus.”

These sentiments may well be perfectly legitimate, but it also suggests to me that many of the people saying it really would like to earn more than ’some money’ from their effort. The problem is, they do not want to commit themselves to the psychology of really trying to make a go of it. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, it is quite common, most people lack the confidence to actually state that they really intend to make money from an endeavor, when in reality they can quite probably achieve both goals, blogging with a passion, and earning a good income at the same time. It may not necessarily be easy, but it is possible.

If you have the motivation to blog for any of the professional reasons, why not take measures to ensure that you also make a living from it. Instead of looking at some income as a bonus, include it as part of your motivation. Even blogging for a cause requires some form of income to ensure that all the costs are covered.

Wordpress 2.3 Release On Monday

Wordpress 2.3 is being released on Monday 24 September. As you may know, I use Wordpress as the blogging platform for this blog.

One of the promoted features of 2.3 is the inclusion of tags. It also comes with other features like plugin and core update notification, faster JavaScript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.

Will I be upgrading?

Not for a while. I think I’ll wait and see if any bugs appear and see what kind of issues it has with various plugins. It has been reported that changes to the database will break some WordPress Plugins that deal with tables for categories. You can check WordPress 2.3 Plugin Compatibility List to see if any you use are on the list.

Webtrepreneur - The Journey Begins

Well the time is fast approaching when I leave my day job and embark on the next part of my journey.

For the last 8 years I have been a tenured Academic, lecturing in Information and Communication Technology and Digital Innovation.

I have been involved with the Web before the dot com crash, but that’s another story for another time. So what is this site about? I am going to cover my journey of making money online. I know, I know, I can hear you saying, ‘oh, not another how to make money online blog’, well yes and no.

Yes, there are many other blogs out there with the same focus; with a few main ones dominating the segment. Is it a wise decision to move into this segment? Darren Rowse, at Problogger.net (regarded by many as being the top in this segment) has a post today dealing with choosing a profitable niche for your blog. In it, he states:

“One mistake that many bloggers fall into when they discover the idea of making money from blogging is to start a blog on that very topic. The problem is that the ‘make money online’ niche is crowded, there are already many established blogs, to be successful in it you need credibility and runs on the board (or a unique approach to it) and it really has a limited audience when compared to many other niches.”

His comments here are valid, the segment is crowded, and credibility and runs on the board are important. Does this mean that you cannot break into this ‘niche’? I don’t think so. Do I have unique approach? I think so, but ultimately, the readers and users will be the judge.

While the focus of this blog will be making money online, I will cover other areas that interest me, and hopefully you also.

And the car? I just like it, that’s all.