The Raging Tech

Bloggers Unite For Human Rights on May 15th

On May 15th, 2008, bloggers from across the world will be participating in one of the largest collaborations of online publication for human rights violations. If you decide to join me, you can help by being a voice for those who don’t have a voice.

There are several main topics to choose from, primarily to keep everyone on the same topics so the impact is greater - such as Darfur, Shi Tao in China and Yahoo!’s part in his being seized by the Chinese government, the illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and more.

Blogs are indexed by search engines, feed readers, and other programs of interest. That means when thousands of bloggers write on the same topic, especially in a relatively short period of time, like one day, it gets noticed.

Join Bloggers Unite now, and on May 15th blog for Human Rights violations world-wide!

Put Your Ugly Mug on Anything

That’s right. You can put your ugly mug on anything, even an ugly mug! Or a t-shirt, or a mouse pad [Note: despite popular opinion, mouse pads are not feminine protection for mice], or a calendar, or just about anything else that can be printed on.

What’s even better is you don’t have to sacrifice quality to get them cheap! The last two or three times I’ve needed business cards for several enterprising ventures of mine, I’ve had them printed up with VistaPrint. If you’re a first time customer, they can give you some basic cards for free (you just pay shipping). You can also get other free stuff as a way to try out their services.

If you’re a regular customer, they send you e-mails with huge discounts on stationary, calendars, business cards, and other cool print items and personalized office accessories. If you haven’t heard of them before, be sure and check them out for just about any of your print needs. You can even order checks with your design on it! Shipping is fast and inexpensive, and their packaging is unique! My cards always come in a white box that can be easily folded back and used as a display holder for my desk. I’ve also purchased a cool metal business card holder, so my cards don’t get all bended in my wallet or pocket.

One Rank to Rule Them All

Previously mentioned Izea Ranks, is set to trump all other ranking systems. Alexa, Google Page Rank, Technorati, Blogjuice, and the other myriad of ranking systems are starting to get nervous, maybe even a little sweaty, over newcomer Izea Ranks.

These other ranking systems all have their prolific search engine-based ranking algorithms and fancy mathematical formulas that basically add up to bloggers and other web site owners having to kiss-up to the ranking provider, and live and die by their numbers.

Those systems might still be well and good, after all, they’ve been mostly good to me (I’m glaring at you, Google). But when you’re a blogger and your livelyhood is based on how popular your blog is, you want a metric that’s actually based on your blog traffic and not whether or not the ranking provider likes you or the way you run things.

Enter Izea Ranks - just install a simple piece of javascript code into your blog’s template (don’t worry, it’s not that complicated - they provide you with instructions) and then within a day or two, you’ll start getting statistics on your blog’s popularity within the blogosphere.

It’s exciting to get daily updates on where you stand, as opposed to waiting 3 or 4 months for a certain company to get off their “google” and update your page rank. That way, you can see what is and is not effective at attracting visitors to your site. This allows blog owners to be dynamic and quick-change artists who can effectively draw traffic and page views.

One of the best things about a daily update though, is that it gives a certain sense of satisfaction to my competitive side. Something about looking at my rank and knowing that there’s thousands upon thousands of blogs that aren’t doing as well as me makes me happy. I know that’s unsportsman-like, but you know you’d do the same thing.

I challenge you other blog owners out there to sign-up for Izea Ranks and install the code, and see how you stack up against The Raging Tech.

SocialSpark: How I Survived Google Spanking Me

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I often write content that is sponsored, and I am pretty open about disclosing such things. At the bottom of most sponsored content, you’ll notice a small blue bubble that will say “Sponsored by” and then the advertiser name. However, some folks didn’t take kindly to any of my content being sponsored, and said it wasn’t cool that I write the same quality of content whether it’s sponsored or not.

Ever since I got my page rank slapped down to zero from it’s former beauty of 3, I had been totally killed on the sponsorships I could take. I’ve previously written about how I’d be taking a break until I could work out sponsorship again. Well, that time has come, as you might have noticed. I have signed up for SocialSpark, which may prove to be the revolution for which the blog monetization game has been eagerly waiting.

SocialSpark uses a system called RealRank, based on actual page views and traffic to your site. It’s also a fun social network that gives bloggers ideas, or “sparks” on what to write about when you’ve got writer’s block. It hooks up bloggers with advertisers and other bloggers, and lets you comment, vote, and leave feedback for each other. Think of it as a MySpace for blog owners, only without all the crap.

