With the help of plug-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog far beyond what's available to you when you add it to your server.
One of the best ways to get the most out of your blogs is through social plug-ins. These simple plug-ins can be added to your blog to help you connect socially with both your readers and their friends. They offer a fine way to build traffic to your site.
Go social with your blog
Add to Facebook If you want to make it easy for readers to syndicate your content to Facebook, Add to Facebook is the plug-in for you.
The plug-in provides a simple option at the bottom of each post, called "Share on Facebook." When the reader clicks on that link, they're immediately delivered to their Facebook page, showing a thumbnail of the image in your blog post, as well as the beginning of your post. If Facebook followers click on that link, they'll be delivered to your page. It's a neat utility. And it's a great way to share content through social channels.
Add to Facebook makes it easy for readers to syndicate your content.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Digg Digg Although its name might suggest that Digg Digg is a way to get readers to share your content with the popular social news site, it's much more than that.
Digg Digg allows you to add voting buttons to your blog. You can add a TweetMeme retweet button, a Yahoo Buzz button, and a "Submit to Reddit" option, along with your Digg button. The plug-in also allows you to decide where to place those buttons. You can choose the top, bottom, left, or right of your post.
Digg Digg is a great way to syndicate your content around the Web.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Pinboard is Maciej Ceglowski's Delicious competitor. Sort of. It's a one-man show, a feature-light but fast site for saving bookmarks and seeing what other people are saving, too, if you wish. It's easy to use, thanks to a collection of functional bookmarklets that do various things (I like the "read later" one). TechCrunch has a glowing review.
Unlike most tools in the category, Pinboard is not free. There's a one-time fee for getting access to the service, and the fee is going up. For every person that signs on, the fee rises a tenth of a penny. As of this writing, the gate fee is $5.03, indicating that the service has about 5,030 users. It's free to use after payment, although Ceglowski may eventually charge a subscription fee for additional features. He'll give users credit for their sign-up fee if he does that.
Pinboard has several fast ways to save links, including this pop-up bookmarklet.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)There's no trial period, but there is a three-day satisfaction guarantee. The whole thing is part of Ceglowski's plan to build a product he likes, make enough money to support himself for a while doing it, stay small, and prevent the service from filling up with spam accounts and bogus links.
I asked Ceglowski, via IM, if he thought this upfront payment plan was limiting the growth of his user base. He told me that infinite growth is not the goal. "The site is spam-free and I was able to collect enough money to work on it full time for a while; those were my main goals," he wrote. Ceglowski lives in Romania and is the only person working on this project full time.
In fact, he appears to want to actively avoid rapid growth. "I have seen a lot of free services burn up all their development time scaling for users," he said. He has no plan to cap the gate fee as more people sign on. "I am tempted to just let it go up and see what happens," he says.
Ceglowski built the Pinboard serivce, he says, after watching the Magnolia meltdown and watching Delicious become big and bloated. In fact, it was Delicious founder Joshua Schachter who gave Ceglowski the idea for the escalating sign-up fee.
Ceglowski set me up with a (free) reviewer's account before our chat. After talking with Ceglowski I told him I felt bad that I didn't pay the $5.03 gate fee. He just said, "That's ten loaves of fine Romanian bread, I'll have you know."
Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn't sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.
Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that "For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, "eats our own dogfood" by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs."
The issue that Delicious is trying to address here is that the existing "Popular Bookmarks" tab (which will continue to be available) tends to point to what Singh describes as "authoritative resources rather than fresh news." This is because, although Delicious is often described as a social-bookmarking service, in fact, many use it primarily as a way to store bookmarks online solely for their own purposes. And, in fact, Delicious even introduced private tags in 2007 that made it possible to save bookmarks without sharing.
Not everyone is happy about the change. Delicious founder Joshua Schacter, who left Yahoo last year (and is now at Google) writes on Twitter that "I can't BELIEVE delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own." He adds that "i had always wanted delicious to show notes from your social network on the links that you bookmark."
Social bookmarking has often seemed like rather the red-haired stepchild of social media. Its evolution in general has been slow and there's long been a tension between bookmarking to share and bookmarking to store.
In general, social bookmarking services have also failed to surface the data that they have stored in ways that allow for useful and serendipitous exploration. This latest announcement tries to do something about that by making use of data from Twitter, a service that's all about the now.
Yahoo has made a new variety of data available through its BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) program, giving those using the search results access to what's going on at its Delicious site for storing and sharing Web address bookmarks.
BOSS lets others incorporate Yahoo search results onto their own sites, processing them and blending them with other data if desired and sharing resulting revenue with Yahoo from larger-scale partnerships. With the Delicious data, developers get access to information such as how many times a particular Web site has been bookmarked at Delicious, what tags people labeled it with, and how often those tags were applied.
The company, which hopes BOSS will help it reclaim search market share lost to Google, announced the new BOSS features on its search blog Thursday.
