Embed easily forum in your blog with Tal.ki

If you plan to bring more interactive communication to your blog, you may be interesting in embeddable free forum offered by Tal.ki , so your visitors can have discussions right in your site.

Main Advantages

• No account registration needed. Your forum will be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other services so members can skip registration.
• Engage your website's visitors. Turn passive blog and content readers into participating members, contributing content.
• Make your website stickier. Forums tend to keep people on a website longer and have them visit 50% more pages.
• Seamlessly blends into your website. Tal.ki detects the colors of your website, the layout, and the fonts and automatically styles itself to blend it with your site.
• Easy to use Admin Tools. Configure the privacy settings for each forum to choose who has access, from guests to moderators.

Screenshot

AppVita Review

Tal.ki is an application that lets users embed forums into their websites just like they would a YouTube video. If you can copy and paste, then you have the skills necessary to create a fully functional online forum where the readers of your blog or website can interact with each other and discuss the day’s latest events. Much more than just a souped-up commenting feature, Tal.ki forums put the control in your readers’ hands by letting them create new discussions centered around the topics that matter to them most.

Multiple Tal.ki pricing options let you select the plan that fits best; depending on the number of visitors you expect to have using the forums on your site. After signing up, Tal.ki will give you a line of HTML code to embed in your website just like you would embed a YouTube video clip. Paste the code wherever you like, and within an instant you’ve got a functioning forum where your readers can sound off. Individual Tal.ki forums can be run across multiple pages of your website, allowing people to check out the forums no matter what page they’re on. Even better, your readers don’t have to sign up for an account with Tal.ki before they get started posting. Instead, they just need to log in with a Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Twitter account and they’re ready to go.

Like other online forums, Tal.ki forums feature multiple categories and sticky posts, and let users subscribe to certain threads to find out when new content has been added. And because the forum is located on your site, you’ll always remain the key administrator in charge of determining who is and isn’t allowed to post what types of content. For bloggers and developers who need a better way to increase the amount of time users spend on their sites, Tal.ki forums are an obvious solution that can ramp up user interaction on any website or blog.

Practical Uses:

• Create a forum on your blog where readers can chat with each other
• Get to know your fans by communicating in your own forum
• Find out what readers would like to read more about on your site
• Encourage your website readers to spend more time on your site

Insider Tips:

• Users can log in to post with a Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or Open ID account
• Forum users can change their display name to whatever they want
• Hide your member list from the view of others at any time
• Allow members to include photos with their forum posts

What we liked:

• Adding a Tal.ki forum to a website is as simple as clicking copy and paste
• Admin panel is easy to understand and use
• Tal.ki offers plugins for increased integration with WordPress and Google sites
• Forums are a great way to get to know your readers

What we didn’t like:

• The Tal.ki forums design might not blend in seamlessly with all websites

Costs:

• Free account with limited features
• Pro account is $9.95/month
• Platinum account is $59/month
• Max account is $249/month

Website: http://tal.ki/

3 Laws of Blogging

I am blogging for 3 years. Is that a lot? Yes and no.

Did I reach the goals I setup for myself in 2007? Yes and no.

But no matter, if my financial expectations were real or not, I am not leaving. Because, I like blogging. I do not expect immediate results anymore, I set the realistic expectations, and I enjoy every bit of success.

And what about you?

I found the article on VA4buisness useful for those, who started blogging, but are not happy with their results. Presenting below…

Many people start blogging with a big hope, but a lot of them fail to convert that hope into real excitement. And a lot many say quit, just after a couple of months of blogging. I have personally witness the sad exist of many talented blogger. They would have done better, if they had persisted and factored in the elements I am going to talk in this article.

I personally do not like the idea of quitting, and seeing countless many people failing, I decided to pen down 3 laws of blogging which should never be broken or overlooked — come what may. These laws are there since always and they have been talked about many times, but still people are not applying them. I hope this article will help them put things in order.

Clean design

Design is the first thing anyone notices on your website, and when I said anyone I meant search engine spiders as well. Yes, they too care about the design and how well your website is laid out. Still many people do not seem to care about this, and they end up choosing a poorly laid theme for their blogs.

A poorly laid theme could be of two kinds: one that looks sleek to human, but the codes are not well written, such themes appears messy to search bots, and the another type could be the one that appears messy and cluttered to human as well.

You should choose a theme that looks clutter free, and whose code is optimized for search bots. Any blogging theme that comes from a reliable designer meets these criteria. Themes created by armatures do fail to meet either of the two criteria I talked about above.

Creative content

Although the design of a blog is what people notice at first, it is not “the thing” for which they come to your blog, with a possible exception of blogs that are known for their WOW (read creative) design.

Content of a blog is more important than the design, and it should always be top quality. Do not ever use syndicated content. I know, upon reading this, a lot many eye brows must be raised, but this will not change the fact that they are not “top quality” content. Search engine may not penalize the use of syndicated content, but human does. No one likes to waste time reading crappy article, which is available everywhere else.

You should stay clear of duplicate content as well because even search engines do not like this. I must add here that syndicated content is classified as duplicate content by search engine or not is a debated issue, and the winner of the debate is yet to be decided.

Do not use any PLR content or spun articles on your blog. This will not only push your visitors away, but it will also push the search engines to raise red flag, which may lead to banishment from the search world. And no website or blog would like to be “search untouchable”.

