Google Gets Serious About Blog Search. Look Out, Lijit!

When I met with the Lijit team in Boulder earlier this year, they asked an important question around brand loyalty. While I was already a user of Lijit, did I feel a loyalty to their brand over others? I thought a bit, and answered honestly, that I didn't (or at least not much). I said that if Google were to deliver an equal or better product to theirs, they were already the trusted name in search, and I would at least give them a shot. Today, Google has done just that, taking an element from Blogger In Draft, and releasing it into the wild. It's one of the many steps required to complete the marathon I told you about last week.

As Blogger announced today, the new Search Box gadget searches not only your own posts, but Web pages you link from your blog and blogs in your list (like a blogroll). This is quite comparable to Lijit's offering (see right sidebar), where users can search my blog, my social activity, and my blogroll.

I haven't yet installed the Google Blog Search gadget on my own blog yet, partly due to the fact I am using an older template, and don't yet want to break what works. But you can see the widget in action on Product Manager Rick Klau's blog on the right side.


Searching Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching Links from Rick Klau's Blog for FTP


Searching the Web for FTP
For example, searching his blog for "FTP" displays the results in line on the blog without a pop-up window or going to a new page. I can click "Linked From Here" to see pages that have linked to Rick that also mention the term "FTP", or lastly, I can search "The Web" at large.

It is an elegant solution, so far as I can tell.

So what does this mean for Lijit? Lijit is striving to find a way to measure influence, as well as to develop an advertising network that is trusted for bloggers that use its products, so this doesn't mean the mighty Google swoops in and erases Lijit of the face of the Web. But Lijit will have to work hard to better define itself and make it differentiated from what Google offers - especially for Blogger users who haven't yet considered moving to WordPress.

Google's Blogger Challenge: Win the Marathon and Don't Bonk.

Sometimes I feel like I am a rarity in the tech blogging world, considering I haven't moved away from the Blogger platform and onto the more frequently celebrated, higher geek cred option, WordPress. In fact, I'm such an oddity that I am not even on the newest version of Blogger. I still cling to the "Old" Blogger and post my stories using FTP, as it's something that has worked for me for the better part of three and a half years. But while I haven't made the switch, many have - falling in love with WordPress' wide array of extensions and open source mentality. I've even had offers for people to help me move off Blogger to WordPress, and have, so far, resisted.

With this going on, there's no question Google's Blogger platform has a perception problem. While it is on record as the largest blogging platform on the Web today, ahead of Six Apart's TypePad, LiveJournal and WordPress, it is largely seen as not leading the innovation curve - even if mommybloggers (like my wife) use it and love it.

Some aspects of Blogger feel like they haven't changed in maybe five years, and surprisingly, that perception is actually true. Today I had lunch at Google Headquarters with Rick Klau, who is a Product Manager on the Blogger team at Google, and we talked at length about the current state of the platform, as well as what is planned in upcoming releases to help the product become even more on par, and in some cases, ahead of the competition. He said that for the most part, Google has just "kept the product alive" in maintenance mode, not adding too many features. Meanwhile a good number of the features being tested in the product's "Draft" area, similar to Google Labs, are unknown to the majority of the product's users.

But even in keeping the product going, there's been a tremendous amount of effort from people Rick said were "working their butts off". He wrote me in an e-mail after our lunch, saying, "There's been a ton of largely invisible innovation over the last few years - things that don't get seen because they just work, but enable the massive scale at which Blogger operates."

Klau joined Google as part of the company's acquisition of FeedBurner in mid 2007, and since that purchase, neither FeedBurner nor Blogger have been spared the arrows from critics who recognize the value of their services, but expect more, myself included. Klau agreed with my comments this afternoon saying that users see Google as having the combination of tremendous brain power and seemingly infinite technical infrastructure resources, making any hiccups practically inexcusable. I've always said I favor the little guy over a large monolith like Google, and users are easily tweaked when products produce incorrect results or have outages that last hours - both of which I've highlighted before in darker days.

But Klau also noted the platform is under a constant around-the-clock battle with spammers and other hackers attempting distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and working to find ways to blast spam into comments on the millions of blogs on the Blogger platform worldwide. In fact, the Blogger team has three people in three continents around the world dedicated to keeping the sites up and the riffraff out.

To fully appreciate life as a Blogger user, Klau did the opposite of what many have done of late, moving from WordPress to the Blogger platform with his own blog. He now gets the privilege to see both the good and the bad of his product from the perspective of the company's large user base - and despite the competitive state, he sounded eager at what the future will bring, and the opportunities available, with top resources available from the Mountain View search giant, including potential integration with newly announced products elsewhere within the company.

"I feel like we're in a marathon, and I am beginning with a 10 mile headstart," Klau said. And while it may have been true that in recent years, Blogger had been sitting idly, or jogging in place to hold their position, it is clearly no longer the case now, as I learned during my talk with Klau today. The team is running again.

Social Media Outposts: Maintenance

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

This is a continuation of last week's post regarding creating social media outposts. The first part was creating outposts or as I refer to them, tollbooths. The core objective is for organic search engine traffic, and reserving the brand's identity on the given social networks I have chosen. It's no secret anymore that social media optimization works and it works well with regards to search engines. In the previous post, I outlined my reasons for choosing the social media platforms, today I will delve into maintenance, which is basically updating the outposts.

Maintenance starts with automation:

Automation is key to making this work. My outpost task is for commercial use, so it's not a viable option for me to manually update all of these outposts. Some of the outposts will have to be manually updated, but the majority of them will be automated. I will be covering some of the tools and features for automation that I use in this post.

