The Tiger Beat

7 Quick Tips for Branding Yourself Through Social Networking

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:23:00 -0500

7 Quick Tips for Branding Yourself Through Social Networking: head over to the BlogCatalog Blog for a new guest post by OutsideMyBrain.

BlogCatatlog's Most Popular Blogs

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:14:31 -0500

One of the things that bothers me most about the new BlogCatalog homepage is it’s static nature; Not a lot changes on the BlogCatalog homepage from hour to hour, let alone day to day. There isn’t much of a reason to ever return to the homepage once you’ve seen it before. After we launched the redesign, the only complaints i really heard was from those members who were on the homepage as the Most Popular, it seems that section of our site was a great source of traffic for these bloggers and they weren’t happy we cut off that traffic. So i thought it would be interesting to see what blogs would be on the list if it were still there today. So behold The Unofficial Most Popular BlogCatalog Blogs:

Gale Rainwater Photography
by GaleRainwater
THE OFFENDED BLOGGER
by offendedblogger
livelife365.blogspot
by livelife365
My Life As It Was, Is, and Will Be
by ssgreylord
LWGodsil’s Jadis Jewelry
by lwgodsil
Make The Most of Your Time
by Liane
History’s Mysteries
by Historianlover
Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness
by Svasti
Directing Shen
by kanester1
ProBlogger
by ProBlogger

More Hardware Upgrades

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:25:54 -0500

We have some more hardware upgrades scheduled for our DB server this week. We are upgrading our server file system to a RAID 10 array to help improve performance on some of the more intensive queries. Once the upgrade is complete we should see an improvement in read intensive queries, our nightly backups as well as the indexing of our user’s posts throughout the day. Expect these upgrades to take place after 12AM CST today or tomorrow.

Things seem to be getting back to normal for the BC web server....

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:22:02 -0500

Things seem to be getting back to normal for the BC web server. We had a difficult time yesterday finding out what was hitting us so hard all day but it looks like we finally got things under control.

Social Stream Upgrades

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:32:00 -0500

Given the right search terms, BlogCatalog’s Social Search is an amazing tool to find some interesting things across multiple social sites indexed by BlogCatalog users. Social search creates a chronological mix of photos, tweets, bookmarks, music, and much more. I know Tony likes to search for sushi pretty regularly. I, personally, am guilty of being subscribed to the Bacon Social Search RSS feed (who knew bacon came in so many different forms and flavors?). I even found this picture of these delicious looking dumplings through the social search. (Maybe i should have eaten before writing this post)

In the upcoming weeks we are going to making some small changes to the social streams on the site such as the social search, dashboard feed, and individual user activity feeds. These updates include limited pagination and more advanced filters to help you find all the interesting stuff that BlogCatalog members find and post on the internet.

Do you have any fun search terms that you like to put into the BlogCatalog Social Search? Share them in the comments below!

Tiger Beat's New Comment System

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:52:46 -0500

It’s with great dismay that i have had to abandon all the great comments i have gotten so far on The Tiger Beat, but my previous comment system, HaloScan, just wasn’t cutting it. It was kind of slow and buggy and had to go.

Luckily, I stumbled upon Disqus on another tumblr blog and found it much more appealing. No more annoying pop-ups, poorly cached comment counts, or ads. Disqus seems to be a much better comment solution for tumblr.

If you can, please take a moment and leave me a comment. It would be greatly appreciated.

The absolute, hands down, without question best place in the blogosphere

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:35:15 -0500

The absolute, hands down, without question best place in the blogosphere:

Robert Stevenson gives BlogCatalog a glowing review in his latest blog post.

“For thousands of years, bloggers have come together on BC to share, support, laugh, learn, vent, inform, and just plain be.”

What do you think? Is BlogCatalog the best place in the Blogosphere for bloggers?

Irreplaceable Moments…

Fri, 30 May 2008 09:32:17 -0500

Irreplaceable Moments…: How much would you sacrifice to boost your BlogCatalog Rank? Robin has some interesting thoughts on the question.

BlogCatalog 4.0 Tonight?

Thu, 29 May 2008 07:15:00 -0500

The new version of BlogCatalog is very close to a point that we feel comfortable releasing it. The new site includes an improved navigation, some page layout tweaks, some small new features, and renaming of things. We tried not to change around too much, just the problem areas. The BC team is going to be traveling to Austin today for a social media presentation, but I’m hoping we get back home with enough time to launch the new site. Keep your eyes peeled!

Sunday Summary [05.25.08]

Sun, 25 May 2008 21:03:32 -0500

It’s been an extremely busy weekend behind the scenes at BlogCatalog. I’m running on fumes at this point and still have another full day or two of work to go.

The visual refresh, aka BlogCatalog 4.0, is progressing very nicely. I’ve been using the new version of the site and it really addresses a lot of usability problems we have with the current layout, not to mention it’s just more fun. To really appreciate how far we have come though, you have to consider where we started. Check out how BlogCatalog looked when we bought it back in January 2007.

I’m not sure what was with the stars all over the place up top, and the stats tab on top didn’t even go anywhere as far as i a remember. When you logged into the site, the user backend was still using a layout from before the previous owner redesigned the site, so it was almost as if you were sent to a whole new site. Bascailly the place was a mess, I don’t know what possessed Tony to buy such a werid little site but i’m glad he did. It’s been a long road since then and we still have further to go. So thanks to everyone along the way who has provided their support, insults, criticisms, suggestions, and priase.

BlogCatalog Bloggers Listed by Myers-Briggs Typology

Sat, 24 May 2008 22:58:00 -0500

BlogCatalog Bloggers Listed by Myers-Briggs Typology: OutsideMyBrain started an interesting discussion the other day asking BlogCatalog bloggers what type of personality they have based on the infamous Myers-Briggs Typology. So far he has collected 26 blogger’s responses and the results are really quite interesting. It’s no surprise, however, that quite a few of our discussion regulars came up as type INTJ. I’m off to take the test now, curious to see how i compare.

Social Networking Wars : MyBlogLog vs BlogCatalog

Fri, 23 May 2008 23:55:00 -0500

Social Networking Wars : MyBlogLog vs BlogCatalog:

Abhinav Sood compares the alexa rankings for BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog over the last few months and leaves us with an interesting insight:

“MyBlogLog shows you the traffic for your blog while BlogCatalog gives you the traffic for your blog!”

Did you know BlogCatalog takes fresh thumbshots of over 2,800...

Thu, 22 May 2008 22:08:47 -0500

Did you know BlogCatalog takes fresh thumbshots of over 2,800 blogs every day? That’s over 1 million thumbshots in a year!

When was the last time you updated yours?

Been so busy working on the new navigation layout I almost...

Tue, 20 May 2008 23:55:00 -0500

Been so busy working on the new navigation layout I almost forgot to post today. Here is a small sneak peak of what you have to look forward to.

Do You Link to Your Sources?

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:39:53 -0500

Do You Link to Your Sources?: Over at the BlogCatalog Blog, Mark Stoneman give us four reasons why linking to your sources is an important part of blogging.

Sunday Summary

Sun, 18 May 2008 21:38:00 -0500

It’s been another busy week for BlogCatalog, but that’s nothing new. I sacrificed a lot of sleep this week battling with our servers, trying to get the word out about Bloggers Unite, and working with Oscar on getting the new layout just right (we keep finding way to make it cooler and cooler!).

Unless you have been living under one of the many rocks laying around BlogCatalog, you probably heard about, and maybe even participated in, our latest Bloggers Unite event. The participation and attention for Bloggers Unite has grown exponentially with each each event. I’m still trying to make my way through the colossal number of posts that were submitted to us and hopefully will have a post up this week with some of my favorites. If you’d like to see how Bloggers Unite for Human Rights turned out, just check out the huge list of Bloggers Unite posts or the coverage from CNN.

In between all the chaos from Bloggers Unite, we still managed to make some improvements around the site. Most importantly we have finally added links to shoutboxes to report spam shouts. When you mark a shoutbox message as spam, it will be deleted from your shoutbox and the BlogCatalog team will get an alert notifying us of the offensive spam message. We will use these reports to decide to remove these spammers from the site or not.

That’s it for this week. Thanks to everyone who has read my blog this last week and everyone who has been kind enough to leave a comment.

Customizing Your BlogCatalog Widgets

Sun, 18 May 2008 09:34:00 -0500

Customizing Your BlogCatalog Widgets: The Buzz Nutter provides a few quick and easy tips for customizing your BC widgets to better suit your blog’s template.

Blog of the Week

Sat, 17 May 2008 21:00:55 -0500

Last week’s blog of the week was a close race, there are so many great blogs and i’m glad i get to feature last weeks runner up as this week’s blog of the week.