Constant promotion

Promotion is akin to going on rooftop with a loudspeaker in your hand and shouting at top of your voice. This may sound heinous — blame it on the description of promotion I gave above — but we need to do that only. You may not want to do that in your neighborhood, but up here on the Internet, you do not have any other option. If you do not do that, no one will know about your blog.

The Internet is an overly crowded world, and it is getting even more crowded after every passing second. Just being different or even the best will not cut it for you here. You will have to outspoken about the services you offer.

Do not shy away from promotion. This is the only marketing tool we have to inform our visitors about the work we do. Talking about you and your work is not a shameful activity. Be as enthusiastic about promotion as you can be.

Do not break any law

The laws of blogging that I have talked about above are not like traffic laws in your city, which by design is stupid and senseless. These laws have their foot in reality and consumer psyche. Breaking any of the above given three unbreakable laws of blogging will put your blog at risk.

My comment

So, what am I doing? Why I am intentionally breaking one of the unbreakable laws and posting non-original content? It might look illogical in content that I absolutely agree with author that duplicate content is not well-accepted by search engines? Simply say – because I respect the reader and if I find the content and explanation useful, there is no point to re-write it just to please crawlers. How reasonable that is? I deem that a reasonable approach, but admit that it can be questionable.

And what is your opinion? 

HTTrack Website Copier

This Thanksgiving Holidays brought me an unpleasant surprise. Coming home from the long and cold weekend, I have found out that my Blogger account was completely blocked and all 18 blogs, I am managing, were disabled. Luckily, the account restoration was smooth, and the blogs reappear immediately after my credentials were confirmed. All blogs, but one, which was claimed to be a splog (spam blog). Even though I am absolutely confident that there was mistake in the spider definition, I cannot be sure that it error is going to be corrected, and the blog is going to be restored. That is one of the major drawbacks of using overly nice, convenient, and free Blogger platform. But even thou I have appealed twice for additional review, the blog can be gone forever.

So, what could I do differently to avoid such situation? Follow the rules? I followed them. Be careful with posted content? I am confident, there was no violation. But, I missed one important step: I failed to backup the blogs. Indeed, if I would have a backup of the blocked blog on my hard drive, I could more or less easy transfer the posts to a different location, another blogging or hosting platform.

Essentially, I started looking for good solution to backup the remaining blogs. While there are several online services available for blogs backup (like Blog Backupr, for example), I decided to shoot for completely independent solution and choose the software, which will allow downloading the entire blog with text, pictures, and comments to my Hard Drive). And I would like to share the utility, I am going to use from now on. Hope you may find it useful as well.

HTTrack is a free (GPL) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It is able to operate with any website on the Web, including blogs. Software allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure.

Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

The software has many configuration options for advanced users, but it can be used “out-of-the-box” right away without making any changes to the default settings.

WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. Portable version is available, so you do not need to install the utility on your Hard Drive.

Developers Website: http://www.httrack.com/

Downloading page: http://www.ziddu.com/download/12789420/httrack-noinst-3.43-9C.zip.html

Google PageRank Explained

Everybody using internet is aware of the power of Google. Google is everywhere whether its search engine, email, social networking, online marketing, blogging etc.

But most important of all these is it's search engine which share approximately 60% of all searches made all over the world.This explains the importance of rank SERP (Search Engine Results Page) fo Google.The higher the ranking on SERP the more free visitors you will get from Google.

While displaying the results for a particular query Google takes into consideration a lot of factors.

Two most impotant factors being (source - Google's Corporate Information) -

• PageRank Technology
• Hypertext-Matching Analysis.

Now here comes the importance of Google PageRank.

What is Google PageRank?

According to Google - PageRank is Google's view of importance of a webpage. Pagerank is given out of 10.

Thus a webpage with a higher pagerank will be more important in view of Google as compared to the one with lower pagerank. Hence, a webpage with a better pagerank will get higher position in the SERP.
e.g. A webpage with Google PageRank of 5/10 will be more important and hence placed higher in Google SERP than the webpage with Google PageRank of 3/10.

How does Google determines a PageRank for any webpage ?

Lets see what Google says -

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

So Google takes into account the backlinks each webpage gets from different other webpages. Each backlink a webpage gets is considered as a vote by Google in the favour that webpage. But at the same time Google also analyzes the webpage from which a baclink is given.

Let's examine the following figure for some better understanding -

In the above figure A,B,C,D,E and F are different webpages. Here you can see that page C has got a higher pagerank than page E, even though it have fewer links as compared to page E. It's because of the importance of the page from which page C is receiving a link and also the number of outbound links from that page. In the above case as you can see page B has got most importance and is having only one outbound link to page C, so up to 90% of its PageRank is carried to page C.

In the essence, a page with higher baklinks from quality pages (those with higher pagerank) will have a better pagerank.

Thus, improving your Google PageRank helps you by getting you more visitors through search engines and ultimately can result into better revenue from your website/blog.

Source: Blogger-Help

Do you have too many "real" friends on Facebook?

"Remember five years ago when no one had Facebook and you didn't know what the guy you took high school biology with was having for lunch?" Jimmy Kimmel asked the audience on his show last night. "Remember how that was fine? Let's go back to that."

If you didn't watch "Jimmy Kimmel Live" November 11, you might think Kimmel started a campaign to end Facebook, but he's not. Instead, he announced a new national holiday called "National Unfriend Day," where he encourages you to "cut out some of the friend fat in your life" on Facebook and otherwise.

