Twitter Fails Once Again, Slavish Devotion Continues

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

How to Use Google Trends to Spike Your Traffic

In a previous post, Google Trends: The Borg Speaks, I talked about the strange and sometimes disturbing movements of Google Trends.

In that post I had some fun using Google Trends as a radar of our bizarre cultural zeitgeist. But that is far from its only use. For one thing, bloggers have found a clever, perhaps less than scrupulous way to use Google Trends to gain a large bump in their site traffic, and thus their advertising income.

Now, I’m not necessarily advising this technique, but in the spirit of full disclosure of the black arts, I’ll tell you how to do it.

For this to work well, your site needs to already be a) reasonably popular in terms of traffic, b) already listed by Google, and c) indexed quickly by Google Blog Search after each post – quickly meaning a matter of minutes. If c) isn’t happening, make sure your blogging software is set to ping “http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2″ after each post. The faster your post is indexed, the better this will work.

Step One: Find It

Google Trends is updated frequently throughout the day. As it updates, wait for a newly popular subject to bubble up. Look for one without much competition in the search results – something new or uncommon. That’s not too difficult in a society which creates new “celebrities” on a pace of about twice a day. Sometimes a neologism will pop up, usually after being spoken by someone on a popular TV show. Grab it.

Step Two: Write It

Write a quick, keyword-heavy post on this hot subject. The content can be cribbed from Wikipedia, imdb, or AP News – it just needs to be relevant to the subject. The first couple of lines should be inviting to a searcher (i.e. “Everything you want to know about _____”, “Hot nude pics of _____”, etc.). Use the popular term by itself as the post title, for maximum keyword density.

Step Three: Ping It

The final step is to ping Google as quickly as possible and get indexed. If it works, searchers will see this post in the top few results for one of the most popular searches of the day. That can mean thousands of clicks. If you have advertising which pays by the impression, you just made some money. Even if you have pay-per-click ads, you’re likely to get quite a few extra clicks from people simply looking for somewhere else to go after they’re done with your page.

Now, that’s how to do it unethically. But do you really want to post solely for the sake of gaining traffic? If you were a store owner, do you just want to get people inside your store with a window display, or would you rather work on having satisfied repeat customers?

Then again, how unethical is it really? Isn’t this really just another form of what the Huffington Post does – re-packaging other people’s work and putting it in front of more noses? Don’t get me started; let’s save that for another post.

So there are open questions and gray areas. If your post is relevant to your site and to the subject, and you manage to add some value, then clearly you’ve served a purpose, even if you’ve marketed your goods in an manipulative way. And isn’t all marketing inherently manipulative? Doesn’t a consumerist, advertising-based society favor manipulative tactics over quality, innovation, humanity and all that other bullshit people still seem to care about despite decades of soul-crushing propaganda? 

I think the only way to answer these questions is with an experiment. Tune in tomorrow for a Google Garbage™ Special!

The Best Blogging Platform is…

Tumblr.

By far.

If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, don’t let the stupid name put you off. While everyone has been nattering on about Twitter, Tumblr has built what is very nearly the perfect tool for publishing on the web. It’s easily the best blogging platform in existence. Why?

It’s incredibly easy, and it scales effortlessly from Twitter-length messages to full-length blog posts with images, multimedia – whatever you like.

Some elitist techie gatekeepers may not like this ease of use, but I say screw ‘em.  It’s a new day, people.

Here’s how you do it with Tumblr:

1. Go to tumblr.com (time: 1 second).
    
2. Sign up. Fill in three text fields – your email, a password, and the name you want, i.e. xxxx.tumblr.com (time: maybe 10 seconds).
    
3. You are taken to your Dashboard page. From there, click one of these buttons, and share something: (time: whatever you like).

   Each type of post has a built-in code snippet that tells it to treat each type of post differently, with zero effort on your part. Audio files you upload are served up in a sweet little Flash-based player. Quotes are pre-formatted with blockquote styling. Everything looks like it should – automatically.

4. Done. You don’t even need a title for your post. It’s amazing how freeing that is.
    
5. (optional) Put a “Share on Tumblr” button in your toolbar (get it from the “Goodies” page). When you see something you want to share on the web, click the button. Absurdly easy.
    
6. (optional) Surf other tumblelogs (yes, that’s what they call them), and when you like a post, click the “re-blog” button. It’s added to your blog, with the proper attribution.
    
7. (optional) Customize your look. Although Tumblr is the first and only platform whose default style looks absolutely great, there are plenty of excellent, free styles to chose from.
    
8. (optional) Make your own style (if you’re handy with CSS), point your own domain at your blog, add custom html/javascript…do your thing.
    
9. (optional) Get fancy. Publish RSS feeds, post via email, phone, IM, OSX widget. Import posts from your other blog with one click. Embed this blog in your other one with a tiny bit of code. Use third party tools and mash it up. Follow other users – yes, like Twitter, only much much better.

You’ll soon see that Tumblr scales up and down with your thoughts, from random asides to lengthy manifestos. Find something on the web, and want to share it without jumping through hoops? No problem, click one button. Just had a funny thought, but not enough for a blog post? Scribble it out and click a button. Found a great photo of Mr. T and Nancy Reagan smoking crack? Please send it to me privately – I think we could get some money for that. Everything else, put it on Tumblr.

Oh, and all the cool kids are doing it:

For a few examples of what you can do with this amazing tool, check out the winners of this year’s Tumblr Awards, announced on Friday.

And have I mentioned that this is all free? 

There is no longer any excuse. Take your passion. Make it happen. Et cetera.

p.s. Yes, I’m using WordPress for this blog. Though it is annoying, complicated, time-consuming and difficult to maintain, it’s still more suitable for long, editorial-style posts, and some of the plug-ins are must-haves for a blog of this type. But I may just switch over any day now. Meanwhile, I’ve been toying around with it here.

p.p.s.: As with anything, there are disadvantages: the data is on their servers, with no back-up option. If they perceive you as a spammer, they’ll “disappear” you faster than Dick Cheney. But if you own your own domain, use a roll-your-own backup tool (Google “Tumblr backup”), and play nice, you should stay happy.