In Conversation With Daniel Scocco And Amit Agarwal

Great Mind Thinks Alike, this is absolutely true.

I coined few questions before two heavy weight bloggers Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com and our very own Amit Agarwal of labnol.org. Expectedly on most of the issues both gave almost similar answers. Worth mentioning that while answering these questions both of these guys were unaware what other has quoted. Daniel love to explain things while Amit is a man of few words, spoke very clearly and to the point.

Well these guys need no introduction but for a newbie who want to know more about them:

Daniel Scocco started developing blogs and websites in 2005, on his blog Daily Blog Tips he shares what he learned along the way. The blog was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently it is ranked among the 500 most popular blogs in the world and among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world. He is also the founder of the online marketing and business training program Online Profits.

Amit Agarwal launched his blog Digital Inspiration in 2004 and is now the 40^th most-favorite blog on the Internet. Amit has appeared on TV and radio channels including BBC, CNN IBN, CNBC, NDTV, Star TV, ETV and Blog TV Singapore. He has been featured on the cover page of The Week magazine; Digital Inspiration won the Best Technology Blog award at Indibloggies 2006 and is also included in the prestigious “Blogs of Note” list compiled by the Blogger team at Google. The site also recommended as “must read” by “India Today” and is one of the top 20 blogs at Microsoft BlogStars.

Question: They say Video blogging is the next big thing? What you think about it?

Daniel Scocco: Video is huge. In fact it is not the next but the current big thing. If I am not wrong YouTube confirmed a while ago that it is streaming over 1 billion videos every day. As for video blogging, it depends how you define it. If you are talking about someone getting in front of a web cam and talking about general stuff, well I am not sure how many people will have success with that (some certainly will, but it requires talent). Independent video creations that try to explore different concepts have a bright future though.

Amit Agarwal: video blogging will get popular no doubt with the emergence of services like qik that bring live streaming to phones.

Question: Do you see any threat from “Video” blogging to the traditional/conventional “Text” blogging?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t think that video blogging threatens traditional blogging. Both media have their place. It is like when television came along. It certainly didn’t kill books and newspapers.

Amit Agarwal: They complement to each other, neither is a threat.

Question: Bunch of boys trying to make money from blogging and fails miserably, why people see blogging as a mean to make money rather than a platform to express their onion and thoughts?

Daniel Scocco: Money makes the world go around, so people will chase it wherever they can. I am not sure if the majority of the people who start blogging do so because of the money though. As for the people who want to make money blogging and fail, well, I believe it comes from the fact that they are not willing to put what it takes. Making money with a blog is no different than making money with another type of website or with an offline venture. As such, it requires a lot of time and hard work.

Amit Agarwal: Money from blogs is a long term effort and you only realize this when you get into the thing, I mean you read success stories that Mr. x is making y from blogging and you tend to thing that I too can do it, But it’s a long term effort and lot of people quit before they reach that stage.

Question: Affiliate Marketing and Blogging is a lethal combination if you know how to go about it, do you think blogging was designed for this purpose?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t think blogging was designed for affiliate marketing. In fact I am not even sure that we can say that blogging was “designed.” I see it rather as a phenomenon that emerged spontaneously on the web, and that was shaped by a myriad of factors.

Amit Agarwal: I have no clue about affiliate marketing so no comments; I never sold any affiliate product on your blog.

Question: There is flood of Blogging coaching programs in the internet market now, everyone claims to give inside secrets of how to become a super blogger and a rich affiliate marketer. What do you think on this situation?

Daniel Scocco: Honestly I haven’t checked most of those programs, so I couldn’t say if they are good or bad. The only program which I have seen the material is Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind, and I confirm it is quality stuff.  Yaro himself generated over $500,000 last year if I am not wrong, so he knows what he is talking about.

Amit Agarwal: I am not sure if they offer value, there are tons of great blogs / resources on the web that talk about blogging and communities in depth, follow them, read their archives, and that’s it.

