• Automattic
• FeedBurner
• Google Analytics
• QuantCast
• Others…?

If you’re like me, you want to know whether anyone’s eating the meat you grind out from the butcher shop of ideas called your blog. Sure, there’s some measure of pride and ego involved: as your stats move ever upward your sense of confidence inflates proportionately. So does your sense of importance and pride. We all want at least a little touch of fame.

Problem is, unless you get a lot of comments on your blog, it’s difficult to know how many subscribers you have reading your feed, or which posts are getting the most attention, or whether your visitors are first-timers who never return, or old die hards who just can’t get enough of your tasty cuts. Yes, traffic analysis is more than just pretty charts, it’s a window into the effectiveness and impact of your writing — and promotion.

Good news: There are a number of free metrics, stats, and performance tracking packages to help you see out what’s going on with your weblog (or website). Just beware, though, mining your blog trackers for insights can get addictive and it often has very little return value for all the effort expended. However, if you’re looking to improve your blogging tactics, you need data. And for that, I highly recommend the following:

Automattic Stats for self-hosted WordPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Andy Skelton has just released this brand new plugin for WordPress sites, and it looks very, very promising (see also his “Day One” report, and Carthik Sharma’s review). As of today, if you are a WordPress blogger, you can piggyback on the WordPress.com blogging community’s very own metric system and, like Google Analytics, you don’t pay a dime, and there’s no server overhead to slow your site down.

According to the plugin’s documentation:

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

And it’s a very nice interface, indeed. Check it out, and enjoy!

FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com/

I think every blogger should use FeedBurner for delivering their feed because:

• You get a cross-browser, cross-feed-reader way to provide one-click subscription options.
• FB adds value to your feed items and posts with widgets that allow users to email the entry, find related content elsewhere, and even rate your posts.
• FB just plain cleans up your feed so that practically any reader on the planet can handle your feed.
• Plus, if you change your feed URL or your blogging platform, users don’t have to resubscribe. You just point your FeedBurner feed to the new URL.

That’s all good for your readers, but there’s more: For you, the blog owner, you finally get real, useful, stats about how many subscribers you have to your feed, what they’re paying attention to, and what the trends are in your subscribers’ activity. And that’s all good. And it’s free! If you pay for the pro version, you get even more data, more stats, and more options about the URL you deliver your feed from.

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

There really isn’t a more comprehensive stats analysis package available for free anywhere else. If you’re a statsaholic and you need to know the relative performance of every page on your site, if you want to know what’s the top entry or exit page, if you need to track your advertising goals (it integrates with Google AdSense, naturally), or if you want to know more about the “paths” users take through your site. Oh, you can also see the “bounce rates” for individual pages, which tells you which “entrance” pages are also the “exit page” for visitors. If a visitor clicks through your site to another page, it’s not a bounce. But if a visitor lands on a page and then exits, it counts as a bounce. I haven’t seen this metric anywhere else, and it can tell you whether a particular landing page is converting visitors to readers, or not. Very helpful. For infoholics, Google Analytics is your drug of choice.

The only problem, however, is that there is maybe too much information. So if you use Google Analytics and have a WordPress blog, I also recommend Joe tan’s excellent “Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin,” which provides a simple high-level overview of the most important metrics from Google Analytics. It plugs in to your WordPress blog and adds a “Reports” link to your Dashboard for a quick snapshot of the trends for daily visits, daily page views, average page views per visit, popular content, and more. Plus, if you use Feedburner, it will give you a quick subscriber report for your burned feed as well.

The best part about these two options is that neither adds any processing or database overhead to your WordPress site. Too many other WordPress stats plugins explode your database. This doesn’t because you’re not using your database, you’re using Google’s. Want to bet Google’s going to have nice, fast servers that don’t bog down every half hour?

QuantCast Internet Ratings
http://quantcast.com/

Some people like the Alexa stats system, and I check Alexa out from time-to time. But Alexa stats are really unreliable metrics since it only pulls in data from registered toolbar users, and its stats are extrapolated (i.e.: it’s a guess) from that small, self-selected demographic of users.

So, lately, I’ve been using QuantCast, which provides some interesting demographic details for a website. For example, according to QuantCast, here are my site’s demographics summary:

Tatumweb.com has 6,150 monthly unique visitors, 4,054 (66%) reside in the U.S. The site caters to a more educated/highly educated, primarily male audience.

The demographics information is interesting. It remains to be seen, for me, whether it’s truly useful or not, but if I were going to sell ad-space on my blog to another ministry, this would be useful information to include in a proposal.

Others…?

There are other free metrics systems I use (see my “stats junk” link at the bottom of the page), such as SiteMeter and StatCounter. I like SiteMeter quite a bit, but others have complained about it, and sometimes the counter does load slowly. So, SiteMeter may be going through growing pains. StatCounter is a good viable alternative offering a basic free account and a more detailed paid account.

I also use Technorati, The Truth Laid Bear, BlogTopSites, ChristianTop1000, and IceRocket’s BlogTracker.

Another tracker I’ve been using lately was created by my friend and fellow PneumaBlogger, John Abela. It’s The Top 100 Christian Blog Websites. However, it’s currently only tracking four blogs, and John’s not sure how many bloggers he really wants to add to his tracker, since that could hog server resources. Feel free to contact John if you’re interested, but you might want to wait a while, in case he gets deluged with requests due to this mention.

Finally, I use a WordPress plugin to create a Google-compliant sitemap for every post in this blog. This plugin notifies Google every time I update the site, and that kicks off a Googlebot session to come spider BlogRodent and add new pages to the vasty Google Index. This plugin is the Google Sitemap Generator provided by Arne Brachhold and it’s been very good to me.

A bunch of useful measurements are provided by Google via the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, which provides an eyeful of reports. Some similar reports might be available through your host’s cPanel, but it’s convenient to have it here at Google too. Reports like what pages are generating HTTP errors, which pages return a “not found” error, which pages are timing-out, and which URLs are simply unreachable. This is all good, because it points out what’s broken and should be fixed (when you have the time and aren’t jonesing on traffic data). Plus, these are reports external to your own site’s weblogs, which is a useful third-party verification of problems your site may not be catching.

But there’s more. Google nicely provides a Links page showing you every page it’s indexed from your site with a number in the right-hand column tabulating all the pages outside of your site which link to it. Click on the hyperlinked number and you get to see who’s linking to what page. Nice.

Google lets you download a spreadsheet of all the pages that are linking to every page in your site. Using this, I did a little spreadsheet magic, deleted all the inbound links from my other blogs and from my feed, and quickly found the top ten most frequently linked posts on BlogRodent — apart from the PneumaBlogs page (see sidebar at right).

That kind of data is very useful, and not found anywhere else that I know of.

Comments? Additions? Your favorites?

You might disagree with my picks here. And you might quibble that a number of these tools are WordPress-specific. Well, feel free to add your kudos, criticisms or dissent via the comment form. All takers welcome!

