Friday, December 14th, 2007
Do you use the Google Reader? Do you have a lot of friends on G-Talk? Then you might find this interesting. Today when I opened my Google reader a new pop-up came up telling me now its possible to share my feed items with friends on GTalk. I have been using the Google reader for quite some time now and I have seen it evolving and integrating features like getting its own search option, providing the feed count via Feedburner ( a good feature to track number of subscribers to ones blog) and Google Reader International versions ( French and Japanese).
If you are new to this whole sharing business, let me explain it in brief. Google Reader automatically creates a public page for any items that you mark as “shared.” You can also choose to create public pages for your starred items, or for items you have marked with a particular tag. If you decide to share some feeds with your friends, all you need to do is click on the share link at the bottom of the post and the icon turns orange indicating that now the feed is being displayed on the shared page, and is visible to friends on your Gtalk list. To view which posts have been shared till now, you can click on the shared items link (on left sidebar of the reader) and it would display your public page, with the shared posts.
Also, you can decide while setting up the sharing feature, which friends can see the public page. If its shared, it doesn’t mean everyone on the list can see that page. If you like you can share information just with your close friends or co-workers. If you want a fresh start you also have an option to erase previous sharing history. How about that?
This is an interesting feature and can be put to good use, if you have a decent social network, especially on IM clients.
I had written about growing one’s social network through IM Network some time back, and I was able to get acquainted with some really famous bloggers like Daniel from DaliyBlogTips, Fred Peters from Newestonthenet and Maki from Dosh Dosh. Also I have a lot of fellow bloggers who share a lot of stuff common to our niche through various social networking sites. However if one is on IM, you would get to share stuff in real time.
I just cant stress enough the importance of being on top of things in your niche by being the first one to blog about a certain topic. Yesterday I wrote about the Yahoo Shortcut WordPress plugin, immediately after it was released. Now that post ranks 11th in Google results along with blogs like Weblog Tools Collection and Read Write Web and I have received more than 300 unique visitors to that posts already.
Now a days, the RSS feeds have penetrated almost every aspect of the internet and now they are making their way into Instant Messaging, the original social networking tool. I have always been an IM fan as I like to do things in real time. So I guess this would be quite useful for me to share stuff with my fellow bloggers.
Can you think of any other use this can be put to? Would you start using this feature?
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Posted in Google, News, Online Services, Social Networking | No Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
If you don’t already know the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg recently saw a survey from Google, in which the search giant examined all of the http headers of Web. He found that .8 percent of those pages were powered by WordPress. Considering there are more than 100 million websites on the internet a 0.8 percent would mean an incredible reach for any platform that started just a few years back.
This could be as a good a time as any for any service to capitalize on the reach of WordPress, and Yahoo! has just jumped in. After Yahoo got together with Adobe for PDF Ads, Yahoo has just released a plugin for WordPress users called as Yahoo! Shortcuts, which creates small pop ups containing relevant information linked to the term. It works something like the Snaps from Snapshots.com. However the content that is displayed in these shortcut pop ups is that of Yahoo itself.
As you type the content for your blog post, this plugin looks for Flickr Photos, Maps to any locations that you might mention in the post, any products that are listed or even related news to your blogs post.
If your content regularly mentions some companies regularly, Yahoo shortcuts can bring up latest financial information related to that company.
Relevant search results would also come up for certain terms like in the image shown UNIX Pipes would pop up a Yahoo shortcut with relevant contextual search results. Some bloggers may find some shortcuts annoying and irrelevant to their blogs content, but some might really find it useful. It all depends on what you blog about.
However the best feature I think is the auto detection of relevant images to your blog post. Images can really enlighten the posts and make them more interesting.
Best Yahoo Shortcut feature: Relevant photos for your Blog Post.
Yahoo shortcut comes up with the most relevant images for your post. As mentioned in the image above the images are licensed images and when you insert a related image in the blogs post the credit is provided to the owner automatically. This feature is quite useful and can save you some time hunting around for images on the web. Also attribution issues are taken care of automatically.The Creative Commons license aggresments for these images can be found here.
Another faeture is the various size choices that one has while adding a photo to the post. It has been displayed in the image below.
Images below display the small pop up that comes up when you hover the mouse pointer on a location or address. There is a feature called as “Badges” in this plugin using which you can embed the entire map as an image in the blogs post.The users have complete control over which links should show up and if required they can just remove all the links from the option that comes up in the writing pane of the blog post.
These two images display Yahoo short cut as a pop up and the actual Badge as embedded in a post. As you can see both of them contain information from Yahoo database from yahoo maps.
In a way yahoo has found a use of WordPress while helping bloggers find relevant content for their blg posts.
Use of Yahoo shortcut Images and other contents are under a BSD License. You can read more about BSD license here and here. The terms of use for Yahoo shortcuts is here.
Get a T-Shirt for using this plugin.
Since the plugin is new, yahoo is promoting it by offering T-Shits to bloggers who use this Plug in. You can get a Charcoal gray T-Shirt with “Pimp my Blog” written on the front and “shortcuts.yahoo.com” written on the back.
I would like to have this T-Shirt as I already started using this plugin and find it useful for getting blog images. However, its only for guys who live in USA. Unfortunately for me, since am not in the US I can’t get it.
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You can see the Irony of the situation. Yahoo has released a plugin for WordPress which requires the version of WordPress to be 2.2 and since Yahoo powered hosting is still using Wordpress2.0.2 the Yahoo shortcuts plugin is not compatible with yahoo hosting itself.
Details of Yahoo hosting are here.
I think this plugin would draw mixed reactions. Flickr users would most probably like it. However bloggers who prefer to look for images themselves and have a source of getting images for their blogs would not use it.
You might wonder why my links are not Yahoo shortcuts enabled,even though I am using th plugin? An update for Yahoo shortcut guys, my blog breaks the Yahoo shortcut images and pop ups, so it looks kind of messy and so I had to remove all the links. I guess that is a part they need to work on and might soon need to send an Update.
Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tools, WordPress, Yahoo | 14 Comments »
