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.
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Lots of big news today from iUpload. They’ve been a central player in the enterprise blogging game for years (and sponsored the very first BBS conference back in 2005.) They’re one of several players surging forward into the emerging enterprise social media market. They have a new release of the software which contains more “participation options.” We’ll get a demo and report back.

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.

I had the good fortune to sit down with Jeff Nick CTO of EMC at the excellent Future in Review conference a few weeks back and we discussed the EMC Enterprise 2.0 initiative he calls the “EMC Innovation Network.” A video of the interview is here, and my notes follow.

EMC is trying to achieve two objectives with the Innovation Network. One idea is that the network will create value earlier in the product development pipeline. Traditionally EMC has been very strong on development, but less focused on pure research. Nick is anticipating that the initiative will enhance this dimension of their R&D efforts. The second objective is on collaboration — to provide a means of getting cross-cutting capabilities and innovation across business units.

EMC has grown organically and also through a set of acquisitions. Within business units information flows fairly freely, but the challenge has been breaking through the independent silos so ideas can cross divisional boundaries. Nick feels the systems they’re implementing will provide a collaboration model that cuts across business units.

EMC is not alone in this challenge of propagating knowledge across divisions . Nick’s discussions at FiRe with Mark Bregman and Tom Malloy (the CTOs of Symantec and Adobe respectively), made it clear to him that other organizations are also also challenged with cross-divisional knowledge transfer.

Nick told me that initially he focused on providing a platform for process innovation. He identified a set of areas where crossing the seams between business units would be a priority. He began with the intersection of security and information management, and then where resource management and information management came together.

Content management and collaboration are key to the initiative. Nick feels these are arenas where Web 2.0 technologies excel. In the collaborative sphere, the requirements for EMC were:

• To get people to be able to find each other
• To communicate and socialize ideas
• To harvest those ideas
• To iterate across organizational boundaries
• Enable rapid sharing, and materialization of collateral

Nick and his team investigated the capabilities of current open source collaborative tools and also talked to companies providing proprietary technology. EMC finally settled on what Nick calls a “framework model” which allows for integration of a variety of different tools. They specifically did not want to be locked into any particular monolithic platform. Nick’s team also preferred tools that their user community was already familiar with, and liked to use.

EMC largely settled on open-source applications including WordPress. The only proprietary technology they’re using is Documentum which is designed to securely share content and documents, but not a great way to collaborate. These tools have been enhanced by EMC with code to provide enhanced security, and some WordPress plugins are in development.

Nick’s team now has blogging and Wiki capabilities, along with RSS feeds, and instant messaging.

The collaboration is not just internal — the collaboration includes many university partners and these outsiders are granted access to the full capabilities of the system.

We’re working to get someone from EMC to our upcoming event to discuss the specifics of the tools they’ve implemented.

 

 Interview with Jeff Nick: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Jeremiah Owyang did a really interesting interview with Intel Internet Strategist Bryan Rhoads. For the most part, I found it really informative, but I’m going to nitpick on one particular question that I feel wasn’t fully answered.

Owyang asked, “Do you have an Blog Policy? What’s the publishing process like for the Intel Blogs, and who’s involved? Who is allowed to blog and how are they selected?”

Rhoads replied:

We do have a policy for employees that is essentially an extension of our long standing communications policy. Its very much inline with former electronic communications policies, but updated to accommodate the medium and new technologies…

There is no “content workflow” through PR, Marketing or Legal… it’s the blogger communicating directly w/ his or her audience. Unfiltered and straight from the blogger’s keyboard to the live blog.

Given that there is no filter for content before it is published, it seems rather important that Intel choose bloggers who will represent the company well. I don’t mean to imply that Intel bloggers are required to drink the Kool Aid before they can speak, but I would like to know what criteria they use to determine who can blog.

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 United States Army has instituted regulations requiring that a commanding officer approve all posts to personal blogs.

The concern is that non-classified information might leak out to enemy intelligence through seemingly harmless blog posts. And commanding officers who don’t want to take unnecessary career risks or spend additional time vetting blog posts may simply ban the practice outright.

In a statement to Wired, retired paratrooper Matthew Burden of The Blog of War anthology said, “This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging. No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”

If ever there was an organization in need of a world-class enterprise blogging platform, the United States Army — the whole military, for that matter — is it. Rather than putting the burden of supervision directly on overworked, stressed out and ill-prepared commanding officers, why not have a group back home that screens blog posts as they come in?

The vast majority of information that is posted on military blogs is utterly harmless, and silencing the voices of soldiers abroad and at home is ill-advised. It seems that the military is throwing the baby out with the bathwater when all they need is a good platform.

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.

Dave Taylor notes that Patrick Benny has built an Auto-Save plugin for Movable Type.

It’s about time!

Fast Company’s cover story this month is about Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Obviously, there’s a lot to cover here. I thought reporter Ellen McGirt did a great job covering the rise of Facebook and the reasoning behind Zuckerberg’s decision to keep the company private rather than selling or going public.

The part of the article that stood out for me is when COO Owen Van Natta discussed Facebook’s backend:

“We’re one of the largest MySQL Web sites in production,” says chief operating officer Owen Van Natta, 37. MySQL, a popular open-source software, “has been a revolution for young entrepreneurs,” Van Natta explains, partly because it frees them from paying the licensing fees of, say, an Oracle.

The role of MySQL in the emergence of new Web technologies from WordPress to Facebook has been huge. It’s a free, open source database system that has become an integral part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python).

