I’ve often taken a snarky approach when it comes to people who set up blogs for their pets. I barely want to read about humans’ mundane lives, let alone issues with litter and pooper scoopers. However, there might be a new reason to subscribe to Lucky, Fido or Buddy’s blog.

Animals’ ability to prognosticate goes far beyond the annual Groundhog Day ritual. Since the beginning of time, many have believed that little furry creatures (and fish!) can tip off humans to imminent natural disasters.

…an earthquake specialist from the US Geological Survey in San Francisco kept a record of the numbers of small ads for lost pets in the local newspaper. He found there was a dramatic upsurge in missing pets weeks before a quake. How animals could forecast earthquakes is not known.

Animals also seem to forecast severe weather. There were many reports of bizarre animal behaviour before the cyclone that devastated Bangladesh (then called East Pakistan), in November 1970. For example, dogs howled endlessly for days, cattle became restless and stopped eating and ants moved to higher positions.

Given the recent disasters in Myanmar (Burma) and China, it might be time to start monitoring the moods of our four-legged companions.

Read more here.

I have noticed a great many bloggers I meet are introverted. This is something I can well empathize with as I have had to train myself to be more outgoing. Perhaps communicating online gives us introverts a less intimidating means to connect? The tricky part though is for people who find it hard to connect offline and on.

Fact is, if you want to get anywhere online, increasingly you need to break out of that bubble and connect with people. I am not talking about schmoozing or using people, but talking, doing favors and getting known.

My friend Damian has learned this the hard way. He is a brilliant WordPress plugin developer but until recently nobody knew who he was. Once he put himself out there his traffic has increased and people are now talking about his plugins. The lesson, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if nobody notices. You need the technical skills and the social skills.

• Join Twitter
• Participate in forums
• Comment on blogs
• Take part in carnivals and memes
• Link out - a lot
• Guest post
• Create something useful for the community, for bloggers this would be a widget, theme or plugin

What are you doing to make yourself better known?

Inquisitor is a cool plugin for Safari, and now Yahoo owns it. The developer, David Watanabe, won’t be joining Yahoo, but will continue the development.

I look forward to assisting Yahoo! in refining and extending the Inquisitor user experience beyond where it is today. I truly believe that Inquisitor and its users can only benefit, both from Yahoo’s resources and attention, and from the product integration possibilities that would have been impossible to pursue on my own.

The idea behind this is, of course, to tap in to the search market coming from Safari, which uses Google per default.

Hat tip: Liquidicity

I thought they were already, but obviously not so. Google has been the leading search engine, but overall Yahoo is the most popular web site according to ComScore’s rankings. No more though, according to an AP report:

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 percent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo’s audience grew 7 percent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft Corp. was third at about 121 million.

That said, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

YouTube probably helps a lot, and the fact that Gmail is growing rapidly is also mentioned in the news story.

Ryan Caldwell, of Performancing fame, had an idea:

Why not build a tool that only shows the stories that went popular on at least two social voting sites?

The result, via Suffolk Software, is SocialMediaPop. Cool project, in beta for now. I wonder what the social media sites think of services like this?

In an upcoming interview, you will read me say the following:

I hate labels and putting people in boxes. That’s why blogging and the web is so exciting to me and I’ve long been one of its stanchest fans and advocates. I don’t care if you are black, brown, green, yellow, or chartreuse. I don’t care if you have eyes or ears. I don’t care if you have legs or feet. I don’t care if you are young or old. I just don’t care about the surface. I care about what’s inside. I care about what’s under the skin, no matter how much skin you have or don’t have.

I care about your words. I care about your thoughts. Your feelings. Your ideas. I want to know what you think about a subject. Not what you think you should say, and definitely not a regurgitation of what others have said. I’m so SICK of the blog echo-chamber! I want you to matter and a blog gives you a platform to have that say. Make it matter. Make the soap box you stand on count.

As I looked at that on the screen, I realized how much that summed up my feelings about blogging, a closer definition of blogging than most that people come up with.

