TrafficG -- blog surfing and traffic generation

For some time I've been a member of Blog Explosion, which is intended to bring traffic to your blog when you surf other blogs.

I've now found a similar site, TrafficG, which may be better and more versatile.

Both work on a similar principle -- you surf blogs from their site, and as you do so you earn "credits", which are applied to directing other people to your blog(s).

Both of them have selections of interests -- you can say what interests your blog caters for, and what kind of blogs you are interested in, and that should mean that when you surf you can discover new blogs on topics you are interested in.

Unfortunately that feature of Blog Explosion stopped working some time ago. My main interest was "Books, literature and writing", but it hardly ever shows me blogs in that category any more, and when I visit it shows me blogs in categories I'm not interested in , the same ones over and over, even if they haven't been updated for months.

TrafficG seems to be based on the same idea, so I'll be interested in seeing if it works any better, and shows me some more interesting blogs.

To me the "interests" thing is crucial.

I'm not interested simply in "hits" -- what I want is readers who are interested in at least some of the same things I'm interested in, who will leave intelligent comments on the content of the posts, and possibly lead to interesting conversations. Blog Explosion did that in the beginning, but no longer does so. I think the owners have got bored with it and are neglecting it.

So here's hoping that TrafficG works better.

And the verdict is...

Blog Explosion beats TrafficG hands down.

For all its faults, Blog Explosion does occasionally show me a web site that I find interesting. Only about one in 20 match my preferred interest (Books, literature and writing), but TrafficG did not manage to show me a single site that was of any interest at all. About 99,9% of them looked like paid ads for other web sites that promise to bring traffic to your side -- and none of them looked like they would have any interest in visiting my blog, much less be capable of making intelligent comments. That kind of "traffic" I could do without. It looks like TrafficG is the tip of an iceberg: a huge incestuous network of "traffic-generation" sites wasting bandwidth by generatng traffic for each other in an endless circle.

Blog Comment Day 2008 | Blogging

John Smulo is tryin g to promote more interaction in the blogosphere by starting a "Blog Comment DaY"

Blog Comment Day 2008 | Blogging:

Though there may be 100 reasons why people blog, I've yet to meet a blogger who doesn't appreciate comments. For this reason I'm starting Blog Comment Day on December 3, 2008. Here's how it works:

* On December 3, 2008 you will leave one comment on at least 5 different blogs.
* Out of the 5 blogs you comment on, at least 2 of them will be blogs you haven't commented on previously.

John has also set up an event on Facebook and invited people to join in.One thing that surprised me about that was the number of people who declined the event. I'm amazed that so many people have conscientious objections to commenting on other people's blogs!

askSam 6.1

I've been using the askSam database software for 17 years, and this year my wife bought me an upgrade to the latest version for Christmas, and I've been playing with some of the new features.

If you are doing any kind of research, askSam is one of the best tools for keeping your notes and documents in order. It's a freeform text database that lets you find anything you put into it, and also allows you to have fixed fields for sorting.

I started using it when I persuaded the university departments I was working in to use it for journal abstracts and a terminology database. I'd read reviews of it in computer magazines, and it sounded as though it would be one of the best tools for the job. It was.

Back then it was the DOS version.

It was easy to get started using it -- you simply tossed information in and it would fish it out again. But to get the best out of it required quite a lot of learning, and to learn to use it I tried it out on different kinds of applications -- making notes from books, genealogical research, keeping track of correspondence, keeping a log of various activities. For all of these things, it worked very well.

Back then we also used the XyWrite word processor, and XyWrite's formatting was done using codes similar to HTML markup, so it was easy to produce askSam reports that were fully-formatted XyWrite documents. Reports could be imported into e-mail for sharing information. It worked just as well for exporting data to web pages.

For a long time I resisted the Windows version, but the new version has several features that older ones did not. One of them is the ability to import, link to and attach documents. So you can use it to keep track of word processor documents, PDF files and the like. It handles MS Word documents, pdf files (text only) and RTF files as well. It is somewhat limited in not handling Open Office files, for example, though those can be exported to rtf of pdf format.

If you do any kind of research, especially in the humanities, and want to keep your research notes in order, I definitely recommend askSam. I've found it useful for genealogy research, theological research and articles (keeping notes for my MTh dissertation and DTh thesis) and much more.

If this sounds like the sort of program you could use, you can read more about it (and download a 30-day trial version) at the askSam web site.