Are you a Widget Freak?
Friday, den 22. August 2008I know that you love accessories and a lot of people are so accessory freak that they would simply add on anything to show themselves as “the in thing”.
Do you follow the same rule with your blog? I mean do you add as many widgets as you get to your blog?
If your answer is positive, you got some problems or you are far from being a pro-blogger.
There are some primary widgets or add-ons that you must have to run the blog smoothly. For example, if you are blogging in WordPress platform, widgets like Blog Archive, Pages, Tags, Categories, Recent Comments, Blogroll, Feed, Direct Contact Form, Related Posts plugin and All in One SEO Pack are good enough for you as a start up blog. Do you really need anything else to run your blog smoothly?
If you look closely, you will see that, I did not even include Akismet, which is considered almost inevitable for any WordPress blog. However, do you really need Akismet to filter comments right from the beginning? Do you really have enough comments to get an automated system to moderate?
Another common thing is showing off visitor counts from day one. Do you really have enough visitors to show off? Would it gain more trust from existing visitors?
I am not saying that, you should always take a minimalistic approach while adding widgets in your blog. But if you start using widgets hoping that your visitors may like to use it or if you add a widget to show off that you have a good collection of widgets, you are loosing your focus - your blog posts.
There is no doubt that widgets have the potential to divert your visitors from the focal point. Personally, I consider widgets to be exit points of any blog. Thus before adding any widget, I ask myself a thousand times if it would really help my visitors to interact with my blog. Can I do without that? Will it really add some value? Moreover, that’s not all - I watch its performance closely (Google Analytics) over a certain period of time before taking any final decision.
This is true for any industry or topic - even if you are blogging about widgets.
BTW, how do you decide on the respective position of a widget?
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Boxed Wine Saves the Environment & Money
Friday, den 22. August 2008Boxed wine has always been looked down on as the cheap way to consume the most elegant of alcoholic beverages. However, an opinion article from the New York Times says that this image should change considering the carbon footprint created by trucking around glass bottles.
The vast majority (90% +) of American wine is produced [...]
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Montreal, a Hub of Digital Culture
Friday, den 22. August 2008Yesterday’s post on New York’s upcoming Electronic music and innovation festival got us thinking about other similar events, and Montreal’s Mutek could not be ignored. Hoping to distinguish itself from the rave and club culture, the weeklong event highlights experimental electronic music and media art in venues throughout the city. In doing so, [...]
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Interesting Conference New York 2008
Friday, den 22. August 2008Open Intelligence Agency is bringing the fourth installment of their awesome “Interesting Conference” to New York City next month.
Interesting brings speakers together to talk about things they are passionate about, but may have never shared before. Previous conferences have covered a huge range of fascinating and random subjects including: what to do with a broken [...]
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Liu Xiang: Sponsors Scramble to Address Fallen Athlete
Friday, den 22. August 2008The Wall Street Journal reports that the fallout surrounding Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang’s withdrawal from the Olympic Games has been met with positive messaging from his sponsors. The athlete, who achieved worldwide fame after he won China’s first gold track and field medal at the 2004 Olympic Games, limped off the track last week complaining [...]
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Now Everyone Can Buy a Piece at the Guggenheim
Friday, den 22. August 2008The Guggenheim Museum is offering special edition jewelry that contains actual fragments of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original Guggenheim Museum building in New York. Sold exclusively at the museum store and through their website, the line features earrings, pendants, bracelets, a ring, and even cuff links. Designed by California-based jewelry artist Cara Tilker, the Restoration [...]
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Virtual Goods Sustaining Poor
Friday, den 22. August 2008In a game like World of Warcraft, some non-devout players often can’t be bothered to put the time & effort into gameplay to gain better weapons and armor for their avatars. So they’ll outsource gameplay to “gold-farmers” to play & advance their avatar. BBC reports that at least 400,000 people in China earn an average [...]
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UnionJac: Retail Concept for the 2012 Olympics
Friday, den 22. August 2008Design and construction of the sports venues aren’t the only buildings underway for the 2012 London Olympics. Columbus Ohio based Chute-Gerderman has already penned a concept for youth style shop inspired by British culture. The design was developed for Chain Store Magazine’s annual Store of the Future.
The UnionJac concept is part clothing store, salon, cafe [...]
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PenguinDating: “Where Book Lovers Meet”
Friday, den 22. August 2008PenguinDating is a new site by Penguin UK that aims to - you guessed it - help bookworms find love. In partnership with Match.com, Penguin launched the site to introduce a little literary twist to the online dating scene. While sites like GoodReads provide a virtual community for avid book readers, PenguinDating focuses more primarily [...]
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Say Goodbye To Phone Books
Friday, den 22. August 2008Even though physical phone book usage is on the decline, phone companies continue to print and deliver 540 million unsolicited directories a year. In our era of easily accessible online information, you would think they would get the hint. But no, the lucrative $13.58B phone book business keeps chugging along, wasting paper, space and electricity.
To [...]
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