AdesBlog.com

Don’t you agree with me? I think WP is moving towards that direction now. In the very near future, I am positive that it will become full fledged CMS (content management system) instead of being just a blogging platform.

With its open source and open platform nature, it will be so much easier to setup a website (for anybody) then. Just like now, there will be tons of plugins that would be built for standard website requirements (i.e payment gateways, statistical tools, newsletter integration, photo gallery.. etc).

I hope that WP 3.0 version will move in that direction.

My friend Nurbek pointed me to this news, which I thought was pretty amazing.

Source: MercuryNews
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So if you are not already using Twitter, make sure you register today ;) Because you never know in what (emergency) situation you might find yourself in, especially when you are overseas.

As you know Twitter supports SMS updates from your mobile phone internationally. After you have registered, don’t forget to verify your mobile number. Also don’t forget to add your Twitter account to your mobile’s addressbook (for easy SMS). An of course, you should inform your friends about your Twitter account. Otherwise, rescue mission might take considerable time ;)

Keep an eye on my twitter from time to time too ;) Especially when my blog goes un-updated for a long time. (God forbid).

I have this feeling that top bloggers do not really follow other blogs. I think they are too busy to read other blogs (probably busy with their own blogs or working on other projects). And even if they followed, I presumed that there must be only a handful of blogs that they really followed on daily basis.

In order to test whether my theory was true, I twittered some of the top bloggers and had two of them respond. One was Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com and the other was Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com Below is their replies to my question “How many blogs do you read daily?”.

I also sent one line question through email to few top-bloggers and two of them responded. One was Yaro Starak of www.entrepreneurs-journey.com, and the other was Darren Rowse of www.problogger.net

Yaro Starak said: Usually zero, but every few days I’ll spend some time checking about 5-10 of the leaders in my industry.

Just after I was starting to think that my theory was in fact true, I received an email from Darren.

Darren Rowse said: I track around 700 blogs - however I don’t read them all (I scan) and I wouldn’t do that on a daily basis. For me there are probably 50 or so that are on my daily read list but the rest would be weekly.

So, again it’s a tie. Not really a tie, but there are people on both sides. But if we were to follow the rules of statistics and make a statement on the poll results. It would read something like this:

Seventy five percent of top-bloggers either followed no blogs or followed less than 10 blogs daily.

Lesson to be learned from this

If you spend your day reading blogs (tens of them) and do not really do much other than reading blogs (like working on your own blog, working on your personal web projects..etc) then you might want to re-evaluate your reading habits.

Because these top-bloggers are successful not because they read tons of other blogs, but because they know what to concentrate on, how to prioritize their daily tasks, and most importantly they know how NOT to waste their time reading so many blogs daily.

Because, at the end of the day, if you do not take action (i.e do something: launch a new niche blog, work on a web project, or make a new software… etc), reading hundreds of blogs daily won’t make you successful. The difference here is “reading only and doing nothing” vs “reading important things from selective blogs, learning from them, and then making use of this newly acquired knowledge - applying them on your personal projects“.

Your say…

Now, let me listen what you have to say about this theory. Do you think top bloggers read many blogs? And what should be a healthy dose of reading blogs daily? Do you think reading too many blogs will affect your own productivity negatively? Look forward to your comments.

After this, once in a while I would like to post theories that is based on my own personal experiences, thoughts, and ideas. We could then discuss them if they were true. This week’s theory is:

RSS via Email doesn’t work. Most of the people who subscribe to RSS via email will eventually unsubscribe. Ades

This is from my own personal experience. I had subscribed to quite a few blogs’ RSS through email. But at the end I have unsubscribed from most of them. The main reasons for my unsubscribing were:

• I ended up not reading them, partly because I have a lot of other emails to read (attend to).
• Too many blog-posts a day.
• The posts didn’t bring any value.

If this theory is true and if your blog posts are mainly “ramblings” then it’s not a good idea to emphasize RSS via Email feature on your blog. Rather it’s best to concentrate on normal RSS subscriptions i.e RSS that is read through RSS readers like Google Reader.

What is your thoughts on this theory? Do you think, in general, this theory applies to most blogs?

I have decided to go fully on RSS, in other words this blog will be accessible through RSS only. So don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS if you want to continue reading this blog’s content.

The blog itself will be removed completely and the URL will redirect all the traffic to my other site www.adesdesign.net.

So, again, bookmark this URL and keep it safe feeds.feedburner.com/AdesBlog. More on this I will write in the upcoming posts… (which will be only published to the RSS readers).

I have sold (or as entrepreneurs say “let go”) one of my projects UserInterfaceIcons.com. It was a four month old site that was launched November last year. It was listed on SitePoint and within 10 minutes of listing was bought through BIN (Buy It Now) feature for $5,900.

Initially I had invested about $550 for the development of the icons and hosting + domain name. So it’s about 10 fold return, which I think is quite good.

Be Careful To Whom You Sell Your Sites

Now the regret part. I had explicitly asked what the new owner will do with the site, what his plans were, and how he would be using the site. Because I didn’t want the site to go to someone who would abuse it and use it for illegal things. His response was, he would be using it for the same reason (providing free icons) and develop it further.

He didn’t use it for illegal things, but he is now pushing Adware (Zango Toolbar) product when the user wants to download the icons. Clearly this is what I didn’t want the site to be used for! But deal is deal and the site has been sold. I can’t really do anything about it now.

I have told him to remove my personal info from the site asap. Because I do not want to be associated with pushing adware products. If you have time, please send him a message to stop using my name on the site. (Thanks in advance).

I am sure he would want to have my name there as long as possible, because it will be more believable to the users. As a result he would push more downloads and make more money. But I won’t allow that, if he fails to remove it, I will be taking legal action against him.

Lesson: Make a proper background check of the buyer before you sell your sites! I had checked, but obviously I didn’t check enough.