Online Marketing Blog

WordPress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates – No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets – This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at WordPress.
3. AdSense – Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload – Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.

Believe it or not, social media just may be what elects our next president into office. From Obama’s Girl to Giuliani’s Girl and now Hillary’s Girl, YouTube and other social media outlets will have a much larger impact on the younger voters than anything else.

Lets face it, watching a presidential debate is not high on many people’s list. It may have worked back in the day, but now more and more people are turning to the Internet for news and filtering out what they don’t want. Included in the filtering process will more than likely be campaign speeches, debates and candidates views. Instead, much of America will wait until someone spins it on MySpace, Facebook or YouTube before they really start paying attention. They won’t stop to fact check, they’ll just believe in it. That’s the way social media works though, if your friends say it’s true, it must be.

I’ve been searching and searching for a good way to get videos embedded into a WordPress blog post and the best was was to turn off the WYSIWYG editor. Well not any more. Viper’s Video Quicktags could be the best plugin around.

What’s so great about Viper’s Video Quicktags? For starters it works with YouTube, Google Video, WMF, Quicktime and FLV files. But the kicker is it adds buttons to your WYSIWYG toolbar.

This is a big feature as I may know how other plugins work, but remembering, or telling someone else, is a bit harder. With Viper there is just an icon to click on and it tells you want kind of ID it needs. Simple and effective. Plus it’s a snap to install.

TIME Magazine has listed their best inventions for 2006 and YouTube has been named Invention of the Year:

“TIME‚Äôs 2006 list of the Best Inventions names YouTube as Invention of the Year for creating a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and ‚Äúgrok‚Äù one another on a scale we‚Äôve never seen before. Three twenty-something guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim started it, but the rest of us, in our basements and bedrooms, with our broadband and our webcams, invented it.”

Examples of other products include: a nano-fabric umbrella that never gets wet, a car that travels 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas, a robot that learned how to bike, cats that are naturally hypoallergenic and with the recent spinach scare, a food sanitizer that kills microbes and removes toxins.

One of the things that bugs me about WordPress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

On my flight from Minneapolis to Vegas today I picked up a copy of Fortune Magazine, which had and the founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe of MySpace on the cover. The article, “MySpace Cowboys” was pretty good describing the founding of the company as well as the acquisition by News Corp.

With an acquisition price of $580 million, Tom and Chris are still singing the “we’ll keep working as long as we can keep building the vision” song. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. They do seem pretty committed to continuing the journey of making MySpace all about the users and the community.