Improve your PageRank by optimizing internal links

PageRank is widely considered as important factor for your blog or webpage to improve its position in the Search Engines results. It is calculated according to the number of external links which point to your pages, but also according to the internal links, could be identified on your site.

LinkSpirit is open source freeware, specialized in managing and optimization of internal links.

It will help you to:

• Calculate and optimize the internal distribution of your PageRank.
• Calculate PageRank lost by the bad exploitation of your internal links.
• Check your internal links, detect the dead links and perform manual or auto-correction of these links.
• Identify the orphan pages and of pages hidden by the "robots" instruction or by the robots.txt file.
• Identify the file names not respecting HTML standards (because of accents or spaces) and fix these names.
• Find out the links using the wrong character ’ instead of / and perform autocorrection of these links.
• Check the syntax of your "robots.txt" file, create or edit this file using an assistant.
• Edit the code of your pages in text mode.
• Edit the "robots" meta tag.

Developers’ website: http://www.rankspirit.com/downloadprceng.php

Direct link for software downloading: http://www.ziddu.com/download/1811084/link_spirit.zip.html

Live Traffic Widget for your Blog - FEEDJIT

Feedjit (http://feedjit.com/) is offering a widget that provides important information about who is visiting your blog or website. An entry is posted to the widget every time a person arrives at your website and again when the person leaves. Feedjit entries list referring web site where your visitors came from, what was their post of interest, and their geographical location. To visualize the gadget, Feedjit also posts a little flag near every entry to indicate what country each visitor is from. Feedjit also offers a separate map widget that shows the locations of the last 100 visitors to your website.

The offered widgets are all free and you do not need to register to get them for your blog or website. They are also extremely lightweight and won’t slow your site down.

If you’re a Blogger or Typepad user you can install any of the widgets with one click. If you use a different blogging platform or website, you can simply cut and paste the provided script into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

You can choose from four types of the Widget to install:

1. Live Traffic Feed
2. Live Traffic Map
3. Live Recommended Reading
4. Live Page Popularity

Take a glance on how the Widget (Live Traffic Feed) looks on the page (screen shot is take from my blog http://freeware4review.blogspot.com)

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft for Blog Desktop Publishing

By many bloggers, Windows Live Writer (WLW) is regarded as the best free blogging software on the market. It is a Microsoft product and is strongly supported and maintained by the software giant.

WLW has lots of features that put it aside among desktop freeware blogging applications. Among the main application features are:

• Supports multiple blog platforms, including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, Wordpress, Blogger and many others.
• Ability to compel your blog with easy. You can insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content, all in no time.
• Powerful editing features include tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks.
• You can preview your publication before you post. Since the software enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring, it will show you exactly what your blog entry will look like before you post it, using your blog’s templates and formatting.
• You can compose your entries while being offline, and later publish them, when you get back online.
• Windows Live Writer is currently available in 6 different languages.

Developer’s Home Page: http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Direct Link for downloading: http://www.ziddu.com/download/1860119/WWL0057.exe.html

Twingly delivers spam-free blogs search results

With growing popularity of blogging, there is inevitable parallel growth of the spam blogs sometimes called splogs. These are artificially (and mostly automatically) created weblog sites, used to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
All the responsible organizations like blogging platform providers or affiliate marketing companies are doing their best to weed out the splogs from the blogosphere, however, the sploggers, equipped with automatic software and modern techniques, are able to generate new splogs in stead of removed in no time. Unfortunately, readers are suffering from splogs as well. When you have to pass through several splogs, looking for information, before you get to the real blog, you waste your time, you loose your money, and the real blog ranking and visibility can be diminished as well because of the “splog competitors”.
This problem is addressed by Swedish company Twingly, promising to deliver spam-free search results. In June, it opened up its blog search engine to the public. At present, it offers two search options: regular search and spam-free search; the latter is still in beta testing. It now covers 30 million blogs, and results can be sorted by authority (number of incoming links) or most recent posts. A spam-free search option only brings back results from the hundreds of thousands of white-list blogs known to be real.
"The traditional way of building a spam-free index is to remove spam blogs as they are discovered, but we are starting from scratch, only adding spam-free blogs to the index," said Martin Källström, CEO at Twingly. The benefit is better results; the drawback is a longer development phase. Before ending the beta phase, Twingly wants the spam-free index to include several million blogs. "At that point the plan is to remove the regular search option," he said.
To keep spam out, Twingly uses its own algorithm. One thing its algorithm does when adding a new a blog to the index is look at other blogs it links to. Linking to other known spam-producing blogs is usually a bad thing. Combating spam has become a must for search companies, according to Källström. Since spam blogs are now considered to stand for the majority of the blog posts worldwide, traditional search engines are becoming useless.
Check Twingly search results: http://www.twingly.com/
Bloggers might consider ping Twingly to include their blogs in the trusted database.
To promote its search engine among bloggers, Twingly developed and distributes freely an attractive screensaver, visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.
Video presentation of the Twingy Screensaver:

Additional Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/040308-swedes-hope-to-keep-spam.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/twingly-blog-search-engine-now-public-with-widgets/

Death Sentence for "Bad" Bloggers in Iran

Blogging as one of the essential means of the “free speech” propagation in the modern society is seen as significant threat by the religious conservative Iranian government. About a year and a half ago, the Iranian government officially demanded that all bloggers, who are Iranian citizens, have to register and provide their names and addresses on a site called Samandehi. Many people have their reasons to believe that such a process would facilitate legal action against them, if they continue to post censorship-free publications on their blogs. Bloggers resisted and many published an “I do not register my blog/site” banner on their blogs. The Government then realized it cannot have real control of the situation in the blogosphere, or force bloggers to register. However, it is doing everything possible to shut down “inappropriate” blogs, and even jail the responsible bloggers.

There is a history of the bloggers’ prosecution in Iran as well. Blogging about subjects such as minority rights and freedom of speech and religion has already carried a risk. In 2005, blogger Mojtaba Saminejad was tried before a local court in Teheran charged with insulting the prophets, which carries the death penalty. He was eventually acquitted. Last year, two Kurdish bloggers were sentenced to death on charges of subversive activities against national security, spying and separatist propaganda.

To strengthen a legal base for the bloggers prosecution, on Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy” to the list of crimes punishable by death. Apostasy is defined by dictionary.com as “a total desertion of or departure from one’s religion, principles, party, cause, etc.” but in Iran it could have a wide-ranging and flexible meaning. The government might simply use the bill at its convenience, physically removing non-cooperating bloggers from the map.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenges the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committee to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students." The Iranian government has already blocked access to many respected sites as Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among others.

Even the president if Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has his own blog. Is he in danger now as well?

Bazri, one of the Iranian bloggers, warns: “We should do our best to stop members of parliament from approving this draft bill. Tomorrow it will be too late. It is easy to accuse a blogger of apostasy and corruption. Let’s tell the Parliament that to think differently is not a crime that should be punishable by death.”

But who can tell Iranian government that they are wrong? Can international community do something to save our brothers-bloggers from prosecution? As small, as we can do, please support the case, whenever you can, wherever you go!

Additional Reading:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iranian_deth_penalty_for_bloggers.php
http://www.geek.com/iran-may-start-putting-bloggers-to-death-20080707/
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/07/04/iran-death-penalty-for-blogging/
http://www.citizensugar.com/1764871

NicEdit - Comments Format Enhancement

Comments left by your readers on your Web Site or blog give produce a perception of the site popularity and legitimacy. Therefore, comments are generally encouraged, with exception of junk and spam, that can be successfully blocked by the modern filtering.
NicEdit is a very handy solution that helps, among other applications, to bring more user comments. It is done by significant enhancement of the comments formating capabilities.

NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor allowing easy editing of comments or any web site content as a matter of fact on the fly in the browser. This Javascript utility can be easily integrated in any site with minimal impact while providing visitors an effective means to express themselves in rich text, making the standard text areas completely obsolete and boring.

NicEdit was developed by Brian Kirchoff and is free to use for any purpose under the MIT license.