ContentRobot

This has been an eventful week for the ContentRobot team! Please indulge us for being a bit personal in this post.

On Monday, Dana and his wife welcomed their new son (Decker Scott Rockel) into the world - many congratulations to them. On Thursday, Karen celebrated a birthday - while certainly not a milestone, this web entrepreneur enjoyed her day.

What does that have to do with Web 2.0? Check out how social networking tools and life events converged:

Plaxo

Our social networking savvy friends and associates who are linked up with Karen on Plaxo sent along Happy Birthday wishes via phone calls, email, and even Twitter! Even tho I have a profile on LinkedIn and Facebook it was Plaxo that made people reach out. Who knew that an old AIM account would lead to this?

Twitter

ContentRobot has only recently dipped their toe into the Twitter scene and have been unsure on how to add it to our communications mix. Then yesterday afternoon, someone posted a tweet about Karen’s birthday (and a nice plug about the company). Amazingly - in fairly rapid succession - many connected clients sent along their “happy birthdays,” making Karen feel pretty darn special. However, it was quite surreal the ripple effect that a personal tweet made on for both Karen and ContentRobot. From those simple 140 character messages, we got a bunch of new Twitter followers, which is probably due to others’ trust in our current business network. We, in turn, were were treated to an expanded network - we finally get it!

Blogging

We have been fairly quiet about Dana’s son, but it’s my pleasure to share him with everyone via this blog post. Blogging is best when it’s transparent and personal and we hope you have enjoyed learning more about us at ContentRobot today.

Mobile Me

Our resident “Apple fanboy” Dana has already embraced the new Mobile Me. What’s so cool about that? Go see his posted photos of his son here.

We feel that these new social networking tools have allowed us to effectively connect and communicate with those in our business circles and beyond. It’s interesting to realize that all these important people live all over the world, but we feel close to them today. And a special shout goes out to the new people we met this week!

By their very nature, blogs are the building blocks of Web 2.0. For those of you who don’t know, the term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2003, and is defined by wikipedia as:

… a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

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We love Wufoo! Wufoo allows you to create forms on the fly and easily insert them into your websites and blogs.

You don’t need to be a programmer or web designer to implement and make beautiful forms. The Wufoo interface is slick and intuitive - anyone can make a form, questionnaire, survey, and more (the possibilities are endless) in about 5 minutes flat.

Cool features:

• Use any web browser to build forms quickly, including the ability to drag and drop form fields.
• Easily customize the layout to match your site’s look with a few clicks of the mouse (or your own CSS XHTML styling).
• Integrate the form on to your site by simply cutting and pasting a snippet of code.
• No need to create a database or develop backend scripts to collect your data -
  Wufoo does it automatically.
• Email entries can be emailed to you or updated in your RSS feed as they are submitted.
• Wufoo manages your information securely, and it’s easy to export your data to excel.
• Track form usage with day, week, month, and year graphing.
• You can try ‘em for free (tho other paid plans are available).

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Feedburner rocks! This tool allows you add extra dimensions to your blog’s reach.

RSS Tools
By burning your feed, with Feedburner, you can:

• Publicize your feed and make it easy for people to subscribe
• Manage your feed (even find out if someone is using your feed in a less that “credible” way)
• Track your feed’s subscribers (see how many people are viewing your feed and which stories they are clicking to read)
• Optimize your feed’s performance (we love adding the Feed Flares into the posts and RSS feed)
• Troubleshoot your feed

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While we live in a continuous wired-in existence, doesn’t it strike you funny that out of the box blogging software doesn’t offer much in the way of allowing others to contact us? ContentRobot offers some ways you can enhance your blog, so that others can reach you:

Email links
It’s easy to add your contactme@myblog.com link on your blog; however, it opens you up for a bunch of spam. To combat that, you can create a link that doesn’t explicitly write out the address - consider these formats: contactme [at] myblog.com or contactme[SPAM]@myblog.com (don’t forget to tell people to remove the [SPAM] when writing you).
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Although we have clients on a variety of blogging platforms, including Drupal, TypePad, and WordPress, we’ve been suggesting WordPress more and more. Why?