I’ve blogged on tragedy before:

• Church shooting at Sash Assembly of God, Sash, Texas and a survivor’s reaction (”God Protected Her“)
• Katrina (”On Moral Levees,” and “Nature, God, Blame and Shame“)
• Former A/G youth pastor, Eric Brian Golden, who murdered his wife (”Youth pastor slays wife, confesses. Why, oh why?“, with several updates)
• And 9/11, five years later (”September 11 and a Terrible Joy“)

But since the massacre at Virginia Tech, I’ve been at a loss for words. I’ve wanted to try to research this to put it into perspective for myself and perhaps my readers — as if anyone could. But it’s still too grisly and horrifying. I only know I’m already sickened of the politicizing going on around the tragedy.

So, I am relieved that a fellow Christian blogger has put what I think is the true proper perspective on this or any other tragedy. Kevin Stilley, of Encyclopedia Kevannica, writes:

Today and for the rest of the week every radio talk show and television news program will be discussing yesterday’s events at Virginia Tech. They will host philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and sociologists who will discuss the problem of evil ad nauseam. They will try their best to help the populace make sense of the senseless.

And, when they get tired of those topics they will move on to the political issues; — gun control, campus security, the cultural ramifications of violence in movies and music, etc.

On Sunday morning pastors will stand in their pulpits and explore such themes as the depravity of man, the comfort of God, trusting God when we do not understand, and more.

What a shame.

All of those issues are important and need to be repeatedly revisited and explored in depth, but ….

Jesus said that when we become witnesses to the unexpected tragedies of others to whom we are not personally ministering our response is not to be voyeuristic gawkers, philosophical soothsayers, or even theologians. It is a time for personal reflection and repentance.

It’s a great article, and a sobering one, putting our response into the proper perspective.

Encyclopedia Kevannica
“Our mishandling of the Virginia Tech tragedy“

I would simply like to add that when we are ministering to folks experiencing their own chaos, we should practice the proper response as modeled by Jesus … what Foursquare pastor Jerry Cook calls the Jesus Question:

Yet, here is Jesus Christ stepping out of eternity to reveal the only God there is, and He says, “I haven’t come to be served.” Now to me that doesn’t make sense. Again, my question is, If You haven’t come to be served, why are You here? Why did You come? Again His answer is, “I haven’t come to be served , but to serve.”

Immediately I begin to recall all the questions Jesus asked throughout the Gospels. Almost always they came down to this: “What can I do for you?” What were His first words to blind Bartimaeus? “What would you like Me to do for you?” What about the lepers? “What can I do for you?” What about the man at the pool? “What can I do for you?”

Indeed. How can we help?

How can I help?

While not as selective nor exclusive as my own PneumaBlogs list, Michele does have requirements. If you want to join the Christian Blogosphere BlogRoll, visit her site.

Click here to view the blogroll right here right now. Then bookmark!

Just now I’ve added a third page to my collection: PneumaSearch. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone crazy with the whole “Pneuma” prefix, just like I’ve irrationally appended “Rodent” to everything else. I guess, in the tradition of Web 2.0 mash-ups, I’m the PneumaRodent. But that may be carrying things too far. (Talk to my editor about it.)

Anyhow here’s what’s new:

I’ve finally gotten around to evaluating everybody who’s been asking for consideration, and it shows. My paltry list of 70-80 PneumaBloggers has shot up to 130+. That number could change daily, or weekly.

Also, previously, I’ve used the built-in “BlogRoll” or “Links Manager” function of WordPress to manage my ever-growing list of Spirit-filled bloggers. But, no more. The WordPress link management system is just too unwieldy for this sort of list, and it’s too difficult to output and format things just the way I like it. Sure, if I were a crack coder, no problem. But I’m not.

So, after spending hours and hours attempting to fit every online blogrolling tool I could find into my format and needs, I’ve given up. I’m now going old-school and using an Excel spreadsheet to maintain all my information, from email addresses, blog-owner’s names, URLs, and even my pithy descriptions. Who knows, some day maybe I’ll add rankings and ratings.

The upshot of all this for you is that it’s now easier for me to maintain my list and insure it is always kept up to date. Now I can add a blogger, save my spreadsheet, and with a few simple actions, I can have an updated link list out on the site within minutes.

Please, check it out. And notice that nifty little homepage and feed icons. Feedback welcomed.

First: note the obsessive fascination with suffixes. And, yes. I’ve changed the name of the page to PneumaSphere.

Second: This page, too, wasted several hours of research-time trying to find the ideal online aggregator just so I could display a “river of news” for the most recent items from my link list. After trying a dozen aggregation and re-feeding sites, I’ve come back to my old standby, the BDP RSS Aggregator. It’s a sweet application and does nearly everything I need it to do, except manage my linkroll list (see above). So, for that I use Excel. I could bore you to tears with my travails in finding a usable online aggregator, but, well, nobody cares. If you, for some reason, do care, contact me. I’ll send up a prayer for you.

And, finally, my latest addition is a custom Google search of only the bloggers listed in the PneumaBlogs catalog. This, my friends, is very, very cool. For the first time, you can search within only the best of the Spirit-filled blog-world. This is amazing, and I invite you to give it a try.

My only problem with this is, really, the way it breaks my template (or doesn’t play nicely with my template). This may necessitate spending some time with my template files to make them resizeable and more liquid, but all-in-all, it’s still useful.

And if you want to add the PneumaSearch Google Gadget to your Google start page, click here:

Enjoy!

Here are some tips I’ve learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site’s traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I’m a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.

Since some of these tips are from smart, expert bloggers, I’ll cite some URLs for further guidance. Maybe you’re already using some of these approaches, but maybe there’ll be something new here for you. A handful will have no direct noticeable impact on your blog traffic, but will help make your blog more useable — which brings the long-term benefit of creating loyalty and thus repeat traffic —which is what you’re ultimately after (in terms of traffic, that is). Some tips are tech-related, some have nothing to do with technology at all.

Some tips I don’t even mention because I assume you’ve already established the basics. Like, I’m sure you actually have something to say beyond fluffy’s latest furball episode, you actually have an operating RSS/Atom feed, and you already know how to string a couple sentences together now and then :: grin :: Why belabor the obvious?

And now, ranked loosely by what I believe have the most impact, in descending order:

Tip #1: Use Standard Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks

There’s a lot that can be said about SEO tricks. Some are good, some are so-so, and some tricks are downright evil (like re-purposing other people’s content for your own, and splogging). I don’t recommend every SEO trick in the book, but there are some standard approaches to optimizing your site that no ambitious webmaster or blogger should overlook.

• Submit URLs to the major search engines.
• Use keywords in your posts. Use keywords in the metadata in the HTML header, too.
• Make sure your post’s title and summary/abstract are in the metadata as well.
• Make the article title the first part of the page title (in the title bar).
• Put “key” words and phrases in the titles of your posts.
• Use <h1> and <h2> tags for titles and section subtitles within the page.
• Name links intelligently, so that search engines can add relevance to the link. So, instead of “click here to learn about me”, use “Learn more about Rich Tatum, the BlogRodent.”
• Use title attributes in the hyperlinks.
• Use alt attributes in the images.
• Get others to link to you. Be friendly and link to others, too. (It’s reciprocal, in the end.)
• See
• SEOmoz
• SEOmoz’s SEO Guide for Beginners
• SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors
• Problogger’s Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources
• AListApart’s High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization
• Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
• Google’s SEO Guidelines
• Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines
• MSN’s Search Guidelines for Successful Indexing

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Tip #2: (For corporate bloggers, especially) Come down from your ivory tower

Traditionally, magazine editors and corporate writers don’t really interact with their reading audience except through boilerplate in response to letters-to-the-editor and the occasional article sidebar. I’ve noticed that this tradition is hard to give way when old-school corporations (especially publishing oriented companies) first start blogging.

