GRD Google Fans

Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company’s user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you’ll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you’ll probably never want to go back.

First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It’s still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and…

It’s been about a month since Google announced its new Friend Connect platform which lets you add social widgets to any blog or web site. If you’ve been waiting patiently to see these widgets start popping up on the wild, wild web, it looks like the wait is over. Tech blogger Orli Yakuel has added a widget to her blog, Go2Web20.

The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply…

Google has taken the beta label off yet another project that is significantly younger than Gmail, which remains in beta. Google Website Optimizer has been available to AdWords customers for the past year, but now the company is making it available to anyone who wants to test out different web site layouts.

Basically, the tool lets web publishers try out different designs on their web page to see which one performs best. Want to see which ad unit is more likely to get people to click? Want to see which RSS icon…

I clicked open my New York Times (I read the Kindle version) and was drawn to this story with this headline - In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

I started the story and I found myself looking around for the punchline, but I’m afraid they - the New York Times and Matt Richtel - were serious. Each paragraph was more bizarre than the next. I felt as though I had to have stumbled onto an edition of the Onion.

This was the basic gist of the content…

Creating a blog and then recruiting a group of authors who have strong strategic referral partner potential is a killer local marketing idea. Every time I mention this tip in small business workshops the light bulb goes on for one or two marketing thinking owners. Just going out and recruiting potential strategic referral partners with this approach will get you much farther than the typical “hey, send me some business pitch.”

Blog networks are all over, but few local businesses are taking advantage of this play. If the right referral partners…

Business owners, more or less, have accepted blogs as a necessary part of the marketing mix and some have even come to the realization that this blogging is a good thing.

So, what’s next you ask? I think it’s time to move beyond the notion that a blog is part of a web site, an appendage of sorts, where blog posting is done. The idea that makes blogs so powerful is that they enable anyone in the organization to easily create education based, search-engine friendly content at the drop of a…

I gave a presentation for the National Center for Business Journalism this week on the subject of using social media in journalism. The event was hosted by the Kansas City Star and most in attendance were reporters and editors for daily and weekly newspapers.

While all are dabbling in new media (meaning some are blogging) few are able to embrace the full leverage of the social tools available. Some of this is due to a lack of information in an “old school” mindset, but a great deal of is due to the…