When I read a blog, I don’t care about the surface qualities or characteristics of the blogger. I care about what goes on inside their head and how they translate that onto their blog.

What about you? Does this match your thoughts about bloggers? Is it important to you to know their color, religion, age, or sex? Or is it honestly the quality of the content that matters more? Have we reached this point in our development as a species?

Knowing that I was robbing Peter to pay Paul, I tentatively entered into an agreement with US News and World Report to provide content for their “Outside Voices” career blog on a gratis basis.

So far, I do not regret this decision. I still think it’s a “resume” booster and increases blogosphere street cred. However, many of you were skeptical…perhaps rightfully so. Two weeks, and two articles later, the entries have referred - drum roll please - 17 clicks from six sources to my main blog. Ouch. That pales in comparison to the click-throughs I get from BH: where I get paid to write!

The blog entries so far are hardly the best thing since sliced bread, but with the amount of traffic the US News site generates, this click-through rate is pretty lame.

I’ve already set an end date in my head, where if the results do not improve, or at least show they will be worthwhile beyond what I’ve already done, I will terminate the arrangement.

If I were to charge $15 for a 300 word blog post, I’d be averaging about $1 per click - and that math doesn’t work for anyone involved.

Hopefully we both will continue to learn from this experience. I’ll keep you posted.

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of my biggest blog money makers is Chitika. I’ve reviewed and written about them many times. They’ve always done very well for me on product related sites - however on sites that don’t have a product focus they have never performed.

I’ve been nagging the Chitika team to get them to produce ads for non product related sites and they’ve been hinting at a new ad unit for a while that will meet this need. In the last week or so they’ve released it - Interactive Premium Listing Units.

They look like this:

The ads are quite like their other units but they are ads for all kinds of other products. I’ve included a live one lower on this post (although not all of you will be able to see it - read on to find out why).

The ads are getting good reviews from publishers that I’ve been chatting with who have tested them although at this stage they will only be served to US readers (some of them). At this stage the ads target at US readers and even then they are ‘behavioral’ and not all US readers will see them. If Chitika feels it’s more profitable to you they show other ads.

The ads pay on a CPC basis and you can specify different keywords when generating your code for the ad. On the following ad I’ve chosen ‘Search Engine Optimization’ as the keyword.

To test out these new ad units Apply to Join Chitika Today.

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The startup Seesmic provides a video comment service to blogs, through installation of a WordPress plugin. Any reader with a microphone enabled webcam can then leave comments in video form.

Seesmic has been working with Disqus, a blog commenting service (previously covered by the Blog Herald here and here) to provide video comments to Disqus-enabled blogs. Now, bloggers using Disqus can easily activate Seesmic video comments through just one setting.

Just log into your Disqus dashboard, click the “Configure” tab, and under “General Settings” check the box next to “Enable video comments”. That’s it - your blog now is now set up to receive video comments!

Personally have mixed feelings regarding video comments, as I can type much faster than I can prepare some thoughts for the camera and make myself presentable and set up lighting and sound for a webcam. As a blogger and a reader, it’s much easier and faster to skim through a column of text than multiple video comments. Lastly, there’s comment moderation. Will I have to watch every video to check for questionable content or spam?

Perhaps Seesmic could add transcription text that would appear as a text comment in the traditional manner, or just to the blog owner for moderation purposes. I have no idea if this is even technically possible to automate (voice recognition software?), but it would solve the latter two issues above.

Still, these are just my personal misgivings regarding video comments. Ultimately, I turned on them on because some readers may really like them, and providing communication options is part of the blogger’s duty to their readers (like providing an RSS feed). Second, the easy, one check box process provided by Disqus was ridiculously easy - I barely had any time to contemplate my misgivings.

So what do you think about video comments? Meh? Pretty Cool?

In any event, I suppose I should dust off the web cam and brush up on my oral presentation skills just in case this thing catches on.