Question: People consider you as one of the Guru of Professional Blogging, your take on that and also. Tell me who your favorites are?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t consider myself a guru. I just have a passion for business and online marketing, and I am glad that people like the stuff I share on my blogs. Some of my favorite bloggers are: Darren Rowse from Problogger.net, Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com, Leo Babauta from ZenHabits.net

Amit Agarwal: It’s a level playing field, you write good and unique content and they’ll find you. There’s no “god” in blogging, my favorite is Om Malik from GigaOM, very successful yet so down to earth.

Question: Your one single piece of advice to budding bloggers.

Daniel Scocco: If you are blogging as a hobby, have fun. If you are blogging to make money, treat it like a business and work hard.

Amit Agarwal: Work hard.

Interview with Donncha O Caoimh-Developer of WordPress MU

Well this man indeed needs no introduction. All you web developer guys out there know him very well.  An authority in his chosen field, a software developer and as they call him “Murphy’s Quality Controller” of Automattic Inc. He is Lead Developer behind weblog site WordPress.com and the multi-user version of WordPress WordPress MU. He lives with his lovely wife Jacinta in the scenic town of Blarney, Co. Cork, Ireland. He is also a passionate photographer, dragging around a camera everywhere and posting photos every day to Inphotos.org. Donncha is a Linux user and his primary post-production tool is The GIMP, using GThumb as an image viewer.

Donncha has released dozen of other useful WordPress Plugin. Some of them are No Adverts for Friends, Comment Referrers adds the referrer to comment notification emails, Flickr Comment Importer imports comments from your photos on Flickr into your blog. Flickr Blog This to Draft stops your post appearing when you blog a photo from Flickr. Brian’s Latest Comments Cached caches the output of Brian’s Latest Comments. WP Super Cache that creates static html files. Blog Voyeur – spy on your visitors! Cookies for Comments sets a cookie in your browser and marks a comment as spam if the cookie isn’t present later. WordPress Theme Tester enables you to test new themes without any impact on your visitors. Let’s talk to the man himself.

Shanker Bakshi: You are a lead developer of WordPress MU. There is lot of Buzz about its extension BuddyPress. Users are mixing up both WordPress MU and BuddyPress and creating powerful social media Networking sites just like Facebook. What’s your take on that?

Donncha O Caoimh: It’s exciting that the tools are there for users to build sites like Facebook. These same tools will raise the expectations of users for what their software should do, and possibly make it harder for proprietary software makers to compete with GPLed software.

Shanker Bakshi: When Ma.tt Mullenweg was here for attending WordCamp India a couple of months back I requested him to integrate BuddyPress with WordPress blog. He liked my idea. Do you think it will help bloggers if they have their blogs supported by an internal integrated social network community?

Donncha O Caoimh: Yes and no. Yes, it will help communication between bloggers to discuss issues but no, it might discourage those bloggers looking elsewhere for differing opinions. Their local social network could become an echo chamber where only the populist view prevails. I find the most interesting bloggers are those with original thoughts.

On a more positive note, an internal social network will help to gel a group of bloggers together. There will be friendships built, the site will become sticky and invaluable to those users.

Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about how you guys works at Automattic. How its likes to be a part of the most influential work Group of Web 2.0

Donncha O Caoimh: Oh, it’s fabulous. We’re jetting off here, there and everywhere. We get to work on really cool code. Sort of. Working for Automattic is a superb opportunity and the job is very interesting and always throwing up new challenges. I never think much about how influential Automattic is.

I love working on code and doing interesting things with it so it’s a surprise to me when I hear things like that!
As you know Automattic is made up of people from all over the world so communication is vitally important. I think Matt’s recent post on P2 hits the nail on the head. IRC is really useful for immediate responses from those in your same timezone, but P2 does that too, plus the conversation I started on a micro blog can be joined by Matt when he starts work 8 hours later.

Shanker Bakshi: social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs are the main evolutions on web 2.0. Where you see this movement in two years from now?

Donncha O Caoimh: Not surprisingly I think video will play a bigger role but there’s always going to be a place for the written word. I think we’ll find a lot more older people will get online. This may hopefully improve usability of websites. Some upstart website is going to shake the foundations a bit but for the most part technology will slowly evolve.

