Read an interesting article titled Growing shift from blogs by Verne G. Kopytoff in NST dated February, 28 2011. The gist of the article was about the waning interest in blogging by the younger generations who prefer social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to blogs. Do you think that blogging is at its ending? For me, I just don’t think so..

Blogging started about 10 years ago by services, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, became so popular that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. I remembered that.. Now, blogs are being challenged by Facebook with its all-purpose hub for posting anything under the Sun and Twitter that becomes part of the so called microblogging services, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters..

Let me share some quotes from the article that would be of interest to bloggers..

According to Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder of BlogHer, “If you’re looking for  substantive conversation, you turn to blogs. You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging. It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”, said Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project.

How is Blogger, owned by Google, doing? It had a 2% decline, to 58.6 million unique visitors in the United States in December 2010 compared to a year earlier. However, globally, its unique visitors rose 9%, to 323 million. Have you ever wondered what would happen if Google decides to shutdown Blogger?

On the other hand,WordPress and Tumblr, which also calls itself a blogging service, seem to have avoided any decline. Isn’t that interesting? According to Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes WordPress blogging software, bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience thus making them complimentary rather than competitors. He also mentioned that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.

“There is a lot of fragmentation. But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”, said Schneider.

Looks like blogging will still be around for a long time folks!

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This entry applies to those who are using Twitter as a tool to do whatever it is that you do. If you are not using Twitter, you can skip the entry and go straight to the comment form and tell me that you do not use Twitter… … And if you are a celebrity using Twitter, this entry does not apply to you too…

Assuming that you are using Twitter to promote something, you would need to have lots of followers. In order to have many followers, you have to have something that attracts people to follow you or you can start following as many people as you can and hopefully some would then follow you back in return. The latter since to be a workable method to build up your followers despite that it is a time consuming effort.

But then, there is a problem to that method. Twitter impose a limit to the number of people that you can follow based on some caculated ratio that is only known to them. That means, if you only have 1 or 10 or 100 followers, you could only follow up to 2000 people. After that, the ratio kicks in and you must have some number of followers before you can follow 2001 people. This is mainly put in place to get rid of spammers and other undesirable people.

So, from time to time you would get people following you and some people, such as I, would then follow them back in the intention of having mutual benefits of following each other. Like anything else in this world, there would be some bad people who would follow you just to get you to follow them back so that they can increase their followers. Once you have followed them, they would them un-follow you so that they can start following someone else and increase their follower again. You would end up with less followers thus you are unable to add more people to follow… Bad eh!

What can you do? I think that there are many tools out there to help you manage this. My favorite is FriendorFollow. This is a site where you can check/do 3 things.

1. People that you are following but they are not following you back
2. People that are following you but you are not following them
3. People that you are following and they are following you back

I make use of no. 1 and 2 a lot. No.1 is for me to remove those who have stopped following me. You don’t follow me, why should I follow you unless you have something that I really like.

No. 2 is used when I want to return the favor to those who take the trouble to follow me. But when they misbehaved, I would then use no.1 on them…

By using this, I can weed out any bad followers as easy as 1 2 3…

The service is Free! No registration required. Just key in your Twitter ID on the front page and then use the Following, Fans, and Friends Tabs accordingly. You must log on to your Twitter if you need to follow or unfollow someone. FriendorFollow is at http://friendorfollow.com/

Happy Twitting!

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Today I feel like sharing about my Twitter and what do I use it with. Twitter is one of those so called micro blogging tools  and the only other similar thing out there is Plurk. I have seen Plurk with its fancy time line display stuffs but somehow I am still sticking to Twitter, which I find simpler and more straight forward. Furthermore, with the number of followers that I have right now, it would make it harder for me to move away from it.

Here are the tools or programs that I am currently using to complement my Twitter:

TwitterFox – I just need to see what are my friends and and the people I follow talk about and it would be not practical for me to log in to my Twitter account and refresh it all the time to see the latest tweet. With TwitterFox, an add-on to Firefox, this is done automatically and I have the option to reply as well as put in my own tweet. This is a must have for those who are following the tweets.

TweetLater – This is a powerful program that allows you to schedule your tweets, auto follow those who follow you and many more things. So far I only use this to auto follow those who follow me and send welcome and thank you message to my new follower.

