Windows Live Writer is a free tool from Microsoft that makes it easy to post entries to almost any blog service like Windows Live, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Posterous, and TypePad. The tool allows you to post content with photos and videos.

A not so well known fact is that Live Writer can do much more with the use of plugins. Live Writer supports third party plugins that extend the base functionality well beyond text and photos. You can download out of the box plugins from http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8

Frustrated not being able to use the fonts you want to use in your site? In the past, using your favorite fonts in your site required creating an image or using other quirky approaches like using Flash. The problem is that the content embedded using those approaches is generally not visible to search engines and thus not indexable.

There are now a number of sites that allow you to upload your font and get a bit of code to place in your websites's stylesheet, a global file where your site's...

jQuery is a standardized scripting library used by web developers to enhance web pages with effects, animations, and more. The library speeds up the development process saving time and money. While there have been mobile device interface implementations using jQuery such as the iUi project, jQuery is now launching a version of their library for mobile devices. 

Currently they are planning on supporting the following smartphone platforms: IOS, Android, BlackBerry, Bada, Windows Phone, palm...

Sitemaps are a big part of a search engine optimization strategy. They consist of a file or files structured in a way that a search engine like Google can understand and provides them with the outline of your site content. Standards dictating what information you can supply in these files are becoming more accomodating...

LinkedIn, the social networking site that showcases your professional expertise and accomplishments, has made a number of great feature releases. Two of these are particularly useful on your social media networking efforts. Twitter integration - Provides a way to connect and feed your Twitter updates to Linked....

Contrail, a new service developed by Microsoft researchers will allow secure encrypted sharing in any social network. The service works by sending an encrypted filter from the phone of the person that wants to share to the phone of the person he/she wants to share with. The sharer can then send encrypted information...

Search engines like Google are constantly changing their algorithms they use to process, index, and rank your pages. In fact, Google has done that over 500 times last year.

On May this year, Google confirmed to have made such a change and it appears to be fairly substantial. The change has caused many sites to loose their positioning and while it seems to be specific to certain types of keywords called long-tailed keywords (keywords with 3 or more words) Google never releases specifics...

There is no question that the fast evolution in mobile technology is working as a great catalyst for innovative experiments.

While the weather remains the number one app in smartphones, features such as using a smartphone camera as a barcode scanning device has enabled a fairly new technology known as mobile tagging. There are a number of flavors of this technology...

So now what ... you have all that great content you have created. You posted it in your website, Twitter, and Facebook. What else can you do with it? How about turning it into a search engine asset.

Scribd.com, one of the largest social publishing and reading sites, is an excellent way of getting your content ranking very quickly in search engines. The application allows you to publish your content (i.e. case studies, white papers,...

It is essential to keep social media personal. Folks typically like to talk to a person and not a robot or a brand. But just how personal is personal. The 'rules of engagement' have not changed from traditional marketing to digital or social media marketing. It is good practice to tend to avoid engaging in politics or religion in business settings, for example, and this is not different in social media.

Love it or hate it the Internet is a 'permanent record' of sorts. Knowing this, here are...

Ever found yourself going back to reference an article you bookmarked a year ago and come to find out it is no longer available? Worst yet, try to find it in the first place after you've changed the way you manage your bookmarking for the 21st time. Wouldn't it be nice if you had an article indexing system that allowed you to annotate, tag, and convert to something more permanent like PDF's?

Diigo.com, a powerful research tool, allows you...

The main driver behind thought leadership is content development. Generating engaging and useful content requires a lot of research, preparation, and writing skills. An excellent approach to organizing your ideas is to use mind maps.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in writing — Wikipedia

Bubbl.us,...

While there really is no practical means to quantify social media Return on Investment, this clip should give you an idea on how thousands of organizations are measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns.

 



...

An important part of a balanced social media diet is having a Facebook fan page. Fan pages are separate from your personal profile and are designed to promote an idea, product, service or an organization. Think about fan pages as your business profile versus your personal profile.

Here are some resources I hope you'll find...

With all of these geo-based services out there and the constant updating on social media networks, it was bound to come up. PleaseRobMe.com, a site dedicated to find what homes crooks can break into, accentuates the self-imposed threats of social media. The service tracks comments and updates made by users as to their current location making themselves excellent targets.

Finding useful tips or resources for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly frustrating. Here is a great resource straight from the horse's mouth: Google Webmaster Central Channel at YouTube. One of the many great tips: Google does not use the keywords meta tag AT ALL ...

There are primarily two approaches to optimizing your site for search engines. One of them concentrates on optimizing on-page issues with your site: proper titles, descriptions, keywords, etc. The second one deals with techniques targeting off-page such as how many links point to your site sometimes called back-links. A technique called reciprocal linking, where you and another site link to one another, has been documented to have a significant negative impact on ranking. But even one-way links to...

One of the difficulties about social media is the time it takes to publish to so many different social networks. There seems to be a whole new sector developing to address just that. These are 5 of the most popular social media presence management applications:

http://om.shaayad.com/ http://hootsuite.com/ http://ping.fm/...

Reality is catching up with science fiction rather quickly these days. Augmented Reality (AR) gives a whole new meaning to integration. AR involves using existing sources of data to super impose information and images on top of our view of the world. Whether it is viewing a street and finding houses for sale to matching and finding someone's contact info via social networking via face recognition, this technology promises to change the way we view the world. For some killer examples, check out http://bit.ly/uEg5C...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed new guidelines for bloggers who offer opinion on products or services in their blog. Specifically, the FTC requires bloggers to disclose any "material connections" with endorsements of a product or service. The new rules took effect on December 1, 2009. cmp.ly is a site that provides you with an easy way to facilitate disclosure and provides a simple and easy method to disclose material connections in the content that you publish. Visit http://cmp.ly/ for...