I’ve added social networking features with BuddyPress 1.2 to a couple of my WordPress blogs without any problems. I can safely state that this new version is going to be very popular with bloggers all over the globe. Within minutes your blog will have Twitter-like status updates for your blog readers and writers (called the “activity stream”), who all now become members of your new social network. Also included out of the box are easy to use message boards and groups. Members can either join existing forums and groups or create new ones about any subject matter they’re interested in. They can communicate in the public stream or via private messaging with one another or via their own groups they establish on your social network. There’s also a useful Member Directory that allows members to communicate with other other. Every member has an extended profile they can fill out any way they want.

Here’s a sample of what a BuddyPress install looks like:

One of the things that I like is the option to make your home page either your blog posts or the activity stream. The choice is up to you: do you want to keep your blog as the focal point of your site or do you want the social network to take center stage? If you choose to make the activity stream your home page, then a new tab called “Blog” is added, which is where all blog posts will be available.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that BuddyPress — like WordPress itself — is extensible, which means you can add many new features and functionality via plugins and widgets.You can also change the look and feel of your new social network with themes customized for BuddyPress features.

I’ve been a BuddyPress user since its early beta and release candidate releases. While those early iterations had some minor bugs as you might expect, the BuddyPress support community was extremely helpful and swift with suggestions for fixes or workarounds. I expect the community to continue to be so supportive with this official release of BuddyPress 1.2.

Important: Just in case, it’s always smart to perform a full backup of your WordPress blog and database before experimenting with anything that integrates with your infrastructure, as BuddyPress does. There are many excellent backup plugins you can use. It’s better safe than sorry.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Practice is the real key, but it can be hard to find inspiration to put in that practice. Here are some ways that I eventually came across which helped me develop my skill, and weren’t nearly as expensive as just trading up to a newer model camera in the hope that it would somehow improve my abilities.

The 365

This is a classic technique, and one employed by photography schools around the country. The idea is simple; take one photo a day for an entire year, hence the “365″ moniker. You can have more (or less) structure in addition to that, but if you’re just starting out, it might be best to just go ahead and keep things loose. That way any picture you take will count, and that will come in handy on days when you’re less than motivated to go out and find the perfect shot.

Assignments

Homework isn’t just for students, and you don’t need a traditional teacher to receive assignments. There are a number of places on the web to pick up tasks and prompts that can start a fire under your photography habit.

One of my favorites might already be familiar to many hobbyists. It’s Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School. Not only does the site provide great tips and tutorials for people at all skill levels of digital photography, written by a wide variety of industry professionals, but it also features an ongoing weekly assignment section that you can use to help create some truly inspired work. Even just browsing the contributions of other users can provide great ideas.

Competitions

Similar to assignments, but not the same, are contests. They aren’t the same because there’s a competitive element involved, and the point is to share your work, whereas with an assignment you could just keep your results to yourself if you prefer.

There are no shortage of photography contests going on online, so it’s hard to narrow the field down to just a few. Photo Friday is a great one, though, because it occurs weekly and results are posted both online at the web site and now to a special Twitter account, too. The stakes aren’t that high, but it’s a great way for beginners to get exposure and there’s no shortage of chances to win.

One thing to watch out for is sites that aren’t exactly honest about their processes in these competitions. The thing is that stock photography is lucrative, and there’s no easier way to amass that than to hold a “contest” in which all photos submitted automatically become property of the site, which means they can collect royalties instead of the photographer.

Become a Double Threat

Being a good writer is a really useful skill to have if you’re going to pursue work online, especially if you’re looking to get into blogging or copywriting. It’s good, but if you can pair that with photographic skill, it becomes great. The years of the one-trick pony in online work are behind us, as more people flock to the web to make some money. The true test of whether you succeed will depend upon your ability to outperform others in multiple areas, not just one. Video is next, but that’s a horse of a different color.

What tips do you have for budding photographers?

What exactly are comment trolls? They’re the readers, often anonymous, who post inflammatory or off-topic remarks. They can be doing this to attract attention to themselves, promote their own web sites, or simply because they are bored.

According to my friend he received both inflammatory comments and off-topic self-promotion from his readers. Though I’ve gotten the odd troll in my own blogs, I don’t have the readership to be as bothered as he was. Even then, there must be a better way to deal with trolls than just by deleting your blog altogether. Here are some alternatives:

Have a comment policy. This is a paragraph in your comments section or a separate page that lists your policy for identifying and handling inappropriate comments. For an example comment policy, check out this one from ProBlogger.

