This post is one in which I will be showing my more technical side. I am going to be focusing on a topic I raised a little while ago - the ecology of blogging in Thanet. In part this is inspired by the sterling work carried out by the Thanet Blog List in compiling a list of Thanet bloggers and blogs.

In modern search technology the nature of hyper media and its unformed link structure have formed a basis for understanding the relationship documents. What this means is that pages that are connected in topic are often linked to similar or the same sources. At the centre of all that are the most linked to pages. This pages are probably the most significant.

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Blog Rank - The Theory

Just writing you blog post and leaving it to linger is not all there is to blogging. It is core to the art, sure, but it is only a very small part of it. You blog extends far beyond the website where it all started.

For Thanet Bloggers a tight knitted yet open community means that can quickly become "plugged in" to the Thanet blog scene. However, there is a world of additional support, services, tools and communities and more are springing up every week it seems. In this post I will be looking at the services and sites that have an impact on your blog.

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» Continue Reading: Your (Thanet) blog but not on your blog

It never ends. Feel free to talk about what you got, gave or drank this season of over eating.

Regular transmissions will resume after I have removed the fat man from the roof.

Well, guess what season it is now...

No, that is not a typers tick the word "no" appears twice. But what is NoNoFollow and how can is benifit Thanet, Thanet Bloggers and Thanet Business Bloggers? To answer that I must first explain what NoFollow is.

It was proposed some time ago. It was suggested by some that it might be an answer to comment spam but even then many people were saying that this would not work. The reason they said (and they were right) is that comment spammers use automated processes and don't care much for the specific results only for the shear magnitude of of comments posted.

What the NoFollow does is adds an instruction to search engines to not follow a link. The hope was that if comments no longer passed "link love" to the commenter's blog then people would stop spamming. This did not work and has only served to isolate bloggers from each other and devalue commenting.

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» Continue Reading: Embracing NoNofollow

Now I've not noticed too much discussion within the Thanet blogging community of the finer mechanics of blogging. I had, until recently, given this no thought at all. But it occurs to me that there are some words that I am going to want to use that might be alien to some Thanet bloggers.

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» Continue Reading: What's your niche?

For a blog to be a success beyond the satisfaction of simply writing it you need people to read it. We can use a number of words to describe people in relation to our blog and each describes the same people but within a different relationship.

The most important word we use is "Traffic" this is simply a measure of the number of people passing through. Traffic includes people that open a page from out blog in their browser but close it without reading and also those that find the blog and read ever last page. Generally the more traffic you get the better.

Traffic is disable into two groups human and nonhuman. Nonhuman traffic is things like spiders, bots and other automated scripts. They happen but for general analysis we can ignore them. When I talk of traffic in this blog I am almost always talking of the human kind.

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» Continue Reading: Traffic is your blood

Being an guide to and for blogging politic in Thanet.

I have previewing our high quality blogging from Thanet and today choose to focus on politics. Not my own but those of the bloggers. I have arranged the blogs in a sort of not all that accurate spectrum from right to left. Right is at the top mainly to get it over with quickly rather than try to end on a damp fizz. Right wing politics is not widely blogged about in Thanet. (Unless you care to prove me wrong).

This guide to the World of Thanet blogging is a continuation of my quest to "really get to the bottom of" the current ecosystem and understand who, what and where. It contains plenty of links (links are good) and a little opinion. With all things that are mostly personal judgment there is bond to be something you disagree with. Why not let me know your thoughts.

Without further ado...

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Political Punditry Both Satirical and Real

It has been quickly pointed out to me that my research is somewhat flawed when it comes to the ruling class A-list of Thanet blogging. Which of course it was bound to be - I cheated and just picked the seven most prominent blogs that I remembered, read or saw linked to a lot. My rather hit or miss methods will have produced one of two results.

1. Astounding accuracy (unlikely)
2. A random list (more likely)

As a businessman I do not like to leave things half done. When I wrote that list I had a plan for a more accurate and self updating list. I still do.

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» Continue Reading: The Ecology of Thanet Blogs #2: Thanet's A-List Revisited

Almost the entire Thanet Blogging community is hosted on a single host - blogger.com. It is by far the most popular free blog hosting solution currently available. This leadership is somewhat undeserved gained from the traction the Google has established with the Google tool bar. Blogger.com lacks a significant number of tools and features that others take for granted.

Google (who own blogger.com) have now blocked all commenters (not from blogger.com) from leaving a courtesy link back to their own blog. Comments, cross linking and connecting are what have made blogging work in the first place. This change cuts right to the heart of that and creates a significant chance that blogger.com users will become isolated in the same way that livejournal.com users have.

Blogger.com already has the reputation of holding the largest collection of spam anywhere on the Internet and now it seems it wants to lock users to the platform. This is a common action for large business driven services that desire "more security". Yet this very act of locking in can backfire as it becomes an anti-feature repelling new users and evicting the more alert current users.

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» Continue Reading: Is blogger.com harming Thanet blogging?

Thanet Blog List is currently not completely open. In fact it is likely to be closed to new entries by most people. The reason for this is that it uses an excellent anti-spam script called "bad behavior" which spots spam bots before they get started.

Bad behavior, however, has an update after a blacklist was deactivated and thus returning a false positive on most, if not all, IP addresses. Simply downloading the latest version from the site and copying the core files over your current set will complete the update and remove the issue.

Here's to hoping to a swift and ready update at Thanet Blog List so we can all get back to enjoying the most up to date listing of blogs in Thanet.

XML is a powerful technical specification but powerful specifications are nothing without a useful implementation. RSS and ATOM are two such examples of an implementation that is both fun and useful. However, that means nothing if you don't understand what they are for.

Atom and RSS are site feed formats. A site feed is simply the raw content (headlines, story etc) of a site. While this sounds rather dull there is plenty that can be done with it.

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» Continue Reading: What is a feed?

The ecology of Thanet blogs is dominated by a few big players. These are blogs that rank highly in the search engines for searches on "Thanet" and "Blog" but also occur regularly within the wider blogging community. For the Thanet blog scene these can perhaps be considered "The A-List" I think.

This is a topic I hope to return to many times as growth and an influx of blogging talent hits Thanet... or at leasts shows up and says "hi" from time to time.

1. Big News Margate - authored by Tony Flag this is probably the leading Thanet commentary blog at present. Over the years it has carved a considerable reputation in the Thanet blog scene. Tony is possibly the most vocally political of the Thanet Bloggers but has gotten so far by not being boring nor feeling the need to be exclusive to the topic. As you can Guess there is some Margate bias and focus in the blog beyond the topic of Thanet in general.

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» Continue Reading: The Ecology of Thanet Blogs: Thanet's A-List