PureBlogging

One of the biggest trends in technology today is increased seamlessness between all of the different tech tools that you use. VoIP technology is a main player in creating wireless seamlessness because it connects phone calls through your computer to let people reach you at home or on your cell phone via one number. And now, with click-to-call widgets, you don’t actually have to publish that number so people can now place a call to you without having access to your personal phone number. Not too many bloggers are taking advantage of this tool but it’s something that you might want to think about adding to your blog.

How the click-to-call widget works

You sign up with a VoIP service that offers click-to-call widgets. Make sure you choose a low-cost or free service because you don’t want this to cost you more than it needs to. You then download the click-to-call widget for your blog. It will add a button to your site that says something like “click here to call me”. A reader can click on that button and the computer will dial your personal phone number (without sharing it with the reader). Your phone will ring and you can choose whether or not to take the call. (You can also forward calls to different numbers and send them straight to voice mail when you don’t want to be bothered.)

How click-to-call benefits bloggers

There are some very obvious reasons that bloggers have been hesitant to add these buttons to their blogs. Most of us are busy working all day and don’t actually want to have strangers calling us at any time of day or night. But there are some major benefits to bloggers who opt to use this technology.

The main thing is that you’re going to rapidly increase your loyalty from your readers when you encourage them to call you with their thoughts, questions and concerns. You show that you’re interested in what your readers have to say. You also indicate that you trust them enough to provide this service. That makes you a lot more accessible and accessibility can gain you friends online. Those friends will promote your blog to others.

And you might find that you really do make friends with some of these people. The blogging life can be pretty lonely and people actually benefit a lot from making friends with other bloggers. This can lead to personal rewards as well as to financial benefits caused by the social networking aspect of the job.

Additionally, this is an innovative tool for blogging. It’s relatively new and it’s not something that bloggers are taking advantage of. If you’re among the first bloggers to use this tool, you’re going to get attention in the blogosphere as a result. Attention leads to traffic which leads to revenue.

And finally, you make it really easy for blog owners to get in touch to offer you additional work with their blogs. Many blog owners work on the Internet but prefer to resolve the details of the business with their bloggers over the phone. Make it easy for them and you’re one step ahead of your competition.

Keeping the problems to a minimum

In order to maximize the benefits of this technology, you’ll want to minimize its drawbacks. The main problem is that annoying people may call you at odd hours and interrupt either your sleep or your work. The key to preventing this problem is to establish some really clear rules for calling you and place those on your blog.

For example, you may decide that you’re only taking calls during certain hours. Whether that’s Monday-Friday from 9-5 or just on Tuesday nights from 6-8, figure out a schedule that works for you. Be available to take calls then and people won’t be likely to bug you at other times.

You also need to come up with some clear rules for yourself as to what you will and won’t tolerate from these calls. You may be happy to debate with people who disagree with something that you said on your blog or you may prefer to keep conversations non-confrontational. Set those boundaries for yourself so that this can be a positive experience.

Branching out to other areas of VoIP calling

If you discover that you like the benefits of opening your blog up to callers, you might want to branch out into other opportunities made possible by this technology. For example, you may wish to hold conference calls with your readers on a weekly or monthly basis. You could discuss a specific topic and put the audio file of the transaction on your blog for others to read. The possibilities are wide open since VoIP lets you easily merge your data, voice and image information in one location online.

Where to go for click-to-call widgets

There are a whole lot of different VoIP providers out there and many of them offer the click-to-call widget. (Incidentally, there are also Skype-specific widgets and widgets that are designed to go on your social networking profiles rather than on your blog.) TringMe and Jajah are two big names but shop around to find a service that suits your needs.

Make your blog more appealing with cool widgets. The following are some of the many cool widgets for bloggers. However, I recommend you don’t overload your sidebar with tons of widgets. Overloading your sidebar will make your blog less appealing; just a few cool widgets is all you need to create a more appealing blog.

1. Contactify will allow you to give your blog readers a way to contact you without revealing your e-mail address to spambots. Another great benefit is this cool widget for bloggers cuts down on spam!

2. Do you offer a free newsletter? Invite your blog readers to sign up by adding the Newsletter Registration Form to your blog.

3. FeedJournal is a cool widget that allows your blog readers to read your blog in newspaper form. Not only can they read your blog in newspaper form, but they can also save the file on their harddrive for later reading.

4. Publicize your upcoming events and/or appearances with the Upcoming Badge. You can customize the badge to show up to 10 upcoming events and/or appearances.