What do you do when a reader breaks your comment policy? It depends on how long the reader has been participating in your blog. Personally, I prefer to delete the comment and move on.

Set comment approval rules. Blogging platforms and plug-ins can usually automate comment approval for you. Readers that have commented before can have their comments auto-approved, while first-time commenters will have their messages held for approval. This ensures that readers who already know your comment policy will be able to reply to a post without waiting. You can also filter out comments that have swear words and too many outbound links (often a sign of spam).

If you get too many comments and it’s no longer practical for you to moderate them, you can get a virtual assistant to help you. You can ask him or her to delete or unapprove inappropriate comments, as well as notify you when specific comments require an urgent reply.

Disallow comments altogether. This may sound a drastic move, but if you don’t want to deal with the commenting aspect of having a blog, then don’t allow comments at all. Most blogging platforms allow you to disable comments on your entire blog or on individual posts. The trade-off is that you then can’t build a community with your blog, but if that’s not part of your goals, then allowing comments doesn’t really matter. Do you get many comment trolls on your blog? How do you deal with them?

Image by shuttermon from sxc.hu

If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources.

Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news and general information sites that receive regular updates. You can browse all of these by popularity, by subsection, by topic, or by source using Google’s new visual interface that works a little like Apple’s Cover Flow technology. Each site is represented by an image capture of the relevant page.

Clicking through to a source doesn’t actually bring you to the site in question, as I would’ve initially guessed. It actually opened up the relevant article in a reading interface, but doesn’t redirect away from Google Fast Flip. The reader view gives you a set portion of the article viewed as an image file, the idea being that you can see a quick preview before clicking through to the full story at the site itself. It sort of feels like searching through microfiche in the basement of the local library.

Arrows at the side of the image in reader view allow you to browse other stories in the category you’ve chosen, and an expandable tray allows you access to the thumbnails of all the stories in that series. You can also email and “Like” any story you find, which requires sign-in with your Google credentials.

Is it useful? Speaking as someone who depends on the Internet news media for my online career, I think it may be. It’s a great way to see what the major outlets are talking about all at once, without having to visit each individually. I can see people arguing that an RSS reader does the same job without as much distracting visual flair, but for people who process information visually, Fast Flip might prove more effective or more comfortable overall.

Do you think Google Fast Flip will catch on as a search tool? Do you see yourself using it over something like Alltop or RSS?

For me, it also raises the age-old question: is self-publishing really just a form of vanity publishing, along with all the negative connotations that implies?

It’s a thorny question, and one that takes on new significance as we slowly but surely move away from print media towards online publishing. I went to school for writing, and had it drilled into me pretty much every day that unless it was someone else’s name on the masthead of the journal or press I was publishing with, I wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Online, however, many of the most successful professionals are self-published, and self-made. Darren Rowse, Guy Kawasaki and Om Malik Richard MacManus come to mind. They are dealing primarily in the medium of the blog, however. The stigma associated with self-publishing doesn’t seem to have entirely disappeared when it comes to books.

Smashwords is a service for self-publishing your own eBook. Once you’ve signed up for an account you can upload your original work and offer it for sale at a price of your own choosing. Your book will also be available for purchase via Stanza for the iPhone, the most popular and fastest-growing eReader available. Authors make a royalty of 85% of the net proceeds from the sale of their work. Readers using the service get free samples of all the books available on the site, and get access to search and library-building services.

It’s a good system, but will it work? Even if you already have a built-in readership from a successful blogging career, will users be willing to take the extra step and pay for your content in eBook form? The answer probably depends on what kind of content you’re offering. If you’re just repackaging your blog as paid content, it probably won’t pay off. But if you’re offering valuable content that extends, rather than mirrors, your blog-based content, Smashwords may be a useful platform.

To me, the benefit of a service like Smashwords, and self-publishing in general, is the same benefit that consulting firms get from preparing free research reports for distribution to clients. It’s a proof of competency, a means to show you can and will deliver the type of results they’re looking for. And with distribution via Stanza, there’s also the possibility that you could reach potential clients where you otherwise wouldn’t have, even if you do end up just reformatting your blog content for alternative distribution.

What do you think about self-publishing? Is it a good means to increase your revenue or profile as a web worker?

Doing what we do here at WebWorkerDaily, it is sometimes easy to forget from whence we came. That is to say, everything has a beginning, including a career, or part of a career, devoted to working online. For many of us already in the field, the starting point may have been a natural inclination towards technology that gradually blossomed into a full-fledged professional pursuit.

