Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Google has bought Feedburner (and yes, I’m still around)

May 25, 2007 No Comments »

Google has bough Feedburner for $100 million. It seems more and more cool services are being bought by big companies. Two things happen when the big companies buy comparatively smaller products; the products are killed, the products expand and lose their niche markets, the popularity of these products gains newer heights and newer technologies and innovations are introduced into them. One example I can remember is Hotmail. Hotmail was bought by the Microsoft from Sabir Bhatia and then developed into a completely new email application.

What will happen to Feedburner? In a recent post on some blog (I’ve forgotten where) I read Google might just include the Adsense ads in the feeds and won’t allow 3rd-party ads. If that happens, it will be a set back, and it will also be an opportunity for some other feed distribution tool because publishers will be leaving Feedburner in hordes then. So I think Google won’t do it.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, google buys feedburner, rss feeds

A big thank you to a Samaritan for pointing out my content writing errors

May 07, 2007 No Comments »

A visitor of my content writing website went through all the pages and then compiled a gargantuan list of errors (all in all, 23 errors). He, or she also posted the list in the comments section of this blog: I deleted the comments because first, it didn’t make sense posting it when he or she could have simply emailed it to me, and second, I’m in the process of removing the errors so after that the comment would be rendered meaningless.

He, or she did a marvelous job; it was so good that I couldn’t have gotten it better even after paying for it. Some remarks lurk on the fringes of being scathing, but hey, I think I deserve that, considering the kind of mistakes I’ve made. I wonder how much time was spent going through each and every article, reading it carefully and then skimming the text for grammatical errors as well as typos.

I felt really bad when I went through the list of those errors. But now I’m really grateful because now at least these errors are gone from my website. Whoever took so much trouble, has helped me a lot and I’m really, really grateful. They were also a good learning lesson.

I might have been losing business due to these errors.

Do bad comments harm your content?

May 01, 2007 2 Comments »

Quick note: I haven’t been away from blogging, I’ve just been trying to revive my other blog.

Cameron Olthuis on his Link Building Blog says that on social media websites such as Digg, a few negative comments can really harm your prospects of reaching the top page. I think this is because the crowds that throng these websites are not really professional crowds and they play around with the submissions probably because they have nothing better to do in their lives. It’s not though, totally true. Some do visit these websites to come across quality content. And such people like to form their own opinions after reading the content, and not the comments.

Although I haven’t produced enough quality content, I think the best way to perform well on these websites would be to write something really good, with a catchy title. By “catchy” I mean, that really tells about your content in an interesting, compelling manner.

Negative comments can even help you. I’m sure people who like your content will react to the negative comments with an equal vehemence, probably causing a flame war, giving you lots of publicity.

Technorati Tags: content publishing, social media websites