Blogger:

Since I will be using multiple Blogger.com accounts for this task, and updating the majority of these blogs at the same time, the solution is post by email. This works because the blogs I will be updating are going to be receiving the same content. This also works with Wordpress blogs.

I simply create a mail list with all the distribution blogs post to email addresses. Using Outlook or Gmail, I compose the blog content. The subject of your email letters will be the titles of your posts, and the body of the emails will be the posts themselves. To include an image in your post, you can attach an image to your email. You can also use plain text or HTML when composing your posts via email.

Twitter:

To send status updates to Twitter, I will be using TweetDeck. I prefer TweetDeck because of the ability to group my followers, and because nothing comes close to it, at least for a Windows client. TweetDeck also allows you to post status updates to Facebook. There is one drawback though, presently you can not use multiple Twitter accounts on TweetDeck. This is a major hurdle as I will need to be updating multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. Seesmic would be better off for this task because it supports multiple Twitter accounts and grouping. Both of these are desktop AIR apps and are memory hogs, so there are plenty of other solutions for posting to Twitter. Eventually the clients will be taking over these Twitter accounts and will have their own preferences on how to post to Twitter. Most of these clients are not too tech savvy, and in speaking with them, the majority of them are used to using a browser for everything. Using Twitter.com to post will probably be the road they take.

Facebook:

For updating the Facebook fan pages I will be using a few of the built in options as well as using a few applications. For my objectives, I'm only concerned with automation for videos, status updates and notes. There are a ton of Facebook applications you can use for customizing your Facebook fan pages. Read this Mashable post for a good starting point. Spend some time browsing the application directory for a full sampling of all the current Facebook applications.

Status updates:

There are a few Facebook applications that will do this using your Twitter account's RSS feed. One that I have been testing out is RSS Connect. You can also use ping.fm to update your fan pages too. There are a few other tricks to do this, but either one that I mentioned should be suffice.

Notes:

This will be done by using RSS. Simply add your blog's RSS feed, set it and forget it.

Importing video:

Videos for the fan page will be imported in from our YouTube channel. You can either upload them manually to your page or use YouTube Video Box or YouTube Box for automation.

Importing photos:

I do this manually, as I want to be selective on what photos I add to the fan page. I suspect there is probably an application for this. I also allow on the the fan pages for tagging and adding of photos by fans.

Create custom boxes:

With basic HTML knowledge you can use Static FBML to create custom boxes to cater to your fan page needs.

MySpace:

This outpost will be pretty much bare-bones. Its only purpose will be for branding and vanity url purposes. I will customize the layout, upload a few target videos, link back to my central hub, fill in some profile data and that's all. The application gallery is very weak. While there is an option to export blog postings made on Myspace, I did not find an application to import RSS feeds into Myspace. MySpace is the weakest link in my outpost strategy, again only being used as a branded outpost and that's all. Set this one and forget it.

YouTube:

YouTube will be used for the main video hub. All videos are uploaded to YouTube through YouTube.com first, then distributed to all the outposts. There are tools to create videos and upload them to YouTube directly, I prefer using their website to do this. With our YouTube channels, the first thing we did was customize our channels.

1. Log into your YouTube account. Click the yellow "Edit Channel" button.
2. Set up your channel information - website URL, profile picture (88x88) and description.
3. Within Channel Design scroll down to "Advanced Design Customization". Set background, link and border colors.

If you are looking to automate the YouTube upload process, a good site to use for this is TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul will allow you to send videos to YouTube as well as Viddler, Vimeo , and a whole slew of other video sites.

One tool that does it all is ping.fm:

You can use ping.fm to pretty much update all of your social networks. Ping.fm supports over 40 social networking platforms. I have tried it out in the past and it works pretty well. One word of advice is not to cross your streams. The last thing you want to do is have double or triple updates of the same message broadcasted across your social networks.

That's pretty much the tools of the trade that I recommend and or use for updating my outposts. I'm still pretty much old fashioned and prefer manually updating the majority of my content, but when it comes to bulk and that's what this project is, these tools, once set up, save a lot of time and effort. In the end, it's all about working smarter not harder.

The next post, part three, is not necessarily about outposts, but more on brand monitoring and a big part of that is monitoring the social media networks for brand mentions. Stay tuned...

Image by Rejar under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Creating Social Media Outposts

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Roll-Your-Own Social Media Campaign: Outposts

I recently started a new job at a software company. One of my responsiblites is creating and launching an effective organic SEO & social media strategy for our customers. Our customer base deals primarily with the auto industry, not the keenest when it comes to marketing on the Internet, much less social web. The majority of our customers spend their advertising dollars on print, TV and radio ads. This strategy for the most part works well, as it's locally targeted to a geographical region.

My main objective with this task is primarily for search engine purposes only. Creating back links and outposts. Brand monitoring is also another objective. This is a roll-your-own strategy tailored for the three objectives I mentioned only. Educational training on social media comes later. These type of clients are salesmen who are on the sales floor all day long trying to move product, and often these clients will have an employee assigned to the Internet division, but that employee usually does not know the first thing about Internet marketing. Their sole task is updating online inventory and responding to Internet requests. These are the employees who will require ongoing training about Internet marketing and more specifically social media marketing, engagement and interaction. More on that on a future post, but lets get started.

Think of outposts as a sort of toll booth. This is the analogy I'm making here. It's pretty much the same in real life. On the Internet there are many toll booths for many destinations. You need to own and operate that toll booth, instead of your competitors.