Shanker Bakshi: You have also developed a hand full of WordPress Plugins but it seems you are fallen in love with WP Super Cache. What are the other projects you are handing at this moment?

Donncha O Caoimh: Love? WP Super Cache? Ha! If you only knew the nights I fell asleep thinking of caching and why this or that didn’t work, or the weekends spent hacking on it when I wanted to be playing with my son. That plugin takes up a lot of my time!

Other projects are listed on my blog’s “WordPress Plugins” page, but I’ve also contributed to:
1. Tweetbacks – got it to use wp-cron to fetch tweets.

2. WP-hashcash – it now protects the MU signup form.

3. Subscribe to Comments which is now used on WordPress.com and I need to get a patch to Mark Jaquith

4. Viper’s adminbar which briefly made an appearance in MU but I’ll be merging the changes back into that plugin.

Shanker Bakshi: would you like to share some of the new features that you are incorporating in next versions of WordPress MU? I mean what major changes we will see in near future in MU Platform.

Donncha O Caoimh: The next major change will be merging WordPress 2.8 into MU, but mostly it’s bug fixing and incremental improvements. Any major improvements will likely come in the form of Plugins, if I find the time to work on them.

Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about your other love Photography. You and matt both loves to click things. In fact I can see you post a new photograph every day on In Photos.

Donncha O Caoimh: Yeah, I love photography and drag my camera everywhere. It annoys some people but thankfully my wife is a photography fan too. I shoot whatever I find interesting, quite often from an unusual angle if I can and I have little time for the analysis of photography. My life is too busy with work and family life to worry about interpretation. If I like it, I’ll shoot it!

Shanker Bakshi: In the planet of more then 4000 WordPress Plugin which one is your favorite and which other WordPress coder’s works inspire you or impress you?

Donncha O Caoimh: Hands down, it has to be Subscribe to Comments. It’s currently maintained and developed by Mark Jaquith and has to be the most useful plugin of all. I cringe whenever I leave a comment on a blog that doesn’t use it because I know I’ll miss the rest of the conversation.

I also like what viper007bond did with his admin bar and Joost De valk did some neat things to make his Plugins easier to configure. He added a “Settings” link next to the “Deactivate” link on the plugins.php page in Tweetbacks. No other plugin does that so I copied it for WP Super Cache (Thanks Joost!)

Shanker Bakshi: Any thing you want to convey to your WordPress MU and Plugin users.

Donncha O Caoimh: Writing GPL software is a two way process. You get the software without paying an upfront cost in currency but the real cost is when you don’t give back in some form. That can be either by helping someone else use the same software, reporting problems back to the author, or submitting a patch to make the software better.
If you find a bug in a WordPress plugin, get in there with a text editor. Look at the error logs. Use Google to search for any error messages and then get back in there and learn. Sending the plugin author a donation or buying something off their Amazon wishlist will help too of course!

Shanker Bakshi: Thanks very much for giving time from your busy schedule to Shanker Bakshi dot Com readers. Thanks again.

Donncha O Caoimh: You’re welcome!

Best Buddies – Donncha O Caoimh with Matt Mullenweg

Short Conversation between dot Com Mogul and dot Com Guru

It seems I am enjoying interviewing fellow bloggers and biggies of blogsphere these days. First of all it was with blogging buddy Gyutae Park then coder craftsman Andy and now comes short conversation with Mr. John Chow. There is one more coming your way in a very short time. If you go through various pages of this blog I had quoted it at many places that I started blogging only after reading some great stuff of Mr. Chow on his blog, before that I was not even aware any such thing like blogging exists on this earth. So I’m very humbly and respectfully owe this whole blogging thing of mine to Mr. Chow.

Way back somewhere in October 2007, I won this prestigious million Euro Wiki Page from John Chow dot com in a contest where Mr. Chow and Shoemoney were fighting with each other on who could get more RSS subscriber in the month of during contest period, so like many other things John is also pioneer and expert in this blogging contest things, so before starting this lets Win this contest together -Season 2 I had a short conversation with him in which he guide me how to go about it.

