Blogging Sueblimely

Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

My Scoutle scout is busy strolling round blogs that match my interest areas. You can see her in action in my footer. She is meeting up with other scouts who share my interests. Hopefully their creators will then come and visit my blog, be fascinated with its content, subscribe, comment regularly and become blogging contacts - time will tell.

Scoutle considers itself to be “Automated Social Networking” where there is no need for communication in order to connect and no real life obligations. I think they must be talking only about the initial method of connection here as, once you have connected with someone, there must be communication for a blogging relationship to develop and establish.The novelty of Scoutle is that you do not have to search for people to connect with, Scoutle’s search does that for you, filtering out sites that it considers not worthy - eg outdated sites or those just that only exist for advertising purposes. As well as finding contacts via the widget you can discover other members on the Scoutle website itself, - via contacts of contacts and through networks based on interest areas.

Scoutle is premised on the idea that it is the quality of connections that is important not the quantity. This appeals to me considering the masses of people I do not know that connect to me on sites such as MyBlogLog; many who have likely never visited this blog. Scoutle allows your Scout to walk twice for every time you have a visitor to your site - the more your Scout gets to walk the more it will appear on the sites of other Scoutle members. You make contact with other users by requesting to make a “Connection” with them via the Scoutle website. You score points based on your site visitor numbers and the number of Connections you make. The higher your point value the higher your place in the Scoutle Guide, which in turn should lead to more visitors.

This service has been available for a good few months now and, although as usual I joined as soon as I heard about it, I felt that I already took part in too many social networking activities and these were beginning to take time away from blogging: becoming counterproductive. I have since narrowed these down to networks I find the most use and enjoy using the most so I have some leeway to explore others.

I will report on Scoutle once I have had more opportunity to find out if it is working for me, although I suspect it is not attracting as many members as it deserves because of general social networking fatigue as well as the desire not to have too many widgets. I have already discovered a few very informative blogs that I had not come across before - one you may be interested in is Social Web Tools by ChaCha Fance - it sent me off in discovery of various new, interesting applications.

If you are a Scoutle member please leave a comment letting us know what you think of it.

(I placed the Scoutle widget in my footer because this reduces the impact of any increase in page load time it causes - the footer loads last so the rest of the page is visible even though the social networking widgets may not have fully loaded)

Popularity: 8% [?]

As promised here is the second part of my Blogosphere News post following on from Part 1 last week.

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature - Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator - you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic - currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook - share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

Wordpress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• Wordpress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• Wordpress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines - Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines - 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country :-). If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

Popularity: 6% [?]

You can probably tell by the length of this list that I have not been posting this, what is meant to be a weekly news feature, weekly. For someone who advises on blogging I sometimes do not adhere to my own advice. I have been having fun and a few headaches coding and designing a CMS site, using Wordpress, for the newly amalgamated National Fragile X Association of Australia. I am not ready to give you the link to it yet as it is still full of Lorem ipsums. Even if you could read the Latin it is tedious and repetitive

To save you from eye strain and the possibility of losing concentration from a long long post, I am splitting my news into two this week. In any case you may find something of interest in the links, follow them, and not come back here to read the rest.

News

• Influential Blogger is running a writing project which aims to identify The Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs in 2008, blogs that started after 1st July 2007. Entering the project requires that you write a post with your choice 10 (or less) of emerging influential blogs. The Cut-off date and time for submission of entries is July 30, Wednesday, 5:00 pm. More details and lists of previous weeks submissions can be seen on the Influencial Blogger site. Even if you do not enter it is always interesting to find new quality blogs.
• Blog Catalog is conducting broadcasts at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/blogcatalog every other Monday night. The first two broadcasts were “Twitter for Beginners” and how to increase your blog’s traffic using social media tools. The next broadcast, 30th June explores the World of Online Streaming Video. I am rather late publishing this aren’t I!
• Have you heard about blogger Vlad being sued by eperks for comments that were made on a paid review he did? (the comments would you believe!) Andy Beard and others have been supporting Vlad through his ordeal.

• Andy’s post also gives us a good way to search for up to date posts and the latest news about a particular subject - simply by doing a search on Friendfeed. Here is an example using the query “eperks”
• 100 Awesome Webmaster Blogs by and for Women I came across this one via a twitter message. I will leave it to you to decide if the blogs are awesome - I cannot be objective as I am included in the list
• Awesome Gmail Trick To View Contact Conversations
• How to Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works - Copyblogger gives us some useful tips on creating taglines or slogans that capture the essence of your site. This is something I have always struggled to do.
• Do You Suffer from Blogger Imposter Syndrome? by ProBlogger

Blogging Tools

• How To Embed an RSS Feed On Your Website or Blog? In case you want to add a separate webpage to your blog that you are going to update and want people to be informed about it when you do.
• Twingly Blog Search - promises to be a spam free blog search engine. Twingly search excludes spam by working “outwards from selected high quality blogs, discovering and including only those that are linked directly or indirectly to the quality “seeded blogs.”