As boring as they sound, databases are the driving force behind everything that has been happening online. All of the robust content management that has enabled free expression, word of mouth and consumer generated media is due to MySQL and other structured query database programs like it. This blog runs on a MySQL database. So do all the blogs at Wordpress.com.

Blogging platform Movable Type runs on MySQL, although it also works with Microsoft’s SQL Server. But as Van Natta pointed out, MySQL continues to be the dominant force in online entrepreneurship and open source development simply because it is both robust and free.

Companies can expect that as more of these types of technologies become widespread, you’ll see more opportunities for your customers to express themselves in new and powerful ways. After all, when you give smart people robust, inexpensive tools, they’ll create things that people will want to use.

At the last Blog Business Summit, I had a nice chat with Mary Hodder where we commiserated on how we longed for a blog search engine that would let us find posts by authors with little to no formally recognized “authority.”

As experienced bloggers know all too well, Technorati and Google easily help us find posts (and authors) that are linked to frequently, but in my mind that just advances the echo-chamber problem. What I’ve wanted is a way to find authors, articles and posts that are largely “undiscovered.”

We have a blog called bigbusinessjet.com that is sponsored by Greenpoint Technologies and covers the rarified space of owning and operating ultra-expensive business aircraft. Today I found a highly relevant article put forth by Dealmaker Magazine (a site with a PR of zero (?!)) that no one else has blogged about, hence has been ignored completely by Google Blog Search and Technorati.

How did I find it? I used the (thankfully under-appreciated!) Live Search from Microsoft. Live Search has some easily accessed parameters that enable you to find unpopular pages that have been recently been updated — and can even provide an RSS feed for that search. The essential parameters are found under the “Advanced” link, and the key settings are within “Results ranking” which brings up 3 sliders (see below.)

What I asked for was newer results that are relatively unpopular but match closely the search string “bbj3″ — which is the industry term for the Boeing Business Jet Version 3. Note how I could just as easily have entered the parameters as text.

Without Live Search, I don’t know if/when I would have found this article. Probably after some other blogger picked it up I guess…

Matt Mullenweg posted today that “Plugin Authors Get No Love”. Its true that while the authors of themes often get link love from the pages that use their work, the authors of plugins get very little. So I’d like to send a shoutout to all the wonderful people who wrote the GPL plugins we’re running on this Wordpress install.

In alphabetical order, they are:

• George Notras, whose Add Meta Tags plugin gives us lots of easily customized SEO love.
• Matt Mullenweg himself for the brilliant Akismet plugin that keeps the evil spammers at bay. (At the time of this posting, Akismet has blocked 525 pieces of pernicious spam.)
• Scott Reilly, for the Customizable Post Listings plugin that generates the lists of random content that sometimes appear on our site.
• Michael Woehrer for the Simple Tagging plugin that generates our tag cloud and the lists of related content in our individual posts.
• Matthew Robinson for his Subscribe2 plugin that manages the folks that subscribe to our blog via e-mail.

Let’s show the awesome people who write these great plugins that we love them. Who wrote the plugins for your Wordpress blog?

If you take a look in our right-hand sidebar, you’ll notice that we’ve added a little widget called “Recent Readers.” This is courtesy of MyBlogLog, which combines some key community building features with site statistics.

Basically, MyBlogLog has three parts. The first is the widget you embed in your blog’s sidebar. This tells you and your readers about the people who have come to your blog. Anyone who has a MyBlogLog account registers as having visited. The second part is the cookie they embed in your computer that tells other blogs when you’ve stopped by. The third part is the internal community that allows you to message with your fellow MyBlogLoggers and find new and interesting content to peruse. I’ve found some of my favorite blogs this way.

Why is this a good tool for business? Because if you’re looking to build a community online, MyBlogLog facilitates that organically. People know that you’ve been looking at their blog simply because they see that you’ve come by. This drives traffic back to your blog. If you pay attention to your visitors, you can click through to see where they blog and what they write about. This helps you find great new content that you can link to, and that helps solidify community even further.

In the interests of self-promotion, I should add that community building techniques and tools are going to play a huge roll in our conference this year.

When we rebuilt this site in Wordpress, one of our hot to-do items was to make it easy for the less HTML savvy members of our team to add bios and photos of our speakers. We accomplished this in three steps:

1. Create a plugin that gives conference speakers an authorship role and has a custom template tag that will display only authors in that group.
2. Create a standard author.php file that displays author bio and photo information.
3. Override the Wordpress function that requires an author to have posts attributed to to them in order to pass the query to the author.php page.

Unfortunately, when you pass the author function in Wordpress and the author in question has no posts, Wordpress returns a 404 error. We originally solved the problem by adding the following PHP to our custom 404 page.


if( function_exists( 'bbs_is_author' ) && bbs_is_author()) {
include (TEMPLATEPATH.'/author.php');
} else {


This allowed the 404 page to pass the query along to the author.php page and display author information for authors (a.k.a. speakers) that have not written any posts in this system.

Unfortunately for us, Internet Explorer threw in a major hurdle. Unlike most browsers, Internet Explorer has friendly HTTP error messages that override our custom 404 page. Since IE users weren’t seeing our custom page, Wordpress didn’t know to pass the query to author.php page. Instead of the speaker information they requested, IE users were seeing a custom HTTP error message.

To rectify this, we modified the /wp-includes/classes.php file to pass the query to the author.php template rather than returning an HTTP error, regardless of whether the author had written any posts or not. If you are interested in learning more about the modification, you can e-mail me.

By the way, we’ll be covering more stuff like this at our next conference.