What is blog flare all about? What is a widget?

Blog flare and widgets are everywhere on the Internet today. This seems to be the new big trend. It makes some sense to me. A blog is fairly uninteresting looking. They are built from templates, which means that yours looks just like the next 500 that are created. Therefore, people really want a way to stand-out from the other bloggers so they can catch some attention in the blogosphere. In comes flare and widgets. Widgets are a form of blog decoration. Some people have called them the bumper stickers of the Internet. There was a big movement, at least in the US, back in the 80's where people put bumper stickers on their cars. The idea was that anyone could express themselves with a bumper sticker. You have people looking at your car anyway, why not make a statement. Well, the dynamics on the Internet are certainly different from driving, but some of the analogy holds true.

Widgets and flare are a way to personalize your blog and help your readers understand you. The more the author can make their blog a true extension of themselves, the more interesting the blog is likely to be to read. I think this is the human psychology behind why people post these things in such large numbers. I also think there is another entire group of bloggers who are simply posting for financial gain. In these cases, they don't spend much time on their blogs. For them, these added little pieces make the blog look more "lived in." It's like staging an empty house that you're trying to sell.

The technical dynamics of blog widgets is really straight forward. The widget provider gives you some HTML code that you paste into your blog. Many of the major blogging platforms permit this, some don't. While the IT execution is fairly straight forward, what this means for the Internet is actually quite profound. And I think this was the design of the HTML approach in the first place, but it's only now really being leveraged. HTML and IP was invented for distributed processing and decentralized hosting. By this, I mean, the page you are looking at can be a collect of content / code from a bunch of different servers. Sure, we all knew that. But with the growing popularity of widgets we're seeing the concept stretched to an entirely new dimension. Widgets are basically an mini-application running on your blog, hosted on someone else's server. You can have 10 widgets on your blog which are all provided by 10 different servers. Very cool. It's abstracted the very definition of what an "application" is even further into virtual territory.

Stay tuned!

So many blogs

There are simply a million blogs out there! Okay, that's a total UNDERSTATEMENT. There are hundreds of millions of blogs out there. With so many, how is it than anyone actually finds your blog? I guess the answer is simple, there are also hundreds of millions of Internet users hungry for information. These users are searching and searching for the perfect blog to give them the information that will satisfy their needs. How do the two connect? That's easy. Google. Google has a near monopoly on search. I think something like 60% of search runs through Google. Additionally, Google's profits are soaring. I just read a few days ago that their earning outpaced expectations again. This, in a time when the rest of the companies are feeling the effects of the slowing economy and credit crunch. Not Google. Their stock is well over $600 a share now...

At any rate, I like blogging. Even if I am ultimately typing to myself because nobody every reads my words, I like the process of writing and posting my thoughts on the Internet. I do, like everyone, hope that the occassional reader comes along and says "hey - I can identify with that dude." But it's not a requirement.

Bloggers are all looking for traffic. They want to create blog, promote blog and then make money from their blogs. The problem is that there a ton of people doing this. So there is a great deal of competition for this activity. I think the volume of content that is being created on the web is simply amazing. I don't have any stats on this, but I've read that it's REALLY REALLY REALLY big. So how do you make money with all this competition? I'm not really sure. One thing I do know, is that it's not as easy as all of the advertisements you will find say it is. I have friends who have been at it for a long time and are still not making any meaningful income. This is amazing because it seems like every other web page you visit promises you can make $1,000 a week if you only follow their system. Well, I'm here to tell you that those advertisements are total crap. Don't believe them one bit.

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I've been to many blog registration sites and put in my RSS feed with the hopes of increasing traffic. So far, I can't really tell if this activity is doing anything. blogskinny.com was different because I could actually watch the robot spider hitting my site from their real-time page. I'm assuming this will boost traffic to your site and ratings.

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