New Hosting for Instigator Blog

I’ve moved hosting companies because my old one was falling apart. This is a quick test post to make sure the DNS is propagating properly.

You should not have to update your RSS feeds, but when you see this message in your RSS feed, please click through and take a look to make sure everything is working properly. I appreciate it.

There may be a few hiccups along the way as I get all the plugins re-installed and configured, so bear with me. And I do plan on blogging more in the near future, Standout Jobs has kept me swamped.

Incidentally, I’ve moved to Media Temple and purchased their Grid Service (gs) hosting. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Media Temple, although immediately after purchasing I heard some bad things (from someone I trust). So we’ll see how it goes.


Adding Disqus and AddThis to Make Blog More Social

Disqus

AddThis

It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the latest widgets, gadgets, plugins and features available for bloggers. New stuff is coming out daily, which is understandable, there are millions and millions of bloggers, and many of them are very dedicated to blogging — that’s a nice market with interesting opportunities.

Few companies have really capitalized on bloggers (except those helping them generate revenue). I expect a lot of those that offer “nice add-ons” will fall off the radar eventually. But some will survive, do well, and ultimately get acquired.

Blogs are meant to be social things. (Just ask folks like Chris Brogan and Liz Strauss.) Blog success can be measured by many things (and it varies for each blog owner) but the social nature and social quality of a blog is certainly one measure. I would measure the social nature of a blog through a few things — including comments and content sharing.

With that in mind, I’ve added two features to improve Instigator Blog’s “socialness”:

(more…)


Quoted in The New York Times – The Power of Blogging

The New York Times

At this point, you really can’t question the power of blogging. It works. There are examples of blogging working across different industries, for different reasons. It’s great for customer service. It’s great for building up a following (that you can then leverage into all kinds of different businesses.) Blogging might not be for everyone, but you can’t deny it’s value. Even when some people are supposedly quitting…

After all, look at what happened to yours truly recently — I was quoted in The New York Times (free registration required).

Truth be told, I didn’t even know the author, Paul B. Brown, was going to quote me. I’d never heard of him until a reader emailed me to congratulate me. My guess is that Mr. Brown used Google to search for relevant content related to his article and came across my blog. Unless he’s been a faithful reader for some time, but the article he quoted was from April 2007.

In Mr. Brown’s article, Being Serious About Your Own Money, he’s taking about how entrepreneurs often forget to manage their personal finances, because they’re so focused on their businesses. Often, entrepreneurs put their personal finances at huge risk to accommodate and support their business ventures.

The article he quoted that I had written way back when was on that very subject — Entrepreneurs Should Plan Their Finances And Invest Wisely. I re-read my post and it’s certainly true; it’s easy to forget your own finances, let things slip (even paying bills, or paying yourself!) and get overwhelmed in an avalanche of financial trouble…

It was cool to be quoted in The New York Times. It was great that one of my readers pointed me to the article. I really do owe Mr. Brown a thank you…


About Ben Yoskovitz
I recently joined GoInstant as VP Product. GoInstant changes how we use the web, making it shareable like never before.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). I'm a hands-on startup guy, helping companies grow successfully from the idea forward. You can reach me at byosko at gmail dot com.

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The opinions and commentary on this site are mine and mine alone. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of my employer, GoInstant.