Want Your Own Garden Blog

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is work with a group of fellow gardeners in a blog network about gardening. So when the opportunity came along to start a gardening blog network, I jumped at the chance.

And now I’m going to open up the network to you folks.

If you want a gardening blog on an all-gardening blog-network, click here to see the front page. There’s a blue button in the top right hand corner - click on that and sign up.

Some things to know.

1) This is a time limited offer. I’ll be closing down the registration in a short bit and then opening it up every now and then as we can handle new bloggers.

2) You own your content. You can import an existing blog or if you decide to leave this network, you can export your content to another blog.

3) Money. Always an interesting question. The biggest problem that network owners have is how to pay writers. By post? By traffic? By advertising revenue? Each system rewards one kind of behavior and penalizes others and networks disintegrate (business-wise) based on these problems. I’ve researched this pretty thoroughly so here’s the deal. Garden blogs don’t make a lot of money (check your adsense numbers if you think this is an error) So if we make the hosting fees, life is good (I’m covering shortfalls). If we make more than the hosting fees, the money from the adsense accounts will be given to charity. I’m thinking charities that are non-political like Doctors without Borders - groups that help people who truly need it. This will be transparent and reported every month.

So - there will be no money made by any blogger. But with the extra traffic we create as a network, you should get more readers and this can translate into any number of income possibilities. Or networking or just one heck of a good time.

NEW - it turns out that we have two options - the system wide ads that will be served to all blogs to make money and your own codes in individual posts where you get to keep the money. So we all win on this one.

Or - you don’t care about making money and just want to have fun and hang out with a bunch of fellow garden bloggers. In this case, here we are.

4) The software is Wordpress with over 100 plugins to make your blog do almost anything you can think of.

Disable Comments

I don’t know about your blog but most of the spam comments that roll in are usually given to older posts. In the case of this blog, two posts in particular have drawn spam like flowers attract bees.

The nofollow tag is a tag that I used to have enableddisabled. This allowed a direct link to your site from my site from every comment post. It was one way to reward great comments. However, the spammers troll for this plugin and when they find it, they too make comments hoping to pick up a link from a mid-level ranking site. So I get to delete these regularly.

I’ve deleted the nofollowdofollow plugin so it no longer works. And I’ve disabled comments on the posts that usually draws spammers.

If you find that spammers tend to make comments on old posts, you can do the same thing. Simply disable comments on that individual post. I don’t know if you can do this on other blogging software but with Wordpress, the disable comments for this post box is at the bottom of each post. You can disable individual post comments without having to disable all comments on your blog.

But you can still make comments on other posts on my site. Just not the old ones the spammers tend to love.
photocredit

Big Apple Blog

If you’re living in NYC, then you want to check out this new blog that’s just been started by some buddies of mine. They’re calling it Garden Bytes from The Big Apple and describing how tough it is to garden in the city (oh really!) and all the innovative things that are going on there. So if you’re looking for a clearing-house for garden info in the Big Apple, click here.

Good stuff written by two pro’s.

Blogging Comments Section

I did a few other things yesterday to the comments section in order to make it a more interesting place.

The first is a plugin called CommentLuv and this little feature will act as a promotional tool for *your* blog. What it does is go to your blog and pulls up the last headline you wrote. So if somebody sees your comment and likes your post, they’re going to click through to your blog to read it.

The other thing I added was a plugin called Comment Remix. This plugin allows you to directly quote other writers or comments and creates a threaded comment discussion. This should help those of us with limited concentration follow what’s been said by whom. It’s not a full forum feature but it can act as a limited one.

So - we now have nofollow tags so I can give you direct links, automatic promotion blocks for your own blog if you have one (no websites remember) and a threaded conversation function so we senior-gardeners can figure out what the heck is going on and act like we’re functioning properly without coffee in the mornings.

I think that just about does it for now. I’m always open to suggestions for making this a better experience so don’t hesitate to comment and tell me other things that I can do in the comment section to make them better for you.

Blog Awards

So what do you guys do about blog-type awards or listings on prestigious directories?

Do you go after them? Do you thank the directories? Do you post the little gizmo graphic that they suggest?

Let me lead off with how I look at this…

I’ve only gone for one award in my writing life. I entered a GWA Golden Globe awards with a book I wrote (Gardening Wisdom) and it won the best writing award that year out of the all the various writing categories. I also received a Canada Council Award for it. I was pretty pleased but the reason I entered it was that I was hoping for at least an honorable mention so I could then write “award-winning garden writer” after my name. And I hoped my publisher would do something with it and flog my book even more (they didn’t) I haven’t entered since (some would say my writing has gone downhill anyway)

I’ve never entered or promoted my blog for the garden blogging awards but I think they’re a heck of a lot of fun to watch and see who gets awarded those coveted badges. I do visit each of the nominees and winners to check ‘em out. But I’m not overly interested in entering or winning (good thing too I suspect) because I’m not looking for awards anymore. I have my own standards for success and I’m pretty much hitting them (but then I go and increase the darn targets).

