Problogger runs a great post on what you can do with the spare time you can gain from not obsessing over your blog stats. So, rather than looking at who’s coming to your blog and what they do when they get there, concentrate more on getting more (and better) traffic to your site.

There are some real gems in this post such as:

readers really don’t “care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

and on top of that a great call for benevolence: why not spend some time helping new bloggers. Your reward will come. I’d suggest this all points towards one overarching principle which seems to underpin successful blogging: think of your writing more as community service rather than self-promotion.

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Possibly a bit premature given that the year is not even over yet, but MediaPost have pulled together a number of statistics on how many blogs are out there, how many people reads them, and how much money they make.

According to comScore, blogs had 77 million unique visitors in the US for August 2008 – as opposed to Facebook, which only had an audience of 41million. I didn’t expect these figures to be quite so high. Another impressive figure is that 77% of active internet users read blogs. Quite impressive given that the medium has only been around for about the last 5 years.

There is a lot more information in the MediaPost research brief. Read more…

Deirdre Breakenridge from PR2.0 Strategies has some great tips for corporate bloggers who are concerned their blogs are not performing just because they don’t get any comments.

She gives a number of useful tips to get around this, particularly if you have an executive blog where visitors don’t feel confident posting. She makes the excellent point that best blogs are conversations and not monologues. Listen to your community and play an active role in it.

I’d suggest it’s also worth checking your web logs and looking at how many people visit the blog, and whether or not they are engaged enough to stick around and come back for more. Benchmarking these figures can be tricky, although if you have multiple blogs, you can compare them against each other.

Read Dierdre’s post on attracting more comments

With all the recent hype surrounding Google SearchWiki and the ensuing row over whether the changes add or detract from Google’s core search offering, it makes you wander to what extent Google trial this services prior to launch.

In this post on the art of field study, you get an idea into what Google does in the realm of usability (they are not alone given that they have one of the most used interfaces on the planet – check out this early eye-tracking study).

They perform surveys:

It turns out that people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior.

They undertake eye-tracking studies:

Notice how methodically the gaze moves from result title to title, occasionally inspecting the snippet text to gain more detail about the result.

And generally spend time with users getting to grips with what they do. The post is thoughtful in that it also considers some of the limitations of usability testing – particularly in the lab scenario.

One of the questions that springs to mind though is what exactly is the link between the usability team and the engineering guys? Just how much teeth do these usability testers have? I’m not advocating that they should have more control of the interface – after all, it’s refreshing that counting in web years, the Google interface has hardly changed in a millenium. The design just hasn’t swung with every whim of the crowd. We need some standards in this life.

Read more about Google’s usability studies

Buildify have a great post detailing the additional pages you can add to supplement your blog. This is a great idea given the number of visitors that will arrive deep into a blog through search. Treat every page as a landing page and make sure you have the resources available that will let your visitors know more about you and your blog.

For instance, an About Us page is vital to give your blog some background and personality. A Contact Us page lets users get in touch, and adds a degree of transparency. The Update Page they suggest I find a bit more tricky to understand although they describe it as a place where you can get all ‘salesy’. Having a page that lists all extensions, widgets and plugins is great to offer all the tchotchkes now on offer that spreads your message beyond the corner of your blog.

All great pages to add – although some of these features could just as easily live on your sidebar. Just remember to include them somewhere and give that blog some context.

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Spout follows up on a post from Paul Chaney at Marketing Profs Daily Fix asking the question who should write a corporate blog: one person (create a cult) or a team (more reliable, but not such a definitive voice).

Spout argues in favor of the team approach, suggesting that this gives more touch-points into the company and a more rounded view of what’s happening. I’d say I largely agree with this. Of the six blogs we run here, by far the most successful have been those that have a team, rather than a single author, behind them. This could in part be due to these blogs generally producing more posts – and we do see correlation between posts and traffic.

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Mack Collier’s Viral Garden is a great place to catch up on what’s going on in the social media space. As far as this industry goes, you could call him a veteran. Bryan Person recently caught up with Mack at the 2008 MarketingProfs Digital Mixer (MPDM) and took the opportunity to ply Mack with various questions related to corporate blogging.

Listen to the interview

Google today unveiled what it’s calling Google SearchWiki – a way for you, the user, to move its results up or down or add your own comments to results pages. Whilst these changes will by default only be seen by you, there is the option to open this up and see all comments anyone has made on a search page. Google is touting this feature as a way to give you more control over the search results you see. In order to use this service, you need a Google account and need to be logged in.

Little icons next to each result give you the ability to mark these up or down.

You can also add comments for each result, giving you a way to store information about common searches.

What this means for searchers

People use Google in many ways. For alot of these searches (eg. a navigational search to find the online site for ‘Best Buy’) this feature adds little value as Google generally gets these right. It is definitely more important for those doing research – perhaps working their way through each link down a results page looking for a potential product/service. In this instance you can potentially rank the providers and leave notes on those you find most useful.

I would expect the feature to be potentially more useful for ranking down bad results rather than promoting good ones – on the basis that it’s difficult to rank a result unless you have visited the site. A compelling site would hold you there – so you may never make it back to Google SearchWiki to leave your feedback.

Given that you can access all your comments on one screen, you can also use Google SearchWiki to build a history of web searches – in one, web-based location that hou can access from anywhere: home, at work, on the go. Hopefully in time Google will add some social capabilities to this, like a Del.icio.us or Friendfeed synch, so others can follow what searches you record.

What this means for website owners

For website owners, there is increasing pressure to produce good content – it’s not just about getting the top ranking (whether it ever has been is debatable). However, now, If you’re not giving the audience what it wants it’ll rank against you.

To ensure the ranking remains robust, it is definitely in Google’s interest to ensure the system can check spam and the votes of the unscrupulous. It’s the same cat-and-mouse game search engines have been playing against hardcore SEOs since search began, albeit with a social dimension.

Another aspect is that it is getting more difficult to know exactly what the audience sees – ranking reports are less accurate. Although a site owner may see them self rank highly for a given search, there is no guarantee their audience will see the same thing.

What this means for Google

Even if a very small percentage of users participate, Google will gain some valuable insight into how users perceive its rankings. As ZDNet put it:

“Google has the scale to take all of that user input, analyze it and potentially refine its algorithms. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll use this too much, but Google has millions of users that may contribute. Rivals may have the same technology for these search tools, but Google has the scale to actually get a lot of data to mine.”

Google themselves are obviously playing up the additional benefit to their customer: the search user base. According to Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google:

“We’ve always said that the best search engine is the one that understands what the individual user wants”
(Quote from the UK Telegraph)

So, just in time for Thanksgiving here in the US, Google rolls out the biggest improvement to search since Universal (or Blended) Search appeared 18 months ago. This gives the other search engines something more than turkey to ruminate over in this holiday season.

Read the Google release