Today, November 17, Kimmel wants you to look at all of your Facebook friends and decide: who is really your friend? A friend, as he says, is not someone who "asks what 'Harry Potter' character you are."

See two Video Presentations (watch one after another as they are logically connected):

National UnFriend Day

National UnFriend Day (part 2)

On his show yesterday evening, Kimmel celebrated the arrival of National Unfriend Day with its very own anthem sung by country artists Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker.

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Who sent me quizzes about Jersey Shore

You made my life a hell

With your stupid LOL

To all the friends I've un'ed before

To all the guys from grammar school

Posting shirtless pictures by their pool

Your fat and sweaty back

Really makes me want to yak

To all the friends I've un'ed before

Our time on earth goes by so quickly

We have to make each moment great

So I cannot waste one more minute

Reading your dumb status update

Kimmel may have a point, but this rather funny joke of a holiday seems to be more a late night comedy sketch than an event manufactured out of real concern for the status of friendship.

Still, National UnFriend Day is good natured -- at least for those not being unfriended -- and you might even consider taking the day to cut some friend fat of our own.

Facebook had no immediate comment on how the festivities were being marked at company headquarters. Needless to say, Zuckerberg is not likely to be adding Kimmel to his friends list anytime soon.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://100searches.blogspot.com/2010/11/national-unfriend-day-clean-your.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/national-unfriend-day-jim_n_778742.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/11/national.unfriend.day.mashable/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20023121-501465.html

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/11/08/jimmy-kimmel-national-unfriend-day/

How to Highlight Author Comment in Blogspot Blog?

This trick is to give a Highlight Author Comment. This will make the blog's owner comments looks different from the visitors’ comments. It is very useful and interesting blogger hack tips. You can see the example in my blog. Here is what to do to make a "Highlight Author Comment" effect in Blogspot.

Credit for the trick goes to Trick Tips Blogger.

1. Login to blogger, then choose "Layout --> Edit HTML". Don't forget to backup your template first.
2. Check the "Expand Widget Templates" box.
3. Copy this script and put it before ]]></b:skin> or copy to your CSS area.

.comment-body-author {
background: #E6E6E6; /* Background color*/
color: #000; /* Text color*/
border-top: 1px dotted #223344;border-bottom: 1px dotted #223344;border-left: 1px dotted #223344;border-right: 1px dotted #223344;
margin:0;
padding:0 0 0 20px; /* Posotion*/
}

4. Then find this code:

<dl id='comments-block'>
<b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'>
<dt class='comment-author' expr:id='"comment-" + data:comment.id'>
<a expr:name='"comment-" + data:comment.id'/>
<b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'><data:comment.author/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:comment.author/>
</b:if>
said...
</dt>

<b:if cond='data:comment.author == data:post.author'>
<dd class='comment-body-author'>
<p><data:comment.body/></p>
</dd>
<b:else/>

<dd class='comment-body'>
<b:if cond='data:comment.isDeleted'>
<span class='deleted-comment'><data:comment.body/></span>
<b:else/>
<p><data:comment.body/></p>
</b:if>
</dd>

</b:if>

<dd class='comment-footer'>
<span class='comment-timestamp'>
<a expr:href='"#comment-" + data:comment.id' title='comment permalink'>
<data:comment.timestamp/>
</a>
<b:include data='comment' name='commentDeleteIcon'/>
</span>
</dd>
</b:loop>
</dl>

5. The red color text is the code that you have to add to your script. The position must be right.
6. And then save your template.

TinEye – Reverse search using your Images

When you prepare your blog post, you may need to add several images, which will help your readers to understand better the content, or will make the post more attractive and readable. Let’s say, you have found an image but you are not satisfied with quality, resolution, or you prefer having the same pic, but without visible watermark. Definitely, you may continue image searching through the popular sites, but there might be difficulties to locate what you exactly need. Here, you find a new useful service - TinEye - a reverse image search engine.

Using it is quite simple. You submit an image to TinEye and find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in the index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

Note that TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been edited, like cropped or resized.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching. TinEye regularly crawls the web, looking for new images, and in addition accepts contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed out 1.8 million images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.

Examples of use

• Find out where an image came from, or get more information about it
• Research or track the appearance of an image online
• Find higher resolution versions of an image
• Locate web pages that make use of an image you have created
• Discover modified or edited versions of an image

Free services limitation

The free for non-commercial use version of TinEye at tineye.com allows you to do up to 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches per week.

Registration

TinEye must be able to save your search image to permanently link to your search results. Unregistered users of TinEye cannot save their search images, as they are automatically discarded after 72 hours. Links to these searches will stop working after 72 hours, unless a registered user happens to save the same image. Registered users of TinEye can save their search images if history is enabled in their user Profile. Saved searches are available from the History page, and permanent URL links to any saved search can be bookmarked or shared with friends.

Registration to TinEye is free.

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Review the following screenshots to check what the service can do for you.

Website: http://www.tineye.com/

How to Post to Your Blog with Word 2010?

While I am personally not using Word 2010, I am sure that there are many bloggers who already relocated to this text editor platform. So, the question for those who use it: do you know that it is possible to write and publish a blog post using the same application you are using for anything else?

Device Magazine provides detailed review of this new Word feature I would like to present today.

