Blogger.com vs WordPress.com

September 17, 2009

So you must be having a Blog(If NO, Go get one today). Where do you host it Blogger.com OR WordPress.com. Or if you have your own Hosting space with php and Mysql then for sure WordPress.org. This post will compare Blogger.com with WordPress.com. Also don’t get confused with WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is a CMS which you need to host and is the best Blog System currently. I will not be including features which are in both of them OR neither of them.

Feature	Blogger.com	WordPress.com
Customization with themes	Yes, You can edit the HTML and CSS	No
Import	No, Only from another Blogspot Blog	Yes, From most of the Blog programs
Static Page	No	Yes, As much as you want
Analytics/Stats	No, But you may install a third party Analytics program	Yes, In built and is great
Image Storage	1 GB, Can be browsed through Picasa	3 GB, Can be upgraded
Classification	Through applying Labels	Through applying Categories and Tags
Contact Forms	No, But Third Party contact forms can be installed	Yes, Using [contact-form]
Comments	Simple, But you can install powerful comments system like Disqus	Nice comment system but you can’t install Disqus
Embed Object (Like: Flash)	Yes	No
RSS	Yes, And can be optimized with Feedburner	Yes, But No Feedburner optimization
Spam Fighting	No	Akismet
Change blog URL	Yes	No
Javascript	Yes, You can Add it here	No
Google Webmaster Tools	Yes, Verify using <meta> tag and Add blog/atom.	No

Please See:

If you wish to upgrade to WordPress.org soon then go for WordPress.com. As it supports Categories as well as Tags(Which is common in WordPress.com and WordPress.org).
If you don’t wish to upgrade to WordPress.org and don’t want to host things then go for Blogger.com
Most of people start from platforms like WordPress.com or Blogger.com and move to WordPress.org(It includes me).
Also if you are newbie in Blogging go for Blogger.
Blogger is also owned by Google which is a 800 pound gorilla in Internet.
There is also a http://draft.blogger.com where you can see features if blogger about to come.

My Suggestion: Go for Blogger.com. As it has the biggest advantage that is Flexibility.

Web Analytics

August 2, 2009

Web analytics is the measurement of the visits to a website to track website performance. Its also the process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website. So it is a tool that collects data on web site users behavior.

How can we use it ?

For Web Analytics you just need to Sign Up for a Web Analytics program and then add the essential code given by the Program to your site. Or Install a couple of plugin’s if you are on WordPress.

What programs are available ?

There are many of the programs available for analytics for Websites. I have included few which I like.

Google Analytics

For me its the best as it is owned by 800 pound gorilla of the internet market and the features it provides are very useful. All though it’s not highly advanced or high on features still it has everything which is required for analytics. One can add multiple sites here and most importantly its 100% Free. You just need to add the code to your website for its functioning(Or a plugin if you are on WordPress). Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. You may integrate it with Your Adwords account too.

Clicky Web Analytics

It has all the features of Google Analytics plus many more like giving a Mobile version of your dashboard, Viewing the history for an individual page, Visitor segmentation, Twitter Analytics etc. It’s hugely accpeted. But the drawback is its not Free. Though it has a Free version too but using GA will be the better option then.

Analytics for WordPress using a simple Plugin(WordPress.com Stats)

Its like Google Analytics providing an incredible depth of information. Installing this stats plugin is easy, all you need is to put in your API Key. When running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, popular posts and pages, traffic source, etc. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard. And because all of the processing and collection runs on there servers. it doesn’t cause any additional load on our hosting account.

2 Great Twitter Tools

June 4, 2009

Mutuality

Well Huitter.com offers a service called Mutuality which has the following features and are very useful in the journey of becoming a Pro-Twittrer.

Unfollow all who do not follow you back
Unfollow all
Follow all who follows you

I dont use the 2nd one but the 1st and 3rd are quite useful. One can also use the 3rd one as a manual auto follow feature.

Twitter Follower

is a database of Twitter users who will follow you if you follow them. By following the users in the database, you can quickly and effectively build your list and avoid that dread zero in the follower count. But everyone doesn’t follow you back in that list that’s the drawback as anyone can submit there name there.
Another feature from Twitter Followers:

Mass Unfollow Everyone Who’s Not Following You: The other feature of Twitter Follow is the mass unfollow button. Push this button and Twitter Follower will unfollow everyone who’s not following you back.

