Web 2.0 is all about functionality and user input. There certainly is plenty of data available on the Web, but sometimes it isn't exactly in the format you desire. This is why mashups were born. A mashup draws data (or functionality) from two (or more) different sources and deploys them within a single tool. An example would be drawing location pictures from Google Earth and adding them to house listings from a real estate agency. Lots of mashups are created using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) methodology.
But for mere mortals, Microsoft has provided a site which allows the easy creation of mashups with drag and drop functionality. Popfly is a cool site which you can access for free using a Microsoft Live ID (also available for free). Once you are there, there is a handy tutorial which will have you making your first mashup, which you can then deploy on a blog, social networking site or Web page, in just minutes. But to make things even easier, just watch the video below which shows you how to make a photo carousel mashup and include it on a blog.
So start exploring on Popfly and see what you can create. Then add the mashups you create to your blog and see what your readers think about them. Set up a poll on the blog to ask about the usefulness of your mashup. But most of all, have fun with it!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Increase Blog Functionality (and Coolness) With Mashups
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Pictures Not to Include on a Blog or a MySpace Page
I'm always amazed at the pictures that students will put on blogs or social networking sites. They may be great photos to share with your friends, but if you are identified in the photo, is it worth jeopardizing your chances of being selected for a job? Just in case you need some guidelines about what not to include on your site, here are a couple of suggestions...
You may feel passionately about a particular cause...which is fantastic...get involved! However, a prospective employer may not agree with your views. In the majority of cases, you should keep your personal views separate from your work life.
Anything showing you with alcohol, partially clothed or in an embarrassing situation. It might have been a great party, but will it impress an employer?
It is hard to imagine how the ability to do a keg stand would impress any boss! Yet I constantly see these photos on the web.
Blog Away...But Blog Safely
Just as with any other online activity, blogging has risks. Protecting your identity by remaining anonymous is a smart idea. Employers often take a dim view of critical comments made by employees on personal blogs. Some bloggers have even lost their job because of comments made on blogs. The most famous case is probably Ellen Simonetti, a former Delta Airlines attendant, who was fired after Delta officials took exception to photos on her blog. She continues to write her blog (formerly known as Queen of the Sky) but now retitled Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant.
Prospective employers are now searching social networking sites, as well as blogs, for information about prospective employees. So you may not want yourself identified on your blog or MySpace page as the person doing the keg stand in the photo.
To avoid these types of issues, you may want to follow the guidelines from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on How to Blog Safely. Stay anonymous and stay employed!
Blogging Resources
There are many blogs that help new bloggers get up to speed on blogging techniques. A few of my favorites are:
Blogger Tips and Tricks - Focuses mainly on Blogger.com issues
Tips for New Bloggers - Another site with good information for users of Blogger
Problogger - A very professional site with great tips about earning money with your blog.
Steve Pavalina's Personal Development for Smart People - This guy is a genius. He makes a ton of money from his personal development blog and gives you free tips on how to make money from your blog.
Dosh Dosh - Although mainly geared towards making money blogging, this site also has good general tips about blogging.
Pearsonified - Described by the humble owner as the "Best Damn Blog on the Planet". It contains great tips on blogging, search engine optimization and blog templates.
So check out these sites and pick up some great free advice!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Making Money on a Blog: Amazon Associates
One of the best known affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates program. This program, which is free to join, allows you to generate links and widgets to showcase Amazon products on your blog and to collect a commission when people follow the links and buy from Amazon.
Amazon Associates has a short sign up page that requires you to provide a valid e-mail address, payment information (name, address, bank account) and the URL of your blog (make sure your blog already exists). Once your application is approved, you can begin generating links to display on your blog.
Single product links that fit into appropriate posts usually work best. Log in to your Amazon Associates account and from the front page click on Build Links/Widgets. A large variety of widget and link categories are displayed.
Product links are useful for linking to a single product. The search widget is useful for providing an Amazon search feature to your readers without having them leave your blog. Click the "Add to your Web page" button next to your desired type of widget. To create a product link, the first step is to search for the desired product on Amazon. Just key your search terms into the box and click "Go".
From the search results returned, find the correct product and click the "Get HTML" button next to it.
On the page below, select the appropriate options for your link. The preview area of the screen will change as you select options so you can see exactly how your link will look on your blog.
