Blogging Tools

Fred Wilson is absolutely right about web discussions: Information can be sucked out, but it needs to be pumped back in as well.

If I write a great blog post, and it gets sucked in to Facebook as a note, and the conversation happens there, inside Facebook - it doesn’t automatically get attached to my site. The problem stems from the fact that all these different web services get value from having the conversation happen on their servers.

Facebook gets value from having a complete social environment going on inside their walled garden, so they’re not dependent on search.

Disqus gets value because all the comments left in their system are regarded by Google as their original content.

FriendFeed gets value from having conversations happen ON friendfeed, which keeps people on their service.

Business bloggers get value from having comments on their site because Google sees it as original content and because smart commenters frequently add to the knowledge available in the post.

Google is the largest roadblock in this process. As long as it provides an incentive to web sites and services who collect comments and discussion on their server (first), then it’s only smart business to keep things segmented.

I know that blogging can often take more time than you expect. I sat down to write this post half an hour ago, and I’m just now starting to type. Who knows what time it will be when I’m actually done writing it.

Unfortunately, successful blogging often requires a commitment to consistency that can seem daunting. Fear not - there are strategies for rolling activities that you do on a daily basis into good, useful blog posts with a minimum of effort.

Del.icio.us

If you use del.cio.us to tag interesting posts or pages on the ‘net, you can also use it to automatically generate a digest post at the end of each day.

You can find instructions on how to set up your blog by plugging your username into the following URL:

https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/blogging/posting

As long as you bookmark at least one item with del.icio.us each day, you’re guaranteed to have a post on your blog. Even better, if you’re bookmarking interesting things (and why wouldn’t you be?), you’ll be giving your readers a great set of recommendations.

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you should be. It’s the new Facebook.

Twitter’s API is awesome, flexible, and completely malleable. It also gave birth to Twitter Tools, which is an awesome plugin for anyone using WordPress (and why wouldn’t you be?) that lets you import a digest of the day’s tweets.

So unless you go a day without tweeting OR tagging anything in del.icio.us, that makes two posts a day without even opening your posting window.

Everybody knows that Alexa, although flawed, is how you compare traffic between your sites and other sites. Sure, your numbers probably aren’t accurate, but it’s a graph you can point at.

Well, now that Allen Stern at CenterNetworks is showing us that Alexa stopped updating their numbers on the 15th, and seem to be giving up on tracking statistics anymore, where do you go?

My current favorite tool is Compete.com.

It works pretty much the same way. You put in several domains (up to three without logging in) and it’ll go munching and then serve you some results.

Just for fun, I put in my blog, Jason-Preston.com, Teresa’s blog, Teresacentric.com, and this blog. Here’s the results page, complete with disclaimer: they don’t have much data, so they did some informed guesswork to fill out the chart.

As you can see, I’m being soundly crushed

If you’ve looked at the traffic statistics for any given web site nowadays, you’ll see the ridiculously high portion of traffic that comes from Google. The reason being, put simply: Google is the navigation interface to the web.

So I think it behooves most webmasters to keep an eye on what “The Google” itself is recommending for webmasters in terms of making your site nice and Google-friendly. After all, if you speak their language, it’s a lot easier for them to communicate with you.

OK, you get the metaphor.

The Official Google Webmasters Central blog recently posted a list of their top 7 most requested posts (essentially, the most FA FAQ). If you’re running any sort of link-tracking or affiliate program, you might want to pay particular attention to the post about duplicate content.

If you’ve been thinking about getting your business into hassle-free podcasting, NowLive might not be a bad option (and it’s free!).

Tomorrow at 10am, Jack Olmsted will be interviewing Steve, Teresa, and I about our 2008 CES blogger party on his show, which will be streaming live on NowLive, and edited later for a more traditional podcast format (did I just use the word “traditional” to describe a podcast? amazing).

We’ll be able to tell you more about the service after the show, but apparently NowLive lets you host what amounts to a conference call that is both recorded and streamed live over the internet. If you want, you can even embed a widget on your blog that lets listeners catch your broadcast on the fly.

If you ask me, that’s not a bad way to get into podcasting. Everyone knows how to use a phone, and it takes a lot of the headache out of the recording process.

Back when there was a Gillmor Gang to regularly listen to, I remember being halfway confused about Steve’s obsession with “gestures,” in the internet.

I have, of course, spent the required five minutes of thinking time to get my head wrapped around it, and I now think he’s got the right idea (or at least, the idea I got from his idea is the right idea…you with me?). When you have tons of people on the internet trying to form communities, everything is linked by “gestures” - mostly those are links.

