Most bloggers nowadays use Feedburner to monitor their feed statistics. While the tracking their is extremely useful by itself, a few enterprising web developers have used the Feed Awareness API to add even new functions to Feedburner. The one program that stands out from the rest is BlogPerfume’s Feed Analysis.

WHAT DOES IT DO?
It makes lots of fancy charts. No, really, that’s pretty much it. Still, those charts are exceedingly useful for seeing how your subscriber count has risen over time. It also predicts your subscribers after 3/6/12 months if you keep expanding at your current rate, and it’s fun to look at approximately where you’ll be in the future (apparently, I’ll have 2.5k readers within a year. Remember that the metric for determining blog popularity is whether your RSS count can be expressed in “k.” If you can, then you are automatically a top blogger).

My description doesn’t do it justice, so I’ll let these pictures do the talking:

Even if you’re not a stat junkie, you need to check Feed Analysis out.

Posted by Max Miroff | 31 Comments »

Performancing Ads is a new ad network that sets itself apart from all of the others in a lazy yet brilliant way: it exclusively focuses on the sales of 125×125 ad boxes on blogs. Instead of confusing people with such complicated things as 486×60 and CTR and whatnot, all it offers are those cool little square buttons that are the hottest thing on the web since, well, 468×60.

But don’t let my seemingly mocking introduction fool you - the concept really is nice. Most blogs have space for 125×125 ads and lots of people want to sell them, and making a dedicated marketplace for the format is a nice move by Performancing.

SO HOW DOES PERFORMANCING ADS WORK?
After signing up for an account and submitting a blog that you want to display ads on, you install the Performancing Ads plugin and add a piece of code to your blog. The process is fairly straightforward (although installing a plugin takes more work than the far-easier variant of putting javascript/HTML to display the ad) and shouldn’t take too long. You then set a weekly price for each square you add and wait for the money to start flowing in.

Well, kinda. I haven’t had a single booking yet for my test period (only two days, but at four bucks per week it’s a steal compared to my normal pricing) and all of the other sites that I’ve seen using it are filled with the default ads. This would be all fine and dandy if the backup ads actually made me money, though, or if I could at least CHANGE them. Not so. Having useless affiliate ads on my blog is not something I’m partial too, so Performancing needs to get its act together.

Despite this huge shortcoming, Performancing Ads is still worth checking out because it’s the first ad program of it’s kind.

Posted by Max Miroff | 21 Comments »

Posted by Max Miroff | 38 Comments »

It’s innovative, fresh, new, and another generic-sounding word describing something innovative, fresh, and new.

It’s Firef.ly.

Since it’d be easier to simply show you what it is first, click on the slider above to open it up (please hop on over to this page, RSS readers). An overlay will appear on Blog Badly and you’ll be able to type anywhere on it. If there is another reader here that’s using the app, you’ll be able to talk with them. I’ll be here for the next hour or so checking back on it, so you can talk to the famed owner of this prestigious blog

SO WHAT IS FIREFLY, EXACTLY?
One could describe it as a fancy pants chat client (because that’s basically what it is), but lets get into the nitty gritty: it’s a chat application that you install on your site/blog using a simple piece of code that allows for easy reader-to-reader-to-owner interaction. This takes place in a simple overlay that allows you to type messages and view what others using Firef.ly on the site are doing in real-time. This is a killer app because it’s

• simple
• easy-to-implement
• user-friendly

There is, of course, one problem: you need to have quite a few willing users for it to work, and a good amount of traffic. I’m counting on you guys to provide your feedback, whether in the comments section of this post or just by typing it into the app (it saves chat history too - and I can ban you troublemakers [even more cool features]).

Posted by Max Miroff | 13 Comments »

I envy contest bloggers. They can automatically join any cool blog contest they can find and their readers don’t hate them for it (because it’s their niche). They get prizes just for blogging about their topic. Their style of writing isn’t challenging at all and yet they reap all the rewards.

Why couldn’t I be a contest blogger?

Posted by Max Miroff | 18 Comments »

Posted by Max Miroff | 10 Comments »