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Building Traffic to Your Blog
In addition to the links below, check the Blackboard site for Liza’s presentation.

Google Analytics
We set up this account in class by pasting the necessary code into the “footer.php” file for your site. You should be receiving data now and be able to see that someone in Davenport, Iowa spent 4 minutes and 3 seconds perusing your blog on Tuesday night because she did a Google search for “crazy analytics stalker” and your blog came up. If you’re not seeing data, let me know.

Google Webmaster Tools
We also set up this account to ensure that Google is aware of your site’s existence. Google will send out its “spiders” to “crawl” your site soon (creepy metaphor, huh?) and index your pages. You can speed up this process by using the optimization tools found on this site. Unlike analytics, you probably won’t see data for a few weeks or a month because Google doesn’t know you exist yet. But check back regularly to see if you have data. And be sure that you have already followed the next link to…

Add Your URL To Google
Google is a great search engine, but it’s not psychic. Add your URL to its list of sites to be indexed by following the instructions. This will hopefully get the ball rolling so that you can get some data on your Google Webmaster Tools site.

Google Blog Search
Find bloggers who write about topics similar to you (a.k.a. the competition), but don’t look at them as competition. Add them to your Blogroll and engage with their sites by reading and leaving comments. Blog linking and commenting are a two-way street and you will probably boost traffic to your site if you do this.

Google Keywords Tool
Use this tool to find out which keywords appear frequently in your blog or related blogs. This will give you an idea of potential tags you can use for your posts to increase search engine optimization and make them easier to find by Web surfers.

Linkvendor.com
This site has a lot of useful Web site data just waiting to be harvested. Choose from the options in the left menu, type in your URL and watch the hours slip away as you find out everything from how many outbound links you have on your site (Outbound Links) and which words appear most frequently in your posts (Keyword Density) to how high your blog appears in search engine results for a given keyword (SERPs Position).

Websitegrader.com
Get a free “marketing report” for your site. Even if you leave all of the fields blank (competitors, keywords, etc.), you can get a nifty marketability effectiveness score. The report will also tell you if there are things you can improve about the content on your site to make it more easily “spidered” and recognized by search engines, such as adding Alt tags to photos (the little descriptive tags that appear when your mouse hovers over an image). My blog (See how I just plugged it there? That’s what you should do to build traffic! Plug away!) somehow received a score of 91 out of 100, so that’s the score to beat.

Audio Assignment Stuff
Grand Central is an awesome service that also offers free recording, but Google just bought it and you have to sign up to be issued an account now. Fortunately, I e-mailed someone at Google and asked if I could get invites for the class.  Supposedly you will be receiving an invitation shortly, so check your inbox (and your spam folder…in case it gets misfiled.)

Audacity
This is the audio-editing software you will be using to edit your audio assignment. You should already have fond memories of Audacity from your glory days in Methods, but if you skipped Methods or have a short memory, here’s the handout on audio editing. Export as MP3 and use the Anarchy plug-in to embed your interview in your post. See Blackboard for the handouts.

Adding to Holly’s post about Twitter, new media blog, Read Write Web, has a piece up on how they use Twitter for journalism. I’ve got my Twitter account set up.

NY Times reporter Barry Bearak was jailed in Zimbabwe while he was covering the elections. In this article, he talks about the miserable condition of the prison in which he was confined for four days. More interesting is why he ended up in jail in the first place.

Normally, he says, he takes great precaution when traveling to countries hostile to independent reporters. For instance, he won’t take his lap top or recording devices into the country and he won’t take notes or conduct interviews in public– instead he will do interviews and note-taking behind closed doors and dictate his stories using his cell phone to someone across the border.

He also usually leaves off his by line to the stories he writes so officials can not link him to the articles. But because the NY Times was pressing him to file four stories a day for the Web site, he threw caution to the wind…and it ended up costing him a sore back, a case of scabies, and “an infestation of microscopic mites that swelled my hands and wrists to nearly twice their size.”

And he was lucky. He could have been in the hell hole for years. So my question is– what do we do when we graduate and get jobs at hot shot newspapers that demand we file four stories a day for their Web site? Does delivering breaking news, in actuality, deliver you to the breaking point? What can we journalists do to protect ourselves against this sort of slave driving that technology now makes possible?

This cnn.com article looks at how Twitter is keeping people connected, even in dire situations. An American student sent a one word text message to his Twitter account as he was being arrested in Egypt. That got the word out and may have led to his release.

Here is an interesting list of tips about journalistic skills that bloggers should employ and blogging skills that journalists might adopt. I find it somewhat ironic that the journalistic tips for bloggers are actually things that journalists-turned-bloggers should keep in mind for their own blogging efforts. When journalists are forced to blog, it often seems that they think their blog is just a print column posted on the Web.

But our class knows better, right?

FYI: I found this article through Journerdism, a fantastic site (run by Will Sullivan, a fellow Medill MSJ new media alum!) that links to news and resources about online journalism. Subscribe to his feed and you’ll receive his del.icio.us links in your reader. I guarantee these links will introduce you to even more sites that you’ll want to subscribe to. He always links to quality stuff that you should be aware of as an online journalist.

I came across this site when doing some research for my blog.  www.womensenews.org. It is a non-profit news website run by a former New York Times columnist, Rita Henley-Jensen.  Interesting in light of our classroom discussions.  The site emphasizes it uses professional journalists of the highest standards with offices in NYC, Washington D.C. and other “news hubs” around the world.  It is a very simple site in design and navigation.  (It could probably use a re-design.  The graphics, font and style look dated to me.) The site is free. Its business model is based on reader donations, reprints and licensing fees and lots of foundation grants. 

Blogs may be rendered obsolete by new technology.

This piece in the San Francisco Gate blends FDR and wi-fi in its suggestion about what the next president should do.

Dahlia Lithwick, who writes for SCOTUSblog and Slate, has an interesting article about the future of Supreme Court reporting in the age of blogs. She makes some interesting points that echo many of our own about how newspapers have to adapt and find new ways of storytelling if they want to stay relevant and start reaching a younger generation.

Time has rounded up their list of the 25 best blogs and wants you to vote on your favorites. There some interesting blogs in there that might give you some ideas for your own. Also see if you can spot AP style no-no in their headline. Way to go, Time.