Storage – If paying you can sometimes get more storage space for more money. Text only blogs with no photos, video, audio clips or podcasts – 100M (the low end) can go a long way.
Ads for income - revenue possibilities.
Photos – most blog services allow for the inclusion of a photo, but some platforms make it surprisingly difficult.
Traffic reporting – monitor the number of users visiting the site.
Chapter 3
Traffic reporting - monitoring who views your work
Trackbacks are a unique way to know that other bloggers are aware of your work and are responding to it on their own blogs. Currently no social networks offer trackbacks. Trackbacks area way of communicating between two sites, so both sites must be empowered with the TrackBackfeature for it to work.
The easiest and most common way to examine one’s own influence in the blogoshpere (to see if others are reading your blog) is to enter the URL of an entry into the search engine.
How:
Bring up an entry page in your blog
Copy the URL
Go to http://www.blogpulse.com/
Paste your URL into the keyword box
Click the go button.
The most disappointing result of this search is no results. That means that no other blog has cited your blog entry – at least no other blog searched by BlogPulse during the time since you posted the entry.
Most used blog search engines quality of results varies hugely from engine to engine and from search to search. The four major blog engines are:
http://www.technorati.com/ – indexes a database of 16 million blogs. Older entries are harder to find.
http://www.feedster.com/ – fast with extremely useful results.
http://www.blogpulse.com/ – index contains nothing older than 6 months.
http://www.bloglines.com/ – requires an RSS subscription.
http://www.digg.com/ is an experiment in collaboratively filtering Web content, a way of finding high quality through group intelligence. Users submit Web pages and a short comment or summary which get categorised and put on long lists. New items stay on the first page of the list until they get pushed to later pages by the continual influx of newer items. A tally is kept of the number of times an item is ‘dugg’. After a certain threshold is reached, that item is moved to Digg’s home page where it receives tremendously more visibility.
Del.icio.us is a popular tagging site and a difficult-to-type Web address. Tagging is a way of organising many items into categories such as your favourite’s pages (links to pages). Once saved and tagged, a page becomes publicly viewable. Others might click through your saved page and save it themselves. The result of a popularly saved page is lots of traffic to that page.
Chapter 4 & 5 & 6
Free Software reviews
MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360
MSN Spaces,Yahoo 360 are free services not exclusively about blogging and each deliver basic tools you need to put up an informal blog, update it as frequently as you like, show it to your friends, syndicate your entries with feeds and include photographs.
MSN Spaces is Microsoft’s contribution to social networking on spaces.msn.com..Just click on the sign up button it is free yo you; the price you pay is to display ads for Microsoft. It is easy to use and some aspects uploading and displaying pictures are easy to use. No other blog service covered in this review comes close to the ease of page building. MSN space gets 30M of storage.
Trackbacks era allowed they let you refer to somebody else’s b log entry and leave a link to your post on the other person’s blog. MSN has fabulous photo features, easy to upload, display and even tough up digital photos. Pictures are automatically compressed so you can fit more pictures in your allotted space. MSN spaces require the use of Internet Explorer to access and view the best parts of the Spaces service.
To get started type in spaces.msn.com and click the Sign Up button and follow instructions for establishing your own space
Yahoo! 360 started in March 2005 and the yahoo domain is the first or second most-visited Internet destination. It is a free service available to anyone with a Yahoo! ID. The beauty of Yahoo 360 is that it ties together some parts of the Yahoo platform and throws them onto your page will little effort on your part. It is best to uploaded pictures via photo.yahoo.com or http://www.flickr.com/ so they can easily be put onto your blog with no further uploading. The home page is a page that only you can see. It gives quick links for adding photos, composing and inviting a new friend. It is where your friends additins appear.
My page is how other people see you in Yahoo! 360 it is the summary of yourself to the public and contains everything you have created and want to share. Yahoo! 360 relies on an invitation system. Click the Invite link in the navigation bar to view the invitation page. Blogging in 360 is one of the simplest and gets the award for the easiest blog tool or perhaps shares the distinction with Blogger.com.
To get started type 360.yahoo.com then click the Sign Up link fill in the boxes and click the I Agree button.
LiveJournal: A classic social network is open source software where any third-party programs can be developed to enhance the LiveJournal experience. There is a free or paid version. LiveJournal is full of features meant to emphasize who you are and what you like. Millions of people use it and feel great loyalty to the network.
Chapter 6
Blogger.com
Blogger.com is free, there is no restriction on the number of blogs you can have or the number of pictures you can upload. Blogs are easy to create and get posted faster than any other service. Blogger is more blog-intensive, blog-centric service than the social networks. It is primarily about blogging, not about meeting people.
However Blogger offers few templates. The lack of visible feed is a draw back to Blogger. Blogger uses alternative to the RSS feed format Atom that can be simply added to the end of any blogs home-page URL: /atom.xml. Atom feeds work just like RSS feeds in the important ways. Atom feeds display blog entries just like RSS feeds in a feed newsreader.
To get started go to http://www.blogger.com/ and click create your blog now button.
Note: The dashboard is where you access your profile information. To get to the Dashboard, click the Back to Dashboard link near the upper-right corner of the control panel. In the dashboard screen click the Edit Profile link to see your profile settings.
Saving changes is not the same as publishing changes it is a three-stage process.
1. Make the changes
2. Save the changes
3. Republish the blog
Other features of blogger.com are emailing entries, moblogging (from mobile phone), downloading photos from a mobile phone (go@blogger.com).
Chapter 7, 8 & 9, 10, 11, 12
Commercial and high end blogging software –
(not much use for us here at TAFE)
Chapter 13
Hooking into RSS Feeds
hoping that theTony workshop can enlighten us a little more here..
If you have read on down to here then the rest is yet to come…. (give me a prod!)
Chapter 14
Rules of Blogosphere Citizenship
Chapter 15
Blogging for bucks
Chapter 16
Using your real voice: podcasting
Chapter 17
Photoblogging and Audioblogging
Chapter 19
Ten resources for the Power Blogger
June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 June 2007