Though weblogs began as a one-sided journal-like view of the Web, they have matured into a fully social phenomenon. While there are a few popular one-sided weblogs of note, most of the highly-trafficked blog sites feature writers who engage the audience in conversation. This doesn’t mean that the post author has to respond to every comment posted on a weblog, but when questions are raised and challenges issued, the post author(s) should at least make a showing.

Weblogs are a hierarchy-flattening environment. The author who writes from his high castle and merely deigns to publish comments without responding to them will come off as uninvolved, arrogant, deaf, and unengaging. If your involvement consumes too much time due to the heavy volume of posts, moderate your comments and institute a firm policy on who gets approved. Simple “Amen” or “Attaboy” comments can be discouraged for not adding value while comments which contribute substance can encouraged. This could lower the volume of comments while increasing the value of the dialog, and hopefully make it more worthwhile to participate.

Unfortunately, as your blog ages comment spam will inevitably appear on older entries, and nobody wants to mess with that. So many blog authors now disable commenting for anything more than a month old. Depending on the nature of your audience, the kind of dialog you like to foster at your site, and how attractive your blog is for comment-spam, you may need to do this as well.

Just remember, it’s good to have a higher ratio of comments to posts on your site. (See Stowe Boyd’s articles: “The Social Scale of Social Media: The Conversational Index” and “The Conversational Index: Thoughts After The Deluge“.)

By this measurement, BlogRodent is doing okay, even counting the 466 “ChurchRodent” terms I’ve ported over as posts my CI is 1.74 (1,120 comments/645 posts). If you remove the ChurchRodent entries, my CI jumps to 5.63.

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Tip #3: Don’t be shy: comment on other blogs

A surprising amount of traffic can be generated just by being involved in the conversation on other blogs related to your niche. A thoughtful, well-written comment will induce readers to check out the commenter, and this can lead to really good conversion rates. (Presumably, the reader who liked your comment will probably like your posts.)

To this day, I still get hits from months-old comments I’ve left on blogs like Leadership’s Out of Ur and Dan Edelen’s Cerulean Sanctum.

Don’t be crass, though. Post comments that genuinely contribute to dialog. Don’t just troll for hits.

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Tip #4: Share the dialog: use trackback links

Similarly, follow the blogs of related content in your niche market and whenever you see a post you like, post something reviewing that post, commenting on it, praising it, or critiquing it — and link to it. Whenever you quote another blogger, link to the original post. And when linking, use the trackback URL so that the post you’re pointing to (if it’s enabled with trackbacks or pingbacks) will automatically create an entry on the target post that indicates you’ve commented on it. This creates a sort of virtual “bridge” between the two posts on separate blogs, and readers from both blog sites will discover the other weblog. This is a great way to generate traffic from sites that have audiences similar to your own.

Again, don’t be crass. Like happiness, traffic is best found while pursuing other goals. Generating trackbacks for the sake of traffic will only generate ill will and the deletion of every trackback you send out. Be a participant, not a parasite.

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Tip #5: Guest post on others’ blogs

This is even better than commenting or generating trackback entries, because you also get the benefit of transferred credibility. Plus, you may very well convert a fellow blogger into an active reader. And when active bloggers read your blog, they’ll eventually link to another one of your posts — driving more traffic to your site.

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Tip #6: Invite guest bloggers

Because they will point to their own guest commentary on your blog, and their audience will come to see what their favorite blogger has written on your site.

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Tip #7: Provide email subscription tools

In addition to the various RSS feeds that blogs naturally provide, you should also provide a way for visitors to subscribe to new blog posts and the latest comments via email. (Yes, that’s two separate channels: both blog posts and post comments.) On the one hand, some users don’t use RSS news readers, don’t care to, and don’t want to learn how. But they would like to know whenever you post new content to the blog. Give them a way to subscribe to the new content via email.

You should also provide a way for anybody to subscribe to the new comments and updates for each article on the blog. Thus, every time a comment is added to a single article, an email goes out to the subscribers to that article. This will continue to drive traffic to articles long after they’ve “matured” and the rest of the blog has moved on to greener pastures. After all, people will still be landing on the old articles for years to come, and they still want to contribute to the conversation. When a month or so has passed and someone discovers the article for the first time, his or her new comment will remind the old subscribers to that article, and they’ll return to view the post and the new comment.

The goal here is to convert visitors into relationships, and the RSS/newsfeed channel isn’t the only way to do that with a blog.

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Tip #8: Email-This-Post-to-a-Friend

That doesn’t really need much explanation. Please tell me it doesn’t.

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Tip #9: Provide a full-text feed

In addition to the abstracted partial feed that is placed in the auto-discovery tags for the blog (the abstracted feed only sends out the first x number of words, forcing users interested in new posts to visit the site for the full monty), you should also offer a full-text feed for those who want it. Many bloggers insist you should make your main site feed a full-text feed, but that’s really up to you.

If you do offer a full-text feed as an alternative to your main feed, promote it somewhere in your sidebar. Some blog readers only subscribe to full-text feeds, and if you don’t offer one, they won’t read your posts — ever. These are the die-hard news reader aggregator types who don’t want to click through to see the full post just to find out if they’re interested. Without a full-text feed you’ll lose them as audience members but with it you’ll still have them hanging around. Don’t worry, they’ll stop by to comment and view comments as well. (Remember, comments don’t go out in the full text feed, so users will want to visit to see what others are saying.)

I started out offering an abstracted feed summary for BlogRodent, but since my latest redesign I’ve started offering a full-text feed instead. Part of my rationale for doing this is that I don’t want more traffic, I want more readers. In fact, the more readers I have who enjoy the blog from within the comfort of their feed-readers, the less work my server has to do. So, it’s actually better for me to deliver more feeds and fewer pages. It costs less. Literally.

If you have advertisers, don’t worry. You can still deliver ads via feeds, if you must. And loyal readers will be back to comment, so you’re not losing eyeballs. Just unnecessary page views and frustrated subscribers.

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Tip #10: Use FeedBurner for all your feed URLs

There are a few reasons for this.

