ContentRobot

While most blogs are written and mananged by a single person, more and more blogs, such as the Team Timex blog and The Huffington Post have multiple authors and contributors.

This poses some challenges for the blog (mostly in terms of the blog’s design and the way the posts display) because of the many cooks tending the soup. If you are publishing a blog with more than one author, you might need to be aware of these issues:

Work Balance
Some bloggers will be prolific with many stories, while others will not add more than one or two entries. This is probably OK, but you need to be aware that others’interest and writing abilities will effect how much production you’ll get from them. Reward your busy posters and prod your less ambitious ones.

Training
Let’s face it, most bloggers have another day job. This means that they need to be trained on how to use the blogging software or an external editor. While it may seem to you that writing posts are the same as writing a Word document, it often requires some technical training. Thankfully, becuase the WYSIWG editors are similar to Word, most training can be done with some simple documentation rather than costly in-person training.

Quality
Some bloggers are not writers. You’ll find that you might need to go back and edit what’s been written. Soon, you’ll be able to let them go by following your blog’s style guidelines. But before that, you might be challenged with managing these issues:

• Images. Images are great to include with posts, but you need to be aware of copyright issues. Also, some images may be too big or placed strangely with the post, causing the design look less than professional.
• Content. Encourage your bloggers to stick the niche they’ve been asked to write. You don’t want to read about their kittens if they were supposed to write about the moon.
• Readability. Minimally, ask your bloggers to check their spelling and grammar. Even better is to have them make sure their posts are formatted with good paragraph breaks, proper HTML code, and that they are filed under the appropriate categories.

In Sum
Team blogging is possible if you discuss expectations. When the team gels, the site will grow exponentially and - hopefully - your blog’s readership as well.

According to The Competitive Advantage Ezine, teens don’t talk, they blog. And while teens do shop and read online, their greatest use of the Web is communication.

Instead of chatting on the phone for hours on end as their parents did, teens now frequent chat rooms and message boards that link them to Web sites where they can enjoy the company of like-minded souls.

What do they “talk” about? School, music, entertainment, hobbies, hopes, dreams and fears are the top topics at teen spots MySpace and Xanga.

So, if your company want to reach out to teenagers, take it to the blogosphere.

Tags: ContentRobot, Xanga, blog , MySpace

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Do you know where your feeds are? Do you know who is reading them?

Feedburner gives bloggers a simple way of finding out exactly how many people were reading your feed, how many of those people were clicking on items and which items they were following up on.

It’s an extremely useful service. You can choose between their free basic service, yet it’s well worth the mere $4.99 a month for the professional account that includes expanded metrics tracking.

Scraping and Splogging
Now, Feedburner has taken RSS and feed tracking to a new level by detecting and pointing out people that may be illegally reusing your feed. It will track the use of your feed and alert you when they think there is something fishy going on.

It now can “name names” to help blog publishers to find out who is scraping and splogging (”spam blogging”) their feeds. Categorized as “uncommon uses,” Feedburner can sniff out the thiefs and point you right to them.

No longer do bloggers have to rely on search engines or dumb luck to find out if their content is being reused. Instead, they get a neat report of all suspicious activity, complete with links to follow up on.

What Happened to Us
This is exactly what happened at our tunevroom.com blog that we publish. We found that a site, which was wrapped in advertising, was “scraping” our feed so it looked like the stories they presented were their own. Luckily for us, a simple cease and desist email took care of that and the feed was dropped.

Thankfully, the vast majority of RSS users are legitimate. But knowing is a lot better than not knowing and Feedburner’s new stats make it easier than ever to find out what your feed is being used for. That alone is great news for people concerned about online content theft.

This post was inspired by our experience as well as the great post at Plagiarism Today.

Syntagma interviewed Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc.

Q. What’s the single most effective monetization step for a blog network?

A. Create world-class content every day for a year. Folks get one to three months into blogging and they’re like “I don’t have an audience.” Uhhh … well, it’s only been three months.

If you’re going to make it in blogging today you have really be willing to invest a decent amount of time (or money).

So, there you have it! It takes to nurture your blog to attract the audience you seek. Don’t give up too soon!

You can read the interview here.