140Char

Wikio has just updated the rankings for UK blogs, and 140Char has appeared in the list for the first time, going straight in at number 59!

Not only that, but apparently we’re 749 overall:

Wahey!

Particularly as it means I have two sites in the top 100 UK tech blogs, with TheWayoftheWeb at 71.

Not a bad start to 2009.

Bearing in mind the huge influx of bloggers to the microblogging/microsharing space, and the huge amount of applications being developed, I wanted to focus more on in-depth posts to offer value, and not replicate what other people have already done.

At the same time I want to be providing an overview of what’s happening and what’s available.

So I’m going to trial the Postalicious plug-in for Wordpress to see if it provides some value - if the posts are too frequent/annoying, or aren’t providing value, please let me know!

While it was an honour to be asked to contribute to an article which appeared on Businessweek.com recently, I was a bit reluctant to post a link until an error had been corrected, but seeing as it still hasn’t happened, I thought I might as well clear up the confusion here.

The article in question is ‘Building a Better Twitter‘, and to clarify - although I am indeed Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, and I may occasionally refer to some of the work I do for my day job involving microblogging, this blog is not owned by Bauer Media, or in any way endorsed by my employer - it’s something I do as a personal project in my spare time, and all views and opinions published are my own, and are not representative of my employer.

On a brighter note, Darren Rowse kindly commented on my last post - highlighting how much more responsive the blogging world in general is to monitoring what is going on and ensuring assuracy and dialogue!

And finally, while I continue to work out how 140char is going to continue to progress, I’m going to air a minor irritation I’ve encountered with some of my new followers - if you’re going to follow me, and you’ve got your Twitter updates protected, are you just looking for me to broadcast at you? Am I meant to guess whether to repripocate? Or wouldn’t it be helpful for you to maybe send me a message telling me who you are?…

Just a quick update that I won’t be online much, if at all, for the next week, so updates might be quiet until my return…

Security North by James Cridland on Flickr (CC Licence)

Funnily enough, searching for a suitable image on Flickr just gave me the above picture by James Cridland, whose blog and Twitter accounts I started reading recently - and the discovery of each was almost entirely unrelated!

Anyway, a good friend and colleague is aiming to supply some guest posts for here and www.thewayoftheweb.net while I’m offline, so you shouldn’t be alone. And as he’s a video expert, hopefully he’ll redress a slight lack of Seesmic, 12seconds, and Mobatalk coverage due to my lack of good looks a webcam.

And after the soul searching I mentioned in my last post, there are several really good things which have renewed my commitment to the site in the jaws of posting something once a week to just keep it going. So this week is a great time to contribute ideas, suggestions, topics, applications, tools or anything else which might be of interest, as I should be online long enough to access my email and even print off some ideas to work onn for my return…just drop your input to thewayoftheweb at googlemail dot com