• Using FeedBurner simplifies the subscription process for many users since FB provides numerous “chicklets” and methods to subscribe for folks who get your FB feed URL. (FeedBurner can also solve the problem of notifying subscribers by email if they don’t use a feed reader.)
• FeedBurner will automatically ping the aggregator ping sites like pingomatic.com, which gets the word out to dozens of other RSS sites and bots that your site is ready for re-indexing and re-syndicating. This keeps traffic fresh.
• Probably the most important reason is that FeedBurner provides detailed stats for your subscribers, the posts they visit, the clickthroughs, and etc. Data is good, know what works for your readers is even “gooder.”
• Using FB also prevents a resource drain on your server — especially if you’re on a hosted shared account (like I am). Feed readers often ping sites every 5-15 minutes, and this is a really unnecessary drain on your server resources, especially if you only post once every other day or so. Let someone else bear the brunt of that bandwidth burden. FeedBurner does so, happily. (You could also try RSSCache, but I prefer FeedBurner.)

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Tip #11: Give Google a Sitemap

Make it easy for Google to find new content and re-crawl updated content by forcing the blog to create a new sitemap.xml file every time a post and comment are updated. The sitemap.xml is a quick way for Google (and other search engine ‘bots) to find what’s fresh and reindex it for their search community. With the right template, Moveable Type can do this automatically. See:

• Google Sitemaps — Google.com
• Add your URL to Google — Google.com
• Google SiteMaps for Movable Type — now with correct Last Modified dates (Anders Jacobsen’s blog)
• Arne Brachhold’s “Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress 2.5“
• Cameron’s Thoughts : Sitemaps — Latest Update

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Tip #12: Get indexed by everybody else, too

The Google sitemap helps other search engines discover content as well. And also be sure to submit your URL for inclusion in all the big players: Google, Lycos, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. This is standard Search Engine Optimization work. A shocking amount of all site traffic is from first-time visitors hitting the site through searching. Capitalize on it. (I get approximately 70% of my first-time visitors via search engines.)

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Tip #13: Get into Technorati, and use Technorati-friendly keyword tags

There are a lot of blog-indexing sites out there for people to search blogs with. Aside from using Google.com and BlogSearch.Google.com the most popular site, by far, is Technorati.com. So, you need to add the blog URL to the Technorati database, and you also need to “claim” the blog entry (See; “Technorati Membership“). This means you have to paste some unique ID into a blog post or somewhere in a blog template so that TRati can visit you homepage and verify that you have control over the content in the blog. Then you can view reports for your URL and provide other identifying data for the blog.

Beyond that, every post should have some hyperlinked URLs that Technorati (and other tag-and-keyword-indexing search sites) can see that will help categorize your blog post according to the meta-data the editor supplies. This allows users on other sites to follow a conversation around the blogosphere and discover posts on CTI blogs by keyword — driving the auto-discovery of the Blog.

So, a post on Billy Graham’s latest appearance would obviously have the keyword “Billy Graham.” The TRati-friendly “rel” tag would look like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/billy-graham/" rel="tag">Billy Graham</a>

Notice that this hyperlink is not much different from a normal hyperlink except in two respects. One: it links to the tag-name in Technorati as a lookup tool for other blog posts with the same tag-name. And, two, it uses the rel=”tag” that Technorati introduced and has become standard fare for blogging metadata. (See, for example, the actual results from Technorati for “Billy Graham.”)

Technorati Help: Tags
technorati.com/help/tags.html

Note, categories in Moveable Type are automatically created as “rel” keyword tags. And also note that you don’t have to link to Technorati … any link will work fine as long as the visible content is the tag. So, this would be fine, too:

<a href="http://christianitytoday.com/search?query=billy+graham" rel="tag">Billy Graham</a>

Technorati needs to be pinged to be notified of new posts and therefore new tagged conversations. As long as we’re using FeedBurner in our feeds, FB will automatically ping Technorati when the new post is published. (You can always ping Technorati manually.)

For suggestions on keywords related to content, see:

• Google Keyword tool
• Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Also, see: Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Technorati Account

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Tip #14: Predict the future

If you see something shaping up on the horizon that looks like it will be of general appeal or — especially — of hot interest to your niche audience, blog on it early … even if the early post doesn’t generate a lot of traffic. The earlier you get indexed by the search engines, the more easily you’ll be found when the predicted event comes to pass.

This really doesn’t require predicting the future as much as it requires paying attention to the incipient and fomenting trends of the now.

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Tip #15: Swim in the stream

And even if you don’t get there ahead of the rest of the bloggers, if you can at least spot what the current hot topics are, you can still get in the conversation and draw new readers to your blog just by jumping in and swimming along. For example, nobody could’ve predicted Ted Haggard’s fall from grace, but I can guarantee you that Gordon MacDonald’s post at Out Of Ur is very highly visited.

Keep on top of current emerging conversations with tools like:

• Alexa.com’s Movers and Shakers
• Technorati’s Popular News
• Technorati’s Popular Blogs
• Technorati’s top-level Popular page also shows the most active recent searches.
• Google’s Zeitgeist
• Yahoo! Buzz Index
• Populicio.us

For more see David Holmes’ Web Zeitgeist

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Tip #16: Clear, web-oriented post titles

Don’t be clever. Don’t be cute. Be clear, direct, and descriptive. Readers are extremely pragmatic, only clicking on links they suspect will satisfy their actual curiosity and need for information. If you must be clever, combine the clever and the pragmatic into a single line separated by a colon or a dash, like “Naked blogging: On how to write transparently.” Etc.

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Tip #17: Friendly, intimate, and humorous

Blogging is essentially a social phenomenon, but we’ve all been trained to avoid sociability in our writing: we’re warned to avoid the authorial “I” like the dengue fever. But readers are looking for a personal connection with the writer, and once they feel loyal to whoever’s behind a blog, they’ll not leave soon, and will be back for more, more, more. This requires a certain amount of intimacy and even transparency that most writers and almost all professional editors are not used to providing. But the reward is a loyal and fervent audience.

Humor is also, clearly, a good tool for this kind of virtual relationship-building, but the risk is to overdo the humor (don’t be trite) and to overdo the transparency (I find your bowel movements neither entertaining nor informative).

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Tip #18: Put hyperlinked blog URLs in email signature files

Just another way to expose people to your URL. You can go even further and insert an image in your signature that shows your latest posts. FeedBurner has a Headline Animinator that let’s you do this. I use something called “RSS PNG Signature“, which is a PHP file that turns a feed into an image. (See it in action here and here.) Unfortunately, I can no longer find the code for this PHP code in the wild. If you need it, download my live feedsig code here. Follow the comments and modify it to your own PHP installation and feed details.

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Tip #19: Original content

Content, content, content. The more original your stuff is, the more likely you’ll stand out and readers will continue to come back for more. I’d write more about this, but, frankly, I would be unoriginal. Others have written more and better about it.

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Tip #20: Unoriginal content

Sometimes, swimming in the stream of current popular interest means writing a review and covering the ground others have covered — but doing it better, with more comprehensiveness, and adding value by injecting opinion and commentary. In one sense, this is still original content. But, in another sense, it feels “unoriginal” or derivative because you’re aggregating links and content from other bloggers and websites on a single topic. But this provides a service to your audience when they learn to trust you for an authoritative, unique, and incisive view of current events.

This is what bloggers are best — and worst at.

