BCBlog

You’ve been waiting for it, Sports Editor Suss has been chomping on his virtual cigar for it, and here is is!

Please note: there is no free gas contest!

Unless you’re an uber-insider or hardcore Blogcritics phreak (like me!) it’s very easy to get the various terminologies and parlances straight when it comes to how we highlight, promote, and celebrate the best stories and writers of Blogcritics.

Here’s the down-and-dirty so you’ll never have to feel out in the digital cold again:

RED ALERTS

With the rise in popularity of many social software / content aggregator / Web 2.0 platforms (which exist because people submit stuff that other people have written and then people vote on it or talk about it or whatever) and with the continuing explosion of the blogosphere (which includes many blogs that link to other blogs and websites and reflect on the state of the media and blogosphere), Blogcritics finds itself in a very unique and advantageous position.

The challenge for us has always been to explain to people what Blogcritics is and why it’s such a fantastical place to check out i.e. the news, opinions, and reviews found here are outstanding and interesting and are part of a community you just won’t find anywhere
else.

We’re special. We know that, and we’re working on having other people know it as well!

One of the most special aspects of Blogcritics.org is its wonderful community of writers and readers and bloggers and thinkers. One of the easiest and best ways to use the “people power” of Blogcritcs is through a system we call “red alerts.”

What red alerts mean in practice is that a quick note gets sent out to the large e-mail list of Blogcritics writers with “Red Alert” and the title of a Blogcritics story in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, there are most often links to three different websites (Digg, ShoutWire, and Reddit). The red alert signals writers to click those links, which takes them to a page on each of the three websites where they can literally “vote” for the Blogcritics story. Voting for stories on these sites increases its popularity. The more popular the story, the better the chance that it will land on the site’s front page, which is really a jackpot in terms of the number of visitors that will read that story and therefore visit Blogcritics.org.

In order to vote for stories, you must first register for these sites, which is a quick, easy, and free process.

* Register for Digg here: http://www.digg.com/register
* Register for Shoutwire here: http://www.shoutwire.com/register
* Register for Reddit by looking in the upper right hand corner, clicking the “register” tab, and creating a username and password: http://reddit.com/

After stories have been “red alerted,” links to the appropriate pages on digg, shoutwire, and/or reddit will be installed at the bottom of the story on Blogcritics.org.

Please vote for Blogcritics stories via digg, shoutwire, and reddit! There’s literally no easier way to directly impact the day-to-day success of the site that more than 1,200 writers call home and thousands of daily readers have come to love.

TAGGING

Tagging is getting to be a big time activity on the Internet these days.

What are tags? Del.icio.us, one of the most popular tagging sites, defines it thus:

Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark. Tags can’t contain quotation marks or whitespace, but are otherwise unrestricted. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, and rename, delete, add or merge tags together.

You can now find a link to del.icio.us at the bottom of every single Blogcritics story! Tagging is a perfect example of people power. The more people who tag stories, or create their own descriptors which can be shared and used by others, the more popular those stories become.

Register for del.icio.us here: http://del.icio.us/register

Tailrank (www.tailrank.com) is another popular and up-and-coming tag-based website.

Register for tailrank here: http://www.tailrank.com/register

Please tag Blogcritics stories via del.icio.us and tailrank!

EDITORS’ PICKS OF THE WEEK

Editors’ picks allow the editorial staff of Blogcritics to select the flat-out best stories of the week. Picks are collected in a fun, varied, and star-studded weekly column that really show off the dazzling display of writers and stories that Blogcritics has to offer
each day.

FEATURED STORIES

Yet another way that we honor and promote the best stories on Blogcritics.org is through an initiative called “featured story.”

Featured stories are sent out to the writer’s e-mail list in a similar fashion as red alerts. Blogcritics are encouraged to read featured stories, comment upon them, and mention and link to them on home sites.

Featured stories also get a prominent link for a day or two on the front page of Blogcritics.org in the “spotlight box.”

ADVANCE FAMILY OF WEBSITES

Blogcritics.org stories are also syndicated in a number of ways. Each week, the best music, television, sports, and books related stories are syndicated to the Advance family or websites, which are associated with online newspapers such as Cleveland.com.

GOOGLE NEWS

Blogcritics.org is an official Google News site, which means that the vast majority of Blogcritics stories can be found on Google News, a news source that receives many hundreds of thousands of visitors each day.

MORE, THE FUTURE, AND TIME INCARNATE

We syndicate our stories in other ways and there are also a full slate-load of content partnerships on deck (or in Pending, so to speak), some of which of the pan-dimensionally large variety.

But let’s leave it at that for now, shall we?