Archive for the ‘Blogging News’ Category
by David Peralty on May 25th, 2009
I just realized that the Social Media Success Summit starts tomorrow, which means today is the last day to get $100 off the price of admission, making the price $397. That’s not cheap, but it sounds like this online event is going to be epic. Just read this list of SOME of the sessions that will be included…
* How to Create a Mega-Following and Mega-Sales With Social Media Marketing
* Building a Loyal Facebook Following for Increased Profits
* How to Grow and Engage an Audience on Twitter
* Five Reasons You Need to Be on Twitter (and Tools to Help You Manage)
* Social Media Start Up: 3 Key Tools to Build Your Social Media Marketing Plan
* How to Attract Tens of Thousands of People in Mere Days
The list of presenters is pretty damn good too: Gary Vaynerchuk, Darren Rowse, Mari Smith, Jason Alba, Ann Handley, Brian Clark, Chris Garrett, Denise Wakeman, Michael A. Stelzener.
There are also apparently a heck of a long list of giveaways (in the form of ebooks, cds, etc), that they say is worth up to $370, so the price doesn’t seem quite so bad, so long as those giveaways are of use to you.
The major thing though I think, is how they are presenting these sessions. Purely online. And unlike most conferences none of the 4 weeks worth of sessions will be on overlapping time slots.
From the site…
At traditional summits and conferences, groups of sessions are often held at the same time, so it’s impossible to attend them all.
Not this summit.
When you register, you’ll be able to take advantage of EVERY business-building opportunity. Even better, after the summit you can download a video recording of each session. If you miss a live session, we’ll provide you a free recording AND transcript.
If you want to dig into social media to push your blog to the next level, or just want to hear Gary Vaynerchuk yelling about “killing it” (and who doesn’t? Gary is great), get signed up today. Tomorrow it’ll cost ya an extra $100.
Categories: Blogging News
by David Peralty on May 20th, 2009
DailyBlogTips.com has a great post up today about how to gain some traffic to your blog.
It’s get some really good advice on what you should (and shouldn’t) be doing to build up some traffic.
Here’s a small taste of one of the tips…
Why social bookmarking traffic is bad for my blog?
Social bookmarking traffic is very smart. If you are trying to make money with contextual ads like Adsense, for example, you will notice that such traffic will covert very poorly, if at all..
And why is social bookmarking traffic is good for my blog?
This is no brainer. More traffic means people like your content. Just imagine even if 1% of those visitors link to your article from their blog. Also imagine if 1% of of those people visiting your blog for the first time become your subscribers.
The tips are all pretty good (especially the stuff to avoid), so if you’re struggling to get traffic coming to your blog, or you just want to build it up a little faster than it should make some interesting reading.
Any great traffic building tips you think they missed or are wrong about?
Now I’m off to bug everyone in my family to visit this blog(that’s a joke, read the tips!).
Categories: Blogging News, General
by David Peralty on May 14th, 2009
Up until now, there have been very few blogs available for the Amazon Kindle. Those days are over now though, thanks to the “Kindle Publishing for Blogs BETA”
It sounds pretty cool actually. You get to make your blog available to a bazillion (give or take a few) potential new readers, and even get 70/30 split revenue sharing(the 70% going to Amazon). It seems like Amazon is doing the pricing, and it tends to average around $2 a month, but without knowing how they are making that decision, it’s hard to say if that is likely to change or not.
I’m not sure how fast this will spread, but it will be pretty nice to have access to a lot more blogs on the Kindle, and is a very good sign of things to come.
What do you think, should BloggingPro spread into the world of the Kindle? I’m not sure, but it’s interesting to ponder just how this will change blogging in the semi-near future.
Categories: Blogging News
by David Peralty on May 12th, 2009
There’s finally HD video support for WordPress.com sites with VideoPress. A lot of the WordPress.tv videos have gone HD, and it’s spreading like wildfire.
Here’s what the WordPress.com blog there has to say about it.
With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.
Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.
The HD features (along with custom stats and a host of other video related features) will run you $5/month, but for people making and posting their own videos, it could well be worth it for the added quality and speed of using a WordPress based service instead of YouTube or the other HD capable video hosts.
Here’s a sample from the post about the upgrade on the WordPress.com blog. Go to full-screen in HD mode for the full effect.
Categories: Blogging News, WordPress News
by David Peralty on April 24th, 2009
Big news recently was the movement of Blo.gs, a popular ping service, to Automattic, the keepers of WordPress. It seems Automattic has been entrusted with continuing to develop Blo.gs though I don’t understand how they can effectively do that while managing all of the other projects they currently have on the go. Automattic as a company seems to be expanding quickly. Acquiring companies, and now managing Blo.gs for Yahoo!.
It is interesting to see a company the size of Yahoo! give developmental control over any of their properties, though Blo.gs has not seen a major update in some time, from what I can see. It was time to either let it die, or get rid of it, and I think they made the smarter choice.
What will Automattic do with Blo.gs going forward? If anyone has any ideas, speculation, or actual information, I’d love to know.
Categories: Blogging News
by jim on September 16th, 2008
What does placing “ninth in the highest internet users in the world “mean? It means an undisclosed amount by Google purchasing Korean blogging company Tatter, that’s what it means. Google is setting it’s eyes on Yahoo dominated Korea with this move to “Google-ize” the country’s popular blogging software “TextCube” by Tatter. TextCube has been compared to Blogger.com rival WordPress.
