Dane Morgan - Niche Marketing

So Much More Than Just Another Inbox

Dane Morgan — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:55:26 -0500

The Only Other Inbox You'll Ever Need

OtherInbox is a revolutionary new take on the old idea of the throwaway email box. If you're anything like me, as an Internet Marketer and or as a Blogger you'll have many many opportunities in the course of a day to type your email address into some box somewhere to gain access to some information or some information stream.

Update: Joshua has set up 25 invites to this private beta for my readers. You can claim yours here if you're quick enough.
http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/danemorgan

The problem is in managing all of those emails in a significant and meaningful way. I know my inbox is simply unmanageable these days. Inbox Zero has become a bit of an El Dorado Quest for me. How about yours?

I have a handful of throwaway and limited or marginal use email addresses, a couple of low priority boxes and a number of "main" email addresses as well. Every time I ask for some information, buy something, want to access something or need another account for something, it's a chore to decide where to send the email.

I even tried for a little while setting up one use email addresses on my main domain, but it was a major chore to log in, create the box, set it up in Thunderbird if I wanted desktop delivery and then type it into a box that was really there to capture me on an impulse decision in the first place.

Later I thought I had found the answer in Gmail's ability to add a prefix+ to the Gmail address. but unfortunately many many places simply won't accept and email address with a '+' character in it.

The whole problem is solved now though. OtherInbox lets you set up a subdomain account and then you can set up as many inboxes for that subdomain as you care to.

And it's drop dead easy to set up a new inbox. You just create a new username portion for the email when you are giving the email out. If you're signing up for a Twitter account just use twitter@yourdomain.otherinbox.com. Or use danemorgan@yourdomain.otherinbox.com to sign up for an email from me.

Now each batch of emails goes into it's own inbox, all accessible from the same place. This lets you put all of your newsletter subscriptions, email alerts, social network profiles and everything else into an easy to use, instantly created separate email inbox, and reserve your "main" email for those emails that should command your instant and undivided attention. Emails from close friends, family and partners can go into a nice fresh uncluttered box and be dealt with on the fly, and you can get to the rest of that stuff latter on your own schedule.

I think they need to create a new Nobel Prize so that can give it to these guys.

OtherInbox

Dane Morgan — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:35:17 -0500

All the inboxes you'll ever need rolled up into one.

BlogRovR

Dane Morgan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:23:43 -0500

BlogRovR Feed Fetcher RSS Tool.

Have You Hugged Your RSS Today?

Dane Morgan — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:09:24 -0500

So, I found a link to rssHugger at Twine and I thought I'd check it out.

In order to get your feed listed they ask that you post a review of the site first. I feel a little naked doing that having not really had a chance to experience the site yet.

That said, what I can tell you is that they have a nice clean fast interface and they are listing a lot of feeds. They promise to send traffic through those feed listings, and with a PR 4 on the Top 100 blogs listing page and a 142k Alexa ranking I imagine they should be able to send some traffic.

The search result pages link out to the blog and to the feed for each listing and all seem to be direct follow links, so there is some definite potential here.

Once they approve me and I get into the listings I'll report back with more details of how it works out for me.

I've included a few links to other blogs who've reviewed rssHugger as well.

Do Bloggers Have A Contract With Their Readers?

Dane Morgan — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:59:24 -0500

As bloggers we want people to read what we write. And because of the personal nature of the medium of blogging, we owe some certain obligations to our readers.

I was reading through my feeds earlier, when I came across two political posts from a social media blog. I don't particularly care what the blogger's political opinions are, I read the blog for the excellent social media content. I don't really want political opinion in that reader, as it's just clutter when I'm researching and learning about the social and semantic web.

I'm not going to mention the blog here, because while I am complaining about it, it is an excellent blog, and I don't want to complain about it by name. Especially when there are many blogs doing this very thing, and there is no reason to single this blog out, other than the subject was on my mind and I hit the posts in question, so it made a good example for what I'm thinking here.

People read blogs for specific reasons. They read humor blogs to be entertained, have a fun time and a laugh or two. The read Search Engine blogs to keep up with new trends and techniques in obtaining good listings in the SERPs. They read blogging blogs to learn better blogging skills and tips and tricks for improving their blog space. They read Social media blogs to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of social networking, and obtain best practice advice and information for making a good presentation for themselves well those networks.

Because blogging is a personal medium, and blogs are a personal publishing system, there is some flex available to inject the occasional bit of personal information into the blog.

Anyone who really enjoys a certain blog will be happy to read the occasional post about having a baby, getting married, lose teeth and even traffic frustration or project disappointment.

There are limits to these allowances, however. If your humor blog suddenly starts filling up with make money on line posts, you are going to drive your readers away. If you start posting soup recipes to your tech gadgets blog, you are going to bore your readers to tears.

If you start posting about politics or religion on any blog that isn't about those things, you run an even bigger risk. You annoy those who have no interest in those things, and you alienate those who disagree with your particular stance. Both of these results are detrimental to your blog's health.

We are operating under an unwritten contract with our readers. We all know how it is. Our feed readers and email boxes are too full as it is. So we rigorously filter them. As bloggers we have an obligation to our readers not to start dumping unrelated content into their feed readers and inboxes.

It's not fair to them. They've bookmarked us for the content we write that is in keeping with the topic our blogs are about. They subscribe to us for that specific content. We owe it to them not to start pushing out messages about things they aren't interested in.

What makes this even worse is that we have many venues for expressing ourselves on these other topics in places where people do want to read them. You can post to a forum that covers the off topic writing. You could offer your articles as guest posts to a friend with a blog on the foreign topics.

Hell, you could even start another, appropriate blog if you really have a passion about the topic. Even do a quick, "I have a new blog about ____________" post to let readers who are interested know that they can red about it there.

What do you say? is there a contract, or obligation to our readers? If not, where have I gone wrong? Do you post off topic frequently? Do you stay on message at all times? I'd love to read your thoughts.

Do you know me? Let's FOAF.

Dane Morgan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:22:12 -0500

Hey, do you know me? and by know me, I mean have we communicated? In blog comments? On a forum? In email?

If we have, and you have a FOAF page, send me you FOAF link. Or just post it in the comments on this post, and I'll add it to my FOAF page. If you'd like to add me to your FOAF page, you can use my FOAF address, and my gyrocy -[at]- gmail.com email address to include me in your FOAF.

It's time we started using tools like these to connect ourselves. This is the kind of portable connections which will, I think, begin driving "friends" list on the internet. Twine is using FOAFs for members, and I think it's a pretty cool idea.

Once you have one of these, you can link to the file from any network, any forum, you blog, membership sites, whatever. And then when you update this file, your information can be updated across any of the sites using it automatically.

Cool, eh?

Lets FOAF!

Add css styles to your posts faster and more accurately.

Dane Morgan — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:13:47 -0500

If you are like most bloggers you like to spruce up your articles with custom css styles. You can add classes to your css file for things like pull quotes, block quotes, images paragraphs and a lot more.

Here's a quick and easy tip to make adding css style to your posts faster and more accurate.

Most of us create specific use css classes, because we are designing classes for specific purposes. But this can lead to having a lot of classes that are rarely used and that repeat certain style elements over and over.

Consider that you might have classes for left, right and centered pull quotes with multiple copies of each for different widths, background colors and borders. Then you have left, right and centered images and even multiple copies of each of these for with and without borders and padding.

Here is an example of just three different width pull quote classes floated either left or right. Adding more variations means multiplying these classes and re repeating that many more times.

.left-30-blue-pullquote {
  float: left;
  width: 30%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}
 
.left-40-blue-pullquote {
  float: left;
  width: 40%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}
 
.left-50-blue-pullquote {
  float: left;
  width: 50%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}
 
.left-30-blue-pullquote {
  float: right;
  width: 30%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}
 
.left-40-blue-pullquote {
  float: right;
  width: 40%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}
 
.right-50-blue-pullquote {
  float: right;
  width: 50%;
  border: 1px solid #000;
  background-color: #00f;
}  

After a while it can be hard to remember the many different names of these different classes, and depending on the cache settings of your site and the readers browser, all of this duplicated class information can be loaded by the browser every time a page loads, burning up bandwidth and taking longer to render the page.

In stead of doing it the normal way, try creating modular style classes. Have a left, right and center class, each of which simply instructs the browser how to float (or not float) the element it is applied to. Also include a couple of width classes with just a single width instruction in each and nothing more.

Consider this modular approach to the same classes as the above example.