I got put up by Alltop lately and seem to have joined a goodly group of garden bloggers. So it looks like I’m in good company there and I’m really pleased to have been included.

They gave me the option of putting their badge on my site but I can’t decide whether to do it or not - even though Guy Kawasaki is one of the leading folks over there and I enjoy his blog “How To Save the World” immensely.

Reminds me of the old lines “If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve” etc.

But what do you guys think about getting awards and putting badges up on your pages? Good thing - bad thing? Do it? Don’t do it?

Should I put one of these badges up on my site? Would you?

Who’s a Gardening or Blogging Expert?

One of the questions I’m intrigued with at the moment is, “Who’s an expert?”.

The easiest example to start this question is to look at the television and catch the “talking heads” or “talent” that appear there. We see “experts” trotted out to examine the entrails of just about every major situation - from political to military to foreign situation analysts and even gardening now and then. There’s an expert for everything.

Some of these folks have really “been there and done that” and have expertise to draw on. Some did it a few years ago (or more) and some are still involved. But no matter the level of expertise, the nature of television lends them credence. They’re on the tube so you trust them. Somebody has branded them as “expert”.

I have a personal stake in this at the moment because I’m taking several courses from “experts” and I had to research them pretty carefully before I signed on to give them my money and my time. What’s the point in taking advice from somebody who is simply a talking head and can read a teleprompter well?

And what’s this got to do with blogging and gardening?

Well, I think the same kinds of questions can be asked of the gardening and garden-blogging world.

It is one thing to read a personal blog and know the gardener is telling us something from her own garden, sharing what she’s seeing and taking pictures of. This person makes no pretense at authority and writes for her own pleasure and for a journaling kind of writing. These are great fun.

It is entirely another thing to take advice from somebody who’s giving it as if they know something about gardening. How do you know?

What are the reference points you use to determine that somebody will make a good garden instructor or garden coach? Or are they good talking heads, good garden bloggers, like our well-coifed tv guys? Or do they really know their stuff? What qualifications do you look for when picking a garden “expert”?

Similarly, do you go to garden bloggers to learn about blogging or do you go to those who make a 6-figure income by blogging? What are the reference points you use to make that decision?

You see, here’s the real deal with publishing and television. It’s a business. The person who can give you the best ratings wins. The person who can sell the most magazines wins. The person with the biggest blogging audience wins. The author with the biggest book sales wins. The most attractive-to-the-audience person gets the job given all equal factors in television because looks count in responses/advertising revenues.

The best writer doesn’t necessarily sell the most books nor have the biggest blog. The best gardener may languish unknown because they prefer to be gardening and not doing the social swirl that raises profiles. Being the best at what you do doesn’t necessarily translate into the highest profile.

So how do you decide who’s an expert?

Free Ebook(s) for Writers

If you write or want to make money writing, (and it doesn’t have to be about gardening) you might want to check out these two -suddenly free - ebooks on copywriting. I paid about $25 bucks for one of them 5 or 6 years ago. And now they’re free.

Check it out and download it here.

But I’m glad I didn’t wait.

Are Blogs the New Garden Magazine?

One of the things I’m really excited about right now is the new way I’m looking at setting up online gardening seminars. A few brave souls stuck around for a few hours of webinars, gave me some great feedback and pushed my thinking into the 21st century. While I’ll be making a video this coming week on that, I thought I’d turn the same lessons to blogging.

So here’s what I’m thinking about and I’d love your thoughts.

The old publishing model went something like: editor gets a thought about subject X. Finds writer. Editor and writer to and fro and work out story details. At this point, the story is between the editor and the writer. (and yes, sometimes the details vary - the writer comes up with the story etc)
Bottom line though, the decision to publish is made by the editor and communication is between the editor and the writer.

The editor involves a support team to put out the magazine.

Magazine printed.

Reader reads.

End of story. Oh yeah, the odd reader writes editor and gets published in next issue.

So the established process goes something like writer>editor>reader.

A New Paradigm?

I think the technology of the Net has really given us disintermediation and that the time and technology is ripe to take full advantage of it.

But for the most part we aren’t.

Most writers (and I include bloggers here) are stuck in the old writer>editor>reader model. What has happened is that the writer has become the writer/editor so the process now looks like writer/editor>reader.

