Deadlines are good for you; they give you an aim and push you to keep working on whatever it is you're doing. However, from time to time, you miss those deadlines for reasons out of your control (or just because you're lazy). Most of the time that doesn't really matter, you just push to get it done as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if that deadline was public you'll quickly gain a reputation of being unable to keep to schedules.

If hundreds of people are waiting for you to release the next patch of your program, and the deadline you've told them passes, they're going to get a tad annoyed and each day that goes by they'll get bored of waiting and just head to a competitor.

To counter this, you just don't release a deadline. Keep one to yourself by all means, but don't publicise it at all. Google have this policy to and never give a specific date of when a new product will be released. It's because of this people quickly forget that half their products have been in 'beta' for many years. We'd never know if Google had set Google Talk to be released before it actually was and so no one can say that Google isn't very organised.

Microsoft said that they were going to release elite features for Vista Premium users in January. They're still waiting for them... This was a massive thing when someone blogged about it and the entire world was like "Oh, that's really crappy of Microsoft!"

So, why follow Microsoft when Google is much better?

Running a blog that requires lots of content is all good and well, but sometimes you get dry on ideas. So, once again, we rely on other random people to tell you what to write.

The blog posts that get linked to most are ones which have original research in them. Getting original research is easy for big blogs who have the money to spend on market research, but what about us little guys?

Well, why not rely on Facebook? Facebook Polls is just $6 and that gives you access to all of their users. Amazing, eh?

Once you've done your poll, write up your analysis and hey! Original, informative and (most importantly?) link bait!

I was saying just the other day that entering competitions, or group projects is a brilliant way to get link backs to your blog; and now Problogger is running one that will definitely send traffic your way.

I'm signed up to an awful lot of RSS feeds; for copyrighting blogs, professional bloggers, humorous feeds, news feeds, feeds that give me game updates. All in all, I get around 30 new posts every hour or so (gotta love TechCrunch and their compulsive posting) so whenever I'm away from an Internet connection for a short while, I come back to find hundreds of new feeds that I have to read. Do I read them all? Of course I don't. But do you know which ones I always seem to stop and read?

Usually, it's the ones with pictures.

Childish as it may seem we're all attracted to pictures. I only really noticed the power of them a few days ago, when I spotted that whilst I was 'j-keying' through Google Reader with two hundred feeds to look through I was stopping at random articles that I thought interested me. And yes, most of them had images in.

I've been reading blogs for quite a while now, they are after all the newspaper of the Internet; if you don't read them you fall behind and running a website becomes pointless (and what do you have to geek out on!?). Though there's one thing that really bugs me.

Interlinking.

It annoys me when blogs constantly link to themselves. When it's helpful, obviously it doesn't bother me. Like when they link to a post they wrote about Feedburner's merger with Google when the author wants to mention that. The type of interlinking that bugs me is when the author links the word "Playstation 3" to a review of an obscure game that they reviewed on their blog a few weeks back. It's the first kind that is actually useful.

It's useful not only to the user, but to the blogger as well. There a few reasons behind interlinking. First, it ups that page's PR, not as much as an organic link from another site does, but it still does. One of my projects got PR 4 from just interlinking.

Another reason is that people reading from an RSS reader are more likely to head over to the site if you link to another page on it. RSS feeds are great for the readers since they can get all the content they want all in one space, but for publishers it means that users never have to go to their website and so they don't get so many page views which causes their advertising revenue to drop. So, by interlinking you'll get more people to see your actual pages (and adverts!).

A reason that I don't like; it gets people to stay on their site, rather than go to another. Chances are that if you link out of your site then the person won't come back unless they're really interested and have a good attention span (which tests say most people online don't).

So, you should interlink sensibly, in order not to annoy your readers. If you're linking to information then it's fine to link to that information on your site if you have it, but don't link to your site if that information really won't help the user.

Today we've just added the functionality so that comments have to be moderated before they're shown to the general public. This'll help keep out SPAM and just general nasty people. Of course, nothing wrong with a heated discussion.

All these additions though have started to make the scripting cramped and messy, so that will be the main focus of the next lot of updates. That does mean that there won't be any fancy front end/visible updates for you guys, but it'll make it a lot easier to implement anything else that should be added.

We also added our RSS feed! All fixed up, nice and RSS 2 valid! Subscribe to it from Feedburner, I'll probably do a proper blog post later on Feedburner later because I never realised how great it is! It comes packed with features to make your feed better. Not to mention, they cut out the problem of me having to learn how to pingback! The only reason that we bothered starting to use it was because of its acquisition by Google, who we're all a big fan of here at Shamess Productions.

We've also added ourselves to Technorati and already have an authority of four. Okay, that's not amazing but I'm sure we're getting there!