1. Reserving and creating the brands name online, aka vanity urls.

The first step is creating accounts on the major social networking sites. All I'm concerned with at this point is Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , YouTube and blogging. Blogging for this objective will be using Blogger.com, eventually leading to in house blogs as well as hosted on the brands website using WordPress. I need to reserve the brand's name on these networks for search engine traffic, but equally important is to keep them out of the hands of name squatters and potential competitors. I'm not concerned about the smaller social networks, they can come at a later point if needed.

Why choose Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and YouTube?

Blogger:

• The ability to create dozens of blogs utilizing targeted keywords.
• Easy to use with no learning curve.
• Vanity URLs
• Google juice
• Marketing
• Branded outpost

Self hosted WordPress blogs will eventually be the main informational hub for consumers

Twitter:

• Real time search capabilities.
• An API we can hook into to pull and post data.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Broadcasting inventory, specials, etc.
• Vanity URL & tweets are indexable by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Branded outpost

Facebook:

• The ability to create a public branded fan page & vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines. Google being the prime target.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Rich multimedia environment.
• Branded outpost

MySpace:

• Vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Multimedia environment, primarily will be used for video/photo purposes only.
• Branded outpost

YouTube:

• Vanity URL
• Distribution hub for videos created in house.
• Ability to create a custom channel.
• Embeddable share options for videos and soc nets.
• Indexable by search engines, great for Google juice.
• Branded outpost

2. Creating consistent brandable outposts.
Now that all these accounts are created, it's time to turn them into outposts. Remember an outpost is used for driving traffic back to your central hub. The hub in this case is the brands website.

• Outposts need to be streamlined and most importantly consistent across the board.
• Corporate contact information, banners, logos and URL name should all be the same.
• Outposts always link back to the central hub.
• Always use targeted keywords in profile information.
• Goal is to achieve uniform omnipresence on all outposts.
• When information is changed on the central hub, it needs to be reflected on the outpost.
• Link back to all your outposts. Always remember main emphasis is on the central hub.
• Encourage following and fans on your outposts and always follow back.
• Keep the outpost fresh with content as often as possible, this is key for search engines.

That's part 1 of this roll-your-own strategy. Outposts are relatively easy to set up and maintain, and are key for organic search traffic. Part 2 will cover maintenance of the outposts and will also dive into brand monitoring.
Image by thetruthabout under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead

I didn't make any blog posts on Thursday, after a full Wednesday which included a visit to Google headquarters to meet with the Google Reader team. And even though I made a few posts on Friday, the first day of the SXSW conference, many people still think I'm on a temporary hiatus, thanks to a tag-team failure between FeedBurner and Blogger, who have significantly impacted many users by zeroing out their feeds, stopping their posts from getting out of their domain. It looks like I should have spent more time in Mountain View after chatting up the Reader team, to see just what the heck is going on elsewhere on campus.

As the resurgent Kent Newsome of Newsome.org noted today, in his post, "FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy", the XML file that Blogger generates to distribute RSS feeds was completely wiped out - and I have been impacted as well. No matter if I had 20 or 2,000 posts historically, the file reports it has zero kilobytes, and no amount of trouble-shooting thus far has been of any help.

In this world of RSS-enabled services, a failure of this level means that my posts aren't getting out to the previously-mentioned Google Reader. They aren't populating social networking sites like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. And that will no doubt cripple visits for those affected.

As always, I at first considered the issue was my fault. I noticed FriendFeed this morning wasn't picking up my posts, and tried to delete and add my blog six ways from Sunday, but with no success to speak of. While Kent recounts his searches for real tech support, I was in the air during much of the day, and came back to find I was not the only one hearing the silence from Google, as others assumed silence from me.

Complaints are wide-spread in Blogger's help forums - from RSS Feeds are EMPTY today when publishing via FTP. to atom.xml is empty and simply empty feeds.

I'm concerned on quite a few levels here. FeedBurner and Blogger are among the most mocked Google products because of their presumed neglect. Yet they are two of the major foundations for my blog. Also, I am concerned because we are seeing this issue as a weekend starts and a major tech conference is starting up. There's a huge chance this issue won't be resolved if Google is asleep at the wheel. There's nothing I can do except accelerate my move to Wordpress. This doesn't make me feel all that lovey-dovey with Blogger at the moment.

Socialtwist's Widget Puts New Twist On Social Content Sharing

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

When reading a blog post, it's not uncommon that you will see a "Share This!" button at the bottom that you allows you to do such things as share it with friends or to publish it on your own blog or social media profile. A new Tell-a-Friend widget, produced by SocialTwist, aims to expand on that idea by enabling distribution to such communications platforms as instant messaging services and by allowing easy selection of contacts through e-mail and social networking address books. Here's how they describe it:

Unlike other sharing utilities, Tell-a-Friend stands unique to give you a single button which enables both one-to-one personal recommendations and social broadcasting. Tell-a-Friend is the only sharing widget to support Instant Messengers (chat) and personal messages to friends on social networks. That's clearly the best of word of mouth marketing rolled in one.

The idea is that the widget is easily installable, highly customizable, supports more than 80 services, and comes packed with analytics so that you can monitor your "viral campaigns." With support for all major instant messenger services and social media services spanning from Bebo to Yardbarker, it's hard to think of a place that you can't use Tell-a-Friend to send to. And the fact that Tell-a-Friend displays as a pop-up within the Web page that you're visiting makes for a seamless and easy user experience. I also really like the tabbed interface that allows you to easily select that type of service you'd like to use to distribute the content.