When you leave a comment in someone else’s blog, that’s a gesture (my definition). So is subscribing to feeds, mentioning people or sites in podcasts or videos - if Scoble wears a Wordpress shirt, that’s a gesture.

We’ve recently discovered a neat little Wordpress plugin that can help you enable these gestures in your blog: it’s called Link Love. (Now on this site as well as our Web Community Forum blog).

The idea is that Wordpress automatically inserts a “nofollow” tag in all links that people add to their comments. This tells Google, essentially, to ignore the link. That means that people can’t bump their search rankings just by leaving comments with links to their sites (and yet spammers try it anyway…)

This plugin sets it so that anyone who comments regularly (default is 10 comments, but you may set the number as you like) gets those pesky “nofollow” properties removed. Now their comment links actually count for something in Google.

I think this is an awesome way to reward regular commenters, and also encourage people to leave comments. It’s also (wait for it)…a gesture. See? I told you it was everywhere.

I have an addictive personality. I’m apparently 82% addicted to blogging. I’m probably addicted to video games. And I’m certainly addicted to Firefox.

Which is why I’m surprised to notice that I haven’t particularly missed it in the past two days while I’ve been using the new release of Flock. To be fair, Flock is built on the same foundation as Firfefox. The code is open source, and anyone is allowed to snag their own copy, develop it in their own particular way, and then release it back into the wild. And that’s exactly what Flock is doing.

As far as I can tell, the basic idea behind Flock, and what sets it apart, is the way it integrates a whole bunch of features that in other browsers are essentially extensions and plug-ins.

It boots up with a nifty “My World” homepage that is coupled to whatever actual home page you choose. MyWorld is a bit like custom Google or Netvibes in that it aggregates a couple different search engines, a favorite feeds widget (generated from the built in RSS reader), a favorite sites widget (which also appears to be automatically generated–cool!), and a favorite media widget.

When you go to sites like FlickR and YouTube, Flock recognizes the site, pops up a media bar, and prompts you to “enable advanced features”:

The RSS Reader is pretty solid. It’s integrated as a sidebar and the feed display gives you several important options (headlines, full feed, partial), and it lets you split into two columns if you want:

And then the blog editor is reasonably good. It was a quick two-step process to get it set up with my self-hosted WordPress install. I particularly like how it asks if you want to append your post with a credit to Flock, rather than simply inserting it like Performancing. I wish it would let you save drafts, though. In fact, I wish any editor would let you save drafts in MySQL so it could sync with your web back-end drafts. Someone please do that.

Overall, Flock is a good package. It’s different than Firefox, definitely, but it has the same core reliability, and while it doesn’t have as many extensions (it does have some), a lot of the desirable features are already built in.

If you’re tired of your current browser, or just looking to check out something new, grab yourself a copy of version 0.9.0.

The Blog Herald has a giant mega post about all things WordPress.

In all honesty, I haven’t had time to digest it all, but hooray for great open source software.

Incidentally, open-source software is going to be a topic at our conference this September. I’m working on editorial development right now, so if anyone has ideas for what you’d like to see covered. Here’s the place to comment.

The gals over at Blog Squad have an interesting post about some of the biggest mistakes you can make in business blogging. One of them is not using proper metrics to measure how well your blog is meeting its goals.

Of late, we’ve become big fans of StatCounter. In our experience, it has been head and shoulders over all the other metrics programs we’ve tried in terms of accuracy and real time reporting.

The results are even downloadable.

Intelius Chief Technology Officer Kevin Marcus has a great post up about why Intelius uses technology built on the LAMP stack.

I just had a great chat with Matt Mullenweg about the amazing applications of open source technology to business. In the past, businesses have been wary of using anything developed in an open source environment because it doesn’t come with the same level of legal accountability and technical support that a proprietary piece of software does.

This can be a deal breaker for a lot of businesses, but for some, Matt and I both agree that the support/accountability issue is trumped by the dedication of passionate communities to problem solving and by the fact that companies can get open source software to jump through hoops that proprietary software will not.

And as Marcus writes:

Yes, commercialization can result in advantages including more robust support and compatibility, (consider the success of RedHat or MySQL), but in my mind, the real benefit to an open source model is overall software quality and flexibility.

Can you imagine the day that email sent from Outlook requires an Outlook browser to read it? If you can imagine the potential implications of a development like that (something like the different formats for different versions of Excel not always being backwards compatible), you might want to look more closely at the design motivation behind your infrastructure.

If the increase in interest in WordPress is any indication, open source blogging platforms appear to be one of the major themes of 2007. Surely their applications are not limited to non business bloggers. It’s something we definitely plan to discuss at our conference this September.

Many thanks to my colleague and friend Kim Larsen for pointing me in the direction of Marcus’ piece.