Archive for June, 2008

Plurk is rocking the social media scene of late and for good reason! Twitter is cool and I’m sure there will be many other twitter clones but to label Plurk a clone is simply outrageous. Looking back on that last sentence I wrote would you believe I signed up for Plurk almost exactly 24 hours ago?

Plurk fittingly has peace love unity and respect written all over it from the get go but that’s enough of the hippy stuff. Doesn’t matter whether it was planned or it was simply a short brandable domain that became available. I’ve heard in the plurkosphere it’s a cross of “Play and Work”. Whatever it is they have hit the big time with something that’s bound to become a blockbuster. I can’t see how it won’t.

What Are The Top 10 Reasons To Say Hello To Plurk?

1) Everything is organized on a graphical timeline. It is quite easy to interpret and makes things relatively easy and clear to follow.

2) Three different options for viewing the timeline of plurks. You can switch between everyone’s plurk’s, your plurks, or your private plurks. You’d naturally want to spend more time answering comments on the plurks you started out of respect for the people plurking. Also I would hope it’s a conversation on a topic you find of interest.

3) It has CLIQUES! That sounded bad I know but it’s just a fancy word for group. Now you can follow everyone and anyone until they spam you and if they are someone you are interested in hearing more from you can chime into that clique. So I went to check it out and the below quote is direct from plurk.

Cliques make it easy to send plurks to a group of people. You can even filter your timeline via cliques.

What’s even cooler is you can message a whole clique at a time? Maybe that is why there is a difference between a fan and a friend? Some people are more sensitive to perceived spam then others.

4) Each new “Plurk” is an individual thread. A dialogue that you can track on a timeline. Imagine writing about something of interest and coming back later to find an active conversation on the topic? Since I have only been a member for a day can’t confirm how long you can go back but I’m hoping a while.

5) You can easily share all types of media such as images, videos and links. The images and videos appear as clickable thumbnail; very cool.

6) It has a karma system. I’m not going to write much about it as I have no clue how it works and I have no clue when it updates except that it’s apparently not in real time.

7) You can talk in third person with a slew of choices to choose from that are also color coded. This will help the dedicated plurker know your mood simply by the color of your action. Items currently are things such as wishes, feels, has, says, is, thinks etc…

8) It’s still in the early adopters phase. As of 10:55PM June 5th 2008 the search term “plurk” on google brought up 59,300 results; “twitter” was 68,700,000. On the compete bar it showed 31,000 as the people count. I mean it probably/easily had more people then that register today alone. It’s in its infancy and now is the time to discover it. Imagine finding twitter 12 or 16 months ago?

9) It has emoticons. Whether you’re a high, moderate or low emoticon user / lover it’s good to have. It’s so easy to convey the wrong tone on email where you can write a book let alone 140 characters!

10) It has a built in top 10! It’s “intresting pluckers” features the top 10 users by karma and also lists the latest noobs who are always looking for a friend right? It also has 10 features worth mentioning for this and MANY more.

This may come across as a twitter bash which I guess it is sorta. I still like and plan to use twitter it’s just Plurk took a good idea and made it great.

When I first bought this blog in November 2007 I thought I had to post all the time. I wanted to post all the time but sometimes you just have nothing to say.

Next time you’re sitting over a blog post with nothing really on your mind how about you do other things? That’s what I’ve been doing; I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to and how this blog has faired with just 1 update over all of last week.

First let me say the HIGHEST I’ve seen the subscriber count since I purchased the blog at around 180 subscribers was a max of 240. We’re currently at 237 after leaving a post on the front page for 1 solid week now.

What does this tell me? It tells me that it’s better to update less with quality then it is to update frequently with mediocre posts for the sake of posting. So instead of sitting around scratching my head thinking of what to write what have I been up to?

1st) I launched the Bloggeries Blog Affiliate Program which pays $20US for each approved directory submission and pays $5US to the person who referred the webmaster who made the sale. Great way to earn passive money from your blog.

2nd) Worked on Bloggeries core functions; made a blog review post, spent a lot of time in the forum and of course networking with others. Never think you can do everything yourself. Magic happens when you mix like-minded individuals towards joint goals.

3rd) I took time for myself; time to lay back and look at things through a new lens if you will. Where do I want to go? But first; where am I? What are my skills? What are my flaws? (We all have a plethora of each).

I’ll write another post later about the affiliate program but just wanted to say there are many other things you can do online besides posting bloggeries everyday.  Also if you have nothing to say just don’t bother as people will come through like they always do and probably not subscribe if the last post isn’t any good and all you’ll be doing is irritating your current subscribers sending them stuff they don’t need.