It's a pretty cool and timely service as it builds upon already available services and aims to please publishers who are always eager to enable the distribution of their content. And the ability to track the metrics of that distribution is potentially important in quantifying the ever elusive notion of "influence."

So if everything about the Tell-a-Friend widget makes sense and is looking good, I think the challenge will be to make it as easy as possible for publishers to understand and install. The Web site showcases a really cute and well produced explainer video:


But I was left wondering, "Where's the Tell-a-Friend widget?" I realized that I didn't know what it looked like! To be fair, a sample version of it is sitting in the middle of the homepage, but it took me some time to track it down.


And so if that leaves room for argument that I'm slow on the uptake, keep that in mind while I explain that I had some trouble getting the widget installed and running. I began by trying to install Tell-a-Friend on a Blogger site, figuring that would be the easiest way to test it out.

However, I couldn't get the widget to publish. I followed the step-by-step instructions that were provided, but could not get the widget to appear.


Even though there were several screenshots given to help me, there was no final screenshot showing the widget displayed on a "live website" so that publishers can see what the widget is supposed to look like on a published webpage. Translated, I did not see any written or visual instruction that tips the audience off that Tell-a-Friend is supposed to appear directly beneath the bottom of each article.

After trying to "hack" the Blogger template in a few different ways, I gave up and moved onto a WordPress site. That one proved to be successful, though it does take a little bit of technical knowhow to get it running: You have to download a .zip file with the widget code, FTP it to your WordPress plug-ins folder, and then go into your WP management tools to activate it.

Overall, I believe that there's a market for widgets that are truly useful to both publishers and Web site visitors, and Tell-a-Friend is certainly a part of that conversation.

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

Plinky Launches With Prompts to Spur Stuck Bloggers

Starting a blog can be daunting for a lot of people. Jason Shellen, a key member of the original team that started Blogger, says that many people easily get disenchanted, asking "what do I do?", when viewing a blank page. His new service, Plinky, launches today, with hooks that not only help to connect friends, like many other social media tools, but also help to provide new discussion points, with an engaging tool called "prompts".

I spoke with Shellen today, in advance of this afternoon's launch, and he said he felt that while many different social media tools have focused on aggregation and developing rich media, less attention has been spent on the creation experience itself. As a result, many of these services have grown outside of the mainstream, limiting their potential market.

"I didn't think for the average user, there was really much work being done," Shellen said. "We wanted to develop something that was really fun, and I wanted to see answers to things I wanted to know from my friends. Plinky is to inspire people, and make them create content and look good doing it."


You Can Answer Plinky's Multiple Choice Questions


An Example Answer from Me On My First Paycheck
One of the quickest routes to creating interesting content through Plinky is answering one of the prompts, seen on the front page of the site. When you answer one of the prompts on Plinky, your answer is shown alongside other users of the service, and you can send the data out to any of third party services the product supports on day one - ranging from Blogger, to Twitter and Facebook, for starters.


Plinky Grabs Album Data from Amazon for My Mix Tape


I Can Send My Plinky Notifications to Twitter or Facebook
Plinky, which is starting off with a team of seven, based in Lafayette in the East Bay, also features many of the friend connection aspects you have seen in other products. You can browse all the users of the site, and choose to follow them, like making friends or followers in Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. By following them, you can go to the drop-down of Answers and see "Followed Answers", giving you all the answers to prompts from those friends you following on Plinky.


I Can Choose to Follow Other Plinky Users
And like Twitter, you can even make answers to prompts as your favorites. So if a friend of yours says he has an awesome answer to songs he would keep on his mix tape, one of the prompts this week, you can click Favorite and see it in your favorites list.

If you think you are a social media guru and power user, or you're one of those bloggers who is posting stuff every day, Plinky might seem a little light for you, but for the much larger audience who gets writers' block and can go weeks without updating their blog, or maybe they posted a picture of their kid once and never came back, after sending a mass e-mail to their friends and family, Plinky is a fun way to get re-engaged with new ideas, as you answer prompts, see what other friends have said to the same questions, and can pass that data out to the rest of your online presence.

In a world of social media when so many things are about how many places you're signed up and everything you're doing, Plinky gets back and focuses on the social. Now, I just might find out whether you change clothes when you get home, what your favorite venue is to catch a concert and how you got started in your career. You can, as always, find me with the ID of "louisgray", here: http://www.plinky.com/people/louisgray.

You Can't Afford to Lose Mobile Readers

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The continued market growth of iPhones, Netbooks, Blackberries and other tools make mobile browser support more and more important.  Here’s a quick thought experiment for you: If you’re running site analytics, look and see how many of your viewers run a resolution lower than 800x600.  Nearly 6% of all visitors to this site are using these low-resolution devices.  Most of them are using the 320x396 screen of the iPhone and iPod touch family.

Respected publisher and all-around media thinker Tim O’Reilly insists that the tipping point has come:  “… if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.”  Google blogger Matt Cutts succinctly demonstrates the worst-case scenario in mobile browsing:  If you’ve got a flash-only site, those iPhone users are just going to surf around you without a second thought.  Can you afford to lose them?  Not for long.How your site could be frustrating mobile usersGreat, so you’re now committed to making your site as mobile friendly as possible!  You’ll need to understand some common frustrations mobile users encounter when viewing sites and how to deal with them.  I’ll list the ones I’ve picked up in my years of browsing on handheld devices:

Load time:  Many contemporary blogs include third-party (such as this site and my own) include sidebar widgets, third party commenting systems, animated subscriber counts, and plenty of other things that load off-site.  You’re also likely to see an image or three in every post because images are known to increase user interest in reading posts.