5. Increase your sales with the vFlyer Listing Widget.

6. Display your most popular blog posts, page views and visitors on your blog with the Visit Widget.

7. Do you communicate with your customers and/or clients through Skype? Add Skype Online Status to your blog’s sidebar .

8. The Alexa Traffic Rank Badge reveals your blog’s Alexa ranking.

9. We’ve all seen Wordpress bloggers display “related posts” at the end of their most recent blog posts, right? Well, now there’s a Related Posts Widget for Blogger blogs as well.

10. Another widget for Blogger blogs is the Top Commenter’s Widget. This widget shows your commenters you appreciate them, and by displaying this widget on your blog, you might start to see more comments on your blog posts.

That concludes my list of 10 cool widgets for bloggers. If you know of any other cool widgets for bloggers, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

I love Firefox. I have done since I first started using it, way back when the only version available was 0.2. One of the things I love most about it is the hundreds of add-ons you can use to customise it to suit your needs. Today, I’d like to share five of the extensions I find most useful when I blog.

British English Dictionary

Ok, so it’s not the most exciting extension, but it’s something I use every day. The default language in Firefox is US English, but it’s got a number of dictionaries in other languages. One of these is UK English. Now, I bet you’re wondering why it would matter what language your browser uses. The truth is that it never used to. However, the more time I spend on the net, the more I need to fill in forms and check that they are spelled correctly.

Still not excited? How about this? The Wordpress compose window in the admin panel is a web form. That means that the inline spell checker checks my spelling on that form. It’s an easy way to spell check my posts. For me it works two ways. Sometimes I use the spell checker to check that I have used British spelling; at other times I use it to check that I haven’t.

IE Tab

In spite of my love of Firefox, there are some blogs and sites that just don’t display well in it. If people persist in using IE, then there are times when I need to use it - or do I? Not any more, thanks to IE Tab. This nifty little extension allows you to open a new tab that uses the IE rendering engine right within Firefox. You can look at an IE enabled site without having to leave your (ok, my) favourite browser. You can right click on any link and choose to open it in an IE Tab. I sometimes use it to check how my blog themes look in different browsers. Occasionally, this has sent me back to the drawing board to choose a new theme.

FoxClocks

FoxClocks is not so much a blogging tool, as an everything tool. In a wired world, many of us are blogging and writing for people around the world. I currently write for people in the UK, US and Canada, and work with people who are based in Australia. That means that it soon gets difficult to keep track of all the time zones. FoxClocks is the answer. You can track an almost unlimited number of countries and time zones by using a simple interface. Then all you do is hover over the icon in your statusbar to see what time it is in several countries.

Twitterbar

This is a good one. Twitterbar lets you post to Twitter from your browser address bar. All you do is type your Tweet, hit the plus sign and it’s posted. This is great when I find a blog post that I want to tell others about. A word to the wise, though. Don’t press that plus sign till you’re really ready. I’ve ended up sending Tweets from my WP Admin panel before - not cool!

SU Toolbar

If you want to stumble blogs posts that you have found, ask others to stumble yours or simply browse the web to see what’s happening, then you can’t do without the StumbleUpon toolbar. I love the fact that I can limit my stumbles to a particular category or communicate with friends right from the toolbar.

I use many other Firefox add-ons . One more good blogging tool is Scribefire, which I’ve recently replaced with Windows Live Writer. Which Firefox extensions do you find most useful for blogging?

Last week I put up a link to my DIY Moleskine PDA video. Part of the process, of course, was finding a good site to host the video. Here are the three finalists.

YouTube. Ladies love him, men want to be his friend, give a big Las Vegas welcome to a dear old friend of mine, you all know his name: YouTube. (Wild sustained applause.) Truth be told, I don’t like YouTube much. It’s like Sears — first on the scene, it was a respected powerhouse for many years, and still commands pretty strong name recognition. But at the end of the day, I’d rather stick with its competitors.

What’s great about YouTube is that people spend a lot of time on it, just looking at video after video, so you’re guaranteed some views of your work simply by the law of averages. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into people visiting your site; they may be more likely to simply check out the next suggested video.

YouTube’s performance is also finicky to a degree that’s pretty unacceptable, considering how well its competitors work and the general state of technology today. I’d wager that I’ve had to reload about half of all the YT pages I’ve looked at, simply because the media player refused to load the video all the way. I expect that from some crappy embedded Yahoo! player; I can’t believe the granddaddy of all Web video doesn’t have a better interface. When it comes to posting videos, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that someone might not be able to watch the whole thing.

