Big News!!! You can now post comments on my blog using video! Thanks to Seesmic.com. Last week, Seesmic released a plug-in for Wordpress that allows you to post video comments on my blog. You can check out the plug-in by clicking here. Or feel free to leave a video comment down below!

Thanks Loic!

Yesterday SixApart, the creators of the popular TypePad blogging system released a Facebook application called BlogIt that allows you to blog simple posts and have the post published to your blog, whether it be through TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and more and have the title of the post added to Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook as a status update.

The purpose of the application is to enable the author the ability to share posted items quickly and to streamline the sharing process.

You can get more information by clicking here .

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I just ran across a post on Search Engine Watch that does a great job of highlighting the different types of social media content. Since there is a little confusion with most businesses and consumers as to what is really classified as “social media” here’s a quick reference.

Wikipedia probably defines the term “social media” the best:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

See often we mistake social media as just one thing or concept when it is really a whole lot more. Social media mainly thrives on the social interaction between users. A few years ago the most widely adapted concept was to add a forum or a chat to a website to enable the communication between users, giving the user control over some of the content that was added to a website as well as facilitating the social interaction between users.

More recently social media has been embodied in “social networks” like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, LinkedIn and more. The idea of creating connections between friends, co-workers, colleagues and more creating what’s been called the social graph. Social media is those networks and more.

I say more because it seems that almost all new websites that have launched in the last two and a half years have had some form of social media. Delicious exists to allow “social bookmarking”: a website bookmark list that is public and accessible to consumers and tracks the general trends and popularity between new stories, websites, blog posts and more.

In fact, a major push behind Web 2.0 is the idea of social media. Web 2.0 embraces the concept that the internet has matured into something that can be utilized as a platform. Social media takes center stage in embracing this new era by enabling user generated content or UGC. User generated content puts the user in control of the content that appears on a website rather than just one or two webmasters. This is the principal concept behind many of today’s popular social media websites.

In general, here are the types of social media as defined by Search Engine Watch:

1. News Content - Time sensitive events and news stories. Through the proliferation of social bookmarking websites and RSS syndication technology, news stories are distributed, blogged, bookmarked and rated in a rapid pace. Businesses looking to track and monitor the daily flow of information that can affect marketing and online business can use a service like online reputation monitoring to help manage their reputation based on this information online.
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content - This includes things that are aimed at attracting attention to something online. This category is most like to include “viral marketing” - where an ordinary video, blog post, or story can be proliferate through many thousands of people in a very short amount of time. YouTube videos are a perfect illustration of this category. Often people will blog, email or forward a link to a YouTube video they find entertaining or interesting making the video popularity increase immensely in a short amount of time.
3. Resource/Educational Content -You noticed that I pulled something from Wikipedia. If you’ve done a Google search researching information in the past, you’ve most likely come across this website. Wikipedia exists to give the consumer the ability to create the authoritative content on a topic. This type of social media is a perfect example of user generated content and social media.

Social media can seem like a complex topic, but it’s more than likely that in the past you’ve engaged in some form of social media. Whether it be commenting on a blog or news article, asking a question or responding on a forum, creating a social network account, or even just creating an online account to share pictures with your family. It all is considered social media!

I just ran across this shot my wonderful wife got of me on Easter. I love it so much, I think it might just be my new headshot!! By the way, if you need a new headshot for business, resume, etc, give Erin Hession a call. She does amazing work!

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I’ve been behind when it comes to upgrading my Wordpress blogging platform. In fact, they just released their version 2.5 of their system and I was still on version 2.1.3. So, I made the leap and decided to upgrade.

For those of you who have not upgraded, it’s always a good idea to do so every now and then as the upgrade process is a great way to back up your blog files and database in case something happens down the road. Plus, they add new and exciting features into the newer versions that can easily simplify what you are doing.

The upgrade process was simple and I LOVE the new features. They integrated the "sidebar widgets" plugin into the system and a new plugin update system informing you of any software updates to WP plugins (although this may have already been in previous updates)

Also, the UI is dramatically enhanced. The posting process is a lot simpler with integrated functionality to add photos, video, audio and more to a post. And I am in love with the tagging system.

Here’s a few screenshots:

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Okay, so it’s been a few days since my last post… don’t worry. I have a lot of great posts coming.

Erin and I just returned from a fabulous and memorable trip to Las Vegas for a photography convention. It was a lot of information crammed into the trip (especially on branding and promotion), but we managed to sneak in some time to see some great attractions.

