01 May, 2009

For Book Bloggers: A Call to Action!

     Now that I have your attention with that admittedly catchy title, here we go.

On the use of Twitter

     I know that a lot of you use Twitter out there to post many interesting articles and comments. That's awesome, I'm there too, and I think twitter is great (@bloggeratf). What I wanted to address is the use of # in our general posts. I have seen #SciFi, #SyFy, #SF/F, #SFF, and any number of other variations. I would love it if we could standardize our # use. Not only would this make it much easier for me to see all of your posts when I get back from work, but help your readers do the same.
      I propose #SFF (science fiction and fantasy), but thats only me, and I believe Mulluane (edit: who apparently got it from @resaliens) . Post up if you don't like this for some reason and post your other suggestions so we can pick based on that. I can think of several additional useful ones that I would search for, such as #ARCreview, ect.

Technorati, Alexa, and Pinging

     These are the two largest blog trackers that rank your blog based on the number of links from other blogs registered there. Registering takes all of five seconds, costs nothing, and at worst will generate some extra traffic for your blog. Note: If you have a million links form blog X, blog X still only counts as one link in their rankings. Technorati and Alexa.
     Lastly, whenever you make a new post on you blog, go here so that you can ping all blog trackers. If you post more than several times a week you only need to do this every couple days. It simply lets all those tracking services know that your blog has new content for them to trawl.
     I hope this was helpful to some of you, and I know for a fact that the # thing will be helpful to all of us. Go bloggers!

8 comments:

Mulluane said...

Actually credit goes to @resaliens for getting me started on #SFF. Now I have it preset to be added to my important (non chat) tweets.

I'd love to see this happen but what I do instead is I have tweets from my favorite twitters setup in my google reader. You can get the RSS feed from their individual home pages. That way I can keep track of you all!

Mahahaha

bloggeratf said...

That is a good way to go about it. But the idea behind a generally consistent # dichotomy across all SFF reviewers ect is that you can see posts from people you don't know. For example, I want to see which new science fiction and fantasy arc's are being reviewed, all I have to do is search #SFF + #ARCreview. At least that is what I was trying to get at. This way you can easily find new stuff.

Unknown said...

I'd be happy to add #SFF to my sci-fi/fantasy tweets :o) Thanks for taking the initiative to standardize!

Donna said...

Good idea, pulling everyone together. I'll make a point of adding the hash tags.

Would you include Urban Fantasy in #SFF? or would that be #UF?

bloggeratf said...

I would include urban fantasy in SFF since we are trying for a tag that everyone can use. So far we have:

#SFF
#ARCreview (should we break this down into two separate hash-tags? #ARC #review).

I'll edit the main post once a few more people have commented.

Donna said...

I would just use #ARC - less characters. Especially with 140 char. limit on Twitter, leaves more room for book verbiage.

Debbie said...

I'd be happy yo use #SFF for my fanasty/sci-fi book review tweets.

I use #bookreview when posting links to my reviews.

kaolin fire said...

RT'd :)