social media

Bloglovin v Feedly – and what is RSS anyway?

28th March 2017 by Jax Blunt 9 Comments

Time for an update on the Bloglovin situation. As you may have seen if you’re on social media (and if you’re not, how did you get here anyway? 😉 ) Bloglovin have made a statement that the canonical URL pointing to their site was an oversight, it’s all been fixed, and everything is hunky dory.

Except.

There’s still that little issue of a copy of your content on their site. And your images. And share options which share the bloglovin URL *not* your site.

This isn’t how RSS readers usually work. Sorry, but no. Back in the mists of time (probably around 2005??) I did some development work using RSS, and for my sins, I know way more about RSS than most people realise there is to know.

Basically, and this is the as non technical as I can make it version, your blog consists of content that you’ve written, then a whole load of instructions (html, css, code) that are used by computers at various stages to display it in friendly formats for people to read. Your content in this case isn’t just the blog post itself, it’s the tags, categories, title and so on – all the bits that are different from post to post.

RSS is a different way of describing that content, and it’s utterly consistent so that every RSS reader everywhere knows exactly what data it’s getting. Yes, readers can then display it differently, and can make it more or less pretty, but RSS is a really tightly defined way of listing out which bit of content is which.

In a recently updated help article on their site they say

What does Bloglovin’ do with my content?

Once we discover new content via your RSS feed we incorporate it into our platform in a few different ways.

First, we update your blog’s profile page on our platform, this page contains a summary of ever post on your blog.

Next, we create a page on our site where your content lives, this page has a canonical URL pointing to your blog post and ensures that google and others know that you are the creator. You get all the credit for the post. We prominently display your blog’s name and URL, and link directly to the original post.

OK, and this is where we’ve gone a bit off the reader aspect of it all.

Disregarding the canonical bit (which isn’t entirely correct if you’re using feedburner or feedblitz to serve your feed, they’re using that URL not your site URL), let’s look at what happens with that content page.

If you tweet this version of someone’s post, you tweet a link to bloglovin. If you pin an image, you pin the bloglovin page. How is this giving the content creator all credit for the post? Good grief, my name as author isn’t even on the page! If someone comments on this created page, I don’t get a notification, and as far as I can tell, I can’t moderate it. Jolly good. Can’t see any potential issues there at all.

What should a good RSS reader do? Enter Feedly.

Isn’t that clean? (I’m a big fan of simple and elegant.)

Yes, it’s still minus my blog sidebars and so on (which means any advertising there is invisible) – that’s because RSS only serves up your written content as it were. But see those share options? If you use them, you share links to your post, direct on your site. Feedly isn’t hogging the limelight here, they are merely allowing people to gather feeds in one place, read the content quickly and easily, and interact with it in the way they want. Perfect.

If you want to set your RSS to an excerpt (wordpress>settings>reading) feedly will display just that excerpt with a link to let people arrive at the original. Do be aware that will affect anything that relies on your RSS – so potentially email subscriptions? Depends how you’re setting it all up.

Bloglovin has moved from being an RSS aggregator/ RSS reader to being a full on syndication site. They are publishing your content (if they’d like to disagree with that assertion, perhaps they could explain the value in the og:publisher field? That’s their facebook page ID right there. The original from my site has me as the publisher, funnily enough.)

It might be that you’re OK with that. It might be that you feel that being visible on bloglovin has value for you – and only you can take that decision. But I’d ask you – how many views are your articles getting on their site? And how much traffic is actually arriving at your own site from there? Who is really getting the benefit of your hard work here? Is it you? Or is it bloglovin?

Personally, I’m moving all the feeds I follow to feedly, and pulling my blog from Bloglovin 🙂

Edited to add – you can grab an importable list of all your feeds from bloglovin here and import them to feedly here. Thanks for the tip Anna 🙂

Find this post useful? Please feel free to share, or you could even buy me a coffee 😉

How to share links to facebook with just one image.

18th November 2015 by Jax Blunt 1 Comment

If you’re in the habit of sharing your blog or brand links to facebook, you may have noticed that recently something changed and instead of the one link with image preview, you get a kind of carousel effect. This is, quite frankly, kind of irritating.

You’ll be pleased to hear that it’s easy to avoid.

So, from my facebook page:

As you can see, I’ve pasted in the link to one of my recent, (highly popular!) posts, Getting up, going on. Facebook has popped to my blog and harvested three images, two from the post, and one, slightly irritatingly from the sidebar.

Scroll down under the preview carousel and you’ll see the three images are there, with blue boxes and numbers. Click on the images you *don’t* want, to deselect them. Then when you hit publish, after you’ve edited the text into something inviting and shareable of course 😉 you get the one image preview instead of the somewhat bizarre carousel effect that all lead to the same place anyway.

This tutorial relates purely to the web interface, I haven’t investigated thoroughly from mobile or apps but hopefully that gives you some hints as to how to make it all look a bit cleaner.

If you found this tip helpful, do please share, and if you’re coming to Mumsnet Blogfest this weekend, do find me in the tech clinic and pick my brains. Looking forward to seeing you there!

I look a bit like this. But not hugely, given I won’t be wearing glasses and my hair has grown a bit. Will replace with more up to date picture when there’s enough light to take a decent shot 🙂

Is Google really the only game in town?

