Healthacker.com, the newest addition to the Bloglogic network, is live. I’ve just submitted the following press release over at PRWeb.com and will contact a few blogging news sites over the next few hours.
Scifi Novelist Teams Up with Bloglogic.net to Create the Slashdot of Health
What do you get when you combine a formerly overweight scifi novelist, an outspoken blog network pioneer and a lack of passionate blogs on a major topic?
Toronto, Canada (PRWEB) March 29, 2006 — Tobias S. Buckell, author of the highly acclaimed science fiction novel Crystal Rain (Tor Books) has teamed up with the growing weblog network, Bloglogic.net to launch Healthacker.com, a new blog dedicated to helping geeks get healthy.
“My goal is to build a blog that brings together the best of the health and fitness areas online, and tries to keep out the cruddy ‘lose weight fast’ or article generated sites I see around so much. I’d like to create the slashdot of health.” says Tobias, a self proclaimed health nut.
In early March, ‘06, Paul Short, President and CEO of Bloglogic.Net Media put out the call for professional bloggers and recieved a wide variety of applicants, one of which was Buckell. After reading samples of his work, realizing the calibre of his writing and being inspired with his weight loss success story, Short set up a Skype interview with Buckell to get a feel for what he was interested in writing about.
After a short discussion, they came to a conclusion: “Up to this point, there’s been no #1 health destination in the blogosphere.” says Paul. “So through the combination of Tobias’ passion for writing, his success story with combatting his own weight problems and my realization that the health arena was woefully under targeted by mainstream bloggers, Healthacker.com was born.”
Paul’s goal with Healthacker.com? To work side by side with Tobias and “…create the Slashdot of health.”
Paul Short is the President and CEO of Bloglogic.Net Media, a small but growing network of mainstream weblogs. For more information, check out http://www.bloglogic.net
Contact:
Paul Short
Bloglogic.Net Media
110 Victoria St. W
Whitby ON Canada
L1N-1B7
Phone # 905-666-7609
In a few days we’ll be launching a new blog. This is one I’m very excited about because there aren’t many real blogs, or I should say popular blogs on the subject, plus, the editor there is a professional writer, published author and is passionate about the topic.
The blog is already linked to from a few sites and there’s enough content now to set the tone of the site, so all is well for the announcement later this coming week.
Heh heh, someone lifted a post and pic from Gadgetizer.com earlier today. They took the full post, hotlinked to the image in that post and reposted it verbatum, with no indication as to where the material came from. It looked as if they had posted it themselves.
Heh, you think the EngadgetKerfluffel was a circus? Well here’s a prime example of someone sourcing a story from a blogger and not giving credit, at all.
Now, yesterday I notice how a site-reference article ends up on the front page of Slashdot. So I read the article, and realize it’s a rewrite of Scobels article, making it appear that the author over at SR researched and sourced the info himself. He even cites Myspace and Craigslist like Scoble did in his article.
We always thought that it would be an advantage to Gawker to use Movable Type as a publishing platform. A host of plug-ins to provide additional functionality, and a community of developers to tap. Well, in practice, the plug-ins have been the bane of our existence: some are incompatible, others resource hogs. And the great community of MT developers is more impressive in theory than in practice. Gawker’s scouting for a couple of MT experts in NYC right now. Without much success. Six Apart doesn’t have a directory of MT-savvy developers, and the forums aren’t much help either. If you’re reading this, and you have the skills, email tom [at] gawker.com.
Well folks, it’s 5:30am here and I’ve been working almost non-stop all weekend. My main project? The new Gadgetizer Forums
If you’ve been following along here lately, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been grappling with how to effectively merge or add new features and benefits to blog networks. I’ve mentioned and gotten feedback on network branded RSS readers, newsletters, etc. as spinoffs to blogs and I thank all here who offered their insights. Very enlightening indeed.
I’ve also thought of testing forums attached to individual blogs to help bump up reader interaction and give readers an extension of the normal commenting features on blogs. Not only would this give readers a more robust interface for chattering amongst themselves, but it would increase pageviews on the sites and allow an easier way to attract user generated content which would help the site as a whole grow in size and SE penetration.
It’s more or less a test of how well forums and blogs can benefit from each other to build sites into more of a community and “destination” rather than just a blog. It seems to me a melding of the two could have a great impact on the success of a site, then maybe go with an email newsletter or PDF magazine once the user base is built up.
Specifically, how they seem to be handling caching and spidering?
Ok, so I subscribe to watchlists from Technorati. I “watch” certain key words and phrases like the name of my blogs, my own name, stuff I’m interested in, etc. and subscribe to the RSS feeds. That way, if someone blogs about my sites or me, I can pop by and see what they said. Very few people talk about me lately, which is a whole ‘nother story…
Anyway, I’ve been noticing over the past few weeks that I’m seeing a lot of old references to my blogs popping up - like from 4 month old posts on other sites. This leads me to believe that Technorati’s spider is either a) crawling and indexing a lot deeper and more thorough on blogs, or b) caching RSS feeds on their own servers, crawling those and adding to their index.
Another thing I’ve noticed in the past 10 days or so, is that Technorati is crawling and indexing comments on blog posts, or crawling and caching the comments RSS feed. I’ve seen my watchlist pop up with my own name and a site name for several comments I’ve made on other sites, that don’t link to me otherwise.
Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, I see it as a big plus since the more content Technorati crawls and indexes, the better and more complete the snapshot of the blogosphere is when someone does a search there.
Another thing I’d like to mention: The Technorati bot seems to be very friendly while crawling. Must be a well written and thought out script, unlike freakin loopy inktomi which I’ve had to ban from a couple of sites for sucking bandwidth. Not to mention numerous scraper bots…
Any other people out there geeky enough to notice these Technorati changes?
Folks, there’ll be a new editor weilding the mighty electronic sword over at Gadgetizer.com in the next few hours. I’ve been reading his stuff on another gadget blog for months now and he’s talented, knows his stuff, is in demand throughout the gadgetsphere, has a really cool name - and we got him. He’s also European.
The ink is barely dry on the contract, but after a few email exchanges I have good feelings about his ability to help take that site to the next level.
So who is it? Who will be calling himself The Gadgetizer from now on?