It makes perfect sense that Microsoft should want their users to employ Word for all word processing tasks, not just the ones that take place on documents stored on their PC or laptop.

Microsoft have become more and more aware of the wider uses for their Office applications in recent years, and have even released an online version of Office which is free to use for domestic users and offers the ability to save work in the cloud.

Writing a blog post with Word 2010 is nothing more but an extension of this. You are probably thinking "so I can write a blog with Word, but I can do that anyway and paste it in" but this method allows you to connect Word directly to the blog software, removing the need for any desktop or browser based blog editors like Scribefire, and dispensing with any problems with Word formatting causing problems with the display of your blog post.

Write a Blog Post with Word 2010

You can easily create a new Word document for your post and have it ready to publish to your blog in minutes. There are several blog platforms supported by Word 2010:

• Windows Live Spaces
• Blogger
• SharePoint blog
• Community Server
• TypePad
• WordPress

…and if you don’t use any of these, you can enter manual configuration options by choosing “Other”.

To set this up, create a new document in Word 2010 (File > New) and choose Blog post under Available Templates.

You will then be prompted to setup an account – here you should choose from one of the options as listed above. For instance, if you're using a WordPress blog, you will be prompted to enter the Blog Post URL for the XMLRPC.php script that manages links from third party apps like Word. You will see something like this:

http://<Enter your blog URL here>/xmlrpc.php

If you use a private WordPress blog, simply enter the URL as instructed, and then add your username and password. Many WordPress users have blogs hosted at www.wordpress.com – they should enter

http://<blog account name>.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

For Blogger and TypePad accounts you need only enter your username and password, while SharePoint blogs require just the URL. Windows Live Spaces blogs require the space name and your “secret word”, while Community Server requires a special URL similar to that shown above (to the “metablog.ashx” script) as well as a username and password. Once you have configured the account for your blog, you’re ready to start posting!

Publish Your Blog with Word 2010

With your blog linked up to Word, you can then proceed to write a new post. Using the Blog Post and Insert tabs, you can visit the Home page, choose a Category for your blog, apply text formatting (if supported by your blog) and insert Tables, Pictures and Clip Art, Hyperlinks and other media options.

A few useful blog platform tools are missing, however – there is now way, for example, to split your post so that only a small portion of it appears on your blog’s home page. This would need to be added manually in your blog admin screen. Similarly, tags and labels cannot be added, but other than this, you can use Word as a great alternative to tools like Scribefire or your blogs own admin screen.

One word of warning: when your blog account username and password are used by from Word, they may not be encrypted. This will be down to the authentication method used by your blogging platform, so make sure you make regular backups of your blog and that you don’t employ a username and password that you might also use for other purposes.

Freeware Blog Editor from Firefox Browser

Deepest Sender is a blogging client that runs inside popular browsers Firefox, SeaMonkey, and XULRunner.

So, Deepest Sender is a blogging client for Firefox-based applications. What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of having to go to the Update page on LiveJournal/WordPress/Blogger/whatever, or loading up a separate client program, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+\, or click the button in your toolbar, and you can start posting.

Advantages over using update pages:

* Multiple accounts - You can have multiple accounts in Deepest Sender, and quickly switch between them.

* WYSIWYG - An integrated mini-HTML editor, with countless hacks implemented to get it to function as well and as neatly as possible. You can also switch between that and source view, or preview mode. No more typing countless <li> tags!

* Sidebars! You can load up Deepest Sender in the Mozilla/Firefox sidebar, and post from there.

* Drag and drop - select part of a page, drag it onto DS, and it's there!

* Music detection - if you have Foxy Tunes installed, or are running Windows and are using a plugin for your media player that is compatible with the Windows Media Player blogging plugin, then you can have music automatically detected for you. If you can get your player to write song details to a text file, then DS can detect the current music from that, too.

* Spellchecking - if you're running Firefox 2 or SeaMonkey with spellcheck installed, you can spellcheck your entries!

* Crash recovery - if Mozilla/Firefox crashes while you were halfway through typing up a huge entry, don't worry! When you next load Deepest Sender up, it'll try and recover as much of your post as possible.

* Load and save drafts - want to come back to something later? Save it as a draft, then get to work on another post. You can load it back up later.

* Easily edit posts - instead of poking through LiveJournal's edit system, just hit Ctrl+Shift+H, and use the calendar to find the post you were after, load it up, and edit it. If you're using other blogging protocols, you can easily search through the last 15 posts.

* Offline mode - Can't connect? Well, type away at your post, then load Deepest Sender at a later time when you can connect to your server!

Advantages over other clients:

* Easy installation - go to the Deepest Sender site (or Mozilla update), click install, restart your browser, and start posting! Even if you're on a computer account that doesn't have administrative priveliges (on Firefox)!

* Small download - how many other blogging clients are under 300KB?

* Cross-platform - Deepest Sender will run on any OS that Firefox will run on. Type up posts at work on your Windows computer, then come home and type up more posts on your Linux box - using the same program!

Screenshots (Click to Enlarge):

Developers Website: http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/

Latest software release: 0.9.3 (June 2, 2010).

Direct Client Download: http://downloads.mozdev.org/deepestsender/deepestsender-0.9.3.xpi

Review more free software for blog publishing (48 items to choose from at the moment) at RateItAll Rating List.