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Tip #21: Give back

Provide something of value to the audience that they simply cannot get anywhere else and give it away for free. Provide lists of specialized links, articles with critical advice, downloads that provide great information. MP3s, PDFs, Movies …. Too many blogs have no real substance behind them, and even the ones that do have substance don’t make it easy to get to the meat of it in one location. So, if you have a blog series on, say, the top preaching mistakes and how to avoid them, after the series is complete, bundle up the contents as a well-designed PDF file and offer it as a download.

The stuff you’re giving away will attract attention, people will link to it, and you’ll drive more traffic.

One great posting strategy for giving back that is always sure to generate some attention and may likely get you bookmarked on the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, is to offer “Top Ten” posts, or bullet-point advice. Guy Kawasaki does this frequently on his site to great effect, often providing something like “Ten Tips for Great Interviews” and he invariably gives 11 or 12 tips as a “bonus.” (See: Guy Kawasaki’s “Best Of” index)

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Tip #22: Use StumbleUpon.com

This is a dirty little secret of blog marketing … social networking sites can actually help drive traffic.

Create an account at StumbleUpon.com, install the toolbar, and whenever you’re at a site relevant to your blog audience, review it and give it a thumbs up. Also: every time you publish an article on your blog, review your own article, and give it a thumbs up. (Of course you would! You love your writing, don’t you?) This article then gets randomly promoted to visitors who like the same types of websites you like.

You will get an extra few dozen or more hits a day that way from people who would have never discovered your site otherwise. But, and this is the beautiful part, they like the same kinds of sites you like, and they may very well like you.

Other sites can be used similarly, such as Reddit, Furl, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and etc.

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Tip #23: Swag

People like to get stuff for free. If you have magazine subscriptions you can give away, offer one for the blogger who generates the most referrals (or just buy one, it may be worth the money!). Offer mousepads for the 1,000th feed subscriber. Offer free T-Shirts via Cafe Press for the best comment posted in a particular article.

This could backfire, though, in the amount of time spent tracking the “entries” and responding to inquiries. And even after you close the contest down, people will still be contacting you about it, so make sure it’s worth your time.

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Tip #24: Advertise on related sites

Buy Google AdSense ads. Buy ads on the Performancing ad network. Contact bloggers directly and offer to buy ad space on their blog for a set period of time. This works.

Or so they say

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Tip #25: Be niche

Too many weblogs try to be too many things to too many people, and they wind up diluting their audience. Focus on a niche theme and interest area that you can specialize in and hammer it home.

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Tip #26: Interview people of interest to the niche audience

Interesting people interviewed well drive traffic and interest. If you have a preaching-oriented site, interview the best known preachers. If you have a book-focused site, interview writers your readers want to know about. If you have a theology site, interview professors who teach theology. Interview pastors with a theological mindset. If you have a Chevy site, interview mechanics.

Interview anybody you can get your hands on, even if it’s only 10 minutes and you just get three bullet points out of the interview — people want short blog articles anyhow. And the interviews don’t even have to be on the phone, they can be re-edited condensations of an exchange of emails over time.

Guy Kawasaki does this to great effect: whenever he’s at a convention or in a new location, he finds somebody to interview and posts the results on his site. (See his “Ten Questions” category on his blog: <blog.guykawasaki.com/best_of/index.html>).

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Tip #27: Be brief, be scannable

Articles which are consistently too long simply don’t get read. That’s not to say an occasional lengthy article will be suffered as long as you’re developing a faithful audience that wants more of what you’ve written. But if every single post on the site is a magna carta, they’ll lose patience with you and move on — because everybody is suffering from information overload.

Follow Jakob Nielson’s usability advice (<useit.com> and especially the page on how to write for the Web <useit.com/papers/webwriting>).

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Tip #28: Cross-promote within your personal blogosphere

Almost every social bookmarking and “Web 2.0″ site gives you a blog-page when you sign up for membership. While I don’t want to publish my blog articles in a dozen different sites, every once in a while I’ll push an article out to one of my other blogs to keep things interesting. And I always publish as my first (and sometimes only) post a “This is not my home” article, linking back to my main blog, including post titles that best highlight what I do. (See my Yahoo! 360 blog for an example.)

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Tip #29: (For publishers) Promote the blog within your magazines

Make sure the blog URLs are also included in the relevant mastheads of your magazines, newsletters, books, and publications. Pick the best posts and republish them as articles. Mention the blog in an editorial now and then. Feature the best comments in a letter to the blog editor section. Create ad spots in the magazines. Use the magazines to build buzz (and use the blogs to buzz about the magazines.)

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Tip #30: Cross-promote within your blog

Be sure to use the plugins that automatically find possibly related posts by keywords. Also, whenever referencing a post that was written in the past, be sure to link to it — and find ways to reference the best posts of the past once in a while to float them back to the top and introduce new visitors to the best of the old content. After a year or so, put a list of “top ten articles” in the sidebar, and review it every quarter. Or create a page of “Best of…” article links and reference that in the sidebar (perhaps as a “More…” link under the “top ten” sidebar item.

There may also be a plugin for your blog platform to automatically “resurrect” an older random article from the archives to feature it on your blog’s front page. I used to do this on my blog (until I got nervous about server resources and republishing my homepage for every visitor) and I set the third article from the top to be my “From the archives….” spot.

This keeps your new audience aware of the history of your site, keeps interest in older articles a little fresher, and consistently exposes Technorati and search engines to the content deeper within your site.

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Tip #31: Track your referrers

Every good blogger keeps an eye on their blog logs looking for referral links (that don’t come from search engines). Whenever you spot a valid referral link, it means somebody, somewhere has linked to you. It’s a good idea to drop into a blog mentioning one of your posts to thank them for the link — even if the comments associated with the link are inflammatory. Plus, it helps you discover bloggers in the same niche content area who you may want to add to your own blogroll, link to in your sidebar, or invite as a guest commenter.

Also, monitor blogs that mention your site by using Technorati’s tracking tools as well.

But, whatever you do, don’t publish a raw, dynamic list of referrer URLs. You’ll just get hammered by spam-bots trying to get their “referrer spam” into your list.

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Tip #32: Start a meme

These can, too often, be frivolous or silly, but they can be insightful and useful, too (See <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme>). One meme I took part in was a listing of books read … favorite books, one book I couldn’t do without, one book that should’ve been banned, and the fellow who started the meme tracked many of the responses and aggregated them. (See “The One Book Meme: My Response“.)

This kind of thing is most powerful when you have begun building a community around your blog.

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Tip #33: Post three to five times a week

Or, at least, once a week, regularly. Too many posts a week, though, can drive people away for fear of information overload. Too infrequent a posting schedule keeps you off your readers’ radar and they’ll start unsubscribing from your RSS feed.

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Tip #34: Use imagery in the posts

Again, the same principle that works in magazines works in blogs: People need eye candy. But think like a designer: Don’t use art just for the sake of art itself: choose imagery that supports the contents of the post. It will not only help visually communicate the point you are driving, but it also helps break up the uniform “gray” of unbroken text.

The right image can really make an article pop. A complete lack of imagery (and their textual cousin, pull-quotes) looks rather boring.

Keeping your posts attractive and visually interesting keeps your audience happy and loyal — and coming back for more.

