Comment Friday gave us 17 comments! I have finished visiting each commentors blog and have chosen my winner.

I’ve chosen Jason Buckley’s blog as our comment winner this week. He left us a comment about procrasting at work. Here at BAYB we love to reward hard workers (lol).

Congrats Jason and thanks for the comment.

I’m happy to see a lot of the same commentors here every friday. Not only can you receive a link from us by winning, but we also have a top commentor list where you can also receive a free link from. As you can see it is pretty easy to get on that list, so take the time and leave us a few comments.

I just wanted to thank our readers and authors for the great response on Comment Friday, also the article about RSS Feeds . Make sure to give it a digg if you enjoyed it 🙂

We’ve received a few of our authors promoting our blog competition, make sure to join so we can give some money away. Thank you Chris, Ed, Mike and Stefanie for trying to get the word out about our competition. Remember it’s not too late to enter.

Cap’nSwag here, with my first of hopefully many installments tackling the good, bad and ugly in sports.

I watched a few NCAA Tournament games yesterday and it’s officially official: College basketball can’t even hold a candle to the pros. I’m no longer even entertaining the argument. I used to get into it all the times with older types who would continually repeat the same mantra, “they care more in college, it’s more of a team game, the pros are overpaid, we’re scared of black people rap culture, anum sheba, anum sheba, anum sheba, anum sheba!” and then a shaman would reach into their chest and pull out their heart. Just kidding… kind of. But it’s true, that’s the fall-back position, that they think the collegiate athletes have more heart because they aren’t paid, and that the lack of overpaid, overhyped stars leads to a more cohesive team game. All I can say to all that is this; bullshit. Don’t hand me a bunch of loose rhetoric based on what you saw in some games during the, admittedly, dark ages of late 90’s NBA play. The bottom line is the NBA is the cream of the paltry college crop. The talent pool isn’t diluted by forcing one or two good players to play on a team of rejects, and though it may not be as lily white as the college game, it’s high time we let go of that foolishness and embrace the new game.
So there are a lot of black dudes in the NBA. I don’t see why that should turn white audiences off from the game. It’s called racism. Trying to justify it with any other qualifyers is bull$h@t. The craziest part is that there are really only a tiny handful of these black athletes that actually “represent a hip hop lifestyle,” that terrifies white America. The only truly gangster dudes in the NBA are Stephen Jackson, Ron Artest and Jamaal Tinsley. And who put those dudes on the same team? The great white hope, Larry Bird.

As for team play being better in college, that’s just hogwash. The stars in college get the rock in their hands on every play, just like in the pros. The only difference is that in college the team’s lone stud gets triple teamed every time he touches it, forcing him to get his worthless teammates involved.

As for “heart,” frankly my dear, I don’t give a sh%t. I’ll take a heartless, cold blooded, rim rocking, three draining, crossover blinding, defensive stalwart like Kobe, who does get paid more than God, any day over some “full of heart” star like Kevin Pittsnogle, who was so good and “hearty” in college that he couldn’t even make a pro team. He’s currently languishing in the NBADL hoping 25 seven footers simultaneously die of heart attacks and he gets called up to the bigs.

As for being overpaid, they get paid what the market will bear. If we didn’t love the game so much, they wouldn’t get paid crap (see Major League Soccer, or the NHL for examples of what that looks like). They don’t get paid as much as Baseball players, who do demonstrably nothing for most of the game as they wait for someone to make contact.
I watched Indiana and Gonzaga run up and down the court as a formless mess last night, chucking threes and committing turnovers and it struck me: these guys are so inferior to the NBA, I wouldn’t even accurately describe it as the same sport.

For more of the Cap’n’s snarkiness, come visit me at my blog, SportSwag, or on First Bounce Fly to which I contribute articles.

I don’t seem to have posted her for a while – where does the time go – so I thought I’d do an update about recent posts on my own blog.

Today is my blogs day for spreading a little link love. I rate this idea, first suggested to me by Matt, very much. It’s so much better than these long lists of links as in the case of the z-list.

Today on my post I have the links to six bloggers, with their photos, who have helped me since I first started Mike’s Money Making Mission.

Other post subjects include Zlio, where you can have a free shop and choose the products you stock; Seven Steps To Get Anyone To Do What You Want, this is really about selling but can be adapted for just about ‘anything’ you want someone else to do; Money Making Proof showing proof of some of my recent earnings – oh, and lots more besides.

I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that you are very welcome to visit my blog.

As someone once told me: ‘If you don’t ask you don’t get’.

 Of course there are lots of similar sayings, such as: ‘If you don’t tell you can’t sell,’ for instance.

So now I’ve ‘asked’ and ‘told’ I’ll get on with something else.

Good blogging,
Mike.

P.S. Have you entered Blog About Your Blogs competition?

More comments, and another Friday!

