Posts Tagged ‘Blogger’

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Study: Google Ads Work Better Than Facebook’s (Boston Herald)
Facebook may be this week’s stock market darling, but when it comes to online display advertising, search engine Google provides advertisers with “significantly more value” than the social media giant in terms of growth rates, performance, targeting options and formats, according to a study released Tuesday. The study compares the value of Facebook advertising to Google’s Display Network. PC Magazine Facebook moved quickly — again — to address concerns that it wasn’t doing enough to satisfy mobile users, buying the developers of the Lightbox Android photo app. However, the company also made it clear that Facebook was not acquiring the company or the photos that users had stored on the Lightbox website, just the developer team. AdAge General Motors said Tuesday that it is “reassessing” its spending on Facebook advertising — about $10 million — but “remains committed” to the social network as part of “an aggressive content strategy with all our products and brands.” Meanwhile, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, said that the automaker is bullish about Facebook ads — particularly “sponsored stories” that contain a social layer — and intends to “accelerate” spending on them. AllFacebook Facebook followed up last week’s introduction of its app center with two new metrics to its insights for applications: app ratings and negative feedback. The new app ratings dashboard will bring developers information on how users rated their apps with the five-star ratings system Facebook recently implemented. The negative feedback feature shows developers how many times stories from their apps have been hidden or reported as spam, as well as how many times the app itself has been blocked. Mashable Two Colombian criminals almost got away with robbing an Internet cafe, but one of them checked Facebook first — and ended up being identified and arrested because he forgot to log out. The two men whipped out guns at the cash register to demand money and made a clean getaway on a motorcycle. After the men escaped, an employee at the cafe called the police turning in information from the Facebook page that led to his arrest. Read more

Blogging has come a long way since its beginnings in the ‘90s, with over 156 million public blogs in existence as of February 2011. Everyone is blogging, from moms to techies to artists and politicians, and a fun infographic from Flowtown examines the blogging ecosystem.

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The Japan Tourism Agency is seriously looking at the potential of social media to help the country’s tourism industry regain visitors after the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear issues. The agency is proposing the country offer 10,000 free round trip tickets to social media users to help promote the country as a safe and exciting holiday destination.

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Social network influence-measurement service Klout doubled its pleasure by doubling the total number of networks it factors into its ratings system, announcing the addition of Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, and Last.fm.

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A true-to-life drama better than anything Aaron Sorkin could pen for Hollywood.

Dan Lyon’s The Daily Beast reported today that Facebook hired “Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.”

Burson offered to help Chris Soghoian, a prominent blogger, write a Google-bashing op-ed. Then, Burson backed up the proposal with a promise to place the blog in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico and The Huffington Post.

Facebook’s proposed smear campaign was fabricated from a Google tool called Social Circle. The tool allows people with Gmail accounts see information about their friends and about the friends of their friends. Google calls it “secondary connections.”

Burson’s wanted to slant the claim that Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC.”

The Daily Beast also reported that Burson was trying foist off on the media the idea that “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission.”

But, the scheme backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. My hat goes off to Chris Soghoian for turning down Burson’s offer and exposing their smear campaign.

The smear campaign spiraled over the USA Today where the publication reported that two PR agents from Burson “had been pushing reporters at USA Today and other outlets to write stories and editorials claiming Google was violating people’s privacy with Social Circle.”

The Daily Best confronted Facebook with evidence in which “a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.“

“A smear campaign is an intentional, premeditated effort to undermine an individual’s or group’s reputation, credibility, and character. “Mud Slinging,” like negative campaigning, most often targets government officials, politicians, political candidates, and other public figures. However, private persons or groups may also become targets of smear campaigns perpetrated in schools, companies, institutions, families, and other social groups.” Wikipedia

Why a smear campaign? What is Facebook afraid of? There’s plenty of space on the Internet for everyone to reap the benefits. The Daily Best says there is a growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. “Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.”