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Tip #35: Be patient: slog, blog, flog

As a variation on “crawl, walk, run:”: Be patient about traffic and numbers. First you have to slog your way through getting your blog listed in various indexes and feed aggregators, you have to slog your way though owning your blog on Technorati, getting all the proper widgets and plugins working, and fine-tuning your RSS feeds, etc.

Then you have to blog, blog, blog. Get content on the site, build some depth, demonstrate consistency, slowly start building up a community, get people posting comments.

Then you can flog your blog by encouraging cross-links, commenting on other’s blogs, soliciting guest commenters, and responding to comments in your own blog.

It’s a process, and it traffic doesn’t happen overnight, but with patience and discipline, the audience will come and stay.

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Tip #36: Blog about sex

Really, you don’t need me to write much on this one, but it can be done tastefully, and interestingly. For example, if you’re a preaching blogger, consider an article like, “How to preach about sex without blushing.” Just avoid being salacious, offer something useful and interesting, and keep it within your content theme. Traffic will happen.

One of my most visited articles is about Justin Berry, who used to operate a porn site as a teenager, and is now State’s witness in the fight against child pornography. I didn’t write it for the traffic or the salaciousness, but it nearly brought my server to its knees.

Or you could just mention Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Antonella Barba, or any of the latest hotties du jour. But that’s baiting, and it won’t pay off in the long run.

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Tip #37: Be extreme

In a related vein, I remember an article posted in Out of Ur about a poet at the “Scum of the Earth” church in Denver, who recited a poem that included the F-Bomb. That’s guaranteed to be a top traffic generator on Out of Ur. It certainly was when I merely blogged about the post over here on BlogRodent (see “F-bombs, poets, and church. Or, ‘When church goes intentionally awry!’“).

But beware being too extreme. Controversy always generates interest and excitement, but it’s not something you want to get into the habit of doing.

Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, I guess

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Tip #38: Get listed

I mentioned slogging earlier. Get listed in the relevant sites mentioned here:

Robin Good’ Sharewood Tidings
RSSTop55 — Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

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Tip #39: And more …

For more useful and interesting blog promotion strategies see:

ProBlogger

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As I mentioned previously, my workhorse laptop was stolen late December, 2006. Since then I’ve been using a much older laptop circa 1988. Okay, it’s not that old, but it’s a Pentium 4 with only 500 MB of RAM … and it turns out, my Firefox browser occasionally likes to suck up about 3-400 MB of that RAM in one sitting.

Of course, that might have something to do with all 47 of my favorite extensions (”My Firefox on crack: the best extensions I could find“).

Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I wind up tweaking its registry settings to improve its page-load time and network connections to give me a better browsing experience. This time I needed to do the same thing, but also minimize some of the RAM I’m using. While doing the research for my tweaks, I thought I’d share my results with you in case you’re interested and brave enough to muddle around in the Firefox about:config settings. Also, I wanted to save my notes on my blog so I won’t have to trawl the Net again the next time ’round.

If you do make any of these changes to your Firefox installation, please don’t contact me for support. I’m not a techie, I only played one at my last job.

Remove extensions

First things first, you can easily reduce considerable memory overhead by uninstalling all your extensions. Okay, so maybe you’re addicted to all your cool tools. I know I am. But there are some you should be wary of anyhow, as they’re known to “leak” memory — meaning the longer you have Firefox open the more memory they consume. There are a few lists describing the usual suspects, but you should know that extension developers are usually trying to beat a bad rap, so keep checking in for updates to the extension: Known Leaky Extensions.

Forget your history

Next, reduce the number of days your Firefox tracks your browsing. The more you track, the more memory Firefox apparently uses. Change this by going to Tools » Options » Privacy » History. I set my history to three days.

Modify your configuration

Go to your Firefox location bar and type about:config and hit Enter. You’ll get a crazy table of techie-looking names on the left and numbers and options on the right. This is the complete output of all your Firefox configuration settings. Depending on what extensions and themes you have installed, yours will look different than mine. To change a configuration item, you only need to doubleclick on the setting you want to change, and a box will pop up with the current setting plugged in. To change it, you just edit the value (if it’s an integer or a string) and click OK. If the setting was “boolean” (meaning either “true” or “false”), double-clicking will automatically change the setting to the opposite value.

Before changing a setting, I usually search for it so I can isolate it from all the other settings around it. To search for a specific value, you just enter the configuration “Preference Name” in the “Filter” bar near the top of the table. Just pasting in the name will isolate the value you’re interested in.

Doing this before changing a value provides a couple of benefits for me: 1) I don’t inadvertently double-click on the wrong neighboring setting by accident. And 2) I find out immediately whether a particular settng actually exists in my configuration or not. Some of the config settings below may not exist in your particular installation, so you’ll have to create them.

To create a config setting, just right click in the table area, select “New” in the context menu that pops up, then select whether you are creating a “String,” “Integer,” or “Boolean” value. A string value is used for things like path names and alphanumeric characters. Integer settings are pure numbers. Boolean settings are either “True” or “False.” (For more info, see “About:Config entries” at the Mozilla Knowledge Base.)

These are the settings I modified to make my Firefox a little faster and more reliable on a machine with little memory. Your mileage may vary. Be sure to check out my resources at the end for more information. I’ve linked each preference name to the Mozilla Knowledge Base for further reading.

Choice about:config settings

Preference name: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
Type: Integer
Value: 2

This is for faster loading of pages via the back and forward buttons on your toolbar. The higher the number, the more pages FF keeps in memory for each tab, and thus the higher the memory usage. One page will on average take 4MB of memory. However, reducing this number will make pages load more slowly when you do use the back and forward arrows because they’ll need to be pulled from your disk cache and re-parsed in memory.

Preference name: config.trim_on_minimize
Type: Boolean
Value: true

This setting should force Firefox to dump most of what’s in RAM to disk whenever you minimize it and allows Windows to reclaim the memory for other apps to use. However, some users report spotty success with this, but others claim to be able to get back 90% of their allocated Firefox memory using this hack. (You can view the memory used by applications with a tool like Process Explorer previously from Sysinternals.com but now owned by Microsoft.) Note that if you use this, Firefox may take longer to restore from its minimized state as it has to negotiate for more RAM from Windows to restore itself.

(At the time of this blog entry I have FF open with five tabs. It’s using approximately 104MB of RAM. A few seconds after minimizing, its RAM utilization dropped to 13MB.)

Preference name: content.notify.backoffcount
Type: Integer
Value: 5

As Firefox downloads a page it will attempt to render it for display. As it receives more data from the Web, it will move items around on the page to repair rendering until all the data is finally received and the page can be finally re-parsed and fully redrawn. The backoff count limits the number of times FF will redraw the page in memory while downloading content. Setting the number to five, as above, limits FF to redrawing the page six times. Five (max) during downloads (according to the timer intervals set below) and once upon completion.

I set this to five because I have a fast connection and I prefer to get the page drawn quickly even if all the images and stuff haven’t downloaded yet. Every time FF has to redraw the page, it slows down total page load time.

Preference name: content.notify.interval
Type: Integer
Value: 120000

120,000 microseconds is actually the default. I specified it in case I want to change it later. This is equivalent to redrawing a page (as it downloads) every .12 seconds.