Readability: Pile all of the widgets into a layout that’s designed to be read at 1024x768 or higher and you’ll find that you’re seriously taxing the bandwidth and processing power of the average mobile phone.

Navigation: Each mobile device has its own sacrifices in terms of navigation.  The iPhone’s multitouch screen makes zooming and resizing easy but iPhone users sorely miss a real live tactile keyboard.  You won’t find many iPhone/iPod users willing to type out more than a few lines at a time.  Other phones like the T-Mobile G1 have real keyboards but no multitouch.  The lowest common denominator of phones (that are going to be browsing at all) is probably something like my Motorola RAZR.  The RAZR lets me flip through lo-fi pages using the equivalent of a five-key keyboard: up, down, left, right, enter.Start making your blog mobile friendly today!If you’re here to learn how to make your blog more mobile friendly, you’re in luck.  The relatively simple format of most blogs – one post at a time in chronological order – lends itself well to the task of adding a mobile layout.  Here are a few of the more common blogging platforms and tips on how to “mobile-ize” them:

• WordPress has a series of plugins that will ease the process for you.  I use MobilePress and WPTouch.  Beware that you’ll have trouble integrating WPTouch alongside the popular WP Super Cache plugin. 

• Blogger doesn’t have the plugin architecture WordPress does, so you’ll have to either work a lot harder or settle for less in terms of mobile supoport.  Intersquash will “iPhoneize” any site that has an RSS feed at no charge.  Here’s the Intersquashed iPhone-friendly version of LouisGray.com:  You’ll notice that Intersquash shows only the latest items on a feed.  This won’t help a mobile reader who comes to your site looking for an older article. 

• TypePad doesn’t seem to have built-in mobile browsing support but there are some tips on providing your own mobile-friendly stylesheets at TypePad support.  This knowledge base article is from early 2007 so there may be some updated information on this front. 

• Tumblr has a dead-simple “mobile” feature – access it by adding “/mobile” to the end of your tumblog’s URL.  Check out the mobile view on Fred Wilson’s tumblog for a nice example.  The only complaint I have about Tumblr’s mobile support is that it strips out any customization you’ve done, such as adding the ability to comment on your posts via DISQUS or IntenseDebate.

Where should we go next? Now that we’ve started on the road towards making our sites more mobile friendly, let’s plan out our next steps.  At my blog I’ve noticed that the MobilePress and WPTouch themes put a great face on my posts, but they ignore a lot of my favorite user convenience features.  My “Share this” widget and the “related posts you might enjoy” plug-in don’t appear for mobile browsers.  It would be great to get more of these features supported by the mobile “face” of our sites.  Maybe I can track down the authors of some of these plug-ins and see what we can do!

Perhaps more important is the question of providing accessibility to the disabled.  How easily will blind or deaf visitors be able to read your content and navigate your site?  They’ll likely come armed with a few tools of their own to aid them in reading your posts but they surely deserve at least as much of your time and consideration as do iPhone users.  I personally have not yet looked into this on my blog, but I feel I ought to make it my next task.  The World Wide Web consortium has a Web Accessibility Initiative to point us in the right direction.  Good luck, and thanks for reading!

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work

Crowdsource Software Payments to Reward Alert Developers

Not all software is free, and not all of it should be. Unless you are the type who can break out your C and Python manuals with ease, the time may come where you have an idea for a great application, and you're going to need someone else to do it. Why not leverage others who have the same need, and combine to provide a bounty, by which, if your solution is delivered to satisfaction, the developer or developers can reap the rewards directly from the end-users who will benefit from their product?

As a visible, active, FriendFeed user, I grew jealous by the success WordPress bloggers were having with Glenn Saven's nifty plug-in to show if items had received comments or "likes" from the popular social lifestreaming service. He had single-handedly developed a tool to unify conversations from disparate sources in an elegant way. But, for me, a long-time Blogger user, I was basically faced with a rock and a hard place. Migrate to WordPress, or keep my conversations separate.


This clearly wouldn't do. So, on May 25th, I said I needed a solution, writing:

Needed: FriendFeed Comments + Likes for Blogger (Old and New)

Thomas Hawk and I need your help. The WordPress bloggers are having way too much fun with getting FriendFeed likes and comments into their blog, and we using Blogger (both the old or new) can't yet do it. I am offering a $250 bounty to the developer of a solution good enough I can integrate into my blog. This would not replace Disqus, but go alongside it, as seen at the Inquisitr. Thomas and others, feel free to add to the bounty...

As much as the WordPress advocates wanted me to just switch blogging platforms (and I respect their views), I was looking for somebody to develop a solution that could help other FriendFeed users in the same predicament I was. After all, what was more likely? That you would see a lot of people make an exodus to a new platform for want of a widget, or that many people on Blogger would find the FriendFeed widget useful? I was willing to pay $250 to make this happen, and I wanted others to pay as well.

By June 16th, Pat Hawks had a solution worth paying money for, and Thomas Hawk agreed. He wrote, "I'm good for a match."


In the space of less than 30 days, I had helped spur an alert developer to create a fantastic solution which I have in place today, and one that continues to improve. Pat, for his efforts, not only gained at least the $500 from Thomas and me, but now has a great deal more awareness and respect across the FriendFeed community and the blogosphere at large. I bet that with platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter and others having direct, immediate, connections to people on the "demand" and "supply" side of the fence, this won't be the last time you see a crowdsourced method for getting software developed.