And again, a few folks make comments on blogs but every garden blogger I know laments the fact that only a very small proportion of subscribers actually comment.

There’s a message there folks.

Writer/editor>reader doesn’t fully involve the readership.

There’s still an editor in the process and that editor still stands between the writer and the reader. The writer has become the editor.

Look around the Net and figure out how many websites are written by the writer/editor without regard for what readers want to read. Without regard for what’s important to readers. Writers have become their own editors and make decisions accordingly but it’s still a one-way street. The old publishing model isn’t dead; it has simply moved online.

The power of the Net is such that we can now involve our readers in the process. We can ask them what they want to read, what they want to know and then we can respond appropriately.

The process becomes writer>reader>writer. A circular process and an ongoing one.

I already do this in some small way with my web sites. I use software to discover what folks are looking for in the Net and then I write about those things. My thinking is that if you’re looking for something, then I’ll write about it for you. Over the last 3-4 years, there have been some 3000 pages put up on my sites about just about every gardening topic you could think of - and still folks keep asking new questions. New software lets me take questions and comments directly on my sites and I can answer them right there. Yes, I still make writer/editor decisions but more and more I’m involving my readers in the process.

In that case it’s reader>writer>reader> Fun stuff.

This leads me back to the seminar series where I’m setting up the same kind of system only much more transparently - it is much more direct and obvious. This system is going to be reader>writer>reader>writer>reader>etc. This will be a circular system and we’re going to harness the power of the Internet (as far as I can push it anyway) in an ongoing loop of having readers determine the nature of what they want to know/read. In that case, I’ll be part of the process but not necessarily determining where it will go.

So what’s the point of all this? I think I’ve got a writer>reader>writer process working as best I can on my websites. I’ve got it designed for the seminar series but I haven’t quite figured out how and what to do with this blog, I think blogging is still pretty much stuck in the writer/editor>reader process (with small proportions of readers commenting) and I have to think about that.

My point (and you knew I was going to get there sooner or later) is that the vast majority of garden blogs and websites are stuck in a writer/editor>reader process and will never grow out of it.

Is this important to you? Is this important to your readers? Or is blogging the place for this writer/editor>reader function?

Are blogs the new garden magazines?

Confessions of a Garden Reader

OK, I read a ton of stuff every day. In fact, I read about 75 blogs almost every day (that’s down from 100 a month or so ago) and it is only the determined and high quality blogs that stay in my reader (or the so-different that there is no alternative) And I said at one point that I’d share some of those with you.

One blog that I read (and have for some time now) is that of George Ball. Yes, “that” George Ball - vilified in the blogosphere as the ultimate Darth Gardener for his company’s purchase and subsequent moving of Heronswood Nursery.

But hold on for just a second.

Understand several things. The first is that I spent over 20 years in the trenches running my own specialist nursery and 3 years travelling the U.S. east coast as the Territory Sales Manager for Canada’s largest perennial nursery. This qualifies me to have opinions about the nursery trade. Well, I guess any gardener/blogger can have opinions but I have some experience behind mine.

And George Ball has opinions based on his experiences in the nursery trade.

Now George and I have never met. He wrote the introduction to one of my books (Burpee Book of Bulbs) and given that he owns Burpee, this is his right. That’s as close as we’ve come to talking. Heck, he never even asked me to sign his copy (assuming he has one)

The deal is simple. This man is in the trenches. He runs one of the largest gardening operations in the US. And regarding the blogosphere, there are always two sides to every issue. I don’t want nor do I intend to enter that debate nor will I be approving comments that want to open it here.

All I want to say is that love him or hate him - you have to read him.

Tropical Plant Beauties

Here’s another of my friends with her “guest blog” for you to enjoy. You might want to check out her ongoing stories here.

Honey, after seven Wisconsin winters, I thought I had seen every kind of weather the planet spews, from hurricanes to blizzards. But, two feet of snow and -15ºF nights followed by a 50-degree-day that spawned frozen fog thick enough to cut into blocks are testing my Southern serenity. I might as well be back in the bayous of Louisiana, where sulfur fog obscures oil refinery pollution and muffles crying nutrias. At least, I wouldn’t be chilled to the bone as I am now, despite my mink coat and endless cups of Earl Grey tea spiked with peach brandy.

