Integrating Your Blog and Facebook

Using social networks can be a great source of traffic and generating a group of people around your blog site. Many people have profiles on Facebook, and people are quick to put their URL in their profile. This is good, but it is difficult to expand beyond your network of friends. You should keep your “friends” to the people you actually know or have some type of relationship with. This is where Facebook pages come in. These pages were created for authors, businesses, and celebrities etc. to build groups of people around whatever they are promoting. You can only have a limited number of friends on Facebook, so there is no way to send email to all your friends at one time. Once you have created a page on Facebook, people can then become your “fan” or “supporter”. You do not have to accept people and they can’t see your individual profile. On a page you can add pictures, video, have a discussion board and add any applications to your page. You can send email updates to all your “fans”. Also there is no chance of messages going to a “junk mail” inbox; your messages are assured of 100 percent deliverability.

Wrap Up of Google Video

Since this is my last post on my Web 2.0 topic Google Video, I thought I would give a brief overview of all the things that I have learned about it throughout this class.
Google Video is a very simple video-sharing site. Though not as popular as YouTube, Google Video does offer some unique features. The cost of Google Video is FREE.
All you need is a gmail account to use Google Video. There are two simple ways of uploading content to Google Video. You can use their online uploader, which accepts files up to 100MB and emails you a link to your video right away. Or you can download the Google Video Uploader, which lets you upload files from your desktop. This is handy because you can upload much larger files and also upload multiple files at the same time.
Google Video uploads are fast and generally result in better-quality videos then YouTube does. They recommend using the online uploader for the best results. Unlike YouTube, Google Video does not ask for search keywords; it does however allow you to list credits for the movie. You can make your video ‘unlisted’ so that it doesn’t appear in the search results. Google Video lets users email a video link and you can also allow viewers to download the video to their computer or embed it on other web sites. You can also post the video to MySpace, Blogger, or TypePad directly from Google Video.

Integrating Your Blog with Twitter

Twitter seems to be taking over the web. Everyone seems to have a Twitter account, or two these days. With all the hype surrounding Twitter, there are many ways to integrate Twitter and your blog together, and why wouldn’t you? There are a few applications that I feel would help your business when integrating these two networks together.
TweetThis is a link integrated into your blog posts that make it easy for users to click on and post your post to Twitter without having to go separately into both.
TwitterFeed can take your blogs feed and post an update automatically to your Twitter account when you make a new post to your blog.
TweetBacks integrates Twitter updates about a certain blog post much like trackbacks or pingbacks. This allows a blog author to see if other Twitter users are discussing their posts.
TweetDigest This will pull a daily digest of your Twitter updates and post them to your blog as a blog post. This way, if some of your blog readers are not on Twitter, they can still see your updates.