Image via CrunchBase

A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.

In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.

You know what? All of them started “following” me just not long ago, maybe “waiting” for me to follow them back. Since this hasn’t happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers’ number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.

Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don’t think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it’s because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don’t care if you follow me back.

It’s great how Qwitter gives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by “marketing-only” twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, “much interested” in my thoughts and opinions:

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It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:

Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.

Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.

The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.

In the Top 5 - Reach we found some well known names:

1) Jason Calcanis

2) Ewan Williams (Twitter’s CEO)

3) Chris Brogan

4) TechCrunch

5) Guy Kawasaki

Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.

Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?

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Technorati Tags: Kevin Rose, microblogging, robert scoble, Social Media, twinfluence, twitter

Here is an image:

It’s not bad so far, but I’ll need to test it out more to get a good idea about it. Has anyone tried it yet?

Technorati Tags: Blogo, luca filigheddu

One example for all is my recent post about Apple iPhone vs Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. In a couple of days, it received more than 3000 uniques views mainly coming from Google Search. Other similar posts, where I tried to compare two or more hot mobile phones, ended up performing similarly.

That being said, how to make a blog post successful and bring many visitors to it? And, secondly, how to make it so successful that it remains on top of your list of blog posts in terms of unique visits? Here are three simple tips.

1) Choose the title carefully. If you choose your title very close to the one you guess people will use while searching on Google, it’s bingo time. For example, I verified that the format “X vs Y” for hot products of the moment is definitely a winning choice. My post “Apple iPhone vs Nokia N95” has been the daily most read post for many months and it’s still in the daily top 10. Moreover, make sure you have the latest plugins to manage SEO installed. In my Wordpress installation I use “All in One Seo Plugin” and it’s working very well, in particular for the so called “title tags“.

2) Spread the word everywhere. Make sure that any social netowork you are subscribed to is notified as soon as your post is published. Make sure an automatic Tweet is posted as well as your Facebook status, for instance. Many people come to my blog by just clicking on the URL shown in my FB status. Sometimes this leads to a massive burst of visits but doesn’t make your blog sticky. If you care about a certain post more than others, update your status on social networks like Twitter, Linkedin and Plaxo with a link to your post and every hour make sure to update your status with the same message… I can assure it brings an interesting amount of visits (taking for granted you have many contacts in those networks…).

3) Engage people who leave comments to your post. Starting a discussion about your post is always a very good way to keep the visitors’ attention very high. In addition, try to involve people sending emails to a couple of key bloggers trying to make them refer to your post in their own blog posts.

Bonus - 4) Blog about something hot. In times when people are searching for specific information on Google (new hot products announcements etc.), make sure you blogged about that (if it fits with your blog subjects and guidelines, of course). It can quickly become a popular post and you couldn’t ever imagine it could happen.

There is nothing really new in the tips above but I guess many new bloggers don’t really pay attention to the #1 which, in my opinion, is the most important. Do you have other tips to share? Leave a comment!

Technorati Tags: Blogging, luca filigheddu

Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr

Causal and not engaged one-shot readers or faithful subscribers? Well, no doubt, the latter.

I was noticing that while the number of pageviews of this blog is growing more and more (in the range of 1200-1500 / day) the number of RSS subscribers is quite frozen since I crossed 500 readers. Now it’s usually in the range 500-600, while I noticed that there are many recurring visitors that don’t use RSS but come straight to the website. Why ?!?

My invite is: SUBSCRIBE. With the new format of this blog, there will be news and articles which will be available for RSS subscribers only. Those will be tagged with the category “RSS Only” and I’ll not make them available to visitors. Those will be indexed by Google of course, but will become fresh content for subscribers only.

Here are some ways to subscribe. Just click one of the links below to subscribe with you default RSS reader or, my recommendation, Google Reader.

Generic RSS reader

There are many other methods to subscribe. If you want to get more information about RSS, take a look at this article, very well done, which explains what RSS is and how it can save you a lot of time letting you consume more news very quickly and effectively. That article basically responds to this question:

“I don’t have a lot of extra time but I find that blogs can eat up the little bit of time I do have. I find that some people don’t update their blog daily or even weekly but I can’t remember if I checked their blog today or I check again later in the day if they didn’t update. … Do you have a good way to set this up? I don’t subscribe to blogs either, because I don’t really understand why I would do that.”