Tomorrow I will post the other regular Blogosphere News sections:

• Social Networking News
• Search Engine News
• Blogger and Wordpress News

It is part of my dastardly plot to get you to come back and visit me, as I miss your comments when I do not post as frequently as I should. (my Technorati ratings have been slipping too - you really have to keep grinding away to retain those ratings don’t you? There is often no rhyme or reason to them at times? I have however gone up in Alexa’s eyes and am now no 6 in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Bloggers list (the list is now being hosted by crazy meezer) but have slipped down 3 to no 25 in the Top 100 Australian Blog index. Google Analytics reckons I was getting between 3-4000 unique hits a day in early June and now it is less than 200. (A Google Gaff I think as I do not believe the 1000’s and do not want to believe the low 100’s).

Popularity: 6% [?]

Double double, toil and trouble twitzer twhirl twitch and twubble . The language of Shakespeare’s era may be difficult to understand but so is internet speak; the vocabulary of Twitter adding to the frothing cauldron.

Where do you begin with Twitter?:

As you may know the basic Twitter interface is just that - basic. Type in a short message and press enter. There are some official twitter commands that you can use. For example the @ command before a contacts name addresses a message to that person:

• From Sueblimely ” @Shakespeare Your rhymes are more revolting than Roald Dahl’s”
• DHLawrence to Shakespeare - “@Shakespeare When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunderIn such a lovely language.”
• replies from Shakespeare:
  • @Sueblimely I thank you for your voice: thank you: Your most sweet voice. I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.
  • @ DHLawrence Thou surly ill-breeding death-token!

Adding “Retweet: @” indicates that you are rebroadcasting a message made by someone else. e.g.

• Retweet: @Hamlet I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such a lovely language.

A hashtag (#) before a word is a kind of tag, a word which identifies a topic, place, event etc.

• #shakesepeare The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet are showing in Stratford this season http://www.rsc.org.uk/content/5153.aspx.

#Hamlet @horatio O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit: I cannot live to hear the tweets from England;

Be careful you do not misquote It may help to take a look at The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics by Blogging Bits.

• Caroline Middlebrooke’s The Big Juicy Twitter Guide is worth reading if you are a newcomer to Twitter as is
• How to: The Beginners Guide to Twitter - Part 1, the basics by carocat of Cat’s Blog .
• How to explain Twitter and use it correctly, before it’s too late on New Media Bytes discusses twitter etiquette (twitiquette) and includes a video tutorial by Common Craft.
• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter has some good tips on making the most of Twitter, finding contacts and using it efficiently/

There are so many applications, clients. scripts and extensions for interacting with Twitter (hereafter referred to as “thingies” - no that should be “thwingies”). Twitter is becoming far more than a simple messaging platform; with potential to provide us with valuable targeted multimedia information via computer and phone. Taking advantage of this means using more than the basic twitter site interface.

Where to find out more about Twitter thwingies:

• Twitter Fan Wiki, which is dedicated to keeping up with Twitter thwingies and all sorts of other aspects.
• ReadWriteWeb monitored methods used for interacting with Twitter and have produced a list of the top 20 (out of 142 possible ways). How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients. The site has recently published The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere. As I was writing this a Digsby popup informed me they had just published another - Top 10 Twitter Apps
• Mashable list 24th May -Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools! - includes links to their other Twitter tool posts.

How and why to use Twitter:

• Maki of DoshDosh is cluey about Twitter and has written a number of posts on the topic including 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• ProBlogger Darren Rowse is also a good source of knowledge. Take a look at 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers for starters.
• 12 ways to use Twitter to increase your productivity on Simple Net.
• Twitter Freaks Group on diigo

That is enough reading material for now. While writing this, I have been trying to think of new twitter terms. How about:

• Twinkling - what the the Twitterati Glitterati do, whereas the rest of us tweet or twitter.
• Twender - how you message your sweetheart.
• Twyslexic - bad spelling in tertwit
• Twenterhooks - when you are waiting eagerly for a reply

I will leave you to guess what these already coined unofficial Twitter terms mean.