Shanker Bakshi: I am starting a big contest, it’s a contributory contest, Am trying to contact big shot of blogsphere to make it big but they are not responding positively.

John Chow: That’s too bad; did you answer the “What’s in it for me” question?

Shanker Bakshi: “HOW TO RUN A CONTEST AND MAKE IT BIG?”

John Chow: That might make a cool blog post

Shanker Bakshi: they can at least response.

John Chow: That answer is pretty easy, you need to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Well, you need to answer their questions, it’s not yours, when emailing others to help, tell them what’s in it for them

Shanker Bakshi: okay – that’s a great tip. What is best place/way to promote a blog contest?

John Chow: any place you can, facebook, other blogs, twitter, etc

Shanker Bakshi: These days commenting helps more then anything -what’s your take on this?

John Chow: Yes, if you’re among the first

Shanker Bakshi: If I put a condition to participate in the contest like “TO BLOG ABOUT THE CONTEST” would it be amount to duplicate contents for Google? Lots of bloggers will copy and paste the contest post.

John Chow: Not unless every blog writes the exact same thing, you can solve that by asking a question like “What do you like about it?” that forces them to write something unique.

Shanker Bakshi: That’s a great advise again, thanks for your time, you been always so kind towards me.

John Chow: That’s good for you

Interview With Andy Bailey – The Man Behind Plugin CommentLuv

We bloggers are living in a world where we need Plugins to show our love (or hate for that matter) towards our readers and commentators. Andy Bailey understood this need and crafted one of most downloaded Plugin for WordPress – CommentLuv. At the moment it is processing approximately 150000 Comments per day, that’s enough to establish the fact that how much bloggers love this idea. CommentLuv is a WordPress Plugin which enables bloggers to reward blog readers by leaving a titled link to their last post automatically whenever they comment. This also encourages readers to make more comments.

Andy is a busy man, he has been associated with some other popular projects elottery affiliate, Magnetic Sponsoring, Oceanside Wealth etc. In the following short interview I will ask him about his brain child CommentLuv and some other cool features that he wish to add up in CommentLuv.

Shanker Bakshi: When exactly you got this idea to create a WordPress plugin which rewards readers on a blog?

Andy Bailey: it was at the time that blogrush came out with a widget that showed links to other sites on your blog. I thought it would be better to show links to the sites of the people that contribute to the blog rather than some stranger who already gets traffic I spent a while on a test script and it worked, so I installed it on my own blog after a while, some people asked if they could have it too. The rest is history (in the making)

Shanker Bakshi: Yes it’s a History in the making, how were the initial reactions from its users?

Andy Bailey: Great, if it wasn’t for the reactions I wouldn’t have made it as a release. My only goal at that time was to reward my own readers and it seems to be a common want among bloggers (especially the nice ones!)

Shanker Bakshi: You are totally fallen in love with CommentLuv or there are some other projects you are handing at this moment.

Andy Bailey: I have quite a few projects on and a company to run, I have to do  CommentLuv stuff in my spare time or fit it around doing a project by slipping a couple of extra hours in here and there (mostly late at night)

Shanker Bakshi: what’s your take on Automattic acquiring IntenseDebate? What kind of changes in whole commenting system you were expecting with WP 2.7?

Andy Bailey: I’m not sure on the merits of ID being integrated into WP 2.7. One of the things I like most about CommentLuv is that it creates the community on your own blog, you don’t have to go to a 3rd party site with different details to see what your community is up to. I have tried it out on 2.7 Beta 3 and got CommentLuv to work on it in a rough form so when it comes out I will have an option for it.

Shanker Bakshi: would you like to share some of the new features that you are going to introduce in CommentLuv?

Andy Bailey: The JavaScript file will be remotely hosted this time so I can implement updates without the user needing to download/upload files and more secure and reliable feed handling with easier to understand error messages and the contest is going really well so I want to put in a way of notifying the user that they have won. A long distant future feature would be a way for blogs to allow an ad to be shown as the last blog post when the user doesn’t have a feed. Something that works as a revenue share using a generic term for the anchor text like “just bought a new LCD TV, my review” so it can point to a product page that’s a long way off though.

