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Kids and Blogging: A Call for Parents to Respond!

April 30, 2008 By Daisy 3 Comments

PC is my best friendAt the end of one full week of blogging with my son I am seeing some things that work, some things that don’t, and a lot of things that will develop as time goes on. I started writing a Top 10 type blog post and then stopped myself. After all, I have a grand total of one week of experience observing how my son approaches blogging. So instead of claiming to have advice to offer others I would rather gather information from others that are doing this!

With that said, I would like to start gathering stories and experiences from other parents with young bloggers. Here are some things I’d be interested in hearing.

  1. At what age did your child begin blogging?
  2. Was starting a blog his/her idea or did you suggest it?
  3. How involved were you in the beginning
  4. How involved are you now.
  5. How often does your child post?
  6. What types of things does your child write about?
  7. Is the blog public or private?
  8. What blogging platform is the blog using?
  9. Do you have any advice regarding kids and blogging that would be useful for other parents that are considering it for their own children?
  10. If you are comfortable, leave the URL of your child’s blog. I would love to share it with my son.

Alternatively, if your child does not have a blog tell me about how you think blogging would (or would not) be a good thing for kids to be involved in.

You can leave a comment on this post or use the contact link at the top of the page. I hope to get a lot of responses! I think the information gathered here will be very useful as I plan to spend a lot of time writing about this subject over the next several months (and hopefully beyond!)

Creative Commons License photo credit: iwannt

Filed Under: Blogging for Kids Tagged With: blog, bloggers, blogging, child, experience, experiences, kids, parents

Balance & Proportion Versus A Do-It-Yourself Mentality

April 28, 2008 By Daisy 1 Comment

I come from pretty humble beginnings and, for most of my childhood, life consisted of myself, my Mom, and 2 sisters with special needs. Partly due to circumstance and partly due to the way I’m wired I learned to do things for myself. Why have someone else do something when you can do it for yourself, right? I have difficulty asking for help and even more difficulty delegating work when the help is available to me.

I now live in an area where I am surrounded by affluence(not me, the people around me.) It is interesting to see that, when money is not an issue, it is nothing to hire someone to do the pesky little tasks in your life. Have a large house? Hire a cleaning service. Yard work to do? Landscaper. Something broken? Repair Person. Oil Change? Jiffy Lube. You get the idea. I’m not saying that I don’t ever hire anyone to do anything but between myself and my husband we are capable of handling most things that arise. The problem is time. When you try to do everything singlehandedly it becomes clear, very quickly, that you will get to critical overload before you can say “stop the madness.”

I’m a generalist and so is my husband. We have wide interests and wide skill sets. Where one of us is weak the other is strong. This is really great for being self sufficient. It is not great when trying to build a career or hone in on a specific skill set. There are too many distractions.  Instead of thinking “how can I earn the money to buy that” hen I see something that I want. I think “I could do that myself!” What’s worse, is that when I see something that intrigues me I’m always tempted to dive into it head first to the exclusion of everything else in my life. I have a fairly significant string of failed attempts at business ideas. Most of them failed, not because they were bad ideas, but because I came to an obstacle where I couldn’t fix the problem on my own so I stopped dead in my tracks.

I guess the real issue here is balance and proportion. Knowing when it’s time to call in a professional and when it’s feasible to handle something on your own. Balance is definitely a problem area for me. I am a bit of an extremist and a perfectionist. All or nothing. If I can’t do it “right” (or, at least, the vision of “right” that i have in my mind), I don’t do it at all. I also have a problems with volunteering myself for things just because I know I CAN do the job. And the word NO is not really in my vocabulary when it comes to things that I have, even a passing, interest in.

My objective for this week is to reduce clutter in my workload. I need to focus on all the little loose ends and stray tasks that always seem to trail on after the majority of a project has been completed. The stuff that remains once the interesting bits of a job are finished.

To my readers: If I offer to do anything for you please remind me that I need to deal with what is already on my plate, first. Also, please remind me that offering to do work on your website for free will never get me anywhere even if it makes my own experience on the web, and your website, a tiny bit nicer.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Balance, career, distractions, money, obstacle, proportion

Choosing a Camera for a Young Blogger

April 28, 2008 By Daisy 2 Comments

I’m sure that there will be those that disagree with my view on purchasing a good camera for a kid. I will attempt to defend my opinion on the matter. My little blogger had been using our old FujiFilm SLR-like 3.2mp camera. A good camera for it’s time. The lack of image stabilization made most of his images come out much less than crisp. I firmly believe that having the right tools will make the adoption of a new routine much more enjoyable and in turn will encourage him to continue on for more than just a few days.

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A cool accessory:

[asa]B000BP4ZQY[/asa] – Pop-Up Shade. This is very cool for him since it both shades the LCD screen in the sun and also protects the screen from scratches and such.