• Twisticuffs
• Twitterrheart
• Tweetheart

You can find the answers on the Twitter Fan Wiki Glossary and check out more Twitter terms and shortcuts on their Twictionary.

If you can think of any more of these, or know of good beginner’s guides to Twitter, please leave a comment or send a tweet to @Sueblimely.

Popularity: 12% [?]

News

• Daniel of Blogging Tips has initiated RSS Awareness Day to take place 1st May. The objective - to get as many people as possible talking about RSS and its benefits. Read his blog for More details on how to get involved.
• If there is a web article that you do not have time to read there and then consider using Instapaper which, via a browser bookmarklet, saves the details for reading later. You could, instead, just leave a multitude of tabs open with the intent of coming back to them, slowing your browser down until it eventually crashes (I don’t recommend this although I often use this method!) or you could bookmark or favorite to a folder called “read later”.

 

• Liz Strauss - SOBCon08 and Utterz announce the
  GET MY MESSAGE Contest!! Do a Commercial for Your Blog.

Reading

• Blog Profiling Sites Declare War! Who Wins…? It seems BlogCatalog is gaining favor and MyBlogLog is declining. I personally favor BlogCatalog since the new features were introduced.
• The 100 top Web apps for 2008
  These are the 100 best Web 2.0 applications, chosen by Webware readers and Internet users across the globe. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select these Webware 100 winners:

Blogging Tools

• 55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your Feeds! - the title says it all.
• Fontcubes is a free font site in beta.

Social Networking

• Oziwi is a Ning based social networking site for “Connecting people Down Under all over the world”.
• SocialVibe is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity. Add ads to your profile and gain points for the number of views. Review on ReadWriteWeb
• Shiftr - a new RSS aggregator service which is bad news for bloggers as it allows comments via their service rather than on our blogs. Read more at the Blog Herald: The Shyftr Saga

Wordpress

• Wordbook - a plugin that lets you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Your Facebook profile will also show your most recent blog posts.
• Free, Premium and custom Wordpress themes are available at Blog Oh!Blog I thought the free Tutorial theme interesting.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Sueblimely invites you to SocialVibe

Popularity: 4% [?]

Diigo is a Bookmarking, Annotation and Social Networking site that has got me all excited. I think I am in love.

I first tried Diigo when it came out in 2006 but it did not turn my eye; it was a touch too young and inexperienced then. Diigo 3 was launched 20th March 2008, showing a new maturity. After seeing its attractive new features I have been unfaithful to Delicious, my bookmarking partner of 5 years, and fallen in love with the younger and more versatile diigo.

I have always stayed with Delicious, despite its lack of sparkling design and social networking features, because it allowed me to organize my bookmarks well. I used it as a resource for research and referral purposes.

What I like about diigo

• Bookmarking
  - As well as bookmarking and tagging:
  • Create lists to add specific bookmarks to and produce interactive web slides from these.
  • Importing of bookmarks from your browser and other bookmarking sites is easy to do.
  • You are able to automatically add bookmarks to Delicious and other bookmarking sites too. I am two timing for now. If you do not want to automatically duplicate bookmarks you can do it manually via the “publish” button next to the diigo bookmark.
  • An RSS feed is available for your bookmarks and your lists.
  • A widget can be created to display items on your blog - as you can see in my sidebar.
  • Tag communities show you bookmarks by tag and the members who have used that tag.

  

• . Diigo allows you to annotate web pages.
  • You can highlight areas you find of interest and add sticky notes, (or highlight just to add the text as a description of your bookmark). The highlights remain when you return to a page, which makes it easy to find the areas that you were interested in.
  • If a page has changed since your last visit you can view a cached version with your annotations in place.
• Social Networking is possible via adding friends and joining groups. Knowledge sharing is one of the main aims of the site.
  • You can find friends by searching your email addresses for existing diigo users or inviting those who are not yet members.
  • You can browse for those who share similar interests, search for those you know and see who is currently online.
  • Invite members to groups you belong to.

Groups allow you to find those who share your interests. (When bookmarking you can choose to share it with a group, with your friends and add to a list.) Voting for a group bookmark via a thumbs up raises its profile - the idea is that the more popular better content becomes easier to find.

• Search by tags is possible and you can set up watch lists for specific tags.
• Diigo lets you see everyone who has bookmarked your site and what they saved - a handy tool to research what is popular on your blog.

Diigo operates via a browser extension which installs a toolbar with options for interacting with diigo and a sidebar showing your bookmarks. I am impressed by their features.