Metacafe. Metacafe is sort of the opposite of YouTube, with very little name recognition but a much more dependable interface. I feel like users probably associate Metacafe with cheesy, ebaumsworld-esque videos of guys in banana suits setting themselves on fire, and thus don’t give it the propers it deserves.

But MC has a great user interface and relatively quick upload time. The drawback is that it takes a bit longer for your video to show up online than if you use YouTube, where it pretty much shows up moments after it finishes uploading. The wait isn’t terribly long, but if you’re liveblogging and need to get something up NOW, you might run into trouble.

Revver. The best thing about Revver is that allows you to monetize your video based on the number of views it gets. I’ve never used Revver, so I’d be interested to hear about anyone’s experience with it.

Revver’s page seems a little light on details as to how exactly its users get paid. And the hardest part of Revver — speaking from a creator’s standpoint — is that Revver’s panel of admins has to approve your video… and approval can take a few days. I found this out a little too late; last week’s video was my first foray into Revver territory, and my deadline would have approached faster than the admins’ approval. This is a great security measure from Revver’s point of view, and I have no arguments with it, but it does require the artist to do a little creative planning.

Oh, and embedding any of these on your blog will require a plug-in based on your blogging platform and video host… just a reminder.

In the end, I went with Metacafe, simply because of the great interface. I also posted to YouTube, since I already had an account there, but overall I think Metacafe will be my #1 choice for future videoblogs.

When I first started reading blogs, I used to spend time visiting each one every day just to see what was new. It was fun, but as I got busier and started reading more blogs, it soon became impractical. Too many blogs and too little time left me feeling overwhelmed by the task of keeping up with the bloggers. Then I discovered RSS feeds. RSS - really simple syndication, rich site summary, RDF site summary. Whatever you want to call it, those three letters and the little orange and white symbol are the answer for every busy blogger. But there’s one decision left - what’s the best way to access those feeds? It’s a choice of two - either you get your RSS updates by email, or you get them in a reader.

RSS By Email

I can see several benefits of subscribing to RSS by email. Instead of being confronted with hundreds of posts in a reader, you can get them one at a time as they happen. With some email subscription services, you can choose a daily update which sends a single email with all the posts from the blogs you are tracking. I still get an email from Feedblitz, which I used before Feedburner offered its own email subscription service. It gives me the latest postings from a number of sites.

You can’t beat having the text in front of you as soon as you’re ready to read it. In most cases, it is beautifully and attractively laid out and a pleasure to read. So, why don’t I use email subscriptions any more? One reason is that I don’t want on the fly updates in my inbox. I get enough email as it is, thank you very much, so adding daily updates - or even weekly updates - from the 100+ blogs that I track would give me far too much extra reading to do.

Feed Readers

Instead, I prefer to use a feed reader. Until recently, my reader of choice was Google Reader. What I liked about it was that I could divide the blogs I was tracking by category. I had a category for writing blogs, blogging blogs, friends’ blogs and my own blogs (just so I could see how they look to others). I could see at a glance how many new posts there were, and if I was pressed for time I could select the categories that seemed most important. Even better, I could star content that I wanted to come back to.

I’m now doing much the same thing, but I’m using Netvibes. That’s because I finally decided that an internet start page made sense, and I imported all my feeds into it. I’ve divided the blogs into various tabs, so I can get an at-a-glance view of what’s been updated on what topics. I’ve added a tab for job feeds, and another for places where I post, so that I can follow what’s happening on those blogs and contribute to them. It works well.

Dealing With Information Overload

I like using a reader because my inbox is not flooded. Of course, it doesn’t protect me from information overload. I still have to face updates on the blogs that I follow. However, with several blogs on a page, it’s easy for me to skim the page and see which headlines catch my eye. I can skip over the posts with boring titles, or about topics which don’t interest me and go straight for the ones which do. I can save posts for later so that I can use them in a roundup or share them through social networking. I’ve found it an efficient way to deal with my feeds, though it still isn’t perfect.

It may be a mistake to ask one program to do everything, so I could still be in the market for a feed reader with lots of features. Do you prefer email or a reader to keep up with your RSS subscriptions, and why? And if you use a reader, what’s your top pick?

Last week Michael wrote a great post on methods of getting your ideas down. I’ve found that Moleskine notebooks are the best portable notebooks around; with sites like Moleskinerie and DIY Planner around, I think most Web mavens tend to agree.

It got me to thinking about how I could use my Moleskine to its greatest advantage. So I came up with this little tutorial. Enjoy.

How To Make A Moleskine PDA