After copying the HTML code, go to your Blogger account and select the Page Elements sub-tab from the Template tab. Click on Add a New Page Element in the appropriate part of the blog and select an HTML/Javascript page element from the list in the dialog box. Paste the HTML code you copied from the Amazon site into the empty dialog box.
When you click the orange "Save Changes" button, the link will be displayed on your blog. When your readers click the Amazon link and follow it to Amazon, you'll receive a commission on any products that they buy.
Making Money on a Blog: Google AdSense Part 2
Website users are accustomed to being able to conduct searches to find the information they need. Putting a search box on your blog that enables users to search either your blog or the Internet is a great idea. Offering this feature using Google AdSense for Search makes it a valuable feature to you since clickable ads that can make you money are served up with the search results.
To set up AdSense for Search, log into your AdSense account and from the AdSense Setup tab select the Products sub-tab. From the list of products, click on AdSense for Search to display the following screen:
Click the radio button next to Google WebSearch + SiteSearch to allow searching on both your blog and the Web. Next, key in the URL of the main page of your blog. Page down to the bottom half of the screen as shown below:
Click the radio button next to the URL of your blog in the search box. This will ensure that the search box searches your site (not the Internet) by default. It is important to try to keep people on your blog for as long as possible. Adjust the other options to change the design and color of the box until you get it the way you want it. As you change options the box will change so you can see exactly what you are getting. Click Continue when done to proceed to the following screen:
There are additional color options for the search box on this page. You can also provide the URL of your logo to display in the search box. Also, you can determine whether the results of the search are displayed in the existing window or whether a new window opens to display the results. When done, click Continue to display the last page.
This screen provides the HTML code for the search box you specified on the previous screens. You do not need to know HTML to use the code. Merely highlight and copy the code exactly.
Back on Blogger, go to the Template tab and the Page Elements sub-tab. In the section where you wish to place the search box, click on Add a Page Element and select HTML/JavaScript from the choices provided in the dialog box. This displays the Configure HTML/JavaScript dialog box.
Paste the HTML code from the AdSense site into the large box. Add a title if you prefer. Clicking the orange "Save Changes" button will insert the search box onto your blog.
When someone keys in a search term and clicks Search, this results screen is displayed.
Now your readers can find what they are looking for and you have the opportunity to make some more money!
Making Money on a Blog: Google AdSense Part 1
Google AdSense provides you with a variety of methods to make cash from your blog readers by serving ads up to your blog automatically. Registering for AdSense is free and requires only filling out a relatively short series of forms. You need to have a valid e-mail address and provide them with a telephone number and payment information. You also will need to give them your blog URL so they can review and approve it. Make sure your blog has been up and operating for a few weeks before applying or you might be rejected. You can also be rejected for having a blog that contains:
- Violent content
- Racial intolerance
- Advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
- Pornography
- Adult or mature content
- Hacking/cracking content
- Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
- Excessive profanity
- Gambling or casino-related content
Check out all of Google's restrictions here.
Assuming you don't violate Google's guidelines, your blog should be approved for AdSense content within a few days. As shown below, there are four main types of content that are useful to display on blogs.
Google AdSense for Content is very easy to deploy on a Blogger site (once you are registered with AdSense and your blog is approved).
From the Template tab in Blogger select the Page Element sub-tab. Then click Add a Page Element in the section of your blog template where you wish to add the AdSense content. This displays the Configure AdSense dialog box shown below.
There are a variety of shapes to choose from so pick the best one for the area of your blog (vertical shapes work best in the side column of a blog). You have a lot of control over the color scheme for the ad area so you can make it blend seamlessly into your template. When you are happy with the way the ad looks in the preview section, click the orange "Save Changes" button to save your selection and start displaying the ads on your blog.
Now, whenever a reader clicks on the links displayed on your blog, money will be credited to you in your AdSense account.
How Bloggers Make Money
There are numerous ways that a well written blog that attracts a lot of readers (traffic) can make money. The key to attracting readers is generating well written, informative, original posts on a regular basis. So new bloggers really need to concentrate on generating content. But once you have had your blog up and running for a while, you can start to explore various methods of generating revenue.