6 Applications to post on Blogger Blog from Android Phones

I love my Android based HTC Incredible. Actually, it is the first mobile phone I really love. More and more functions, unthinkable for being performed through mobile phone can be done fast and efficiently now. It is time for me to think about convenient mobile blogging agent to be able post from the road to my blogs. In search for the suitable client I came to several utilities on the market I would like to share with you:

1. Blogaway for Android is a simple blogger client for your Android phone that helps you blog on the go. Blogaway works with blogs hosted on Blogger (the next Beta client is developed to support Wordpress blogs as well). Blogaway supports almost everything that you need to post a simple blog with images, links and videos. It works with blogs hosted on blogspot as well as on custom domains. You can also read blogs of your favorite authors’ right from inside Blogaway.

Here are a few features that make Blogaway a great blogging tool for your mobile. And we are continuously adding more.

- Multiple accounts/blogs support.
- Posts with images (single), videos(single), links, tags etc.
- Add your favorite blogs to Blogaway.
- Read/post comments on blogs.
- Share your post's URL through multiple channels.
- Geotag your posts.

Website: http://sites.google.com/site/blogawaysupport/home

My rating: 4 of 5.

2. AndroBlogger is very basic Blogger authoring client to read, post to and comment on blogs based on Blogger engine. Recently more features were added, making the utility more useful, such as pictures (as URL only), text formatting, rich preview, etc. Most international encodings are now supported.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-sadko-androblogger-jiAi.aspx

My rating: 2.5 of 5

3. Bloggeroid is a small application (about 50KB), which can help you blog on Blogger blogs "attached" to any of your Google Accounts. You may upload many pictures, and you decide where in your posts those images will be placed. You may use also some kind of "wikisyntax", so when you will wrote **bold** in the result you will have word bold in bold, for __italic__ it will be italic. You can edit existing posts, and you can choose if this should be edited in HTML or in this "wikisyntax".

Website: http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/pl.przemelek.android.blogger/Bloggeroid

My rating: 3.5 of 5

4. Blogger-Droid is a simple Blogger client, allowing to create/view/edit/delete blog posts on Blogger Blog. You can also post comments to published blog posts, upload picture(s) and video(s). So, with this application you can easily share pictures, videos, YouTube clips, links etc.

Website: http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/social/bloggerdroid_hikk.html

My rating: 4 of 5

5. I am Blogger is a lightweight application with limited functionality that allows keep your travel status in Twitter and Blogger's blog. You can send tweets and short blog records with your location and photo.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mblog-activites-iCAn.aspx

My rating: 2 of 5

6. Moby is a multi-platform utility, allows its users to share photos, videos, audio and text from their Android based phones with your friends, family and contacts on all the major social networking sites and services.  Moby distributes to more than 25 sites and services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Netlog, and many more.

Website: http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-mobypicture-android-qDjp.aspx

My rating: 3.5 of 5

How to create a Free Professional Blog with BlinkWeb?

Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the blogging platforms for the new bloggers, we often restrain our reviews by the big players in this marketing niche only (like Blogger, for example). However, there are many small players, who may offer quite impressive set of features and capabilities.

Today, we are going to present of the sites, which can easily compete with big boys – BlinkWeb.  It’s one of those websites that surprisingly offers you their services for free without any loopholes and hassles. The site was founded in June 2008 by Brad and Matthew Callen, the company is based in Indiana, USA.

BlinkWeb offers you to create professionally looking website or blog with simplicity and speed of the drag and drop functionality. You can easily create all the major website types such as a blogs, a content style websites, or a sales letter style websites. The blogging platform was developed with novice users in mind. However, those with moderate experience, basically anyone who doesn’t know the least bit about html and other coding stuff, can still very easily make use of this platform. Blinkweb comes equipped with many high quality website templates that users can select from, making the new blog unique in the blogosphere.

To get started with the service is pretty simple: you just need to sign up for a new account on BlinkWeb. It is easy as well. Simply enter your chosen username, password and your email address on the homepage of the site in the signup box. It’s free to sign up and use BlinkWeb, depending on where you want to host your site you may have to pay a fee.

The Blinkweb page builder is completely free. After the user creates their website, they are presented with 3 main options which include; get a subdomain for your website, get a domain name for your website, or download your website in .zip format. Users will be able to get a subdomain completely free, which is then hosted by our servers. Users can also choose to get a domain from Blinkweb. Domain names are completely free as well. Should the user choose to get a domain name, Blinkweb will host their website for $1.00 the first month and then $14.95 for each month thereafter. Users can have unlimited domains with Blinkweb. Each additional domain is only an extra $1.30/month. Finally, if users prefer to host their websites with their current webhost, rather than through Blinkweb, they can choose the 3rd option, which is to download their website in .zip format. Doing so costs only a very small fee. Blinkweb also offers an extensive line of training tools and guides to earning money strictly from an online business. These tools come in the form of videos, workbooks, and audio CDs.

It incorporates the following features:

• It has a very user friendly interface, even a novice can get a hang of it in no time.
• You can download website to your own computer
• It very conveniently lets you build websites by simply dragging and dropping components
• You can also add few add-on and plug-in like AdSense, contact forms, guestbooks and maps according to your requirement.
• The basic services comes for free but if you are looking for trying out and applying more advanced features then you will be charged accordingly.

