“Neither story [on either site] was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into
its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway….

Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade.”

Interestingly, the bloggers quoted in the article don’t really (or at least aren’t given the opportunity to) defend their integrity.   In a fairly expansive quote “the bloggers” say they do not engage in rumor-mongering, but rather in “involving the readers in the reporting process”.   As they don’t “have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything”.   

The articles goes on to compare blogging to the “truth-be-damned
approach” to journalism prevalent in the early 1900s when there were
many more newspapers competing for readers.   In the end, newspapers
“embraced credibility” but “lost … their pizzazz”.  It seems to me the gloves are coming off as blogs compete more and more successfully with mainstream traditional media.  Having given up their pizzazz, the traditional media clings fiercely to its credibility.  But do readers agree?  Do you find the argument that traditional media is more credible credible? 

First – for those following this series, I have had a change of plans.  After setting up the cooking blog described in Part 1, I decided to set up a running blog and then realized I had nowhere to post about the other things I find interesting.  I realized that a strategy of several  focused blogs was not going to work for me so I decided to combine all the personal blogs I set up into just one: http://fun.sherilarsen.com.  I am also combining my personal twitter stream in one account: @sherilarsen. 

Professional Sheri: http://sherilarsen.com and @shlarsen
Personal Sheri: http://fun.sherilarsen.com and @sherilarsen

Setting up Wordpress on my self-hosted blogs is quite easy, as is importing and exporting posts.  Yesterday I created a sub-domain for fun.sherilarsen.com and installed Wordpress using Fantastico in the administration area of my domain hosting service (AN Hosting).   It took about 5 minutes to set it up and install the software, but the site didn’t show up on the Web for a few hours.

The next step was to install some plugins:

• Askimet – this default plugin comes with WordPress software, you need a Wordpress.com account in order to get an “API key”.
• One Click Plugin Updater – allows you to install any plugin by uploading or just linking to the zip file.  There’s a Firefox plugin too, but it’s not updated for the latest versions of Firefox.  Install this FIRST – it makes the rest of the plugin installation much faster.
• Postalicious – automatically creates a post of links you’ve saved to Delicious.  If you want to limit to those with a specific tag, don’t forget the upload the RSS.PHP file as described on the site.
• Google Xml Sitemaps – generated sitemap and created robots.txt
• Wordpress Database Backup – backs up your Wordpress installation and emails it to you on a regular schedule
• Wordpress Reports – turned on reporting for Feedburner and Google Analytics, had it install the tracking code
• What Would Seth Godin Do – display a message to new visitors
• Twitter Tools – set up to post a tweet for new blog posts
• Delicious for Wordpress – displays your latest bookmarks as a headlines feed
• Delicatessen – see who’s linking to your posts on Delicious
• Adsense-Deluxe – add Google advertisements – if you think you could/should monetize your blog
• No Self Pings – Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.
• Share This or Sociable – lets visitors share a page or post on various sites

Coming in Part 3 -Setting up Publicity and Statistics

Related posts:
Setting up and Marketing a New Blog Part 1 – Introduction

“A Google Profile might be an easy way to establish a presence on the
first page of Google results, at the cost of just a few minutes of your
time. Of course, once everyone sets up a Google Profile its usefulness
as a branding tool will be diminished somewhat, but right now it’s a
highly recommended step.”

Here’s a link to my new profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/sherillarsen.  A search on Sheri Larsen brings up this blog first and then lots of links to my various profiles (Linkedin, Plaxo, Wink, Friendfeed, Northern Light’s corporate blog).  I couldn’t get the profile to show up in Google search results but will try again later.  The Sheri Larsen who’s profile shows up right now is someone else ;(.

• Taxonomy: Silver Bullet or Shallow Puddle – From Beyond Search.
• Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching – From Fast Company.
• Friendfeed is the Next Great Blogging Platform, Here’s Why… – From Micro Persuasion.
• 18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work – From Dave Cheong’s blog.
• Announcing the Media 2.0 Best Practices – From Being Peter Kim.

Tools, Apps Widgets and Addins:

• Cool FireFox Plugins to Enhance Google Analytics – From Search Engine Journal.
• Sizer – Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size.
• Taskbar Shuffle – Let’s you reorder your taskbar buttons by dragging and dropping them.
• Never Forget an Attachment with Outlook Attachment Reminder – From Web Worker Daily
• Increase Productivity with Gmail Multiple Inboxes – From Web Worker Daily
• 3 New Tools for Better Twittering – From Web Worker Daily
• 6 Ways To Convert PowerPoint To Flash – From Webinar Wire
• 25 Free Web Apps That Make Life Easier – From Tony Morgan Live.