Although there are numerous methods for generating revenue, these are extremely popular:
Advertising Programs - Almost all web pages have some type of adverting now and blogs are no exception. The most well known contextual ad program is Google Adsense. Since Google owns Blogger as well as Adsense, it is extremely easy to integrate Google Adsense ads into a blog hosted on Blogger. Other popular ad programs are DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Clicksor, Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Peak Click, AVN and Kanoodle (to name but a few). But you don't want to clutter up your blog with too many ads and risk driving off readers because your blog looks like it exists only to make money. So start out with just Google Adsense and see how it goes.
Affiliate Programs - These are programs which pay you for referring your blog readers to other sites where they purchase goods or services. Usually you are paid a commission on what the customers buy by following the links displayed on your web site to the affiliate's site. One of the largest programs (and easiest to join and manage) is Amazon Associates (from Amazon.com). Other large affiliate programs such as Commission Junction, Linkshare and Clickbank provide you with opportunities to direct customers to a wide variety of merchants. But there are many other smaller affiliate programs which you can use on your site. Affiliate programs are often used in conjunction with specific posts. For instance, if you are running a blog that reviews new digital equipment and you create a post about a new digital camera, you may want to provide a link through the Amazon Associates program to allow your readers to buy the cameras at Amazon.com.
Paid to Blog Programs - People with products and services to sell have discovered that bloggers are more than willing to write posts about their companies in return for compensation. PayPerPost is the grandaddy of all the paid blogging services. Other sites that pay you to blog are PayU2Blog, Blogitive, Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch, V7N, and Smorty. You need to have an established blog site (usually at least 90 days old) with a minimum number of posts to have your blog approved for posting opportunities. After it is approved, you are presented with opportunities and given guidelines for writing posts about products or services. Compensation ranges from $5 for simple 100 to 150 word posts up to hundreds of dollars for posts that include originally produced video. Many of the higher dollar opportunities require you to have a certain Google page rank to participate, but there are many $5 to $20 opportunities for sites without a high page rank.
Please click the button to join PayPerPost as my affiliate.
Donations - Readers appreciate a well written blog and some readers will show their appreciation by making a donation to support your blog. Paypal tip jars or donation buttons make it quick and easy for loyal readers to give you a couple of their hard earned dollars.
Sponsored Ads - In addition to advertising programs such as Google Adsense, many companies are paying bloggers to directly advertise on their sites (usually through buttons or banners). Although this is not something that usually happens to beginning bloggers, it is a goal to aim for when your blog garners a respectable amount of traffic (visitors) and a decent Google page rank.
Although there are many other ways bloggers can make money, these ideas should keep beginning bloggers busy for a while.
Marketing Your Blog 1: Get Indexed in Search Engines
You can write the most brilliant blog ever created. And it won't do you a bit of good if no one can find it! You need to find ways to allow potential readers to find your blog. In this post, we'll discuss the first step you should take...getting your blog indexed by search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an emerging science the goal of which is to increase the number of visitors (volume of traffic) that a blog (or website) receives from search engine results. Search engine results are the equivalent of billboards along the highway. Just as billboards direct people to a product or service, links in search engine results drive people to relevant blogs (or websites). All search engines use different proprietary methods to analyze the contents and keywords of blogs for purposes of generating search results. Google, the big Kahuna of search engines, gives every web page a rank (called page rank) and pages with a high rank appear in search results before lower ranked pages. Many factors go into generating a web page's rank score such as key words, relevance to search terms (which is based on key words) and quality of links to the site from other pages. Most experts agree that your page rank will eventually increase as your visibility on the Internet increases.
Therefore, having your site linked to by other websites (preferably ones with a high page rank) and indexed by a variety of search engines will help your site become more visible. As a starting point, you should submit your URL to a number of search engines to increase the chances that a search engine will index your site. Most search engines do not guarantee that they will list your site (or that it will rank highly in search results). But by submitting your URL to the search engine, you ensure that the search engines' automated agents that crawl the web looking for sites to index should eventually locate your site.
You only need to submit the main URL of your blog, not the URL for each individual blog posting that you have. For instance, when submitting this blog for indexing, we only submitted the URL http://bloggingacrosscurriculum.blogspot.com.
Below is a listing of links to search engine submission pages. You certainly don't need to submit your URL to every site on the list. But the top 4 are an absolute minimum.