Access Website Homepage: http://business.blinkweb.com/

Google Instant Search and Marketing Concerns

Google recently introduced their “Instant Search” feature which starts to populate search results the instant you start typing into the search box. At the same time, Google suggests alternate search terms as you type to help narrow your search without forcing you to enter entire search phrases.

The main idea behind this new feature is to save users a few seconds on each search and cut down on misspellings for search terms, business names or product names. Users may not notice much difference in their overall experience, however, for small businesses and online entrepreneurs, this new search method carries a few interesting ramifications.

Since Google clearly ranks as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online marketing world, acting as de facto gateway to the Web for millions, any change to their system makes businesses nervous. Many have expressed concern that this latest change will force users of Google’s AdWords program, the search giant’s lucrative pay-per-click marketing arm, to pay for more expensive keywords.

They reason that since the most popular search terms appear in the search box first, and that most people will opt to accept Google suggestions, those most popular searches will carry the highest click prices. In other words, businesses that depend on Google to show their ads fear that Google will force them to pay more money by recommending more expensive keyword searches.

But that might not be a real future!

The suggested search term feature actually appeared on Google quite a while ago, and all that’s really changed is Google starts to display the actual search results AS you type. With the old 2-step process, Google made suggestions as you typed and then you clicked the search button to see the search results.

Instant Search just creates a FAST way to see the results for different search variations without forcing you to click the button each time to see those results. This process makes it simple to see the results, change your mind, and not wait for the results each time you change the phrase.

Most people always start with a broad search and then narrow it by including more descriptive terms (often called “long-tail” keywords) to better find what they want. This new process won’t change that.

In fact, it will give people more chances to refine their searches on-the-fly by providing Google more details of what they want. Instead of posing a threat, I believe this new Instant Search feature creates an opportunity for any business to perform high-speed market research to look for possible opportunities and trouble spots.

The following four steps will help any small business use Google’s new feature for instant results.

1. Go to Google and search for your business as if you were a consumer.

2. Make a note of the keyword suggestions Google offers as you type.

3. See if those suggestions give you any ideas for your own marketing (since they should represent the most popular phrases).

4. Note which competitors show up and where you appear in relation to them.

These 4 simple steps make a great barometer for taking a read on your local market, fast.

Who appears consistently?

Who shows up hit-and-miss or every once in a while?

Who shows up in Google Maps?

If your competitors show up and you don’t, you’ve got some work to do!

Bottom line: as a small business, use Google’s new Instant Search to quickly get the big picture when it comes to your business, industry, and local competition.

Source and Additional Information:

 http://smallbusinessmarketingweekly.com/

http://www.webguild.org/20100909/google-instant-implications-for-users-advertisers-website-operators

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641319

101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden

In this post, I would like to present an ebook - 101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden from http://www.toptenblogtips.com/. As the title claims, the ebook contains 101 essential tips for all bloggers, no matter how technical you are, or which platform you use.

The ebook is divided into 10 sections, each containing 10 tips:

1. Advertising and Promotion
2. Blogging Personalities
3. Comments
4. Content
5. Design
6. Guest Posts
7. Networking
8. Overcoming blogger's block
9. Planning
10. Post frequency

Tip #101 is provided at the end of the ebook.

You can download the ebook here:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/11644427/Ben_Barden_-_101_tips_for_improving_your_blog.pdf.html

It's a free download, so you can share it with no restriction.

How to submit blog sitemap to Bing?

As you know, Search Engine Bing, powered by Microsoft, is one of the new successful additions to the marketing niche, dominated by Google. You may need to consider seriously your exposure to the Bing searchers, besides focusing on Google and Yahoo! To get more visibility, you can follow the simple steps, described below.

1. The first thing is to create an account or use one you already have for the services of pages of Microsoft, like Hotmail.

2. If this is the first time you access the service and never have sent your URL, you will see the option to "Add Site. You can have multiple websites / blogs in the same account.

3. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
* Click the "Add Site" to add the URL of your blog.

* Enter the address of your blog where it says.
* And click on "Submit" to submit your request.

4. Verify your ownership of your website.

Webmaster Tools requires authentication to ensure that only the rightful owners are provided with information about their websites. There are two ways to prepare your website for authentication, both of which rely on your adding an authentication code your website. You need to do only one of them to get verified.

* "Option 1" offers blog authorship verification by hosting a XML file on your Web Server, which is appropriate for the server hosted blogs (Wordpress.org, for example).

* "Option 2" represents a meta tag authorization by adding certain source code to your blog template (recommended for Blogger blogs).

As I am a Blogger platform user, I have applied the second approach, and it takes just a minute to complete site authorization. You can go to the panel, click on "Design" ~> "Edit HTML" and embed the generated line under the head. Then click the "Verify" button to let Bing to confirm your registration. Note that the tracking and displaying data indexing can take several days to begin to appear.

5. Adding sitemap of your blog

Now, when your blog has been successfully verified you can send its sitemap to get it crawled easier and help the algorithms to find and read its contents. Click on Add Sitemap on the line of your blog listing. At this point you have to add the address of the sitemap file to your blog.

* For blogs on Blogger (Blogspot) your map address definition is pretty simple. Just Enter the default address of RSS Feed, as in the example below:

URL- http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

* For wordpress.org blogs

You may use site maps generator Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Simply create or have created an XML file of your sitemap, hosted on your host and add the link as explained above, clicking the "Submit".

