A week in Blogging - Nov 8th-15th 2007

It’s been a very busy week truly and there were both good and bad news for bloggers.

The bad news for bloggers was from Google, regarding AdSense. AdSense made the ads less clickable by narrowing down the clickable area to the title of the ad and the URL. So now, that means people who are really interested to click the ads only will gnerate good clicks (and money) and accidental clicks (on the space) will not be counted, even if some one clicks and visits the page. In my personal opinion the AdSense team has gone just too far with it. And in the process of reducing accidental clicks, they may just hurt the income of some genuine publishers as well.

But the message here to bloggers is that you should not rely to AdSense alone when starting your journey of making money online, because in case if they come up with some weird changes like this one, you are left with no choices. So as John Chow (and many others) says, try your luck with everyone. Affiliates, Paid ads, Links etc so that the aggregate will be a good amount.

Last week, Flickr users touched the two billion photos upload mark.It was not a celebration that many knew about but I think that was a milestone they could’ve celebrated with the users. Well,it was reported that a user called “Yukesmooksk“ managed to upload the magic figure photo but she was not rewarded at all, but just a few comments on the photo that went to history. Bad bad flickr!

MyblogLog is running a competition for US bloggers, to compete themselves and find who grows their community the most until Nov 30th 2007. The community that had the maximum growth will win some cool prizes. But honestly, it’s a good concept but somehow, it’s receiving cold response from bloggers Could it be because it’s US only? I don’t know.
Psst..MyBloglog also had some glitches with it’s avatar images not appearing on the widgets. What’s happening there?

On November 13th Yahoo search team posted a few “tips” to its users to help understand the search engine functioning and how not to run into trouble using them. But, hey if you check out those tips you will understand that Yahoo! is 1-2 years behind the industry (I’d love to hear someone disagree on that.). All of them were rolled out to SEOs and discussed my Matt and his team long,long time ago. Gear up Yahoo!

(Let me squeeze this in) Bloggingtips announced it’s Market place, where you can buy/sell things related to your blog like advertisements to co-bloggers and anything in between. Kevin has been generous to give a 30 day free trial period, so if you want to take advantage of it, go right now!

And yeah, if you are a problogger fan you would’ve already bought one, but we got to mention it - Darren has announced his ProBlogger T-Shirt Collection, for those who want to flash your blogging skills to the public. I strongly recommend that if you have a clean shaven head and wear glasses (forget the Australian accent), you are at a risk of identity crisis, so don’t wear one of them in public.

Compete, which is preferred by many search professionals as a genuine tool to measure traffic, released it’s brand new tool - Search Analytics Select, which is a service that reports competitive search performance within specific segments, giving marketers new insight into how their SEO/SEM campaigns attract and engage their most important customer segments.

That’s about it for the week, if you have anything to add up, do let us know. See you next thursday.