Faster EntreCard Drops

Earlier this year I wrote about Entrecard and how to make the most of it. One of the key parts of EntreCard is "dropping".

Dropping
The final way to earn credits is the most intensive, but is also the primary earning for a blog with little traffic. You can go to other sites that have EntreCard and "drop" on them. Not only will that site earn a credit, you will too. As a bonus, many sites will often do "dropbacks" meaning they will drop on your site if you drop on theirs. If you find people that do that each drop doubles in value. My suggestion for doing drops is to bookmark a few blogs everyday that have the following characteristic:
1. Have an EntreCard
2. Are of a related subject
3. Have the EntreCard widget towards the top of their site.
Then put all of those bookmarks in the same folder(I use the firefox "Delicious" add-on and give all the sites the same tag). Everyday, go to that folder and choose the "open all sites in this folder" option. Then, go to the bathroom or make breakfast. By the time they are done loading you can click-close-click-close each and every site. Once they are all loaded you should be able to do about 50 or more drops in 5 minutes. Also, monitor your "dropbacks" and see who returns your drops. Delete the sites that do not and replace them with sites that do.

As Dropping is the most time intensive part of EntreCard I'm always on the lookout for ways to do it more quickly. I've come up with a way to find people's EntreCard's faster and completely eliminated requirement 3 from your drop list.

Here is what you'll need.

1. The Firefox Web Browser
2. The GreaseMonkey Add-On
3. Click on this link to install the EntreCard User Script

Once it's all installed what will happen is that whenever you visit a website that has the entrecard widget it will move it to the top left of the webpage. For Example, here is my blog before installing the user script:


Now, here is what it looks like after installing the script


You may wonder what happens if you don't want the website's entrecard in the top left corner. Looking again at the picture and you will notice that not only that the card is moved, but there is now a black box below it. After dropping your card(even before if you really want to), you can click the words in the box, "Move Back", and it will move the Widget back to where it was originally placed.

I wrote the script with the thought that I could now put any website in my drop list regardless of where they placed their widget; however, I have found it useful during my normal browsing too. It's a good way to be notified that someone has an EntreCard on their site. And with the "Move Back" button you can easily move the widget back to where it should be.

Hope you guys find it as useful as me.

New Layout

How do you guys like the new layout?

It's a pretty radical change, but I think it was needed. Over the last couple years I had hacked up the layout little by little until it was no longer coherent. So let me know what you think. If it is panned across the board I'll consider restoring the old layout.

There Is No eBook Standards "War"

Last week, PC World had an article last week suggesting a Format War for ebooks is brewing - One similar to the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray format war. The latest catalyst was Google's entrance into ebooks. I think this is a little (actually VERY) over hyped situation. There is almost no similarity between the next gen DVD and eBooks.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray was years in the making. That battle cost the involved businesses millions in R&D, manufacturing, and marketing. Worse still, consumers who picked the wrong side were left with hundreds, even thousands of dollars in outmoted equipment and disc.

The first difference with eBooks is that there are more than 2 options. Sony has their own style(lrf\lrx) and Amazon has their own style (AZW), also there's ePub which is an openly developed standard. Also, there's formats transferred from PCs (such as PDF, text, html, etc...). Oh, and there's also Mobipocket and a dozen other formats that you probably haven't ever heard of. So that's the first difference is that there are more than 2 formats in competition.

For Blu-Ray(Sony) and HD-DVD(Toshiba) there was a financial incentive for the businesses to want their format to succeed. They wanted to collect on license fees. They collect a fee for every machine, or software program written that could read their format. They even charge a per disk fee for every disk that is manufactured and sold. The companies had every reason to want their format to beat out the other one.

There isn't that incentive for ebooks... mostly. The state of most eBook formats fall into 1 of 3 general categories:

1. Completely Open and Free(with or without DRM)
2. Open without DRM, Closed or license for DRM
3. Proprietary

No license for the first category. There is some incentive to win a "standards" war for the second and third category. However, not nearly as much as disks. License fees are only collected for programs that consume or create the eBooks. There isn't a per file cost as there are with DVDs. In addition, many of the programs to read the formats are given away for free by the companies.

The third and most important difference is that, with the eBook "war", is that it's near impossible for the consumers to lose. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, the loss for consumers was easy to see. If a consumer bought the "losing" equipment they are now out hundreds - even thousands - of dollars in outmoted equipment and movies that they will soon not be able to play on anything. The hardware of Blu-Ray used different hardware and lasers than HD-DVD.

Ebooks are software! If you have an ebook writer that can't read a certain format the manufacturer can always release new "firmware" so that it can read a new format. Better still you can always convert from one format to another (hopefully legally). A practice that wasn't really an option with physical disks. This really is the most important difference. Consumers don't have to worry that they might be buying a 300$ brick.

So if you agree with my dismantling of a "format war", how do we look at all the different ebook formats out there? A better model to understand what is going on is to look at the previous format competition for digital music format and word processor document formats.

Both digital music and word processor document formats that have already been fought and settled, have a lot more in common with ebooks. All three had more than 2 options, difficult to leverage license fees from the winner, and all 3 are software based.

Not only are these better models, but they give us 2 different results of the results of the ebook format competition.

One scenario result would follow the results of the digital music formats. In digital music, mp3 won. MP3 is a open and free standard that anyone can use without having to pay any company the rights to create, or use mp3s. There are still proprietary digital music formats, of course. But in every case-be it Windows Audio, iTunes, or a CD ripper- if your program can't convert to or from mp3s it is just plain primitive.

The other scenario is the word proccesor documents. A long long time ago, there were lots and lots of word processor programs. Each company would try to outdo each other by supporting their own proprietary document format as well as their competitors. There was no effort to make a standard across all applications. Eventually, Microsoft's doc(.doc) format won and became a de facto standard. Partially from being an able document format and also the proliferation of Microsoft Office. Just like MP3s and music, no word processor dares to enter the market unless it can read and write .doc documents (see openoffice and google documents). Fortunately, they didn't charge other companies for reading their files. Unfortunately, this result left one company with complete control over current and future formats. They also had the upper hand because other companies must reverse engineer the spec as Microsoft didn't open the specification until more than 15 years after it's creation.

• What will happen to ebooks? Will an open format or a proprietary format become the standard? I don't know. What I do know is the following:
• A standard will eventually emerge
• The "losers" will be able to easily convert over to the "winner"
• For a proprietary format to win it would have to be from massive proliferation of content and devices that use the format exclusively. From where I'm sitting, Amazon and it's Kindle device, are the only ones in a position to win that war.
• Finally, and most importantly, none of this should be a factor in delaying your purchase of an ebook reader.

The next 18 months should be enough time to prove me right, or prove me a fool.

Privacy Policy

Because of some new requirements by Google's Adsense, I have to have a posted Privacy Policy to continue using their service. Please consider this post the official Privacy Policy of blog.blogfiction.org

Privacy Policy for blog.blogfiction.org

The privacy of our visitors to blog.blogfiction.org is important to us.

At blog.blogfiction.org, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit blog.blogfiction.org, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.

We also use third party advertisements on blog.blogfiction.org to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

DoubleClick DART cookies
We also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests (”interest based targeting”). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (For example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting Las Vegas, you may see Las Vegas hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about hockey). DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx

You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Deleting cookies does not mean you are permanently opted out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.

AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by JenSense

How to link to your site

Here's a quick little promotional tip for Blog Fiction writers. I've talked about linking before, but it is a topic worth repeating. If leaving a comment on a blog or a forum promoting your site, don't link to it using the name of your website.

As an example. Instead of saying:
Check out my online fiction site, Improvisational Oblivion.

Instead, say this:
Check out my online fiction site, Improvisational Oblivion.

So, why would you do this? This way when search engines pick up your site, they will record that it's about "online fiction". That way, when somebody does a search of that term, your site is more likely to come up than others. Someone looking for fiction is going to be searching for things like, fiction, online fiction, blog fiction, etc... This is web traffic that you want to get.

If you link to your site using the name of your blog you will only be increasing your ranking when somebody does a search on the name of your blog. Unless somebody has already seen your blog, they are not going to know the name of it and therefore will not be doing a search on it. Also, the name of your site will probably already be in one of the top rankings so there is no reason to try and increase it.

Keep this tip in mind and you'll hopefully start seeing more traffic from google, yahoo, and MSN Bing.

Why your Blog Fiction will never be published

I grew up in a mostly Christian community and didn't learn much about other religions. When I did start learning about other religions I found out many things that fascinated me. One of the things that fascinated me about Islamic theology when it comes to translations of their holy book, the Qur'an. You see, the Muslims believe that the Qur'an was divinely inspired and is the literal word of God. Therefore, any published version of the Qur'an in a language other than the original arabic is considered only an "interpretation" of the Qur'an. It is not considered to be as good as the original. Blog fiction (minus the divine inspiration part) is the same way. A published version of a blog fiction is not going to be the same as experiencing the original online.

Let's pretend that you write a blog fiction site that becomes insanely popular. You have tens of thousands of readers. One day a publisher contacts you and wants to take your blog and make it into a book. Great! All you have to do is take all of your posts, paste them together, and send it in as a manuscript. Or do you? Should you fix all of your misspellings? Probably, well, except for that one that lead to a really long conversation in the comments section. Oh wait, the comments! What about them? Do you put those in the book too? Maybe only some of them? Will it be the same without any or some of the comments?

Let's say you do finally get the manuscript assembled and published. There are a lot of things that make Blog Fiction unique. The interaction, the performance, and the instantness, to name just a few. Now let's think about what would happen to all those things if you were to read a dead tree published version of it.

There is no interaction in a book. Not with the character, author, or other readers. The best you can do is join a book club and talk about it with a few people that may or may not be at the same point as you. There is no performance interaction with the characters either. You can no longer ask them a question when you think of it.

What about the instantness of it? If your blog was taking place in real time you may have been talking about or mentioning current events. Reading it on paper months or even years later is not going to give it the same fresh feel as reading the first time it was published.

I'm not trying to squash anyone's dream of selling print copies of their works. I just want to give a reality check. Fiction created with one medium in mind is going to translate perfectly to another. You may not have to go as far as calling the print version an "interpretation" of the original, but it would be accurate to call it an adaptation, or just a partial reprint.

Time to relearn how to type

It seems like everyday I am turning more into an old folgie. First, I'm complaining about those crazy kids and their new fiction, now I'm being told that I type wrong. Apparently, after a period I no longer need spaces. I only need one. This is true in both APA and MLA typing style. Of course, on the internet it doesn't matter. Two spaces are usually condensed into one, but that doesn't stop me from typing them. It almost pains me to keep my thumb from double-tapping that spacebar after typing a period. I hope other old folgies have better luck changing than I am.