Technorati Tags: Aggregator, Feeds, Google Reader, luca filigheddu, RSS, Social Media

Video posting is not available yet… anyway stay tuned, more exciting news will follow very soon:-)

The integration with Hictu! took just a couple of days thanks to Hictu’s new set of APIs and the great support we got from HelloTXT.

HelloTXT is currently all you need if you want to update your status / send a “micro” blog post on various social networks and microblogging services. The list of supported services is impressive and I know for sure they are adding many more in the following days.

Users can update their status by using the very well designed user interface as well as Google Talk, SMS or email.

The services you are subscribed to are displayed on the right sidebar of your HelloTXT interface and you can also populate your posts by uploading pictures (through TwitPic) or videos (by embedding it).

A history of your posts is always available and you can check where and when you posted what.

They also have a very simple and usable mobile version that can be used to update your status while on the go. This is how it look slike on my Nokia N95:

What to say, congrats to HelloTXT for the fantastic service and the great job they are doing and I’m really proud my company’s video micro blogging service Hictu is now available on HelloTXT as well.

Still not on HelloTXT? Join it here.

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Kaalga is a Firefox extension which integrates a very useful feature into your Wordpress blog editor. It basically highlights some particular words or phrases while you are writing your posts and suggests some possible links. Actually Wordpress is not the only supported platform but it works well with Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal too.

Usage is very easy: use the combination “shift + right click” (shif+ctrl+click on a Mac touchpad) when your mouse is over the underlined words and a window with some suggested links pops up. The image below shows how it looks like:

Behind the scenes Kalgaa uses a semantic analysis engine called OpenCalais and shows the relevant results through Yahoo search.

A similar feature is provided by Zemanta too, a great plugin I use to insert links, tags and images to my blog posts very easily. Unlike Zemanta, one of the cool features of Kaalga is that it lets you insert your domain as the preferred source for links, making it very easy to insert links to posts which belong to your blog. The popup window then shows you your domain’s links first (with a red “L” which stands for “local”) then other links on the web.

My opinion? A big thumb up for this extension, definitely a must-have for any blogger and it is what I was always looking for. The funny thing? I had to insert the link to Kaalga.com manually

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Technorati Tags: Blogger, firefox, kaalga, LiveJournal, luca filigheddu, Movable Type, typepad, wordpress, Zemanta

Writing a blog post from a portable mobile device has always been challenging to me. There are many solutions, but one of the main problems I experienced is getting a user experience as close as you can to that you are used to by writing through a blogging tool on your computer.

I blogged from my Nokia N95 a couple of times, mainly to publish to my blog a photo together with a comment. The overall experience has not that great, mainly due to the small screen and to the lack of a keyboard.

Now, with the iPhone, the number of options bloggers have to write and publish a blog post while on the go has really increased. The purpose of this post today is putting together a couple of solutions which make blogging from your iPhone a very easy activity.

Wordpress

This is a must-have for any blogger who run a blog on Wordpress (like me). They just released version 1.1 and it looks like very well designed and providing a user experience very close to the web version (even if with less features). You can also embed photos on your blog post and upload them to your blog, whether you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog or hosted by Wordpress.com.

The following video, provided by Automattic (the company behind Wordpress), offers an overview of the main functionalities.

As soon as I get a 3G iPhone, this is definitely going to be one of the first apps I will install.

BlogPress

Blogpress is a multi-platform blogging software for the iPhone, a great choice if you run multiple blogs on different platforms.

Currently the following blogging services are supported: Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad and MSN Live Space. You can easily upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums or to a self hosted BlogPress Public Album.

An interesting feature is the ability to post the same content at the same time to multiple blogs. In the screenshot below the author is publishing a photo to Blogger as well as to MSN Live Space.

BlogIt by SixApart

Unlike the applications above, BlogIt is a web applications that you can use from your iPhone’s Safari browser. It’s much more than a blogging tool which works for TypePad, MovableType, Vox, Blogger and LiveJournal, but it also lets you update your status on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Pownce.

