'Net Features : blogger

Threaded Comments (and more) at Blogger

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Google’s Blogger platform announced recently that it is now offering threaded comments.

While other popular blogging platforms (most that I've come across recently in fact) already have threaded commenting as a core feature - or at least offer plugins to support it - it's a neccessary addition with such a heavy emphasis on social these days.

Threaded commenting, for those unfamiliar, makes it easy for users, and the blog owner themselves, to tell the difference between whether a reader is making a general comment about the post content iteself or if they are replying to another comment in the comment thread. Threaded comments are a great way to let users socialize amongst themselves and discuss the content. For many weblog owners it has done wonders in the "community building" department.

Google has actually made several enhancements to Blogger over the past few months including improvements to Adsense, custom domains and of course integration with the Google+ platform. In early December, Blogger made it possible for users to link a blog to their Google+ account and access a prefilled Google+ share box after publishing a post.

Google's "20.5" Hour Blogger Meltdown

Administrator — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:19:00 GMT

Millions of blog publishers using Google's Blogger.com service were unable to use the service mid-afternoon Thursday (including Google itself). Service has since been restored after 20.5 hours of issues.

According to Google, during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, the service experienced some "data corruption" that impacted its behavior. As the near 24-hour long meltdown continued, bloggers and readers were experiencing a variety of anomalies including "intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages" according to the official announcement post.

Google did indicate that a small subset of Blogger users (estimated at 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday Google rolled back to a pre-maintenance state/version of Blogger - from Wednesday May 2011 - and is currently restoring posts which may have been temporarily removed around that time. WM will provide more information as the story develops.

It will be difficult to determine just how much Web user traffic may have been diverted as a result of the downtime and service disruption. It does serve as a good reminder of the importance of creating and storing backups remotely and of having the ability to those deploy those backups quickly.

SEO: The International Language of Success

Mike Phillips — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:00:00 GMT

If there's one characteristic that all cultures share it's the quest for information. So, it should come as no surprise that the most heavily trafficked websites across the world are search engines. Whether your business is one of providing information (such as a news site or blog), a service provider (software or app developer) or e-commerce (selling tangible products), it is important to appeal to searchers and the search engines by capitalizing on the information that people want. This means finding trending topics and searching for the right keywords -- whether for use in blog post titles, social media updates, or marketing and advertising copy.

As Web professionals we have great opportunities in international markets, as the Web has few borders. In addition to standard keyword research as it applies to your industry, addressing those topics of interest to audiences worldwide can place your brand in front of potential consumers across the world. With that in mind, below you will find a few websites where the world goes for information. These are valuable resources for finding what's buzzing on the Web and the information people care about. With this information, we can craft our content and products to relate to anyone, anywhere.

Use these resources to find possible keywords, content ideas and inspiration for expanding your business across borders. Each of these websites provides information relating to world news and politics, finance, entertainment and sports, and more. When crafting content, remember that searchers are not just looking for text -- videos and photos are among the most visited sources of content online, worldwide.

Twitter.com: Alexa Rank 9

Twitter is one of the most popular websites in the world and provides an excellent opportunity to find the most current worldwide trends. Take advantage of the "Trends" option that can be sorted by country and region.

Percent of site traffic
US 36.8%
Japan 10.4%
India 6.1%
China 5.1%
UK 4.2%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
Nigeria (80)
US (98)
Canada (110)
Japan (131)
UK (145)
South Africa (151)
Egypt (161)
Venezuela (171)
Australia (196)
Italy (222)

BBC.co.uk: Alexa Rank 40

The BBC does an outstanding job of covering world news. Of course, most of the traffic comes from the UK but the BBC also attracts audiences from all over the world.

Percent of site traffic
UK 34.1%
US 15.7%
India 4.7%
Canada 2.5%
Japan 2.3%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
UK (5)
Ireland (12)
Nigeria (13)
Pakistan (16)
United Arab Emirates (18)
South Africa (20)
Finland (22)
Canada (33)
Australia (34)
Sweden (36)

CNN.com: Alexa Rank 48

CNN is most widely used in the United States and Canada but spans across other countries as well. The CNN International edition is handy. CNN's Facebook integration can show what those in your network find interesting.

Percent of site traffic
US 61%
Canada 3.8%
India 3.0%
Japan 2.3%
UK 2.1%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
US (16)
Canada (22)
Nigeria (35)
South Africa (36)
Philippines (39)
Malaysia (56)
Netherlands (65)
South Korea (67)
Thailand (68)
Australia (71)

Reddit.com: Alexa Rank 143

While Reddit is decidedly bent toward the offbeat and humorous side of the Web, it does provide many sortable categories (such as world news, politics and technology) that can be useful for finding trending topics. Reddit also has a sizable international audience.

Percent of site traffic
US 46.2%
India 12.2%
UK 5.0%
Canada 4.8%
Pakistan 3.1%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
Pakistan (51)
US (54)
Canada (54)
UK (94)
Philippines (102)
India (103)
Australia (113)
Romania (129)
South Africa (158)
Bangladesh (184)

Reuters.com: Alexa Rank 220

Reuters is another news site that provides many different editions, accessible through an easy-to-use drop-down menu. Choose a section then use a translation tool to discover what's trending in that particular part of the world.

