It’s been fascinating to see how the Bumpzee affiliate marketing community is developing. As the “owner” of this community and developer of the platform, I wrestle with lots of decisions and policies.

Who Gets Included?

One area that has been on top of my mind from the start is how to decide which blogs get their RSS feeds included or not. Right now, htis is pretty much all on me. When someone submits a blog for inclusion, I take a look and make a judgement. I look at the posts and picture them showing up in the newest entries page. But what are the requirements?

1. The blog must be at least partly about affiliate marketing. Usually the blogs are a mixture of Affiliate Marketing, PPC, SEO, blogging, etc. That’s great, but if it’s missing the affiliate part as a significant percentage, I usually pass. Or, if the non-affiliate stuff is too far off topic, I’ll usally pass on that too, sometimes reluctantly. Many times it’s a difficult decision.

2. The content should be unique, interesting, mostly non-self-promitional or sales-y, and built for readers and not for search engines. I like to see more than just the same old stuff regurgitated. Affiliate marketing news is fairly hard to come by and many people do end up writing about the same stuff. But I like to see unique perspective added. Plus, if you do this, you’ll have a more interesting blog.

3. The more interesting and unique the content is (as long as it’s online marketing related), the more I’ll relax the affiliate-specific requirement, though never completely.

At the beginning, I wasn’t this choosy. Pretty much anyone who responded to my original blog post back in October got included. I just asked for affiliate marketing blogs.

I’m strongly considering stopping the RSS on a few blogs that contain only merchant offers. There’s nothing wrong with those blogs. It’s all interesting stuff, and serves a purpose, but is it of interest in this particular community? I’m not sure. (If you have feedback on this, please keep it general. I don’t want a witch hunt here.)

If you’re not included (or get removed), please don’t take it personally. We’ll hopefully have new communities soon where your blog will be a better fit. Or have ways to include or exclude certain types of posts. Read on…

Off-topic Posts

What bothers me the most, however, is that some people who ARE included feel pressure to write about certain stuff, or worse, not write about certain stuff because it may not be what “belongs” on BZ. We all write about non-affiliate marketing stuff and shouldn’t stop because of Bumpzee.

A small amount of off-topic stuff seems to flow through here just fine. It can even add some levity. If it’s a significant percentage, however, it starts to stick out.

Currently, as a blogger, you can prevent any single post from appearing here by putting a comment in the body:

<!–no_bumpzee–>

So write about getting your dog spayed or your vacation in the Seychelles without worrying about it getting dumped on bumpzee by putting that code in there.

Future Stuff

That no_bumpzee code still requires that the author has BZ in mind and take action before hitting that publish button. So it’s not ideal.

I’d like to develop a way to automatically pull in only stuff that the blogger wants pulled in. So for example, a blogger may specify one or more categories on their blog that get included. Or perhaps categories that do NOT get included. Like on my blog, I’d want to exclude the “samsung dlp” and the “electronics” categories. The blog owner could control this.

That would also allow me to include more blogs that are not 100% affiliate marketing without worrying about flooding the entries list with a bunch of off-topic stuff.

What do you think? Your feedback is welcome required.

“Blogs are conversations” is the mantra of many blogging advocates and experts. The real action is in the comments, and I agree with that. The problem is that the more blogs that we follow, the more fragmented our community becomes. There could be six conversations going on today on 6 different blogs that I read and I don’t even realize it because I read through them before the conversation started (getting up early on the east coast compounds that problem a bit for the U.S. blogs that I read.)

Here’s what usability expert, Jakob Nielsen has to say in response to the notion that “it’s very important to use blogs to have a ‘conversation’ with customers.” (source: WSJ interview)

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction.

He’s talking about using blogs as newsletters and is suggesting that most customers won’t go to check out a company’s blog very often, if at all. But it’s even more of a problem with blog comments. You have to go back and check every hour to get involved in a discussion there. Sure, on many blogs you can get an email on updates, but you usually have to comment first. There’s also a cool service called co.mments that allows you to subscribe to comments on virtually any blog, but again, you have to actively subscribe, and that’s where they lose me.