Source: http://www.johnchow.com/twitter-follower-my-new-twitter-site/

Get your Social Media diagram by Geekchart

May 26, 2009

If you are a social media addict and share great links and content you get in the net with others and if you are a Geek in Social Media and do it in various platforms then this thing is for you. Geekchart is a new tool which gives pie chart based on your activity of various social media sites in the last 30 days

GeekChart fetches data from these 8 social media sources That is your blog, Twitter , YouTube , Flickr , Digg , StumbleUpon , Delicious , and Last.fm(and facebook coming soon.)

Geek Chart Keeps updating your Social Media diagram automatically as you continue to share.

I am sharing my Geekchart with you.

Priteshgupta’s Geek Chart

Free and Legal Music in Web 2.0

May 26, 2009

This is probably what everyone one wants these days.

Last.fm:This thing has a Free Music Downloads section in bottom of the page, One can go there and browse for free downloads in that section, Of course the Downloads are limited still one can listen to unlimited and new songs there. I use this site frequently to share the name of my favorite tracks in my Twitter and Facebook.

ARTISTdirect:This is a brilliant place for free music, Some of the big releases aren’t always free, You need to pay for them. Still I use it a lot to see new tracks by top artists. One can use this site for browsing music by various Artists.

Kazaa: This site can be used to listen and download lots of free and latest music but this is only open for US. Not for any other country.

Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums

May 20, 2009

What if your digital camera is full of Pictures and you want to share with friends and relatives, Of course you wont mail them. You will probably like upload it somewhere and share.
There are 2 major 800 pound gorillas for photos sharing in Web. Yahoo’s Flickr and Picasa Web Albums by Google.

Flickr

Flickr is a well known in the photo sharing market and is owned by Yahoo. It has a good interface, it’s polished, works well, and is indeed addictive. But Flickr has some limitations Flickr offers 100 MB of free storage each calendar month but the storage counter is reset every month so you get virtually unlimited space on Flickr without spending a penny. (100 MB is good for storing upto 120 picture of average size). New pictures can be uploaded to Flickr via mobile phones, desktop software, email attachments or through the web-based interface available on Flickr website. Pictures can then be grouped in sets (like “Conference in New York”) as well as tags (like “conference”). You can upgrade to Pro for making the number of photos unlimited for each month but even after you upgrade to Pro, you’ll bump up against more limitations if your JPG files are over 10MB each, which happens quite often when you shoot with a late-model DSLR and upload at full resolution with the intention of printing that photo in a large size. Use Flickr if you want to engage actively within the big and friendly Flickr user community, get comments on your photos, join groups and submit photos to them — in short, partake fully of the social community of photo sharing.

Picasa Web Albums

This is the photo sharing client owned by Web Giant Google, This was made to enable Google Image Organization Software Picasa user’s to share there photos online. One can create private and public albums there and order prints. This is the best option for Photo sharing for a regular person but the storage is limited(Disadvantage over Flickr) it has a 1 GB storage and then Paid storage of 7Gb for $25 a year, You can come over this just by resizing the images rather than uploading the full High Resolution Pics. The default option is to resize only, so that’ll get done automatically. Once you’ve done tell your friends and its done.

Extra Features
For describing the photo, both services let you edit tags and a caption for the image, with Flickr also letting you give each photo a title. Both have a mapping feature letting you set a location for the photo on an interactive map. For the technical data relating to the photo, both services will read and display the EXIF data from a digital camera such as shutter speed, date/time etc. And for viewing a bunch of images, both have a slideshow feature built in. Finally, both services let you specify a name to make a more user friendly URL to give to your friends or family.

Flickr Vs Picasa

Transferring Photos: In Flickr the picture upload thing is very easy but downloading photos from there is difficult, for this you may need to have a 3rd part Flickr App where as in Google’s Picasa Web Albums it comes with an application Picasa. Through Picasa, you can do basic image editing (like crop, rotate, color adjustments, etc) and then upload the edited pictures online. The software can also download photos from the online Picasa albums to your hard-drive without any effort.