Today Lisa sent in this question which I thought might make an interesting post topic:

“I would love if you’d do a post on how you handle emails from people who ask for one on one help.

As my site and blog grows, I continue to get more and more emails for one on one assistance. I often feel guilty about saying “no” but I have to setup boundaries in order to remain sane.

Thanks for the question Lisa - it’s a good one and one that many bloggers grapple with as their blogs grow.

It is actually a good sign that people are approaching you for assistance in this way as it shows that people see you as an authority in your niche and someone that they want trust to help them apply the principles that you talk about on your blog. That is worth celebrating!

OK, so it’s a positive sign, but the problem still remains. How do you respond to these types of approaches? As I see it there are a number of responses - all of them are valid (although I’d avoid #2) and some will appeal to different people depending upon the life stage of their blog and time commitments.

Here’s a few options for you:

1. Respond to each request for help

At one end of the spectrum is the option of freely helping each person that asks for help. This one is doable for those with either a small blog with few requests or someone with a lot of time on their hands but isn’t really sustainable once those circumstances change - unless you’re willing to lose that sanity that you talk about in your question.

I should say before I give you any other options that this would be my personal preference in an ideal world - but like you say there’s a need to have boundaries.

2. Ignore all such requests for help

At the opposite end of the spectrum we have a fairly harsh approach - while this might help your workload it’s probably not going to help your reputation that much.

3. Work on Reader Expectations

One technique that has helped me a little is to add information to my contact form to help filter some of the approaches that I get. I include on that form that I read all emails but can’t respond to everyone. I also note on my contact form that I’m not available for consulting and link to my FAQ page.

All of this is to help readers to get their expectations aligned with what I can offer. People are still able to contact me but I don’t promise to respond with help for everyone. In having this information on my contact form I found the emails I get asking for help dropped.

4. Develop a Draft Response

Of course no matter what you say on your contact form I still get a lot of emails asking for help. This is something that I enjoy and while I can’t respond to everyone I’ve developed an email response to those asking for help that is an attempt at helping readers find the information that they need as well as decreasing my own workload.

The email is fairly simple and explains that I am not able to help everyone and that I’m not taking on new consulting work. It then goes on to suggest a number of strategies for readers to help themselves. It points readers to my Blogging for Beginners page, my book and some other key pages on my blog. It also says that while I don’t do consulting at the moment that I would be happy to recommend others that do so on a paid basis.

While I’d prefer to be able to help everyone that asks for assistance it’s just not possible and I find that this draft email response has helped a lot. For many readers I try to personalize it a little more. If they ask a question about something I’ve written about I often add a link to the email or make a very quick suggestions. The draft therefor acts as a head start to a response.

5. Public Answers

Another technique that I use is to reply to those asking the questions asking if they’d mind if I answer the question publicly as a post (either giving them credit for the question or not - some like anonymity). You’d be familiar with this technique Lisa as this is what I’m currently doing.

These types of responses kill a few birds with one stone. Firstly the reader gets an answer, secondly other readers who didn’t verbalize the question but have the need get the answer too and thirdly, you get a new post for your blog!

6. Community Discussion

Another tactic is to take the question asked and pose it to your wider readership for them to answer. ProBlogger readers will be familiar with this technique (I did it a few times over the weekend just gone by). The beauty of this approach is that your reader gets an answer (or many of them) and it generates good discussion for your blog. You do need to choose the right questions for this type of thing though.

7. Convert to Paid Consulting

Lastly, you could also respond to such requests with an email that attempts to convert the questioner into a paying client for some consulting work. This won’t work with every type of question - but if what the person is asking is for you to actually help them do something or work through an issue that you can’t do in a quick response it might be reasonable to offer your services in a paid capacity. This might be something you only do in the minority of circumstances but you’ll find that in some people will have a need that they are willing to pay for an answer in.

I’m interested to hear what techniques others use to help them deal with requests for help from readers - particularly when the requests begin to get more numerous than you can actually handle?

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