Web 2.0 Blog

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.

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

Although syndication is most notably recalled for its powerful impact on the success of blogging technologies during the web 2.0 boom, it’s ability to inform users of new content on otherwise stand-alone sites is what is giving supporting sites a significant advantage. A content management system is useless if users are unaware that new content has been added, and often users won’t go looking for the information you’ve added. In my opinion, the days of static websites with non-interactive content are numbered.

Web 2.0 is changing the way websites are being created. A website I created recently called Mystical Art, was developed completely using blogging technologies, however it assumes the appearance of a normal website. Further styling of the sidebar of this site would make it indistinguishable from a traditionally built website. In addition to this it has an RSS feed so that potential users can stay automatically updated every time a new piece of art is added.

This shows that even non-blogs should be syndicating their content. Newspapers in the real world are published daily with new content. In order for this to be realized in web technology, they have made their corresponding websites rich with RSS feeds of the latest headlines. For example, check out The Independent or The Times. In most cases, the feeds can be published elsewhere meaning users needn’t even visit the company’s website. All top web browsers and next-gen operating systems are driving support for RSS, meaning it’s even easier for users to subscribe to feeds.

I fully expect RSS or a similar content delivery platform to become a standard feature of websites in the future as users become more accustomed to syndication feeds. But how soon will it happen, or will another technology be developed that can perform better functionality than RSS?