Blogging

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)

FriendFeed Comments If you’re a FriendFeed user, you know that it’s a great site to discuss interesting stories. FriendFeed Comments helps you bring those discussions to your blog.

When you activate FriendFeed Comments, you need only to input your FriendFeed username, tweak a couple of settings, and watch all the comments about your blog post get added to your site. Any comment placed on FriendFeed will be displayed on your blog. You can see the discussions made between different people on the social network. Even better, all those comments are placed in-line with comments made on your blog.

FriendFeed Comments will display comments from the social site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Instant Highlighter Instant Highlighter provides readers with the option to highlight different portions of your blog posts and share that with Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, and other social sites. They can also save portions of your blog post for their own future consumption.

But to do that, they’ll be brought to the plug-in’s developer page, giving them a variety of options to choose from. It’s a little confusing at first and I’m not quite sold on the implementation. It might annoy some readers. But if your readers like it, the plug-in could significantly improve your chances of getting your posts on social networks. Test it out to see what your readers think before you commit to Instant Highlighter.

Instant Highlighter is a test case.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Social Bookmarks Sharing your content on different social networks is extremely important as you try to build your blog. Social Bookmarks will help you do just that.

When you activate Social Bookmarks, it automatically adds several social-networking icons to the bottom of each of your blog posts. When the reader chooses one of those options, they can send your post’s link to their social profile. The list includes Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Digg, and more. Adding content to the profile is quick and easy. It’s a really nice app. Check it out.

Social Bookmarks is a great way to get readers to share content.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Twitter for Wordpress Twitter for Wordpress allows you to place your Wordpress updates into your sidebar for all your readers to see.

After it’s activated, Twitter for Wordpress won’t automatically work. Instead, you’ll need to either drag-and-drop a Twitter widget into your sidebar or you’ll need to add some simple PHP code to the sidebar to have it display your Twitter updates. The Twitter widgets make it look nicer, but if you want a simple status message on your sidebar, the second option is fine. Twitter for Wordpress is a nice plug-in if you want something simple.

Twitter for Wordpress is OK, but not great.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Twitter Friendly Links Since many Wordpress blogs don’t provide the most Twitter-friendly links, Twitter Friendly Links helps solve that problem by automatically shortening your blog’s URLs.

When readers share a blog post with their Twitter followers, the link won’t show the full post URL. Instead, the Twitter link will display your site’s domain, followed by a unique identifier. It’s similar to TinyURL or Bit.ly, but instead of those domains, you’ll see your own. It’s a simple feature, for sure, but it’s extremely useful for those who don’t want to lose Twitter-based traffic due to a long URL.

Twitter Friendly Links makes your URLs much nicer.

(Credit: Kovshenin.com)

My top 3</h2

1. Digg Digg: Getting your content added to important content-syndication platforms is made simple with Digg Digg.

2. FriendFeed Comments: FriendFeed is a great discussion platform. It’s even better when it’s on your blog.

3. Twitter Friendly Links: There’s something simple, yet compelling about Twitter Friendly Links.

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Go social with these Wordpress plug-ins

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze the impact of real-time information on the Web, investigate ‘web squared’ (when web 2.0 meets Internet of Things), tell you why cloud computing is the future of mobile, look at Delicious’ new Twitter re-design, check out Digg’s read/write API plans, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

We’re excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb’s Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you’ve seen.

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June – who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what’s included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Trends

Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as “flash trading,” where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders. This raises similar issues about the growing prominence of real-time information on the web.

Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It’s a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

Twitter’s Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Only 5% of Twitter’s users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots.

As the EBook Market Matures, Amazon Will Face Stiff Competition

eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, there will be a lot of opportunities for other players in the market – including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile

The term “cloud computing” is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the “future of the web.” But cloud computing’s potential doesn’t begin and end with the personal computer’s transformation into a thin client – the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
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ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Enterprise 2.0: Awareness is Easier Than Execution, Says Nielsen

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point. This is a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code too.

Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker

Yahoo’s social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this week, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time.

Digg Opening Up? New Read/Write API Coming Soon

The social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. A forthcoming Digg API will allow people to “not only read data, but also contribute data, too.” In other words, a Read/Write API.

SchoolRack Gives Teachers, Students, Parents Interactive Resources Online

SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students’ parents.

Spotify to Close Up to $50M Round Before US Launch

In anticipation of the company’s US launch, the on-demand music streaming site Spotify is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. This will value the Swedish company at $250 million dollars.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Read more here:
Weekly Wrapup: Real Time Delicious, Read/Write Digg, Web Squared, And More…

Social media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here are the week’s top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Delicious Comes out With Real-Time News Tracking
• ESPN Responds to Social Media Outcry
• Social Media Gets Even More Mobile
• Marines and NFL Ban Twitter and Facebook

Read the original here:
The Social Media Minute (05-Aug-2009)

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”

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Sites_can_block_the_DiggBar_but_is_it_worth_it’;

John Gruber of the blog Daring Fireball doesn’t like what Digg’s doing with its DiggBar, and has come up with a relatively simple way to block it on his own site. By making a small change to his site’s PHP files, any shortened DiggURL created for one of his pages will automatically take users to a separate page Gruber has created that chides the company.

In Gruber’s opinion, the service, which automatically shortens a site’s URL and adds some of Digg’s features to the top of the source content, is bad for both users and sites. Gruber says it’s tainting the purity of a site’s URL, which also affects search engine optimization and the capability for users to easily bookmark content. “URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others,” he says.

But is Gruber right?

As for the SEO, John Quinn–Digg’s vice president of engineering, came out on Thursday and said that Digg had been in touch with search engines like Google and traffic monitoring services like Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, and Nielsen prior to launching the DiggBar, and that pre-launch testing had shown that it was not, in fact, changing the accuracy of traffic numbers. In fact, in the week since launching, Quinn said that the DiggBar was giving both Digg and publishers a noticeable boost in traffic.

One area where Gruber has a point though is with user bookmarking and link identification. Many sites use URLs that contain the headline, or certain keywords about the story. For readers this is a quick way to figure out where a link is going. For Digg, part of the problem with this is that its users can completely rewrite the headline and description of a story when submitting it to the site, which means the last way to see what something is–prior to clicking on it, is to check the URL, which is what the DiggBar effectively kills.

While Digg retains the source of the story right in front of the description, along with the full URL on the DiggBar, it’s also changing what users are seeing in their address bar, which is yet another place where users are used to figuring out where they are and what they’re looking at.

So how does this factor into bookmarking, and more importantly–social bookmarking? For personal bookmarking, Digg is replacing a site’s Favicon (yet another identifier) with its own, along with replacing the site’s standard URL with a shortened Digg one. Add a few shortened Digg bookmarks to your own personal bookmarks and you’ll see where this can hinder the capability to sort, and quickly parse saved links.

For social bookmarking, sites like Delicious merely show the hottest links by page title (something the DiggBar does not alter), however when browsing the URLs alone, yet again it’s a sea of Digg.com links.

Where Digg may have to change its tune is in giving publishers a way to opt out of having their site URLs shortened, along with a way to keep the bar from showing up on the top of the page. If Digg were to meet publishers in the middle, and act like any other link shortening service out there (TinyURL, Bit.ly, et al) and convert the Digg URL into the site’s normal URL, I think it would go a long way toward preserving the happiness of publishers who want to maintain their site’s identity.

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Sites can block the DiggBar, but is it worth it?