SixApart also announced a native blogging application for TypePad available for free on the App Store already, but it doesn’t seem to be as much complete and full-featured as BlogIt. Even if web based, I would definitely choose BlogIt over the native one.

Tumble

If you are a Tumblr user this is the application for you. Tumble is a native iPhone application which lets you easily post photos and text to your Tumblr blog. You can download it from here.

LifeCast

LifeCast is an iPhone blogging application for Blogger and Tumblr. The focus of this application is to help users to create a timeline of their life and post it to their blog. Unfortunately not many blogging platforms are available and some options, like the ability to post photos, are available for Tumblr only.

Here is a list of feature this application provides:

• Create multiple LifeCast timelines : one for work, one for home, another for a special event or maybe a vacation tour.
• Optionally connect each LifeCast with a blog. You can have a different blog set up for each LifeCast.
• Enter text entries with a title and body text
• Take a photo, or choose one from your library, and give it a title
• Fix the location of any text or photo entry. View the locations of past entries using the Maps application.
• Post your entries to your blog* Choose which entries to post and which to keep to yourself.

I find some of them very innovative, even if traditional bloggers will find this app a little bit confusing (at least, this was the first impression I had by watching their screenshots, even if I have’t tried it yet).

VirtueSoft Blogwriter

BlogWriter is a very clean and usable blogging application which supports Wordpress blogs as well as MSN Live Spaces. It’s not a free app, but the $3.99 they ask for doesn’t seem to be that much even if I bet no bloggers who run a Wordpress blog would never choose this over the native WP app for iPhone. The good thing is that a RSS reader is included, so that you can read your favorite news from within this app.

BlogWriter can be bought here.

ShoZu

Shozu is definitely the most complete application in this list. It’s much more than a blogging editor, it actually provides users with a powerful posting and sharing tool to various blogging and social networks as well as photo sharing services like Flickr.

I’ve been using Shozu for a while on my Nokia phones and I have to say it really rocks. I also used it to post photos on my blog some time ago and it worked really well. These premises lead me to think that the iPhone version is even better and surely more usable.

The video below shows you ShoZu in action on the iPhone. Really cool.

Shozu for the iphone can be downloaded from this link.

CellSpin

CellSpin is another application that is much more than a blogging editor only. With CellSpin you can easily post various types of content (text, audio, video or photos) to different sites, blogs as well as social networks or photo sharing services. The number of available sites is impressive. For each of them, all types of content are admitted, except for those specifically designed for photo sharing.

The iPhone and iPod touch are just a very small subset of supported devices, whose list is really impressive. One of the differences with the other softwares is that CellSpin is rather a service than an app only. After you sign up, you also have other options to post your contents, such as SMS, MMS and email. CellSpin was also awarded with the Top Mobile Application 2008. The video below, taken during DEMO 2008, shows CellSpin at work:

Conclusion

Even if many of the applications listed above are designed for specific blogging platforms and only a few of them give users a wide set of options, I have to say that they still don’t provide all the features you are used to find in many desktop applications like MarsEdit or Ecto. In addition, the latest version of the Wordpress web based posting tool provides you with so many great features that, together with some plugins like Zemanta, makes that user experience definitely unbeatable.

All that said, if you are a eager blogger and don’t want to miss the opportunity to post to your blog while you are on the go, these applications are for you (and your iPhone). I look forward to trying the Wordpress app on the iphone, as soon as I get a new one (I have a 1st gen version, but had to give it to my wife because my SIM is for 3G phones only…).

Do you know other apps not listed here? Please leave them in the comment section.

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Technorati Tags: Automattic, Blog, blogpress, blogwriter, cellspin, iphone, lifecast, luca filigheddu, Movable Type, Pownce, shozu, twitter, typepad, wordpress

As you can see by yourself, it’s more and more news oriented and a dynamic homepage lets me highlight the most important news, even if you can find the latest ones by browsing each category very easily.

I’m also willing to host well-known guest bloggers to share their thoughts on specific subjects they are expert in. If you are interested in posting a guest article at LucaFiligheddu.com, please drop me a line.

Many little adjustments are still undergoing, so please leave your feedback and I’ll be happy to get back to you or to fix any bug you should find. Thanks!

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