I uploaded one of the videos I took from the Fountains of Bellagio to YouTube. Check it out below:

I follow a lot of different blogs. So much so that I don’t always have the time to keep up with them via Google Reader. But I ran across this post tonight and I thought it too good not to share. In this day and age, a lot of marketers focus on the SEO benefits of blogs and how search marketing is going to be a huge portion of incoming traffic.

I no doubt believe that there are various SEO benefits of blogs with company websites, but when it comes to marketing a blog itself outside of a company (ex: TechCrunch, Go2web2, Mashable, etc), there are other factors that come into play. John Chow talks about the concepts that make a blog memorable. It’s not about having a huge marketing budget that makes a website memorable (although it can be helpful in bringing in a lot of traffic). What really matters is a handful of factors including having the right design, the right concept, good content, and frequent updates.

It’s a great read, I just wanted to share it.

I happened to stumble across a new Firefox plug-in tonight that will definitely help me blog faster and easier. It’s called ScribeFire and it allows you to quickly and easily make a post about a website straight from the website. For example, to test out this new plug-in, I went to my previous post and told ScribeFire to make a new post of that page. It opened up a handy split screen that allows me to quickly type a post with a WYSIWYG editor. It even allows me to link to images or upload them to my custom Wordpress blog.

It works with all sorts of blogging platforms and even custom ones as long as you have the RPC link that allows external posting to your blog.

So if you’re a blogger, check it out (link above). You might find it a lot faster than what you’re already doing.

Very Good Words From a Very Good Vlogger | InspireMedia Blog

(and yes… I did use the plug-in to make this post)

For many of my clients, this post may seem a little too simple. More and more, I get questions on the basics of RSS feeds and how they are used to benefit blogs and news sites and the general blog reader. My goal with this post is to help answer some of those questions and to help proliferate the use of RSS feeds.

RSS Feeds. I love them. They organize my popular websites, improve my productivity, give me only the information that I want to see and help spread the content from my blog further.

So, what is RSS? In short, it’s called Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary or Atom depending on who you get your information from). RSS is a way to syndicate content from your website, blog, etc and make it available for others to access using an RSS reader. Most blogs (in fact almost all, including mine) come with an RSS feed with it that helps to syndicate the content you make on your blog for readers.

For example, say I went to a website like Techcrunch.com and I don’t want to have to go back to their website everytime I want to view their content, so I access their RSS feed and give that web address to my RSS feed reader (in my case, I use Google Reader). This funnels all of my news sources and blogs into one source so that I can get all of my updates quickly without having to visit every single website.

In addition, RSS feeds help me to distribute my content faster and better. You see, when I make a post to my blog, it automatically updates the RSS feed that my readers subscribe to, allowing them almostinstantaneous access to the content I posted.

A common misconception with RSS Feeds

There is also a little bit of confusion with RSS feeds, particularly when readers first look at a feed, often times all they see is code. For example, look at the sample below from my own RSS feed:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<?xml-stylesheet href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/rss2full.xsl” type=”text/xsl” media=”screen”?><?xml-stylesheet href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/itemcontent.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen”?><!– generator=”wordpress/2.1″ –><rss xmlns:content=“http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/” xmlns:wfw=“http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/” xmlns:dc=“http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/” version=“2.0″>

<channel>
	<title>InspireMedia Blog</title>
	<link>http://inspiremediablog.com</link>
	<description>The mind of John Wooton</description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:13:21 +0000</pubDate>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1</generator>

	<language>en</language>
			<atom10:link xmlns:atom10=“http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom” rel=“self” href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/InspiremediaBlog” type=“application/rss+xml” /><item>
		<title>Tetris Revamped</title>
		<link>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</link>
		<comments>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:34:29 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>John</dc:creator>

		<category><![CDATA[Links]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Websites]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink=“false”>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

The code you see is not any error, the code is the RSS feed. You see, RSS is written in a XML programming language. XML is meant to be read and interpreted by a browser or RSS Feed Reader. What you should do is ignore the code and copy and paste the web address of the feed in the browser into a RSS feed reader like Google Reader. The feed reader will read the XML code and spit out a readable format that you can read.

Take a look at the screen shot of my blog from Google Reader:

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Hey everyone,
I’m testing out mobile blogging using my new iPod touch. I hope to use this to post a little more often and from different locations.