Organization: Picasa lets you create as many “albums” as you like to sort your photos into. Flickr lets you have just 3 “sets” to group your photos in, otherwise they all get added to a single “photostream”. For unlimited sets at Flickr you’ll have to go pro.

Storage: Picasa gives you 1GB of storage with the option to buy more (7GB for US$25 per year – shared storage with your Gmail account). Flickr doesn’t state a storage limit, instead they have an upload limit of 100MB per month and limit your “photostream” to the 200 most recent images. The “pro” option at Flickr which will give you unlimited uploads, storage, bandwidth and more.

Cost: Both Flickr and Picasa offer a free service initially, but with limitations on the service at Flickr And a word of warning here, Flickr’s FAQ states “if your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted”. Picasa is better here. You can upgrade to Flickr Pro for $25 and upgarde you 1GB to 7GB in Picasa for $25 a year.

The usefullness of Twitter for me

April 2, 2009

Today even 1 day without Twitter kills me, Twitter is the best thing in the Web I have found yet(Another is facebook). Many people feel Twitter has no advantages and it is addictive, Time Waste and Lame. This isn’t true at all, There are great advantages of it but only one who uses Twitter can get it. A non Twitter user will surely think its a waste. This included me too earlier I didn’t know about Twitter and didn’t joined it, then one of my friend @ramkarthik Told me about Twitter and explained its uses and advantages in detail. Since that day I became twitter-addicted and just saw advantages in it. No disadvantages.

To make my point clear I am sharing this video its very humorous and one of mine YouTube favorite’s

The First good thing about Tweeple’s(Twitter People{Twitter user’s}) is that the Twitter crowd is very helpful. For an instance I broke up my WordPress and wasn’t able to fix it myself. I twitted and soon got help from many people(Mainly @Rampantheart).

Its great for connecting to people via Twitter, and Twitter provides us with 140 Chars so that no one gets bored by one’s Tweet and isn’t time consuming also. Most of the times I see Humorous Tweets in my twitter Timeline, Which is great. Basically it is a medium for connections with others in an easy and unobtrusive way.People say that micro blogging(Twitter) Makes one a better Blogger too.

A few possible advantages of Twitter are:

Stay connected with colleagues and friends when you are away.
Provides us with immediate support.
Be the first one to cast events/meets/summits by twitting in between and sharing the experiences.
Share Links and Other information
Learn more about people’s interests.

Do these basic steps and start tweeting today.

Sign up
Follow others.
Make friends on Twitter
Tell other people to join
And start communicating with people

Using Google services for a Website/blog

March 5, 2009

Google provides number of services/products to promote your blog or website on the Internet, the good thing about these services are that most of them are free for a very low price. These services are very helpful in various things. And all of its services works great for all types of blogs and websites.

Most of the services have a main focus for improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from Google Search engine via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results(viz. SEO).

Here is the list of Google Services for a Website/Blog :
In the order of their importance

Google Adsense:Offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. Its great for earning huge bucks and trustworthy too(Because its Google).

Feedburner:Allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. The best advantage is it converts a RSS feed to a Email newsletter by “Subscribe via Email” thing.
Google Webmaster tools:Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. One just need to verify the site and add Sitemaps.
Google Analytics:Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives.

Google Apps:
Google Apps provide with Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites complement traditional office software to make teamwork easier. The best thing is it provides with a Email ID of your Domain just by adding MX data into your domain (Eg: [email protected]).
Google Friend Connect:
Grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Google Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website.
Google Custom Search:
Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine for your very own site.

Web 2.0 for Free Media

March 5, 2009

These days every one finds internet as a Web Market in which every thing is for free it may be Black hat(Warez) or White hat(Free games). That is Internet is turned up in into a Piracy Hub. But still there are sites which are completely legal like http://www.youtube.com but majority of them are P2P that is Illegal/Legal(It is still a controversy).

Napster was the first sharing thing(P2P) in the Web2.0

It was created by Shawn Fanning when he was in Northeastern University in Boston. He created the Software for Audio/Mp3 sharing and circulated to some of his friends. Those friends again circulated to their friends and it went on and on and soon within 1-2 week it was found more than million people were using Napster. Its aim was ‘ You give me a song and I will also give a song ‘

It grew popular and popular but the major drawback was that it was against ‘ Copyright Violations ‘ it was said that during Napster time the Music stores were vacant and everyone preferred to get Music through Napster. It was easy and also saved money. All the music companies were annoyed by Napster there sales went down due to Napster.

