Blog Action Day 2011

It’s not often we post on a Sunday. In fact I think this is the first time we ever have. The reason for this post is clearly one of high importance then…

UPDATE: I have since discovered that this is our second post on a Sunday, the first being a warning to potential writers about providing copied content – another (although slightly less) important matter.

Every year (for the past four years) on the 15th of October, there is a global Blog Action Day, where bloggers around the world write about one common problem in the world today, in order to try to raise awareness of a pressing issue.

This year the day have been moved back to the 16th of October (today) as that makes it coincide with World Food Day. Unsurprisingly, this years Blog Action Day theme is on food.

A history of Blog Action Day

The first Blog Action Day was held in 2007. The 2007 theme was the environment. At the time, one of the main global concerns (not that it isn’t even more so now) was regarding the sustainability of our current way of life, and the environmental impact, be it global warming, climate change, ecosystem instability or environmental degradation.

The world is in our hands

A green coloured globe represents the environment, which is held carefully in someone’s hands – representing how we control the future of our planet

Blog Action Day took off with a bang with around 20,000 blogs taking part, of which, there were around 20 in Technorati’s top 100 blogs – at the time. This proves that from day 1, Blog Action Day had a big influence, giving it a big potential to actually raise awareness and improve things that it petitions for.

2008 saw an equally important matter being raised: poverty. Poverty is a very pressing issue, and is part of the UN’s 8 Millennium Development Goals which it hoped to meet by 2015.

In 2009 the theme changed to climate change. The phrase ‘global warming’ used to be used before we realised that it wasn’t a very good term, as it’s not just warming that is likely to take place.

The world’s climate is so intricate and complex that you couldn’t say that increase in greenhouse gasses via intensive farming of rice, rearing of cows, burning of fossil fuels, cutting down of rainforests etc. would cause global temperatures to rise, as it wouldn’t necessarily do that everywhere, all the time.

Melting Ice Caps - A Sign of Climate Change

Melting ice caps are a symptom linked to climate change

Hence the term climate change was born in order to supersed the term ‘global warming’ in describing the likelihood of an increase in extreme and irregular weather/climate patterns.

In 2010 Blog Action Day moved onto stressing the importance (and scarcity) of water. Currently most people in the developed world use far more water than should really be available to them, if all water supplies were equally divided.

Only 3% of the world’s water is freshwater, of which the majority is ‘locked up’ in the form of ice. This means that less than 0.007% of all the worlds water drinkable and accessible. This matched with an exponentially rising global population is why over 20% of the world’s population don’t have access to safe drinking water, and one in three people around the world have inadequate sanitation.

One in Five People Don't Have Access to Safe Drinking Water2011 – Food

Now down to matter in hand – Blog Action Day 2011. As I have already mentioned, today is World Food Day, and Blog Action Day’s focus for this year is food.

World Food Day marks the 1945 foundation of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN project aimed at achieving food security for all, as well as making sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality, nutritional food, to lead active healthy lives.

Why should we worry about food?

In the words of Blog Action Day’s website:

“We use food to mark times of celebration and sorrow. Lack of access to food causes devastating famines, whilst too much is causing a generation of new health problems. It can cost the world, or be too cheap for farmers to make a living.

The way we companies produce food and drinks can provide important jobs for communities or be completely destructive to habitats and local food producers. Food can give us energy to get through the day or contain ingredients that gives us allergic reactions.

Food can cooked by highly skilled chefs with inventive flair, or mass produced and delivered with speed at the side of road. It can be incredibly healthy or complete junk and bad for your health. It can taste delicious or be a locals only delicacy.

Food is important to our culture, identity and daily sustenance and the team at Blog Action invite you to join us to talk about food.”

Nobody alive today can live without food for more than a month, and a lack of inadequate amounts/types of food can also kill.

Many people don’t realise it, but the greedy ‘Western’ lifestyle is the main reason for food issues around the world. Developed countries are getting too fat, whilst undeveloped ones are not getting enough food. According to the UN, malnutrition kills a child around the world every 15 seconds. That is heart breaking.

Westerners waste so much food, it is disgusting, even more so because of the fact that there are people who don’t have enough of the right foods (or any food at all for that matter) to eat.

How can you help?

If you want to help on a personal level there are two main things you can do.

  1. Try to source as much of your food as locally as you can. This helps local producers, as well as reduced greenhouse emission and water loss from undeveloped countries who use vast amounts of their scarce water to produce food for us. Some global food purchases can be justified, so try to pay attention to where your food is coming from and what the impact of getting it to you is.
  2. Donate to a crisis. There is currently a famine in Eastern Africa, and charities are there to help, but they need your help, be it through voluntary work or capital donations. I an not listing any charities, as it’s often better to decide yourself which ones to support.

You could also blog about the topic. If you have a blog, I wholeheartedly recommend you help to raise awareness yourself. If you read this a day or two late, don’t worry you missed the date, sill write about it and raise awareness. I missed the day last year, but I still blogged about it.

Blog Action Day suggest some topic areas you might like to discuss, which can be helpful if you are not sure where to start.