TwitterCounter – This is for the vain pots out there. It gives you a little counter that you can add to your blog as display the number of folowers that you have. I have it installed at the footer of this blog. It does not do anything much but it is a nice little thing to show on a blog.

FriendOrFollow.com – This site helps me manage my Twitter contacts. I use it to review those people who I followed but not following me back and it gives me the option to remove those people from my list. It is very useful for doing housekeeping on your Twitter. There you can find, 1-People who don’t follow me back. 2-People I don’t follow back. 3. Mutual Follow.

Magpie – Last but not least, why not make some money while you tweet. This is an affiliate program that let you tweet some paid advertisements using your Twitter account based on your own preferences. I have made Euro1.96 so far on this. It is free to join but the competition is high and it takes time to get something there.

Well, you do not have to do anything but just use your Twitter as you always do.

There you go! Do let me know if you have are using or know any other Twitter related stuffs that I should have. Happy tweeting my fellow twitters!  To those who wants to follow me, just click on the blue bird ya!

I love Firefox not because many claim that it is the safest web browser in the world. To me, there is no such thing as safe surfing on the internet. It is just like there is no such thing as a car that is totally safe to drive. You just need to be careful and not do some stupid things while you are at it.

At the same time, many claim that Firefox is the fastest web browser in the world. There is some truth in that statement when running it side by side to the fat Internet Explorer from Microsoft. However, when it is timed against Google Chrome, that opinion might not really hold 100% as some sites are loaded faster on Chrome compared to Firefox.

So, if those are not the reason to fall in love and to be still in love with a fox that is on fire, what is it then?

Well, it is none other than the Add-ons! Those little programs that hop into the back of the fox and make its fire hotter are the answers. Now I am going to share with you what Add-ons I have on my Firefox 3.0.3:

1. Download Statusbar – I use this download management add-on a lot for downloading pictures, plug-ins for my blog as well as some other things that I need to download. I chose this because it does not give me one of those big download windows that pop-up on your face when you are dwonloading something.
2. Downloadhelper – This add-on is primarily used to download YouTube videos to my hard disk so that they can be viewed offline. An FLV player is needed to play those video or you can install a video converter program and get this add-on to convert it to the format that you want automatically.
3. Entrecard Toolbar – I am an Entrecard member and this one helps me to do my daily drop.
4. Extended Statusbar – I like the status bar on Opera web browser and finally I found this. It shows percentage of the page loaded, number of loaded images, bytes downloaded, average download speed and load time. It is more for fun than anything else.
5. FireFTP – FTP program is a must have for those running their own sites. So, instead of installing a separate FTP program, I use this add-on and it has done nothing but wonders so far.
6. Flagfox – It displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and web server information. For example, if your site/blog is on Blogger, then the US flag will appear. If you load this blog, the Malaysian flag will appear.
7. Gspace – Not G-spot! This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host. I have never actually used this so far.
8. Linky – A handy tool if you need to open multiple links on a page into multiple tabs and then you can visit them one by one. You are going to be sure that you would not miss a link.
9. Resurrect Pages – This one performs like magic. Dead pages, broken links, the scourge of the internet. Powerhouse sites like Slashdot and Digg can bring a server to its knees. What do we do when a page is dead but we still want to see it? Call in the clerics, and perform a resurrection ceremony! Or, the easier route, use this extension. I had even managed to copy some entries from my defunct blog at Modblog using this.
10. SeacrhStatus – A quick way to view that PageRank and Alexa rank of the site/blog that you are visiting. It displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.
11. Tweak Network – I was using Fasterfox on Firefox 2 before and it is still in the experimental stage form Firefox 3. Therefore, I switched to this. With Tweak Network, you can tweak these settings, and you might be able to speed up the loading of web pages. You can also increase the maximum number of simultaneous downloads from a site (the default is only four). Please bear in mind that it can not do anything if the bottleneck is your own internet connection.
12. TwitterFox – I need to see what people that I follow on Twitter are doing and talking about. This is the best tool to do that so that I don’t miss a tweet.
13. Zemanta – An excellent blogging companion for me. Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.

There you go! What about you?

If you are not a Firefox user, you can go here.