Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Odds and ends on blogging

One new feature from Blogger.com is a long overdue enhancement to allow those leaving comments to be notified by email if there has been a reply.

So, if you leave a comment expecting a reply, you can subscribe and receive any further comments by email without having to go back and check the blog each time. This pretty basic idea has been available on WordPress and MovableType blogs for a long time but blogger just launched it recently.

If you have a blog, the feature is available automatically to your readers if they use a Google account, you don't need to change anything on your blog.

I recently subscribed to blogrush.com. It has not brought me any visitors yet, but I've moved the widget up to the top of the blog on the right hand side to promote it. If you see an interesting blog post title there, click to visit another blog in the blogrush network.

I followed one link today and on the blog I visited, Violet eclipse, I saw a link in her blogrush widget to a my good friend Gdog over at The Daily Kimchi. I think that almost proves that relevant links are being generated by their system. I continued following links and it led me to Japanese Penguin which is a blog written by three English language teachers in Tokyo. One of them has the misfortune of being an employee of Nova, a rather large English language school that has very publicly gone into administration last week owing 7,000 teachers several months salary.

I try to keep my blogroll on the right hand side up to date with blogs that are still being maintained. I've said goodbye to several blogs that have stopped posting and added new blogs, particularly on Japan, as I come across them. Check out some of the new blogs added on the righthand side today.

There is no good equivalent of the Korean Blog List for finding bloggers in Japan. The top two blogs JapanProbe and Japundit have sizable blogrolls so I'll be working my way through those in the coming months. RokDrop always has some good links from Japanese blogs in his regular Rok Droplets feature on Sundays. I very briefly considered joining the Yamanote line Halloween party on Saturday evening. Reading about the event afterwards however, I am very glad I did not.

Happy Halloween to you all.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, odd you mentioned about the lack of a Japan Blog List, as I have just recently started one. You can check it out here: http://www.japanbloglist.com/

You're already on the list! :)

Jon Allen said...

Thank you very much.

Your blog is only open to invited guests at the moment, so please send me an email with the password, or login to your blog and go into the Settings tab, go to the Permissions tab and change the Blog readers to Anybody so that we can all see it.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the spelling tip on my site! Whoops! I gave you a shout out, on my post http://cultureshock.kristiejoy.net/thanks-2/
if you want to check it out.
I have also been to South Korea ( I know your not there anymore) but I lived there for 3 months. Loved it and miss it! I will be bookmarking you and coming back! Hopefully you can visit my blog and offer any other spelling advice :) Thanks again.

Meg said...

Hey! The small world of the Asian blogosphere gets even smaller -- I went to high school with Roy from Mutant Frogs on your own blogroll.

Meg from Violet Eclipse

Unknown said...

Jon- It's been changed, thanks for the reminder. I hope you'll find my site useful!

So how would you compare life in Japan to Korea? I have been to Seoul once and it was a unique experience. I have yet to visit Japan though.

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

I dont have much experience with blogrush but blogexplosion has been pretty good to me when I started out blogging :)

Its typically a site where you get credits for surfing other sites. You can use these credits to have members surf to your blog.

Its interesting to see the people who stumble in :)

And speaking of stumble, you might want to subscribe to sumbleupon.com - as the previous link, this is another site where you can surf blogs and be surfed at the same time :)

Jon Allen said...

Japanbloglist.com will be added to the blogroll very shortly now it's been opened to the world.

Hi Meg,
yes blogging is a small world.

Rinaz
Thanks for letting me know about blogexplosion. I've not heard of it, but will check it out.

I am a stumbler, but I've not had any visits from it.

Anonymous said...

Hey don't forget www.japannewbie.com!

Hey I saw your blog rush widget in the upper right. That's pretty nifty. I haven't tried it yet, but heard about it.

I have also found that StumbleUpon can bring tons of traffic, but only for brief fleeting moments. Hopefully blog rush will bring a bit more consistent... long-term traffic.