My Blog

[ax0n]

Might as well pimp it:

http://kc-bike.blogspot.com/

It's mostly a place for me to write about bike stuff. This is usually a breakdown of my daily commute, with other bicycling, bike commuting, and advocacy rants tossed in. I started in December and I'm up to over 150 posts.

[CRUM]

Pimping works sometimes. Just visited your blog.

[Brian]

Maybe we should have a blog pimping contest.

[CRUM]

Maybe we should have a blog pimping contest.

You'd win. I am such a clueless newbie.

[ax0n]

Maybe we should have a blog pimping contest.

I could post a link to mine on all of the ~100 websites hosted on my servers. Of course, my customers might get a bit steamed.

Thanks for the comments.

[bigskymacadam]

where's your computer blog?

[Brian]

I do like your blog, by the way. Mine is still floundering a bit, as I try to find my direction. I actually have 2 products to review (I like the free stuff) and no time to review them. The one thing I have learned is that comprehensive is always better, so I try to do a lot of research before posting anything important. The recycled news last night was an attempt at something different.

[ax0n]

I know it's kind of a different world in the blogosphere, but in the real media world, it's generally poor form to keep the products you're reviewing even if the supplier says you can.

I have two takes on this. My main website is a Ford Focus how-to site. I've reviewed a great many products and I have close personal friends in the Focus aftermarket and enthusiast community. A friend of mine reviewed some stuff, and I reviewed some stuff. We traded parts.

I must admit that I did keep the FocusSport custom chip that they sent me, but again, I'm close friends with the VP of FocusSport, I'm a nerd, and I can help him troubleshoot his tuning programs for the Focus. I've gone through nearly 20 different "programs" on four different Focuses with two different products (SCT Chip and SCT XCalibrator II) so I've gone far above and beyond just a simple product review and pimping the product. I don't feel guilty about keeping the SCT chip at all. He actually sent me two to keep, and I gave one away to the second most active contributor to my site (I'm #1).

Product giveaways (of stuff you've been given to keep) are a huge boon. Sponsor a contest or something, and give the contest a bit of lead time to build up a good head of steam and media buzz before the giveaway.

Here in the blogosphere, the "rules" are a lot more lenient, but the occasional giveaway can actually net a bigger payoff (higher traffic, more exposure, more advertisement hits, and more advertisers targeting your site with their ads if you use a delivery system like AdSense) than keeping the product for yourself. Think of it as "free traffic/ad revenue/street cred" instead of "free goodies".

where's your computer blog?

http://retro-computing.blogspot.com

Or do you mean the pseudo-hacking/security/whatever blog that my friends and I all help with?

http://www.h-i-r.net

[bigskymacadam]

^ nice!