It has been a week since this blog was added to Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio. So far, my predictions have been slightly off-mark. As expected, not much extra traffic has been seen from any of these sources. However, it was originally thought that Blogged would provide the most traffic. Instead, most traffic (out of these sites) has come from Technorati.

When trying to increase traffic to ones blog, does the day/time on which a blog entry is posted matter? I tried an experiment in order to determine this, but the results so far are inconclusive. In the experiment, two blog posts contained links to the Huffington Post, and Gizmodo, two of the highest-ranked blogs on Technorati.  These links within the posts cause them to be listed as "blog reactions" on the Technorati listings for the Huffington Post and Gizmodo. The hypothesis was that more people would be likely to see these posts on weekdays, as opposed to weekends. This would be due to more people reading on weekdays relative to the number of people posting "blog reactions."

... because no-one is reading. Ok, so this is not entirely true. However, it would appear that the number of readers does drop off over the weekend. Why would this be an issue? After all, the posts could easily be read on the following Monday. Well, this relates to trying to increase traffic by linking to other blogs. It appears that posts written over the weekend are likely to quickly become buried under other posts, before others notice that they are there.

Today I found a fellow Technorati skeptic, who is also trying to increase the visibility of his blog. In his blog post titled "Blog tips to get your posts seen by more people," he states that he hasn't had much luck with Technorati so far, and wonders how to "get some authority" (i.e., increase the Technorati authority value of his site). This authority value is based on the number of other blogs on Technorati that have referenced your blog.

Having signed up to Technorati, Zimbio and Blogged, my goal is to examine how effective each of these are in bringing traffic to this blog/site. At least one of these three sites has brought in a few visitors to the blog post titled: "A Skeptic's View of Technorati and Zimbio." These visits came either from mail.google.com (i.e., links from someone's inbox), or were marked as direct links. The direct links are most likely from email clients too. Thus, I have no idea which of the three blog directories/search-engines sent the emails containing the links. 

 ... courtesy of blogged.com. This morning I thought that I would have to revise my hypothesis regarding Technorati making it almost impossible for new blogs to get any exposure. This blog received a single visit from Technorati. However, looking at the URL showed that blogged.com had a lot to do with this visit. The referring URL was:

Since signing up to both Technorati and Zimbio yesterday, my skepticism has not decreased regarding how helpful these sites are likely to be for promoting new blogs. Both operate in very different manners, but neither appears to give much space for new blogs. Let us have a look at both sites, what they offer, and what the issues are.

Given the millions upon millions of blogs in existence, and the thousands of new ones starting every day, some sort of directory or search-engine for blogs would make sense. Unfortunately, it appears that all too many people agree. A quick search for blog directory or blog search engine brings a mind-blowing number of hits. There is as big an overdose of blog directories and search-engines as there are blogs. This is probably fueled by reports that some people have made money off their blogs; the smell of money to be made bringing in plenty of entrepreneurs.

Following up from one of the previous blog posts, I have deleted all the extra rewrite rules from the .htaccess file, and the CMS operates perfectly. So, here are the installation instructions for anyone wishing to use Silverstripe with kiwihosting.net.nz. These instructions may also solve problems on other hosts.

A new page is up in the projects section. This page is the dumping ground for all worthy ideas for software/gadgets that I have had, which I do not have time to develop myself. Anyone and everyone is welcome to peruse this page, and take what they wish. My only request in return is to receive credit for the idea, should anyone make some of the ideas a reality. I should be updating this page occasionally, whenever I have more good ideas that I wish to give away.