Blog Action Day 2011 Bagde

Technology Bloggers is supporting Blog Action Day!

If you do decide to write about Blog Action Day, you can register your blog with them, on their official list, so that they know roughly how many blogs took part.

The final way (I can think of at the moment) to help the Blog Action Day cause is to like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Technology Bloggers is already doing this.

Please do your bit for the world and support Blog Action Day in whatever way you can.

How promoting your blog’s launch is key to an early success

This is the second in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

They say that if your parents give you a good start in life, you will go far. It is of course possible to go far by yourself, but a good start significantly improves your chances of greatness.

I believe that you can apply this ethos to blogging too. A good start to a blog, usually (with exceptions of bloggers who lie/cheat etc.) helps towards guaranteeing the success of a blog.

For a blog to be given a good start, one key thing is needed: promotion. Promoting the blog can be done in various ways, as I am about to explain.

Social Media

10 years ago, blogging was in it’s infancy, and you could argue that social media didn’t even exist. Now social media is one of the most powerful tools that a blogger can have in his inventory.

I believe that social media played a part, (not a massive one, but a valid one all the same) in the initial success of Technology Bloggers, via helping promote the blog.

Technology Bloggers has a Facebook page. Now this would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t use this article to get a tiny plug for the page in, so here it is. Please like Technology Bloggers for updates straight to your feed. How? Click ‘like’ on our sidebar button, it really is that simple!

Anyway, we also have a Twitter and YouTube account. These all established the blog across the social web before the blog had even started posting.

Twitter's LogoAt the time the number of people following our social media pages was relatively small, but, if just a few people are subscribed and visit the site, see the great content, cool design, dofollow links etc. and tell a few friends or even better, blog about the blog, then that’s a lot of traffic gained from a relatively small number of subscribers.

Social media only played a small part in our promotion though. This technology blog had a lot more than that to get it off the ground!

about.me and Technorati

When the blog launched, I registered Technology Bloggers with Technorati and about.me. These further advanced Technology Blogger out into the world wide web.

Again only a few people are likely to have initially found Technology Bloggers via our about.me profile, or our via searching for technology articles in Technorati and having our blog come up. Hoverer, again these few people all add up.

Friends Sites

The majority of our Technology Bloggers traffic initially came from referrals from sites that I regularly visited and commented on or guest blogged for. The importance of comments is very great.

Comments can help to generate you a lot of positive traffic, and valuable links. The people who’s blogs you comment on are likely to visit your blog, so too are the commenters of that blog, especially if it is one with a ‘tight community’.

Guest blogging is also a great way to get traffic quick. On behalf of Technology Bloggers I have guest blogged in an attempt to raise the blogs profile. Finding high traffic, good quality sites with large reader numbers, which allow guest posts is a gift.


Guest blogging is very very useful as it helps to get you known around the blogosphere to both bloggers and comments. It also helps you to get quality, keyword rich backlinks to your site. Guest blogging can also give you a new perspective on blogging and a sense of direction.

My Other Sites

If you are thinking of setting up a blog, website or forum you would be daft not to use your existing sites to help promote the newbie. I did exactly this for Technology Bloggers at it’s launch. I wrote about it and linked to it from my website (Christopher Roberts Website) my social blog, my philosophy blog and my (now archive) technology blog.

To sum up…

When starting a blog it is really important that you promote it in as many ways as possible. You could look at financial advertising, or simply just use social media, online profiles and links from your own site. Build yourself a reputation up and promote your blog in as many ways as you can think, and you are sure to have a smooth and fairly rapid launch.

If you are looking to start a blog, good luck. Also stay tuned to this series, as you may find some more useful info in next weeks article. Finally if you ever need any help, contact us via our contact page.

How to claim your blog with Technorati

When registering Technology Bloggers Technorati account, I thought what a great idea it would be for me to tell you how you can claim you blog with Technorati too.

Why Claim Your Blog?

Why should you bother claiming your blog? Well there are a number of very good reasons as to why you should! The first is that it gives your blog some form of protection against content theft. If Technorati spiders your site and registers your latest content, and then hours later someone reposts your content claiming it as their own, you can use Technorati as your proof that the content is yours.

Technorati is also known as a “blog search engine” so if you are submitted to it and someone is looking for a blog like yours, yours might just come up!

How Do I Claim My Blog With Technorati?

Ever found yourself asking that question, or asking yourself that question now? Well it’s very simple. Just register for your free account, then scroll down to the bit that says “My claimed blogs” and enter your blog URL in the “Start a blog claim:” box and click claim!

You will then have to enter a few very simple details about your blog, like the ones shown in the image below…

Technorati Blog Claim - Enter Your Blog DetailsThen you will be given a code (probably by email) that you have to publish on your blog. Technology Bloggers code is MKZMCFEAWAME – yours will probably something of similar length, just random (to you and I but not to Technorati) letters.

Technorati will then spider your blog until it finds the code. Usually your blog then has to be reviewed by someone at Technorati, and after that it is registered to you!

After Claiming

You will then be able to see what rank and authority it gains, and other people will be able to search for it.

Happy blogging everyone 🙂

Any comments or questions?