But Napster time was ended in July 2001 when Metallica (A famous heavy metal band) cased because its song “I disappear” was leaked before it was released, also Madonna’s singles were leaked which annoyed her.

In 2000, A&M records with several other recording companies sued Napster for contributing to copyright violations of US Digital Millennium Act (DMC Act) The music companies made the following claims against Napster:(1) That its users were directly infringing the plaintiff’s copyright;

(2) That Napster was liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright;

(3) That Napster was liable for vicarious infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright.

The court found it guilty for all of the above and it had to be shut downed in July 2001 and was declared bankrupt in 2002 .

The company still has website http://free.napster.com/
Soon after Napster a video exchange site was launched which was

http://www.youtube.com

Youtube.com is a Video Sharing site started somewhat in 2005(February) by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim who were employed by PayPal at that time. Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig. It was somewhat influenced by Napster(which was Audio sharing) and provided with Video sharing Napster was soon closed within 3 years. Youtube wasn’t closed because it was supported by Google.com which was a strong player in the internet field and backed You Tube. Google took over You Tube in 2006.

It is said that the two developers developed You Tube as they were having big problems in sharing videos with their friends.

You Tube is now the biggest Video Sharing website having the Traffic Rank of 3 and there are many small sites like metacafe.com which also offers Video Sharing. There is also a Flag community in You Tube which regularly remove violated contents.

Earlier people were using Software’s Like Lime Wire and Ares too much for downloading stuff but they bad content Bad Quality content so they moved to Torrent’s and HD downloading Software’s like Vuze. But these days the leader in Piracy are Torrents which is not yet termed as Illegal yet. But sometimes we are dragged to use these thing, For a instance a Movie came few time back called “Slumdog Millionaire” this movie was based on India but was released few months after getting released in Foreign market there were no signs of the movie’ s DVD to be coming. So people getting annoyed by the late release proffered to download it and watch it. This is not the only case the same happens often with Song’s, Movies and Warez(Software,Games). Torrents are not termed illegal as it is P2P which stands for Peer to Peer.

Social Media for Promoting a Web Site/Blog

January 27, 2009

Social Media is a great tool for Everyone these Day’s, It helps everyone to carry out various activities. It refers to a place where the content is not given by the Web Site employees, But given by its various user’s. Social Media is mainly used for Communication or Marketing.

Communication:

It refers for communicating to people through Social Media. Like chatting to Friends with Facebook and interacting to people and participating in various Forum’s.

Advertising/Publicizing:
Advertising someone’s blog or Web Site through Social Media is a great advantage of Social Media.
It involves the following steps.

Steps undertaken for Advertising/Publicizing in Social Media:

Social media marketing
This thing has 2 important aspects

1.The first is a way in which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media by on-page tactics. Such optimization method includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and Bookmark links so that their pages can be easily ‘saved and submitted’ to and for these services.

2.The second one involves the task of building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.

Social media optimization :

These are the method’s for generating publicity through social media,community websites and online communities. It includes optimizing websites so that it’s content can be easily spread to web by website’s own visitors/users it involves installing buttons like using RSS Button, Social news buttons, social bookmarks, track backs and widgets to a site’s page, such as “add to del.ici.ous” links and the MyBlogLog widget and stuff.

The Aim is related to that of Search engine marketing but the difference is the aim is to get traffic from Social Media rather than Search Engine’s. This is the first step and its not enough alone. If we want these thing’s to benefit us the page should have compelling content. A content which user will like and may share with his/her Network.

Other related thing’s:

Social network marketing :
It is the method of advertising one’s product(Any sort of Product) in a Social Networking Web site which leads to increase in Web Presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking websites, viral marketing which spreads throughout the web, email or word of mouth, or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised.

Search engine marketing :
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a type of Internet marketing that helps to promote sites by boosting their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization(SEMPO), SEM methods includes : search engine optimization (or SEO), Paid placement and Paid inclusion, contextual advertising. Other sources, such as New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

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