I am not all that much of a photographer but here are some of the points that made me choose this particular camera:

  • 8 MP – Pretty standard for an entry level camera at this time
  • 6X Optical Zoom – About the best I found in this price range
  • Optical Image Stabilization – better than digital for still shots, according to my research
  • Face detection. This works. It even figured out the face of the cat.
  • Takes 2 AA Batteries – NiMh Rechargable batteries are a great choice. Keep a few sets charged for long photo shoots.
  • Uses SD cards – a plus if you already have a bunch of these around the house for other devices.
  • Lot’s of settings and optional accessories available so the camera can grow with him.

Cons:

  • Price – the street price for this camera is around $200. I’ve seen it at low as $169 online.
  • No neck strap. It comes with a wrist strap. Kids are not always coordinated enough to work all the controls AND keep a good hold of the camera.
  • A little too big to fit in Jeans pocket. It will fit in a jacket pocket, but really, a neck strap or bag would be a better bet anyway.
  • Comes with 16mb SD card. A waste of plastic these days.

Once he really starts using the new camera I should be able to come back and report on whether or not this particular camera was the right choice for him.

Filed Under: Blogging for Kids Tagged With: kids, new camera

Poll: Blogging with young kids

April 26, 2008 By Daisy Leave a Comment

With my son recently starting his own blog I have been researching to see what others in the blogosphere might be saying in regard to blogging with children. I have not been finding much information more recent than about 2004. This makes the topic more intriguing than ever. It’s something that would be interesting to start some conversation about.

Here is a quick poll to get things started:

[poll id="2"]

Please visit the website if you are not able to view this poll

Please share more specific thoughts in the comments after voting!  I’m quite interested in hearing what people have to say on this matter.

Filed Under: Blogging for Kids Tagged With: blogging, blogosphere, child, kids, poll

Monetizing for new bloggers

April 22, 2008 By Daisy Leave a Comment

I’ve known for awhile that, if I really want to make a go at blogging, there needs to be some compensation involved. With this in mind I set out to see what could be done, as a new comer with few visitors, to set up some potential revenue streams. Once a blog gains some staying power in terms of both content and traffic it is easier to gain acceptance with some of the advertising networks with more stringent guidelines.

I see monetization on a blog as a multi-front effort that can be broken down into several areas.

  • In Post – Here we have affiliate links to products that are mentioned
  • Around the page – Contextual ads and buttons in the header, footer, sidebar and between posts.
  • Mobile – ads targeted to mobile visitors
  • In the Feed
  • Email Subscription Ads
  • Search Page Ads

I am not suggesting that anyone fill every available space with advertising. As a new publisher several doors were closed to me. I was rejected by both Yahoo Publisher’s Network and text-ads.

For Mobile ads there are two primary options. These are Admob and Adsense for mobile. Since I have a plugin that handles making my site mobile friendly and it has admob already integrated that is what I chose to use for my sites. I would be interested in hearing feedback on these two options.

For advertising in feeds there are also two options. I do not consider Adsense for feeds to be an option since it appears to be in a perpetual closed beta cycle. This leaves Pheedo, which focuses specifically on advertising in RSS feeds, and Bidvertiser, which serves contextual ads as it’s primary platform but is running feed based advertising as an open beta. I ran Pheedo on a blog with 11k subscribers for a few days and have not switched to bidvertiser. The switch to Bidvertiser was mainly due to the fact that they have a WordPress plugin. Pheedo required that I either burn the feed with them, or modify every one of my rss templates. I will see how Bidvertiser performs over the next week or so and then determine where to go from there.

Options that are currently being testing on this site:

I chose to limit this list to category based and contextual advertising networks, with the exception of Amazon.

Plugins:

  • All in One Adsene & YPN
  • Ask Apache Firefox Adsense – This one is kind of cool. Only those that meet the guidelines for payment are actually shown the ad. So windows users in IE get the ad, Firefox users and Non-windows do not.
  • Adsense manager – This does much more than adsense. It’s a good way to keep track of the ads that I’ve set up in adsense and then I can insert them where I choose.
  • Bidvertiser ads for feeds (Download plugin after adding feed to publisher account)
  • WordPress Mobile (Admob ads) This is the most reliable mobile plugin I’ve tried.

I’m still on the hunt for a great plugin for handling Amazon links. There are a few that are promising but I haven’t narrowed it down completely. I’m leaning strongly toward a combination of the following two plugins. AmazonSimpleAdmin and AVH Amazon (Wishlist Widget)

Note about ads in feeds: On initial inspection Pheedo seems better in many ways than Bidvertiser for inserting ads into rss feeds. The ads seem to appear more often and seem to be from higher quality advertisers. This subject will be revisited in more detail at some point in the near future.

Image by Tracy O

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: adsense, advertising networks, affiliate, Amazon, bidvertiser, blogging, contextual ads, Google, mobile ads, Monetization, pheedo, Plugin, revenue streams, text ads
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