A month ago, I reviewed Zemanta, the blogging extensions service company that provides contextual images, links, latest articles or blog posts and tags to your blog posts. I was a little harsh on the somewhat lack of relevant images and sometimes even irrelevant links that Zemanta offered up to me in their feature bar that appeared neatly embedded in my Typepad and Blogger publishing tools. I think my exact words were “all hell broke loose.”
Since then, I’ve still not incorporated Zemanta suggested items into this WWD blog but have used them more and more often on some of my other blogs, particularly my personal blogs where I have less stringent writers guidelines to follow and anything goes because they’re mine. Now Zemanta has added a few more features that have caught my attention.
Zemanta says their tools can help increase traffic to your blog because of:
1. better annotation of posts, links, images with actual crawlers for Google and Yahoo can rate the post higher and glean more context from your post; and
2. placement of links to related posts across blogosphere helps get more track back for the post which can also increase traffic. Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress, the open source blog management software, has released version 2.5 of their popular web application. WordPress has been quickly adopted because it presents a very flexible and easy to manage web publishing system. Out of the box it is a fully functional blog management system, but can also be used as a content management system (CMS) for a website as well.
Read the rest of this entry »
When you’re a web worker, time is money. Here at Web Worker Daily, we’re all about helping you efficiently use your time.
In order to have some of the Word Processor features in my blog editor, I often compose my blog posts in Google Docs, then paste them into my blogging software. Well as bavatuesdays has pointed out, Google Documents now features the ability to post directly to your blog software.
To use this quietly rolled out feature, type in your Google Doc as you normally would and hit the “Publish” button. One of the options is to post to your blog. You’re presented with the following screen:
As you can see, the window asks for your blog type, username, password, and blog name. The support a large number of blog engines including WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, and more.
Once you’ve set up your blog information, you can easily post the Google Doc to your blog. In my testing, the result was plain looking posts that appear just as they do inside Google Documents.
Last December, our own Anne Zelenka posted about the social possibilities WordPress presented. Apparently Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic (the company behind WordPress) agreed with Anne.
In a blog post, Mullenweg announced that Automattic is acquiring BuddyPress and the designer and developer behind it, Andy Peating. BuddyPress is a series of WordPress plug-ins that can take a WordPress MU (multiple WordPress weblogs on one single server) website and turn it into a social network platform.
What can BuddyPress practically be used for? Say you have a group of co-workers or team mates and you want to have a social environment to exchange ideas and information with. You don’t want to have to force everyone to sign up for FaceBook or MySpace, you simply want to collaborate. WordPress, combined with BuddyPress will give you a space to connect with your cohorts outside of the ‘walled-garden‘ of these other social networking sites.
It will be great to see what comes out of the acquisition. WordPress holds a high degree of promise as a content management system, and with the load of venture funding Automattic attracted recently, more great developments are sure to manifest.