But for those just getting their feet wet, the process might not be so organic. You might be showing up late to the game, and with only a basic grasp of the rules to begin with. Let’s take some of the pressure off by taking an introductory look at two of the basic tools of the trade.

Blogs

Blogs (or weblogs, to give them their original name), are a web worker’s best friend. They help with research, networking, sales, and brand establishment (personal or corporate). Once upon a time, you could just put up a web site and forget it, or maybe go back and update content once a quarter, or once every two quarters. That was fine when the Internet was just a supplement to real-world business, but it’s become much more than that. In web working, your web site is the social face you present to the client, and having a blog helps keep you relevant.

Imagine a salesperson who checks in with a prospect once a quarter. Now imagine that salesperson provides exactly the same information in exactly the same way to exactly the same stakeholder every time. That’s what you’re doing if you’re not providing frequently-updated content on your web site. With a blog, which you might update on a daily or weekly basis with articles about new developments and trends in your field, you can show prospects that you’re engaged, excited about your field, and always aware of shifts in the business landscape.

That’s the “why”, but what about the “how”? The best way to get started is to become familiar with some basic blog publishing software. Try out a free WordPress.com (disclosure: WebWorkerDaily is hosted on WordPress; see additional disclosure related to WordPress below) or Blogger account, both of which offer visual editing and preset templates; leaving you to concentrate on the content, not the geeky back-end stuff. Read around so you get familiar with the blog writing style. Note the average length of posts, where paragraph breaks occur, the use of hyperlinking, etc. You don’t have to share your blogging with the public until you’re comfortable doing so. Take your time and build competence first.

Twitter

You’ve probably heard about it, but you may not yet have gone so far as to sign up for an account. Twitter is a relatively new kind of social network, that, unlike its popular predecessors MySpace and Facebook, is focused primarily on users’ content and less on users’ profiles or identities.

When I first discovered Twitter, which was not all that long ago, I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t figure out how to find people to add, no one I knew was using it, and the 140-character limit seemed arbitrary and somewhat cruel. I came to realize that it is a valuable way to expand your network of potential clients, collaborators and service providers, and to conduct spot research and enhance your reputation as an online professional.

Nowadays, you will find that most professionals working online who have active blogs will also have a “Follow me” button or at least link to their Twitter profile in some way. Twitter takes the concepts I talked about with blogging to the next level. To successfully use your account to further your professional goals, you have to provide updated content with a frequency previously unheard of, and with significant brevity, as well. Those in advertising will probably relish the challenge of drilling down meaningful content to 140 characters, as I soon came to.

How to use Twitter succesfully is a topic that is still subject to fervent debate. If you’re looking for a good starting point, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net is frequently considered an expert in the field, and you can find his Twitter-oriented blog at Twitip.com. With Twitter, as with blogs, the key is to follow others and take in as much as possible, in order to get comfortable with the unique form of communication it presents.

I know the “watch and learn” method of gaining familiarity with these basic web working tools might not appeal to those newcomers who’ve been forced by the loss of employment to seek work online, rather than chosen it themselves. But like starting any new career, there will be ramp up time, and training and orientation are required if you want to become truly successful. Hopefully our Web Work 101 series of articles will help cut down the time on that learning curve.

(Disclosure: WordPress is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

“Web sites don’t really actively manage your online reputation,” I countered.

“Yes, but aren’t there free templates that people can use to set up cheap web sites? And what about hiring someone to create a one-page site?”

“I’m sure there are templates, but I would never recommend to a client today to build a web site like that,” I explained. “And I’d never recommend that anyone just put up a single page.”

My comments didn’t faze the writer, who was determined to present me as a “web expert” recommending cheap and easy web site building solutions for her article.

That exchange got me thinking: How did I – a former web developer – become so anti-web site? And why is a national publication promoting an article advising that businesspeople build web sites for themselves to manage their online reputation, especially when their chosen web expert was telling them, “Don’t do it!“?

Why static web sites don’t really cut it any more

I don’t really think web sites are obsolete. Clearly, blogs are fundamentally web sites, but they are more dynamic and have more interactive features.

