Chris Blackwell’s Domain

I am now taking new submissions for this week’s “site of the week”. If you would like your website to be featured on Friday with a small review then please submit your site now. To submit your site please go to my contact page, fill out the form, and put “Site of the Week” in the subject line. Include your URL and a small description of what your site is about. I look forward to seeing all the submissions and best of luck to everyone!

This week’s site of the week award goes to April’s Thoughts & Inspirations. This blog is a simple yet powerful little personal blog that inspires and helps with general day to day life. April provides small tidbits of inspirational help everyday and mini-articles that discuss dealing with situations and reducing your overall stress level. You can see all of April’s thoughts at http://aprillaw.wordpress.com

I am starting a new feature this week called “Website of the Week”. I love promoting small blogs that are starting out or haven’t hit a good number of subscribers yet. I want to hear about your site so I can showcase it on my website. Every week I will pick the best (hand selected) of all the blogs and/or websites that are emailed to me. I will post the best from each week as a featured review on this site every Friday.

To participate, go to my contact page and fill out the contact form with the subject “Site of the Week”. The winner will be posted Friday morning. If you are not selected one week, please resubmit your site for the next week. Good luck to everyone and I can’t wait to see all the exciting websites that you will be sending to me.

Every morning I roll out of bed, make my way to the coffee machine and then head to my computer with one thing in mind: check my RSS Reader! This has been my morning routine for over two years now and it works for me with one little exception now. The amount of unread posts that are absolute junk! When I wake up in the morning and see I have 130 unread items and I end up only reading about 5, that is not acceptable by any means. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, so where has the real simple part gone?

I can’t read the news on the net anymore

I had to completely unsubscribe from all news company’s RSS feeds because they really don’t get it, and, are by far the worst at posting junk. When a news company reports on an issue they create a post about it and then my RSS feeder is updated with that post. But then they post another article about the same topic, and another, and another. Before too long I have 5 unread messages in my RSS reader about the same topic. Come on guys, consolidate this into either one post or one RSS message. Every time I try to subscribe to a newspaper’s “general news feed”, it has over 200 unread messages by the end of the day. How am to keep up with that?

All in a race to make Google happy

A lot of these sites are posting very frequently so that Google indexes them faster and faster, and the more their competitors post, the more they feel like they have to retaliate. Even some of my favorite sites like Lifehacker and Engadget have slipped a little and are now submitting dozens of posts a day. Engadget by my count is up to about 50 postings a day! Are there really 50 new tech stories to talk about each day?

What’s this whole quality thing about?

You’ve probably noticed a trend or lack thereof on my blog. I don’t post anything unless I have something meaningful to say. You don’t need to read yet again about the new MacBooks that Apple released, or another post on how badly Windows VISTA is doing, because you’ve already read it. It’s been covered! So I don’t waste my time and I don’t waste yours rehashing the obvious. Make sure your posts are original, note worthy, and to the point.