The Toolbar

The toolbar allows you to:

• Highlight parts of a page for future visits.
• Add sticky notes to the highlighted areas.
• If you have selected text before bookmarking, this is added to the bookmark’s description.
• Bookmark it to diigo (and to your browser favorites and other social networking sites).
• Add comments relating to the page you are on.
• Send the page to your diigo friends, to your blog, twitter or Facebook.
• Send messages and receive message alerts.

Sidebar

The sidebar is split into 3 tabs:

The URL tab:

• Shows you other members who have bookmarked the page you are on.
• Displays annotations that have been added to the page by yourself and or others.
• Allows you to leave a comment via the sidebar which will be visible to all diigo users who visit the page.

The Bookmarks Tab

• Shows your bookmarks, tags or lists:

The Friends Tab

• Lists your friends and allows you to message them via email or diigo messaging system. My mate Colin has found me but I have not yet found anyone else I know on there. My profile name is Sue Blimely hint hint.

Diigo’s interface is well designed and I found it easy to find my way around its features right from the start.

I suspect Delicious and I may separate but still remain friends. After all I am still throwing bookmarks its way and will visit from time to time to add any new tags to the right categories.

I really hope diigo becomes extremely popular as I would happily use the site as my main social networking venue if more of my friends and contacts were to join.

As usual I am a little late with the news of the new diigo because I had to give it a good work out before I reported on it. I have spent hours playing with it, uploading my bookmarks from Delicious, creating lists, annotating, adding sticky notes, joining groups ….

I created a list specifically for my own blog posts and one for diigo. This link takes you to all the posts and diigo tutorials I have bookmarked for you to browse through and learn more. A snippet of these is displayed in the tag roll widget to the right.

Thanks to Phil Butler whose article alerted me to the diigo changes and motivated me to go and take another look. He says “Diigo has refined a social annotation and collaboration service into an even more effective “personal and group oriented tool” - which is how I would have defined it if I could have thought up something so concise and meaningful!

I am off to be sociable now - join some diigo groups and find me some friends. I hope to see you there.

Popularity: 7% [?]

News

• Adobe PhotoShop has released a free online version Adobe PhotoShop Express. It is only available to the US as yet, which peeves me, so all I can tell you is that it is a cut down and simpler to use version of Photoshop. As you are given your own URL I presume you can share your creations with others. Perhaps one of the privileged could let us know if it is any good although Profy thinks so Photoshop Express - An Excellent Web-based Photo Editor
• Andy Beard has been noticing a trend in his blog and other which leads him to ask Alexa Rating Changes? Have you noticed any changes in your rating?

Reading

• 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts - Google Webmaster Central
• 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog - Skelliwag
• The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion - Internet Duct Tape
• 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider - Darren Rowse
• Blog Marketing Tips Even the Professional Bloggers Won’t Share - Tip #1 - Andy Beal.
• 50 Thoughtful, Funny and Polemic Blogging Quotes - Daily Blog Tips
• How to Help Immunize Your Site Against Scraping - Blog Herald

Blogging Tools

• Social Scan is an online tool for checking a website link popularity among well known social sites.
• Test different font types, styles and spacing at Font Tester or Typesetter
• LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email - or even via blogs as you can see by the blogging blogs I have bunched together here: http://linkbun.ch/76r

Social Networking

• Alltop, a news aggregator, now has a section for dads - Dads.Alltop.com
• Profile aggregator Tabber has been completely redesigned. You can read a review by Profy at Tabber’s Complete Makeover: Looks Like FriendFeed
• Colin of Life warns us about Social Networks Targeted With Trojan At present this uses the Orkut social network to spread. I hope this is not just the tip of the iceberg! Thanks for keeping track of such nasties Colin.
• Facebook has introduced a new feature that suggests “people you may know.”
• Social Media and Simplicity, Part 1: Reduce by Muhammad Saleem writing on Freelance Switch. Wise strategies to reduce our blogging workload.
• The Common is a new site aimed at bringing people who wish to know how do do something together with those who do know. Profy has a post that explains more - The Common: Helping Each Other 2.0 Style

Blogger

• How to Install a Blogger XML Template - includes an excellent idea for saving all your current widgets if you do not want to lose them in a template change over.
• Blogger has recently created a Blogger Help YoutTube channel for those who prefer their tutorials in video form.
• 8 steps to a more professional Blogspot blog - from the Download Squad
• A directory of Blogger Templates - BTemplates

Wordpress

• An easily browsed visual index of free Wordpress themes - Fresheezy!
• Wordpress 2.5 has some significant changes that will need learning. Here are a few posts introducing you to WP 2.5:
  • WordPress 2.5: A Thorough Analysis
  • WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist

Popularity: 5% [?]