Percent of site traffic
US 36.8%
Japan 10.4%
India 6.1%
China 5.1%
UK 4.2%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
Nigeria (80)
US (98)
Canada (110)
Japan (131)
UK (145)
South Africa (151)
Egypt (161)
Venezuela (171)
Australia (196)
Italy (222)

Finally, if you have time for some browsing and/or blogging, don't forget about Blogger.com (Alexa Rank 7) and Tumblr.com (Alexa Rank 59). It can be difficult to drill down to find what you want in these sites but they are both extremely popular with the international community. Also, while not yet as respected as sources of content by search engines, they provide some opportunities to network and to get content in front of a very large and diverse audience. Setting up blogs through either of these sites is very easy and practiced by some very large media properties, including The Economist.

Blogger.com: Alexa Rank 7

Percent of site traffic
US 19.5%
India 10.0%
Brazil 5.6%
Indonesia 5.1%
Spain 3.6%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
Indonesia (4)
Malaysia (4)
Bangladesh (4)
Greece (5)
Nigeria (5)
India (6)
Spain (6)
Pakistan (6)
Philippines (6)
Venezuela (6)

Tumblr.com: Alexa Rank 59

Percent of site traffic
US 36.1%
Japan 6.0%
UK 5.0%
Brazil 4.4%
India 4.0%

Regional Alexa Traffic Ranks
Philippines (13)
Singapore (26)
US (32)
UK (37)
Canada (37)
Brazil (41)
Chile (42)
Mexico (45)
Australia (45)
Venezuela (49)

ShareThis Social Tool Gets Big Update

Mike Phillips — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:59:00 GMT

ShareThis, the popular social sharing widget, has released an update that is currently in beta. The biggest upgrade is the ability for users to share a page's content to more than one destination simultaneously. With a single click, users can share your content via email, Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Tumblr, LinkedIn and more. This added convenience for the user could be significant - anything that makes content sharing easier should also be on publishers' radars.

Also included in the update is the ability for users to share content without ever leaving your website and the incorporation of custom themes and colors. In the works are updated plugins for Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. ShareThis claims nearly one million websites use the tool.

You can see an example of the new widget functionality below, and vist the ShareThis website for more details and to test it out.

Essential Social Sharing Tools for Websites

Mike Phillips — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Social media has become a standard in Web business and that includes design and development. In the past, providing eye-catching and functional social profile links and sharing options was a cumbersome process; involving hard-coding and scouring the Web for usable images.

Not anymore. Amateur bloggers (and sophisticated ones, too) can deploy any number of widgets with one click. Many of the social widgets also offer developers the ability to modify and implement the tools and offer APIs.

Enabling social sharing and providing links to various social touch points is not optional - today's online business environment demands it. Fortunately there are tools to make it easy. Below are just a few.*

AddThis is one of the most recognizable and popular social widgets available. According to the website, AddThis is featured on more than 7 million domains. The advantage of that, is that users have been exposed to the widget repeatedly, meaning most are likely quite familiar, and therefore adept, at using it. AddThis also offers some pretty insightful analytics (which can be emailed to you), including search and referrers, social mentions and audience interests. There are plenty of display options with AddThis, so look around the site. ShareThis is similar.

Share and Follow (pictured, at left) is a hot item in the blogging world. Call it a social sticky widget or floating sidebar widget, it allows users one-click access to your social profiles and sits in a fixed position; so that even when a user scrolls down or up, the widget stays on the side of the page - allowing for users to share whenever it strikes their fancy. Although constantly present, it's attractive and relatively small, so it does not feel intrusive. It also enables users to share content. Add in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp ... just about anything. The WordPress plugin supports WP e-Commerce, so product pages can be shared and 'liked.' There are several choices when it comes to "follow me" widgets but this one is one of the most popular, and one of the best. Social Slider is similar.

Sexy Bookmarks (pictured, at right) is another sharing tool but, unlike AddThis, it comes in a slick package. You might even call it "sexy." Just about every necessary social network is supported, and RSS. It's whimsical design and hover-over effects are a good option for bloggers with a bit of lighter atmosphere, perhaps not so great for business publishers. Sexy Bookmarks is very easy to install for WordPress, Blogger and Joomla.

*Many plugins can be unstable, or you might need support. Be sure to read user reviews about these tools before using them, and look for an active community.

Plug Into Better Commenting With Intense Debate

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Are you using a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad? Third-party commenting solution Intense Debate announced the release of several plugins for its service which may help you leverage the power of commenting on your Web property.

If you're not familiar with Intense Debate and services like it (such as Disqus), it is a service for bloggers to "enhance and encourage" the conversation occurring on your blog or website through features like comment threading, or reply by email. Other features like commenter profiles, RSS readers and tracking, widgets, moderation/blacklisting, reputation points and comment voting, and even a simple Twitter integration make this type of service a must-have for serious, social-networking focused websites.

Plugins for Polldaddy (another Automattic company - which also owns WordPress) for embedded polls, Seesmic and YouTube (for displaying videos in blog comments) are available now. Thanks to a recently published API, expect that developers will be pushing out plugins to users of the very active commenting network.

Current users of IntenseDebate need to just log in to their dashboard to see a list of current plugins. Activating a plugin from the account requires you simply select "Activate" next to the plugin in your account. Users will see a comments section on their blog and a plugin icon at the top right of the comment box. To use the plugin, just select the icon - that's it!

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