If you have ever come across nardeeisms on BlogCatalog you’ll probably agree that she is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Nardee writes a personal blog appropriately titled Nardeeisms. However, she puts a twist on the personal blog. I have been stalking her blog almost daily for the last week as each of her stories has a song connected to it and lately I have been most impressed with her song choices and how she relates them to her daily journeys. with songs from some of my favorite artists like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Leonard Cohen, I keep checking back to see what’s up next. If you haven’t already, check out Nardeeisms and be sure to let Nardee know what a great job she is doing.

Join the Nardeeisms Neighborhood

BlogCatalog at Startup Weekend San Antonio

Sat, 17 May 2008 20:27:43 -0500

Just wanted to quickly mention that Angie, Tony, and Oscar are camped out at Start Up Weekend San Antonio showing off what they can do. For those who don’t know Startup Weekend is basically a 54 hour event where teams have to create a startup and pitch it to VC’s.

Boosting Your BlogRank

Fri, 16 May 2008 11:32:00 -0500

Earlier this week I made a call out for future blog post ideas in the BlogCatalog discussion. Not surprisingly most people responded wanting to know just what the heck goes into calculating their mysterious BlogRank numbers. Up until now, this has been a pretty tight-lipped secret as to prevent members from trying to game the system to boost their rank. However, i feel somewhat obligated to to share some of the factors that make up the infamous BlogRank and who better than the only person who actually knows how it works.

Before i jump into my tips though, I feel a little BlogRank history lesson is in order. After Tony purchased the site in early 2007, we had the daunting task of figuring out how to convert a categorical and alphabetical blog directory in to a directory that is actually usable.

The original platform had several flaws in its approach. First, once people noticed the listings were alphabetical, it became a game of who could put the most special characters in a specific order to come up first for a category. Secondably, their system for tracking what blog listings you viewed and which you clicked was all done through cookies, so while the hits/views stats didn’t have any meaning, it was easy to game by just disabling your cookies and hitting refresh over and over. For this reason, the previous stats had to be scrapped and everyone reset to zero.

I’m not totally sure who’s idea it was originally, but one morning i woke up and had an e-mail from Tony detailing elaborate suggestions as to how we could score blogs in order to decide what order they appear in the directory. With SEO and PageRanks being the latest craze during that time, it seemed only natural to call our system BlogRank. Over time we have slowly tweaked, added, and removed what goes into the ranks to come up with something that helps highlight the active bloggers and tries to bury the dead blogs in the stacks.

So how do you improve your BlogRank?

I can’t tell you the specifics of what makes up your rank, but i will give you some tips to improving your rank. Below are what Oscar has coined as BlogRank Optimization Tips or simply BRO tips.

Be Active on BlogCatalog. This, more than anything, has the greatest effect on your rank. The more active you are on BC, the more places your avatar shows up and the more people click through to your listing, click through to your blog, and possibly even join your neighborhood.
Blog Regularly. Because we pull in your recent posts from your RSS feed, we know how often you are posting and we know when you have stopped. Make sure your Autodiscovery tags are set up properly in your blog’s template and that you are posting on a regular basis. If too much time passes without a post, your rank will slip.
Show Your Support For Other Bloggers. One of the great things about BlogCatlog is the reciprocation that occurs for all of your social actions. Want to raise your rank? Try raising other’s ranks first. Join the neighborhoods of blogs you like, write a blog review on the blog listings of blogs you like, or just send a friendly shout to bloggers who you think are doing a good job. You will find that your good deed will often be reciprocated.
Don’t Abuse the System. This in reference to the previous tip. It’s not hard for us to notice what users are adding hundreds of friends or join hundreds of blog neighborhoods in a single day. new users use these tactics in an attempt to get other users to reciprocate their actions and it’s not a good idea. We have several checks in place to make sure these abusers are flagged and penalized. If you get flagged as what we call “un-neighborly”, BlogCatalog makes sure to promote your blog and avatar as little as possible throughout the site. If we see continued abuse, don’t be surprised if that user’s avatar turns back into a black silhouette.
Add a BlogCatalog Widget. Adding a BlogCatalog widget to your blog is probably the easiest way to get a few extra points tacked onto your rank. However, adding 15 widgets isn’t going to give you 15 times more of a bump. The rank bump can sometimes take up to a week to show up and we do know when you take the widget off.

That’s all the tips i have for now, if you have any comments or questions feel free to ask them in the comments or send me a shout. I’d also suggest that you leave a comment with your current BlogRank, try out my tips, and then come back in a week and see how you have done.