I am all too happy to give Pat $250, and I'm headed to PayPal now. In this age when you have developers trying to compete with free software and Web services, why not encourage them to build something that you would use, and offer them real cash? If you get enough friends together, you could end up with a serious code competition on your hands.

See also: WinExtra: Crowdsourcing a tech interview

FriendFeed Friday Tips #5: Bringing Comments Back to Your Blog

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, and how to integrate with Google Talk. Today, I'm going to talk about how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog, capturing the conversation.

While FriendFeed has gained considerable praise from many corners of the tech blogosphere, one place where they have been maligned is in how conversations that take place on the site aren't immediately ported back to the original blog. These "fragmented conversations" have flared up as major issues every couple of weeks, and while I've personally never had a problem with it, and have actually seen comments on my own site grow, even as I've used FriendFeed, many are hoping to keep control over the conversation and keep it on their site.

While FriendFeed hasn't yet introduced an initiative to defragment these conversations, in their place, independent developers have designed tools that will bring comments from FriendFeed back to blogs, including Wordpress, and as of today, Blogger, both the "new" and the "old" versions of Blogger. You can even see the brand-new tool for Blogger live on my site already.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your WordPress Blog

WordPress has gained a lot of traction in the blogosphere, in part due to its wide library of available third-party plug-ins. Only a day after FriendFeed released its API, the entrepreneurial Glenn Saven debuted announced a plug-in that pulls back comments and likes from FriendFeed and displays them on your site.

As he writes on the plug-in page:

"The plugin ads a template tag called , which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside "the loop" so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.
Unzip the plugin into your plugins folder & activate it. You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed. Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save and you’re done with the setup. All the other settings in there are optional. You then need to place on your template file(s)."

The result is a two-way box that shows how many comments and likes an item received, as well as the avatars of the poster, and has the option to add a comment yourself, back to FriendFeed, assuming you know your user name and API key. You can see it installed at my fellow B-List blogger, Steven Hodson's site, at WinExtra. The below screenshot is from his post Some thoughts on a Microsoft after Gates.



Not having installed WordPress myself and tested this, I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from Steven's site and Duncan Riley's work at The Inquisitr, it works very well.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your Blogger Blog

The argument could be made that Blogger's not the most robust platform out there. It certainly hasn't been the most reliable. And its lacking plug-in architecture has made it a less-preferred choice among the with-it digerati. And for the last three months, as WordPress users have enjoyed Glenn Slaven's solution, we Blogger users have been in the dark. Until now.

Pat Hawks posted code using Yahoo! Pipes, which delivers a lightweight JavaScript based solution, bringing FriendFeed comments back to the originating blog. See: FriendFeed Comments in Blogger.

Rather than copy the full code from Pat, I recommend you visit his page if this is important to you. Still being on the "old" Blogger, I saved my Blogger template (just in case), added the new code, just by adding the JavaScript code after where Blogger concludes comments, and before my already customized Disqus code. Now, when people (including me) comment on my FriendFeed items, I can see the comments here as well, as well as those from Disqus. It's now one great big conversation.



This, for me, is an exciting development. On May 25th, I offered a $250 bounty for the first solution good enough to integrate into my blog that shows both FriendFeed likes and comments. Now, Pat has delivered on comments. So... should I pay up now, or wait for likes to be supported as well? Either way, this is a great add.

On another solution? TypePad, for example?

I don't yet know of a way to get FriendFeed comments back to TypePad, the third leg of the blogging platform triumvirate. If somebody does have a solution, or is in the process, I'd love to hear about it.

So what comes next?

I expect this issue of comment fragmentation to fade away pretty quickly. It might not be long until there are solutions that support commenters, aggregators and publishers, all in one. But until then, these new ways to bring FriendFeed comments to your blog are a great solution. Leave a comment here (or on FriendFeed) if you've got one of these solutions running. I'd love to see it.

Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours

I hadn't planned on making my blog a sounding board for all products that have had significant downtime, but this one has certainly hit close to home.

Starting yesterday evening, around 8 p.m., I have been completely unable to add new posts to the site, making it appear that I am asleep at the wheel. The culprit? An issue with Google's Blogger service, which has blocked the ability to post via FTP.

This is not the first time Google's Blogger has had a outage of significant length here, and also, not the first time they have completely ignored a throe of user complaints and support requests on their site.

At a time when Wordpress and other platforms are gaining significant momentum, and can tout "5 minute" upgrades, the temptation to move, assuming the site structure and comments are retained, is extremely high.

I'd have thought Google's acquisition of Blogger via Pyra Labs would have provided the team with significant experience in growing a scalable, trouble-free infrastructure, but from conversations I've had with people close to the team, it seems that the most infrastructure-focused employees at Blogger had stars in their eyes around Google's other products, and Blogger has suffered from neglect.

Something is Broken indeed.

Update: Finally acknowledged on Blogger Status and FTP is starting to flow. But this is ... bad.

See Also:

Google Blogger: Something is Broken!
http://tinyurl.com/5sejhy

Thomas Hawk Cites Blogger Outage on FriendFeed
http://tinyurl.com/3p96y8

From August 9, 2007:
Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/08/google-ignores-users-during-major.html

Disqus' Excellent Customer Service Enables Comments Integration

Disqus is seeing a meteoric rise as the default comments management system for the Web, enabling bloggers to deliver threaded comments, and track their own commenting activity throughout the blogosphere. Recently, Disqus has made a lot of headway through integration with popular social networking tools, including RSSMeme, ReadBurner, Fav.or.it and Plaxo.