Yahoo also added new language support to BOSS--Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese--so people can retrieve search results specifically in those languages, too.
BOSS also got new sorting abilities for situations when developers need to organize search results by date.
If you're looking for a really simple way to feed your Delicious account and keep track of all the links you've shared over Twitter, Tweecious is a fantastic tool for the lazy. This new Firefox add-on turns links you've included in Twitter messages into bookmarks for your Delicious library, and even tags everything for you.
Once you've logged into both accounts to provision Tweecious with access, it simply keeps an eye on what you've posted in Twitter and will send it over to Delicious. This also works retroactively, so you can have it slurp up all the links from your previous 1,000 tweets and send them over. For me that whole process took about 10 minutes after I had installed it and provisioned my accounts. It also adds a "Tweecious" tag to each item so you can sort which bookmarks came from Twitter.
Tweecious takes links you've included in Twitter messages and automatically saves them to Delicious--complete with tags!
(Credit: CNET Networks)To auto-tag everything for you, Tweecious makes use of both LongURL and Zemanta. LongURL takes URLs that have been shortened by services like TinyURL or Bit.ly and expands them so they can be added and found in Delicious. It then uses Zemanta (coverage) to come up with some tags, which are automatically appended to each bookmarked item. These may not always be accurate, but it's a huge time saver to have Zemanta do it for you.
It's worth a mention that this extension is still considered "experimental" by Mozilla. Shortly after installing it I noticed some slowdown when using Twitter, as well as having the post button not work for me at all. However, after it finished indexing all my previous tweets with links, everything went back to normal.
If you're a Firefox user, chances are you've been using add-ons to extend its functionality. But if you haven't, or if you're looking for new add-ons, I've found 20 for you to try. But since installing all 20 will probably slow your browser to a crawl, I've broken them into four categories. I have grouped the add-ons into "packs" for business professionals, shoppers, social-network fanatics, and students.
The business professional
Xmarks (download): If you're running a business and want everyone in the office to have the same resources available to them, Xmarks is the way to do it. Simply download it into your browser, create an account, and install it on all the browsers in the office. Once configured, every Xmarks instance connected to that account will be automatically updated whenever a user adds a bookmark. In other words, if one employee adds Webware to their bookmarks, every other person in the office who's running Xmarks will have it installed, as well.
Jigsaw Contact and Company Search: Most business professionals need to have easy access to a company's contact information. If you're one of those people, consider using the Jigsaw Contact and Company Search. Jigsaw, a global online business directory, features millions of contacts and company profiles that can be searched by title, geography, and business.
Stock Pilot makes it simple to find quotes.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Stock Pilot (download): Sometimes going to Google Finance is too time consuming to get quick public company info. Try using Stock Pilot instead. The add-on allows you to switch between financial sites to research a particular stock. It also boasts RSS alerts to update you when news breaks about a company you're tracking. Ready access to SEC filings makes it a handy tool for anyone who wants to see a company's quarterly or annual financial data.
TripSync: Once you install the TripSync travel manager add-on, you'll be blown away by its functionality. You can book and hold reservations to places across the world, receive travel alerts, and place your itineraries on Outlook and Google Calendar. TripSync is designed specifically for the business professional, so it's a bit more useful than using a site like Expedia.
WOT (download): WOT, short for Web of Trust, is designed to ensure security and privacy are maintained while you're browsing. Once installed, the add-on warns you about risky Web sites. It also alerts you to sites that deliver malware or send spam. The add-on shows you safety ratings on over 21 million sites.
The shopper
1 Stop travel and retail shopping engine: If you want to find the best deals across the U.S., Europe, or Canada, the 1 Stop travel and retail shopping engine add-on is a good place to start. While you're browsing, it allows you to search for flights on more than 40 airlines. It also lets you search for deals on more than 20 sites, including Amazon, eBay, and Wal-Mart. Once you start searching in the add-on, it finds the desired page and automatically opens it in a separate tab.
Buy it online lets you find the best deals.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Buy it online (download): If you've ever been on a Web site and found a product you'd like to buy, but were forced to go to Amazon.com to search for it, you'll be happy to know that there's an add-on designed specifically for you. Dubbed "Buy it online," the add-on adds another option when you right-click on a product title on any Web page. If you click the "Buy it online!" button, you'll be shown a listing of all the stores on the Web that are currently selling the product. All the retailers listed are well-known and trustworthy.
eBayBuddy (download): If you're obsessed with eBay, there's a great add-on you might want to consider. Dubbed eBayBuddy, the tool is available in the right-click menu in Firefox and allows you to have full access to eBay's site map, search, and more. It's a great way to quickly and easily find products on eBay without being forced to deal with the site itself.