My feeling is that static “plain vanilla” web sites:

• have limited impact on your online reputation. Basic web sites, as I’ve defined them, just don’t have as much influence as they once did. They’re being replaced by an array of social media, where your reach can be exponentially greater, with much less effort on your part.
• have limited interactive capabilities. Blogs and blog engines are much better suited for integrating interactive features, embedding widgets, and interconnecting social media accounts.
• are too expensive compared to other available solutions. A simple three to five page web site can still cost at $300-$500, or more, through a web developer. That’s if you can find a reputable one willing to take such a small project. Then there are the “hidden” costs of web hosting and fees for site updates. It all adds up and “affordable” can become “nickel and dime nightmare.”
• are still too complicated for most non-technical clients to build, much less manage. Unless there is a built-in CMS, even a five page site can be nearly impossible for someone without the required  HTML and graphic skills to update properly, even if they have an  expensive authoring tool tool like Dreamweaver.
• have less of a positive professional impact when templated. Let’s face it, a templated static site site almost always looks like…a templated site. Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a bias against Twitter and MySpace pages that look “templated.” Yet.

What works instead of static web sites today

• blogs or blog engines behind sites. Blog engines are much more flexible these days and for the most part allow easy integration of “widgets” and other tools to incorporate other social media into the blog. You don’t need a developer or designer, or even HTML know-how, to use many of today’s blogging tools. You still end up with a clean, professional-looking blog that you can use to manage both content and comments with ease.
• social networks. Google my name and my Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn accounts show up on the first page. Until blogs and social networks, only my web site showed up and the rest were mentions of me on other people’s sites. It’s nice that other people mention me, but when it comes to managing my online reputation, I can’t control what they say. For businesses, Facebook Pages and Facebook Advertising add a great deal of power to building and managing online reputation.
• microblogs. Soon after I joined Twitter, my account showed up on the first page of Google results for my name and has never left its lofty position. Twitter appears often and high on Google searches.  So people can find you via your Twitter page and then link over to your static web site or, better yet, your blog.

Yes, there are very specific cases when only a web site will do for a client, and static web sites still make good archives and basic information destinations. Even I use a five page static “placeholder” site as a destination for my new consulting company.

However, whenever possible, I recommend integrating a blog, microblog and some relevant, strategic social network visibility into the mix to manage your online reputation have a far greater impact on awareness-building.

The main caveats, of course, are make sure there is consistent monitoring in place and a solid policy on how to handle negative statements or conversations about you or your company in the social media. But if you are not there in the first place and are, instead, twiddling your thumbs with a “plain vanilla” static web site waiting for people to come to you, you’re about to get lost in the shuffle.

Are static, “plain vanilla” web sites obsolete?

Do we really need to forgo the functionality that we are really looking for when choosing a small team solution? Traction Software says “no,” and they are offering up TeamPage5, a free 5 user version of their Enterprise TeamPage workspace system, as proof.

Traction’s TeamPage was one of the first blog and wiki products to reach market with their 1.0 release in 1999. It is a mature system that has garnered good reviews, and their prior release was awarded Best Enterprise Wiki in the InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Awards.

TeamPage uses a familiar Project metaphor, with each space having its own permission structure. It incorporates all of the standard features you would expect from a wiki / blog like linking, journaling, edit history, tagging and categorization, threaded comments and moderation. It’s the advanced features that make it stand out though. The collector lets you bookmark articles within the system for later reference or action while the ability to view the site in draft view lets you prepare multiple pages before content is published.

Traction TeamPage is a complex system with a comprehensive feature set, actually doing far more than I can cover here. Even common features seem to have an extra layer of functionality designed to make the system more powerful.

For example, TeamPage takes a common feature like tagging and then adds a tremendous amount of functionality to it. Instead of just being an organizational tool, tags are also time based so they can be used for building custom workflows. Track newly tagged items like to do assignments and status, bug priority changes – any combination really. In conjunction with the permission system, tags can be used to pull and aggregate content from across spaces while still maintaining and adhering to your access rules.

The advanced features do add an extra layer of complexity though. That isn’t to say that TeamPage5 is hard to use but there is a learning curve, and some serious thought and planning is recommended to set up a system that can fully take advantage of its capabilities. The challenge for Traction is to balance a very powerful feature set with ease of use, and for the most part I think they pull this off.

Even though it is marketed as an Enterprise Wiki, the system isn’t inherently enterprise. It doesn’t require extensive infrastructure and has a low to moderate bar for deployment. It is Java based with modest system requirements. I was up and running with a local installation and slightly modified base journal in about an hour. Obviously additional configuration and customization can add significant time to that based on your needs. The free TeamPage5 version is great for small teams and can be upgraded to a full server license as your needs grow.