List of Search Engine Submission Links (List obtained from Tips for New Bloggers)
Advanced Lesson 1: Adding More Page Element Options to Your Template
In Basic Lesson 7, you saw how easy it was to add page elements to the right hand (or left hand) column of your blog or to add elements at the end of the blog. But what if you want to add an element below the header (such as our Firefox link on this blog) or before your blog posts? As shown below, most standard Blogger templates don't offer the option to add elements in these places.
You can remedy this situation by following the simple instructions at the Tips for New Bloggers blog site. This requires editing the HTML code of your Blogger template, which is very easy to do (you don't need to know HTML coding...just follow the directions).
To make changes to your Blogger template, click on Layout for your blog on the Blogger Dashboard. This puts you on the Template tab. Click the Edit HTML sub-tab to display the HTML of your template. The top of this screen will look like this:
Before making modifications to your template's HTML code, it is always a good idea to back up your existing template. This enables you to go back to your original template if you muck up editing the HTML code. Click the link to save a copy of your template to your hard drive.
Just follow the step-by-step instructions at the Tips for New Bloggers site. After making the HTML modifications, clicking your Page Elements sub-tab should give you a screen that looks similar to this:
You now have more places where you can add content!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Basic Lesson 9: Adding Lists of Web Links to Your Blog
In the course of web surfing, you probably run across web sites that readers of your blog might find useful. Adding a list of useful links to your blog is easy. Go to Template tab of your blog and select the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on one of the Add a Page Element links.
The Choose a New Page Element dialog box (shown below) is now displayed. Find the element called Link List and click on Add to Blog button below it.
The Configure Link List dialog box (below) is now displayed. First, type in a title for your link list. Then enter the URL for the first web site. Enter a name for the site as you want it to appear on the link list. Then click the Add Link button to add the web site to the Link List. When you have added all of your links, click the orange Save Changes button. You can always come back later and add more links or delete existing links.
The Link List you entered is now displayed on your blog.
Basic Lesson 8: Adjusting Your Blog Settings
The settings section of your blog is very important as it controls a lot of the functionality by which your readers interface with your blog. As you can see from the image below, the Settings tab is divided into 8 sub-tabs. The default settings on most options will suffice but we will point out a few you should consider changing.
The Basic Sub-Tab
Filling in the Description section on this sub-tab gives you a sub-title for your blog that falls right below the title. This is a great place to give a description of what your blog is about as readers will see this immediately.
E-mail post links are turned off by default. When turned on, a little envelope icon appears beneath each of the posts on your blog. Readers can click this icon to easily e-mail another person a link to your post. Since you want readers to spread the word about your blog, turning this tool on is a great idea.
The Formatting Sub-Tab
The default number of posts displayed on the front page of your blog is seven. You can change this to a higher or lower number or even change the option to displaying a certain number of days worth of posts. We find 7 posts is a reasonable number, but feel free to change it to suit your taste.
The Comments Sub-Tab
If you want readers to be able to leave comments on your posts, make sure the Show Comments option is on. You have three choices regarding who can leave comments on your blog. The most restrictive is "Only Members of This Blog". You can assign membership to a blog, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a free and open exchange of ideas. "Only Registered Users" is a good choice as only people who have signed up for a Blogger account can post comments. This will help cut down (but not eliminate) spam comments. The most risky option is allowing "Anyone" to comment. This can lead to bad spam problems if moderation is not enabled.
If you decide to show comments (and thereby allow people to leave comments), you should enable moderation. This requires you to enter an e-mail address. Whenever a non-member leaves a comment, you will receive an e-mail. You will need to check the comments frequently to ensure they are valid (not spam) or are not offensive to you or your readers. You can delete comments you don't like. Showing word verification for comments is a great way to cut down on spam. To leave a comment, a person has to key in the letters shown on screen in a small box. This foils automated software agents that are often used to leave spam comments.
The Permissions Sub-Tab
On this sub-tab, you can assign other people the ability to create posts on your blog. This is especially useful for student group blog projects or for maintaining a blog with fellow faculty members. To assign more authors, just click the blue Add Authors button.