But while I had tried earlier this month to get Disqus up and running, the way I use Blogger, with a customized template, along with FTP publishing to louisgray.com, got in my way. But overnight, with some incredible help from Disqus' Daniel Ha, the site now features Disqus comments for all posts, without losing the existing comments from previous conversations.

Disqus is designed to offer bloggers simple installation, be they on Wordpress, Blogger or TypePad. But by default, it assumes a user has upgraded to the newest edition of Blogger, featuring greater widget control, customized layouts and templates. As I have made numerous changes to my template in raw HTML, I haven't made this change, and Blogger hasn't made it easy for me to move to the new service, not making it available for FTP-hosted blogs like mine.

So essentially, I thought I would remain Disqus-free, saying so last night on Twitter. But showing incredible awareness, Daniel Ha of Disqus, said "How can we make it easier for you?"

We traded direct messages and e-mail, and he quickly understood the issue, offering to patch it manually.

Daniel came back with his first solution this morning, but that solution wouldn't have displayed old comments, which would be a showstopper for me, so I balked, asked for him to keep working on it, and again, he said he'd give it a shot. He wrote, "I will take a look into how to display the comments for older articles and let you know ASAP."

Just seven minutes later, he sent me an updated template, which now lets all blog entries, such as this one, use Disqus for comments. And all previous posts will also display Disqus comments, underneath existing conversations. At the moment, this change makes it look like the posts don't have existing comments, but they do, and over time, the Disqus comments will populate the data here, instead of Blogger's comments.

If Daniel hadn't been listening, and willing to give my "corner case" some real effort on a Saturday morning, we wouldn't have been able to get Disqus up and running. This is a great example of next-generation customer service, and engaging. Of course, if you see any oddities related to the new Disqus usage on louisgray.com, please do let me know. I'm listening, and so is Daniel...

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

Google Update Breaks Embedded Shared Links

Often in engineering, a new feature comes with a tradeoff - new bugs. It appears that with the introduction of the new Google Reader, all bloggers who embedded their "Shared Google Reader Links", as I did, have seen their links disappear.

The ability to easily display my shared items from Google Reader in my Blogger template is one of the best features of Google's RSS feed service. Rather than updating my blog manually with each new shared link, the code was automatically refreshed through JavaScript. But as I noted on the Google Reader support forum, "something is broken", and there's nothing I can do to restore the feature.

As another avid Google Reader user writes, "Please fix this ASAP cause i have big community of bloggers internaly connected with this and it would not be nice to tell them all to change the code."

Just when I thought Google Reader was ready to turn the corner, and graduate from Google Labs, I found out this happened. We'll see how long it takes the company to respond. Previously, they haven't been fast at all in responding to user complaints and outages.

Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage

Last night, when I tried to make two posts to the blog, Google's Blogger service stalled out, saying "your publish is taking longer than expected." But try as I might, repeated attempts went nowhere. Turns out FTP Publishing through Blogger was seriously broken, and not just for me, as a well-trafficked Google Groups support board shows.

Starting around 4 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, Blogger users who utilize the FTP Publishing option, as I do, were unable to post new stories. And while they tried to contact Google through the company's own Google Groups service, the company made absolutely no response. You can see the frustration mount...

• Two hours in: "I'm seeing the same problem. Frustrating, isn't it?"
  
• Four hours in: "blogger just sits and spins without successfully publishing anything"
  
• Five hours in: "This is a serious problem! I can't believe it. Blogger should do something ASAP"

But Google didn't respond, and the service stayed down, driving users nuts.

• "Google's customer service is abhorent. These treads are full of issues that are never resoolved" (sic)
  
• "7 hours have passed since i first noticed FTP publishing was down..."
  
• "What happens now? Do we just discuss the problem amongst ourselves until a Blogger technician takes pity on us, or what?"

For many, it seemed incredulous that a company like this would be completely dark when all of us were affected.

"It is pretty unbelievable that it has been down so long without any kind of acknowledgement or statement from Blogger. Take 30 seconds to post an update!"

"Come on Blogger? What's up? Anyone got a update for us? Anything? It's 4:24pm (CST) here, and we're well over 24 hours into this issue with no resolution, nor any Google/Blogger response"

Meanwhile, the company's Blogger Status page never updated, nor did the Help site or the Known Issues page. Google never acknowledged a problem, nor did they come to the discussion board where those seeing the issue were asking for answers.

At some point mid-day today, the issue cleared up, but instead of an apology or an explanation as to what happened, or why it won't happen again, the company's users were ignored, expected to accept the level of downtime. I know it certainly threw a crimp into my schedule, and I'm not all that happy about it. It's enough to make me once again make sure I have all my data backed up and can change platforms (again) if necessary. I hope that won't be the case, but to answer a serious outage with silence doesn't fill me with pleasure.

Power Outage In Palo Alto

Just before midnight tonight, all our lights went out here in Palo Alto, where Kristine and I are housesitting and watching over our dog, and the homeowner's dog and cat. Being a high tech Silicon Valley house, we have been stumbling about by the light of our cell phone, letting the BlackBerry guide us to matches and faux candles.

As usual, there is no known cause of yet. There has not been any inclement weather, and police sirens immediately following the outage have me thinking some car found a power pole instead of staying within the lines. But who knows?

All I know is that it's very dark, the animals are confused, and the BlackBerry is our only source of light, phone and link to the outside world. What a good device! While our laptops, cable TV and all other power sucking utilities are dead, or won't reach the Internet, the BlackBerry enables us to both see and hear.