14th April 2012 by Jax Blunt 12 Comments

Tonight on twitter I caught the buzz about someone losing their google pagerank, due to having had normal links (ie not no follow) in sponsored posts. Hard on the heels of that discussion there was a groundswell of questions. What is pagerank? Why does it matter? What’s a nofollow link anyway*? And so on. And I went on to have an interesting chat about where traffic for blogs come from anyway.

You see, I’m not that convinced that Google and its pagerank are all that important for blogs. Sure, if you want to sell advertising, most companies are probably going to check what your pagerank is, but if you aren’t, why would you be bothered?

Would you be worried about losing your google derived traffic? Does it deliver you good, interested, dedicated blog followers?

It’s my suspicion that most traffic to blogs from search engines falls into two categories. There are the ppl who arrive at a single clearly targeted post – such as for example my camping list. For a while that ranked top of google’s search for a camping list, I think it’s still on the first page. And I’m sure for most ppl it’s quite a useful resource. However, if they are looking for camping resources I doubt the rest of the somewhat eclectic ramblings here interest them, and I assume they are in the portion of traffic which bounces away again.

The rest of the search related traffic is probably slightly surprised at where they find themselves. For whatever reason a post here is thrown up as a good match for what they are looking for, when it manifestly isn’t, and they probably bounce immediately.

Bounce rate is another thing we’re told to worry about. But actually, for a blog, a high bounce rate isn’t so bad. After all, you hope most ppl are passing by regularly, so there should only be one new post for them to read, they read it and then bounce away. You’re looking for a reasonable percentage of recurring visitors, and ppl who’ve arrived from a search engine probably aren’t going to join in with them.

If you’re looking at your stats, there are all sorts of interesting things in there. You can find out what percentage of visitors are new, or which come back. You can find out how long they tend to stay on site, where they come from (around the world), where they came from (referring site). My top referring site is twitter – measure of how much time I spend on there I suspect. But I also get a good number of visitors from posts I write on other sites, such as Emma’s Diary blog. (What, you haven’t read it? But I’m scintillating on there. Rivetting. Pop over and check 🙂 )

And there are other useful places to pick up traffic. Stumbleupon. Pinterest. Facebook. Social networks with user generated links, entirely possibly delivering better quality traffic thaqn search engines? Ever wondered why google is putting so much effort into g+? It’s because they suspect social is the future of the web, and in that world, how is pagerank going to be relevant at all?

*It’s a link that has rel=”nofollow” in it, telling search engines they shouldn’t give weighting to it.

Ponderings on Klout following that there new algorithm.

31st October 2011 by Jax Blunt 3 Comments

Quite some time ago I wrote an article proposing that there should be more than one type of Klout. That they should separate out professionals/ brands from ppl. With their latest algorithm tweaking, I suspect they’ve started to refocus their attentions on those ordinary ppl, and I don’t really like the way it’s going. That may seem hypocritical, but stay with me for a minute.

I’ve read a lot of articles about the tweak in the last few days. One that really started to crystallise my thoughts on it this morning was by @heycheri on The Next Web, via @MikeJulietBravo. Now, these ppl are well into their social media, and like many ppl observing the punishing drop lots of us have taken, they’ve got this idea that Klout has reweighted everything to make facebook more influential. Why would this be?

I have a sneaking suspicion, probably cynical, that it’s all about the user as products. (And now you may be beginning to see why I’m not too happy about this.) We thought of ourselves as using Klout, as being important in how our scores worked out, but actually, we’re the product, and there were too many of us getting high scores too easily, via the twitter medium. My score was generally in the mid 60’s – dropped now to 53. But I hardly use facebook – it’s where I have family and friends and keep in touch on a vague basis, and since I discovered I couldn’t link only one page via Klout, I haven’t linked my blog page. Facebook is personal, while twitter is constant – educational, conversational, escapist, self-promotional, all sorts of stuff. I connect with publishers and authors, geeks and social media experts, bloggers and PRs, friends and home educators and the occasional slightly random stranger. I don’t work at building connections or spicing my timeline with retweetable quotes – and I tend to unfollow ppl who do too much of that. I’m looking for something a little more real. I follow over a thousand ppl, and have about double that following me but I’m guessing I don’t really spark a huge amount of interaction.

On facebook pretty much everything I do will have a bounce effect. It’s far more targeted to ppl who actually know me as a person, although the amount of influence I have over them is debatable. It might *look* like I’m influencing them more though, given it’s a tighter knit network and more likely to have ripples of action bounce through it.

And I think that’s what Klout has decided to value. That kind of tight knit network that we all stand a chance with, instead of the broader, often work or interest based networks we’ve built elsewhere. However, there is an invasion of privacy issue here – many ppl on FB have private profiles and might not want to be imported to Klout, but are being given profiles and scores as a result of their links to Klout users. I think Klout should be being very careful – I know of a number of ppl who have delinked the two for this reason, and I’m considering doing it myself.

Disregarding this, is the new algorithm really so much of a problem? Well, no, probably not for me. I’m not relying on my Klout score to get a job. But there are ppl out there who were, and for them, such a drastic and unexplained change in the calculations has no doubt been a very stressful experience. And I think Klout ought to bear that in mind before they go around shaking everything up. And perhaps being a bit more up front about it all would help too. And on whether I’m a product or a person? I’m a person, and I’m not interested in being sold to a brand for the value of my influence. It’s one of the things I disliked about google+ and I left there, I may yet do the same for Klout.

Still pondering.

social media

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