Web 2.0 Blog

Like this blog, I’ve noticed a growing trend of bloggers removing the rel=”nofollow” attribute from their blogs which essentially encourages users to comment on posts without loosing what might be a valuable link to their own site. However, as some people including myself have found out, this drasticallyincreases the level of spam following each of your posts. At first I accepted this and simply deleted them from my moderation panel before they were allowed to be set live, but after a while this became a very drawn-out and exhausting process.

The answer is definately an anti-spam challenge that each user must complete before submitting a comment. The challenegs are usually so simple that a monkey could answer them, but not a robot. The one I use is called Math Comment Spam Protectionand has worked a treat since adding to my comment form.

Download here: MathCommentSpamProtection.zip

Once up and running, I also reccommend adding one fo these U Comment, I Follow Icons to your blog to let people know instantly that your blog is nofollow-free, this will surely encourage interactivity among readers. It’s also treated as a ‘badge of honour’ among bloggers who believe users should be rewarded with at least a decent link for contributing quality comments to a post. That’s how I see it anyway.

I came across Profy today and it really impressed me. It claims to be an ‘all-in-one’ blogging platform, a haven for bloggers if you like, where a combination of blog posting, social networking and feed reading is combined into one easy-to-use platform. Having watched the demo, it certainly does look easy to use and this leads on from my previous post about who uses social bookmarking. My concerns of casual Internet users being able to use such features were founded on lack of purpose to uses them and lack of mass documentation describing what they are and how to use them.

The platform consists of four main areas:

• Simple blogging platform where you can choose from a variety of templates, modify the layout and add HTML/JavaScript
• Social bookmarking and sharing tags and favourites amongst other bloggers in the community
• A place for social networking - interacting with other user’s profiles including discussion boards and instant messaging
• An RSS feed reader platform which storing any number of RSS feeds from external sites

Profy Dashboard

Ultimately, this is another example of a nice piece of user-friendly Web 2.0 software which can get pretty much anyone involved with social networking, blogging and sharing, all in one place. But how will people know about it, and will it ever have the power and publicity to overthrow giants like Blogger and Facebook. I wouldn’t be so confident. But as a Web 2.0 startup, it shows promising signs for a potentially large userbase and with the right promotion it could introduce these terrific Web 2.0 technologies to a generation of casual users.

You look at any blog post including this one, and you’ll see various tags attached around the pages tell you to ‘bookmark this’, ’sphinn that’ or ‘make this post a favourite’ and I’m sitting here thinking who actually uses all these widgets and why? Digg claims to have over 20 million users, which is quite incredible but who are these users?

The idea is that when you bookmark a site or a post, it becomes saved in your profile on the social bookmarking site and most likely shared to other users using the same service. So by making this bookmark, you are also alerting others to the existance of this website’s content. But is it meant for casual Internet users? I think not.

From the people I have asked, who are regular users of social networing sites and are therefore quite in tune with web 2.0 technologies, there is not much understanding of what a social boomark is. Ther’s not much out there that will tell usrs what it social bookmarking is. No adverts, no formal descriptions and certainly no advice as to why anyone should bother with it. And yet there’s millions of users using these services worldwide, how did it all take off?

I do know that social bookmarking is quickly becoming an ideal resource for search engine optimizers. Every time my posts are submitted to social boomarking sites I get more backwards links and Google sees these links as valuable votes, a process which will increase my rankings. If my readers also submit my posts to social bookmarking sites then that helps me even more. It’s therefore easy to see why webmasters use social bookmarking.

However a drawback of this is that these systems are becoming abused by spammers who want nothing more than to fill these sites up with their links. A lot of sites are now using nofollow tags to combat this.

So it’s a good information resource, a way of sharing and promoting websites and it’s definitely a notable method for optimizing RSS based websites, but I’m still not sure who the majority of their users are. It’s also very difficult to find any information about who the users are, I certainly couldn’t find any information on Google regarding the market of this phenomenon. There’s millions of users out there who are using these sites and my guess would be that the majority of users are keen Internet users who embrace web 2.0 technologies and have more than a passing interest in Internet services. This would include:

• Web developers
• Forum and blog posters
• Internet marketers
• Web writers
• Graphic designers
• Web enthusiasts

I simply cannot see how casual users would have the interest, time and patience to learn about how to use social bookmarking. But maybe I am wrong. If you can shed any light on this please give me a reply, or even add this post to a social bookmarking site. Sphinn it, Furl it, StumbleUpon it or and tell people that you’ve Reddit. Just don’t ask them understand it…

If you’re interested in optimizing your blog, you can make it much easier for search engines to crawl by adding a sitemap written on an XML page. The standard way of doing this involves creating a static XML page by taking a snapshot of your site at one time. However, the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress will create an excellent quality sitemap for you which dynamically and automatically updates whenever new pages or posts are added to your blog.

Take a look at mine: http://www.adammoss.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It is downloadable as a simple plugin which just requires activation and submission from the Wordpress dashboard area. It results in a clean-looking, well presented and anchored list of your pages, with additional details of when it was last updated. Once installed you don’t need to do anything. It really is a must-have plugin for any serious blogger out there who wants respectable search rankings, so it comes highly recommended from me.

Download the plugin here: Download Plugin

One of the drawbacks of the current blogging platform is the fact that the content displayed on the page is static - it won’t update until you tell it to, by revisiting the page or refreshing the browser. Static content is also a feature of discussion boards and forums which is why it can be difficult to have flowing conversations, especially when posts are made simultaneously. ScribbleLive rewrites the ules of this publishing platform by offering its users the ability to view and manipulate live data over a network.

ScribbleLive was given special recognition at Canada’s Mesh Conference of the latest web technologies. Two advantages of this is the ability to transmit live data to viewers, with no reloading necessary. This type of communication could be ideal for broadcasting on a global scale, using a well designed platform to broadcast information. Conferences, demonstrations and up to the minute updates within communities would all be possible. Another advantage is the fact that it is written with Ajax, making it a perfect scrolling information service on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

The main requirement for this is participants however. There needs to be a decent community of users to be able to make this worthwhile, so it may take a while before this takes off and possibly replaces the standard blogging format. People can be aprehensive about changing from what they know, particularly when communities already exist.