My precious tropical beauties are keeping me from going totally mad, especially the 14-pound amorphophallus bulb in the sunroom. Its passion-pink bud tantalizes me, knowing that it will burst forth in a month or two with the smelliest flower on the planet. ‘Konjac’, the cultivar I’ve been growing in the garden during our brief summers for the last four years, is the little cousin of giant ‘Titan’, the one television news crews like to cover when it blooms for a sensational blurb for the 6 p.m. news. Mine will produce the same cheap-vinyl-car-seat-cover purple spathe (Tony Avent’s description, not mine) atop a snakeskin mottled-burgundy and chartreuse stem, followed by a three-foot-high violet spadix that unfurls for only 12 hours. It reeks like rotten fish to attract carrion flies, its normal pollinator. They usually feed off of dead ‘gators and cows mired in the swamp.

I can hardly wait for the bud to break dormancy. Any harbinger of spring, especially one of this enormity cannot come too soon. It’s snowing again!
Love,
M’Liz

Kitchen Gardeners Website

I invited a few garden writer friends to post some “guest blogs” this week. Here’s the first from Roger Dorion of Kitchen Gardeners.

Kitchen Gardeners of the World Unite!

The French say potager. In Italy, it’s called an orto. Anglophones use the term kitchen garden. Wherever soil can be found, you’ll find people getting their hands in it with visions of home-made feasts dancing in their heads. In the past few years, a new nonprofit organization called “Kitchen Gardeners International” (KGI) has taken root to unite and grow the global community of gardening gastronomes.

The organization was founded by Roger Doiron, an American who lived for 10 years in Europe, as a hopeful response to what he sees as a troubled food system. “We’re becoming increasing distant from our food, both literally and figuratively to the detriment of our health, environment and gastronomy,” says Doiron “. For Doiron, the kitchen garden offers both a means and a metaphor for people to reconnect with their sustenance.

Although still a seedling, the organization would seem to have sprouted on fertile ground. “The response to our launch has been very encouraging,” says Doiron. “We now have over 4800 people from over 90 countries subscribed to our e-mail newsletter, from Alabama to Albania”. Through its newsletter and other activities, KGI offers gardeners and food lovers a portal to multicultural world of kitchen gardening and hand-made foods.

Its future plans include new activities for bringing kitchen gardeners together both literally and virtually. It will once again organize “International Kitchen Garden Day” which it dubs a “global celebration of the most local of foods”. This year’s event will take place on August 24th, 2008.

For more information, see the KGI website: www.kitchengardeners.org.

Garden Bloggers

One of the things I’ve started doing again after a bit of a break, is reading a lot more garden blogs. (Hey, it’s winter and I can’t garden) I had read about Blogger’s new policy of requiring you to have a Blogger site if you wanted to interact with other Blogger blogs but hadn’t run into it until this weekend. I read a post and decided to make a comment but then ran into the fact that I no longer have a Blogger account.

I could sign up for some kind of “anonymous” account but what’s the point?

Blogging is and always has been about creating networks and sharing stuff among blogs. With one swoop of policy, Blogger has surgically removed all future networking/links from outside its own boundaries. Because I host my own blog, I can’t make comments on Blogger sites that will include a link to my site to include myself as part of the ongoing conversation. I can’t include myself and my blog into the conversations of Blogger sites.

Garden bloggers that use Blogger will no longer be able to have comment links from a range of non-Blogger sites. Blogger-hosted blogs are now insulated from the rest of the blogosphere. A blog-ghetto if you will. It’s a big ghetto but as soon as you put up a wall where you restrict people from coming in, it doesn’t matter how large the area enclosed, you still live inside a wall.

So. Too bad I couldn’t contribute to the ongoing discussion on the blog I visited but them’s the breaks. I suspect both myself and the blog author are slightly worse off for this.

I think the real losers in this though are those that blog within Blogger. Not to put too fine a point on it but if you look at the most-read gardening blogs, the most popular, the majority of them are outside of Blogger and self-hosted. Those who blog within the Blogger network will find themselves slowly weaned off contact from these content leaders. It won’t happen next week or next month but my guess is it will happen unless Blogger changes its policy. Those who blog seriously will move to self-hosting and those who want to play will stay within Blogger.

My .02 on a snow-recovering Monday morning.

Pond Guy Blog

Whoa Nelly! The biggest pond company in the U.S. is in a bit of an economic downturn and the owner Greg Whittstock was just asked to blog about his company at Inc.
This isn’t particularly interesting if you’re a home gardener but if you’re in the trade at all or are interested in corporate dynamics, this is interesting stuff. Just be aware that there’s a ton of very angry people writing comments (some of the folks who had to be let go in the cost-cutting)

But it’s a window into the nursery trade for sure.

I actually visited the building they’re talking about and took some pond tours courtesy of these guys last summer. They were very professional and helpful in setting this garden writer up with some great ponds to see and tour. So while I love their ponds, I’m not at all qualified to write about the business itself.

Thanks to the Golden Gecko for the tip.