If you’re looking for a powerful collaboration system and are willing to put in a bit of thought and effort to define how it will best be used, TeamPage5 might just be a good option for you.

The free Traction TeamPage5 version supports 5 projects / spaces and 5 named users. Support is provided via an online forum and knowledgebase or additional paid support is available. Upgrades to a full TeamPage license vary based on license type and number of named users.

Are your Wiki needs being fully met by your solution? Is TeamPage5 a contender for you?

The Windows Vista blog team announces the Best Vista Website

Simple Help teaches us How to install WordPress on your Windows PC

Zoho sponsors Cloud Avenue blog to focus on online business applications

Smashing Mag offers up a WordPress Developer’s Toolbox

Serendipity is a powerful, feature filled weblog application and a worthy WordPress alternative.

• GigaOM, for reporting and analysis of the big stories in Web 2.0, mobile, and other new technology.
• Web Worker Daily, for coverage of the new world of online work.
• NewTeeVee, for everything related to the video revolution.
• Earth2Tech, looking at the intersection of green and technology.
• OStatic, with thorough coverage of open source software and its ramifications.
• jkOnTheRun, covering the world of mobile devices.
• The Apple Blog, for news of all things Apple-related.

Om Malik points out the good fit of this acquisition:

A blog that is closest to our way of thinking turned out to be TheAppleBlog, one that I have been reading for a while. In Josh [Pigford] we found someone who shares the same vision — restraint in editorial and a desire to provide utility for the readers.

The editors of WWD are delighted to welcome The Apple Blog to our growing network. While web workers can be found using any and every operating system on a variety of hardware, a larger-than-average proportion of our readers do use Apple products. Indeed, both of us are using Macs as our primary computers these days.

Having The Apple Blog join our network is the next step in Giga Omni Media’s continuing ability to bring information and analysis across a variety of cutting-edge topics to its readers. You won’t see any huge immediate changes at WWD as a result: we’ll still cover Apple news when we think it has a particular bearing on the challenges facing web workers. But in the weeks and months to come, you’ll see more links between WWD and The Apple Blog, as we use their resources to enhance coverage in their own particular specialty area.

Welcome to the family, Josh!

Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.

One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.

Google may make a splash, but their not the first

Google joins a competitive space. Yahoo! News has had local news in Beta status for some time. To it’s credit, Yahoo! News is more pleasing to the eye when compared Google News. It cleanly breaks up news content based on originating source and allows easy access to local video reports. Additionally, Yahoo! leverages it’s assets by displaying user submitted photos for the area that reside on Flickr.

Similar to Google News, Yahoo! news does not enable you to search the local sources and retrieve results based on your geography. Google’s local news offering delivers local news from many more areas as Yahoo has not expanded it’s service beyond major metro areas.

MSNBC’s offering is even more limited than that of Google or Yahoo!. After being prompted for your zip code, MSNBC’s home page displays a paltry 3 or 4 stories and your local weather provided by the Weather Channel. An individual city’s news page requires massive amount of scrolling and, as expected, shows a few stories from local news sources including newspapers and local TV affiliates’ news departments. Again, leveraging their assets, MSN displays a Virtual Earth map showing local traffic, a view of local company’s stock activity, local sports scores, and lottery results. To my surprise, MSNBC adds a unique view into local blog scene by featuring recent posts from local blogs. As with Yahoo! and Google, no local search is supported.

Topix is a winner in the news aggregation scene and is sure to feel some pressure from Google’s News’ newest feature. Topix’s claim to fame is mixing traditional media with citizen journalists. Topix presents a well laid out website with main news stories dominating the page with weather, traffic, and a poll appearing on the page. Like Google News, Topix pulls from numerous sites. Their tagline on their site is “Local news continually updated from thousands of sources on the web”. Topix has developed a strong audience by delivering pertinent information to a local audience. Each article has “Related Topix” that give a tagsonomy to the website and creating linkage to each article. Topix, like Google News, features many geographic area because of the reach of it’s new sources.

Conclusion

Google’s local news service has a massive amount of potential and represents a fantastic way to stay up to date on news in a geographic area. However it’s clear that if they utilize other components of their online offerings, Google’s local news sites would be more valuable for users. For example: offer Google Maps with it’s easy to use Traffic view, embed Picasa photos that have been tagged or geo-tagged with the known local city name, and offer blog posts that have been discovered by Google Blog Search.