Stream Music on your Blog with iRadeo

About iRadeo

iRodeo offers the bloggers’ community a free open source MP3 player and online radio streaming platform. You can start streaming your mp3 files with ease, launching your online radio station.

 iRadeo is the simple, easy-to-use technology that allows turning any website or blog into a professional, lively, or altogether unique page. You can even personalize your homepage to have audio that reflects you, or play your own pre-recorded audio files.

Main Features:

• ·        Fast and easy setup. Register, customize your settings, and upload to start streaming. No other setup required. You can embed player on any website. Nothing to download and no technical skills required.
• ·         Unlimited streaming. Stream as many MP3 files as you provide, without any restrictions.
• ·         M3 tags detections. Auto MP3 ID tag detection and display is built-in.
• ·         Unlimited listeners. No restrictions on number of listeners at the same time.
• ·         Complete customization. Complete control of the style for the player, including color, size, types of players and field options.
• ·         Free downloads for your visitors. Enable your listeners to download each stream.

Web site: http://www.iradeo.com/features

Promote your blog through Dagaloo

No matter how popular your blog is, there is always not enough if you are rather ambitious blog owner. So the question on how to spread a word about the site always remains on the bloggers’ agenda. Today, we are going to present a new service, based on a Twitter mini-blogging platform, developed by a respected blogger, Nick Cardot, from SiteSketch 101.  The site is called Dagaloo, and it is described as “an intense social media sharing community”. 

Here’s the basic concept at the heart of this program: help another user by tweeting out a link to their content and in return another user will tweet out a link to your content. Practical implementation is very simple and straightforward. You join the community (where you sign up with your Twitter ID and password).  You then tweet a link to share another member’s content with your followers.  Each time you send a tweet, you are awarded points.  The point system is based on your Klout score. 

Then you submit your own content and community members will tweet your links to their own followers and earn credits from you for the effort.

To avoid the system misuse, there is a limit for tweets submission to only 1 tweet per 90 seconds, so hopefully as you browse the site, you’ll take the time to find content that you’re truly impressed with to share with others.

Register and promote: http://dagaloo.com/

How to track stats directly from the Blogger blog?

I have noticed a new feature Stats in Blogger onsite editor not right away, as it was introduced, but now I am using it all the time. It gives you convenience of instant access to the basic statistics and data of the blog, you are working on. The brief explanation on the new feature is offered on the official Blogger blog.

Although some of you use Google Analytics or other third party tools to track your blog traffic, many of you have requested an easier-to-use, fully-integrated stats feature for Blogger. We heard that, and we are excited to announce that Blogger in Draft now has built-in stats. Just go to Blogger in Draft, and you'll notice a new "Stats" tab. You don't have to install or configure anything to start benefitting from Stats.

The coolest thing about the new Blogger Stats is that it monitors and analyzes your visitor traffic in near-real-time. You can see which posts are getting the most visits and which sites are sending traffic to your blog right now. For example, if a reader shares one of your blog posts on Twitter and the post is getting lots of clicks, you will see a traffic increase in Blogger Stats almost instantly, with the particular Tweet mentioning your post being identified as the traffic source. Of course, traffic data across longer time periods (day/week/month) and all-time historical data are available as well.


There's also a lot more data that's being tracked, such as popular search keywords that send visitors to your blog, which country your visitors come from, and which web browsers they are using. Basically, with the new Stats feature, you know what's going on with your blog right now.

The new Stats feature shows all of this data in a simple, easy-to-understand graphical user interface. Since Stats are part of Blogger, you don't have to sign up for another service, or embed any code in a gadget.

Additionally, if you want the enterprise-level power and flexibility of Google Analytics, you can still use it, as outlined in this Help Center article. Note that the pageview data in Blogger Stats and in Google Analytics may not be identical, due to different collection mechanisms used. Also, Blogger Stats do not support private blogs for now.

7 Wordpress Plugins to get more visitors to your blog

There are many ways to directly increase traffic to your blog, but there are even more indirect ways to give your blog traffic a significant boost. Using the Wordpress plugins listed below, you can automate the process of leveraging some of the best blog traffic building opportunities available through search engine optimization, social bookmarking and social networking. There's even a Wordpress plugin to help you use Twitter to increase traffic to your blog!

1. SEO Title Tag

The SEO Title Tag plugin allows you to override the automated title tags that Wordpress sets for your blog posts and pages, so you can use keywords in your title tags that are far more search engine-friendly than the words in your actual post or page titles.

2. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin does exactly what its name implies - it allows you to add title tags, descriptions, keywords and more to every page and post published on your blog. Users consistently report a noticeable increase in traffic to their blogs from Google searches after installing and using the All in One SEO Pack plugin.

3. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin made with a specific search engine optimization benefit in mind - to help Google find every post and every page on your blog, index them and include them in search results. This plugin is particularly helpful for blogs that want to get indexed by search engines quickly.

4. Simple Tags

The tagging functionality in Wordpress is great, but the Simple Tags plugin takes it to a whole new level. Great tags can boost your blog's search traffic, so adding the Simple Tags plugin is a great way to get started.

5. Sociable

WP-Notable adds icons at the end of each blog post you publish asking visitors to your blog to share the posts they read through Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and so on. Making it easy for people to submit your content to social bookmarking sites by using a plugin like WP-Notable can give your blog a boost in exposure and traffic.

