Toluu has a added a small new feature to your Activity Page that turns out to be a big usability enhancement, here’s what Caleb, Toluu’s founder had to say about it:
I found that many times I had no idea what a feed was about but, I didn’t want to click on it and then have to click back if I wasn’t interested I wanted a really quick way to get some more info so that is how the tooltip came to be it shows the 5 most recent post titles from the feed and you can click a title and go directly to the source
With this new enhancement the Activity page has just gotten much more useful, and it’s good news for bloggers as well. Those of us who are total marketing geniuses and not only put 2 silent Ks in their blog name, but also give no context clues about the content, can now rest easier. All you would have to do is hover over ‘The Knight Knetwork’ and you’d see my 5 latest posts, giving you a chance to visit a post with an interesting title and see what you really think about my writing and subject matter. Here’s an idea of what you’ll see:
Kudos again to Toluu for adding enhancements that really increase the usabillity of the site, and don’t forget to Toluu ‘The Knight Knetwork’, those silent Ks actually speak volumes.
Does Amazon’s new Page Recommendation and Product Reccomendation in one widget make sense? I see the logic from the programmer’s point of view, both processes have the same first steps – scan the text and check for relevance with another data source. As a blogger and reader I’m not as sure there’s a connection at all. This is a common programming pitfall. When you are deciding on features and design you have to remove yourself from the backend of the program as much as possible and focus on what makes sense from the users perspective. This may mean separating features that have a lot in common programmatically into different parts of the interface.
I’ve installed the widget and we’ll see if it adds value or not, having the ability to tweak the results would be nice as I can certainly see the value in recommending books with a similar subject matter. If the widget trys to sell me some Roomba filters and printer ink then it won’t be adding value to my site, it’ll just be trying to sell something and what does that have to do with page recommendations?
I was a little hesitant to install the Disqus comment system, but I took the plunge to see how I liked it and I find many of the features so helpful and superior to Wordpress’s native comment system that I’ve decided to make the switch permanent. The Disqus dashboard, the universal login for all other sites using Disqus, and the ability to reply and delete comments by responding to the notification e-mail are all major reasons that I’ve decided to stick with the switch. There were two concerns that I had that almost had me hit the uninstall:
1.SEO- I’m not an expert in SEO but I have explored the basics and have seen the value that comments on a post can add to your search ranking, so I was concerned about losing that traffic source. In looking into the subject this issue was one that many bloggers had expressed and is one that Disqus is taking seriously. For Wordpress users, the Disqus plugin uses their API and there doesn’t seem to be a problem. I did a little experiment to make sure that the Disqus comments are being indexed correctly, and while I can’t say they have the same value as a Wordpress comments, what I see is good enough for me:
Wordpress comment w/ #1 rank from my post helping people having trouble opening files with an .efw extension:
Obviously not heavily searched terms, but it’s what I could quickly pull from my existing comments, I encourage you to try the same thing for yourself. You’ll also note that there is no duplicate content from Disqus showing in the searches.
2. Not Hosting Comments – The problems with not hosting your own comments were made clear this past week as a database error at Disqus made all comments unavailable for a short time. Hopefully this point will be moot in a month or so as Disqus implements the export to Wordpress feature that’s in the works. If Disqus goes down, you’ll still have all the data. It will be a huge reduction in risk and should help sway those bloggers who aren’t quite sure about making the change.
To win you had to pick the 5 most popular startups out of a field of 100, and the popularity was judged by several different standards. I picked 4 out of the 5 companies to win, my top 5 were (in alphabetical order)
Acquia
Igloo
Mill River Labs (owns tradesvibes)
Sprout
Zoho
The winning companies are all the same except the surprising result that Acquia is out and Rearden Commerce is in. Check them out and you tell me if you wouldn’t have made the same choice I did.
Thanks to TradeVibes for running the contest and offering such a generous prize!
Svetlana Gladkova is the Vice President of Business Development at Profy.com. Profy is a new and exciting entry into the hosted blog market that is aiming to outdo the current heavy hitters by building from the ground up as a one stop blogging, social network, and RSS reader. The social features and the greater customization and monetization options should put Profy in a good position after the service exits beta. There’s a lot more to recommend Profy and as long as users won’t scoff at Profy placing an ad on their free blogs, I think we’ll see a steady rise in traffic as users switch or supplement their other blogs with Profy. I do have a few Profy invites if you leave a comment I’ll see what I can do. If you want to see a Profy blog you can take a peek @ KnightKnetwork.Profy.com. Svetlana was kind enough to talk to me about Profy and share some of her thoughts about blogging in general:
What benefits do you see in going with a hosted blog service over self-hosting? Why should users choose Profy in particular?continue reading »