Shanker Bakshi: Okay – What else Andy Bailey has in store for us?

Andy Bailey: that’s it I’m afraid, CommentLuv takes every sliver of my spare time. the forums, the help desk, the site, the newsletter, the new versions, the updates, the help requests by email, the twitter requests, interview requests (lol!), promotion, prize sending, address getting… it goes on! it’s a great way for me to pass the time doing something I enjoy I have other Plugins I have written but not released but the maintenance time is what stops me , any other plugin would take away time from CommentLuv and I luvs my CommentLuv

Shanker Bakshi: which are other things that excite you besides coding for your projects and all?

Andy Bailey: I have been going to the gym and swim regularly for the past 5 months, that’s pretty good and makes me feel awesome (especially when I have to buy new trousers coz the old ones are too big!) I really like reading sci-fi books but I don’t have the time these days so I have been listening to the dragons of pern series by anne mccaffrey while I am driving on business mostly I like to spend time with my partner, she is the glue that stops me falling apart I like helping too, running a business and an affiliate network is fun (when it doesn’t go wrong or deliveries get lost)

Shanker Bakshi: tell us about your inspiration, the Idol you follow.

Andy Bailey: I’ve been really impressed by Barack Obama speeches, I guess you could say I look up to him in a way. My inspiration is a quote I heard once saying “you can have anything you want just by helping others to get what they want” and the instructions for life taped to the wall behind my monitors , my favorite is number 5 – “Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly”

I’ve always thought Richard Branson was a good role model.

Shanker Bakshi: Any other thing you want to convey to your Comment LUV user and to Shanker Bakshi dot Com Readers.

Andy Bailey: spread the luv!

Shanker Bakshi: that’s so cool, Thanks very much for your time, all the best for all your future assignments.

Andy Bailey: thanks, you too.

Gyutae Park -The Ultimate IM Blog Ranking System From WTW

Many of you make Money Online Bloggers might have submitted your blogs to 45n5 for inclusion in his Top MMO Blog List, now if you tried it for ten times and  fail to penetrate in that buddy’s list then you have a better option now to choose.

My friend and blogger Gyutae Park has come up with IM TOP Blog list. He has created this list of Top Blogs under various categories ranked. It uses a variety of important metrics when ranking sites on the list. Ranking is based on 10 Qualify factors weighted according to their importance includes Feedburner RSS Subscribers,  Alexa Rank,  Alexa Rank,  Technorati Rank, Google PageRank,  StumbleUpon Reviews, del.icio.us Votes, Links from his blog Winning the Web,  and User Votes.

I have a sort talk with Gyutae on his IM TOP blog list. He is very enthusiastic about this project , lets see what he has to say about it?

Me: where do you get the idea to make it?

Gyutae Park: I always wanted a list like that so i made it

Me: any inspiration behind it?

Gyutae Park: just a need for it.

Me: How is the response so far?

Gyutae Park: response is good, many people have blogged about it around many have added the badge.

Me: what you wanna say about 45n5 list?

Gyutae Park: well it was very limiting not as many factors

Me: How will you manage when the list will have millions of blogs registered?

Gyutae Park: oh that would be great but I doubt that would happen

Me: Which new features you would like to add in future with this list?

Gyutae Park: not sure yet… Still getting feedback from users.

Me: anything else you want to convey to users of this IM top Blog list?

Gyutae Park: I incorporated all of the features that i thought would be useful

It’s the ultimate list and it should more accurately show the landscape of the IM blogsphere.

Me: thanks very much for your time – I wish success for you hope more and more bloggers will use this service.

Gyutae Park: cool, thanks.

So head over to this page and check this cool list and yes if you have submitted your blog and ranked then don’t forget to place your rank badge on your blog.

Here is mine Rank Badge, I currently stand at rank 268 in Make Money Online Category and I’m very happy about it