Preference name: content.notify.ontimer
Type: Boolean
Value: true

This turns the timer on for the previous two settings.

Preference name: network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
Type: Integer
Value: 8

Persistent connections are “keep-alive” connections from your browser to the server you’re getting data from. In HTTP 1.1, persistent connections are used to download multiple items via one connection without wasting overhead for one connection per file. On a typical web page you might have 50-100 items that need to be downloaded. Forcing every time to be pulled off a web server with its own connection will slow things down considerably. However, you don’t want too many of these connections per server, since it could clobber a server’s response time. I’ll probably be adjusting this value over time. The default is 2. (Requires that network.http.keep-alive be set to “true.” And if you are using a proxy, see Network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy)

If you’re on dialup, this probably won’t help.

Preference name: network.http.pipelining
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Related to the previous setting, this allows Firefox to send multiple requests before any responses are received. The maximum number of requests is set in the following option. This will help page load times on fast connections.

If you’re on dialup, this probably won’t help. (If you are using a proxy, see network.http.proxy.pipelining.)

Preference name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Type: Integer
Value: 8

This sets the maximum number of requests that can be sent to a server via pipelining before anything is sent back to the browser. You can choose between 1 to 8.

Preference name: network.http.max-connections
Type: Integer
Value: 60

This determines how many total connections Firefox can open to all servers at once. In order to download anything, an HTML file, an image, a video, Firefox has to establish a connection. This setting controls the total maximum number of connections Firefox will establish. Given that many web pages include content from other servers and considering how Firefox extensions also generate their own connections (such as the Google Toolbar), it’s good to have this number higher than the following number, which is a per-server configuration. If you have too many connections open at once, however, you’ll clobber your Internet connection, so make sure you have a good fast pipe before increasing this number.

The downside, of course, is that dialup users won’t benefit from this.

Preference name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Type: Integer
Value: 15

This controls the total number of connections Firefox will establish with a single server. The total max is 255 connections, but I’d caution you to be conservative about this. Rumors persist that some hosts will ban you from their site if you abuse their server. And setting this value too high will clobber your Net connection (again, dialup users, move on), so there’s a “sweet spot” where too high a number slows down your data rate for a given file and too low a number slows down your data rate for a given server. Naturally, this will vary from server to server, so finding the right number for your ISP and the sites you visit will be a matter of trial and error.

Preference name: nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Type: Integer
Value: 0

This controls how long (in milliseconds) Firefox will wait before drawing a page on screen. The default is to wait a bit, to make sure some useful data has come down the pipe first. On a fast connection you could set a really low value. On a slower connection (dialup users, beware) you’ll need a higher value. I set mine to zero because FF will wind up repaint the screen within .12 seconds, anyhow, so why wait?

Preference name: plugin.expose_full_path
Type: Integer
Value: true

This doesn’t make anything faster, it just shows you the path to plugins (like the Adobe PDF plugin, etc.) instead of just the name of the plugin.

Preference name: browser.cache.memory.enable
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Just make sure this is enabled (set to “true”) so that the following settings work.

Preference name: browser.cache.memory.capacity
Type: Integer
Value: 4096

This determines how much of your RAM Firefox will use for caching purposes (the cache for pages you’ve recently downloaded, there’s a RAM cache and a disk cache, this just deals with the cache in memory, not on file). Note, I only have 512MB on my current machine, so I’m setting my total cache fairly low. This will probably increase the load time of pages I’ve previously visited (via the back and forward arrows) but it also protects my RAM usage (more important).

See your current cache usage in RAM by plugging about:cache?device=memory into the Location Bar. For info about your cache on disk, use about:cache?device=disk.

Preference name: browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl
Type: Boolean
Value: true

Since I am the only one to use this laptop (I, or the thief who steals this machine next!) and since I purge my cache files pretty frequently I’d rather store all my HTML pages on disk rather than in memory. This setting forces Firefox to store secure pages on disk, too, which it normally doesn’t do for security purposes. Note, don’t do this on a public or work computer that others may have access to, since this will expose your secure pages (bank sites, webmail stuff, etc.) to disk browsing. I guess, if you’ve got a nefarious streak in you, you could covertly use this setting to evil ends, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?

Hope this helps! I know it helped me.

Rich

Resources used to compile this list:

• element14: Firefox does not have a memory “bug”, but here’s how you improve mem usage
• CyberNetNews: This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak
• CyberNetNews: Reducing Your Memory Usage In Firefox
• MozillaZine Knowledge Base: Reducing memory usage — Firefox
• PluginDoc: Firefox Memory Usage Frequently Questioned Answers

First, the news item, via the BBC.

Last Thursday, a pack of hungry, killer squirrels (yes, that’s right — squirrels) descended from from on high to terminate with extreme prejudice a stray dog. The stray was, admittedly, annoying the hungry squirrels: loitering around their tree, barking at them with short-lived temerity. When the black squirrels finally had enough, they swarmed down the tree like ninja rodents, attacked the dog and literally eviscerated him.

When some human-folk came to investigate, they scampered off … some of them still clamping dog-meat in their jowls. Read about it here:

Russian squirrel pack “kills dog”

Next, a couple years ago, I was a member of a small ceative writing group at Christianity Today. One of our assignments required creating “hook” paragraphs to grab a reader’s attention and pull them in for a longer story. One hook I submitted (shown below) got a chuckle. Please, enjoy my little exercise in fun. And … remember ….

Life is more creative than fiction.

Subject: Albino Squirrel
Genre: Spiritual Life/Devotional

God enrolled me in a new class on humility yesterday. My schoomaster was a rodent.

As it happens, a delightful little neighbor moved into our backyard recently: A cute little albino squirrel. Sitting at our kitchen table, we’ve all admired his acrobatic prowess, twitchy grace, and near-paranoid awareness of his surroundings.

So, I thought I would be a hero to my daughter by showing her how to befriend a squirrel. Armed with a pocketful of walnuts I brought my little girl out to the yard: “Watch Daddy feed the squirrel a nut!”

The next thirty seconds were a blur. When it was over, the pocket from my jeans was missing, as were — in fact — my pants themselves. I found myself bleeding from my right hand, the lobe on my right ear was nearly bitten off, and I had claw marks running from the side of my face to the top of my head where the “cute” squirrel finally launched itself over the wall. With my pants. Turns out I was the “nut” the squirrel ate.

Somewhere, in the distance, I can hear my daughter’s screams.

(The BBC news story is true. My fake “devotional” is not.)

