Newsbites

For small bits of news, quotations, odd videos, and flimflam.

Buzz #11: Obblogatory dot com

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I do have a confession to make… I’ve been working on another blog… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to happen. I tried to resist the temptation… but I enjoy that blog, too. Am I too timing you? Am I? No, please don’t look at me that way! You always knew I had other blogs, we never agreed that it was to be an exclusive arrangement, did we? Look, I’m sorry…

In 2007, I started doing a few BlogBuzzes for people, and in 2008 I am continuing my BlogBuzz. You’ll see it is a great way to advertise your blog around the net, and I get my blog seen on your blog… If you’re still interested, drop me a line in the contact form. Do complete the opp first. The buzzes can be short or long, but at least a minimum of 50 words, please!

Yes, it’s time for a BlogBuzz. This time I’m doing it for one of my own blogs:

obblogatory

Actually, most of the content at Obblogatory was originally found at this blog, but I moved it over in 2006 when I decided to refound the whole InvestorBlogger thing. Of course, little did I know what a PR5 meant at that time, and how moving the blog would blow the entire thing up in my face! Oh, well. Such are regrets.

Well, Obblogatory is a general blog with categories as wide ranging as Taiwan, Entertainment, Blogging, Shopping and much more… it’s fun to write and I have no expectations it will ever be high profile like this one. But I enjoy writing it. Despite that, I know that there are a lot of improvements I could make:

  • 1. Change that header image: I have no way for people to know what the blog’s name is!
  • 2. The side bar is a real mess: I have reorganized it several times, and it’s still a mess. Worse: it leaves out important stuff!
  • 3. I use almost no SEO stuff at all apart from the friendly URLs… I really have to use tags, summaries and much more. One day, I’ll get around to fixing that.

They say your worst critic is in the mirror, and that’s true! Oh, well. Anyway, if you fancy a more general blog on other stuff, that’s the one! Check it out!

And that’s it for Blog Buzz #11! Drop me a line if you want one! I’ve got two more in the pipeline right now!

Introducing: Google Friends Connect

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google connectThere is a huge land rush going on for social networks and for the longest time, Google has been on the outside, looking in. Myspace, FaceBook, LinkedIn have all come along and created huge audiences for social networks; smaller players have carved valuable niches, such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and so on.

But Google has failed singularly to come up with its own successful social network. Until now.

Introducing: Google Friends Connect…

Google writes: “Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site. Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.”

Google Friends Connect is a way to bring the social networking world out into the real world allowing webmasters to add a simple code element, visit the website, and configure the social networking features required. This turning the social world inside out is going to be very welcome to webmasters and users and will enable new ways to find existing websites. The walled worlds of FaceBook, Linked In and so on have been pretty frustrating for me: I hate having to login each day just to get useless updates and waste time removing or adding pointless applications that have little relationship with the rest of the web. This will a terrific advance for bloggers, who although they use social networking a lot, find that social networking means that they and their visitors are now interacting OFF the website, not on it. Why maintain two or even more subsidiary sites when you can maintain one primary site!?

Just watch the video.

Stimulus Checks: Are you going to go shopping?

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Having ranted on the recent post about spending money, I was reminded of the Tax Back scheme that the US government is endorsing now. In this video, some Americans are talking about their plans: and they are not SPLURGING… They are using the money to pay for education, mortgages, and basic stuff. Few are planning to spend it… but that’s what they say they will do…

If you’d like some ideas on how to make that stimulus check work FOR you, not against you, then get the RSS Feed Download and do some reading! [download#1]