Social Media Networking Integration with this Blog!

Ft Lauderdale, FL February 18th, 2008 - For Immediate Release - I finally got some help and got some of the social media stuff tightly integrated in my blogs. For instance, in this post, you will see at the bottom, you can just click on these links and help share this story with others and bookmark it for yourself.

Now I grant you, this is not much of a post. But have you seen my recent series over at the blog on homeschool curriculum? My recent series is great! At least I think so - Take a look

History Today - Kosova's War of Independence or Serbia's Civil War...you decide.
Textbooks & Education
Why did we adopt the constitution? Part 2
Why did we adopt the constitution?
Homeschooling and the internet



del.icio.us

Technorati - 'Claim a Blog"

All week, whenever I try to add some blogs to my account, I get the same error message. Is it them or is my account or blog messed up?

Blog Status - How to Compare

In our course on blogging (primarily a writing course but which teaches writing with audience-participation as an integral part of it), we are looking to give guidance to our students on how to "rate" a blog. Obviously, writing cannot be simply rated. But status can.

How can a newbie quickly and simply compare the status of blogs? Our current answers (all of which are fallible...we're looking for ideas)

1. Check the google page rank. Sites with zero are probably inferior to those with a 3.
2. Technorati. Three numbers: Authority, Rank, and blog citations. I have a little karate blog that I have listed there and it has an authority of 3, a rank of 2.2 millionth, and 4 blog citations. Pretty weak but I've changed it's name and URL a few times and so far, it hasn't really settled out.
3. Other approaches?

Based on this, I guess I'll claim this blog in technorati. But each time I've tried to do that, I've run into technology problems on the technorati site.

Reader & subscriber status. These are essentially useless as each site has it's own system.
Number of posts. Not easily counted, not clear that it shows anything other than number of posts.

PS - the reason to want to compare blogs is that as bloggers start, they should expect to find their best response rate when they correspond (comment, trackback etc) with bloggers of similiar stature. Or at least, expect to get snubbed by the big boys when your blog is still getting started. Unless you have something really interesting to say and you say it really well. In my experience, your judgement on these issues grows with your rank. Although there is room for cause/effect questions.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Social Bookmarking - State of the Art Today

In the last year or so, a Mysterious List of Words & Logos have appeared on the web: Digg, Del.icio.us, PopURLs, Reddit, Fark, Blue Dot, StumbleUpon, tags, Ikeepbookmarks, and so-on.


This latest set of techniques is known as social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking can affect search engine position and provides an alternative approach for viewers to navigate the web.

Are all these services worth participating in and are they all the same? NO, some are specialized in some area, some are small, and some are old fashioned (can you believe it? There are already some old fashioned sites in this latest and greatest trends. ex Ikeepbookmarks).

Which are the ones to select? Well, here are today's leaders and how they are different....

StumbleUpon.com provides a new way to go around the net following links established by people who have recommended sites by category and popularity.

Digg.com is all about articles. People vote.

del.icio.us is more of a bookmarking tool. Your favorite are listed and connected with others. BTW, for a great explanation and howto on del.icio.ous, try this social bookmarketing video

technorati - A multimedia listing by tag of blogs, music, pictures.

Furl - A listing by tag of websites.

Reddit - Articles get tagged and voted upon with the votes weighted by the taggers karma. This is the least corporate (albeit owned by conde nast) of the services.

Now some people (such as gino) categorize social bookmarking sites as subset of social media sites and include the bookmarking sites above with the likes of:

MySpace: social networking site
Facebook: social networking site
YouTube: video sharing community
Flickr: photo sharing site
LinkedIn: professional networking
Wikipedia: web-based community-created encyclopaedia
Yahoo! Answers: community answer site
MyBlogLog: blog networking community
FIQL & Netlister - sharing playlists.


Time4Learning's parent forum has started using social bookmarking