The Blog from e-mail function from Blogger is pretty cool too, as I guess you can tell. We'll see if the lights come on sooner, rather than later.

My Web Widgets: The Why and Where

I vacillate between wanting a spartan blog that loads quickly and looks sharp, and one that features all sorts of widgets that increase interactivity, community and information. A Web site owner can easily overdo the use of widgets, and relying on many third party sites for functionality can serve to slow the user experience, as browsers are forced to make calls and retrieve data from multiple points. But despite this, I've implemented a few widgets worth highlighting.

1. Recent Comments (from Storago)

Google's Blogger platform doesn't offer an easy way to highlight recent comments, so after searching the Web for options, I added a tool from Storago.com that highlights the five most recent comments on the right sidebar of the page. The widget says when the comment was made, by whom, and on which post. This way, if somebody finds a post from the archives worth commenting on, I don't miss their note, even if its off the front page.

While I don't get dozens of comments a day, I do get some regulars, including Tony Chung of Geekwhat, Gal Josefsberg from 60in3 and Erin Gurney of Ballhype. Others of note include Webomatica and Galeal Zino from NextBlitz.

2. Recent Shared Items from Google Reader

There are a lot of great bloggers out there, far too many for me to post about each day. I've subscribed to more than 100 RSS feeds, and read more than 500 items each weekday. Those which I find most interesting, I'll share via my link blog from Google Reader. Google has made it very easy to share this in Blogger, which you can see on the right sidebar.

Google Reader Trends says that in the last month, my most frequently shared bloggers were TechCrunch, Robert Scoble, Mashable!, Engadget and Read/WriteWeb - all outstanding blogs.

3. ZoomClouds

ZoomClouds takes tagging to a new level. Rather than asking me to proactively tag each of my posts with a specific topic or set of topics, ZoomClouds watches what I write about and reports the keywords, in descending order of use. The larger the font, the more frequently I blog on that topic.

It should be no surprise that my top 5 topics, according to Zoomclouds are: Apple, Google, Microsoft, TiVo and iTunes.

4. Technorati

Despite some criticism of the site's uptime, and continued competition with Google, Technorati is well integrated with the blogosphere, offering tools that summarize a site's Web influence, tagged as "Authority", with the option to read a blogger's profile, add to favorites, and search previous posts. Over the last few months, I've seen my blog's authority jump all the way from the mid-50s in late March to almost 100 today. While some of those counts may be spam blogs, I know Technorati is doing a great deal to avoid overcount.

Technorati tools: Blog Summary, My Profile and Blog Reactions

5. MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog, now a Yahoo! property, showcases icons that display recent visitors, and gives a better sense of a site's community. Even those of us without thousands of visitors a day can get an understanding of who visits the site, what other topics they like, and when signed in, let other bloggers know I've been visiting their site. Depending on site settings, MyBlogLog will add me to a community based on how many times I've visited their site. The service also tracks site visitor traffic and popular outgoing links, though I can honestly get that data in a multiple of other places...

MyBlogLog: Join the Community View the Community and View My Profile

Other widget-like details in the sidebar are gussied up links to LinkedIn for professional networking, and signups for my RSS Feed from Feedburner and blog by e-mail from Feedblitz.

While not fully comprehensive, there's a lot here. What other widgets do you use on your blog and think I should look into?

Google User Experience Study Promises No Electrodes

They say that Google strives to "Do no evil", but as the company comes under increasing scrutiny for having a monopolist's share in the global search market, and others are growing more distrusting over the company's motives, in light of the Feedburner acquisition that expanded Google's ability to track user behavior, it's no surprise they have to remind people now and again they're not Big Brother.

Users of Google's Blogger service, the service powering this Web site, are invited to undergo a user experience study testing new features. Applicants may even get paid, upwards of $100, the company promises.

But clicking through to learn more about the opportunity led me to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page detailing what would be expected. While it's no surprise that you could "try out a prototype" and give feedback, the third question could be seen as a surprise, reading: "Does it involve having electrodes attached to my body?"

The answer? "No. Sorry."

Apparently, not only does this question come up a lot, but applicants appear to have been disappointed by the lack of electrodes. An odd group, to be sure.

Also of interest, the FAQ dictates that you would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). While that's no surprise in the trade secret protecting Valley, for Google to expect bloggers who use their Blogger service to be the shy, quiet types is unlikely. It would be like telling a 15 year-old girl a juicy secret, sending her to a slumber party and expecting your confidence to be iron-clad. Not a safe bet, unless you were eavesdropping, and she were wired to electrodes...

I Stayed Up How Late to Get This Done?

It took the better part of 2-3 months to migrate all 643 posts from RapidWeaver to Google's Blogger engine, but once I saw the end in sight tonight, it didn't really matter how late I had to stay up, or how much other work I needed to be doing - so after hundreds of "Command C, Command V" routines, I am happy to report that the migration is complete.

As a result of the move, the new site look and feel should have been imported, with a very familiar side bar. The old RSS feed should also be working and load from the same URL.

Comments from the last year are no longer tied to their equivalent posts. You can see them as running in parallel, as the original site is still hard coded to its original URLs. New comments to all posts will stick on the new engine. We will also be watching Feedblitz closely to see if that process is working well, though I expect we will learn that on Thursday morning.

With it being nearly 2 a.m. now, I can rest peacefully, knowing that this big undertaking, for now, is over. Find bugs? Let me know.