You get a friends list, as well as a “fav 9″ to highlight your favorite bloggers. You can send messages, invite people to be your friend, give “props” to those people you like or opportunities that you like. You can see the stats on a blog you’re interested in advertising on if you’re an advertiser.

My favorite part of this system is the pure distinction between blogger and blog. You can give props to a blog instead of directly to a blog owner, which is especially great for people who have more than one blog.

SocialSpark requires 100% in-post disclosure, 100% transparency (no games, man!), actual blogger opinions - they don’t tell us what we should like or dislike, and I only take the opportunities I think are appropriate for my blog and my readers. Sign-up is easy, and payment goes out to your PayPal account, so if you don’t have one of those already, be sure and sign up for one.

It’s free to sign up, even though it’s still in beta, and if you have a blog or are an advertiser looking to spread the word about your product or service, give SocialSpark a try. I’ve never regretted being a part of SocialSpark, and so far it’s been a blast!

Apologies to My Readers

Ladies and Gentlemen who regularly visit my blog, I’d like to apologize for the obnoxiousness of the “Rick Roll” Social Spark sponsorship ad that had been on my blog for the last few days. I wanted to try it out and see how blog sponsorships would work, and almost unanimously everyone who has contacted me about it has had negative things to say about it.

I have ended the blog-wide sponsorship and removed the advert. I hope you all continue to enjoy reading my blog, and I’m sorry for the annoyance. I’m pretty open-minded, and I have an “open door” policy concerning this blog, so if you have any concerns, questions, or confessions, feel free to leave me a comment. Thanks for reading!

Make Your Site “Sticky” with Zookoda

Zookoda is a site that lets bloggers and other content providers create fully-customizable, managable, and effective e-mail newsletters. Bloggers can use Zookoda to send out periodic digests of recent posts, entice readers back to their site, or host an insider’s newsletter.

Content providers can use newsletters to keep customers and website visitors informed of what’s new and happening at their company. The newsletters are completely customizable to match your existing web site’s theme.

Bloggers can also customize to match their blog’s theme. You can even place a customized newsletter subscription form on your site that will make your blog seem more professional.

Zookoda also gives its users the ability to receive real-time reports on things like bouncebacks (bad e-mail addresses), unsubscriptions, and click-through rates on the links in your newsletters. This gives you, the blog owner, the ability to see what your readers are interested in and what copy works best to get them to click-through from your newsletter to your site.

Currently, you’ll need a blog hosted by either Blogger, Yahoo! 360, MovableType, TypePad, Word Press, Bloglines, or MSN spaces to take part in the Zookoda e-mail newsletter subscription service. You don’t need to install any serious server applications because Zookoda is served up off their own servers.

There is not a currently supported medium for serving up ads, such as Google Adsense or Project Wonderful within your e-mail newsletters, though support for doing so seems to be in the works for the future.

Zookoda will allow you to manage more than one blog, as I’m sure many of you are operating two or three or even twenty blogs! You can control all of your Zookoda subscriptions for all of your blogs from one single Zookoda account.

Check out Zookoda today and see what it can do for your blog’s traffic base.

Get Proper Rankings for Your Blog

Google Page Rank has been king of the web for far too long. They use a “mysterious” and “magical” formula whose inner workings is only barely understood by the public. GPR also has a certain amount of manual human adjustment to weed out those that “cheat the system.” How biased or unbiased this system is has been subject of some debate among bloggers.

Now is the time for change - bloggers can take ranking back into their own hands again. Izea Inc., the company behind PayPerPost and SocialSpark and RockStartUp and firm spacebar atheists when it comes to titles, have launched IzeaRanks.com. This RealRank system is based on the actual popularity and traffic to your site, and is reserved specially for bloggers.

It’s fairly simple to install and use - just visit IzeaRanks.com and sign up, then get the code for the ITK tools (a small snippet of Javascript) that you put into your blog’s HTML code. Usually that’s somewhere inside your blog’s template. Their website has instructions on where it should go.

Once installed, the IzeaRanks RealRank system will show you how many site visitors you have per day and on average for the week and show you on a line graph how you do on a month-to-month basis. You’ll then be ranked amongst other RealRank bloggers. There are already thousands of other blogs on this system, so you don’t have to feel like your ranking is artificially inflated because of a low number of initial rankings.

Finally, show off your blog’s ranking using an IzeaRanks badge, another small snippet of code you can put in your blog’s sidebar or other location that displays your rank for bragging rights.