6. TweetThis

TweetThis is a great Wordpress plugin to help you increase the likelihood for visitors to your blog to share your posts through Twitter thereby increasing potential blog traffic. When you install the plugin, an invitation link is included at the end of your blog posts suggesting that readers "TweetThis" and share a link to the post they're reading through their Twitter feed.

7. WP-Email

The WP-Email plugin is a must-have. When you install this plugin, a message and link is included at the end of every post enabling visitors to send posts they like to friends via email with a single mouse click. Allowing readers to introduce other people to your blog through emailed posts is a great way to pick up some new visitors!

Source: http://weblogs.about.com/od/addonsandplugins/tp/WordpressPluginsBoostTraffic.htm

How to Add an Online Image Editor to Your Website?

If you have a website which works with images (for example, lets users upload images or share images on your website to their social media networking accounts) then it would be a great idea to provide your site visitors with the option to edit images online. If a person wants to set his profile picture on your site, he can upload the original photo and then edit it in the online editor (available on your site) then put up the resultant image as the picture. Similarly if you have a funny picture up on your site which users can share on Facebook, enabling them to edit it online makes things more convenient in case they want to crop the image.

You do not need to do anything extremely fancy with you site’s code to add an online image editor on your website; all you need is Picmeleo.

Picmeleo is a free online photo editor that any third-party developers can integrate to their website. To use the service, click on the blue SIGN UP BUTTON on the homepage and create an account by entering yours and your website’s details.

After signing into your account, you can obtain the code for the editor; all you will need to do now is embed this code into your site and you will have given your site visitors an online image editor.

You can also preview the editor before actually pasting the code on your blog. The loading process may take a little whole so give it some time. Here’s how it looks

Some of the tools this editor contains are Crop, Scale, Rotate, Auto-fix, and Filters. If you do not want your users to be able to extensively edit the image on your site, you can choose to exclude some tools which Picmeleo offers in its editor. This is a unique feature of this online image editor.

Overall the easy integration of Picmeleo into your website is what makes it so special.

Recently, Picmeleo have launched a new photo tagging tool called Picmeleo Alive (Beta) that allows you to tag photos with mouseover bubbles. Bubbles appear only if you move your mouse over the photo so they don't affect your original photo. Tagged photos can be embedded to blogs or shared with a permanent URL.

Website: http://www.picmeleo.com/

Discover income potential for your blog with AdGenta

AdGenta is an easy and powerful way for you to unlock the revenue potential of your website or blog. It offers you an opportunity to embed ads anywhere you can place a picture – in your blog post, on your website, in your RSS feed. Because you choose the keywords for your post, you are in a better control of the ad your website visitors see – it is no longer bound to the content, but to your knowledge of your readers and what you are writing.

AdGenta is a powerful way for you to monetize your content – you are free to choose when and where your ads are placed, what they look like, and what ad is displayed. You can use them as little or as much as you want.

What is AdGenta?

AdGenta is an advertising network that frees writers from traditional constraints in advertising. It delivers relevant advertising, based on user defined keywords, as image based text ads that can then be used on websites, in blog posts, and in RSS feeds.

                                       

Signing up is easy 
                                                                                                                                                                         

1. Fill out the form here
2. You get a confirmation email, than just follow instructions to confirm your email address address.
3. Start placing ads!

Customize AdGenta

You can customize the appearance of your ads, choosing from a wide range of colors, sizes, and formats. The default ad performs highly on all blog types, but you are in full control to customize your ads.

Choose when & where

                                                                                                                                                                                                              

AdGenta is not a program you turn on or off for your entire site. AdGenta lets you insert keyword-driven advertisements when and where you want. You can choose to put it in all your posts, or only a few. Each time you insert an ad, you have the option to change how it looks.

You can place the ads anywhere you like in your post, allowing you to decide how things look. The ads are totally flexible because they are images.

Comparing Keyword vs. Contextual Advertising

Keyword advertising focuses on the human brain - what a person really thinks about what they've written, and how they think readers will interact with that. Many bloggers will describe their posts in specific terms, often using the same words to tag a post, but some bloggers choose complimentary words - those words that may appeal to the readers, even if not specifically mentioned in the post.

Advertising options

• Aside from keyword vs. contextual, you have the option as well of image/banner vs. text ads. Each has shown to be effective in certain situations, but text ads perform overall far better
• Text ads have the advantage of looking like content, and seamlessly integrating with it.
• Ads placed close to, or within, content perform better
• Ads that can be formatted to alter size, color, etc to customize to blog features will outperform those that cannot
• Putting ads in blogs can be post- or blog-centric

Post-centric vs. blog-centric or feed-centric advertising

• Advertising on blogs can be focused on the blog itself, the feed, or on the post.
• Blog-centric advertising treats the blog as the main element for revenue. The concept behind this is to capture people who physically go to the website to see the ads. This usually requires placing the ad code into the blog template, and knowledge of HTML at minimum.
• Feed-centric advertising is designed to attract people to ads in RSS feeds. These ads are not visible on the blog/website, and are only visible through RSS readers to the blog subscribers.
• Post-centric advertising is focused on a combination approach that will captivate attention from people at the site, as well as subscribers to the RSS feed. Ads are placed within the blog posts individually, and these ads will flow through to the RSS feed where they can also be seen.

Company Website: http://www.adgenta.com/default.shtml