We have seen our smear campaigns through history such as General Motors against Ralph Nader and Nixon’s re-election campaign. I am just delight that this one got nipped in the bud before it arrived in the press. Now, lies are recoiling on Facebook as well as Burson-Marsteller. The social network and the 58-year old PR firm have a lot of cleaning up to do. Burson’s CEO, Mark Penn, Burson’s CEO, was the political consultant for Bill Clinton, and is best known as the chief strategist in HIllary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

I’ve been a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) in the Windows CE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile/Windows Phone category for over a decade now. People are awarded the MVP distinction for a variety of reasons. But, one common thread is that MVPs share their knowledge in a wide variety of ways. Microsoft has been collecting some of the knowledge MVPs share in the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog. I recently provided a guest blog article on a topic that I think about and experiment with a lot: Mobile blogging.

MVPs for Windows Phone 7: Blogging While on the Move with a Windows Phone

In the article I cover using a Windows Phone 7 smartphone to directly create and post content to blogs using WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous services. Blogs can be created an hosted for free on any of these platforms/sites. However, I forgot to mention a big platform in my article: Google’s Blogger. Thanks to @weemundo for pointing this out to me on Twitter. This follow-up blog posts will fill in that gap.

There’s a Windows Phone 7 WordPress app to create and manage WordPress hosted blogs (either by WordPress itself or self-hosted). Posting mobile blogs to Tumblr and Posterous involves a simple to setup email process. There isn’t a native Windows Phone app to post blog items to Blogger. However, like Tumblr and Posterous, Google/Blogger provides a simple email mechanism that can be used. This process is described here on a Blogger help page.

How do I post via email?

Blogger provides a unique email address that accepts posts just for your blog. Anyone who knows the secret word and your username can post a blog item to your blog. So, be sure to keep the secret word a secret like your password. Like Posterous, Blogger translates the following email components into blog components:

Email title -> Blog title
Email text -> Blog text
Attached digital photo -> blog image

You can add a pound sign (“#”) to the end of your intended blog text to make sure that other unnecessary items like email signatures do not get posted into your blog entry.

You think it’s easy? Find out just what it takes to date a blogger.

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Whether you run a personal blog, a corporate blog or a mass media outlet (like SocialTimes), you don’t want your site to go down. Thanks to tough years for Twitter and Facebook, we’ve been getting used to unavailable social media platforms, even if we aren’t at all satisfied with it – it’s almost becoming an expectation. That said, nothing is worse than pointing your browser at a spot on the web and not being able to get there … especially if it’s yours.

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Mommy blogging is the new black. And while it seems mom-centric weblogs are a dime a dozen, some crafty women have forged their way by sharing (get this) original, honest content. The following mommy bloggers are women that encapsulate the meaning of success. Their sweat equity has helped them rise to the top – where they’re sometimes criticized, but never ignored.

The Redneck Mommy

Nearly swallowed whole by the loss of her young son in 2006, Tanis Miller was saved by her kids and her blog. Writing at TheRedneckMommy.com, Miller is just as likely to dish out pee-your-pants humor as she is to write a heart-wrenching post about finding her way out grief’s foggy forest. She’s sometimes crass, always honest, and doesn’t try to hide her daily struggle to put one foot in front of the other.

Her Bad Mother

Catherine Connors knows parenting can be an experiment. Her motto, “Bad is the new good,” bashes stereotypes about “perfect” mothering. Blogging at HerBadMother.com, Connors is tight-lipped about nothing. Her faux pas, frustrations, and ugly parenting moments are all a matter of public record – along with joyful posts about her family. Connors believes moms should toss out convention and just figure out what works – and more importantly, what doesn’t. Read more

For those bloggers who use Blogspot as they blog platform and want to spice up the design of the blog I can recommend to take a look at these amazing Blogger themes. You can download and setup these templates by following instructions you can find in download page of every template.

If you know more amazing templates for Blogspot share them in comments!

Magasin Cuatro

Demo | Download

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