While each of the platforms has its quirks - and things we love about them - we think WordPress provides the most options and flexibility. We can offer the maximum amount of customizations and enhancements with WordPress.

We have been tentative to upgrade our clients to the latest 2.1 platform, but have found that our fears have been squelched with our latest client install. We are impressed with its stability and features.
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Out with the old and in with the new! Major blog software providers, Drupal and WordPress have released major upgrades just about a week apart from each other. Here’s some of the highlights of each:

Drupal 5.0 - Released 01/15/07

• The Administration pages were completely retooled, including a default task view with an option to hide descriptions and a ‘by module’ view with links to configuration options.
• The Settings pages are divided into smaller pages, so you can find the options you need.
• Easier installation with a Status page and requirement checking and web-based installer.
• New themes: Garland (not-fixed) and Minnelli (fixed width).
• Automatic hyperlinking of URLs and email addresses.
• More block customization per role and title editing.
• User management improvements with filters and statuses.
• Modules are listed by category and origin, along with their versions and dependencies.
• Detailed reports on search terms, ‘page not found’ and ‘access denied’ errors to help improve your site.
• CSS preprocessor allows all (cacheable) stylesheets to aggregate into one compressed file, which makes your site faster (especially for first time visitors).
• Any releases prior to 4.6 will no longer be supported.

WordPress 2.1 - Released 01/22/07

• Called “Ella” for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.
• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• New tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The visual editor, which was completely redone, also includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you to indicate if your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• Set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else.
• Login screen has been redesigned.
• AJAX makes custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. The comments page, for example, lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
• 2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.
• April 23 is the date of the next planned release (2.2).

These look like great new upgrades! Good luck!

Podcasting has been put in the forefront of the news lately, with former Microsoft uber-blogger, Robert Scoble, jumping to PodTech.net.

What is Podcasting?

Adapted from Wikipedia’s definition:

Podcasting allows multimedia files (audio programs, music videos, etc.) to be distributed over the Internet via RSS or for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.

Podcasters’ web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their files; a podcast however is distinguished by its ability to be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading RSS or Atom feeds.

Usually a podcast features one type of ’show’, with new episodes released either sporadically or at planned intervals such as daily or weekly. In addition, there are podcast networks that feature multiple shows on the same feed.

“Podcasting” was coined in 2004, combining “iPod” and “broadcasting.” The name is a misnomer because podcasting doesn’t require an iPod and no over-the-air broadcasting is required, but it has maintained its prominence in the face of numerous alternatives.

What Are the Benefits of Podcasting

• If you think your readers might benefit more from listening to your ideas rather than reading about them, you might consider delivering podcasts. Podcasting is great for on-the-go blog consumers who want to listen as they run or work out. Even desk jockeys who are working away and commuters on the road can take in what you have to say at the time of their choice.
• Podcasting can be used a supplemental content source as an alternative way to reach your audience. For example, you can do a weekly podcast that summarizes what’s been happening at your company or industry. Think of it as a blog post inside a listening format.
• It’s a great way to showcase an interview. This can help your viewers to understand the context and content of the conversation.

The Downside

• Podcasts can take up a lot of bandwidth and server space (after a while).
• They are not that lucrative. They may be costly to produce and monetanizing them with ads can be clunky (and annoying).

So if you have some things to say and you think it may be useful for your visitors to listen to podcasts rather than just reading whitepapers and case studies, check them out!

vs vs

Don’t want to be boxed in by your blog’s posting software? ContentRobot did a head-to-head test of some popular external blogging editors. Here is what we found:

Qumana

Pluses

• It’s free
• Can set up for multiple blogs
• Full WYSIWYG and source editing
• Select categories, comments, trackbacks, and pings
• Spell checker / Thesaurus
• DropPad allows you to gather links, text, and pictures by dragging them to a resizeable, always visible desktop pad
• Drag and drop images (will automatically upload images to your server) with image resizer and alignment tools
• Shows existing posts from any of your blogs
• Offline editing to work at your own pace
• Draft support
• Technorati tagging - one click insertion of tags, with editing option