“We are excited to welcome Tatter and Company’s engineering team to Google Korea”, announced a Google spokesperson in an e-mailed statement. “Acquiring Tatter and Company will allow us to enhance our online publishing tools in Korea, benefiting a large number of users who already depend on and enjoy Google and Tatter and Company’s products”.
An excited Tatter co-chief executive Chang-Won Kim confirmed the deal on his personal blog, noting that Tatter had been “Googled”.
In a country where it’s all high-speed internet access (mostly), it is no wonder that with this move by Google, all other big names in the “cloud” and the computer industry in general will take a definitive move towards connecting with the Korean market.
Categories: Blogging News, Interesting
by jim on August 20th, 2008
The first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media… that’s Blog World and new media expo 2008. I think this is the first trade show that’s actually dedicated to the blogosphere and new media. If you’re just starting to blog, are already blogging, professionally blogging, or thinking of expanding your blogging influence, this is a conference you may not want to miss. It’s definitely something to check out!
Because this is the first I couldn’t reliably tell you it will be all good and worth it, but I’d also tell you because it’s the first you may not want to miss this as it is history in the making. The conference schedule seems pretty tight and packed with powerhouse speakers. This will all happen on September 20-21 at the Las Vegas Convention center with the exclusive “Executive & Entrepreneur” conference beginning September 19th.
Some of the speakers… click to see speaker list.
Categories: Blogging News
by jim on August 9th, 2008
Now that’s news!
Wordpress.com announced that they have extended their support hours from 9AM to 4PM PDT to 24-hours weekdays… to 24/7! That is one huge commitment that this team has put on and I think deserves a standing ovation. Kudos to you guys!
When you send a support message to wordpress.com you’re assured there’s a real human being replying. If you send a support question and you don’t have a blog hosted at wordpress.com, it will be ignored. This is solely for wordpress.com hosted blogs. They’ve said that they would respond to any wordpress service question, so fire away. Just please be sure that you’ve exhausted time into their FAQs and FORUMs before you do. There’s a high chance that you’re question has already been discussed in length by experts and users like you.
Support team profile can be read here, they are the happy engineers behind http://automattic.com
I really think that support will define the successful online tool. There are many online products available and some are hands-down so useful that people like me use them (even if support is not good). Wordpress.com is so spot-on in looking after the well-being of it’s users. I’m sure they’d get a ton of happy people blogging away. And because wordpress.com is ad-driven, the new support system will ultimately result in more blog pages to attach those ads to… good thinking guys! And congratulations.
Categories: Blogger Tools, Blogging News
by J. Angelo Racoma on July 16th, 2008
Word is out that Google is now able to index Flash content. This is probably good news to web developers out there who are into building sites with Flash. However, should bloggers rejoice at this news?
Probably not. Or at least there’s no compelling reason to be too happy because of this news, unless you run a video blog with a lot of flash-based videos. I would agree with our resident designer Ia that Google’s new Flash-indexing ability might be misused by designers who are fond of designing in Flash without much regard for usability and accessibility.
Google’s efforts to read Flash still seem to be in the premature stages. Typical Google, they always release their products in beta without being wary of the consequences.
By consequences I mean clients who are now running around telling their web designers to create animated intros and the extravagant interfaces for their websites. I can’t really shoot down this little achievement by Google—except that it’s getting scarily smarter everyday and should try to have more features than issues when they launch a product.
More importantly, I can only continue to condemn those who misuse Flash without any regard for accessibility, much less usability, whatsoever.
If you are serious about optimizing your blog for the search engines, then I think the first thing to do would make sure you have good content!
Categories: Blog Design, Blogging News, Blogging Sense
Tags: flash, google, seach, seo
by jim on July 9th, 2008
Multiply.com has introduced its Premium Membership Account last June 25. Now, due to the millions of hi-res photos and videos they receive everyday, they are now charging US$19.95 for unlimitted storage space.
Here is a comparison between the free and premium membership accounts of Multiply.com in relation to storage space:
For free accounts – album sized photos are still free, and stored forever. But for hi-res/original photos it will only be stored free within 30 days. After that, automatic deletion.
For Premium Members – album sized photos, hi-res/original photos are stored forever.
Multiply.com has explained this move clearly right here.
As a Multiply.com user myself, I would understand Multiply.com’s move to start selling “idle property”. True that most users would choose to store the original hi-res photo versions just because the opportunity is there. I would likely agree with Multiply.com too that most of those hi-res photos aren’t viewed… ergo aren’t generally useful to the user, or the public. I guess not everything in life is or will remain free… except Wordpress! (of course)
Multiply users post millions of photos and tens of thousands of videos a day, and that’s a lot of stuff to store and manage… which costs money and resources. We’ve also learned that an overwhelming majority of the original photos and videos are never even viewed! Clearly, for many Multiply users, the album-sized photos and Flash videos are good enough.
So rather than spend resources supporting something that isn’t used, we feel it makes more sense to focus on making the site faster and better for everyone, improving the features that are used, and adding more features. For free. But if your original content is important to you, you have the option of sharing and storing that indefinitely by upgrading to Multiply Premium.
Categories: Blogging News, Interesting
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