• IVP New Testament Commentaries online at BibleGateway.com
  Some excellent NT commentaries available for free. Useful for online Bible study and sermon prep.
• Science and Spirit: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Science/Religion Dialogue
  From the page: “Pentecostals need to seriously engage the sciences as Pentecostals, and need to be involved in the science and religion dialogue … Pentecostal spirituality … can yield unique insights for the broader science and religion dialogue.
• Pentecostals enjoy Christian books and music
  From the page: “Attendees of Pentecostal or charismatic congregations are more likely than other Christians to read religious-based fiction and magazines as well as listen to Christian radio and music, according to a study by Ellison Research.”
• Desiring God ‘06 National Conference mp3s online
  This is John Piper’s conference packed with Reformed theology — but there’s some really good stuff here, like Voddie Baucham’s out-of-the-park sermon, Mark Dricoll, DA Carson, Tim Keller, and more. Good stuff here, check it out.
• Today’s Youth Need Our Help To Go … Beyond Belief
  Beliefs have consequences: “The way teens behave comes from something. Their attitudes and actions spring from their value system, and their value system is based on what they believe. Glen Schultz puts it this way: “At the foundation of a person’s life, we find his beliefs. These beliefs shape his values, and his values drive his actions.”
• Fundamentalists? We? Critique of Lee Silver’s “Challenging Nature”
  Valuable critique of the claim that those who claim the embryo is a human are operating only out of theological beliefs. Good read.
• Mark Driscoll — The Charismatic with a Seat Belt
  Adrian Warnock links to Mark Driscoll’s (Pastor of Mars Hill) sermon series on the Spiritual Gifts. The series is interesting and useful, it’s pro-charismatic and not pro-Pentecostal, but still worth listening to. He presents arguments for continuationism.
• Spirit and Power, a 10 Country Survey of Pentecostals — Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
  Interesting survey of Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Renewalists. It’s hefty, but the executive summary, at least, is worth the read. I plan to blog it at some point after I’ve read the whole thing.
• Book: Off-Road Disciplines — Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders
  Dr. Earl Creps of the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary publishes his first book. Leadership Network has put together a useful promotion for the book here with flash and audio. Book looks interesting, check out the intro here.
• The Secret Letter From Iraq (Time Magazine)
  From the page: “Written last month, this straightforward account of life in Iraq by a Marine officer was initially sent just to a small group of family and friends. His honest but wry narration and unusually frank dissection of the mission contrasts sharply with the story presented by both sides of the Iraq war debate, the Pentagon spin masters and fierce critics. Perhaps inevitably, the ‘Letter from Iraq’ moved quickly beyond the small group of acquantainaces and hit the inboxes of retired generals, officers in the Pentagon, and staffers on Capitol Hill.”
• National Council of Churches’ 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches
  From the page: “The Yearbook also records the continuing growth of Pentecostal, historic African American and other non-mainline churches in the U.S. Among the largest 25 churches in the U.S., the fastest growing are the Assemblies of God (increasing 1.81 percent to 2,779,095), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (increasing 1.74 percent to 5,999,177) and the Roman Catholic Church (increasing .83 percent to 67,820,833).”
• Poll Says Many Pentecostals Don’t Speak in Tongues (Christianity Today)
  More from the recent Pew survey. From the page: “Researchers found that many Pentecostals and charismatics attend worship services where speaking in tongues and other signs of the Holy Spirit are evident. But in six of the 10 countries surveyed, at least 40 percent of Pentecostals said they never pray or speak in tongues.”
• Good Blog Writing Style
  From Philipp Lenssen, 10 tips: Use descriptive headlines, use the inverted pyramid, first links get the most clicks, explain core ideas, use readability elements, write simply, credit sources, mark updates and changes, spellcheck, break the rules.
• Religion Timelines
  Clever interactive timeline giving an excellent (if cluttered) overview of Church history.
• Fifty Ways to Take Notes (SolutionWatch)
  From Brian Benzinger comes a comprehensive list of 50 websites that will help you write, take notes, and organize your life. Some real gems here, check them out. I used a couple of these plus a timeline tool to create an easy-to-update task-reporting tool.
• Kids hang on to dad’s every word (New ScientistMagazine)
  From the page: “Children whose father’s vocabulary was more varied when they were 2 years old had more advanced language skills at age 3. Surprisingly, the dads spoke less and asked fewer questions than the mothers, suggesting it was not how much they spoke but what they said and how they said it that resonated with their children.”

AG News wants to know if podcasts of sermons/messages by the local church is widespread.

Take the short AG News poll and let us know! Click here to begin…

I took the poll.

I listen to a lot of sermons and other spoken word content on my PocketPC. I load it up each week with chocolaty goodness and fill my mind while commuting the two hours I spend driving each day.

Here’s to hoping the A/G decides to promote podcasting by the local church. Though, not every church needs to (or should) podcast, it would be good to get some of our better preachers more exposure.

Meanwhile, check out my good friend John Abela’s online audio initiative for A/G preachers at:

AGSermons.com
Dedicated to providing a central location for all Assemblies of God pastors and their online audio sermons for their church members and the mass public to access them!

John is a former A/G pastor, crack coder (he co-wrote one of the most popular online community fora available today: phBB), and accumulator/creator of a vast horde of A/G related websites including AGJobs, AGSingles, and AGPrayer … among others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the A/G HQ got into the podcasting game … in the next couple of years, especially with their new A/G web-hosting initiative for local churches (free: AGChurches.org). But I’d also be surprised if the local pastors got on board with them — what with the typical pastor’s distrust of initiatives out of Springfield, Missouri.

If I hear more, I’ll be sure to track and post it.

• Kids in Ministry, Becky Fischer’s offical website
  This is the official website of the “Jesus Camp” kids’ camp director. Good, bad, extreme? You be the judge.
• Does God Want You To Be Rich? (TIME magazine — 09/18/06)
  An excellent, balanced presentation of prosperity doctrine and it’s major proponents today, and its opponents. Worth the read.
• Where Were You on 9/11?
  Anonymous and not-so-anonymous reflection on this tragic day in history. I remember where I was when Reagon was shot, when the Challenger shuttle exploded, and when the Wall came down. Do you remember where you were on 9/11?
• Ted Haggard distances himself from “Jesus Camp” film (Denver Post)
  Haggard, president of the NAE, said he “can learn as much about the Catholic Church from ‘Nacho Libre”" … as a nonevangelical can learn about evangelicalism from “Jesus Camp.”
• Resourcing American Pentecostalism (academic resources for teaching about Pentecostals)
  A variety of teaching tools given at a 2004 conference at by the A/G Theo. Sem.. Hhistorians, theologians, administrators, archivists, editors and media experts provide different ways to access Pentecostal traditions academically.
• Spiritual Tidal Wave, The Origins and Impact of Pentecostalism (Speaking of Faith from American Public Media)
  Extensive public radio programming covering pentecostalism. Features Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. and Arlene Sanches Walsh as well as selected conversatons on Pentecostalism from the archives of the program. Check this out.
• Ethnic Leaders are ‘Integral Part’ of Assemblies of God (Christianpost.com)
  “Our [executive] leadership has made it clear to ethnic leaders that (the districts and fellowships they represent) aren’t an extension, but an integral part of the A/G,” (Efraim Espinoza, director of the Office of Hispanic Relations)
• Bush Tells Group He Sees a ‘Third Awakening’ (Washington Post via slantright.com)
  Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.
• Apparently faith has consequences: “Is God dead in Europe?” from USA Today
  Among the consequences of Europe’s abandonment of its religious roots and the [resulting] moral code is a plunge in birth rates to below the replacement level. … Europe is “committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself.”