Enjoy and thanks for visiting!

• follow cost: Is that Twitter celebrity worth the pain? – See how many tweets you’ll have to wade through everyday.
• Multiple Facebook Accounts and Their Alternatives – From Caroline Middlebrook. I just closed my Facebook account to separate my personal and professional lives. Caroline suggests using Facebook pages for public profiles.
• How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted – From TheNextWeb.com. I’ve been trying to contact the owner of @northernlight with no success for months. The owner is protected and has only 3 updates. Hope it works!
• Add Social Proof to Your Blog With TweetBacks
• 6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009 – From the Online Marketing Blog.
• 10 Ways to Give Your Corporate Blog a Sense of Purpose – From the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
• The 50 Best Business Blogs of 2008 – From Business Pundit
• The 10 most useful Word shortcuts – From 10 Things at TechRepublic.com.
• 10 services to turn off in MS Windows XP – From Security at TechRepublic.com.
• Who has the most Followers on Twitter? (Top 100) (Massachusetts Edition) | Twitterholic.com – I am the 30th ranked twitterer in Massachusetts!
• 20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins – From Mashable.

Enjoy and thanks for visiting!

• Delicious Toolbar – save bookmarks with a right click, browse bookmarks from the brower header (I organize in them in bundles to make drop down folders), open a full featured sidebar to browse and search all your bookmarks.
• Roboform Toolbar ($$) – I love Roboform! RoboForm is a “password manager and Web form filler that completely automates password entering and form filling. RoboForm was named PC Magazine Editor’s Choice, and CNET Download.com’s Software of the Year.” Saves passwords, generates secure ones for new sites. Includes an addin that fills in logins with a right click.
• ScribeFire – integrated blog editor. Can publish to multiple blogs, store drafts, categorize, standard post editing tools. Handy to have it right in the browser where you can move around to different sites while writing to grab quotes, links, and images. I used it to write this post! Wish it had an option to schedule publishing of posts and better image formatting.
• ScreenGrab – captures screen shots – full page, visible page or a selection. The selection option doesn’t work on all pages, but this addin makes grabbing screen shots easy and quick and skips all the browser menus so no cropping later.
• Picnik – opens any image in the Picnik image editor.
• IE Tabs – opens an IE tab to view pages not optimized for Firefox. Handy if you keep getting bounced out of certain sites or can’t use the advanced features.
• GButts – add a drop down list next to the address bar to quickly open your favorite Google services. (I had to edit the header bar to force it to show up.)
• Colorful Tabs – subtle but useful tool that makes each tab a different color.
• Forecast Fox – display the weather in the browser header.
• Foxy Tunes – control your media player (including iTunes) from the browser footer.
• Undo Closed Tabs Button – This extension allows you to undo closed tabs via a toolbar and/or tab bar button or the right-click context menu.
• Foxclocks – Ever wonder what time it is in the UK? FoxClocks lets you keep an eye on the time around the world – or just
  your local time – by putting small clocks in your status bar.

The Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers in Massachusetts:

Wow!  I’m #31!

I thought I’d document and share the experience with you – dear readers – in a series of posts devoted to the setting up and marketing of a new blog.  Please comment if you need more detail on any of the steps.  I can provide more information or write an expanded post on any particular step.

The first step is deciding what to call the new blog and where to host it.   These go together because the URL is driven by blog name (or vice versa).  I came up pretty quickly with For the Love of Cooking as the name of the blog.  The next step was to decide whether to use wordpress.com, host it at its own URL or add it as a subdomain to sherilarsen.com.  I did some research and found that http://www.loveofcooking.com was not available but also not being used (although info, biz, net and many others were available – .info for very cheap!).

I registered http://loveofcooking.wordpress.com with my Wordpress account, but in the end decided it would be better for technical reasons to host it at my own domain rather than at Wordpress.com.  I also decided that I would prefer to host it at http://loveofcooking.sherilarsen.com and leverage any branding for myself as an social media and marketing expert rather than try to maintain two separate brands.  Check it out – there are several posts with some great recipes!

Coming in Part 2 – WordPress Nitty Gritty

• Master List ?(A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples?)
• How to Use Twitter as a Twool – From How to Change the World: “This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.””
• Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter – From How to Change the World. “Follow the “smores (social media whores*).” They are the folks with large number of followers and seem to be the opinion leaders (and perhaps even “heros”) of Twitter.” – Made me smile .
• 27 Free Must-have Online Collaboration Tools – List of free virtual workspaces, customer service applications, project management tools, mindmapping and even online conferencing tools from Crazeegeekchick.com.

Enjoy and thanks for visiting!