.left {float: left;}
.right {float: right;}
.w30 {width: 30%;}
.w40 {width: 40%;}
.w50 {width: 50%;}
.border1 {border: 1px solid #000;}
.blue-back {background-color: #00f;}
.green-back {background-color: #0f0;}

By doing this you can include these classes combined together on various elements and instead of have things like class="left-40-blue-pullquote" and class="right-30-black-pullquote" you can have class="left w40 blue-back quote" class="right gray-back border image"

As you can see from these short examples, you are creating classes that can be reused with different types of elements, and have short meaningful names. You don't have to remember what order you put things in either, because each is a self contained class, and all classes will be applied no matter what order you list them in.

Much simpler to remember and much easier and faster to use.

What do you do to make your css easier and faster? What quick shortcuts do you use to help make posting your articles and styling them simpler and better?

Top Entrecard Droppers

Dane Morgan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:01:14 -0500

Top droppers on your blog

One Heck Of An Easy Way To Get A Link From Me

Dane Morgan — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:48:35 -0500

Pssst... Want a link from Dane Morgan? There are a number of ways to do so. You could always write some killer software that I really like a lot, or a great blog post could do it to.

Everyone is looking for links. The more the better, right? It's all about advertising and getting your word out there. Now, if you can grab a cool link here and there without having to do anything extra to get them, that's obviously just a cool bonus.

Another way to do it though, is a lot easier. Just drop your Entrecard on me. that's right. Drop your card, and you'll automatically get your link on this blog.

The nine most recent drops are right there on the front page in the side bar, and a bunch more are included on the Recent Entrecard Drops page.

And don't forget to drop you card again tomorrow to get your link back in the mixture!

All of this happens automagically without you or I having to do anything else. Go ahead and drop your card. As soon as the blog checks my inbox again, it will post your link. It might take a few minutes, so feel free to read a couple more posts, and even leave a comment or two, then check back and you'll see your link right here on the blog.

Sort Your Feeds By The Quality Of The Posts

Dane Morgan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:18:34 -0500

AideRSS is pretty cool. I've been playing with it for a few days now and I see a lot of potential here.

Figuring Out What To Read The Old Way

There are a lot of feeds out there. A lot. And if you are anything like me, you are subscribed to a lot of them. There is simply no way to actually read them all.

You have to pick and choose. Until now the only real way to do that was to look at headlines and make a snap judgment. Read or not read.

Unfortunately, some very smart people who write some very good posts simply aren't all that good at writing killer headlines, or even intelligible headlines. So this method means missing some good stuff, and reading some bad stuff that doesn't live up to the headline.

The measure Of A Feed: Post Rank

Now there is a better way. Or at least a new way to enhance the old way.

AideRSS has developed something they call Post Rank 1 which they use to evaluate and rank posts on a scale of 1 to 10 with decimal values at each level.

Post Rank is based on The 5 Cs of Engagement2 and uses these principles to arrive at a quality score, called a Post Rank, based on the engagement the post receives from the community at large.

Sorting And Filtering Feeds Based On Engagement

To some greater or lesser extent this system is going to be valuable in direct proportion to how well you would agree that engagement is going to tend to equate to quality. In other words, if you agree that when a lot of people post about, comment on, click through to, link to and book mark a post, it is more likely to be worth reading than posts that do not garner such attention, then you are going to love AideRSS.

Using these engagement factors, each post has a post rank, and you can sort your feeds by their post ranks, and even filter out posts below a certain threshold. This leaves you with just the best posts (or the better, or the good, depending on the filter you chose) to read through. There is even a sort for the "top 20" posts for the view you are looking at.

Read It There Or take It With You

The Feed reader at AideRSS is a very simple easy to navigate reader. It is quick and presents information is a well thought out easy to follow format. But if that's not to your liking there are a couple of ways to take the feeds, with their filtering and sorting with you to your favorite reader.
AideRSS Feed Reader: You can read your filtered feeds right there at AideRSS, or in your own reader.
You can first of all filter all feeds at once to a certain level, and you can filter each feed individually. So you could filter all feeds in your list for the best posts, and then selectively change a few feeds that you like more to a lower criteria.

You can grab feeds for these filtered feeds from AideRSS and import them to your own feed reader to read the filtered feeds there. And, yes, there is full OPML support so it's easy to do.

The other cool option is a Firefox extension that adds Post Rank filtering and sorting to Google Reader. I've been using this a lot, and I love it.
AideRSS In Google Reader: You can use AideRSS Post Rank to filter and sort feeds in Gogle Reader.

1. PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. It is a core part of the AideRSS engine that works to ensure that this digital assistant is helping you to tame the RSS beast and keep your news stream manageable.
2. The 5 Cs of Engagement are Creating, Critiquing, Chatting, Collecting and Clicking.