The dialog box below is now displayed. Just enter the e-mail addresses (separated by commas) of the people you wish to invite. Then click the orange Invite button. When they receive your e-mail invitation, they will be able to register on Blogger (if they don't already have an account) and become an author on your blog.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Basic Lesson 7: Organizing Your Blog By Topic (Labels)
Most people find it easier to search a blog by topic. Fortunately, Blogger has included a feature called labels that make it easy to provide a list of postings by topic.
At the bottom of the post window is a section called "Labels for this post". In this box, you can enter any terms you think will help categorize your posts. Labels can contain more than one word. If you are using multiple labels for a posting, make sure to separate each label with a comma.
If you find it hard to remember the labels being used on your blog, just click on the show all link. This will display all the labels currently being used on the blog. Just click the "Hide all" link to hide the labels again.
Once you've assigned labels to all your posts, you need to display a clickable index of those labels on your blog so that readers can display all posts related to that particular topic. To add an index of your labels, you must insert a new page element on your blog layout.
In the blog editing mode, click on the Template tab. Then click on the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on the Add a Page Element link to display the list of possible page elements that can be added to your blog.
From the list of elements in the Choose a New Page Element dialog box, click Add to Blog under the element Labels. 
The Configure Labels dialog box now appears. Change the title for the archive list to something obvious like Blog Topics. Chose to sort the topics alphabetically or by frequency (number of postings in that topic). Click the orange Save Changes button to add the topic archive to your blog.
When you click on View Blog, you will notice that the topic archive is now displayed on your blog. Every time you assign labels to a blog posting and publish the post, this list will be updated.
Basic Lesson 6: Layout of a Blog Explained & Modifying Your Profile
The layout of the default blog is pretty much the same for all of the standard templates provided by Blogger. There are two columns. One contains your posts and the other contains useful elements that provide functionality to your readers. The two default elements that will appear in a basic blog are the Blog Archive and the Author Profile (About Me). In subsequent lessons, we'll discuss other elements that you might want to add to your blog layout, but for the rest of this post we'll discuss the two default elements.
The Blog Archive provides a listing of your posts grouped by month (you can change this to other periods) in reverse chronological order. This helps readers find past posts in your blog that they may want to read and provides an easy way to navigate to them. But chronological archives aren't always the best way to navigate a blog. Grouping postings by topics if often much more useful. See Lesson 7 to learn how to organize your blog by topic.
The about me section provides you with an opportunity to list details about yourself on your blog. This blog element brings in information from you Profile. You can reveal as little or as much information in your profile as you wish. To edit your profile click on View My Complete Profile (in the About Me section) and then click on the Edit Your Profile button that appears on the next page.
Explore the profile at your leisure and decide what you wish to reveal. If you don't feel comfortable revealing some piece of information (even your name)...then don't put it in the profile! Remember...
Basic Lesson 5: Embedding YouTube Video in Posts
YouTube is full of useful videos that you or your students may want to add to a blog. Also, many of our students are posting video at YouTube that they made themselves which might make a great addition to a blog. Fortunately, since Google owns Blogger and YouTube, it is easy to integrate YouTube video into your blog.
This is an example of what video looks like when embedded in a blog. Just click the arrow in the middle of the window to play the video.
Follow these easy steps to embed YouTube video into your blog posts.
Step 1: Locate the appropriate video on YouTube.
Step 2: Find the embed code box located next to the video on YouTube. Click in the embed box to highlight the code. Right click when the code is highlighted and click copy.
Step 3: So far you have been working on the Compose Tab of the posting window. This hides all HTML code from you. However, when working with embedding video (or other HTML code) in a post, it is best to work in the Edit Html window. Just click the Edit Html tab to switch over.
Step 4: Paste the embed code that you copied into the appropriate place in your posting text window. The video will now appear in your post as it does above in this post.
Basic Lesson 4: Meaningful Links in Posts
A better way to show links in a post is to have them be descriptive Best Sci-Fi Book Review Site rather than just a web address such as www.futurefiction.com. Fortunately, there is an easy way to generate links such as this in Blogger.
Type the text you want to turn into a link first such as:
Bill's Wonderful Web Site
Highlight the text by left clicking the mouse at the start of the text and then dragging the mouse to the end of the text. When highlighted, the text should look something like this:
With the text highlighted, click the Link button 
to display the link dialog box.
Enter the address of the web site (such as microsoft.com) after the http:// and click OK. The link will now be clickable as follows:
Bill's Wonderful Web Site
