I'm a Twhirl user. I'm in two minds as to whether I like the way they've integrated FriendFeed support. Why the two windows? Why not one?
Using Twist to measure Twitter chat suggests that the battle between the two applications is going to be a close one.
Back in January 2007 I did a study on next blog button pushes on blogger and blogspot. Google puts a bar across blogpost hosted blogs which lets users, well, log in, post, search or randomly reach another blog. It's really an advert for the service.
I counted how many button pushes it took for me to reach 100 English language non-spam blogs. It took 241 button pushes. I also discovered a lot of spam; in particular redirects to porn sites.
I've repeated this exercise this week and can say that the random button never once took me to porn at all. On a few occasions it took me to a hard sell site that was essentially a spam landing page.
Google's cleaned up the button. So, it is better? Ah... last year it took me 241 button pushes to find 100 English language sites. This year it took 309.
The difference is in non-English blogs. They've doubled from last year. There are a few reasons for this; Wordpress and SixApart are likely to be clawing market share away from Blogger in the UK, Canada and the USA. The Next Button isn't entirely random it; it's reciprocal and some geographic areas (thus languages) may be more likely to press the button than others.
My chart for 2007 looked like this:
The chart for 2008 looks like this:
I've had the Outbrain stars on my blog and vote option on my feedflare for a while. I like the ease of use and I like the anonymous feedback.
I recently got on to the beta to add the Outbrain recommendations widget. You can see the most popular stories (by rating) have been added to the top right of the blog.
I'd encourage you to start rating my blog posts. Why? Outbrain learns what you like and starts to make recommendations for you. Think of it as a personalised and content sensitive widget version of Google News.
There's a catch; it needs enough data before it can start to make recommendations. Does anyone know of any other search related Outbrain blogs? I'm inclined to start reading them so I can start building up my Outbrain profile.
I know Twitter is popular with lots of you. Yep. I'm looking at you Lisa Barone. I'm going to skip it for now - although I reserve the right to to review that call. :)
I'm going Pownce instead. It just seems much more stable.
What disappoints me with Pownce right now is the lack of Facebook integration. I like the way Barry Schwartz coordinates his Twits with his Facebook Status and want something similar. I'd also like a way to integrate my locked LiveJournal account with Pownce.
At LiveJournal there's a simple checkbox option for whether you want your LJ posts to be indexed by the search engines or not. It is perfectly possible to have a public LiveJournal but still check the box to keep search engines out.
LiveJournal, recently sold to a Russian portal, has recently started to test a portal page system where appropriate recent posts are aggregrated together to form a blog/news splash page.
You can access these portal pages by clicking on one of the links in the LiveJournal navigation bar which appears at the top of all LJ blogs. For example, here's a link to the Technology page.
The problem? It's only a small issue but the search engines index these pages. One of the reasons I first took my LJ to the noindex side was because I wanted to be able to mention work by name without trigging a host of Google Alerts (I later went fully private and locked the journal to friends only). If my LiveJournal was noindex but was syndicated to these portal pages then I would still trigger those Google Alerts.
Here's a sample of the new LiveJournal 'tag portals'.
You can clearly see the intro to the post from Full Moons Rock. If you pop over to their actual LiveJournal post, though, and take a look at the source code you can see the noindex, nofollow, noarchive tags in force. (Well. Click on the image and you can see them!)
Ooops. Is there an opt-out for this? Shouldn't LJ be excluding posts which are intented to be omitted from the search engines from these new portal pages?
Here's my only contribution to the Wired Wiki nofollow debate:
Kan we hav sum formatting plz!
Honestly. I gave up trying to read what Ross Mayfield, in the centre of the storm, wrote over on WebProNews.
You'll get a much clearer understanding, and nicer formatting, over at Barry's original article with its comments from Danny.
P.S. You can find the original post, with formatting at Ross' blog.
Long live the return key!
Back on Friday I posted that Kevin Fox was leaving Google. I didn't expect so many other blogs to carry - to shout - the news. This isn't a "me too" news blog.
Kevin didn't expect it either. Kevin did the really cool thing and blogged about this, he noted some of the bigger blogs and what he thought about their posts. In fact, in an ultra cool move he acknowledged what VuNet said about moving to a more open company but then not saying where he was going! He also bent over backwards to stress that Google would be fine without him. I'm sure Google will cope but he's clearly someone that they'll miss.
Kevin has moved to FriendFeed and was introduced by a blog post. What a big deal for FriendFeed, huh? I bet their user base is currently soaring!
This isn't a 'me too' news blog but I bet I'm not the only one to blog about this!
Right now we've blog posts from Michael Gray and Andy Beard which are picking up viral steam and complaining about Matt Cutts insisting that all links within paid content should be nofollowed.
Here's the catch. He didn't say that. It's a misquote. Scan down the original IZEA blog post and you'll find Matt himself making that clear.
I think quoting me as saying "ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post" is different than our conversation.
I like the latest upgraded to Google Reader... but come on Google Talk friends; let's have some shared suggestions.
First I was torn between uploading pictures to Flickr or Facebook; I know more people find them on Facebook. Now I have to decided whether I should share an interesting blog post on Facebook, Google Reader or both!
SubBait? SubscriberBait? ScriberBait?
Yesterday I published three posts:
