Can WordPress Compete Against Moveable Type? ((from One by One Media):

Tags: Media, Blog tools, Services, The Site, Blogging News, Corporate Blogs, Partnerships, Social media, Professional blogging, Blog Platforms, Blog Consulting, Bloggers and Blogs, Blog Revenue

Leafletter is a web based application which enables users to create miniature web sites (”Leaflets”) and embed them into social networks, blogs, and other web sites with ease.

A Leaflet is a miniature Flash® based web site that can be displayed anywhere HTML is welcome. For instance, a Leaflet could be distributed to the About Me section of a MySpace Profile, the body of a Blog Entry, and in the Portfolio section of a photographer’s Personal Website, all simultaneously.

Leafletter is geared toward professional content creators - creative artists, media professionals, online sellers - users who seek broader exposure for their content, who probably already have a web site and/or online portfolio, and who want to begin showing their content, in a specific way, on social networks and blogs.

Leafletter is unique in that it gives the user complete control over how his media is laid out, embellished and displayed. It is created using an intuitive browser based (WYSIWYG) design tool, and features such helpful tools as Real Time Layout Changing, whereby a completed page can be viewed in 36 different configurations, Build By Blocks, whereby a user need only fill in Blocks to create a page within a Leaflet, and smooth Flickr integration for users wishing to share photos and maintain control of their presentation.

Once a Leaflet has been created it can be distributed using the familiar process of Copying and Pasting an Embed Code or URL to any location where HTML is accepted.

We have now begun a public beta for which free accounts are available. It only takes 10 seconds to sign up for an account and an optional 5 Minute Tutorial will walk you through the many unique features the product has to offer. Please take a moment to view the Leafletter Beta and consider sending me some of your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: beta, blogging, leafletter, social media, socialmedia

This morning, I like many others, am trying to follow the Apple announcements which are being covered by some of the bigger blog networks. As of 10:31am, I am unable to get reliable connections to:

Engadget — “Connection timed out”

Gizmodo — “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”

The Unofficial Apple Weblog — Alternates between slow connection and timing out

Even Valleywag is down at this point.

I think live-blogging is a good thing but is the software being used to run these sites designed for this type of abuse. Would it make sense to setup a low-res blog on a subdomain for just this purpose, maybe using a static html output?

Hopefully someone else follows this and gets it right for the Christmas shopping season. Im sure more announcements will come then.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, apple event, blogging software, load-balancing, liveblogging, engadget, gizmodo, tuaw

Terapad, a unified blogging platform, came out of private beta and launched today.

“What we’re offering is truly game-changing” says Stephan Tual, CEO. “Blogging has been technologically very active recently, but feature-wise it’s been completely stagnant. We’ve capitalized on this and added all the features of major corporate websites to the blogging equation.” Indeed the feature list of the London-based ‘do it yourself’ service appears never-ending: online shop, discussion forums, image gallery, job search, and even integration with a host of big-name third party services, such as Google Analytics and Paypal. This certainly isn’t your average blog.

The service is offered for a flat monthly fee. Individuals or companies select the features they wish to use (or not) on their site, at no extra cost. Each site or blog requires no technical knowledge to setup, as Terapad.com hosts and monitors everything at their datacenter, 24/7. Providing a wealth of features while staying simple to use has been the number one priority of the service - all the latest buzzword technologies are present, yet you’ll be hard pressed to find any acronym soup on the friendly control panel.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web 2.0, blogging, blog tools, blog platform, terapad, startup

The Web Photo Sharing Site Faceoff:

In this post we profile the red hot photo sharing space, where the blogosphere darling Flickr is actually trailing in the mass market. Back in June, Hitwise posted their online photo market statistics - which showed Photobucket with a huge market lead at #1 and Flickr at #6. A lot of Photobucket’s lead is due to its high
usage in MySpace pages - 56% of Photobucket’s traffic is from MySpace, according to Hitwise.

Richard MacManus at Read Write Web does a nice job of showing the differences between all the major photo sharing sites. While he proclaims Photobucket the best combo of photosharing and social web features, I continue to prefer those sites which have decided to put social sharing first - Flickr and Zooomr.

Technorati Tags: readwriteweb, social 2.0, photosharing, flickr, zooomr, photobucket, myspace

Just discovered this and am wowed by the work that went into setting up the links and the nice clean look of the site. A tremondous resource for any web hacker or developer and blogger looking to change/invigor their sites.

Vitaly Friedman’s Web Developer’s Handbook

Technorati Tags: developer, css, bookmarks, links, web design, webdesign, handbook, websites

I’ve wrapped up my notes from the SEO session at Wordcamp over the weekend to post here with links to the plugins and methods described to optimize your Wordpress install.

Meta tags - These are done for use in SEO with the exception of Meta Description. The Head Meta Description plug-in takes care of this for you by pulling x number of words from your entry and info about the category of the post. These items are configurable within the plugin.

Permalinks - Change out the permalink structure to get more keyword search friendly words in the title.

Title - Change out your titles to get the title of the post (which should get you more specific search engine traffic) in front of the title of the blog. Some people talked about a hack of the code in the blog itself and there is a plugin - Optimal Title - which does this for you.

Blogrolls/Incoming links - While how to get incoming links wasn’t discussed to much, it was mentioned that incoming links from relevant sites using relevant anchor tags are a good idea. So a link which reads “wordpress seo tips” leading to this post from a site like Problogger would be better than coming from a random poker gambling blog.

Some techniques for getting links include sending an email to other bloggers who deal in the same subject and letting them know about your post, using trackbacks on other sites, commenting in other’s blogs and getting on sites like Digg or del.icio.us.

Create a sitemap - The use of Google’s sitemap tool was talked about and also mention of a good Wordpress sitemap plugin.

Create compelling content often - Not only is this a great way to keep readers once they find you, the search engines tend to favor sites which update often.

Link to the speaker’s post - Cameron and Neil from Pronet Advertising - about their seo talk.

blog marketing, blogroll, comments, del.icio.us, digg, meta, search engines, seo, trackback, traffic, wordcamp, wordpress

Just a note that I will be away from this site tomorrow and attending Wordcamp. I’ll be liveblogging from some of the sessions and posting photos. You can check things out at Blogu Weblog.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordcamp, liveblogging, on location, unconference

Techcrunch covers a new feature in Bloglines which would allow you to keep your feed private from search engines, a sort-of robots.txt for feeds.

Ask and Bloglines already support this tag, access:restriction tag, which would be added to your feed. The proposed standard, Feed Access Control RSS and Atom, is covered here. While this can be useful for some who would like to keep certain private, the tag doesn’t have universal support yet and would require manual editing of your current RSS/Atom feed.

Duncan Riley meanwhile wonders why the industry wasn’t consulted before the announcement.

Technorati Tags: techcrunch, ask.com, bloglines, privacy, rss, atom, duncan riley, feeds, feed access control, tags