KeepCash Coupon Notifier (download): As someone who frequents coupon sites and goes to a retailer's page with the discount ready to be used, I found KeepCash Coupon Notifier to be an extremely useful add-on. Whenever you go to a retail site, it automatically searches its database to find any coupons currently available for the site you're on. If there are, it will list them for you to be used while you're shopping.
PriceAdvance (download): When you run PriceAdvance and surf to a retail site to research a product, the add-on will tell you its price on a handful of other prominent sites across the Web. For instance, if you're on Amazon looking to buy an Xbox 360, the site will automatically search for other retailers selling the console and display their pricing, so you can be sure that you're getting the best price.
... Read moreJoshua Schachter, the founder of Yahoo's Delicious social-bookmarking service who left the company last June, has taken a new job at Google.
In an e-mail interview, Schachter said he's started work at the rival Internet company but doesn't yet know what he'll be working on. He's a a member of Google's technical staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.
TechCrunch reported the new hire Monday after First Round Capital Managing Director Josh Kopelman mentioned the job in a Twitter posting.
Schacter created Delicious to help manage bookmarks he posted at an earlier site, the once entertaining but now dormant collection of links at Memepool, and continued to work on the project after Yahoo acquired it, so he's got plenty of experience with the concept of bookmarks. Perhaps he's just the fellow to help spruce up Google Bookmarks--or perhaps he'd rather try something new for a change.
I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.
But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?
Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious
Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.
Although Diigo's highlighting options are useful, ZigTag's semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo's social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious' most useful offering--its Firefox add-on--has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don't work as well as the Delicious tool.
Taking all that into account, I simply don't know why it's worth using another service besides Delicious. It's a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It's the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.
Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter
I'll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it's not hard to figure out that it's the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.
Granted, Twitter still doesn't offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that's both lively and engaging, you won't find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it's more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.
As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.
News Aggregation keeper: Reddit
Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there's conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it's the "social" news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I'm a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.
Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn't cut it. Sure, it's the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn't make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit's site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit's advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg's, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose's brainchild.
Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much "gaming," it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.
Social Network keeper: Facebook
Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn't easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it's because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It's time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.
Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world's most popular social network? It's simple: Facebook doesn't have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it's growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.
MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.
Video site keeper: YouTube
Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don't see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn't provide the professional content that YouTube does.
And it's that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn't available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it's sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.
I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.
There's no doubt the Internet enables a new level of social engagement--e-mail was, after all, its first killer app--but social bookmarking looks to me like it's been relegated to a techie niche.
I'm not the first to have this thought--Gordon Haff first planted the idea in my head. But Yahoo showed some evidence Thursday by publishing the top searches of 2008 for its Delicious service, which lets people store, tag, and share bookmarks.
Nowhere on the list was Britney Spears, the prevailing top result for mainstream search engines. Instead, Delicious shows a search profile with a tech-savvy tilt. Here's the top 10 list for 2008, according to a Delicious blog post on Thursday:
• news
• blogs
• reference
• wiki
• restaurants
• hotels
• CSS
• Web 2.0
• artists
• music
Yes, restaurants, music, and hotels are relatively mainstream, but
There's nothing wrong with a tech-focused user base. After all, it's just one community among many on the Net whose members want to share information with like-minded folk, and some of us relish the opportunity to avoid celebrity gossip. But the search results don't translate into social bookmarking escaping a niche.
Social-bookmarking site Delicious announced Tuesday that it has launched a mobile site to allow users to view saved pages while on the go. Delicious Mobile allows users to browse saved bookmarks, view their in-box, and browse recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. The company says it will integrate its social search engine into the mobile site next.
Analysts from market research firm Gartner said Wednesday that organizations need to understand how social networks are "altering the recruitment landscape and adapt recruiting strategies and systems accordingly." Gartner analysts went on to say that by 2011, organizations that fail to effectively manage their brands through social networks will not be able to attract top talent.
Truphone, a company that provides VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls over the Web through mobile phones, announced Wednesday that it has added two new features to its iPhone app. Dubbed Truphone Anywhere, the company's app will now allow iPhone users to make calls over GSM when a Wi-Fi connection isn't available. The updated app will also allow for inbound calling, providing free conversations between two iPhone Truphone users.
MySpace announced Wednesday that it has launched a new product called MySpace Toolbar to offer users activity notifications while away from the social network. Starting Wednesday, MySpace users will be able to install the toolbar into their browser and receive real-time alerts and notifications including new friend requests, messages, comments, and friend updates. The toolbar's MySpace Search feature will be powered by Google.
QuickPlay Media, a company that provides mobile TV and video solutions, unveiled its mobile video usage study Wednesday. According to its research, which is based on activity on 15 QuickPlay-powered services during the July through September quarter, total video downloads increased by more than 87 percent over the previous quarter. Average downloads per user increased by 42 percent to four downloads per user per month. Total video streams grew more than 27 percent over the previous quarter and the average user streamed 19.3 videos per month.