We’re trying to solve that on Bumpzee, if only for the blogs in the communities served here.

For many, the most commonly used page on BZ is the “newest entries” page. It shows the most recent blog posts in the community. However, we’ve introduced, and now revamped the Active Discussions page. This page is as important as the newest entries page, and we’ve moved it up to the top nav bar.

Check it out. It’s sorted by blog posts that have the most recent comment. You can sort by BZ comments or by blog comments by clicking the header.

Also note that if you have a blog included on BZ, your blog’s comments will only appear here if you are using the most recent wordpress widgets plugin. The active widgets (bump this button and recent visitors) are what do the magic to allow BZ to keep track of the latest comments.

Don’t have a wordpress blog? Sorry about that. We’re working on a solution for other blogs as well. If you know how to get into the code-nitty-gritty of another blog platform, please let us know.

We’ve released a new version of the Bumpzee widget wordpress plugin.

There are a few new features in this plugin:

1. The recent readers/top entries widget is now included in this plugin (instead of cutting and pasting the javascript).

2. The recent readers/top entries widget has additional configuration to allow the display of visitors to be a grid instead of a single list. You can choose how many pictures to show and in how many columns. The pictures resize accordingly.

3. Most importantly, using either the recent readers widget or the bump this widget from this plugin will get your blog’s comments reported here on Bumpzee. This is a great and unique way for people to see that there is a discussion going on over at your blog, as I talked about here: where’s the discussion?

For installation instructions, see the widgets page.

Over the years, two things have bothered me about blogs.

1. They’re chronological to a fault. This is great if you stay on top of a blog and watch the new stuff as it appears. It’s awful if a blogger writes some really great and fairly timeless piece, especially if they write a lot. Good stuff gets buried very quickly, often never to be seen again.

2. Discussions happen all over the place in blog comments and it is extremely difficult to notice them and if you do, keep track of them.

I’ve worked on a number of community related sites and I always have these things in mind.

On Bumpzee, I’ve tried to address the disappearing post issue by helping to keep the good ones around longer, those being identified with the most ‘bumps’. These posts end up on the list of top posts and stay there for as long as they’re deemed important, either by recent bumps or recent comments. When the buzz fades away, then the story does too. In that order, which is critical. The tagging also attempts to give stories more life, removing them from the fate of disappearing off a list because they became old, and putting them in context of similar posts.

The second issue, fragmented discussions, is addressed somewhat in that discussions can happen right here at Bumpzee. Since it’s a central location for people to post comments, they stay top of mind, and the discussions have a good chance of developing.

But, since the basic item of discussion here is a blog post, their discussions can, do, and should happen right on the blogs where they are posted. It’s very difficult to keep tabs on these discussions that go on all over the place. If you follow more than a dozen blogs, it’s all but impossible to keep track.

You can usually subscribe to comment feeds for a blog, but who needs MORE feeds? There is also a great service called co.mments which addresses this very issue for an individual who locates blog posts that they’re interested in keeping track of. This, however, requires that the user mark an indidual post for tracking.

But what happens so often to me is that I read a post early, often when there are no comments, the discussion picks up later and I miss it. This happened recently on Vlad’s blog. 25 posts later, I stopped by and saw that I missed the whole party.

So I’m attempting to address this on Bumpzee. Each entry may not only have comments here on BZ, but I’m building tools to keep track of which entries have comments going on at the originating blog. If there’s a good discussion going on somewhere, it deserves to be seen.

I’ve developed a new version of the widget plugin for Wordpress. It does all the hard work of reporting the number of comments back to BZ to store and show this number on the BZ entry for a given blog, like this:

Again, this functionality is only available with the new plugin, which isn’t generally available yet, but I’m about ready for some testers. Please let me know if you’d like the new plugin code.

What’s a newfangled website without a blog to talk about developments and such? So, we’ve put a spiffy new wordpress 2.1 blog up and moved all the old news posts in here.

I’m not going to pull this into the affiliate marketing community entries, but we’ll keep the latest posts listed on the homepage in the news section.

I’ll be posting any BZ info, news, happenings, etc. here.