If you are new around here, comment friday is a fun and simple idea. Leave us a comment about anything you want to. By leaving a comment, you will have your blog visited by me, and you may even get a link out of it. I will select a blog from the comment list to be linked to and have their link on our blogroll, until next friday. Our Friday’s have been catching on, don’t miss out.

Last Friday we had 22 comments, and Ryan was our winner. He just left one comment, that intrigued me, so I picked it as our winner. With that we even exchanged feed subscriptions. Now I am a daily reader of his blog. When we linked to him, he even linked back.

Don’t be shy, leave us a comment and share some link love. We also love promoting great new ideas, contests and that sort of thing. If you have something new and interesting at your blog, let us know.

As the months have gone on, it’s become extremely difficult to keep updated with everyone’s blog that I read, by visiting each of them.

That’s where feed reading comes in handy.

What is a RSS feed?

To put it simply, it is the blogs content. By subscribing to each blogs feed, you can then keep track of them all at once. I use Google Reader, but there are many alternatives that act the same.

Why should I subscribe?

The main point is simple, ease. It’s easy to simply subscribe to a blog and then keep track of it on the same page all of the other blogs are. You can easily find out when its updated, and read all of the most recent entries within minutes. No need to wait for the site to load, guess when it is going to be updated, or wait for it to be delivered to your email.

The downside seems to be small. However, there is nothing small when it comes to traffic. Since Blog about your Blog has seen an increase of feed reader subscribers, we’ve seen a small decrease in regular traffic. That just means, those 40 people that used to visit the blog, now don’t really have to daily, unless to comment.

If traffic decreases, what is the benefit?

Most bloggers seem to like traffic, but more importantly, want their blog to be read. And when it’s read, they want it to be read by many. That’s always been my goal. I like knowing that 40(ish) people are going to read our content everyday. Not because they find it randomly, but because they want to. So by making your blog easy to add to feed reading, you are increasing the chance of that reader to come back and contribute.

Since the increase in subscribed readers, we have also experienced an increase in comments as well as participation in more bloggers.

How can feed reading be made easier?

If you haven’t installed the wordpress plugin for feedburner I suggest you do. Before the install, our feed count displayed under 10, now it displays 40. That is because not everyone was subscribed through feedburner. Now with the plugin, it directs all our feed readers through feedburner.

Not only does it better display the actual feedcount, but it also gives customized options to leave a comment, digg us, submit to reddit, and more.

If you are struggling to visit your favorite blogs everyday, check out their feed. If you don’t find one I suggest you simply ask. If not it is pretty easy to find out what their feed url is to subscribe to. If you haven’t made your feed available to your readers, you are already a step behind a lot of blogs.

If you’ve been blogging for a while I wonder if you even remember your first post?

Do you want to?

One of the blogs I write for uses the first post as the about us page (the text anyway). Whilst evaluating the blog for a redesign (time to clean out some of the cobwebs) I realised how far the blog has come in style and how many of the promised goals have been fulfilled. Fortunately the style has greatly improved! Some of the goals were realised whilst others were abandoned as the blog organically grew.

So my question to you gentle reader is this:

Is it better to jump into the blogging river by taking a flying leap or is it better to dip your toe in and plan to ease in nice and carefully?

I know which one sounds like more fun!

But fun doesn’t always mean right. If we continue to use my example then jumping in can be full of all sorts of danger. What if the water is too shallow or there are rocks or mutated fish that can suck the salt out of your blood like that thing on Star Trek?

What if someone reads your first post and decides they don’t like it? What happens if you say you’re going to post every day of the week but wind up only posting twice a week?? What if you change what you write about???

If it’s a personal blog my advice is simple. Take the fun path! Most readers are going to judge you by your last post anyway not one you did months ago.

When Star Trek Deep Space Nine came out its first season at times was dull, awkward and cringe worthy. I count DS9 as some of the best Star Trek ever filmed thanks to strong later seasons. Certainly don’t get me wrong there was lots of great stuff in that first season but there was more potential than anything else.

Just like your first post.

Jump in and write something! Tell everyone a bit about yourself, what you hope to do with the blog. But get blogging! Don’t let that hello sit there for a month. The best introduction to your blog will no doubt be your next post.

Lee

Quit Your Day Job
Crypt Hunter
Pop Culture Heroines

Next up – “Hi my business name goes here and this is my blog“

Rand8 is a new concept that takes user generated content such as blog posts, flickr images etc and publishes them in a monthly print magazine.

The magazine is created by users submitting and voting for stories in a digg like environment and at the end of each month, the top content is published. It would be pretty cool to have stories from my blogs published in a magazine.

This could be used as a powerful promotion tool. Not only will visitors find you through the “digg like” submission system but if any of your content is actually published you can expect a truck load of traffic.

The mag can be bought from Barnes and Noble and Amazon! The homepage of Rand8 can be found here and you can submit content here

My Blog Can Be Found at Go2Tap.com